16 ms·

Firefox 25 is released

347 points by lambda_cube 13y ago

beagle3 13y ago
Can someone shed some light on the rationale and usefulness of the inline "iframe" and "srcdoc" attributes? I read the description, I understand how they work, but I'm not sure what they are good for.
- josso 13y ago
  Mike West, developer advocate at Google Chrome in Münich, had a great talk, recently at GOTO Aarhus, where this was mention. The talk was focused on security and mentions the new sandboxed iframes[1]. With the inline iframe, iframe's can now be used as div – a sandboxed div. The 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-iframes/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/security/sandboxed-if...
  - eevee 13y ago
    But you can also just use a data: URI with the entire document inlined—gross, but no moreso than srcdoc. Why is srcdoc any better?
jstalin 13y ago
I don't understand why click to play doesn't work anymore. I've turned it on, but it allows all plugins to run without the previous "click to activate" box.
- subsection1h 13y ago
  The following thread was the most informative discussion about the state of click-to-play that I found when I searched last month: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2723831 http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2723831
sebm 13y ago
I use Firefox Nightly (since the beginning of this new releases schedule) as my main browser on OS X and I'm quite happy with it. The only (minor) inconvenience is to have to reboot the browser after every update every day.
lobster_johnson 13y ago
Wow, on my MacBook Pro Retina, Firefox is now faster than Chrome. It's noticeable during any graphics update, scrolling pages in particular. 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.
- muizelaar 13y ago
  Firefox 25 has some big changes in the graphics area on OS X. It removed a layer of abstraction used for drawing content and switched to off-main-thread compositing. Either of these changes could have caused the speed up you're seeing.
- skybrian 13y ago
  Maybe try clearing your Chrome cache?
  - mburns 13y ago
    Clearing your cache would make Chrome behave more slowly, because it has to fetch those things over the network again.
- cenhyperion 13y ago
  I've noticed this too on my first gen retina macbook pro. I switched back to firefox from chrome this summer and it's been a notably better experience.
- mirsadm 13y ago
  I am also pretty disappointed with Chrome these days. I switched to Safari because it's just way smoother/faster for me. It's annoying because the sluggishness is still evident on Android.
- piyush_soni 13y ago
  Unfortunately, even after any graphics (WebGL) related improvements, on my Windows machine Firefox still lacks in graphics performance when compared to Chrome. If I open the new Google maps, it is very slow when compared to Google Chrome. Wonder what is the reason for such huge difference in panning/zooming performance. What is Firefox lacking here? Anyone knows more about it?
brymaster 13y ago
Mozilla had postponed turning on the "block third party tracking cookies by default" feature since May, originally slated for FF22 I believe and it keeps getting pushed back. Anyone know the status of this?
jacob019 13y ago
Getting closer, can't wait for 26 ever since that massive memshrink improvement hit the front page.
- Skinney 13y ago
  More info on this?
  - mccr8 13y ago
    I think they are referring to this change: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2013/10/01/memshrink-progress-week-117-120/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2013/10/01/memshrink-pr... 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.
    - jacob019 13y ago
      Yep that's the one. The whole web is image heavy these days so this will affect everyone. We have a lot of older computers on our network, this will really help.
- mixmastamyk 13y ago
  Another one eh? I've been happy with FF ever since the big mem fix around FF 16 or so. Surprised there is still room for another massive fix.
bovermyer 13y ago
I do like the release schedule for Firefox. 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.
- baby 13y ago
  Try Tree Style Tab and you'll see how hard it is to leave Firefox.
  - jryans 13y ago
    Yes, this add-on is amazing. It's a critical part of my web browsing experience.
  - bovermyer 13y ago
    Tree Style Tab? Now I'm curious.
    - nnethercote 13y ago
      https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... 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.
      - wpietri 13y ago
        Wow, just trying it now. So much better than existing tabs. I suspect it's going to take a lot to rewire my brain to use this, but it's clearly worth it. Any tips on how best to use it?
christopherryan 13y ago
GOSPEL ARTIST POSES NUDE! Evon Latrail is the author of a children's book "When Mommy Went to Heaven". She wrote/recorded a few songs; "Lord Bless My Enemies. And, even has a song entitled, "Can't You See (Abortion Is Murder). She went Pro-life after having a abortion! Really???? Now here is a photo of her posing in chocolate as a "Swamp Girl". The word Hypocrite is floating around somewhere. This story has made front page news in the local paper. Go to Google or YouTube and search, Evon Latrail.
u12481632 13y ago
The search bar close, "Highlight All", "Match Case" buttons moved to the right side of the screen while the addonbar close button is still on the left side. 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?
sanyi 13y ago
Argh, it still has this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686747 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686747 Edit: I would fix this myself, but don't even know where to look...
Siecje 13y ago
My issues with Firefox 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.
- jakub_g 13y ago
  ad 5: change "mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_y" in about:config 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 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.
  - Siecje 13y ago
    re 5: I don't mind the speed at which it scrolls, I just want one scroll wheel tick to be less. 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.
    - eieio 13y ago
      If your problem is specifically with "define", you could set up a bookmark to http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=define:%s http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=define:%s with the keyword "define:". Just checked and firefox doesn't complain about the colon in that case. 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.
contextual 13y ago
Mad respect to the contributors and developers of Firefox. I've been loving the updates lately. Firefox has become my browser of choice again :)
- snogglethorpe 13y ago
  It's quite amazing really. FF is a really big project with a complex highly-layered codebase that has to work on a lot of very different platforms (and not just the most recent versions either); changes that might seem simple in the abstract can be very difficult to make in practice. And yet despite this, recently it seems like they're just flying: not only are releases more frequent, but each release seems to contain significant improvements, both in functionality and speed/robustness. How exactly they manage to pull this off I don't know, but mad props seem apropos... :]
super_mario 13y ago
Still the best browser out there, esp. with Pentadactyl. I can't imagine browsing without the two together.
python27 13y ago
very impressive
lucb1e 13y ago
> Search bar is no longer shared between tabs Wait, is that a new feature? Well let's file a bug.
Webbber 13y ago
I've been a FF enthusiast for years now. Don't never really use chrome at all anymore (although I do use torch browser for downloading and site unblocking). I find that for standard browsing, nothing works better and quicker than Mozilla.
grn 13y ago
Changelog: 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) The ES6 features are: new ES6 math functions Map#forEach and Set#forEach Array.of Number.parseInt and Number.parseFloat
sp332 13y ago
Hey, web audio is now in Firefox! That means all the web apps that did user-agent detection instead of feature detection will have to be updated.
- graue 13y ago
  Ugh, why do people do that to begin with? :( I've had Web Audio for a while since I'm on the Aurora channel, and there's so many demos that refuse to work for no reason. 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.
  - crazygringo 13y ago
    Sorry, you're wrong. I hate to be rude about it, but I'm really getting tired of people, who don't know any better, acting like feature detection is always the way to go. 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.
    - eevee 13y ago
      So do what the spec says by default (and if the feature appears to exist), and only deviate for particular UAs. Assume good faith.
      - crazygringo 13y ago
        I agree in principle. But I've got to get stuff done in the real world. I don't have an extra week to read the 22,554 words of JUST the video/audio spec in HTML5, and try to figure out not just how all the browser versions differ from each other, but also how they differ from the spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-20110113/video.html Sometimes user-agent sniffing is the only remotely sane thing you can do. Blame the browsers, not the programmers who have to work around their "idiosyncracies".
k2enemy 13y ago
Still no h.264 on Mac :(
- shmerl 13y ago
  Linux has it though, through GStreamer (but you need to set media.gstreamer.enabled to true in about:config). 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?
- edf825 13y ago
  Hi! This is on my to-do list. Should be in Nightly builds in a few months' time.
- jeena 13y ago
  This can not happen because of licenses afaik.
  - drzaiusapelord 13y ago
    Why can't they use the built-in decoder in OSX like they do in Windows?
    - padenot 13y ago
      We are doing that, it just tales time.
  - edf825 13y ago
    Licensing is the responsibility of the party distributing the codec. When using the platform decoder any licensing fees have already been paid by, e.g. Apple. This is coming soon.
- ck2 13y ago
  Or XP (no media framework api) But youtube encodes popular videos into the native firefox formats.
mrspeaker 13y ago
The ES6 bits makes me all smiley: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=717379%2C866847%2C866849%2C886949 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=717379%... I wish Chrome would start adding them, then I could start using them for personal/particularly nerdy projects.
- robin_reala 13y ago
  I guess you’ve seen kangax’s charts, but he does a good job of tracking progress: http://kangax.github.io/es5-compat-table/es6/ http://kangax.github.io/es5-compat-table/es6/ Firefox 26 will introduce Array.of, Math.fround, Generators and Structs.
  - recuter 13y ago
    That seems to be coming along nicely but it looks like almost nothing made it into IE11 - so doesn't that mean we missed the boat for a few more years? I want to use this stuff so badly already. Gah.
    - megaman821 13y ago
      Since TypeScript is somewhat tracking ES6 proposals it looks like Microsoft will be quick to include it once the spec is finalized.
      - recuter 13y ago
        Will the spec be finalized before IE11 ships? Seems unlikely.
        megaman821 13y ago
        Well since IE11 shipped already with Windows 8.1, no. 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.
asdasf 13y ago
How did firefox get development stagnate so badly? We have more workarounds and polyfills for dealing with firefox than we do for dealing with IE now, it is ridiculous.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- sp332 13y ago
  Development isn't stagnant. They have releases on a 6-week schedule now, that's why each update is smaller. Because of the more frequent releases, features get released as soon as they're ready instead of waiting months or years for a "major release" like they used to.
  - asdasf 13y ago
    I did not suggest the size of any given update, or the schedule they are released at was evidence of stagnation. The fact that firefox is the problem browser now instead of IE is what I pointed to. It is nearly 2014. Firefox still doesn't have html 5 form elements even. Remember making internal use sites and telling people "we're not supporting IE, use firefox"? Now we're doing "we're not supporting firefox, use chrome or IE or your phone".
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - Yoric 13y ago
      I'm not sure what you mean. As far as I can remember, Firefox has had HTML 5 forms since Firefox 4 (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/HTML/Forms_in_HTML?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=Web%2FHTML%2FForms_in_HTML https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/HTML/Form...). What exactly are you talking about?
      - oblio 13y ago
        I think he means these: http://caniuse.com/#search=input http://caniuse.com/#search=input Firefox doesn't support advanced (and more user friendly) input types. Number, color, date/time. At least that's what I'm guessing.
p4bl0 13y ago
> The find bar is no longer shared between tabs It was about time!
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- avdd_ 13y ago
  Why? I found that useful.
  - avdd_ 13y ago
    Actually, it's the sharing of search terms across tabs that is useful, and is still supported.
    - cpeterso 13y ago
      Do you need to toggle a pref to share search terms across tabs? It no longer works for me. :(
iMark 13y ago
Inline iframe content is a fascinating addition. Anyone have any further documention on it? I'm guessing that it's a viable alternative to using xmlhttprequests to update page content, which is really rather neat.
- Yoric 13y ago
  Even better: this feature was added by a new contributor :)
qwerty_asdf 13y ago
I find it irritating that Mozilla now herds its Firefox users toward the Stub installer, and not the full offline-install redistributable binary. The actual download itself is available on the "Systems & Languages" page: > https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/ 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.
- kevingadd 13y ago
  Large downloads dramatically decrease the number of users who get from a download page to actually running an application, even for web browsers. As a result, any steps you can take to make an install process faster or easier will have a tangible impact on the number of customers you have (and any revenue potential that results). Mozilla, like any other company, has salaries to pay, so they would be foolish to make things worse for the majority of users just to make them slightly easier for theoretical users who want to install in a networkless VM and can't figure out that the stub is a stub. 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.
  - baddox 13y ago
    All your points are valid, but none of them explain why Mozilla couldn't or shouldn't just put an explicit link from the main download page to something like "offline install" or "redistributable install."
agentultra 13y ago
I developed a patch that added the VAO WebGL extensions earlier this year and it's finally out there! So. Cool. And everyone at mozilla is really helpful if you're thinking about contributing for the first time.
- mortyseinfeld 13y ago
  Sorry to be dense, I know what WebGL is, but what's VAO?
  - riq_ 13y ago
    It means Vertex Array Object. http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/ARB/vertex_array_object.txt http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/ARB/vertex_array_object...
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - evanmoran 13y ago
    My understanding is Vertex Array Objects are one of the core browser improvements that asm.js taps into to make C++ based game engines (unreal, rage, unity) crazy fast. http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/154994-epic-mozilla-release-unreal-engine-3-html5-demo-to-the-public-and-its-awesome http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/154994-epic-mozilla-releas...
- lxt 13y ago
  Thank you for your contribution!
- Yoric 13y ago
  We love contributors :) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/introduction https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/introduction
  - rohitv 13y ago
    This is great! Thanks :) Anyone know of any other open source projects that one can contribute to?
Silhouette 13y ago
Pleased to see they've backed off on the draconian Java restrictions. I now see (with an up-to-date plug-in) three options: always or never active, or ask to activate, with the latter then prompting as a one-time or remembered choice. This seems a much more reasonable balance between trying to protect security and making sure people can get work done than some of the other proposals in recent discussions.
- Svip 13y ago
  Look at it this way; I love a good debate. Even where more extreme measures are proposed. In fact, when starting a discussion about a problem, not having proposals (i.e. solutions) of your own, tends to leave your debate dead in the water. 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.
- josteink 13y ago
  They honestly had to though. their aggressive stance on plugins risked losing them significant market share in the Java-heavier parts of the world. 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.
  - mixmastamyk 13y ago
    The plugin is quite dangerous, an "aggressive" stance sounds reasonable to me. In the interest of fairness I keep a similar stance with IE/ActiveX.
    - Silhouette 13y ago
      The plugin is quite dangerous, an "aggressive" stance sounds reasonable to me. 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.
liveoneggs 13y ago
So session cookies now never expire? CHANGED Resetting Firefox no longer clears your browsing session
- dubrocks 13y ago
  A Firefox reset is a maintenance operation, they don't mean restarting FF.
- snarfy 13y ago
  I believe 'session' and 'session cookies' are different things here. IMO It's a rather poorly described change.
  - wnevets 13y ago
    Yeah, session probably means tabs open, etc.
- msujaws 13y ago
  This is a misinterpretation of what they are saying. Firefox has a "Reset Firefox" feature that will reset many of the settings within Firefox that may be causing a poor browsing experience. 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.
Yoric 13y ago
As a side note we have a "I am a Mozillian, ask me anything" on Reddit in a few hours. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/
Sam121 13y ago
It will hang like previous versions ? Unhappy with the performance so i shift to chrome.
- Yoric 13y ago
  Alternatively, you could help us improve the responsiveness of Firefox: https://dutherenverseauborddelatable.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/making-firefox-feel-as-fast-as-its-benchmarks-async-programming-on-the-mozilla-platform-part-1/ https://dutherenverseauborddelatable.wordpress.com/2013/10/0... I am willing to help you get started, if you are interested.
- moystard 13y ago
  I don't understand how you can be unhappy about the performance of the few last versions of Firefox. It is now quite savy in memory (especially in comparison with Chrome) and handles everything I throw at it without noticeable janks.
  - agumonkey 13y ago
    The GUI toolkit take its toll but I can't say enough how much the js, html/css renderer, network and memory subsystems have been improved, chrome doesn't feel faster, except on the UI side of things, but can show long lags when loading/rendering. Kudos to Mozilla.
  - telesphore 13y ago
    Well it's certainly better. But, as some one who has to run Selenium at work a fair bit (it makes me so sad), I can tell you that Aurora is quite savvy and the memory use never really got out of hand but FF24 still crashes after running a fairly long suite.
    - moystard 13y ago
      I am not a Selenium user and I am genuinely curious: does the same thing happen on Chrome?
workbench 13y ago
Still not input range support? laaaaaame
erikb 13y ago
I know a guy who still runs FF3. It's really incredible how fast Mozilla can push out new releases now!
- josefresco 13y ago
  Maybe this comment was meant to be sarcastic, but the version number is not an indication of progress as it was with prior development. When Chrome went all nutty with frequent new version numbers, Mozilla followed suit.
  - ahoge 13y ago
    You know that there is a point to it, right? Now there are always 4 versions: fresh nightly builds, dev, beta, and stable. Every ~6 weeks dev becomes beta and beta becomes the new stable version. This way you get a higher degree of parallelization. There is no global feature or whatever freeze. New stuff is added all the time. The version number is now basically just a step counter.
    - BlackDeath3 13y ago
      Can't wait for Firefox 150!
      - ahoge 13y ago
        I know you tried to be funny, but this "150" actually means something very specific. It's +125 of those steps. 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.
        BlackDeath3 13y ago
        What I said doesn't imply that I find the idea silly, but "Firefox 150" does indeed sound silly to me. However, what you say seems to hinge on the idea that each of Firefox's steps are consistent in their impact. Is that true?
bsimpson 13y ago
Why is this news? I don't remember seeing a "Chrome r30 released" thread. Aren't minor updates not a big deal when a vendor is doing rolling releases?
- wnevets 13y ago
  because firefox needs some love
  - mortyseinfeld 13y ago
    I hope that dicking around with Rust turns into some end-user love. I love some R&D, but Mozilla's limited non-profit funding, there should be priorities (yes, I hope they can walk and chew gum at the same time). But the point is that 3 is a magic number, and we need Mozilla to keep Google and Microsoft on the straight and true path ;)
    - graue 13y ago
      Rust is about long-term strategy. They need it to build Servo, and they need Servo so they have a state-of-the-art browser engine in 5 years. 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. https://brendaneich.com/2013/02/why-mozilla-matters/ https://brendaneich.com/2013/02/why-mozilla-matters/
ksec 13y ago
With All of their effort shifted to Firefox OS. Dont expect much improvement with Desktop Firefox in the short run.
- daleharvey 13y ago
  Its worth mentioning that Firefox OS and Desktop Firefox share gecko, a huge amount of the improvements for Firefox OS will be relevant for desktop, Especially regarding the performance and memory improvements. (Also that there are definitely still people working on improvements solely to desktop, see the upcoming redesign)
  - ksec 13y ago
    Yes, but not everything is applicable to Desktop Firefox. And the porting back takes time. We have already been told dont expect e10s until early 2015. That in Mozilla calendar is telling me it will be around by the end of 2015.
- skore 13y ago
  > Dont expect much improvement with Desktop Firefox in the short run. 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?
ghx 13y ago
Wasn't there supposed to be a new UI with this release? When you Google "firefox new ui", the headlines all point to 25 having that. http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/05/mozilla-is-planning-a-major-design-overhaul-with-the-release-of-firefox-25-in-october-heres-a-quick-peek/ http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/05/mozilla-is-planning...
- lillycat 13y ago
  It is not yet ready. Expected for Fx 28 (but would not sign it with my blood). There is a UX Nightly with Australis (the name of the redesign) out there.
  - untog 13y ago
    Really looking forward to it. Maybe it makes me sound superficial but that might be what finally makes me switch back from Chrome - the compactness of the Chrome UI is great. Firefox on OSX is really in need of a boost.
    - dmunoz 13y ago
      I don't know how well it works on a OS X, but I have been using the firefox-ux nightly build on Windows for awhile now. You can find them at [0]. It's been as stable for me as the other nightly builds tend to be, which is very stable, but do be aware that going this route can lead to running into bugs. I understand why these things take a long time to shake out, but it is massively disappointing to hear that the new UI won't be released until Firefox 28 or later! [0] https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-ux/ https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/late...
      - abrowne 13y ago
        I've been using UX Nightly on OS X as my primary personal browser for something like 6 months now and it has given me very little trouble. It's worked well on Linux, too, but I haven't used it there as much.
nick2021 13y ago
Chrome is better.
mortyseinfeld 13y ago
I've been toying around with Auoera(sic) as a dev debugging tool lately and curious what the relationship between built-in dev tools and firebug is?
- computer 13y ago
  > "Auoera(sic) " [sic] 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!"
- campd 13y ago
  https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/10/firefox-developer-tools-and-firebug/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/10/firefox-developer-tools-an... has the current description of that relationship.
eYsYs 13y ago
Hey FF team, did you get the cake from IE guys? This tradition started by IE always makes a good story to tell, especially for an industry infamous for cut-throat competition.
- ordinary 13y ago
  As far as I know they stopped when Mozilla tried to abuse their generosity by switching to a shorter release cycle. Not cool, guys!
  - roryokane 13y ago
    I don't think Mozilla changed release cycles with the intention of getting more cake...
    - SimpleXYZ 13y ago
      You never know...
- belandrew 13y ago
  They stopped a couple of years ago. For the first few small releases 5-7 the IE team sent a cupcake instead but they stopped with 8.

347 points by lambda_cube 13y ago

Can someone shed some light on the rationale and usefulness of the inline "iframe" and "srcdoc" attributes? I read the description, I understand how they work, but I'm not sure what they are good for.

josso 13y ago
Mike West, developer advocate at Google Chrome in Münich, had a great talk, recently at GOTO Aarhus, where this was mention. The talk was focused on security and mentions the new sandboxed iframes[1]. With the inline iframe, iframe's can now be used as div – a sandboxed div. The 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-iframes/ http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/security/sandboxed-if...
- eevee 13y ago
  But you can also just use a data: URI with the entire document inlined—gross, but no moreso than srcdoc. Why is srcdoc any better?

jstalin 13y ago

I don't understand why click to play doesn't work anymore. I've turned it on, but it allows all plugins to run without the previous "click to activate" box.

subsection1h 13y ago
The following thread was the most informative discussion about the state of click-to-play that I found when I searched last month: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2723831 http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2723831

sebm 13y ago

I use Firefox Nightly (since the beginning of this new releases schedule) as my main browser on OS X and I'm quite happy with it. The only (minor) inconvenience is to have to reboot the browser after every update every day.

lobster_johnson 13y ago

Wow, on my MacBook Pro Retina, Firefox is now faster than Chrome. It's noticeable during any graphics update, scrolling pages in particular. 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.

muizelaar 13y ago
Firefox 25 has some big changes in the graphics area on OS X. It removed a layer of abstraction used for drawing content and switched to off-main-thread compositing. Either of these changes could have caused the speed up you're seeing.
skybrian 13y ago
Maybe try clearing your Chrome cache?
- mburns 13y ago
  Clearing your cache would make Chrome behave more slowly, because it has to fetch those things over the network again.
cenhyperion 13y ago
I've noticed this too on my first gen retina macbook pro. I switched back to firefox from chrome this summer and it's been a notably better experience.
mirsadm 13y ago
I am also pretty disappointed with Chrome these days. I switched to Safari because it's just way smoother/faster for me. It's annoying because the sluggishness is still evident on Android.
piyush_soni 13y ago
Unfortunately, even after any graphics (WebGL) related improvements, on my Windows machine Firefox still lacks in graphics performance when compared to Chrome. If I open the new Google maps, it is very slow when compared to Google Chrome. Wonder what is the reason for such huge difference in panning/zooming performance. What is Firefox lacking here? Anyone knows more about it?

brymaster 13y ago

Mozilla had postponed turning on the "block third party tracking cookies by default" feature since May, originally slated for FF22 I believe and it keeps getting pushed back. Anyone know the status of this?

jacob019 13y ago

Getting closer, can't wait for 26 ever since that massive memshrink improvement hit the front page.

Skinney 13y ago
More info on this?
- mccr8 13y ago
  I think they are referring to this change: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2013/10/01/memshrink-progress-week-117-120/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2013/10/01/memshrink-pr... 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.
  - jacob019 13y ago
    Yep that's the one. The whole web is image heavy these days so this will affect everyone. We have a lot of older computers on our network, this will really help.
mixmastamyk 13y ago
Another one eh? I've been happy with FF ever since the big mem fix around FF 16 or so. Surprised there is still room for another massive fix.

bovermyer 13y ago

I do like the release schedule for Firefox. 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.

baby 13y ago
Try Tree Style Tab and you'll see how hard it is to leave Firefox.
- jryans 13y ago
  Yes, this add-on is amazing. It's a critical part of my web browsing experience.
- bovermyer 13y ago
  Tree Style Tab? Now I'm curious.
  - nnethercote 13y ago
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... 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.
    - wpietri 13y ago
      Wow, just trying it now. So much better than existing tabs. I suspect it's going to take a lot to rewire my brain to use this, but it's clearly worth it. Any tips on how best to use it?

christopherryan 13y ago

GOSPEL ARTIST POSES NUDE! Evon Latrail is the author of a children's book "When Mommy Went to Heaven". She wrote/recorded a few songs; "Lord Bless My Enemies. And, even has a song entitled, "Can't You See (Abortion Is Murder). She went Pro-life after having a abortion! Really???? Now here is a photo of her posing in chocolate as a "Swamp Girl". The word Hypocrite is floating around somewhere. This story has made front page news in the local paper. Go to Google or YouTube and search, Evon Latrail.

u12481632 13y ago

The search bar close, "Highlight All", "Match Case" buttons moved to the right side of the screen while the addonbar close button is still on the left side. 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?

sanyi 13y ago

Argh, it still has this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686747 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686747 Edit: I would fix this myself, but don't even know where to look...

Siecje 13y ago

My issues with Firefox 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.

jakub_g 13y ago
ad 5: change "mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_y" in about:config 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 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.
- Siecje 13y ago
  re 5: I don't mind the speed at which it scrolls, I just want one scroll wheel tick to be less. 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.
  - eieio 13y ago
    If your problem is specifically with "define", you could set up a bookmark to http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=define:%s http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=define:%s with the keyword "define:". Just checked and firefox doesn't complain about the colon in that case. 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.

contextual 13y ago

Mad respect to the contributors and developers of Firefox. I've been loving the updates lately. Firefox has become my browser of choice again :)

snogglethorpe 13y ago
It's quite amazing really. FF is a really big project with a complex highly-layered codebase that has to work on a lot of very different platforms (and not just the most recent versions either); changes that might seem simple in the abstract can be very difficult to make in practice. And yet despite this, recently it seems like they're just flying: not only are releases more frequent, but each release seems to contain significant improvements, both in functionality and speed/robustness. How exactly they manage to pull this off I don't know, but mad props seem apropos... :]

super_mario 13y ago

Still the best browser out there, esp. with Pentadactyl. I can't imagine browsing without the two together.

python27 13y ago

very impressive

lucb1e 13y ago

> Search bar is no longer shared between tabs Wait, is that a new feature? Well let's file a bug.

Webbber 13y ago

I've been a FF enthusiast for years now. Don't never really use chrome at all anymore (although I do use torch browser for downloading and site unblocking). I find that for standard browsing, nothing works better and quicker than Mozilla.

grn 13y ago

Changelog: 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) The ES6 features are: new ES6 math functions Map#forEach and Set#forEach Array.of Number.parseInt and Number.parseFloat

sp332 13y ago

Hey, web audio is now in Firefox! That means all the web apps that did user-agent detection instead of feature detection will have to be updated.

graue 13y ago
Ugh, why do people do that to begin with? :( I've had Web Audio for a while since I'm on the Aurora channel, and there's so many demos that refuse to work for no reason. 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.
- crazygringo 13y ago
  Sorry, you're wrong. I hate to be rude about it, but I'm really getting tired of people, who don't know any better, acting like feature detection is always the way to go. 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.
  - eevee 13y ago
    So do what the spec says by default (and if the feature appears to exist), and only deviate for particular UAs. Assume good faith.
    - crazygringo 13y ago
      I agree in principle. But I've got to get stuff done in the real world. I don't have an extra week to read the 22,554 words of JUST the video/audio spec in HTML5, and try to figure out not just how all the browser versions differ from each other, but also how they differ from the spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-20110113/video.html Sometimes user-agent sniffing is the only remotely sane thing you can do. Blame the browsers, not the programmers who have to work around their "idiosyncracies".

k2enemy 13y ago

Still no h.264 on Mac :(

shmerl 13y ago
Linux has it though, through GStreamer (but you need to set media.gstreamer.enabled to true in about:config). 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?
edf825 13y ago
Hi! This is on my to-do list. Should be in Nightly builds in a few months' time.
jeena 13y ago
This can not happen because of licenses afaik.
- drzaiusapelord 13y ago
  Why can't they use the built-in decoder in OSX like they do in Windows?
  - padenot 13y ago
    We are doing that, it just tales time.
- edf825 13y ago
  Licensing is the responsibility of the party distributing the codec. When using the platform decoder any licensing fees have already been paid by, e.g. Apple. This is coming soon.
ck2 13y ago
Or XP (no media framework api) But youtube encodes popular videos into the native firefox formats.

mrspeaker 13y ago

The ES6 bits makes me all smiley: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=717379%2C866847%2C866849%2C886949 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=717379%... I wish Chrome would start adding them, then I could start using them for personal/particularly nerdy projects.

robin_reala 13y ago
I guess you’ve seen kangax’s charts, but he does a good job of tracking progress: http://kangax.github.io/es5-compat-table/es6/ http://kangax.github.io/es5-compat-table/es6/ Firefox 26 will introduce Array.of, Math.fround, Generators and Structs.
- recuter 13y ago
  That seems to be coming along nicely but it looks like almost nothing made it into IE11 - so doesn't that mean we missed the boat for a few more years? I want to use this stuff so badly already. Gah.
  - megaman821 13y ago
    Since TypeScript is somewhat tracking ES6 proposals it looks like Microsoft will be quick to include it once the spec is finalized.
    - recuter 13y ago
      Will the spec be finalized before IE11 ships? Seems unlikely.
      - megaman821 13y ago
        Well since IE11 shipped already with Windows 8.1, no. 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.

asdasf 13y ago

How did firefox get development stagnate so badly? We have more workarounds and polyfills for dealing with firefox than we do for dealing with IE now, it is ridiculous.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
sp332 13y ago
Development isn't stagnant. They have releases on a 6-week schedule now, that's why each update is smaller. Because of the more frequent releases, features get released as soon as they're ready instead of waiting months or years for a "major release" like they used to.
- asdasf 13y ago
  I did not suggest the size of any given update, or the schedule they are released at was evidence of stagnation. The fact that firefox is the problem browser now instead of IE is what I pointed to. It is nearly 2014. Firefox still doesn't have html 5 form elements even. Remember making internal use sites and telling people "we're not supporting IE, use firefox"? Now we're doing "we're not supporting firefox, use chrome or IE or your phone".
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - Yoric 13y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean. As far as I can remember, Firefox has had HTML 5 forms since Firefox 4 (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/HTML/Forms_in_HTML?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=Web%2FHTML%2FForms_in_HTML https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/HTML/Form...). What exactly are you talking about?
    - oblio 13y ago
      I think he means these: http://caniuse.com/#search=input http://caniuse.com/#search=input Firefox doesn't support advanced (and more user friendly) input types. Number, color, date/time. At least that's what I'm guessing.

p4bl0 13y ago

> The find bar is no longer shared between tabs It was about time!

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
avdd_ 13y ago
Why? I found that useful.
- avdd_ 13y ago
  Actually, it's the sharing of search terms across tabs that is useful, and is still supported.
  - cpeterso 13y ago
    Do you need to toggle a pref to share search terms across tabs? It no longer works for me. :(

iMark 13y ago

Inline iframe content is a fascinating addition. Anyone have any further documention on it? I'm guessing that it's a viable alternative to using xmlhttprequests to update page content, which is really rather neat.

Yoric 13y ago
Even better: this feature was added by a new contributor :)

qwerty_asdf 13y ago

I find it irritating that Mozilla now herds its Firefox users toward the Stub installer, and not the full offline-install redistributable binary. The actual download itself is available on the "Systems & Languages" page: > https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/ 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.

kevingadd 13y ago
Large downloads dramatically decrease the number of users who get from a download page to actually running an application, even for web browsers. As a result, any steps you can take to make an install process faster or easier will have a tangible impact on the number of customers you have (and any revenue potential that results). Mozilla, like any other company, has salaries to pay, so they would be foolish to make things worse for the majority of users just to make them slightly easier for theoretical users who want to install in a networkless VM and can't figure out that the stub is a stub. 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.
- baddox 13y ago
  All your points are valid, but none of them explain why Mozilla couldn't or shouldn't just put an explicit link from the main download page to something like "offline install" or "redistributable install."

agentultra 13y ago

I developed a patch that added the VAO WebGL extensions earlier this year and it's finally out there! So. Cool. And everyone at mozilla is really helpful if you're thinking about contributing for the first time.

mortyseinfeld 13y ago
Sorry to be dense, I know what WebGL is, but what's VAO?
- riq_ 13y ago
  It means Vertex Array Object. http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/ARB/vertex_array_object.txt http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/ARB/vertex_array_object...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- evanmoran 13y ago
  My understanding is Vertex Array Objects are one of the core browser improvements that asm.js taps into to make C++ based game engines (unreal, rage, unity) crazy fast. http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/154994-epic-mozilla-release-unreal-engine-3-html5-demo-to-the-public-and-its-awesome http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/154994-epic-mozilla-releas...
lxt 13y ago
Thank you for your contribution!
Yoric 13y ago
We love contributors :) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/introduction https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/introduction
- rohitv 13y ago
  This is great! Thanks :) Anyone know of any other open source projects that one can contribute to?

Silhouette 13y ago

Pleased to see they've backed off on the draconian Java restrictions. I now see (with an up-to-date plug-in) three options: always or never active, or ask to activate, with the latter then prompting as a one-time or remembered choice. This seems a much more reasonable balance between trying to protect security and making sure people can get work done than some of the other proposals in recent discussions.

Svip 13y ago
Look at it this way; I love a good debate. Even where more extreme measures are proposed. In fact, when starting a discussion about a problem, not having proposals (i.e. solutions) of your own, tends to leave your debate dead in the water. 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.
josteink 13y ago
They honestly had to though. their aggressive stance on plugins risked losing them significant market share in the Java-heavier parts of the world. 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.
- mixmastamyk 13y ago
  The plugin is quite dangerous, an "aggressive" stance sounds reasonable to me. In the interest of fairness I keep a similar stance with IE/ActiveX.
  - Silhouette 13y ago
    The plugin is quite dangerous, an "aggressive" stance sounds reasonable to me. 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.

liveoneggs 13y ago

So session cookies now never expire? CHANGED Resetting Firefox no longer clears your browsing session

dubrocks 13y ago
A Firefox reset is a maintenance operation, they don't mean restarting FF.
snarfy 13y ago
I believe 'session' and 'session cookies' are different things here. IMO It's a rather poorly described change.
- wnevets 13y ago
  Yeah, session probably means tabs open, etc.
msujaws 13y ago
This is a misinterpretation of what they are saying. Firefox has a "Reset Firefox" feature that will reset many of the settings within Firefox that may be causing a poor browsing experience. 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.

Yoric 13y ago

As a side note we have a "I am a Mozillian, ask me anything" on Reddit in a few hours. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/

Sam121 13y ago

It will hang like previous versions ? Unhappy with the performance so i shift to chrome.

Yoric 13y ago
Alternatively, you could help us improve the responsiveness of Firefox: https://dutherenverseauborddelatable.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/making-firefox-feel-as-fast-as-its-benchmarks-async-programming-on-the-mozilla-platform-part-1/ https://dutherenverseauborddelatable.wordpress.com/2013/10/0... I am willing to help you get started, if you are interested.
moystard 13y ago
I don't understand how you can be unhappy about the performance of the few last versions of Firefox. It is now quite savy in memory (especially in comparison with Chrome) and handles everything I throw at it without noticeable janks.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  The GUI toolkit take its toll but I can't say enough how much the js, html/css renderer, network and memory subsystems have been improved, chrome doesn't feel faster, except on the UI side of things, but can show long lags when loading/rendering. Kudos to Mozilla.
- telesphore 13y ago
  Well it's certainly better. But, as some one who has to run Selenium at work a fair bit (it makes me so sad), I can tell you that Aurora is quite savvy and the memory use never really got out of hand but FF24 still crashes after running a fairly long suite.
  - moystard 13y ago
    I am not a Selenium user and I am genuinely curious: does the same thing happen on Chrome?

workbench 13y ago

Still not input range support? laaaaaame

erikb 13y ago

I know a guy who still runs FF3. It's really incredible how fast Mozilla can push out new releases now!

josefresco 13y ago
Maybe this comment was meant to be sarcastic, but the version number is not an indication of progress as it was with prior development. When Chrome went all nutty with frequent new version numbers, Mozilla followed suit.
- ahoge 13y ago
  You know that there is a point to it, right? Now there are always 4 versions: fresh nightly builds, dev, beta, and stable. Every ~6 weeks dev becomes beta and beta becomes the new stable version. This way you get a higher degree of parallelization. There is no global feature or whatever freeze. New stuff is added all the time. The version number is now basically just a step counter.
  - BlackDeath3 13y ago
    Can't wait for Firefox 150!
    - ahoge 13y ago
      I know you tried to be funny, but this "150" actually means something very specific. It's +125 of those steps. 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.
      - BlackDeath3 13y ago
        What I said doesn't imply that I find the idea silly, but "Firefox 150" does indeed sound silly to me. However, what you say seems to hinge on the idea that each of Firefox's steps are consistent in their impact. Is that true?

bsimpson 13y ago

Why is this news? I don't remember seeing a "Chrome r30 released" thread. Aren't minor updates not a big deal when a vendor is doing rolling releases?

wnevets 13y ago
because firefox needs some love
- mortyseinfeld 13y ago
  I hope that dicking around with Rust turns into some end-user love. I love some R&D, but Mozilla's limited non-profit funding, there should be priorities (yes, I hope they can walk and chew gum at the same time). But the point is that 3 is a magic number, and we need Mozilla to keep Google and Microsoft on the straight and true path ;)
  - graue 13y ago
    Rust is about long-term strategy. They need it to build Servo, and they need Servo so they have a state-of-the-art browser engine in 5 years. 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. https://brendaneich.com/2013/02/why-mozilla-matters/ https://brendaneich.com/2013/02/why-mozilla-matters/

ksec 13y ago

With All of their effort shifted to Firefox OS. Dont expect much improvement with Desktop Firefox in the short run.

daleharvey 13y ago
Its worth mentioning that Firefox OS and Desktop Firefox share gecko, a huge amount of the improvements for Firefox OS will be relevant for desktop, Especially regarding the performance and memory improvements. (Also that there are definitely still people working on improvements solely to desktop, see the upcoming redesign)
- ksec 13y ago
  Yes, but not everything is applicable to Desktop Firefox. And the porting back takes time. We have already been told dont expect e10s until early 2015. That in Mozilla calendar is telling me it will be around by the end of 2015.
skore 13y ago
> Dont expect much improvement with Desktop Firefox in the short run. 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?

ghx 13y ago

Wasn't there supposed to be a new UI with this release? When you Google "firefox new ui", the headlines all point to 25 having that. http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/05/mozilla-is-planning-a-major-design-overhaul-with-the-release-of-firefox-25-in-october-heres-a-quick-peek/ http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/06/05/mozilla-is-planning...

lillycat 13y ago
It is not yet ready. Expected for Fx 28 (but would not sign it with my blood). There is a UX Nightly with Australis (the name of the redesign) out there.
- untog 13y ago
  Really looking forward to it. Maybe it makes me sound superficial but that might be what finally makes me switch back from Chrome - the compactness of the Chrome UI is great. Firefox on OSX is really in need of a boost.
  - dmunoz 13y ago
    I don't know how well it works on a OS X, but I have been using the firefox-ux nightly build on Windows for awhile now. You can find them at [0]. It's been as stable for me as the other nightly builds tend to be, which is very stable, but do be aware that going this route can lead to running into bugs. I understand why these things take a long time to shake out, but it is massively disappointing to hear that the new UI won't be released until Firefox 28 or later! [0] https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-ux/ https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/late...
    - abrowne 13y ago
      I've been using UX Nightly on OS X as my primary personal browser for something like 6 months now and it has given me very little trouble. It's worked well on Linux, too, but I haven't used it there as much.

nick2021 13y ago

Chrome is better.

mortyseinfeld 13y ago

I've been toying around with Auoera(sic) as a dev debugging tool lately and curious what the relationship between built-in dev tools and firebug is?

computer 13y ago
> "Auoera(sic) " [sic] 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!"
campd 13y ago
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/10/firefox-developer-tools-and-firebug/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/10/firefox-developer-tools-an... has the current description of that relationship.

eYsYs 13y ago

Hey FF team, did you get the cake from IE guys? This tradition started by IE always makes a good story to tell, especially for an industry infamous for cut-throat competition.

ordinary 13y ago
As far as I know they stopped when Mozilla tried to abuse their generosity by switching to a shorter release cycle. Not cool, guys!
- roryokane 13y ago
  I don't think Mozilla changed release cycles with the intention of getting more cake...
  - SimpleXYZ 13y ago
    You never know...
belandrew 13y ago
They stopped a couple of years ago. For the first few small releases 5-7 the IE team sent a cupcake instead but they stopped with 8.