31
votes
Firefox 64 release notes
For general users: https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/64.0/releasenotes/
For web developers: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/12/firefox-64-released/
For general users: https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/64.0/releasenotes/
For web developers: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/12/firefox-64-released/
The tab management features seem really useful!
Yeah! I'm happy with how the tab stuff is progressing especially with respect to WebExtensions. I use Tree Style Tab and it's great to see it working with the new features.
In the web developer release notes, they link to a post by the Tree Style Tab dev, the summary of which is: now addons can interoperate better when creating custom menus. So for example if you have multiple tab-related addons installed, they can each create context menus that will work as expected, without a crazy amount of effort on the developers' part to write a special case for every other possible addon they'd want to interoperate with.
Just don't. If you want to start a Chrome vs Firefox browser war shitfest, do it elsewhere.
Edit: Reminder to users: you can press "Label" on comments to mark them accordingly if you think they don't contribute to conversation.
I'm not trying to start a browser "war", I'm just pointing it out. There is a very clear bias against Chrome (and Google in general), and I want to make sure people are informed. I don't feel I've shown any signs of aggression, just pointed it out and you're shutting me down and cussing me out. Calm down.
Both Google and Mozilla have done great things for the web, and I feel they both should be recognized. Not just the one.
And Vivaldi had it for months, and in Vivaldi you can group tabs and ...
It's pointless to talk about Chrome in this Firefox thread. If you want to talk about other browsers, create separate thread about them.
The bias against Google (and Facebook) is natural consequence of the population here. Most people here work in tech, have above average education and care about privacy much more than ordinary people. And Google is the biggest personal data storage we've ever seen.
And that's great. I'm actually a huge fan of Vivaldi, definitely my second choice right now after Chrome, but it changes frequently. But you know as well as I do that a thread about different browsers (especially regarding tab management) would be short-lived, and possibly end up labeled for "malice". I didn't top-level comment about other browsers, that'd be rude, but in this context, I see nothing wrong with pointing it out.
Also this:
Is very condescending. I work in tech too, I just happen to like Chrome.
Frankly just pointing it out is not really useful. If there are reasons that one is better at having these sorts of features, that's way more interesting. Not all software that do the same thing will have the same set of features, that's expected and normal.
You're right, and that's fair.
I don't want to claim either is better, that's of course subjective. (most) Browsers always have some differentiating feature that others eventually copy. For example, Firefox has had scrolling tabs for a while now, and Chrome is just now about to add it. Same with Vivaldi's stacks (as Soptik pointed out).
Competition is great, my intent wasn't to put down Firefox. I realize the point of my comment was wasn't worth all this. There's more arguing going on rather than discussion about the topic at hand, and that's entirely my fault. I'm sorry.
That's fine, it happens! Your comment is actually useful, it just needed a bit more to it. And it is actually the other commenter that made this into a flame-ish thread, not you.
This one being about Firefox need not mean that no other browser can be mentioned and compared to Firefox. It should be more substantive than "Chrome had this", but there is no reason to banish it altogether. It's useful and interesting when it has some depth to it.
I'm not the commenter you're replying to, but I also don't like your imperative tone and personally don't welcome it here.
Been really happy with firefox lately. So many new good features and its so fast.
I'm loving it too. Just found out about the Lockbox app on iOS and so that ends my search for a free open-source password manager. I'm hoping they make the Notes app available on iOS (or maybe just another incentive to switch to Android).
FYI, Bitwarden is a great free open-source password manager.
I don't know how I haven't heard of this before. I've literally been looking for exactly this. I think what Firefox is offering gets the job done for me as well but I'll be checking this out. Thank you!
Live bookmarks was one absurd feature, IDK how you can make use of it unless you only follow a handful feeds and that's it. But I don't get why the preview needs to go. Doesn't anybody check how frequent the feed is published or whether the feed is valid, proper RSS/Atom?
I have two major gripes with Firefox: data integrity and decisions about features. Removing fields from bookmarks for some reason, removing the RSS preview, the whole WebExtensions kerfuffle; I don't like these. We don't gain much for this. Feature decisions come from above, apparently. Not nice. Also, Firefox should take data integrity more seriously. I've lost my open tabs on multiple occasions, and now I keep bookmarks instead. On one occasion, just because I accidentally run FF 52 (former ESR) instead of 61, my whole user profile was reset, all bookmarks all history all everything deleted w/o notice. And it suddenly propagated through Sync to my phone. Luckily I had a recent backup. Or I'd have lost thousands of bookmarks collected in years.
I am in the market for an alternative browser. I've tried Qutebrowser for a while, but it was consuming too much memory, and had concurrency problems (say an action in one tab could affect another tab sometimes, I don't recall the exact details tho). I want Next, but it's not really stable yet, and does not run on Debian Stable. Ungoogled Chromium is interesting, but I can't build it on my computer.
What keeps me using Firefox is the fact that Mozilla is privacy conscious and that Firefox Sync is very useful. I probably will keep using FF on Android, but on desktop, as a "power user", I don't feel prioritised, but even ignored instead.
Ouch that sucks, just noticed this particular change. Someone made this nice Feed Preview addon in response.
I exported my bookmarks when they announced this change a few months ago, and looking at the exported data, saw that the field was filled with low quality auto-generated snippets generated by Firefox. AFAIK it wasn't even exposed in the GUI. Did you notice otherwise?
There was no way this wasn't going to be contentious. Downsides are lost functionality for long-term users. Upsides are security and speed. By sandboxing extensions into their own processes, they can be rendered separately from and in parallel with webpage content and the rest of the GUI. Also enables the permissions system for extensions.
On an older machine that used to have random lag running Firefox, it became very smooth after they enabled multiple content processes, which the WebExtensions architecture was a prerequisite for.
I can't downplay the performance enhancements, I have a laptop with 4Gb ram and FF with many tabs plus my rather heavy Emacs only eat less than an eigth of that, whereas Chromium alone can use upwards of a gigabyte with a few tabs. Multiprocess Firefox is definitely nice. But the way an entire, bustling ecosystem was discarded for it was not nice. I can't really think of what could have been done to preserve that, but still, it was a big loss.
IIRC the usual bookmark pop up does not have a field for descriptions, but the bookmark editor (Ctrl Shift O) did have the field. I did not use it personally, but I can't see why it needs to go, creating backwards incompatibilities. Removing the UI for it could be fine, but why remove the data all together? At least allow those who used it to keep the data and maybe make an addon to manipulate or view it.
Maybe I am too sensitive to this, but I feel like they are too lax when treating end user data. And that I really dislike.
Would you care to elaborate?
Things like bookmarks, history, open tabs etc. are data that a user expressly generates, and a browser must be able to guarantee that they are never lost, maybe except the user opts out. I don't think it's that hard to do. They should survive the browser crashing or getting killed unexpectedly. I lost my open tabs many times with Firefox because of crashes (both OS and FF itself), and on one occasion I lost my user profile full of important bookmarks and tens of tabs, just because I ran, accidentally, Firefox 52 instead of 61, without a notice whatsoever. And it propagated immediately through sync, resetting practically my profile on the phone. Luckily I had a recent backup, so I could salvage years worth of bookmarks, settings for my extensions, personal settings in about:config, etc. That it, instead of notifying the user that the profile version is incompatible or making a new profile, just empties the default profile is completely unacceptable. That I can simply lose tens or hundreds of tabs at random is unacceptable. One shouldn't have to play minesweeper with this sort of stuff. But apparently that is not the priority at Mozilla.
You see this elsewhere too, where the software just goes ahead and destroys your data instead of bailing out like it should. XFCE or KDE configs work like that, for example. I've gone back to i3-wm because say when you move from Debian to Arch or NixOS you have to redo your XFCE config, can't expect things to work as they did. The panels get messed up, they keybindings, the language settings, even if the locales are there. Whereas i3 won't modify my config file or bash delete aliases because the aliased programs don't exist. Or git won't delete my commit history because the repo is from a few versions ago. And this has pushed me to using stuff like Emacs and i3 etc. where configuration will survive, and be version controllable (preferably plain text or code). The only thing that I am still using that has this sort of user hostility is Firefox, and I hope to be able to hop on an alternative soon (the Next browser is an interesting one).
(I'm a Mozilla employee)
I'm sorry that you had that experience. New versions of Firefox have always guaranteed backward compatibility with profiles from older versions (obviously, or you wouldn't be able to upgrade). Forward compatibility has never been guaranteed, but as you found out, is also not (yet) enforced either.
Good news: we've had our front-end architect working on a solution that I expect will take care of this scenario.
Hi! Thanks for your response! I absolutely appreciate what Mozilla does.
WRT this profile loss problem, I think the main problem is that a totally destructive operation happens with no confirmation. The user must have a chance to bail out and make backups. The solution you linked is nice, but it wouldn't work when say on Debian unstable I downgrade from Firefox release to Firefox ESR (which rather recently would've been ~61 & 52 respectively), because in both cases the
firefoxinstallation directories are similar (e.g./usr/bin/firefoxin both). And even if I'm misunderstanding that, still, there should be a way out before destructive operations. Firefox does ask me if I want to close multiple tabs, it can sure ask me before nuking my profile.Off topic, but did anyone read this as Starfox 64? Repeatedly? Probably just me, and I'm not sure why it is, but I've read the title at least a dozen times now and it still registers as "starfox" when I skim past it on the page.