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Firefox Mozilla Privacy The Internet

Firefox 71 Arrives With Better Lockwise and Tracker Blocking, Picture-in-Picture on Windows (venturebeat.com) 53

Mozilla today released Firefox 71 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. Firefox 71 includes Lockwise password manager improvements, Enhanced Tracking Protection tweaks, and Picture-in-Picture video on Windows.
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Firefox 71 Arrives With Better Lockwise and Tracker Blocking, Picture-in-Picture on Windows

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  • by Dallas May ( 4891515 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2019 @10:02AM (#59480244)

    That's all I want from FF right now. A true video autoplay blocker that blocks autoplay on ALL videos. I don't understand why this is so hard. How hard is it to just NOT play the video automatically?

    • With Javascript it can be hard to tell if an action was initiated by the user or by something automatic.

      • by caseih ( 160668 )

        Shouldn't matter. The little area of the screen where the video shows should require a direct click on it to make it go. Something that can't come from Javascript at all.

    • by samdu ( 114873 )

      This. I'm super happy with Firefox at the moment, but they built up the autoplay block up for months before it came out and honestly, I don't see much difference since then.

    • by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2019 @10:16AM (#59480306)
      Open up a new browser tab, go to about:config, and adjust these settings:

      Set media.autoplay.default to 1 to disable video autoplay for all sites

      Set media.autoplay.allow-muted to false to disable video autoplay even for muted videos
    • by TypoNAM ( 695420 )

      My about:config settings that seem to work so far on various news sites, netflix, youtube, and etc

      media.autoplay.ask-permission true
      media.autoplay.block-event.enabled true
      media.autoplay.default 5
      media.autoplay.enabled.user-gestures-needed false

      It does however somewhat break web-based media players that use queue's such as amazon music where you'll have to explicitly play the first and second song before firefox then allows auto playing the rest of the queue/playlist. And have to explicitly play the vide

    • Fully-working autoplay blocking would be the one killer feature that would win me back to Firefox from Chrome. We never realized how great we had it back when videos were all in Flash so we could easily make them click-to-play.

    • I've found the problem is that Firefox doesn't block autoplay of muted media at all - on purpose.

      The Mozilla autoplay meta bug 1376321 [mozilla.org] has a link to the following HTMLMediaElement.play() behaviour flowchart [bmoattachments.org] showing the inevitable conclusion.

      Reading the code at dom/media/AutoplayPolicy.cpp [mozilla.org] you need to kill the isInaudible variables as the old config media.autoplay.allow-muted was purged. Else you still need an addon that blocks autoplay.
    • by Mousit ( 646085 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2019 @02:20PM (#59481434)

      That's all I want from FF right now. A true video autoplay blocker that blocks autoplay on ALL videos. I don't understand why this is so hard. How hard is it to just NOT play the video automatically?


      media.autoplay.allow-muted = false
      media.autoplay.block-event.enabled = false
      media.autoplay.block-webaudio = true
      media.autoplay.default = 5
      media.autoplay.enabled.user-gestures-needed = false


      The above five about:config settings have successfully prevented autoplay for me on every site I have gone to. Note I do not have Java or Flash so I can't speak for those, but as far as anything else, I have zero autoplay videos anywhere.

      Of particular note, the "media.autoplay.default = 5" is important. It used to be 1, and another reply to you in this thread also said 1. This is the OLD functionality. 5 is now the everything-fuck-off-block-it-all setting. Mozilla changed this without warning and many people still have not noticed.

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      That's all I want from FF right now. A true video autoplay blocker that blocks autoplay on ALL videos. I don't understand why this is so hard. How hard is it to just NOT play the video automatically?

      Because it isn't automatic.

      It's easy to disable autoplay because you disable playing the video using the media framework - you load the video, you show the thumbnail or first frame, then don't start the playback. But that only works half the time because the advertisers and such have already figured a way around

  • by bjdevil66 ( 583941 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2019 @10:16AM (#59480308)

    I love the new multiline entry mode [mozilla.org] in the console. That's been a long time coming in Firefox.

    I'm glad Chrome is continuing to push them to keep getting better with each release so I don't have to switch.

    The saddest part is that there are some stalwart, OCD types that are still holding onto pre-Quantum FF. Give it a chance, guys...

    • I did! (Score:5, Informative)

      by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2019 @11:05AM (#59480508)
      I already gave it a chance, that's the problem. They keep removing functionality I like. The biggest culprit was and remains to this day the status bar, which, aside from displaying status, also doubled as a great place to stash addon buttons so they don't clutter my address bar. There's also garbage anti-features they keep adding, Pocket being the most obvious but their brain-dead implementation of DoH that manages to be worse than both Google's and Microsoft's is another.

      Look, I want Firefox to be good. All of the philosophy they spout about privacy being the last bastion against Chromium dominance, all that's correct. The problem is they keep shooting themselves in the foot with dumb bullshit.
      • privacy *and* being the last bastion against Chromium, sorry
      • I already gave it a chance, that's the problem. They keep removing functionality I like. The biggest culprit was and remains to this day the status bar, which, aside from displaying status, also doubled as a great place to stash addon buttons so they don't clutter my address bar. There's also garbage anti-features they keep adding, Pocket being the most obvious but their brain-dead implementation of DoH that manages to be worse than both Google's and Microsoft's is another. Look, I want Firefox to be good. All of the philosophy they spout about privacy being the last bastion against Chromium dominance, all that's correct. The problem is they keep shooting themselves in the foot with dumb bullshit.

        Welcome to the hell that car enthusiasts with families have been going through for years.

        1. The manual transmission is all but dead in anything that has more than 2 seats.
        2. The non "SUV" station wagon (the right solution for anyone with a family of 4 or less) is dead unless you want to pay through the nose for something from BMW, Audi, or Mercedes Benz.
        3. The sedan is dying, and very few of them are anywhere near interesting anymore, unless you again pay through the nose for something like a station wagon. Kia/H
      • The biggest culprit was and remains to this day the status bar

        If you want to add the status bar back you'll need to edit the profile's user chrome style sheet. This is located in: "your user home"\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\"your profile name"\chrome\userChrome.css within Windows. You can find the all of this in ~/.mozilla in *nix.

        #browser-bottombox { height: 20px; border-top: solid 1px #CCC; }

        .browserContainer>#statuspanel { left: 4px !important; bottom: 0px; transition-duration: 0s !important; transition-delay: 0s !important; }
        .browserConta

        • by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2019 @12:54PM (#59481004)
          Ah, sorry, I don't use Chromium-based browsers. I actually use Pale Moon as my daily driver like you mentioned. It's just at this point, I'm basically relying on a small number of devs (mainly one) to maintain an unsupported fork that has the featureset I want. That featureset used to be Firefox. I don't like what Firefox has become.
      • their brain-dead implementation of DoH that manages to be worse than both Google's and Microsoft's is another.

        Cloudflare's DoH server is available over tor as an .onion [cloudflare.com].
        Which means that with care, it's possible to set DoH in a way that not even cloud flare know who is browsing where.

        Hopefully, other DoH providers will also eventually get .onion addresses.

        Once that is in place too, it should be possible to run your own dnsmasq which then randomly interrogate one hidden .onion DoH resolver out of a large-enough pool

    • They're bloated enough already , I don't need an IDE for Noddyscript shoved in there as well sucking up memory and disk space. There should be a seperate dev browser for web monkeys.

    • The saddest part is that there are some stalwart, OCD types that are still holding onto pre-Quantum FF. Give it a chance, guys...

      When they make it so that addons can write files without helpers, and therefore Scrapbook+ is possible again, I'll try it. Until then, I'm using pale moon.

  • by Ashthon ( 5513156 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2019 @10:32AM (#59480384)

    Don't forget the new about:config which has a ridiculous amount of padding between rows, no support for sorting by column, and no deep linking. Mozilla have been informed of these issues but say they're not going to fix them because they don't care that their browser is garbage.

    The only thing declining faster than the quality of Firefox is it's market share. You'd think Mozilla would take the hint, but they continue to believe that they know best and the user knows nothing. They'll no doubt believe that right up until they have no users left.

    • Congratz this has to be the best "First World Problem" post of the week. The fucking About:Config page ... really.

      • In fairness, being able to deep link to a config setting would be pretty sweet for "This is how you make Firefox do the thing it doesn't do right now but can".
        • In fairness, being able to deep link to a config setting would be pretty sweet for "This is how you make Firefox do the thing it doesn't do right now but can".

          Playing the devil's advocate:

          - Avoiding deep linking basically requires the user to go past the "Here Be Dragons" warning entry page and at least type a search keyword in the search bar. This is bare minimum to make sure that user clearly intend to modify a specific setting. Think it as a minimal test to make sure the users is capable of doing actual config mods.

          - Deeplinking, if it existed, is probably going to be abused to have people modify something in their config without even understanding what they m

          • To the first, we've been doing intercept and redirect work on the web for a long, long time. While I'm not privy to the inner workings and detail, I am curious as to how difficult it would be to do it for this purpose.

            As to the second, you're probably right. That said, they already do that if they want it to do the thing that it can do but doesn't by default.
    • Don't forget the new about:config which has a ridiculous amount of padding between rows, no support for sorting by column, and no deep linking.

      By all means, feel free to add it yourself. [mozilla.org]

      They'll no doubt believe that right up until they have no users left

      Well then go ahead and hasten that outcome by going here then [google.com]. If you personally don't want to fix it, then by all means go elsewhere. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm tired of people whining about open source software that they won't actually make a patch for. If FOSS software is that much trouble for you, by all means, head on back over to the proprietary stuff.

      ridiculous amount of padding between rows

      Dude it's a fucking CSS style. You really that broken about it, change it your damn self o

  • Mozilla has been blacklisting inline translation addons, for a while. The justification is understandable, these addons were loading javascript code from providers like Microsoft and Google, which is against their policies.

    A long time ago they said they were working on their own integrated inline translation, there even are settings for that in "about:config", although it doesn't seem to be functional yet.

    Am I the only one thinking this is a major missing feature?

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