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Firefox Release Includes Total Cookie Protection and Multiple Picture-in-Picture

312 points| stunt | 5 years ago |blog.mozilla.org | reply

163 comments

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[+] corobo|5 years ago|reply
And ads in the address bar search results.

https://twitter.com/CohanRobinson/status/1364172683118866433

E: saved you a click on my own link. In about:config you can disable this by setting the following to false

browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsored

browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsoredTopSites

[+] faebi|5 years ago|reply
I would pay for an ad-free experience so they have a stable source of income.
[+] foofoo4u|5 years ago|reply
I make monthly donations to Mozilla to support their cause. I will stop my donations and migrate to a different browser if they continue down this path.
[+] etiam|5 years ago|reply
Thanks for restoring order to my world view. I always face Firefox updates these days with trepidation about what fundamental interface functionality they're going to turn from perfectly adequate to shit this time. The present update seemed to break the pattern, but apparently things are going according to expectations after all.

And so far it's a bug that has an off-switch. Best kind. Much obliged for the documentation.

[+] labawi|5 years ago|reply
At this point, I dream of a competitor arriving. One that that would be supported by the community and actually care about competent users, like Firefox once was.

AFAICT, Firefox (Mozilla Corporation) wants dumb users, an expanding platform they control and ad money.

There is no way to donate for Firefox development, nor can you pay for support, nor specific development or feature requests. People would throw money at them, yet they try finding creative ways to monetize their users in an effort to "diversify sources of income".

Meanwhile they continue to show they are in control of your browser - ignoring user preferences, hotpatching, A/B tests, dozens of requests without a single page open and no way to disable, numerous ways of advertising...

I still consider Firefox the lesser evil, but the stage is ripe for an uprising.

[+] pentagrama|5 years ago|reply
I find useful the Picture-in-Picture feature when was introduced, but find it really annoying that the icon has to be visible on every video (on mouse hover), and I disable it.

Hope they introduce an option to show a PiP icon on the address bar when a video is on the tab, which is less intrusive, like the Reader View icon/feature.

[+] morsch|5 years ago|reply
That's a terrible UI for pages with multiple videos.
[+] avolcano|5 years ago|reply
The technical details of Total Cookie Protection are going to be of interest to any web dev: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Pri...

It's not enabled by default (it's part of Strict privacy controls), but I think the heuristics it's using might be copied by other browser or extensions implementing similar features. I don't love the amount of "heuristics-based" features being added to browsers, since they're not always easy to discover as a developer, but it's certainly better than a whitelist/blacklist system like Google"s used for certain features. The console.log entries that article mentions should help a bit with debugging as well.

[+] ycombinete|5 years ago|reply
What do people use Picture in Picture for? I have still never found a use for it, on any of the devices I have that support it.
[+] izacus|5 years ago|reply
Listening / watching YT video essays while doing something else. Having a borderless floating video is preferrable to having issues with getting a full browser window to float on top.

(Especially on tablets.)

[+] account42|5 years ago|reply
I have long been using an external player for all videos (with a Firefox extension to launch it) so that I can

- Switch to other tabs and still see the video

- Use the shortcuts of the native player same as for local video files

- Use all the features of the native player including better hardware acceleration

I guess this feature helps with the first of these while not requiring additional setup.

[+] RpFLCL|5 years ago|reply
I use it when I'm drawing on my Cintiq to have a small video in the corner I can idly watch while drawing.

When playing video games I can use PiP to place a video on top of my fullscreen game.

[+] Vinnl|5 years ago|reply
I most often use it when reading a news article that has a short clip, to be able to scroll down to read the rest of the article while playing the clip so I can keep an eye on when the interesting part comes.

Also for keeping covid press conferences open while I do other stuff. I could move the tab to a new window and then resize it to only show the video, but this is far less effort.

[+] bromuro|5 years ago|reply
Yeah I hate when i click that button. if i want to do something else i close the video.
[+] nsomaru|5 years ago|reply
Keep a small video playing a local Comission of inquiry whilst working
[+] kome|5 years ago|reply
watching a video while you browse other stuff
[+] cassepipe|5 years ago|reply
I was wondering : What is the purpose of picture in picture? I don't have any use case for it and was curious about who does.
[+] matthberg|5 years ago|reply
I've used it to put video from web based video chat on top of a full screen video, while still keeping focus on the main video. I mainly browse with a whole bunch of tabs open instead of multiple windows, so it's useful to pull a video out of a page and be able to navigate away and continue watching instead of dragging to a new window which would take up more space and get lost more easily. I've also used it for checking docs while following video tutorials, or watching recorded classes while looking at assignment pages.
[+] Vrondi|5 years ago|reply
It is rare, but sometimes a video embedded in a web page has no option to make it full screen. I can click the PIP button in Firefox, then I can double-click it to make it full screen. Nice workaround for those moments.
[+] shpongled|5 years ago|reply
I LOVE the picture in picture feature. It's nice for multitasking - I can pull up a video and put it on top of any other full-screen app or webpage.
[+] cardamomo|5 years ago|reply
I've used it when I am multitasking (watching something fun while "working") or while taking notes on the video.
[+] jffry|5 years ago|reply
I've run into videos where the option is either to watch a tiny video as-is in the page (too small), or make it full screen (too large), with no in-between option. Twitch clips are an example of this.

If I pop the video out via PiP, I can resize it to a comfortable inbetween size.

[+] dhritzkiv|5 years ago|reply
I use PiP in Safari, and I find it useful for watching a video in a small window in the corner of my screen without having to keep the page the video was on (YouTube, etc.) open. That way, I can watch the video while reading other tabs, or working in other windows.

It's nice because PiP (at least Safari's/macOS' implementation) keeps the video above all other windows, and it even carries over into other Spaces.

In short: multitasking.

[+] kbenson|5 years ago|reply
I haven't used it much, but it does allow you to not have to pull a tab out for youtube or the like if you want to watch something on the side while doing something else, and it does it with zero extra interface, which is nice (it's always annoying when I want to resize a video in the window to take almost all the window size and there's useless padding I can't easily bypass).
[+] kome|5 years ago|reply
I use it literally all the time: i watch a video while i do other low intensity stuff, like browsing or messaging.
[+] asdff|5 years ago|reply
opening a sports game stream and keeping it on top in the corner while doing something else (my use case)
[+] gcthomas|5 years ago|reply
I use it to make it easy to pass the video only to OBS Studio - the video shows up as a separate window.
[+] millzlane|5 years ago|reply
I use it for when I want to watch multiple streams of the same event.
[+] t0mas88|5 years ago|reply
> If a tracker tracker.example (as classified by the Enhanced Tracking Protection) redirects to a non-tracker a.example and tracker.example received user interaction as a first-party within the last 45 days, tracker.example is granted storage access to a.example for 15 minutes.

Why is Mozilla creating a special exception for Facebook (and Google) while those two are the worst privacy invaders?

[+] msk20|5 years ago|reply
Is there any privacy benifit to use containers now with the new isolations built into firefox? I'm using cookie autodelete + Containers, So now its either isolate and keep them or Isolate and delete them. I quite like this.
[+] download13|5 years ago|reply
Multiple PiP is a great idea
[+] mxxx|5 years ago|reply
PiP is one of those things that never seemed particularly useful to me until I started using it, and now it’s one of my favourite features
[+] agumonkey|5 years ago|reply
For some odd reason I don't get the PiP icon on the firefox demo video. It works well on different youtube videos though :)
[+] scrooched_moose|5 years ago|reply
Is there a possibility sites just begin blocking Firefox?

It's only ~8% of the desktop market share and ~4% across all devices. It doesn't seem inconceivable sites just give up supporting it if they're not getting the ad revenue.

[+] ybbond|5 years ago|reply
but still no shortcut to show PiP. also no shortcut to pin and unpin tab.

Firefox is great, major downsides for me are the lack of good shortcut (especially for macOS).

[+] PoignardAzur|5 years ago|reply
Still no subtitles for picture-in-picture though =(
[+] millzlane|5 years ago|reply
I'm not complaining I asked for multiple picture-in-picture.
[+] dbg31415|5 years ago|reply
Cool, but when will they release a feature that makes it so I can run a Zoom call without turning my MBP into a toaster hot enough to melt diamonds?
[+] rnestler|5 years ago|reply
Zoom is a different software, so I don't really see a connection to Firefox. Am I missing something?
[+] Andrew_nenakhov|5 years ago|reply
Cool. But I alreasy had everything I wanted in Firefox, but one thing. Can I please have a non-buggy backdrop-filter: blur enabled and working by default in my Fitefox?