Firefox 83 Released With Warp'ed JavaScript, HTTPS-Only Mode Option

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Firefox 83 Released With Warp'ed JavaScript, HTTPS-Only Mode Option

Firefox 83.0 is now shipping as a notable update to the Mozilla web browser and this time around are some exciting changes...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-83-Released

[ivan.cwb]

The only thing is missing for me on Firefox is 100% hardware-decoding for video... It's kind-of-working, but I still have some problems with multi-gpu.

Besides that, I'm pretty satisfied with Firefox performance for some time...

[treba]

Looks like 84 will be the first release to enable Webrender for a subset of users on release, with 85 expected to expand that number. Also the Wayland and EGL-on-X11 backends are getting close to get shipped by default (maybe EGL-on-X11 will ship on 85). Finally great out-of-the-box performance

[uid313]

The only thing is missing for me on Firefox is 100% hardware-decoding for video... It's kind-of-working, but I still have some problems with multi-gpu.

Besides that, I'm pretty satisfied with Firefox performance for some time...

As a web developer there still some things missing:

• HTML dialog element.
• CSS font-family "system-ui".
• JavaScript ES6 class private fields.
• Toggle in devtools for prefer-color-scheme CSS media query, to easily toggle dark mode.

Chrome 87 just got released with WebAuthn support in devtools.
I am quite content with my real world performance of Firefox, however benchmarks show that Chrome is usually much faster.

I recently had some performance problems with Firefox, just changing tabs took a long time, but I solved it by clearing the cache, and going to about: preferences#privacy and clicking on "Manage Data" and manually deleting some cookies. Some domains such as YouTube had 100+ cookies, and some domains such as YouTube had multi-megabyte cookies like 8,6 MB.

Still, I don't think there's much to be excited about with firefox...hasn't been for a longwhile but it continues to hang on which counts for something.

Firefox is rolling out Pocket to more users which presents articles in the new tab page. The quality of articles is much better than the articles presented in new tab on Microsoft Edge. I haven't seen much of any political bias yet, so it seems to be actually rather good.
Firefox is also gradually getting more code written in Rust. It was nice to see the JavaScript "Warp" improvements in this release.

[arQon]

Looks like 84 will be the first release to enable Webrender for a subset of users on release, with 85 expected to expand that number.

oh? My impression of WebRender on Linux is that the FF team's position is more like "if you have exactly this GPU, then maybe", but not much more than that. The HW-exclusion list seems to be almost infinitely large, with no reasoning behind it other than "well, we haven't tested this specific device" rather than simply assessing a device's capabilities, all of which are well-defined and have been exposed for a very long time now.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the situation, since none of my machines seem slow enough anyway for me to care about trying out WebRender, since I don't benchmark browsers and don't care about single-digit performance improvements. But I've lost track of how many YEARS it's been since the "WebRender will make everything sooo much better" hype, and in all that time I don't think I've ever seen any real effort at all to actually have it work on anything except Windows. (Which to be clear is a position I totally understand: I'm not blaming FF for throwing 99% of the resources at 99% of the market).

It'll be cool if it happens, I suppose? But like I say, a difference of a few %, or slightly better battery life or whatever doesn't mean anything to me anyway.

[arQon]

I recently had some performance problems with Firefox, just changing tabs took a long time, but I solved it by clearing the cache, and going to aboutreferences#privacy and clicking on "Manage Data" and manually deleting some cookies. Some domains such as YouTube had 100+ cookies, and some domains such as YouTube had multi-megabyte cookies like 8,6 MB.

Yeah, I recently had to help someone out with a Google-driven cookie problem, and came across the same thing. Even weirder is that the *YouTube* cookies are being set by things like Gmail.
It seems to be a side-effect of some attempt by G to preserve their tracking against something - privacy tools like containers or uBlock or whatever. Now, they're practically putting an entire DB in the cookies, and I'd guess maybe merging all the data from every G site into the cookies for all of them. Backups, effectively, so that if one ever gets deleted they can restore all the linkages via the cookies of any other G site you use.

I don't think the megacookies themselves are the cause of any problems with FF, though in fairness you REALLY don't expect a cookie to run to multiple MB, so maybe there's some issue with how the FF code handles pathological cases like that.

[treba]

oh? My impression of WebRender on Linux is that the FF team's position is more like "if you have exactly this GPU, then maybe", but not much more than that. The HW-exclusion list seems to be almost infinitely large, with no reasoning behind it other than "well, we haven't tested this specific device" rather than simply assessing a device's capabilities, all of which are well-defined and have been exposed for a very long time now.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the situation, since none of my machines seem slow enough anyway for me to care about trying out WebRender, since I don't benchmark browsers and don't care about single-digit performance improvements. But I've lost track of how many YEARS it's been since the "WebRender will make everything sooo much better" hype, and in all that time I don't think I've ever seen any real effort at all to actually have it work on anything except Windows. (Which to be clear is a position I totally understand: I'm not blaming FF for throwing 99% of the resources at 99% of the market).

It'll be cool if it happens, I suppose? But like I say, a difference of a few %, or slightly better battery life or whatever doesn't mean anything to me anyway.

It's quite more than a few percent. The biggest features "unlocked" by Webrender (in combination with EGL, both on Wayland or X11) are zero-copy WebGL[1] and hardware video decoding (so far limited to VAAPI) support. Both can have quite huge impacts. Apart from that there are many cases that benefit from Webrender itself, especially as screens are getting ever bigger. Rendering 4k in software works but is far from efficient.

Also, Webrender is now also used on MacOS and Android[3]

1: https://mastransky.wordpress.com/202...on-on-wayland/
2: https://mastransky.wordpress.com/202...pi-on-wayland/
3: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where

[dev_null]

Am I only sad about HTTPS-Only Mode Option ? I cannot see anything bad with http, it specially was created in text in order to be readable an debuggable. Https requires certificates which only ‘good’ companies can issue, CPU power, complicates debugging and code writing. And it’s amazing where it matters like privacy or money but why to enforce it everywhere ??

[kescherPh]

Am I only sad about HTTPS-Only Mode Option ? I cannot see anything bad with http

As a user of this mode for a long time (it was exposed in about:config), I avoid http-only websites like the plague.

Https requires certificates which only ‘good’ companies can issue

Have you heard of Let's Encrypt?

CPU power

Barely.

complicates debugging and code writing

This mode exempts localhost, for instance, so locally hosted services are still easily debuggable for devs. Also, devs usually don't implement https into their services directly, that is the job of a frontend webserver such as NGINX.

why to enforce it everywhere

Because sites that are still not supporting https are a liability to every single visitor. See Does my site need HTTPS?

Edit: Besides, HTTPS-only mode is optional... So, why are you complaining? You can use your filthy HTTP-only sites without an issue!

[dev_null]

it’s now optional. Like with apple if you are aware: they initially asked for signing, then disallowed launching of unsigned apps by default, then added optional notarization (i.e. your app has to be approved by apple service) then made it mandatory and now if you open an app which is not notarized apple just suggests move it to trash right away without even showing “open” button.

Yes I’m aware of Let’s encrypt and use it. however it anyway stinks a little bit: if I have a load balancer: to which server I should install certbot ? ... okay Google at least suggests their own https certificate for the case, but it smells by ‘good’ companies again