Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, the best New Tab experience is about:blank.
If that's what best for you, its trivial to change it in about:preferences (in the "Home" section). What's "best" for everybody is hard to define, I would bet that Mozilla has studied this significantly more than Grue3 has.
Firefox 69.0 Released
141–150 of 331 posts
Re: Firefox 69.0 Released
#142Re: Firefox 69.0 Released
#143I've been using the Firefox 69 beta since it came out, and with auto-playing audio and video set to blocked, some sites still somehow manage to auto-start muted videos. Is this a bug I should report, or is there some exception that websites are taking advantage of (like starting the video via an event handler like onscroll)?
I think Yahoo News was loading new article content into the same page (like Turbolinks does) instead of navigating to a new page. Clicking links becomes the user action that allows video playback for the current page and that permission is retained across articles because the browser is not navigating away to new pages. Just a theory...
Re: Firefox 69.0 Released
#144Re: Firefox 69.0 Released
#145Can someone clarify for me what "Enhanced Tracking Protection" covers? The text on Mozilla's pages is a bit fluff, I'm interested in the mechanics of it. I've been out of ad-tech for about 5 years, but when I was working in that industry it was common to drop evil cookie pixels everywhere in the page and then do cookie-matching with them ("my cookie for this user is X, do we per-chance have a match with something you…
Re: Firefox 69.0 Released
#146> Firefox no longer loads userChrome.css or userContent.css by default improving start-up performance. Users who wish to customize Firefox by using these files can set the toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets preference to true to restore this ability. How much of a performance improvement does this make?
Even just checking for the existence of a file can take a really long time depending on the disk speed and other on going IO.
Re: Firefox 69.0 Released
#147> The Block Autoplay feature is enhanced to give users the option to block any video that automatically starts playing, not just those that automatically play with sound. Good. I know a news website that was on purpose disabling sound on videos to prevent that. So not only does it autoplay, you need to click to unmute anyway to actually hear it! Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throat…
Fantastic news for people, like me, who spend a lot of time with $10/GB hotspot data prices. I'd click a link to a 5KB news article only to find it streaming HD video of talking heads reading the article.
Re: Firefox 69.0 Released
#148> macOS users on dual-graphics-card machines (like MacBook Pro) will switch back to the low-power GPU more aggressively, saving battery life. macOS user base can now consider FF as a viable browser alternative.
Please be the case - this is reason #1 why I haven't switched.
Re: Firefox 69.0 Released
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use userChrome.css and userContent.css, and I get the nagging feeling that the silent end of that sentence is "...when we eventually replace the code that currently enables user customization with faster, less flexible APIs." (I'm paranoid and FUDing because I care: there's some UX low hanging fruit before they could get rid of userChrome.css. For instance, you need userChrome.css to autohide the toolbar in full sc…
I mean, how slow could an "if file_exists()" check have been? This smells like deprecation to me, if the user CSS doesn't exist, don't load anything. Boom, no slowdown.
For what it's worth, this change happened because people were seeing the stat() call involved in startup profiles, taking sufficient time that it seemed worthwhile to avoid it if possible, as far as I can tell.
Re: Firefox 69.0 Released
#150For our users in the US or using the en-US browser, we are shipping a new “New Tab” page experience that connects you to the best of Pocket’s content. Uhmmm...
I don't see anyone complaining that Safari has a built-in Reader feature. Safari even has "Siri Suggestions" almost identical to this Firefox experiment. Pocket has been acquired by Mozilla, so it's not a 3rd party feature any more. It's really no different. It seems that some people are just used to hating Pocket as if it was some kind of tradition.
What Mozilla calls "the best of Pocket's content" is ads and articles that border on clickbait. Some people don't like marketing doublespeak.