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Firefox 76

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171–180 of 274 posts

Re: Firefox 76

#171
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to see how Safari handles your benchmark! I find it pretty fast, but maybe that's just bias because it treats my battery nice.

I ran three trials of each on a min spec 2019 MacBook Pro 16". All numbers are ms rounded to the nearest integer, all browsers are latest stable. I also loaded the page with dev tools closed since that affected times. Browser: (trial 1 prep, trial 1 chart), (trial 2 prep, trial 2 chart), (trial 3 prep, trial 3 chart) Chrome: (649, 347), (638, 343), (618, 358) Firefox: (353, 307), (358, 307), (361, 308) Safari: (281,…

Similar experience. Beating WebKit on macOS in rendering performance or energy use is very hard for both Chrome and Firefox (and the clones).

Re: Firefox 76

#172

Thank you to the Firefox team, this seems like a really nice release. I am very happy about the "If you don’t have a master password set up for Firefox, Windows and macOS now requires a login to your operating system account before showing your saved passwords." change. It might seem like a small change, but it's one of those friction points (another password to remember!) that will lead to (hopefully) more people us…

Personally, I don't like operating systems that train users to enter login credentials while using the system as this increases the chance of someone capturing those credentials via spoofing.

I used to think Firefox trying to protect the entered passwords made some sense, but I've been convinced it isn't really such a good idea. Better would be a full profile being protected (with all files encrypted), or just rely on an OS level lock screen for inactivity lockout.

I'm not sure if the current system actually prevents recovering the passwords. Do they require this authorization even to use a show password option on a website or the equivalent effect via bookmarklet-style javascript? I suspect they don't and it doesn't try to protect from intentional theft only casual viewing of passwords. This might still be valuable for some people, but it would be more valuable to fully protect the profile. I worry that people will think they are more protected than they actually are and that this effect will be increased by the use of system login credentials.

Also, IMO the list of sites that you have passwords for should be treated as just as sensitive as the passwords themselves. I think as is you can often see the sites with accounts, visit them, and have the current password autofilled into the old password field of the change password dialog.

The "generate password" option is great, even though personally I would make it 21 characters rather than 15 (there might be an option for that?). IMO, no one should ever choose a password.

Re: Firefox 76

#173
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? The reason I assumed otherwise is that, the buttons on Mac look like Mac buttons to me. And furthermore, the buttons on my Mavericks Mac (pre Apple's flat redesign) look different than the ones on my High Sierra Mac.

I think it's an imitation. They're not stock UI elements. For example, on my Mojave system, if I just make an HTML button, I can see it doesn't respect the systemwide dark setting, the highlight color looks slightly darker than a normal light-theme button and it doesn't invert the text color when highlighted.

In dark mode, buttons have a darker highlight and don't invert their text color.

Re: Firefox 76

#174

> The shadow around the address bar field is reduced in width when a new tab is opened; I mean, at least they're trying, I guess. Still seems to me like lipstick on a pig. I'm still trying to figure out what UX problem the expanding bar was intended to address.

I disabled it in the first 15 minutes.

I just hope they don't remove the disable recipe.

(about:config browser.urlbar.update1 -> false)

Re: Firefox 76

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? The reason I assumed otherwise is that, the buttons on Mac look like Mac buttons to me. And furthermore, the buttons on my Mavericks Mac (pre Apple's flat redesign) look different than the ones on my High Sierra Mac.

Safari on windows were showing osx-styled default buttons, so I think safari also implement their own UI controls, not using system's ui elements.

That’s because Safari was ported to Windows by porting a large chunk of AppKit to Windows - it didn’t make direct use of Win32.

Re: Firefox 76

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that it's faster on every website I use except Gmail, Google Voice, and Youtube. I wonder whether Google is using some sort of Chrome-specific javascript to make those sites run faster in their own browser?

It doesn't exactly need to be Chrome-specific; every browser/JS engine will have slightly different performance on different workloads, so Google just has to lean heavily on things that are golden-path for Chrome. They could even do this accidentally/nonmaliciously just by mostly testing on Chrome and not testing performance on other browsers.

> They could even do this accidentally/nonmaliciously

Designing a development process that naturally achieves a malicious outcome is just as bad as actively making malicious decisions: https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

Re: Firefox 76

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded. I prefer it to the old design. But we seem to be the minority.

It's just the HN effect; complain about the most minute details. Firefox simply wanted it to be more obvious that the address bar is in focus the moment you open a new tab.

If that was all it did, fine. It also does the suggestion list on focus rather than after you begin typing, obscuring the page. This makes click-and-copy to get the current URL a destructive action - you need to click outside of the address bar to see the page you were already on. The new "equivalent" is using the tiny ellipsis menu, a Fitt's Law fail.

Re: Firefox 76

#178
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to see how Safari handles your benchmark! I find it pretty fast, but maybe that's just bias because it treats my battery nice.

I ran three trials of each on a min spec 2019 MacBook Pro 16". All numbers are ms rounded to the nearest integer, all browsers are latest stable. I also loaded the page with dev tools closed since that affected times. Browser: (trial 1 prep, trial 1 chart), (trial 2 prep, trial 2 chart), (trial 3 prep, trial 3 chart) Chrome: (649, 347), (638, 343), (618, 358) Firefox: (353, 307), (358, 307), (361, 308) Safari: (281,…

Very interesting. Thanks a lot! Firefox did really well, that’s cool to see.

Re: Firefox 76

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> also, better default form input styling would be nice. it's so...Windows 98....but i'm on Windows 10. :\ Google and Microsoft seem to agree with you, but I totally don't get it! If the website doesn't specify a style, my browser should fall back to a design that matches my OS, not whatever the browser developer thought was pretty! And if Windows is coming back and telling the browser to use Windows 98 styled button…

> The underlying problem is Windows suggesting Windows 98 styled buttons. Microsoft should fix Windows. i think that's the canned WONTFIX response for every bugzilla issue ever closed about it in the past, what, 7 years?

...but does that make it wrong?

Re: Firefox 76

#180
post #11

Firefox made a huge mistake following in Chrome's trail with the version numbering scheme. I just don't care about Firefox 76, is it a big change? Is there some new feature I would want to try? Who knows, I'm sure Firefox 77 will be out soon though!

I want to figure out who to talk to on both Firefox and Chrome sides to beg that they adopt a scheme like YYYY.MM.minor for their version numbering. I believe that would be superior for basically everyone —web developers, users, &c. (In the case of Firefox, it works especially well since they’re releasing approximately monthly now. I could imagine people on Chrome puzzling over why some month numbers got skipped—not…

Aw yes, the Ubuntu style.
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