Firefox 25 is released
mozilla.org
mozilla.org
Although lately I haven't worked in anything, would like to hear about more great opensource projects.
With many projects though, some conflate "my patch was rejected" for "they're jerks" without understanding the impact of their fix/suggestions. Feature bloat, backwards compat, API verbosity, etc all add up.
http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/ARB/vertex_array_object...
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/154994-epic-mozilla-releas...
I wonder if this is because Firefox has been optimized, or whether Chrome has simply stagnated. I suspect it's the latter; when I got the Retina MBP I immediately noticed that graphics performance was laggy compared to what I was used to on my previous (slower but non-Retina) MBP.
And a week or so ago somebody invited to a call was told he couldn't join in the version of Firefox he was using, which I'm pretty sure was up to date.
I avoid using it in Firefox; on Linux, it was performing terribly in FF but fine in Chrome.
The actual download itself is available on the "Systems & Languages" page:
> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/
This kind of download is important, when you want to try out a new release, without committing yourself to it. For example, let's say you want to load it up in a VM, without contaminating your normal environment.
Googling for things like "firefox standalone redistributable offline install" are a road to nowhere.
You sort of just have to "know" that "Download Firefox in your language" means "Download the standalone installer, and not the stub installer". They don't explain this, or make it obvious that this is how you can get a copy of a static binary for predictable results.
It makes sense though. The modern browser is epitome of "the user is always online, and should always receive and run the latest version of code on the fly" execution model. Why not apply those assumptions to the execution environment too?
(I wonder if they push the stub so as to collect more (system) information without having to say that it's Firefox itself that's collecting that information.)
That sounds rather unlikely.
My suspicion is that it's essentially a "security through obscurity" tactic, so that the majority of users are left with no choice but the "smart" installer, which offers greater control for load balancing heavy duty traffic during peak download periods.
or you can go to http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases... from a traditional web browser as well
Cheers!
Or am I missing something?
"Systems & Languages" doesn't tell me anything about being able to find the offline installer there. Either changing the phrasing to something more explicit like "Other downloads", and/or adding a title attribute explaining what can you find there could be a good improvement.
Also, giving a hint at the "thank you" page (ex. Having trouble? Try the offline installer) would be a nice addition.
> You are missing his point that it's not easy to find [...]
That, on the other hand, is a valid point.
Entering in much detail of a specific use case is not really a helpful way to leave feedback, but it's understandable since users have the perception that their use case is completely ignored/forgotten.
The alternative, expecting all users to know precisely which components they need, is absurd and never works. And we all know you can't reliably do configuration detection in a web page to that extent either.
You've just excluded >95% of Firefox users. Those that do use a VM will know how to get hold of the full installer.
If they'd stop making full installs, I would be annoyed. But they're just optimising for the most common use cases.
My complaint is simply that it's hard to find, and for those who want it, there's no real road map or sign postings for where to get it.
A bit like the so-called "Chromification" of the UI: I don't want to see too much "power" obscured or sacrificed for the sake of usability. Keep things sane, also, for the "power users".
----
When I see patterns like this, too often as I look further, I become convinced they are deliberate. I suppose one can argue as to motive and intent. Nonetheless, they seem to be forcing all users toward a more dependent and opaque pattern.
Therefore, I consider them "dark patterns". If you want to label that as my personal perspective ("you're weird"), then so be it.
If say 5% of your users want a stand-alone installation package, is that too low to add the description and/or provide a link to "stand-alone installer"? Is it really going to destroy usability if you do so?
And that's where, once again, I -- in my opinion -- start to bump up against today's "designers". Where pages and everything else have to be "streamlined" to the point of excluding any and all minority usage patterns.
"The web" used to be about choice. TIMTOWTDI. Some of us have atypical patterns, sometimes for good reason. In my opinion, that diversity breeds robustness. Things get examined from different angles. And no single pattern becomes irreplaceable.
It's only natural that an application that's designed to communicate live with servers on the internet would, at some point, have to pull more and more of its configuration and application logic from the same internet. The browser's still open source, so if it bugs you, you're free to compile a build yourself and gather all the dependencies manually.
The fact is that there are still stand alone installers available for all sorts of configurations, right there on the Mozilla FTP where they've been for something like a decade. If you're a power user and you're saying you can't figure out how to hit an FTP server or type 'firefox standalone installer' into a search engine, I don't know what to tell you.
Calling this a dark pattern is absurd. Nobody's being tricked, you're not being conned into opting something other than what you intended. The same Firefox gets installed either way, the install process is just streamlined in ways that increase success rates and simplify it for most users.
As to the Firefox installer specifically, now that my brain and memory have had a chance to catch up with the rest of me, I dealt with its "stubification" some time ago. When that first occurred, I was somewhat annoyed. However, I fairly quickly found that full installer downloads were provided under the... "other languages and systems" link/page, or whatever it is specifically labelled.
I did also, over time, observed that the new pattern, including automatic downloads and updates -- or prompts to update -- probably would help significantly in keeping the majority "non-technical" user population up to date, particularly on Windows, that I was using more at that time.
More recently, I've been using Ubuntu primarily, and I've gotten used to the release hitting package management within a couple of hours. I reboot daily, and usually check for and install updates when I do, so Firefox updating has just become part of the daily routine.
I do, nonetheless, think there is something of a "dark pattern" going around, in general, of making erstwhile stand-alone processes more dependent upon network-connected and dependent back-end services.
When I occasionally help family and friends out with a new computer, no longer can I download their ISP-provided security software and get it up and running before plugging into the network. Nope -- that's all network-dependent installs, now. (Used to be, you could sign in to the ISP, generate a license key, and then use that to validate against a stand-alone installation package.)
At least Windows now has a default firewall that actually kind of works, and most people are behind a wi-fi router that has its own firewall. These mitigate the "machine will be probed within minutes if not seconds" scenario that's been described ad nauseum in the last decade plus.
There was also a point in time when moving forward in version could and did sometimes break things. Some of use became sensitized to automated updates and no convenient, or at all officially provided, way to roll back. And some of those update processes could and did get a bit annoying of themselves with their resource use.
Adobe has switched to a online-dependent, "rental"-heavy licensing pattern. To subsequently have X million user accounts compromised. (Thank goodness I purchased my full, stand-alone installation of 5.5 from Amazon.)
Dark patterns...
Also, here's a genuine usecase for a truly offline installer... What if you are the "resident software/pc maintainer" of your extended family.... In such a case, would it not make better sense to have one complete download, then copy it into a pen drive, and install it on every machine, without spending 30 mins to an hour on every machine, doing a download+install for every single one!
The rationale of an online installer might be justified as some of the replies indeed seem to do, but, I think that there is something fundamentally flawed/wrong with having to first "download an installer", only to have it "download the application" again! I mean, what the hell!?
EDIT: Also, the speed of these release cycles (not just Mozilla, but other software too!) are getting old and tired to keep up with, TBH...
Especially for consumer PCs, there doesn't need to be anything to keep up with.
>> let's say you want to load it up, [snip] but without contaminating your normal environment.
Add-ons don't necessarily survive every upgrade, and take some time to catch up with the new release. Many people that I know, (in the family and outside) would rather wait on a new release than have one of their add-on break on them.
So, whatever way you put it, I am firm in my statement, that an offline installer should be a de-facto proviso, rather than being buried somewhere else.
That said, they do make the full installers easily available (google “Firefox offline installer”) should you need to update a ton of computers behind a slow connection.
For sure, lycos/ddg/ask-jeeves/bing "Firefox offline installer" is an option that is not lost on us luddites :).
But did you also notice the parent comment: "Googling for things like "firefox standalone redistributable offline install" are a road to nowhere"? ;)
They could make it more obvious but, really, the audience for that page doesn't really include people who are familiar with technical issues and have made the calculation that it would be faster to download the full thing & copy it around.
> But did you also notice the parent comment: "Googling for things like "firefox standalone redistributable offline install" are a road to nowhere"? ;)
I did – and part of the point is that that's an unnecessarily complex query. Removing any of the redundant words (e.g. "firefox standalone installer", "firefox offline install") produces the correct result as the first hit. ("redistributable" appears to be the problem as that term hits a bunch of spam download sites)
In other words, that search query was itself an attempt to micro-optimize something which turned out to be unnecessary – rather like the entire post.
Users of VMs are more than likely power users at the very least, and if you want to test different versions then you should probably also be testing beta and even nightly. I don't think a full exe just to install in your VM really needs to be "homepage" visible.
The concept of PortableApps has been simply amazing! (FWIW, I donate to this project too, it's been really worthwhile having the platform).
I have begun to adopt this mechanism for some of my software maintenance strategy. Nowadays, I test the latest version of the updated "PortableApp" on my local copy on my machine first, and if all works well post-update, I ask others to choose the update. Else I simply tell them to uncheck the update until I can confirm that existing functionality remains unbroken. :)
That site does not readily provide hashes for their binaries (MD5, SHA512, whatever), and the page is smeared with ads. There's no way to know if the site is trustworthy.
And, anyway, where would I get the trustworthy hashes? They'd need to be communicated to me, directly from the horse's mouth. I'd need to visit ftp.firefox.com, to find out what the correct hashes are in the first place, and then check them against the binary download I receive from your site.
The link you should have provided was:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/portableapps/files/Mozilla%2...
Version 25 isn't listed there yet.
All of this is even less convenient than digging for and deciphering the meaning of Firefox's official downloads.
Also, I see the hash right there on the page: http://puu.sh/530kX.png
Take a look again over the weekend. They are completely FOSS and all their bundling and bundled packages are transparent.
The entire project is voluntary, and it usually takes a day or two from the official release dates, before the volunteers bundle, test, and release the portable application to the general users.
Edit: It's probably just that I'm using Linux.
It's a complication, but it eliminates the need for the user to come back after waiting for some dozens of megabytes to download and then interact. You can download a stub near-instantaneously, do things like pick your install directory, and then forget about the install process entirely as it completes without your supervision. That's a good thing, and it isn't possible with offline installers.
Browsers like Firefox and Chrome already need network access after installation anyway. They update on a regular basis, and pull down optional packages like Chrome's software WebGL rasterizer, malware blacklists, and Firefox's GPU blacklist. So, in practice, it is already impossible to do a true offline install of either browser; you just may not be aware of the things that are left out of the installer.
Some people have lousy Internet connections. Those people use things like download managers to help. Download managers don't work with stub installers.
A simple link to a true offline installer would help those people. (Torrent is fine too, I guess.)
> Large downloads dramatically decrease the number of
> users who get from a download page to actually running
> an application
> they would be foolish to make things worse for the
> majority of users
> just to make them slightly easier for theoretical users
> ...do things like pick your install directory, and then
> forget about the install process entirely as it
> completes without your supervision. That's a good thing,
> and it isn't possible with offline installers.
Firefox's installer is dead simple, and believe me, I am HUGELY grateful for that. The only thing easier than the Windows installer is unzipping the Linux tarball into whatever path I choose. I hate Adobe's Flash and PDF installers, and I fucking DESPISE the Java installer, with its damnable bundling of that bloody Ask.com toolbar.
Seeing Firefox add these additional layers of background updater services and stub installers deeply worries me, and fills me with concern that as a "salary paying organization" (albeit, ostensibly non-profit), they might veer down an ugly path, go the way of the Sith, and start engaging in questionable behavior that is inappropriate for an open source project.
Consider the example of Ubuntu's desktop file search bundling Amazon ads in the results. What if one day, Mozilla decides that in order to pay the bills, it needs to negotiate a deal, whereby all those users with automatic updating enabled should get railroaded with some kind of optional-but-defaulted-to-enabled third party feature suggesting helpful reminders to buy more burritos from Jimbo's Refried Beans Emporium. Just sayin'...
> Browsers like Firefox and Chrome already need network
> access after installation anyway.
A browser only "needs" to to exactly what I ask it to do, and not much else. I tell the browser what to do, not the other way around.
> They update on a regular basis, and pull down optional
> packages like Chrome's software WebGL rasterizer,
> malware blacklists, and Firefox's GPU blacklist.
Malware blacklists are another concept that I tend to reject as mostly ineffective in achieving their stated goal. We could go round and around with that argument for days. Let's not get started on THAT can of worms.
> So, in practice, it is already impossible to do a true
> offline install of either browser; you just may not be
> aware of the things that are left out of the installer.
Anyway, my point re things like the blacklist and webgl rasterizer is that the browser is not completely installed without those components. The offline installer is missing key features and components of the browser; things that show up on feature lists that web applications can rely on. Without the WebGL rasterizer, WebGL demos won't work in your offline-installed copy of Chrome in your VM without hardware accel. Without the GPU blacklist, on some configurations Firefox will be nonfunctional (or worse, crash your machine) because it attempts to do acceleration on a broken driver. Audio/video codecs are another area where it's no longer possible to realistically ship 'everything' in a single offline installer.
If you simply want an offline installer for a bare minimum browser that can do a stripped down subset of HTML5, it's still possible to deliver that. But the amount of the 'web' that works in that bare minimum installation will keep decreasing.
P.S. The reason Firefox has to install a service is because it's not possible to install updates cleanly in any other fashion on UAC-enabled Windows. Your alternatives are installing into %AppData% (like chrome does, which removes the ability to pick an install dir and has other gross consequences) or requiring the user to UAC elevate every time an update installs. As I stated in the parent post, not installing updates puts users at risk when you're dealing with a web browser - the attack surface is enormous.
> The reason Firefox has to install a service is because
> it's not possible to install updates cleanly in any
> other fashion on UAC-enabled Windows.
It makes sense that Windows UAC has forced bad decision making. Windows, in general, is just a hideous, mutated mess nowadays.
Anyway, it's essentially a correct decision to never marry a browser to device drivers or hardware. The websites that count won't dare crash browsers due to hardware requirements. The browsers that count will fail gracefully, and tell the user that their settings are not compliant with the requirements of the page they are trying to view, before they ever crash. However one wishes to communicate the nature of highly specific user options, and then adapt to the long fragmented tail of hardware conditions, is beyond the scope of a "NORMAL" web browser (no-true-scotsman).
When requirements become that unforgiving, you've entered the realm of the highly specialized plug-in, or custom client-server software. It's cool that Firefox is brave enough to wade into those territories, and still deliver awesomeness, but the core necessities of the web browser should never be sacrificed, for fluff and sugar-coated eye candy.
I'm really not worried about the idea that "The Web" is changing. The sites that matter will always work with the bare minimum, with little more than HTTP GET and HTTP POST, even with JavaScript disabled.
The rest is just cruft.
You're talking about a very small number of people who will update the way you described.
Most Firefox users will update by having Firefox automatically update in the background and then be prompted to restart.
I just downloaded the latest version (in my language) by going to 'About Firefox' and hitting the update button.
The intention is to provide a better download experience: there was a gap between the number of people who begin downloading Firefox (counted via hits on download.m.o), and the ones who open it for the first time (counted via hits on the firstrun page). The stub installer is intended to address this. It also checksums the full file to make sure you're getting what you think you're getting.
(Disclaimers: I work for Mozilla, and am responsible for download.mozilla.org among other behind the scenes web things. I don't work on the installers, but we had to change the download scripts to support the stub. I do not speak for Mozilla.)
For future reference: look into externalizing your scripts/css into a separate file and referencing that instead of copying and pasting to every page.
I also liked the find | xargs and sed one-liners. They might as well have been speaking Aramaic.
Someone named YHWH should probably be able to understand Aramaic! :)
I try to do my part by submitting pull requests that fix it, when possible, but most of those pull requests have been sitting ignored for months.
Clearly more people need to be educated that user-agent sniffing = bad.
Feature detection simply doesn't work it many cases, and there's no alternative. Especially with new stuff like audio, sometimes function calls need to be called in different orders, have subtly different behaviors, etc., and user-agent sniffing is literally the only thing you can do.
When I programmed an HTML5 music player, calling .load() before .play() on one platform was necessary, and on another it would crash the Android browser IIRC. No choice but to use user-agent sniffing -- I probably had 20 different things that depended not just on the browser, but on the browser version.
I'd love if we could use just feature detection. Unfortunately, we have to program in the real world.
Assume good faith.
http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-20110113/video.html
So that's the whole point. People who go on about "feature detection" and "follow the spec", and think it's that simple, really don't seem to understand what's actually going on.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLMediaEl...
You can't reliably detect the audio formats Web Audio can decode, and they vary both across hardware and software configurations (because the spec doesn't specify them), so your only choice is to download an entire audio file, try to decode it, and if you fail, download another and try that. Worse still, the <audio> mechanism of handing the browser a list of sources (so it can try to aggressively reduce wasted bandwidth) doesn't work because Web Audio requires you to download a full file before it can be decoded. Oops!
Shipped demos out there rely on Chrome-only Web Audio features that never made it into the spec, because Web Audio was written first as a non-portable implementation and then haphazardly turned into a spec while people were already building code against that implementation.
The spec changed after Google shipped it to the public (without putting it behind a flag or otherwise versioning it) so there are corner cases (albeit mostly small ones) where two spec-compliant implementations (Firefox and Chrome's for example) will produce different output. The only way to address some of these is update the application.
On the bright side, devs from both Mozilla and Google (among others) are working hard on addressing the issues, so it'll probably be fine in a year or so.
I wish Chrome would start adding them, then I could start using them for personal/particularly nerdy projects.
Firefox 26 will introduce Array.of, Math.fround, Generators and Structs.
I don't expect Microsoft to follow Google and Mozilla with their 6-week release cadence. If they keep to their yearly releases, we will see new features integrated into IE much faster than ever before. As a web developer, I can live with 1 year or less of waiting when specs are finalized.
The real problem is Windows XP has been abandoned so those users cannot upgrade past IE8. They must either upgrade their systems or switch to another browser.
However, I haven't used it in years, except for testing. Philosophically, I agree more with Mozilla than Google, but I just can't seem to get past three things:
1) Chrome gets out of my way. The UI is unobtrusive. Firefox is still bulkier here. 2) For whatever reason, more websites render oddly in Firefox/Gecko than in Chrome/Webkit. 3) Chrome, being a part of the Google ecosystem, plays very nicely with my Android phone.
This is not to say I'm not open to switching back to Firefox, but I'm going to need a compelling reason to uproot my workflow and abandon my apps and extensions.
Firefox 25 doesn't appear to give me that compelling reason.
It puts tabs on the side, where they take up low-value horizontal screen space instead of high-value vertical screen space. And you can read the tab titles them even if you have lots of tabs open. And it groups them into trees -- links opened with a middle-click from one tab become children of that tab -- and you can collapse/expand trees.
Try it, you won't regret it.
Any tips on how best to use it?
you can close multiple tabs that are nested by closing the parent when its minimized.
Just yes. God yes.
It's absolutely must-try if you are the can't live without TabMixPlus type. Mission critical if you do any kind of ticket management/research at work. I frequently convert coworkers with the combo.
Bonus: https://addons.mozilla.org/EN-us/firefox/addon/context-searc...
* adblock plus
* adblock plus popup
* multirow bookmark plus
* text link
1) I really want to like Chrome, but I find the UI pretty bad. Yes, it's fine when you have 5/10 tabs open, but try to open more and you'll see (Firefox without addons is just slightly better than Chrome here, but at least I can customize Firefox). That said, there's a planned restyling of the Firefox UI (which you might already know), called Australis, which might fit more your liking (but I'm not sure when it will land).
2) I'm going to admit that I've never had this problem with Firefox. Firefox is a pretty reliable browser (for what is worth, check the Tom's HW Browser GP), and should render pages just fine. The only time I see problems is when developers use webkit- specific features, without including the moz- too (some times it's something not supported by Firefox, but many times it's just lazy developers that test their sites only with Chrome/Safari)
3) I'm in love with the Firefox mobile UI, and I find mobile Chrome just terrible. I'm not sure what do you mean by "plays very nicely", you mean tab sync?
To be clear, I'm not trying to say that Firefox is better/worse/equal/similar to Chrome, and I'm not trying to convince you to switch back. I just wanted to reply to your points.
Firefox's rendering issues have been largely, I imagine, the case of developers designing only for Chrome, or only for IE. It's not Firefox's fault, in that case, but it's still a reason for me to be wary of Firefox.
As for tabs in Chrome... I never have more than eight open at a time. I'm religious about closing tabs I haven't looked at in over five minutes. My own personal quirk, that!
When you study a subject, do you compare sources of information to determine which sources are the best (e.g., authoritative, detailed, etc.) and should be referenced in your notes? If so, how do you compare multiple sources while never having more than eight tabs open?
When I study a deep subject, I almost always end up with hundreds of tabs, including articles, papers, reports, policy statements, discussions, etc. I use the wonderful Tree Style Tab and Session Manager extensions for Firefox to organize tabs and manage sessions. After I finish my research, I process the hundreds of open tabs and add references to the best sources in my personal wiki, which is powered by Org mode.
They couldn't let a few rogue cowboy-developers with an agenda and complete user disconnect overnight just ruin what Mozilla have spent decades building up.
But what would persisting with claims that Java plug-ins are always dangerous have achieved? By a similar argument, the Firefox team fixes several security vulnerabilities they themselves describe as "critical" in each new six-weekly release, so they ought to have advised users not to run Firefox either. Software has bugs, and security flaws need to be fixed, but something about glass houses and stones kept coming to mind with the previous stance. The new one seems a reasonable balance and a constructive policy, and I welcome it as such.
Oracle has been issuing ~50 per quarter recently, an incredibly long time to wait for critical fixes. In security, less is more. Now that Windows has become safer, the big targets are Java and Flash. It continues to be good practice to avoid standing behind big targets.
Also, as has been pointed out in numerous recent debates about Java, it might be unnecessary for most folks, but there are still many millions who use it routinely. Indeed, this is precisely why I think Mozilla's U-turn on this issue was a sensible move.
for better or worse some places java is the one sanctioned way to sign into online banks and sign official documents online.
Having your browser constantly telling you that you can't do that anymore, completely out of the blue, tends to cause dramatic reduction in browser usage in those areas.
Merely stating that Java is a security problem hasn't really sped up a solution to the problem. It's like the talk about how terrible PHP and JavaScript are, but it isn't really helping, is it?
So while my personal experience would not have been ruined by the initial proposal from Mozilla (as I do not use any plugins in my Firefox, I leave that for my Chromium browser), I do agree that they made the right call in the end. But it did at least spark a debate on the matter, and an interesting one at that. And it'll probably come up again, when another Java security issue appears.
It was about time!
Aren't minor updates not a big deal when a vendor is doing rolling releases?
An unbelievable amount of effort has gone into optimizing Gecko, with impressive results, but ultimately it's an aging, legacy codebase. More importantly, neither Gecko nor WebKit/Blink are ready for a manycore world. As Brendan Eich puts it[1]:
The multicore/GPU future is not going to favor either WebKit or Gecko especially. The various companies investing in these engines, including us but of course Apple, Google, and others, will need to multi-thread as well as process-isolate their engines to scale better on “sea of processors” future hardware.
There’s more to it than threads: due to Amdahl’s Law both threads and so-called “Data Parallelism”, aka SIMD, are needed at fine grain in all the stages of the engine, not just in image and audio/video decoding. But threads in C++ mean more hard bugs and security exploits than otherwise.
I learned at SGI, which dived into the deep end of the memory-unsafe SMP kernel pool in the late ’80s, to never say never. Apple and Google can and probably will multi-thread and even SIMD-parallelize more of their code, but it will take them a while, and there will be productivity and safety hits. Servo looks like a good bet to me technically because it is safer by design, as the main implementation language, Rust, focuses on safety as well as concurrency.
1) Signing into Chrome is easier and more intuitive then syncing with a code. Also having your extensions is nice.
2) The Inspect element and console are easier to use in Chrome. (Copy as HTML, etc)
3) I seem to have to click on a YouTube video twice for it to pause in Firefox.
4) Typing search queries in chrome is easier. For example in Firefox, you can't just type define: word to search Google for the definition of 'word', as it complains it is not a known command. I don't often use URL commands and think you should access about:config from somewhere else.
5) In Firefox when you scroll with the mouse you scroll too far per mouse tick.
ad 4: you can create a bookmark, edit its "location" and "keyword" accordingly. "%s" is the placeholder for the text you type. E.g.
Location: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%s Keyword: g
Usage: Type "g whatever" in the URL bar to launch google search for "whatever".
You just need to extract the minimal URL and place "%s" accordingly. That way you can create multiple ad-hoc search engines, like "so foo" -> google search "site:stackoverflow.com foo" etc.
re 4: I do have the keyword 'g' set up but it is still easier to not type g[space] everytime. And yes there is ctrl +k but it is still easier in chrome with just one location.
For the more general case, I agree that firefox can be a bit annoying about treating any address with a : as some kind of protocol. It occasionally bytes me when doing things like trying to google a Python error via copy-paste.
Not sure how I feel about that typo
This is coming soon.
But youtube encodes popular videos into the native firefox formats.
So I'd say it's 50/50.
Is there any way to set a preference for free formats by the way? I.e. if the page specified several sources for the audio or video tags, but puts MP4 first let's say, is there way to override that and say "always prefer WebM if present" or something like that?
This is on my to-do list. Should be in Nightly builds in a few months' time.
[0] https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/late...
It's worked well on Linux, too, but I haven't used it there as much.
NEW Web Audio support (https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/10/songs-of-diridum-pushing-the-web-audio-api-to-its-limits/)
NEW The find bar is no longer shared between tabs
CHANGED If away from Firefox for months, you now will be offered the option to reset it to its default state while preserving your essential information
CHANGED Resetting Firefox no longer clears your browsing session
DEVELOPER CSS3 background-attachment:local support to control background scrolling
DEVELOPER Many new ES6 functions implemented
HTML5 iframe document content can now be specified inline
FIXED Blank or missing page thumbnails when opening a new tab
FIXED Security fixes (https://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox.html)
new ES6 math functions
Map#forEach and Set#forEach
Array.of
Number.parseInt and Number.parseFloatThe idea is that you can sandbox e.g. social buttons by putting them in a sandboxed iframe. You can also populate the iframe's without extra HTTP-requests by the iframe, by using "srcdoc". This is a perfect way to sandbox user generated comments on your blog.
I recommend reading [1] as it covers all of this.
[1]: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/security/sandboxed-if...
At least with the addons I have installed moving the close button of the addons bar is not possible.
I prefer the old position of the search bar buttons. The new one forces me to move the mouse to the other edge of the screen and also look at the opposite sides of the screen.
Unlike other elements it isn't possible to change the positions of the search bar buttons.
Not sure why they changed it. Could it be a bug?
The version number is now basically just a step counter.
That's way more meaningful than +7 major releases. Just look at other software. Sometimes it takes 1 year. Sometimes 6 or even longer. Sometimes the changes are very minor or purely cosmetic. Sometimes the changes are very drastic. Sometimes it's even a complete rewrite.
I don't see how that's any better. Basically, it just means that someone thought it would be a good idea to increase the major number by one.
Also, if there are ~86 releases per decade, those features and improvements are of course far more evenly spread compared to some product which only released 4 versions in the same time span. (IE6 was released in 2001 and IE9 in 2011.)
Images that aren't visible aren't decoded as they are downloaded, or something like that. It reduces peak memory usage on image-heavy pages. It should be coming in Firefox 26.
CHANGED Resetting Firefox no longer clears your browsing session
IMO It's a rather poorly described change.
Previously, when the "Reset Firefox" feature was used, all of your open tabs would get lost in the shuffle. This has now been fixed, and you won't lose your open tabs and current browsing session when Firefox restarts with a fresh and clean profile.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686747
Edit: I would fix this myself, but don't even know where to look...
Wait, is that a new feature? Well let's file a bug.
I am willing to help you get started, if you are interested.
(Also that there are definitely still people working on improvements solely to desktop, see the upcoming redesign)
You do realize that you are commenting in a thread about a short-release-cycle release that adds a good number of improvements while you're also able to check on the improvements coming up in the next releases?
How exactly they manage to pull this off I don't know, but mad props seem apropos... :]
You mean Aurora, and I'm not sure why you use "(sic)" here. It means "that's how it was written upstream, I didn't invent this!"
What exactly are you talking about?
It's hard to believe you have to tell users to use IE over Firefox because of that difference.
Firefox doesn't support advanced (and more user friendly) input types. Number, color, date/time.
At least that's what I'm guessing.
If you have a pet bug that badly needs fixing, though, I can help you get started, if you are interested.
Here are some open bugs which affect sites I work on, one which was opened in 2000. I don't understand how having a bug open for 13 years is acceptable.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63895