Firefox 70 • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox 70

#401

Post by ht_th » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 1:09 PM UTC

reportgunner wrote: post #391

ar7hur wrote: post #2

The one thing that prevents me from switching to Firefox is the spell checker. Like many non-native English people, I'm constantly switching between languages when typing. Chrome is smart with that, and detects the right language sentence per sentence. Is there a way to have FF do this? Did I miss something?

Honest question, where does one use a spellchecker in the browser ?

All text-based input fields. Like this text-area element I am typing in now. But also for elements with the contentEditable attribute set to true.

This is one of the features I appreciate a lot. I am not a native speaker of the English language, and I sometimes mix British English and USA English, and the spell-checker helps me to write consistently better messages.

Re: Firefox 70

#402

Post by paulintrognon » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 1:23 PM UTC

theonemind wrote: post #346

freddie_mercury wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic HackerNews " This is so easy and I, a software developer with no actual experience in that area, know the obvious solution that eludes that hundreds of developers with actual experience in the area. Meanwhile, I take umbrage when my product manager tells me that implementing the next feature will be easy and I'm exaggerating how complicated it is."

Perhaps so. But, if (not_visible) { suspend_wait_and_stop_consuming_resources } I can imagine that it gets massively more complicated. However, as, say, an executive, this probably indicates that you can lean on your sw dev staff to approach the asymptotic ideal that looks so simple if you really care about the goal.

Reminds me an old boss I had who, when I reported a complicated problem, always came up with: "why don't you just write if (problem) { solution(); } ? Should'nt take long, should it?

Well, the difficult part is not writing an if statement...

Re: Firefox 70

#403

Post by sings » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 1:29 PM UTC

jfk13 wrote: post #384

sings wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the default values for offset and thickness will respect those declared in the font. And also whether sub-pixel values are allowed? I don’t know how many fonts declare these values, but it would be a shame not to use information that provides values tailored to the font in use.

Firefox has always* respected the underline position/thickness in the font. This is why in an example like data:text/html, Times Arial the Times and Arial elements get different underlines. (Safari and Chrome don't do this, they ignore the font's properties and use an arbitrary underline of their own -- which differs between the two, Chrome's being somewhat thicker.) * "Always" may not be strictly true, but it's cert…

That’s great to hear. I had assumed otherwise because of the other browsers lack of support.

Re: Firefox 70

#404

Post by tripzilch » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 1:35 PM UTC

tom-khagai wrote: post #390

doesnt_know wrote: post #359

Links for the password manager, "Firefox Lockwise" go through adjust, which appears to be a tracking/analytics/marketing platform. This is both through their website and by clicking through the Firefox UI menu. I guess it's harder to walk the walk yourself when the desires to track usage and analytics come from within your own teams. Check the links yourself over at: https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/lockwise/ An…

To be fair, it's common practice to measure marketing campaign effectiveness. Mozilla doesn't hide that they share data to "Measure and support our marketing" "Campaign and Referral Data: This helps Mozilla understand the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns." "On iOS and Android: Firefox by default sends mobile campaign data to Adjust, our analytics vendor, which has its own privacy policy. Mobile campaign data…

And I can't opt-out?

Re: Firefox 70

#405

Post by squiggleblaz » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 1:42 PM UTC

LoSboccacc wrote: post #11

ar7hur wrote: post #2

The one thing that prevents me from switching to Firefox is the spell checker. Like many non-native English people, I'm constantly switching between languages when typing. Chrome is smart with that, and detects the right language sentence per sentence. Is there a way to have FF do this? Did I miss something?

not a great solution but dictionaries are simple files and you can merge them into the one you consider to be your main language

Well, I mean, "do" is an English word, "de" is an Esperanto word and "di" is an Indonesian word. I'd rather they get marked as wrong in the wrong language. (If I'm mixing languages, which I do on my phone often enough in text messages, whatever; but then I don't care about spelling anyway.)

Re: Firefox 70

#406

Post by justusthane » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 1:49 PM UTC

taco_emoji wrote: post #27

theodorejb wrote: post #17

Wow, blown away by how much better the new password manager is! If they add support for custom fields on each login, this could almost completely replace my need for a 3rd party solution.

Couple other features I'd like: - Import from other formats (Keepass, or at least any format Keepass can export to) - Share items with someone else

I'm blown away that there's no import yet. How else am I going to switch from another password manager?

I also saw a comment from the dev team that they're "aware" of the need for such a feature but it's not on a road map yet.

Re: Firefox 70

#407

Post by squiggleblaz » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 1:50 PM UTC

ivanjaros wrote: post #382

Since they censored Dissenter, they are dead to me. They can be the best web browser ever made, but it will never touch the sillicon of my hard drives ever again. With Goolag, at least I know where they stand and I know what to expect from them. Mozilla betrayed my trust and I am not fan of second chances.

With Firefox, I'm mostly free. Alternatively, I can let Google be my feudal overlord. Nothing Firefox prohibits is permitted by Google. Easy choice

Re: Firefox 70

#408

Post by mantap » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 2:03 PM UTC

roca wrote: post #309

willtim wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC Safari achieves this by suspending the processes in background tabs, which could be running inefficient JavaScript (polling for new ads etc). There's no cross-platform way to do this, but I think Mozilla absolutely need to try and find a way to address this. Web sites cannot be trusted to write efficient well-behaved JavaScript and so the burden of taming it falls upon the browser. There is probably some throttl…

Firefox can and does aggressively throttle JS in background tabs. However, it's not easy to do this in a way that doesn't break sites. Sometimes background tabs have JS doing actually useful work --- playing audio, running a simulation, receiving notifications, stuff like that. I don't know what Safari is doing differently to Firefox, and no doubt Firefox can improve here, but when people say "it's easy, just complet…

The answer is simply that yes Safari breaks websites, but users are happy to make that tradeoff.

It's common knowledge among web developers that browsers aggressively throttle background tabs so anybody who is designing a website that depends on it is misguided.

I don't hear anybody complaining about Safari being too aggressive with background tabs, I do hear people complaining that Firefox uses too much battery. So I think Firefox should be more aggressive.

Re: Firefox 70

#409

Post by giancarlostoro » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 2:08 PM UTC

Vinnl wrote: post #225

giancarlostoro wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of those updates are to catch up to Chrome's developer tools. If I were in charge of Firefox, I would honestly have them hire a developer or two to focus solely on the Developer Tools. I'm sure there's many things that browser developer tools could do that we have not even scratched the surface of. I prefer Firefox overall, only use Chrome due to manager only looking at my work on Chrome (it will be deployed in…

They spent the past few years rewriting them to allow them to build on it more quickly and encourage outside contributions. They finished that a while ago and have been ramping up new features quickly, and some exciting things are coming. For example: https://gist.github.com/jasonLaster/1e220992c294a571dd9b59ab...

Woah! Awesome! If I remember correctly the formal name for this is "Event Sourcing."

Re: Firefox 70

#410

Post by gamblor956 » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 2:26 PM UTC

leosarev wrote: post #356

gamblor956 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A donation to a Christian charity would have been fine. There are thousands of them in the US and around the world. No, Eich specifically made a donation to a political campaign for CA's Prop 8 that used blood-libel-level lies to cast homosexuals as pedophiles and sexual predators and use that as a justification to deny them the right to marry. And this was the state of the Prop 8 campaign at the time he made the don…

Please note that Prop 8 was actually supported by voters. So if supporting Prop 8 is reason for firing, more than half of voters of California should lose their jobs. I think that's unfair, and suspect that witch hunt campaign was probably initiated because of some kind of power games inside Mozilla. Also, please make note that there is zero evidence of any LBGT Mozilla employee was discriminated by Brendan Eich or e…

Please note that Prop 8 supporters spent many tens of millions of dollars lying about gays to get people to vote for Prop 8.

They also lied about what the impact of Prop 8 would be.

Also note that one of the biggest such spenders, the Mormon Church, formally apologized for its role in the Prop 8 campaign after they got to be in the receiving end of the lies during Romney's first presidential campaign.