Firefox 65.0 released

Recently switched from chromium to Firefox. Very pleased with its performance.<p>Android Firefox demolishes chrome too but probably just because I no longer need to download and render all the ads (thanks ublock.)<p>While I was at it I also took the chance to migrate passwords out of Google land into Bitwarden.<p>Session restore is amazing, my .cache is tmpfs but it still manages to instantly recover all my tabs on reboot. Tabs are addictive in FF and don&#x27;t have the same usage constraints like in chrome.<p>The container system for managing different developer&#x2F;test&#x2F;personal profiles is a dream. No longer have to worry about Slack links opening in whatever random chrome instance had focus last. (Back up your user data, sync on these container settings doesn&#x27;t work - yet)<p>Also enjoying different proxy profiles per Firefox profile as well.<p>Yes,<p>Work profile + work containers + works SSH tunnel proxy.<p>Personal profile + personal containers + NordVPN.<p>Passwords managed by bitwarden and any required crossover is shared via a private organisation. This gives me minimal work access on my phone, and minimal private passwords on my work profile.(GitHub&#x2F;stack overflow)<p>It&#x27;s kind of complicated but it&#x27;s such a quality of life change coming from 20 odd chrome profiles and the nasty sync issues that ensues. Most people can probably get by with a single profile. I just have multiple systems and need to keep work stuff separate but end up using work laptop as a daily driver most of the time.

I’m a diehard Firefox user and supporter, but with every release there are still things I wait on the WebExtensions support to improve:<p>1. There’s still no full featured Tab Mix Plus possible with the current APIs. That’s been a big bummer for some years now.<p>2. The most downloaded session management extension now is still not as rich and good as the old XUL extension Session Manager (from mozdev).<p>3. I probably have to search again for a WebExtension equivalent for this one. Lazarus was a nice form saving extension in the past. Not sure if something similar exists or is even possible.

FF65 also supports WebP images and animations. Here&#x27;s few test images: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;speed&#x2F;webp&#x2F;gallery1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;speed&#x2F;webp&#x2F;gallery1</a>

I was intrigued by this statement:<p>&gt; A better video streaming experience for Windows users: Firefox now supports the next-generation, royalty-free video compression technology called AV1<p>Since I don&#x27;t care about Windows, I was curious as to whether this had already shipped for other platforms or not. At least using Firefox Developer Edition v66, it works fine behind the media.av1.enabled flag on Linux.<p>----<p>Also seems that <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;security&#x2F;known-vulnerabilities&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;#firefox65" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;security&#x2F;known-vulnerabilities...</a> has yet to be updated.

&gt; Support for Handoff on macOS: Continue browsing across devices. Pick up where you left off with iOS (via Firefox or Safari) on Firefox on Mac.<p>OH YES! Finally!

I have turned on Webrender in FF66a (nightly) and it’s fantastic; it sped up a site I quickly threw together for a friend no end [1] and almost everything with lots of graphical painting is buttery smooth.<p>Even though they are only starting in nightly to make it the default on Nvidia hardware it seems to work without incident so far on this 2016 AMD Radeon’d MacBook Pro.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;uparchitects.co.uk&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;uparchitects.co.uk&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discourse.mozilla.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;have-you-tested-webrender&#x2F;16137" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discourse.mozilla.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;have-you-tested-webrender&#x2F;16...</a>

I don&#x27;t understand why Firefox doesn&#x27;t include an option to download the .deb package instead of tar file for Ubuntu and Debian during release announcements. The market share is already shrinking and why make it harder for people to install or upgrade Firefox? Chrome does it. Why can&#x27;t Firefox do that as well?

I recently made the transition back to Firefox too, like a lot of other folks in here it seems. Containers makes working with all my AWS much easier, and the containers isolating Facebook are great.<p>One problem though, that I can&#x27;t solve, is that every once in a while I <i>want</i> to log in with Facebook, like for AirBnB. But I can&#x27;t, because the cookie only lives in the Facebook container, but I can&#x27;t add AirBnB as a hostname to the Facebook container.<p>Has anyone solved this?<p>Edit: I just solved this. You have to disable the built in Facebook Container extension and then it works as expected.

I just updated and immediately noticed two things that bothered me:<p>1. It added a new search engine (amazon.com.au) to my list that I&#x27;d culled down to just DuckDuckGo<p>2. It started recommending extensions for websites I visited<p>Maybe I&#x27;m overreacting a bit but why does it feel like every time I update anything recently I then have to spend 5 minutes going through the preferences to make sure it hasn&#x27;t changed anything. It makes me hesitant to update any app when I feel like the developers are working against my interests.

No one mentioned WebP support yet! This is great news, Firefox will now feel faster on all the sites that use WebP. Safari is the last major browser to hold out.

I love Firefox and use it all the time, but for the last few years one of my biggest pains is the OSX performance on my Macbook Pro. Is this close to be resolved soon?

I feel like I&#x27;ve been waiting a long time for autoplay blocking - does this keep being pushed back or have I missed a feature cancellation&#x2F;config setting&#x2F;extension announcement?

Is there any news on Wayland support? I had read here previously that Firefox 65 was when support was going to be available by default[0] but there are no references in the release notes.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18657960" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18657960</a>

They finally implemented globalThis [0]! It&#x27;s not a huge or complex feature, but it&#x27;s been something I&#x27;ve been wanting for a long time. Now there&#x27;s a portable way to access the global object. I would&#x27;ve preferred `global`, but that broke web compatibility which made it a non-starter.<p>I just checked and was a bit sad to find that the latest version of node still doesn&#x27;t support it. This is a bit surprising as globalThis is already supported in Chrome.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tc39&#x2F;proposal-global" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tc39&#x2F;proposal-global</a>

I would love to switch to Firefox but it still lacks -<p>* Per-site JavaScript controls (which Chrome has)<p>* Pinch to zoom (on macOS)<p>* Customisable keyboard shortcuts for Add-ons (which Chrome has)<p>* No elastic scroll (bounce effect) (which Chrome has)<p>I stick with Chrome as it works how I want it to although I find myself using Safari now and then but Safari&#x27;s extensions are pretty crap in comparison to Chromes.

I wish Mozilla started to compete with Google on ChromeOS. Just make it the browser and leverage containers to keep things locked down. There’s a total business here and Mozilla could make it happen, without the entanglements of the ads business. Real missed opportunity to help promote open standards at the services level as well.

Huge props to the Mozilla crew. Firefox has been an awesome browser and I&#x27;m thankful for their product.<p>My only major gripe is video sort of sucks in it, especially when I&#x27;m on my laptop.<p>I&#x27;m glad we&#x27;re starting to see AV1 rolling out in places. Full support can&#x27;t come soon enough. Last year at NAB everyone was saying it&#x27;s about 2 years out from solid support. 2020 should be a good year. AV1 looks pretty promising.

I&#x27;m <i>very</i> happy with the wayland performance in this release. XWayland looks really bad with sway on a HiDPI display, and previous to this release, firefox wayland was too slow to be usable.<p>That&#x27;s no longer true. I&#x27;m giddy with how clear everything looks and how fast it is. This is a huge deal for me.

At the risk of a downvote storm, a few months ago I tried to switch from Chrome to Firefox until I had a call of two hours via Google Hangouts and Firefox started to degrade the voice until a point of no return. I don&#x27;t know if this is common in very demanding &quot;web apps&quot;.

Is there any progress with GPU accelerated video decoding &#x2F; encoding in the Linux version? Now that WebRender is in place it should be possible?<p>Without it, any WebRTC video conferencing applications are very CPU heavy, which cripples them on laptops especially.

&gt;Firefox will now warn you when closing a window (regardless of whether you have automatic session restore enabled for restart).<p>To whoever is responsible for pushing this change through: <i>Thank you.</i>

Fantastic product, excellent release.<p>Just a little complain if website team reads this. Being on main landing page[0] there is no way to find out which version of Firefox is currently the latest.<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;</a>

Is it just me, or the font used by FF is changed on OSX? It&#x27;s a bit crispier and it&#x27;s not antialiased

Does anyone know what the decoding performance of AV1 is these days? I&#x27;d love to play with it, but back when I last tried my oldish laptop did NOT like decoding it.

Still waiting for vimperator so I can use browser like I used to use only 2 years back.<p>Tridactyl is good but no :map, no :js and alphabets instead of numbers for links.

Chrome has a very annoying (and somewhat severe) Japanese input issue on Linux and pretty much forced me to use Firefox.[0] But I do like Firefox from feature perspectives, too.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.chromium.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;chromium&#x2F;issues&#x2F;detail?id=681389" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.chromium.org&#x2F;p&#x2F;chromium&#x2F;issues&#x2F;detail?id=681389</a>

Once read that Firefox is working on a Chrome-like language translation feature. Anyone know when it&#x27;ll be done?

The other day I found out that live bookmarks can still be made to work in Firefox 64, in a way:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;comments&#x2F;advckx&#x2F;live_boomarks_still_kind_of_works_in_firefox_64&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;comments&#x2F;advckx&#x2F;live_boomar...</a><p>Not sure if the same applies to 65, but it might help someone...

I really like Firefox containers. Having different containers for each of Google, Google G Suite, Hacker News, Twitter, and Reddit lets me have one browser open and keep cookies separate.<p>I started using Firefox again when I got a new Linux laptop last December (from Sytem76 - love it). After getting used to having containers, then I started also using Firefox again on my MacBook.

The energy usage in the task manager doesn&#x27;t seem to be very accurate.<p>I tested by opening a new window with a cpu-intensive webpage (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitalattackmap.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitalattackmap.com</a>). Real CPU usage jumps all the way up, but energy usage in the task manager is still showing low. Why?

I&#x27;m hoping it will be less crashy than the last three or four releases. But they don&#x27;t say so in the announcement...<p>Does anybody know whether we get to blame Servo for the crashiness? Rust code is supposed to be &quot;safe&quot;, but that never really pans out in industrial use; maturity is a better predictor of stability.

I&#x27;d love to switch over to Firefox, but I&#x27;m used to Chrome&#x27;s developer toolkit. I understand it thoroughly and can use it proficiently.<p>Any insight as to the comparison between the state of FF&#x27;s developer tools and Chrome&#x27;s would be appreciated. I&#x27;d love to be convinced to switch.

&gt; Firefox will now warn you when closing a window (regardless of whether you have automatic session restore enabled for restart).<p>Excellent! The number of times I&#x27;ve accidentally hit ctrl+q instead of ctrl+w and then had to relaunch firefox and restore my session - this will be a welcome relief.

Anyone else had a problem with AMP on Android with Firefox set as the default browser? Tapping on AMP search results from a Google search resulted in a blank page and a never-ending progress bar.<p>Installing the &quot;Redirect AMP to HTML&quot; plugin sort of solves the issues but adds a delay.

I remember about a year or two ago, there was a lot of press on HN about a new Firefox engine that made it extremely fast. Ever since then, I&#x27;ve only seen negative comments about Firefox. Did that just not pan out as much as people had expected?

Downloaded Firefox 65 (Windows) and quickly loaded a web page... and still no pinch zoom. :-(<p>I hope macOS &amp; Windows Firefox will get pinch zoom soon, so that I can finally switch from Chrome.<p>Firefox seems to have good performance and user-centric features &amp; functionality.

Could any seniors give more information on what do they mean by this firefox update: A better video streaming experience for Windows users: Firefox now supports the next-generation, royalty-free video compression technology called AV1?

I hope someday we&#x27;ll see Duck Duck Go partner with Firefox as the default engine.

Tangential, but has anyone here figured out how to get menu copy and paste working in Firefox on webapps such as Google Docs?<p>I&#x27;ve tried suggestions such as changing the dom.clipboard settings in about:config, but that doesn&#x27;t help.

How do the new privacy blocker settings interfere or conflict with uBlock?

Happy with a lot of stuff 65 introduced (this is a nice trend in a lot of recent Firefox releases)<p>One thing I&#x27;m <i>not</i> happy about; opted-in recommendations for addons when you browse websites.

Handoff on macOS, finally! \o&#x2F;<p>Just tested opening Firefox on iOS, and the &quot;Open page in Firefox&quot; pops up in the Dock of my Mac. Neat.<p>(It is advertised as also working with Mobile Safari.)

Committed FF user after finding you can stop auto playing HTML5 videos without the need for an extension.<p>Plus: Google’s auto-login debacle which precipitated the move.

Any big reasons to up date to this over the ESR release (60)? So far it seems like mostly minor updates since then or did I miss something?

Anybody else seeing blurry text for the bookmark toolbar and background tab titles? macOS 10.14 on an external monitor.

Darn was hoping for default urls for containers. so when you open a container the tab will open a specific url also.

Finally it seems the performance issues on macbook pro with retina display have been solved, at least for me!

The hard-coded alt+# for switching to numbered tabs is a deal breaker for me. I wish it wasn&#x27;t but I have ingrained ctrl+# for switching and alt+# is used for my window manager. I accept I&#x27;m in a minority, but it seems like a strange design decision for an open browser.

What would it take for firefox to support Gmail&#x27;s offline mode?

Is there any decent mouse gesture solution yet?

Is per site autoplay control still not available?

I wish I could revert. 65 regressed and the tabs are back above the address bar.

A question regarding the advertisements they show on the home page: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neowin.net&#x2F;news&#x2F;firefox-640-is-now-showing-a-bookingcom-ad-in-the-new-tab-page&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.neowin.net&#x2F;news&#x2F;firefox-640-is-now-showing-a-boo...</a><p>Are these ads introduced with these updates, or does Firefox include a backdoor so the Mozilla Corporation can show whatever they want on your home page?

No changes to the interface again! Will not go back to FF till they take graphic design seriously.