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From Firefox's faster, slicker, slimmer Quantum edition now out
[...] Collectively, the performance work being done to modernize Firefox is called Project Quantum. We took a closer look at Quantum back when Firefox 57 hit the developer channel in September, but the short version is, Mozilla is rebuilding core parts of the browser, such as how it handles CSS stylesheets, how it draws pages on-screen, and how it uses the GPU.
This work is being motivated by a few things. First, the Web has changed since many parts of Firefox were initially designed and developed; pages are more dynamic in structure and applications are richer and more graphically intensive. JavaScript is also more complex and difficult to debug. Second, computers now have many cores and simultaneous threads, giving them much greater scope to work in parallel. And security remains a pressing concern, prompting the use of new techniques to protect against exploitation. Some of the rebuilt portions are even using Mozilla's new Rust programming language, which is designed to offer improved security compared to C++.
Also at: Firefox aims to win back Chrome users with its souped up Quantum browser
The fastest version of Firefox yet is now live
(Score: 5, Informative) by FakeBeldin on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:45AM (20 children)
Though a few have updated. I believe no-script, mublock origin, and https everywhere exist now in usable form for the new firefox.
(Score: 5, Informative) by KritonK on Thursday November 16 2017, @10:59AM (9 children)
Noscript is still being worked on. It should become available any day now, but it is not ready yet. Ublock origin is already available, but with some minor problems regarding <noscript> tags, which is unknown if they will be fixed: from what I understand, uBlock origin's developer has requested additional functionality from the WebExtensions API, but according to noscript's developer, equivalent functionality is already present and is being used by noscript.
The photon UI is a step away from the ugliness of Australis, while the modern ugliness of Photon, with its monochromatic black icons can be overriden using CSS (check here [github.com] for a nice set of presets from which to chose from, created by the author of Classic Theme Restorer), so when the above two addons become ready for prime time, it might not be as inconceivable to keep using Firefox, as we originally thought, even if many of the other plugins have stopped working. Until these two are ready, however, I won't even consider switching from Waterfox.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday November 16 2017, @01:42PM (8 children)
If uBlock has migrated, odds are that uMatrix has as well, and in my opinion, it's superior to NoScript.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday November 16 2017, @01:58PM (6 children)
uBlock is for scrubs, uMatrix is for PROs.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday November 16 2017, @04:16PM (3 children)
I guess I'm somewhere in between. uBlock0 is usually on; uMatrix when I'm in the mood to do a ton of clicking. Unlike so many control panels / options / settings menus these days, you have to be sure to save after teaching uMatrix, or all that clicking was for naught. Not sure if they have a way to export that info, it would be great to be able to copy it to other computers.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @08:03PM (2 children)
1. You can use the sync feature to sync setting between computers or just export the rules in the dashboard for bot uMatrix and uBlock.
2. You can set uBlock to "I am an advanced user" and then it adds a clickable field like uMatrix, but not quite as detailed. See: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium-mode [github.com] although I use "hard mode" myself.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:14PM (1 child)
Awesome, very informative, thank you!
My typical brute-force mode is to just copy the extension's whole sub-directory.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @02:28AM
I forgot to mention, Firefox and Chrome both have limits on how much data you can sync, so if you have too many, you may have to roll your own. Luckily, that is stupidly easy if you know what you are doing, but can be frustratingly difficult if you don't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @08:57PM
Fine, scrubs whatever. Do I have the TIME to clickify everything? That is where NoScript operates so easily. With FF57, what add-ons should I add. Is uMatrix a superset of uOrigin, so no need for the latter, or totally different? What else should I add in? Not trying to be funny here, but there are thousands of add-ons and most of them are nonsense, but a few can enhance security and improve the surfing experience.
(Score: 1) by Crash on Friday November 17 2017, @09:03AM
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Thursday November 16 2017, @02:12PM
Indeed, it has migrated. Not much of a surprise, as it was already working in chrome. It probably needed few, if any, changes, to run in firefox.
As to which is better, that is a matter of preference. With noscript, I have enabled "Temporarily allow top-level sites by default / Base 2nd level Domains", and most sites work as intended, with the possible exceptions of embedded multimedia, if they are served from another host, e.g., youtube, in which case I only need to allow that host. With uMatrix, I have to micromanage every single site, specifying not only the hosts from which it is allowed to use resources, but the kind of resources it is allowed to use as well. Theoretically, one can come up with the minimum amount of permissions that one needs to enable, in order for a site to work. In practice, this is way too much work, not to mention that one needs to actually understand what all these kinds of resources are. With uMatrix, I find myself enabling all the resources of host after host (example.com, cdn.example.com, images.example.com, whydotheyusesomanyhostnamesat.example.com, etc.), then doing it again, as some resources need to be enabled individually, with the process often getting out of hand, as the list of hosts keeps increasing, each time one is enabled. Thus, I prefer using noscript.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Thursday November 16 2017, @11:04AM (7 children)
The problem is not that Firefox is breaking compatibility with addons, it's that they waited so long to do it. Chrome was release 9 years ago with per-tab sandboxing. Safari had it shortly after. Edge has had it since its creation. It's something that is now considered such a basic feature of web browsers that no one bothers to mention it in their marketing. Firefox 57 finally starts to introduce this. Adding per-tab sandboxing was always going to mean changes to the add-on model, because the classic add-on model had no thought to security and gave every add-on complete access to every browsing context. You don't want to go to the trouble of compartmentalising your web browser and then allow every add-on that people use to be an exploit vector for bypassing it.
The writing has been on the wall for almost a decade. I think I last actively used Firefox on the desktop[1] in 2012, because even then running a web browser with no sandboxing seemed irresponsible.
[1] I actually like Firefox on Android, and don't mind so much the lack of compartmentalisation there because I don't log into any web sites with my phone and the OS provides sandboxing to isolate the browser from the rest of the system. Unfortunately, they screwed up distribution to the point where it was pulled from F-Droid. I'd use it again if Mozilla would publish an F-Droid repo.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @04:31PM
The real problem, of course, is that browsers have tabs at all. Window managing should be left to the window manager, and any decent window manager will provide options for the user to group them (likewise we have finally moved away from the MDI [wikipedia.org] abomination). Process spawning should again be left to user preference or system settings, as should worrying about "sandboxing" to prevent leakage (of which there are a varity of ready-made [wordpress.com] tools [sandboxie.com]).
Or put another way, the whole "the browser is the system" mentality is the cancer that
ishas killinged internet browsers.(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @08:54AM (5 children)
That makes no sense to me.
The browser has full access to every tab, not matter what you do. I don't see the browser as more trusted than add-ons, I more see the add-ons (such as Classic Theme Restorer) as the browser, and the actual browser as the rendering engine. But then, most of the add-ons I have installed were originally Firefox features that became add-ons when the features were removed from Firefox.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday November 17 2017, @10:08AM (4 children)
I don't know how far Firefox has gone, but that's certainly not true for Chrome or Safari. The browser is split into multiple compartments, which are isolated by putting them in different processes. Network processing is isolated from the UI and each tab has a separate renderer process that receives the data for that tab, runs the scripts, and renders into a texture in shared memory. The 'browser' (parent) process transfers this texture to the screen and sends messages to the renderer process in response to user input (e.g. click here, scroll down, zoom out). The parent process has no visibility into the DOM for any page, nor access to JavaScript state. It validates URL requests, but that's about it. For security, the interface between the renderer process is as narrow as possible so that a compromise in the renderer has a narrow attack surface.
If you want to support add-ons in this model, you have to make them run either in the renderer process (in which case they can do arbitrary things to the DOM, but can't be allowed access to any global state without compromising the security model), or in the parent process (in which case they can do arbitrary things to the UI, can block network connections, but can't access the DOM). The old Firefox extension model had no separation there and most extensions used interfaces that touched both the DOM and the exterior UI (it didn't help that XUL effectively made the rest of the UI a DOM, so these APIs were the same in many cases). There is no way to make that work with a compartmentalised model.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @10:48AM (3 children)
The browser (code that you downloaded from either mozilla.org or google.com) has access to everything.
Sure it's compartmentalized, but there is still communication between compartments, otherwise the UI wouldn't work. That communication can be done for add-ons also.
Compartmentalizing these things are not to defend the page against the browser, but to prevent bugs in the parts of the browser in contact with one page to take down every page open in the browser. A good idea, especially considering the stability of browsers at the time this was introduced, but not something that add-ons should need to care about.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday November 19 2017, @09:00PM (2 children)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Tuesday November 21 2017, @08:50AM (1 child)
Naah, GP is saying that browsers should be secure no matter what the plugins are doing.
I have no words for how wonderful an idea that is ;-)
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday November 21 2017, @09:48AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Thursday November 16 2017, @11:44AM (1 child)
I can switch back to Firefox when there's a working Vimperator-style addon.
Meanwhile I'll stick with cVim [github.com].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bart9h on Thursday November 16 2017, @12:01PM
I just downloaded FF57 to give it a try anyway, and to my surprise (apart from it loading really fast) there *were* some results for "Vim" on the addons search.
I'll try and see if any of them is good enough.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Bot on Thursday November 16 2017, @10:39AM
We are indeed in the era of quantum browsing, where the page has been parsed and not parsed at the same time. Thanks, javascript.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by lgsoynews on Thursday November 16 2017, @10:44AM (21 children)
Speed is good. But what's the point when the changes have made the browser useless?
I've been forced to downgrade after FF forced the lastest version on me and killed almost all my addons (at the time most were not ready yet). And to keep it downgraded required changes in plenty of profiles (I use 5 profiles regularly, more than 10 for various cases), each profile updating FF AGAIN until the option was unchecked. It was painful. And BTW, some addons have migrated to the new format/recommandations -to ease transition- killing the current version in the process, that was also REALLY PAINFUL, I also had to downgrade & disable addons updates.
Why do I say that it is useless for me? First because of the missing addons, while several crucial ones have been updated, I currently have 26 extensions installed, of which I really use (and need) 20. From those 20, only half are working on the new version, and I'm missing several crucial ones, especially those that deal with the UI issues (see below).
Then, there is the problem of the UI, where do I start? Must I say that I hate it? Maybe that's too strong a word, but it has some incredible issues, that persist from older bad choices, and some missing features are stunning. The worst examples -for me- are the management of tabs and the "add a bookmark" menu. They are BAD. They always have been BAD. At least for anybody who is not a complete beginner. Tabs cannot span several rows, this means that more than 12 and they are impossible to use (I usually have several windows opened with more than a hundred tabs). Panorama was not a great feature, but at least it helped in that area, until they removed it a few versions ago! The addon that allowed this multi-row feature is not compatible yet, its status is unknown. As for the bookmarking, there used to be an addon that helped, but it went bad some time ago, the fact that you cannot resize the menu, that you cannot have it remember that it was opened last time, forcing you EVERY TIME to open it and search the list of bookmarks directories is PAINFUL. This is a big problem with FF (basically encouraging people to bookmark everything in the same place, with no directory at all, awful!), it used to be solved by a couple of addons/CSS, no longer. And worse, I suspect those addons will not be able to be replaced for FF57 as they were pure UI addons.
To summarize my problems with the UI: for quite a few years now, I've clearly felt that the UI was absurdly oversimplified (streamlined to use the "big words") with beginners in mind, at the expense of power-users. And, no, addons did not solve all those issues.
(Please understand that I'm NOT against change, Firefox UI had plenty of room for improvement, I'm only against BAD changes and changes without warning.)
I also think that Mozilla have really done a very poor job of managing all those changes, it's incredible that such a MAJOR UI change happens brutally, without warning. They KNOW that many addons will break, but there is no warning beforehand: you restart your browser and are greeted by surprise by a completely different interface, you are not even warned to backup your stuff, how will you retrieve data from addons that NO LONGER WORK? I'm a pro, so I can find workarounds (even if it's annoying and painful), but what about regular users?
Obviously, they did not learn anything from the UI disaster of 2014 (Australis, FF29), which also broke my FF install so badly it took days to make it work again, and months to get back to a more or less usable configuration.
So, for now, I'm using the latest 56 (DEV edition) with most of my profiles, and ONE special profile with the 57 for updating a website that uses a lot of JS in the hope that it will be faster (it does not seem to be that much better BTW), as well as for testing the new addons.
I expect at last 6 months, probably a year before I'm able to fully switch, and I still expect that I'll need at least one profile with the old version for a few addons.
To be clear: I understand the need for a overall, and big changes are difficult. I get that (but I still disagree with their absurd UI decisions). And to tell you the truth, I had been thinking for quite a while now that FF had some severe performance issues, and I'm on a very fast computer. BUT such BIG changes require a lot of CARE, not just throwing them to your users and expecting them to "deal with it".
(Score: 2) by Shimitar on Thursday November 16 2017, @12:28PM (9 children)
Personally i have given up on Firefox such long ago. I already wrote about it in the past, and i do not want to annoy anybody again.
Anyway, the point is... Firefox is just a memory. I switched to Chrome on all my platforms by now and i am fully happy with the change. While i am a power user, i never felt the need for tons of extensions or plugins. I have UBlock Origin, UMatrix and Ghostery, and that's it, by needs are fully covered. I am not a web dev, if this helps.
I am truly sorry for Firefox, it used to be the best and it had potential to still be the best and keep leading the race. Now it's the last horse (maybe on par with edge, don't know, never used it) without any hope to recover because Google pushed Chrome, which is quite good, and Microsoft Edge. Firefox will decline at the same level of Opera, which is still a good browser, can't say if it is better or worse than latest firefox.
It seems to me most of people who used Firefox are slowly going away, and i don't see any reason somebody new should start using it with the current choices. I am sad i had to abandon Firefox myself... but it's really no going back, because there is simply nothing special about it anymore. They moved too close to Chrome and lost it all there.
Coding is an art. No, java is not coding. Yes, i am biased, i know, sorry if this bothers you.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @01:16PM
Firefox has only themselves to blame.
Here should have been their priorities:
Job #1: make a performant, standards compliant browser
Job #2: there is no job 2
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Thursday November 16 2017, @02:34PM (3 children)
I just spent a couple of hours to finally switch from FF to Chromium, because this time FF broke my start page (netvibes.com), which now works fine in Chromium with exactly the same extensions enabled. But I hate Chrome(ium) because there's no "always open in a new window" option. I hate tabs from the day they were forced on me and up to now I've been able to avoid them mostly. With Chromium I now have to for ever right-click to open everything in its own window.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday November 16 2017, @02:59PM (2 children)
I often open in new windows. Mostly, I use separate windows rather than tabs, and so I find the Hide Tab Bar With One Tab add on fairly important. That used to be an option in Firefox itself, then they removed it and told everyone who wanted it to use that extension instead, and now they've broken that extension too.
BTW, I find this "extension" and "add on" terminology needlessly confusing. They appear to be the same thing, why does Firefox use different names? Before you add it, it's called an "add on", after you add it, it's called an "extension". Why? Could that date from the time Java was a somewhat popular and very, very large add on? Seems version 57 was a good time to unify on a single term.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Thursday November 16 2017, @03:26PM
I just found an extension that opens everything in a new window instead of tabs: Tab-less. Works great, now looking for an extension that will hide the useless tab bar.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @09:00AM
Not entirely. From the way the menu is layout, it appears that the definition is:
There are two kind of add-ons: Plugins and extensions. Plugins are things like Flash, Java and Silverlight. Extensions are Javascript based.
Three kinds if you count "personas", the themes that aren't full extensions.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @04:09PM
Frankly the Firefox kicks ass, and if you care at all about privacy, then Firefox is the way to go.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday November 16 2017, @04:19PM (2 children)
Have you tried Vivaldi?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @07:18PM
It's proprietary trash.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @07:31PM
what kind of blundering ignoramus uses a proprietary browser (in the 21rst century!) to surf the web?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @12:51PM
Regarding tabs, I use TreeStyleTab: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ [mozilla.org]
Maybe you'll still prefer multi-row but nowadays with screens getting wider it actually makes more sense to have the tabs by the side.
There are other similar add-ons for Firefox.
The Sidewise add on for chrome is almost there but still not as good.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Thursday November 16 2017, @03:56PM (9 children)
The heck OS are you on? I haven't seen that on either Windows or Linux. Unless they recently made it way harder to just disable automatic updates?
Or is this a work PC? In which case it's not Firefox forcing the latest version on you, but your IT department, really.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by lgsoynews on Thursday November 16 2017, @04:37PM (8 children)
I'm on Linux. But it does not matter, before the 57 appeared, I had no reason to NOT update automatically. Also, what I criticize is the lack of warning before a KNOWN breaking change.
Also, I don't use the regular version, I use the Dev Edition, which is updated earlier.
And it's a pain to disable the automatic updates AFTER the fact, especially when you use many profiles, as I do.
So, after that unexpected update, for EACH profile I use, I had to go and change to "never check". Then each time, I had to replace the modified FF directory, to go back to version 56.
(Score: 5, Informative) by tangomargarine on Thursday November 16 2017, @05:21PM (3 children)
Okay, this just killed most of my sympathy for your issue. You don't run the bleeding-edge alpha version *with automatic updates turned on* and have any right to complain about breaking changes.
You might as well lean out your front door, shout "HEY EVERYBODY I'VE GOT A REALLY EXPENSIVE BIGSCREEN TV IN HERE AND AM LEAVING FOR THE WEEKEND!" then be surprised when it's gone when you get back.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by lgsoynews on Friday November 17 2017, @06:28AM (2 children)
Blaming the victims does not help, and your arguments are wrong...
The reason I use the DEV Edition is mostly because it's the official way to run unsigned addons, which i NEED, because I have some small personal addons & I've done a bit of testing of addons dev, so I must be able to run unsigned ones.
In addition to that, the DEV edition is not an "alpha", that's the role of the Nightly channel (which I also used but no longer now since it broke most of my addons). On Mozilla's website, it's even explained: this is the edition for developers (I quote: "For web/platform developers and early adopters")!
And to repeat what I wrote above: I HAVE to use it, it's not even a choice! Since version 48, I had to switch to the DEV edition or lose my unsigned addons. Before that I ran separate versions: one with Nightly (for tests), all the others with the release (for all real uses), until Mozilla forced the signed addons for the Release and Beta versions. What choice do I have? Do you think I enjoyed switching from something that worked fine, that it was just for the LOLz?
Anyway, it DOES NOT MATTER. FF should always display a warning popup when BIG changes are about to happen. Even with automatic updates!
So, don't blame me! I did NOT choose to remove the ability to run unsigned addons (with a setting change) in the Releases.
(Score: 1) by Crash on Friday November 17 2017, @09:12AM
Firefox Dev AKA Firefox Aurora is behind Nightly by ~4 weeks. Whereas Firefox Beta is behind Nightly by ~8-12 weeks.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday November 17 2017, @04:44PM
Ooh yeah baby, throw more dismissive buzzwords at me. I'm so close!
Pale Moon?
If it gave you a sanity check it would hardly be automatic. So if by that you mean, they should make the automatic updates not automatic, I...guess I agree.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @01:09AM (3 children)
Or instead of opening your profiles to let them upgrade as you change the settings, you could have manually opened the databases containing that setting and turned off auto-updated before loading your other profiles. Try that next time. If you don't like modifying files directly, then turn off your internet access or select work offline when you open firefox so it can't update itself.
(Score: 2) by lgsoynews on Friday November 17 2017, @05:56AM (2 children)
Easily said... But you missed my point: I DID NOT know that the breaking update was coming.
How do I stop the update by going offline, while the profile has ALREADY downloaded the new version? Remember, my profiles are used all at the same time, to separate my uses...
Even if it were not already downloaded, how do you change a setting for a profile without loading it first? By modifying some obscure setting in the database, I agree, I can do it. But how much time would it take? I'd need to identify the setting, open and change in each profile's database with SQLliteMan (or something), it would take as long as just replacing the files...
Anyway, all those are workarounds that should not be needed. I'm a pro, so I can manage, but what about other users? The REAL problem is that FF does not display a dialog box before apply the breaking change (even in "automatic update"), that's a HUGE mistake, and it will cost many users to Mozilla, again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @08:50AM
The "non-pro" users:
a) Won't be using Firefox.
b) Would be using FireFox without your unsigned addons.
Given Firefox's small user base you might actually be the only one with this problem.
You can run more than one instance of Firefox. I personally do that. That way my banking firefox is not the same as my soylentnews one (they don't even run with the same user account).
If you're doing testing of add-ons you should actually do stuff like this. That you're affected so badly is you being pro but not being pro enough.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @03:39PM
I didn't realize you had all your profiles open at once. I too use multiple profiles, but I also have tons of tabs so I can't have too many profiles open at once else things start crashing.
(Score: 2) by esperto123 on Thursday November 16 2017, @11:42AM (1 child)
Adding to the complains, now that they put this version out of the door, they should gather every last one of its programmers and convert all extensions with more then a dozen users that are still on the old API to the new one, otherwise they will lose even more market share because most users hanged on to firefox precisely because of these extensions, if you piss they (we) off they (we) will just go away.
I'm dreading having to give away my tabgroup extension, this is pretty much essential to my browsing habits, I don't know if I will go ESR or one of the forks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @01:11PM
FTFY
(Score: 5, Insightful) by crafoo on Thursday November 16 2017, @12:24PM (21 children)
Browsers should not be second-tier operating systems. Javascript was a mistake. ActiveX was a mistake, Flash was a mistake, javashit is just as big a mistake. The perversion of the web has made video playback (for example) included within the browser. Which is insane. Every website "developer" team builds their own UI for a video player in a shitty interpreted language. The browser should launch a native application of the user's choice to play video streams.
"Burn this motherfucker down" is what I am getting at.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Thursday November 16 2017, @12:34PM (14 children)
I beg to disagree. We have almost come around full circle in that a browser is (almost) an operation system. This is the only chance for this generation to get true cross-platform applications. So far, it has allowed Linux users to easily keep up with other platforms as so much has moved to the web. I remember times, when encyclopedias, video applications, and especially interacting with companies (create an album and send it out for printing) required windows-only software.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @03:29PM (3 children)
Firefox is an ok operating system, but what it really needs is a decent browser.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @11:13PM (1 child)
I hear there is an extension for that.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday November 17 2017, @06:06AM
Which gets broken with the newest version.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday November 17 2017, @04:35PM
...I'm a consultant and I can only get into the consulting company email as webmail...which they recently changed so it's now only available from behind a Citrix "VPN" that access the webmail from a Firefox instance running through citrix inside the browser. They've literally put Firefox in my Firefox...
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @05:19PM (8 children)
Such a great workd we live in, where we can install a free operating system so we can run proprietary javascript applications on it.
I fail to see how this is an improvement over proprietary windows applications.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday November 16 2017, @05:33PM (7 children)
No-one's forcing you to.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @07:22PM (6 children)
The mere existence of proprietary software is an abomination, and people who write it are abusing those who use it, which are mostly ignorant people. Why are you okay with others being abused?
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday November 16 2017, @11:44PM (5 children)
Because I'm not a self-righteous holier-than-thou software justice warrior.
How are people being abused by proprietary software (in the general case)? That's a ridiculous hyperbole. Are people "abused" by wearing proprietary clothes, eating proprietary meals, or watching proprietary TV shows?
If you don't want to use it, don't use it. Don't start screeching at other people just because they don't agree. For the vast majority of people it makes absolutely no difference.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday November 17 2017, @01:41AM (2 children)
Proprietary meals: If your farm is next to a GMO farm, watch for lawyers. (Monsanto v. Schmeiser)
Proprietary TV shows: If you ever decide to make TV shows yourself, you are legally required to avoid making expression that is too similar to that of an existing TV show that you have seen. A successful claim of nonliteral copyright infringement requires that the alleged infringer have had access to the older work and that the works be substantially similar in expression. Even accidental similarity is actionable (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music), and even access that occurred several years prior still taints the viewer (ibid). So as far as I'm aware, the only surefire way to avoid accidental infringement is to avoid having access even once.
This is easier said than done. When you shop in a grocery store, a fraction of what you pay for groceries goes toward a royalty for the proprietary background music played over the store's speaker system when it isn't being used to make an announcement. This again taints you with access to the songs played.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday November 17 2017, @05:44PM (1 child)
I said wearing clothes, not making them. Eating food, not producing it. Watching TV shows, not producing them.
How does it "taint" me?
The shop sells things at a profit. I don't expect to have a say in how that profit is spent.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Saturday November 18 2017, @08:16PM
You may expose yourself to liability for infringement of exclusive rights in the following cases:
Or is your argument "I need not worry because I plan to never make clothes, food, or TV shows in my lifetime"?
If you listen to encumbered music in a shop, and years later write a similar song, your writing the song will infringe the copyright in the song that you listened to in the shop but didn't make.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darnkitten on Friday November 17 2017, @03:26AM
Interestingly, I was talking to the proprietor of the local print shop today, and he told me how, after using Adobe InDesign for graphic design work since opening the business well over a decade ago, he came in one morning to find that all of the InDesign files from the past ten years no longer opened. They remained locked until he upgraded and purchased a monthly subscription. "Just like ransomware," were his exact words.
Abuse? Depends on how you define it, but, while I (might not) object to an older version not opening files created in a newer version; I would classify locking him out of his entire library of projects--created on earlier, legally licensed versions of the software--mind you, in an attempt to (figuratively) extort a monthly payment as, both objectionable and abusive.
The terms of service for his use of the software were changed to something entirely different to that which he operated under during over a decade of use. You might argue that he "should have known" not to use proprietary software, but, like most users without a background in technology issues, he didn't see the change coming until he lost access to the files he had created, and had no option but to bow to Adobe's demands.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @07:34PM
"re people "abused" by wearing proprietary clothes, eating proprietary meals, or watching proprietary TV shows?"
yes, you blithering idiot. yes.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday November 16 2017, @08:57PM
Meh. We've had plenty of opportunity from Inferno to Java. Now we're stuck with a pile of shit that refuses to take shape into something resembling an OS or platform because before you know it, it's obsolete. I agree with the GP. Burn it all down.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @01:12PM (1 child)
We don't use browsers to simply download/display files. Shortly after their invention, HTML forms were added and browsers became a terminal interface with a GUI starting from that point forward.
We really needed a universal, network-aware client GUI interface since xterms don't cut it in the 21st century.
You are right in that browsers as they are now are a junk solution... to that problem.
Eventually we will have something better (WASM apps), but for now, this is the junk we must use.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday November 17 2017, @01:44AM
If the comment section of the green site is to be believed, the answer is Qt. Write a native application once and compile it for all six major desktop and mobile platforms (Windows desktop, Windows UWP, macOS, X11/Linux, iOS, and Android).
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday November 17 2017, @01:47AM (2 children)
Then what not-a-browser thing should have been the second-tier operating system? Currently a web application will have much greater reach than, say, a macOS application.
Which fails if the native applications installed on the user's device don't support a particular video stream format.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday November 17 2017, @04:40PM (1 child)
There are multiple video formats supported by HTML5's video tag...and not every browser supports every format. So how is that any different?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Saturday November 18 2017, @08:24PM
HTML5 browsers support interactivity in video. Script controlling playback can support seek points, branching paths like those in Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks, or other ways to navigate through the video other than plain seeking. Which native video players support a format containing interactivity?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @09:27AM
Something that may cause you to re-think your opinion: All that Javascript to play video is not needed, it's something websites do just to ensure that the user has to learn a new user interface on every website they visit.
That doesn't give you the video opening in an external player, but I don't agree that should be the default. Not everyone installs a video player, and those that don't may just end up having the video open in Windows Media Player or Quicktime (not sure which is the worst). However, you can right click and "save video as", just like you can "save image as" and then open it in your favorite player. I think you can "copy video url" also, if not, that's a feature that should be implemented.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @12:39PM
when they reduce pwnership 30% as well.
(Score: 2) by jimbrooking on Thursday November 16 2017, @01:03PM (4 children)
My go-to FTP client for years. Gone forever.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday November 16 2017, @01:15PM
"What's FTP? Fuck The Police?"
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @04:12PM (2 children)
I used to recommend FileZilla but the installer deceptively includes unwanted 3rd party crap now.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @06:40PM
Crapware could only come with FileZilla for Windows. I thought the big download sites adding wares to downloads was a story from 2-3 years ago. Are they at it again? I kicked MicroVirus years ago so it does not affect me. As for FTP - Fire Trap Protocol... er, I mean File Transfer Protocol. Use it a few times a week.
FF57 - it's 2017 and opening pop-under windows still works. Did one of the UI designers get their 4 year-old to do the icons and tabs? Some addons work, but no NoScript no upgrade (yet) for the main rig. The addons morph so quickly and people have mentioned several ones that are new to me. Now I'm confused. Also there is something about uBlock original vs some ripoff version, something uMatrix, huh? I don't have hours for this as work presses on. A browser must browse, not get complicated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @07:36PM
get a grown up's OS, ffs!
(Score: 2) by srobert on Thursday November 16 2017, @02:18PM (4 children)
... are all broken. Vimium-FF or Saka-Key, Print Edit WE, are mediocre substitutes for the first 2. I haven't found a plugin for the 3rd.
(Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Thursday November 16 2017, @06:21PM (2 children)
Playing around with "It's All Text" right now...this is baller.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 1) by Crash on Friday November 17 2017, @09:24AM (1 child)
Not sure I get the point... You can write in your text editor of choice, and then copy-paste into the browsers text-box.
So "It's All Text!" saves you a couple seconds of Activating an Editor, Copy, Activating Browser and Pasting?
And the time savings is questionable, as you have to save the text in the editor to a file.
(Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Wednesday November 22 2017, @12:03AM
I don't know...it opens your editor of chioce at a single click and your text automatically appears in the textbox when you :wq. I guess it only "saves a few seconds", but it also saves like 3 or 4 discreet actions. I'm not sold on it myself yet, but if you do a *lot* of textarea entry, I could see it being more useful.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 1) by Mike on Saturday November 18 2017, @12:06AM
I've been looking for a replacement for 'It's all text' (and IIRC emacstext, i.e. c-f c-b etc. for moving the cursor in a textarea, which I haven't found). I did find GhostText which looks to be compatible with the FireFox changes. That allows connecting to a number of different editors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @07:28PM
and my addons are broken. Well done Mozilla! The RAM usage improvements are welcome but... meh!
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:23PM (5 children)
Pale Moon.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Thursday November 16 2017, @10:11PM (2 children)
Waterfox.
(Score: 3, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday November 16 2017, @11:50PM (1 child)
Cheese microscope.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @01:59AM
Cannot unsee.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @10:15PM (1 child)
I would use Pale Moon for all my browsing if there was an effective substitute for Random Agent Spoofer. I can use a generic user agent spoofer and manually switch from time to time, but Random Agent Spoofer does it automatically after a set (or random) time period. Alas, it's broken (or was, haven't tried it in a while) in both Pale Moon and Firefox.
I'd give Firefox another shot, but since Mozilla teamed up with Soros, I've lost the little bit of trust I had left in the company. I guess I don't blame them too much; it was either slim down significantly or stay bloated and find a non-Google money source. They chose the latter. It's hard to fire friends and relatives, even if their positions aren't really all that necessary.
(Score: 1) by Goghit on Friday November 17 2017, @10:02PM
Yeah, I'd go Pale Moon as well, except it barfs when I try to hook it up to Zotero.
I'll move "Beat Pale Moon into submission" up the priority list. I'm really unimpressed with not having tab group add-ons anymore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @02:59AM (4 children)
The good - supposedly snappier, lighter on RAM, modernized.
The bad - add-ons lagging. Not that they had no warning :) ..and the flat design, silly 1980's tab shapes, etc. FF58 might fix these?
From time to time Mozilla (oh sorry, "moz://a") innovate to stay ahead. This is the next step in the legacy since Netscape. Often these things are accompanied by screams - some legit, some less so. When GiMP made it that Save was for the native format and for JPG etc you had to Export, folks fumed, frothed and swore to use something else. In three or four uses the muscle memory was reprogrammed, "big issue" done and dusted. So now with FF57, moz://a have made a bunch of changes. The worthy add-ons will catch up if they are not already updated. You can't stay on FF52 ESR forever as the Net keeps on changing from year to year. Someone tried out FF3 on today's web a while back - that was an interesting read.
Thus - this is my Last Post from FF56. The update is in the queue, wanting to get installed. Should I wear my Get Firefox (v1.0) t-shirt for this occasion?
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Friday November 17 2017, @03:46AM (2 children)
The Save/Export thing on GIMP lost most of my former students, who switched to easier-to-use alternatives, because the change happened without warning, accompanied by neither instructions on how to navigate the change, nor an explanation of why the program was operating in a manner different to every other program they were using.
On top of the complexity of the software and the unorthodox user interface, this was the figurative straw that broke the camel's back, and they left.
I must admit that, while muscle memory does the trick most of the time, when I get in the zone, I still mix up Save and Export, and, when I do, I curse the GIMP devs, every single time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @09:07PM
I too get regularly bummed by the export/save silliness but let's be quite honest, which software warns you of changes beforehand? None.
And if you really like changelogs, there's always the apt-listchanges package.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 18 2017, @12:19AM
My understanding is that they made to the change to better match photoshop.
But I still don't understand the thinking, "Hey, photoshop uses an awkward and overly complex opening and saving procedure that makes it harder for people to actually use it. But since it's popular, we should try to copy even their bad ideas?". Just don't get it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Friday November 17 2017, @06:35AM
The problem is that not all plugins can be updated. For example,Zotero is now only available as a standalone application that opens a port to be used by a browser extension that only does a small part of the functionality, exactly because providing the full functionality is no longer possible with the new interface.
Which not only means that you now have to start the standalone application separately, but also I suspect that this opens up a security hole on a multi user system.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by jbernardo on Friday November 17 2017, @06:22AM (1 child)
Why would I go back to Firefox, when it is now as full of telemetry, and users that dare disable it are insulted by the pompous Mozilla developers? Just check how the arrogant "genius" that infected Firefox with DRM reacted to the bug opened when he decided to beak sound in Linux: "Telemetry is a low barrier to entry way to provide feedback. Nobody in my team has telepathy." - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345661#c122 [mozilla.org] dismissing the usage of bugzilla. And that is the second reason not to use Firefox since version 52 - it requires pulseaudio on Linux. Since the fix to >90% of sound issues I've encountered continues to be removing pulseaudio, there is no way I'm running that crap.
Palemoon works quite well, doesn't break add-ons, and isn't forcing bloat and spyware on users.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 19 2017, @07:48PM
> when it is now as full of telemetry, and users that dare disable it are insulted by the pompous Mozilla developers?
WTF are you talking about?
> Is Telemetry enabled by default on normal Firefox releases?
> No. Users of Firefox release builds must explicitly opt in to Telemetry.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telemetry/FAQ#Is_Telemetry_enabled_by_default_on_normal_Firefox_releases.3F [mozilla.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @10:30AM
In my experience, any time Mozilla announces that a new version of Firefox is faster, it means that the time between freezing is shorter. Which can technically be considered faster, it moves faster from one freeze to the next.
Last time it became "faster" was when they moved everything over to SQLite, and this update is not supposed to do anything about that, so I guess it just mean that some other thing has become "faster" this time.