The Mozilla Nightly blog is written by Firefox developers and covers features in Nightly builds and weekly engineering updates.
Commenters link it for Firefox performance work, Nightly packages and updates, and experiments like feature recommendations.
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-issue-7/
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-width
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.
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-firefox/
1 - https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2018/08/28/firefox-nightly-secure-dns-experimental-results/
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-permission-prompt-spam-in-firefox/
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-deduplication-better-auto-open-picture-in-picture-and-more-these-weeks-in-firefox-issue-170/]. 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.
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-firefox/