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Firefox 67.0 Released

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251–260 of 264 posts

Re: Firefox 67.0 Released

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people also get annoyed at printed paper being white? Do they wish books had black pages? If not, as you say, it is only a matter of adjusting the screen for the proper brightness, depending on ambient light. And it is true that, inevitably, whatever you're doing, sooner or later some white background or picture will appear on screen and blast your eyes with light. I cannot stand this, so I don't use dark themes o…

> Do people also get annoyed at printed paper being white? Printed paper glowing white would indeed be very annoying. Passive displays, such as old non-backlit LCD or e-ink, can be white and not annoying. Most people don't want to stare into a light source more than necessary. Using proper brightness helps, and dark mode can help even more.

What's the difference between a screen emitting X light as a primary light source and a sheet of paper emitting the same exact amount of light, as a secondary light source ?

The amount of light coming to your retina stays the same..

Just lower the brightness until it matches the amount of light reflected by a sheet of paper placed next to the screen.

If you can't read the paper, turn the lights on. Being in a dark room dilates your pupils which makes them even more sensible to bright light...

Re: Firefox 67.0 Released

#252
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but I think the parent is wondering in what situation you'd want to store in the browser details of a site you'd visited, but still use private mode to "hide" that you'd visited? What data does the password use retain? IIRC password store retains the "time first used, time last used" and displays that visibly. In short what's the use-case or user story that fits this feature?

If you password-protect your passwords, aren't they unavailable to anyone else? I use a password manager and that is what it does..

I'm assuming the threat is considered to be someone with local physical access to one's computer. Once you've entered your master password then an "attacker" only has to click the burger menu, then "logins" then they can enter a string from a website login URL, maybe "porn" and it would show the website's full domain, the username used, when the site was first and most-recently visited, and how many visits were made over time -- if it keeps bookmarks with all the info -- if you were using privacy mode to hide your tracks then it's not working there.

If you use Private Mode all the time then can't you just set the browser to act as if it were in private mode but with more fine-settings choice, that way you could have had password saving all along.

So, I'm still not really seeing the benefit.

That said, presumably the password db could have salted-hashes in in-place of domains/URLs for "privacy mode passwords" and then they'd be very hard to casually discover; that might be closer to user expectations.

Re: Firefox 67.0 Released

#253
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They held off for a very long time, and I'm glad they did that. I'm also glad they switched, because the alternative is that either you don't use the most effective security option available or you stop using Firefox, both of which seem like even bigger long-term problems.

A case of “Too big to fail”? Stop using Google wasn’t even mentioned as an alternative!

The goal of a web browser is to browse the web, not to browse most of the web. Principled objection to a site doing something nonstandard is great when the goal is to get the site to fix it, so the browser's users can visit that site. Once it became clear Google wasn't going to fix it, refusing to ship support (that was already implemented!) only has the effect of hurting Firefox's users (slash telling some fraction of Firefox users to stop being Firefox users anymore) and not improving the web or maintaining internal engineering standards.

Re: Firefox 67.0 Released

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, you wouldn't need to save a password if it was a one-off, either?

That's true, although I could picture a scenario where you want to log into a service only occasionally, so you want the password saved but don't necessarily want to keep a container for it. For instance, my wife and I have separate brokerage accounts, and I log into both simultaneously once a month.

That heavily depends on how much of a hassle the container system is, really. If specific sites automatically get opened in a specific container (a la facebook) then I'm certainly going to take advantage of password saving. Anything to have to not type and/or click fewer things to actually do what I want to do, instead of getting to what I wanted to do.

If I have to manually open the correct container first, though, that's a hassle. It's why I use containers sparingly, but hot damn do I have the "facebook container" extension installed (a site I look at maybe once a week) because automatic silos are fantastic.

Re: Firefox 67.0 Released

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's frustrating that we've come to a point where websites can track users by knowing how they set up their browser to render pages. Such information should have no way nor reason to ever be transmitted back from the client to the server in the first place.

One of the original, and continuing, uses of browser scripting is to tweak the layout based on client rendering quirks. ISTR (late 1990's?) reading about fingerprinting attacks that didn't require script or even CSS. Subtle changes in font size and attributes (bold, italic) may affect the order in which page elements are requested by the browser. Even if you wanted to, there's simply no reliable way to isolate data a…

I contend that while everything about the client cannot be hidden from the server, the number of things that can be identified is increasing.

Re: Firefox 67.0 Released

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find the source, but I believe they didn't upgrade to the newer standard due to some combination of existing keys and ChromeOS.

They helped write the new standard and it's been a standard for years now. There is really no excuse.

Well, they don't need an excuse. They are Google. :-/

Re: Firefox 67.0 Released

#258
post #35
post #27

Running Firefox under Qubes has become increasingly frustrating, as tabs crash whenever (apparently?) they try to use WebGL, or anything that depends on access to a GPU. More and more, Firefox seems to depend on GPU access (or something?) and fails hard when it's not there.

Yeah I had to disable gpu acceleration on Firefox in parallels. Otherwise it rendered black boxes for elements with certain styles.

I would love, love, love to see black boxes instead of crashes.

Re: Firefox 67.0 Released

#259
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

about:config certainly has lots of settings to turn off, but I manifestly have not found enough of them, if indeed any number is enough.

You can cross-check about:config with the about:support Graphics section. A few switches of relevance: layers.acceleration, webgl.disabled, media.hardware-video-decoding.enabled, gfx.webrender.force-disabled

Aha! gfx.webrender.force-disabled was false. Now to ser how much difference it makes.

Re: Firefox 67.0 Released

#260
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be better if they offered a way to really turn it off. Firefox has got very crashy in environments that have no access to a GPU.

gfx.webrender.force-disabled=true should do the trick. Though we shouldn't be attempting to switch it on without a GPU, if you could file a bug that would be great.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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