Firefox 76 (opens in new tab)

> also, better default form input styling would be nice. it's so...Windows 98....but i'm on Windows 10. :\

Google and Microsoft seem to agree with you, but I totally don't get it!

If the website doesn't specify a style, my browser should fall back to a design that matches my OS, not whatever the browser developer thought was pretty!

And if Windows is coming back and telling the browser to use Windows 98 styled buttons, Microsoft should fix Windows!

It seems that it's faster on every website I use except Gmail, Google Voice, and Youtube. I wonder whether Google is using some sort of Chrome-specific javascript to make those sites run faster in their own browser?

Concerning form input styling, many of the responses that have been made before this time are broadly technically incorrect or insufficient (roca’s comments are excellent, as a developer in this very space), and no one’s mentioned that work is actively happening in this space.

On Windows, Firefox currently uses Windows APIs to draw the form controls, scrollbars, &c. where possible, and imitates the style in the places that there is no native API for it.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1381938 introduced a new style, available behind the widget.disable-native-theme-for-content pref. I’ve been using it for the last three months and reporting various bugs and problems. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1615105 is tracking the remaining work before it can be turned on by default.

My opinion: the new control styles are… fine, I guess; but they could do with some not-flatness (especially for buttons), and increases in size and padding are seriously problematic on many existing sites.

My LOD 3D models still take ~10ms per batch to load from binary file in Firefox, whereas Chrome needs ~1ms per batch. Mostly because of DataView but Mozilla recently assigned someone to work on it so I'm hopefull for the future.

I recently switched to Firefox after being a Chrome user for the most part of my life. In the past I couldn't switch to Firefox due to a lack of alternatives for the extensions I use on Chrome (particularly Google Dictionary) but I recently use Firefox again and decided that the performance difference is worth the change. I still miss the extension options I had sometimes but I have to admit that my overall browsing experience is markedly improved on Firefox. Glad to see that my anecdotal browsing experience is backed by benchmark.

Would love to see how Safari handles your benchmark! I find it pretty fast, but maybe that's just bias because it treats my battery nice.

Firefox uses Direct2d on windows, while Chrome will just use Skia.

Personally, I don't like operating systems that train users to enter login credentials while using the system as this increases the chance of someone capturing those credentials via spoofing.

I used to think Firefox trying to protect the entered passwords made some sense, but I've been convinced it isn't really such a good idea. Better would be a full profile being protected (with all files encrypted), or just rely on an OS level lock screen for inactivity lockout.

I'm not sure if the current system actually prevents recovering the passwords. Do they require this authorization even to use a show password option on a website or the equivalent effect via bookmarklet-style javascript? I suspect they don't and it doesn't try to protect from intentional theft only casual viewing of passwords. This might still be valuable for some people, but it would be more valuable to fully protect the profile. I worry that people will think they are more protected than they actually are and that this effect will be increased by the use of system login credentials.

Also, IMO the list of sites that you have passwords for should be treated as just as sensitive as the passwords themselves. I think as is you can often see the sites with accounts, visit them, and have the current password autofilled into the old password field of the change password dialog.

The "generate password" option is great, even though personally I would make it 21 characters rather than 15 (there might be an option for that?). IMO, no one should ever choose a password.

Does it use the OS credentials to encrypt the passwords? Otherwise one could still read them in clear text with another program.

Edit: punctuation

This is a great feature. I always added passwords to the browser auto-fill without thinking, and was shocked to find out that these are viewable to anyone without any password by default.

Honestly after getting used to it I like the change. Why? Because before it was often not easy to see if the input focus was on the address bar or somewhere else, and often I'd start typing and the input land somewhere I didn't expect. Now at least it's very clear, although I agree they could have done it better.

Oh, that's intentional? I had no idea what was going on and am just now realizing I haven't had a weird bug or something this whole time.

edit: just remembered because it happened again. I'm not sure if it's related but I often find now that when I type "n" the bar doesn't autocomplete "ews.ycombinator.com" with the rest of the text highlighted anymore. It still goes there if I hit enter, though.

In the last update (75) I had this bizarre problem that any amazon.co.uk links in my history weren't showing up in the "most used links" that the url bar is usually populated with if you click the down arrow (or in this update where the down arrow used to be)

I have a browser profile that is used almost exclusively for amazon content as well. The most visited links in that profile are amazon.co.uk and prime video but the only "most frequent" links it would show were on twitch and the occasional youtube page I visited to find trailers for amazon hosted videos.

When I went to about:config and toggled the four "update1" bools to false, amazon came back in my "most frequent" links.

Pretty strange, eh?

Edit: so I just installed 76, and switched the four "browser.urlbar.update1" bools that enable this back to "true", and again, any amazon.co.uk links are removed from the list I get when clicking on the empty urlbar.

I don't really care about the ugly styling, but since this is a navigation feature I use extensively, I'm turning the whole thing off again. Hope they fix (or document) this before the choice disappears!

Is it really such an issue? It really doesn't bother me at all.

I disabled it in the first 15 minutes.

I just hope they don't remove the disable recipe.

(about:config browser.urlbar.update1 -> false)

Yeah as somebody that uses the bookmarks bar, this is just maddening. First I go to about:config on my personal profile, great. But I have a work profile, and once again I have to turn it off. Dev Edition gets the update, gotta turn it off there. Login to desktop at work. Repeat all 3 of those. Oh, work laptop also needs all 3 to get updated. Then I move to my MacBook, gotta turn it off again. Power up my old Dell XPS13, god damn it I have to turn it off again...

I like it!

Yes, I still don't like this. I've got used to it, but when I was testing it on Dev edition of FF, it was covering half of my bookmark toolbar, and I couldn't get over it. I wish they had a setting to toggle it, which I think a browser like Vivaldi would implement.

They should just put a toggle for it under the Customization page. I think that would be the simplest way to placate peope that dislike it. (Yes I know you can about:config to fix it, but a toggle makes more sense.)

it's not when a new tab is opened... it's when the field is in focus

> I'm still trying to figure out what UX problem the expanding bar was intended to address.

Possibly the same as removing navigation arrows from the context menu if text is selected, i.e. to annoy long time Firefox users like me?

Certain features should be compile time options, default off and then we could make a UX-designer edition with all the crazy stuff just line we have developer edition.

Then I and everyone else could continue you use the old ux that actually worked very well ;-)

I wonder if it'll fix the fans going nuts on google.com/<whatever> video calls.

Does anyone know if this is something that will benefit Jitsi too?

Cool! I wonder if this also does anything to fix audio in Slack calls and Microsoft Teams? Once I spoof the useragent, I mean. :)

On my Windows setup running on Bootcamp, the previous versions of Firefox had trouble accessing the microphone for many of the video call providers while Edge and Chrome are working fine.

I guess it's time to boot it up and check.

> CVE-2020-12388: Sandbox escape with improperly guarded Access Tokens

Perhaps it's the same as the Chromium one reported here recently? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22945630

I want to figure out who to talk to on both Firefox and Chrome sides to beg that they adopt a scheme like YYYY.MM.minor for their version numbering. I believe that would be superior for basically everyone—web developers, users, &c. (In the case of Firefox, it works especially well since they’re releasing approximately monthly now. I could imagine people on Chrome puzzling over why some month numbers got skipped—not that people actually look at those numbers often.)

You always want to be on the latest one, because that's where the security fixes are.

And if you care about what's in it just read the release notes.

I prefer date-based version numbers so that I can easily tell how out of date something is - assuming it's updated frequently enough.

But either way, I don't think this is a particularly important issue.

How is that addressed by a more traditional version number? There are many examples of major software upgrades reflected by a change in minor version number, minor software updates reflected by a change in major version number, or a major new release having less functionality than the previous version (e.g. Final Cut Pro X). With mature software like Firefox, what even is a "major change"?

Calling it Firefox 13.17.6 is not an improvement.

Firefox 76 or Firefox 5.6.6 makes no difference to me really. With browsers everyone should aim to be on the latest version and definitely not very old versions. To know if Firefox 76 is the latest or really old you need to get some more information. I wonder if anyone has tried to do it as follows:

Let the latest version be called Firefox and then adjust the previous versions to Firefox -1,-2,-3,-4,-5.. -76

You are like _eight_ years too late with that discussion ... trust me, it has been extensively covered :-)

If they follow Ubuntu, I'd wish they name it Cinco De Mayo for this version.

How exactly does this work?

- Sending tabs between devices does not work. It sometimes arrives 12 hours!!! later

It doesn't work on my window 10 instantly but it works for osx and ios.

The work around for my window10 machine, for me at least, is to click the hamburger and click on my account name, then click sync now.

That sounds like a bug worth filing!

Sending tabs works fine for me

Been using Pushbullet for years to send tabs between devices.

I've been using it since it was introduced. I no longer think about my passwords. Everytime I register in a new website, I just right-click -> generate secure password, it auto-fills and saves it. One password for every website. Yes, they are stored remotely with Firefox Sync.

I just love this browser more and more

Its just the browser's normal 'save password' thing, but now with great UI for managing saved logins.

E2E encrypted with your Mozilla account password. If you forget your password and lose/reset every device that you have firefox installed on, you will lose the database. The firefox lockwise app is a login db replicator/ui for devices you don't want a full FF install on.

I've been using it for years since, again, its just the normal save password function that's existed for decades. Completely frictionless experience. The UI, accessible through the menu or about:logins, has options now to manually add/edit/copy logins. And it suggests auto generated random passwords when creating new accounts.

There can be some weird situations that you need to be careful of. For example, if you jump on your partners PC, log them out of their Firefox account and log into yours, all of their passwords / history etc gets merged into your account. You need to learn about Firefox profiles to get around this.

Also, the old Firefox had a way of clearing all saved passwords from the Options menu. This is now gone, you can only delete a single password at a time. You need to enter the following URL into the Firefox browser, which will let you clear all your passwords: chrome://pippki/content/resetpassword.xhtml

I personally use KeePass, but I like having the passwords saved in Firefox so that they are accessible on all my devices.

I'm using it, it seems to work fine, and works/syncs on mobile as well (mobile Firefox that is, not for other apps AFAIK), and on my work computer's Firefox instance. I seem to recall attempting to change my Firefox sync password once and it notified my that I would need to export and re-import the passwords (IIRC), which I took to mean they are careful to never get full access to them unencrypted on their side. While less convenient, I like how that's set up if it's how I think it is.

For every device I have logged in with Firefox sync it just works as you would expect.

Maybe it sounds silly but make sure you have access to the email associated with your Mozilla account. I learnt the hard way after reinstalling Windows that Mozilla sends a confirmation email to this address when you set up Sync on a new system. It turned out that I had no access to this email anymore since the provider went out of business. I was told it's impossible to access my sync data. Thankfully I did not use it to store any passwords (I use KeePass for that) because otherwise it would have been a catastrophe.

> Anybody using Firefox password manager that can comment on it? Is it considered safe enough?

Have been for >10 years now. It feels kinda icky because of how close the passwords are to every website I visit, but the convenience of having passwords auto-fill enables me to auto-delete cookies of most sites (reduced tracking without compromising on convenience) and not hesitate to use a strong password. I've heard of way more bugs in third party auto-fillers than in Firefox' own, but that notion is of course not scientific proof.

I do think that if you want real security, you need to have the passwords on a separate device (for example on a phone) since malware has been known to keylog and steal password databases. Keylogging is not really possible on a phone unless you grant the offending app some very odd permissions. Whether a separate device is worth the hassle for you depends on how big you judge the risk for the accounts you'd store in there. Not using autofill or browser integration also helps in case there is some security issue in that, but I'm not sure how much that really helps (most browser bugs are aimed at running code on the host anyway) and how much it's just a nuisance.

> Is it considered safe enough?

No: Mozilla have access to your passwords if you use the Sync feature.

They encrypt your passwords with a key encrypted by a key generated from your Firefox Account password, and you enter that password on a web page they serve from servers they control. At any point they can start or stop serving malicious JavaScript to one, many or all users logging in, and steal your master password, then use that to decrypt your stored passwords.

Yes, they could also target users in Firefox itself, but that would leave traces in the Firefox binaries, and users should not automatically install Firefox updates the way they 'install' JavaScript on every page load.

If you do not use the Sync feature I believe that the password manager is okay enough.

I have a huge problem with how Firefox handles asking for a master password (if you want your password to be encrypted on disk).

Sometimes a small pop-up windows opens and ask you to fill your password. No other indication of which tab, which site, of even which Firefox profile opened it. It is not always the active tab. Also after unlocking it remains unlocked indefinitely.

Lockwise itself works nicely, it is just a reskinned version of the usual password manager.

Before you commit, you might want to know that there is no export feature.

It's really nice. Better than any other browser password manager. I've resisted using the browser's until now (I have 1Password) but the sync feature is slick for iOS.

I believe you can host your own instance of the back end portion if you wish:

https://github.com/mozilla/fxa

Smells like a sandboxing issue to me.

Search By Image: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/search_by_ima...

Translate Now: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/translate-now...

I sorely miss the ability to make my homepage a layout of the sites I visit daily. On Chrome I had this grid of most frequented sites that I set up myself, fine-tuned so I could launch Chrome and immediately open up any mail, read the news, check some of the blogs I read, etc. On Firefox, I've been using bookmarks but that's not as effective.

I highly recommend start.me as new tab page. It can be a bit slow to load so I use the singlefile addon to bundle it into a self-contained HTML that I set as my new tab page. Nothing else satisfies me!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/image-search-... has like 10 different search engines, including Google, Bing, Baidu, and many anime-focused search engines.

I really miss being able to search youtube quickly by opening a new tab, typing `you`, and hitting tab to query inline.

It exists since the very first Firefox version (and probably even before)

After Firefox 3 (which introduced site specific zoom feature) you can set the below config option for old behavior

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.zoom.siteSpecific

There are numerous Firefox add-ons that provide this feature, e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng.... IMHO, the main benefit of using Safari/Screen Time for this is that it automatically syncs the same limits across all of your iCloud-connected devices, which is great. I know Firefox has a Sync feature but I'm not sure if any of the add-ons leverage it to provide a similar seamless cross-device experience.

Extensions fill this role for Firefox. I have used LeechBlock previously and can recommend it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng...

...how often do you start up Firefox? I don't think I've ever seen this.

I generally loath automatic updates, but IMO web browsers are the one place they make sense. If you need something a bit slower, consider switching to Firefox ESR!

That's very clearly because you don't open it very often. This is a once a month "issue".

Have you heard of "Check for updates but let me choose when to install them" option under about:preferences > Firefox Updates? I assume you did not.

I like how Visual Studio code auto-updates when you close it. It never slows me down.

Both Firefox and VSCode take about 3 seconds to install updates on my PC, so it hardly matters anyway.

Ah that happens to me too every once in awhile and it's absolutely infuriating every time. Classic UI fail. It wouldn't be so bad if it just asked for permission first.