10 ms·

Firefox 60 released

413 points by dikiaap 8y ago

superdaniel 8y ago
I'm glad that they have released support for the Web Authentication API. Hopefully I won't need to use Chrome for websites I choose to be more secure with. Although, with a quick look it seems like I still can't use U2F with Google on Firefox.
- mtgx 8y ago
  It's also good because this version will be supported in FF ESR for enterprise for another 11 months or so.
- Tomte 8y ago
  Me neither (FastMail and Gmail). sigh But just yesterday people tried to "educate" me that it works with 60 and for 59 I had to toggle an about:config switch. It's great that they support the proper web standard. It would be useful if all those web sites supported it. This is a long-known issue, and nobody cares about non-Chrome browsers.
  - chrismorgan 8y ago
    I’m probably the one that will implement the Web Authentication API for FastMail and Topicbox, though it’s a some way down my list of things to do at present. I looked into it a couple of months back (I would have liked us to get it out before browsers enabled it by default), but documentation was very scarce, and so it wasn’t particularly clear what we’d need to do to migrate from u2f.js to webauthn (especially while still supporting both), and then other things came up. Since then, https://www.imperialviolet.org/2018/03/27/webauthn.html https://www.imperialviolet.org/2018/03/27/webauthn.html has been written, which will help, but it’d still be nice to have a concise “here’s what to do, backend and frontend, to migrate from u2f.js to webauthn” guide. If no one has by the time we support webauthn, I’ll probably write such a guide. For now, it’s not as high a priority as it could be, because the functionality it provides is already available in Chrome (for that matter, I don’t believe Chrome’s webauthn implementation hits stable until the next release), Firefox can get it by enabling security.webauth.u2f which is good enough as a short-term measure when it’s always been required in the past anyway, and Edge doesn’t have many users (and few of them currently do 2FA). It’s pragmatism, sadly.
- yborg 8y ago
  I believe that Google specifically will only work with Chrome. I just tried with FF 61 with Yubikey and still doesn't work.
- FullyFunctional 8y ago
  Alas, I'm completely unable to get the soft token to work (after enabling it in config:about). It even fail on https://u2f.bin.coffee/ https://u2f.bin.coffee/ which seems to claim it should work. It's a usability trade off; I have a physical key, but I'm asked to authenticate 20+ times a day which make it a pain on my port-limited MacBook Pro.
malfeasance 8y ago
Pocket Sponsored Stories will appear for a percentage of users in the US. Read about our privacy-conscious approach to sponsored content If you can't roll out a feature without violating EU privacy laws, you're not employing a "privacy-conscious approach."
- AbacusAvenger 8y ago
  Yeah, that's why I set the "extensions.pocket.enabled" to "false" in my about:config. It's such a weird feature in an otherwise pleasant browser.
  - move-on-by 8y ago
    I have that setting as well. The new config specifically for this is "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsored", you might want to flip it too just in case. The config name doesn't specifically reference pocket - so perhaps it could be used in other ways as well.
- setquk 8y ago
  Yes. Firefox is basically adware now.
  - Karunamon 8y ago
    Not sure why this comment is grey, FF is now adware by objective definition of the word adware. Wiki >Adware, or advertising-supported software, is software that generates revenue for its developer by automatically generating online advertisements in the user interface of the software or on a screen presented to the user during the installation process
    - gruez 8y ago
      >... is software that generates revenue for its developer ... does pocket suggesting stories somehow generate revenue for Mozilla?
PhantomBKB 8y ago
Holy shit! It's fast
apazzolini 8y ago
Unfortunately, looks like the CPU spikes are still a problem on OS X for me. I check this every time a new version is released as I'd love to make the switch from Chrome, but Firefox with one blank tab and no extensions uses more CPU than Chrome with 15 actual tabs. When I actually throw activity at Firefox it hogs the CPU even more. Here's hoping v61 addresses it.
- butz 8y ago
  Have you reported this bug? It's all fine on the old OS X Mavericks.
  - spiderfarmer 8y ago
    I reported it and they know what the problem is but it got marked as no-priority. Everytime there’s a new release I check if it’s solved and move back to Safari. Every release there are people complaining about it. I know I have been for 2 years now, but it falls on deaf ears.
    - cat199 8y ago
      issue ref?
      - spiderfarmer 8y ago
        See above.
    - sayhello 8y ago
      Might be hardware related. Did you provide your HW profile in the bug report?
      - spiderfarmer 8y ago
        Yes, twice.
- Kpourdeilami 8y ago
newscracker 8y ago
The enterprise part is great to see (though it was something that seemed long overdue). I recently noticed on a Firefox mailing list that Mike Kaply (of Kaply Consulting, a company that helped with enterprise deployment and configuration of Firefox) had officially joined the Firefox team. Mike's presence is going to make Firefox in the enterprise much better. On Firefox 60, I'm still not on board with the newest versions after the support for legacy extensions was removed. SessionManager, an awesome (legacy, XUL) extension, still doesn't have a perfect equivalent in the Web Extension world. Tab Session Manager, which has similar functionality, seems to be lagging behind and struggling with issues in Firefox that prevent it from becoming a good session manager. If there's one thing I could ask the Firefox team, it would be to focus on enabling web extensions to do almost everything that legacy extensions were able to. Without the power of feature rich and stable extensions, Firefox is currently inadequate for me (though I still use it as my primary browser).
- catach 8y ago
  On the one hand, the FF webextension API is under continual development [0]. On the other hand, "almost everything" previously possible does not seem not a realistic expectation since it'd mean the ability to change almost every single atom of browser behavior. [0] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/04/02/extensions-firefox-60/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/04/02/extensions-firefo...
  - newscracker 8y ago
    Considering that Firefox pioneered the extensions concept among the masses and had a wide variety of terrific extensions (and still has) as a key differentiator, and since many users have appreciated Firefox for this reason (even if they didn't care much about FOSS), Firefox must continue to push heavily on this front. Of course, everything that was possible before wouldn't make sense in the web extensions platform (for security and other reasons), which is why I said "almost everything". But things like tab management (even Tab Mix Plus on web extensions is only in beta now), session management, etc., are highly important to the browser UX for a lot of Firefox users. They're highly sticky factors as well that prevent users from switching to another browser. I've also seen some people who deploy and use Firefox in enterprise state that they're going to be on ESR 52 for quite sometime, with one of the reasons being some extensions not being available (or ported) on web extensions. I'm not going to blame Mozilla or the Firefox team for the current state of affairs. But knowing what we know (with the advance notice on web extensions), the main advantage of Firefox on the extensions front shouldn't be lost. If anything, this piece needs to be accelerated further and also have the Mozilla Firefox team drive new features and abilities in web extensions that make other browsers look outdated. I'm a die hard Firefox fan, and would always be cheering it on to thrive and grow.
lwansbrough 8y ago
They still haven't fixed whatever problem causes my Late 2013 RMBP's CPU/fan to jump to 80C and stay there while FF is open. Back to Chrome. :(
IshKebab 8y ago
Firefox in mobile is worth using simply for the reader view. It makes the mobile web tolerable again.
- overcast 8y ago
  Not that Firefox isn't great, but Safari has had this on the iPhone for as long as I can remember. I use it exclusively for viewing articles.
- severine 8y ago
  Do you use the Open in Reader View extension? https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/reader-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/reader-view/
  - IshKebab 8y ago
    No, it's built in.
- zlynx 8y ago
  You'd think that CMS developers would take a hint and copy the CSS that reader view uses. But no, they continue to be useless. "We put this 800px wide image in here and dag gone it, we want you to SEE THE WHOLE THING."
billysielu 8y ago
Blocking Third-Party Cookies is a nice option, but it would be better if those settings were for full-blown First Party Isolation instead.
- Xylakant 8y ago
  First party isolation was added in FF55 https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/another-tor-browser-feature-makes-it-into-firefox-first-party-isolation/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/another-tor-b...
  - billysielu 8y ago
    It's off by default. To enable it you have to go into about:config. I'm saying it should be on by default, or at least exposed in the Settings for people to find. The concern about doing that was that some sites would break, but their definition of break included things which should break because they were previously abusing the lack of FPI. I have been browsing with FPI on for a while and nothing has broken. Protecting our privacy should be the default state of affairs. Mozilla did say Firefox would be opinionated...
    - Xylakant 8y ago
      I have it enabled and I can attest that it breaks a fair amount of sites. I think it’s fair to expose that as an expert level setting. It could benefit from a bit of advertising though.
      - unethical_ban 8y ago
        I wonder if it can be implemented on a per-site basis, like a security policy. Exception: gitea uses Github oauth Exception: unbury.me uses Google login etc Default: Full FPI
        bscphil 8y ago
        This is extremely easy to do in uMatrix. If you don't want to use the other features, just set a default policy of allow all, then block third party cookies. You can then selectively allow access to cookies on a site by site basis.
nailer 8y ago
Switched from Chrome for privacy reasons a couple of months ago. As a webdev (and hence heavy DevTools user), it feels excellent, the inspector's a little bit faster, and having containers for Facebook and Google tracking services is excellent. Spell check in text boxes doesn't work though - apparently it should, I have no idea why it doesn't.
- dblohm7 8y ago
  Bug reports welcome! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org https://bugzilla.mozilla.org
  - nailer 8y ago
    Yeah, I've made some big reports already (CSP errors from undefined source when using Stripe with LastPass enabled) but I want to check it out more before bothering anyone - maybe it's my Windows language config
- orthecreedence 8y ago
  For spell check, I've noticed I have to right-click and check spelling. I actually kind of like not having the browser second guess me, but not sure if this is an intentional default on FF's part.
lonk 8y ago
Scrolling is still jerky and sluggish on android.
- cpeterso 8y ago
  Firefox for Android will be copying Chrome's scrolling physics for faster scrolling, since that's what Android users are used to. Chrome doesn't use Android's standard scrolling physics, so custom scrolling code is needed to emulate its behavior. You can test this in Firefox 61 Beta by setting the "apz.android.chrome_fling_physics.enabled" pref to true in about:config. The new behavior will hopefully be enabled by default in Firefox 62. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1448439 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1448439
  - sp332 8y ago
    Ah, I was wondering why my scrolling was getting "fling"ed so much on Nightly. It's kinda unusable because 2/3 of the time, when I lift my thumb off the screen, it gets interpreted as a fling. Maybe I'll get used to being very careful, but for now I'm glad to know there's a toggle.
    - cpeterso 8y ago
      There are still fling bugs to be fixed. :) Feel free to file a bug in Bugzilla that blocks bug 1448439. Perhaps you are seeing one of these known bugs: * Weirdness at end of Fennec fling. Don't send duplicate DOM 'scroll' event for sub-pixel scrolling: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1230176 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1230176 * Scrolling in Android has a distinct hitch when releasing finger: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1425739 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1425739 You can also tweak the fling physics parameters with these about:config prefs: apz.android.chrome_fling_physics.friction apz.android.chrome_fling_physics.inflexion apz.android.chrome_fling_physics.stop_threshold
      - sp332 8y ago
        Thanks, I had noticed the behavior in 1425739 but assumed it was because of my bulky screen protector.
wpdev_63 8y ago
If anyone from lastpass is reading this thread, please fix your plugin. Everytime I try to edit the password from the prompt on the page, it opens a blank page for the password vault page.
- sametmax 8y ago
  I love lastpass, I'm actually a paying user, but it's getting more and more buggy. Sometime you generate passwords to change an existing one, and it doesn't update, so you only have the old one. Sometime autocomplete doesn't work: either the menu doesn't do anything, or the first click on the input icon doesn't work. It's not too bad, and honestly the mobile version is a god send (it fills passwords in apps !), but it's irritating.
  - Someone1234 8y ago
    Agreed. But LogMeIn purchased them, so I'm unsurprised that price has increased and quality has dipped. One issue I've been seeing more of (both on Android and on desktop) is the cache not re-populating automatically. You have to go Advanced -> Clear Local Cache, and only then will it download a fresh copy. Or worse, sometimes after adding new credentials it never sync's it to the cloud. It remains on that device, but that's it.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- godelski 8y ago
  Anyone else get the bug where it doesn't auto-fill (shows grey box), you right click and it shows that you have no stored logins, and then once you close that (right click) menu you are prompted like normal? This happens to me frequently, though seems to be specific sites.
  - AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
    Mine's worse. Literally every other login fails. I don't get a rejection or anything--the box will light up and turn red--but the vault will appear empty and none of the sites will be found. I have to log out of it and login a second time (meaning put in my giant master password), and only the second time will it find the stuff in my vault correctly. It's maddening.
dumbmatter 8y ago
I'm psyched to see the fix to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1193394 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1193394 released, which (amongst other things) mean that you can finally write code using both IndexedDB and promises without inadvertently committing the active transaction on promise resolution. Now I just need to wait until the market share of other Firefox versions decreases before I can actually take advantage in production :)
- sp332 8y ago
  According to the CSV data available from http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-market-share http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-market-share new Firefox versions tend to dominate just 1-2 months after release. https://imgur.com/a/xzvAU4t https://imgur.com/a/xzvAU4t
  - dumbmatter 8y ago
    Firefox 52 may be around for a while - it's the last LTS before extensions were broken by Quantum, and it's also the last release that runs on XP and Vista.
    - sp332 8y ago
      As you can see in the graph, it's hovering around 0.5% of all browsers and ~10% of FF usage.
    - ptman 8y ago
      It seems that ff esr60 will be the only esr in august: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/
      - sp332 8y ago
        That's a minimum, but I haven't heard any noise from Mozilla about pushing it any further. Either way I'm sure some third party will pick it up and it will live forever. The only question is the % of people who switch.
kiliancs 8y ago
> Stylo comes to Firefox for Android in 60 > Firefox's new parallel CSS engine — also known as Quantum CSS or Stylo — which was first enabled by default in Firefox 57 for desktop, has now been enabled in Firefox for Android. That's exciting, but on my phone the Play Store still doesn't provide the new version.
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  Play Store rollout always takes a bit longer
- trumped 8y ago
  You can download the apk straight from Mozilla: https://firefox.com/m https://firefox.com/m
- sanxiyn 8y ago
  It's somewhat humorous that Rust Android support is not Tier 1 while in production for >100M installation app.
Panino 8y ago
> Applied Quantum CSS to render browser UI I'm so excited about the future of Firefox. In addition to the above, OpenBSD is currently working on pledge support in FF. In a couple years FF could be simultaneously faster, more private and more secure than Chrome.
- ams6110 8y ago
  I use FF on OpenBSD as my daily browser. I have at least three different profiles running simultaneously with multiple tabs open in each (though I don't go nuts with tabs like some do -- I never tend to have more than 10 or so open). It does occasionally seem to get stuck in a state where it just starts chewing CPU cycles and RAM. I've seen this mostly with Google sites like gmail or docs, so I assume it's JS-related. But it's fairly rare, and seems to be improving with each release.
  - bugmen0t 8y ago
    Did you try container tabs instead of profiles? Could save you a few coh cycles. The gmail/gdocs slowdowns are being tracked and worked on. It's a problem when websites actively optimize for competitive products though.
    - kbenson 8y ago
      The other problem with container tabs, which isn't really a Mozilla problem as much as a Google problem, is that if you have enough segregated google profiles going you seem to hit some google anti-abuse codepaths or aomething. I have 3 separate Google accounts separated with container tabs (on purpose, I know Google supports multiple accounts), and a separate regular browsing container, and occassionally just following a link from Gmail or hangouts where Google bounces you through their redirect hangs for 30 seconds or so. When it's doing that it generally does it consistently though.
dsissitka 8y ago
Still no option to see all of the permissions an extension requires without digging through its source. :( https://imgur.com/a/k4rk0 https://imgur.com/a/k4rk0 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1449698 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1449698
- sp332 8y ago
  You've linked to a duplicate of this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427622 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427622
- nathancahill 8y ago
  Proposed fix: https://bug1387695.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=8901766 https://bug1387695.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=8901...
- rmist 8y ago
  Open about:debugging, goto Manifest URL of the extension, search for 'permissions'.
- bugmen0t 8y ago
  Coming soon though!
_bxg1 8y ago
But did they fix the weird scrolling friction on Android? Seriously, it's the main reason I don't use Firefox.
- davnicwil 8y ago
  I'm using Firefox on Android - not sure what friction you're referring to here, but the lack of 'reload on pull down when scrolled to top' feature is seriously annoying for me. Despite this, I stick with Firefox because I want to use it - I can imagine that the vast, vast majority of users who have no opinion on which browser they use simply don't/won't put up with this and just go back to the easier to use Chrome. It's little things like this that make all the difference.
  - _bxg1 8y ago
    In every other Android app there's no bound on how much scroll momentum you can build up; if you want to zoom to the bottom of a long page, you can keep flicking to go as fast as you want. Firefox mobile adds an obnoxious amount of extra friction that prevents you from going much faster than your finger moves, making scrolling feel like wading through water. As an aside, I think iOS might have the same behavior, which could be the reason they're doing it, but it goes against the system standard and is completely unbearable for me.
  - idonotknowwhy 8y ago
    These users would never install Firefox in the first place.
- majani 8y ago
  mobile is clearly still secondary to them, judging by the list of improvements to each. A sorry state of affairs that few here seem to be calling out
- jasonkostempski 8y ago
  What do you use? I cant imagine ever going back to a browser that doesnt have uBlock Origin support.
faitswulff 8y ago
I've been using Firefox Nightly as my daily browser for a while and I am beginning to notice more and more websites breaking on it - mostly Google services, although Facebook as well, recently, too. I know it's complicated by the fact that I'm on the Nightly channel, but has anyone else noticed an increase in sites that are incompatible with FF?
- Silhouette 8y ago
  has anyone else noticed an increase in sites that are incompatible with FF? Yes, but I'm not sure it's just Firefox. I suspect a significant number of sites are now being developed and tested only with Chrome, using Google's developer tools and recommended practices and browser feature set. Unfortunately, those things may not be supported or work well on other browsers, and if you don't choose carefully and test properly...
- ethagnawl 8y ago
  I've noticed this while using the last few stable releases of FF (on Debian 9.4, on the odd chance it's relevant). Off the top of my head, the (popular) sites I regularly have issues with are: ebay (creating/editing listings), LinkedIn (have to refresh the homepage multiple times before all of the components appear and are usable), GitHub (WYSIWYG). I've just assumed these issue are caused by add-ons behaving badly, but I haven't bothered to get scientific about it yet.
- dblohm7 8y ago
  Report your broken websites to webcompat.com
- chrismorgan 8y ago
  Nightly has been my daily driver for years, with a couple of brief interludes. There’s the very occasional possibly serious breakage, but I haven’t noticed any compatibility troubles for a long time. (But I don’t use Facebook, and of Google I only ever use Maps.) Actually, I suppose there are a couple of sites which Tracking Protection completely broke, but that’s not Nightly-specific.
pmoriarty 8y ago
Does the new Firefox have something like RequestPolicy or NoScript?
- icebraining 8y ago
  Yes, the original dev migrated NoScript, but it's not a complete clone: https://blog.jeaye.com/2017/11/30/noscript/ https://blog.jeaye.com/2017/11/30/noscript/
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    What about RequestPolicy? RequestPolicy can selectively block third-party content that NoScript will let through.
    - zootboy 8y ago
      Check out uMatrix. I used to use RP, but switched to uM because it gives even better fine-grain controls.
- ChrisGranger 8y ago
  uBlock Origin in medium or hard mode is similar to those. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium-mode https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...
- beagle3 8y ago
  uMatrix is excellent; more capabilities than RequestPolicy with a much better UI. Written by gorhill (Raymond Hill) who also made uBlock (and still maintains uBlock Origin); rock solid, low resource. It's not for non-technical users, but if you are looking for RequestPolicy or NoScript I'm sure you'll manage.
superkuh 8y ago
I haven't tried Firefox since version 47 and haven't used it as my main since 37. I gave 61 (dev edition) a spin yesterday. All the extensions that make the browser usable for me were like 1990s geocities pages: "Under Construction" if they existed at all. They were just placeholders that lacked most features with links to bugzilla pages to vote for features to be added back into Firefox. Garbage collection was pretty terrible too. I managed to use up 4 GB of ram with ~10 tabs. In my normal (firefox fork) browser I run 300 active/loaded tabs and 700 'suspended' tabs for ~1k total and never get that high. There's seemingly still a lot of work to be done before it's usable as a main browser.
- hiram112 8y ago
  I know everyone has there own work flows, but how can you even keep track of that many tabs? After about 8 or 9, I find myself tabbing through half of a dozen tabs to get where I'm going, and at that point I realize I've added like 5 new tasks to my original stack of todos or research or whatever I was originally doing. At that point it's time to shut some tabs and concentrate on the original item. Also, once I've logged into, for example, GMail or Facebook, I do not want to be browsing other sites while under their eye. I instead usually open multiple Chromiums / Chrome, each app for a specific task.
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    Tree style tabs addon makes huge numbers of tabs useable, you really rethink the whole tab workflow. For logging into sites like gmail and Facebook, consider using Containers https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-facebook-container-different-multi-account-con https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-facebook-container-...
    - Izkata 8y ago
      Hoo yeah, before TreeStyleTabs, I limited myself to somewhere around 30-40 just because there wasn't room to see everything. Nowadays I'm up somewhere around 300 and it's not a big deal, because they self-organize into related groups that are expandable/collapsible.
ww520 8y ago
Kudos for the new release. Firefox is getting better.
Silhouette 8y ago
In case anyone else is getting a "What's new" page after the restart that is just a spammy and broken Firefox Accounts advert, you can get to the more normal release notes via the About Firefox dialog's "What's new" link, or just go here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/60.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/60.0/releasenotes/
equalunique 8y ago
>Added a policy engine that allows customized Firefox deployments in enterprise environments, using Windows Group Policy or a cross-platform JSON file Hopefully this means the two gigantic companies I work for will phase out Firefox ESR for Quantum. I also hope they move from 32-bit Firefox to 64-bit, but I've learned to keep my expectations low when it comes to these places progressing with tech. >Added support for Web Authentication API, which allows USB tokens for website authentication. That's awesome. Ok. Maybe I'll let myself get a little more hopeful. :')
- spencercw 8y ago
  Firefox ESR 60 has been released at the same time, and is more or less identical to the non-ESR version. ESR makes a lot of sense for corporate networks, even if it can be a drag being a bit behind the curve.
  - equalunique 8y ago
    Sure, ESR does make a lot of sense. According to Mozilla's timeline[0], enterprises will have to move to Firefox 60 ESR after August 2018, because the 52 ESR will be EOL after that time. [0] https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/organizations/release-overview.fddbdb1b7d81.png https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/organizations/rele...
- bugmen0t 8y ago
  Unlikely. FWIW, Firefox 60 is an ESR release :-)
  - equalunique 8y ago
    Looks like the Firefox 52 ESR will be EOL after August this year, so should be before 2019 when we start to see Firefox 60 ESR on most corporate networks: https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/organizations/release-overview.fddbdb1b7d81.png https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/organizations/rele...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
mrspeaker 8y ago
I'm unreasonably happy that Native Module support is now enabled by default in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Edge! My side-projects and experiments (like the WebGL2 "minecraft-y" demo - https://mrspeaker.github.io/webgl2-voxels/ https://mrspeaker.github.io/webgl2-voxels/) now work out of the box: no build system, no transpilers, no dot-files. Happy day!
- dtf 8y ago
  Native modules have brought the fun and immediacy back to development for me. I never quite got used to the delay and boilerplate of build systems, despite their power. But performance seems a little inconsistent in production. For iOS Safari in particular, I've had apps take over a minute to load via modules, versus seconds when bundled. So I stick to rollup for deploy (maybe http2 is supposed to fix this?) (great demo btw!)
- samschooler 8y ago
  Have you found any good tutorials that are good introductions on how to use native modules?
  - ivanfon 8y ago
    This Mozilla Hacks article[0] will tell you everything you need to know. For something shorter, the import[1] and export[2] pages on MDN are great. These pages also have some useful related articles linked at the bottom. Unrelated side note: MDN and Mozilla Hacks are doing an incredible job documenting web development and web standards. [0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/08/es6-in-depth-modules/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/08/es6-in-depth-modules/ [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Statements/import https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Statements/export https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
Larrikin 8y ago
Did they fix the text lag in this version? I was on the beta version of 60 and ended up having to downgrade back to 59.
Nadya 8y ago
>Bookmarks no longer support multiple keywords for the same URL unless the request has different POST data Can someone explain this one to me? Does this mean I can't use "gi", "i", "image", and "is" as my Google Image Search keywords and need to pick one? Reading the issue [0] isn't helping me. I only recently updated to FF59 from FF39, having to abandon most of my workflow. I really hope this update isn't another nail on the stairs for me, seems every single update since FF40 has broken a significant piece of my workflow. I'd appreciate knowing before updating and then having to roll-back. [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1313188 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1313188
- Izkata 8y ago
  ...based on this comment on the bug: > But people expect that it's the specific bookmarks that have keywords, not the urls+postdata, because it always worked like this. > The UI also shows this. There's a keyword field for a bookmark. And it's not labeled keyword for url/post data. This is a discrepancy, and results in unexpectedly overwritten keywords. I'm guessing the title is supposed to be read "(multiple bookmark) keywords", not "multiple (bookmark keywords)", and the release note restated it wrongly. Like, if you have two separate bookmarks with different names, but they go to the same URL, they share whatever's in the keywords field.
  - Nadya 8y ago
    I had someone on IRC confirm for me before I updated, multiple keywords for the same URL (eg: youtube.com/?q=%s) still works. I'm still not 100% sure what is meant by this line though, which is what caused confusion for me: >It is no longer possible to have multiple bookmark keywords for the same url, unless the request has different POST data. I guess I'm confused what "POST data" is - as it apparently isn't %s and I don't know what else you can change for a keyword bookmark so I'm not sure how you'd even change what the POST data is. "y" and "yt" both work to navigate to "youtube.com" and "y search" and "yt search" both did a youtube search for "search".
clumsysmurf 8y ago
One killer feature from Safari missing still is 'Show tab overview' with thumbnails of all your tabs ... anyone know of a well maintained plugin that does something like this? I think it should be built into the browser.
- kbrosnan 8y ago
  browser.ctrlTab.previews in about:conifg though the feature may be in various states of broken as it is not exposed anywhere
  - clumsysmurf 8y ago
    Yes - I use this, and it works for a few things, but Safari shows a grid which is easier to see when you have many tabs. Thanks for the tip.
  - Sylos 8y ago
    It is actually exposed, since a few versions ago. It's in the Preferences under General -> Tabs -> "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order". Right in the middle of the screen, when you open the Preferences-page...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- forapurpose 8y ago
  I just came across the link below and remembered your comment: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tip-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tip-tab/ It was runner up in a Mozilla add-ons contest: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/05/08/firefox-quantum-extensions-challenge-winners/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/05/08/firefox-quantum-e...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
vardump 8y ago
Firefox overall performance starts to be pretty good and it's pretty pleasant to use. It feels smoother than Chrome on 2015 Macbook Pro. But I guess there's a long tail of issues that keep some people from (still) switching to Firefox. Mine is lack of smooth pinch-zoom on macOS. Once that is fixed, I think I'll be using Firefox most of the time. On 2018 Android flagship phone, scrolling speed seems to be maybe 58/59 fps. Occasional jerky motion sticks out like a sore thumb. I think it might feel smoother steady 30 fps, because at least then all frames take equally long to render.
excalibur 8y ago
Running 60, installed and configured the group policy templates. Still can't get Firefox to pull trusted root certificates from the Windows certificate store. #headdesk
- felipc 8y ago
  Can you check in about:config if the pref security.enterprise_roots.enabled is being set to true?
  - excalibur 8y ago
    Yes, it's set to true with a status of locked.
esfandia 8y ago
Has the Classic Theme Restorer add-on been ported to the new extension API? Until then, I'm staying with my old version of Firefox.
- Sylos 8y ago
  It will never be ported fully. It's one of those extensions that dived so deep into Firefox's source code that Mozilla changing things in the source code caused it to break a lot of the times. Mozilla categorically doesn't want that anymore, as it will inevitably cause some Mozilla devs to try to not break those extensions and therefore not do things such as code refactoring. The sort of stuff that you can ignore in the short-term in order to not break extensions, but which causes huge problems in the long run. The CTR dev has however created a userChrome.css file, which you can use to get at least the visual changes: http://techdows.com/2017/09/classic-theme-restorer-userchrome-css-modify-firefox-57-photon-ui.html http://techdows.com/2017/09/classic-theme-restorer-userchrom...
- grandpoobah 8y ago
  Dude, let it go already.
bhandziuk 8y ago
Did anyone else lose the ability to scroll by clicking the middle mouse button in the 57 (Quantum) upgrade? Still missing for me in this version.
- RussianCow 8y ago
  Go to Preferences > scroll down to Browsing at the bottom > check "Use autoscrolling".
  - chrismorgan 8y ago
    Ah, that’s what autoscrolling is, is it? I wish it had some explanation of what non-obvious preferences are, at least a link to a document explaining it.
  - bhandziuk 8y ago
    I love you. Thank you! I was searching with the wrong words apparently!
majani 8y ago
From the comparison of the lists, looks like desktop is still their focus, which points to a sad level of navel gazing for an internet company in 2018. Makes me question whether they are focused on competing with Chrome or whether they just want to make cool tech.
- PostOnce 8y ago
  The desktop (and laptop) is still my focus, too. It's where I do all my work. I'm glad someone still gives a damn. I'm glad not everyone is chasing the crowdsourced social-mobile-AI-blockchain. Not all tech has to point in the same direction. That said I use Firefox on Android every day and it's fantastic, so what are you talking about specifically?
  - majani 8y ago
    Firefox has major issues with scrolling and also with a lot of plugins that claim to be available on mobile but simply don't work. They need to do a marketing push because nobody wins when one browser has monopoly share on an OS, especially if it's the default browser.
- ianbicking 8y ago
  Desktop is where nearly all Firefox users are, all of whom immediately get the benefits of improvements to Firefox, and whose use of Firefox funds all Mozilla.
- ionised 8y ago
  I'm fine with them focusing on desktop. That's where I'd rather be anyway.
philliphaydon 8y ago
I wish they would fix the bug in developer tools network tab. Adding columns breaks alignments. :(
esturk 8y ago
For such a privacy minded browser, it still preserves closed tabs in Private Mode. If you do (in OSX) cmd+shift+T, you can reopen the closed tabs from earlier. This does not happen in Chrome nor Safari.
- orthecreedence 8y ago
  Please, FF devs, if you're reading this, preserve this feature, or at least give it an about:config setting. I use ctrl+shift+t in private browsing all the time.
jakeogh 8y ago
Obvious stuff that's too pro-user: Tab pause button. Or better, opt in to not pause; I hacked up a -STOP for webkit (surf/glide) when the tab/window was not in the foreground. The X plumbing was tricky and never quite right. Still on my TODO to finish.
spondyl 8y ago
My coworker likes to say "None of this [tech] shit is cool" and that's kind of how I feel about browsers. Firefox Quantum is quite nice but in the past, I've had a constant resizing bug that makes it unusable on my home laptop plus the numerous issues listed below. Alternatively, Chrome is neat but I find it runs sluggish after a while on my older Macbook. I wish it had container tabs a la Firefox and the upcoming "disabled autoplay by default" change is really annoying. I feel the same about OSs anyway but it's easy to complain rather than contribute bug fixes. Mind you, I don't know eg; C++ so
sexy_seedbox 8y ago
Aside from continuous memory issues which others have mentioned, my biggest issue is that we still cannot have access to core FF pages and elements with webextensions (ex: mouse gestures on blank/new tabpages, userscripts on RSS feeds, scroll through tabs with mouse wheel, etc...)
isodev 8y ago
In the past couple of months, Firefox has turned into my favorite browser. I am truly grateful to everyone involved with it.

413 points by dikiaap 8y ago

I'm glad that they have released support for the Web Authentication API. Hopefully I won't need to use Chrome for websites I choose to be more secure with. Although, with a quick look it seems like I still can't use U2F with Google on Firefox.

mtgx 8y ago
It's also good because this version will be supported in FF ESR for enterprise for another 11 months or so.
Tomte 8y ago
Me neither (FastMail and Gmail). sigh But just yesterday people tried to "educate" me that it works with 60 and for 59 I had to toggle an about:config switch. It's great that they support the proper web standard. It would be useful if all those web sites supported it. This is a long-known issue, and nobody cares about non-Chrome browsers.
- chrismorgan 8y ago
  I’m probably the one that will implement the Web Authentication API for FastMail and Topicbox, though it’s a some way down my list of things to do at present. I looked into it a couple of months back (I would have liked us to get it out before browsers enabled it by default), but documentation was very scarce, and so it wasn’t particularly clear what we’d need to do to migrate from u2f.js to webauthn (especially while still supporting both), and then other things came up. Since then, https://www.imperialviolet.org/2018/03/27/webauthn.html https://www.imperialviolet.org/2018/03/27/webauthn.html has been written, which will help, but it’d still be nice to have a concise “here’s what to do, backend and frontend, to migrate from u2f.js to webauthn” guide. If no one has by the time we support webauthn, I’ll probably write such a guide. For now, it’s not as high a priority as it could be, because the functionality it provides is already available in Chrome (for that matter, I don’t believe Chrome’s webauthn implementation hits stable until the next release), Firefox can get it by enabling security.webauth.u2f which is good enough as a short-term measure when it’s always been required in the past anyway, and Edge doesn’t have many users (and few of them currently do 2FA). It’s pragmatism, sadly.
yborg 8y ago
I believe that Google specifically will only work with Chrome. I just tried with FF 61 with Yubikey and still doesn't work.
FullyFunctional 8y ago
Alas, I'm completely unable to get the soft token to work (after enabling it in config:about). It even fail on https://u2f.bin.coffee/ https://u2f.bin.coffee/ which seems to claim it should work. It's a usability trade off; I have a physical key, but I'm asked to authenticate 20+ times a day which make it a pain on my port-limited MacBook Pro.

malfeasance 8y ago

Pocket Sponsored Stories will appear for a percentage of users in the US. Read about our privacy-conscious approach to sponsored content If you can't roll out a feature without violating EU privacy laws, you're not employing a "privacy-conscious approach."

AbacusAvenger 8y ago
Yeah, that's why I set the "extensions.pocket.enabled" to "false" in my about:config. It's such a weird feature in an otherwise pleasant browser.
- move-on-by 8y ago
  I have that setting as well. The new config specifically for this is "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsored", you might want to flip it too just in case. The config name doesn't specifically reference pocket - so perhaps it could be used in other ways as well.
setquk 8y ago
Yes. Firefox is basically adware now.
- Karunamon 8y ago
  Not sure why this comment is grey, FF is now adware by objective definition of the word adware. Wiki >Adware, or advertising-supported software, is software that generates revenue for its developer by automatically generating online advertisements in the user interface of the software or on a screen presented to the user during the installation process
  - gruez 8y ago
    >... is software that generates revenue for its developer ... does pocket suggesting stories somehow generate revenue for Mozilla?

PhantomBKB 8y ago

Holy shit! It's fast

apazzolini 8y ago

Unfortunately, looks like the CPU spikes are still a problem on OS X for me. I check this every time a new version is released as I'd love to make the switch from Chrome, but Firefox with one blank tab and no extensions uses more CPU than Chrome with 15 actual tabs. When I actually throw activity at Firefox it hogs the CPU even more. Here's hoping v61 addresses it.

butz 8y ago
Have you reported this bug? It's all fine on the old OS X Mavericks.
- spiderfarmer 8y ago
  I reported it and they know what the problem is but it got marked as no-priority. Everytime there’s a new release I check if it’s solved and move back to Safari. Every release there are people complaining about it. I know I have been for 2 years now, but it falls on deaf ears.
  - cat199 8y ago
    issue ref?
    - spiderfarmer 8y ago
      See above.
  - sayhello 8y ago
    Might be hardware related. Did you provide your HW profile in the bug report?
    - spiderfarmer 8y ago
      Yes, twice.
Kpourdeilami 8y ago

newscracker 8y ago

The enterprise part is great to see (though it was something that seemed long overdue). I recently noticed on a Firefox mailing list that Mike Kaply (of Kaply Consulting, a company that helped with enterprise deployment and configuration of Firefox) had officially joined the Firefox team. Mike's presence is going to make Firefox in the enterprise much better. On Firefox 60, I'm still not on board with the newest versions after the support for legacy extensions was removed. SessionManager, an awesome (legacy, XUL) extension, still doesn't have a perfect equivalent in the Web Extension world. Tab Session Manager, which has similar functionality, seems to be lagging behind and struggling with issues in Firefox that prevent it from becoming a good session manager. If there's one thing I could ask the Firefox team, it would be to focus on enabling web extensions to do almost everything that legacy extensions were able to. Without the power of feature rich and stable extensions, Firefox is currently inadequate for me (though I still use it as my primary browser).

catach 8y ago
On the one hand, the FF webextension API is under continual development [0]. On the other hand, "almost everything" previously possible does not seem not a realistic expectation since it'd mean the ability to change almost every single atom of browser behavior. [0] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/04/02/extensions-firefox-60/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/04/02/extensions-firefo...
- newscracker 8y ago
  Considering that Firefox pioneered the extensions concept among the masses and had a wide variety of terrific extensions (and still has) as a key differentiator, and since many users have appreciated Firefox for this reason (even if they didn't care much about FOSS), Firefox must continue to push heavily on this front. Of course, everything that was possible before wouldn't make sense in the web extensions platform (for security and other reasons), which is why I said "almost everything". But things like tab management (even Tab Mix Plus on web extensions is only in beta now), session management, etc., are highly important to the browser UX for a lot of Firefox users. They're highly sticky factors as well that prevent users from switching to another browser. I've also seen some people who deploy and use Firefox in enterprise state that they're going to be on ESR 52 for quite sometime, with one of the reasons being some extensions not being available (or ported) on web extensions. I'm not going to blame Mozilla or the Firefox team for the current state of affairs. But knowing what we know (with the advance notice on web extensions), the main advantage of Firefox on the extensions front shouldn't be lost. If anything, this piece needs to be accelerated further and also have the Mozilla Firefox team drive new features and abilities in web extensions that make other browsers look outdated. I'm a die hard Firefox fan, and would always be cheering it on to thrive and grow.

lwansbrough 8y ago

They still haven't fixed whatever problem causes my Late 2013 RMBP's CPU/fan to jump to 80C and stay there while FF is open. Back to Chrome. :(

IshKebab 8y ago

Firefox in mobile is worth using simply for the reader view. It makes the mobile web tolerable again.

overcast 8y ago
Not that Firefox isn't great, but Safari has had this on the iPhone for as long as I can remember. I use it exclusively for viewing articles.
severine 8y ago
Do you use the Open in Reader View extension? https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/reader-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/reader-view/
- IshKebab 8y ago
  No, it's built in.
zlynx 8y ago
You'd think that CMS developers would take a hint and copy the CSS that reader view uses. But no, they continue to be useless. "We put this 800px wide image in here and dag gone it, we want you to SEE THE WHOLE THING."

billysielu 8y ago

Blocking Third-Party Cookies is a nice option, but it would be better if those settings were for full-blown First Party Isolation instead.

Xylakant 8y ago
First party isolation was added in FF55 https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/another-tor-browser-feature-makes-it-into-firefox-first-party-isolation/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/another-tor-b...
- billysielu 8y ago
  It's off by default. To enable it you have to go into about:config. I'm saying it should be on by default, or at least exposed in the Settings for people to find. The concern about doing that was that some sites would break, but their definition of break included things which should break because they were previously abusing the lack of FPI. I have been browsing with FPI on for a while and nothing has broken. Protecting our privacy should be the default state of affairs. Mozilla did say Firefox would be opinionated...
  - Xylakant 8y ago
    I have it enabled and I can attest that it breaks a fair amount of sites. I think it’s fair to expose that as an expert level setting. It could benefit from a bit of advertising though.
    - unethical_ban 8y ago
      I wonder if it can be implemented on a per-site basis, like a security policy. Exception: gitea uses Github oauth Exception: unbury.me uses Google login etc Default: Full FPI
      - bscphil 8y ago
        This is extremely easy to do in uMatrix. If you don't want to use the other features, just set a default policy of allow all, then block third party cookies. You can then selectively allow access to cookies on a site by site basis.

nailer 8y ago

Switched from Chrome for privacy reasons a couple of months ago. As a webdev (and hence heavy DevTools user), it feels excellent, the inspector's a little bit faster, and having containers for Facebook and Google tracking services is excellent. Spell check in text boxes doesn't work though - apparently it should, I have no idea why it doesn't.

dblohm7 8y ago
Bug reports welcome! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org https://bugzilla.mozilla.org
- nailer 8y ago
  Yeah, I've made some big reports already (CSP errors from undefined source when using Stripe with LastPass enabled) but I want to check it out more before bothering anyone - maybe it's my Windows language config
orthecreedence 8y ago
For spell check, I've noticed I have to right-click and check spelling. I actually kind of like not having the browser second guess me, but not sure if this is an intentional default on FF's part.

lonk 8y ago

Scrolling is still jerky and sluggish on android.

cpeterso 8y ago
Firefox for Android will be copying Chrome's scrolling physics for faster scrolling, since that's what Android users are used to. Chrome doesn't use Android's standard scrolling physics, so custom scrolling code is needed to emulate its behavior. You can test this in Firefox 61 Beta by setting the "apz.android.chrome_fling_physics.enabled" pref to true in about:config. The new behavior will hopefully be enabled by default in Firefox 62. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1448439 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1448439
- sp332 8y ago
  Ah, I was wondering why my scrolling was getting "fling"ed so much on Nightly. It's kinda unusable because 2/3 of the time, when I lift my thumb off the screen, it gets interpreted as a fling. Maybe I'll get used to being very careful, but for now I'm glad to know there's a toggle.
  - cpeterso 8y ago
    There are still fling bugs to be fixed. :) Feel free to file a bug in Bugzilla that blocks bug 1448439. Perhaps you are seeing one of these known bugs: * Weirdness at end of Fennec fling. Don't send duplicate DOM 'scroll' event for sub-pixel scrolling: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1230176 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1230176 * Scrolling in Android has a distinct hitch when releasing finger: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1425739 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1425739 You can also tweak the fling physics parameters with these about:config prefs: apz.android.chrome_fling_physics.friction apz.android.chrome_fling_physics.inflexion apz.android.chrome_fling_physics.stop_threshold
    - sp332 8y ago
      Thanks, I had noticed the behavior in 1425739 but assumed it was because of my bulky screen protector.

wpdev_63 8y ago

If anyone from lastpass is reading this thread, please fix your plugin. Everytime I try to edit the password from the prompt on the page, it opens a blank page for the password vault page.

sametmax 8y ago
I love lastpass, I'm actually a paying user, but it's getting more and more buggy. Sometime you generate passwords to change an existing one, and it doesn't update, so you only have the old one. Sometime autocomplete doesn't work: either the menu doesn't do anything, or the first click on the input icon doesn't work. It's not too bad, and honestly the mobile version is a god send (it fills passwords in apps !), but it's irritating.
- Someone1234 8y ago
  Agreed. But LogMeIn purchased them, so I'm unsurprised that price has increased and quality has dipped. One issue I've been seeing more of (both on Android and on desktop) is the cache not re-populating automatically. You have to go Advanced -> Clear Local Cache, and only then will it download a fresh copy. Or worse, sometimes after adding new credentials it never sync's it to the cloud. It remains on that device, but that's it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
godelski 8y ago
Anyone else get the bug where it doesn't auto-fill (shows grey box), you right click and it shows that you have no stored logins, and then once you close that (right click) menu you are prompted like normal? This happens to me frequently, though seems to be specific sites.
- AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
  Mine's worse. Literally every other login fails. I don't get a rejection or anything--the box will light up and turn red--but the vault will appear empty and none of the sites will be found. I have to log out of it and login a second time (meaning put in my giant master password), and only the second time will it find the stuff in my vault correctly. It's maddening.

dumbmatter 8y ago

I'm psyched to see the fix to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1193394 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1193394 released, which (amongst other things) mean that you can finally write code using both IndexedDB and promises without inadvertently committing the active transaction on promise resolution. Now I just need to wait until the market share of other Firefox versions decreases before I can actually take advantage in production :)

sp332 8y ago
According to the CSV data available from http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-market-share http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-market-share new Firefox versions tend to dominate just 1-2 months after release. https://imgur.com/a/xzvAU4t https://imgur.com/a/xzvAU4t
- dumbmatter 8y ago
  Firefox 52 may be around for a while - it's the last LTS before extensions were broken by Quantum, and it's also the last release that runs on XP and Vista.
  - sp332 8y ago
    As you can see in the graph, it's hovering around 0.5% of all browsers and ~10% of FF usage.
  - ptman 8y ago
    It seems that ff esr60 will be the only esr in august: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/
    - sp332 8y ago
      That's a minimum, but I haven't heard any noise from Mozilla about pushing it any further. Either way I'm sure some third party will pick it up and it will live forever. The only question is the % of people who switch.

kiliancs 8y ago

> Stylo comes to Firefox for Android in 60 > Firefox's new parallel CSS engine — also known as Quantum CSS or Stylo — which was first enabled by default in Firefox 57 for desktop, has now been enabled in Firefox for Android. That's exciting, but on my phone the Play Store still doesn't provide the new version.

vanderZwan 8y ago
Play Store rollout always takes a bit longer
trumped 8y ago
You can download the apk straight from Mozilla: https://firefox.com/m https://firefox.com/m
sanxiyn 8y ago
It's somewhat humorous that Rust Android support is not Tier 1 while in production for >100M installation app.

Panino 8y ago

> Applied Quantum CSS to render browser UI I'm so excited about the future of Firefox. In addition to the above, OpenBSD is currently working on pledge support in FF. In a couple years FF could be simultaneously faster, more private and more secure than Chrome.

ams6110 8y ago
I use FF on OpenBSD as my daily browser. I have at least three different profiles running simultaneously with multiple tabs open in each (though I don't go nuts with tabs like some do -- I never tend to have more than 10 or so open). It does occasionally seem to get stuck in a state where it just starts chewing CPU cycles and RAM. I've seen this mostly with Google sites like gmail or docs, so I assume it's JS-related. But it's fairly rare, and seems to be improving with each release.
- bugmen0t 8y ago
  Did you try container tabs instead of profiles? Could save you a few coh cycles. The gmail/gdocs slowdowns are being tracked and worked on. It's a problem when websites actively optimize for competitive products though.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    The other problem with container tabs, which isn't really a Mozilla problem as much as a Google problem, is that if you have enough segregated google profiles going you seem to hit some google anti-abuse codepaths or aomething. I have 3 separate Google accounts separated with container tabs (on purpose, I know Google supports multiple accounts), and a separate regular browsing container, and occassionally just following a link from Gmail or hangouts where Google bounces you through their redirect hangs for 30 seconds or so. When it's doing that it generally does it consistently though.

dsissitka 8y ago

Still no option to see all of the permissions an extension requires without digging through its source. :( https://imgur.com/a/k4rk0 https://imgur.com/a/k4rk0 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1449698 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1449698

sp332 8y ago
You've linked to a duplicate of this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427622 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427622
nathancahill 8y ago
Proposed fix: https://bug1387695.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=8901766 https://bug1387695.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=8901...
rmist 8y ago
Open about:debugging, goto Manifest URL of the extension, search for 'permissions'.
bugmen0t 8y ago
Coming soon though!

_bxg1 8y ago

But did they fix the weird scrolling friction on Android? Seriously, it's the main reason I don't use Firefox.

davnicwil 8y ago
I'm using Firefox on Android - not sure what friction you're referring to here, but the lack of 'reload on pull down when scrolled to top' feature is seriously annoying for me. Despite this, I stick with Firefox because I want to use it - I can imagine that the vast, vast majority of users who have no opinion on which browser they use simply don't/won't put up with this and just go back to the easier to use Chrome. It's little things like this that make all the difference.
- _bxg1 8y ago
  In every other Android app there's no bound on how much scroll momentum you can build up; if you want to zoom to the bottom of a long page, you can keep flicking to go as fast as you want. Firefox mobile adds an obnoxious amount of extra friction that prevents you from going much faster than your finger moves, making scrolling feel like wading through water. As an aside, I think iOS might have the same behavior, which could be the reason they're doing it, but it goes against the system standard and is completely unbearable for me.
- idonotknowwhy 8y ago
  These users would never install Firefox in the first place.
majani 8y ago
mobile is clearly still secondary to them, judging by the list of improvements to each. A sorry state of affairs that few here seem to be calling out
jasonkostempski 8y ago
What do you use? I cant imagine ever going back to a browser that doesnt have uBlock Origin support.

faitswulff 8y ago

I've been using Firefox Nightly as my daily browser for a while and I am beginning to notice more and more websites breaking on it - mostly Google services, although Facebook as well, recently, too. I know it's complicated by the fact that I'm on the Nightly channel, but has anyone else noticed an increase in sites that are incompatible with FF?

Silhouette 8y ago
has anyone else noticed an increase in sites that are incompatible with FF? Yes, but I'm not sure it's just Firefox. I suspect a significant number of sites are now being developed and tested only with Chrome, using Google's developer tools and recommended practices and browser feature set. Unfortunately, those things may not be supported or work well on other browsers, and if you don't choose carefully and test properly...
ethagnawl 8y ago
I've noticed this while using the last few stable releases of FF (on Debian 9.4, on the odd chance it's relevant). Off the top of my head, the (popular) sites I regularly have issues with are: ebay (creating/editing listings), LinkedIn (have to refresh the homepage multiple times before all of the components appear and are usable), GitHub (WYSIWYG). I've just assumed these issue are caused by add-ons behaving badly, but I haven't bothered to get scientific about it yet.
dblohm7 8y ago
Report your broken websites to webcompat.com
chrismorgan 8y ago
Nightly has been my daily driver for years, with a couple of brief interludes. There’s the very occasional possibly serious breakage, but I haven’t noticed any compatibility troubles for a long time. (But I don’t use Facebook, and of Google I only ever use Maps.) Actually, I suppose there are a couple of sites which Tracking Protection completely broke, but that’s not Nightly-specific.

pmoriarty 8y ago

Does the new Firefox have something like RequestPolicy or NoScript?

icebraining 8y ago
Yes, the original dev migrated NoScript, but it's not a complete clone: https://blog.jeaye.com/2017/11/30/noscript/ https://blog.jeaye.com/2017/11/30/noscript/
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  What about RequestPolicy? RequestPolicy can selectively block third-party content that NoScript will let through.
  - zootboy 8y ago
    Check out uMatrix. I used to use RP, but switched to uM because it gives even better fine-grain controls.
ChrisGranger 8y ago
uBlock Origin in medium or hard mode is similar to those. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium-mode https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...
beagle3 8y ago
uMatrix is excellent; more capabilities than RequestPolicy with a much better UI. Written by gorhill (Raymond Hill) who also made uBlock (and still maintains uBlock Origin); rock solid, low resource. It's not for non-technical users, but if you are looking for RequestPolicy or NoScript I'm sure you'll manage.

superkuh 8y ago

I haven't tried Firefox since version 47 and haven't used it as my main since 37. I gave 61 (dev edition) a spin yesterday. All the extensions that make the browser usable for me were like 1990s geocities pages: "Under Construction" if they existed at all. They were just placeholders that lacked most features with links to bugzilla pages to vote for features to be added back into Firefox. Garbage collection was pretty terrible too. I managed to use up 4 GB of ram with ~10 tabs. In my normal (firefox fork) browser I run 300 active/loaded tabs and 700 'suspended' tabs for ~1k total and never get that high. There's seemingly still a lot of work to be done before it's usable as a main browser.

hiram112 8y ago
I know everyone has there own work flows, but how can you even keep track of that many tabs? After about 8 or 9, I find myself tabbing through half of a dozen tabs to get where I'm going, and at that point I realize I've added like 5 new tasks to my original stack of todos or research or whatever I was originally doing. At that point it's time to shut some tabs and concentrate on the original item. Also, once I've logged into, for example, GMail or Facebook, I do not want to be browsing other sites while under their eye. I instead usually open multiple Chromiums / Chrome, each app for a specific task.
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  Tree style tabs addon makes huge numbers of tabs useable, you really rethink the whole tab workflow. For logging into sites like gmail and Facebook, consider using Containers https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-facebook-container-different-multi-account-con https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-facebook-container-...
  - Izkata 8y ago
    Hoo yeah, before TreeStyleTabs, I limited myself to somewhere around 30-40 just because there wasn't room to see everything. Nowadays I'm up somewhere around 300 and it's not a big deal, because they self-organize into related groups that are expandable/collapsible.

ww520 8y ago

Kudos for the new release. Firefox is getting better.

Silhouette 8y ago

In case anyone else is getting a "What's new" page after the restart that is just a spammy and broken Firefox Accounts advert, you can get to the more normal release notes via the About Firefox dialog's "What's new" link, or just go here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/60.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/60.0/releasenotes/

equalunique 8y ago

>Added a policy engine that allows customized Firefox deployments in enterprise environments, using Windows Group Policy or a cross-platform JSON file Hopefully this means the two gigantic companies I work for will phase out Firefox ESR for Quantum. I also hope they move from 32-bit Firefox to 64-bit, but I've learned to keep my expectations low when it comes to these places progressing with tech. >Added support for Web Authentication API, which allows USB tokens for website authentication. That's awesome. Ok. Maybe I'll let myself get a little more hopeful. :')

spencercw 8y ago
Firefox ESR 60 has been released at the same time, and is more or less identical to the non-ESR version. ESR makes a lot of sense for corporate networks, even if it can be a drag being a bit behind the curve.
- equalunique 8y ago
  Sure, ESR does make a lot of sense. According to Mozilla's timeline[0], enterprises will have to move to Firefox 60 ESR after August 2018, because the 52 ESR will be EOL after that time. [0] https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/organizations/release-overview.fddbdb1b7d81.png https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/organizations/rele...
bugmen0t 8y ago
Unlikely. FWIW, Firefox 60 is an ESR release :-)
- equalunique 8y ago
  Looks like the Firefox 52 ESR will be EOL after August this year, so should be before 2019 when we start to see Firefox 60 ESR on most corporate networks: https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/organizations/release-overview.fddbdb1b7d81.png https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/organizations/rele...
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mrspeaker 8y ago

I'm unreasonably happy that Native Module support is now enabled by default in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Edge! My side-projects and experiments (like the WebGL2 "minecraft-y" demo - https://mrspeaker.github.io/webgl2-voxels/ https://mrspeaker.github.io/webgl2-voxels/) now work out of the box: no build system, no transpilers, no dot-files. Happy day!

dtf 8y ago
Native modules have brought the fun and immediacy back to development for me. I never quite got used to the delay and boilerplate of build systems, despite their power. But performance seems a little inconsistent in production. For iOS Safari in particular, I've had apps take over a minute to load via modules, versus seconds when bundled. So I stick to rollup for deploy (maybe http2 is supposed to fix this?) (great demo btw!)
samschooler 8y ago
Have you found any good tutorials that are good introductions on how to use native modules?
- ivanfon 8y ago
  This Mozilla Hacks article[0] will tell you everything you need to know. For something shorter, the import[1] and export[2] pages on MDN are great. These pages also have some useful related articles linked at the bottom. Unrelated side note: MDN and Mozilla Hacks are doing an incredible job documenting web development and web standards. [0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/08/es6-in-depth-modules/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/08/es6-in-depth-modules/ [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Statements/import https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Statements/export https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Larrikin 8y ago

Did they fix the text lag in this version? I was on the beta version of 60 and ended up having to downgrade back to 59.

Nadya 8y ago

>Bookmarks no longer support multiple keywords for the same URL unless the request has different POST data Can someone explain this one to me? Does this mean I can't use "gi", "i", "image", and "is" as my Google Image Search keywords and need to pick one? Reading the issue [0] isn't helping me. I only recently updated to FF59 from FF39, having to abandon most of my workflow. I really hope this update isn't another nail on the stairs for me, seems every single update since FF40 has broken a significant piece of my workflow. I'd appreciate knowing before updating and then having to roll-back. [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1313188 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1313188

Izkata 8y ago
...based on this comment on the bug: > But people expect that it's the specific bookmarks that have keywords, not the urls+postdata, because it always worked like this. > The UI also shows this. There's a keyword field for a bookmark. And it's not labeled keyword for url/post data. This is a discrepancy, and results in unexpectedly overwritten keywords. I'm guessing the title is supposed to be read "(multiple bookmark) keywords", not "multiple (bookmark keywords)", and the release note restated it wrongly. Like, if you have two separate bookmarks with different names, but they go to the same URL, they share whatever's in the keywords field.
- Nadya 8y ago
  I had someone on IRC confirm for me before I updated, multiple keywords for the same URL (eg: youtube.com/?q=%s) still works. I'm still not 100% sure what is meant by this line though, which is what caused confusion for me: >It is no longer possible to have multiple bookmark keywords for the same url, unless the request has different POST data. I guess I'm confused what "POST data" is - as it apparently isn't %s and I don't know what else you can change for a keyword bookmark so I'm not sure how you'd even change what the POST data is. "y" and "yt" both work to navigate to "youtube.com" and "y search" and "yt search" both did a youtube search for "search".

clumsysmurf 8y ago

One killer feature from Safari missing still is 'Show tab overview' with thumbnails of all your tabs ... anyone know of a well maintained plugin that does something like this? I think it should be built into the browser.

kbrosnan 8y ago
browser.ctrlTab.previews in about:conifg though the feature may be in various states of broken as it is not exposed anywhere
- clumsysmurf 8y ago
  Yes - I use this, and it works for a few things, but Safari shows a grid which is easier to see when you have many tabs. Thanks for the tip.
- Sylos 8y ago
  It is actually exposed, since a few versions ago. It's in the Preferences under General -> Tabs -> "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order". Right in the middle of the screen, when you open the Preferences-page...
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forapurpose 8y ago
I just came across the link below and remembered your comment: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tip-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tip-tab/ It was runner up in a Mozilla add-ons contest: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/05/08/firefox-quantum-extensions-challenge-winners/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/05/08/firefox-quantum-e...

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vardump 8y ago

Firefox overall performance starts to be pretty good and it's pretty pleasant to use. It feels smoother than Chrome on 2015 Macbook Pro. But I guess there's a long tail of issues that keep some people from (still) switching to Firefox. Mine is lack of smooth pinch-zoom on macOS. Once that is fixed, I think I'll be using Firefox most of the time. On 2018 Android flagship phone, scrolling speed seems to be maybe 58/59 fps. Occasional jerky motion sticks out like a sore thumb. I think it might feel smoother steady 30 fps, because at least then all frames take equally long to render.

excalibur 8y ago

Running 60, installed and configured the group policy templates. Still can't get Firefox to pull trusted root certificates from the Windows certificate store. #headdesk

felipc 8y ago
Can you check in about:config if the pref security.enterprise_roots.enabled is being set to true?
- excalibur 8y ago
  Yes, it's set to true with a status of locked.

esfandia 8y ago

Has the Classic Theme Restorer add-on been ported to the new extension API? Until then, I'm staying with my old version of Firefox.

Sylos 8y ago
It will never be ported fully. It's one of those extensions that dived so deep into Firefox's source code that Mozilla changing things in the source code caused it to break a lot of the times. Mozilla categorically doesn't want that anymore, as it will inevitably cause some Mozilla devs to try to not break those extensions and therefore not do things such as code refactoring. The sort of stuff that you can ignore in the short-term in order to not break extensions, but which causes huge problems in the long run. The CTR dev has however created a userChrome.css file, which you can use to get at least the visual changes: http://techdows.com/2017/09/classic-theme-restorer-userchrome-css-modify-firefox-57-photon-ui.html http://techdows.com/2017/09/classic-theme-restorer-userchrom...
grandpoobah 8y ago
Dude, let it go already.

bhandziuk 8y ago

Did anyone else lose the ability to scroll by clicking the middle mouse button in the 57 (Quantum) upgrade? Still missing for me in this version.

RussianCow 8y ago
Go to Preferences > scroll down to Browsing at the bottom > check "Use autoscrolling".
- chrismorgan 8y ago
  Ah, that’s what autoscrolling is, is it? I wish it had some explanation of what non-obvious preferences are, at least a link to a document explaining it.
- bhandziuk 8y ago
  I love you. Thank you! I was searching with the wrong words apparently!

majani 8y ago

From the comparison of the lists, looks like desktop is still their focus, which points to a sad level of navel gazing for an internet company in 2018. Makes me question whether they are focused on competing with Chrome or whether they just want to make cool tech.

PostOnce 8y ago
The desktop (and laptop) is still my focus, too. It's where I do all my work. I'm glad someone still gives a damn. I'm glad not everyone is chasing the crowdsourced social-mobile-AI-blockchain. Not all tech has to point in the same direction. That said I use Firefox on Android every day and it's fantastic, so what are you talking about specifically?
- majani 8y ago
  Firefox has major issues with scrolling and also with a lot of plugins that claim to be available on mobile but simply don't work. They need to do a marketing push because nobody wins when one browser has monopoly share on an OS, especially if it's the default browser.
ianbicking 8y ago
Desktop is where nearly all Firefox users are, all of whom immediately get the benefits of improvements to Firefox, and whose use of Firefox funds all Mozilla.
ionised 8y ago
I'm fine with them focusing on desktop. That's where I'd rather be anyway.

philliphaydon 8y ago

I wish they would fix the bug in developer tools network tab. Adding columns breaks alignments. :(

esturk 8y ago

For such a privacy minded browser, it still preserves closed tabs in Private Mode. If you do (in OSX) cmd+shift+T, you can reopen the closed tabs from earlier. This does not happen in Chrome nor Safari.

orthecreedence 8y ago
Please, FF devs, if you're reading this, preserve this feature, or at least give it an about:config setting. I use ctrl+shift+t in private browsing all the time.

jakeogh 8y ago

Obvious stuff that's too pro-user: Tab pause button. Or better, opt in to not pause; I hacked up a -STOP for webkit (surf/glide) when the tab/window was not in the foreground. The X plumbing was tricky and never quite right. Still on my TODO to finish.

spondyl 8y ago

My coworker likes to say "None of this [tech] shit is cool" and that's kind of how I feel about browsers. Firefox Quantum is quite nice but in the past, I've had a constant resizing bug that makes it unusable on my home laptop plus the numerous issues listed below. Alternatively, Chrome is neat but I find it runs sluggish after a while on my older Macbook. I wish it had container tabs a la Firefox and the upcoming "disabled autoplay by default" change is really annoying. I feel the same about OSs anyway but it's easy to complain rather than contribute bug fixes. Mind you, I don't know eg; C++ so

sexy_seedbox 8y ago

Aside from continuous memory issues which others have mentioned, my biggest issue is that we still cannot have access to core FF pages and elements with webextensions (ex: mouse gestures on blank/new tabpages, userscripts on RSS feeds, scroll through tabs with mouse wheel, etc...)

isodev 8y ago

In the past couple of months, Firefox has turned into my favorite browser. I am truly grateful to everyone involved with it.