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Firefox 69.0 Released

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Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#201

Post by suby »

marrone12 wrote: post #169
Aardwolf wrote: post #82

> 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. With all due respect, if you have to call it an "experience" you know it's something nobody asked for :p

I like the Pocket recommendations ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'd be fine if they limited it to just unpaid recommendations, but they include sponsored pocket stories in the new page tab too. It's inserting advertising into the web browser in a round-about way.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#202

Post by povertyworld »

nindalf wrote: post #92
povertyworld wrote: post #9

I have a bunch of Facebook domains in my hosts, but for some reason Firefox 69.0 gets DNS from somewhere else and goes right through. Weird. The other stuff in hosts resolves correctly.

Could you run `sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder` and try again? It's possible that the DNS is cached.

No luck. I thought maybe it was cached somehow because of the way Facebook is linked from the start page, but so is Reddit, and putting Reddit in the hosts worked. Strangely, the hosts file doesn't seem to be read with Instagram either. I'm not sure what's going on here.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#203

Post by zerocrates »

aswan wrote: post #132
plopz wrote: 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?

> How much of a performance improvement does this make? For a user with an SSD, perhaps not much. But there are still a lot of users out there with magnetic hard drives. Firefox has to do a decent amount of I/O at startup, and unneeded disk seeks add up for these users. In addition, Firefox formerly checked for these files on the main thread, which is especially bad for performance. (Firefox engineer Mike Conley wrot…

My unscientific feeling as an outside observer is that there's a pretty common pattern in the browsers of making a feature harder to access, leading to less use of the feature, and then removing the feature when the telemetry data shows there are few users.

I don't know if it's a purposeful process or not, but I'd say it's perfectly reasonable for users to think that pref-gating is the first step toward removal. The long road to RSS being completely removed from the browsers started with "just" taking it away from the defaults.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#205

Post by wDcBKgt66V8WDs »

denzil_correa wrote: post #20

> 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.

On my 2018 Air, firefox runs a lot better if I put it into low res mode (macOS setting, not ffx setting). Downside is text looks pretty bad but somehow images/videos are fine and content is the same right so whatever.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#206

Post by slater »

Aardwolf wrote: post #82

> 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. With all due respect, if you have to call it an "experience" you know it's something nobody asked for :p

I just wish they'd once and for all drop Pocket.

At what point do they understand that it's a failed experiment if they constantly have to re-enable and/or "ship" an "experience"?

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#207

Post by jillesvangurp »

lorenzhs wrote: post #31
denzil_correa wrote: post #20

> 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.

There are more macOS battery life improvements coming in Firefox 70 in around six weeks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20864255

I just got 70b3 via the beta channel and the difference is notable when using gmail and google drive. They load faster and there's a bit less latency when you click something in the UI. I can't tell you if this completely closes the gap as I don't really use other browsers. But it definitely improved a bit.

Two big changes related to performance: - the baseline javascript interpreter is now enabled (this is probably responsible for improving things for Google related stuff). - they optimized a few things with the compositor for mac to further reduce battery usage. I'm guessing this might include some of the work that has been done to port parts of the browser to rust.

Upcoming versions should at some point include the webrender changes that are currently available to some windows users already.

If you are wondering, the beta channel is generally rock solid for me. You end up restarting the browser a bit more often to get the latest beta and obviously they are still finding and fixing bugs. But I can't remember the last time Firefox crashed on me. I've been on the beta channel for close to two years. By the time features land to the beta channel, they've been on nightly for some time already. So, that generally means all the obvious stuff has been resolved already.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#208

Post by _coveredInBees »

suby wrote: post #201
marrone12 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the Pocket recommendations ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'd be fine if they limited it to just unpaid recommendations, but they include sponsored pocket stories in the new page tab too. It's inserting advertising into the web browser in a round-about way.

Good thing you can turn it off?

If you're not paying Mozilla for their browser, it seems weird to me to bitch and complain about ways Mozilla explores to generate some revenue without selling out their user's privacy. Especially when they make it very easy to opt out of the thing you don't like. Comments like yours are what makes me very nervous about the future for Mozilla. They are still entirely at the mercy of Google and their revenue sharing agreement for enabling Google as the default search engine. The day that ends, they are going to be in deep trouble if their user base is so hostile to any potential avenues they choose to explore to stay afloat.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#209

Post by danyork »

marrone12 wrote: post #169
Aardwolf wrote: post #82

> 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. With all due respect, if you have to call it an "experience" you know it's something nobody asked for :p

I like the Pocket recommendations ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Agreed! I find many of the recommendations useful. (I also use Pocket personally for bookmarking sites.)
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