954 points by feross 2637 days ago | 513 comments on HN
| Moderate positive
Contested
Editorial · v3.7· 2026-02-28 09:00:53 0
Summary Education & Digital Access Champions
Mozilla's Firefox 64 release announcement champions human rights through developer empowerment, open standards, and privacy protections. The content strongly advocates for freedom of expression via standardization and interoperability, education via documentation and knowledge-sharing, and privacy via security and anti-tracking features, positioning the web platform as a commons enabling universal access without proprietary barriers.
> Easier performance management: The new Task Manager page found at about:performance lets you see how much energy each open tab consumes and provides access to close tabs to conserve power
> Improved performance for Mac and Linux users, by enabling link time optimization (Clang LTO). (Clang LTO was enabled for Windows users in Firefox 63.)
Is this the version that kills Live Bookmarks? Some of us FF old-timers are hopelessly reliant on these things, and it's, as far as I have found, the fastest way to quickly scan lists of headlines from all your favorite sites at once. Seriously, one click and you can quickly mouse over the sites on your bookmarks toolbar to consume hundreds of headlines.
Kind of a niche thing to comment on, but this release lands a commit I made that enables XDG desktop portals support in Firefox. If you're on KDE Plasma, you can run Firefox with the environment variable `GTK_USE_PORTAL=1` set and it will use KDE file selection dialogs.
I have a local html page devoted to news. An entry for a specific site will see at least two urls: The main site's URL and a link to it's RSS feed.
Linking to the feed directly was a great way to bypass all the modern garbage on the home page to see a simple list of articles (not unlike HN's home page). It's borked now...
None of my RSS links render. Chromium was very bad at this but at least it rendered a few (a couple of examples below), FF64 doesn't render any (in any form):
A huge part of my ability to enjoy the web has just been destroyed.:( I'll have to test this on other browsers...
edit (update): both sample links above are working now (odd). Most others with XML, RSS, Atom extensions do not render (FF offers to open in external app or save).
> Symantec CA Distrust: Due to a history of malpractice, Firefox 64 will not trust TLS certificates issued by Symantec (including under their GeoTrust, RapidSSL, and Thawte brands). Microsoft, Google, and Apple are implementing similar measures for their respective browsers.
> Multiple tab selection: We’re excited to introduce multiple tab selection, which makes it easier to manage windows with many open tabs. Simply hold Control (Windows, Linux) or Command (macOS) and click on tabs to select them. Once selected, click and drag to move the tabs as a group — either within a given window, or out into a new window.
The new API browser.menus.overrideContext is announced with documentation links pointing to blogs, including a personal blog page with unrelated Japanese texts and anime pictures. The official documentation (MDN) has no reference to the new features. Even the API features from FF63 (august 2018) are only have a draft of documentation (e.g. Menus.getTargetElement). Documentation is important, even more for an API. I think this pattern is worrying.
Curious about the "energy impact" metric. It seems to be just runtime. Fairly lame, had expected some kind of real energy model. This will be quite misleading in many cases, e.g. GPU usage or heavy floating point.
// 'Dispatches' doesn't make sense to users, and it's difficult to present
// two numbers in a meaningful way, so we need to somehow aggregate the
// dispatches and duration values we have.
// The current formula to aggregate the numbers assumes that the cost of
// a dispatch is equivalent to 1ms of CPU time.
// Dividing the result by the sampling interval and by 10 gives a number that
// looks like a familiar percentage to users, as fullying using one core will
// result in a number close to 100.
let energyImpact =
Math.max(duration || 0, dispatches * 1000) / UPDATE_INTERVAL_MS / 10;
// Keep only 2 digits after the decimal point.
> We’re excited to introduce multiple tab selection, which makes it easier to manage windows with many open tabs. Simply hold Control (Windows, Linux) or Command (macOS) and click on tabs to select them. Once selected, click and drag to move the tabs as a group — either within a given window, or out into a new window.
Yessss. It doesn't happen often, but the times when I open up 6-10 tabs for research but then decide they deserve their own window so I can focus on them (and subsequently drag them out one by one) is still a lot.
Anecdotally the scrolling performance feels better on my 2018 Macbook Pro. I've been doing heavy work all morning (lots of scrolling around) and after updating, something feels better. Can't really prove any of this scientifically but good to percieve performance improvements.
I also have a brutally long Trello card that used to choke up Firefox (not as bad on Chrome). Happy to say that is no longer happening either.
Unfortunately Gmail still looks to have optimization that only work in Chrome. For whatever reason the time from first load to seeing the compose window after clicking "compose" is brutally slow in FFX, but not in Chrome.
For those using Firefox, I have one question. Is there any way to replicate Chrome's tab-to-search feature? It's literally the ONLY reason I'm still on Chrome.
Let me explain by showing how I would search for "apples" in youtube across both browsers.
Firefox:
1 - Ctrl+L (go to location bar)
2 - Type "you", press "down" to select youtube from history.
3 - Wait for site to load......
4 - Click on search box
5 - Type in "apples"
6 - Press enter
Chrome:
1 - Ctrl+L (go to location bar)
2 - Type "you", and if youtube is first item in history,
3 - Press "tab"
4 - Type in "apples"
5 - Press enter.
Youtube opens up with my searched item. Nice and easy with far fewer key presses no waiting nor mouse clicking.
Works for youtube, hacker news, wiktionary, google images, and a heap of other sites I use daily.
What's the status of the cat and mouse game being played with autoplay video being forced on and new options needing to be hunted down?
First Chrome forced it on, because EvilCorp's business model is around a forced-open-eyelid philosophy of advertising revenue from unstoppable impressions.
Next I moved to Firefox, which in an update a few months ago changed the autoplay option to be on, removed the config attribute and made it a new one, which has as options 0, 1 and 2. Turned out autoplay default should be 1.
I'm not about to wait to find out what's around the corner. I started using Vivaldi this weekend in hopes someone actually made a browser for those who don't care about some company's ad revenue.
I don't know why Firefox would do that, and introduce Pocket as well. Is copying Google that sexy a thing?
I really wish they would implement tab stacking, that is the feature that I really miss from the old Opera, here is a video of how it looks in case you don't know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWpJvg8icmM
I've tried to find an extension for FF that does this, but so far I was unable to find one.
I'm afraid I'm a bit of a one-issue voter when it comes to web browser, and the reason that I haven't switched to Firefox from Chrome (even though ideologically I want to) is this workflow that I use for clicking links in other apps. I open an incognito/private browser window in the foreground, then click the link in the other application. In Chrome, this opens the link in the incognito window. In Firefox, this opens the link in a normal browser window. In order to open the link in a private browser window, I have to manually copy paste the link between applications into the private window. I follow this workflow when the link is some site that I don't generally visit, or don't recognize, and hence don't want to access any cookies associated with my regular browser window, and importantly, also don't want to show up in my browsing history.
I recall there being an issue on Mozilla's bug tracker where someone brought this up and it was closed as a wontfix. Unless there is something about Firefox's container system that obviates my workflow, I'm still reluctantly sticking with Chrome.
There's always been a look & feel problem for me with Firefox...something that seemed to be solved right out of the box with Chrome. I've not been able to put my finger on it, but I think this kind of small user-convenience stuff is part of it. It's not "features" per se, but more the feel of how the application works.
It reminds me of old platform video games before Super Mario Bros. (and for a while after) Superficially, they looked and played kind of the same, but there were a thousand little tweaks in how Mario handled that made it feel right.
I'm definitely going to give Firefox a spin and see how it handles these days.
Every new release of Firefox makes the experience better and better. I'm glad Mozilla has started focusing on the browser again, not just as an "open alternative to chrome" but as the "best possible browser", which I truly believe Firefox today is :)
Mozilla did the same with tab groups, then the addon was abandoned. The replacement that is compatible with the new form of extension isn't able to unload the tabs, just hide them, which undoes most of the performance benefits.
[abraham simpson voice] It'll happen to you too! [/abraham simpson voice] /jk
> Easier performance management: The new Task Manager page found at about:performance lets you see how much energy each open tab consumes and provides access to close tabs to conserve power
This is pretty neat, now I'm wondering why the webex extension is having "Medium" impact when it should be doing nothing.
You have no idea how excited I am for this. I use sway as my daily driver since it supports HiDPI so much better than i3, but the one caveat to that has been firefox and xwayland. Once this ships, sway will have nearly flawless HiDPI support.
I believe that the FF RSS reader is still available via extension. I am not 100% certain but I seem to recall hearing that in a podcast which covered the pending demise of standard RSS support in FF.
Yeah, the feature is not introduced that well. It is mostly a good feature for the extension that they are talking about, TreeStyleTab[1], which explains the feature. Piro's blogpost is actually awesome. It describes the history of the feature, and how it is used today in his extension.
However, they could stand do the documentation themselves, or at least setting up the context of the blog-post a little more.
I am not worried by the reference to the post, Piro may not have the most pretty site, but his writeups are great!
I know it is not what you've been doing but it may be something you'd like to consider. I also love RSS and even though there are many add-ons to use in Firefox to restore that kind of functionality, I prefer to use Thunderbird to consume RSS/Atom feeds, I've posted about it at:
That's the blog of the developer of Tree Style Tabs, who is presumably Japanese. I agree that it would be nice to have such information on MDN, and since MDN is a wiki, anyone here can do it if they feel strongly enough about it. The linked blog post contains a wealth of information describing how the API works, along with links to further explanatory posts.
Time for FF's balance of configurability and reasonable defaults to shine: the about:config properties to edit are `layout.css.scrollbar-color.enabled` and `layout.css.scrollbar-width.enabled`.
One thing I like about the Firefox (Gtk?) scrollbar is that it finally removed (a few version ago already) the "Click on it somewhere, but it doesn't move there but just acts like PgDown/Up", i.e. the non-warping to the exact click position but just inching towards it. This is completely unnecessary in the time of wheels and touchpads and I already miss it everywhere else.
I am working on a HTML5 game which has a list of rooms, list which has a scrollbar. It looks as ugly as it can be with the default scrollbar when everything else is neatly designed and has a specific theme, it ruins the immersion and reminds you hey, this is just a browser game, not a real game. I am not saying that all the sites should have custom scrollbars, but there are definitely use cases for it.
It's the little things (: To be honest as soon as I figure out how to change all the little workflow details I currently use in Chrome, I'll be happy to switch to use Firefox more often / primarily. I love how snappy Quantum feels.
Why not use a feed reader which is designed and optimized for that task? I like Newsblur.com (aka https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur) but there are tons of great desktop apps which do a much better job than Firefox ever did.
I think in Firefox the closest is to manually add them as search providers with a short code :/ Right-click in e.g. the search field on YouTube, there's an option to add it with a key word, e.g. "yt". You then can do "yt apples" in the address bar.
Maybe there's an extension that does the Chrome thing, but I searched in the past and didn't find one.
now you can type in the omnibar "yt my search" and it will do directly the search.
It's not as good as chrome solution but it's the only thing for now.
3. Now in the Location bar type "you apples" and apples will be searched on YouTube.
I use this for a lot of sites with search inputs. I often do searches using ddg of sites I visit with forums or other buried content. Any search that has a URL that you can input a set of terms into can be used. Just use %s in the location for where the terms are in the URL.
> Next I moved to Firefox, which in an update a few months ago changed the autoplay option to be on, removed the config attribute and made it a new one, which has as options 0, 1 and 2. Turned out autoplay default should be 1.
I don't understand what you mean here. Without having changed any of the settings from the default, Firefox (Nightly) pops up to ask me if I want to "allow auto-playing media with sound" the first time each website tries to do it. If I say no, the media doesn't auto-play.
It might be niche in the grand scheme of things, but for me this is an incredible improvement on my usage of Firefox. This was honestly one of the few things that Chrome did better. Firefox was the only program that I use every day that forced me to use the GTK file selection dialog. Thank you very much!
Article centers on freedom of expression through open web standards. Explicitly advocates for standardizing proprietary CSS features, unprefixing APIs to free them from browser lock-in, and promoting interoperability. Frames web platform as commons enabling universal expression.
FW Ratio: 56%
Observable Facts
Article announces standardization of CSS Scrollbars and -webkit-appearance, explicitly removing proprietary barriers to cross-browser styling.
Multiple references to freeing APIs from vendor prefixes: 'Goodbye mozRequestFullScreen! The Fullscreen API is now available in Firefox without a prefix.'
Article links to MDN Web Docs and CSS Tricks as free educational resources, democratizing technical knowledge.
Explicit emphasis on cross-browser cooperation: notes Apple, Google, Microsoft standardization efforts.
Comment section shows Dan Callahan responding to community feedback, modeling open dialogue.
Inferences
Standardization work removes vendor lock-in and enables universal expression without proprietary barriers.
Framing of open web for 'everyone, even if they're on a proprietary platform' advocates for expression freedom as universal right transcending corporate boundaries.
Publishing standards and documentation freely supports information access as prerequisite for expression.
Cross-browser cooperation prevents any single actor from censoring or restricting expression through platform lock-in.
Article highlights two privacy protections under heading 'Privacy features for your protection': Referrer-Policy header for CSS requests (prevents referrer leakage) and buildID fixed timestamp (mitigates fingerprinting). Explicit advocacy for privacy as user right.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Referrer-Policy header now applies to CSS requests, preventing referrer information leakage when https requests http resources.
navigator.buildID property returns fixed timestamp 20181001000000 to prevent browser fingerprinting for user identification.
Section explicitly labeled 'Privacy features for your protection' frames features as user rights.
Inferences
Referrer-Policy and buildID fixes directly reduce tracking and user identification capabilities.
Advocacy framing positions privacy protection as fundamental right rather than optional feature.
Implementation indicates organizational commitment to privacy as default practice.
Article explicitly advocates for knowledge-sharing and developer education through comprehensive technical documentation, API references, and links to learning resources. Positions technical education as public good.
FW Ratio: 56%
Observable Facts
Article provides comprehensive documentation of 30+ new features with detailed technical explanations.
Multiple references to MDN Web Docs and CSS Tricks as free educational resources.
Authors identified with detailed bios describing expertise: Dan Callahan (Mozilla Persona developer), Chris Mills (web technologies specialist).
Post invites readers to 'have a play around' with features, encouraging experiential learning.
Accessibility Inspector feature explicitly measures WCAG 2.0 Level AA and AAA compliance, advocating for accessible design standards that serve all users.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Accessibility Inspector displays text contrast ratios in hover popups.
Feature indicates whether text meets WCAG 2.0 Level AA or AAA guidelines for minimum contrast.
Inferences
Implementation of accessibility standards in developer tools removes barriers to disabled persons creating and inspecting accessible content.
WCAG compliance emphasis suggests commitment to universal design principles.
Article advocates for participation in scientific and cultural life through web standards development. Describes Firefox as contributor to collective knowledge infrastructure (CSS, JavaScript, WebVR specifications). Frames open web as cultural commons.
FW Ratio: 57%
Observable Facts
Article announces participation in CSS Level 4/5 specifications and standardization efforts.
Chris Mills' author bio explicitly mentions previous W3C employment.
Preamble emphasizes human dignity through technology by promoting open web accessibility, free developer tools, and privacy protections as foundational values.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Article explicitly frames web platform features as enabling developer empowerment and community feedback.
Content is freely accessible without paywall or registration barrier.
Published under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License.
Inferences
Emphasis on open web and community participation suggests Mozilla positions technology as enabling human autonomy.
Open licensing and free access reflect organizational commitment to dignity and universal benefit.
Article notes cross-browser coordination on security (Symantec distrust by Microsoft, Google, Apple, Firefox), advocating for international order through technical standards cooperation.
FW Ratio: 40%
Observable Facts
Article explicitly notes: 'Microsoft, Google, and Apple are implementing similar measures for their respective browsers.'
Multiple references to international standards (CSS Level 4/5, WebVR 1.1) with cross-browser support.
Inferences
Cross-browser security coordination prevents any single actor from imposing unilateral control over users.
Participation in international standards supports social and international order based on consensus rather than monopoly.
Public commitment to standards interoperability demonstrates respect for universal principles.
Technical education and developer tools support economic opportunity and social security by enabling developers to build sustainable careers and economic participation.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Article provides detailed technical documentation enabling developers to learn new capabilities.
Multiple references to external learning resources (MDN Web Docs, CSS Tricks) that educate developers.
Inferences
Accessible technical knowledge supports developers' ability to secure economic opportunity.
Free tools and documentation reduce barriers to professional development and career advancement.
Implicit in open-source ethos and community framing: contribution to community through shared standards and free tools. Article frames developer empowerment as shared responsibility.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Article invites community participation: 'let us know your feedback in the comment section below.'
Open-source licensing (Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike) enables community derivative works.
Free publication of developer tools and documentation represents community contribution.
Inferences
Invitation for feedback positions community as active participant rather than passive consumer.
Free tools and open licensing represent organizational duty to contribute to community technological advancement.
Site implements Google Analytics and GTM tracking with UTM parameter removal utility, indicating awareness of privacy concerns but continued analytics deployment.
Terms of Service
—
Terms of service not observable in provided content.
Identity & Mission
Mission
+0.20
Article 19 Article 27
Mozilla's stated mission around open web and developer empowerment aligns with knowledge-sharing and technical security education.
Editorial Code
+0.05
Article 19
Technical blog format with clear author attribution and date stamps supports editorial transparency.
Ownership
+0.10
Article 19
Mozilla Foundation ownership as non-profit organization supports commitment to public interest over profit-driven content.
Access & Distribution
Access Model
+0.15
Article 26
Open access technical content published without paywall or registration barrier.
Ad/Tracking
-0.10
Article 12
Google Analytics and GTM tracking present on page reduces privacy score despite Mozilla's privacy advocacy.
Mozilla's publication of open documentation, developer tools, and commitment to standards (not proprietary features) structurally support expression freedom. Open access, no paywall, free MDN resources amplify information access.
Mozilla publishes educational content freely without paywall; MDN Web Docs referenced as community resource; transparent authorship supports educational trust.
Mozilla's participation in W3C standards bodies and TC39 (referenced via author Chris Mills' W3C background) demonstrates structural commitment to scientific standards work.
Mozilla's implementation of privacy features demonstrates organizational practice, though site-level tracking (Google Analytics, GTM per DCP) moderates structural commitment.
build 1ad9551+j7zs · deployed 2026-03-02 09:09 UTC · evaluated 2026-03-02 11:31:12 UTC
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