Firefox 98 released

Posted Mar 9, 2022 14:34 UTC (Wed) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266)
In reply to: Firefox 98 released by firasha
Parent article: Firefox 98 released

Unfortunately, there's no way to get the old behavior back. I tested it yesterday.

If you configure PDF files to "always ask", and when it asks you answer to "open it in Firefox" this time, it'll silently download the file to ~/Downloads (even if you have configured Firefox to always ask where to save downloaded files!), and then open it in a new tab. This is different from what happens when you configure PDF files to "open it in Firefox", since in that case it opens the built-in PDF viewer and loads the file in it without saving it to ~/Downloads.

The same issue when opening in an external viewer: instead of downloading the file to a transient temporary location where it'll get cleaned up after a while, it's silently downloaded to ~/Downloads (even if you have configured Firefox to always ask where to save downloaded files).

In the end, this will lead to ~/Downloads becoming full of random junk (which would normally end up on /tmp, but at least /tmp is automatically cleaned).

It's even worse if the reason you set up Firefox to always ask where to save is because you don't want anything to end up in ~/Downloads unless you explicitly put it there, either because you're afraid of it silently overwriting files there with the same name (which IIRC had been an issue some time in the past), or because just placing files there could lead to a security vulnerability (less of an issue on Linux, but on Windows where the DLL search path includes "the directory where the EXE file is located", this could easily be a problem), or because you have limited disk space on your /home partition (for instance, it's mounted via NFS from a file server with strict quotas, which was the case on the computer lab at the university I studied at).

That is: they are now treating ~/Downloads as if it was a temporary directory managed by the browser, instead of letting the user manage it.

I won't stop using Firefox as my main browser, but this is probably the first change in all the time since it was still called Netscape Navigator that made me reconsider.

Firefox 98 released

Posted Mar 9, 2022 18:42 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Limited space in /home/ is one problem, limited tmpfs space is a problem too (Firefox treats /tmp and /dev/shm like infinite free scratch space and it goes off the rails when they're reasonably sized).

There are a few good (technical, security) reasons to want to keep all data in the user's homedir, but I get the feeling those weren't a factor in this change.

Firefox 98 released

Posted Mar 10, 2022 4:46 UTC (Thu) by sionescu (subscriber, #59410) [Link] (1 responses)

I opened https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1758844.

Firefox 98 released

Posted Mar 10, 2022 15:41 UTC (Thu) by sionescu (subscriber, #59410) [Link]

It's sad to see how after the rollout of this feature has turned up to be a complete and utter fuckup, they keep closing the bug reports.

Firefox 98 released

Posted Mar 10, 2022 15:51 UTC (Thu) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link]

> The same issue when opening in an external viewer: instead of downloading the file to a transient temporary location where it'll get cleaned up after a while, it's silently downloaded to ~/Downloads (even if you have configured Firefox to always ask where to save downloaded files).
> That is: they are now treating ~/Downloads as if it was a temporary directory managed by the browser, instead of letting the user manage it.

Confirmed, I get the same behavior. This annoying but at least you can choose the directory---it doesn't have to be ~/Downloads. I've made it ~/tmp, which on some of my computers is mounted on a tmpfs and others not. (I also long ago deleted ~/Downloads and `chmod a-w ~`, so programs that don't respect XDG can't write to my home directory anyway).

Firefox 98 released

Posted Mar 14, 2022 1:35 UTC (Mon) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm surprised that this is the first change that you have a serious problem with. I think the removal of XUL for plugins was the worst thing they could have done. It abandoned Firefox's status as having the most powerful customization capabilities of any browser. One of my biggest criticisms of Chrome was their limited extension API, but now that Firefox invented WebExtensions, Chrome doesn't look so bad. Many great plugins like NoScript are now empty shells of their former selves due to switching to the inferior "more secure" API.

With that said, I still prefer Firefox, but only because their development model better suites me.

Firefox 98 released

Posted Mar 17, 2022 8:51 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

My understanding is that the XUL APIs basically blocked much of the multi-process improvements because XUL extensions could "bridge" them and live in "both". One could set up pipes and locks in such places, but I suspect that would tank performance really hard. Not to mention that multi-process lock-mediated code sounds like a nightmare to handle. I can't say I blame them.

However, Google is digging their own grave with the next API that hamstrings what uBlock and the like are able to do (even compared to the current extension API). AFAIK, only Edge has committed to using the change though how long the Chrome-forks can maintain it against Google's wishes remains to be seen.