from Hacker News

Firefox 59 released

by dikiaap on 3/13/18, 1:46 PM with 231 comments

• by Flimm on 3/13/18, 2:49 PM

  Firefox 59 is the first Firefox release to support SameSite cookie attribute, joining Chrome.

  > Same-site cookies ("First-Party-Only" or "First-Party") allow servers to mitigate the risk of CSRF and information leakage attacks by asserting that a particular cookie should only be sent with requests initiated from the same registrable domain.

  I like this one!

• by dmix on 3/13/18, 2:37 PM

  The article about "Off-Main-Thread Painting (OMTP)"is an interesting read:

  https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2017/12/05/off-main-thread-...

  Great to see so much effort being put into the fundamentals.

• by ChrisSD on 3/13/18, 2:41 PM

  It's great that they're continuing to add back customisation to the new tab page but why am I still restricted to two rows of "top sites"? I'm on a desktop here, I'm not going to run out of pixels. Even on Android I liked having more space for quick links to websites I visit semi-regularly. In fact it was more useful there because there isn't a good way to bring order to the history panel.

  Is it just to make room for "highlights"? I switched that off because it's utterly useless for me. I don't find it helpful to be shown a random selection of things I've clicked on. Besides, I am capable of scrolling.

  Yes I know, there's an addon for that (probably). But it just feels like such an arbitrary restriction.

  Why are only twelve "top sites" allowed?

• by teamhappy on 3/13/18, 2:24 PM

  "Added settings in about:preferences to stop websites from asking to send notifications"

  Been waiting for this one.

• by sutoor on 3/13/18, 2:47 PM

  Sadly, still unusable for me since the Quantum update.

  A clean install and profile, no add-ons, and google.com/maps (for example) will max out my cpu. There must be some bug related to old hardware and OS (Macbook Pro 2009 + 10.11.x) or more people would be experiencing this.

• by Santosh83 on 3/13/18, 2:31 PM

  Although its a minor thing, I'm personally delighted with drag & drop for the new tab tiles. These are the kind of little usability improvements that can tip the finely balanced scales between major browsers these days.

• by grok2 on 3/13/18, 3:20 PM

  After I switched to Firefox 59 beta on Windows (7 upgraded to 10), I see the following issue all the time. When accessing finance.google.com in one tab and etrade.com (internal page) in another, if I am on finance.google.com and if it refreshes and is slow for some reason I start seeing a blank page with a spinner on that tab and while this is happening, if I switch to the etrade.com tab, I see that page is blank too and has a spinner that doesn't refresh until the finance.google.com tab comes back -- almost like the browser is stuck in a system call somewhere and all tabs using javascript are blocked. Maybe it's likely some interaction with some addons I have (mostly NoScript), but it's been frustrating and for the first time in so many years I am considering switching browsers :-(.

  BTW, where is the best way to ask about issues like this regarding Firefox, it seems like Googling for Firefox issues mostly only brings up years old issues and no one is publically posting about more recent issues like this. Also it's hard to describe problems like this in a reasonable way to come up with search terms that Google likes and doesn't hit old reported problems.

• by andrepd on 3/13/18, 3:25 PM

  Still on 56, sadly. The addons crucial for my workflow have stopped working. Shame these concerns were not properly addressed, even after months of clamour about breaking changes like these.

• by symlinkk on 3/13/18, 2:27 PM

  > Added settings in about:preferences to stop websites from asking to send notifications or access your device’s camera, microphone, and location, while still allowing trusted websites to use these features

  Good. I get so tired of having to click that little [x] on the location prompt.

  However it's really just covering up a bigger issue, which is that the permissions prompts in Firefox and Chrome should be redesigned. It would be good if they were designed so that they were still noticeable, but they:

  * don't cover part of the webpage

  * don't cover other parts of the browser's UI

  * and don't take focus away from the webpage

• by Aelius on 3/13/18, 4:02 PM

  More good news: expect to see Fx60 on Fdroid.

  https://forum.f-droid.org/t/making-it-easier-for-f-droid-to-...

• by syeaj on 3/13/18, 3:13 PM

  I switched to Firefox from Chrome at 58. I've been very happy with the experience all around. Keep up the good work, Mozilla!

• by axelfontaine on 3/13/18, 2:46 PM

  Still no proper Yukikey 2FA support. Github kinda works, Gmail still completely broken. I would love to switch from Chrome for the privacy benefits, but this is an absolute deal-breaker.

  Edit: There is hope for Firefox 60 or 61 -> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1409573

• by dmix on 3/13/18, 2:39 PM

  > Firefox Private Browsing Mode will remove path information from referrers to prevent cross-site tracking

  Surprised this wasn't done yet.

• by childintime on 3/13/18, 2:52 PM

  Sadly no news on the Web-extensions front. Several of my extensions continue broken.

• by armandduijn on 3/13/18, 4:00 PM

  > Improved graphics rendering using Off-Main-Thread Painting (OMTP) for Mac users

  Does this update improve its power consumption? Currently, Firefox has a significantly larger effect on my MacBook's battery life compared to Safari with similar usage.

• by CoffeeDregs on 3/13/18, 2:47 PM

  Switched to FF Nightly from Chrome about 6 months ago because Chrome's memory usage was awful. Firefox has been much better, especially since I modified the following in about:config:

      browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers => 0
      dom.ipc.processCount                     => 1

• by crawdingle on 3/13/18, 2:31 PM

  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1353319 - RESOLVED FIXED in Firefox 59, super happy about that.

• by chmln on 3/13/18, 4:22 PM

  Firefox gets raving feedback here, but for me it is unusably slow on a Linux machine.

  While websites do render fast, the UI is not very responsive, whether its laggy typing into the address bar [1] or the crawling devtools.

  [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1408699

• by zaarn on 3/13/18, 2:40 PM

  59 is probably a bit of a less spectacula release than Quantum itself but the recent updates nonetheless bring me joy.

  The "stop notifying me about permissions and just block it" is something I genuinely didn't know I wanted. Though I do hope (but will have to test later) if this also works for HTML Canvas since I use the additional anti fingerprinting.

• by exodust on 3/13/18, 3:16 PM

  Won't be updating beyond FF 55.0.3 because 'Status-4-Evar' add-on doesn't work with Quantum. Apparently it can't be updated to work with Quantum for reasons I don't know, but was mentioned on the support forum.

  Until such time as I can prevent the annoying floating URL pop-up in bottom corner when hovering over links, I won't be updating. I don't see why I can't have a harmless fixed status bar extending 100% at bottom of window. It creates a nice gap between Windows taskbar and the browser, with the URL hover text contained neatly within and doesn't appear over the page as an irritating floating layer.

  Is it law at Mozilla that FF must imitate Chrome on interface style? Perhaps my choice of wanting choice is the wrong choice. Perhaps it's my fault as user, for wanting something that was taken away.

  Another add-on I liked, now kaput, is Mozilla's own Lightbeam. The important list view and domain blocking function of that extension has been broken for some time. The march towards the "best browser" seems to involve breaking things and pissing people off.

• by Something1234 on 3/13/18, 3:59 PM

  Is allow client side decorations available yet in about:config? It was in a fedora release about 2 months ago, and it was removed because it wasn't in mainline. I have the title bar disabled for now, but that's broken in it's own way(dragging doesn't work right).

• by odabaxok on 3/13/18, 2:38 PM

  A little OT, but how can I enable/use the Screenshots feature? I cannot find it.

• by floatboth on 3/13/18, 2:50 PM

  > Added support for W3C specs for pointer events and improved platform integration with added device support for mouse, pen, and touch screen pointer input

  ohh yeah finally! I somehow missed that even though I'm following Nightly.

• by szemet on 3/13/18, 4:28 PM

  Can't find in the release notes: Is the Android version now based on quantum as the desktop version? As it was promised a few months back:

  https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/09/26/project-quantum-enh...

• by Grollicus on 3/13/18, 5:13 PM

  Can someone tell me what's behind "Faster load times for content on the Firefox Home page"?

• by cgrf on 3/13/18, 2:46 PM

  I'm sad to say that Firefox Quantum will remain useless to me until proper session management is restored. But without even the necessary API to enable features that were provided by the "Session Manager" add-on for many years, this still seems to be a long way off.

• by acaramanamaraca on 3/13/18, 2:40 PM

  Looks like 'client side decorations' on Linux didn't make this release?

• by esturk on 3/14/18, 6:36 PM

  Does anyone know why Alt+D doesn't focus into the Address Bar anymore? (I thought the behavior was suppose to be like Ctrl+L) I'm on Linux.

• by ams6110 on 3/13/18, 5:46 PM

  I use Firefox Focus on my phone (android). Anyone know if it tracks the full Firefox releases or is it something completely separate?

• by marak830 on 3/13/18, 2:41 PM

  Damn I'm excited about this (specifically those damn notification popups!).

  Slightly off topic: has anyone else been getting frequent crashes lately? It's as if it's running out of memory then freezing a moment. I thought it was because I'm on an older phone at first (note 3 here) but my wife said the same thing to me and she is in an edge 7.

  (Kinda hoping someone knows a config fix to it haha)

• by MrBuddyCasino on 3/13/18, 6:16 PM

  Off-Main-Thread Painting (OMTP) for Mac users is some good stuff. FF is now noticeably smoother. Nice!

• by nokcha on 3/13/18, 3:15 PM

  Has the issue with HSTS supercookies leaking into Private Browsing mode been fixed yet?

• by ppbutt on 3/13/18, 3:07 PM

  Does this include the forced collection of the user's usage data?

• by superdaniel on 3/13/18, 4:51 PM

  cmd+f,"u2f" or "webauth"

  Nothing.. I wonder when they'll ever get to fully supporting u2f (probably via webauth) so I don't have to use Chrome to log into certain websites.

• by Tepix on 3/13/18, 2:47 PM

  Congratulations!

  What's the memory usage like compare to earlier versions?

• by gdulli on 3/13/18, 4:08 PM

  Did they fix the bug introduced with multi-process where select lists in their popped-up state don't respect css styles?

• by dreamygeek on 3/13/18, 2:25 PM

  Mozilla should also be focusing on RAM utilization. If they are doing that on the back end they should explicitly mention it in the update details.

• by John_KZ on 3/13/18, 2:57 PM

  Firefox is dead to me ever since they killed their addons and marketed it as a step forward. If I wanted to use Chrome I'd use fucking Chrome.