Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
How does this compare with other browsers?
Normally most webpages just give the browsers so much junk Pictures that are too large which only get scaled down. JavaScript Libraries that are many megs big, and often use only a fraction of the features. Also many pages are just long, just because it isn't in your field of view the data needs to be stored, and with DHTML and JS, it needs to be all the data, including junk that may never be used.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
For those of you who need real extensions.
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.
I never understand-ed this supposed "memory leak" subject: seems that only Firefox suffers of these problems...
I use it in a daily basis since ~2004 (in several OSes), and it never becomes a real problem...
You mean that you actually just run javascript from ANY webpage you visit without authorizing it first? No wonder you're angry about autoplaying videos!
auto-playing videos is really annoying (but is not an FF exclusivity...)
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.
What's it like living in 1998?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Yes, but PIP mode where the unwanted fucking video continues playing when you've left the browser to go into another application is apparently a FF exclusive feature.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
auto-playing videos is really annoying (but is not an FF exclusivity...)
This is trivial to fix in about:config, which I assume you know ...
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!
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
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
No: Google Chrome has it "feature" for several weeks now...
On Android? I've never seen this happen, and I'd be pretty pissed if it does. If it does, I send equal contempt to Google as for as Mozilla on this.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Curious which OS you are using?
I recently learned on Linux if your shm isn't big enough (mine was defaulted to 128M) that firefox, chrome, and basically any highly multithreaded application will try to compensate by caching things in their own processes, which causes the application to use way more RAM.
I increased my shm to 1GB and immediately noticed a much smoother operation, and much less memory usage by those applications.
I use mostly, but rarely, Google Chrome on Android to eventual "normal browsing" (I have FF configured to use SOCKS5 proxy, generated by https://play.google.com/store/..., to access remote addresses, or addresses filtered in some places WiFi, and with https://noscript.net/ [to access some paywalled content :P] - Google Chrome is a "dumb user" browser, I think...)
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.
Yeap - I think it needs Android 8/Oreo: when I upgraded my phone (I use lineages.org) from Android 7, it begined to happen
Thanks for warning me. The world is going to hell, urgh.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Interesting, I've actually tried pressing the buttons before and none of them did anything, but I assume from this that some pumps at least do have an escape.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
Hm. You must mean five of these?
and it only happens with already full-screen videos (not to any video)