Firefox 75.0

Related from a couple days ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22804149" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22804149</a>

The new style of the address bar is extremely jarring, and (imo) ugly. It breaks all kinds of UI conventions, drawing itself over other UI elements like the tab bar and the toolbar to the left and right of it.<p>For this reason alone, at least I&#x27;ve found that setting `browser.urlbar.update1` to false in about:config reverts to the old code--mostly. Firefox 75 still seems to have changed the click behavior of the bar to be totally unlike any other program too; it highlights the entire text by default, without putting it in the selection buffer, and in general makes handling it with the mouse a lot more tedious than it used to be.<p>I&#x27;m ragging on this a lot, but seriously, it&#x27;s a major regression in UX.

The select-all Chrome-like behaviour is so horrible. It makes the two most useful interactions with the address bar much more difficult - putting the address into the primary buffer (on X11) so you can paste it somewhere else (this now requires a triple click), and putting the caret inside the address to edit the URL (which now requires clicking twice, but not double clicking because that is different, so you have to click with exactly the right pause inbetween, which is a horrible interaction).<p>What&#x27;s extra annoying is that a single click will select the whole address but not put it in the primary buffer! Another UI convention broken.<p>All of this is to optimise for the most useless address bar interaction - clicking into it with the mouse and then changing to the keyboard to type a new URL, instead of just using ctrl+L. This is a feature made to optimise for people using the software (IMO) incorrectly.

I&#x27;ve been using nightlies for a while, and the address bar seems fine to me. I haven&#x27;t even noticed when it changed.<p>It&#x27;s a central piece of user interface, so it makes sense to make it more prominent than what a &#x27;90s design of a bog-standard dropdown menu allows.<p>It even logically makes sense to make it like a little popover window, because when you edit the address, you&#x27;re navigating to a new page, not editing a property of the existing page.<p>Anyway, overall it&#x27;s a small issue.

&gt; We’ve enlarged the address bar anytime you want to do a search and simplified it in a single view with larger font, shorter URLs, adjusts to multiple sizes and a shortcut to the most popular sites to search.<p>Almost every single point in that sentence is a negative change. Which is +1 for my personal pet theory: all software gets worse over time

For me possibly the most interesting feature of this release is the possibility Of good GPU support on Gnu&#x2F;Linux&#x2F;Wayland.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastransky.wordpress.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;03&#x2F;webgl-and-fgx-acceleration-on-wayland&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastransky.wordpress.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;03&#x2F;webgl-and-fgx-ac...</a>

Interestingly (maybe not), a lot of people seem to be upset about the new address bar. To me, this is the biggest improvement. I don’t have a lot of custom config in Firefox, mainly use it and DuckDuckGo to no be using Google, and find it refreshingly easy to see my search engines and have more information available in a spot that I use all the time rather than having to know where to look or have it hidden in the first place

I&#x27;ve been using FFX 75.0 for a few hours and I very much like the new address bar. When I ctrl-L my eyes fix on the address bar, where they should, because of the blue outline and the chunky left&#x2F;right margins. I like this and I wish others here would stop calling this an objective UX fail. To the contrary, I think the FFX devs have done a splendid job once again.

The biggest change in this release that I&#x27;m _so_ happy about is that they finally fixed session restore to preserve which macOS Spaces your windows were originally on! I believe the Linux equivalent with virtual desktops was also fixed. It was an outstanding issue for years that made me loath restarting. I typically have 50 or more windows spread across several spaces, each with a different context, and it was a huge pain to have to move them back to their original place.

I find it interesting that the fact so many comments mention config flags mean not many here are actually using the same Firefox, and not even close to the default one used by the 99% of its users.

I read this discussion before updating, and I was prepared for the worst.<p>And... It&#x27;s fine, it&#x27;s perfectly usable, it&#x27;s not some gigantic world-ending change, it works.<p>As someone who uses multiple browsers on multiple platforms both at work and privately, unifying the address bar behavior across all platforms is logical, especially considering it lets the developers clean up some crufty old legacy code in the process.<p>I&#x27;ve been using Firefox since it was Phoenix 0.1 and not once have I felt the user interface and experience was made <i>worse</i>. Some people may use an obscure feature or a combination of plugins that doesn&#x27;t quite work anymore, for which the UI changes would be negative. These people have to realize that they are a tiny niche of a niche of people, who wildly modify their software far beyond the general user experience. They just have to realize that sometimes this means breakage.<p>Sometimes you just aren&#x27;t the target audience, and that&#x27;s fine. The world of general use software doesn&#x27;t revolve around power user needs, and sometimes power users have to work a bit harder to get things exactly how they want them. Mozilla would rather the vast majority have a significantly improved experience, and let the power user minority have to adapt a bit.

This relese installs a system telemetry service that constantly sends to Mozilla your default browser.

I am excited by the address bar changes. It makes common tasks much faster, makes my top sites easy to visit and overall makes the experience of using Firefox more enjoyable to me.<p>I realize this is not everyone.

I let Firefox upgrade itself when .75 was and after a restart, I didn&#x27;t notice a single ux change. What on earth are you people talking about?

I can&#x27;t relate to much of the criticism but can say that the inspector has gotten awesome. I switched all of my development to it. There are a couple of things that _require_ chrome, like Slack calls, otherwise I&#x27;m Firefox only and would recommend it.

I&#x27;m a bit peeved that they removed browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll and browser.urlbar.doubleClickSelectsAll.<p>I thought it was a bug, but in the bug tracker they told me it was intentional.<p>When I suggested they notify users when they have set a setting set to something other than the default and then this setting is removed, I was told it&#x27;s documented in the Release Notes.<p>Well, no, it isn&#x27;t.

The address bar is awful but, most importantly, it breaks my keyboard workflow. When I press Cmd+L, I&#x27;d expect the focus to go to the address bar and the whole url to be selected (like it is with any other software). Now, Firefox doesn&#x27;t do this any more. The focus goes to the address bar, but the text is not selected. I have to select it myself. It&#x27;s really badly designed, ugly and not useful.<p>Unfortunately, as a longtime Firefox user, I have to admit that Chrome is the best browser. Cleanly designed and fast, it&#x27;s just a better experience. Too bad it&#x27;s run by an advertisement company. This is really the only reason I&#x27;ll stick to Firefox: because I believe in the importance of a free web and I dislike Google. But really, it&#x27;s not because of any merit of Firefox.

I would like Firefox to be my main browser again but a couple of times I&#x27;ve run into the situation where an uncaught JavaScript error logged in Firefox&#x27;s console doesn&#x27;t give me any useful information as compared to Chromium. I wish I had a reproduction instead of just ragequitting but I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s a known issue that exists in their bug tracker somewhere.

Firefox succumbs to needless change for the sake of it, ruining the address bar with this horrible giant thing.<p>Not really sure what alternatives there are though. I hate that Firefox seems to be falling victim to the “hah we haven’t updated that in a while” intern mentality yet nothing else stands out to replace it.

I switched to Firefox for tab containers but they are seriously broken. Ctrl shift t just opens a random tab. With this most recent update, opening something in the current container rather than the preferred container still opens it in the preferred container.

Good that its available in flatpack. But the new address bar is so unnecessarily space consuming. If I move it to a smaller window in my desktop its taking up so much space!

Side note of Firefox 74 or 75, not sure when it started: close a tab where you had clicked on at least a link so you have some tab history and reopen it with cmd + shift + t: the last page you visited is lost!<p>Is it only me or others too? It&#x27;s so annoying.

I fail to understand why Firefox takes as its lead Chrome&#x27;s behavior. Let it be different, let it distinguish itself. We constantly hear how less configurability is easier to maintain. Unfortunately, that was Firefox&#x27;s main distinction from Chrome. This path where it simply copies Chrome&#x27;s UX and removes more and more features in the interests of something easier to maintain ... taking that to its logical conclusion, Firefox might as well become a Chromium fork now.

Does anyone know what is the keyboard shortcut in dEbugger to &quot;Go to line&quot; , I am unable to find the action in the UI or by a google. I think all actions should be put there in the context menu.

I use an older version of Firefox with many customizations (including the relative location bar, removal of all toolbar icons, and others), and still I don&#x27;t like what they are doing with any version of any browser. I also tried to get rid of arrow scrollbars and implement the Xaw like scrollbars instead, although it doesn&#x27;t work as well as real Xaw scrollbars do. I just hate a lot of the design principles of web browsers in general. So, rather, the better way to design a web browser would be using principles such as:<p>- The user is assumed to understand the computer and to know what they are doing, and if not, to read the documentation in order to understand it.<p>- Stuff coming from the server is assumed to be possibly hostile and not necessarily a code that the user wants to execute, or having the styles that the user wants to be displayed; this is independent of whether or not the connection is secure, which should not control access to any features (except those which are part of the protocol, such as certificates). The user must be able to have complete control over it.<p>- You have enough ropes to hang yourself, and also a few more just in case. That is the better way to design anything.<p>- Disable CSS transitions, and otherwise the user can customize how the CSS is interpreted (in addition to defining their own, of any priority level, low or high or anything in between).<p>- Use keyboard controls for many things, and do not override the browser&#x27;s commands of keyboard or mouse or otherwise except if the user specifically activates the command to do that (&quot;application mode&quot;).<p>- Support use of ARIA even for ordinary screen view and not only for speech.<p>- Allow stuff to be controlled directly by the user rather than APIs used by scripts in web pages.<p>- Add a command for the user to save and recall form data using local files.<p>- Allow individual scripts and other files to be overridden with the user&#x27;s own version.<p>- etc.<p>Those who set up the services should also be encouraged to use other protocols, such as IRC, NNTP, SMTP, Telnet, etc. Such thing can be more suitable than web browser, less complicated and less stupid than a web browser, and can even be usable (to some degree) without specialized software (although having software to use specifically with these protocols certainly improves it, it isn&#x27;t entirely necessary; I think IRC was actually designed for that purpose anyways).<p>And I really would like them to stop using such huge fonts (they should respect the user&#x27;s font setting).

I&#x27;ve been using the new Flatpak in beta for a month or so. I really like it on Fedora since it means I don&#x27;t have to enable any 3rd party repos to get DRM working.

biggest thing for me, this release was hardware acceleration support on Linux. and with that I won&#x27;t need to use mpv and smplayer to play youtube videos anymore

The new features page says that the address bar has been enhanced to support better search. However, after installing the new version, I still see the search bar on the right hand side of the address bar. Why is that? I am expecting to see just the address bar.

I saw this change in nightly a while back. The change honestly shocked me; &quot;woh,&quot; I said aloud. I wish Mozilla would STOP forcing changes like these. They could have a deprecation period allowing for an easier transition. I&#x27;m still a loyal fan, though it does seem to get harder day by day.

Am I the only one bothered by the steadily declining performance? I bought a cheapish laptop this summer and FF worked just fine then, but every five versions or so it seems the performance drops just a little bit. Even old reddit feels like glue now, especially compared to Chromium.

That&#x27;s it. I&#x27;m forking it.

Mozilla, the only reason I&#x27;m using Firefox is because it is highly cutomizable... Not as YOU want, but as <i>I</i> want.

Anyone else got logged out of every single website after updating to this version? Annoying as hell.

What is this?

They actually managed to make context menus even _less_ native with this release. All of a sudden context menus have straight corners and higher contrast. In a few months it will actually be legal for this bug to buy booze and do jelly shots: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=34572" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=34572</a>

Mozilla, every release: hey how do you like the new cosmetics&#x2F;bells and whistles<p>Me: hey how&#x27;s that html5 compatibility coming<p>Mozilla: ...<p>Mozilla: hey how do you like the new cosmetics&#x2F;bells and whistles<p>Me, after years: (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

And still no movement on finally getting Bug 1178764 out the door, despite every other major browser supporting it. Nope, instead they&#x27;d rather faff about with the address bar to resounding universal disgust.<p>[Bug 1178764]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1178765" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1178765</a>

Besides the address bar, another issue for me is now all image is lazy-loaded even in websites that don&#x27;t use Javascript.<p>While I realize there are advantages to lazy-loading image, I&#x27;ve never liked it because often it makes the content moved a bit, which a bit annoying. However, in pages that uses JS to lazy-load image at least they usually put placeholder image so I know that there will be image there.<p>Unfortunately, since Firefox do it even for ordinary websites, now I often scrolling away without realizing there are images, only to find out later the paragraph that I read suddenly jumped to bottom.<p>I&#x27;m worried it will be permanent, especially since right now it&#x27;s a bit hard to revert this feature.