Firefox Quantum continues to make news as Mozilla incorporates even more innovative technology into the platform. The development team behind the WebExtensions architecture is no exception, landing a slew of new API and improvements that can now be found in Firefox 59 (just released to the Beta channel).
Interesting reading that and how much attention they gave to it. In part, it’s a feature directly requested by the folks behind TabGroups and similar extensions because the WebExtensions API broke them outright with FFv57, and users like myself are waiting for those extensions to be fixed before we update, trying other solutions (f.e Chrome) in the meantime but not really finding a good solution.
Glad to see it landing; hopefully they’ll work it out and we can have the awesome experience of TabGroups/etc again.
I, for one, really miss TabGroups on up-to-date browsers.
Are we waiting?
I still use firefox as my main browser. (Wish they would fix the random whatever that causes secure sites to suck and require me clearing all local data though).
Have chrome as backup. (Mainly to play radio 2 as at one point FF would not, though that’s probably fixed!).
And for times when I do need the older FF plugins (not much but not infrequently either) I installed pale moon.
And the goddamn annoying disappearing mouse cursor bug, which was first reported to them over a decade ago.
You can always go with Firefox ESR to maintain old school plugin support while you wait for the main release to get to a usable state again.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/
browsers need to be *less* complex not more complex, haven’t they already had to add fuzziness to timing just to avoid direct browser->cpu snooping?….
Which, as I remember, had nothing to do with Firefox itself, and was all about mitigating vulnerabilities in the CPU. All OSes had to be upgraded as well, so I don’t really see how it is relevant here.
You might be right that modern browsers have become too complex; but what can you do, when you go from a simple document reader to basically an OS for all those Web frameworks…
Went from Chrome to edge and cant complain. Got a windows phone and noticed that edge gets almost no ads from youtube! Then noticed no full screen ads! No invasive ads! Hell now i run edge on desktop with origin and firefox on android with a ua lumia string. Netflix and youtube videos are soo much better than ff or chrome. I cant believe that chrome has turned into the new internet explorer, hell a lot of websites wont run with ff or edge. Like comedy central
Edited 2018-01-27 19:35 UTC
missingxtension,
Do you install adblockers? FF won’t show youtube ads if you have an adblocker and keep it up to date. If you aren’t using an adblocker, it’s possible google is using the useragent to change the content (ironically they’ll penalize others for this behavior if they catch you doing it).
I’ve also experienced another form of discrimination by google. As I’m sure you know, a lot of the websites insist on outsourcing captcha to google.
I’ve long known that recaptcha is extremely lax with users who are logged into google’s services, but I recently discovered something else: clear cookies, same IP, same time, same site, the ONLY difference is FF and chrome browser, google would consistently block FF with a captcha while letting chrome through unblocked.
Technically this doesn’t really make sense for a captcha service to do since an actual bot could just as easily use a chrome user agent rather than a FF UA or whatever else. So it seems that google could be exploiting 3rd party recaptcha protected websites to deliberately give chrome users a better experience.
The next time it happens, I don’t know if it would be worthwhile to gather that evidence and publishing it to try and shame google into ceasing the practice? Would they even care?
absolutely right, comedy central videos won’t load in FF. I’ve noticed the capcha problem, I always reload a bunch of times until i get the easiest one.
Use the slimjet browser. It automatically blocks ads and uses the chrome extensions. https://www.slimjet.com, It doesnt send usage data back to Google. It also has a youtube downloader and can record online video for saving offline for later use. Another good browser that blocks ads and trackers by default is the Brave browser. https://brave.com/
Edited 2018-01-27 19:48 UTC
Sadly, I have to walk back my praise/”it’s no so bad” comment from earlier (http://www.osnews.com/permalink?650866). The TabHunter plugin has been updated, and the new version doesn’t support configurable keyboard shortcuts – it defaults to Alt-Shift-T on Windows, which (if you have the menu bar enabled) conflicts with the keyboard shortcut to open the Tools menu.
And the ItsAllText addon has stopped working entirely – which is a deal breaker for me, because trying to write code in a textarea is, to me, akin to trying to type while wearing mittens. I tried TextEditorAnywhere – and while it has the advantage of working with any application (and not just textareas in browsers), it seems much less reliable in terms of tracking which file goes with which browser tab/form field (so it’s effectively unusable if, E.g., editing multiple CMS templates at a time).
The “Quantum” updates certainly make Firefox noticeably faster/more responsive – but after having spent the better part of a year recovering from De Quervian’s Syndrome in both hands (tendonitis at the base of the thumb), I’ll happily take a more efficient UI over a more responsive one.