I guess I started using Firefox when it was called NCSA Mosaic. A friend showed it to me at Apple in 1993, but I didn't get what the web was good for then. (To be sure, there wasn't much there yet.) By 1994 I was working at SGI, and marketing was exploring whether there was a product there for us, so I installed it, started using it, followed NCSA's daily roundup of new web sites for a while. It was mind boggling -- hundreds of sites, and three or four new ones every day! (Yes, those are global totals.)
By late 1994, Mosaic Communications (later renamed to Netscape, then Mozilla) was poaching employees from SGI, including quite a few people I knew.
By 1995, my girlfriend (now wife) was shocked to see a URL on the side of a bus. That was our proof that the web had gone mainstream.
Internet Explorer and Chrome didn't exist yet, of course.
Man... I don't remember specifically when I started using Firefox, but it was up until Chrome first was released and then I was stuck in the Chromium and its offshoots ever since.
I recently came back only as of....last year and made it a point to get away from a lot of Google junk, as well as negative social media experiences!
When I started, Netscape was wonderful. I loved the toolbars with the 'drag' bars which you could click to collapse... so much better than IE.
When I moved to Thailand, internet shops started up - using Windows 98 for a while there.
Opera browser and Firefox were really good viable options. Opera had super smooth mouse gestures and was better for a while - but in the long run Firefox was more reliable.
Chrome took over for a number of years, but Firefox later became my 'default' (though still not most-used) browser.
About 5 years ago when I moved over to Manjaro KDE, I liked their theming for Firefox (I dropped it now, but still...) and just found very very few reasons to fire up another browser.
KDE with X11 desktop has mouse gestures built in, so it no longer matters in that regard if I use Firefox, or anything else (even text editors) because many shortcuts are now almost consistent across all softwares... I can close, reopen and navigate tabs in Dolphin file browser the same as with Firefox.
To be fair, cheese being edible is now pretty much worldwide accepted, like pineapple on pizza, and it wasn't even really "weird" back at the time. Snails on the other hand...
Article 6 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to create the means to mandatorily block websites present on a government provided list.
These are the kind of provisions that totalitarian regimes would absolutely benefit from and make regular use of if France or another "western democracy" forced browser developers to develop it. Consider the role that the internet has had in popular uprisings of the last 15 years and its utility for accessing information that oppressive governments want to hide from their citizens.
It might not be as bad as Vichy France or the Rassemblement National, but these provisions definitely pose a major threat to global freedom and would be a gift to the likes of China, Iran and Russia (and I'm sure plenty of US state legislatures would use this for their own ends, looking at you Florida).
It looks like some of the codepens are not working for me on FF 114 and Edge 114, for example this one where the flame is apparently supposed to rotate around the button. I guess those features are only coming later? A bit confusing since the guide makes it sound like they're already well-supported.
Or Firefox can just stick to being a browser and not try to push any agendas. You want to discuss discrimination, get out of your feel-good bubble and go protest in the middle-east where discrimination actually exists, but you won't, will you
As far as I can tell, you can set cookiebanners.service.mode and cookiebanners.service.mode.privateBrowsing to 1 to enable the feature as far back as 114. There may be fixes in future versions, so check there before reporting bugs.
Kind of a big update... this is the last version of Firefox for Windows 7 and Windows 8, along with macOS 10.12, 10.13, and 10.14. I know this is forcing family members to finally upgrade their (mac) OS.
More big updates:
Hardware video decoding is now enabled for Intel GPUs on Linux.
We've refreshed and streamlined the user interface for importing data in from other browsers.
The builtin editor now behaves similarly to other browsers with contenteditable and designMode when splitting a node, e.g. typing Enter to split a paragraph, and also when joining two nodes, e.g. typing Backspace at the start of a paragraph to join the paragraph and the previous one.
Pretty sure that last feature is what finally fixes the Reddit Fancy Pants editor in Firefox... exactly when Reddit is destroying itself.
IndexedDB is now also supported in private browsing without memory limits thanks to encrypted storage on disk. The temporary keys to decrypt the information are hold in RAM only and all stored information is purged at the normal end of a private browsing session from disk.
This might help WhatsApp web run in private browsing, among other sites.
The most impactful thing is definitely going to be OS compatibility... this is going to be the last version of Firefox for a long time for a lot of people.
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