6.7.1 — Fine Tuning

Interface Customisations

6.7 reduced the ‘Look and Feel’ pane to seven Photon toggles and moved the rest to about:config. They have returned, and there are far more of them - there are now 121 options across ten new groups in the Appearance pane, each with a plain-language label rather than a pref name.

The reason this took so long and wasn’t in the original 6.7.0 release was that almost all of the customisation options were no longer compatible with the updated codebase, and so required a thorough comb through - but the changes in 6.7.0 were pressing enough to not be worth waiting for them to be ready.

• Tab bar. Options include stretching tabs to fill the width, hiding the tab or title bar container, shrinking background tabs until you point at them (with optional fade and blur), adjusting the width and height of the tab bar, customising the drag space, centring tab contents and adding a tab counter.
• Tabs. Corner style (Default, Australis, Chrome, Chrome Legacy, Edge or Wave), padding, separators, new tab button style, context line, close button on hover or on pinned tabs, container tab markers, sound indicator placement and faded unloaded tabs.
• Toolbars. You can hide or auto-hide the navigation bar and combine the back and forward buttons. You can also adjust the padding of toolbar buttons and the padding of the floating find bar and infobar.
• Bookmarks. Multi-row bookmarks toolbar, auto-hide, centring, icon and label visibility, bookmark menu padding and counters.
• Icons. Choose from Photon or full-coverage for menu, context menu, global menu and panel icons.
• Rounding. Square off tabs, toolbars, buttons and the rest of the interface.
• Theme, content, new tab and player. Colour, transparency and animation can be styled on top of web pages, the new tab page and the controls and sizing of the built-in video player.

The old three-way ‘Enable Waterfox theme customisations’ mode has been replaced by a single ‘Load interface customisations’ toggle. Turning this off unloads the customisations and hides every option it controls.

The density picker (Compact, Normal, Touch) is now located in the Appearance menu alongside the browser style and palette controls.

Privacy

The four controls that shipped without a UI in version 6.7 are back. WebRTC peer connections and referrer header policy are in a new ‘Advanced web privacy’ group, and ‘Load images automatically’ and ‘Enable JavaScript’ are in a new ‘Web content’ group.

The referrer options have been renamed to make their function clearer: ‘Never send a referrer’, ‘Send for document navigations only’, or ‘Send for navigations and page resources’. All four options display which extension is controlling them.

Beyond Settings:

• DRM is now off by default. When playing a protected stream, a proprietary binary is downloaded, so Waterfox waits for you to opt in, either in Settings or from the prompt triggered by the first site.
• Address and payment card autofill is available regardless of your region, rather than only in regions where Mozilla enables it.
• Firefox’s network connectivity checking service has been disabled, since the captive portal feature was disabled. Your operating system should handle whether you need to login to a captive portal, and it’s one less outbound connection that the browser makes.

Tree Tabs

Group tabs: A tree parent can now be a group tab, which is a lightweight named page that exists purely to hold children. You can rename it in situ and set it to close when it has no tabs left or when only one remains. When you close a parent, you can now replace it with a group tab instead of promoting or closing its children.

Split view and native tab groups: Both now coexist with trees. In split view, the view moves and restores as a unit within its branch. Dragging a tree onto a native tab group adds the whole subtree.

Bookmark folder trees: Opening a bookmark folder can rebuild the original tree structure, and multiple trees opened from one folder can be gathered under a group tab. The ‘Bookmark This Tree’ function saves the structure back out. Tabs opened in this way are discarded until they are visited.

New context menu commands: Reload Tree, Mute Tree, Unmute Tree, Unload Tree, Collapse Tree Recursively, Expand Tree Recursively, Copy Tree as Links, and Copy Descendants as Links.

Beyond that:

• A new tab position chooser sits next to the new tab button and offers the following options: independent, child, last sibling or next sibling of the current tab.
• Dropping a link onto a tab prompts you to choose whether to load it there or open it as a child, with an option to remember your choice.
• Undoing a tab close now restores the entire subtree that was closed with it, not just the one tab.
• Selecting the next tab after closing one is tree-aware rather than positional.
• A collapsed parent now displays a sound or mute indicator when something in its branch is playing.
• The left and right arrow keys can be used to collapse and expand the focused tree.
• Tabs opened from the same pinned tab can now group themselves automatically.
• The default behaviour when closing a parent has changed from promoting all children to promoting the first child. A collapsed parent still closes its entire subtree.

Thank you to ALL the hard work done by piroor for Tree Style Tab, which this work has been ported from.

Fixes

• Profile upgrades maintain the browser’s style. Gecko does not store a preference value that matches the default, which meant that version 6.7 was unable to distinguish between a Photon profile and a fresh one during an upgrade. Style detection now runs off an explicit style preference.
• Nova no longer draws its window gap and rounded corners in full-screen mode.
• The Waterfox wordmark now follows the theme instead of being fixed black.
• Extensions that set a tab’s opener now update the tree immediately.
• Ultra, our DNS over Oblivious HTTP setup, now probes its relay and provider. Settings informs you when lookups are failing and explains why, rather than remaining silently active.

Known Issues

• An empty Waterfox directory is created in $HOME on Linux systems - this is a bug from the XDG_* basedir spec support.
• When adding an exception for a blocked domain via the ad blocker panel, it’s permanent and unremovable instead of being only for that page load.
• Duplicate Tabs menu option appears, even when only a single tab is selected.