Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN comments? It's as much "news" as the vast majority of major sites...
comments are a poor replacement for journalism.
But surprisingly better than what often passes for journalism.
Firefox 69.0 Released
181–190 of 331 posts
Re: Firefox 69.0 Released
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Are many users on HDDs these days? Weird that it would take this long, although I guess it's niche enough that you'd want to save those 20 ms for something used by a tiny fraction of users.
> Are many users on HDDs these days?
Yes, there are. They are not a niche cohort.
EDIT: In fact, we have many more users with magnetic HDDs than who use userChrome.css. That tells you everything you need to know about this decision right there.
Re: Firefox 69.0 Released
#183It didn't make it to the developer notes, but Firefox 69 should be the first one to ship with unhandledrejection event on by default[0] - I'm so looking forward to being able to catch promises and do proper error handling on them in Firefox without having to jump through hoops [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/unha...
> It didn't make it to the developer notes I see it here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...
Oh yes, you're right. It obviously just didn't make into the release announcement
Re: Firefox 69.0 Released
#184ANY news on the fact that FF makes my Mac sound like it's gonna take off?? I honestly can't understand how an issue so prevalent gets ignored for so long by them.
For those doubting, do a simple Google with "firefox cpu".
Re: Firefox 69.0 Released
#185The privacy aspect of Firefox is great. The containers also a great thing and help us to a great extend. Beyond the privacy aspects, I really wish if Firefox pays attention to little things that can make the life of a user a bit better.
- The Firefox sign in process is considerably improved, with a link based sign in with email. The fact is that you will not be singed in to email on the first time usage. So you are behind a wall to start browsing and the cognitive load not to leave the tab before completing setup. This experience with Google Chrome is far far better, as it’s one time setup using your Google Account . Even if you discount the google’s ownership and single account sign in, there are considerable improvements to be made in the onboarding process
- The Pocket integration is substandard to the Pocket extension.
- The Top sites and highlights are too big for my aesthetics. It could be little cuter in the way it appears.
- Moving a video to full screen makes your blank for a second and not a smooth transition as in Chrome or Safari
- Lack of certain platform specific integrations such as Look Up on macOS to get the dictionary triggered by selected word. It works across all the other browsers well. On Firefox, I need to make a google search.
- The tab bar is ugly and has lot of blank spaces
- No default support for dark mode which works beautifully well on Chrome and Safari in a very early stage. More than a feature, the slowness in picking up platform specific features.
- The containers concept is really great but not for most of the general users to make use of it. It’s still a bit geeky in nature.
- I’ve to go with standard privacy settings to make my sites work including google. Making the privacy settings strong doesn’t help much and get signed out of the sessions very frequently. - I use an app called Magnet on Mac to snap my windows easily by dragging to corners. The snapping works great on all browsers by dragging a tab to one of the corners. But Firefox just releases the tab once it’s pulled out from the current window. We need to drag again this to the corners. More than a third-party workflow, it’s about how these windows are defined and behaves in a standard way
Re: Firefox 69.0 Released
#186> 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?
It's just a lame excuse really, such a change not improve performance in any noticeable way. I fear the change is just to take away this important customization option in the future and I don't like it.
by itself it won't, but they've been working on various optimizations to shorten startup time.
A few ms isn't much by itself, but when you add up a bunch of small optimizations like this one, it can add up to be a significant improvement.
Re: Firefox 69.0 Released
#187Re: Firefox 69.0 Released
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
People are mostly hating the advertising on the New Page from Pocket, not Pocket itself these days. EDIT: Here's a screenshot of the feature specifically that people dislike these days: https://imgur.com/a/p2rD4AY While it can be disabled, it can be said that people are a bit annoyed that the browser that is "Privacy Focused" is shoving ads down your throat. While we as technical users can figure out how to disable i…
If you follow the "How it works" link, they state that everyone is sent the same set of ads. Your local browser chooses what to recommend from that set. I was happy to see they designed it in a privacy-conscious manner.
Re: Firefox 69.0 Released
#189For 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...
Say what you will about Firefox, but they do make it super easy to disable this nonsense. - Options -> Home -> Firefox Home Content -> Uncheck everything I personally leave "Web Search" enabled, which gives a Chrome-like/minimalist experience.
Good advice. I just figured this out on my own, and thought it was reasonably easy enough. (You can also fiddle in about:config or click on the hamburger menu in about:home)
Switch to a privacy-friendly search engine like DuckDuckGo while you're at it.