Firefox 91 released

[Posted August 10, 2021 by corbet]

The Firefox 91 release is available. Changes include stronger tracking-cookie protection, use of HTTPS within anonymous windows whenever possible, and more.

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 10, 2021 17:26 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (24 responses)

Heck. The tab buttons became bloated and the divider between them has disappeared. Is there a way to return them to normal?

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 10, 2021 17:29 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (14 responses)

Wow. The checkboxes in settings don't work either. And the font color in the drop-down URL list changed to unreadable (for me) blue.

I don't see how they could screw it up even more.

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 10, 2021 18:03 UTC (Tue) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]

My guess is you are a victim of whatever theme you are using (assuming a Linux desktop system)... and that your issues aren't present in a stock configuration... although admittedly, I haven't tried 91 yet.

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 10, 2021 18:26 UTC (Tue) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (3 responses)

Try with a new, clean profile. If it works, have fun diffing your old and fresh profiles!

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 10, 2021 18:28 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Yeah. Did just that. And applied https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix while I was doing that. It did restore some sanity, but the colors are still terrible.

Who the hell decided that teal color for buttons and fonts is a good idea? WTF is WRONG with this person?

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 10, 2021 20:23 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

And here I was, seeing the only major feature being Bloatware NTLM, and getting hopeful that this would be a release cycle where they didn't arbitrarily change things for the worse out of spite. Nope, they had to drop another silent-but-deadly one in the room. WCAG? Never heard of it.

Guess I'll just hold off on updating until a third party cleans up the mess after them.

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 11, 2021 2:31 UTC (Wed) by kenmoffat (subscriber, #4807) [Link]

ISTR that when I first hit this, a change of theme ameliorated things. On this machine, with 91.0esr I've got grey tabs with what I suppose is black text. It isn't as obvious as in the past which tab is the current tab. In particular it is much harder to find the active tab if you have more tabs than fit in the browser window and move sideways so that the active tab is no-longer visible.

Writing this from seamonkey which has a blue line above the active tab and proper dividers between them, which I think is how things used to be.

I see I'm using the System theme.

But apart from that it works well - just a shame that it needs to be patched to build on glibc-2.34.

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 11, 2021 1:34 UTC (Wed) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (8 responses)

Took me a couple of days to get used to the new tabs, but now it doesn't bother met at all.

No issues with font colors and checkboxes here (though I'm on Nightly). That doesn't sound like a deliberate change.

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 11, 2021 3:47 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (6 responses)

My problem with bloated-style tabs is that I simply can't distinguish them. I've tried them for a week, but I found myself undoing tab closing constantly because I clicked on "close" button for a wrong tab.

It was quantifyably worse for me. And I don't really get what are the supposed advantages.

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 11, 2021 13:51 UTC (Wed) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] (3 responses)

This won't be a solution for everyone, but here, I began using the Tree Style Tab (aka TST) extension some releases ago, and haven't looked back. It's a recommended extension so it gets the benefit of the closer cooperation with Mozilla that brings, and there's quite an active community around it, including other extensions that use its extensible interface.

The TST documentation then includes a userChrome.css recipe that users can choose to apply if they like, to get rid of either the native tabs only (leaving the tabbar for other content if desired), or the entire tabbar. The author does stress that this is at your own risk and doesn't really recommend it, but I've found that as long as I have other ways of switching tabs if I need them (like the control-tab keyboard shortcut or a tab-button extension such as Tab List), the extra space not having the tabbar frees up is more valuable to me than the risks. Plus worse-comes-to-worse, I could always delete or temporarily move the userChrome.css file if I needed to.

Like I said not for everyone, and I was initially skeptical, but it certainly changed my firefox usage, and I believe I first read about it in a comment such as this somewhere, so if I can pass that on...

Then you don't really have to care /what/ firefox does to its tabbar. =:^) (Well, as long as that userChrome.css hack works, but like I said TST is a recommended extension with a rather active community around it that Mozilla's obviously aware of and supports, so I don't consider that /too/ likely.)

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 11, 2021 19:28 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

I've tried it, but it doesn't map well onto my workflow. I rarely have more than 10 or so tabs, and TST ends up wasting a lot of screen space. I also don't like vertical tab tree.

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 12, 2021 2:41 UTC (Thu) by interalia (subscriber, #26615) [Link]

> I rarely have more than 10 or so tabs

What superpower is this and how do I get it?

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 12, 2021 9:25 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

The thing is, I don't (or didn't, see #3 below) often have double-digit-plus tabs open either, that actually being a big part of my initial skepticism, but I still found TST useful, even with just 2-4 tabs open most of the time, and I quickly discovered two factors that made it work /for/ /me/, plus a third "bonus" factor.

1) Hotkeys. In addition to the usual X/close button and the optional TST panel-toggle button, TST defaults to F1 (of course switchable using FF's normal hotkey management) to toggle it on and off. That's invaluable.

Additionally, one of TST's helper extensions (Tab Flip) allows toggling between the current and previous tabs. Along with a bit of CSS theming to color-code the previous tab (normally only the current tab is alt-colored) and flipping just by clicking the current tab to flip to the previous one, there's a default Shift-F2 hotkey for that as well (which I switched to simply F2, to match the F1 for TST itself). Anyone with a workflow involving repeated flipping between two tabs should find this useful, especially since the TST sidepanel doesn't have to be open to use the hotkey.

It didn't take long for those F1/F2 hotkeys to embed themselves in my muscle-memory! =:^)

2) Modern "ultrawide" display form-factors. Typical web pages are designed to display to 1024-1280 px minimum widths without forcing horizontal scrolling, while full-HD 1920 or 4K 3840 display widths are increasingly common. Even with a moderate desktop side-panel a browser window can be 1800 pixels wide or so, leaving plenty of room beside the web page for a browser side-panel. By contrast, web pages of more than a screen full are the norm and while vertical scrolling is virtually painless in a modern UI, the additional vertical space a horizontal tabbar requires tends to be far more painful than that of a vertical tab panel -- especially when the tab panel's easily toggled by the F1 key and F2 toggles current/previous even when the panel's closed, while the tabbar... not so much!

3) Once I had embedded TST into my workflow and more than say a half-dozen tabs were much easier to handle, I discovered an additional usage. I have a (separate) feed-reader to follow various news sites (including LWN), with one in particular feeding triple-digit articles a day. Now I can scan down the feed clicking on articles that look interesting without having to worry about overloading the tabbar. Even if I exceed the nearly 50 tabs visible at once in the tab panel (with my selected font size) I don't often exceed two pages worth, a whole lot easier to manage than more than twice that on the tabbar. And that's in addition to collapsible subtrees should I happen to need 'em.

Of course all those "extra" tabs are soon cleared, but it does allow me to do a much bigger batch at once without the pain of having to sort thru a bunch of additional pages to find the one tab I need, during the time they're open.

And of course the same "batch processing" flow works if you're opening say a bunch of full-size images from a single thumbnail page, or middle-click-opening a bunch of articles from the pocket section of the newtab page, etc. Once that ~half-dozen-tabs-viewable-at-once limit is lifted...

Tho again, it's what works for me, not something that I expect to work for everyone. But if someone else finds it useful...

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 12, 2021 22:24 UTC (Thu) by janecek (subscriber, #74774) [Link] (1 responses)

Try using the middle button to close a tab: middle click anywhere in the tab bar closes the tab. This way, you don't have to hit the close button at all, so you don't have to worry which one belongs to the tab you want to close. Works even when the close buttons get hidden to save space with too many tabs or in narrow windows.

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 12, 2021 23:43 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I'm already doing this (when not on a touchpad), but the problem is that I can't easily visually tell WHICH tab is active.

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 11, 2021 5:04 UTC (Wed) by BerendDeSchouwer (subscriber, #97789) [Link]

For me it depends on the light/dark theme.

In the light theme, it's definitely necessary to make the tabs (much) wider in about:config, to prevent mistaking one tab for another. It's much less of an issue for me in the stock dark theme. The reason wider tabs helps is because then I get some text which helps define the border. With the stock tab width the text -- if any -- instantly fades away, so the whole thing is a smear.

Different fonts are unreadable in light/dark, in different places. Sometimes I get dark-blue on dark-grey, sometimes white-on-light-blue, and other such combinations.

How much of a problem it is also depends on the room light. I work in both darkness and outside in sunlight, hence the frequent swaps between dark/light theme.

Different monitors (different locations) can make it worse, along with Wayland's lack of a gamma correction.

It's not good to design the default theme for perfect hardware and room light conditions. It's like designing your network stack for no dropped packets.

Having said all that, the new theme isn't terrible for me, but it definitely needs work.

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 10, 2021 21:02 UTC (Tue) by mbiebl (subscriber, #41876) [Link] (7 responses)

Does about:config -> browser.proton.enabled = false help

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 10, 2021 21:03 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (6 responses)

Nope. I've had it disabled since the last version.

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 11, 2021 20:01 UTC (Wed) by mbiebl (subscriber, #41876) [Link] (5 responses)

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/ojzf0m/proton_f...

Too bad, I'm not a an of the new UI either.

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 11, 2021 20:15 UTC (Wed) by mbiebl (subscriber, #41876) [Link] (4 responses)

... not a *fan* of the new Proton UI.

I'm currently considering switching to firefox-esr.
But that means having to create a fresh use profile and recreating all my settings, as firefox-esr refuses to read the profile from FF 91. And using firefox-esr just means I'm on borrowed time. Not a great prospect either.

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 11, 2021 20:36 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix seems to fix the issues and its author is sane. I'm trying to find styles for the tab bar and tweak colors a bit, but overall I can make the UI behave as before.

I'm not optimistic about long-term, though.

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 14, 2021 11:46 UTC (Sat) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link] (1 responses)

> And using firefox-esr just means I'm on borrowed time. Not a great prospect either.

Firefox started to commit slow suicide years ago when they started to follow chrome on stupid and annoying things just to "look cool", without realizing that their supporters were probably praising its reliability and predictability more than the "modern" look of chrome.

At *every* single firefox update I'm more and more pissed off by their changes, and have yet to figure a *single* benefit over the previous version. Everything they do makes their browser more painful to use. The last benefit I got years ago was when they implemented the ability to reload a previous session on startup because it allowed me to easily stop its CPU wastage by a simple "killall firefox" then reload it once I need it. Since then, only annoying junk, resource consumption and extreme confusion in the user interface. Yet they're wondering why their users are leaving.
Just restart firefox 4.76 to rememer how convenient and fast browsers were by then and you'll hate your new version even more...

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 15, 2021 13:32 UTC (Sun) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

There's definitely a contingent of users who feel similarly. I'm one of them.

But what's the other option? Chrome is a privacy disaster. Firefox isn't great on privacy but there are unbreakme patches you can get least.

Firefox profile not working on earlier versions, possible solution

Posted Aug 16, 2021 5:36 UTC (Mon) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

For the profile problem, if you haven't already tried this, ensure firefox is shut down, back up the profile, then if a compatibility.ini file exists in the profile, remove it. Or if you prefer just edit it. IIRC it's text file with a version number in it, allowing to migrate forward but not backward.

There is of course a small risk something actually is incompatible, thus the backup, but I've not had problems with removing it, and in fact put an exist-conditional rm in my firefox wrapper script (which I just looked up to tell you exactly which file to rm) and haven't worried about it since.

Firefox 91 released

Posted Aug 11, 2021 7:27 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

Does widget.non-native-theme.enabled = false help? I found it necessary in 90 to unbreak the scroll bars, and it might have become relevant to unbreaking the non-Proton UI in 91.