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Firefox 69.0 Released

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Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#301

Post by thirdsun »

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…

Not to mention the waste of bandwidth - imagine being on a metered connection and forgetting a Bloomberg tab in the background. It will happily stream a neverending series of videos for hours if I remember correctly.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#303

Post by thirdsun »

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 it. However given your goal of delivering sane and lighweight news articles you might want to extend that mission to the selection of your sources and consider excluding some. For the Boris Johnson story you link to The Independent, which returns a 14 MB article (while autplaying is disabled in Firefox) and basically has become a collection of worst practices when it comes to user experience and web development. Surely there must be better sources for popular stories like these.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#304

Post by thirdsun »

basch wrote: post #85
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

Im probably in the minority, but I think its a good way to compete with Edge/MSN. The clickbait I get out of the pocket new tab page is infinitely more interesting than MSN, which has too much focus on salacious current events.

Sounds like a lesser evil rather than idea worth competing with.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#305

Post by xxs »

bzbarsky wrote: post #149
StavrosK wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, how slow could an "if file_exists()" check have been? This smells like deprecation to me, if the user CSS doesn't exist, don't load anything. Boom, no slowdown.

The technical answer to the question you asked is "10-20ms, if you're not on an SSD". That's not great, actually, if you're trying to shave tens of milliseconds at a time off startup performance. For what it's worth, this change happened because people were seeing the stat() call involved in startup profiles, taking sufficient time that it seemed worthwhile to avoid it if possible, as far as I can tell.

>The technical answer to the question you asked is "10-20ms, if you're not on an SSD

C'mon the directory structure would be cached already, even if it was not - the seek times for HDD are 3-4ms.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#307

Post by MarcysVonEylau »

GeekyBear wrote: post #136
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 is still a text only version of NPR that is exceptionally lightweight. https://text.npr.org/

They probably thought they're pulling a number on GDPR compliance, but created the best news reading experience in process...

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#308

Post by acdha »

mikekchar wrote: post #284
xvector wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People that choose 5-minute videos over 5 lines of text probably aren't doing it because they can't do the latter. They do the former to fill time. Popcorn for the brain, if you're bored.

I often wonder, why are people so bored? I'm fighting off doing my typical "old man rant" but I often hear people dream of a life where they have no responsibilities, but then I notice that most people fill their time with fluff -- because they are bored. I do it myself, even! Fun fact: I'm on HN posting this post, not because this is what I want to do, but because it was the easiest thing I could think of starting t…

Commutes and jobs are soaking up more time, most people live in places with increased travel times to anything, and there’s never been more opportunity for easy distraction - why spend 40 minutes round trip driving somewhere to do something when you can watch Netflix on the couch?

Most importantly, though, are smartphones: you didn’t used to have so much just a second away anywhere you went. There’s an entire industry building entertainment for people in lines, on transit, walking to their car, etc. so I don’t think it’s as much that distraction is replacing previous big activities but filling in lots of space throughout the day.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#309

Post by bzbarsky »

xxs wrote: post #305
bzbarsky wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technical answer to the question you asked is "10-20ms, if you're not on an SSD". That's not great, actually, if you're trying to shave tens of milliseconds at a time off startup performance. For what it's worth, this change happened because people were seeing the stat() call involved in startup profiles, taking sufficient time that it seemed worthwhile to avoid it if possible, as far as I can tell.

>The technical answer to the question you asked is "10-20ms, if you're not on an SSD C'mon the directory structure would be cached already, even if it was not - the seek times for HDD are 3-4ms.

The directory structure may or may not be cached already: these files are in a separate directory from everything else Firefox needs at startup.

If your HDD has a seek time of 3-4ms on average, that means it needs to rotate completely in at most 6-8ms, which gives you a rotation speed of 7500-10,000 rpm. HDDs in data centers do that, sure. Consumer HDDs just don't do that, last I checked; they're mostly in the 5400-7200 rpm range, with laptops firmly in the 5400 bucket. See https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sc/laptops?appl... for example (currently offered Dell laptops "for home" with an HDD: they're all 5400rpm). At 5400 rpm, your average latency from just the rotation is 5.5ms and your worst-case latency from the rotation is 11ms. That doesn't include other latency sources, but let's assume those are somehow scheduled away to happen during the rotation.

Keep in mind that what typically sticks in users' minds is worst-case, not average-case, behavior, so you have to bring your worst-case time budget down to whatever your target is.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#310

Post by plopz »

zerocrates wrote: post #296
aswan wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I also think this is a pretty reasonable change, since it already requires users to edit files, so about:config is not really a major additional step. But I also would imagine the usage was quite low already and any incremental hassle will push it lower and it won't be hard to get to an analysis where maintaining a rarely-used non-default codepath is seen as not worth it. Of course it all depends on what's going on w…

I use the feature, but only because an extension I used before, ClassicThemeRestorer, isn't supported in the new extension ecosystem. The only workaround is to use the css files. I would imagine a large percent of people that used to use the extension didn't migrate to the css files when extensions broke. So they wouldn't be counted in metrics. Also the experience is much worse for an end user since extensions auto update, but changes to the css files have to be manually updated.
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