Firefox 37 Release Notes
mozilla.org
mozilla.org
This is great! Actually just today I was wondering why Firefox was still using the Flash player for Youtube. Now it isn't anymore :)
(Personally, whenever it fails, or sometimes even when it doesn't, I use youtube-dl.)
What am I doing "wrong"? What am I missing here?
Did you enable media.mediasource.enabled in about:config? Check it for Firefox 36, and if it's true, see if it's highlighted or not. If yes (and you are using the stock Mozilla build and not Gentoo custom one) it means you don't have the default.
Sure, you could enable it already for a while there, but it was buggy. For me the default was false. Strangely, it's false even in Firefox 37, which contradicts the release notes. But at least it works well now in actual videos when enabled.
As you can see, media.mediasource.enabled is disabled by default.
There's a few plugins (eg: youtube-center) that let you play any video via the HTML5 player.
Personally, I got rid of flash sometime around 2011. The only side effect is firefox not crashing ever.
As a bonus, I noticed that a few months ago youtube added video ads that you can't skip to lots of videos (noticed it on my gf's iPad). You'll never have to deal with those with the HTML5 player (or maybe it's just adblock).
It does work if I disable Flash in the browser, but if it is enabled the videos are always played via the Flash plugin.
Is there some setting I have to turn on/off?
Firefox 37 seems to have fixed this issue for me.
Edit: Unfortunately, you must be using SPDY or HTTP/2 to use it. That's a real shame. I already had self-signed TLS and added the header, but then discovered it doesn't work with HTTP/1.1 (and with no good reason, either).
From their site:
OE is not available with HTTP/1 servers because that protocol does not carry the scheme as part of each transaction which is a necessary ingredient for the Alt-Svc approach.
Even better, it seems that Firefox has finally stopped erroneously reporting that some pages with multimedia content served properly over HTTPS were only partially encrypted. This had been a long-standing issue and the early comments from developers were not promising, so kudos and my personal thanks to whoever has fixed this one.
EDIT: I should say that I usually keep Firefox open for days (with only ~30-40 tabs) and at some point it starts consuming unreasonable amounts of CPU just... idling (apparently).
Why? Setting aside that, as the sibling comment points out, Electrolysis is on the roadmap, why? I use Firefox every day with dozens to hundreds of tabs in 1-2 windows and the fact it's not process-per-tab has never bothered me or even been something I noticed. Sure, it's nice to have theoretically; if the browser crashed all the time then sure, I'd like to have just one tab go away instead of session-restoring the whole thing, but that's a minor convenience, and according to about:crashes, it's only happen about two dozen times in two years anyway. On the other hand, it's nice that, despite having 32 tabs open right now, Firefox is only using 210MB of memory.
There are advantages (stability, sandboxing) and disadvantages (memory usage) to the process-per-tab model. I think there's a fair argument that Mozilla should implement it in Firefox, but I don't understand in what sense Firefox would be lagging behind other browsers if they didn't implement it. The Ideal Browser does not necessarily require process-per-tab nor is there some Ideal Browser all the browsers are converging to that Firefox is further behind on.
(I have oodles of memory and CPU, so it's not just a lack-of-resources problem.)
[1] EDIT: I'm talking about something like 30-50% of a single CPU. In extreme cases it would use 100% of one CPU, but those are admittedly outliers.
This is absurd. Apart from anything else FF needs to be better at protecting its users, and that includes separate-process-per-tab. (Ideally, it should be sandboxes, but honestly I'd settle for "separate processes" at this point in time.)
[1] One of them was http://www.xojane.com/
Interesting. Looks like Putin's relationship with Erdogan gets cozier all the time. Yandex has a very strong connection to Russian intelligence services:
Doesn't Mozilla decides for itself, which default it sets?
https://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/position/oXqA0fwH
I am extremely curious to find out what exactly do they have in mind here?
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tiles/
I believe those allow advertising without tracking of users.
It is much easier to flip a preference. If you wanted to get sophisticated, you could create an addon that disables all of the preferences you dislike.
That's a good idea. Another option is to patch the code to remove the new features, unless Mozilla has taken steps to deter unbundling.
If there's a big enough market, perhaps some company will backport the security fixes. How much are you willing to pay? Another option is that you could volunteer and start the fork.
Of course, there's that other problem where developers are only going to support the latest browser.
> Every day a random subset of users are offered a rating widget
> After rating Firefox, an ENGAGEMENT page may open in a background tab.
That's... not the phoenix I signed up for.
(I'm sure I'll toggle this off)
I'm a big fan of Firefox, and I would find being prompted to provide them with useful feedback a positive experience.
https://www.browserling.com/browse/firefox/37/news.ycombinator.com
UPDATE: Strangely, media.mediasource.enabled still remained false for me in Firefox 37 (Linux). I had to manually set it to true, and it's highlighted, meaning that default is still false... Not sure how it fits with release notes then.
Anyone have any thoughts on what that could be used for?
Undefined or Browser specific. Or just a further explosion of the spec?
If you have nested display:contents things, it just works: you end up with a box and what used to be its great-nephews/nieces in the same flat list is all.
So, yes, this may all be there in the spec. But this is really just making the spec larger and larger with what seems to be nominal, if not decreasing, gains.
The same thing as happens if you just delete the parent element from the source (if we ignore for the moment selector matching and inheritance).
> with what seems to be nominal, if not decreasing, gains.
display:contents was pretty commonly requested by component authors who want their component to fit into a larger layout framework (flex, grid, table) as more than one layout unit. I agree that if you're not trying to author components it's of pretty limited utility.
ng-switch in AngularJS, for instance, is going to leave a wrapping tag for the switch declaration.
Nice browser. Better than Chrome. But the UI sucks. First they managed to have a different UI on tablets (phone: Tab button in the upper right corner, upper left on the tablet). Then they iterated and came out with a new (and soon to be if not already) mandatory tablet UI that just .. well .. it's bad.
I still regularly try to open a link in a tab and hit 'share', because at some point in the past they decided that the menu on a link should be
- share
- open in tab
- open in private tab
etc.
I'm a fan, use it on the desktop, wish that FxOS succeeds - but Fennec is a constant nuisance and complete UX failure for me.
Wish I had the time and drive to contribute to the ux - truly appreciate having the option of independent browser on mobile device.
It's interesting that you can still download videos if you let them play and then hold the finger in the middle of the video until a menu pops up and you can Save it from there. So the download functionality is there, it just isn't exposed.
This is a shame, because that download function works much better than the one in Chrome (with Firefox, you can pause/continue).
That's really odd given that Android has a proper filesystem that applications can (and do!) access.
You can use this add-on to fix it (Yes, I'm author of it)
(Now, is there an addon to fix the tablet UI back to 'simple'?)