What's new in Firefox 17 (shipping today)
mozilla.org
mozilla.org
Hundreds of millions of folk use their browser for social stuff. It's not an unreasonable use of developer time to make the web better for those people. (It probably springs from their work on FirefoxOS in any case.)
The small set of folk like you can just disable it. (Or, as is pointed out elsewhere, just never enable it in the first place!)
If it's off by default, it should be in a plugin. If you want it, come and get it.
You still have to have in mind that even knowing that the FB parasite is somehow "in my browser and I cant remove it", even if it is not activated, makes me want to immediately toss it away in disgust and go Chrome exclusively.
16 is the latest FF I will be using and recommending and I am very likely not alone. Mozilla forcing FB on us is high treason, and many of us will start recommending Chrome instaed of FF to people we can influence just to harm Mozilla because of this betrayal.
The FF user base rose quickly by word of mouth and by word of mouth it can even more quickly disappear in Chrome's mighty shadow. FF needs us more than we need FF. Keep that in mind when you make decisions like pushing FB on us. You cannot afford playing a dictator.
see: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2012/07/06/bringing-...
> go Chrome exclusively
Wat? Google wants to slurp your data just as much as Facebook
It's like BrowserID - a protocol that enables authentication. Facebook can implement BrowserID, StackExchange can implement BrowserID, Google can implement BrowserID; you get the idea.
The same goes for Social API. It's just a protocol for social networks. Anybody who wants to create a social site, can support the Social API and users can enable it to work on any site that offers such functionality.
Social API IS NOT "Facebook in my browser".
"The idea is to be able to have a quick view into a site without having to switch back and forth between tabs...The Social API doesn’t have to work with only social sites. The API could be used by financial and sports sites to maintain a ticker or email providers could use it to make it easy to check in-coming messages. And since Firefox is open source, other browser makers could implement the Social API, though no other company has announced their intention to do so."
http://gigaom.com/2012/11/20/firefox-17-launches-with-social...
It's fine if you want to debate whether such functionality belongs in a web browser, but this isn't the 90s, and I think these capabilities make sense given what I often do on the web. You can find out more about its capabilities here:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Social_API
Cheers!
...come on. What Firefox have implemented is an API. Facebook is not involved until you go to Facebook and give them permission to be involved. Quit being so hysterical and remember that Mozilla is a non-profit organisation and has your interests far more at heart than Google does.
Everything else can be a plugin. I guess that means the plugin mechanism better be pretty good.
If I recall, these were some of the reasons people flocked to Chrome (Speed & Usability).
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Firefox_17_for_deve...
The sandbox support for iframes looks particularly helpful.
Sadly this is the first version of Firefox in a year or two that actually breaks things for me: the "animate once" setting is no longer being obeyed for GIFs in some cases and the "secure login" plugin seems to have stopped working despite a recent update.
Mostly intact though and I've finally turned off Flash completely since enough of the web and youtube supports it properly with pure html5
What the hell are those crap on the developer menu anyway? Oh right they are there because you still can't do live editing in meaningful ways in the inspect bar. See point above.
Font rendering is still terrible by default for Asian fonts BTW. Argh. I'm going back to Safari.
I believe secure login stopped working on several popular sites due to changes in those sites' webforms. A while ago I applied a patch mentioned in the addons.mozilla.org comments, and the extension worked again.
I've just checked out and diff'd the most recent v1 update. The only change is the addition of a pretty spammy looking URL that appears on first launch. No bugs were fixed. Sad.
The version I'm using (works in Firefox 17 for me) is: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/tmp/secure_login-0.9.... I suggest unzipping and doing a "diff -r" against the unzipped contents of the official version to check I'm not evil.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/fxchrome/
It's a rather good emulation of Chrome's, er, browser chrome. Fingers crossed that australis can save me from the embarrassment of Firefox's default look on Linux.
I think Chrome is the more awkward of the two. I used Chromium for about two years before switching back to Fx with version 4 (Fx has better extensions and comparable speed, and I like using a browser that's not so closely linked to Google's services). I have been using Linux nearly exclusively for 7+ years.
Will have to check out Australis and see if it makes me feel angry or not.
Praise God, that has been a pet peeve of mine for years.
I was about to ask how the new Firefox knows what constitutes a "fixed header" and what doesn't - like, what if the overlay only goes part way across the page, or something? Then I read at the above link that they've drawn up some clever heuristics to guess the 'right' scroll amount in each case.
"It works well on many pages. No doubt there are some pages it doesn't work on. It seems like a good idea to start conservatively here."
I cautiously welcome this 'fix' for my own casual web browsing, while fearing for the rare trouble it might cause a responsible web dev who might have a legitimate need for a particular kind of overlay while having page up/down still work in the currently established way. No such need springs to mind but I'm sure that if I thought about it for long enough, in this age of games in the browser and whatnot... (some sort of fancy web comic perhaps?). Now needing to workaround what is more complex and unpredictable behaviour, this is the kind of push/pull between web developers and browser implementers which a few years down the line could turn into a bloody impossible mess for all concerned.
It may seem picky, but its very obvious when browsing.
Which Apple may consider a feature rather than a bug :-D
Alternatively you can go to about:config and set layers.acceleration.disabled to true.
tl/dr; summary: 12 months of security only releases. Each year the ESR branch is rebased on the current version of Firefox. I believe Firefox 17 will be the basis for the next year of ESR releases.
Mozilla makes it very difficult to find the download page, but it is here: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all.html
At last it will be able to drink beer too.
Four Big features, lets hope Mozilla will finish them off in 2013.
I've been using noscript intstead. It provides an easier interface for approving plugins and more.