Mozilla Nightly Blog

In the Firefox Nightly blog, there is some discussion of the performance improvements they've delivered in each release: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org For example: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2023/04/14/dropping-the-banner-hammer… > The two big jumps are from these two fixes. Great job, Performance Team! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1444491 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1815069

I’m not sure about these stable packages, but for the nightly packages they introduced recently they explicitly mention on [1] that you can keep browsing: > Following community discussions, we have updated the post to highlight that Firefox can continue browsing after an APT upgrade, allowing people to restart at their convenience. [1]: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2023/10/30/introducing-mozillas-firef…

This is for Mozilla's own builds. If you add a .desktop file¹, they work great, and they include a built-in updater (like the updater on Mac or Win). 1: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2018/01/22/335/

I think they are, slowly. See the Firefox Weekly 44 ( https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2018/08/29/these-weeks-in-firefox-iss… ) and search for "Contextual Feature Recommender": they're starting by experimenting pushing their Facebook Container addon. Screenshot: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/files/2018/08/f712ffde-1c33-441f-927b…

We do exactly this for people who want. A reasonably stable build (including full testing, and benchmarking, which takes multiple hundreds hours, parallelized of course) is available twice a day (0:00 and 12:00 UTC). It self updates (either differential or full download depending of what landed on the past day). I've been using only this for the last 10 years or so (on windows, Linux, Mac and Android), and I can count the number of time things really broke on one hand. We call these Firefox Nighly, and they are available at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/nightly/all/. Release notes at available at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/71.0a1/releasenotes/, but they are not always updated for each version, sometimes batched (its quite some work due to the amount of commits that are pushed per day). There is a cool blog at https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/ that talks a bit about the new stuff. All this is really experimental and probably not for everybody, but helps us to deliver something good at the end. Filing bugs and giving us feedback is of course particularly appreciated, as always!

Ellipsis will take up less space from Firefox 53 onwards: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2016/12/20/these-weeks-in-firefox-iss… As for the CSS-file, you have to create a folder called "chrome" in your profile folder and then in that folder create a file "userChrome.css". In that file, you have to have the following line at the top of everything else: "@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");&… From that point onwards, I'd just search on userstyles.org. In the advanced search, select "App" from the first dropdown, then it'll show you pretty much only Firefox-styles. If you found something that suites your taste, you can click the "Show CSS"-link and copy-paste that into userChrome.css. Just make sure that you don't have the @namespace-line twice. This for example sets the minimal tab-width rather low: https://userstyles.org/styles/53019/firefox-5-minimal-browser-tab-widt… You can also find userstyles that for example hide the close-button until you hover over the tab or merge the close-button with the favicon.

Oh damn that sucks, still nothing affecting user experience... yet. Reminds me of a nightly build I saw where they tested forcibly putting fakespot products on the frontpage. [https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/11/19/experimental-address-bar-d… I think they knew this was gonna be controversial, you'd think the blog title would mention something like this but they choose to focus on smaller bug fixes and tuck the literal forced advertising near the bottom. For now I'll stick around, but if this stuff ever gets released / impacts the way the browser functions I'll have to find something else.

Also in Firefox Dev Edition settings (in the Firefox Labs section) you can turn on their AI chatbot feature which gives you the option to send the selected text to Claude or other chatbots and opens their response in a sidebar. https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/06/24/experimenting-with-ai-serv…

Cool. Helped me track down the origin story of the 'dedicated search button' feature which, to me, mysteriously insinuated itself into Android FF:) https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/07/18/100-webdriver-bidi-and-101…

Good news: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/08/07/firefox-sidebar-and-vertic…

Mozilla does it too! [0] [0]: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/06/24/experimenting-with-ai-serv…

Found this: >Lee Salzman (:lsalzman) landed off-main-thread canvas for macOS, Linux and Android back in December for Firefox 123 – and that’s given us a 4-7% boost on Speedometer3! Here: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/01/22/happy-new-year-these-weeks…

The CSS style system (stylo) started out in Servo and is now in Firefox but as I understand it they've diverged quite a bit. https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2017/07/25/stylo-is-ready-for-communi…

Like parent said, Network Link Conditioner is exactly that tool. It's even built directly into iOS (though only visible in settings once "used for development" via XCode). Both Firefox and Chrome dev tools also have built in throttling of network connections. https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2016/11/07/simulate-slow-connections-… The tools exist and they're easy to use. Most people just don't bother.

"These weeks in Firefox: issue 124" was referenced in the post, but was not linked. https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2022/09/21/these-weeks-in-firefox-iss…

This study was cited by Mozilla a couple of years ago when they introduced their dev console redesign (https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2017/09/11/developer-tools-visual-ref…

The challenge is that the notification acceptance rate is so low on mobile devices that it makes it meaningless to implement such features [1]. Practically, user is most likely to accept notifications from sites that they interact with a lot. Those also happen to be the sites whose app user is willing to install. Thus, the notification feature on web is not something that a lot of users require. > This is a reasonable feature to exist on the web platform Not really? [1] indicates that notification prompts actually result in users navigating away from webpages clearly demonstrating that this is a user hostile feature. [1] https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2019/04/01/reducing-notification-perm…

Were you previously on Nightly? Thinking of: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2019/01/14/moving-to-a-profile-per-in…

Whoever wrote that blog post made several claims which are contradicted by the linked blog post. I'm wondering whether that's just being confused on the different between enabling the DoH code behind a disabled default setting and changing the default configuration to use a particular server. Here's what Mozilla said: > Firefox does not yet use DoH by default. See the end of this post for instructions on how you can configure Nightly to use (or not use) any DoH server. > Our second effort focuses on building a default configuration for DoH servers that puts privacy first. https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2018/06/01/improving-dns-privacy-in-f…

> To this day Firefox is still lagging behind in its isolation. That is being worked on though: > The first batch of changes to not run extensions in private browsing mode by default landed, this is still behind a preference. https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2019/01/31/these-weeks-in-firefox-iss…

https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2018/08/23/screenshots-from-the-conso… https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-screenshots

Thing is, it does bargain, and trusts third-party privacy policy, but I, for example, do not trust Cloudflare. "We’ve chosen Cloudflare because they agreed to a very strong privacy agreement" [0]. Like, legally agreed? With regular audits and full access for Mozilla people? Where does that leave me, if it gets baked into my browser? [0] https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2018/06/01/improving-dns-privacy-in-f…

Firefox 62 has DoH support enabled. https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2018/06/01/improving-dns-privacy-in-f… Has been plenty useful getting around court -ordered clampdowns on torrent sites in India. You can configure it to use any publicly known DoH server: https://github.com/curl/curl/wiki/DNS-over-HTTPS#publicly-available-se…

To clarify, only in nightly and previously disclosed [0] (results at [1]). The article is right to be fearful that FF is pondering a default change, but until that is even on the table, I'm not worried. Now if they wanted to make it really really easy for regular users to change from your default ISP DNS to CloudFlare, I'd actually be OK with that, but I'd expect it to be implemented like search engine providers where anyone could just as easily be the DNS provider chosen (ideally without any CloudFlare favoritism). And it would be clear who your DNS provider is maybe via an icon (if there is real estate for it). 0 - https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2018/06/01/improving-dns-privacy-in-f… 1 - https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2018/08/28/firefox-nightly-secure-dns…

It’s already happening: the DoH endpoint that Mozilla defaults to on the CF-Side has a stronger privacy agreement as per https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2018/06/01/improving-dns-privacy-in-f…

More information: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2018/06/01/improving-dns-privacy-in-f… According to this page: - you can already test this right now - you can provide your own server And some more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_over_HTTPS

The default is already off[1] though... Mozilla has stated plans to eventually turn it on by default[2] but I have yet to see any timeline or details of what the default config will actually be. Your article seems to assert that it will be on by default in FF62, where did Mozilla ever say this? Everything I have read seems to indicate that FF62 is just adding support, which is off by default, and requires a change to about:config to enable in the first place. [1] https://gist.github.com/bagder/5e29101079e9ac78920ba2fc718aceec [2] https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2018/06/01/improving-dns-privacy-in-f…

If the site is using Cloudflare (free), AWS CloudFront (cheap), or another CDN, it won't have a unique IP address. For now, the domain name will still leak in plaintext through DNS and over the TLS connection in the SNI field, but browsers are planning to implement DNS over HTTPS [1], and encrypted SNI is on the way [2]. [1] https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2018/06/01/improving-dns-privacy-in-f… [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17401509

Should be in 56: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2017/06/12/datetime-inputs-enabled-on…

Autoformfill is partly enabled already in Nightly and will hopefully ship sometime in the future. https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2017/05/23/preview-form-autofill-in-f… So I guess credit card information (sensible) is maybe not in scope at the moment.