Firefox 47 Release Notes | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 47 Release Notes

mozilla.org

57 pointsJoshTriplett19 comments

Sadly only just caught, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1278605: "Selenium webdriver will totally break when 47 ships: it just causes the browser to crash on startup."

Thanks for pointing this out; saved us an update and reversion headache.

Also fyi, link has an extra trailing '>'.

Why is the Widevine support they're adding limited to Windows and OS X? It's supported by Chrome in Linux.

Of course, HTML5 video is supposed to make video on the web more standard and easily available, but DRM means you need every CDM to support both your browser and OS...

You answered your own question, Linux Firefox doesn't have a CDM available for MP4 like Windows and OS X.

Google's Widevine CDM works fine on Linux. Google's Chrome browsers uses it. Even if it doesn't work with MP4 (not sure if this is actually the case) why not include it for other video formats that are supported?

We're working on it. We have the code to host Widevine on Linux and are endeavoring to get the Linux side enabled in the future.

Great to hear. I'm on 32bit Ubuntu where Chrome isn't updated anymore, so I am eagerly waiting for this ;) Do you have a bugzilla URL so I can follow progress?

I guess it's https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1265235 Correct me if I'm wrong.

Why is Firefox adding CDM support at all? Do they not care about the security and well-being of their users? Or do they think that somehow making ideological compromises will further their proclaimed goals of respecting and helping users of the Web?

The whole point of CDMs is to prevent users from doing things (e.g. taking screenshots or clips of videos for fair use, or backing them up, or pirating wholesale). You can't claim that this is empowering users.

Any effective CDM implementation requires a media company having final control over the user's computer (or a nested computer as provided by TrustZone or SGX). This is not compatible with user freedom or security.

This seems like the opposite of what Mozilla is supposed to be working for. If Mozilla can't exist without market share, and they can only have market share by giving up on user freedom, then simple modus ponens tells us that Mozilla can't exist. If this is the case, those interested in continuing to pursue the goals of empowering typical computer users should look into some form of praxis more effective than developing a Web browser.

I dunno, maybe they like their users to be able to play content on the web? People NOT being able to do that on Firefox would just speed up the conversations to Chrome. You know you can turn any CDM module off right?

The most interesting things in Firefox 47: automatically detecting embedded YouTube Flash videos, converting them to HTML5, and dropping the whitelist of plugins/sites that bypass "click to activate". One more step towards eliminating the last browser plugin, Flash.

That's interesting. I have all flash disabled and click to enable on all sites bar a couple trusted sources. A feature I quite like.

Is the comment about converting them true? or does it just tell YouTube to use the html5 player instead?

People used to embed the Flash player using <object>. This just converts that to an <iframe>, which is YouTube's currently recommended way of embedding, since it can auto-detect video support and load Flash or HTML5 video accordingly.

Interesting indeed.

One could suspect, of course, that this Google-specific kludge is meant to test waters and prep for automatic Flash-to-HTML5 video ads conversions, but that'd be just ridiculous.

This doesn't convert the video data, just an <object> to an <iframe>. AFAIK most ads are already served as scripts that load the content dynamically, so the ad networks can serve whatever they want.

May fix one thing, but do not fix another reason why you get served flash. And that is that Youtube puts priority on generating MP4 before webm. Really makes one wonder about Google's commitment to their own codec...

Not sure why it's not in the release notes, but this adds per-monitor DPI support!

Pretty major feature for professional users, does Chrome support it yet?

Nice update. Three finger tap dictionary lookup has been fixed for OS X 10.11. But we'll have to wait until v49 to see this in stable.

Please fix the services menu issues on OS X next: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1261299 Bug is assigned, so looking forward to that.

This also adds support for ChaCha20/Poly1305 cipher suites. Chrome has supported this for a while and it performs better on some mobile devices.

You can go to https://privacyinternational.org to test this. Then click the lock and go to more info to see the tech details.

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