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Firefox 106 Is Now Available With PDF Annotation, Firefox View (9to5linux.com) 35

Firefox 106 is now available for download, bringing various new features and enhancements, such as a new PDF editing feature and new way to organize recently closed tabs. 9to5Linux reports: Mozilla says that Firefox 106 finally brings the long-anticipated two-finger swipe horizontal gesture for navigating back and forward on a website without having to hold down the Alt key. [...] Firefox 106 also introduces annotation capabilities to the built-in PDF viewer so you can write text, draw, or add signatures on PDF files. You'll be able to change the size and color of the text tool, as well as the thickness, opacity, and color of the draw tool.

Another interesting new feature of the Firefox 106 release is called Firefox View, which is implemented as a pinned tab, promising to help you get back to the content you've previously discovered by allowing you to switch seamlessly between your devices running Firefox. On top of all that, Firefox 106 also brings major WebRTC changes to improve Windows and Wayland screen sharing, RTP performance and reliability, statistics, and more. There are also the usual bug and security fixes to make Firefox more stable and reliable on your system.

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Firefox 106 Is Now Available With PDF Annotation, Firefox View

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  • Another interesting new feature of the Firefox 106 release is called Firefox View, ...

    More eye candy (I guess) that doesn't really help/do anything (IMHO).
    This config setting disables this "feature" ...

    user_pref("browser.tabs.firefox-view", false);

    If you leave it enabled though, this will reduce the Colorways ad panel on that tab:

    user_pref("browser.theme.colorway-closet", false);

    Haven't found a way to actually remove these (useless) themes from the install / Themes page though ...

    • Another interesting new feature of the Firefox 106 release is called Firefox View, ...

      More eye candy (I guess) that doesn't really help/do anything

      Another stupid, pointless feature that they thought up when they weren't busy ripping out all the stuff that was actually useful.

      • by narcc ( 412956 ) on Wednesday October 19, 2022 @09:00PM (#62981695) Journal

        That stuff you thought was "actually useful" is the same stuff the rest of us thought was "stupid" and "pointless". This may come as a surprise to you, but the rest of the world might not share your preferences.

        As for these specific additions:

          - PDF annotations are incredibly useful. What could you possibly have to complain about here?

          - Firefox View is also very handy. Not just for those of us who switch between desktop and mobile frequently, but for people who know how bookmarks work and don't like having hundreds of tabs open. It's not uncommon to close a few tabs, only to realize that you'd like one of them back. Hitting ctrl+shift+t until you recover the one you wanted is annoying. Being able to just select the one you want from a list is very handy.

        - Colorways. I couldn't care less about Colorways. It's not a feature that I'll ever use. I won't complain about it because why the hell should I care about a features I don't want to use? If someone else likes it, and I'm sure that lots of other people will, then that's great.

          - The two-finger swipe horizontal gesture. This is absolutely horrible. Any back/forward gestures are a recipe for disaster. I've been disabling the backspace key shortcut as long as it's been possible for the same reason. Nothing is worse than hitting backspace and losing some work or even just a post you put effort into. Who the hell hits back frequently enough to want it bound to a key that's commonly used for other things anyway?

        But you know what? I'll get over it. I can disable a feature that I don't like. Oh, wait! I already did ages ago! This is just for Linux users who use Wayland. (Good job, editors.) It was a real pain. Scrolling down would sometimes just go back if you it suddenly decided you weren't swiping vertically enough. Ugh... If you haven't already disable this misfeature, go to about:config and remove anything for browser.gesture.swipe.left and browser.gesture.swipe.right It's not that hard.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Colorways is just a new front end for their Firefox Color extension, with several pre-made themes included. You can still go to color.firefox.com to create your own custom themes, such as fixing the colors on foreground and background tabs. Sample theme I use [firefox.com]

          Another new feature I notice is when I previously opened a Private Window its icon on the taskbar was grouped with the other Firefox icons. Now, private browsing has its own icon on the taskbar, making it easier to move between open and private brows

        • I've heard of people keeping hundreds of tabs open for some reason, and I just can't believe it's an actual use case. What possessed anybody to think that makes more sense than bookmarks? Then again, maybe the people who have 100s of tabs open think I'm stupid for using the search engine to prompt me for the few common sites I use. If people really are keeping hundreds of tabs open, at least I suppose that's made the browser more memory efficient and/or less likely to leak memory because that seems like

          • I've heard of people keeping hundreds of tabs open for some reason, and I just can't believe it's an actual use case. What possessed anybody to think that makes more sense than bookmarks?

            There's a clear difference: bookmarks require an active action to create them and anticipating that you will need it later, while reaccessing an open tab requires no upfront planning and no additional action required. So keeping tabs open allows you to retrieve a lot more content than what you would have available in bookm

        • Any back/forward gestures are a recipe for disaster. I've been disabling the backspace key shortcut as long as it's been possible for the same reason.

          This. Reusing a common gesture or key is a recipe for disaster. Going back is alt+left arrow where it belongs and shouldn't be tied to the context of the current webpage (whether I have a textbox in focus or not).

          Same with double finger gestures. Pinch and zoom as well as moving in map modes both are two fingered gestures. I can get behind three fingered swipes but two fingered swipes suddenly becomes context sensitive again.

          Who the hell hits back frequently enough to want it bound to a key that's commonly used for other things anyway?

          I do. But not gesture wise. It's faster to hit alt+left, and even faster to hit my

        • This is just for Linux users who use Wayland.

          Which is pretty much just GNOME users, right? KDE doesn't work worth a fuck on Wayland, bummer because I wanted to run waydroid.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Firefox View was a major missing feature, but unfortunately it's blighted by the fact that Firefox for Android is broken on many devices.

          I've been trying to get it fixed for years, and looking for work-arounds. You can improve it by adding a uBlock Origin rule that forces the size of the viewport to be something sensible, but it needs to be enabled on a per-site basis to avoid breakage.

          It would be nice to have tab groups like Chrome for Android, but fixing the basic rendering is the priority.

          • by narcc ( 412956 )

            I've never had a problem with it. At least, none that I've noticed. What isn't working for you?

            • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              On every Pixel phone, at least up to the Pixel 5, there is a bug that affects the scaling in Firefox for Android. It makes some pages too wide, and fonts too small to read.

              They half fixed it a few years ago, so that at least with automatic font sizing every site is readable. The problem is that uses the system font size, and you probably want that smaller than is really needed to read many sites comfortably. There is a manual font size option, but it's still broken.

              Slashdot is a good example of such a site.

    • Another interesting new feature of the Firefox 106 release is called Firefox View, ...

      More eye candy (I guess) that doesn't really help/do anything (IMHO).

      Not just low-usefulness eye candy. It's a glaring security hole.

      All the bad guy needs to do is convince your firefox infrastructure that one of his instances of firefox (or a cracking tool disguising itself as one) is one of yours, and he gets to watch your browsing, even as you move from one machine to another. (Maybe he needs to get hold of some persi

  • And yet (Score:3, Insightful)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Wednesday October 19, 2022 @07:20PM (#62981551)

    They still won't put back the option to never be notified of updates. But yes, useless eye candy is what is really needed.

    • by xwin ( 848234 )
      Try this page https://www.webnots.com/how-to... [webnots.com] . Second part tells you how to disable updates with a simple text file.
      • by gTsiros ( 205624 )

        That looks to me like a rather low-quality page (not site. page. can't comment on the site because i only skimmed through that one page).

        i do not what kind of hardware someone has, that firefox becomes slow, considering i can run quakejs on a 6 year old *smartphone* but if someone is hell-bent on running a browser on a tamagotchi they should try opera mini for j2me which could run on a 2002 siemens c55 with a 101x64 monochrome lcd.

    • I can do with the updates. It's the "plugs" I can do without. If I wanted to see the latest features I would have looked them up when I installed the update.
    • Re:And yet (Score:4, Informative)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday October 20, 2022 @03:52AM (#62982221) Homepage Journal

      Being able to fill in PDF forms with libre software is hardly "eye candy". It's a major feature that Chromium browsers lack, and one that many people will see the utility of.

      As for notifications... Why wouldn't you want to know about notifications? Your browser is the front line protecting you from malware. It downloads arbitrary code (HTML, CSS, Javascript) and arbitrary binary files (images and video) from the internet whenever you use it, and has to have extensive security features to keep you safe. If Firefox releases an update, especially an emergency one, you should install it immediately.

      If you really don't like being notified of important safety information, try LibreWolf. It's basically Firefox but with update notifications disabled and some more restrictive default settings.

      • Being able to fill in PDF forms with libre software is hardly "eye candy".

        Firefox got the ability to fill out PDF forms a month ago. What it's getting now is annotation.

  • How can they still not have tab group functionality like chrome?
  • More attack surface! Of course nobody would try to exploit this. /s

  • Have they finally stopped nannying and done their job and stopped blocking add-ons on Android ?

    https://discourse.mozilla.org/... [mozilla.org]

  • Typing this form Firefox 106.

    This was pushed to my laptopp a week ago, because I am on Xubuntu (20.04), and use the Mozilla Team PPA for Firefox [launchpad.net]. The reason to use that PPA is that I don't like snapd. I use a Debian derived distro for all the .deb goodness, and don't want another way to install stuff. Therefore, I uninstalled snapd, which is the way Firefox installs on Ubuntu by default (really backwards ...)

    Okay, now to the important point: how to disable Firefox View?

    Go into about:config, and set the valu

  • I may finally get it as a pdf editor. Browser? I prefer others.

I judge a religion as being good or bad based on whether its adherents become better people as a result of practicing it. - Joe Mullally, computer salesman

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