Here's my Firefox wishlist:<p>- Open new windows more quickly. Firefox feels sluggish (on Mac) even though it isn't, simply because it opens new windows far more slowly than Safari or Chrome.<p>- Use the platform native key store. I don't want my passwords stored unencrypted on disk. But I don't want to enter a separate master password either. I do want to use fingerprint/face unlock on mobile to reveal passwords.<p>- Give me a setting to autoconfirm all cookie consent requests and lobby for a legally binding do-not-track header. Cookie consent was well meaning, but it has turned out to make things worse. Let's move on.
As a long time Chrome user, and someone who (admittedly) said to a FF fan about an year ago, that it's too late for FF to catch up to Chrome now. I gave FF another shot about 6 months ago, and I'm liking it more every month since then.<p>It has been my primary browser outside of work, the major reason I use Chrome now is for Chrome Dev Tools.<p>Also, some websites don't behave well in FF and I find that most of the time it's because of the site tracking being blocked. So not a big deal
"Firefox replaces annoying notification request pop-ups with a more delightful experience, by default for all users. The pop-ups no longer interrupt your browsing, in its place, a speech bubble will appear in the address bar when you interact with the site."<p>That should pretty much kill off a lot of the notification request crap, especially if Chrome follows suit. I can envision the conversion rate massively falling off when it's no longer something right in your face.
> Firefox replaces annoying notification request pop-ups with a more delightful experience, by default for all users. The pop-ups no longer interrupt your browsing, in its place, a speech bubble will appear in the address bar when you interact with the site.<p>This is fantastic! I had finally figured out I could turn this off in settings a while ago, glad it's now a default. I get so annoyed by this, annoying indeed!
I've been using Firefox for the last 10 or so years. (Used the "new Chrome-Opera" for a while but went back soon)<p>These recent developments are awesome. As a frontend developer, I also find the devtools absolutely competitive with Chrome's.<p>The default ad- and tracker blocking is nice, I only need to use uBblock Origin for Youtube (whitelisting only that), since Youtube became nearly unusable due to the massive amount of ads.<p>Edit: also, they are fortunately tackling two prominent annoyances of the "modern web" i.e. push notification popups (for those who don't turn the whole feature off outright in about:config) and video autoplay.<p>So sad that Firefox's market share is still just 9-10%. :(
With notification spam fixed, how about tackling cookie banners spam next? Let's work on a standard to allow user to set their preferred cookie settings level once in browser UI and keep websites clean.
Note that with some tinkering you can already manually enable WebRender, fast GPU and Rust based rendering engine, in stable Firefox<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945206" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945206</a>
I keep trying Chrome out every so often, but there's little usability issues that keep bringing me back to Firefox. For example, Chrome never wants to bring me to the correct sites when you start typing letters. It's always a site I maybe visited once (like nypost instead of news.ycombinator.com)
I know the hacks blog tends to stick to "what web technologies changed" but 72 also introduces "Experimental support for using client certificates from the OS certificate store can be enabled by setting the preference security.osclientcerts.autoload to true (Windows only)." which has always been a huge PITA for me while testing and many interested in these technology changes are probably interested in this flag (though maybe moreso when Mac/Linux get supported).
I love the Picture in Picture feature. There are too many web sites which leave you only the choice between a rather small video or full screen. With PIP I can choose the size which works best for my screen. Also, as it floats on top, it is never covered by other applications.<p>One thing would make this even more increadible: is there a way to set the default size and position? If the PIP feature would always start in my preferred size and position, this would be just so great.
Can't wait to find out if this release fixes a bug (<a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1557160" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1557160</a>) that was preventing correct rendering of extension popup windows/context menus when the APZ zooming was enabled (which allows pinch-to-zoom gestures, e.g. on the MS Surface).<p>Update: Just got to try it out, seems like it indeed works now. Yay Firefox 72!
I'm honestly surprised that we aren't talking about tab behavior here. Literally the only reason I keep using Chrome is that no matter how many tabs I have open, they're all visible at the top.<p>There's visual persistence of state. On Firefox, even with the trick of reducing minimum tab width, my tabs overflow and I have to click through to get different groups of tabs. It is utterly maddening and I don't know why every other browser refuses to do Chrome like tabs.<p>Why the continued choice to violate the first rule of UI design which is to keep things in the same place?
Are they doing anything about floating videos? It's annoying on desktop, but on mobile it's so bad I just don't bother. Typically it's "news" sites that use it.
It's such a great update again!<p>And now this: "Following in Mozilla's footsteps, Google announced today plans to hide notification popup prompts inside Chrome starting next month"<p>I love how Google follows Firefox with these "better web experience" features but only if they don't impact their business model.
Firefox keeps getting better. I really want to switch. The only thing that’s holding me back is the design. It just doesn’t look as modern as Chrome or Brave. The back button is a different height than the search bar; the tab container doesn’t line up with the search from the left side of the window. And it has a weird mix of slightly-square and rounded buttons, which makes it feel like a second-class browser.<p>I know that the average person isn’t concerned with these things, but I spend almost all of my day in a browser, and I want it to look as good (or better) than the competition.
I find the notification permission change (requiring it to be after a user gesture) really annoying. It doesn't do almost anything to combat permission spam (if you're visiting a clickbait site, you'll probably click or scroll at least once, especially on mobile where sites usually have a giant header so you need to scroll past the fold to even see that the article is clickbait), and just inconveniences developers who have to special-case Firefox's divergence from the spec when trying to <i>legitimately</i> use the gated features.
If anyone from Mozilla is reading, is it too much to ask to host apk's for the mobile version on your site and provide other update mechanisms apart from google app store? Like what Signal are doing.
What do people use for “Profiles”. I need ability to switch easily between profiles (different identities) without going to command line. I also don’t want to install a third party extension for that if possible
The new notification request behavior is great (speech bubble in URL bar, instead of a popup <a href="https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/block-notification-requests/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/block-notification-requests...</a>). Much better than the ubiquitous popup asking if a site could give you popups...
I'm a huge fan of the picture-in-picture, though I wish for a few enhancements:<p>I wish clicking anywhere on the box would act as "play/pause", instead of requiring me to hunt down the button. And of course I wish for some visible/interactable buffer-bar, though I realize that might not be standardized across webplayers, so maybe not possible.
I find Firefox and Thunderbird amazing, I just miss being able to customize keyboard shortcuts. Thunderbird ones are especially evil (they don’t use any modifier like Ctrl, so I often mess my inbox up when I don’t notice Thunderbird is the focused window). Also, while Firefox for iOS is leagues ahead of e.g. Brave, it still has many issues.
Has firefox fixed video playback on sites like instagram and gfycat yet? Their mp4 playback was broken for a significant number of videos last time I attempted to update. I'm still on an FF version 10 versions back because of their atrocious compatibility with mp4s (which is still incompatible, but less so).
Okay, so I don't really post to HN and this may seem like a silly complaint but Firefox's management of theming just seems off to me. I use macOS, I don't fiddle about with my wallpaper very much and so this stains Firefox's top bar with an ugly brown tint. I could switch to the light theme, however when I do so Firefox no longer respects my system change to dark mode.<p>Does anyone else get bothered by this? Is there any way around this? I'm not an aesthetics person by any means but this is quite annoying. It's a fantastic browser other than this, I've been a user for as long as I can remember.<p>I'm sure you can probably modify userChrome and all this and I've not really tried because I'm not <i>THAT</i> bothered by it, but surely there should be a way to set your preferred themes for light & dark?
I just upgraded my iMac to Catalina, and noticed this rather serious issue with Firefox:<p><a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606620" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606620</a><p>Basically if you have an external screen (possibly related to it being low-DPI and main screen being Retina), context menus don't work properly, if at all.<p>It seems it got even worse in 72 than it was in 71 - now I'm not even getting a context menu in the wrong place, it's invisible (maybe off-screen?).<p>Hopefully someone who works on Firefox can see this and fix it - it's making Firefox nearly unusable as is :(
Firefox's killer feature was generating sync keys locally and letting you self-host a compatible sync host.<p>Chrome generates the sync keys on server and has proprietary sync software.<p>That's it. That's all it took for me to switch. I know FF eats almost double the CPU compared to Chrome. I know 1 out of every 10 webapps will just not work in it. That's fine. I will take the security and privacy over convenience.<p>Just buy a better CPU.
2 grave security/privacy issues in Firefox right now (both are still open after more than 1 year):<p><i>Firefox Installs non-free binaries from Cisco and Google again</i> <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=915582" rel="nofollow">https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=915582</a><p><i>firefox: Safe Browsing updates fail due to insufficient quota on the Google API key</i> <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=895147" rel="nofollow">https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=895147</a><p>Just recently I discovered DoH was activated by default now and bypassing my /etc/hosts block list without any warning. This opened me up to tracking from sites I thought I had blocked.<p>In all above cases the failure-modes are insecure. It's like a firewall that suddenly switches its enforcement policy from a <i>deny-all+whitelisting</i> to <i>allow-all+blacklisting</i> without properly informing users.<p>Totally unacceptable!
Still hanging out for Replay, which if it gets into mainline Firefox, will easily make the FF the best JS development environment: <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/WebReplay" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/We...</a>
Firefox is great on desktop. I use it 95+% of time. But it is not so good on Android. Ebay is great example. Most of the time, go to page 2 of search results and you get no listings. I want to use Firefox on mobile as it syncs my bookmarks and passwords but things like this are frustrating.
I appreciate all the upgrades, but I keep finding that Firefox is abysmal for battery life, even the versions that supposedly have focused on this issue. Have folks found ways to reduce it's power consumption on OSX?
I too would like to join the bandwagon of people happily switching from Chrome to Firefox (mainly for ethical reasons at this point). However, I am on Linux (Ubuntu 19.04 on a desktop machine) and last time I tried (around FF 70 I believe, maybe 2 months ago), I experienced horrible system-wide lockups, requiring hard reboots (I was surprised to discover that it's even still possible, nowadays). It probably doesn't help that I'm doing web development with React, and thus I'm heavily using some dev tools, but still.. Anyone would have any clue about this?
Can anybody share some insight as to why the PiP mode is implemented non-natively? Both macOs and Windows have a system PiP mode that should be usable?
Re: picture in picture - anyone else here think that this feature doesn't belong to a browser? It just seems so... erm... random, basically.<p>Looks like something that was cloned from some other product and rather crudely shoehorned in. At the very least it should have been introduced after an update and given an option to <i>opt-in</i> to using it, rather than automatically enabling it without any notice.
I still dont get why firefox is 1 to 2 seconds slow doing everything.<p>We already have uorgin block and https everywhere and privacy beaver.<p>They just want to make their browser even more bloated.<p>And lets not even talk about linux distro. On my xubuntu its even slower than chromium or chrome.<p>Here is my advice: Invest everything on speed. Your user already know about privacy and stuff. That why less than 9% of us are left.
Interestingly the beta for 73.0 [1] includes NextDNS as a second choice for DNS over HTTPS providers as well as Cloudflare.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/73.0beta/releasenotes/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/73.0beta/releasenotes/</a>
> User research commonly brings up permission prompt spam as a top user annoyance<p>What's user research?<p>Jokes aside, my favorite feature in Firefox is the good old-fashioned search box. I use Bing by default and repeat searches on Google or Duck Duck Go if I don't find results right away.
Switched to Firefox recently on my desktop. I had the strangest problem with Chrome: Somehow it just kept forking more and more processes until the rlimit got filled (100k+ threads/processes).<p>Too much trouble to debug it so I opted to switch instead.
Looking forward to video decoding (and encoding) hardware acceleration through VAAPI in Firefox on Linux. Now that WebRender is already in the codebase, at least doing it for WebRender path would be very welcome.
The one-click search icons have been removed from the adress bar to the search bar? I cant tell if this is a hidden design feature that does not appear on the release notes, but it sure will bother me...
"Say goodbye to annoying notification requests (unless you want them)"<p>For a moment I thought they had done this for the cookie and privacy notices. Oh how that would be amazing to move that functionality into the browser.
Does fingerprint blocking just use a blacklist, like ad blockers? Seems like a pretty lame approach. Shouldn't they focus on approaches that work for all future scripts? I.e. making browsers seem less unique.
Unfortunately the font rendering is still not up to Chromes, a lot of sites look weird. Fastmail for instance is rendered with a visibly smaller font on FF, and it looks blurry on FF. (Win10).
What the hey? No hash values posted after downloading the Firefox binary.<p>How can we tell that we got the real deal, especially if the original Firefox binary got compromised?
Only thing keeping me in Chrome is multiple profiles<p>And no, Firefox containers are not the same, I cannot install two versions for 1pass - personal/private<p>Firefox also have true "profiles" but they are kind of a hack
Password fields are broken in Ubuntu 18.04 (Gnome Flashback Metacity), when using Firefox's Sync feature, (and without add-ons).<p>This was a problem in recent versions, and is still a problem in version 72.
What's the criteria for FF bumping its major versions? Looks to me like these release announcements are getting much more frequent.<p>Edit: Answered by zamadatix.
I switched to ff a couples years ago and up until the last few months everything has been great. Now a lot of important sites don't work because the content security policy is completely inflexible. It should allow me to make exceptions on sites I chose. I've had to install chrome just for a couple sites and now its just easier to make chrome my daily driver again. The ff team should consider making the CSP flexible.
am slightly dismayed that to this day on macOS I can't use back and forward buttons even if I redefine them in karabiner. it works with other browsers, seems that autoscroll feature is no degrading gracefully when you disable it.
Dont forget that if you manually update, Firefox destroys your update settings:<p><a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1576400" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1576400</a>
Haven't been paying attention or keeping up and noticed the version number is 72. One thought is "Wow - that's a lot" and another is "That doesn't sound like semantic versioning."
I really like Firefox, but I had to switch back to Chrome because of resource usage. After using it for some time it got up to 3GB RAM consumption for a single tab with no plugins.
After the recent missteps by Chrome (mangling the display of URLs), I decided to switch to Firefox and DuckDuckGo a few months ago and I was pleasantly surprised at how fast Firefox is these days than what I found it to be 10 years ago.<p>While I still consider DuckDuckGo to be in the "not bad" category, Firefox is in the "seriously awesome" category now.<p>If you have been away from Firefox for a while like me, give it another shot. It won't disappoint you for sure.
My biggest gripe with Firefox is how it opens tabs. If I open a new tab in Chrome, it opens just to the right of the current one which is nice because it keeps related tabs together. In Firefox it opens to the far right which is annoying. I tried installing an extension to fix this but it was buggy. Only recently did I discover that I could dig into about:config to enable the behavior I consider expected (and I'm sure most people agree with me given how many Chrome users there are).