Slashdot Mirror
Firefox 61 Arrives With Better Search, Tab Warming, and Accessibility Tools Inspector (venturebeat.com)
On Tuesday, Mozilla released Firefox 61, the newest version of its web browser for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android platforms. The release builds on Firefox Quantum, which the company calls "by far the biggest update since Firefox 1.0 in 2004." VentureBeat: Version 61 brings TLS 1.3, the ability to add custom search engines to the location bar, tab warming, retained display lists, WebExtension tab management, and the Accessibility Tools Inspector. Mozilla doesn't break out the exact numbers for Firefox, though the company does say "half a billion people around the world" use the browser. In other words, it's a major platform that web developers have to consider.
I am guessing this means "preloading tabs"? Ugh. Just stop already.
My personal test case will be with the UniFi 5.7/5.8 Controller web interface page. I've found consistently under the last few versions of Firefox that, while it's fine for at least an hour, if I leave it up constantly for ease of monitoring then after a day or two the Firefox process inevitably ends up pegging an entire core. There is no video whatsoever or any particularly fancy graphical usage, and while they may be doing something odd internally (I haven't had time to really dig into it) I'm not sure Firefox should end up in that state there over time. It's relatively easily repeatable though (will take a day but requires no interaction on my part) so I look forward to testing it. Although if it does resolve the problem I'll be mildly bummed whatever fix it was didn't make it into ESR, but so it goes.
Tut tut tut... I believe you mean the AWESOMEBAR.
that is what *I* want to know...
Anyone who needs 52ESR will be out of luck soon as its the last patch cycle. Those with Windows XP, XUL and NPAPI requirements are affected. Also Chrome is discontinuing Marvericks support, which also throws perfectly working Macs into the trash. Don’t give me the “it’s old” spiel, Mavericks is less than 5 years old.
"... the company does say "half a billion people around the world" use the browser. In other words, it's a major platform that web developers have to consider...."
Web developers will more than likely consider browsers that have significant (i.e., > 15-20%) market share, not one that is hyped up by its developers.
C'mon, how about some better Dev tools please?
If my years in the Canadian Army taught me anything, it's that tab warming leads to tab fires.
Think of the poor tabs, you filthy Americans!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I like my browser meek and docile, not aggressively second-guessing me and doing all sorts of crap "just in case". It already does too much!
How about a way to stop all javascript when the tab isn't active? Or a way to block javascript by domain, instead of having to rely on an adblocker? Opera has had that last one for ages.
Just watch it from the web server log for what FireFox actually sends when you send a JQuery post request that goes past the 5 minute mark... you cannot see this from the networking tab in your browser, but wireshark will also grab it for you. So.. not suitable for all web use
In other words, it's a major platform that web developers have to consider.
Hear that folks? The article says Firefox isn't a 3rd-class netizen anymore. Party's over: No more testing on just Chrome!
Ever since Nov, 2017 when they broke the extensions, their market share has gone down each month. They are currently at only 5.27%. They are irrelevant.
"Tab Warming" sounds like a great, well thought out feature! Yay!
Not necessarily.
Do you want the rendering of the current page to slow down because you flicked the mouse out of view, which happened to be over a tab?
Do you want the machine and network to slow to a crawl because you dragged the pointer across a great many tabs on the way to the one you wanted, and they all start rendering?
Do you want even higher memory/CPU use for a product that's already considered seriously bloated?
Dear all:
Tired of google changing the browser, moving the interface around and breaking things Every 6 Weeks?
Tired of microsoft changing the browser, moving the interface around and breaking things Every 6 Weeks?
Tired of using safari and not having support of big boy tools, like iLO, IPIMI and the web consoles of Orocle and SAP?
Welcome to the wonderful world of Firefox ESR.
Current ESR (60) will be supported for about a year, with no new features or UI changes, only security patches and bug fixes. It has the full power of Quantum (which means more or less performance parity with the other browsers).
The version released today is 60.1, which means that ESR 60 has been in the wild for a couple of months now, allowing time to iron any rough edges, and includes a Fix for tab_selected so it works when headerURL is not set (uplifted to 60)...
Also, since the "Great breakage" of PlugIns and Add-ons happened in FireFox 53, chances are most of your plug-ins and extensions already have been ported (or have suitable equivalents).
As we speak, I am downloading it, and will install it over ESR 52, after I delete as much as possible of all the NPAPI Plug-ins that litter my Computer (Citrix, saba-meeting, WebEx, iLO, Huawei IPIMI, etc).
ESR Is the best balance for people who use the Browser as a Tool to "get things done", and not as an entertainment/media consumption.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
For me, when I open a page, in a new tab or the same one, I open it because I intend to look at the page. I *want* my browser to get a page ready to view when I open it.
Where I may not want it loaded right away is when I re-open my browser and have many tabs open from an earlier session. That's a niche where a well thought-out new UI feature would be good, though - pages I intend to use this week, but not right now. Bookmarks feel more permanent than that use case; I use bookmarks for things I plan to return to months later. Tabs aren't really the right choice, either, though - having many pages loaded that I'm not going to miss today is wasteful.
Bookmarks / favorites require a few more clicks than tabs. Tabs are "right click, open in new tab" to start, "close tab" to end, a total of three clicks. Bookmarks add many additional clicks - "open in new table, bookmark this page,select the folder, close the page", then "open bookmarks, find the right bookmark folder", then afterwards, navigating bookmarks again, and removing the bookmark, then closing the tab.
I'd like to "right click - add to read later", two clicks. Then right-click on the close button to "close and remove from read later".
Does the upgrade give you an advantage in agar.io? If not then skip it.
"How much more electricity will "tab warming"
Minimal.
Firefox Tab Warming explained:
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/01...
From TFA:
Firefox 61 for desktop brings an improved search experience by letting you more easily add custom search engines to the location bar. Mozilla offered a helpful example: “Imagine searching an actor’s name; now with Firefox you can automatically search through IMDB in the location bar.”
Sorry, the Location Bar (thank you for not perpetuating the "Awesome Bar" myth) is for URLs not searching. Stop trying to "improve" my "search experience" within the fucking browser. Browsers are for browsing, search engines are for searching.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
From TFA:
There’s also a small update to extensions built using the WebExtension API. WebExtensions can now hide tabs and manage the behavior of the browser when a tab is opened or closed.
And how do I disable it? Seriously, why would we want the browser to do stuff like this? Just what I need, more seemingly random things happening that I can't see and/or presumably control ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
the ability to add custom search engines to the location bar
I've been doing that for years now. Did Mozilla forget about their own feature, one of the features that keeps me on Firefox, I might add?
Use trve Norwegian Vivaldi, instead of shady Chinese Opera.
Why is Firefox so slow to render and pan/zoom an SVG image? We have a custom SVG base map and Firefox is significantly slower than all other browsers. So much so that it's unusable and I can no longer recommend the browser to my users. *sigh*
Many laptops' trackpads lack a middle button or emulation thereof.
Hi, APK! How's the weather in Syracuse?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Known as "quotemining" in the trade.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
APK doesn't project much at all, does he?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Your Net Marketshare link with Firefox at 9.92% is narrowed to desktop as opposed to mobile. If you likewise narrow StatCounter to desktop, Firefox is at 11.55% (source). The negligible (0.3%) mobile usage share of Firefox for Android (source: StatCounter) is probably dragging down the overall numbers.
Exactly. These silly acceleration features are exactly what cause responsiveness issues, not solve them. Every good UI programmer is supposed to know this.
Nothing in that article suggests "minimal" other than the usual marketing BS. In fact, it works exactly as I expected it to, which is far from minimal.
More spamming and quote-mining. (Like the man said, Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.) More evasion. More bullying and lying. More magical thinking along the lines of "If I attack others, then say they're really doing it to me, well, that's proof they're attacking me". Something that most people figure out doesn't work by the time they're ready for primary school.
But you never did. Sad!
Rather than whingeing that someone whom you went out of your way to antagonise tracked you down, you should instead be grateful that, this case, that someone was me. I sent you a cheery postcard that said only, "Greetings from Stockholm! Behave yourself! Regards, Zontar." That's all it said, and you and I both know it, and you can stop lying about it.
If you felt threatened by the fact that, due to your long history of screwups and harassing nearly everyone you've come in contact with, you left your info where anybody whom you've threatened* can find it without much effort, guess who's responsible for that? Not the people you've harassed.
*(By, I dunno, say, trying to run them off a discussion board by spamming them with hundreds of posts per day, day after day? And posting and re-posting lies and half-truths about them, day after day? Sound familiar? I'm pretty sure it does.)
What might a less ethical being have done in my place? Hmmmm? If you feel by threatened by that line of thought, perhaps you should start recognising that your actions do indeed have consequences.
But you won't, because it seems that you're never going to grow up, and that you are never going to accept responsibility for your actions.
As a result you'll spend the rest of your life in your mother's basement, cowering in fear of all the people you've attacked over the years.
Well, Booga-booga to you, then. Hope you enjoy lying on the bed of nails you've made for yourself.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Do you want the rendering of the current page to slow down because you flicked the mouse out of view, which happened to be over a tab?
If you're spending so much time rendering the page that this is an issue then the web designer should have their testicles removed for the good of humanity.
Do you want the machine and network to slow to a crawl because you dragged the pointer across a great many tabs on the way to the one you wanted, and they all start rendering?
There is a difference between pre-fetching and pre-rendering.
Do you want even higher memory/CPU use for a product that's already considered seriously bloated?
Define higher CPU usage. Just because I do an activity earlier than planned doesn't mean I do more of it.
Exactly. These silly acceleration features are exactly what cause responsiveness issues, not solve them. Every good UI programmer is supposed to know this.
What an absolute daft reply. UI responsiveness issues come up when a lot of activities queue at the same time. Starting some of them earlier and delaying others is one of the main ways to improve this responsiveness and has been part of the speed improvements from everything like UI design, background service management, kernel schedules, and even CPU design itself.
Yes, I too long for the days of static HTML pages, 10dpi 320x320 gifs, and Geocities. Shun change! Yarr why do computers even have harddrives - we should be toggling binary switches for each program we want to run. Yarrrr change rabble rabble rabble.
Hell, he probably threatened his own mother, which is why she left his ass in Syracuse (they shared the same address) and moved to Florida.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You can just download the tarball and use that until Ubuntu gets the update.
https://support.mozilla.org/en...
It will use the same config you currently have so no loss in bookmarks, logins, etc.
Ubuntu gives some more complex instructions in case you want to make sure to back up your firefox profile first
https://help.ubuntu.com/commun...
I use an external mouse with this laptop when at my desk. When it's on my lap, such as when I'm riding the bus or waiting on a bench for someone, there really isn't room or a good angle.
If you mouse-over a tab and it starts rendering something that's not even visible, that requires system resources and can slow down the whole system. That is NOT queuing things in a reasonable way, especially if garbage collection kicks in, yo.
If you mouse-over a tab and it starts rendering something that's not even visible, that requires system resources and can slow down the whole system.
Or the correct way of looking at it: you use idle system resource to reduce load on the system when the actual event takes place. You're right, it's not queueing. It's prediction. You don't like prediction buy yourself a 486 and run DOS. Prediction to speed up operations has been a mainstay of computer in all forms, and directly against your complaint: was also parts of project butter and other changes to UIs that improved their responsiveness.
Pre-rendering a page when you move a mouse cursor over a tab isn't prediction, it's reaction.
Using so-called "idle" resources to render a page in the background takes time away from the browser UI. In this situation, the most likely outcome is that there will be a slight pause if you actually do click on the tab after mousing over it (and Firefox has had TONS of problems with random pauses over the last decade, especially with regards to garbage collection). I perfectly understand what you're saying, as I've studied CPU design, but despite all the hype and promises, these techniques never actually result in a net benefit in the real world. Hardware people get caches and prediction. From what I've seen, software people don't.
UIs were responsive in the days of Win2K and arguably XP, but that all went to hell when people started using all this turbo superprefetch nonsense, and used that as an excuse to justify tons of new bloat. Take a look at Win10. It does preventive maintenance all day long using "idle time" and it's slow as a dog and completely unpredictable, even if you have an SSD. The same has been happening to Linux for a while (at least with the distros I've tried).
When they actually make UIs more responsive, then I'll be impressed. Mozilla has been crooning about both speed and responsiveness for a decade... and I haven't seen it. Nobody else has, either, which is exactly why they've lost so much market share.
Pre-rendering a page when you move a mouse cursor over a tab isn't prediction, it's reaction.
Oh really? And if I don't click? Did it just react to something I didn't want to? That's kind of the textbook definition of prediction, doing something anticipating the following action.
If you can't even understand the base principle how can we have a discussion on it.
Using so-called "idle" resources to render a page in the background takes time away from the browser UI
What a stupid thing to say. Take time away from a UI that literally is about to take time to do something, all the while almost certainly consuming little to no resources.
the most likely outcome is that there will be a slight pause
The most likely outcome is you wont notice shit other than the tab will appear to be faster.
and Firefox has had TONS of problems with random pauses over the last decade
Yeah, and have done a lot of improvements in the last decade too leading to the latest iteration to be among the fastest releases to date. Excuse me for giving the developers who have proven themselves a little rope.
these techniques never actually result in a net benefit in the real world
I agree, except for all the places where they have. As said this has been a basis of many projects that have actively improved UI responsiveness. You claim otherwise, and you're wrong.
UIs were responsive in the days of Win2K and arguably XP, but that all went to hell when people started using all this turbo superprefetch nonsense
I get it now. This comment combined with the bit where you've studied CPU design ... you have no idea how software works. That's the only conclusion that someone can make given you think superprefetch has anything remotely to do with the UI.
Take a look at Win10. It does preventive maintenance all day long using "idle time" and it's slow as a dog and completely unpredictable
Yeah, except for the bit where it's faster than all previous versions of windows down to 7 as measured by both synthetic and workload benchmarks.
The same has been happening to Linux for a while
Yeah I agree. The new kernel schedulers and advances in X have made Linux faster and snappier too! (Yes I know I'm playing with your sentences)
When they actually make UIs more responsive, then I'll be impressed
No you won't, quite evidently. Car analogy time. You're claiming that a V8 engine with 400bhp is no more powerful than a shittly little 4cyl with 200bhp simply because your only frame of reference is a small hatchback vs a 3-tonne utility vehicle. You complain that the utility vehicle doesn't accelerate completely ignoring you have a different car.
You want to feel some speed, how about you disable all window animations and then see how fast notepad.exe appears. That seems to be your frame of reference completely ignoring the massively more complex software and functions you are attempting to do now over the Win2k days.
Mozilla has been crooning about both speed and responsiveness for a decade... and I haven't seen it.
Observation bias. They most definitely haven't been. A decade ago Mozilla was talking about speed exclusively in terms of javascript performance. 6 years ago there was no talk of speed at all but a focus entirely on memory footprint, 5 years ago the talk was exclusively on sandboxing, security and the plugin architecture. A part of that was UI responsiveness changes with Australis and the UI took a nice jump up in speed then which a lot of people then instantly shit on with a laundry list of plugins because they didn't like the look. Even firefox quantum didn't talk about the UI focused exclusively on page rendering.
Nobody