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Firefox 17 Launches With Click-to-Play Plugin Blocks

Posted by Soulskill on from the primed-with-new-features dept.

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).

3 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. Still no Retina support for OS X by TheoCryst · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

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    1. Re:Still no Retina support for OS X by _xeno_ · · Score: 1, Interesting

      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.

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  2. Sandbox by mx+b · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?).