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Firefox 18 Launches With Faster IonMonkey-Enabled JavaScript, Built-In PDF Viewe

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla on Tuesday officially launched Firefox 18 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The improvements include a new JavaScript compiler, a built-in PDF viewer, as well as Retina and touch support. The release notes are available, as is a list of changes for devs."

9 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Honestly? by Malc · · Score: 1, Insightful

    And still a tired old monolithic app. I switched to Chrome eight months ago, and although it uses a lot of memory it does give me the ability to properly manage its memory and CPU usage: it's so much easier to identify pages to kill when they're running in their own process space. Not only does this allow me to selectively reduce the app's memory footprint, but I can conserve battery life on my laptop by easily culling busy pages.

  2. Re:Quit whining by Bill_the_Engineer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And your narrow-mindedness is annoying. Do you know why Microsoft only releases patches once a month for its operating systems?

    And your complaining about the mainstream version of Firefox while ignoring the existence of the enterprise version of Firefox makes your argument disingenuous.

    Here let me get you started: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/

    --
    These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
  3. Re:Quit whining by Lucky75 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Firefox has a version that releases less often for corporate users. Also, Chrome does the exact same thing, sans the alternate version.

    --
    DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
  4. OTOH by dogsbreath · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Went to Chrome for a while to see what the buzz was about. Supposedly faster, cleaner, etc.

    Got po'd when I couldn't configure it to operate the way I wanted it to. Just personal taste and not a criticism; to each their own, as they say. However, I did not see any improvement in responsiveness and, for me there was a genuine loss of functionality. Went back to Firefox and have been very happy. Sure it would be nice to have some process options but Mozilla seems to be doing a bang up job of dealing with the various issues that caused process hangs and memory leaks. I can't remember the last time I had to kill an unresponding FF process. Used to happen weekly, even daily. Kudos to the FF team.

    For the most part the Firefox version changes have been transparent to me (well, except for tabs - grrrr - but I have been able to customize them to work the way I want). The update cycle is more or less the same with Chrome and IE. If they changed the numbering scheme so it went from, say, 10.17 to 10.18 instead of 17 to 18, there would be less reaction. Or maybe not. Anyways, it is not a huge issue.

    Firefox is easily competitive with any other popular browser and is well supported. Don't think I will bother trying a change again for a while unless something truly game changing comes along.

  5. Re:Too many revisions chased me away by Lucky75 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Pretty sure that doesn't happen any more with the new way they write extensions.

    --
    DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
  6. Re:Quit whining by Vaphell · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's the reality of the web. People want to use css3, html5, svg, faster javascript and what not now, not in 1 year, maybe.
    I don't really pay too much attention to what companies want, if they had their way we'd be still using IE6.0

  7. a plugin full or security issue by JcMorin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah and Adobe have a long reputation of having seriously security with their PDF reader. Wonder why they want to make it run without the plugin...

  8. Re:Honestly? by viperidaenz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Would you rather use Adobe software to read PDFs?

  9. Re:Honestly? by hobarrera · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No, I'd rather use zathura. Windows users can use SumatraPDF.
    Why do people keep assuming that Adobe is the only PDF reader there is, there's dozens out there.

    I prefer firefox not to have a PDF reader, so when I click on a link to a PDF I'm prompted to download it, instead of having to wait for it to load and be rendered with JS before downloading it.