Firefox 100 released

[Posted May 4, 2022 by corbet]

Version 100.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. New features include video caption display on various proprietary sites, multiple-language spelling checking, invisible scrollbars, and more.

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Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 1:56 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

Before anyone asks: this looks to be a workaround for those proprietary sites lagging behind in the accessibility department by years. WebM has embedded WebVTT tracks and (iirc) those just work out of the box.

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 7:48 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

It looks like this is about picture-in-picture. Subtitles certainly worked on youtube earlier. Article also says

> Picture-in-Picture now also supports video captions on websites that use WebVTT (Web Video Text Track) format, like Coursera.org, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and many more.

implying WebVTT didn't work in picture-in-picture earlier.

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 9:03 UTC (Wed) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link] (5 responses)

What does "Support for profiling multiple java threads has been added" mean?

Did Firefox re-add support for Java Applets?
Or is there another context where Java is relevant in Firefox?

I guess most likely, is a browser vendor really so incompetent that they don't know the name of the language that they themselves implement?

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 9:20 UTC (Wed) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (1 responses)

I think it's more likely to be a typo than that Mozilla forgot the name of Javascript.

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 10:23 UTC (Wed) by bmork (subscriber, #88411) [Link]

Typoscript?

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 9:22 UTC (Wed) by je.r (subscriber, #113267) [Link]

Firefox for Android (and Focus for Android) both use Gecko underneath with other parts being written in Kotlin, and some Java in between for the communication between those parts.
Firefox comes with support to profile those apps, see https://profiler.firefox.com/docs/#/guide-remote-profiling

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 9:29 UTC (Wed) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (1 responses)

I believe it does mean Java, for Fenix (Firefox on Android). Or really it means JVM, because Fenix uses Kotlin too. Or really it means ART because Android doesn't call it a JVM. But Java is close enough. I think the relevant bug is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1618560

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 10:23 UTC (Wed) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]

Thanks, that makes sense. Although it's surprising they would add such a thing to public release notes, when this change was meant for people who develop Firefox, without any context to clarify that.

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 12:00 UTC (Wed) by mgedmin (guest, #34497) [Link] (4 responses)

> multiple-language spelling checking

Woo, I've been waiting for this for a long time!

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 17:05 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Aaaaand it's broken for me. Also, how do they solve the problem of the same word being correct in one language but misspelled in another language (e.g. in language pairs like Dutch and German or Russian and Ukrainian)?

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 19:30 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Or English and American !!!

"In the theatre, the seats are coloured red" ...

Cheers,
Wol

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 10, 2022 4:25 UTC (Tue) by KJ7RRV (subscriber, #153595) [Link]

I've had that problem with aspell. I use an American English dictionary, which worked great... Until I wrote a report about a book written in British English. It flagged words in several places where i quoted from the book.

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 19:39 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Maybe it'll finally fix the years-old bug on i686 where the only language available is en-US...

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 12:02 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (14 responses)

Neat! Anyone doing PGO builds, a couple of patches are needed, but it builds nicely after that and seems to work.

One caveat:
> Scrollbars on Linux and Windows 11 won't take space by default. On Linux, users can change this in Settings.

I do hope this setting never goes away. I use the visual affordance of the scrollbar position *all the time*, and obviously that only works if the scrollbar is visible: with it invisible I feel lost in the document: scrolling in that situation can actually make me feel nauseous! (Back in the 90s before people forgot what affordances even were, this sort of positional hint was much of the point of scrollbars.)

Even with this setting enabled, though, the new scrollbars are incredibly narrow and hard to see, and bulge up disturbingly when the mouse is moved near them. It looks like something alive and hideous. Ewwww. Please revert. Whoever implemented this forgot what scrollbars are for. Hint: it's not art.

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 13:42 UTC (Wed) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link] (2 responses)

I agree completely. Please never take away the scrollbars, they are *very* useful.

If I understand it correctly, the option to always show the scrollbar has already disappeared?! Firefox developers, please please please revert this. Or make it optional and easy to configure. But please don't take my scrollbars away from me.

Also if I understand it correctly, the scrollbar hiding misfeature doesn't work on Windows 10 (only on Linux and Windows 11)? That's another reason not to upgrade to Windows 11 I guess, at least until the end of support for Windows 10.

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 16:56 UTC (Wed) by ametlwn (subscriber, #10544) [Link] (1 responses)

rschroev wrote
> If I understand it correctly, the option to always show the scrollbar
> has already disappeared?!

No under Linux it can be configured under

8X-------------
Browsing

[x] Always show scrollbars
8X--------------

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 17:38 UTC (Wed) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link]

I sent my comment too fast.

> Scrollbars on Linux and Windows 11 won't take space by default. On Linux, users can change this in Settings.

That felt to mean like it's already not configurable on Windows 11, but now I reread the release notes which say

> On Windows, Firefox follows the system setting (System Settings > Accessibility > Visual Effects > Always show scrollbars).

So luckily still configurable.

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 15:08 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (5 responses)

This, 100%. Scrollbars aren't for scrolling. (I can do that with my keyboard, my trackpad, my touchscreen, or my thinkpad-speciality trackpoint button.) Scrollbars are for figuring out where you are in the page/document. And therefore should not be hidden.

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 15:10 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (2 responses)

ps - my bad - the trackpoint button doesn't help to scroll. Unless... I'm moving the scrollbar with it!

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 15:23 UTC (Wed) by bmork (subscriber, #88411) [Link] (1 responses)

You can scroll with the trackpoint by holding down the middle mouse button

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 15:28 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

Interesting. Thanks. Every day I learn something new! I had tried the left mouse button.

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 16:32 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

Scrollbars are helpful for coarse scrolling when dealing with a really big document. Yes, it would be better to have the document broken up better, internal links, or the like, but sadly often I find myself scrolling through a document that's dozens or hundreds of pages. For that case, scrollbars are really handy.

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 5, 2022 10:40 UTC (Thu) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link]

>Scrollbars are for figuring out where you are in the page/document. And therefore should not be hidden.

On my Firefox 100 on Linux the scroll bar does show where I am in the document, even if "always show scrollbar" is off. The scroll bar is also "proportional": the "thumb" size varies with the overall size of the page.

The scroll bar vanishes after a second of mouse inactivity, so you will have to move the mouse a little bit to see the thumb. Scrolling the page with the space bar or PgUp/PgDown also briefly shows the thumb. Note that you do not need to move the mouse near the right border for the scroll bar to reappear, it can be anywhere on the window.

I think the new behavior results in a cleaner appearance and I welcome it.

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 4, 2022 16:40 UTC (Wed) by frostsnow (subscriber, #114957) [Link] (3 responses)

Agreed. Partially related: does anyone know of a way to re-enable the arrow buttons on the ends of the scroll bar? Every now and then the page gets very large and the, what to call it, "scroll-focus" gets stuck (or I'm using some kind of touchpad) and find that the now-missing arrow keys would be useful.

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 5, 2022 7:25 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (2 responses)

widget.non-native-theme.gtk.scrollbar.allow-buttons does it for me in 99; I don't know if it's completely different again in 100.

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 5, 2022 12:21 UTC (Thu) by burdi01 (guest, #65371) [Link] (1 responses)

widget.non-native-theme.gtk.scrollbar.allow-buttons works for me in 100.
:D

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 5, 2022 16:53 UTC (Thu) by frostsnow (subscriber, #114957) [Link]

Doesn't work for me in 91.8.0. The other 'scrollbar' options affect the display (such as 'widget.non-native-theme.gtk.scrollbar.round-thumb' and 'widget.non-native-theme.gtk.scrollbar.thumb-size'), but no up/down buttons.

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 5, 2022 13:40 UTC (Thu) by agateau (subscriber, #57569) [Link]

> I do hope this setting never goes away.

Potential future:

Firefox 102: To avoid cluttering the settings screen, the scrollbars setting has been moved to about:config.

Firefox 104: Telemetry shows no one uses the scrollbars setting buried in about:config, so we removed it.

I wish I was being sarcastic, but I fear this is a very possible evolution.

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 8, 2022 6:29 UTC (Sun) by lamikr (guest, #2289) [Link] (1 responses)

Congrats, I prefer firefox over other browsers but in some cases I need to use other browsers on Linux because of the some critical problems

1) I sometimes need to use browser on environment with network proxy and because of that I have configured in Gnome the automatic network proxy URL. And in Firefox settings I have defined to use the system (=gnome) proxy settings. In cases where the network has the proxy, it will always take multiple seconds from Firefox to connect to most of the web pages making firefox almost unusable. Google chrome does not have this problem and is much faster on proxy environment. I googled and there are multiple firefox bugs opened for this many years ago that are not resolved becaused it's claimed in response be a design choise... This should be fixed as chromium proofs that browser can act fast also on network proxy environments.

2) Firefox on Linux does not support display sharing with microsoft team (and with cicso webex) while it works well with google chrome on Linux.

3) Firefox webcast support to google chromecast (sharing basketball games to TV if owning nba leagua pass for example)

Firefox 100 released

Posted May 12, 2022 16:42 UTC (Thu) by docontra (guest, #153758) [Link]

Regarding 1), you've had better luck than me; "System Proxy settings" where the system was actually using a discovered proxy (Auto Discovery/wpad, not an explicit URL as it seems to be your case), on all two OSes that I've used it with (Windows and GNU/Linux) flat-out didn't work (I had to enable Autodetect proxy settings in FF). The flip side, however, is that Chromium based + Proxy currently fails hard on any GUI environment that isn't GNOME(-ish) or KDE (my experience was in 2018 with XFCE; had to edit the .destkop file to set a manual proxy). It also seemed a bit wobbly when using xdg-portal, but I should retry that.

2) and to a lesser extent 3) are typically "Firefox didn't implement/had a less than stellar implementation of X[1] and therefore it shall be banned forevermore". Upstream has been faking the User-Agent string for many of these sites but it might not yet have those on, try opening those sites with an extension that changes the browser's User-Agent (copy Chorme/Chromium's UA), it might just work! (TM)

[1]: It seemingly had an incomplete, performance killing implementation of WebRTC at one time (per Jitsi's docs), but it seems to work well enough nowadays.