Firefox 88.0 • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox 88.0

#91

Post by judge2020 » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:40 PM UTC

keeganjw wrote: post #46

Side note: I don't know how often this happens but it's kinda cool that Firefox went straight from 87.0 to 88.0 without any sub-versions. They didn't seem to have any security/bug patches, they just got it right on the first try.

I'm sure a few of these could have been backported but weren't severe enough to warrant an immediate push when 88 was right around the corner: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2021-1...

And this apparently happens quite a lot [no security patches in between versions]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities...

Re: Firefox 88.0

#92

Post by childintime » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

Disappointed. There is so much low hanging fruit in the GUI department:

- have bookmarks/history stay on the page you open it on (and no other)

- have bookmarks and history occupy a full page, instead of shoveled into a GUI element, dialog style

- option to collapse tabs into a page (tab)

- make the "tabs window" (the downward arrow after +) a tab, so the tabs can be sorted, searched in, or copied from, as html, to a file (I now get a rather useless list of 100 tabs)

- have navigation to all of these pages, along with recent Downloads and options like Help and New Private Tab, right from the New Tab page, and leave the hamburger menu for page specific actions.

And more. But even without Firefox is a great browser.

Re: Firefox 88.0

#93

Post by bassdropvroom » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

lmkg wrote: post #33

drewda wrote: post #3

> PDF forms now support JavaScript embedded in PDF files. Some PDF forms use JavaScript for validation and other interactive features. The amount of complexity that one can put into a PDF is both surprising and a tad frightening.

Note that this is a new feature for Firefox's PDF reader, but not a new feature of PDFs in general. Adobe had to update reader back in like... 2008?... to prompt before loading external resources. Because companies were embedding Google Analytics into PDFs.

> Because companies were embedding Google Analytics into PDFs.

Wow! This is daft. Thank the FLOSS gods for things like Pi-Hole because I never realised this. And if I hadn't blocked Google Analytics there, this would have been a sad state of affairs.

Re: Firefox 88.0

#94

Post by gwern » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

IncRnd wrote: post #29

contravariant wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you can run interactive javascript then you're mostly there, PDF is pretty much Turing complete so you can just crosscompile a browser into it using javascript to take care of the interactive parts, though you might need to rewrite the rendering logic.

PDFs are definitely not Turing complete. [0] [0] https://www.cs.odu.edu/~zeil/cs390/latest/Public/turing-comp...

Depends on your PDF viewer... https://github.com/osnr/horrifying-pdf-experiments

Re: Firefox 88.0

#95

Post by Evidlo » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

Does Firefox not import profiles from old versions? I upgraded 85->88 and got the message "this installation has a new profile" and am missing all my history, bookmarks and addons.

Re: Firefox 88.0

#96

Post by fuzzy2 » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

cpeterso wrote: post #86

51Cards wrote: post #17

>The ‘Take a Screenshot’ feature was removed from the Page Actions menu in the url bar. Odd, this is the only place I accessed it from. Not a big deal as it's still on the context menu and also can be added as a tool bar item but I am curious the rationalization behind this change. That seemed like a great place to have it to me.

There is still a "Take Screenshot" menu item in the context menu when you right-click on a web page.

Unless the context menu is not available, that is.

Re: Firefox 88.0

#97

Post by morsch » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

fartcannon wrote: post #48

Mozilla, can we have bookmarks back for new tabs in Android? Collections seemingly reinvent the wheel but limit the number of bookmarks, and force me to swipe left to view them.

Also can you let me go back to the New tab page without opening a new tab? You know, the same way every other page works? The way it used to work?

Re: Firefox 88.0

#98

Post by Hjfrf » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:54 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #84

egberts1 wrote: post #77

Holy Moly! JavaScript in PDF?! What were they thinking? It’ll just get disabled in a few months because it makes for one awesome vector attack.

How so? Will JS in web pages get disabled too?

Hopefully

Re: Firefox 88.0

#99

Post by danudey » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

drewda wrote: post #3

> PDF forms now support JavaScript embedded in PDF files. Some PDF forms use JavaScript for validation and other interactive features. The amount of complexity that one can put into a PDF is both surprising and a tad frightening.

Back when I started playing D&D again, some friends stumbled across a PDF of "MPMB's character sheet" or something.

Basically, it was a PDF full of scripting and options and such, that let you:

* Choose which content you wanted to use (i.e. content from which sources) * Choose which rules you wanted to use (in case you wanted to use optional rules) * Choose your class, race, and background, and handle them appropriately * Level up your character, prompting you to choose spells, feats, abilities, etc. from every option available to you based on your current character options * Manage your inventory * Import and export your character data * Import and export source data

It was pretty insane. Granted, it was also insanely slow (presumably due to limitations of what data you can store in a PDF and how), but for a bunch of tech-savvy newbies to 5th edition D&D, it was vastly better than the other options and helped us discover a lot of character features that we'd missed when overwhelmed at first.

I still wish they'd put it into literally anything more performant, like an electron app or something. Yes, it was that bad.

Re: Firefox 88.0

#100

Post by kbenson » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

lou1306 wrote: post #63

cardanome wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used it yesterday. I regularly use FTP at work, well preferably SFTP but it does happen. While we have a automatic deployment pipeline for our own projects, lots of our customers that host externally still use good old FTP. I don't think FTP is ever going to fully die. It is still a typical way to deploy your files when using a shared web hosting that does not offer SSH.

FTP is still pretty much alive in research as well (well, until now). I also used it in the past week. I understand it has flaws, but... I don't know, this seems yet another nail in the Old Web coffin.

"Has flaws" is an understatement. FTP does not play well with the current way the web is set up. Any firewalling or NAT is a pain unless you have the firewall introspect the FTP commands, which is easy for plain FTP because it's plain text and unencrypted, but once you start encrypting the transport it gets more complex, and you need to add support for that in the firewall. There's also often two connection channels, one for control and one for data.

Just be aware that any FTP upload capability offered is likely a serious pain for the admins on the other side. Even if they finally get it configured well enough to mostly forget about, they'll have to dive back in every time they upgrade any infrastructure along the path to it. It's much easier to just pass a TCP port though, which is what scp/sftp (the SSH variant, not the misnamed ftp/s variants some clients used to advertise as it) is much easier, and if you use rsync, includes easy recovery.