I'm on FF 142.0.1 (64 bit) windows and i've no link preview. I think it's a good news they're introducing some paid features for pro users
Open Settings. You can enable it at the bottom of the General tab.
What's New with Firefox 142
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Re: What's New with Firefox 142
#62I'm genuinely perplexed why people find link previews useful. The page image is too small to really see, and it's not as if rapidly opening and closing a tab actually takes effort. It may be faster than the long click depending how comfortable you are with keyboard controls. I have other questions as well -- does the link preview ignore your plugins? So if you loaded the web page, would uBlock Origin prevent tracking…
Mostly in agreement, though I could perhaps find them useful if not for:
Four times of five the link previews are blocked by a cookie consent or newsletter signup modal anyway.
Re: What's New with Firefox 142
#63> Link Previews show a snapshot of a page before you open it, helping you decide what’s worth your time. Just long press any link to preview and reduce distractions. On macOS there is a native affordance for this by using force click. It's kind of annoying that Firefox chose to not support this and instead made it click-and-hold only.
Pretty typical of browsers and especially of Firefox. Took them 7 years to use native scrollbars post Lion, it looked like cross-platform junk for the longest time.
Back when Chrome was still trying to gain traction, they came out supporting native Keychain Access for password management. Firefox, which had a 4 year head start, never implemented it.
Re: What's New with Firefox 142
#64I'm genuinely perplexed why people find link previews useful. The page image is too small to really see, and it's not as if rapidly opening and closing a tab actually takes effort. It may be faster than the long click depending how comfortable you are with keyboard controls. I have other questions as well -- does the link preview ignore your plugins? So if you loaded the web page, would uBlock Origin prevent tracking…
>> it's not as if rapidly opening and closing a tab actually takes effort. It may be faster than the long click depending how comfortable you are with keyboard controls.
For normal people, i.e. those who aren't techies, you have your answer right there on why this may be useful. We are very efficient with our browser usage. Normal people struggle with this task because they get lost in the steps. Even if they can do the steps at a slow pace, it doesn't stick because it's too slow. The leap to using keyboard shortcuts just won't happen for the majority of people.
I think your points on how this is implemented are fairer. That said, that said it seems like the best approach is to follow the simplest and most efficient approach, which is to not load extensions, or use what is loaded.
The success of features like this is known with technical users like us. We don't like them because we have a workflow that avoids the issue like the phishing one you describe. It's unclear whether this helps users and is likely somewhat experimental. I think it's a much better place to be doing work that other areas where they have invested even if it has many issues.
Re: What's New with Firefox 142
#65Lately, I’ve experienced memory leaks in Firefox that I’m too amateur to diagnose, that leads to Firefox eating 8gb of memory in some web renderer process. So when I excitedly check the changelog hoping for a summary of possible changes, I’m disappointed that there isn’t a verbose changelog for advanced users. I’m sure I could search bugzilla, but it makes me sad that the only “important” things are the headlining fe…
When trying to diagnose performance or memory issues with a browser, always start with the installed and enabled extensions.
Yep. Can’t upvote this enough.
Next up would be looking closer at the pages you frequent. I think many people would be surprised at all the ways web apps screw up these days.
All that said, the browsers, as unfair as it may seem, should do better at handling all of the slop that web app and extension developers put out there. It’s sometimes just a whole lot easier to make the browser more bulletproof than it is to make a bajillion JavaScript/python monkeys conscientious and competent.
Re: What's New with Firefox 142
#66Anecdotally but Firefox has become slower and slower in the past few years for me. I have no idea what is going on behind the scene but it's getting nearly unusable. Tried Edge yesterday and it was so much faster, but the amount of ads pushing is yikes.
Re: What's New with Firefox 142
#67I'm genuinely perplexed why people find link previews useful. The page image is too small to really see, and it's not as if rapidly opening and closing a tab actually takes effort. It may be faster than the long click depending how comfortable you are with keyboard controls. I have other questions as well -- does the link preview ignore your plugins? So if you loaded the web page, would uBlock Origin prevent tracking…
> I have other questions as well -- does the link preview ignore your plugins? So if you loaded the web page, would uBlock Origin prevent tracking which is _not_ prevented when loading the preview?
This was the primary reason I'd never used Vivaldi browser's long-standing feature of being able to set sites within a side panel, since it ignored addons. Was only last year that was changed to allow addons.
Re: What's New with Firefox 142
#68I really like those local AI features. It's tempting me yo move to vanilla Firefox over LibreWolf...
I'm still ambivalent on the rest of the AI features, but the AI translation is absolutely amazing . The translation quality isn't perfect, but being able to seamlessly translate 20+ languages 100% locally is amazing.
The models[0] are open and great, I find them so useful that I ended up making an Android app[1] just to have them available also outside of Firefox.
[0]: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations-models/
Re: What's New with Firefox 142
#69I have found the majority of these relay services utterly useless. A large number of sites are using some kind of email verification service/API that detect all these relay/trash domains (mailinator etc.) and you can never sign up unless you have a legit domain. I'd be astonished if mozmail.com wasn't already on this list. I'm not saying I don't value the idea behind this, but at least with Apple they are using their…
Have been using FireFox Relay for a couple of years now and can coun't the amount of sites which have denied my signup on a single hand.
I'd say that's lucky. I'm using "Masked Email" on Fastmail with a personal domain and I still find that I get blocked from signups from time to time. I assume they're looking for some sort of pattern?
Re: What's New with Firefox 142
#70I'm genuinely perplexed why people find link previews useful. The page image is too small to really see, and it's not as if rapidly opening and closing a tab actually takes effort. It may be faster than the long click depending how comfortable you are with keyboard controls. I have other questions as well -- does the link preview ignore your plugins? So if you loaded the web page, would uBlock Origin prevent tracking…
for me I'm interested in the preview so I know where the link goes in a general sense, not what it looks like. i would use it for shortened or redirected links to see where a random anchor is pointing before I actually open it?
It already seems to basically grab the text from reader mode. What might be more useful is a way to just open a link directly in that to avoid paywalls or annoying uis though