What's New with Firefox 142

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Local AI Translation & Models

  • Strong enthusiasm for Firefox’s fully local, offline translation; seen as genuinely useful and privacy-preserving.
  • Quality is considered “not perfect but amazing,” especially for users switching among many languages, including ones they know only partially.
  • Pain points:
    • Want ability to force translation even when language detection doesn’t trigger.
    • Desire for simple “good/bad translation” feedback to improve models.
  • Workarounds: translation via context menu or the main “Translate page…” entry.
  • Models are open and reused in third‑party apps (e.g., Android translator using the same models).

Link Previews & AI Summaries

  • Mixed reception: some find previews intriguing (especially with local AI summaries), others see them as slow, buggy, or redundant vs. middle‑click + close.
  • Discoverability disputed: long‑press vs. hover vs. OS “force click” on macOS; debate over what counts as a true “affordance.”
  • Privacy concerns:
    • Clarified that previews only load on explicit interaction (long‑press or menu) and summarization is local.
    • Still concern about unintentionally “visiting” tracking/phishing links, especially if hover mode is enabled.
  • Open questions/complaints:
    • Whether previews respect extensions like uBlock; some fear they may not.
    • Previews often blocked by cookie/newsletter modals or provide weak info (small card, generic text, slow AI).
    • Some users prefer Wikipedia-style or Arc/Zen-style modal “peek” rather than tiny cards.
  • Rollout is region‑limited; can be enabled via settings or about:config.

Relay & Email Masking

  • One camp calls relay domains “mostly useless” due to increasing blocking by sites.
  • Others report high success rates, hundreds of masks in use, and consider even partial coverage worth the cost.
  • Some use personal domains or Fastmail wildcards as more reliable alternatives; blocking is often treated as a red flag about the service itself.

Performance, Memory, and Diagnostics

  • Several reports of large memory leaks (8–15+ GB) and system lockups, especially left overnight.
  • Suggestions:
    • Use about:processes, about:memory, about:performance and OS task manager to identify offending tabs/sites.
    • Suspect particular web apps (e.g., Jenkins, Google tools) or extensions, especially YouTube or Electron apps.
    • Check network issues (e.g., IPv6) and consider that some OOM problems come from distro package updates + forced restarts.
  • Disagreement over whether new AI features materially affect performance; at least one confirmed regression was fixed pre‑wide rollout.

Direction, AI Fatigue & UX

  • Widespread frustration with “AI everywhere”; many users disable all AI except translation.
  • Complaints that Firefox focuses on features (AI, new‑tab recommendations, link previews) instead of:
    • Core performance and memory robustness.
    • Web compatibility and JS/HTML engine speed vs. Chromium.
    • Long‑standing issues (spellchecker quality, broken find, tab-loss bugs, security hardening).
  • Others appreciate tab groups and UI work; for some, tab groups finally make Firefox viable.
  • New‑tab content recommendations are compared to “portal” bloat but are easy to turn off; irritation that they sometimes reappear with new variants.

Platform & Privacy Oddities

  • macOS users criticize slow adoption of native behaviors (scrollbars, keychain, force‑click previews, fullscreen) and say Firefox often feels non‑native.
  • Debate over private windows blocking clipboard history:
    • One side values strict privacy.
    • Another wants an opt‑out because they rely on clipboard tools for client work.
    • Containers/temporary containers are suggested as alternative session‑isolation tools.
  • Some view Firefox as too eager to make non‑user‑initiated HTTP requests and telemetry by default, and wish for a mode with zero unsolicited prompts or network calls.