Firefox 152 understands 'Sssh!' Firefox 152 is now available for download, after no fewer than four minor point releases to its predecessor, last month’s Firefox 151. And quieting noisy tabs has never been easier. It’s a good time to check out the Fox: recently, this patch to the Google Chromium codebase, continues closing the door to Manifest V2 extensions, …
I'm not sure about the new two-line toolbar (Settings > Customise), but it looks like something that could grow on me because you can finally see the URL bar again, the one that shrank a few versions back...
Also AI settings are have been added to the mobile version, although at the moment it only has options for translation (enabled) and Google TTS (blocked of course).
I've never had this issue either before or after the update. I appreciate this doesn't help you a lot, but the way you describe it makes it sound like an extremely common problem which Mozilla is ignoring, and I don't think that's the case.
Disabling background running for Firefox doesn't seem like the right approach though tbh - if anything it's likely to lead to Firefox churning through more battery after being killed and restarted unnecessarily.
If you wanted to pay $60 for Brave Origin (extra features over Brave: no AI, no crypto wallet, and no telemetry), consider downloading and donating to Firefox instead.
There's so many things wrong with Brave and Firefox already has no crypto, settings to disable AI and telemetry, Enhanced Tracking Protection, and full-fat uBlock Origin.
I already paid the $60, well worth supporting them. I'd much rather give it to a company I support.
Firefox, not so much.
Yes, I've read the article before. On point number two, he donated to a cause that CA voted in favor of. Mozilla was wrong to get rid of him.
Mozilla has also come out in favor of internet censorship in the past. No thanks, I'll avoid that.
Not even mentioning the questionable issues Brave backs, let's talk about the true Brave issue - "privacy". Or, lack thereof. Brave contacts a list of IP's every time it starts and you can't be "private" if the browser is leaking your IP address before you even start browsing.
No. Just, no. Although I do have Brave on my Android device it is there for 'emergency' purposes only, firewall blocked until I really need it for some reason. Brave is a shady browser doing things behind your back and telling you it's all in your best interest - ooh, Apple!
> there is already a button on tabs playing media to mute them.
Yes, I know. I regularly hit it by mistake and wonder why the radio went quiet. I could happily lose that button.
But the thing is, if you have >1 tabs playing audio, you have to find them to click on them. That could be tricky especially if they are in multiple windows. I don't generally use >2 windows at the most, but some do.
This silences all of them at once, without searching, without identifying what was playing, and without cluttering the UI.
> Yes, I know. I regularly hit it by mistake and wonder why the radio went quiet. I could happily lose that button.
If you clicked and the radio turned off, it should be pretty obvious, so you shouldn't be wondering long - and if you're having trouble accidentally clicking a tab mute button, how do you not also accidentally hit the wrong tab close button?
Also, how often do you have multiple tabs playing audio?
For me that's mostly if I opened a few youtube links and visited those tabs (as until you open that tab it pauses waiting) - if I want to stop audio in something, I usually want to go to that tab to pause the video as well.
I'll acknowledge that sometimes ads play sound in random tabs if you don't have good blocking, but other than that, is it common?
The audio playing/muted/waiting to start icons don't take much space (no UI clutter on a desktop screen) - and they're more visible that knowing a magical phrase for the address bar.
And if I've muted a tab, I usually want to know which one it is - either because it's something I want to restart later, or it was unwanted and something is misbehaving on that site.
Not identifying which tab/site it was isn't necessarily a feature
Sure, maybe a mute-all is useful sometimes, but it's something I need less once a year (KDE's task bar has playing/mute icons for each window - so I've used something equivalent but faster than typing in the address bar).
> how do you not also accidentally hit the wrong tab close button?
I do. Hundreds of times. This is why I prefer keyboard control to mouse, and why I keep banging on about standards-based keyboard UI.
Most useful keystroke in most browsers: Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + T -- reopen the last closed tab.
> The audio playing/muted/waiting to start icons don't take much space
Which is a problem, because they leave less space on the already very small click target of a tab.
> (no UI clutter on a desktop screen) - and they're more visible that knowing a magical phrase for the address bar.
Controls that only appear when they are needed, i.e. when there's something for them to do, are better for skilled users, and that is the core market for Firefox: it is the web browser for power users.
As a general point, this is why ~more~ *all* GUI designers _need_ to know their way around multiple desktop GUIs. As a bare minimum, Classic MacOS and Acorn RISC OS, because those are more or less the 2 most sophisticated and most original WIMP interfaces there have ever been.
MEMO TO THE GNOME TEAM
If someone doesn't know their way around Classic MacOS _and_ RISC OS _and_ Windows then they do not know WIMPs, and if they do not know WIMPs then they should not attempt to design (or redesign) one.
> > how do you not also accidentally hit the wrong tab close button?
> I do. Hundreds of times. This is why I prefer keyboard control to mouse, and why I keep banging on about standards-based keyboard UI.
Firefox has keyboard controls - new tab, select address bar, paste, back in history, close tab, cycle to next/prev tab - can all be done without mouse - so if you struggle to use a mouse, why keep doing it?
Leave it to the side and just use the keyboard, if that's better for you
There's nothing you need to use a mouse for around the tab bar area if you don't want to, or are unable to use a mouse with precision
Touch interface has inherent imprecision, and needs more spacing, but that's a different kettle of fish
> > The audio playing/muted/waiting to start icons don't take much space
> Which is a problem, because they leave less space on the already very small click target of a tab.
It's not a small target for me, but maybe that's usage because I don't have a lot of tabs open most of the time (I'll bookmark if I want to save for later, or use another window if I want to run through a list of things)
But even then, minimum tab size if I shrink the window right now is favicon, a couple of letters from title, and a close tab button
If I want to select, mute, or close - those are all about the same size clickable areas
What do you actually want? tabs and buttons so large that you can't misclick them? If you're struggling with that, it's not a tiny audio icon that's the problem
> > (no UI clutter on a desktop screen) - and they're more visible that knowing a magical phrase for the address bar.
> Controls that only appear when they are needed, i.e. when there's something for them to do, are better for skilled users, and that is the core market for Firefox: it is the web browser for power users.
An icon that shows "this is the tab that's playing audio" is sensible - tabs playing audio should be a rare event (rare that you'd want more than 1 tab, very rare you'd want more than 2)
And since it only shows when there's audio playing, and you can click that to mute - that's the *definition* of only appearing when needed and there's something to do!
More broadly, UI should be intuitive and discoverable.
Audio plays? an icon shows up. Click the icon? audio is muted. Easily discoverable, and I'd say intuitive (or at least a common pattern - as I said, KDE's menu bar does exactly the same).
Typing something other than an address or search term into the address bar? Not very discoverable unless you know already. Not intuitive unless you're already hooked on siri/chatgpt/some other nonsense
And I say that as someone who learnt to use the kio protocol addresses in konqueror and other KDE apps - that's a power user feature, muting audio should not be!
The instruction is also localized, so I have to type "hysj".
The English words usually still work when you're using an interface like this, which is useful since a people will learn about them from articles which are generally in English, but I guess here the localization bot has decided to be a bit too clever.
Tabs should by default by silent when they aren't in the foreground, with action needed to unsilence them if you want to hear a background tab's audio. I don't really care that much since I almost never have a tab start playing sound out of the blue (don't have to worry much about ads doing that with Ublock Origin) but I can't see a reason why anyone would want the default to be background tabs can make noise.
For something like that you want ONE tab in the background to make sound. So you'd still want the default to have them all silent, and then you would manually right click to unmute that one.
Doesn't that make more sense than having to create a special "sssh" command to silence them all because you randomly have one chatty tab because of some ad your adblocker missed or a dumb time delayed autoplay video, and you don't want to have to go through them all to figure out which one is doing that?
Meetings, for me. If you have an web-only meeting platform like Google Meet or a meeting platform you don't want to install the local binary for, that's in a tab. I often need to be on the meeting, hear people, and look at or take action in another tab at the same time. There's also putting on some audio while you do something in another tab. I would prefer if the default allow or deny was configurable, as I have not found background tabs wanting to start making noise very much so I am content to let them continue by default.
And how exactly does having the DEFAULT be that background tabs are silent prevent that? You'd enable background sound on that one tab, and you're golden. Then you don't need a stupid "sssh" command to shut up all tabs because one of them is making sound but it would waste a lot of time going through them all one by one to figure out which one is doing that.
I think they were responding to your "I can't see a reason why anyone would want the default to be background tabs can make noise". Clearly, they can work with that default. Anyone can. However, for people who are in the intersection of "frequently use background audio in tabs" and "don't have much problem with background tabs playing unwanted audio", having the default the other way means less manually unmuting things. This is my setup, mostly because I don't find background tabs getting noisy basically ever, so the less clicking around, the simpler things are for me. I don't care if the default goes your way, but I would appreciate being able to switch it to everything can make noise unless muted.
for me, either playing music whilst doing something else (although I often use a standalone player for that) but probably more often, being in some boring video conference meeting and doing something more constructive in other tabs whilst everyone is waffling on about what they had for breakfast. Or the ever popular "lets do a round of introductions", no let's not, let's get to the actual point of the call I don't care who any of you are, I have work to do.
For when i want be bothered to install a bloatware Electron app and just play Spotify in the browser.
But it probably should be a thing you set and then can override per tab. Although just yesterday it reminded me that one of my tabs was playing a YT short on loop when I unmuted my laptop ;)
And while is true that µBlock origin lite lets a little bit more ads to pass through, the difference is neither to significant, nor to big, or too anoying to matter.
AFAIK, µBlock Origin Lite uses Solely manifest V3, no workarounds, so google killing Manifest V2 workarounds will not affect it much.
¿How long will this last? I do not know.
So, google removing V2 type workarounds has been a nothingburger for me... If anything, will make Chrome slightly faster... But YMMV
Having said that, I use Firefox for most of my browsing, Chrome is there for certain media sites, and for Chromecasting, so what do I know...
If the only thing y'all do with your browser is consume content, good for you, that's fine and dandy.
But think of the people using the browser to access web based office suits (like Google Workspaces, or the web versions of MSOffice Apps) and other clouddy apps. Or the people accesing internal/INTRAnet company portals all day...
For those people, there is no ad in sight, so for them, a faster browser is a better browser.
If, after their 8 hours of work, they use said browser for 4 hours of watching content, protected by µBlock Origin Lite, and a few ads escape the dragnet, that's a small price to pay for 8 hours of productivity gains that will keep putting food on the table (as opposed to lower productivity leading to a dismissal).
Also, think of all those elecron apps, or tauri apps, any speedup of the undelying rendering engine will speed up said applications as well...
JM2¢
YMMV
And how confident are you that removing Manifest V2 will make any difference to the startup time of Google Docs? If there are no ads being removed, do the slower (claim not verified) operations that don't need to run to remove things still affecting it? Are there other operations that occur nonetheless that still affect it? Or is this just speculation that maybe removing code will speed things up, which is only true if that code was noticeably slow and running at the time?
Manifest V2 is not only used by adblockers, is used by many other extensions. Manifest V2 plumbing is still there wether you are using and adbblocker or not.
Manifest V2 was removed due to performance and security concerns.
The fact that it made life SIGNIFICANTLY harder for AdBlock developers was a nice side-effect, the cherry on top, icing on the cake... not the main act.
You're points are orthogonal to the discussion and irrelevant in any case. Let's start with the disconnect about performance. It's likely true that Manifest V3 is faster than V2. There's an advantage in moving compatible extensions to that. If you run only extensions using V3, the presence of V2 will not slow down page loads because V2 isn't being executed by anything. The page code doesn't do it, the browser runtime doesn't do it, so it only runs if you have an extension calling it. Therefore, the case that web office suites, not fast software in general, would be even slower with Manifest V2 is incorrect for anyone not using an ad blocker, incorrect for anyone who disabled their ad blocker, and not necessarily correct for those who kept it on. It's not as simple as everything slowing down if the code could theoretically execute, but that's a requirement to use the argument you did in your previous post.
Of course, the problems we're complaining about aren't that they replaced interfaces for speed. This is not people unhappy because V2 was nicer to write. It's because, when they did what ordinarily would be a normal improvement to interfaces, they conveniently left out things they didn't want to be in there and broke things that required them. That was not about performance, because they could easily have made a performant V3 with the power of V2. They chose not to.
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Constant, never ending Captchas have made me start using Bing FFS! As for Firefox, thar be ads that Brave blocks and I'm fed up of having my time wasted and thought disrupted by all that "buy me" crap.
Firefox for site access via digital cert, but for everything else I use Brave.
And I give Brave bonus points for pissing Google off.
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Keeps just asking me to prove I'm human by ticking the box over and over. So unless the test is that a human will give up eventually, something's not quite right.
Had to use chromium to get this far.
Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data and HTTP headers, controlling access, and removing ads and other obnoxious Internet junk. Privoxy has a flexible configuration and can be customized to suit individual needs and tastes. It has application for both stand-alone systems and multi-user networks.
So basically a re-hash/re-vamp of Proxomitron.
There is one thing that Firefox does, that I love. When you sign up for the Firefox account, I get 'remembered bookmarks/history/passwords across all my devices that have Firefox installed on. Android, Debian, PC/windows. Same interface/shortcuts/bookmarks after syncing. LOVE IT. And UBlock Origin extension for blocking ads. Youtube is enjoyable without ads, and Facebook with FBP add-on really works to limit the garbage ads. I'm 68, and never know when I'll be gone, but I don't want 50 percent of my life spent watching some google ads.
