Firefox 66 released [LWN.net]

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 19, 2019 18:17 UTC (Tue) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (1 responses)

"smoother scrolling" doesn't quite describe the new feature here. Firefox now avoids having the page content change position after you've scrolled down and newly loaded content appears above the viewport.

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 20, 2019 11:26 UTC (Wed) by zwol (guest, #126152) [Link]

It's personally gratifying to see this get done. I worked for Mozilla briefly about ten years ago (2008-2010ish). On my first day I asked David Baron how hard it would be to prevent pages from jumping around when stuff loads above your scroll position, and he gently encouraged me to tackle something easier as my first project.

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 19, 2019 18:38 UTC (Tue) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]

Wow this looks like one of the most impactful new releases in quite some time! Long list of useful improvements there. Most releases, there's one or two things that make me go "ok, that's cool I guess."

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 19, 2019 19:10 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (4 responses)

> Improved performance and reduced crash rates by doubling web content loading processes from 4 to 8

Interesting to read that increasing the number of threads reduced crash rates :) .

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 19, 2019 20:47 UTC (Tue) by MatejLach (guest, #84942) [Link]

I'd imagine because less tabs rely on one process, so when there's more processes, there's less tabs per one that could crash.

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 19, 2019 22:07 UTC (Tue) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link] (2 responses)

4 to 8: that can increase memory use ...

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 19, 2019 23:27 UTC (Tue) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (1 responses)

http://www.erahm.org/2019/03/13/doubling-the-number-of-co...

> Even on our worst-case-scenario stress test — AWSY which loads 100 pages in 30 tabs, repeated 3 times — we only saw a 6% increase in memory usage when turning on 8 content processes when compared to when we started the project.

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 22, 2019 9:30 UTC (Fri) by leromarinvit (subscriber, #56850) [Link]

Interesting to see what they consider a worst-case stress test (and, by extension, what would be considered typical usage). I guess I'm not a very typical user then, seeing as I currently have 47 tabs open - but only because I cleaned up most of my open tabs a few days ago. It's not uncommon for me to have several hundred...

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 19, 2019 22:30 UTC (Tue) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link] (10 responses)

> Extensions now store their settings in a Firefox database, rather than individual JSON files, making every site you visit faster

*quietly sobs into a pint*

I keep the settings for some of my extensions under version control, and I really enjoyed being able to create a symlink from the firefox profile directory to my repo.

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 20, 2019 18:49 UTC (Wed) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link] (7 responses)

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/1172/

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 20, 2019 19:17 UTC (Wed) by jeffcook (guest, #119964) [Link] (6 responses)

Seems a bit unfair. How much of a speed-up does the change really represent? Unless Firefox was reloading the settings from disk on each page load, it doesn't seem like keeping them in discrete files would cost much.

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 20, 2019 20:21 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

I think this is because we designed extensions as loading javascript in the page content, and the page renderer needs to be isolated. Thus I'd assume we start with a fresh context for each page for security reasons, and thus we launch the extension anew and it reads the data (via firefox interfaces) directly.

It's certainly true that the data could be read via some shared firefox mechanism from a config cacher or whatever to the renderer process, skipping the need to have a specialized datastore, but maybe this was easier to do?

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 21, 2019 1:41 UTC (Thu) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (3 responses)

If the extension has per-site settings then it's entirely believable files would be re-read on each page load.

But honestly, if Mozilla engineers make a change and claim it's because it makes things measurably faster, why wouldn't you give them the benefit of the doubt? Or at least go look in the relevant Bugzilla bugs to see what they say they did and measured, before casting doubt on it?

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 21, 2019 3:53 UTC (Thu) by sionescu (subscriber, #59410) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't doubt it makes things faster, only that making things somewhat faster was not worth losing the ability to manage configs through a version control system.

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 21, 2019 21:52 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Git has smudge filters to extract the relevant information for efficient storage in Git's object store. I assume someone has done something like that for sqlite databases somewhere. Not saying that it'd be easy since I assume there's one extension database, not one per extension.

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 22, 2019 14:27 UTC (Fri) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link]

(thread author here) so I for one don't actually claim that this feature wasn't worth the cost.

It will make Firefox even faster for all of its users. This is so welcome because what has been holding back Firefox's adoption for so long was its slow pre-Quantum user experience. So hurrah for that.

It will inconvenience me and the four other people in the world who care enough about their extension configurations to version them. Boo-hoo, but several people have pointed out that git has an answer to this. I had actually made up my mind to write a script that would transparently encode my JSON files as a database, and whenever an extension writes to the database, I get a (JSON) pull request by email which I can accept or not. But several commenters ruined my fun by pointing out that such a tool already exists.

I do this with git fairly frequently. For years I had maintained a script which automated the process of binary-searching a sequence of commits to find the one that introduced a bug. It started off as a shell script, then I rewrote it in ruby, then I rewrote it in python when I forgot ruby. Then somebody told me about git bisect. I should skim every single git man page at some point, I bet there are more gems.

(Speaking of which. April Fools' Day approaches. I'll leave this Markov-chain based git man page generator here so that people can torment their SVN-using friends: https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/)

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 21, 2019 7:56 UTC (Thu) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link]

I apologise, my comment wasn't intended as a snide remark about karkhaz's interesting use case.

Rather I meant it as an observation about how developers never can expose any api, whether intentional or unintentional, to users without exposing their product to either ossification or disapointment when the api is modified.

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 21, 2019 14:08 UTC (Thu) by ptman (subscriber, #57271) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe you can still dump the (sqlite?) database to a file and version control that dump?

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 21, 2019 15:02 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

This process can be automated with Git filters; for example:

http://share.find.coop/doc/tutorial_git.html#tutorial_git...

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 20, 2019 10:28 UTC (Wed) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link] (5 responses)

Really love the autoplay blocking, another defense against hostile webdesign.

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 20, 2019 13:29 UTC (Wed) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link] (4 responses)

Yes! This could be done via an about:config option, but there was no whitelist.

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 22, 2019 6:55 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (3 responses)

Now if only they'd extend that to autoplaying silent video, animated images, CSS animations…

I'm starting to miss SWF already. At least it had a stop button.

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 22, 2019 9:40 UTC (Fri) by leromarinvit (subscriber, #56850) [Link]

At least for videos (including silent ones), media.autoplay.default=1 and media.autoplay.allow-muted=false works for me. The only annoyance is that it breaks the player UI on many pages, since they expect the video to auto-play.

image.animation_mode=none should prevent animated GIFs from playing, though I haven't tried it. No idea about CSS animations.

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 22, 2019 10:57 UTC (Fri) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link]

I agree, I would rather have a media whitelist for sites like youtube, netflix, prime. Bonus points for not even loading the media.

This would be even more useful for mobile devices where data transfer is ridiculously expensive.

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 26, 2019 14:29 UTC (Tue) by higuita (guest, #32245) [Link]

it is not the same, but you have the add-on superstop, it will stop all javascript, animations and other trash. Recommended!

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 22, 2019 10:10 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (3 responses)

I am slightly split about tabs in the title bar, which is the default at least on Ubuntu. Some GNOME applications have taken to putting the sandwich menu button and similar buttons (for Firefox this would be back, forward, reload and so on) into the title bar. I am wondering whether that would have been nicer - and keeping a title bar and the separate tab bar, but hiding the URL field except when it is needed for typing something in.

If someone is thinking that it is good to see the URL to check that it is what it should be, I would say that those checks can possibly be done better by algorithms.

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 22, 2019 21:26 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> If someone is thinking that it is good to see the URL to check that it is what it should be, I would say that those checks can possibly be done better by algorithms.

And how on earth is the algorithm supposed to know what the url is supposed to be?

Pages re-direct and re-write urls all the time. IME AI is *useless* at knowing what I want (eg pretty much ALL Thunderbird scam warnings I see come up on legit emails that don't even have anything that looks scammy to me !!!).

I seriously would NOT trust ANY form of AI to check whether an URL "looks right".

Cheers,
Wol

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 25, 2019 21:18 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

Quite right. There's been URL-spoofing attacks (in *2019*!) that rely on big-name mobile browsers truncating the hostname from the wrong end. If a trillion-dollar AI company can't get that right, it's obviously the wrong approach.

Firefox 66 released

Posted Mar 26, 2019 6:52 UTC (Tue) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

> Quite right. There's been URL-spoofing attacks (in *2019*!) that rely on big-name mobile browsers truncating the hostname from the wrong end. If a trillion-dollar AI company can't get that right, it's obviously the wrong approach.

I wonder what percent of users would spot this though. I would be interested to hear a comment from a Firefox developer (roc?)

Client certificate support

Posted Mar 26, 2019 10:34 UTC (Tue) by morhippo (guest, #334) [Link] (1 responses)

Too bad firefox still does not support client certificates stored in the windows certificate repository (unlike chrome). This makes it impossible for many corporate users (like me) to use this as default browser. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1120350

I would love it if the mozilla organization put its focus on these basic things, please, instead of avantgarde things like " passwordless windows hello for windows 10"?

Client certificate support

Posted Mar 27, 2019 4:17 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

I expect it is more likely that Mozilla/Chrome etc will remove support for client certificates entirely (switching to Webauthn instead) than to put any effort into fixing the *terrible* UI they have or to add support for more use cases.