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Firefox 69.0 Released

mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#221

Post by hayd »

Aardwolf wrote: post #54

> 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…

Yesterday I was reading an article and, part way through, a video started playing on the sidebar. I saw it, thought it looked interesting, but wanted to finish the article before watching. I paused the video. As I scrolled further the video resumed (reproducibly). By the time I'd finished the article it was auto-playing a new video, and there was no way to find the original.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#222

Post by namewasmypw »

gfodor wrote: post #95
Operyl wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Advertising, tracking, and privacy are three separate concerns. We conflate them due to the way current advertising networks work: they track you, storing + analyzing the data in centralized servers (which violates your privacy), to deliver ads. You can deliver ads without tracking (for example, contextually based upon the page you are looking at, without any storage of that information or historical state.) And you…

Advertising is an issue of user autonomy and a user's security in their autonomy. Users don't want to see ads. A browser that is supposed to be "for the users" shouldn't have its main screen be something that their users specifically do not want.

For most of us, adware is a type of malware. For Mozilla, they have a tradeoff between user autonomy and cash flow. They can at least say that the bad things they do are because of the sacks of cash and not for any positive user "experience." Lying about it makes it worse, not better.

Aside from ads, there is the issue that Firefox comes with backdoors (see Mr. Robot ad) and spyware (see telemetry that can't be opted out of.)

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#223

Post by newshophours »

gfodor wrote: post #95
Operyl wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Advertising, tracking, and privacy are three separate concerns. We conflate them due to the way current advertising networks work: they track you, storing + analyzing the data in centralized servers (which violates your privacy), to deliver ads. You can deliver ads without tracking (for example, contextually based upon the page you are looking at, without any storage of that information or historical state.) And you…

I'm one of those "don't mind ads, do mind privacy intrusions" crowd. I'd be perfectly willing to turn off my adblocker for good if only advertisers would be willing to turn off their tracking and scripts and stick to only serving up JPEG banners.

Alas, that's not likely. So I do what I can to use web services ethically - pay for services where possible (like Fastmail), whitelist when a site owner seems to be using ethical non-tracking ads, donate where appropriate (like open source developers looking for help with hosting fees).

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#224

Post by chrisfinazzo »

c0nducktr wrote: post #151
Carpetsmoker wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 5KB news article On what site do you find "5KB news articles"? Pretty much all news sites that I know of load a gigantic amount of useless and obnoxious JavaScript, CSS, images, etc. with or without video.

There's CNN Lite as well. https://lite.cnn.com/en

I wish they would use more of that on mobile or even the old m.cnn.com. The more recent trend of "www-m.cnn.com" URLs is glacially slow, even when going through a Raspberry Pi.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#225

Post by kevingadd »

bzbarsky wrote: post #152
kevingadd wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has to have been showing up in profiles for them to bother, nobody would go out of their way to disable it otherwise. They added a pref to turn it back on and then disabled it instead of the easy thing (just removing it) which is some engineering effort plus testing effort to make sure the pref works right. Silly to do that for nothing. Antivirus software does add a measurable delay to file operations sometimes, a…

Not just that, but in an earlier release code was shipped to set the pref for users who already had the file, so that anyone who already had one of these files would not observe any behavior regressions. And yes, file I/O was the issue.

Yeah, I checked and it was automatically enabled for me, so no regression.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#226

Post by alinspired »

kuu wrote: 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...

disable in about:config:

  extensions.pocket.enabled -> false

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#228

Post by robocat »

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?

Weird...

Why wouldn't they just load them asynchronously?

I read that custom CSS files are often used by disabled users, which makes it doubly odd that they would just disable it by default.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#229

Post by cmroanirgo »

bradgessler wrote: post #175
Carpetsmoker wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 5KB news article On what site do you find "5KB news articles"? Pretty much all news sites that I know of load a gigantic amount of useless and obnoxious JavaScript, CSS, images, etc. with or without video.

I created https://legiblenews.com/ because of this frustration ... and took it all the way to the level where loading a page is exactly 1 request. The other frustration I’ve had with news websites is they don’t link to source material, so it’s impossible to dig into a topic and accidentally learn something.

I like the way you make the categories. Finally, someone calling a spade is a spade.

Eg. "Disasters and accidents" had disasters and accidents.

It did highlight how much of our news isn't the most uplifting of topics however.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#230

Post by sellingwebsite »

gnud wrote: post #51
kuu wrote: 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...

It _really_ bugs me that pocket isn't packaged as a pre-installed extension, that you can uninstall normally.

But you can disable it quite easily:

about:config -> extensions.pocket.enabled: false

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