Firefox 99 Available With Strengthened Linux Sandbox, Web MIDI

[Dhoulmagus]

The only advantages Firefox has over Chrome(ium) at this point of time are

1. Works almost perfectly under Wayland with proper hidpi scaling. Chrome(ium) completely fucks up its scaling on hidpi displays and I'm always forced to fucking down-res the display from 4K to 1080 instead as a workaround.
2. Works with almost all known drivers under Wayland. i915, i965, crocus, iris, nouveau, amdgpu, radeon, zink, llvmpipe...you name it. Especially nouveau, and even under Optimus. Chrome(ium) throws a fucking fit when used under Optimus conditions with the nouveau driver under Wayland.
3. Works with IMEs like fcitx5 and ibus under Wayland, which is bloody important for Chinese and Japanese input. Chrome(ium) completely ignores IMEs on Wayland
4. Doesn't tear under Wayland and redraws scrolling content properly when the browser is set to use software rendering and software compositing. Try running Chrome(ium) with --disable-gpu-compositing (which is absolutely fucking neccessary when trying to use it with drivers like nouveau) or --disable-gpu and watch the browser contents tear itself to hell or skip some scrolls to the point where the content displayed in the browser is completely unreliable; more than half the time the link you are clicking on is not what you think it is, but is instead another portion of the content that missed its scroll.

And yet Chrome(ium) has none of these problems in Windows and macOS.

5. Can force use specified fonts by unchecking "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above" in settings instead of resorting to some extensions scripts (will break sites using icon fonts though)
6. has the best looking CJK fonts under Windows combined with 5 and customized font settings

[RealNC]

Presumably they are caches?

On my system, I got at least 1G of cache from firefox.

Why would it write to the cache when doing nothing? Like I close all tabs but one which only has a static web page. Firefox keeps writing to disk forever even then.

[grok]

Why would it write to the cache when doing nothing? Like I close all tabs but one which only has a static web page. Firefox keeps writing to disk forever even then.

It doesn't do this here, so either try a new profile or you're unlucky and you have naughty elves or sprites in your computer.
Regarding HDD moving parts, the motor spins at all times and the mechanism that moves the heads is like that of a loudspeaker. It's fine but will of course fail for no reason if you don't have a back up.

[aufkrawall]

I'm playing a vp9 video from youtube right now on FF 100b1 and it is hardware accelerated.

You're right, it works again with 100. Though media RDD sandboxing still needs to be disabled.

Edit: But doesn't seem to be reliable.

[yoshi314]

I would like Mozilla to publish a strongly sandboxed Snap with minimal permissions. They can have the normal Snap for normal users, but I think should have a separate Snap that is strongly sandboxed so both can be installed side-by-side so I have one normal Firefox for trusted websites, and one strongly sandboxed one (no storage, Bluetooth, USB, etc) for untrusted websites.

you know - that makes me wonder, whether online banking should be done in the former or the latter...

[royce]

You're right, it works again with 100. Though media RDD sandboxing still needs to be disabled.

Edit: But doesn't seem to be reliable.

I do have rdd sandboxing off.

[RealNC]

It doesn't do this here, so either try a new profile or you're unlucky and you have naughty elves or sprites in your computer.
Regarding HDD moving parts, the motor spins at all times and the mechanism that moves the heads is like that of a loudspeaker. It's fine but will of course fail for no reason if you don't have a back up.

I searched and found people reporting the same thing. It's happening on both Windows and Linux. The suggestion is to disable session restore, but it doesn't fix it.

Does someone know a way to show which files are being written to?

[gr0nk]

Anyone else experience FF crashing after ~2 seconds when auto-scrolling at maximum speed on any long(ish) web page? (Fedora 35, Wayland, FF 98.0.2)

Supposed to be fixed; https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1750443

[lucrus]

Spinning up a full fledged virtual machine takes a lot of time, lots of system resources, the performance is worse, usability and user interaction is worse, because I have to interact with a browser inside the VM window. VM is an awkward solution. I would much rather have something sandboxed on my existing machine. Linux supports many things like Flatpak, Snap, LXD, namespaces, etc.

Hey Sheldon. "SARCASM".

[c117152]

And in practice: often not so detailed... most .mid files on the web restrict themselves to the standardized parts of General MIDI, e.g., they'll most often use the standard GM (or maybe GS variation) instruments.

You won't find that often system-specific SysEx trying to fine-tune the sound of the synth (The exception being the retro computing scene with MT-32's .mid/.syx. It predates General MIDI anyway and dates from an era when artist would compose for a specific instrument, and thus would tweak it).
Ideally, .mid should come with some finely selected .sf2 sound-font. At which point: congrats, you've successfully re-invented tracker modules (.mod, .xm, .it, .s3m), so dear to the demoscene and indie devs!

This is the reason why most people associate .mid with awful crappy sound (e.g. ring tunes on old feature phones and cordless phones):
Iin that era and on that hardware it would have most likely been played on simple FM 4-op synth (either the OPL-3 on your sound-blaster compatible sound card, or random MA-xx in the phone, some of which even 2-op only) with whatever instrument it has in its default patchset.
Or on a "wavetable" rompler with the smallest possible rom and crappy in-house made sound-font to keep the cost of the card low (see the cheapo daughter boards like Waveblaster, see the default sound set of AWE32 if the card isn't directly programmed but used as a midi device).

That's why some time older music tracks of some older games targetting Adlib sound cooler: despite being less complex (2-op only) a lot of games targetted it specifically and did take time to tweak its sound (e.g.: ID software's older game don't even use MIDI but a stream of adlib direct commands. It's possible to make some very crazy sound, e.g. use for sound effects).

That's why some crazy japanese people will make a Sound Canvas sing the lyrics of Bad Apple through composite sine (Not a joke! - Update: damn, the Dailymotion link on real hardware has died :-( ), but most .mid sound like "take instrument 'default guitar', slap it on top of 'default drum', done !"

Sheet music isn't any more detailed than midi. It's just that musicians are free to articulate and even embellish the missing pieces where appropriate.
And instrument quality isn't a new issue either. It's fairly common some pieces to sound really bad on instruments lacking in overtones, sustain or color. So having an appropriate synthesizer is really a given.

All in all, midi is fine for what it is. It's the users' expectation that's the problem.