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I think that these kind of wearable devices would really benefits from the Firefox OS. First, the Firefox OS is from Mozilla, and Mozilla is known for making the best softwares. Second, the Firefox OS embrace open web technologies like JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3, which are the best there are. Third, the Firefox OS is open because it's from Mozilla and because it uses open web technologies. Fourth, the Firefox OS uses Linux kernel. Fifth, the Firefox OS can be used for the embedded softwares and hardwares. Sixth, the Firefox OS is big show in India, the country of softwares. Seventh, the Firefox OS is use important w3c standards. Seven points make me thinking that the Firefox OS is good choice! It is be best choice even!

...there are some other interesting things you can do with your inexpensive smartphone. I have a couple of these:
https://developer.mozilla.org/...
For use in development with this:
http://www.rangenetworks.com/p...
And it may enable SCADA and text message coverage of farms and places that will never get commercial GSM coverage at an incredible pricepoint.

For games though, there are still far more (and better) web games for Flash than there are for noFlash.

I'd agree with more but not better. What's an example of a Flash game that's better than HTML5 games like DeadTrigger 2 or AngryBots or HexGL or Bejeweled or Browser Quest or the GA.ME games. I don't think Flash games have any technical edge over HTML5 games these days.

The PS4's user interface is implemented in WebGL. Don Olmstead gave a talk on its development and optimization.

I suggest you read the Mozilla post. Basically, the output *will* be free, with open-source software under the Apache 2.0 license, and the patents being licensed according to W3C rules. So it doesn't get any more free than that. As for DRM, it's not a property of the codec. There certainly won't be any in the codec itself, but people can put DRM on top of anything they want (including ASCII art).

Sorry, son, you're the one who's full of shit in this matter.

Firefox's share of the market is plummeting because people are unhappy with it. It's likely under 10% at this point, across all platforms. IE 11 and Safari for iOS each almost have more users than Firefox does in total. Chrome for Android has far more. Even Opera Mini almost has as many users as Firefox does!

Fuck, even Mozilla's own Firefox satisfaction numbers show that its users don't like it. Over 80% of Firefox users are unhappy with it! That's an unbelievably bad rating, regardless of product and industry. Even the most despised politicians rarely see such poor satisfaction levels.

It's your kind of attitude that's directly responsible for what's happening to Firefox. Firefox's few remaining users are very clearly saying that there are some severe problems. Yet instead of doing the sensible thing and listening to these users and considering what they're saying, we have people like you who just deny that there are any problems.

While you and other Firefox advocates are spewing out denial, these long-standing bugs, performance issues, and idiotic changes remain unfixed. Each day some more of Firefox's remaining users will finally give up, and move to some other browser. Since no new users are bothering to use Firefox due to these problems, Firefox's market share dwindles.

Eventually it will get to the point that there are so few Firefox users that nobody will care what Mozilla thinks. After all, Mozilla's revenue and influence are only possible due to the size of its user base. But when Firefox has next to no users, nobody will do lucrative Firefox search deals with Mozilla, depriving them of their funding. Nobody involved with the standardization of web technologies will listen to them. Mozilla will go from being a respected, innovative organization to a totally irrelevant organization.

Personally, I don't want to see that happen. But thanks to people like you, and a complete lack of sensible action from Mozilla, I fear we're seeing the decline of Firefox and Mozilla getting closer every single day.

Opera's antiphishing filter != "ignores hosts" dimwit http://forums.opera.com/discus... & that's easily corrected and not a default. I use Opera 12.17 & know it.

FireFox bug caused 1 of the results-> https://support.mozilla.org/en...

Chrome = you're wrong YET AGAIN: Caching @ OS level has to be turned off with large hosts anyhow (with large hosts like my program makes you disable that cache since that dnscache breaks down with large hosts, & you save CPU cycles, RAM, & other i/o it was wasting thus by turning it off) http://superuser.com/questions...

* :)

LMAO!

So you're WRONG as usual, dimwit, again, just like here too (hosts != Windows 98 technology you utter moron) -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...

APK

P.S.=> So much for DESPERATE little technical incompetents like "Khyber" (complete with his delusional online fantasy name, lol)... apk

I work at Microsoft and generally feel glad about open-source advancements made around the company but this hardly warrants a "open-source browser" headline. Welcome to 2005.

But doesn't this integrate better with Win10 than the Mozilla engine you linked to? MS is trying to make WIn10 appealing and it appears that the future of desktop applications will really be a better integrated browser which is the ultimate irony when one considers the legal battles MS encountered when it made IE so tightly integrated with the desktop.

I work at Microsoft and generally feel glad about open-source advancements made around the company but this hardly warrants a "open-source browser" headline. Welcome to 2005.

• OSMAnd, which is actually the reason that I'm still using Android. Best mobile maps app (Nokia's Here is better for driving, but not for walking): offline vector maps that are small enough that you can fit a few entire countries on the phone, offline routing, and so on. The version on the Play store is not as good. I used to use the free version on Play, but actually donated $10 to them after discovering the F-Droid version.
• K9 Mail is a pretty reasonable mail client.
• Standalone Calendar is a fork of the AOSP calendar (now replaced by the Google Calendar app on most devices). The UI is not great, but I've not found any mobile calendar app that is. I mostly just use the Calendar Widget on my home screen to look at upcoming events and DAVDroid to sync with my CalDAV / CardDAV server (which also syncs with my laptop).
• Open Camera is definitely a geek's calendar app: far more configurable settings than the stock one, but the UI isn't quite as polished.
• KQSMS provides a nicer interface to SMS. For backups, SMS Backup+ will sync SMS with an IMAP server.
• AnySoftKeyboard provides a configurable set of keyboard layouts and, unlike the Google version, doesn't appear to be spyware.
• Firefox on Android is actually pretty nice, and the addition of the Self Destructing Cookies addon makes it a lot nicer than any other Android browser I've tried (cookies are automatically deleted when you navigate away from a page, tracking cookies are deleted periodically while on the page. There's an undo button if you realised that you actually wanted them for one site, and and you can then whitelist just those ones).

I'd love to have a company adopt some of these, polish the UI a bit, and provide an Android phone that ships with them by default, instead of the Google stuff.

The Gecko engine's current extension mechanism is not really compatible with the forthcoming change to multiple processes. (BTW: Multiple processes, not multiple threads, for proper isolation.) This move is in fact _necessary_ for what you want them to do.

Another problem with the current extension mechanism is that any extension can do basically anything to the browser, or any component of it. (Hence the need to deprecate unsigned extensions.) The permission system is a single bit: XUL/XBL chrome (including extensions) can do anything, non-chrome is restricted per HTML5. The new WebExtensions API has fine-grained permissions, among many other good things. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebEx... for details.

err, what an utterly ignorant comment.
clearly you don't read any of the change logs?

Even with Mozilla's very limited budget as compared to Chrome, in many cases Firefox is ahead of Chrome in feature implementation and uptake of HTML5, ES6, and CSS4.

In version 40, besides the countless performance enhancements with plugins, images, and smoother animations (vsync), etc, it also intro'd improvements to AudioBuffer API and IndexedDB in html5 (es6).

Version 41 includes massive performance enhancement in terms of memory usage fix when using AdBlock, performance enhancements when decoding images, and performance around smoother css animations.
On top of all that, they've intro'd CSS Font Loading API, the ES6 execCommand for copy/cut, MessageChannel and MessagePort API, CacheStorage API, and other html5/es6 features.

It's actually pretty amazing, even on their limited budget (since no one ever donates), how far ahead Firefox is even against Chrome in numerous web standards!

err, what an utterly ignorant comment.
clearly you don't read any of the change logs?

Even with Mozilla's very limited budget as compared to Chrome, in many cases Firefox is ahead of Chrome in feature implementation and uptake of HTML5, ES6, and CSS4.

In version 40, besides the countless performance enhancements with plugins, images, and smoother animations (vsync), etc, it also intro'd improvements to AudioBuffer API and IndexedDB in html5 (es6).

Version 41 includes massive performance enhancement in terms of memory usage fix when using AdBlock, performance enhancements when decoding images, and performance around smoother css animations.
On top of all that, they've intro'd CSS Font Loading API, the ES6 execCommand for copy/cut, MessageChannel and MessagePort API, CacheStorage API, and other html5/es6 features.

It's actually pretty amazing, even on their limited budget (since no one ever donates), how far ahead Firefox is even against Chrome in numerous web standards!

err, what an utterly ignorant comment.
clearly you don't read any of the change logs?

Even with Mozilla's very limited budget as compared to Chrome, in many cases Firefox is ahead of Chrome in feature implementation and uptake of HTML5, ES6, and CSS4.

In version 40, besides the countless performance enhancements with plugins, images, and smoother animations (vsync), etc, it also intro'd improvements to AudioBuffer API and IndexedDB in html5 (es6).

Version 41 includes massive performance enhancement in terms of memory usage fix when using AdBlock, performance enhancements when decoding images, and performance around smoother css animations.
On top of all that, they've intro'd CSS Font Loading API, the ES6 execCommand for copy/cut, MessageChannel and MessagePort API, CacheStorage API, and other html5/es6 features.

It's actually pretty amazing, even on their limited budget (since no one ever donates), how far ahead Firefox is even against Chrome in numerous web standards!

err, what an utterly ignorant comment.
clearly you don't read any of the change logs?

Even with Mozilla's very limited budget as compared to Chrome, in many cases Firefox is ahead of Chrome in feature implementation and uptake of HTML5, ES6, and CSS4.

In version 40, besides the countless performance enhancements with plugins, images, and smoother animations (vsync), etc, it also intro'd improvements to AudioBuffer API and IndexedDB in html5 (es6).

Version 41 includes massive performance enhancement in terms of memory usage fix when using AdBlock, performance enhancements when decoding images, and performance around smoother css animations.
On top of all that, they've intro'd CSS Font Loading API, the ES6 execCommand for copy/cut, MessageChannel and MessagePort API, CacheStorage API, and other html5/es6 features.

It's actually pretty amazing, even on their limited budget (since no one ever donates), how far ahead Firefox is even against Chrome in numerous web standards!

err, what an utterly ignorant comment.
clearly you don't read any of the change logs?

Even with Mozilla's very limited budget as compared to Chrome, in many cases Firefox is ahead of Chrome in feature implementation and uptake of HTML5, ES6, and CSS4.

In version 40, besides the countless performance enhancements with plugins, images, and smoother animations (vsync), etc, it also intro'd improvements to AudioBuffer API and IndexedDB in html5 (es6).

Version 41 includes massive performance enhancement in terms of memory usage fix when using AdBlock, performance enhancements when decoding images, and performance around smoother css animations.
On top of all that, they've intro'd CSS Font Loading API, the ES6 execCommand for copy/cut, MessageChannel and MessagePort API, CacheStorage API, and other html5/es6 features.

It's actually pretty amazing, even on their limited budget (since no one ever donates), how far ahead Firefox is even against Chrome in numerous web standards!

err, what an utterly ignorant comment.
clearly you don't read any of the change logs?

Even with Mozilla's very limited budget as compared to Chrome, in many cases Firefox is ahead of Chrome in feature implementation and uptake of HTML5, ES6, and CSS4.

In version 40, besides the countless performance enhancements with plugins, images, and smoother animations (vsync), etc, it also intro'd improvements to AudioBuffer API and IndexedDB in html5 (es6).

Version 41 includes massive performance enhancement in terms of memory usage fix when using AdBlock, performance enhancements when decoding images, and performance around smoother css animations.
On top of all that, they've intro'd CSS Font Loading API, the ES6 execCommand for copy/cut, MessageChannel and MessagePort API, CacheStorage API, and other html5/es6 features.

It's actually pretty amazing, even on their limited budget (since no one ever donates), how far ahead Firefox is even against Chrome in numerous web standards!

err, what an utterly ignorant comment.
clearly you don't read any of the change logs?

Even with Mozilla's very limited budget as compared to Chrome, in many cases Firefox is ahead of Chrome in feature implementation and uptake of HTML5, ES6, and CSS4.

In version 40, besides the countless performance enhancements with plugins, images, and smoother animations (vsync), etc, it also intro'd improvements to AudioBuffer API and IndexedDB in html5 (es6).

Version 41 includes massive performance enhancement in terms of memory usage fix when using AdBlock, performance enhancements when decoding images, and performance around smoother css animations.
On top of all that, they've intro'd CSS Font Loading API, the ES6 execCommand for copy/cut, MessageChannel and MessagePort API, CacheStorage API, and other html5/es6 features.

It's actually pretty amazing, even on their limited budget (since no one ever donates), how far ahead Firefox is even against Chrome in numerous web standards!

err, what an utterly ignorant comment.
clearly you don't read any of the change logs?

Even with Mozilla's very limited budget as compared to Chrome, in many cases Firefox is ahead of Chrome in feature implementation and uptake of HTML5, ES6, and CSS4.

In version 40, besides the countless performance enhancements with plugins, images, and smoother animations (vsync), etc, it also intro'd improvements to AudioBuffer API and IndexedDB in html5 (es6).

Version 41 includes massive performance enhancement in terms of memory usage fix when using AdBlock, performance enhancements when decoding images, and performance around smoother css animations.
On top of all that, they've intro'd CSS Font Loading API, the ES6 execCommand for copy/cut, MessageChannel and MessagePort API, CacheStorage API, and other html5/es6 features.

It's actually pretty amazing, even on their limited budget (since no one ever donates), how far ahead Firefox is even against Chrome in numerous web standards!

from the liliputing article:

it’s possible that some existing plugins will never be able to make the transition since they rely on a “permissive” model that allowed for deep integration into the browser and that’s exactly the sort of thing Mozilla is ruling out for future add-ons.

The developer of popular Firefox add-on DownThemAll, for example, says he’ll probably stop developing plugins if Mozilla eliminates support for XUL-based add-ons because the new tools don’t offer the same kind of flexibility as those that are being deprecated.

And for all the right wingers that cry for Eich, saying he wasn't ousted for "not being progressive"? I hate to burst your bubble but he was fired for refusing to do his job simple as that. What IS the job of a CEO? Well a very large part of it is to be "the face of the company" and to deal with the press and issues in the press that are affecting your company's image...what did Eich do? Say "I don't want to talk about it" like a little spineless coward and hid while the opposition could say anything they wanted and build up steam for the boycott because he refused to do his job and fight back! If he would have said "these are my beliefs, this is what I support and what I do not and why" and actually started a dialog? He probably could have diffused the entire thing, remember he had an entire PR team at Moz to help him craft his side, while the other side simply were speaking their minds, so he had a pretty big advantage.

Nope, I don't buy that. Firing him from a company with Mozilla's tech cred for failing to carry out the PR mission sounds like lame after-the-fact justification. I suppose it could be argued that the company's primary focus had already changed by that point--the new marketing CEO and strange decisions since then do seem to point that way--but that makes the situation worse rather than excusing it.

Eich had already created javacript, founded Mozilla, served as the browser's chief architect and the company's chief tech officer for years and years. It's tough (maybe impossible) to think of anyone more in tune with Mozilla's mission, or qualified to carry it out.

And as we've seen in the last year, "the opposition" has unreal influence over the tech news media (including Slashdot), often right down to user forums/comment policy, including the willingness and ability to spin a one-sided narrative completely disconnected from reality and/or popular opinion.

From the /. post announcing the new CEO:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...

We did not "stand by and watch". Many Mozilla staff made public statements supporting Brendan as CEO, including (courageously) many LGBT Mozilla staff. Many more publicly supported Brendan than publicly opposed him. The media of course focused on his opponents because "Mozilla employees call for CEO to step down" gets more clicks than "Mozilla employees support CEO".

http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...

It's absolutely true. There were a bunch of blog posts by Mozilla employees supporting Brendan as CEO (even though many disagreed with his position on Prop 8), all completely ignored by the media. Looking at the relevant date range on http://planet.mozilla.org/ should find them...

Did you ever see any of these viewpoints reported on at tech news sites? I think the Eich fiasco might have ended differently if it happened today, now we're more savvy to the disengenuousness and bigoted (and collusive) nature of those who perpetrate outrage culture.

If Mozilla wants their browser share to increase, deprecate the god damned single-threaded engine!!!!

It's on the way.

That is not strictly true, there are currently 3 types of extensions where one provides a abstraction layer: 1) Legacy/Overlay. These access the XUL DOM directly. 2) Bootstrap/Restartless. Like 1 but without UI overlays so they can be added/removed without restarts. 3) Using the addons SDK. These are supposed to be abstracted away from the Firefox XUL and are "based on HTML5" and all those buzzwords. https://blog.mozilla.org/addon...

There's got to be a good reason for this.

Because the extension API was kind of lousy.
Because the extension API was going to need big changes to deal with the new multi-process browser capability that Mozilla is implementing.
Because the extension API was never very stable to begin with.
Because the extension API wasn't really an API, it was basically allowed full access to whatever was in Firefox (which explains why it wasn't stable).

You are right that the Chrome API lacks functionality. The Mozilla plan is to extend the API, so that everything that is (reasonably) possible now remains possible. They are asking for help identifying functionality that will need to be added, so maybe you can volunteer some ideas.

Apologies: I mis-read the earlier comment. My comment about StartSSL generating a private key for the user applies only for SSL/TLS certs (where users can, as I mentioned, skip that and submit their own CSR).

When one generates a client certificate such as used in S/MIME, the key generation takes place entirely in the browser using keygen tags -- the private key is stored locally and the public key is sent to the server for signing.

Put simply, StartSSL (and other CAs around the world) are happy to issue certificates identifying you as you, but none of them AFAIK generate the private key themselves. Maybe some internal corporate CA systems do, but I'm not aware of any commercial ones that generate private keys for client certs.

All you have to do is remove the icon. Here.

Yes I don't like the Pocket integration either, but it's temporary, does no harm if you don't use it, and, this story inclusive, probably does no harm even if you do use it. It's just a useless icon. Get rid of it and put it behind you.

Hahaha, lol, love the sarcasm ;) ... ABP and ABE are known to dramatically increase memory usage: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-pluss-effect-on-firefoxs-memory-usage/

...and I meant to add a link to bug 659285 there, but I dropped a quote and the entire <a> tag got stripped out, and I somehow missed it in the preview. Sigh.

Like all the other crap that's been added to our "browser", there should not be any default.

If you want to save a web page for later perusal on the same device, you can use Scrapbook Plus. It works. (If you want to install it on a recent browser and not an extended support release, scroll down and install from the development channel.)

Thanks, but is it so hard to make a proper link? watch-with-mpv. Turn in your nerd card.

. More commonly, you'll hear about the mysterious memory leak issues (many of which simply didn't exist) from a bygone era.

Wrong

And really wrong

The last work posted there by Nicholas Nethercote was December 11, 2014 - hardly a bygone era. He basically stopped posting about every little find around 2012, but kept making improvements to memory analysis tools used to improved Firefox. I'm sure you'll read a few sentences and tell me I'm an idiot so

November 4, 2014 by Nicholas Nethercote| 23 Comments If you record every heap allocation and re-allocation done by Firefox you find some interesting things. In particular, you find some sub-optimal buffer growth strategies that cause a lot of heap churn.

You have to stop minimizing the negative impact of bad memory management to be taken seriously by anyone who noticed it for YEARS and was being ignored.

Back on topic, Firefox now has too much money. Instead of paying people to keep the lights on (fix security and implement new standards) they are now adding features that most people don't want or need. Improved privacy, with a built in blocklist, is finally something that people want.

we should instead promote it as the better browser. FF will regain market share the same way it lost it.

Finally, you're really mistaken. Back then, there was a "better browser", because "browsing" was a thing. Now, there are so many different ways of interacting, and each web browser excels in one way or another for a particular pattern. I use FireFox because of the plug-ins, but no one that I would recommend a browser to needs that. I don't see a way for Firefox to come back at this point without something unique and generally popular - and it seems like they are banking on privacy. especially because Google isn't the prime funding source.

Problem is, they are going to have to make privacy mode as near a default as they can get away with, or it won't be worth switching for most people. And that's unlikely.

. More commonly, you'll hear about the mysterious memory leak issues (many of which simply didn't exist) from a bygone era.

Wrong

And really wrong

The last work posted there by Nicholas Nethercote was December 11, 2014 - hardly a bygone era. He basically stopped posting about every little find around 2012, but kept making improvements to memory analysis tools used to improved Firefox. I'm sure you'll read a few sentences and tell me I'm an idiot so

November 4, 2014 by Nicholas Nethercote| 23 Comments If you record every heap allocation and re-allocation done by Firefox you find some interesting things. In particular, you find some sub-optimal buffer growth strategies that cause a lot of heap churn.

You have to stop minimizing the negative impact of bad memory management to be taken seriously by anyone who noticed it for YEARS and was being ignored.

Back on topic, Firefox now has too much money. Instead of paying people to keep the lights on (fix security and implement new standards) they are now adding features that most people don't want or need. Improved privacy, with a built in blocklist, is finally something that people want.

we should instead promote it as the better browser. FF will regain market share the same way it lost it.

Finally, you're really mistaken. Back then, there was a "better browser", because "browsing" was a thing. Now, there are so many different ways of interacting, and each web browser excels in one way or another for a particular pattern. I use FireFox because of the plug-ins, but no one that I would recommend a browser to needs that. I don't see a way for Firefox to come back at this point without something unique and generally popular - and it seems like they are banking on privacy. especially because Google isn't the prime funding source.

Problem is, they are going to have to make privacy mode as near a default as they can get away with, or it won't be worth switching for most people. And that's unlikely.

I'd say the problem with FF isn't privacy, which there are several excellent plugins like NoScript that can help with that, its the security which IMHO is still really piss poor.

Why is security in FF and pretty much every browser based on gecko bad? Its really very simple in FF and the other Gecko browsers everything you do in FF has the same permissions as the user which considering that the #1 attack vector by far is the browser? That's not just a dumb idea, its downright dangerous.The sad part is it should be a pretty easy fix for the devs, Windows has had support for browsers running in Low Rights Mode since Windows Vista. They can't even argue that LRM isn't cross platform as the changes to support LRM in Windows should translate to AppArmor in Linux thus helping improve security on both sides of the aisle, yet despite this Gecko is the only current browser that doesn't support LRM which I would argue makes it probably the most dangerous browser you can run. All the Chromiums, as well as IE and Edge? They all run by default in LRM and anybody who knows anything about security knows that you should always run software with the least permissions required to perform the task.

Considering how many Firefox exploits we have had of late its just mind boggling why they insist on running the browser with higher permissions than is required.

Or the "privacy mode" that recorded sites you visited with blocked plugins: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s... - oh wait, it still does that.

In the meantime guys, why can't you stop Firefox leaking internal IP addresses? Or other issues, such as exposing identifiable hardware-id's in the gamepad interface?

The people programming Firefox clearly don't think from a privacy/security-first perspective, when developing.

Maybe you're just a little retarded for believing slashdot blindly without reading the article?!

This has nothing to do making silent requests to random sites.
Try it yourself, get the HttpFox addon and monitor how firefox doesn't make any random requests on hover!

Slashdot is on a war against Mozilla/Firefox.

Maybe you're just a little retarded for believing slashdot blindly without reading the article?!

This has nothing to do making silent requests to random sites.
Try it yourself, get the HttpFox addon and monitor how firefox doesn't make any random requests on hover!

Slashdot is on a war against Mozilla/Firefox.

Maybe you're just a little retarded for believing slashdot blindly without reading the article?!

This has nothing to do making silent requests to random sites.
Try it yourself, get the HttpFox addon and monitor how firefox doesn't make any random requests on hover!

Slashdot is on a war against Mozilla/Firefox.

Maybe you're just a little retarded for believing slashdot blindly without reading the article?!

This has nothing to do making silent requests to random sites.

Try it yourself, get the HttpFox addon and monitor how firefox doesn't make any random requests on hover!

Anyone confirmed what the article summary claims?

Slashdot is on a war against Mozilla/Firefox.

That doesn't sound very credible. I'd go so far as to say it makes no sense at all.

Maybe you're just a little retarded for believing slashdot blindly without reading the article?!

This has nothing to do making silent requests to random sites.
Try it yourself, get the HttpFox addon and monitor how firefox doesn't make any random requests on hover!

Slashdot is on a war against Mozilla/Firefox.

Maybe you're just a little retarded for believing slashdot blindly without reading the article?!

This has nothing to do making silent requests to random sites.
Try it yourself, get the HttpFox addon and monitor how firefox doesn't make any random requests on hover!

Slashdot is on a war against Mozilla/Firefox.

Maybe you're just a little retarded for believing slashdot blindly without reading the article?!

This has nothing to do making silent requests to random sites.
Try it yourself, get the HttpFox addon and monitor how firefox doesn't make any random requests on hover!

Slashdot is on a war against Mozilla/Firefox.

I've always had good luck with explicitly set variables being carried forward successfully.

I think the parent is referring to variables that get removed in newer versions of Firefox.

Here's an example: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Addon...

Note that in Firefox 41 a variable will be introduced to allow bypassing of signature enforcement, but 42 will ignore said variable. This is a rare case of Mozilla actually telling us about a variable which will be ignored in the future, as opposed to people discovering it being ignored when they update.

And looking closer at the API description, speculative connect isn't supposed to actually make the HTTP request, just set up the TCP connection. No headers, no URL, just an IP address at the network layer.

Still technically a connection, but hardly any information is sent, and it's not mistakable for an actual click.

According to the docs, this doesn't fire on just any random website's links, only in specific parts of the Firefox UI:

To improve the loading speed, Firefox will open predictive connections to sites when the user hovers their mouse over thumbnails on the New Tab Page or the user starts to search in the Search Bar, or in the search field on the Home or the New Tab Page. In case the user follows through with the action, the page can begin loading faster since some of the work was already started in advance.

That's fortunate, because firing it on any website's hover link would reach that nightmare scenario pretty quickly.

Link prefetcing on websites only happens if the site explicitly marks the link for prefetch. (Example use case: prefetch page 2 of an article from page 1.) Firefox & Chrome have done this for years.

Unlike older versions of Firefox, more recent versions will make a request to a destination server just by hovering over a link.

Looking at the bug request that was linked in the summary, it appears that "more recent versions" of Firefox means "all versions since 2012".

Even in Firefox 39 (possibly earlier), Google gets to set a permanent cookie if you have malware/"web forgery" detection enabled (which is the default). Even with an addon like 'Self-Destructing Cookies' you still can't get rid of the Google cookie. You can even try for yourself in Settings > Privacy > Show Cookies on a fresh install of Firefox. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...

Translation: We tried to hide more buttons and functionality from users with Firefox 40

Monday, the geek will post about wanting a no-frills browser that "just works."

Tuesday, he'll post about wanting more menus, options and functionality. Which most users won't have a clue how to configure and won't want to deal with.

------

For those unaware of Pocket:

Save web pages for later with Pocket for Firefox

Fuck off, shill.

You make it sound unreasonable, but let's take a closer look.

Monday, the geek will post about wanting a no-frills browser that "just works."

I don't hear "geeks" asking for a browser that "just works." I hear them ask for browser makers to step messing around with the UI and to step adding more and more bloat.

No-frills, a web browser. Not a VoIP-Client, Media-Player, 3D-Engine hybrid or email client. It should display websites.

On that note, websites should stop trying to be applications. They suck at it and websites that don't degrade gracefully without JavaScript need to die. Of course, this is just my personal opinion.

Tuesday, he'll post about wanting more menus, options and functionality. Which most users won't have a clue how to configure and won't want to deal with.

It should show websites. In just the way I want. Let me customize my buttons and menus. Let me put the things I need the most where I can get to them easily. Don't try to be smart and do it for me, you'll get it wrong. Configurability is good.

Save web pages for later with Pocket for Firefox

Cloud bullshit. Does it in any way ensure that the stored websites are not accessible to other people, i.e. client-side encryption? I doubt it. This might be mildly useful if it conveniently stored the pages to a file.

If I want to save a webpage, I'll use the MAFF/MHT extension.

Translation: We tried to hide more buttons and functionality from users with Firefox 40

Monday, the geek will post about wanting a no-frills browser that "just works."

Tuesday, he'll post about wanting more menus, options and functionality. Which most users won't have a clue how to configure and won't want to deal with.

------

For those unaware of Pocket:

Save web pages for later with Pocket for Firefox

I've found bugs in Firefox that date back to not only before it was called Firefox but before Firefox even existed.

My personal favorite is this bug which is over 15 years old now. The practical effect is that if your screen resolution ever changes, Firefox breaks and you have to restart it. (Basically tooltips start appearing over the wrong areas and anything that's supposed to not go off the screen uses the wrong screen values.)

A practical example of why that might happen is projecting, say, a web app in a meeting. Doing that means you have to restart Firefox after hooking up the projector and then again when done. Another example is docking a laptop. 15 years with absolutely no progress.