Firefox 66 Arrives With Autoplaying Blocked by Default, Smoother Scrolling, and Better Search (venturebeat.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 66 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The release includes autoplaying content (audio and video) blocked by default, smoother scrolling, better search, revamped security warnings, WebAuthn support for Windows Hello, and improved extensions. The company says its main goal with this release is to reduce irritating experiences such as auto-playing videos, pop-ups, and page jumps. Firefox 66 for desktop is available for download now on Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. The Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play.

Comments

Re:I'm so torn

[Anubis IV]

Honestly curious: in what ways do you find Chrome's user experience to be better than Opera's? I just recently switched to Opera after finally getting annoyed at all of the privacy invasiveness of Chrome, and I found that it's indistinguishable from Chrome in the vast majority of cases once I installed Install Chrome Extensions and added all of my important Chrome extensions back that I had been missing.

If Only Popup Layers Could be Destroyed

[mssymrvn]

The only true browser feature I want is to terminate all of the friggin' popup layers that harass for your email. In what way are these better/less intrusive than popup windows? No! I don't want to be on your mailing list.

Chrome and Firefox devs: Please damn this blight to hell. It's on almost every site I visit and it's such a pain in the ass. Especially if you can't use to close them.

Re:If Only Popup Layers Could be Destroyed

[Luthair]

For me I take the interstitial pop-ups my cue to leave the site. Though I'm not sure that this is more annoying than every site on the internet wanting to show you notifications now or your geo-location.

Re:I'm so torn

[Luthair]

For one thing its not owned by a private Chinese equity firm with unknown motives.

Yay for Firefox

[tsa]

I've been using Firefox ever since it was Netscape 3 or so, and I still am convinced it's the best browser on the planet. I'm a bit worried about all the extra bits they keep developing that are not necessary in a browser or that exist from other companies already, like notes and a password manager. I'd rather see them spend time on Thunderbird.

Re:I'm so torn

[Anubis IV]

While that's true and is a great reason to not use Opera, it doesn't speak to the user experience differences that the OP says turned them off from Opera, which is what I was curious about.

But

[DarkRookie2]

No Classic Theme Restorer. Or Download Statusbar. Or a status bar that will let me run things from it.

Still autoplays silent video

[tepples]

I saw "autoplaying content (audio and video) blocked by default" in the summary and jumped into the usual test suite. All still played. To learn why, I read the featured article and found this:

Mozilla's main goal is to remove the annoyance of sound blaring from your speakers. On sites that automatically mute the sound, the Block Autoplay feature will not stop the video from playing.

This means autoplaying video in floating ads will continue to drain your computer's battery and your monthly Internet cap.

Re:Still autoplays silent video

[Anonymous Coward]

I found settings here that allowed me to make the autoplay blocking work for muted videos as well.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Autoplay_guide#Browser_configuration_options

a reason I don't use Chrome

[gosand]

In firefox (and now with my preferred browser, pale moon), there is a "feature" I use all the time that is not in Chrome.

When you create a bookmark in FF there are properties associated with it, e.g. Description. You don't have that in Chrome.
I use the description to house my userid and password hints for the many sites I have that I need to log into. I never put the full info in it, so it is reasonably secure. I gave up on password managers years ago, and this system has served me very well. Bookmarks can be easily backed up and restored with descriptions fully in tact. Password gets updated, I just update the hint in the description.

It doesn't sound like much, but I once tried to switch to Chrome and it was immediately something that I missed - and there was no equivalent feature.

Re:a reason I don't use Chrome

[Curupira]

Dude, Firefox has a good password manager. If you have an Firefox account, you can access your password in your desktop and your mobile device, without having to install extensions. With a good random password generator (Lastpass has one at their website, you're good to go.

Design

[DrYak]

The problem stems from stupid designers that require animated backgrounds
(Why? Whyyy?!!!!?!?!?)

Using silent videos is still the most efficient way to do these.
If you disable silent videos, the websites will usually try to fall-back to some *other* less-efficient animated format (e.g.: .GIF animated image) instead of stopping the animation.

If designer didn't insist on such backgrounds, Firefox could still block all videos.
Instead, we have to rely on this conditional block to avoid even *more* damage to your monthly internet cap.

But at least, uBlock can take care of the advertisements (be it autoplaying videos or not) and at least on Firefox, that works even in the mobile version (unlike Chrome where only the desktop version gets uBlock)

Re: I'm so torn

[caution live frogs]

I keep hearing this from people ad nauseum but I’ve been using Firefox since Phoenix and there are exactly zero add-ones I use that are “broken”. What exactly is “broken” for you?