Firefox 17 Launches With Click-to-Play Plugin Blocks

An anonymous reader writes "As expected, Mozilla on Tuesday officially launched Firefox 17 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The biggest addition in this release is click-to-play plugins, announced back in October. In short, the addition means Mozilla will now prompt Firefox users on Windows with old versions of Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Silverlight (more will be added eventually)." The release notes are available, as is a list of changes for devs. Firefox for Android got a new release as well (notes).

Comments

Still no Retina support for OS X

[TheoCryst]

Apparently they have it in nightly builds now, but it hasn't trickled down to the main release channel quite yet. Bummer.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

It's okay, the whole point of their fast release cycle is that you'll probably see that feature within the next 6 weeks rather than in 6 months from now. Idiots who don't understand the version system will whine about it, but that's a very tangible benefit of releasing more often.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[noobermin]

It's alright, all the OS X crowd use chrome anyway since it's sleeker and more hip and not as popular.

Paradoxically, because of that, everyone uses it because it's sleeker and more hip and thus is popular.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[ColdWetDog]

17? Seventeen?

WTF.

Last time I checked (I think it was last week) it was 4 or 5.

This Internet thingy is way too fast for me. Getting old. Slowing down.

(And, back on subject, the only way I can tell when FF has a new version is WHEN SOMETHING ELSE BREAKS. Stop that, please.)

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[ColdWetDog]

Chrome? No way. OS X is into old wood veneer.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[firex726]

They changed it up a while ago.
They moved from the more traditional X.Y.Z versioning to basically make it all just X.

When it was announced I think justified it by having it come off as a PR deal, people thinking FF is old and outdated because it's on V4, while Chrome is on v10.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[ArcadeMan]

Apparently, not anymore.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Just grab 10.0.11 ESR and relax.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm, I didn't mention the version number at all. Please, if you hold onto this, every so often these articles will be littered with:

18? Eighteen?

19? WTF.

Last time I checked (I think it was last week) it was 7 or 8, not fucking 20!

This Internet thingy is way too fast for me. Getting old. Slowing down. Can't keep up with 21 versions!

(And, back on subject, the only way I can tell when FF has a new version is WHEN SOMETHING ELSE BREAKS like it did in 21. Stop that at 22, please.)

We get it. I thought that when you're older, you become more wise and realize that some things are just that way, and there's nothing you can do about it so you need to relax. Here, I'll get some of my friends and we'll pretend to play on your lawn so you can yell at us to get off. If it helps, I'm brown and was born from immigrants (legal, but you don't need to know that), so the catharsis will be even more satisfying.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[kthreadd]

Just grab 10.0.11 ESR and relax.

Or 17.0 ESR which is also out now and that will replace 10.0 ESR over the two upcoming releases. So if you want to roll out Firefox in your organization, be advised that 10.0 ESR is going out of support in only a couple of months.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Last time I checked (I think it was last week) it was 4 or 5.

I've always thought that ever since browsers became as ubiquitous as GNU Emacs once was, they've simply wanted to catch up with its flashy version number. :-)

And, back on subject, the only way I can tell when FF has a new version is WHEN SOMETHING ELSE BREAKS.

So you never notice when something unbreaks after an update? You're a glass-is-half-empty kind of guy, I guess.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox doesn't need "retinal support" until real computers and OSes support it.

Um, you know them's fightin' words, right?

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that the UI looks really fuzzy on a Retina display w/o having Retina support. That's one of the larger complaints on non-retina apps. The way around that is to set the MBPr to 2880x1800, but then everything else is small as hell.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[mcgrew]

I hate to point out the obvious, but no web site in existence does "retina" anyway

On the contrary, there are quite a few very large pictures on the internet. Even on wikipedia.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[0123456]

But, uh, didn't 10.0 ESR only come out a couple of months ago?

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Rectal support is very important you insensitive clod!

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[jopsen]

You do realize Chrome has the same release cycle?

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Billly Gates]

ESR is only supported for a year. It allows for 2 months in between versions before one version is dropped.

IE is going the same route with annual updates. IE 10 is an exception due to the incompetence of the Windows 8 team forcing WDDM 1.2 and DirectX 11.1 onto it which requires significant backporting.

So this time next year IE 11 will be out or in RC states and the following IE 12 etc. Organizations need to learn to adapt to change more rapidly. It is not like a minor release is anything like the huge rewrite of apps that resulted from IE 6 to IE 7 or even 8. Your browser should always be updated at a regular basis.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Billly Gates]

Thank goodness Chrome is not updated like Firefox or anything. Then we would have a problem.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, if you're rolling out your new features on a six week schedule as they are implemented... What is the difference between a major and a minor release?
If there's no difference it's just confusing... IMO Firefox major releases lost their significance after the jump from 3.0 to 3.5, but so what... if PR thinks it's good let them have it...

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Cyberax]

Quite a lot of sites support the full 'retina' resolution. For example, Google Maps or Picassa Web.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[_xeno_]

Funny, that picture looks just fine to me on my non-"retina" display. It's almost as if you don't need a retina display to see images!

But wait, there's more. When that image is embedded into a webpage, it's embedded at the standard, non-"retinal" resolution. So when displayed on a "retina" display, it will look "blurry."

Except apparently Wikipedia uses Safari's made up extension for "retina" images, so it would work there. (Hopefully Firefox will stick with standards and not make up extensions for non-existent problems.)

But on the vast majority of webpages, all you're going to get is a standard-res image. Making "retina" basically useless.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[thetoadwarrior]

I'm just on OSX with Firefox. Chrome is for geek posers.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Desler]

Retina support is more than just higher resolution images. It's about the text rendering, too.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[_xeno_]

How would text rendering be a problem for the browser? I'm assuming that Mac OS X isn't written by complete idiots, and that non-"retinal" apps get upscaled with proper high-DPI text rendering, meaning that the only thing Firefox has to deal with is scaling images.

This is true, right? Apple wouldn't do something completely stupid like require all apps that want to do "retinal" be completely rewritten to deal with that, would they?

I suppose they would, wouldn't they.

In any case, text rendering is a thing that the OS should be dealing with, not the app, so it shouldn't be a Firefox problem. All Firefox should need to do is provide higher-res images. Which basically don't exist on the vast majority of sites, so they might as well not bother on something that maybe a percent of a percent of users would be able to use.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Just use Safari. You're living the Apple dream, yes?

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Desler]

You seem to be thinking that "retina support" is only about rendering the webpage at a higher resolution. It's also about the program's UI. And no, Firefox did not automatically use HiDPI rendering of text in webpages or its UI therwise they wouldn't have needed to fix that. That is an issue with Firefox not OS X as you seem to be trying to blame. Your focus solely on the webpage images misses the point entirely.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Cinder6]

Chrome is silent about its updates. Is Firefox? (Genuine question; haven't used it since 3.5.)

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[TheoCryst]

Additionally, any site that renders text will look better. Firefox 17 doesn't render text at the higher DPI supported by new MacBook Pros, causing every site to look blurrier than it would in Chrome or Safari.

For the record, the same is true in Windows: change the scaling factor of the OS, and Firefox simply scales the same low-res text. It's unclear whether the change I mentioned in nightlies will fix Windows as well; I simply haven't tried it yet.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Darinbob]

All they have to do is put the words "Supports the Retina lifestyle" somewhere in the About page and the hipsters will be happy.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize Chrome has the same release cycle?

Although Mozilla proper seems to feel like whatever Chrome does is worthy of emulation, there are many users who would prefer to use Chrome if they want Chrome's behavior. Nobody's thinking, "damn, I wish I had a browser that looked like Chrome and acted like Chrome and was open source like Chrome, but wasn't actually Chrome."

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Darinbob]

You don't understand. These people paid extra money for Retinal Displays. They demand that their applications come and reassure them that the money was well spent.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Darinbob]

Do these not work without the support in the browser?

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Cyberax]

There's an unofficial patch for Firefox for Retina support (I'm using it right now to write this message). It works just fine, and it also is going to be integrated into F18.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

As of 15 or 16, it can be.

When installing or updating to that version on Windows, you can opt to include a background updater service.

I think, on fresh installs, as you click through the installer, on step two or three, after you click "Next > Next > Next" when choosing your Windows installation folder, the install process shows you that they've defaulted a checkbox to "Yes, include the automatic background update service". You can disable it if you want.

Even if you install the service, you can control it through the options/preferences applet, and disable it, have it notify you before doing anything, or run completely silent (default), or through the "services.msc" control panel.

Not sure about Apple and Macs, but there's probably something similar baked into recent versions.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Cyberax]

Sure, your browser should support getting HiDpi images. Chrome, Safari support it out-of-box on Windows and Mac. Firefox doesn't, but there's a patched version with Retina support.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[nmb3000]

It's okay, the whole point of their fast release cycle is that you'll probably see that feature within the next 6 weeks rather than in 6 months from now. Idiots who don't understand the version system will whine about it, but that's a very tangible benefit of releasing more often.

And you know, if the rapid updates were just to fix bugs and improve performance, I doubt anyone would really care how fast versions came out. The problem is that with every release they feel the need to dick around with the user interface as well.

Look what's included in 17:

• Some frakking stupid built-in "Social API" bullshit. Why the hell do I need Facebook and Twitter embedded in my browser? I intentionally block both of them on webpages, and now I have to deal with them being an integrated part of the software? I genuinely DO NOT understand this -- I thought the WHOLE POINT of the addon system was for adding things like this. Nowadays the Firefox addon ecosystem seems more focused on removing things from the browser. What. The. Hell.
• Just what we need: Bigger icons!. Let's display less information and take up valuable vertical screen space (which they whine about so much as excuses to get rid of the status and tab bars).

I think Mozilla would face much less resistance to their new update model if they would release fixes and performance updates automatically, but hold off making poorly thought-out UI changes except for on a 6-12 month cycle.

Or, better yet, drop the stupid UI changes all together.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Darinbob]

Explain this. An image is an image, if it's JPEG, GIF, or PNG the firefox should support it. HiDpi is an Apple marketing term only, it is not a new image format that needs special decoding.

Now if the problem is that you get tiny images and want them to be scaled up then that is what should be said clearly, not some fuzzy phrase like "support retinal displays".

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Smauler]

Retina support is more than just higher resolution images. It's about the text rendering, too.

Ok... I may be missing something here. What exactly is the advantage of having very high resolution text?

I'm serious... I don't understand why anyone could consider that a feature they'd use, apart from in some specialised jobs.

I'm all for big resolution displays for a multitude of reasons, but reading text has never been one of them for me.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Ravaldy]

I'm waiting for F128 :|
I find this release model as ridiculous as people who don't flush the toilet after going. Major versions are for major changes. As they would say in engineering: change in form, fit and function

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[noobermin]

I use w3m without a framebuffer.

Oh wait, this is a OS X hipster superiority argument, not a linux leetness one, my bad.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[KiloByte]

10.0 will still be supported by Debian and a number of other distributions -- heck, the support STARTS in a few months.

If indeed the Mozilla foundation wants to drop 10.0 "ESR" so quickly, then it's not an ESR, it is well below standards for a regular release for most software.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[stms]

Really? I never thought I see the day where (non-troll) people on /. would fail to appreciate the value of a higher resolution display. I understand the "retina" marketing gimmick is bullshit but at least someone is pushing resolution beyond 1080p. I certainly hope we don't keep our current screen resolution as a standard for the web indefinitely. Some people are going to have to start adopting higher resolutions at some point.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[caspy7]

Yes, it is.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Darinbob]

It's a larger resolution but in a physically smaller area (the new retinal display macbooks are actually smaller). That means that the display can actually be harder to see especially for those who do not have good vision (or even moderate vision). If you scale up text and graphics to the same size it was before, all the retinal stuff does it smooth out fonts more, and if you could never see the jaggies in the fonts in the first place it's pretty much pointless.

Plus it's stuck on an absurdly small phone screen or on the laptop. It's useless when you normally use an external monitor which can not display that resolution, and many people use these monitors are they're easier to see without squinting or leaning forward. Ie, a large screen lcd at 2 to 3 feet away from my eyes is comfortable to read and most corrective lenses are set up to focus easily at that distance.

And my external monitor is 1920x1200, which is more than 1080p.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox 17 has it right now. So did Firefox 16. It just doesn't work with hardware acceleration.

So Command-comma, Advanced, General, and uncheck "Use hardware acceleration where available."

Enjoy your retina Firefox. Be sure to recheck it once hardware support for retina lands, and be warned this doesn't work with plugins (so no retina Flash). But it works otherwise.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

well the major releases would be the ESR (extended support release), that's every 7 versions, and lo and behold 17 is actually one of those ESR

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[stms]

If you scale up text and graphics to the same size it was before, all the retinal stuff does it smooth out fonts more, and if you could never see the jaggies in the fonts in the first place it's pretty much pointless.

Obviously it's pointless for text we can read text fine on current generation displays the point is more detail.

Plus it's stuck on an absurdly small phone screen or on the laptop.

I really don't think you've seen one of these displays in person. You can actually see the difference when there's higher PPI the size of the screen is irrelevant.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[donaldm]

You do realize Chrome has the same release cycle?

That is true, however under Linux you get an update download of Chrome (now Version 23.0.1271.64) about 48MB while a Firefox update is less than 9MB. Not sure about MS Windows since I don't use it now, however i do remember when I did that Firefox updates where actually deltas which were only a few MB.

As of writing (my last update was 2 days ago) I still only have version 16.0.2 of Firefox. Now compare that with the latest version of Chrome which is 23.0.1271.64.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Ed Avis]

Can't you just zoom in the website with Ctrl-+ and get the same effect? That's what I do on Windows with a 3840x2400 display. Admittedly some websites specify fixed pixel sizes for things so they appear scrunched into the top left corner, or in a thin dribble down the middle, but I don't see how you can fix that without violating web standards. Does the 'Retina' mode render something that says 100 pixels as 200 pixels instead?

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

... coz when i browse pages i always stop to admire how pretty arial looks

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

But I have seen the screens, side by side at Apple store. Not everyone has good vision. Even Apple fans eventually age.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Updates breaks stuff all over the place. With the Firefox 16 update, for example, it stopped accepting rgb() colors in execCommand, requiring #xxxxxx colors. However, element.style.backgroundColor still returns rgb() commands, requiring us to add a function to convert the rgb() colors returned by firefox into #xxxxxx colors that firefox understands.

Firefox 14 or 15 broke at least one plugin I can't do without, and resulted in rolling back to the previous version while waiting for the plugin to be updated to work with the new version.

Meanwhile, Chrome just keeps working.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Cyberax]

HiDpi images are images with twice the resolution of normal ones, there's nothing magical in them. Apple added a custom CSS selector for them, so browsers that support 'retina' displays could automatically fetch hi-res pictures instead of normal ones.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[ameen.ross]

This joke was funny the first 12 times.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

You still use a 72dpi LaserWriter, instead of the 600dpi printers that have been the minimum for years (and 300 dpi before that)?

Lack of high DPI has lead to the development of some really bad workarounds, like making fonts fuzzy like a broken CRT screen, making it really hard to read - for some reason called "antialiasing", to make it sound smarter than "fuzzy fonts".

Some programs (e.g. Evince) make it impossible to turn that crap off, making reading text in those programs like borrowing somebodys glasses, and being unable to take them off.

All this because modern screens are so low resolution, that even people whose vision is so bad that they don't notice the fuzzy result of antialiasing, can still see the jagged edges of text that isn't blurred.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

A Firefox release is a non-issue for me because the rapid releases annoyed me so much I stopped updating it. ...

I've started using Chrome when I want a solid alternate browser that's not IE. I'm surprised FF hasn't seen a significant dropoff in user base since they started the rapid release crap.

If you kept to Firefox, you would have noticed that the updates are silent now, just like Chrome. Also, you're a fucking moron.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[mcgrew]

Funny, that picture looks just fine to me on my non-"retina" display

To me as well, but I'd bet that if there were two computers side by side with one retina and one not, either one of us would see the difference.

But on the vast majority of webpages, all you're going to get is a standard-res image. Making "retina" basically useless.

Yes, for now.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a Retina MacBook at the native screen resolution with no UI scaling. I appreciate the fact that I can have 8 windows full of code open at the same time.

Have you considered that not all laptops are for everyone? Just because it doesn't make sense for you, doesn't mean that those who it does make sense for are idiots, like you seem to be implying.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[Darinbob]

Ah, finally a reasonable explanation of why a browser would need support for this.

Re:Still no Retina support for OS X

[thetoadwarrior]

My Thinkpad, running Linux (which I'm on today), runs firefox too. I just mentioned my OSX performance since that was relevant to his comment.

exponential version numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

I've ran the numbers through our compute cluster here at JPL and have determined that Firefox version numbers are on an exponential climb and will reach critical mass and achieve self awareness around the 20th or 21st of December THIS YEAR with the creation of a singularity on the entire planet's web browser population.

The Mayans knew... the Mayans knew...

Re:exponential version numbers

[noobermin]

Someone please mod this up I'm laughing so hard.

Re:exponential version numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

So did the programmers. I mean, just look at what is happening in that icon?

Re:exponential version numbers

[0123456]

By an odd coincidence, this morning I was reading Arthur C Clarke's classic SF short story 'The Nine Billion Versions Of Firefox' where the universe comes to an end when they release version 9,000,000,000. I had hoped it wouldn't happen in my lifetime, but it's looking increasingly likely now.

Re:exponential version numbers

[nickittynickname]

That's crazy. Last time I heard a firefox version number joke was right after I fell off my dinosaur and into my wooden underwear. Good job, I'm glad to see you spiced up that dead horse with a few other dead horses. That should bring an old joke back to life.

Re:exponential version numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical comment from someone with a 2-AND 3/4-FUCKING-MILLION id...

Re:exponential version numbers

[nickittynickname]

Typical comment from an AC

Re:exponential version numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!

Firefox Nightly

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay, now we have Firefox 20.0a1!

I always wondered why the bug fix list is so huge.

[etash]

The answer: some bugs seem to be fixed TWICE:

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/17.0/releasenotes/buglist.html
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/16.0/releasenotes/buglist.html

there as it at least one bug ( 786386 ) which has been fixed .. in both versions. ( 3d randomly picked number from version 17.0 )

Click to play plugins?

[Hentes]

As always, Opera did it first.

Re:Click to play plugins?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and about 5 years ago, to boot.

It is rumored that labs.mozilla.org simply redirects to opera.com

Re:Click to play plugins?

[Archenoth]

Yeah, I wonder how long other features like Speed Dial, or Tab stacking will last before someone copies them.

I wish that people knew where all of these fancy features are coming from, that way Opera would have more funding to innovate. They certainly haven't slowed down since they created tabbed browsing eons ago...

Re:Click to play plugins?

[VGPowerlord]

Yeah, I wonder how long other features like Speed Dial, or Tab stacking will last before someone copies them.

Chrome already copied Speed Dial.

Re:Click to play plugins?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure that was his point :)

Re:Click to play plugins?

[bill_mcgonigle]

As always, Opera did it first.

Oh, did Opera implement a feature in 2010 that Flashblocker for Firefox implemented in 2002? How innovative.

Re:Click to play plugins?

[gparent]

Flashblock did this in 2006, if not earlier. Quit sucking Opera's dick.

Re:Click to play plugins?

[cgt]

So what? You want everyone to have permanent patents on everything they “invent”? Also, this feature isn't quite what you think it is—RTFA.

Re:Click to play plugins?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah opera also did buggy, crapware bundled shit first too.

Whats your point.

For all the firsts opera had.... There are damm good reasons opera didnt end up where firefox is. And most of them are the companys fault.

Re:Click to play plugins?

[cgt]

Opera is actually a decent browser (though I prefer Firefox), but their fanboys are even more annoying than Chrome fanboys.

Re:Click to play plugins?

[Anonymous Coward]

Konqueror had it even earlier than that.

Re:Click to play plugins?

[oakgrove]

I wish that people knew where all of these fancy features are coming from, that way Opera would have more funding to innovate.

While the cynic may see it as chump change especially in multi-national mega-corp terms, in 2011, Opera Software's net income came in at a comfortable 24.6 million dollars on an operating income of 156.5 million, a substantial increase over the year before. Not quite as much as Mozilla who netted 43 million in 2009 but for a small company of 777 employees just doing their thing making their browser, it's not too bad. Bear in mind too that Mozilla resides in the US while Opera is in Norway so a direct 1:1 comparison of financials can be slightly misleading especially when you take into account social services especially health care the respective companys' employees have access to and the different tax structures they exist under. Financially, Opera Software looks healthy with very low debt, and I think 150 million in cash reserves which, again, for their size is not too shabby. Most of their revenue comes from two places, namely licensing and search deals with licensing bringing in a bit more. Search is huge for them accounting for about a third of their income so they're in pretty deep with Google and to a much lesser extent Yandex and Amazon. While being heavily dependent on one other company that barring contractual obligations could turn the money off at a whim isn't the greatest thing ever, it's obviously better to have it than not have it just bearing in mind that it might not always be there. The bright side is their licensing revenues are not only slightly larger than search but actually appear to be growing faster respectively as well. And since they do offer some unique technology enabling web browsing on very low-end feature phones that otherwise wouldn't have it at all (as far as I know), it's reasonable to think the licensing revenue is fairly stable. If you want the whole story, here's their (warning pdf)2011 annual report. Riveting.

Re:Click to play plugins?

[Anonymous Coward]

ABOUT 5 years ago. So probably 6 or 7 years ago. Opera had it slightly before flashblock.

Re:I always wondered why the bug fix list is so hu

[kthreadd]

I believe the reason is that work actually starts on 17 around the time of 15. There's always three versions being developed in parallel, each one a few weeks ahead of each other. So a bug fix may get into all currently developed versions.

about time

[Anonymous Coward]

about time. this has always been a serious security issue

Re:I always wondered why the bug fix list is so hu

[etash]

true, it may be just that, i uniq-ed them and it's only 206 duplicated fixes ( out of about ~2200 per version ) so that accounts to less than 10% ( per version )

ClickToPlay sounded good; then I read the summary.

[jonadab]

When I read the headline, "Click-to-Play Plugin Blocks", I was thinking that plugin content would be blocked from doing anything unless the user clicks a play button. Just like FlashBlock, in other words. That would actually be a good thing. A good change, in a new version of Firefox: I might've fainted.

But no, what it actually means is this:
> Mozilla will now prompt Firefox users on Windows with old versions of Adobe Reader...

Oh, yes, please.

We need this because Adobe Reader doesn't already prompt every single user who has it installed to the effect that they need to upgrade it, a bare minimum of three per hour. We definitely need our web browser to bug us about this also, otherwise we might not know that three new versions of Adobe Reader were released during the time it took us to download and install the version we currently have. Well, I mean, okay, in theory we'd _know_, but without this extra reminder we might occasionally go up to fifteen minutes at a time without _thinking_ about it. Mozilla must protect us from that horrific fate.

Waiting for 18..

[dstyle5]

which should release in about 3... 2... 1...

Re:Waiting for 18..

[Anonymous Coward]

20 was out today, though it was still missing support for the "comedian" add-on.

If you could spare some time could you sort them out? You seem to be on the ball.
Support is there for joke recycling already but you'll have to implement flogging dead horses yourself.

v17...

[sirber]

Is it faster now? It's the only browser where you can feel a delay when you change tabs..

Re:v17...

[thetoadwarrior]

Works for me but I'm not running an old virus ridden windows machine like many people as I know what I'm doing with my computer. That's why I also know Chrome isn't that fast and has many flaws the google fanboys don't want to talk about given that google tracks them and knows all the questionable sites they've been on.

Re:v17...

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Which tabs? I only feel a delay when switch between non-Firebugged tabs and Firebugged ones. Oh, and sometimes if I switch to a tab that hasn't been loaded or contains a huge image that takes a while to decode.

Re:v17...

[Desler]

And those flaws are what exactly?

Re:v17...

[thetoadwarrior]

Tabs die too quickly and it poorly handles broken HTML which causes it to use up all it's memory and cause the thing to be unsable are the two biggest. The biggest reason I quit using it is because it's performance was just generally much more poor than Firefox.

Its problem is that it's always used more memory and CPU than pretty much any other browser but they focused on making it feel fast which is fine but that little trick seems to be failing. That or I guess they expect me to have a computer more powerful than something that happily plays TF2 or Portal 2 (on faily high settings and resolution) just to browse the web.
And that's without plugins. I'd hate to see what happens if you take full advantage of it. Not that you can. Google's nazi-like controls won't even let me add buttons to the speed dial page (assuming they haven't recently fixed that after years of people asking for it), the UI in general has a too minimal feel and then when you download a file it has that big butt ugly download bar which I have to then close myself. It was a nice UI compared to all the others when they had small view ports but everyone else seems to be excelling at making the most out of the browser space while give people options. Google still gives you very little flexibility which means they think they either know better than me or they're just not good enough to handle it.

Re:v17...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it faster now?

I hope not. The battle between Safari and Firefox for being the slowest browser is just too thrilling to declare a winner yet.

Re:v17...

[sirber]

pretty much ll of them, whitout firebug. I'm on a netbook too (AMD E-350, 6GB ram). Chrome is fast, as well as opera, but Firefox is choking.

Re:v17...

[Anonymous Coward]

I call shenanigans, Firefox 16 is running just fine here with 227 tabs across 4 windows open on an old Athlon64 3500+ with only 2Gb of ram and an 8800GTS on Linux Mint 13 with the Nouveau drivers and no Flash, using all the crapware blocking extentions and I don't have any slowdowns or unresponsiveness.

ESR 17 is also available for download

[williamyf]

ESR 17.0 is also available for download (as is ESR 10.0.11), but the autmatic update mechanism is not offering it as an option (at least not yet), only 10.0.11.

I guess they will let the Quality testing phase to be completed before offering it as an automatic update

Re:ESR 17 is also available for download

[ChunderDownunder]

Eric S. Raymond is now up to version 17?

I knew he was into all that Cathedral and Bazaar stuff but hadn't realised he'd open sourced himself!

Version 17

[Anonymous Coward]

Now That's Gangsta.

Re:ClickToPlay sounded good; then I read the summa

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's stupid. When I saw "click to play" I was thinking something more about what you said, especially since Opera already has this integrated.

Sandbox

[mx b]

What I find more fascinating in TFA is that Firefox has added simple support for HTML5 Sandboxes. You can apparently specify whether the data inside the IFRAME is allowed to access outside domains, etc. (if I am reading it correctly; I am not actively involved in web design at the moment and so am a bit behind the curve; does anyone know how good this sandbox function is compared to other software/browsers?).

Re:Sandbox

[extra88]

The sandbox adds security restrictions plus "tokens" for explicitly allowing the things that you, the site developer, want. The main purpose of the restrictions is to prevent content within an iframe from accessing content in or related to the parent page. For example, lots of ads are loaded in iframes, the sandbox attribute can prevent JavaScript in the ad from executing. The site Can I Use is a decent place to look for which browsers and browser versions support particular parts of HTML5, CSS3, etc. The iframe sandbox has had support from Google and Apple but Microsoft only added it in IE10 and no version of Opera on any platform has it.

Re:ClickToPlay sounded good; then I read the summa

[Darinbob]

It means they can now kill off Flash and promote their one world domination via HTML5. HTML5 has always been the goal of Mozilla, they don't care about the users they only want their dream to come true.

And I WANT the older versions of Reader. The new Acrobat Reader version are complete crap.

ESR

[jones_supa]

Notice that Firefox 17 is also an Extended Support Release, so if you are a fan of a more conservative update cycle, now is a good time to hop on the wagon.

Mozilla Firefox ESR Overview

Prompt users for/to do what?

[Anonymous Coward]

"In short, the addition means Mozilla will now prompt Firefox users on Windows with old versions of Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Silverlight (more will be added eventually)."

Prompt them for/to do what?

Re:Prompt users for/to do what?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Click-to-Play plugins" i.e. To enable each usage of the plugin, if it is of an old version.

Seriously, this is stupid. I'm not updating until someone indicates that it is possible to turn this shit off.

Sounds much better than it is.

[UltraZelda64]

I thought from the description that this would require clicking *all* Flash, Java or other plug-in applets before they would run. That would be true security (until the dumb masses find and click one they shouldn't). I thought this would be a relief for when I'm using a fresh copy of Firefox; I could possibly go a bit longer before installing Adblock, NoScript and the rest. But no... it only blocks this crap from loading without a click when an "old" version of a plug-in is used. Yay. Talk about pointless. So, AdBlock and NoScript still do it better, and this is no temporary holdover until the real plug-in can be installed.

Actually, this is possibly even worse. Once people find out that they can "block" annoying moving Flash ads that have sound by simply keeping their plug-ins out of date, they'll probably never want to update again. I know I wouldn't. So then when they do click to run a bad applet, they really are screwed.

Re:ClickToPlay sounded good; then I read the summa

[Anonymous Coward]

No, click-to-play does what you think it does. Like FlashBlock. The Acrobat Reader prompts are an additional feature.

Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

[antdude]

No more of this Mac OS X version: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2012/10/04/we-bid-you-adieu-spotted-cat/ ...

Re:Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

[David Nabbit]

This would be more of an issue if they had still been supporting PowerPC, since Leopard was the last OS X version for PPC (PPC support ended with 3.6.x.). It seems silly though that they discontinued Leopard support in the version right before the ESR. At least all Intel Macs can upgrade to Snow Leopard, and TenFourFox is keeping PPC on life support for now. Still, Mozilla's discontinuation of Mac platforms is widely disproportionate to their Windows counterparts.

Re:Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

[BZ]

The amount of effort needed to support multiple versions of OSX at the same time is much larger than the amount of effort needed on Windows, because Microsoft usually bends over backwards to not break compat, while Apple will go out of its way to do so.

Combined with the lower user base on Mac and the faster OS update cycle of Mac users, this means that dropping support for old MacOS versions is a much simpler call than dropping support for old Windows versions: They're more work to support, and the number of users using them is much smaller.

For perspective, about half of Mozilla's Windows users are still on WinXP (which approximately matches the overall fraction of Windows users on WinXP), while the fraction of Mac users on 10.5 was 10% and falling rapidly when support was dropped.

Re:ClickToPlay sounded good; then I read the summa

[Lennie]

It supports both, the behaviour is configurable.

Re:ClickToPlay sounded good; then I read the summa

[higuita]

There are OTHER pdf readers, most of then with plugin support ... no need to use a buggy and insecure acrobat reader

What does the scouter say bout its version number?

[jensend]

There's no way that can be right!

Re:ClickToPlay sounded good; then I read the summa

[Darinbob]

Except that I think reader 7 & 8 have the best UI, for things like search, moving forward and back in history, etc. All others I have tried are clumsy. I use Preview on my Mac at work but am not at all happy with it.

The whole thing is stupid because no one ever should have added the possibility of malware in a read-only non-executable format! What next, RTF viruses? Well, I guess I thought the same way about HTML and didn't think anyone would be stupid enough to add features to it to make it dangerous.

+1

[higuita]

Having used all major browser i agree.

for browsing 2-3 pages, chrome is good, startup fast, but start to load more tabs, demand more from it and you will see the cpu and specially the ram going up.
During the last year and half, firefox manage to rebuild its memory usage and today have the best long term memory usage of all.

Re:ClickToPlay sounded good; then I read the summa

[Anonymous Coward]

Estonian TXT viruses. That politely ask you to forward it to all your contacts and then delete your hard drive contents.

Still not as good as Chrome.

[slacka]

As a web developer, I would love to see FF support WebP. As an end user, I wish the UI was responsive and it took advantage of more than 1 of the cores in my multi-core CPU. Do they even make single-core CPUs anymore?

Re:Still not as good as Chrome.

[BZ]

A serious question: why do you want WebP support? What does it buy you?

The blog post at http://muizelaar.blogspot.com/2011/04/webp.html explains why Mozilla is not likely to support WebP in its current state, but if there's something Jeff missed it might be worth letting him know...

Re:ClickToPlay sounded good; then I read the summa

[caspy7]

To enable click-to-play for all plugins go to about:config in the location bar and set “plugins.click_to_play” to true.
The feature is considered still under development which is why it's not enabled by default.

Still no Hardware Acceleration

[Anonymous Coward]

The Nightlies are now at Version 20, and since Firefox 4 with their much vaunted hardware acceleration that doesn't really exist, and frankly I am getting really annoyed at how horrible performance is compared to every other browser on my system, and about:support states it's not using any hardware acceleration, it

Every single browser on my system can render webpages over 30 times faster than firefox, it's just plain ridiculous; Opera, Konqueror(!), rekonq, luakit, chrome, you name it.
And if you think I'm being unreasonable, Go ask Doxygen to generate some interactive graphs, or go play with one in the "Network" tab of a random github project. They don't even update once a second in firefox yet everything else sports very smooth motion!

I already get nagged enough

[Osgeld]

Acrobat (aka "reader") nags the shit out of me to the point where its in my better interest to just the fucker off, then nothing gets updated until the next reinstall, which is a good way to encourage updating

Re:ClickToPlay sounded good; then I read the summa

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, PDF Reader, you're fat! And you smell bad. There. That should make it a bit more insecure.

Re:ClickToPlay sounded good; then I read the summa

[strikethree]

Considering that there is at least one exploitable vulnerability per month in Adobe plugins and the number of computers getting pwned through that vector, this is still a good thing... even if it is not as useful as something like flashblock or noscript. Can't have the user in control over their own experience now can we? External entities should be in control.

Noscript for the win.

Re:ClickToPlay sounded good; then I read the summa

[Anonymous Coward]

RTF viruses? Ummm, yes, I think? See: "A new Trojan variant, detected as Backdoor.Makadocs and spread via RTF and Microsoft Word document marked as Trojan.Dropper"

Re:ClickToPlay sounded good; then I read the summa

[Waccoon]

You know, I don't understand it.

Every company bitches to high heaven about updating constantly, every piece of software does daily update checks, sometimes with a background process, and you get a billion prompts a day to update. How is it possible to even run old software unless people go out of their way to disable the idiotic, intrusive update messag...

Never mind.

Click to play already out

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been out, at least since FF 16, not sure if before

Firefox fonts are blurry on non-ClearType Win7

[chaseDigger]

Firefox 17 is unusable for me - the font rendering appear broken on non-ClearType enabled systems and my Bookmark Bar links no longer loads things when I click them?! (I have it placed on my Navigation Bar). Broken beyond use for me: I have just installed latest Pale Moon release instead and migrated my profile, apart from a bit of tweaking of the status bar everything works fine for me. The point that Pale Moon is allegedly faster than stock FF releases rendering wise is secondary to me but quite nice to know (ah, the joy of placebo).

Re:ClickToPlay sounded good; then I read the summa

[jonadab]

My main objection to HTML5 is that it is a step back toward the bad old days of HTML4 when parsing the markup was a royal pain in the hind end. XHTML's concept of well-formedness is so immensely useful, I cannot imagine anyone who understands the implications ever wanting to go back to the horrible morass of SGML-based markup. XML-based markup is so much easier to manage, both for the content creator (e.g., web developers) and also for software developers (browsers, editors, server-side stuff, indexers, anything that works with markup).

I have no intrinsic objection to killing off Flash, although I also wouldn't mind having a nickel for every technology that has been promoted with the claim that it would do so. I could sort of understand how someone *might* think Silverlight would kill off Flash, if said someone did not understand about backward compatibility. (Hint: why didn't Itanium kill off 32-bit processors?) I do not, however, understand how anyone could suppose that HTML5 could kill off flash.