Android version comes with a completely new design, and empty "What's new" section in Google Play gave no indication it's going be such a major change.
Even more importantly, it has overridden data collection preferences after the update. Check "Settings > Data collection". I had to disable "Marketing data" and "Experiments" toggles. Not cool!
I suspect that approximately no one reads that "What's new" section, and they know it. Even Google just leaves it with whatever happened to be in the field in summer of 2018 when they stopped updating it.
Maybe nobody reads it when they have automatic updates enabled, but I read the changelogs for every app that has them on F-Droid, even though their update flow is not optimized for this. For projects without changelogs, I'll sometimes check the commit messages.
Quality of changelogs has a big impact on how trustworthy I perceive a project to be. Releasing new versions without a (meaningful) changelog says that you expect blind trust from your users; that you expect them to update anyway regardless of the changelog content; or that you don't consider them able to evaluate whether updating is in their best interest -- in summary, "we know what's best for our users better than they do." Whether or not that's true, the attitude strikes me as vaguely paternalistic. It feels to me that a developer who thinks so little of their users would be more inclined to try and pull a fast one.
As an example, Signal has recently stopped writing changelogs for many of their beta releases, and it has affected my trust in them, and willingness to install said updates.
Let me be very clear: I am NOT saying lack of changelogs makes a developer less trustworthy. I AM talking about how they make me feel about them. I'm also well aware that this is an indirect measurement, so there's some variability and Goodhart's law applies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law).
Add me in that category. If the company/developer doesn't care enough to put one or two sentences about what's changing, they lose a portion of my trust. Even the annoying "bug fixes and performance enhancements" message is better than nothing. But the "don't worry about what's changing, just keep our app on autoupdate!" message is worse than nothing.
"We've smashed more bugs and tidied up a few things to make this release even more awesome. Update to the latest to enjoy the best Blablah!"
Actual updates: Version number bump. In my experience outside of the Big Tech releases the most egregious offenders seem to be Credit and Banking Apps with auto expiration. I loathe that feature, it's bitten me in low connectivity areas.
I do, and I cringe at the weasel-worded disinformation that usually ends up being put there. "We've fixed some defects and improved performance". Yeah, right. Running the updated app provides ample evidence to the contrary.
And then the vendors (and the security people) claim that automatic updates are fundamental, because otherwise people wouldn't install them. But maybe, just maybe, people don't want to install updates because they're being force-fed them, with no information about what to expect, and half of the time the update makes the experience worse.
The road to a better user/vendor interaction starts with providing meaningful changelogs and dropping the paternalistic attitude about updates.
Hehe: My dad used to refer to Mum as the CEO, they are both alive and after being married in well over 40 years they are still an example in being nice and respectful to each other.
I have adapted kind of the same attitude: As the one who brings most money to the table I demand a final say on anything major, but in reality my wife has found our last 3 cars, do the majority of the shopping etc, I mostly just rubberstamp and sign and keep telling my kids to respect their mum.
It's infuriating! Netflix even goes as far as condescendingly saying "don't you worry about this kind of stuff, you worry about what to watch next". It's ridiculous, if you're gonna require patch notes they must either be part of the app review, or be optional from the start!
I strongly agree, especially since I hate 95% of the changes they make. Netflix has the most user hostile design of any media app that I use. I'm still a subscriber for now, but it will be the first one I cut.
Yeah, Spotify feels like a really cluttered small shed in the backyard; like I have to step over all sorts of crap to get what I’m after, and every day the stuff is cluttered up in a slightly different way and somebody randomly hangs a big Michelle Obama poster or some other crap from the ceiling once in a while. Very annoying. Desktop app is mildly more tolerable than mobile.
it was game-over to your opinion when you purchased their product and use a proprietary client to connect to the their proprietary servers.
If they want to break every single feature, while also denying access to older versions of the client, there's nothing you can do. Besides cancelling the membership, that is. But in this case there is nothing the changelog that would have helped you.
...all that is the complete opposite of Mozilla though.
I used to read these until every app stopped providing any useful information in there. Now I wait a while to install updates so I can read the new reviews. Apps updates are so risky, especially on iOS where you can't downgrade an app. More often than not an app upgrade will redesign the UI so I have to relearn it all, or remove free features and make them paid. "Bug fixes and performance improvements", yeah right :-(
On iOS, you can connect your device to a computer running iTunes 12.6.3[1] before updating an app to save the older IPA file to your computer. If you later decide to downgrade, you can delete the app and then restore the old IPA from your computer. Backup the IPAs separately from iTunes, as iTunes syncing can screw you if you're not careful.
Yes, this is a complete and total pain in the neck, but it has saved me in the past. Jailbroken devices can also use tweaks that allow downgrading right from the App Store.
P.S. There's actually one more way to downgrade apps—use a version of iTunes from before Apple introduced certificate pinning (iTunes 7 worked for me) and use Charles Proxy to edit the request so Apple gives you an old version. This worked for me as of last fall—but in this case, "pain in the neck" does not even begin to describe it. :)
Discord has been really good with their changelogs but their changelogs in app stores are not as good as the ones in the beta channels. I liked their transparency when they introduced tabs in their Android app.
Android dev here : big fan of having a what's new containing "we improved things".
ALL the majors apps I am familiar with basically launch new features in the same way : first under a feature flag (e.g. the feature code is in the app but deactivated by default, we control its activation server side). We open up the feature to a small percentage of users, look at how it is behaving (bugs, crashes, impact on metrics) and then decide whether we want to open it up to more users or not.
With such a system where your version number does not mean much, at best release notes would be "we added a new feature, you might or might not see it".
What are you talking about?
Google play update section is my most visited app during the day I think.
I love reading the what's new copy. Some companies put a lot of effort into it, like Signal/Slack (when I still had it installed)
Some companies leave it empty which I think is very bad
But the worst are companies that put a constant what's new section like "we're constantly updating our app to make it better for you" bullshit - Uber. This just feels condescending to me.
Overall I think it's a prime channel to let people who are interested in your app to know ... what's new
Maybe more directly relevant but still very Not OK in my books. I get very few push notifications. Send me an email, put it on your blog, whatever - it's definitely not interesting enough for me to come even close to the "I want this pushed on top of whatever else I was doing" bar though.
Brave sent me a push notification this week too :( what browser should I switch to that doesn't try to exploit my 'engagement'
On Android, most apps include toggles in settings to disable different notification types. It's annoying that they're on by default, but at last you can usually disable them. In Firefox, you can turn off the "Product and feature tips" notifications in settings, and I bet that would prevent that kind of notification appearing. As a last resort, you can disable notifications entirely per-app at the OS level by digging into the Android settings.
It would be nice if Firefox added a separate category for "Political Call to Action" notifications. That way we wouldn't have to miss out on "Product and Feature Tips", which are occasionally helpful. A bit of a moot point for me since I'm using FF on a Nexus 7 that doesn't support that level of selective muting
This notification came through the 'Browser' channel, not 'Mozilla tricks and tips' like you might expect. So, congratulations Mozilla, I've blocked all of the 'Browser' notifications for your browser.
Interesting. Was it a regular Android notification or something custom in-app?
For me, there was no indication that this update was going to be any different from a minor bugfix they've rolled out a couple of days ago, until I've launched FF for the first time after the update and was a greeted by a full screen splash with the new version info.
Mine popped up in the notification area thingy at the top, like any other app notification. Clicking on it took me to a web page detailing the changes.
I've been running Nightly and Regular side-by-side for a while. I still use Regular the most, mainly because I find the new UI quite horrible to use. Nightly is clearly much smoother to use though.
This sort of thing (updates as backdoor to get telemetry from people who explicitly opt out of telemetry) is becoming more and more prevalent. GitExtensions also does it - ostensibly a bug, too, but no hurry to fix it of course.
On the other side, Visual Studio forces me to open up a port and log in to MS account - tied to my real name and credit card - so it could upload my usage patterns every month, as a condition of the 'free' license. Perhaps that's the model we're converging towards, even for open source.
This is why I turned off auto update on Firefox, I knew at some point to fenix update was coming down the pipe, and I was not sure if they would bother to inform me of the change.
> Even more importantly, it has overridden data collection preferences after the update. Check "Settings > Data collection". I had to disable "Marketing data" and "Experiments" toggles. Not cool!
Oh ffs thanks for the heads up. Re-defaulting settings is a big reason I jumped ship from other companies' products.
In one update Mozilla has more or less destroyed my trust in them. They reset privacy settings and pushed out a major change that leaves virtually no add-ons available with no warning. I don't understand what they were thinking with this.
The ability to share a link and be presented with a menu that let you bookmark or send it to a different device -- gone.
Not particularly pleased with that.
I really sometimes grow very frustrated with Mozilla. In Cory Doctorow's _Eastern Standard Tribe_, some people work as saboteurs, planting really unpopular stupid ideas, and sabotaging clean functionality.
It feels like Mozilla is really rife with such characters.
Completely new design that still lacks pull to refresh. Honestly which developer hates that ui design aspect. It's been filed multiple times and more recently as a bug. at this point it rightfully is a bug
I don't know when the last time I refreshed a website on mobile was. It's entirely possible that it could be coded in such a way that I wouldn't notice or accidentally refresh when I'm simply trying to scroll to the top of a page, but I think it's more likely that I wouldn't intentionally use it ever, but I would trigger it accidentally on occasion
> Completely new design that still lacks pull to refresh.
Here's the thing... sometimes when you unload Fenix and then open a link from another app, the browser will fail to load... you get a white screen... and the page never loads, but at least you can pull to refresh, which does nothing... (press Back to get out of this state)
So the only time you can "pull to refresh" is when Fenix doesn't work!
I received a notification before 68.11.0 landed today warning me that an upgrade was coming and things would change. But it was only for 68.11.0 (current stable channel release on Google play store) and not 79.
Thank you so much for that link. I think I got mislead by heise.de into thinking that this issue with Chrome WebView existed.
Since I have had issues in my app with Chrome/Android WebView, I will start experimenting with GeckoView. I didn't know it existed as a component. Thank you so very much!
For me, Fenix on Android is the worst update ever. I use Firefox as my main browser on Android since almost 10 years and my whole mobile workflow depends on the awesome Tab Queue-feature (new tabs from other Apps like Twitter/Slack/Mails are opened in the background).
With Fenix, Mozilla decided to just abandon that feature. Issues are closed, it got removed from the feature list [1] and further questions are ignored.
I fully understand that you can't keep every feature everywhere, but this was THE main benefit of Firefox (besides ublock) for me and if you look at GitHub/Reddit/Twitter I am not the only one.
Now I have to stick to an outdated browser because of an (for me) completely unnecessary, degrading update :/.
- Recently closed tabs (AFAIK "Undo close tab" currently fakes it by not actually closing the tab until the "Undo close tab" popup has disappeared)
- The Firefox share target that actually gave you a choice whether you'd like to open the page in Firefox directly, merely bookmark it or use Sync to send it to some other Firefox instance without having to actually open the page in Firefox first
- Add-on support that isn't limited to a few blessed "Recommended extensions"
- viewing local HTML files is not possible (although admittedly Google hasn't helped there, either, by vastly complicating file system access in recent Android versions, and their purported replacement method is absolutely unsuitable for HTML files that depend on additional resources such as images, styles, scripts, other HTML files etc., but in the end it was still Mozilla's decision to disallow it completely right now)
- about:config
- View source
- bfcache is broken
- cannot force-refresh a page
- the tab import from the previous versions drops all the session history of those tabs, i.e. it only imports the currently viewed page, but you can no longer go back or forward
Same. I blocked the auto-update for Firefox as soon as I saw that the feature hadn't landed in stable.
I hope some other browser picks it up. Would probably be a good fit for Vivaldi, which is meant for power-users who might go through link aggregators a lot.
I don't get what benefit they get from "lock[ing] and limit[ing] conversation to collaborators" on such issues. Why would you want to deliberately cut valuable user feedback? I mean I can't even put a "thumb up" on the issue!
For Wayland users DMA-BUF video textures are now used when the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) is enabled.
I personally saw a number of regressions[0] on Debian testing for video playback on the beta releases for 79, but it largely seems to have settled down now.
>A new stable version of Firefox brings July to a close with the return of shared memory! Firefox 79 also offers a new Promise method, more secure target=_blank links, logical assignment operators, and other updates of interest to web developers.
> At the start of 2018, Shared Memory and high-resolution timers were effectively disabled in light of Spectre. In 2020, a new, more secure approach has been standardized to re-enable shared memory.
> To prevent the DOM property window.opener from being abused by untrusted third-party sites, Firefox 79 now automatically sets rel=noopener for all links that contain target=_blank.
Haven't used it in a while, but when I did it was always easy to switch the behavior (for a power user, and I think the omnibar is much more appealing to non power users as it's visually simpler, big, and easier to click — unifying the search and address bar is what you're talking about, right?).
Its not easy to switch back anymore and breaks a lot of functionality if you do. But its crazy that you have to accept serious UI/UX changes to get security fixes too.
> But its crazy that you have to accept serious UI/UX changes to get security fixes too.
It is sad, but it basically seems par for the course for big, semi-commercial software. I don't like Mozilla, but I appreciate them making an alternative to the massive Chrome near-monopoly that's not only just as fast and lighter but competitively easy to use for normal people. I personally switched to Waterfox years ago, and Pale Moon not long after that. It receives some security fixes slightly after FF (they're fixed after Mozilla publishes the issue), but some of them are not applicable (http://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml) . Overall, to me then Pentadactyl is worth worse than that, and I think you might love the UI.
> It is sad, but it basically seems par for the course for big, semi-commercial software
I totally get why they do it too, Im a big Mozilla fan and have been for a long time. Im glad there is browser competition, I love their take on Add-ons and allowing the user to make decisions for themselves. They are fighting the good fight, Im just expressing my opinions on things I don't like, but Im still going to use FF. I did stop upgrading with version 76 because it was just too much change and disruptive enough for me to downgrade and turn off the installer.
"Preferences > Search > Search Bar" allows you to add back the separate bar. And you can toggle search suggestions in the address bar as well. I don't see how that breaks anything or that it is a "serious UI change".
And finally, the security implications of search suggestions in the address bar are debatable for the end user.
Im talking more about the megabar, not the unified search and address bar (which also has its own issues)
And the security patches for FF are bundles with the release, so if you want security fixes you also HAVE to take whatever UI or feature changes FF put into the browser. You shouldnt force users to relearn functionality for a piece of utility software in order to get fixes for CVEs. I understand its easier for them, but having to retrain people every couple of weeks because there is a new FF release isn't ideal.
> You shouldnt force users to relearn functionality for a piece of utility software in order to get fixes for CVEs.
Yes, exactly. The amount of UI/UX churn in Firefox is pretty crazy and I'm sure discourages some number of people from updating regularly. Mozilla "fixed" that issue on the desktop versions by completely removing the easy options for letting users decide for themselves when to update, rather than just making auto-updates the default.
I just don't get it. Does Mozilla have a problem with too many developers and needing to invent things to keep them occupied with?
> for a power user, and I think the omnibar is much more appealing to non power users as it's visually simpler, big, and easier to click
This is interesting, I always figured it was the opposite. Many casual users don't know or care much about the difference between a search bar and a url bar and just want to type something in and get a result. Personally though I prefer having separate search and url fields because the actions are more precise.
On more than a couple occasions I've tried to make a web search in Chrome's url bar that the browser insisted was a nonsensical url. I know there's a flag to enforce one behavior or the other, but I can't ever remember it and honestly don't feel like having to memorize magic words to get basic functionality working.
Another nice thing about having them separate is you can set the search bar to automatically open in a new tab, whereas the main url bar replaces the current page.
- Return of shared memory between parts of the same page (including web workers). Parallel processing becomes more efficient, good for complex apps and games.
- Time-traveling debugger of sorts: search for "restart frame".
`dom.workers.serialized-sab-access` is the flag they've put in so that way they can disable concurrent execution of JS threads that share memory in case a novel cross-process attack shows up. Spectre is purely an in-process attack and the whole article that comment is attached to is about the work they did to enable shared memory while defending against Spectre. `dom.workers.serialized-sab-access` does not affect Spectre. It appears to be intended for preventing a novel cross-process attack from leveraging shared memory in other processes into becoming a high-resolution timer.
Also note that threads that have access to shared memory in Firefox 79 also have access to the full high-resolution performance.now(), and flipping dom.workers.serialized-sab-access doesn't affect that.
"The reference-types proposal is now supported. It provides a new type, externref, which can hold any JavaScript value, for example strings, DOM references, or objects."
This is exciting! It opens up faster possibilities for wasm apps
I wonder if we could try something new and have all discussion related to Mozilla or Firefox as a whole, including comparisons to other browsers, privacy, and how much battery it uses on macOS in just one thread so people can collapse it.
Looking at about:performance when browser is idle, it doesn't do anything, but as soon as I start doing something with tabs, some extensions start to do some work.
If a little bit more power draw is the price to pay for having no ads while browsing (with ublock origin), I am willing to pay it.
One thought, cant one reason to the difference when you checked be that Firefox is the active application and have focus? And do you maybe have any addons in Firefox? Extensions can give bigger energy impact, you can check that under about:performance. Anyways I think both have low energy impact even if safari happens to be abit lower.
Personally I use Firefox on mac and can many times have 100+ tabs and it works without any problems.
It could also be mention that Firefox now use macos coreanimation that drastically improved Firefox battery performance [1]. So give it a real test again, Firefox is really awesome and needs all support :) We need bigger diversity among webbrowsers, not just chromium based.
The active application was "Activity monitor" as you can see on the screenshot. I did indeed have two Firefox extensions active (vs 7 on Safari). I disabled them and got same results. But everyone should be able to easily perform a similar test for themselves and compare.
Safari has been frustratingly aggressive for me. I was working with a fairly heavy Google Spreadsheet and Safari would need to refresh/reload every time it lost focus.
Between Chrome, Firefox, Safari and their plugins it's a dance to get the desired behavior and efficiency. Lazy loading of pages (when you have multiple tabs and close/reopen) can either be really efficient (because they don't even load the page) or annoying (if you don't have Internet or they change/remove the page when you go back to read it).
There has been progress. Firefox is pretty close to Chrome in power usage on macOS now. Safari is still streets ahead of every other browser on power usage though.
Is the in-house software just better at fitting the power usage metrics, or does the battery actually last longer with Safari when you let it physically drain out?
Ah, I had no idea this was a problem for Firefox in particular. One thing I've noticed is my browser uses a lot of energy (fans turn on) when I get on a video call through the browser, and now I'm curious if switching to Chrome or Safari for calls can resolve that.
For me, the big drain was running Google Chat in Firefox. I switched running GChat using Google’s app and that solved the problem for me. Now the only big drain is WebEx. (This is a work laptop, and my work uses GSuite and WebEx.)
It was in the background, same as Safari. Still the point was, whatever the cpu usage was, it was 6x more than Safari, which when using laptop battery and browser running almost all the time, means a world of difference.
Having to see mentions of Nazi camps on my home page or seeing a notification for Facebook containers although I don't use Facebook. All that bloat being enabled by default is troublesome and goes against very principles Mozilla advocates.
Right, you mean the content Mozilla shoves into new tab. I disabled this the first time I saw it. Not going down in the browser I use. Should it ever be impossible to disable, I'll switch browser in a blink.
I think you missed the point of “behavior enabled by design”. Of course I can remove it, as can someone who just stepped into a pile of poo clean their shoes. We’d just prefer that the pile of poo didn’t exist by default.
They're mostly thumbnails of Web sites people have recently visited or visited frequently, i.e. they look familiar. I don't think they look like ads to most people, and I certainly wouldn't conclude they do without actual data.
By default, the Firefox new tab page has ads and sponsored content, which neither Chrome nor Safari have. This "feature" certainly decreases trust in Firefox as the more privacy-friendly option, although it's easy to disable for experienced users.
Targeted advertisements like the ones built into Firefox's new tab page are the exact kind of thing that privacy-conscious people like to block. When I recommend Firefox to a less-technical friend or relative and suggest that they use uBlock Origin or another powerful ad and tracking blocker, it's awfully ironic that the default new tab page is full of targeted advertisements. It's purely perception, of course, but it's the kind of thing that almost certainly isn't helping Firefox compete against Chrome.
Thumbnails are buggy.
Auto complete doesnt work in some cases. No tab reordering, open in new tab order is weird. Home page is worse. No addons... lots of other small annoyances.
And worst of it, no about config. I dont like the direction mozilla is taking. Do they have any reasoning for no abour config.
This is quite a downgrade, I think I am switching to another browser on mobile.
Eh.. They had to: probably they will add more robust support of extensions in the future, but for now they had to re-implement some basic browser functions + add something new to attract new customers (like "Collections").
Same question as the last time [0]: I see the benefit of wasm extensions and I see how to enable them in "manual" compilation (for rustc, -C target-feature=+bulk-memory), but I didn't yet find a documented way of using them in wider used setups like wasm-pack. I'd love to try recompiling a full project with these features, but I just can't find out how to do it.
The release notes say "The wasm-bindgen documentation includes guidance for taking advantage of externref from Rust", but I didn't yet find anything about it there either.
I would hope the key presses required to use the native search among opened tabs had changed.
- Ctrl-L to go to the address bar
- release Ctrl (otherwise, the next keypress fail)
- Shift-6 to type "%" in the address bar
- space
- [your query and hit tab/enter to navigate results]
The last bullet is a close to ideal, native search among open tabs and make it so smooth to find an opened tab among dozens. But the key presses necessary to get there? Who can use that without weekly hospital stays for finger RSIs?
I love firefox. If someone, somewhere reads this, please please please think of simpler key presses to use this nice, already built functionality.
(I know non-native extensions provide similar feature. But native would be so cool and stable, especially that it's already built).
In 78 they've added a persistent Google search as a top line in URL bar drop-down list. I couldn't find it documented anywhere neither in release notes nor in help topics.
This update has, for the first time in over 10 years, rendered Firefox pretty much unusable for me on Ubuntu: Both the URL and the search bar are completely broken - neither autocomplete nor searching via google/DDG works. The only way to open a URL is to type it in full. Not cool. I guess I should move to ESR.
It's funny how any involvement with cryptocurrencies is now an immediate red flag. Is there any use for cryptocurrencies in 2020 that isn't either an outright scam or a pump-and-dump scheme?
I don't think Brave's attempts to integrate BAT are either a scam or a pump-and-dump. I think they're sincerely just trying to figure out how to move "the internet" to a revenue model that doesn't necessitate holding its users hostage.
Every decentralized or censorship-resistant network gets dragged down to the worst of its adopters in the public consciousness (not entirely by accident IMO). It's sad, but should be acknowledged as par for the course at this point. If you're not going to fall into line, expect the power brokers to mix you up with the worst of 'em.
Are you sure it's not just YouTube? Alphabet's arbitrarily changed YT's behaviour based on the browser's UA string in the past, and used deprecated APIs only implemented in Chrome.
I’ve tried Firefox about once a year for the past five years and always immediately go back to chromium. Scrolling is always broken out of the box on all platforms I’ve tried (Linux and macOS).
Edit: trying again, the macOS track pad seems ok but scroll wheel behavior is different. Firefox requires 2-3 times the scrolling distance and transitions slowly to the final scroll destination. Chrome does not.
I'm so confused by this comment. You downloaded Firefox on MacOS and scrolling was broken? Scrolling itself is always broken on Firefox on all platforms?
Considering that scrolling clearly isn't broken for Firefox users (I think Mozilla would notice), doesn't that point to the fact that it's probably something on your end and not Firefox?
For what it's worth elastic bounce when scrolling to top / bottom of website has never been supported which feels very wrong on macOS. Mozilla doesn't seem to care or not care enough to patch:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1124108
From what I can tell scrolling works fine and speed can be adjusted for personal needs in macOS.
I'm assuming that you are referring to smooth scrolling behavior, since it doesn't feel quite right to me.
options > browsing >
then uncheck smooth scrolling option
edit:
It would be nice if FF had a slider to adjust the speed. The default smooth scrolling for me is too slow (my eyes jump ahead which makes me feel nauseous).
That’s what happens on a clean install on Windows or MacOS. You might want to reset any custom settings and remove any extensions to see if it still reproduced.
Even more importantly, it has overridden data collection preferences after the update. Check "Settings > Data collection". I had to disable "Marketing data" and "Experiments" toggles. Not cool!