"System title bar is hidden by default to match Gnome guideline for Linux users" - which part of the UI does this refer to exactly? Does this mean that Firefox will now be hiding the page title?
I should have explained it better, I was asking about associating actions to the "compact" titlebar (or what's called). I guess I need to wait for a proper GTK3 "header bar", if it's planned at all...
Anyway thanks.
Edit: in Chrome/Chromium works as I expected, I think I should file a bug then.
It looks like Windows. If it behaves like it, then you can read the full title by hovering over the tab.
I haven't used gnome in quite a while, so I'm not totally certain of what was before this change, but I wouldn't consider it problematic. I find that saving the extra 20 pixels at the top is good for the widescreen aspect ratio of most monitors.
IMO, the title isn't really helpful anyway. I did a userChrome.css thing a while back to make it just show favicons in the tab bar with one or two pixels of space and it works great. The tabs don't jump around when you switch tabs and you can fit a bunch more of them in the same space (I keep favicon bookmarks on the right side of the tab bar).
Safari has it and is doing it much better, because it blocks both video and audio autoplay. I just tested it on Firefox 66 and I'm very disappointed. It blocks only audio and... it's broken anyway. On one page the first video was audio muted (great!), but then the second video came after the first one finished playing and it was suddenly unmuted! The tab was inactive and suddenly the sound came from it. Until fixed, I'm still going to use Safari for this solely reason.
Generally this is good.
But I wonder, lets say you want to allow autoplay on Netflix. Do you need to enable it on all subdomains and CDNs - that could be tedious. (I don't know if Netflix has subdomains, CDN, just an example)
I've had to remove a lot of the stuff from mine because, turns out, when I hit certain modifier'd key combos with my left hand I tend to rest my right ring finger at the top of one of the number keys... close enough to the touchbar to trigger it. Didn't know that about myself, but now I do, and I've had to clear out about half my touchbar to keep it from being a problem. Turns out if you press "play/pause" on there, it opens iTunes. Took me a while to figure out why that kept opening for "no reason".
Yeah, it's been a net-negative for me. I never use it for touchbary-stuff (I don't even know why I would) and it's worse than real buttons for everything else. The fingerprint reader's OK I guess but is far enough out of the way that it's barely faster than typing my password—it needs to be toward the bottom. I think the whole thing would have made more sense as an iOS/watchOS companion app for MacBooks. Would have addressed the "so... what do I do if I get used to touchbar stuff then am using an external keyboard for a while?" Though I'd probably still not have used it.
This is rather surprising to me, as they still don't correctly support all the native Mac keyboard editing commands which have been part of the OS (and every physical keyboard) since 10.0.
I really don't understand the priorities of the Mozilla/Firefox project.
Yes, there are bugs filed on the other keyboard issues -- some more than 10 year old, e.g., 433966 or 429043. I could probably fix them myself, with enough effort, but Mozilla has the weirdest architecture so all my Mac programming knowledge won't help much. The last time I filed a minor bug against Firefox (context menus appear in the wrong place by a couple pixels), it was tagged "[good first bug]" -- and it ended up taking some poor soul 7 months and 790 lines to fix, and I still don't think it's correct.
I think it's time for someone to out-Firefox Firefox. The free and open nature is great, but the UI is collapsing under its own weight.
Looking at the news cycle, it seems like the amount of changes is pretty low for this new version. Are they using version numbers for marketing purposes now?
Well more or less, except the time was 1 year or more for "major" releases.
After Chrome went out and incremented major version with every release, firefox went after them.
Chrome doesn't have super huge list of new features either.
After chrome started a policy of version number inflation, firefox, firefox did the same for marketing reasons, else'd we'd be on like... version 6.6 instead of 66.0
About 3500 bugs were fixed for the Firefox 66 cycle; they aren't all in the release notes though. If you are curious about the full list, you can take a look! The query will take a few moments to run: https://mzl.la/2G1l6Ld
On macOS: still waiting for interactions with the address bar to be smooth and fast. It's frustratingly laggy in my opinion. Does anyone else feel this way? For me it's the only reason I still gravitate towards Chrome on a Mac.
AIUI, Mozilla is rewriting the address bar ("QuantumBar"), and you can now toggle it on in Nightly by setting browser.urlbar.quantumbar to true in about:config. I've only tried it on Linux, but it seems smoother.
When did the "Awesome Bar" become the "Quantum Bar", what's the difference, and why can't they call it the "address bar" (yes despite it being overloaded with other functions)?
I thought that when only web extension plugins were allowed shortcut extensions no longer worked. I was using keysnail. I was following https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061 but didn't know if it had been resolved. Thanks I'll check that out
> Scroll anchoring keeps content from jumping as images and ads load at the top of the page
That's a nice little quality-of-life improvement. It's a little annoyance that you don't really consciously notice because you're so used to it, but I recall reading about Chrome adding a similar feature and suddenly realising how annoying it is when you're reading something, and then suddenly it jumps out of your view due to a large image above the viewport loading.
Wouldn't it be nice if browsers or servers could reserve that space even if it's not loaded? Like "this is going to be a 500x200 image so let's load 500x200 pixels worth of empty space until it's fully loaded" and avoid jumping.
I think you're being sarcastic, but if not and for anyone who isn't aware, setting the width and height on an <img> tag (or it's associated style) will do this.
The width and height of an image set in a CSS file can be in any valid CSS unit. That's pixels, or em, or a percentage, or viewport units (vw and vh for 1% of the width or height, vmin or vmax for 1% of the shortest or longest side), or real world units like mm (only works on high DPI screens). Support varies.
Eg setting an image to be "width: 100vw; height: 100vh;" means it'll be squished to fill the user's viewport. "width: 100vw; height: auto;" will fill the viewport horizontally and scale the image vertically as per it's aspect ratio. And so on. Generally that'll look bad though because browsers scale things fast rather than well.
And then there's the options for background images. "background-size: cover" is quite useful.
In many cases you want to set one size and let the other calculate itself based on the aspect ratio of an image. And this is not know prior to loading and can't be specified in any other way. So you get jumpy behavior during load on most responsive websites and slow connections. It's hard to fix in JS too.
I can't think of a good use case for auto generating arbitrarily large images, and as a user I wouldn't want to visit websites where the web designer thinks that's a good idea either.
Usually, yes, though posibly not in all cases. With SVG and CSS/JS, the size could be dynamic as the paage is being viewed, depending on user behaviour or other conditions
What thos cases are is ... a good question, and my point is more thaat this can be done than to say why or that it's a good idea.
Upshot again is that image size need not be deterministic at authoring time.
Not sure why you're downvoted. It's a real problem. It would help if it would be possible to set an aspect ratio on the img tag, so that when it's scaled via CSS or whatever, it would maintain the aspect ratio of the loaded image despite it not being loaded yet.
It's possible and well-known: https://css-tricks.com/aspect-ratio-boxes/. Also, for images, there is the simpler solution of specifying real width/height in the img tag, then use CSS with "max-width: 100%; height: auto" or anything similar.
It would be nice if we could have a ratio rule in CSS for all block elements, so adjusting one dimension would automatically alter the other, preserving the ratio at all screen sizes. e.g.:
width: 2000px;
max-width: 100%;
ratio: 16/9;
Of course this gets tricky when width and height are both specified and they don't match the given ratio, but that just means that one needs to always override the other.
Edit to add: Or maybe it would be better to just have the ability to lock the ratio, such as:
Well, the thing is with `width: 9000px; max-width: 100%;` is that you know neither. And it forces people to use silly things like `padding` to maintain aspect ratio in e.g. embedded videos.
Ugly, but it's easy to make a mixin (or similar) if you're using a preprocessor!
(The ::before element isn't stricly necessary; the padding can go on the .DamnInteresting element directly - just make sure .DamnInteresting is wrapped in a containing element of your desired width and you can even use inline styles for the padding shim.)
I think you're also being sarcastic :) Websites did this 15 years ago (miss the HTMLX compliant button at the bottom of the page), and now in large part do not.
I made my first website 22½ years ago. Even as a raw beginner, I knew it was considered sloth and Very Bad Form Indeed not to specify image size in my markup.
If the browser only knew...but in many cases it doesn't, especially for a fluid width, responsive website. An image may have a near infinite number of potential dimensions depending on the user's viewport.
This theme is discussed here often, but really, this is what HTML was designed for. Load https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ in a browser and scale it at will, it will always look good. The fact that people put a ton of often useless stuff and complain it looks bad in some browser doesn't mean media queries are theonly way.
The client can reserve the space with a CSS media query, then. But it should be the client making that rendering decision, not the loaded asset—i.e. if you have an async-loaded iframe, the iframe shouldn't be able to resize itself on load, but rather should be sized correctly when first created (either by JS or CSS) and then the contents of the iframe should accomodate the dimensions they're loaded into. (Which can be assisted by just sending those dimensions as part of the iframe's URL—though this is bad for privacy reasons.)
Another solution is just to wait until computers and networks are 100 times faster than they were 10 years ago, so that a page and its pieces load instantly. Oh, wait. That speed-up already happened, and yet websites are actually slower than they were 10 years ago. I guess there is no advance in hardware that software cannot overcome.
Networks are thousands of times faster in bandwidth, but they don't have thousands of times less latency. Software is actively working to overcome the limitations of latency, such as with HTTP/2, HTTP/3, and TLS 1.3.
For a page load, why should latency matter once you get below 50 ms? The problem isn’t latency, the problem is that the software stack makes tons of round-trip requests to display some text and images. The modern web makes X11 seem like it was designed by a demoscene coder.
> he problem is that the software stack makes tons of round-trip requests
Latency matters because of all of those round-trip requests. Each individual request incurs at least 2x the network latency value (one network latency trip out to the server, another network latency trip back). If browsers did not try to run parallel requests, then all those round trips would sum up to a substantial overall delay.
X11 doesn't even do any image compression. X11 seems fast because everyone uses the DRI and/or MIT-SHM extensions to hack around the fundamental brokenness of the protocol, at the cost of network transparency. :)
This drove me insane with the WSJ mobile app. I stopped using it because I would continuously lose my place in the article as the various advertisement blocks loaded in.
The problem is mainly with ads, when 1) there may or may not be an ad available, and 2) you're allowing the ad height to be dynamic, to allow for greater possible inventory.
It's even worse on mobile, with variable load times. It's in fact maddening that it has to jolt you while reading an article - because ads and images are very very important (more important than the content). I love reader mode on FF mobile, I click it as soon as the icon appears next to the URL.
On mobile I feel this constantly, mostly due to the lack of adblock. Somehow like 70% of any news site I get linked to by hn feature constantly loading ads that stop me from being able to read anything...
Firefox Focus was a godsend to me for this exact reason. I genuinely did not use any mobile devices to browse the web because it was just a hostile experience, but since Focus has come out I can join the rest of the world.
I'm using Mac OS and the scroll using conventional optical mouse with segmented wheel is really jumpy basically in every other browser. Out of the Firefox, Chrome and Safari only FF scrolls a page really smooth, with no micro jumping as I turn the wheel. Anyone know how to fix this in other browsers?
I think it's just a question of which algorithm the browsers use to translate the mouse wheel input into an animation.
The other browsers are probably mostly tested with Apple's high precision mouse/trackpad devices that report scroll distance in very small steps instead of the coarse distance reporting of standard mice.
There's two things to this. One is an option usually called "smooth scrolling" which was historically disabled in Firefox or Chrome (and it was really annoying). It was an on/off switch that either animated the movement between two points in page or it just jumped. I believe all browsers have this enabled now.
The second issue, what you are probably referring to is how the page is animated between those two points. Firefox now uses something old Opera used to have, a really gradual scroll. All chromium-based browser I just tried have this rather jumpy scroll. It's different, but it is not nearly as bad as it used to be in FF.
In short, I don't know, but "smooth scrolling" is something you might want to search for.
Not sure if the tab search is entirely new or simply made more accessible in FF 66, but it certainly seems to make the All Tabs Helper add-on mostly obsolete for me now.
In previous versions if you typed in the name of tab in the url bar it would offer you the option of a tab you already had open (on any of your computers using FF sync) among the search options.
The feature has been there for years, i.e. you could always enter a magic character to restrict awesomebar searches to tabs. Problem is, people didn't know the magic character, so hardly anybody used this feature. It's more accessible now.
The default is the default and this UI doesn't change that. It allows you to have a default, yet still use the other engines on a one-off basis. It's not limited to google either, e.g. I believe amazon is offered by default as well.
Whenever Firefox is automatically updated through my package manager, any open instances refuse to load any new pages or tabs until I restart Firefox . Needless to say, this is absolutely infuriating when I'm in the middle of something important. Does anyone know how to disable this feature?
It's not a feature and you can't disable it, previously it'd just crash. I think it's to do with the content workers being `exec`d from disk each time instead of forking from a master.
It used to crash under Linux, when you updated it while it was running, and then opened new window or a tab. Now it shows a message that you need to restart.
I restart my browser at most once per week and Firefox has never crashed for me after an update. I do not doubt that there was a risk that it could happen, but it cannot have been that common unless I was very lucky.
It wasn't immediately after update. It was after you updated it while it was running and then you tried something, that triggered the crash (like opening a new tab).
Later it stopped to crash, but acted weirdly (clicks on links didn't work, etc).
Nowadays we have the notice to restart the browser. It didn't arrive years ago, just a few releases ago.
This was only under Linux, and only with the distro package managers. Under Windows or MacOS, the updater updates the browser on next restart, so this didn't happen.
1. Why update an app when you're in the middle of using the app? I dunno, I use Fedora, so I don't execute 'dnf update' until I'm ready to reboot the system, usually because I'm anticipating a kernel update.
2. Firefox has a pretty reliable "Restore Previous Session" feature that works well. I have also been known to throw a SIGTERM at Firefox and just let it prompt me when I start it again for the "Something went wrong, should we restore your session?". Seems to always work for me.
Some people prefer automatic updates. It didn't used to criple the running browser process after an update, that change is very recent.
Restore session doesn't help if you're in a private session.
Also you may be in the middle of actually using your browser for thing that you don't want to interrupt, a game, an online application, anything really..
It's only in parts recent. Updating Firefox did not have this enforcing message telling you to restart, but before Firefox would just randomly break when updated via the package manager. Preventing that is better now.
Don't do automatic updates if you do not want automatic updates. Automatic updates just absolutely can cause you to have to restart stuff, depending on what got updated exactly.
>Why update an app when you're in the middle of using the app?
Updates are automatic every day.
>I use Fedora, so I don't execute 'dnf update' until I'm ready to reboot the system, usually because I'm anticipating a kernel update
How often does that happen? It doesn't seem reasonable to put off security updates that have already been fixed and are simply waiting to install.
Firefox is the only program I've run into where automatic updates have led to a negative experience. Every single other program handles them just fine.
The reason it’s different is that it (like Chromium) runs a multi-process sandbox to try to isolate your system from vulnerabilities in the JS runtime or renderer. It’s possible to handle updates while new tabs are created gracefully in that case, but far from trivial.
Finally I find another person getting annoyed at this. It baffles me how this is acceptable...
My browser is open when my computer is running. I do updates at random times through-out the day, for example before installing new packages. Having to close my browser leads to dead sessions and text being lost from input fields and whatever other state there might be.
My guess is that this is some per-tab isolation/process stuff that would result in a mismatch between tabs from before the update and tabs after the update.
Exactly. The package manager method of updating stomps on the in-use libraries for the running application. The built-in Mozilla updater knows better, downloads an update payload but doesn't apply it until the user relaunches and on "first run" it actually does the update rather than launching, and after that completes it launches the updated application. It's the same on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Chrome on macOS and Windows keeps itself up to date; for whatever reason Chrome on Linux installs a google.chrome repository, uses the distro package manager, and clobbers the running binary. shrug
> for whatever reason Chrome on Linux installs a google.chrome repository, uses the distro package manager
Because that's the proper way to do things instead of each application bypassing the package manager and downloading updates and whatever else behind your back. How would you track and control updates if each application you use decided to do its own thing? Secondly, if installed to system directories, applications cannot write there without superuser privileges.
> The package manager method of updating stomps on the in-use libraries for the running application.
This is not a problem on Unix-like systems, actually. Any running process, that has some file open, will keep the original file open, even if the filename points to another file now. Only processes that open the file after the change will get the new version.
I suspect that the protocol that multiple processes of Firefox used to communicate together could change between version and the mismatch between old and newly launched processes caused the problem. So it is versioned now, and if the versions are mismatched, warning is being shown.
> for whatever reason Chrome on Linux installs a google.chrome repository, uses the distro package manager, and clobbers the running binary
As others have said, it is actually the right approach. The custom updaters for Firefox and Chrome under Windows and MacOS are there, because they are lacking any system for centralized package management.
Flatpak solves this in a third way: it doesn't clobber the current tree, it creates a new, separate one and signals the application, that it was updated, and can restart into a new version, when it is convenient. It gets the best of the custom windows/mac updaters (not overwriting running apps), together with the best of linux package managers (centralized management).
I always ran into this, but I noticed yesterday when I upgraded Firefox (from 64 to 65, bit behind I guess), it didn't do the crashing on new tabs thing. Maybe they sorted that out finally.
Uninstall the distro provided Firefox and use the binary produced by Mozilla. It downloads its own updates in the background and applies the next time you quit and relaunch.
Snap and Flatpak apps I think can do this as well, because they aren't stepping on the running binaries during the update. And you get the updated version when you relaunch.
Firefox isn't special in this regard. 100% of my applications on Windows and macOS expect to be quit before they can be updated, and is enforced either by the application, the OS, or the updater. I suspect that distro package managers don't really have a way to do an out of band update, all they can do is step all over in-use libraries and that inevitably causes the application to go a little crazy.
This change was made because opening a new tab or loading a new page can start a new renderer process. The way things work right now is that this is started by running the on-disk renderer process executable.
If you've updated your installation, the new renderer will be the new version, but the parent (ui) process is still the old version. The protocol the two use to talk to each other is not fixed, and messages will start looking malformed. Malformed messages are handled by immediately terminating the process, because otherwise security guarantees go out the window.
So the upshot was that you'd get various crashes in the "I updated Firefox and then kept using it" situation. I've run into a bunch personally, and there is _lots_ of crash reporting data on this. The crashes are not OS-specific; they just have to do with whether changes happened to the IPC protocol.
A "proper" solution would be for the parent process to not use the on-disk version of the renderer to launch new renderers. There's work ongoing to make that possible, but in the meantime the crash volume due to this problem was high enough that the mitigation you see was put in place.
As others may have mentioned, it's because the binaries are overwritten. But Ubuntu used to ship a plugin with their builds, xul-ext-ubufox, that would detect this and prompt for restart on upgrade, but for some reason it's disabled now according to the package description:
This package currently ships no functionality, but may be used again in
the future to display a restart notification after upgrading Firefox.
On macOS, does setting about:config "geo.provider.use_corelocation" = false and restarting Firefox fix the geolocation error? Firefox 65 or 66 recently changed from always using Google Location Service to first check the operating system's local location service (CoreLocation on macOS, which might have a local location cache for faster lookups).
If disabling CoreLocation fixes the problem, you might look in macOS System Preferences for location permissions. The first time an application tries to use the local location service, macOS prompts the user to grant permission to the application. If you accidentally click "deny", then macOS will automatically deny all future Firefox location requests.
> Improved performance and reduced crash rates by [doubling web content loading processes from 4 to 8 [1]
From personal experience, I believe that things usually get more buggy, not less, as you add more parallelism/concurrency. I think there's supposed to be a link to more explanation or the relevant ticket, but it looks like they forgot to actually add the link. Can somebody fill it in here?
I don't quite understand how that can be possible.
At the end of the day, you're still aiming to load, in FF 66, just as many tabs as in FF pre-66. FF's total memory usage should be about the same whether you're using 4 processes or 8. Sure, if each FF process now takes care of fewer tabs, then when OOM does happen, the FF processes have a lower OOM score and are less likely to get killed. But something will get killed regardless, just maybe not FF. That's like trying to avoid punishment after a prison brawl by keeping your head low: someone will get punished regardless, just maybe not you.
On 32-bit Windows, processes have maximum address space limitations which can be easily hit by web browsers. Having more content processes makes it less likely that any particular one will hit that limit. Note that content process OOM crashes are the #1 source of crash reports Firefox gets (and you can see plenty of other OOM crashes in that list further down too):
Oh, so you mean that on 32-bit Windows, processes (can) have an address space that is smaller than the sum of physical RAM + page file? I didn't know that.
On any 32-bit OS, processes have at most 4GB of address space, because that's how much you can address with 32 bits.
In practice some of that is reserved for the kernel, so you get less for use by the process itself. Historically 2GB on Windows, though there were some non-default compilation/linking options you could set to get 3GB.
A 32-bit process running on a 64-bit kernel can get 4GB of address space.
And yes, lots of computers have >4GB physical RAM, even if you don't count swap/page files.
Yes, technically. But the user experience is fewer tabs crashing, which I'd argue is what user's care about. You notice a crash because of the tab's "oh no" screen, not by watching `ps`.
I see. That starts to make sense if you explain it that way. Users who don't think about the multiprocessing model will just see fewer dead tabs when a FF process crashes, and that could feel like "fewer crashes".
Which is to say, about 99.9% of them. "Crash" in common parlance is understood to mean a glitch, that is, user-visible unintended behavior. If fewer user tabs glitch in that way, that means fewer crashes. User experience is what matters first and foremost.
Just spitballing: maybe there's a race condition for some kind of resource handle used in those shared content-loader workers, such that the longer a worker's lifetime, the higher the probability of some kind of resource leak or deadlock. More workers = less lifetime per worker = less probability of triggering it.
While that post addresses the reason why we can double the number of processes, I think I'm still missing the reason why we should double the number of processes (aside from performance reasons).
I mean, the release notes made it sound like more processes is more stable than fewer processes (unless I'm misreading it). How does doubling the number of processes result in fewer crashes? If we manually force FF 66 to use 4 processes only, would it result in more crashes than using 8 processes?
Fewer tabs running in more processes reduces the likelihood of OOM crashes, increases security (because less likely a security vulnerability will allow JavaScript on one page to read memory from another page in the same process), and might improve responsiveness because Firefox can lower the OS priority of processes that only contain background tabs.
>> From personal experience, I believe that things usually get more buggy, not less, as you add more parallelism/concurrency.
Mozilla/Firefox is writing more stuff in Rust, where concurrency is easier to do right. I'm not sure how much that effort has improved the reliability so far but it's happening:
Considering the recent "Spectre is here to stay" paper [1], can anyone comment on whether Firefox should be considered secure until the work on process-per-site lands (I believe they are working on it)?
I wish they made the macOS version more of a priority. There are two bugs in Bugzilla (window doesn't use CoreAnimation[1], h264/video isn't properly accelerated since quantum[2]) that together cut battery life in half compared to using Chrome or Safari. These have been in there for two years (!) and have varingly been either priority 2 or fix-optional (!!). I understand that there are limited resources but making your browser nigh unusable for on-the-go should mean these bugs get priority 1 or priority critical.
I wonder how was the Wayland support improved. I'm running Firefox 65 with GTK_BACKEND=wayland and it works quite well but there are still some minor issues where and there.
I have been using Firefox on macOS for a while but firefox is not well-integrated with the OS. Scrolling, downloading files, playing video/audio and many more have different convention from Safari/Chrome.
Also, I am trying to avoid using Firefox on battery because it is a killer.
Some (most?) people have no eye for design and simply don't notice stuff like that.
Until recently Firefox's URL bar had a THICK blue glow when it was in focus, instead of the more subtle one the rest of Mac OS has. It infuriated me. They didn't fix it for years. Why? Because nobody noticed it or cared enough, I guess.
I've been using FF on macOS for the past year and haven't noticed any problems with the battery. I'm not sure what the problems are with scrolling, downloading, or playing media are either to be honest.
Chrome and Safari support keyboard multimedia keys to play/pause video and audio which firefox does not. Picture in Picture is not available on Firefox.
Pinch and double tap gestures to zoom are not available. Scrolling does not follow system conventions like overflow kinetic scrolling.
> Pinch and double tap gestures to zoom are not available. Scrolling does not follow system conventions like overflow kinetic scrolling.
I find this hugely annoying as well on MacOS when using the touchpad. This is also the reason why I stick to iOS instead of going for Android. All of these details are great on my laptop and phone, though they're not what I really need on my desktop.
Ah I see, I guess I don't use any of that stuff myself. I tend to move between macOS and Linux, so I don't get too attached to system specific shortcuts. That said, I really don't see any of these problems as being show stoppers, and I haven't noticed much difference in battery usage between Chrome and FF.
Firefox has so many great features and yet I find myself not using it as my main browser for a simple reason: New windows open twice as fast in Safari and Chrome.
I'm opening a lot of windows because I'm not a fan of tabs. So Firefox feels extremely sluggish to me even though the actual rendering and JavaScript execution is anything but sluggish.
I'm not even sure if Firefox windows open so slowly for a reason or if it's just a really badly designed animation.
From the last 3 or so versions Firefox performance on my retina mac is indistinguishable from chrome (from a humam perspective not looking at ram cpu usage), so I'm very happy to be using firefox full time once again. At some point I knew it was time to close firefox when the fans started blowing at max speed. Does not happen any more.
> At some point I knew it was time to close firefox when the fans started blowing at max speed.
In my experience on Mac the guilty party has consistently been the plugin container (or rather something inside it, presumably a bad video codec). `killall plugin-container` fixes the problem without having to restart Firefox, but unfortunately also crashes many if not most tabs (appears everything wants to use a multimedia plugin or another these days...)
The "plugin-container" executable is used for all sandboxed processes on Windows. That started out as plug-ins, but now includes web renderers.
So the "something inside it" could be script on a web page, or part of Gecko's rendering pipeline, or pretty much anything. And killig it crashes tabs because it's the thing rendering those tabs.
It might make sense to rename the executable to make things clearer, but there are some problems: there is Windows software that hardcodes the executable name and does things based on it, and changing the name would break various things for users....
On Mac and Linux, where this problem doesn't exist, the process naming is much saner...
Oh, my experience was on Mac like the GP’s. Edited to clarify. On Windows or Linux I haven’t encountered a similar 100% CPU use problem, which has led me to suspect it’s specifically the Mac version of some plugin that’s the problem.
Interesting. On Mac, the process is called "plugin-container" if you use something like "ps", but Activity Monitor shows it as "FirefoxCP Web Content", which is a lot clearer...
One thing I love about firefox performance-wise is that closing tabs is instant. I can close a lot of tabs very quickly. Chrome lags quite a bit on tab close.
Firefox is very slow on 2014 macs and causes fans to spin up to mad speed. This tends to happen with html5 video players. Chrome seems to not have this issue.
Performance has improved considerably. However, there is still a major outstanding bug, due to the rendering of window transparency[1].
Window transparency can be turned off by setting "gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque" to true in about:config. This will cause a minor degradation in appearance of the window frame and tabs, but it will improve performance and extend battery life.
I have had it set for over 6 months and am anticipating the resolution of this outstanding bug.
> With this update, Firefox is introducing scroll anchoring, which ensures that you’re not going to bounce around on the page as these slow-loading ads load.
While I love the idea of videos not automatically playing, I'm almost more excited for the scroll anchoring feature.
this has been happening to me recently on Google search, as cards load with info about the top results.
Anyone on Google reading this -- please either cut that out, or include css placeholders for content you expect your JS to load.
Both waiting longer for content to load and having to go back from clicking the wrong thing detract from the raison d'etre of fast and relevant search.
Is there any use in removing these automatically-generated tags? They seem like something that might change the second Google's deployment pipeline pushes a new build (or even sooner).
I'm constantly annoyed by that horrible feature too. It usually doesn't cause a misclick anymore, but it's really annoying that every time I go back to look a the next search result, the result moves once I've moved my cursor to the result I want to click.
I was hoping to find someone else who mentioned this.
This catches me out regularly. I would not be surprised if a team at Google implemented this and immediately saw “increased engagement” from users in an AB test, so they locked it in permanently and considered it case closed, the science is in.
This happens to me every single day on the Windows 10 start menu and on my iPhone using the swipe-down search on the Home screen.
Why in God's green Earth the developers who implemented these don't cache obvious local results (like app names) to quickly return them is beyond me, and why the position of the results has to move after the fact is even more maddening
I typed "Arro" for an app I use last night, it took a moment to show up and when I went to click it, the web results populated so I accidentally clicked on "arroz con gandules". Sounds lovely, but I am certainly not expecting that to be the autocomplete...
On iOS I randomly get this weird lag when I swipe down and start typing an app name. Sometimes it shows LOCAL apps and sometimes it... doesn't. For a while. WHY, Apple, WHY? You used to "JUST WORK"
Had the same problem on my iPhone. I turned off Siri for app search (Settings / Siri & Search / Suggestions for Search) and now the results are instant. (And local to my phone, so no internet-sourced results, but I’m fine with that.)
How Microsoft managed to ruin the Start Menu, on the other hand, is amazing. I had to reinstall a computer because some Cortana corruption had made it impossible to launch apps from the Start Menu’s search results. Even though I disabled Cortana. Incredible.
Thank you for the Siri protip, that was one of my biggest frustrations with iOS (that + inability to take scrolling screenshots natively, similarly to how you can on Samsung Galaxy phones). For complete peace, I just wish there was a way to turn off all app suggestions in search at once, instead of flipping that switch in settings for every single app.
How Microsoft managed to ruin the Start Menu, on the other hand, is amazing.
My Windows 10 start menu lags. Press windows key or click on it, no response for a good ten seconds or more.
I have this on my work machine, a previous install, my home machine, a Surface Book, a remote desktop server on Windows 2016.
And yet, I've never seen anyone else talking about it. I can't believe I'm the only one who has this "my start menu has paged out to 5400rpm disk, then powered the disk down" experience.
Same here. Sometimes I’ll click on it a good five or eight times before it comes up. When people say Windows 10 is good, I feel like they’re living in an alternate dimension.
I think you guys are the exceptions to the norm here, and not the norm.
I have too many computers at home, some verrry slow ones, and they all pop up the start menu within a second or two unless I've just booted the PC.
I work with a lot of people who use Windows 10 all day long, and I've never heard one of them ever complain about a slow start menu. Complaints about search results? Absolutely.
I suspect it's something you're installing, and I'm sure you'll deny that (and you very well could be right, I don't know) and these things are time consuming to diagnose, unfortunately.
Any sufficiently popular OS is probably going to suck for ~tens of thousands of users while at least hundreds of thousands more wonder what the fuss is about.
On Android, whenever I want to copy something I have to wait a few seconds for the menu to fully load. Otherwise I end up tapping on the wrong icon. Quite irritating.
The iPhone search has been driving me crazy as well. Another one that always gets me is pressing a number in the recent calls list just after another call was ended.
You're absolutely right. The recent calls issue happens way too often. Nothing worse than calling your boss at 2am when you meant to call your wife or vice-versa...
I often put the phone in my pocket after a call without pressing the sleep button, so the screen stays active, causing me to unknowingly "butt dial" random numbers, sometimes talking to other people while a confused/mischievous person on the call is listening in...
I disagree. I think having some clicks ignored would be pretty annoying. The solution is to design your UI so that what people want to click on isn't jumping around.
This is a good argument for empty place holders when loading dynamic content. Although some people don't like them, it is an easy way to prevent UX issues like this.
Your not accepting the 1st suggestion (Arrow) when you typed "Ar" decreased the probability that that was the term you intended. The next suggestion factored in that you were probably looking for something else and bumped up other suggestions.
That’s a bad assumption. People often type faster than they can respond to changes on screen. Typing speed & muscle memory means I’m more likely to type “arr” than just “ar”. But I’m also likely to be thrown off by the search reshuffling as it expands.
Once an item matches the search, it should stay in place unless it’s invalidated by further typing. Reshuffling just adds needless friction.
This actually made me laugh with how tone-deaf it appears to be about how users normally interact with a search field. Is this response based on industry "knowledge"? How did this sort of thinking come about?
That would be such a stupid way to implement a search.
When you search you don't type letter by letter and inspect the suggestions after each keystroke. You type many letters and only then you inspect the suggestions/results.
Every time I click the share button in Android, the icons are in completely different order. Not last recently used, not alphabetically. Completely random.
Newegg has been particularly bad with this in the past. Looks like they have fixed it now, but used to be that it would take a 0.5-2 seconds for their advertisement to load above the "search within", "only show newegg products, I'm not looking for an amazon experience", and "sort by" fields. Go to click on those (I always prefer "only newegg" instead of the default "all sellers"), and half the time I'd end up clicking on the advertisement when it loaded.
Makes me wish there was some sort of an understanding that: The thing I just clicked was somewhere else within the last 400ms, so click on what used to be there."
I don't think it's likely to have been "planned" deliberately, as the result is an annoyed user. I think it's the result of naive A/B testing, without examining the deeper reasons for the results. "Oh wow, clicks are up 50% with the new layout!"
Of course, if you did discover the true reason for the increase in your click rates, you'd probably stay quiet about it. So maybe it's a bit of both.
That site that you're about to reload because it isn't doing anything? Suddenly loads just as your finger is depressing the mouse button to reload. That JavaScript heavy site that has brought your pc to its knees? Works just as you've elected to kill the process.
> That site that you're about to reload because it isn't doing anything? Suddenly loads just as your finger is depressing the mouse button to reload.
I dont think thats coincidence. More likely, the browser already has downloaded the page itself but is waiting for some resource before rendering it. If you reload, it renders what it has immediately.
How does it know my finger is swiftly moving towards the "R" part of ctl-shift-R? :-) I swear that I sometimes see it render right as my finger is getting ready to contact R.
Oh my god. Sad thing is that I'm almost sure that mist have happened somewhere. Not that they came to the "jumpy layout is good" conclusion, but that maybe an accidentally slower version of the page lead to that result and they ended up with "hey this version makes users want to click ads more"!
Or all of the sites that have adopted a 'card' view. Gannett sites all have this terrible UX that if you click in the white space around an article, it closes the article and takes you to the home page. [0] Accidental clicks on white space shouldn't do anything!
Accidental clicks on white space shouldn't do anything!
They are racking up click-throughs.
Advertisers pay just as much for accidental clicks as intentional ones, so the site operator is incentivized to generate as many as possible. Being the dumbest morons ever to mo a ron, the advertisers don't understand that they're the marks in this particular con game.
Eventually they will get tired of paying for worthless clicks, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Using the NYT iPhone app on the subway is maddening. Every time you go in and out of cell coverage the whole app pauses while it waits to load ads that will never come. It is so frustrating that I am close to giving up on it entirely.
> I'm almost more excited for the scroll anchoring feature.
If we could get this feature on mobile and desktop operating systems, I would be soo happy. I probably click/tap on something just before it moves about fifty times a day. Having the fastest devices only helps a little.
I switched back to Firefox about six months ago, and this issue was the only thing that ever made me consider switching back to Chrome; there's one forum I frequent where the "latest unread post" button was basically useless because of this.
Sad this is even necessary. Progressive loading is a relic of a bygone 28.8 kbps era. Connections are fast enough is where you should be able to draw everything into an off-screen buffer and display the completed page in one go.
People on lower quality connections (high packet loss/roundtrip) eat a lot of delay on page loads because the average site connects to like 20+ servers and the browser has to spin up a bunch of http connections. Then you have to wait for javascript to load... this is unavoidable.
Excellent news! Next step: TWitter and Facebook streams do not reorganize themselves by an algorithm on a Back button. You can click Back and comment the post that gave you the linked article in the first place.
It appears to already be in Chrome. I have a site that I hate because their slider at the top always scrolls the site around, but that has recently stopped, and I've noticed that the page knows where I've scrolled to and adjust the scroll when the page changes above where I'm reading.
A similar annoyance: the browser insisting on switching focus once the page loads.
It happens nearly daily that I'll be typing in to an input field while the page is still loading, and Firefox will switch focus away from that input field when the page finishes loading.
The consequences of this are even worse for me, as I use the Tridactyl extension, which acts on vim-keystrokes when the focus is not in an input field. So if I'm in the middle of typing something in an input field and Firefox in its infinite wisdom chooses to switch focus out of the input field, what I type from then on will be acted on as commands to Tridactyl, which could do things like open, close, or reload a page.
That's actually the reason I stopped using VIM bindings in FF. The small amount of niceness from VIM bindings did not make up for the random annoyances.
Have you tried `set allowautofocus false`? It breaks some fancy editors like CodeMirror but you can always re-enable it on certain pages with `seturl`.
We'll probably just have to agree to disagree re: "JS does more harm than good".
I have at least 5 progressive webapps open right now, none of which could work without javascript. Of the other 20 websites I have open in other tabs, none are being annoying or aggressive, and I'm not even using an adblocker.
Not really. It's way harder (and therefore the barrier is higher, they'd be less likely to exist, etc) to develop cross platform native applications than it is to just implement them as webapps.
If it was just as easy to write and distribute native applications, we'd be doing that, instead of bolting it onto the web. But it's pretty clearly not.
Its the other way round. If web apps didnt exist, there would be more pressure to develop tools that make it easy to write and distribute proper applications.
Under what circumstances would webapps not exist in some form or another? It's a system for deploying applications via the web, and JavaScript is primarily the language that they're implemented in.
I will bet you that in 99% of alternative timelines, we'd end up with something incredibly similar to what we've got today, and you'd still be complaining that applications aren't "native" enough, because practically nobody cares that a taskbar or button isn't a native OS component. They care that their application works, and can be quickly deployed and updated.
Serious question: do you remember the late '90s and early '00s? Have you used Visual Basic, or Qt, or anything? There was an era before web apps existed, and there were tools that made it easy to write and distribute proper applications - are you claiming that that didn't happen, or what?
You're the one claiming that tools would exist to make it easy. I am saying that they did exist, and they were as easy as possible. What remains to be done, and why didn't it happen before the invention of XMLHTTPRequest? Could it get easier, and if so, how?
They are applications. They run in a safe sandbox in the browser, rather than being all-powerful programs running directly on the system. They allow nuances of trust ("I trust this application with the data I'm giving it") rather than absolute trust ("I trust this application with access to my entire system and all my data").
Proper applications follow OS UI conventions, they appear in the task bar, are launched from the application launcher etc. Proper applications can also be sandboxed, though Spectre makes it a bad idea to run untrusted code anyway.
(I'm going to ignore the use of "proper application" instead of "native (non-web) application"; it isn't helping your argument.)
Native applications can choose whether they follow UI conventions or not; many games don't, for instance. Web applications have the same choice; they can use native controls provided by the browser, and I certainly agree that well-behaved web applications should if they don't have a good reason to do otherwise (e.g. use standard form controls for native look-and-feel and better integration/interaction).
> they appear in the task bar
So do progressive web apps (PWAs).
> are launched from the application launcher
PWAs are as well. (Likewise for many other aspects of integration with the rest of the system.)
> Proper applications can also be sandboxed
But there aren't yet standard mechanisms for that (outside of mobile platforms), and you can't necessarily trust that an application will sandbox itself. Current sandbox mechanisms mostly get used by applications to protect against exploits, not for users to protect themselves against applications.
Having them be proper applications would be a huge problem for the security and therefore the computing autonomy of the average person. The fact that you don't generally download unsandboxed, unsigned apps from the internets any more (and don't run shrink-wrapped apps from the local CompUSA that are full of C string parsing vulnerabilities, either) is one of the most meaningful accomplishments in computer security in the last decade. If you want to throw it out, you personally can clean up the Bonzi Buddies on every Windows user's computer. The most malicious JavaScript web page still can't install Bonzi Buddy. We've even gotten to an era where most people don't need to install anti-virus, because moving everything to the web has fixed the fundamental problems with desktop OS design that required a quasi-snake-oil, theoretically-untenable approach to maintain a semblance of integrity.
There's another alternative, which is curated and audited app stores à la iOS, but the fact that you can't use applications unless they're approved by a megacorporation would also be bad for people's computing autonomy.
(Also, what makes you think that the developers of bloated JS apps won't make bloated desktop apps?)
> You can have sandboxing without running pseudo-applications in a document viewer and without walled gardens.
Please expand on this claim. What is a "pseudo-application" and what is a "document viewer"? In particular, how does having an app runtime outside a "document viewer" accomplish the goals you would like to see?
> Its possible to create garbage desktop apps. But its impossible to create non-garbage web apps.
Please expand on this claim. I've seen tons of non-garbage web apps.
> What is a "pseudo-application" and what is a "document viewer"?
Presumably, a webpage in a browser.
> In particular, how does having an app runtime outside a "document viewer" accomplish the goals you would like to see?
> I've seen tons of non-garbage web apps.
Good web software can't compete with good native software in things like performance and platform features, so this is my guess as to what is considered to be non-"garbage".
For example, url sharing / deep linking goes out the window. I can't share what I'm looking at in macOS' Maps.app like I can on the Google Maps website, pure downgrade.
I also don't want to download an application for everything. Very few things deserve a permanent spot on my computer. I have much less control over desktop apps than I do a website.
Or look at macOS' News.app. Another downgrade from reading news in a browser tab. It has no tabs. There's no right-click. It implemented its own back button. It only supports the few news sources that come preinstalled on it. I can't add my own. Why would I prefer this?
Obviously native applications have their place, but let's not suggest there aren't trade-offs.
What's odd about your posts is that you suggest it's an inconvenience that you might have to disable Javascript. Maybe you have to use NoScript or uMatrix or uBlock. But at least you have the option and this sort of control over the web browser. If a native application does something that you don't like, you have basically zero recourse beyond uninstalling it or begging the developer to change something you could've done in the browser with a quick browser extension or CSS tweak.
> For example, url sharing / deep linking goes out the window.
Yes, thats the one good thing about the web. But there is no reason proper applications cannot support this.
> Or look at macOS' News.app.
Im not familiar with that app but I guess its some sort of reader for hypertext documents (published by news organizations)? The one thing a browser is good at?
> Or look at macOS' News.app. Another downgrade from reading news in a browser tab. It has no tabs. There's no right-click. It implemented its own back button. It only supports the few news sources that come preinstalled on it. I can't add my own. Why would I prefer this?
You shouldn't; you should be annoyed that Apple shipped this and demand that they give you better.
Your maps.apple.com example is perfect: the recipient needs to have an Apple device and Maps.app to see the link. It's like a peek into how things might've been in a dismal alternate reality.
On my Macbook, I don't have the choice. Clicking the link summons a modal that asks me if I want to open Maps.app.
It's strictly worse than just sharing the google maps browser link. And this example even is the best case scenario for a native app: there's a website you can redirect to for people without the app. Though it's a competitor's website, and the website vastly outmatches the native application in features and fidelity.
Fair enough. Personally, I avoid PWAs entirely due to (in part) security concerns. But I'm also one of those who views client-side scripting as a threat vector, and prevent it when at all possible.
Citation needed. I dont believe gmail would be as useful eithout javascript, docs wouldnt really be possible, i dont think i could video chat with my family without extensions, and so on.
Installing apps is really not aomething i want. I am trying to keep apps on my phone low for a reason, browser is actually perfect for most of what i do.
Yes! You dont have to update if you dont want to. Thats a feature. Of course, the rise of proprietary APIs over interoperable protocols has lessened that advantage.
What more features? All can be done in javascript, without making users install garbage, without spending extra resources. I prefer companies spend their resources on improving the product instead of implementing same thing thrice.
What most people dont realize is web apps are a boon to linux people. Most companies would not develop for linux at all.
> I prefer companies spend their resources on improving the product instead of implementing same thing thrice.
Funny, this is exactly my issue with web apps. I don't want to use software where the engineers have done a poor job reimplementing things the system provides for free.
For the simplest possible example, ask any Noscript extension user.
For the more advanced things, like identifying the part of Javascript code that brings e.g. 'the fancy eating 40% of the CPU scrollbar' user want to disable, some automation is needed.
I am a NoScript user. I use it to block all JS by default. If a web site won't work properly that way, and the site is somehow really important, I'll work out what the minimum scripts necessary to let the site do what I need is, and just allow those. If the site isn't somehow critical, I just don't use the site.
I have to do it that way because it's very difficult to determine which scripts are bad and which aren't without actually reviewing the JS itself. In my view, "bad" usually means that the script is phoning home in some way.
I wish there were browser extension to exchange the lists of allowed scripts for sites between the users. So Noscript could automatically preset this for you and you don't need to tune the list for every site by yourself.
I recently discovered that Umatrix has something like this. One of the buttons gives you the ability to click to enable common subsets e.g. "GitHub" , "reCAPTCHA" etc.
Much effect for what? If the claim is "much effect for not autoplaying audio," citation needed - the usual ways of blocking autoplaying audio work perfectly fine if the autoplay is triggered from JavaScript instead of from pure HTML.
Agreed. I have yet to find a single use-case that can't be done without JavaScript, with the exception of chat. Like audio and video, chat could have easily been another HTML widget provided by the browser (imagine, standard declarative chat across the web!).
I built my last webapp entirely without JavaScript. Users constantly praise how fast it is. There's no bugs with the back button. It's accessible out-of-the-box. Form inputs work correctly out-of-the-box. It's clear when data is being loaded/submitted and when it's not (since that's already built into the browser). And on and on and on...
JavaScript is the worst thing to happen to UX, privacy, speed, caching, and accessibility. So much of the web's UX is broken because of JS. It's depressing because it was all unnecessary. We went from a standard declarative interface shared by all websites to an "anything goes" black box runtime.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] threadI believe this isn’t enabled for KDE Plasma.
If you like a separate title bar like the old version of Firefox, then use the hamburger menu, choose “customise” and check the box for the title bar.
Someone knows if it's customizable in the config menu, searching the obvious "titlebar" reports only two not useful entries?
Anyway thanks.
Edit: in Chrome/Chromium works as I expected, I think I should file a bug then.
I haven't used gnome in quite a while, so I'm not totally certain of what was before this change, but I wouldn't consider it problematic. I find that saving the extra 20 pixels at the top is good for the widescreen aspect ratio of most monitors.
Could be that Ubuntu were already doing this and it has now made it upstream, I suppose.
- Firefox -
https://www.howtogeek.com/326532/safari-now-disables-auto-pl...
This was actually one of my major annoyances, since I use this feature often. I'm glad they added it, chances are others use it too.
It's occurred to me that I should find out how to make a placebo button and put there, but I haven't prioritized it.
What's funny is that if escape was a real button I would probably really like the touchbar!
Apologies for the mistake.
Works on Chrome as I found out today.
I really don't understand the priorities of the Mozilla/Firefox project.
Yes, there are bugs filed on the other keyboard issues -- some more than 10 year old, e.g., 433966 or 429043. I could probably fix them myself, with enough effort, but Mozilla has the weirdest architecture so all my Mac programming knowledge won't help much. The last time I filed a minor bug against Firefox (context menus appear in the wrong place by a couple pixels), it was tagged "[good first bug]" -- and it ended up taking some poor soul 7 months and 790 lines to fix, and I still don't think it's correct.
I think it's time for someone to out-Firefox Firefox. The free and open nature is great, but the UI is collapsing under its own weight.
Chrome doesn't have super huge list of new features either.
Anyway, here's the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_version_history#Releas...
That's a nice little quality-of-life improvement. It's a little annoyance that you don't really consciously notice because you're so used to it, but I recall reading about Chrome adding a similar feature and suddenly realising how annoying it is when you're reading something, and then suddenly it jumps out of your view due to a large image above the viewport loading.
Eg setting an image to be "width: 100vw; height: 100vh;" means it'll be squished to fill the user's viewport. "width: 100vw; height: auto;" will fill the viewport horizontally and scale the image vertically as per it's aspect ratio. And so on. Generally that'll look bad though because browsers scale things fast rather than well.
And then there's the options for background images. "background-size: cover" is quite useful.
CSS is fun.
``` object-fit: cover ```
comes to mind as a client-side solution I used in the past for this problem
Generally, I'd agree that authoring time is some 9X% solution, though there remain edge cases.
I can't think of a good use case for auto generating arbitrarily large images, and as a user I wouldn't want to visit websites where the web designer thinks that's a good idea either.
What thos cases are is ... a good question, and my point is more thaat this can be done than to say why or that it's a good idea.
Upshot again is that image size need not be deterministic at authoring time.
Edit to add: Or maybe it would be better to just have the ability to lock the ratio, such as:
(The ::before element isn't stricly necessary; the padding can go on the .DamnInteresting element directly - just make sure .DamnInteresting is wrapped in a containing element of your desired width and you can even use inline styles for the padding shim.)
(Edit: a word)
This theme is discussed here often, but really, this is what HTML was designed for. Load https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ in a browser and scale it at will, it will always look good. The fact that people put a ton of often useless stuff and complain it looks bad in some browser doesn't mean media queries are theonly way.
That's a benefit, in my view.
I believe opera 12 could do this?
> he problem is that the software stack makes tons of round-trip requests
Latency matters because of all of those round-trip requests. Each individual request incurs at least 2x the network latency value (one network latency trip out to the server, another network latency trip back). If browsers did not try to run parallel requests, then all those round trips would sum up to a substantial overall delay.
Well then, since it's a physical impossibility to do away with them, we'd better start working on improving the speed of light.
That describes zero browsers. And "it's not loading parallel enough" is very much a software stack problem and not a network problem.
We could shove full pages over the wire in 200ms if we tried harder.
From the post you replied to:
> Software is actively working to overcome the limitations of latency, such as with HTTP/2, HTTP/3, and TLS 1.3.
The whole point is to eliminate those round-trips, and just stream content to the browser at the limit of its available bandwidth.
The problem is mainly with ads, when 1) there may or may not be an ad available, and 2) you're allowing the ad height to be dynamic, to allow for greater possible inventory.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/smoothscroll/nbokb...
The other browsers are probably mostly tested with Apple's high precision mouse/trackpad devices that report scroll distance in very small steps instead of the coarse distance reporting of standard mice.
The second issue, what you are probably referring to is how the page is animated between those two points. Firefox now uses something old Opera used to have, a really gradual scroll. All chromium-based browser I just tried have this rather jumpy scroll. It's different, but it is not nearly as bad as it used to be in FF.
In short, I don't know, but "smooth scrolling" is something you might want to search for.
They added this to my home page, despite the fact that my default search provider is DDG.
Mozilla, could you STOP bundling advertisements into my browser?
I'll add the caveat that I typically restart my browser at least once a day, perhaps avoids the problem.
Later it stopped to crash, but acted weirdly (clicks on links didn't work, etc).
Nowadays we have the notice to restart the browser. It didn't arrive years ago, just a few releases ago.
This was only under Linux, and only with the distro package managers. Under Windows or MacOS, the updater updates the browser on next restart, so this didn't happen.
1. Why update an app when you're in the middle of using the app? I dunno, I use Fedora, so I don't execute 'dnf update' until I'm ready to reboot the system, usually because I'm anticipating a kernel update. 2. Firefox has a pretty reliable "Restore Previous Session" feature that works well. I have also been known to throw a SIGTERM at Firefox and just let it prompt me when I start it again for the "Something went wrong, should we restore your session?". Seems to always work for me.
Restore session doesn't help if you're in a private session.
Also you may be in the middle of actually using your browser for thing that you don't want to interrupt, a game, an online application, anything really..
Don't do automatic updates if you do not want automatic updates. Automatic updates just absolutely can cause you to have to restart stuff, depending on what got updated exactly.
Updates are automatic every day.
>I use Fedora, so I don't execute 'dnf update' until I'm ready to reboot the system, usually because I'm anticipating a kernel update
How often does that happen? It doesn't seem reasonable to put off security updates that have already been fixed and are simply waiting to install.
Firefox is the only program I've run into where automatic updates have led to a negative experience. Every single other program handles them just fine.
I haven't rebooted my system in days, and I make updates twice a day...
Quite inconvenient.
My browser is open when my computer is running. I do updates at random times through-out the day, for example before installing new packages. Having to close my browser leads to dead sessions and text being lost from input fields and whatever other state there might be.
My guess is that this is some per-tab isolation/process stuff that would result in a mismatch between tabs from before the update and tabs after the update.
On MacOS or Windows (maybe even Linux with the Mozilla updater, never tried it), the updater does the update on the next restart.
Chrome on macOS and Windows keeps itself up to date; for whatever reason Chrome on Linux installs a google.chrome repository, uses the distro package manager, and clobbers the running binary. shrug
Because that's the proper way to do things instead of each application bypassing the package manager and downloading updates and whatever else behind your back. How would you track and control updates if each application you use decided to do its own thing? Secondly, if installed to system directories, applications cannot write there without superuser privileges.
This is not a problem on Unix-like systems, actually. Any running process, that has some file open, will keep the original file open, even if the filename points to another file now. Only processes that open the file after the change will get the new version.
I suspect that the protocol that multiple processes of Firefox used to communicate together could change between version and the mismatch between old and newly launched processes caused the problem. So it is versioned now, and if the versions are mismatched, warning is being shown.
> for whatever reason Chrome on Linux installs a google.chrome repository, uses the distro package manager, and clobbers the running binary
As others have said, it is actually the right approach. The custom updaters for Firefox and Chrome under Windows and MacOS are there, because they are lacking any system for centralized package management.
Flatpak solves this in a third way: it doesn't clobber the current tree, it creates a new, separate one and signals the application, that it was updated, and can restart into a new version, when it is convenient. It gets the best of the custom windows/mac updaters (not overwriting running apps), together with the best of linux package managers (centralized management).
They removed the "never check for updates" option and nag nag nag to update.
I unintentionally updated multiple times when the nag menu conveniently appeared while I was pressing the keyboard.
The last accident made me firewall Firefox's update program.
Snap and Flatpak apps I think can do this as well, because they aren't stepping on the running binaries during the update. And you get the updated version when you relaunch.
Firefox isn't special in this regard. 100% of my applications on Windows and macOS expect to be quit before they can be updated, and is enforced either by the application, the OS, or the updater. I suspect that distro package managers don't really have a way to do an out of band update, all they can do is step all over in-use libraries and that inevitably causes the application to go a little crazy.
If you've updated your installation, the new renderer will be the new version, but the parent (ui) process is still the old version. The protocol the two use to talk to each other is not fixed, and messages will start looking malformed. Malformed messages are handled by immediately terminating the process, because otherwise security guarantees go out the window.
So the upshot was that you'd get various crashes in the "I updated Firefox and then kept using it" situation. I've run into a bunch personally, and there is _lots_ of crash reporting data on this. The crashes are not OS-specific; they just have to do with whether changes happened to the IPC protocol.
A "proper" solution would be for the parent process to not use the on-disk version of the renderer to launch new renderers. There's work ongoing to make that possible, but in the meantime the crash volume due to this problem was high enough that the mitigation you see was put in place.
I hoped it was fixed in the release but seems to be not the case.
If disabling CoreLocation fixes the problem, you might look in macOS System Preferences for location permissions. The first time an application tries to use the local location service, macOS prompts the user to grant permission to the application. If you accidentally click "deny", then macOS will automatically deny all future Firefox location requests.
> Improved performance and reduced crash rates by [doubling web content loading processes from 4 to 8 [1]
From personal experience, I believe that things usually get more buggy, not less, as you add more parallelism/concurrency. I think there's supposed to be a link to more explanation or the relevant ticket, but it looks like they forgot to actually add the link. Can somebody fill it in here?
At the end of the day, you're still aiming to load, in FF 66, just as many tabs as in FF pre-66. FF's total memory usage should be about the same whether you're using 4 processes or 8. Sure, if each FF process now takes care of fewer tabs, then when OOM does happen, the FF processes have a lower OOM score and are less likely to get killed. But something will get killed regardless, just maybe not FF. That's like trying to avoid punishment after a prison brawl by keeping your head low: someone will get punished regardless, just maybe not you.
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/topcrashers/?product=Firefox...
It makes sense then.
In practice some of that is reserved for the kernel, so you get less for use by the process itself. Historically 2GB on Windows, though there were some non-default compilation/linking options you could set to get 3GB.
A 32-bit process running on a 64-bit kernel can get 4GB of address space.
And yes, lots of computers have >4GB physical RAM, even if you don't count swap/page files.
For those users, the memory a process can use is capped at 2-4GB (depending on whether the OS itself is 32-bit or 64-bit and a few other things).
The most common OOM crashes on Windows are running out of virtual address space, not running out of actual physical RAM.
In that context, having more processes in fact gives you more address space and reduces the chance that you will run out.
While that post addresses the reason why we can double the number of processes, I think I'm still missing the reason why we should double the number of processes (aside from performance reasons).
I mean, the release notes made it sound like more processes is more stable than fewer processes (unless I'm misreading it). How does doubling the number of processes result in fewer crashes? If we manually force FF 66 to use 4 processes only, would it result in more crashes than using 8 processes?
Mozilla/Firefox is writing more stuff in Rust, where concurrency is easier to do right. I'm not sure how much that effort has improved the reliability so far but it's happening:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05178
No and Yes.
No, theoretically there could be spectre vulns. Practically we have seen zero spectre-based attacks in the wild. It's not a big deal.
The ongoing Fission work is basically defense in depth against future potential Spectre-like vulnerabilities.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1400787#c4
Let the war begin!!
Until recently Firefox's URL bar had a THICK blue glow when it was in focus, instead of the more subtle one the rest of Mac OS has. It infuriated me. They didn't fix it for years. Why? Because nobody noticed it or cared enough, I guess.
"They didn't fix it" implies someone reported it as a bug. Even if no one did, if you were infuriated by it, surely you did, right?
Chrome and Safari support keyboard multimedia keys to play/pause video and audio which firefox does not. Picture in Picture is not available on Firefox.
Pinch and double tap gestures to zoom are not available. Scrolling does not follow system conventions like overflow kinetic scrolling.
https://pcwalton.github.io/2018/12/07/plans-for-2019.html mentions about excessive power consumption on webrender.
I find this hugely annoying as well on MacOS when using the touchpad. This is also the reason why I stick to iOS instead of going for Android. All of these details are great on my laptop and phone, though they're not what I really need on my desktop.
I'm opening a lot of windows because I'm not a fan of tabs. So Firefox feels extremely sluggish to me even though the actual rendering and JavaScript execution is anything but sluggish.
I'm not even sure if Firefox windows open so slowly for a reason or if it's just a really badly designed animation.
In my experience on Mac the guilty party has consistently been the plugin container (or rather something inside it, presumably a bad video codec). `killall plugin-container` fixes the problem without having to restart Firefox, but unfortunately also crashes many if not most tabs (appears everything wants to use a multimedia plugin or another these days...)
So the "something inside it" could be script on a web page, or part of Gecko's rendering pipeline, or pretty much anything. And killig it crashes tabs because it's the thing rendering those tabs.
It might make sense to rename the executable to make things clearer, but there are some problems: there is Windows software that hardcodes the executable name and does things based on it, and changing the name would break various things for users....
On Mac and Linux, where this problem doesn't exist, the process naming is much saner...
Window transparency can be turned off by setting "gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque" to true in about:config. This will cause a minor degradation in appearance of the window frame and tabs, but it will improve performance and extend battery life.
I have had it set for over 6 months and am anticipating the resolution of this outstanding bug.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522
While I love the idea of videos not automatically playing, I'm almost more excited for the scroll anchoring feature.
Anyone on Google reading this -- please either cut that out, or include css placeholders for content you expect your JS to load.
Both waiting longer for content to load and having to go back from clicking the wrong thing detract from the raison d'etre of fast and relevant search.
#eobc_1,.r-i4KASL__ToPM,.r-iGs8q6iiSUas{ display:none !important; }
I think it was something like "other people also search for..." thing which poped up unexepectedly.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Procedural-cosmetic-f...
This catches me out regularly. I would not be surprised if a team at Google implemented this and immediately saw “increased engagement” from users in an AB test, so they locked it in permanently and considered it case closed, the science is in.
Scientism at its worst.
Why in God's green Earth the developers who implemented these don't cache obvious local results (like app names) to quickly return them is beyond me, and why the position of the results has to move after the fact is even more maddening
I typed "Arro" for an app I use last night, it took a moment to show up and when I went to click it, the web results populated so I accidentally clicked on "arroz con gandules". Sounds lovely, but I am certainly not expecting that to be the autocomplete...
How Microsoft managed to ruin the Start Menu, on the other hand, is amazing. I had to reinstall a computer because some Cortana corruption had made it impossible to launch apps from the Start Menu’s search results. Even though I disabled Cortana. Incredible.
Microsoft is actually uncoupling Cortana to Windows Search/Start Menu in the next major release, so this should be less of a problem.
My Windows 10 start menu lags. Press windows key or click on it, no response for a good ten seconds or more.
I have this on my work machine, a previous install, my home machine, a Surface Book, a remote desktop server on Windows 2016.
And yet, I've never seen anyone else talking about it. I can't believe I'm the only one who has this "my start menu has paged out to 5400rpm disk, then powered the disk down" experience.
I have too many computers at home, some verrry slow ones, and they all pop up the start menu within a second or two unless I've just booted the PC.
I work with a lot of people who use Windows 10 all day long, and I've never heard one of them ever complain about a slow start menu. Complaints about search results? Absolutely.
I suspect it's something you're installing, and I'm sure you'll deny that (and you very well could be right, I don't know) and these things are time consuming to diagnose, unfortunately.
A quick search yielded:
https://www.tenforums.com/performance-maintenance/12860-wind... https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3doydz/windows_1... https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/windows-10-start-men... https://bradshacks.com/fix-start-menu-lag/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-10-second-fix-for-sluggish...
Maybe not the norm, but we're not the only ones. It's obviously an issue that exists.
I often put the phone in my pocket after a call without pressing the sleep button, so the screen stays active, causing me to unknowingly "butt dial" random numbers, sometimes talking to other people while a confused/mischievous person on the call is listening in...
1) Arrow
2) Arboles
3) Area
And then type another 'r' before you realize your result is there ("Arr") and as you go to select "Arrow" the auto-suggest results turn into
1) Array
2) Arrogant
3) Arrow
Like, how does adding the second 'r' make "Array" higher probability than "Arrow"?!
Once an item matches the search, it should stay in place unless it’s invalidated by further typing. Reshuffling just adds needless friction.
When you search you don't type letter by letter and inspect the suggestions after each keystroke. You type many letters and only then you inspect the suggestions/results.
Also it seems to use a very slow random number generator because it always takes a long time to populate the random list.
So stupid.
Makes me wish there was some sort of an understanding that: The thing I just clicked was somewhere else within the last 400ms, so click on what used to be there."
Just as planned
Of course, if you did discover the true reason for the increase in your click rates, you'd probably stay quiet about it. So maybe it's a bit of both.
That site that you're about to reload because it isn't doing anything? Suddenly loads just as your finger is depressing the mouse button to reload. That JavaScript heavy site that has brought your pc to its knees? Works just as you've elected to kill the process.
I assume its a variant of Sods Law.
I dont think thats coincidence. More likely, the browser already has downloaded the page itself but is waiting for some resource before rendering it. If you reload, it renders what it has immediately.
[0] https://imgur.com/gallery/OaQDY
https://imgur.com/gallery/YU6EA
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/tourney/2019/03/...
They are racking up click-throughs.
Advertisers pay just as much for accidental clicks as intentional ones, so the site operator is incentivized to generate as many as possible. Being the dumbest morons ever to mo a ron, the advertisers don't understand that they're the marks in this particular con game.
Eventually they will get tired of paying for worthless clicks, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
They'll just start paying less per click. A worse outcome for everyone, not just the bad players.
If we could get this feature on mobile and desktop operating systems, I would be soo happy. I probably click/tap on something just before it moves about fifty times a day. Having the fastest devices only helps a little.
This has been my #1 gripe with web sites since pretty much the dawn of time. Finally!
JavaScript is not “unavoidable,” it’s a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
It happens nearly daily that I'll be typing in to an input field while the page is still loading, and Firefox will switch focus away from that input field when the page finishes loading.
The consequences of this are even worse for me, as I use the Tridactyl extension, which acts on vim-keystrokes when the focus is not in an input field. So if I'm in the middle of typing something in an input field and Firefox in its infinite wisdom chooses to switch focus out of the input field, what I type from then on will be acted on as commands to Tridactyl, which could do things like open, close, or reload a page.
Super, super annoying!
I really hate taking my hands off the keyboard.
Actually it's also time to ban JavaScript after horrendous front end frameworks made simple page loads slow, energy and time consuming.
Javascript is useful, it is just a shame most people dont use it for good.
I have at least 5 progressive webapps open right now, none of which could work without javascript. Of the other 20 websites I have open in other tabs, none are being annoying or aggressive, and I'm not even using an adblocker.
If it was just as easy to write and distribute native applications, we'd be doing that, instead of bolting it onto the web. But it's pretty clearly not.
I will bet you that in 99% of alternative timelines, we'd end up with something incredibly similar to what we've got today, and you'd still be complaining that applications aren't "native" enough, because practically nobody cares that a taskbar or button isn't a native OS component. They care that their application works, and can be quickly deployed and updated.
Browsers not supporting nonsense like Javascript.
(I'm going to ignore the use of "proper application" instead of "native (non-web) application"; it isn't helping your argument.)
Native applications can choose whether they follow UI conventions or not; many games don't, for instance. Web applications have the same choice; they can use native controls provided by the browser, and I certainly agree that well-behaved web applications should if they don't have a good reason to do otherwise (e.g. use standard form controls for native look-and-feel and better integration/interaction).
> they appear in the task bar
So do progressive web apps (PWAs).
> are launched from the application launcher
PWAs are as well. (Likewise for many other aspects of integration with the rest of the system.)
> Proper applications can also be sandboxed
But there aren't yet standard mechanisms for that (outside of mobile platforms), and you can't necessarily trust that an application will sandbox itself. Current sandbox mechanisms mostly get used by applications to protect against exploits, not for users to protect themselves against applications.
macOS certainly has one.
There's another alternative, which is curated and audited app stores à la iOS, but the fact that you can't use applications unless they're approved by a megacorporation would also be bad for people's computing autonomy.
(Also, what makes you think that the developers of bloated JS apps won't make bloated desktop apps?)
> (Also, what makes you think that the developers of bloated JS apps won't make bloated desktop apps?)
Nothing. Its possible to create garbage desktop apps. But its impossible to create non-garbage web apps.
Please expand on this claim. What is a "pseudo-application" and what is a "document viewer"? In particular, how does having an app runtime outside a "document viewer" accomplish the goals you would like to see?
> Its possible to create garbage desktop apps. But its impossible to create non-garbage web apps.
Please expand on this claim. I've seen tons of non-garbage web apps.
Presumably, a webpage in a browser.
> In particular, how does having an app runtime outside a "document viewer" accomplish the goals you would like to see?
> I've seen tons of non-garbage web apps.
Good web software can't compete with good native software in things like performance and platform features, so this is my guess as to what is considered to be non-"garbage".
For example, url sharing / deep linking goes out the window. I can't share what I'm looking at in macOS' Maps.app like I can on the Google Maps website, pure downgrade.
I also don't want to download an application for everything. Very few things deserve a permanent spot on my computer. I have much less control over desktop apps than I do a website.
Or look at macOS' News.app. Another downgrade from reading news in a browser tab. It has no tabs. There's no right-click. It implemented its own back button. It only supports the few news sources that come preinstalled on it. I can't add my own. Why would I prefer this?
Obviously native applications have their place, but let's not suggest there aren't trade-offs.
What's odd about your posts is that you suggest it's an inconvenience that you might have to disable Javascript. Maybe you have to use NoScript or uMatrix or uBlock. But at least you have the option and this sort of control over the web browser. If a native application does something that you don't like, you have basically zero recourse beyond uninstalling it or begging the developer to change something you could've done in the browser with a quick browser extension or CSS tweak.
Yes, thats the one good thing about the web. But there is no reason proper applications cannot support this.
> Or look at macOS' News.app.
Im not familiar with that app but I guess its some sort of reader for hypertext documents (published by news organizations)? The one thing a browser is good at?
But you can? For example, https://maps.apple.com/?ll=36.103117,-103.901438&spn=0.00098...
> Or look at macOS' News.app. Another downgrade from reading news in a browser tab. It has no tabs. There's no right-click. It implemented its own back button. It only supports the few news sources that come preinstalled on it. I can't add my own. Why would I prefer this?
You shouldn't; you should be annoyed that Apple shipped this and demand that they give you better.
Now try this: https://goo.gl/maps/dvhDpd93gJs
It's strictly worse than just sharing the google maps browser link. And this example even is the best case scenario for a native app: there's a website you can redirect to for people without the app. Though it's a competitor's website, and the website vastly outmatches the native application in features and fidelity.
Installing apps is really not aomething i want. I am trying to keep apps on my phone low for a reason, browser is actually perfect for most of what i do.
Word processors? Only if you're requiring something like Markdown.
Video chat seems right out, unless you're permitting a Flash solution, which would be severely cheating.
I can use web apps on any platform without waiting for the company to do it.
I refuse to install apps on my devices.
Yes! You dont have to update if you dont want to. Thats a feature. Of course, the rise of proprietary APIs over interoperable protocols has lessened that advantage.
Is better performance and more features not an improvement to you?
What most people dont realize is web apps are a boon to linux people. Most companies would not develop for linux at all.
Support for most platform APIs?
> I prefer companies spend their resources on improving the product instead of implementing same thing thrice.
Funny, this is exactly my issue with web apps. I don't want to use software where the engineers have done a poor job reimplementing things the system provides for free.
You havent heard of LibreOffice?
Theres Ted if you cant stretch to libreoffice though. https://www.nllgg.nl/Ted/
'offline' apps, 'local' cloud. Its the future!
That's not to say I disagree though. The tech world is very good at creating monopolies.
Don't be disingenuous. The thread's about Firefox and JavaScript. It's quite clear @tehlike wasn't talking about native desktop apps, but web apps.
Well, technically it's possible, and even some parts of the script could be allowed to run or not.
> a browser cannot distinguish it from the good
But the user can. And the machine could help, thanks to machine learning.
How? I don't think that users even agree what consists of "good" and "bad" JavaScript.
For the more advanced things, like identifying the part of Javascript code that brings e.g. 'the fancy eating 40% of the CPU scrollbar' user want to disable, some automation is needed.
I have to do it that way because it's very difficult to determine which scripts are bad and which aren't without actually reviewing the JS itself. In my view, "bad" usually means that the script is phoning home in some way.
Is this good Javascript? I dont think so. Does disabling it on an individual level help? No.
I built my last webapp entirely without JavaScript. Users constantly praise how fast it is. There's no bugs with the back button. It's accessible out-of-the-box. Form inputs work correctly out-of-the-box. It's clear when data is being loaded/submitted and when it's not (since that's already built into the browser). And on and on and on...
JavaScript is the worst thing to happen to UX, privacy, speed, caching, and accessibility. So much of the web's UX is broken because of JS. It's depressing because it was all unnecessary. We went from a standard declarative interface shared by all websites to an "anything goes" black box runtime.
Chrome simply broke a lot of content on the Web, while Firefox just mutes it and lets you unmute.
How well does this work in practice?