Good. I know a news website that was on purpose disabling sound on videos to prevent that. So not only does it autoplay, you need to click to unmute anyway to actually hear it!
Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time when you want?
And why do news websites even care about doing shoving it to the small percentage of people who actually bother to disable autoplay in their browser?
P.S. I already had autoplay for videos without sound disabled through about:config flags, but some videos managed to autoplay anyway. I wonder if they also fixed that issue, or simply made the about:config flag part of the settings dialog.
There was a bubble awhile back when advertisers were being told that video had better metrics, and all of the news sites jumped on higher-paying ads. That seems to have tapered off as advertisers noticed poor returns and learned that Facebook had been massively misrepresenting the metrics (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/advertisers-alle...) but it’ll take years to de-pivot everyone’s shiny new toys and the staffing invested in producing low information density content.
You can pair that with addon called, "Image video block" https://github.com/tiborbarsi/image-video-block-browser-addo...
And finally, you can use Bandwidth hero to compress images on the fly. You need to host the server instance on Heroku. Their free tier should suffice
On what site do you find "5KB news articles"? Pretty much all news sites that I know of load a gigantic amount of useless and obnoxious JavaScript, CSS, images, etc. with or without video.
Advertising metrics.
> And why do news websites even care about doing shoving it to the small percentage of people who actually bother to disable autoplay in their browser?
I believe autoplay is off by default on mobile, so it's a significant market.
Probably so they can show advertisers that every month, they stream XXX terabytes of video, thereby getting these advertisers to pay them more money.
Not technically a lie as long as you don't pretend people are actually watching these videos.
I've never understood why news sites push silent video down your throat. They are wasting serious amounts bandwidth.
Perhaps the websites (website owners) are not the only ones who are motivated to push for inclusion of autoplaying videos. Some sources suggest ad fraud is one of the major drivers of online advertising.1 Sources also suggest that video works especially well for ad fraud.2,3,4 If there is a shift toward using video for advertising,5 then it makes sense that commercial websites would prefer ads (videos) to be shown (play) to the visitor automatically (autoplay). It stands to reason that commercially-funded browser authors, e.g., Firefox,6 will always want to implement features that cater to its primary stakeholders: commercial websites and the online ad industry.
1 https://digiday.com/media/daily-hourly-fight-digital-ad-frau...
2 https://digiday.com/media/state-of-video-ad-fraud/
3 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/in-banne...
4 http://www.adotas.com/2017/12/video-ad-fraudand-matter/
5 https://digiday.com/media/publishers-pivoting-video-5-charts...
6 https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/041315/how-m...
I would totally agree with you and the others that it's an annoying practice. Yet then again when I blanket-banned autoplay, I was annoyed by youtube videos no longer doing it.
Turns out we like it where we expect it. Just not from random google results to sites we rarely visit.
Twitch does this, which is very annoying, because (on Firefox for Android) I have to unmute the video every time. As far as I know there's no way to allow audio to autoplay on a specific site on FfA.
Hopefully this moves web developers in the direction of either requesting autoplay permission (if they need it) or not autoplaying at all.
https://www.espn.com/college-football/boxscore?gameId=401110...
Because forced exposure to advertising pays better than letting you decide when to consume it (if you ever do).
Kind of silly that animated gifs will continue to work fine, but as soon as you try to use a format that doesn't take up a ridiculous amount of bandwidth...
With all due respect, if you have to call it an "experience" you know it's something nobody asked for :p
At what point do they understand that it's a failed experiment if they constantly have to re-enable and/or "ship" an "experience"?
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/unha...
I see it here:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...
Uhmmm...
Originally when Firefox was released it was the antidote to browser forced add ons that were common at the time. I have vague recollections of Netscape Navigator having whole sections of what was essentially ads forced in the browser menu.
I don't like Pocket being built in, as it should be a browser add on. It also sets precedence. It starts the chain of thought - "Well Firefox has Pocket, so lets add backed in thing X too". I wish it wasn't baked it as it goes against the whole of Firefox's original philosophy of being light weight and everything else an add on.
about:config -> extensions.pocket.enabled: false
It seems that some people are just used to hating Pocket as if it was some kind of tradition.
EDIT: Here's a screenshot of the feature specifically that people dislike these days: https://imgur.com/a/p2rD4AY
While it can be disabled, it can be said that people are a bit annoyed that the browser that is "Privacy Focused" is shoving ads down your throat. While we as technical users can figure out how to disable it easily (in the preferences), the less technically inclined might not know that they can be disabled.
What Mozilla calls "the best of Pocket's content" is ads and articles that border on clickbait. Some people don't like marketing doublespeak.
Instead, they prioritize controversial integration into the browser itself.
- Options -> Home -> Firefox Home Content -> Uncheck everything
I personally leave "Web Search" enabled, which gives a Chrome-like/minimalist experience.
Switch to a privacy-friendly search engine like DuckDuckGo while you're at it.
To disable it: Settings, General, Home, Top Sites, disable "Recommended by Pocket".
I've had this for a long time, so I don't know why it's being presented as a new option.
I do think Mozilla managed the Pocket acquisition poorly (relative to the standards I would expect Mozilla to hold itself to...other companies do far worse without being criticized, but that's irrelevant...I used Firefox when it sucked because of the greater trust I placed in Mozilla) but since then they've done a decent job, considering it's their version of the read it later features every other browser has.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/yet-another-s...
Uncheck everything except Top sites.
extensions.pocket.enabled -> falseGood. User agents already contain too much.
That's actually the first time I've ever seen a browser actively removing stuff from the User Agent.
How much of a performance improvement does this make?
(I'm paranoid and FUDing because I care: there's some UX low hanging fruit before they could get rid of userChrome.css. For instance, you need userChrome.css to autohide the toolbar in full screen mode on macOS — that's not even a customization, it's a missing feature.)
For a user with an SSD, perhaps not much. But there are still a lot of users out there with magnetic hard drives. Firefox has to do a decent amount of I/O at startup, and unneeded disk seeks add up for these users.
In addition, Firefox formerly checked for these files on the main thread, which is especially bad for performance. (Firefox engineer Mike Conley wrote about this at length at https://mikeconley.ca/blog/2019/05/16/a-few-words-on-main-th...)
If you read through the related bug (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1541233), you can see that folks went to some trouble to keep anything from breaking for people using these files today. The claims that this is a step toward removing the files completely is FUD.
I don't know if it's a purposeful process or not, but I'd say it's perfectly reasonable for users to think that pref-gating is the first step toward removal. The long road to RSS being completely removed from the browsers started with "just" taking it away from the defaults.
Unfortunately they also changed the css model, so even with the flag on - userChrome.css has become useless (to me)... I guess 66 will not be seeing an upgrade for the time being.
As for the question - should be less than 1ms (depends on the OS/filesystem obviously but still negligible)
I fear the change is just to take away this important customization option in the future and I don't like it.
A few ms isn't much by itself, but when you add up a bunch of small optimizations like this one, it can add up to be a significant improvement.
Even just checking for the existence of a file can take a really long time depending on the disk speed and other on going IO.
Why wouldn't they just load them asynchronously?
I read that custom CSS files are often used by disabled users, which makes it doubly odd that they would just disable it by default.
I'll have to run an extension that will be injecting JS/CSS into every page, to get the same effect. That will likely be slower. Not a speed improvement exactly.
At least it's more powerful. I can replace any rule inside already loaded CSS. Useful to escape this braindead age of "font-size < 16px && font-weight < 400".
Antivirus software does add a measurable delay to file operations sometimes, and each file is gonna be in its own sector so I could see them losing at least a few milliseconds there. Applying CSS does add overhead but the average user can't have that many rules in there so I suspect it's purely on the file i/o level.
macOS user base can now consider FF as a viable browser alternative.
Two big changes related to performance: - the baseline javascript interpreter is now enabled (this is probably responsible for improving things for Google related stuff). - they optimized a few things with the compositor for mac to further reduce battery usage. I'm guessing this might include some of the work that has been done to port parts of the browser to rust.
Upcoming versions should at some point include the webrender changes that are currently available to some windows users already.
If you are wondering, the beta channel is generally rock solid for me. You end up restarting the browser a bit more often to get the latest beta and obviously they are still finding and fixing bugs. But I can't remember the last time Firefox crashed on me. I've been on the beta channel for close to two years. By the time features land to the beta channel, they've been on nightly for some time already. So, that generally means all the obvious stuff has been resolved already.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688990
Edit: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-touch-z... seems to help, though still not perfect.
Most of my lock-ups seem to happen when I try to access specific sites using Firefox, especially financial sites.
The next version will drop OpenGL and use Core Animation instead.
I know a lot of people have become impatient, but they have been doing a huge amount of work behind the scenes.
An app tells an OS it gonna use OpenGL to 3D render stuff. Generally, the OS doesn’t know whether it’s a competitive 3D shooter where each FPS really matters, or a web browser which only uses OpenGL to render a few textured quads. If the OS will default to slower integrated GPU, users will be unhappy, they want 3D performance. So the OSes typically power up the faster GPU in such cases.
On dual-GPU Windows laptop, nVidia partially solves this in their drivers, they have very long list of process names saying which ones are games or other 3D intense apps.
It usually works but very far from being 100% reliable. It requires GPU drivers to be updated regularly. For cases when it fails even with latest drivers, they have multiple methods for user to select the GPU. They implemented context menu on .exe files “Run with graphic processor” with 2 further options, for nVidia and Intel GPUs. They implemented GUI for users to customize that apps list. They also implemented a proprietary API for programmers to customize that list in code, I’m using this method in the installer of a CAD/CAM app I’ve developed.
These things cause quite a lot of complexity, both software bloat, and UI clutter. Traditionally, Apple wants the GUI to be clean. AFAIK they don’t push driver updates, and they avoid UI clutter even if it means some power users won’t get some advanced settings they might like.
I've been out of ad-tech for about 5 years, but when I was working in that industry it was common to drop evil cookie pixels everywhere in the page and then do cookie-matching with them ("my cookie for this user is X, do we per-chance have a match with something you have?")
Will this effectively end that by preventing cookies from domains that aren't the domain of the site itself?
I hope so.
For new users who install and download Firefox for the first time, Enhanced Tracking Protection will automatically be set on by default as part of the ‘Standard’ setting in the browser and will block known “third-party tracking cookies” according to the Disconnect list. We talk more about tracking cookies here. Enhanced Tracking Protection will be practically invisible to you and you’ll only notice that it’s operating when you visit a site and see a shield icon in the address bar next to the URL address and the small “i” icon. When you see the shield icon, you should feel safe that Firefox is blocking thousands of companies from your online activity.
A better source is probably the disconnect site [2]:
> Tracking is the collection of data regarding a particular user's activity across multiple websites or applications that aren’t owned by the data collector, and the retention, use or sharing of that data.
> Our definition focuses on collection AND retention. So, for example, the definition wouldn’t apply to sites that log an IP address, but don’t save that information in a database. The definition also focuses on particular users, so data that is immediately aggregated doesn’t apply. And the collection is across context, so it doesn’t apply in cases when there is solely a first-party relationship with the user, for example the site only collects and retains information on site visitors.
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-availab...
The way I remember it is, as the page host I have a cookie on you. Then I drop in a 1-pixel image to a third party, and in the query string to it I write in a hashed form of the cookie I have for you. That HTTP request then itself can go through the cookie process, but for the third party. They then check their DB for both their own issued cookie and the value you passed in, and are then able to perform some asynchronous (batch or otherwise) match to associate the two IDs. From then on, an ad etc. can be targeted based on that info.
I think Yahoo News was loading new article content into the same page (like Turbolinks does) instead of navigating to a new page. Clicking links becomes the user action that allows video playback for the current page and that permission is retained across articles because the browser is not navigating away to new pages. Just a theory...
Now, no video auto-plays when I interact on the page.
My fingers are itching to ban some sites... such as cnn.com, dailymailco.uk
Does this also block GIFs from auto-playing? Blocking no-sound videos from auto-playing will keep GIFs alive for another decade.
gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.enhanced_contrast = 0
gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.rendering_mode = 5
gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_for_families = ""It's the little things that are making me go back to Firefox more-and-more
The gist of it is that Firefox, and only Firefox, will cause my Windows 10 system to completely hard freeze (no mouse movement, no response period) for about 30-60 seconds at a time, multiple times daily. It's so frustrating that it makes FF unusable for me.
It's odd because it seems to be a rare issue that has to do with it not letting go of a GPU handle/process/thread or something, from what I've been able to deduce from others having this issue that have posted bugs in the tracker. I've tried everything under the sun to fix it, but no other program, period has this problem. I game, I use other browsers, I do all sorts of stuff on this PC with zero issues, but Firefox gives me these temporary hard-freezes. Ugh.
Whenever I experience this type of thing I can't help but speculate that issues like this are not serendipity at work.
I recollect reading an article years back from a Microsoft developer who spoke about how it was quite common for Windows code to take specific actions based on which app was running - ostensibly to 'improve the user experience'. Though, it's not hard to imagine MS using this for the opposite purpose. And, since their code is proprietary, who would know?
> For our existing Windows 10 users, you can easily find and launch Firefox from a shortcut on the Win10 taskbar.
???
As opposed to before?!
The bad: userChrome/userContent not being loaded by default, I don't understand why it would cause a delay at startup.
The ugly: More Pocket crap.
toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets = true
I'm currently using Firefox Developer on the latest auroua update channel version ( 70.0b3 ).
I haven't really expereienced any problems and am only vaugely aware of new things from time to time. Actually mostly I'm not sure if I'm noticing something new or something that's existed for a long time. Like for instance the other day I put in an address in the address bar and it gave me a "switch to tab" option because I already had that open in a browser window, I swear that's new, but I'm not sure!
Yeah, you get a few cool features a bit early, but I just can't stand the instability anymore. Pluis, I'm not actually using any of the "Developer" features, so there's really no reason for me to not just run release.
Good! I remember losing quite some time before I realised something wasn't in the network tab because it never fired rather than failing to be triggered by the application code.
- The Firefox sign in process is considerably improved, with a link based sign in with email. The fact is that you will not be singed in to email on the first time usage. So you are behind a wall to start browsing and the cognitive load not to leave the tab before completing setup. This experience with Google Chrome is far far better, as it’s one time setup using your Google Account . Even if you discount the google’s ownership and single account sign in, there are considerable improvements to be made in the onboarding process
- The Pocket integration is substandard to the Pocket extension.
- The Top sites and highlights are too big for my aesthetics. It could be little cuter in the way it appears.
- Moving a video to full screen makes your blank for a second and not a smooth transition as in Chrome or Safari
- Lack of certain platform specific integrations such as Look Up on macOS to get the dictionary triggered by selected word. It works across all the other browsers well. On Firefox, I need to make a google search.
- The tab bar is ugly and has lot of blank spaces
- No default support for dark mode which works beautifully well on Chrome and Safari in a very early stage. More than a feature, the slowness in picking up platform specific features.
- The containers concept is really great but not for most of the general users to make use of it. It’s still a bit geeky in nature.
- I’ve to go with standard privacy settings to make my sites work including google. Making the privacy settings strong doesn’t help much and get signed out of the sessions very frequently. - I use an app called Magnet on Mac to snap my windows easily by dragging to corners. The snapping works great on all browsers by dragging a tab to one of the corners. But Firefox just releases the tab once it’s pulled out from the current window. We need to drag again this to the corners. More than a third-party workflow, it’s about how these windows are defined and behaves in a standard way
This. Containers are quite complicated to reason about, require a fair amount of setup and do not sync. Not to mention the color pallete is bizarrely limited.
I use both Firefox and Chrome but use Chrome for work because Profiles are much easier to use. I just open another profile, which loads with a nice theme and a set of extensions (limiting my exposure to some extensions in other profiles).
Profiles are so simple and just work.
Firefox of course has profiles, but you cannot run two of them at the same time without using the command line (or creating shortcuts to launch multiple versions of the browser).
"Set `network.trr.mode` to 2 to make DNS Over HTTPS the browser's first choice but use regular DNS as a fallback (0 is "off by default", 1 lets Firefox pick whichever is faster, 3 for TRR only mode, 5 to explicitly turn it off)."
>> "The Block Autoplay feature is enhanced to give users the option to block any video that automatically starts playing, not just those that automatically play with sound."
One time I hit a site with a huge anti-ad block message at the top that said I couldn't watch the video until I disabled my adblocker. But...I came for an article. The article wasn't obstructed. I assume the video was auto-playing. I decided to go back and try another result.
The biggest blocker for it in Firefox seems to be webrender landing in stable.
For those doubting, do a simple Google with "firefox cpu".
Also, knowing your password wouldn't be enough to identify it within a breach, assuming that the breached website does the bare minimum to store them safely (as in, uses a salt).
How about reading a thing or two before jumping to conclusions?
The email gets hashed on your device, and the start of that hash is sent off to the server. The server returns a list of all the hashes that might match. The client then checks that list for complete matches.
>Firefox Monitor gets its data breach information from a publicly searchable source, Have I Been Pwned. If you don’t want your email address to show up in this database, visit the opt-out page.
1. Right now Firefox Monitor uses your Firefox account for signups. For somebody like me who already has a Firefox account, I don't see a net difference in risk here.
2. If you don't want to make one, then Monitor is transparent in that they just use https://haveibeenpwned.com under the hood (source: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-monitor-faq#w_h...), which doesn't require anything more than submitting your email and passing their Google captcha. It's unfortunate that they're not more forthcoming about this, but the option is there.
I think this is a great functionality and it will really help the average user.
Some password managers already do this and I personally think its a nice feature. Though I often generate new emails and passwords for sites on the spot so this feature isn't of much use to me.