Firefox 98 Set For Release With Dialog Element, Still Working On Wayland Support

[Mez']

Finally support for the dialog element! It has been long awaited and is long overdue!

https://caniuse.com/dialog

Now Firefox will behave like Chrome and Edge and automatically download files. I don't like this so much, and find it a bit worrisome. I hope it does not automatically download .exe files too.

What do you mean by automatically download files?
And where would they be downloaded? I mean, one of the first Firefox actions (or any browser, really) to do after install is to check "always ask you where to save files". How can it download something automatically if I haven't given a proper location to save it yet?

[ssokolow]

For executable files, I assume it works like it does in Chrome, with a prompt that still starts downloading the file in the background. This way, the download isn't slowed down because you forgot to accept the prompt quickly.
I assume executable downloads over plain HTTP are also blocked (or will be in the future), which is also something Chrome has been doing (or at least considering).

Firefox has been doing the former for ages. Sit on the "Open or Save As?" dialog for a while, choose one, and watch download progress jump far ahead of what your connection would enable within a second.

As for "improved workflow", I already selected "prompt every time" instead of "just use my downloads folder" in the settings, so I hope this won't be another thing I have to about:config back to what I want.

[M@GOid]

I'm curious what they need to fix for Wayland.

IME Firefox works fine on Wayland (not XWayland), but it crashes within a minute after I also fire up Chromium. I didn't look much into it, but it happened enough to notice the pattern. And we're not talking about a tab crash or something. All windows just disappear at the same time. Thankfully the session restore works fine.

I using it here in Wayland for about a month now and it seems fine. One can say it always be corner cases were bugs came out.

I opened Chromium here and no crashes. I'm on a Intel iGPU and KDE. Firefox works in Wayland mode without any mods.

[bachchain]

How can it download something automatically if I haven't given a proper location to save it yet?

By downloading to a temp folder first.

[aufkrawall]

Was fixed in 97. Only is needed today and it even works in X11.

Did not work for me with 98 beta without MOZ_DISABLE_RDD_SANDBOX=1 .

[bug77]

I using it here in Wayland for about a month now and it seems fine. One can say it always be corner cases were bugs came out.

I opened Chromium here and no crashes. I'm on a Intel iGPU and KDE. Firefox works in Wayland mode without any mods.

I'm running Nvidia on KDE which freaks the hell out of Chromium. Hardware acceleration gets all disabled, launching Chromium by right-clicking its pinned taskbar icon opens an unusable window...

[uid313]

Agreed. It'll be hugely useful for config UIs in userscripts, for example.

It also improves the semantics of the semantic web, and maybe improves accessibility, and makes it easier for web developers to semantically structure the code instead of having a tag soup of of non-semantic div elements.

What do you mean by automatically download files?
And where would they be downloaded? I mean, one of the first Firefox actions (or any browser, really) to do after install is to check "always ask you where to save files". How can it download something automatically if I haven't given a proper location to save it yet?

I don't know, maybe into ~/Downloads/ or it asks the first time or something, but Chrome and Edge already immediately starts the download when you click on a link without prompting where to save it. Pages can also use JavaScript to initiate downloads without user interaction.

[Danny3]

The HTML5 support still suck in Firefox unfortunately!
I can't believe that, after so many years, the HTML5 support score in html5test is still not maxed out or at least at the same level as Chromium.

https://html5test.com/

What really glad bout this release is the fact that they finally fixed the support for KDE Plasma, or at least they said they did.

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/c1598f6d3edad19ccc53f53ab045d1d29835e1dd/modules/libpref/init/StaticPrefList.yaml#12627-12665

It was really annoying to not be able to use the native KDE file manager / picker while running Firefox on KDE Plasma.

I hope that this has been indeed fixed, I can barely wait to test it out.

[caligula]

what gpu? my scrolling and selection is smooth as a babies behind and as quick as the human eye can see at least.

Polaris RX 460

[blackshard]

For executable files, I assume it works like it does in Chrome, with a prompt that still starts downloading the file in the background. This way, the download isn't slowed down because you forgot to accept the prompt quickly.
I assume executable downloads over plain HTTP are also blocked (or will be in the future), which is also something Chrome has been doing (or at least considering).

It looks quite incredible to me that there still some people that makes executable (.exe) files downloadable without zipping them first.
I mean, if I see a .exe file I immediately cancel the download and if executable gets downloaded, it goes into the trash bin directly. (Ok sometimes I use the right-click to see if winrar/7zip are capable of extracting it first...)