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Firefox 69.0 Released

mozilla.org

141–150 of 331 posts

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#141
post #118
post #78

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.

I love how you're unquestionably endorsing studies whos motivations are unclear. Best for who? Users? Mozilla? And to what end? Usability? Profit?

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#143

I'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)?

If you know of specific sites that sidestep auto-play blocking, that would be worth reporting. I think I saw similar behavior on the Yahoo News site.

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

#145

Can 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…

Typically, the way these things work is that third party cookies are set with short lifetimes and first party cookies are set with long lifetimes. In other words, this doesn't prevent Facebook from tracking you with its Like buttons if you visit facebook.com as well, but it does prevent the DSPs and data brokers who don't have first party destination sites from tracking you across their clients. Ultimately, this will consolidate ad spend into Facebook, Google, and Amazon.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#146
post #7

> 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?

Here's the bug about making it dependent on a pref: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1541233

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.

With rates like that I'm surprised you don't use NoScript with a whitelist.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#148
post #25

> 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.

I've been using nightly and developer edition. It's greatly improved. I still don't think it's as good as Safari, but it's at least as good as Chrome. I've gotten nearly 3 hours of battery life back from these improvements.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#149
post #15

Earlier 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.

The technical answer to the question you asked is "10-20ms, if you're not on an SSD". That's not great, actually, if you're trying to shave tens of milliseconds at a time off startup performance.

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

#150
post #67
post #2

For 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.

Mozilla killed a private Reading List feature and replaced it with Pocket. They carefully denied getting paid for the integration before eventually revealing that they got paid for new subscriptions. They promised to open source Pocket when they acquired it and still haven't.

What Mozilla calls "the best of Pocket's content" is ads and articles that border on clickbait. Some people don't like marketing doublespeak.

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