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Firefox 69.0 Released

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Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#251

Post by feanaro »

bovine3dom wrote: post #122
feanaro wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, I think you're right. Mozilla has been fighting a slow war on all powerful UI customization. See: the recent killing of Tridactyl.

Reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated :) You can still install Tridactyl in a normal installation of Firefox by following the instructions on our readme [1]. Admittedly, that may cease to be the case if Mozilla ever tire of us; people in locked-down corporate environments would then find it hard or impossible to install Tridactyl but we'd make it as easy as possible for everyone else. On topic, I'd argue…

I know Tridactyl is still installable, but the situation is not exactly reassuring about the viability of the extension in the future. Instead of a future in which Tridactyl asymptotically approaches the smoothness of Pentadactyl/Vimperator, I now have a vision of a future where a moderate-to-high amount of work has to be periodically invested in order to perhaps maintain the same level of functionality.

> On topic, I'd argue that Mozilla are just desperately trying to cling on to ordinary users; the "war" against power users is a war of (totally understandable) neglect rather than spite.

Perhaps, but meanwhile, as we muse about Tridactyl and the abandonment of userChrome and userContent, a thread about the possibility of Firefox removing webRequest in the future rises to #2. It's getting harder to justify Firefox and Mozilla by the moment.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#253

Post by autoexec »

_coveredInBees wrote: post #208
suby wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Go…

> "without selling out their user's privacy"

This is the key. I think sending any unsolicited traffic to 3rd party websites counts as violating my privacy. Pocket goes far beyond that.

Pocket Recommendations are personalized based on your browsing behavior in Firefox. It doesn't matter that Mozilla and Pocket don't see your browsing history directly. While the choice of which links to push at you are made client side if Pocket knows which pages are suggested to you (either as they are pushed to your browser or after you've clicked them) then they can take away from that information about why you were targeted for those sites.

Sure enough, Pocket collects stats on which links show up in your browser and whether or not you click on them.

"Sponsored stories" often link to DoubleClick or Bitly who redirect you to the suggested site so those companies are also collecting your data because of Pocket. Handing data to DoubleClick is not protecting user's privacy.

Even if you opt out of data collection in Firefox's preferences Pocket and Mozilla will continue to serve you personalized sites and will continue to collect data on you and your browsing history.

I don't mind that pocket exists, but it shouldn't be enabled by default, and it shouldn't take going into about:config to disable.

Firefox should be applauded for taking steps to try to make money off their user's personal information without selling it outright, but at the end of the day they are still trying to make money off their user's personal information.

They do have to compete with Google, but they can best do that by providing a better experience for users and by protecting their privacy.

I've been a long time user of firefox because it's still the best browser when it comes to privacy and control, but it takes an increasing number of default setting changes and about:config edits to get it to stop leaking my data to 3rd parties. It's already to the point where I can't just recommend it to others without explaining there are a ton of settings they should immediately disable or change to protect themselves.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#254

Post by Nition »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #130
tasty_freeze wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fantastic news for people, like me, who spend a lot of time with $10/GB hotspot data prices. I'd click a link to a 5KB news article only to find it streaming HD video of talking heads reading the article.

> 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 think the point was the news article itself is only 5KB. The rest is website fluff.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#255

Post by near »

zerocrates wrote: post #203
aswan wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I mean that's exactly how Firefox operates. They divide the opposition to feature removals by continually allowing the most vocal critics a workaround, until finally when it's removed completely most people have already learned to live without them.

They moved the option to keep browsing history but not keep download history to a user-pref, and then later removed it.

They moved the option for tabs-on-bottom to a user-pref, and then later removed it.

They moved the disable-automatic-updates to a user-pref, and then later buried it in an external policy JSON, which I guess it's okay to see if that file exists at startup but not the user*.css files.

And on and on.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#256

Post by aswan »

zerocrates wrote: post #203
aswan wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There's a very good point here about the limits of using usage telemetry -- given a question of the form "should we invest in improving feature X?", it's a mistake to decide not to simply on the basis of low usage. Low usage could be because users simply aren't interested in the feature (in which case it probably doesn't make sense to invest in improving it), or it could be that they really are interested in it but they don't use it because of limitations (in which case it may well make sense to invest in improving it).

However, I don't believe that's an issue for the specific features discussed here (userChrome.css and userContent.css). These are by their nature features that are only accessible to users with particular knowledge/skills and the Firefox user base is much broader than web developers. But moreover, nobody is proposing to remove this capability and I think its debatable whether it is now harder to access in practice (existing profiles that use this capability were automatically converted, for new profiles you already have to manually add a file to the profile directory, flipping a preference in addition is not a serious barrier).

> 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

It might be reasonable if no other reason was given, but there is a specific and compelling reason (avoiding unneeded main thread I/O during startup for something like 99% of users) here.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#259

Post by lkbm »

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?

Oh man, I thought I was going crazy when Nightly refused to load my userContent.css a while back. I really need a better way to find these changes, and the settings to undo them. I almost left Firefox when they experimented with changing the tab switcher a while back -- I would have left had I not found the flag to turn it off.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#260

Post by 3xblah »

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…

"Why do websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time you want?"

Perhaps the websites (website owners) are not the only ones who are motivated to push for inclusion of autoplaying videos. Some sources suggest ad fraud is one of the major drivers of online advertising.1 Sources also suggest that video works especially well for ad fraud.2,3,4 If there is a shift toward using video for advertising,5 then it makes sense that commercial websites would prefer ads (videos) to be shown (play) to the visitor automatically (autoplay). It stands to reason that commercially-funded browser authors, e.g., Firefox,6 will always want to implement features that cater to its primary stakeholders: commercial websites and the online ad industry.

1 https://digiday.com/media/daily-hourly-fight-digital-ad-frau...

2 https://digiday.com/media/state-of-video-ad-fraud/

3 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/in-banne...

4 http://www.adotas.com/2017/12/video-ad-fraudand-matter/

5 https://digiday.com/media/publishers-pivoting-video-5-charts...

6 https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/041315/how-m...

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