Firefox 71

[pcx]

Great to see Mozilla consistently improving devtools in Firefox. I have been using them over Chrome for a while now, hope it gets to a place where most devs start using FF again for debugging web apps.

[liminal]

The CSS Changes page is a godsend. When editing CSS live it collects all the changes you've made so you can then go back and apply them in your codebase without having to hunt for them in the page elements.

[cm-t]

I agree, devtools are getting better. By the way , I recommmend developpers to use the developper edition https://www.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/developer/

[fandaa]

> DevTools’ Network panel can now inspect WebSocket messages and automatically formats a variety of framework formats

Finally! This was the main reason to develop on Chrome instead of FF for me. The rest is almost comparable with Chrome DevTools for everyday web development.

[weinzierl]

For me the Grid Inspector alone makes using the FF devtools worth it.

[skykooler]

Firefox devtools are great now! The only thing I still use Chrome for is debugging Node (which, since it's webkit based, is probably unavoidable).

[telegrammae]

Firefox is wonderful! Still hoping for much-needed general UI improvements, though. The tabs look bulky and have animation performance issues. The bookmarks manager is outdated and inconsistent with other tools in its look. Same with the downloads manager. All these things aren't a big deal, but Safari and Chrome seem to have a more pleasant overall graphic design.

[m-p-3]

I personally disable the animation to make Firefox feel snappier.

    browser.tabs.loadBookmarksInTabs;true  
    toolkit.cosmeticAnimations.enabled;false

[olah_1]

> The tabs look bulky and have animation performance issues.

The fact that the tabs don't shrink, but instead slide out of view is infuriating. Something like this affects users constantly.

[Someone1234]

Instead they seem to be making the UI worse. The new about:config seems to be a step backwards relative to the old text one (I particularly like that you cannot just browse, you have to know what you're looking for first).

[senorjazz]

was trying to find a bookmark recently, and seems I have 2 or 3 separate bookmarking systems, some here, some there, some from the menu bar, some from an icon.

[qxnqd]

>Native MP3 decoding on Windows, Linux, and macOS

What does "native" mean in this context? Uses accelerated CPU instructions? Uses the codecs of the system instead of something Firefox has built-in?

[ihuman]

Previously, "[f]or patent reasons, Firefox [did] not directly support MP3; instead, platform-native libraries [were] used to support MP3."[0] Now it uses ffvpx, which is their fork of ffmpeg. [1] [2]

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Formats/A...

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1582271

[2] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/master/media/ffvpx...

[techntoke]

Now if they could focus on native video decoding in Linux, something that actually works with Chromium and leads me to believe that Chromium developers are more committed to open source.

[portmanteaufu]

I've been shocked by how helpful the new Picture-in-Picture feature is. I wish the pop-out brought the full set of playback controls with it, but it's still far superior to making a full-blown window for video playback.

[m-p-3]

Sadly it's less than useful on MacOS (Still not stable, you have to manually turn it on in about:config). You cannot resize it, and it doesn't stay on top.

[s9w]

It's an interesting. In Chrome the way you can drag tabs out of the window and easily arrange youtube-tabs on the screen while they play works much smoother than in FF. But this new FF approach is kind of another way of solving that problem.

[dickeytk]

I want to try it, but it’s windows-only right now I think

[psim1]

FF still causes considerable grief on my wife’s Windows 10 laptop. Two hour battery life is not acceptable. MS Edge (spit) more than triples that battery life.

[polymorph1sm]

I switch to Firefox few months ago on macOS and Linux. Other than issues on Youtube video playback ( sometimes the frame just freeze when I switch between different workspace in macOS )and a few minor bugs across google's service the overall experience is mostly on par with Chrome.

[bluenose69]

I'll update, because that's the sensible thing to do. But, frankly, I only use FF because the Zotero plugin works in it, but not in Safari.

And I tend to load FF, use it for a few minutes, and then quit it. That's because FF has a habit of going nuts somehow, and gulping energy on my OSX systems. I've no idea what causes the problem, and I don't really care, because Safari tends to be faster -- sometimes a lot faster.

[MrRadar]

Regarding the energy use, give 71 a try. It includes compositor enhancements (actually included in the last release) that should significantly reduce energy use on modern macOS: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-red...

[benologist]

Looking forward to this update hijacking my browsing and demanding a restart instead of just waiting for me to close the browser.

[weinzierl]

I'm happy to see subgrid land and I hope Chrome will catch up soon.