Firefox 153.0 Beta

> Firefox now verifies and displays Qualified Website Authentication Certificates (QWACs) in accordance with eIDAS regulations.

Interesting that they just buried this in the middle without even a screenshot, considering how hostile Mozilla has been to the proposal in the past[0].

Considering that they previously made quite strong arguments that implementing QWAC would undermine security by completely bypassing the existing CA trust process and violate user's privacy by leaking browsing activity to third parties: what changed?

It does seem to fit into a wider movement, though. Mozilla previously explicitly considered WebUSB, WebHID, and WebMIDI as "harmful" as they lacked an effective mechanism against hostile websites tricking users into permanently compromising their hardware. This switched to "neutral" without addressing the underlying issue, seemingly just to satisfy some users asking for parity with Chrome out of a convenience argument. Same with Firefox happily jumping onto the AI bandwagon, and only backtracking after major public outcry.

Not to be dramatic, but Firefox seems hellbent on rapidly turning into a reimplementation of Chrome, completely ignoring its raison d'être. Will there be any traditional user-serving browsers left a few years from now?

[0]: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21330628/mozilla.pdf

- extremely stupid question but please entertain me here a bit

- why dont any of the modern browsers open and load pages instantaneously anymore, why does it take seconds?

- is this because of backward compatibility support where you are supporting html, css and JS features all the way back to the 90s

- apart from gecko and v8 why dont we have browser engines?

- are you familiar with anyone building an entire browser engine from scratch? how many WhatWG specifications would they have to support

- with all the GPT hype of late, why havent we seen a single GPT yet capable of building a browser engine from scratch supporting the last 20 years of html, css and js specs?

I think it's a function of the endless tussle between browser-as-an-OS and the OS they run on. For example, I absolutely hate that there's no option in Firefox to only use the OS print dialog. Instead I am force to click print, then click "use system print dialog" every time. I seems to remember reading a bug report where Firefox deemed this intentional and wontfix. After all, if you leave Firefox to print something, maybe you won't ever come back and start using your print dialog to surf the web!

They note containers as a new feature. Does this mean containers are shipping with the base installation, instead of as an extension?

> why dont any of the modern browsers open and load pages instantaneously anymore, why does it take seconds?

Right click > Inspect. Go to the "network" tab, reload the page. Maybe do the same on the "performance" tab.