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Firefox 13 Released, Debuts Brand New Tab Page and Homepage
MrSeb writes "Mozilla has officially released Firefox 13. Unlike Firefox 12 (or 11, or 10, or indeed many of the recent Firefox versions), Firefox 13 is an important release with a handful of much-needed features that are long overdue. There's a new New Tab Page launcher, with your favorite and most-used websites, and a new default home page with one-click access to Bookmarks, Settings, Add-ons, etc. SPDY is on by default, too, which should help ameliorate the perceived speed difference between Chrome and Firefox. Finally, the developer tools (Page Inspector, Style Inspector, etc.) have been tweaked and updated!"
I've seen this news all over the web since yesterday, however, the "new tab" page as it is, isn't a Chrome feature, it actually comes from Opera, which had it way before Chrome existed.
Now it looks like Safari.
Last week it looked like Chrome.
I'm going back to Internet Explorer. Or maybe Mosaic.
Either that or I'm going to wait another week for Firefox 16 which will likely imitate Facebook.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"There's a new New Tab Page launcher, with your favorite and most-used websites, and a new default home page with one-click access to Bookmarks, Settings, Add-ons, etc."
Okay, that's great, but what are the much-needed features that they added?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I'll wait until tomorrow and get FF14
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
That would break every website that uses CDN or have multiple domains. That's probably half of the web right there. Not even wikipedia will load under those draconian rules.
In the normal scheme, its really just 4.9.
***YAWN***
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
after I updated to 13. Sorry, I'm not using a tablet or smartphone Firefox guys. Please design it for the platform I'm using.
"So, if I go to slashdot.org, I want my browser to only fetch things from slashdot.org. Not scorecardresearch, not doubleclick, not gstatic, not google, not facebook, etc"
you want noscript then.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
is terrible and they turned it on by default? I immediately noticed that scrolling was sluggish and at first I mistook that for a performance problem...
Switched to Chrome about 2 weeks ago because FF was just too bloody slow. Now I have no desire to switch back.
There's a speed difference? I switched about the same time and didn't notice any difference at all. It must be pretty small or only weird corner cases.
I will say that "chrome to phone" sounded like the most exciting development in computing for the year 2012, installed it, tested it, and haven't used it once since. Oh well.
Addon installation is much smoother, I never realized how annoying restarting the browser was until I didn't have to anymore. Like moving from windows to linux.
The start page web apps page was the greatest disappointment. Basically you use the app store to install a bookmark with a big icon. Thats about all it does. Boo.
I found it amusing that if you want something like "adblock plus" and "flashblock" from firefox on chrome, you install "adblock plus" and "flashblock" on chrome. Yeah, it is the same name. Firebug lite is sooo close to firebug on firefox.
I'm still looking for a way to improve the UI and move the tabs below the address bar. I certainly switch tabs a lot more often than I do address bar stuff. There must be some extension that'll fix that.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The OS already has a perfectly fine task-switching mechanism.
Let me guess, a GIMP developer?
Fuck Mozilla's fucking releases every fucking other fucking week. Want me to pay attention to a new release? then don't bombard me with requests to update, or call versions barely worth an increment to the patch level a fucking release. Buy a clue and stop ruining what was a pretty decent browser. As ColdWetDog already joked, only for real, you're actually making IE look good again. The level of fuckitude necessary to reach that level of fuckedupness is almost unfuckingbeliveable.
So, in other words, it's like Chrome, but slower?
When they started breaking forms on various sites web pages, we started switching.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Speed dial is one of the first things I disabled when I tried Opera. Now I need to get rid of it in Firefox too.
Kudos to Mozilla!
I am still not using it, but I opened FF 12 up and was shocked it used so little memory compared to IE 9 and Chrome. It was smooth, fast, and less buggy than in previous versions.
Before I switch I need to know if the following are fixed
1. Sandbox support
2. Mozilla update breaks permanently after Windows Restore
I fear webmasters will be dealing with Firefox 12, 13, and other obsolete versions many many years from now as anyone who has done a Windows Restore Point will have Mozilla update disabled and wont even know it. Security it scares the crap out of me to run flash unsandoxed with full control over my own computer. I know IE gets bashed a lot here, but Firefox is the weaklink in security for the past year or two as both other browsers are sandboxed and Chrome even has an additional sanbox for flash with its pepper API.
Fix those 2 things I and I may use Firefox again.
http://saveie6.com/
Firefox 12 still has a memory leak in it. Nothing like getting back from the weekend to see Firefox has a 1.5 GB RAM footprint and making my system crawl to a halt. Always amusing to turn on the task manager and just watch the memory getting sucked up in real time.
Or Ghostery
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
On their site (Mozilla Dev Center), one of the reasoning which is #3 states :"qualified by QA as being of sufficient quality to release to hundreds of millions of people". I don't think they include wanting feature in their list of quality when QA people test it. If so, we would see way less firefox release and more testing. I would vote for the latter.
Finding the download page for the latest binary can be tricky, although it's much easier now than it used to be. Here's a link for the lazy.
For the extremely lazy, here's how to install, assuming that you're using linux, and it went into your Downloads folder:
Free unix account: freeshell.org
If you are fine with 40+ security vulnerabilities with it!
Remember Firefox is the only modern browser with no sanboxing still either. Seriously even IE 9 is better than 3.6 as it is old. There is ESR extended support for corporations which is based off of FF 10 and is much slimmer and gets regular security updates. I left Firefox after 4 and use Chrome and IE 9, but I have to say FF 12 is very slim, and very light even compred to FF 3.6.
http://saveie6.com/
They were fixed in Firefox 7: http://www.gadgetvenue.com/firefox-7-to-use-up-to-50-percent-less-memory-08114900/
If by fixed you mean browser usability was sacrificed in order to make the apparent memory usage drop, then yes. My biggest complaint with these memory "improvements" is in regard to image handling:
- Images are now decode-on-draw meaning they display slower and background tab images are not decoded. Browsing an image gallery or some other image-heavy site is now obscenely painful in Firefox.
- Decoded images on background tabs only live for 10-20 seconds and then are discarded at which point they must be re-decoded when the tab is activated. Long-lived tabs like Gmail now flicker every time you switch back to them as images are re-decoded.
These are just the two that come to mind right away. Luckily they can be fixed by tweaking some about:config settings (image.mem.decodeondraw and image.mem.min_discard_timeout_ms). Unfortunately many cannot be fixed so easily.
I'm really tired of the Firefox devs choosing (usually wrong) user complaints over good design and usability practices.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Nevermind, I figured it out. You just click the little grid image in the upper right hand side.
No option to turn back on "new tab opens to home page." Lame. Stuck with "about:newtab" on every new tab I open. So annoying!
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
That'd be RequestPolicy actually. NoScript doesn't stop images from external domains being loaded (the 'traditional' way of tracking across the web).
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
Aaaand i just figured out how to disable that.
In about:config, just type in "newtab" and search
You will get 3 choices.
First one is the URL for new tabs. Set it to what you want (I use about:blank)
Set the other two settings to false and the fancy schmancy crappy new tab is gone.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
First thing I did was to look for an option to disable the "Newtab page" (the feature that Firefox shows you your most used websites including little pictures of them whenever you open a new tab). Seems the Firefox devs decided that this is such an important function that there is no option to disable it in the settings dialogue, or at least I could not find one. But you can disable it via about:config and then setting "browser.newtabpage.enabled" to "false". Guess that is handy if you do NOT want your boss/colleagues to find out about your "hotponysex" fetish whenever you want to open a harmless Intranet page while somebody standing next to you.
I love Firefox and use it every day, but I'm getting a little tired and confused with some of the features they keep putting into the core. I've always thought one of the great things about Firefox is the extensions; and while other browsers offer similar 'add-on' concepts, Firefox just seems to do it better. Why aren't they concentrating on just making a seriously good browser engine and then leaving the extra stuff to the extension developers. Or, if it's something important, get with the extension developers and help them out, offer a 'Firefox suggested extension package' that downloads and enables extensions by default. That way, all the 'normal' users get the cool goodies, and the rest of us can turn them off or uninstall them all together if it's not something we need.
For instance, the new development centric stuff they have in FF13 is nice. But it doesn't hold a candle to the development tools that have been in IE9 and Chrome for some time. I use Firebug for all my web debugging needs in FF and it works wonderfully. Get with those guys and improve their already awesome extension. Don't try to re-invent every cool extension and add it to the core. Not everyone needs it, not everyone wants it. Just build the fastest, most standards compliant browser out there that offers an amazing extension engine and you'll have a winning browser.
I tried Chromium. There is a problem: I've become addicted to tree-style tabs, courtesy of the Firefox extension.
Chromium/Chrome had this feature natively for a long time, until the developers disabled it in a sneaky-Pete maneuver that pissed off a bunch of people.
The obvious response, to write a Chromium extension for Tree-Style Tabs, is not an option. The Chromium plugin API does not expose the functionality necessary to do so.
Webkit (Chromium/Chrome's layout engine) seems to be a little faster than Gecko (Firefox's equivalent), but I would prefer to use a browser that gives the user (ME!) control over it, even at the cost of some rendering speed.
The time I would gain in rendering efficiency would probably be lost trying to scan this, as opposed to this.
The only feature that I want that is long overdue is a setting wherein the browser will make HTTP GETs only to the original domain. So, if I go to slashdot.org, I want my browser to only fetch things from slashdot.org. Not scorecardresearch, not doubleclick, not gstatic, not google, not facebook, etc etc etc.
You want RequestPolicy - it does exactly what you want and lets you whitelist on a per-site basis. So, for example, you could let google pages also pull in stuff from gstatic.com but no other websites could pull in stuff from gstatic.com.
RequestPolicy is more powerful than adblock/noscript/ghostery because of the per-site control - all of those others don't care about what site the request is coming from, only the one it is going to. At best they let you whitelist the requests from an entire site, RequestPolicy is much more fine-grained. Those other add-ons are important too, they just have different strengths.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I just fear FF 3.6 becoming the new IE 6...
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I agree we haven't done a good job tweaking image discarding parameters. We have a plan to fix it, but it's been stuck on some stupid stuff for a long time. I hope we'll get resolved for FF16.
In the meantime, you can make Firefox much less eager to throw away images. Open about:config and set
image.mem.min_discard_timeout_ms to some large value (e.g. 120 000, for 120s), and also bump up image.mem.max_decoded_image_kb (to e.g. 256 000, for 250mb).
For reference, I use Safari on OSX for little more than watching youtube videos and light web browsing (this site, XKCD, Anandtech, etc) and the memory usage blows up over time. I've found through Activity Monitor that's it's really the flash plugin. It appears that it never gives back the RAM it takes until I close Safari (or force quit the plugin, but then I have no Flash until I reboot Safari).
That, combined with the fact that I have occasional stutters playing back an HD Flash video with a 2.8GHz C2D and 3GB of RAM makes me unsurprised that Apple hates Adobe and all things Flash.
Chrome is faster because to pre-loads and pre-renders web pages as you type into the address bar or view a Google search results page. It also seems to lag less with a lot of tabs open because they each get their own process where as Firefox uses a single thread for them all. Firefox tries to "schedule" tabs internally but it doesn't work as well.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It also comes with a f* "Mozilla Maintenance Service" which installs without requesting user permisson and which I promptly uninstalled. If this new service is a requirement for FF to run and update then it's good-bye FF for me.