Firefox 72.0 - <AUTHOR> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/72.0/releasenotes/ <comment><USER2> Here's my Firefox wishlist:

\- Open new windows more quickly. Firefox feels sluggish (on Mac) even though it isn't, simply because it opens new windows far more slowly than Safari or Chrome.

\- Use the platform native key store. I don't want my passwords stored unencrypted on disk. But I don't want to enter a separate master password either. I do want to use fingerprint/face unlock on mobile to reveal passwords.

\- Give me a setting to autoconfirm all cookie consent requests and lobby for a legally binding do-not-track header. Cookie consent was well meaning, but it has turned out to make things worse. Let's move on.

<comment><USER3> > lobby for a legally binding do-not-track header.

DNT is pretty dead, and IMHO was never a good idea in the first place. Opt- outing of invasive and unethical tracking is just weird. What about people who don't know about it? Or don't fully understand what it means?

It's almost like the _Hitchhiker 's Guide_: "Well, you should have visited the planning department in the disused lavatory with a sign 'beware of the leopard".

I wrote some more about it over here: [https://www.arp242.net/dnt.html](https://www.arp242.net/dnt.html)

<comment><USER4> The ultimate irony of DNT was that trackers could use the header as browser fingerprinting data..

<comment><USER5> Well, it only adds one bit of information, that is probably highly correlated with everything else being unique as well :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a long time Chrome user, and someone who (admittedly) said to a FF fan about an year ago, that it's too late for FF to catch up to Chrome now. I gave FF another shot about 6 months ago, and I'm liking it more every month since then.

It has been my primary browser outside of work, the major reason I use Chrome now is for Chrome Dev Tools.

Also, some websites don't behave well in FF and I find that most of the time it's because of the site tracking being blocked. So not a big deal

<comment><USER7> Posts like this always come up in these threads and they're really great, but it's worth adding that 'switching to Firefox' isn't something anyone actually has to do. Just start using it for one thing or another and any complete change will happen naturally if it makes any sense. It's a process that involves no effort and no risk

The only thing I use Chrome for is gaming, graphics perf is still miles better than Firefox. But I'd never trust Chrome with anything as much as a private URL or a username or password, for much the same reason I wouldn't stick my hand through the bars of a cage while visiting the zoo. Did they ever get around to fixing that opt-out password sync crap?

<comment><USER8> > 'switching to Firefox' isn't something anyone actually has to do. Just start > using it for one thing or another and any complete change will happen > naturally

This is going to vary with different people. Have you heard the phrase "Default is destiny"? This is especially true for less technical people (the majority of web users).

Personally I'm not going to dabble, rather keeping to the safe and familiar, so I have to intentionally trial run something as my goto/default.

<comment><USER9> Chrome isn't the default on a lot of platforms.

<comment><USER10> It is on chrome notebooks. And every search on google.com prompts you to install chrome for 'a better user experience'. Soon, just by plain nagging, it ends up becoming default

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Firefox replaces annoying notification request pop-ups with a more delightful experience, by default for all users. The pop-ups no longer interrupt your browsing, in its place, a speech bubble will appear in the address bar when you interact with the site."

That should pretty much kill off a lot of the notification request crap, especially if Chrome follows suit. I can envision the conversion rate massively falling off when it's no longer something right in your face.

<comment><USER12> Slack has started disabling unrelated features if you disallow notifications. For instance, you can't add channels to the "ignore @here" list if notifications are off. I'm sure this'll get worse over time.

FF needs a "disable notifications, but lie to the website and say they're enabled" button.

<comment><USER13> I don't understand why browsers would ever not lie about this.

<comment><USER14> "Why are my notifications for Slack not working?"

<comment><USER15> "Because you've declined to get notifications for Slack"

This does not seem like a reasonable complaint to me.

<comment><USER16> But the application would have no way of knowing that to display this message to the user if the browser lies about it.

<comment><USER17> "Check if you have notifications enabled for Slack on your browser's settings"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Firefox replaces annoying notification request pop-ups with a more > delightful experience, by default for all users. The pop-ups no longer > interrupt your browsing, in its place, a speech bubble will appear in the > address bar when you interact with the site.

This is fantastic! I had finally figured out I could turn this off in settings a while ago, glad it's now a default. I get so annoyed by this, annoying indeed!

<comment><USER19> Well, it's delightfully stupid.

In a webapp where you present user a button to activate notifiactions, when the user clicks the button seemingly nothing happens in FF72 (user is focussed on a big enable notifiactions button in the web app and may not notice that some tiny gray icon wiggled a little in the address bar).

On a big screen a button in the middle of the screen is so far away from the address bar, that you don't see any change in the address bar at all in the peripheral vision.

So yeah, web apps that don't try to force the user to enable notifications are now punished for good behavior again.

EDIT: So it's not so stupid, see below.

<comment><USER20> How about web apps too not show annoying pop-ups which are pretty useless in most cases? Websites which show two pop-ups (custom pop-up followed by browser pop-up) are worse.

<comment><USER19> My website doesn't show any popups. I have a settings dialog that user can open and setup email and other notifications.

This will just not work anymore. I'll have to add some long winded FF specific explanation on what to do after clicking the button.

Anyway the FF UI is broken if user physically can't see any reaction from the browser after he requests notifications by clicking anywhere on the page.

<comment><USER21> If your users are clicking a button then it should actually show the permission prompt, unless you're losing the user interaction somewhere in the callback (by doing something async first)

[https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/11/upcoming-notification- perm...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/11/upcoming-notification-permission- changes-in-firefox-72/)

This is a frequent "mistake"/issue however, and we're working on a mitigation for it.

<comment><USER19> I'm doing this:

[https://megous.com/dl/tmp/sub.txt](https://megous.com/dl/tmp/sub.txt)

I guess this is then happening because I'm first checking if there's a subscription via `pushManager.getSubscription` before creating a new one in the event handler.

Yep, dropping getSubscription makes the popup appear again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been using Firefox for the last 10 or so years. (Used the "new Chrome- Opera" for a while but went back soon)

These recent developments are awesome. As a frontend developer, I also find the devtools absolutely competitive with Chrome's.

The default ad- and tracker blocking is nice, I only need to use uBblock Origin for Youtube (whitelisting only that), since Youtube became nearly unusable due to the massive amount of ads.

Edit: also, they are fortunately tackling two prominent annoyances of the "modern web" i.e. push notification popups (for those who don't turn the whole feature off outright in about:config) and video autoplay.

So sad that Firefox's market share is still just 9-10%. :(

<comment><USER23> > I only need to use uBblock Origin for Youtube (whitelisting only that), > since Youtube became nearly unusable due to the massive amount of ads.

Depends how much you're using it, but as it's pretty much become the primary source of entertainment in our household I decided the most practical and ethical option was to just pay for it.

<comment><USER24> Not sure this is even an option outside the US.

<comment><USER25> It is available in a lot of countries.

[https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?hl=en](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6307365?hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> With notification spam fixed, how about tackling cookie banners spam next? Let's work on a standard to allow user to set their preferred cookie settings level once in browser UI and keep websites clean.

<comment><USER27> Unfortunately, they are required by law (at least in Europe) and we can't do much about it. You can't say use a browser API to set a global setting for them, because GDPR explicitly requires that every website must get the user consent for them.

Of course the real solution (and the reason why GDPR introduced the banner) is for website to stop using cookies for tracking their users and thus have no reason to put the banner (you don't need the banner for technical cookies, such as the one used for logins, but only for third party profiling cookies).

<comment><USER28> > You can't say use a browser API to set a global setting for them, because > GDPR explicitly requires that every website must get the user consent for > them.

I can see why that prevents a browser from auto-accepting all cookies, but how in the world does this logic apply to me if I want to deny consent to 100% of the websites to use cookies?

Set the default on the browser to deny all consent, and show the cookie notification somewhere unobtrusive, the same way it was done for notifications.

<comment><USER29> The browser already has logic/settings controlling which cookies are accepted (first party, all, none). These settings have existed in most browsers for years. It's unfortunate that the cookie law didn't build on this in some way.

<comment><USER30> The cookie law is very flexible. It considers any and all ways in which the user makes their intent explicit as good enough.

The issue is that websites want to annoy users until they finally maybe actually say yes to get the site to shut up.

Legally, tracking has to be off by default, tracking may not change the usability of the site, and tracking has to be purely optional, and the "no" has to be simpler, larger, and easier to use than the "yes".

The point of the GDPR, over the course of the next years, is to utterly destroy online advertising as a business model, and any and all tracking solutions with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If this seems faster than normal it is. 72 is the first major version released on the new 4 week release cycle.

</comment><comment><USER32> Note that with some tinkering you can already manually enable WebRender, fast GPU and Rust based rendering engine, in stable Firefox

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945206)

<comment><USER33> Note also that enabling webrender might make your experience (including performance) worse.

<comment><USER34> Why would that be ?

<comment><USER8> Because it's already enabled on hardware where it's known to work well but disabled where it has issues.

<comment><USER32> Yeah, it is definitely not bug free and tabs crash more often. However I still feel performance improvement and happy to live on the edge.

MacBook Pro 2017.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I keep trying Chrome out every so often, but there's little usability issues that keep bringing me back to Firefox. For example, Chrome never wants to bring me to the correct sites when you start typing letters. It's always a site I maybe visited once (like nypost instead of news.ycombinator.com)

<comment><USER36> That's because one of Chrome team's KPIs is how many Google searches are performed through the Omnibar, and better tab search would decrease that KPI and decrease Google ad revenue.

Think about it: it's a web browser literally built by the biggest search company in the world. The latest version of Chrome will even add Google Drive files to the omnibar search for G Suite users.

There is no excuse that they have a worse omnnibox search than Firefox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I know the hacks blog tends to stick to "what web technologies changed" but 72 also introduces "Experimental support for using client certificates from the OS certificate store can be enabled by setting the preference security.osclientcerts.autoload to true (Windows only)." which has always been a huge PITA for me while testing and many interested in these technology changes are probably interested in this flag (though maybe moreso when Mac/Linux get supported).

<comment><USER37> I've always used the security.enterprise_roots.enabled flag for this, is this new one different?

<comment><USER38> From the property name it sounds like your property is about trust roots (CAs) and parent's about client certificates (for mutual TLS authentication).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I love the Picture in Picture feature. There are too many web sites which leave you only the choice between a rather small video or full screen. With PIP I can choose the size which works best for my screen. Also, as it floats on top, it is never covered by other applications.

One thing would make this even more increadible: is there a way to set the default size and position? If the PIP feature would always start in my preferred size and position, this would be just so great.

<comment><USER40> I use it all the time.

I generally have my browser take up 3/4 of the screen with a small bit of space on the right free.

If watching a video I can drag it into this free space and continue using browser while it's playing.

Many years ago I used to use "popup video" extensions to achieve the same thing. This works much better though.

<comment><USER39> With my preferred setup, I play videos in the upper left corner, so with the current Firefox behavior, I always have to drag the PiP video around. Not the end of the world, but it would be a huge improvement, if it remembered video positions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Can't wait to find out if this release fixes a bug ([https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1557160](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1557160)) that was preventing correct rendering of extension popup windows/context menus when the APZ zooming was enabled (which allows pinch-to-zoom gestures, e.g. on the MS Surface).

Update: Just got to try it out, seems like it indeed works now. Yay Firefox 72!

<comment><USER42> Finally! Been waiting for functional pinch zooming on macOS and Windows for ages. Thank you Mozilla team!

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm honestly surprised that we aren't talking about tab behavior here. Literally the only reason I keep using Chrome is that no matter how many tabs I have open, they're all visible at the top.

There's visual persistence of state. On Firefox, even with the trick of reducing minimum tab width, my tabs overflow and I have to click through to get different groups of tabs. It is utterly maddening and I don't know why every other browser refuses to do Chrome like tabs.

Why the continued choice to violate the first rule of UI design which is to keep things in the same place?

<comment><USER44> If you want to talk about tab behaviour, you might want to have a look at the Tree Style Tabs extension:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style- ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

Tabs are placed in the sidebar, nested in collapsible trees, with a scrollbar. It's a major game changer.

<comment><USER45> I'm always surprised when I find out more people don't know about this (or other vertical-tabs addons). I typically have dozens of tabs and keep them open for weeks at a time (ff is set to restore previous session. So most are usually unloaded, but I also have an addon to unload tabs at-will if it's ever a problem). Horizontal tabs feel so arcane after getting used to it, I'm surprised it's not a standard feature yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Are they doing anything about floating videos? It's annoying on desktop, but on mobile it's so bad I just don't bother. Typically it's "news" sites that use it.

<comment><USER47> IIRC they disabled autoplay for videos with sound. In the settings you can also completely disable autoplay for all videos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The picture in picture is such a great feature. Thanks Firefox devs :)

<comment><USER49> Picture in picture was a feature I didn't know I wanted all along.

I often had a window open only playing a youtube video, having it be native to the browser and always on top is such a great feature.

<comment><USER50> Open in new window. Resize window. Right-click title bar, select "Always on Top".

App developers spend a lot of their time making up for the poor decisions of OS developers. A good window manager would give you tabs for free, PiP (aka an always-on-top window) for free, dark mode for free. Instead OS devs go overboard in simplifying things to the point that app devs have to pay the cost of delivering what users want.

<comment><USER51> Win10 (the version I have at work) has removed "keep above" and made it application specific, OneNote has it, Word doesn't. It's crazy.

<comment><USER52> Windows has never had a universal "keep above" menu option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> It's such a great update again!

And now this: "Following in Mozilla's footsteps, Google announced today plans to hide notification popup prompts inside Chrome starting next month"

I love how Google follows Firefox with these "better web experience" features but only if they don't impact their business model.

</comment><comment><USER54> Firefox keeps getting better. I really want to switch. The only thing that's holding me back is the design. It just doesn't look as modern as Chrome or Brave. The back button is a different height than the search bar; the tab container doesn't line up with the search from the left side of the window. And it has a weird mix of slightly-square and rounded buttons, which makes it feel like a second-class browser.

I know that the average person isn't concerned with these things, but I spend almost all of my day in a browser, and I want it to look as good (or better) than the competition.

<comment><USER55> If you're interested in having Chrome's look in Firefox, check out MaterialFox.

[https://github.com/muckSponge/MaterialFox](https://github.com/muckSponge/MaterialFox)

<comment><USER54> Wow, I didn't even realize this was possible. It looks really nice. Thanks!

<comment><USER56> Unfortunately userchrome.css breaks frequently with firefox updates and is a pain to maintain since it is outside of the extension ecosystem.

There used to be a great addon called ClassicThemeRestorer that got killed during firefox's terrible web extension debacle. It lives on in [https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx](https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx) but different parts break everytime the fickle designers at mozilla change their mind on what a tab should look like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I find the notification permission change (requiring it to be after a user gesture) really annoying. It doesn't do almost anything to combat permission spam (if you're visiting a clickbait site, you'll probably click or scroll at least once, especially on mobile where sites usually have a giant header so you need to scroll past the fold to even see that the article is clickbait), and just inconveniences developers who have to special-case Firefox's divergence from the spec when trying to _legitimately_ use the gated features.

<comment><USER58> Firefox should include a setting to disable all requests for notifications much like they give you total control to block autoplay.

<comment><USER59> It does! [https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/no- notifications/](https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/no-notifications/)

<comment><USER58> Finally!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> If anyone from Mozilla is reading, is it too much to ask to host apk's for the mobile version on your site and provide other update mechanisms apart from google app store? Like what Signal are doing.

<comment><USER61> It's not the most discoverable thing, but according to [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android) this link will always download the newest version: [https://download.mozilla.org/?product=fennec- latest&os=andro...](https://download.mozilla.org/?product=fennec- latest&os=android&lang=multi)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Finally. The notifications popup is seriously annoying.

<comment><USER63> What we really need in these permission popups is the ability to say "no to all permissions from Gawker Media brands" and the problem would be mostly solved.

<comment><USER36> What we really need:

* Websites with notifications that are frequently denied by users, will lose the ability to request web notifications permissions. Users must manually enable it through Domain Settings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> What do people use for "Profiles". I need ability to switch easily between profiles (different identities) without going to command line. I also don't want to install a third party extension for that if possible

<comment><USER65> Firefox has a Container Tabs extension which does just this - the defaults are profiles for Work, Personal, Banking, and Social, and you can add more. You do have to install it but I think the extension is from Mozilla itself, so it's not exactly third-party. It's just features that are already in the nightly builds as I understand it [0]. Personally I've really enjoyed it so far!

[0] - [https://support.mozilla.org/en- US/kb/containers](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers)

<comment><USER66> Additionally, the actual functionality is just built into Firefox; all the extension does is expose a UI to manage it.

<comment><USER67> The extension also allows you to set that a particular site be assigned to, and automatically open in, a given container. I don't believe this particular feature is built into Firefox.

<comment><USER66> Indeed, it's just the containerisation functionality and assigning a tab to open in a Container that's built in; actually initiating the opening is done by the extension, e.g. when you navigate to a specific origin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> The new notification request behavior is great (speech bubble in URL bar, instead of a popup [https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/block-notification- requests...](https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/block-notification-requests/)). Much better than the ubiquitous popup asking if a site could give you popups...

</comment><comment><USER69> Can anyone advise how far away hardware accelerated video on Linux might be?

<comment><USER70> We're currently rewriting most of the graphics rendering of Firefox (with what is called the WebRender project). This is the first time Linux users will have hardware accelerated rendering by default, and is a pre-requisite to take real advantage of hardware-accelerated video decoding. It's enabled on some configuration in Nightly builds [0], and it's being worked on actively. If you want to know more, the graphics teams has a blog where updates are periodically posted about what is happening, often with interesting insight about the innards of a web browser rendering stack [1].

Once rendering is hardware accelerated, it makes sense to look into hardware video decoding. Doing hardware video decoding without hardware rendering roughly means we need to read back from GPU memory into main memory, composite the image in software, and then upload back to the GPU to display, which is super super inefficient.

[0]: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where) [1]: [https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/](https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/)

<comment><USER71> Thanks a lot for hanging out and answering question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I'm a huge fan of the picture-in-picture, though I wish for a few enhancements:

I wish clicking anywhere on the box would act as "play/pause", instead of requiring me to hunt down the button. And of course I wish for some visible/interactable buffer-bar, though I realize that might not be standardized across webplayers, so maybe not possible.

<comment><USER73> I just wish they would enable VAAPI video decoding in Linux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I find Firefox and Thunderbird amazing, I just miss being able to customize keyboard shortcuts. Thunderbird ones are especially evil (they don't use any modifier like Ctrl, so I often mess my inbox up when I don't notice Thunderbird is the focused window). Also, while Firefox for iOS is leagues ahead of e.g. Brave, it still has many issues.

</comment><comment><USER75> Has firefox fixed video playback on sites like instagram and gfycat yet? Their mp4 playback was broken for a significant number of videos last time I attempted to update. I'm still on an FF version 10 versions back because of their atrocious compatibility with mp4s (which is still incompatible, but less so).

<comment><USER76> What have you noticed about mp4 video playback that is broken? I've used Firefox as my daily driver for many, many years (even before the Quantum updates) and have never noticed any playback errors.

<comment><USER75> It simply doesn't work for some non-trivial amount of videos, e.g. some instagram stories or gfycat mp4s. If you load the link directly in the browser it will say the file is corrupt. Loading the same link in chrome plays fine.

<comment><USER70> Would you mind filing a bug at [0] with the content of about:support and maybe a link or two where it doesn't work? Happy to have an initial look into this (I work on the media team at Mozilla).

[0]: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&comp...](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&component=Audio%2FVideo%3A%20playback), you can log in with a github account or create one

<comment><USER77> I suspect this user is on Linux and doesn't have h.264 codecs installed.

They should be able to do this fairly easily -- two distros here:

[https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats)

[https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick- docs/assembly_ins...](https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick- docs/assembly_installing-plugins-for-playing-movies-and-music/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Okay, so I don't really post to HN and this may seem like a silly complaint but Firefox's management of theming just seems off to me. I use macOS, I don't fiddle about with my wallpaper very much and so this stains Firefox's top bar with an ugly brown tint. I could switch to the light theme, however when I do so Firefox no longer respects my system change to dark mode.

Does anyone else get bothered by this? Is there any way around this? I'm not an aesthetics person by any means but this is quite annoying. It's a fantastic browser other than this, I've been a user for as long as I can remember.

I'm sure you can probably modify userChrome and all this and I've not really tried because I'm not _THAT_ bothered by it, but surely there should be a way to set your preferred themes for light & dark?

<comment><USER31> If I'm reading your correctly you'd like to set FF to the light theme (or any theme) but continue to have dark mode pages? about:config browser.in- content.dark-mode true should do that.

<comment><USER79> I highly recommend dark-reader: [https://darkreader.org/](https://darkreader.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> I just upgraded my iMac to Catalina, and noticed this rather serious issue with Firefox:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606620](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606620)

Basically if you have an external screen (possibly related to it being low-DPI and main screen being Retina), context menus don't work properly, if at all.

It seems it got even worse in 72 than it was in 71 - now I'm not even getting a context menu in the wrong place, it's invisible (maybe off-screen?).

Hopefully someone who works on Firefox can see this and fix it - it's making Firefox nearly unusable as is :(

<comment> w-m Ah, that's this 20 year old bug, that predates Mac OS X, striking again: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572)

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Firefox's killer feature was generating sync keys locally and letting you self-host a compatible sync host.

Chrome generates the sync keys on server and has proprietary sync software.

That's it. That's all it took for me to switch. I know FF eats almost double the CPU compared to Chrome. I know 1 out of every 10 webapps will just not work in it. That's fine. I will take the security and privacy over convenience.

Just buy a better CPU.

<comment><USER82> > Just buy a better CPU.

This gets a little hard when the device you want to run FF on is a old laptop that doesn't need replacing and where battery life is more important than raw speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> 2 grave security/privacy issues in Firefox right now (both are still open after more than 1 year):

 _Firefox Installs non-free binaries from Cisco and Google again_ [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=915582](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=915582)

 _firefox: Safe Browsing updates fail due to insufficient quota on the Google API key_ [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=895147](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=895147)

Just recently I discovered DoH was activated by default now and bypassing my /etc/hosts block list without any warning. This opened me up to tracking from sites I thought I had blocked.

In all above cases the failure-modes are insecure. It's like a firewall that suddenly switches its enforcement policy from a _deny-all+whitelisting_ to _allow-all+blacklisting_ without properly informing users.

Totally unacceptable!

<comment><USER83> Is this related to Firefox DRM implementation?

<comment><USER79> no. see this post which has meanwhile hit the frontpage for better discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21990505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21990505)

<comment><USER84> The non-free binary _is_ the DRM implementation.

The bug also mentions openh264 but it's BSD licensed so I'm confused as to why anyone considers it non-free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> Still hanging out for Replay, which if it gets into mainline Firefox, will easily make the FF the best JS development environment: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/We...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/WebReplay)

</comment><comment><USER86> Firefox is great on desktop. I use it 95+% of time. But it is not so good on Android. Ebay is great example. Most of the time, go to page 2 of search results and you get no listings. I want to use Firefox on mobile as it syncs my bookmarks and passwords but things like this are frustrating.

<comment><USER77> Try Firefox Preview: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fe...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix)

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> I appreciate all the upgrades, but I keep finding that Firefox is abysmal for battery life, even the versions that supposedly have focused on this issue. Have folks found ways to reduce it's power consumption on OSX?

<comment><USER88> Have you tried one of the more recent versions? Power consumption should have been reduced by using the CoreAnimation framework on macOS.

<comment><USER87> There is improvement, but it's gone from somewhat unusable to just abysmal, at least in my environment. YMMV, of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> I too would like to join the bandwagon of people happily switching from Chrome to Firefox (mainly for ethical reasons at this point). However, I am on Linux (Ubuntu 19.04 on a desktop machine) and last time I tried (around FF 70 I believe, maybe 2 months ago), I experienced horrible system-wide lockups, requiring hard reboots (I was surprised to discover that it's even still possible, nowadays). It probably doesn't help that I'm doing web development with React, and thus I'm heavily using some dev tools, but still.. Anyone would have any clue about this?

<comment><USER90> What video hardware do you have? Perhaps updating the driver. Fsck might help as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Can anybody share some insight as to why the PiP mode is implemented non- natively? Both macOs and Windows have a system PiP mode that should be usable?

</comment><comment><USER92> Re: picture in picture - anyone else here think that this feature doesn't belong to a browser? It just seems so... erm... random, basically.

Looks like something that was cloned from some other product and rather crudely shoehorned in. At the very least it should have been introduced after an update and given an option to _opt-in_ to using it, rather than automatically enabling it without any notice.

<comment><USER93> I love it and use it multiple (25+) times per day. My only wish is that it kept the interface from whichever player the videos comes from (eg. YouTube's, Netflix's, etc., especially for subtitles & platform-specific controls like Speed)

<comment><USER94> If Firefox kept any website-controlled interface it would give websites an opportunity to block the feature by overlaying it with a black rectangle.

Most content providers probably don't like this feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> I still dont get why firefox is 1 to 2 seconds slow doing everything.

We already have uorgin block and https everywhere and privacy beaver.

They just want to make their browser even more bloated.

And lets not even talk about linux distro. On my xubuntu its even slower than chromium or chrome.

Here is my advice: Invest everything on speed. Your user already know about privacy and stuff. That why less than 9% of us are left.

<comment><USER96> Check the network panel. See the Megabytes of html and js a browser needs to work with.

It's a miracle that browsers can render all that in the seconds it usually takes them, and if Chrome is a second faster, it's due to the billion $ company behind investing the GPD of a medium-sized country into optimizing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> Switched to Firefox in my current machine. Never looked back. Before i used Chrome, Yandex, Opera, Vivaldi.. I'm good with FF for now.

</comment><comment><USER98> Related: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/01/firefox-72-our-first- song-...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/01/firefox-72-our-first-song- of-2020/)

(via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21981817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21981817)).

</comment><comment><USER99> It doesn't seem like you can set the pip window to be sticky across all desktops. That's unfortunate and a bit unusable

<comment><USER100> What is the pip window?

<comment><USER101> Picture in picture window.

It can create, for example, a pop-out video overlay, which can be moved around and resized. It then sits over top of the other content on the page (and remains over other tabs) and will remain fixed as you scroll down the page and similar. On a site like YouTube, you could pop the video out and proceed to scroll down and interact with comments while the video plays to the side or above.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-picture- picture-f...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-picture-picture- firefox)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> Interestingly the beta for 73.0 [1] includes NextDNS as a second choice for DNS over HTTPS providers as well as Cloudflare.

[1] [https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/73.0beta/releasenotes/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/73.0beta/releasenotes/)

<comment><USER103> How do I make sure that Mozilla is respecting my OS DNS settings and not using DNS over HTTPS at all?

<comment><USER31> If you want it to just always use what you've configured and not have to follow the changes they make you can set network.trr.mode to 5 in about:config. 5 signifies "off by choice"

If you just want to know how to toggle it normally in case something goes weird with one of the changes it's in the network settings part of the settings page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> > User research commonly brings up permission prompt spam as a top user > annoyance

What's user research?

Jokes aside, my favorite feature in Firefox is the good old-fashioned search box. I use Bing by default and repeat searches on Google or Duck Duck Go if I don't find results right away.

<comment><USER105> Have you found Bing more desirable than DuckDuckGo for a specific reason? (Uses DuckDuckGo and liberal use of the bangs when things don't come up as expected)

<comment><USER106> I've used Yahoo since the early 2000s and never hopped on the Google bandwagon.

The times Ive tried to find things in Google because "people say it has better search", I've not had much luck. Possibly because they don't have extensive data on me and my search preferences?

I think Yahoo is backed by Bing these days? I always find its search results perfectly adequate.

<comment><USER107> By the way, DDG is also essentially entirely backed by bing. Bing except ddg for bangs is pretty much the same as just DDG.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> How many logos does Firefox have?

</comment><comment><USER109> Switched to Firefox recently on my desktop. I had the strangest problem with Chrome: Somehow it just kept forking more and more processes until the rlimit got filled (100k+ threads/processes).

Too much trouble to debug it so I opted to switch instead.

</comment><comment><USER110> Finally Picture in Picture on MacOS.

The last reason for me to keep using Safari/Chrome is gone.

<comment><USER91> I was missing that one too and did some research about it a while ago. You can achieve the system-wide PiP mode in Safari with a bookmarklet. I posted the guide here: [https://felixfoertsch.github.io/tip/2019/02/15/use-pip- via-b...](https://felixfoertsch.github.io/tip/2019/02/15/use-pip-via- bookmarklet.html)

<comment><USER110> PiP worked in Safari with an extension[0] right? That's why I was still using it for YouTube streaming in the background.

I've switched to Firefox on almost every other platform (apart from iOS). with Firefox 72, I've switch to Firefox only on MacOS as well.

[0]:[https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pipifier-pip-for-nearly- every-...](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pipifier-pip-for-nearly-every- video/id1160374471?mt=12)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER111> Looking forward to video decoding (and encoding) hardware acceleration through VAAPI in Firefox on Linux. Now that WebRender is already in the codebase, at least doing it for WebRender path would be very welcome.

</comment><comment><USER112> The one-click search icons have been removed from the adress bar to the search bar? I cant tell if this is a hidden design feature that does not appear on the release notes, but it sure will bother me...

</comment><comment> martin-adams "Say goodbye to annoying notification requests (unless you want them)"

For a moment I thought they had done this for the cookie and privacy notices. Oh how that would be amazing to move that functionality into the browser.

<comment><USER113> The "I don't care about cookies" extension is a nice solution for now.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont- care-a...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about- cookies/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER114> Does fingerprint blocking just use a blacklist, like ad blockers? Seems like a pretty lame approach. Shouldn't they focus on approaches that work for all future scripts? I.e. making browsers seem less unique.

<comment><USER115> It's complicated. There is in fact a hidden option that makes the web browser less unique, but using it has side-effects such as retrieving pages in English with UTC timezone, noticeably reducing the browser view point size, breaking WebGL, break some JavaScript using <canvas> and most notably, making the web browser noticeably slower. It's not something that a web browser can afford to have without informing the user of the consequences. Not to mention without additional measures, this is unlikely to help much against fingerprinting.

You are probably better of using Tor Browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> Unfortunately the font rendering is still not up to Chromes, a lot of sites look weird. Fastmail for instance is rendered with a visibly smaller font on FF, and it looks blurry on FF. (Win10).

</comment><comment><USER117> What the hey? No hash values posted after downloading the Firefox binary.

How can we tell that we got the real deal, especially if the original Firefox binary got compromised?

</comment><comment><USER118> Only thing keeping me in Chrome is multiple profiles

And no, Firefox containers are not the same, I cannot install two versions for 1pass - personal/private

Firefox also have true "profiles" but they are kind of a hack

<comment><USER31> The profiles are fine it's the lack of integrated GUI that kills it. Just need the ability to launch a different profile in a new window from an existing window and it'd be all set.

It drives me nuts because I have things in FF that can't easily be handled by containers and I have things in Chrome that can't easily be handled by profiles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER119> Password fields are broken in Ubuntu 18.04 (Gnome Flashback Metacity), when using Firefox's Sync feature, (and without add-ons).

This was a problem in recent versions, and is still a problem in version 72.

<comment><USER120> [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome- flashback/+b...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome- flashback/+bug/1836659)

<comment><USER119> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER121> Now if they include a way to block modal subscribe-to-our-bullshit-newsletter pop-ups, it would be the world's most perfect browser.

</comment><comment><USER122> What's the criteria for FF bumping its major versions? Looks to me like these release announcements are getting much more frequent.

Edit: Answered by zamadatix.

<comment><USER35> They're moving to a monthly system. Continuous integration, continuous delivery I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> The only thing that doesn't work in Firefox is exec in the kubernetes dashboard. I have to switch to Chromium when I need to do that.

<comment><USER123> Could you file an issue here? [https://webcompat.com/issues/new](https://webcompat.com/issues/new)

</comment></comment><comment><USER124> It's great to see Firefox improving constantly. Especially since Chrome is unusable on MacOS Catalina for many users atm.

<comment><USER125> ?

i'm using the latest macos and chrome. what exactly isn't supposed to be working?

i also have firefox installed, but on macos firefox is mostly an alpha/unfinished release since years ago.

<comment><USER124> Well I'm having both the smooth scrolling bug and the constant beach ball of death for 5 seconds issue on my macbook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER126> I switched to ff a couples years ago and up until the last few months everything has been great. Now a lot of important sites don't work because the content security policy is completely inflexible. It should allow me to make exceptions on sites I chose. I've had to install chrome just for a couple sites and now its just easier to make chrome my daily driver again. The ff team should consider making the CSP flexible.

<comment><USER127> Out of curiosity, what sites did you have trouble with? I also switched to Firefox a year or two ago, and I haven't had anything noticeably break recently, so I'm curious if I'm just not going to the sites that have issues or if there's something else different in my config that solves it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER128> am slightly dismayed that to this day on macOS I can't use back and forward buttons even if I redefine them in karabiner. it works with other browsers, seems that autoscroll feature is no degrading gracefully when you disable it.

<comment><USER129> I mapped my mouse's back button to backspace and it works okay in FF.

</comment></comment><comment><USER130> I only use FF on mobile because I can run the uBlock extension on it.

</comment><comment><USER131> Nightly is now 74.0a1 (major versions get released every 4 to 5 weeks).

</comment><comment><USER132> The only feature I really want FF to bring back is multi-row tabs.

</comment><comment><USER133> With websocket frames !

</comment><comment><USER134> Dont forget that if you manually update, Firefox destroys your update settings:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1576400](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1576400)

</comment><comment><USER135> Haven't been paying attention or keeping up and noticed the version number is 72. One thought is "Wow - that's a lot" and another is "That doesn't sound like semantic versioning."

<comment><USER136> Semantic versioning doesn't make sense for user facing software. Maintaining API compatibility on the software -> user interface isn't really a problem/doesn't make sense compared to software -> software interfaces.

<comment><USER137> Firefox exposes APIs that other software builds on. Seems like semantic versioning would make sense for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER138> I really like Firefox, but I had to switch back to Chrome because of resource usage. After using it for some time it got up to 3GB RAM consumption for a single tab with no plugins.

</comment><comment><USER139> For the love of what's holy, I think the versioning system adopted by all browsers is just crazy.

<comment><USER140> Numbers aren't exactly a finite resource [1] and there's no particular reason that version numbers have to "stay small" other than aesthetics.

[1] Mathematically positive natural numbers are infinite. Realistically, most systems traditionally implement version numbers as sets of at least 16-bit numbers and there are 65,536 numbers to choose from, not just the first ten or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER141> Still no pinch to zoom. No chance on macOS.

<comment><USER42> Just set "apz.allow_zooming" to true in about:config. Pinch zoom works for me on macOS at least, didn't try on Windows yet. Works smoothly, just like in Safari and Chrome.

Perhaps there are still some minor bugs and they don't enable it by default?

<comment><USER141> Nice try. It works by pinching but double tap and smart zoom to cursor.

And if you zoom in somehow, you cannot pan over the page because Firefox act like you are seeing full screen and trying to go back or forward in browser history.

<comment><USER42> > And if you zoom in somehow, you cannot pan over the page because Firefox act > like you are seeing full screen and trying to go back or forward in browser > history.

Need to first pan at least a bit vertically, then it allows horizontal panning. But yeah, clearly not a finished feature yet. Still nice to see there's progress, and it's already mostly usable with the mentioned caveats.

<comment><USER141> > Need to first pan at least a bit vertically

Thinking of it, it would even be a nice feature since we need to pan to the left of the page or zoom out completely to go back in history with touch pad in Chromium based browsers.

> Still nice to see there's progress, and it's already mostly usable with the > mentioned caveats.

At least.

Next release should definitely have this double-tap and smart-zoom feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER142> honestly I gave Firefox a try but it didn't work for me. I am using Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER143> After the recent missteps by Chrome (mangling the display of URLs), I decided to switch to Firefox and DuckDuckGo a few months ago and I was pleasantly surprised at how fast Firefox is these days than what I found it to be 10 years ago.

While I still consider DuckDuckGo to be in the "not bad" category, Firefox is in the "seriously awesome" category now.

If you have been away from Firefox for a while like me, give it another shot. It won't disappoint you for sure.

<comment><USER144> Are you a devtools user? How do the Firefox ones compare? I speak as someone who originally switched to Chrome (having been a Firefox user since the Phoenix days!) specifically for the devtools — it's pretty much the biggest factor in my browser choice.

<comment><USER145> Sadly, the performance inspector is still pretty useless compared to what Chromium is offering.

<comment><USER146> this is the biggest blocker for me. i still use ff as my main browser, but i cannot develop with it, so i have to spend a lot of my time in chrome.

we had a recent dialog about it here:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/ecyhmr/mozilla_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/ecyhmr/mozilla_survey_how_can_devtools_support_you/fbez5c0/)

there's some cool stuff in the works but it doesnt sound like there's a plan to internalize the work into devtools but to keep it as a web app and rely on a serviceworker for "localness" \- not great, imo.

<comment><USER123> Thanks again for that discussion, it already spawned some follow up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER147> My favorite browser since 2017. I don't miss Chrome for anything.

<comment><USER18> My favorite since the 2000's (idk when I started using it, mom didnt let me install it on the home computer for ages) I tried Chrome earlier on but (and I've said this on HN before) it didnt have adblock, then when it did, it was crippled. I never went back.

<comment><USER31> Chrome still hasn't pushed Manifest v3, it's using the exact same web block extension APIs as Firefox right now.

<comment><USER66> It decrippled it later, but initially, adblockers in Chrome could only hide ads, not prevent them from loading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER148> I'am my friend in member in you.

</comment><comment><USER149> My biggest gripe with Firefox is how it opens tabs. If I open a new tab in Chrome, it opens just to the right of the current one which is nice because it keeps related tabs together. In Firefox it opens to the far right which is annoying. I tried installing an extension to fix this but it was buggy. Only recently did I discover that I could dig into about:config to enable the behavior I consider expected (and I'm sure most people agree with me given how many Chrome users there are).

<comment><USER150> I already updated to v.72 so I don't know if they changed the default, never really noticed before. But now

      browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent

defaults to 'true'. I agree this is expected behavior :)

<comment><USER19> That only applies when you open a tab by clicking on a link. If you do ctrl+t, you'll get new tab at the far right.

<comment><USER151> That is toggled by "browser.tabs.insertAfterContent" ( vs insertRelatedAfterContent).

<comment><USER152> You have a typo there, it's browser.tabs.insertAfterCurrent and browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent (Current, not Content), just in case someone tries to copy and paste those into about:config

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> alf-pogz I use the Brave browser now, and I have no interest in going back to Firefox or Chrome at this point.

<comment><USER153> Good for you. I prefer to use a browser not based on Chromium.</comment></comment>


Next HN Kansai Meetup: February 28th, Kyoto - <AUTHOR> http://hnkansai.org/

<comment><USER2> Here's the actual program for the event : [http://hnkansai.doorkeeper.jp/events/8883](http://hnkansai.doorkeeper.jp/events/8883)

Planned talks

\- Hosting your Photos Online

\- The Life and Death of the Sega Saturn

\- Bento&Co's new service coming up in Japan

\- Developing with Meteor

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there one of these for Kanto/Tokyo?

I really wish this had been posted more than two days in advance.

<comment><USER2> Co-Organizer here. There are posts every month about this event - but they don't always end up on the first page of HN unfortunately. Check HNKansai.org if you want to know about the next monthly event schedule.

Yeah, there are similar events in Tokyo, look for HN Tokyo meetup in HN Search and you will find them as well. They have it every month too.

<comment><USER3> Thank you!

Edit: Hmm, they don't look as well-organized (no central homepage) and the last post is from last October. :-/

<comment><USER4> The next one is in March: [http://hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp/events/9149](http://hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp/events/9149)

All the events are listed here: [http://hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp/](http://hntokyo.doorkeeper.jp/)

<comment><USER3> Ahh. 2500 yen, huh.

<comment><USER2> But I heard you get really good food there, though :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Will Listen to Your Conversations Again, but Ask First - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-23/google-will-listen-to-your-conversations-again-but-ask-first <comment><USER2> Source: [https://www.blog.google/products/assistant/doing-more- protec...](https://www.blog.google/products/assistant/doing-more-protect-your- privacy-assistant/)</comment>