What's New with Firefox 142 • Hacker News Board

Re: What's New with Firefox 142

#101

Post by dydkgbufxuf » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 3:18 PM UTC

beng-nl wrote: post #88

Voultapher wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this speed Ladybird might be the browser to use in a couple years, even though I find their decision to use a memory unsafe language for their core tech foolish in the year 2025.

I remember the original reasoning for creating Firefox (first Phoenix) was to create a more lightweight and faster version of the Mozilla browser, which initially was true.

a big part of making it lightweight wasn't stripping away browser bits, but stripping away non-browser bits.

mail, newsgroups, irc. mozilla (the suite) was a lot more than a browser.

Re: What's New with Firefox 142

#102

Post by Y_Y » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 3:30 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #18

artemisart wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be exclusive to Safari, I can't get it to work in Chrome either (and didn't know about the feature before right now, the discoverability is terrible).

It's that Safari implemented support for it. Firefox added their own version and chose to give it a different affordance

> You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

- Inigo Montoya

This is no affordance. There's nothing the design of either browser that suggests you can obtain a link preview by those actions, you just have to be told what action to take beforehand.

Re: What's New with Firefox 142

#103

Post by bachmeier » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 3:34 PM UTC

This is a promising move in the right direction. Allowing users to pay for Relay Premium lets them take advantage of their reputation for privacy to make money. Let's hope they promote it and give it more than three months before dropping it.

Re: What's New with Firefox 142

#104

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 3:39 PM UTC

anvuong wrote: post #66

Anecdotally but Firefox has become slower and slower in the past few years for me. I have no idea what is going on behind the scene but it's getting nearly unusable. Tried Edge yesterday and it was so much faster, but the amount of ads pushing is yikes.

What extensions do you have? I've not experienced this, so my guess is that it's an extension.

Re: What's New with Firefox 142

#105

Post by birksherty » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 3:43 PM UTC

ambicapter wrote: post #87

rcfox wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days, I'd say always start with the YouTube tabs.

Youtube is just hopelessly broken on Firefox/Linux anyways. Half the time the home page doesn't even load.

I only use ff on windows. No issue. I do have premium. May be adblocking YT is broken. I have ublock turned on too, but no issue.

Re: What's New with Firefox 142

#106

Post by arp242 » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 3:47 PM UTC

muizelaar wrote: post #52

Shank wrote: post #32

Lately, I’ve experienced memory leaks in Firefox that I’m too amateur to diagnose, that leads to Firefox eating 8gb of memory in some web renderer process. So when I excitedly check the changelog hoping for a summary of possible changes, I’m disappointed that there isn’t a verbose changelog for advanced users. I’m sure I could search bugzilla, but it makes me sad that the only “important” things are the headlining fe…

about:memory will let you generate a report that tells you what the memory is being used for.

Or about:performance, for a less detailed but arguably nicer quick overview.

Re: What's New with Firefox 142

#107

Post by technothrasher » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 3:57 PM UTC

Workaccount2 wrote: post #75

I wonder if it addressed something practical and meaningful...like implementing a spell check that at least covers all of the English language. Maybe then they can start working on the 5 year trek to also make the spellchecker somewhat competent. Or maybe we'll just keep packing features, because everyone here knows, features are what save products! Not usability!

> at least covers all of the English language.

Why am I reminded of the Blackadder episode, "Ink and Incapability"?

Re: What's New with Firefox 142

#108

Post by zveyaeyv3sfye » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 3:59 PM UTC

dydkgbufxuf wrote: post #101

beng-nl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the original reasoning for creating Firefox (first Phoenix) was to create a more lightweight and faster version of the Mozilla browser, which initially was true.

a big part of making it lightweight wasn't stripping away browser bits, but stripping away non-browser bits. mail, newsgroups, irc. mozilla (the suite) was a lot more than a browser.

ftp support wasn't dropped from firefox until 2021.

Re: What's New with Firefox 142

#109

Post by AnonC » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 4:00 PM UTC

Link previews reminds me of classic (XUL) Firefox extensions from a couple of decades ago that provided previews when the mouse was hovered over a link (with a short delay). "Cool Previews" was one of those extensions. I'm sure there must be WebExtensions that have the same feature with configurability in how they work.

This built in feature requires a click and hold though.

Re: What's New with Firefox 142

#110

Post by ARandumGuy » Tue, Sep 02, 2025, 4:02 PM UTC

tux3 wrote: post #73

everdrive wrote: post #53

I'm genuinely perplexed why people find link previews useful. The page image is too small to really see, and it's not as if rapidly opening and closing a tab actually takes effort. It may be faster than the long click depending how comfortable you are with keyboard controls. I have other questions as well -- does the link preview ignore your plugins? So if you loaded the web page, would uBlock Origin prevent tracking…

It's an idea that makes a lot of sense on Wikipedia, because every page there explicitly starts with a short summary, and often an image that can be pulled from the infobox. I'm not yet convinced it will work well on the rest of the Web.

But also that's been part of Wikipedia's website for years now, no special browser support necessary. And because it's tailored specifically to Wikipedia, it works great!

Page preview seems nice in theory, but I'm unconvinced it'll be that useful. Web pages just don't have a the level of standardization necessary to automatically grab a useful preview. And I don't think Firefox has a big enough pull to make that sort of standard.