How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
> Firefox now verifies and displays Qualified Website Authentication Certificates (QWACs) in accordance with eIDAS regulations.
Interesting that they just buried this in the middle without even a screenshot, considering how hostile Mozilla has been to the proposal in the past[0].
Considering that they previously made quite strong arguments that implementing QWAC would undermine security by completely bypassing the existing CA trust process and violate user's privacy by leaking browsing activity to third parties: what changed?
It does seem to fit into a wider movement, though. Mozilla previously explicitly considered WebUSB, WebHID, and WebMIDI as "harmful" as they lacked an effective mechanism against hostile websites tricking users into permanently compromising their hardware. This switched to "neutral" without addressing the underlying issue, seemingly just to satisfy some users asking for parity with Chrome out of a convenience argument. Same with Firefox happily jumping onto the AI bandwagon, and only backtracking after major public outcry.
Not to be dramatic, but Firefox seems hellbent on rapidly turning into a reimplementation of Chrome, completely ignoring its raison d'être. Will there be any traditional user-serving browsers left a few years from now?
I think it's a function of the endless tussle between browser-as-an-OS and the OS they run on. For example, I absolutely hate that there's no option in Firefox to only use the OS print dialog. Instead I am force to click print, then click "use system print dialog" every time. I seems to remember reading a bug report where Firefox deemed this intentional and wontfix. After all, if you leave Firefox to print something, maybe you won't ever come back and start using your print dialog to surf the web!
System print dialog isn't quite the same as OS print dialog on every platform, IIRC - on Linux it's often just GTK's own dialog, not OS-level. Still, forcing extra click every time is annoying design either way.
Different feature, not just overlapping terminology confusion. Containers isolate cookies/storage per tab so you stay logged into multiple accounts at once. New "Containers" item likely just UI reorg, not net-new tech. Mozilla's shipped this since 2016.
Yes. Containers will be enabled by default in the regular release without the need to install the extension or flip a preference in about:config.
It's also planned to integrate the ability to assign a website to a specific container. There's no information available on the other extra features from Multi-Account Containers like VPN/Proxy per container for the moment.
It seems so, especially because they explicitly say in the help page[1] that "Multi-Account Containers" brings "a few benefits on top of the native container functionality like site-specific container assignments, syncing across devices, and integration with Mozilla VPN or your own proxy".
Worth separating two things here: the underlying container isolation primitive (separate cookie jars/storage per tab) has existed in Firefox's core since the Containers API landed years ago. What's new, per the sibling comments, is moving the management UI into core too, not just exposing an internal API through a bundled extension.
- extremely stupid question but please entertain me here a bit
- why dont any of the modern browsers open and load pages instantaneously anymore, why does it take seconds?
- is this because of backward compatibility support where you are supporting html, css and JS features all the way back to the 90s
- apart from gecko and v8 why dont we have browser engines?
- are you familiar with anyone building an entire browser engine from scratch? how many WhatWG specifications would they have to support
- with all the GPT hype of late, why havent we seen a single GPT yet capable of building a browser engine from scratch supporting the last 20 years of html, css and js specs?
> with all the GPT hype of late, why havent we seen a single GPT yet capable of building a browser engine from scratch supporting the last 20 years of html, css and js specs?
Macsurf is a browser project for Mac OS 9 leveraging LLMs[1] to do this. Tbh it makes sense for this given how time-consuming (absurd? Though the fact it exists tickles me) it'd be otherwise for essentially a single person to support the scope of web tech it does for such an incredibly niche userbase.
> why dont any of the modern browsers open and load pages instantaneously anymore, why does it take seconds?
If we are talking about a blog page, just a static html - it should take some ms. No problem here.
But if we are talking about some heavy pages and fetch requests to other places, well...
Or simply a page with f 10Mb header image.
>apart from gecko and v8 why dont we have browser engines?
gecko (Firefox), blink (chrome and friends), webkit (Safari, Kagi and some other, mostly linux distro browsers) are the only stable ones. Servo and Ladybird are on the way, but it will take quite some time for them to mature.
>are you familiar with anyone building an entire browser engine from scratch?
Ladybird. No idea about specifications.
>with all the GPT hype of late, why havent we seen a single GPT yet capable of building a browser engine from scratch supporting the last 20 years of html, css and js specs?
Chrome (which I don't use) provides a really good profiler that can give you answers down to the milliseconds on what's happening during page load and also actions. Web tech provides so much functionality but web dev often don't bother optimizing their sites. I'm not saying browsers are blameless, but at least you get good tools that'll give you hints.
> Containers let you keep separate parts of your online life (work, shopping, personal, banking) logged into different accounts in the same browser window, but keep your cookies and ad tracking isolated inside each container.
What's new here? Containers have been an add-on, at least, for a long time? Is it integrated into core Firefox for the first time?
> Quickly pick and copy a color from any page by typing "pick color", "color picker", or "eyedropper" in the address bar and selecting the "Pick a color" quick action.
This seems like add-on or developer tools territory. Maybe that's what quick actions are? Does Firefox really want to add non-essential widgets to maintain, support, and integrate going forward? Maybe this one is necessary for some reason? I have a global color-picker that works in every application; I expect many who need one have the same.
Devtools are built-in on Firefox, and this one is probably useful to more people than want to be looking at the JS console. I can't imagine the maintenance burden is unreasonable, it's just a combination of features that Firefox already has.
QWACs support quietly buried in there is the real story for me, spent months on eIDAS compliance work last year. Firefox verifying those certs matters way more than PDF editing or JPEG-XL, EU banking sites actually require this now and Chrome still doesn't touch it.
Interesting that they just buried this in the middle without even a screenshot, considering how hostile Mozilla has been to the proposal in the past[0].
Considering that they previously made quite strong arguments that implementing QWAC would undermine security by completely bypassing the existing CA trust process and violate user's privacy by leaking browsing activity to third parties: what changed?
It does seem to fit into a wider movement, though. Mozilla previously explicitly considered WebUSB, WebHID, and WebMIDI as "harmful" as they lacked an effective mechanism against hostile websites tricking users into permanently compromising their hardware. This switched to "neutral" without addressing the underlying issue, seemingly just to satisfy some users asking for parity with Chrome out of a convenience argument. Same with Firefox happily jumping onto the AI bandwagon, and only backtracking after major public outcry.
Not to be dramatic, but Firefox seems hellbent on rapidly turning into a reimplementation of Chrome, completely ignoring its raison d'être. Will there be any traditional user-serving browsers left a few years from now?
[0]: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21330628/mozilla.pdf