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What We're Working on in Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#241

Post by amluto »

finack wrote: post #196
amluto wrote: post #62

I have a suggestion for Mozilla: find use cases that benefit your users and are not possible in other browsers . For example: Browsers are terrible at accessing devices on a local network. Make this work well in Firefox, extending protocols as needed. Browsers are terrible at configuring IoT devices. It device makers are terrible at making apps for this purpose that don’t suck. Make Firefox (on desktop and mobile!) b…

None of these things are in scope for a program that is supposed to browse the web (by fetching web pages and rendering them).

How is securely connecting to a device that isn’t, itself, connected to the cloud, fetching a webpage from it, and rendering it out of scope for a web browser? Certainly URLs like http://192.168.1.1 have been in scope for decades — why can’t a web browser figure out how to support that use case well?

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#242

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

akdor1154 wrote: post #152
pleb_nz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox does have profiles and has had for as long as I’ve needed them. For some reason they’ve always been hidden away and needed different args on start to change the profile being started, or the use of an extension to allow profile switching. I don’t use them anymore but from what I remember they worked well and were very isolated. Hopefully they’re using the current implementation and just making it more user fr…

As of a recent update, the Profile Manager is available as a startup option if you right click the ff icon (on gnome at least, i assume this was implemented cross platform)

It's not just a GNOME thing, but it might not be that cross-platform. On Linux, there's a firefox.desktop file that describes the application to your DE/launcher, and it looks like this on my box:

    [Desktop Entry]
    Actions=new-private-window;new-window;profile-manager-window
    Categories=Network;WebBrowser
    Exec=firefox --name firefox %U
    
    ---snip---
    
    [Desktop Action profile-manager-window]
    Exec=firefox --ProfileManager
    Name=Profile Manager
So that'll work on anything that uses https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/de... and there could be parallel features for Windows/Mac, but there also might not be or Firefox might not implement them.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#243

Post by tim333 »

As a recent newbie attempter as switching to Firefox

Vertical Tabs and Profile Management system - seem good. I was a bit shocked that to get the tree style tabs working properly I had to go typing code (to stop the old tabs being there too).

The thing that got me back to Chrome this time was I started getting out of memory errors which I have not had in any other software in a couple of years of using the M1 macbook. Maybe they'll fix that under the "speed, performance" stuff?

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#244

Post by illiac786 »

torstenvl wrote: post #10

> Intuitive privacy settings that deliver all the power of our world-class anti-tracking technologies in a simplified, easy-to-understand way. > More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker. Stop it. Gnome-ification is incredibly user hostile. Almost every time folks "simplify" a UI, they actually make it far more complicated instead.…

It sounds like in your view simplifying a UI is not possible or has never been successfully implemented.

I think it is very much possible, very much needed by lots of software out there, but indeed it’s hard.

The hardest part is not alienating existing users when messing with muscle memory.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#245

Post by cassepipe »

JohnFen wrote: post #151
cassepipe wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I would miss the search box when it disappeared but actually the "awesome bar" is pretty awesome : You can disable search suggestions and it will only search your keywords in history/bookmarks/opened tabs and then you just tab into the list, else if there's nothing of interest in the list you can always press enter and it will launch a search in your default search engine. All that power accessible with jus…

I dislike the "awesome bar" quite a lot. Fortunately, as you say, you can disable a lot of its "awesomeness" (enough that I can live with it), but not all of it. You do have to do a bit of research to find out the various magic "about:config" settings you need to change.

It's easy enough to bring back the search bar without about:config though : right-clik on the chrome then drag and drop the search box item

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#246

Post by finack »

amluto wrote: post #241
finack wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of these things are in scope for a program that is supposed to browse the web (by fetching web pages and rendering them).

How is securely connecting to a device that isn’t, itself, connected to the cloud, fetching a webpage from it, and rendering it out of scope for a web browser? Certainly URLs like http://192.168.1.1 have been in scope for decades — why can’t a web browser figure out how to support that use case well?

Web browsers can already do that. I'm not sure what else is desired beyond what they already do.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#247

Post by finack »

gsuuon wrote: post #202
finack wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programs that don't require an entire web browser to run can already do all of those things.

They can also do a lot of other things that a browser's sandbox would not allow

Until Google decides to give developers the ability to let the browser invade the rest of the system, which, in six months, will suddenly be necessary for everyone to do things like bank online and pay utility bills.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#248

Post by neilv »

1oooqooq wrote: post #220
neilv wrote: post #61

Prioritization that I'd like to suggest for Firefox, driven by needs of society (from high to low): 1. Representing the public interest wrt Web -- especially fervent respect for privacy in the browser, almost as much emphasis on security, fighting commercial excesses around de jure and defacto standards, and social equity within the scope of what Mozilla does (e.g., software accessibility, encouraging all volunteers)…

curious about your motivations to typing all that here

It should be said, I had a moment, and I type fast.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#249

Post by AnthonyMouse »

lxgr wrote: post #237
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mandatory sandboxing increasingly seems like a misfeature. Now you can't install an extension that does a lot of things that are useful , ostensibly to protect you from malware. Optional sandboxing can be good because users can have more confidence that something can't hurt them. But it can also be bad because users will have more confidence that something can't hurt them, and then it does anyway. Meanwhile the abili…

No, you can still grant permissions to web extensions, but the difference is that it's now explicit, and it is at least possible to design extensions with minimally-required privileges. This vastly reduces the blast radius of an extension publisher takeover or an insider attack, for example. > what have we gained, when the user just runs how_to_actually_uninstall_mcafee.avi.exe and gets the malware regardless? Nothin…

> No, you can still grant permissions to web extensions, but the difference is that it's now explicit, and it is at least possible to design extensions with minimally-required privileges.

The problem is the reverse. Some permissions are now considered "too dangerous" for the extension, so there is no facility to grant them even if the user wants the extension to do that and it has a good reason to.

> Nothing would happen if I double-click that file, since it doesn't run on my OS.

In which case the website could have fingerprinted your browser and served you the one that does.

> Are you saying that because we can't protect all users from all harm, we should just give up?

I'm saying that we should give people the tools and information they need to decide if and to what extent they can trust something, instead of presuming to decide for them.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#250

Post by lxgr »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #249
lxgr wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you can still grant permissions to web extensions, but the difference is that it's now explicit, and it is at least possible to design extensions with minimally-required privileges. This vastly reduces the blast radius of an extension publisher takeover or an insider attack, for example. > what have we gained, when the user just runs how_to_actually_uninstall_mcafee.avi.exe and gets the malware regardless? Nothin…

> No, you can still grant permissions to web extensions, but the difference is that it's now explicit, and it is at least possible to design extensions with minimally-required privileges. The problem is the reverse. Some permissions are now considered "too dangerous" for the extension, so there is no facility to grant them even if the user wants the extension to do that and it has a good reason to. > Nothing would ha…

I agree, and that mechanism is to introduce a new, permissioned API into Firefox's Web Extension API implementation.

Requiring them to maintain two completely different extension APIs (the old XUL-based one and Web Extensions) would work too but seems excessive.

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