Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox 57.0 Released

mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 836 posts

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#691

Post by kelnos »

venatiodecorus wrote: post #591
pmoriarty wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite there being no official releases in years and being abandoned by its official developers, Pentadactyl was kept afloat by its users, from whom you could still get fixes and releases through google code and google groups. I also fixed some things for myself, based on help from the community. Despite all this, it did finally completely break recently (before FF 57), and I just had to not update FF for a while un…

you are a tiny minority and a specialized browser fork is a great solution for your use case in this situation.

I think that's a great point: it's difficult, near impossible, to make any particular piece of software contain 100% of the features that 100% of people want. Especially in the case of a tiny-minority feature, a specialized version that caters to your needs sometimes makes the most sense.

I just worry that people using some of these alternative browsers are opening themselves up to security issues since those code bases are less well-tested for security problems, and often they don't have the developer resources to implement things like process isolation and sandboxing.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#692

Post by kelnos »

Silhouette wrote: post #161
Tomte wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla doesn't create all those extensions. And the extensions' authors had, what, two years advance warning or so? Criticize the real culpits, not Mozilla.

My browser and extensions did useful things yesterday that they do not do today. Who changed something in the meantime? Obviously I paid nothing for Firefox and Mozilla owes me the same nothing in return, but if it wants to keep users and remain significant, breaking arguably its main advantage might not be the best plan.

> ... but if it wants to keep users and remain significant, breaking arguably its main advantage might not be the best plan.

I fully expect that this move will certainly lose Mozilla a few Firefox users, but on balance it'll be a net win: they were already losing users to performance problems and lack of modern security features. The users the lose due to lost extensions will be tiny compared to the users they won't lose in the future now that Firefox actually feels like a modern browser performance- and security-wise.

I expect Mozilla knows a ton more about their users than we do and any guesses about user retention due to this move are pure speculation (including what I wrote above). I trust them to do the right thing here, a trust they've earned over the past (nearly) two decades that I do not place in, say, Google & Chrome.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#693

Post by jhasse »

choward wrote: post #435

The one feature I wanted that chrome has isn't there in Gnome: no worthless title bar that shows redundant information. I saw screenshots for Gnome with the title bar missing before Quantum was released, so I had my hopes up. There is an extension to get rid of it. However, you also have to manually install some other garbage too. They provide a debian package, but I'm not using a debian based OS so it's a pain in th…

If youre using Fedora: They backported it to 57 and you can activate client side decorations in about:config.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#694

Post by jhasse »

bobajeff wrote: post #6

I wonder when the Android version of Firefox will be updated to 57.

The thing that makes Firefox on Android unuseable for me: URLs which should be handled by apps (e.g. youtube) always open in Firefox.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#696

Post by blaenk »

arunc wrote: post #536
mkup wrote: post #534

Firefox Quantum feels very fast, but addon support is disappointing :( + uBlock Origin - Self-Destructing Cookies - YesScript - Video DownloadHelper - Save Session

- DownthemAll

This one surprises me the most, not the fact that DownThemAll itself isn't WebExtensions compatible, since that was known since last year [0], but that there is a huge gap in download management functionality.

I'm not even asking for all of the functionality present in DownThemAll, I'd just like:

    * to be able to queue up multiple downloads without actually starting them, so I can start/resume them once I go AFK for example
    * auto-scan all links on the page and be able to filter them to add links to the download queue, e.g. to queue up all files matching a certain filter
    * rearrange the queue's order
    * persist the queue across browser sessions
    * pause any given download and be able to resume it across browser sessions
Meanwhile the usual built-in download functionality nowadays appears to be pitifully bare-bones by comparison, only providing the ability to manually download individual files one by one with no semblance of a queue, nor a way to limit concurrent downloads to one (e.g. I'd rather have one finished and ready to use than 5 downloading slowly due to the connection being spread thin).

For what it's worth, thankfully the author of DownThemAll is working on a WebExtensions version [1], which may also get released on Chrome and other WebExtensions-compatible browsers [2].

[0]: https://www.downthemall.net/re-downthemall-and-webextensions...

[1]: https://www.downthemall.net/delays/

[2]: https://www.downthemall.net/progress/

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#697

Post by jhasse »

johndoe489 wrote: post #582

On Windows 10, am I dreaming or the font smoothing looks a tiny bit different (from Google Chrome)? I kinda like it, small text looks a bit stronger and smoother à-la OS X.

Yes, it has always been different to Chrome (better IMHO).

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#698

Post by ywain »

ajdlinux wrote: post #686
HenryBemis wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looked great, up to the point that 70% of my addons were disabled. I rolled back in 5mins :) I'll give it another chance in a couple of weeks, and hope that there will be a bypass that will force my outdated addons to work.

There won't be a bypass - Fx57 has completely dropped legacy extension support. This is a good thing, and it's just a shame that so many addons haven't been updated yet.

This isn't quite true. Support for legacy extensions is disabled by default, but can be re-enabled via the `extensions.legacy.enabled` flag in about:config.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#699

Post by scholia »

ywain wrote: post #698
ajdlinux wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There won't be a bypass - Fx57 has completely dropped legacy extension support. This is a good thing, and it's just a shame that so many addons haven't been updated yet.

This isn't quite true. Support for legacy extensions is disabled by default, but can be re-enabled via the `extensions.legacy.enabled` flag in about:config.

Though you lose multi-process operation, I think....

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#700

Post by chris_wot »

Yoric wrote: post #656
aquadrop wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've switched to multiple processes model, but you don't have "task manager" as Chrome. Do you plan to implement it in the future?

Working on it right now, but no ETA yet.

Please, that's one of the most useful troubleshooting tools in Chrome.
Post reply on HN