Firefox 15 Released: Silent Updates, Compressed Textures, Add-on Memory Leak Fix

Mozilla released Firefox 15 today, and it brings a number of interesting changes. First, the browser is finally switching to a "silent" update model, like Chrome. (No doubt in answer to endless complaints about their rapid release cycle.) In addition, Mozilla says they have "now plugged the main cause of memory leaks in Firefox add-ons." Add-ons commonly hold extra copies of sites in memory when they don't need to, and the browser now has a mechanism to detect this and reclaim the memory. Another significant improvement is the addition of native support for compressed textures in WebGL, which is a boost for high-res 3D gaming. Here are release notes for the desktop and mobile versions.

Comments

Flash freezing

[Myria]

Did they fix Flash freezing all the time, or is that Adobe's fault?

Re:Flash freezing

[sl4shd0rk]

"Fixing" Flash properly is beyond the capability of mere mortals.

Re:Flash freezing

[Anonymous Coward]

"Fixing" Flash properly is beyond the capability of mere mortals.

The only way to fix Flash is to not install it.

Re:Flash freezing

[MagusSlurpy]

Flashblock fixes the problem with Flash freezing. If I could marry it, I would.

Re:Flash freezing

[Tough Love]

Did they fix Flash freezing all the time, or is that Adobe's fault?

Adobe fixed it by end-of-lifing Flash. Thanks Adobe.

SILENT updates?

[courcoul]

Last thing I need is for an idiot in some far and distant place to think it fun to roll out a new version and trigger an update on all my computers that may render all the corporate apps unusable. No, thank you. FF joins Chrome in the sandboxed "use only if indispensable" bin.

Re:SILENT updates?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, turn it off?

If your managing multiple computers, PLEASE tell me you know how to turn these sorts of features off.

Re:SILENT updates?

[Kethinov]

It's a default, not a mandate. If it doesn't benefit you, like it benefits the vast majority of Firefox users, then turn it off, FFS.

Re:SILENT updates?

[Pieroxy]

You know you can disable that on Chrome, right? It's not even complicated. Here is a guide for the administrators.

I'm sure you can also disable it on Firefox as well.

There's no need to put them in the bin at all, at least not for that reason.

Re:SILENT updates?

[CimmerianX]

Just turn them off. Same thing we do with Window Servers. Download updated but let me choose when to install them.

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/disable-silent-updates-in-firefox/

Re:SILENT updates?

[characterZer0]

If you are managing multiple computers, PLEASE tell me the end users do not have write access to the browser executables in the first place.

Re:SILENT updates?

[linebackn]

Last thing I need is for an idiot in some far and distant place to think it fun to roll out a new version and trigger an update on all my computers that may render all the corporate apps unusable.

And that is why you should download and install the Firefox Extended Support Release: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all.html instead of their version-of-the-month.

Hopefully future ESR releases will remain able to manage updates.

Re:SILENT updates?

[Cro Magnon]

Until an update breaks something, and you don't even know Chrome is what updated.

Re:SILENT updates?

[Obfuscant]

Chrome has been doing them since, like, forever. I think it's fantastic, personally. I dont want the browser to nag me when it's time to update. Just do it...

You probably also don't have 100 computer semi-literates using Chrome for mission critical applications that will all call you at the same time when those mission critical apps stop working.

Automatic updates are fine for people who don't care if the program stops working for some unexplained reason, or who can either debug the problem themselves or put off finding a solution until they have some free time. Or for people who make a living off of debugging other people's computer problems.

Automatic updates are dangerous for high reliability systems, mission critical applications, or anything that is supposed to run unattended. Anyone who has worked in IT for any length of time will have memories of when some program decided to update itself and made itself fail. (E.g., "Firefox has detected that the following plugins are incompatible with the current version and disabled them:")

Re:SILENT updates?

[webheaded]

If needing a small guide on how to do something makes it "complicated" then you shouldn't be an IT administrator.

Re:SILENT updates?

[msimm]

Then, as a admin: about:config app.update.auto = false

Re:SILENT updates?

[LordLimecat]

I take it you never go on the frontlines to deal with the rampant malware problem on the internet.

If this is an issue for you, do your reasearch and turn on the flags to block updates. From the current firefox version:
FirefoxButton-->Options; Advanced, Update; Click "Never Check for updates (not recommended: security risk)", and uncheck "use a background service to install updates".

According to Resource Monitor, this changes a setting in your profile's prefs.js, which if I had to guess would be these two:

user_pref("app.update.auto", false);
user_pref("app.update.enabled", false);

There, 3 minutes of research and I found out how to block this company wide (you can push a prefs.js to the firefox install directory and it becomes globally enforced; Im not taking the time to find out where that is). Push it from GPO, youre all set.

Honestly, the knee-jerk, "I refuse to research the options for myself" reactions from slashdot get old sometimes.

Re:SILENT updates?

[LordLimecat]

Automatic updates are dangerous for high reliability systems, mission critical applications, or anything that is supposed to run unattended.

....Which is why in those situations you set the preference to disable auto-updates, and push that out via GPO.

Seriously guys this isnt rocket science.

Re:SILENT updates?

[LordLimecat]

auto-update of Chrome because while I see it as unnecessary and inconvenient in my usecase, it is not detrimental to security to keep it on.

You might not be aware of this, but like every piece of software ever written-- with the possible exception of Hello World-- Chrome has had numerous security flaws, and has fixed them via updates.

Turning off updates makes you quite vulnerable indeed, and all the more so because those Chrome updates also update Flash and the built in PDF reader which are extensively targetted by malware.

TL;DR- enjoy your botnet.

Upgrades wipe out my login cookies!

[jimwelch]

Every time Firefox upgrades, it wipes out my login cookies. It forces me to re-login to my sites. Is there a way to turn this dictator off?

Re:Upgrades wipe out my login cookies!

[gweihir]

Install Opera instead. There is a very small number of sites with problems, most work just fine.

Re:DOM inspector

[royallthefourth]

They've got to save memory somehow, you know!

Where is 64-bit version?

[Spy Handler]

It's been what, six years since 64-bit OSes became norm? Why can't Firefox devs make a 64-bit version?

32-bit Firefox runs like crap on Win7. I use this ajax grid in my pages, and it runs smooth as glass on XP. The same page viewed on Win7 Firefox is slow and jerky. There's something wrong with the way Firefox renders javascript when running under a 64-bit OS.

Re:Where is 64-bit version?

[daremonai]

They do make 64-bit versions for Windows and Linux as part of the nightly builds. There are also a couple of projects which make "optimized" versions of some of these - Pale Moon (palemoon.org) and Waterfox (waterfoxproject.org).

The biggest issue with the 64-bit versions is that they only run 64-bit plugins, unless you use something like nspluginwrapper (nspluginwrapper.org).

Re:Where is 64-bit version?

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest issue with the 64-bit versions is that they only run 64-bit plugins, unless you use something like nspluginwrapper (nspluginwrapper.org).

That is out of date information. The 64-bit builds (Waterfox & Pal Moon) are compatible with all standard 32-bit extensions.

ESR Releases

[Kalak]

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/

This isn't a bug tracker

[MrEricSir]

Look, I mean you probably found a bug. The thing to do is to either post on the project mailing list or file a bug report.

Posting a comment on Slashdot is unlikely to result in a solution.

Brilliant!!

[rudy_wayne]

the browser is finally switching to a "silent" update model, like Chrome. (No doubt in answer to endless complaints about their rapid release cycle.

So people have been complaining about Firefox's Rapid Release Cycle -- more correctly called Rapid Version Number Inflation -- and so Firefox's solution is to continue doing it and just not tell you about it.

Brilliant.

Re:High Res 3D Gaming??

[fa2k]

Oh please no! High-res 3D "punch the monkey ads" :(

Re:Old story, or something new?

[Urza9814]

I leave Firefox windows with dozens of tabs open for weeks and even months at a time, and haven't noticed any stability issues in a year or so...But I also don't use any add-ons except Firebug.

Re:Old story, or something new?

[Stalks]

Open a lot of windows and tabs and see for yourself.

I do. Daily. 100+ tabs open is not uncommon. Firefox hasn't crashed for years. The rest of your comment is OffTopic.

The summary missed the real headline feature!

[jensend]

The memory improvements are nice and all, but the support for the Opus audio codec will have a much bigger impact on the Web. Opus is open source, royalty-free, and superior to previous formats in latency, flexibility, and audio quality. It handles speech, music, and general audio well, and scales fluidly from a 6kbps mono narrowband VOIP bandwidth all the way up to perceptually-transparent multichannel music. It's been approved as an IETF standard and should be published as an RFC this week.

Finally having a best-of-breed standardized codec which is universally implementable without patent royalties means that HTML5 audio - especially real-time communications - can finally take off.

Firefox is the second major end-user application to add support. (The first was the foobar2k audio player.)

Re:The summary missed the real headline feature!

[jensend]

No codec rules the market forever. You might as well have been saying "dude, mp2 rules both audio and video, give it up" fifteen years ago, or "dude, audio is MP3 and video is DIVX and that is that" nine years ago.

The MPEG cartel doesn't believe you either; they've been rushing to get new codecs together (USAC/Extended HE-AAC, H.265).

This time they were beat to the punch. Opus significantly outperforms MP3 and AAC even at their strong points, and MP3 and AAC are very poor for low-bandwidth use and zero use for low-latency communications. USAC is late to the party, high-latency, and doesn't match Opus's quality.

Opus may not totally displace MP3 and AAC for music player use, but it will gain a place there, just as AAC did, and in many of the markets it competes in- especially low-latency Internet audio- there is no well-established competitor.

Re:Memory leaks

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla says they have "now plugged the main cause of memory leaks in Firefox add-ons."
Er, the same memory leaks they assured us weren't happening or weren't their fault?

I just RTFA so I'll answer that for you: "weren't their fault". In TFA they say the memory leaks aren't Mozilla's fault, but it is their problem. The plugins create the memory leaks and there's not much Mozilla can do about that. They've tried working with lots of plugin writers to clean it up and they've got them to make progress, but they can't force every developer to cooperate, and they can't force those that do cooperate to fix it 100%. So instead, they've figured out a way to forcefull rip the memory out of the hands of the plugins so they can free it up. Theoretically this could be problematic (if the plugin later wanted to use that now-gone memory), but apparently they've done it in a way that ends up not causing any problems (though we'll see what happens once everyone is using it).

Re:Old story, or something new?

[Tough Love]

Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. Open a lot of windows and tabs and see for yourself. Maybe you don't normally do that, but people who do research online often see Firefox instability.

At the moment it's a tie between Firefox and Chrome on that front. I normally run both Firefox and Chrome because both of them will die after some number of days of heavy tab usage (100+ tabs). Chrome has this nasty, nasty habit of forgetting your previously open tabs with no way to recover them, if for some reason it crashes again before you hit the recover button. Which is pretty common actually, for example if you reboot a couple of times. (Embarassing bug! What's up with you smart people who totally own the Chrome project?) Furthermore, if you accidentally hit the "start" button instead of "recover" it's not game over for your Firefox tabs, you can get them back just by renaming a file, or you can archive those tabs just by copying that file if you want. If there's any way to do this in Chrome, I haven't found it. For these reasons, and also Chrome's annoying insistance on forcing you to save content to disk before opening it, Firefox is my primary browser for real work and Chrome is my throwaway browser.

Re:Old story, or something new?

[Martin Blank]

Having run into memory problems repeatedly for years, Firefox 15 is shockingly better at memory management. They completely change the model they used to help clean up after add-ons that don't clean up after themselves and very few of them have had to be fixed to work with it. Memory usage for me has been cut by more than half.

Mozilla also went out of its way to make the updater service run with as few rights as possible with code that revokes rights that it does not need. There were about three dozen permissions explicitly dropped when it was first developed around FF12. That number may have changed slightly but it's still a long list.

Re:Old story, or something new?

[Hatta]

Crash? No. Come to a complete stop for 10 seconds while doing nothing more but scrolling? Yes.

Re:Next...

[Hatta]

Why are you using WinRar when 7zip exists?

Re:Old story, or something new?

[Anonymous Coward]

What you describe is solely due to Firebug, and it's kind of a side-effect of it's features, not truely a bug that should be resolved.

I would recommend you simply run 2 firefox sessions.

Setup firefox with 2 profiles
- keep the Default profile for your regular browsing, enable day-to-day addons like adblock, pretty theme, no firebug)
- Create a development profile, enable firebug and the like, different homepage, no adblock etc, firebug enabled

Alter the Shortcut(s) on your desktop so you have 2 firefox shortcuts, one starting with the default profile /-P default/, and the other one automatically using the developer profile (also use the no-remote commandline switch for this one).

Now you simply have 2 firefox sessions, the developer one has a seperate (boring) theme so its easy to recognise and you can reboot it whenever you feel like it. The default profile has your regular browsing tabs and you can leave this running for months (i do, never any probs). Whenever you click a hyperlink in an external application they will all open in your regular browsing session (even if that firefox wasnt running yet) due to the no-remote flag on the developer shortcut.

It might take you a few days to get used to doing your developing in the seperate browsing session, but you'll be used to it after that and you'll love it. I do web development myself aswell and use a similar setup. Some additional benefits:
- I love adblock/noscript/etc for regular browsing sessions, and now that my development is done in a seperate session (without those addons) i no longer have those weird situations where i add stuff to a site i'm working on and it doesnt show due to being adblocked.
- If you manage to do really wicked shit during development and cause a race condition or browser crash or the like (not likely for regular HTML/JS stuff, but start messing with native client, vrml, plugins or other less common parts and it can happen), your regular browsing session doesn't get affected.
- My regular profile has Google as homepage, my development profile has my current project as homepage
- I spend a lot of time everyday inside my browser (like most ppl here), so i like to tweak every little thing to my taste, having seperate profiles means my development profile can remain mostly "factory default" eliminating the chance that some weird shit i did to firefox is having an effect on the page im developing.

Re:Old story, or something new?

[Anomalyst]

mail me the 1000 bucks for a new laptop asshole

Your laptop has an asshole?
What's wrong with it?

Re:Works fine for me

[Khopesh]

GP said

Every time Firefox upgrades, it wipes out my login cookies. It forces me to re-login to my sites. Is there a way to turn this dictator off?

I would be very surprised if there were not. Chrome lets you turn it off. I'm sure if you use Iceweasel (the Debian Firefox derivative), this wouldn't be a problem (updates are managed by apt). There are third-party efforts like IceWeasel for Windows and Porting Icecat on Mac Using Fink (IceCat is the GNU port of Firefox, sharing quite a bit (even the name, originally) with Iceweasel), but they're horribly out of date.

You said

I just updated Firefox between my "Flash freezing" post above and this post here, and I didn't have to log into Slashdot again.

Slashdot works because its cookies do not expire with the session. Any cookies that expire with the session will be expired by a browser upgrade. This is because "resuming" a crashed or otherwise saved session isn't actually resuming, it is reopening to the browser's best ability. This does not include session cookies for security reasons.

Re:Old story, or something new?

[ezakimak]

Sounds like it has a case of memoroids!

Re:Old story, or something new?

[slacka]

Yes, exactly! The high memory usage comes from firebug. If you really have so little memory, then you'll be much better off running 2 separate instances of Firefox. In both my own testing and Tom's latest browser Firefox turn out on top with the lowest memory footprint.
http://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/memoryusage3wbgp11,0101-343668-0-2-3-1-png-.html

Best 40 tab - Firefox 794 MB
Worst 40 tab - Chrome 1449 MB

Chrome used almost twice the memory as Firefox.

Re:Old story, or something new?

[hairyfeet]

The problem isn't the chips, its the boards. Most boards today have only 2 slots, 4 if you are lucky. That means for a DDR2 board you are maxed at 4-8Gb of RAM (4Gb chips are nearly a hundred a pop for DDR2 so not practical) and with DDR3 you are talking 8Gb-16Gb (again the 8Gb sticks are too high to be practical) so you just aren't gonna be able to stuff that much RAM.

And an even better question is...Why the fuck should I have to? Its a damned browser, not Crysis 2. if your ass is leaking memory so bad i need a shitton of memory just to deal with the thing? Then go back to the drawing board because your browser sucks.

I'm typing this on a 1.8GHz Sempron I keep at the shop for a nettop, its got 2Gb of RAM and with a half a dozen tabs open in Comodo Dragon and a couple of programs running in the background I have nearly half my memory left. I have left this running for a week with more than a half a dozen tabs open and what happened? it was using the same amount of memory as I left. I have done the same to FF overnight and found the machine to be slapping the shit out of the paging file the next day as FF usage slowly but surely climbs over time.

So if you need a server board with 32Gb of RAM to do any real work in your browser? then people need to move to a browser that doesn't go through memory like a drunk goes through a free minibar, because a browser frankly shouldn't be sucking down RAM like that.

Re:Old story, or something new?

[jimshatt]

Some people have a laptop asshole and some have one on the bottom.

I Love Firefox

[Zoxed]

At the risk of killing my Slashdot cred: I love Firefox.
I have not noticed any memory leak problems, my 15+ Add-Ons have not broken with FF updates, I do not care what version they call it (major or minor number updates) and I can not remember when it last crashed on me.

Re:Next...

[aled]

Why are you using WinRar when 7zip exists?

Why anyone is still using the RAR format is beyond me.