This should give pretty noticeable speed and battery improvements on Retina Macbooks.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/70.0/releasenotes/#new

> text-decoration-thickness: sets the thickness of lines added via text-decoration.

> text-underline-offset: sets the distance between a text decoration and the text it is set on. Bear in mind that this only works on underlines.

> text-decoration-skip-ink: sets whether underlines and overlines are drawn if they cross descenders and ascenders. The default value, auto, causes them to only be drawn where they do not cross over a glyph. To allow underlines to cross glyphs, set the value to none.

I'm so excited for these. Implementing sane underlines for headers has been a pain in the ass for far too long. Writers rejoice!

Heckin finally!

The dev tool improvements all seem good. Still no support for inline code edits, which means JS debugging will still be something of a pain, but strengthening Firefox's position as one of the better tools for debugging and prototyping CSS.

This is great news. What a huge security hole that has been.

Oh I am so excited about this! Where can I follow along with this development?

In a previous release, we had access to live reloading shader editor, which was really useful in my case, developing real time WebGL apps. It was a truly nice developer feature.

So just fired a test on my Macbook Air - Safari 13 vs Firefox 70.

Opened top 10 links from techmeme. Both windows in background.

Firefox 70: Energy use 30-200; CPU 20-25%; Threads 82

Safari 13: Energy use 0.1-5; CPU 2-5%; Threads 11

If this is to celebrate I can only imagine what the things looked like before this release. Save for Apple fiddling with the energy use numbers (VW style) this means that my battery is going to last 4-5x longer with Safari. Can anyone replicate this for the sake of argument?

Edit: uploaded screenshots https://imgur.com/a/4L64ShP

I've recently seen a ton of FF fans state that the reason they love Firefox is that it doesn't have ads or track you and preserves your privacy.

However, Firefox wouldn't exist without Google and (to a lesser extent, Google Chrome).

They make 94% of their revenue via bundling and distribution deals with companies like Google.

So to say that Firefox doesn't really have ads I think it is a bit disingenuous. They don't have ads directly but they benefit directly from the ecosystem.

Without Google's ad business Firefox wouldn't exist.

Not saying this to be rude or call you guys out. I think we need an honest discussion on this issue.

Across the industry, we see users just outright refusing to pay for products because they're accustomed to 'free' being the norm.

News, social media, browsers, etc.

If you charge for a news site the users will revolt and go somewhere else.

If Facebook tried to charge users they would revolt.

Same thing for browsers.

Yet a large percentage of these same users will get angry and yell that they're privacy is being sold.

I'd rather things be direct. I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product).

Overflow/rubberband scrolling needs to be added here, because that is how scrolling is supposed to work on macOS. If you don't have it, you feel very alien. I'm not entirely sure why this isn't fixed after all these years, especially since Chrome managed to do it - it's not like an open source implementation doesn't exist at this point to crib the math from.

Apple has demonstrated that privacy is a very effective value proposition. Maybe Apple should look into investing in Mozilla/Firefox.

I guess it's harder to walk the walk yourself when the desires to track usage and analytics come from within your own teams.

Check the links yourself over at:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/lockwise/

And built in to Firefox by going about:logins, the top right * menu and clicking Lockwise for Android or Lockwise for iPhone

You end up with redirect links like:

https://app.adjust.com/6tteyjo?redirect=

https://github.com/kimsey0/FirefoxAutoDict

I use it to sync passwords with my phone. I like that I can use a fingerprint to unlock the file on my phone (instead of passphrase). I used to put silly passwords on sites I didn't care about (variants on a common password), but now I systematically generate a random password for all sites because there is no loss of convenience.

Firefox's Lockwise App (on android) leaves a lot demanding though.

The algorithm we use it not the best (and I think it's not the only cause of bad quality here), and we're investigating what to do.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427267 is where we track this issue.

11% coverage, and almost all of that is iOS Safari.

Many would argue that Chrome is an alternative to Firefox, given that Firefox predates Chrome as the first real viable browser alternative.

Well it might last 4-5x longer if you run safari in the background, since that is what you tested. But wouldn't the real test be running both browsers as the active window and comparing those results?

One thing that Safari is incredibly good at (and its' engineers are proud of) is the ability to reduce resource consumption for non-active tabs and windows to nearly zero. This is really good when running on battery because it is a shame to dedicate resources to things that aren't even visible on screen. But this could make the results far more dramatic through your test.

I would hypothesize that Safari still wins your performance test (if you were to re-test using them both as "active" windows), but probably not as dramatically as in the inactive window test.

Really? My recollection of events 15 years ago is a little hazy, but wasnt FF a browser-only release of Mozilla, itself Netscape which has been around as long as time itself (~25 years?)

What are we talking about here? There was very definitely a push around 2003 to get FF adopted en masse, and I guess Google probably were a big factor in this ...

Bit of a stretch to say FF wouldn’t have existed otherwise though. There was very definitely some dissatisfaction across the board with IE dominance and its not hard to imagine something like FF being inevitable.

> However, Firefox wouldn't exist without Google and (to a lesser extent, Google Chrome).

These are unrelated issues, though. A connection, financial or otherwise, to Google, does not mean that users aren't getting a browser that prioritizes privacy.

You can donate to the Mozilla foundation. Have you ? Have you convinced your company or your friends to do so ?

Because that's a better alternative than outright singling Mozilla out for their ties to Google. Which last time I checked didn't make the user the product of Google like Chrome or Android does.

Out of curiosity, what services and products are you paying for?

I'm willing to bet that a vast majority of HN users are still using a @gmail.com email address. And I'm actually in that super small minority that pays for services such as FastMail, Dropbox, Newsblur, 1Password, or YouTube (premium). I also donated to Mozilla among others.

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The problem is that browsers should be part of the "commons", just like roads, since browsers are indespensible platforms in this day and age.

Are your taxes funding browsers? If no, then are you suggesting that only the privileged should have access to a good, modern browser?

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Also products like Firefox are very unlike other products, because it's open source, both by license and by how it is developed. If Mozilla dies due to Google pulling the plug on their deal, Firefox is still open source and with enough resources somebody else can pick up its development.

To wit Thunderbird may still live under the Mozilla Foundation, but it is community driven, with donations from individuals being its primary source of funding. And it is moving along. Not as fast and it isn't as polished as its users would want, but it lives.

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I'd rather use Mozilla's Firefox, instead of products with obscure VC-backed business models that just piggyback on top of Chromium and are thus in no way a threat to Chrome's monopoly.

I've been using FF since it was in beta, never left but I'm starting to come around to the reality that native browsers are best optimized for the device. While there's no real native browser to leverage on desktop Linux, on macOS/Windows, native may be the best way to go for most people. This is how break down browsers to friends and family.

Google Chrome- optimized for Google's needs and profit margin.

Microsoft Edge- optimized for your device, if running Windows.

Apple Safari- optimized for your device, if running macOS.

Mozilla Firefox- optimized for the user. Certainly a noble goal, but I increasingly have a "mobile" goal and that trend isn't slowing for anyone.

My problem is that Safari won't work for me as a daily driver so it's not an option. It seems too aggressive in memory management and in reloading.

So I'm very happy to see Firefox improve performance over Firefox-v1.