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.

Comments

Meanwhile Waterfox 5.2.4 has been released

[xack]

For those of you who need real extensions.

Re:Meanwhile Waterfox 5.2.4 has been released

[Ashthon]

The problem is WebExtensions APIs doesn't allow you to write "real" extensions, and a lot of what could previously be done is no longer possible. Want to add a status bar? Forget it! Want to fix the search box to restore it to usability? No chance! Want to customise the UI in some other way? Not permitted!

Aside from the limitations on what can be done, many developers do not consider it worth their time to invest in a platform that's being actively sabotaged. This is exactly why we've ended up with so many folks like Waterfox and Pale Moon; developers have lost faith in Mozilla and have given up entirely to instead work on their own project. There's no point trying to work with Mozilla when they're actively working against you.

Mozilla have shown they have no interest in what users want. They actively delete any negative feedback, they disable comments on videos to avoid criticism and they actively destroy the work of developers. Firefox could be a great browser if Mozilla would work with users and developers, but instead they want to dictate to users and refuse to ever accept they're wrong. This is exactly why Firefox's market share has dropped to irrelevance and is still declining.

No it does not "leak like a sieve"

[sjbe]

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.

Re:But it still leaks memory like a sieve..

[fbobraga]

I use it in a daily basis since ~2004 (in several OSes), and it never becomes a real problem...

I would love to see more performance improvements

[grungeman]

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.

Re:I would love to see more performance improvemen

[grungeman]

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.