Firefox 72: Floating videos, blocking fingerprints, and defeating notification pop-ups Mozilla has aired a bunch of new features aimed at making web 2020 a little less unpleasant in its release of Firefox 72. "Picture in picture" is a way to play videos, introduced in Firefox 71 for Windows only, but now available on macOS and Linux. Start a video playing and a blue button appears. Click it, and the video plays …
Indeed, this is a picture in picture option.
I've actually found it most useful when displaying windows for media when in VR - instead of having to fullscreen the video to remove all but the video from view, and subsequently have to capture the full 4k output for display on a screen inside VR, I need only capture the floating video window instead, leaving more system resources and bandwidth for the VR application.
"It's nice to see some more of Opera's pioneering features being picked up by other browsers. ;-)"
Or just the return of Flash pop-ups from 20 years ago. It's cool and useful to have this option, but it might turn out that just as 1 enemy weakens (notifications), another takes its place.
Just how many floating videos can be on 1 page?
I've been 'trying' new browsers for about a year now. I dislike how much Google has their fingers in my pie. When I got my gmail invite back in the day, search and now email! Wow, that was cool. Google just got creepy after that. I avoided Chrome, util my employer drank the kool-aid and embraced gmail, and docs and sheets, etc.
What I find at work these days, is that I need browza 1 for these sites, browza 2 for those devices, and browza 3 for my personal stuff, browza 4 just because something doesn't work well or at all in browza 1,2, or 3.
I have given FF a try in the last few weeks, so far no show stopping issues.
> browza 1 for these sites, browza 2 for those devices, and browza 3 for my personal stuff...
> I have given FF a try in the last few weeks, so far no show stopping issues.
If you're after Logical separation (eg work vs personal), an o-oooooooold feature of netscape is still kicking around, but hidden. Profile Manager.
If you run FF once off the commandline, adding the -P option (firefox.exe -p), you thereafter get access to multiple Profiles forever (or until you disable same).
So each time I click the taskbar icon, I get to choose which group of plugins + opened-windows I want to work in.
Commandline syntax for Linux, MacOSX, and Win is (are?) here: Mozilla Command Line Options.
Mac OS X syntaxes:
* GUI:
hold down Option key (Alt key) when launching FF
* commandline:
* go to "/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS", type "./firefox -ProfileManager"* also, "firefox -?" or "firefox --help" should show you the full list of options; chances are the shorter "-P" is also implemented for macosx
* Browser: type About:Profiles into URL-bar, configure as desired
Recently I looked at some estimates of browser market share. To see M$ IE around 70% was quite a shock. Ok, it used to be much higher way back (in the period from Netscape 6 to M$ IE 6 SP1), but still so high?! Yeah I know, it's all about users who don't know and are quite content in their misery.
Now the choice is clear: You can go with creepy (Chrome), crappy (IE) or Firefox.
I learn here that the release schedule is going to 4-weeks. It looks like they are converging toward daily builds and abolish altogether the notion of a release version, following what's done in experimental channels. I've been using Firefox Nightly at home since 2012, with very little problem. It's a new browser everyday.
To see M$ IE around 70% was quite a shock
It certainly would be. StatCounter shows Chrome with nearly 70%, so between the two of them they'd hold 140% of the market.
IE doesn't even show up on the current StatCounter results. What the hell were you looking at that showed IE at 70%?
It'd be interesting to know exactly where these claims of browser usage share actually come from.
I rather suspect that more privacy conscious people use Firefox, with various privacy add-ons installed, and so any sort of usage monitoring that relies on JavaScript being triggered to acquire usage data probably results in Firefox flying completely under the radar, and so simply not being counted.
I have 7 plug-ins that are marked as legacy 4 due to FF breaking how plug-ins work.
All of which is why software updates are such a pain in the arse. Nero switched their backup program to be some subscription based web thing, thanks but no thanks I had to reinstall Nero8 and won't be purchasing any new Nero based stuff. Other software has moved to subscription based systems no thanks.
The update of Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 broke half my website. Lesson learned won't be updating to D8.
Dread any Apple updates they have a tendency of crashing your system. An iOS update 2 years ago bricked my iPod for 4 days. Updates to windows drivers when updating iTunes had a tendency to brick windows 7 and XP.
And so it goes.
These features are nice and all, but I really wish that they'd do something about the memory/cache problems.
It'd also be nice if there was some way to keep videos from auto-playing or at least not just soaking up bandwidth buffering when I have given zero indication that I'd actually watch the video. This is particularly annoying in combination with the caching issues. A lot of my daily browsing is on documentation sites for the various products my company uses. One of them has a video up on every single page that is essentially a re-hash of the written text, rarely its useful, usually it means several megabytes of bandwidth wasted per page.
I'd also like the ability to just turn off most style sheets on some webpages, or tweak the style a bit. Like I'd very much like to remove a lot of background colors from chunks of text, or at least be able to shift it to black-on-white instead of dark-grey on somewhat-light-grey. I'd also live to be able to expand the width of content frames. I have a 4K monitor, but most websites are configured to only be 1024 pixels wide, so nearly 3/4th of my monitor is wasted displaying background pixels.
The Disable HTML5 Autoplay extension works for me on every site where the block autoplay setting and "media.autoplay.enabled" tweak failed
>It'd also be nice if there was some way to keep videos from auto-playing or at least not just soaking up bandwidth buffering when I have given zero indication that I'd actually watch the video.
Ditto that for audio.
Whilst most of the time I do have audio turned off at the OS level there are times when I have it on eg. when attending a webinar. It is highly irritating when a website you pop up in a different window starts auto playing some audio advert, with no indication on the displayed webpage on how to disable the audio.
> I'd also like the ability to just turn off most style sheets on some webpages, or tweak the style a bit.
2 options occur to me:
* hack anything: install GreaseMonkey plugin/add-on, has(had?) a huge fanbase of devhackery
* just hack Styles: click HamburgerMenu-->Web Developer-->Style Editor (or press Shift-F7)
Or completely eliminate ALL styles, via View menu (Alt-V)-->Page Style-->No Style.
I too was getting irritated by these update messages since they removed the "Never check for updates" option.
Some mitigations that helped are setting the following about:config options as follows.
app.update.doorhanger to false - stops the small/frequent notification message, however that leads to the larger (old style) on-screen notification popup (less frequently but still often enough).
So I set the following preference values to 2147483647 (The largest value possible) - and I haven't seen a notification since :-D
app.update.interval
app.update.idletime
I also had the following set to that value too - as was just playing about really.
app.update.badgeWaitTime
app.update.promptWaitTime
Heads-up, all. I just saw these:
"The issue is this: Firefox versions for desktop older than the just-patched version contain a critical vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take control of a user’s entire operating system—whether they use Windows or Mac. More alarming, the vulnerability is already being exploited in the wild, thus Homeland Security stepping in with the urgent plea for users to upgrade."
Per DHS:
" Mozilla has released security updates to address a vulnerability in Firefox and Firefox ESR. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system. This vulnerability was detected in exploits in the wild.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) encourages users and administrators to review the Mozilla Security Advisory for Firefox 72.0.1 and Firefox ESR 68.4.1 and apply the necessary updates."
Safe versions are apparently Firefox 72.0.1 and Firefox ESR 68.4.1
Mozilla's own advisory here.
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