The one thing that prevents me from switching to Firefox is the spell checker. Like many non-native English people, I'm constantly switching between languages when typing. Chrome is smart with that, and detects the right language sentence per sentence. Is there a way to have FF do this? Did I miss something?
Similarly, the auto-translate (which Firefox is finally getting) is insanely useful if you ever browse a website that isn’t in a language you can read. I’d be interested in how both features can be implemented in a privacy-preserving way.
as an english only speaker I have no need for a feature like this to be built in. I get much more out of monitor. So perhaps neither should be built in by default?
Having features function by default matters a lot in regards to user adoption. A very large portion of users will never change their default settings, let alone discover and install an add on for something Chrome has by default.
Here’s an article by Mozilla stating the power of default settings:
One aspect is having to maintain double dictionaries. Back in the early Mac OS X days the system-wide dictionary was one of the little features that made me happy.
Yes, that's true, but it would be correspondingly more difficult to find an alternative. If a plugin is compromised you're much more likely to be able to easily find an alternative. So it's a trade-off either way.
the cost of a compromised plugin is not just the inconvenience, but also all the passwords you might enter on forms if the plugin has full permissions granted
That's a stretch. We're talking about a translation plugin here. If FF doesn't have a mechanism to keep passwords safe from that, then that is the problem, not the lack of native translation.
I am not wise in the ways of Firefox plugins, but if the ability of a plugin to read a password field is not a separate permission, then that is a much more serious problem than the lack of native translation. That's just a huge gaping security hole, full stop. If that is indeed how Firefox is designed, then the lack of native translation should be the least of your concerns.
that's the whole point I'm trying to make! goddamit stop working on assumption and hypothetical thinking I'm a lunatic, this is a real issue and the actual way firefox works, how do you think all password manager work?
We're not talking about password managers here, we're talking about spelling checkers. If a spelling checker can read passwords, then Firefox has a problem that that has nothing to do with spelling checkers or password managers. You cannot safely use any plugin.
Now, it's possible that Firefox does indeed have this very serious problem, I don't know. But I think it's much more likely that the FF engineers did the obvious thing and excluded password fields from being accessed by plugins by default if they can access text fields. If this were not the case, the complaint would not have been, "FF doesn't have native spell checking", the complaint would have been, "FF has this gaping security hole through which you can drive an M1 Abrams tank."
you're not listening and you're having a very strong opinion on a topic you don't know about, which makes having a discussion frustrating, tedious and very unhackernews-like, the data is before your eyes, believe what you will.
but if you are unwilling to listen, then why ask and answer?
What permission is that? The only permission I see is "Access your data for all websites." If that includes passwords, then FF has much bigger problems than not having native spell checking.
There's slight difference in that in Firefox's case tech journals will be writing about it, everyone else will be talking about it and it will be on front page of HN. In the case of random extension going rogue it will likely get unnoticed for years and when it is finally noticed there's a small chance it will be picked by HN if planets align.
Maybe. Take a look at my exchange with u/LoSboccacc a parallel branch of this thread. If what he claims is correct (I don't know, but he seems pretty confident) then there is already a huge gaping security hole in FF that no one is talking about (AFAICT).
Don't believe everything you read on the internet.
Yes, the text on that page can be interpreted as supporting your position. Still, "Offer a password manager..." is not quite the same thing as "silently read all of your passwords and do whatever the extension wants with them..." I have a very hard time believing that the latter is the case and that no one has sounded the alarm on this yet.
Also, add-ons have been deprecated in favor of extensions.
Well, I mean, "do" is an English word, "de" is an Esperanto word and "di" is an Indonesian word. I'd rather they get marked as wrong in the wrong language. (If I'm mixing languages, which I do on my phone often enough in text messages, whatever; but then I don't care about spelling anyway.)
Weird, Chrome (specifically Electron) always gets confused when I speak English and Spanish all at once and Slack just starts to say everything I spell in English is wrong, it kinda annoys me. I don't think I have experienced this on Firefox.
Whether it is on Chrome, Firefox, Android or in my text editor, I'll always disable spell checking. I am also not a native english speaker and seeing those red underlines everywhere is just way too annoying for me.
All text-based input fields. Like this text-area element I am typing in now. But also for elements with the contentEditable attribute set to true.
This is one of the features I appreciate a lot. I am not a native speaker of the English language, and I sometimes mix British English and USA English, and the spell-checker helps me to write consistently better messages.
I myself (not a native speaker) am very pedantic about setting all my software to enUS and turn all spell checking off. (I can't even stand the linter underline in VS for example, it ruins my focus, especially when it underlines as I type and then lags before disappearing at the end of the word)
The only place where I use spellcheck is e-mail at work to avoid typos.
Over the years I've learned to proofread my messages before sending them and touch typing helps a ton as well.
Is there a good transition path for someone who uses a lot of Google products? In particular, I use Chrome across all my devices, and I depend on the ability to search my history/recent tabs/etc from anywhere. Will Firefox give me the same ability? Is the transition literally just: Install Firefox everywhere and start using it instead?
Firefox Sync let's you syncronize Bookmarks, Open tabs, Logins, History, Add-ons and Preferences across devices by logging in once with username password
If you click on the 'x hours ago' part of the comment next to the username you will get a parent link and can then reply to and save individual comments.
As long as you use it everywhere in the same way you presently use Chrome everywhere, yes. You can also import a certain amount (history & bookmarks, not, I think, current & recent tabs) to get started.
> Is the transition literally just: Install Firefox everywhere and start using it instead?
Yep. I did this about a year ago. You have to create a Mozilla account (if you haven't already) in order to sync your tabs and history across devices, but that should be a given.
I find the Firefox sync a bit clunky compared to Chromes though. I think Chrome sends udpates to Google on each change whereas Firefox polls and updates on a schedule which means sometimes if you put a device to sleep (or if you're on iOS and the app gets suspended) your history and tab state won't be propagated and it'll be missing on your other devices which can be frustrating when you're away from those devices.
Agreed to what everyone else said, but to me the killer feature of Firefox Sync is that you can send tabs from one browser to another, so I can find links on my work computer and ship them directly to my home computer or phone to read later, and they'll just show up when it syncs next.
I'm actually not sure if this is a native Chrome feature, but I can instantly send tabs to my other devices with right click > "send to your devices" > list of devices with a Google account signed in (Which is my phone and laptop for me on my desktop).
I just tried this. Interestingly I'd left it on v68 and it cooked my MBP, fans all on max immediately. When I updated to 70 it seems to work perfectly. CPU temp in the 40s. Gonna leave it on in the background and see if it suddenly spikes.
That's a slightly worrying precedent, they're calling the way to diaable certain bits of obnoxiousness (the header bar in Tree Style Tabs comes to mind) "legacy", which is usually a precursor to removal.
Is there a new method available/forthcoming, or is this more control planned to be wrenched out of user's hands?
It is an opt-in system. They're not making you use it and you don't lose anything by choosing not to opt-in. What exactly are they doing that you would consider "shilling"?
Guess we are dealing with purists here. Mind you that Chromium is free and open-source just like MySQL. A strategical move by the community to fork MySQL to MariaDB to ensure it remained free and open from the tech giant after it was acquired by Oracle. How Brave is any different? It made a similar move. Some people hate crypto. Fine. Personally I've never used the Brave crypto. Perhaps FF 70 has completely fixed its performance problem, sure, happy to switch. But before that really happens Brave is still a viable interim solution.
The issue is the engine. There are few big engines out there and chromium is taking a lot of the market.
The issue with this is that they could start controlling the standards and everyone would have to follow behind instead of everyone working and doing what’s best for consumers.
While chromium is open source, that doesn’t mean they have to accept merges from the community. It only means that they have to provide the source code. Yes it can be forked, but now you have to maintain or develop your engine. If they’re the dominant ones and are setting standards, that won’t help much.
By using another one you are helping keep a neutral ground.
I don't know about other usages, but energy consumption while using YouTube is important to me (usually have something playing while I work) so I just did a quick measurement.
Safari 13.0.2 versus Firefox 70.0 versus Chrome 77.0
Playing the same YouTube video at the same quality (1080p) and watching Energy Impact in Activity Monitor while the video played, I saw averages of: Safari used 20, Firefox used 45, Chrome used 45.
So on that task at least Safari is still king, but Firefox is on par with Chrome.
You could try a plugin which forces h264 Youtube. Just about anything made in the last decade has mature hardware support for decoding h264, but not necessarily for VP8/9. This may be what's going on here.
More work is planned to reduce the energy usage for scrolling and full screen video. Though I guess for your example you don't watch things fullscreen.
Anyway, I imagine that's the price to pay for being crossplatform. You can't implement everything for every platform. Safari only has to work on macOS/iOS.
Speaking for Chrome's implementation, efficiently rendering video on macOS does require CALayer compositing, but it's not sufficient.
Only certain types of decoded frames can be efficiently scanned out (different from the types that can be used efficiently in OpenGL compositing). Actually entering the most efficient fullscreen video mode requires some magic. Matching macOS behavior exactly when a fallback to OpenGL compositing is required can be difficult (eg. colorspace bugs can result in flickering).
I have not looked at the new code in Firefox, but I would expect that not all of the benefit would be realized in a first release. In any case it's a huge undertaking to support a single platform; congrats to the team for making it happen!
Safari does not support vp8 or vp9 when playing youtube, and youtube serves h264 instead. h264 is less efficient in terms of compression ratio (more to download for the same quality), but h264 is decoded in hardware on OSX, and VP8 or VP9 isn't, which explains what you see.
This is why, for example, Safari does not have 4k video on Youtube, while being perfectly capable of playing 4k videos in general.
Depending on the machine, VP9 can be decoded in hardware on Firefox on Windows, but chip support is limited.
All that said, we're working on our video playback performance as we speak, especially on OSX (because it was so bad a few release back), but also in general.
I don't know what iina is, but youtube-dl + mpv mentioned by Angeo34 does exactly that (stream videos without pre-downloading them). Youtube-dl just gets the stream URL and mpv plays it. And it's easy to use, just:
Last I checked it was looking like they would now be as "good" as Chrome, which is much worse than Safari. Hopefully that improved or will soon improve.
Recently switched from Safari to Firefox because of the awful extensions environment in Safari but definitely missing the battery life. Really wish one browser could just get everything right
There are other options (paid ones) that are equal —or even better since they are quite automatic— than ublock.
The only two things I'm missing in safari to be hones are:
- A no-script extension or similar.
- Sync part of my work is on a no macOS machines I don't have safari there, so no sync. I partially overcome this with bookmaster for bookmarks, but I still missing tabs and read it later list. However, firefox doesn't have this later feature on desktop —and I don't why.
Firefox Sync syncs your tabs, bookmarks, passwords, etc. Your read it later list is synced through Pocket (which is owned by Mozilla). They exist on desktop and mobile.
Yes, Nightly is (I'm simplifying a bit but it's generally true) release + a few weeks of patches + different default settings, sometimes experimental things enabled, etc.
I'm running Nightly on OSX and I confirm all those improvements are there, but more are coming.
This is what I am most excited about. I have been using the improvements through nightly since they were released, I think little more than a month, and I couldn't be happier. I'd hate to have to use Chrome and I welcome the competition to webkit.
i am very very eager to test and use this. FF is my main driver but it's a heat machine on my mac 10.11.6. I wonder if i gain something to upgrade my macOS (4g ram :()
Love Firefox. The philosophy, its snappiness, its many add-ons, the UI. - Glad to have an alternative to Chrome! Keep up the good work, Mozilla & Firefox team.
Day to day tasks like browsing the DOM, debug, networking, are top notch in both Chrome and FF, haven't found anything infuriating in FF devtools, they are very serious in having snappy and useful experience.
Recently switched my work (full stack web) Macbook to Firefox and I'm pleasantly surprised by how capable FF's dev-tools are compared to Chrome. I was expecting it to be a much more difficult transition. Still running Chrome on an iMac at home (we use a lot of Chromecast there, so I imagine switching will be a bit more painful) but would like to divest from Google where reasonable.
Does anyone know of what useful/killer features chrome dev tools have that ff doesn't? I switched to ff full time a few years ago and only open chrome for testing sites. The only thing I notice is that they have slightly different habits as to where they jump in the html when you are using the inspect feature. The only killer Firefox "feature" I can think of is an extension which is much more recent -- eval villain (https://www.hurricanelabs.com/blog/making-easy-dom-xss-actua...).
My experience is that Chromium DevTools are much more polished than Firefox's. For instance, the network tab is a pain to use with FF on a small screen because the columns have a large default width, so the Method column ("GET") is as large as the URL path column. And you can't resize them. Chromium has a better default, and I can resize them. If I view the detail of a request, pressing Esc will close the details view in Chromium, while it will toggle the console in FF. Even with the mouse, at first I struggled to find how to close the details with FF (the toggling icon is not part of the toggled window, it's next to the filter field!).
Some of those updates are to catch up to Chrome's developer tools. If I were in charge of Firefox, I would honestly have them hire a developer or two to focus solely on the Developer Tools. I'm sure there's many things that browser developer tools could do that we have not even scratched the surface of. I prefer Firefox overall, only use Chrome due to manager only looking at my work on Chrome (it will be deployed in a WebKit container). The DOM Breakpoint feature is one I found out this week about in Chrome, glad it's now in Firefox.
Firefox has an entire team dedicated to developer tools, fwiw. I'm not sure whether your suggestion was "one or two more, in addition to the 7 or 8 already working on it", or "one or two more, instead of the 0 working on it now"...
I'd happily add more people to the mix yeah, had no concept of how many were working on it currently though, I assumed some people worked on it but not dedicated. As I wrote my comment I realized that kind of tooling is not necessarily easy to work on potentially.
They spent the past few years rewriting them to allow them to build on it more quickly and encourage outside contributions. They finished that a while ago and have been ramping up new features quickly, and some exciting things are coming. For example: https://gist.github.com/jasonLaster/1e220992c294a571dd9b59ab...
Wow, blown away by how much better the new password manager is! If they add support for custom fields on each login, this could almost completely replace my need for a 3rd party solution.
Can't speak for Android, but for iOS Firefox has an app which does all the proper hooking into system autofill to be able to fill your passwords browsers/apps.
(There's an Android app, too. I'm just not familiar with Android's affordances for that sort of thing so I can't really comment on how it works.)
With a previous update 1-2 years ago, the password manager seemed to lose the ability to force-create and edit new items, which is necessary if you are using it as a general purpose password manager, or for sites that stubbornly refused to play nice. I switched to LastPass, which worked out fairly well, with the family option, so that my spouse and I can share subsets of passwords with each other. But this FF update does look like they've fixed that issue.
Does it only support passwords? I actually use 1Password for quite a bit of information. (Credit cards, bank accounts, email accounts, servers, and random memberships)
personally im trying to move away from keeping everything in one basket but maybe there is some benefit to having a password manager built in vs a 3rd party extension? less attack area?
earlier in this year I switched from bitwarden (which I would still recommend) to keepass because I wanted to fill desktop passwords... but there is the added benefit that you actually don't need a browser extension if you don't want to. instead ive been using the autotype feature that can be run from a hotkey.
I would have wished a world where both the chromium project and Mozilla would collaborate to a unified JS compiler instead of having two separate implementations. How faster would have JS been? How more featureful and less buggy?
But without their own js compiler, chrome couldn't randomly add/deprecate features! It's not like Mozilla existed first and was open source back when Chrome launched. Oh wait, it was open sourced 10 years before Chrome launched! So yeah, I blame greed.
On the contrary, I'd say that competition has been good for all involved. For such a maligned language that was born in a little over a week, JavaScript is better and faster than it has any right to be.
The amount of resources that have gone into improving JavaScript is amazing. I just wonder what some other languages would look like now with that kind of attention.
Only a week? And I would slap python 3 right on top of that. Despite the language being inherently messy and fully dynamic (similar to js), there are tons of static analysis tools, compilers, alternate run times, IDEs, etc.
Edit: the "only a week?" question was genuine, it wasn't meant to be tongue in cheek.
"There was a lot of internal pressure to pick one language as soon as possible. Python, Tcl, Scheme itself were all possible candidates. So Eich had to work fast. He had two advantages over the alternatives: freedom to pick the right set of features, and a direct line to those who made the calls. Unfortunately, he also had a big disadvantage: no time. Lots of important decisions had to be made and very little time was available to make them. JavaScript, a.k.a. Mocha, was born in this context. In a matter of weeks a working prototype was functional, and so it was integrated into Netscape Communicator."
Looks like it was pretty quick but maybe not just one week. Looks like Python was actually considered, but bear in mind that this was 25 years ago. Python 3 certainly wasn't out yet and the available tool ecosystem was much more limited.
Do some elementary, Wikipedia-level research — Python was at 1.3 then if I recall correctly. As I’ve written many times, the management order was “make it look like Java”, so none of the languages you mentioned was practical. None was practical anyway in terms of portability and safety from Windows 3.1 to Mac CodeWarrior to a number of Unixes that still mattered to Netscape sales. See/hear also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905155. See also https://devchat.tv/js-jabber/124-jsj-the-origin-of-javascrip... — transcript below the fold.
Speaking as a member of one of the many W3C working groups, I would say that it isn't desirable. When designing a standard, we want to have multiple competing implementations of the standard to ensure it is well defined and understood by users.
Should there be one implementation, we wouldn't be able to say with confidence that we have succeeded for that goal.
Your argument is moot, nothing prevent V8 to make two competitive implementations of a feature. With mozilla ressources focused on not duplicating effort, they would even have resources for making 3 or 4 compretitive implementations per JS proposals.
Because the interpreter pipeline shares code and data structures [0]: a couple of examples from the link below:
> The Baseline Interpreter uses the same frame layout as the Baseline JIT, but we’ve added some interpreter-specific fields to the frame.
> Because the Baseline Interpreter and JIT are so similar, a lot of the code generation code can be shared too. To do this, we added a templated BaselineCodeGen base class with two derived classes:
- BaselineCompiler: used by the Baseline JIT to compile a script’s bytecode to machine code.
- BaselineInterpreterGenerator: used to generate the Baseline Interpreter code.
> The Baseline Interpreter sits between the C++ interpreter and the Baseline JIT and has elements from both. It executes all bytecode instructions with a fixed interpreter loop (like the C++ interpreter). In addition, it uses Inline Caches to improve performance and collect type information (like the Baseline JIT).
Including elements [of code] from both would be considerably harder in another language.
If you read closely it appears the interpreter is "generated" - that it, it's not written directly in C++ or anything at all, but is instead an interpreter emitted by the JIT compiler!
I noticed that firefox (dev edition) got rid of possibility to disable update notifications. I prefer my browser to be updated from repository rather than by itself. Did anyone has the same issue or found some workaround?
"The discussion about the method for disabling updates has been had over and over already, there is nothing left to say about it, and the change will not be reverted. You've been given workarounds for your problem. Please do not reopen this bug or file any others asking the same thing."
> Firefox 70 introduces three new properties related to text decoration/underline:
> text-decoration-thickness: sets the thickness of lines added via text-decoration.
> text-underline-offset: sets the distance between a text decoration and the text it is set on. Bear in mind that this only works on underlines.
> text-decoration-skip-ink: sets whether underlines and overlines are drawn if they cross descenders and ascenders. The default value, auto, causes them to only be drawn where they do not cross over a glyph. To allow underlines to cross glyphs, set the value to none.
I'm so excited for these. Implementing sane underlines for headers has been a pain in the ass for far too long. Writers rejoice!
That's true, but if I used all CSS properties with this amount of coverage it would cause a lot of extra work for very little gain. If this is something that really gets your goat, and you use Firefox, perhaps it's worth it to scratch the itch, but otherwise pretty useless currently.
But if you'd otherwise use border-bottom hacks, this is a good reason to stop doing those and just have Chrome users live with the not-terrible default underline until Chrome supports those properties as well.
It'll be nice to simplify underline links tremendously once that becomes implemented in IE/Edge & Safari. The existing methods for avoiding underlines overlapping text descenders like Tufte-CSS's method (https://github.com/edwardtufte/tufte-css) are kinda crazy looking, and also cause the occasional bug with text highlighting.
Do people actually want it? Technological limitation or not, this is how things have been both in print and digital for as long as I can remember. Not to mention handwriting. I still find the non-overlapping underline weird (even if kind of neat).
I think people do; it's popular enough that many people implement it, not just Tufte-CSS, it was one of the first things I added to gwern.net once I saw it demoed, I believe Medium also does it, and no one's complained to me that they really like the overlapping obscuration.
I really like the overlapping underline. Well, really I like the non-broken underline, which happens to overlap with descenders.
If the underline indicating a link breaks, it looks like there are two adjacent links. To check if this is the case, I have to mouseover both the link before and after the break, and compare the URLs with my eyes.
I find this a much greater annoyance then I do the overlapping underlining.
>If the underline indicating a link breaks, it looks like there are two adjacent links
Ah that's what that is. I've seen a few like that and wondered why there were two identical links next to each other not thinking it was underline style.
I wonder if the default values for offset and thickness will respect those declared in the font. And also whether sub-pixel values are allowed? I don’t know how many fonts declare these values, but it would be a shame not to use information that provides values tailored to the font in use.
the Times and Arial elements get different underlines.
(Safari and Chrome don't do this, they ignore the font's properties and use an arbitrary underline of their own -- which differs between the two, Chrome's being somewhat thicker.)
* "Always" may not be strictly true, but it's certainly been a long time.
I use it to sync passwords with my phone. I like that I can use a fingerprint to unlock the file on my phone (instead of passphrase). I used to put silly passwords on sites I didn't care about (variants on a common password), but now I systematically generate a random password for all sites because there is no loss of convenience.
The dev tool improvements all seem good. Still no support for inline code edits, which means JS debugging will still be something of a pain, but strengthening Firefox's position as one of the better tools for debugging and prototyping CSS.
> Web socket inspector - In Firefox DevEdition, the Network monitor now has a new “Messages” panel, which appears when you are monitoring a web socket connection (i.e. a 101 response)
Yay, this is great news. Thanks guys! Nice to not have to revert to Chrome for websocket debugging.
I’m surprised though to see new CSS features so prominently in the announcement. Doesn’t this add unwanted additional fragmentation to browser CSS support?
A cosmetic feature like that naively seems better implemented with a library rather than folding it straight into one particular browser, but maybe I’m witnessing the process of text-underline-thickness being cemented in the standard after years of such library-based support?
Does FF use a different cert-store than os? I've frequently had to fiddle with os/app cert-stores to get them to trust. Not just import the cert but the signer too, some times on both sides. I'll likely hit this issue when I upgrade.
It does have it's own cert store. You can test your sites with testssl.sh [1] to see if they validate correctly. It only depends on openssl and bash. If you have your own self signed CA/certs, then you would have to import them into FF.
Turns out this was an issue with Firefox's automatic certificate selection logic. I changed it to ask me every time instead of automatically selecting certs, and once it saves my selection it's back to normal.
I'm not sure how that changed in this release, but it's at least resolvable.
I recently switched to firefox to give it a try. Does anyone else 2x-3x their video playback and notice the audio distortion in FF on mac? I've tried to find some discussion or workarounds for it, but no dice. Hoping that maybe the renderer in this release might help a little.
> Lastly, Core Animation allows us to move rendered content around in the window cheaply. This is great for efficient scrolling. (Our current compositor does not yet make use of this capability, but future work in WebRender will take advantage of it.)
Oh I am so excited about this! Where can I follow along with this development?
This is great news! I tried to switch to firefox to do my (frontend) development in, but I noticed serious slowdowns compared to Chrome with multiple tabs open. Going to give this another try!
My message to the team would be: Please bring back the shader editor in devtools.
In a previous release, we had access to live reloading shader editor, which was really useful in my case, developing real time WebGL apps. It was a truly nice developer feature.
Pinch-to-zooooooooom!!!!!!!!!! Finally. I will definitely try Firefox again for a week or so, and see how it manages, battery-wise, compared to Safari.
I don't see any mention of this. I made some about:config changes before and got pinch zoom working on Firefox 68, but it only zooms 10% for each discrete pinch gesture I make. Did they update it to be better than this?
What's the state of saving & autofilling credit card info? That's the one thing that keeps me going back to chrome (rather than typing in my card by hand).
There are some bugs on this that look quite stale, and they don't seem interested in finishing support, and its disabled by default..
It's not on Chrome's level, but it does have autofill. I hope that is next on their agenda. I love how Chrome prompts for security code and generates based on that.
I switched over to FF recently and just use Chrome for password generation, but looks like I can switch for good.
467 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 336 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/kimsey0/FirefoxAutoDict
Here’s an article by Mozilla stating the power of default settings:
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/when-it-comes-to-pr...
e: immaigne people down-voting facts https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/-particle-chr...
> That's just a huge gaping security hole
> If that is indeed how Firefox is designed
that's the whole point I'm trying to make! goddamit stop working on assumption and hypothetical thinking I'm a lunatic, this is a real issue and the actual way firefox works, how do you think all password manager work?
here look yourself https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/permission-request-mess...
and guess what permission the language extension need?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-spe...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21323832
We're not talking about password managers here, we're talking about spelling checkers. If a spelling checker can read passwords, then Firefox has a problem that that has nothing to do with spelling checkers or password managers. You cannot safely use any plugin.
Now, it's possible that Firefox does indeed have this very serious problem, I don't know. But I think it's much more likely that the FF engineers did the obvious thing and excluded password fields from being accessed by plugins by default if they can access text fields. If this were not the case, the complaint would not have been, "FF doesn't have native spell checking", the complaint would have been, "FF has this gaping security hole through which you can drive an M1 Abrams tank."
you're not listening and you're having a very strong opinion on a topic you don't know about, which makes having a discussion frustrating, tedious and very unhackernews-like, the data is before your eyes, believe what you will.
but if you are unwilling to listen, then why ask and answer?
What permission is that? The only permission I see is "Access your data for all websites." If that includes passwords, then FF has much bigger problems than not having native spell checking.
> Access your data for all websites
> The extension can read the content of any web page you visit as well as data you enter into those web pages, such as usernames and passwords.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21336440
Yes, the text on that page can be interpreted as supporting your position. Still, "Offer a password manager..." is not quite the same thing as "silently read all of your passwords and do whatever the extension wants with them..." I have a very hard time believing that the latter is the case and that no one has sounded the alarm on this yet.
Also, add-ons have been deprecated in favor of extensions.
Edit: I commented on Bugzilla I hope everyone does the same.
This is one of the features I appreciate a lot. I am not a native speaker of the English language, and I sometimes mix British English and USA English, and the spell-checker helps me to write consistently better messages.
I myself (not a native speaker) am very pedantic about setting all my software to enUS and turn all spell checking off. (I can't even stand the linter underline in VS for example, it ruins my focus, especially when it underlines as I type and then lags before disappearing at the end of the word)
The only place where I use spellcheck is e-mail at work to avoid typos. Over the years I've learned to proofread my messages before sending them and touch typing helps a ton as well.
This should give pretty noticeable speed and battery improvements on Retina Macbooks.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/70.0/releasenotes/#new
> Passwords can now be imported from Chrome on macOS in addition to existing support for Windows
https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/70.0/releasenotes/
Yes, each (bookmarks, history, passwords, tabs ) can be turned on or off per device basis.
“How Firefox Sync keeps your data safe even if TLS fails” https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-firefox-sync-keeps-...
Yep. I did this about a year ago. You have to create a Mozilla account (if you haven't already) in order to sync your tabs and history across devices, but that should be a given.
I find the Firefox sync a bit clunky compared to Chromes though. I think Chrome sends udpates to Google on each change whereas Firefox polls and updates on a schedule which means sometimes if you put a device to sleep (or if you're on iOS and the app gets suspended) your history and tab state won't be propagated and it'll be missing on your other devices which can be frustrating when you're away from those devices.
Yes.
> transition literally just: Install Firefox everywhere and start using it instead?
Almost. You will have to create a firefox account and export/import your bookmarks. That's it.
Only minor gripe is userChrome.css seems to not be used now.
Set this option to true: toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets
Is there a new method available/forthcoming, or is this more control planned to be wrenched out of user's hands?
https://brave.com/brave-rewards/
That entire industry is a dumpster fire of greed, fraud, and misrepresentation.
Whoever are pushing them - including Telegram that I otherwise like - are damaging their reputation in my eyes.
My gripe there is that it started showing push notifications of ads!!! Once I blocked all its notifications everything went to normality.
Why not use Firefox?
>takes crypto donation hostage and opens funds in other people's names (i.e. scams crypto to artificially create demand for that BAT)
If you use Brave you literally are part of the problem.
The issue with this is that they could start controlling the standards and everyone would have to follow behind instead of everyone working and doing what’s best for consumers.
While chromium is open source, that doesn’t mean they have to accept merges from the community. It only means that they have to provide the source code. Yes it can be forked, but now you have to maintain or develop your engine. If they’re the dominant ones and are setting standards, that won’t help much.
By using another one you are helping keep a neutral ground.
The difference between MySQL and MariaDB is that you have PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQLite, MSSQL among a bunch of others, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_relational_datab...
So the issue isn’t forking or not, but the fact that it’s still close enough that gives chromium the competitive edge and could kill the market.
Safari 13.0.2 versus Firefox 70.0 versus Chrome 77.0
Playing the same YouTube video at the same quality (1080p) and watching Energy Impact in Activity Monitor while the video played, I saw averages of: Safari used 20, Firefox used 45, Chrome used 45.
So on that task at least Safari is still king, but Firefox is on par with Chrome.
~6,4W average in Safari 13.0.3
~8,6W average in Firefox 70
More work is planned to reduce the energy usage for scrolling and full screen video. Though I guess for your example you don't watch things fullscreen.
> Safari’s compositor is entirely Core Animation based; Safari basically skips step 2.
(Step 2 is "the Firefox “compositor” assembles Gecko layers to produce the rendering of the window")
Anyway, I imagine that's the price to pay for being crossplatform. You can't implement everything for every platform. Safari only has to work on macOS/iOS.
Speaking for Chrome's implementation, efficiently rendering video on macOS does require CALayer compositing, but it's not sufficient.
Only certain types of decoded frames can be efficiently scanned out (different from the types that can be used efficiently in OpenGL compositing). Actually entering the most efficient fullscreen video mode requires some magic. Matching macOS behavior exactly when a fallback to OpenGL compositing is required can be difficult (eg. colorspace bugs can result in flickering).
I have not looked at the new code in Firefox, but I would expect that not all of the benefit would be realized in a first release. In any case it's a huge undertaking to support a single platform; congrats to the team for making it happen!
This is why, for example, Safari does not have 4k video on Youtube, while being perfectly capable of playing 4k videos in general.
Depending on the machine, VP9 can be decoded in hardware on Firefox on Windows, but chip support is limited.
All that said, we're working on our video playback performance as we speak, especially on OSX (because it was so bad a few release back), but also in general.
I found this extension that forces FF to use H264 instead: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/
On my old MBP I'd rather consume more bandwidth than more more CPU.
Web Render might allow doing it properly, since the rendering is not on the CPU anymore.
iina is open source and have a lot of codec available.
I don't know if it change something on energy consumption, though.
The only two things I'm missing in safari to be hones are:
- A no-script extension or similar.
- Sync part of my work is on a no macOS machines I don't have safari there, so no sync. I partially overcome this with bookmaster for bookmarks, but I still missing tabs and read it later list. However, firefox doesn't have this later feature on desktop —and I don't why.
I'm running Nightly on OSX and I confirm all those improvements are there, but more are coming.
Many would argue that Chrome is an alternative to Firefox, given that Firefox predates Chrome as the first real viable browser alternative.
History sure does rhyme.
Of course this time the monopolists are also funding their "competition" in exchange for market share protection in other areas. So that's new.
You can resize them nowadays.
I also saw a comment from the dev team that they're "aware" of the need for such a feature but it's not on a road map yet.
Firefox's Lockwise App (on android) leaves a lot demanding though.
(There's an Android app, too. I'm just not familiar with Android's affordances for that sort of thing so I can't really comment on how it works.)
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/lockwise/
earlier in this year I switched from bitwarden (which I would still recommend) to keepass because I wanted to fill desktop passwords... but there is the added benefit that you actually don't need a browser extension if you don't want to. instead ive been using the autotype feature that can be run from a hotkey.
BTW chrome 78 will be released today too!
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/history/
The amount of resources that have gone into improving JavaScript is amazing. I just wonder what some other languages would look like now with that kind of attention.
Edit: the "only a week?" question was genuine, it wasn't meant to be tongue in cheek.
https://auth0.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-javascript/
Looks like it was pretty quick but maybe not just one week. Looks like Python was actually considered, but bear in mind that this was 25 years ago. Python 3 certainly wasn't out yet and the available tool ecosystem was much more limited.
https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/2012/02/mco2012020...
It links to a video interview with Brendan Eich:
https://youtu.be/IPxQ9kEaF8c
Should there be one implementation, we wouldn't be able to say with confidence that we have succeeded for that goal.
> The Baseline Interpreter uses the same frame layout as the Baseline JIT, but we’ve added some interpreter-specific fields to the frame.
> Because the Baseline Interpreter and JIT are so similar, a lot of the code generation code can be shared too. To do this, we added a templated BaselineCodeGen base class with two derived classes: - BaselineCompiler: used by the Baseline JIT to compile a script’s bytecode to machine code. - BaselineInterpreterGenerator: used to generate the Baseline Interpreter code.
[0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/08/the-baseline-interpreter-a...
> The Baseline Interpreter sits between the C++ interpreter and the Baseline JIT and has elements from both. It executes all bytecode instructions with a fixed interpreter loop (like the C++ interpreter). In addition, it uses Inline Caches to improve performance and collect type information (like the Baseline JIT).
Including elements [of code] from both would be considerably harder in another language.
If you read closely it appears the interpreter is "generated" - that it, it's not written directly in C++ or anything at all, but is instead an interpreter emitted by the JIT compiler!
Does anyone know if servo is supposed to be related to Firefox in some way, or if it is always meant to be independent?
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1576400
"The discussion about the method for disabling updates has been had over and over already, there is nothing left to say about it, and the change will not be reverted. You've been given workarounds for your problem. Please do not reopen this bug or file any others asking the same thing."
... who needs Microsoft?
> text-decoration-thickness: sets the thickness of lines added via text-decoration.
> text-underline-offset: sets the distance between a text decoration and the text it is set on. Bear in mind that this only works on underlines.
> text-decoration-skip-ink: sets whether underlines and overlines are drawn if they cross descenders and ascenders. The default value, auto, causes them to only be drawn where they do not cross over a glyph. To allow underlines to cross glyphs, set the value to none.
I'm so excited for these. Implementing sane underlines for headers has been a pain in the ass for far too long. Writers rejoice!
11% coverage, and almost all of that is iOS Safari.
> We have plans to start implementation work on this before the end of the year.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=785230...
If the underline indicating a link breaks, it looks like there are two adjacent links. To check if this is the case, I have to mouseover both the link before and after the break, and compare the URLs with my eyes.
I find this a much greater annoyance then I do the overlapping underlining.
Ah that's what that is. I've seen a few like that and wondered why there were two identical links next to each other not thinking it was underline style.
I'll save myself the hover now!
(Safari and Chrome don't do this, they ignore the font's properties and use an arbitrary underline of their own -- which differs between the two, Chrome's being somewhat thicker.)
* "Always" may not be strictly true, but it's certainly been a long time.
I use it to sync passwords with my phone. I like that I can use a fingerprint to unlock the file on my phone (instead of passphrase). I used to put silly passwords on sites I didn't care about (variants on a common password), but now I systematically generate a random password for all sites because there is no loss of convenience.
Heckin finally!
The dev tool improvements all seem good. Still no support for inline code edits, which means JS debugging will still be something of a pain, but strengthening Firefox's position as one of the better tools for debugging and prototyping CSS.
Yay, this is great news. Thanks guys! Nice to not have to revert to Chrome for websocket debugging.
This is great news. What a huge security hole that has been.
I’m surprised though to see new CSS features so prominently in the announcement. Doesn’t this add unwanted additional fragmentation to browser CSS support?
A cosmetic feature like that naively seems better implemented with a library rather than folding it straight into one particular browser, but maybe I’m witnessing the process of text-underline-thickness being cemented in the standard after years of such library-based support?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-decora...
That said, yeah, they're all off the level 4 working draft, so they're standards-track at least.
[1] - https://github.com/drwetter/testssl.sh
The algorithm we use it not the best (and I think it's not the only cause of bad quality here), and we're investigating what to do.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427267 is where we track this issue.
Oh I am so excited about this! Where can I follow along with this development?
In a previous release, we had access to live reloading shader editor, which was really useful in my case, developing real time WebGL apps. It was a truly nice developer feature.
There are some bugs on this that look quite stale, and they don't seem interested in finishing support, and its disabled by default..
I switched over to FF recently and just use Chrome for password generation, but looks like I can switch for good.