Slashdot Mirror
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."
It still only feels like Firefox 17 was just released last week.
When will the insanity stop? It's getting incredibly tiring.
Psh, I just upgraded to Firefox 22 just 5 minutes ago. Firfox 18 is so 30 minutes ago.
They kept updating it and changing things around in very small ways which seemed to break my add-ons and browsing methods on a regular basis. Like adding the awesomebar, taking it out, breaking the addon I had to replace it and probably putting it back in again by now...
I know updates are generally considered a good thing, but Mozilla chased me away with theirs. I just wanted my browser and daily routine to work every time I started it up without having to worry about whether or not they updated it.
These numbers are meaningless now. It's just stupid. It would almost be better to start calling releases stuff like "firefox 20130108" or something, at least you'd have a logical indicator of how recent the version is without having to look it up on wikipedia or something.
Firefox for Android lacks tabs. I mean, you have them in a sidebar as big screenshots of the website, and there is no option to use classic tabs at the top of the window. I hope they fixed it with Firefox 18, will try it later today. Otherwise, it is a great browser and the only one in which I can use flash for android jelly bean (though I had to install flash by hand). Chrome and Dolphin disabled flash, even if it is installed, for jelly bean.
Honestly, your whining is counterproductive.
Firefox is following a standard open-source style policy of release early, release often and as a vendor following this exact mantra, I see that although I do hear a lot of whining from some of our (typically more backward) customers, we are able to evolve to meet new needs better than our competitors which has allowed us to grow at a sustained rate better than 50% per year for years on end.
Many of our meetings with clients start with whines about how they have trouble keeping up with all the changes, followed up by hours of specifying new changes and additions that they'd like, closing with my pointing out that all the changes that they requested will be released as developed and them having to keep up with them as they are made available.
Perhaps it's necessary for some people to see improvements in a bad light, but if you really don't like it... leave! Go use some product that doesn't update at all if you want. I hear you can still find Firefox 3.6 binaries if you look hard enough. Even Chrome updates constantly.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I set it up to use Chrome as my PDF viewer. (Which wasn't easy, since the nonstandard way Chrome installs itself under Windows meant that it didn't show up on the list of programs.)
I wonder if it's going to override that setting when it updates itself. I don't really care, as long as it works. I just liked keeping my system clean and didn't want to download Adobe if I didn't have to.
I recall reading that the updates would start happening silently in the background. I still appreciate the announcement, but my guess is that next week I'll go to the About Firefox section and find that it waited until just then to download the update to version 18. I much prefer the way Chrome handles it where I go to check and find out it happened while I wasn't paying attention. Where's the hold up on making that happen? Did it happen and I just haven't flipped a setting?
Seriously, were y'all drunk when you came up with that name? It conjures up images of some kind of celestial primate flinging high energy particles about. Firefox at least sounds like something that could be found frolicing about in heavily wooded areas.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Happy 21.0a1!
to w-ork I'm doing,
Sounds like good functionality for a plug-in.
This is exactly what they wanted, by the way. /. article, for example, because they are now at number 18.
With all the big numbers they get a lot more publicity.
This
In the following 3 hours they released Firefox 19 and then Firefox 20, because marketing thought 20 sounded better.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
From another article:
One feature that didn't make it into this release, by the way, is Mozilla's new built-in PDF reader. While the organization has been working on this for a while, it will only make it into the beta release that's expected to arrive on Thursday.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Does the entire browser still lunch itself when a plug-in fails on some page?
Chrome showed us that the browser must be robust and generally survive glitches caused by individual sites. Please learn from Chrome and adopt that model.
I stopped really caring years ago about what happens to be on a computer. They all pretty much work at this point. Just like at a restaurant when I ask for a Coke and they say, 'Pepsi ok?' and I just say sure and go happily on with life.
The PDF viewer in Firefox, PDF.js is an amazing piece of software. It is written entirely in JavaScript and runs in the same sandbox in which a webpage runs. So it is very safe. The layout accuracy and speed of PDF.js are simply amazing. Text selection happens just like it does in the browser. Some PDF viewers only allow you to draw a rectangle on which to do OCR. PDF.js simply lets you select the glyphs.
This viewer has been available as an add-on for a while already.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
Question for anyone running the Windows nightlies with the native H264 support: is it stable? Having to use Flash as an HTML5 H264 decoder is one of the most pointless things I can think of.
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.
They've landed the solution to this issue, first submitted in 2000. Clinton was still president.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Heh, they surely fixed an old bug in this release.
This is a major security risk if you ask me. Chrome and IE are and Mozilla is still behind. Flash luckily is now sandboxed which is a huge improvement but PDFs can contain nasty javascript exploits and without a sandbox could be a SECURITY NIGHTMARE.
I am sticking with Firefox ESR 17.01. It will be supported for a year and and want to see if my suspicions are right.
If my information is outdated feel free to correct as I am in the process of not recommending Firefox anymore unless the corporate system is still on XP. IE is much secure now in Windows 7.
http://saveie6.com/
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...
Why do you need to embed the JavaScript in a PDF when you can just run the JavaScript exploit directly? Do you think that running a PDF viewer written in JavaScript is going to give the embedded JavaScript in a PDF some sort of special powers?
Ever since I started using Google Chrome I've gotten used to fact it doesn't give you annoying update / addon update dialogs. I tried firefox few version numbers ago, it still threw the dialogs! That is insane with this release schedule.
Please Mozilla, make dialogs by default off, and create option to enable them.
Come on, x64 OS's were out in like 2004... it's now almost 10 years later and we're still clinging to 32-bit versions just for shitty plugins to keep working
Flash has x64
Java has x64
Nothing else is required.
...to bring about the demise of the dud that is called Evince;
they finally broke its last functionality under Linux Mint.
Now it runs but will not show any web pages. I just get spinning circular arrows. All pages are blank. :( I want v17 back!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I use Chrome on my Windows machines and Chromium on Linux.
Why do you need to embed the JavaScript in a PDF when you can just run the JavaScript exploit directly? Do you think that running a PDF viewer written in JavaScript is going to give the embedded JavaScript in a PDF some sort of special powers?
The power to execute data? Yes. If Mozilla took it out people would whine their PDFs wont work. It was a moronic thing for Adobe to include. I use Foxit PDF because it allows limited javascript functions, is sandboxed, and on top of that will display a warning and run in safemode with javascript disabled by default. Mozilla does have many holes in Javascript fixed, but it is not fully sandboxed like the other browsers to save ram.
http://saveie6.com/
No kidding about the faster javascript. Now Gmail is practically instantaneous.
I just switched to Firefox 17 ESR.
CacheViewer got broken by the upgrade from 17 to 18, and I don't want any more automatic updates that will break extensions, so I'll just stop automatic updates, and keep a browser that works, and will get updates only for security fixes.
Then we wouldn't have obsolete browsers in the office. IE 9 is the first good MS browser in 12 years! It is standards compliant and does not support the proprietary jscript shit that IE 8 still ties that corps can not leave from which is why corps are not upgrading.
do not recall seeing corps violently opposed to upgrading Netscape or IE (pre IE 6) did you? Infact, the managers DEMANDED up to date browsers! IT workers who did not upgrade all the time were incompetent as the world moved on. IE 6 changed all of that. Even IE 8 has proprietary apis in jscript and VBscript that developers loving using to tie to other products. Even if the rendering engine is not atrocious like IE 6 is.
IE 10 is almost done for Windows 7 and scores to what Firefox 7 does HTML 5 and CSS 3 wise.
The world is moving on and it is time app developers STOP SUPPORTING LOCKIN. If your office choices to stay with IE 8 until 2020 then do not expect the web to support you. It is ridiculous and I wont wait until the 2020s to enjoy todays technology. Lets hope in the coming years as IE is standards compliant that the code will magically work with all other browsers as well.
Macs are in offices more than in any other time since the 1980s. A compliant intranet app that can run with Safari is a plus. The world is changing.
http://saveie6.com/
Well damn, the Cyrillic won't post into Slashdot so go here to see Zontar's post in Russian. ;-)
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Firefox is the most unstable software in common use. One percent of the time it crashes: Crashes per 100 Active Daily Users
I use it only because it has add-ons I need.
At $DAYJOB, the IT department policy used to be "IE6 Only", which everybody ignored and installed Firefox. Eventually they finally decided to support IE7 (and now support IE8, at least on Win7), and they installed Firefox on our machines the middle of this year. Unfortunately, it's the FF10 ESR, which broke my working environment (FF13 really did do a much better job of memory management, and since IT only supports 32-bit Win7, I can't just fix the problem by installing more RAM.) So I'm hoping they'll get moving and let us upgrade to 17 ESR real soon. (And given the latest IE bugs, I'm hoping they'll let us upgrade to IE9 or IE10 soon?)
My lab machines are mostly running Linux, where this is of course not a problem. And the Linux virtual machines on my desktop run relatively current FF, but there's not really enough room for a big enough VM. One of my coworkers installed native Linux on his laptop with a VMware Windows machine on top that's running the IT department official versions, which let him max out the hardware RAM and lets him do most of his work from Linux, which was at least somewhat helpful.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Unless Im mistaken, as pdf.js is written in JS, it IS sandboxed, and in a way that Acrobat is not / cannot be. Remember that Firefox's JS implementation has to be secure enough to interpret code from all over the internet, and has had a LOT more "battle-hardening" as well as a better security record than Acrobat.
I imagine the only downside is rendering speed, but it seems pretty quick.
I just wish they would fix the memory bloat
I'm sick of having to restart Firefox because its consuming 2GB of ram
Faster JavaScript is useless if your system is crawling due to Firefox induced memory paging
Relying on a third-party for security in what is seen as "standard functionality" seems like a really bad idea, especially given Acrobat's (and even Foxit's) security record.
You missed the point.
If there's a security hole, it's in their JS interpreter. That hole would be openly exposed to the web anyway, so the PDF reader doesn't provide any further attack surface. Any random website could already exploit that JS exploits.
It's so unstable that it lost its connection while typing the subject?
(Someone accidentally an R.)
Why not just fix the bugs?
Here is a Slashdot comment from 7 years ago: There is a HUGE, well-known bug in Firefox 1.5, the CPU and Memory Hogging bug.
Element & Style Editing, PDF rendering, scripting, embeddable animation, sound, video, client side storage, 3rd party plugins...
Am I talking about Flash? Java? A web browser? MS Word? A bloated do-everything "Kitchen Sink" Business Solution? WHO CAN TELL?
Fuck that. I already know the best way to engineer things: Each thing does one thing and does it well, and provides an interface so it can be used in conjunction with other things to perform a task. Some call this "The Unix Way", but really it's the only sane way to do anything. See also: Object Oriented Programming (same shit), or Model View Controller (same shit), etc, etc...
A browser should be a text markup system that relies on a content provider layer to provide services for rendering embedded elements: images, videos, animations, games, whatever. It should be a glue program, and I should be able to select what content / mime-types map to what data decoding providers in the content providing layer. That's the way to make a minimal "do everything" engine. That way I can roll my own graphic format and renderer service (maybe for 3D point cloud data), and register it with any browser and create my documents with new elements, maybe submit an element to the W3C, and get it standardized so others can also implement it, then "image/cloud" mime type and my rotate&zoom capable 3D data display can be adopted. W3C needs a content provider / plugin standard for browsers, this way plugins or applications can work across all browsers.
Look, we can't have our cake and eat it too. Either browsers are a lean and mean text and image display system, for static documents, or it's a platform for making any kind of program you want -- If it's the latter then YOU DON'T PUT EVERYTHING YOU CAN THINK OF IN THE PLATFORM. You kick all that shit out of the platform, reduce it's role and complexity, and offload PDF, video, sound -- hell even scripting -- to plugins. Everyone's already seen the include everything approach. It's dumb. You end up with Java. We should be making browsers that can be integral parts of our OSs, standardized so we can swap them out without losing functionality. Make "browser" instances isolatable (optional non shared DLL/.SO) so I can fire up a client side only instance and stay isolated from the web and its exploits.
Gods damn, I know this is just a pipe dream, but this shit WILL happen eventually, why not start doing it now? It's so frustrating to watch all this effort wasted time and again on the do-everything approach, when we could do shit the right way, "the Unix way". WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY.
Exploits need impl. holes or local trust, while Firefox provides neither.
Firefox patches exploits fast. IE sandboxing mitigates damage post-exploit when they have a slow security response: browser data is still at risk.
Fast-patching is the better bet for me, but I'd like both.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Pdf.js is simply not up to standards. It doesn't seem to be able to render documents from InDesign using relatively simple transparency features.
Actually, PDFs can have exploits that have nothing to do with Javascript. If the problem is Javascript, they can deliver it directly to Firefox and don't need to embed them in the PDF. But the real risks are buffer overflows and similar exploits that attack the PDF rendering program directly, which is typically Adobe PDF Reader.
The Firefox developers are aware that they're behind Chrome and IE on this, and they're definitely working on it. Starting at some point last year, Firefox automatically warns users when their browser plugins are out of date. PDF.js in Firefox, once it becomes the default for showing PDFs, will eliminate Adobe PDF Reader as a source of error
With IonMonkey, Firefox has closed the performance gap with Chrome well enough that I would no longer consider Chrome's speed as a deciding factor when choosing a browser. But now Firefox has three remaining Chrome features to tackle:
1. Sandboxing plugins, as you said.
2. Multi-process, so that errors in individual tabs don't crash the entire browser.
3. (Least important.) Updates in Firefox are automatic, but not transparent. Making them transparent would help.
I hope they manage all three.
Version 17.0.1 crashed a few hours ago; it is considerably more crashy than earlier versions. There was a 3. version that was much more stable. Maybe version 18.0 will be better.
The crashes occur when I am doing a lot of research, and have many windows and tabs open, and then go in an out of hibernation or sleep mode.
When you click on a link of a file that isn't a usual image/link/txt type it asks you if you want to Open or Save the link to disk, but even though I've got the checkbox ticked for "Do this automatically for files like this from now on." it ALWAYS brings up that fucking popup! They've NEVER fixed it!
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Dear Sir,
I am firmly opposed to the spread of PDF files either to the home or to the office, We have more than enough of them foisted upon us in public places. They are a disgusting Americanism, and can only result in the farmers being forced to grow smaller potatoes, which in turn will cause massive un-employment in the already severely depressed agricultural industry.
Yours faithfully,
Capt. Quinton D'Arcy, J.P.
Sevenoaks
-- Letters To The Editor, The Times of London
___
p.s. embedded html5 video widgets suck, most flash apparatus work better. It's getting so that I have to postpone Firefox updates (including security ones) until some day in which I have enough time to spend disabling all the new features also included in the release.
p.p.s. I am a 21st century luddite. My car has window cranks, my cell phone has 10 separate buttons, one for each numerical digit.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I have the latest v17 browser and, after a week of being open, it is consuming 3.2GB of memory. No addons. No plugins.
When do u have a plan to designed it for ipad??????????
Some day, Mozilla will drop their craptastic and archaic NSS in favor of some modern SSL library that supports modern protocols.