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Firefox 63 Arrives With Enhanced Tracking Protection, Search Shortcuts, and Picture-in-Picture on Android (venturebeat.com)
Mozilla today launched Firefox 63 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The release brings Enhanced Tracking Protection, performance improvements on Windows and macOS, search shortcuts, and Picture-In-Picture on Android. From a report: Firefox 63 for the desktop is available for download now on Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. According to Mozilla, Firefox has about 300 million active users. In other words, it's a major platform that web developers must consider. Firefox 63 for desktop brings support for Enhanced Tracking Protection. [...] Firefox 63's Enhanced Tracking Protection blocks cookies and storage access from third-party trackers, which Mozilla says targets the problem of cross-site tracking without breaking sites and impacting revenue streams like the original Tracking Protection. It does this by preventing known trackers from setting third-party cookies -- the primary method of tracking across sites -- but still gives you the option to block all known trackers (under Firefox Options/Preferences).
[...] Search shortcuts essentially pins sites like Google and Amazon on the new tab page. When you click or tap them, you're redirected to Firefox's awesome bar, which automatically fills the corresponding keyword (@google or @amazon in this case) for the search engine. This way, you can type your query, hit enter, and get your search results without having to first load the Google or Amazon homepage. [...] The only major new feature for this Firefox for Android release is a picture-in-picture mode (Android Oreo and up). This means that if you're watching a video in full-screen, when you switch away from Firefox it will move the video into a small floating window, which you can tap to return to the full video player.
[...] Search shortcuts essentially pins sites like Google and Amazon on the new tab page. When you click or tap them, you're redirected to Firefox's awesome bar, which automatically fills the corresponding keyword (@google or @amazon in this case) for the search engine. This way, you can type your query, hit enter, and get your search results without having to first load the Google or Amazon homepage. [...] The only major new feature for this Firefox for Android release is a picture-in-picture mode (Android Oreo and up). This means that if you're watching a video in full-screen, when you switch away from Firefox it will move the video into a small floating window, which you can tap to return to the full video player.
This is my number one annoyance with Firefox. It just sucks up all of the machine memory to the point where I can no longer launch any other applications. I am not 100% sure, but I suspect using the browser with Twitter is what pushes it over the edge - other machines where I use Firefox and where I do not use Twitter have no such problem.
And shutting down Firefox takes a good 10 minutes or so - I click the 'X' on the window and I can see the processes slowly shrink and eventually go away. It used to be easier back when it was just one process - I could just terminate that one process and restart.
Firefox 63's Enhanced Tracking Protection blocks cookies and storage access from third-party trackers, which Mozilla says targets the problem of cross-site tracking without breaking sites and impacting revenue streams like the original Tracking Protection.
So it's a regression. Fuck all of your "revenue streams"!
By using the @, many people wil not use it.
People want to type "search item" nor "google search item" Not use captials to make "Google Search Item" And "@google search item" is even worse. And that is just on Qwerty keyboards. There @ is pretty easy. On Azerty the @ is ALT-GR+2. Alt-GR is the ALT bnutton on the right, so you need two hands to type it.
I really miss the time where we had a URL and a place for the search engine on all browsers.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
For those of you who need real extensions.
So now when you open what you think is a news article, and it starts playing a massive video, and you pause it, scroll down to where there's text and then the fucking video moves to the corner and starts playing again and you say "Oh fuck this shit" and hit the home button to get out of the browser, the video will still continue to play and be overlaid over the Android UI.
Should we be surprised? I can't even fill my car with gasoline without getting an autoplaying video FFS. Yes, that's a thing people who aren't in the US right now, gas stations actually have pumps now that have the same screens that are used to confirm your payment method suddenly switch to playing full color ads.
When does this end? I think a quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about walls, revolutions, and being the first comes to mind.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
This is my number one annoyance with Firefox.
Not currently running linux on a desktop machine but I am running Firefox on both Windows and Mac machines currently and haven't seen a memory leak of any significance in years. There was a time when those were problems but not so much recently. Like all browsers these days it does use a lot of memory but I haven't seen evidence of a memory leak in a long time. Given that you posted anonymously I'm guessing you are just throwing FUD around for fun.
And shutting down Firefox takes a good 10 minutes or so - I click the 'X' on the window and I can see the processes slowly shrink and eventually go away.
Again I call bullshit on this unless you are running a machine with some serious hardware problems. I have never seen any behavior like that on literally hundreds of machines I administer through work running firefox or in my personal use. Firefox does have its flaws but you don't need to make stuff up to point them out.
By using the @, many people wil not use it.
This is true. I will be one of them.
I really miss the time where we had a URL and a place for the search engine on all browsers.
I don't. I just type my search into the bar or I go to the website I want to search. Works fine. No idea why people keep trying to over complicate this stuff. Keep it simple. I pretty much never used the search bar when it was there because it didn't solve any problem for me. Maybe it was a hair slower but not enough for me to care.
Firefox has come a long way performance wise. Flexbox layout has been improved dramatically, and lot's of other performance improvements were implemented.
But there are still some major performance issues, and somehow I get the feeling that the Mozilla developers get a bit carried away with implementing new and exciting stuff instead of making the existing functionality really good.
If you are running Windows you may want to run the following test with hardware performance enabled and disabled, and compare the displayed frame rates.
Performance test: https://codepen.io/anon/pen/wY...
On my machine hardware acceleration reduces the frame rate at least by a factor 4(!). This is not what I understand by "acceleration". Please, Mozilla devs, this can't be what you had in mind when you introduced hardware acceleration.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
blocks cookies and storage access from third-party trackers
Seriously, why didn't they do this 20 years ago? Did they really have to wait until their last user has switched?
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Sounds about right for Windows "hardware acceleration".
Remember when they introduced Visual Studio 2010 and claimed that because it used WPF, it had "hardware-accelerated graphics"? End result was it was 50 times slower than Visual Studio 2008.
Don't even bother with 2017; they rewrote most of it in JavaScript to make it 100x slower.
Switched to Firefox after Google added that stupid "hold cmd + q to quit" shit to Chrome...but I must say Firefox sucks ass.
There is still no single-click option for protecting SSDs.
Pocket must go!
Adding a single-line URL/Search bar never needed to be added to the codebase.
Firefox is likely collecting data using Topsites.
No would would need a private mode or it's bloat if you weren't collecting data in the first place.
No one likes looking at square corners on tabs.
The API changes so radically and so often and so deeply and abrupt depreciating, that you can just forget about having a good extension base.
Firefox should have supported its own MAF format, but it didn't.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
>It does this by preventing known trackers from setting third-party cookies -- the primary method of tracking across sites -- but still gives you the option to block all known trackers
>the option to block all known trackers
HAHA what bullshit
they still think they can block 3rd party scripts and shit without breaking sites?? it's fucking impossible, get adblock and start blocking things, that's the only way to selectively isolate yourself from the cancer of today's internet
I see what they added (nothing of interest to me), but with each release I'm more concerned about which functionality I use daily that they decided to take out.
Protect your browser with the Force Safe Search add-on
Sounds like a wonky driver edge-case. If there is no driver update that fixes it for you, then I'd definitely file a bug and let them know what's in the about:support page for graphics. At least then they will know about it and might be able to fix it. Otherwise you might at least get lucky when WebRender comes along (if you're not already using that new and exciting upcoming stuff).
Thanks, that was my first take, too. But I tested this on three computers, two laptops and a gaming pc, Windows 10 and Windows 7, and the results were similar. There is an issue on bugzilla, opened five moths ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...
My guess is that his is just hard and difficult work, and in the Mozilla team there are not too many developers who can do this.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
My Galaxy Note 3 had picture in picture for most apps. Rarely used it, but it's been around for a while.
How is this different or better in any way?
Pale Moon 28.1.0 was released on Sep 20, continuing to be a far superior browser over chrome and firefox.
Seriously, stop posting updates to a fucking unrelated site for views. For those that care: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/63.0/releasenotes/
I'll say it again, stop posting the god damn release notes to a third party; use the actual fucking source.
This is true. I will be one of them.
You were one of them already, consider this feature when used with the keyboard is extremely old. I think it predates Firefox 1.0 and was found on Mozilla.
I tested it again! e.g., go to the top of any slashdot page (this is why I need the home key on a keyboard...)
Right-click on the search field and click "add a keyword for this search"
Now any time you might do Alt-D to activate the URL bar, type something like : slash microsoft
and get taken to https://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=microsoft where you have a collection of stories about microsoft like "Samsung Announces Galaxy Book 2, a 2-in-1 Windows 10 S Hybrid With Gigabit LTE and 20-Hour Battery Life" and whatever bullshit microsoft has done.
I'm not surprised. "Hardware acceleration" consists in sending your data through an abstraction layer and a graphics driver. It worked well with fixed function hardware and direct access or single user operating systems. Meanwhile CPUs got over 100x faster so what they could do in 1990 (draw a letter), they still can do.
My favorite rescue on old PCs with misbehaving or unstable graphics was to switch VLC output to the dumbest method (on linux it's "X11") or to switch the entire PC's graphics to VESA modes.
Even software 3D renderers in video games would not be quite bad. Remember when games were fun, took less than a GB, loaded quick and worked every time, and you jumped into the action with no cutscenes and tutorials. We all have a 2-3GHz CPU now with 2 or 4 hardware threads minimum, but GPUs and their drivers are all over the place from 0.1 teraflops to 20 teraflops, a few GB/s to 800GB/s, a dozen feature levels, three Windows versions and hundreds of linux versions.
We can have amazing enough graphics on the CPU, even if targeting 60 fps on a quad core Atom, dual core i3 (1080p), dual core AMD. We used to play vid games in the 90s to be impressed by the graphics, now I just miss the fun. Launch game play game.
Screw picture-in-picture, call me when reflow is back. Once upon a time, back when things were good, you would zoom in and the text would reflow (rewrap). Now, you zoom in a bit to see some small text, then you have to pan side-to-side.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2014/01/28/bug-watch-text-reflow-removed-from-webviews-in-kitkat-probably-not-coming-back/
Hm. You must mean five of these?
I'm gonna honestly answer.
That top-N bullshit is just that- bullshit. I disable it on every machine I can. My new tab does not need to broadcast to every person standing by my desk what websites I surf to, nor how frequently I visit them. I replace newtab, when I can, with blanktab. My homepage is plain ass google.com. Awesomebar and search suggestions are disabled. Now I type a lot of the websites in manually so I don't necessarily need a home button, but someone else, like yer mom, might need a button to get to her links.
So to answer your question, it's needed when the automation is disabled.
Firefox took a nose dive in performance back around version 45. On perfectly sound hardware I can install Fedora Linux (32bit or 64 bit, doesn't seem to matter) and any recent Firefox, and then open perhaps 10 tabs (nothing unusual, no pirated content or porn etc) and Linux will grind to a halt and the GUI becomes totally non-responsive as Firefox consumes 99% (or more) of resources and thrashes the drive. It can take 5 to 10 minutes to close a tab and as much as an hour to shut the machine down as GIGABYTES of craop get swapped back and forth by the lame excuse for a program that Firefox has become.
Instead of Mozilla coders behaving like dogs who've seen a SQUIRREL, and adding more shiny new features, they need to get back to the basics, like:
(1) The user and GUI come FIRST! If a bit of Javascript consumes too many resources, kill it and blacklist it and never run it again without user consent but certainly NEVER allow Javascript to eat all the performance of a multi-gighertz multicore machine. Mozilla had this solved perfectly FOR YEARS when it allowed users to block execution of Javascript. I presume they eliminated this option to make advertisers happy.
(2) Being honest with the user is important. Mozilla has an option to block pop-up windows, but it's a lie. I always select the option, yet I get more pop-up windows now than I did 5 years ago. There is an option to limit how much the browser caches on the local drive, but it's also a lie: I have set it to various sizes as an experiment and found Firefox stuffing GIGABYTES more onto the drive than I set the limit to.
(3) Stability is more important than glitter. If the programmers at Mozilla are either too incompetent or too lazy to fix current problems, then there is no reason to allow them to add more features, since those features are also likely to have bugs they either cannot or are unable to fix.
When a program like Firefox gets so bad that the only way to stop it is to pull the power plug (because the system has become completely non-responsive, and you do not have an hour to burn waiting for the hard drive thrashing to stop) something is SERIOUSLY wrong. Oh, and it's not the hardware - I have installed the same OS on the same hardware and installed an older Firefox and none of the badness happens.
I do not know who the poster you replied to was (it wasn't me) and I'm certainly not spreading FUD (I use Firefox over any other browser (I do not trust Microsoft or Google and do not like Apple) but I just want the people as Mozilla to go back to what they were years ago - a competent bunch of coders making the best browser available. They're not doing that now.
I'm not the person you were replying to, but it's very bad coding form if the number of tabs opened causes a major problem. If a person opens a bunch of tabs, there's no reason at all for the browser to run all the scripts on all those tabs. The browser should only run the scripts on the current tab unless the user says otherwise, and the content for any new tabs should only be pre-cached up to the limits set by the user-selected (or default) size of the local cache.
I've never seen anybody open "hundreds" of tabs, but I have certainly opened as many as 20, particularly when opening tabs for various search results so I can then rapidly inspect those results and switch back-and-forth between them. In my experience, Firefox cannot safely handle more than about 20 tabs without eating all system resources.
Hint to Firefox programmers: Honor the cache size limits and stop letting every tab run 30 Javascript-driven video ads all at the same time. It's really pretty simple if they would care to do a little boring grunt work on the code instead of adding Pocket, or re-designing the UI for the 30th time, or reworking the rendering code yet again when they are not properly managing what they're going to render in the first place.
You seem annoyed that somebody does not want a lame lazy incompetent would-be programmer destroying a piece of hardware he bought.
Flash memory of any type (including SSDs) can only be written a limited number of times. Flash drive makers cleverly try to wear-level the drives and even make them fail gracefully and quietly over time (mapping out bad sectors/pages as they fail) but none of that addresses the fact that every write to a flash drive destroys that drive by a tiny amount - and as a result it makes lazy programmers who write stuff to drives when it's not necessary into evil destructive jerks whose actions harm many thousands of people many of whom might just not be able to afford a replacement drive at the moment when one might be prematurely needed. My family had a series of health emergencies last year that involved multiple people having a total of 7 surgeries, so I am painfully aware that some family similarly hit but without my resources might be unable to buy a new computer part on a schedule you seem to think trivial.
As an engineer who has designed (an earlier generation of) solid state drives, I find the idea of anybody intentionally wasting write cycles on them offensive, and anybody else downplaying that bad behavior just plain annoying.
Does it have Tab Mix Plus yet? No? Well I'll pass on that then, thanks.