Firefox 113.0 released

[Posted May 9, 2023 by corbet]

Version 113.0 of the Firefox browser is out. Changes include improved picture-in-picture support, blocking of third-party cookies in private windows, some accessibility improvements, and more. "A 13-year-old feature request was fulfilled and Firefox now supports files being drag-and-dropped directly from Microsoft Outlook".

Firefox 113.0 released

Posted May 9, 2023 15:26 UTC (Tue) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]

Still not as old as this 24 year old drag-and-drop feature request in Thunderbird: Implement drag & drop of attached messages to mail folders!

Firefox 113.0 released

Posted May 9, 2023 17:02 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (9 responses)

I've always been mystified by how bad the picture-in-picture UI is. My use case for it is "open a tab on some badly designed website, pop the video out and fullscreen it on another monitor, and not have to interact with the tab until it's over" - and every time I've ended up failing to achieve that and reaching for mpv/yt-dlp/streamlink.

…and I'm sure encouraging more use of AVIF in the wild will do wonders for people's battery life.

Firefox 113.0 released

Posted May 9, 2023 17:06 UTC (Tue) by bartoc (guest, #124262) [Link] (3 responses)

Idk, it might be a problem if it's more (compression) efficient than whatever it's replacing then you get to spend less power on the radios, so I could see some wins.

Firefox 113.0 released

Posted May 9, 2023 19:13 UTC (Tue) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link] (2 responses)

Also, wasn't one of the motivations behind AVIF/AVIS to piggyback on AV1, getting, among other benefits, HW acceleration?

Firefox 113.0 released

Posted May 10, 2023 4:11 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

For those bleeding-edge enough to have such a thing; 99% of that hardware support is (still) only in high-end desktop GPUs and luxury phones. The accursed "gifv" plague on most social media is entirely H264-based for that reason.

Stuffing a video codec into an <img> tag also does an end run around the user's "do not autoplay" setting, because Mozilla for the past 25 years has led the charge on deciding annoying animations should have neither a pause button nor an API to allow anyone else to add one.

Firefox 113.0 released

Posted May 10, 2023 8:55 UTC (Wed) by leromarinvit (subscriber, #56850) [Link]

> Mozilla for the past 25 years has led the charge on deciding annoying animations should have neither a pause button nor an API to allow anyone else to add one.

Once upon a time (definitely less than 25 years ago), it used to be that you could stop animated GIFs by hitting ESC. Alas, no more. But approximately no one seems to actually use real GIFs any more, so disabling video autoplay actually works for now. Let's hope it stays that way and websites won't go back to stuffing faux-videos into images.

Firefox 113.0 released

Posted May 10, 2023 11:46 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

I've always been mystified by how bad the picture-in-picture UI is.

How and why?

every time I've ended up failing to achieve that

So you are mystified by the fact that you failed to achieve something that owners of the web site don't want you to achieve? Why is that even strange?

reaching for mpv/yt-dlp/streamlink

And that works because owners of these web sites don't bother to close these loopholes.

Users of mpv/yt-dlp/streamlink are very much a minority and can be ignored. But something that would actually be convenient by Joe Average? That can not be ignored and they have to do something about that. And they do.

It's as simple as that.

Firefox 113.0 released

Posted May 24, 2023 20:07 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

> And that works because owners of these web sites don't bother to close these loopholes.

> Users of mpv/yt-dlp/streamlink are very much a minority and can be ignored.

The owners of larger websites absolutely do not ignore this software and are constantly going out of their way to break it through technical means and pseudo-legal process abuse. It continues to work in most part because its authors are smarter and more determined.

Firefox 113.0 released

Posted May 10, 2023 14:54 UTC (Wed) by tlamp (subscriber, #108540) [Link] (2 responses)

> I've always been mystified by how bad the picture-in-picture UI is.

What is actually bad about it? I'm using that UI since it was added and always felt it great, also simpler and I could let the video play in a floating window without the need of creating a separate browser window, great for listening to talks that only have occasional visual cues.

The PiP just lacked the video progress timeline bar, which was added in the 113 release.

> encouraging more use of AVIF in the wild will do wonders for people's battery life.

For one, there's no need for inefficient software renderers, as websites that want to uses the new format can simply provide alternatives:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Format...
(Same exists for Video)

Then, users that are conscious about their battery life or data usage can just block images/videos by default via various Addons (simplest probably is via ublock origin), and parts of the higher battery usage due to software renderer might me regained through more efficient format again (compared to GIF that is). Also, it's decoding a picture, even if it needs 10 times the energy it still is just a droplet compared to the ocean of other things going on on mobile devices.

And at last: what's the alternative you propose? Should we just stick with a old, patent encumbered format just because most phones and laptops have an encoder already, stopping all progress to better (performance and FOSS wise) formats?

Firefox 113.0 released

Posted May 12, 2023 7:52 UTC (Fri) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link] (1 responses)

For me the most inconvenient part of the picture-in-picture popup is that it's not an always-on-top window, which can be mostly blamed on Wayland lacking a protocol for it (intentionally).

Firefox 113.0 released

Posted Jun 2, 2023 9:45 UTC (Fri) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

FWIW, there is a proposal for a Wayland protocol extension for PiP windows: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/...

Meanwhile, the user can manually set a PiP window to be always on top, e.g. via the right-click menu.