> With this update, Firefox is introducing scroll anchoring, which ensures that you’re not going to bounce around on the page as these slow-loading ads load.
While I love the idea of videos not automatically playing, I'm almost more excited for the scroll anchoring feature.
This happens to me every single day on the Windows 10 start menu and on my iPhone using the swipe-down search on the Home screen.
Why in God's green Earth the developers who implemented these don't cache obvious local results (like app names) to quickly return them is beyond me, and why the position of the results has to move after the fact is even more maddening
I typed "Arro" for an app I use last night, it took a moment to show up and when I went to click it, the web results populated so I accidentally clicked on "arroz con gandules". Sounds lovely, but I am certainly not expecting that to be the autocomplete...
Or all of the sites that have adopted a 'card' view. Gannett sites all have this terrible UX that if you click in the white space around an article, it closes the article and takes you to the home page. [0] Accidental clicks on white space shouldn't do anything!
this has been happening to me recently on Google search, as cards load with info about the top results.
Anyone on Google reading this -- please either cut that out, or include css placeholders for content you expect your JS to load.
Both waiting longer for content to load and having to go back from clicking the wrong thing detract from the raison d'etre of fast and relevant search.
Using the NYT iPhone app on the subway is maddening. Every time you go in and out of cell coverage the whole app pauses while it waits to load ads that will never come. It is so frustrating that I am close to giving up on it entirely.
Newegg has been particularly bad with this in the past. Looks like they have fixed it now, but used to be that it would take a 0.5-2 seconds for their advertisement to load above the "search within", "only show newegg products, I'm not looking for an amazon experience", and "sort by" fields. Go to click on those (I always prefer "only newegg" instead of the default "all sellers"), and half the time I'd end up clicking on the advertisement when it loaded.
Makes me wish there was some sort of an understanding that: The thing I just clicked was somewhere else within the last 400ms, so click on what used to be there."
> I'm almost more excited for the scroll anchoring feature.
If we could get this feature on mobile and desktop operating systems, I would be soo happy. I probably click/tap on something just before it moves about fifty times a day. Having the fastest devices only helps a little.
A similar annoyance: the browser insisting on switching focus once the page loads.
It happens nearly daily that I'll be typing in to an input field while the page is still loading, and Firefox will switch focus away from that input field when the page finishes loading.
The consequences of this are even worse for me, as I use the Tridactyl extension, which acts on vim-keystrokes when the focus is not in an input field. So if I'm in the middle of typing something in an input field and Firefox in its infinite wisdom chooses to switch focus out of the input field, what I type from then on will be acted on as commands to Tridactyl, which could do things like open, close, or reload a page.
That's actually the reason I stopped using VIM bindings in FF. The small amount of niceness from VIM bindings did not make up for the random annoyances.
Have you tried `set allowautofocus false`? It breaks some fancy editors like CodeMirror but you can always re-enable it on certain pages with `seturl`.
It appears to already be in Chrome. I have a site that I hate because their slider at the top always scrolls the site around, but that has recently stopped, and I've noticed that the page knows where I've scrolled to and adjust the scroll when the page changes above where I'm reading.
I switched back to Firefox about six months ago, and this issue was the only thing that ever made me consider switching back to Chrome; there's one forum I frequent where the "latest unread post" button was basically useless because of this.
Excellent news! Next step: TWitter and Facebook streams do not reorganize themselves by an algorithm on a Back button. You can click Back and comment the post that gave you the linked article in the first place.
Sad this is even necessary. Progressive loading is a relic of a bygone 28.8 kbps era. Connections are fast enough is where you should be able to draw everything into an off-screen buffer and display the completed page in one go.
People on lower quality connections (high packet loss/roundtrip) eat a lot of delay on page loads because the average site connects to like 20+ servers and the browser has to spin up a bunch of http connections. Then you have to wait for javascript to load... this is unavoidable.
> Scroll anchoring keeps content from jumping as images and ads load at the top of the page
That's a nice little quality-of-life improvement. It's a little annoyance that you don't really consciously notice because you're so used to it, but I recall reading about Chrome adding a similar feature and suddenly realising how annoying it is when you're reading something, and then suddenly it jumps out of your view due to a large image above the viewport loading.
Wouldn't it be nice if browsers or servers could reserve that space even if it's not loaded? Like "this is going to be a 500x200 image so let's load 500x200 pixels worth of empty space until it's fully loaded" and avoid jumping.
I think you're being sarcastic, but if not and for anyone who isn't aware, setting the width and height on an <img> tag (or it's associated style) will do this.
Another solution is just to wait until computers and networks are 100 times faster than they were 10 years ago, so that a page and its pieces load instantly. Oh, wait. That speed-up already happened, and yet websites are actually slower than they were 10 years ago. I guess there is no advance in hardware that software cannot overcome.
If the browser only knew...but in many cases it doesn't, especially for a fluid width, responsive website. An image may have a near infinite number of potential dimensions depending on the user's viewport.
This drove me insane with the WSJ mobile app. I stopped using it because I would continuously lose my place in the article as the various advertisement blocks loaded in.
The problem is mainly with ads, when 1) there may or may not be an ad available, and 2) you're allowing the ad height to be dynamic, to allow for greater possible inventory.
It's even worse on mobile, with variable load times. It's in fact maddening that it has to jolt you while reading an article - because ads and images are very very important (more important than the content). I love reader mode on FF mobile, I click it as soon as the icon appears next to the URL.
On mobile I feel this constantly, mostly due to the lack of adblock. Somehow like 70% of any news site I get linked to by hn feature constantly loading ads that stop me from being able to read anything...
Firefox Focus was a godsend to me for this exact reason. I genuinely did not use any mobile devices to browse the web because it was just a hostile experience, but since Focus has come out I can join the rest of the world.
I've switched over to Firefox on all devices. It's especially useful on Android because I can use uBlock and other useful extensions, where Chrome doesn't have any.
The only feature I hope for is "hit tab to search" after typing a domain name in the search bar. For example in Chrome I can type "youtube.com" and then hit tab, and then type in a search query.
I know it's not the same, but if you bookmark "https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s" and put in a keyword like "yt". You can type "yt whatever" in the addressbar and it will do a search on youtube.
You can also use https://www.reddit.com/r/%S with a capital `%S` to avoid escaping the slashes, so you can type "r all/top" or with GitHub "g Zren/reponame"
And if you set DuckDuckGo or Qwant or a different search engine that supports !bangs as your default search engine, you can use those in your address bar - so no need to configure !yt, !w, !s etc manually.
I too have switched on both mobile (Android) and PC. The only thing I would really need now is that the sync is automatic and I don't have to manually trigger it.
The main benefit would be to browse something on your phone then be able to access it on your desktop via Library > Synced Tabs - no need to send it or sync it manually (which require additional steps/taps).
By far the biggest annoyance with firefox on mobile is that when you open the browser, are presented with all your tabs, and a toolbar which only searches your open tabs rather than just being a toolbar that you can type in a website, or a search term, or also search amongst your open tabs.
From the last 3 or so versions Firefox performance on my retina mac is indistinguishable from chrome (from a humam perspective not looking at ram cpu usage), so I'm very happy to be using firefox full time once again. At some point I knew it was time to close firefox when the fans started blowing at max speed. Does not happen any more.
> At some point I knew it was time to close firefox when the fans started blowing at max speed.
In my experience on Mac the guilty party has consistently been the plugin container (or rather something inside it, presumably a bad video codec). `killall plugin-container` fixes the problem without having to restart Firefox, but unfortunately also crashes many if not most tabs (appears everything wants to use a multimedia plugin or another these days...)
The "plugin-container" executable is used for all sandboxed processes on Windows. That started out as plug-ins, but now includes web renderers.
So the "something inside it" could be script on a web page, or part of Gecko's rendering pipeline, or pretty much anything. And killig it crashes tabs because it's the thing rendering those tabs.
It might make sense to rename the executable to make things clearer, but there are some problems: there is Windows software that hardcodes the executable name and does things based on it, and changing the name would break various things for users....
On Mac and Linux, where this problem doesn't exist, the process naming is much saner...
One thing I love about firefox performance-wise is that closing tabs is instant. I can close a lot of tabs very quickly. Chrome lags quite a bit on tab close.
Performance has improved considerably. However, there is still a major outstanding bug, due to the rendering of window transparency[1].
Window transparency can be turned off by setting "gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque" to true in about:config. This will cause a minor degradation in appearance of the window frame and tabs, but it will improve performance and extend battery life.
I have had it set for over 6 months and am anticipating the resolution of this outstanding bug.
Firefox is very slow on 2014 macs and causes fans to spin up to mad speed. This tends to happen with html5 video players. Chrome seems to not have this issue.
I’m saddened by this aspect of YouTube whereby you’re afraid to explore the site without tanking your recommendations. I wish there was a site that focused on finding YouTube videos in a more focused way rather than some rogue ML algorithm that decides to spam you with weird topics. I don’t feel like I have any control over my YouTube account anymore.
I use Incognito mainly to let my friends log into their accounts for a minute on my computer, if they desperately need to e.g. make a bank transaction or an Amazon purchase or something using some combination of my information and theirs, where I can type stuff in (e.g. my shipping address) and they can type stuff in (e.g. their login credentials.)
Porn browsing, meanwhile, is much better done with a secondary dedicated Chrome profile.
The couple of times i've actually used incognito mode for planning a surprise or buying a gift it's definitely put a smile on my face to realize i'm being a euphamism.
I mean I use it for personal stuff at work, for disposable browser environments for testing frontend content and bugs and for quickly handling AWS environments ... By far my use of incognito for mundane tasks outstrips its use for porn.
I used to do that but now I mainly use firefox container tabs. My main usecase being able to use the website as an admin and as a regular user at the same time.
What would be even better is if they let me add arbitrary keyboard shortcuts that don't need to wait until the document has loaded, like they did up to 2016.
Honestly, Reader Mode, in built ad blocker, tree tabs, and containers make Firefox so streamlined for me.
I think that Google sites must not be thoroughly tested on firefox though! Vanilla Gmail (no add-ons or theme, but not the basic HTML version) isn't too fast. Not as fast as it used to be a year ago on Chrome either, but not as bad as FF.
I haven't tried this with gmail yet, but I know that if you use a user agent switcher on the google search page to set your useragent to chrome the search page will have more features (summaries, etc). This is especially noticeable on mobile, where Chrome will have a ton more legibility (IMO) unless you do this.
It's always been a little surprising that this isn't grounds for a huge fine, but apparently they get away with it by saying something vague and corporate like "we can't be sure this works".
Readit News
Another article on this: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/19/firefox-now-automatically-..., deduped from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432362.
While I love the idea of videos not automatically playing, I'm almost more excited for the scroll anchoring feature.
Why in God's green Earth the developers who implemented these don't cache obvious local results (like app names) to quickly return them is beyond me, and why the position of the results has to move after the fact is even more maddening
I typed "Arro" for an app I use last night, it took a moment to show up and when I went to click it, the web results populated so I accidentally clicked on "arroz con gandules". Sounds lovely, but I am certainly not expecting that to be the autocomplete...
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/tourney/2019/03/...
Anyone on Google reading this -- please either cut that out, or include css placeholders for content you expect your JS to load.
Both waiting longer for content to load and having to go back from clicking the wrong thing detract from the raison d'etre of fast and relevant search.
[0] https://imgur.com/gallery/OaQDY
Makes me wish there was some sort of an understanding that: The thing I just clicked was somewhere else within the last 400ms, so click on what used to be there."
Dead Comment
If we could get this feature on mobile and desktop operating systems, I would be soo happy. I probably click/tap on something just before it moves about fifty times a day. Having the fastest devices only helps a little.
It happens nearly daily that I'll be typing in to an input field while the page is still loading, and Firefox will switch focus away from that input field when the page finishes loading.
The consequences of this are even worse for me, as I use the Tridactyl extension, which acts on vim-keystrokes when the focus is not in an input field. So if I'm in the middle of typing something in an input field and Firefox in its infinite wisdom chooses to switch focus out of the input field, what I type from then on will be acted on as commands to Tridactyl, which could do things like open, close, or reload a page.
Super, super annoying!
I really hate taking my hands off the keyboard.
This has been my #1 gripe with web sites since pretty much the dawn of time. Finally!
That's a nice little quality-of-life improvement. It's a little annoyance that you don't really consciously notice because you're so used to it, but I recall reading about Chrome adding a similar feature and suddenly realising how annoying it is when you're reading something, and then suddenly it jumps out of your view due to a large image above the viewport loading.
The problem is mainly with ads, when 1) there may or may not be an ad available, and 2) you're allowing the ad height to be dynamic, to allow for greater possible inventory.
I believe opera 12 could do this?
The only feature I hope for is "hit tab to search" after typing a domain name in the search bar. For example in Chrome I can type "youtube.com" and then hit tab, and then type in a search query.
The most underrated and undermarketed to the average user Firefox feature.
In my experience on Mac the guilty party has consistently been the plugin container (or rather something inside it, presumably a bad video codec). `killall plugin-container` fixes the problem without having to restart Firefox, but unfortunately also crashes many if not most tabs (appears everything wants to use a multimedia plugin or another these days...)
So the "something inside it" could be script on a web page, or part of Gecko's rendering pipeline, or pretty much anything. And killig it crashes tabs because it's the thing rendering those tabs.
It might make sense to rename the executable to make things clearer, but there are some problems: there is Windows software that hardcodes the executable name and does things based on it, and changing the name would break various things for users....
On Mac and Linux, where this problem doesn't exist, the process naming is much saner...
Deleted Comment
Window transparency can be turned off by setting "gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque" to true in about:config. This will cause a minor degradation in appearance of the window frame and tabs, but it will improve performance and extend battery life.
I have had it set for over 6 months and am anticipating the resolution of this outstanding bug.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522
Porn browsing, meanwhile, is much better done with a secondary dedicated Chrome profile.
That said now that I know banks have google analytics in them, I really wonder whether I'm better off trusting the extensions.......
I use little snitch on mac, and I still continue to get Firefox connect dialogs for private tabs long after they were closed.
Safari on mac does not exhibit that behavior.
This will be a big help for me. Makes me wonder how many more there are that are just too cumbersome to discover.
I use the first 3, they compound too (in a slightly strange way, https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire..., see last few paras.).
It's important that you type them AFTER the thing to search for, not before.
For example, `mytag +` instead of `+ mytag`.
I found that quite surprising.
TL;DR:
Add ^ to search for matches in your browsing history.
Add * to search for matches in your bookmarks.
Add + to search for matches in pages you've tagged.
Add % to search for matches in your currently open tabs.
Add # to search for matches in page titles.
Add $ to search for matches in web addresses (URLs).
Add ? to search for matches in suggestions.
I think that Google sites must not be thoroughly tested on firefox though! Vanilla Gmail (no add-ons or theme, but not the basic HTML version) isn't too fast. Not as fast as it used to be a year ago on Chrome either, but not as bad as FF.
It's always been a little surprising that this isn't grounds for a huge fine, but apparently they get away with it by saying something vague and corporate like "we can't be sure this works".