Enabling it on release might take a bit longer though. The specification is currently not in a good shape. And there are some open questions around permissions etc.
If the point is a copy-paste raster image that shall be understood by most other programs, then image/png is a fine choice, as it is lossless and well-known.
Vector images don't really need direct support though, do they? A lot of vector image interchange formats are just plaintext so normal text clipboard APIs should suffice.
Animated images could definitely be somewhat useful though, albeit much more niche than static raster images. In most cases where I want an animated image on my clipboard, a link will suffice. What I want may not map to the majority of course, but at least PNG support is a start!
> A lot of vector image interchange formats are just plaintext so normal text clipboard APIs should suffice.
Yes, but I don't think you can set the MIME type. So whatever you paste in would have to be smart enough to look at a text/plain clipboard data and figure out if it looks like an SVG (or whatever).
This is up to a browser. I believe a browser should give you an option to decline all such requests by default, without asking you each time. Just like you can browse the web with JS disabled, without images, etc.
if this is important to some users (to me it is) why blindly trust an application's claim of what it does without verifying/restricting it[1]? The IMHO logical step for a user (again most don't care) would be to sandbox the application with a precise set of calls that are whitelisted and judge the application not based on trust but based on what they allowed in their security controls (firejail, apparmor, seccomp, SElinux, ...) and so immediately see if they did something different (that breaks the promise/trust)? (even then browsers have million lines of code so even with best intentions ymmv)
Reading/writing clipboards is a problem for sandboxing since they act as a bridge to another layer that otherwise has no contract or understanding of the application. So are many other features not just on browsers but on any application that for some reason needs to handle a gazillion tings (on Linux subscribing to system/user dbus messages is a big issue and out of the box totally unmitigated).
[1] If a monolith like chrome/firefox needs to understand/parse hundreds of protocols, technology-standards, etc, is a challenge to sandbox, maybe it isn't the sandboxing but the application that is the wrong tool for the users threat-model? Note, there is also Tor/Tails/QubesOS if isolation between user-space applications is a serious concern.
The thing I miss most in Firefox is the Smart Bookmarks feature they removed a while ago. Smart Bookmarks were fantastic. Add your favorite sites' RSS feeds to your bookmark toolbar and you'd have all the recent headlines from all your favorite sites at one click. Fortunately I wasn't the only one that appreciated this long neglected feature so someone created Livemarks (https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/) that mostly replicated its functionality, but it's not quite the same as having native support for them.
If Brief synced what you've read between Firefox instances (desktop / mobile in particular for me), it would be heaven. It might even be enough to turn induce me to create an account and turn on Firefox sync. However that is a forlorn wish given it hasn't been updated in 2 years now.
The Firefox team has more or less said that the feature is not coming to desktop. I think a primitive version was hidden behind a flag, but even that is going to be dropped.
I use it for about half a dozen apps. Azure Portal, Youtube Music, SoundCloud, Google Cloud Platform, Twitter, Teamwork, and this chat app I maintain. And I keep them pinned to my taskbar. I love this feature.
> As Gijs says, we have limited resources and so have to spend those resources on work that appears to have the most impact on our mission. Based on the available data we have (both the research we performed as well as looking at how Chrome and Edge's implementations are being received) PWAs on desktop fall behind other work right now.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1682593
Sadly, "PWA mode" (it probably should be called "Install to desktop") was being worked on under "Site Specific Browser (SSB)" name, but due to lacking resources work will be scrapped. More info here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1407202
Those about:config and chrome:flags fixes are only useful for us hackers. You cannot ask your user base to change the deep settings of your browser. For apps it either works out of the box or it does not.
I can do without the clipboard or PWA mode. Performance and responsiveness are what converted me and plenty others from Firefox when Chrome first appeared. If Firefox performance is at least close to Chrome/Chromium it'd make switching back much more appealing.
In fact, _better_ than Chrome for most websites (exceptions perhaps google's). I used to struggle with Chrome/Chromium hang and chew on CPU cores, crawl to a halt, crash, or just simply run out of memory or a regular basis. Switched to Firefox ~67-69 and such issues are completely gone. I still have significant CPU usage from background tabs occasionally even in Firefox, but the rest of the issues are all nearly inexistent (even though I have on average 30+ tabs open).
My tabs have gotten out of control (they are in the hundreds (due to reasons)), but Firefox handles it quite nice. It only gets restarted after updates, so they are long-lived as well.
Chrome seem to struggle when there are tens of tabs.
I personally know somebody who is currently running a Firefox with 3,000+ (yes, you read that right) tabs as part of their day to day workflow. Firefox just unloads tabs that weren't used for long and cause high memory pressure which is very neat feature for tab addicts.
I daily drive FF and even develop using it. Everyone else in the company use Chrome. Recently one of our clients complained about a performance issue, I tried to replicate it on my fast PC, but could not replicate. The people who could replicate it were on Chrome, but when they followed the replication steps in FF, the problem disappeared.
Google web applications still not great, but still usable I find. Facebook performance isn't great either.
Browser performance is not only about objective benchmark but also subjectivity on our feeling when using the browser. So trying it first hand and be open-minded would help confirming it on your very personalized usecase.
I suggest to try Firefox as side browser for your light browsing need. Maybe like when reading news, social media browser, or anything make sense for you.
This worked for me, in my case, now chrome is my side browser.
I don't know how it compares to Chrome but it's definitely fast enough to leave me with no complaints. I'm using it on Samsung A40 and Tab 5e, plus a Sony Xperia X Compact. Also as my primary browser on my laptop (Ubuntu 20.04).
Because people want a desktop application experience inside of the browser.
When I was playing a Counter Strike web app example posted here a few months ago, it was endlessly frustrating to have Control and W mapped to actions that you may want to perform simultaneously while also not being able to suppress default behavior. I kept accidentally closing the tab as a result...
I personally think that the ability to override default shortcuts isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I definitely think it should be opt-in, like capturing the mouse cursor is. There should be strict separation between "app" features and what a default website should be able to do. Overriding shortcuts should be one of the "app-only" features imo.
> When I was playing a Counter Strike web app example posted here a few months ago, it was endlessly frustrating to have Control and W mapped to actions that you may want to perform simultaneously while also not being able to suppress default behavior. I kept accidentally closing the tab as a result...
So play the native version - problem solved.
This drive to accomodate people misusing the web for apps just bloats browsers (making it prohibitively expensive to develop alternative implementations) while adding tons of privacy leaks and attack surface for exploits.
Lack of OffscreenCanvas (without setting a flag) and OffscreenCanvasRenderingContext2D in WebWorkers (no flag at all) makes my WebXR project almost unusable (I have to jump through some ugly hoops of fading the view to black during scene loading to keep the user from throwing up from the render thread frame drops). Having to polyfill WebXR out of the ancient WebVR API is a pain, too.
Normally, the fact that practically nobody actually uses Firefox would mean it's not a huge problem. But the only standalone VR headsets with a Chromium-based browser are the Facebook headsets. If Firefox were better, I could be running twice as many of the not-Facebook-encumbered Pico Neo headsets for the same price. As it stands, Oculus for Business headsets are almost the same price as a Valve Index, once you add in the mandatory "support" yearly licensing fee.
> Normally, the fact that practically nobody actually uses Firefox would mean it's not a huge problem.
I assume you mean "practically nobody without an adblocker".
I dread the day we could have to live without Firefox. Don't dismiss it like that, please.
Cuz Firefox was in such a strong position before Google came around, right.
Mozilla has never been a competitive company. They've always leaned heavily on the illusion of being a non-profit. They've always sold the "eat your vegetables" version of web browsing, without actually offering anything compelling over the competition. We're just expected to use Firefox because "it's made by not-Google".
My job is not to drive users to Firefox. My job is to create a product that people can use. And in my particular case, my job involves creating a product that doesn't physically harm people.
I agree that browser monoculture is a problem. But there is another problem that Mozilla is not the company that is helping with the problem.
EDIT: to go a little further on this, it's not physically possible to create a good WebXR experience in Firefox, at this time. Despite their announcements of focusing on Hubs as one of the few projects they kept around after the most recent purge, there are key technologies that are fundamentally missing from Firefox that have no replacement. And then they have the termerity to user-agent sniff Chromium browsers on desktop PCs and tell you that they supposedly don't support WebXR, that you need to download Firefox to use Hubs. So it seems even Mozilla doesn't really give a shit about the Open Web.
Can you share anything about what it is that you're working on? I never understood why web VR/AR APIs even exist and why anyone would want to use them with the hardware we have today.
It's a foriegn language instruction environment for government employees. You meet with your language instructor in culturally-appropriate environment and role-play different language training scenarios.
Why shouldn't the browser have VR APIs? WebXR allows us to iterate faster, across more devices, and more easily integrate with other services than building in a framework like Unity can do for us. I've spent the last 6 years doing nothing but WebXR and Unity work and WebXR is hands down far easier to develop the sort of application we're building.
No, you're not going to build MS Flight Simulator in WebXR, but you probably weren't going to do that in Unity, either, and ain't nobody got the budget for AAA++ graphics anyway. The folks who do graphically intensive work in Unity have stripped large parts of Unity away to make it possible.
As a user I create separate Firefox profiles for every site I want to use as a PWA, add a desktop short-cut and some custom userChrome.css, but while the result is okay, it sucks to set it up.
The only positive seems to be, that I can disable the buggy Spotify service-workers while keeping them enabled for other pages.
It would be awesome, if the PWA implementation would even support the system tray (similar to kdocker), but just the basic functionality would be better than the status quo.
Hey thanks for the cool site -- I've used it numerous times for non-trivial image manipulation I've needed to complete where access to Photoshop was not possible.
You will see more and more applications being implemented for the browser. Browsers who do not support this trend will simply lose market share. Simple as that.
Student here, I loathe it and the schools that it et al. convince ChromeOS is an acceptable substitute for real OSes. It seems more crashy than pre-1.0 Inkscape and slow as nitrogen-cooled molasses to boot.
I mean putting an image into a clipboard when the user presses Ctrl+C, or some button in my program (without crating a <img> element on the screen and asking the user to right-click it).
It's about programmatic access to clipboard, like selecting a part of image in a browser-based image editor (likely a canvas), and copy-pasting it into some other application.
> Websites should not have access to my clipboard.
Being able to take an image from the web page and place it on the clipboard is not 'the website having access to my clipboard'. It's the _browser_ having access.
Going in the reverse direction, placing data from the clipboard into the web page, is more tricky, but Firefox already does a good job of blocking clipboard accesses unless they're the direct result of user action (keyboard shortcut or button press).
You know that you can just copy an image to the clipboard on Firefox yourself, right? Right click, copy image.
The question is whether the website should be able to push images to the clipboard by itself, which it shouldn't. Firefox already supports doing what you're talking about.
The point is when the image is not an image. Maybe it's being drawn on a canvas, or composited with multiple layers, or you want only a part of it (all of these apply to Photopea, I believe).
I don't like the way clipboard access is handled in browsers either, but the fact remains that if I'm using an in-browser image editor, select a part of the image and press CTRL+C, I want that portion of the image in my clipboard. How it gets there is an implementation detail that the average user doesn't and, if it doesn't affect security/privacy, shouldn't have to care about. And since it's write-only, there's no security/privacy concern.
Why? Why would a harmless feature that the vast majority of people want have to have its own "prominent" setting. I'd argue the exact opposite - that making it prominent would lead people to disable it without knowing the consequences and then think their browser is broken: "Oh, I don't want sites to access my clipboard, that sounds scary", then two months later "this browser sucks! When I copy my selection from Google Docs it strips all formatting! It works in Chrome, Firefox sucks!"
Anyways, this is far more time than I'm willing to spend talking to someone who thinks their PoV is the only correct one (I just now recognize your username from a few other threads under this post). Cheeers!
So let's say it is 2005, some phones have cameras, and some don't. The manufacturer of phones without cameras says: "Phones are for calling, just buy a camera, it is literally what you want".
You can be right, but the market has a final word.
Today, many people enjoy using advanced apps, that can be "installed" and "uninstalled" in one second (by opening and closing a website), without leaving any track (mess) in your computer.
> That's a feature. Icons on my home screen should only ever be native applications. Use bookmarks for websites instead.
Why shouldn’t I be allowed to put a bookmark as an icon? That’s essentially what a PWA is anyways. A fancy bookmark that behaves like a native app. Why are you the arbitrator of what I can do?
- impossible to put an image into a clipboard (so that user can e.g. paste it outside a browser)
- no PWA mode (impossible to put an icon of a website to your homescreen, which will open the website without a browser UI)
- impossible to have keyboard shortcuts with Alt https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1568130