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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."
Psh, I just upgraded to Firefox 22 just 5 minutes ago. Firfox 18 is so 30 minutes ago.
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all.html
ESR versions are yearly if you care so much about fast releases.
Feel free to use the LTR and only upgrade once a year if you like. Nobody's forcing you to upgrade with every release.
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.
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
It already happened. Check your settings to see if it's turned on.
I wonder if it's going to override that setting when it updates itself.
Doesn't seem that way. I had the Foxit Reader plugin installed, and after upgrading, PDFs still opened in Foxit. Quite frankly I can't figure out where the built-in PDF reader even is; I uninstalled Foxit and if I try to load a PDF, Firefox now just prompts me to save the file.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
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!
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.
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.
Pretty sure that doesn't happen any more with the new way they write extensions.
DNA -- National Dyslexic Association
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/
You need to set pdfjs.disabled to 'false' in about:config. PDF reader seems to be disabled by default for old installations.
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...
My browser is one of the first things I start up when I turn on my PC, and generally stays open until my PC has to reboot for some reason (which may be anywhere from a week to a month). This is really only possible now because I use Chrome.
I call shenanigans. "[rebooting monthly] is ... only possible now [because of Chrome]" is just not true.
I'm running Win7-64bit on a laptop with 6G ram and I use Firefox. FF is always running and I very very seldom kill the process. Like almost never. I reboot about once a month and usually because of something non-related to Windows or FF crashing/hanging. Usually just a Win security update.
I run some heavy memory usage video editing apps and usually have a LOT of terminal windows open, along with multiple desktops. FF has not been an issue.
eh, your mileage may vary but that is my experience.
Theyre only getting publicity because slashdot bothers posting the update stories, which honestly is the only way Id know there was an update.
They switched models because its a BETTER MODEL. They can actually get useful features out more quickly than the old 1-year dev time. I dont know if anyone remembers, but the upgrade from 1.5 to 2.0 took like a year, and came with like 4 features-- a new-tab button, a completely messed up (still bitter) options GUI, and tab-close-undo.
Now we get about that many features in an 8 week dev period, and incremental speed increases to keep pace with chrome. Im failing to see how this is a bad thing; its keeping Firefox remotely relevant to Chrome who was kicking their hiney in features and speed for about 2 years.
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.
I used to do the same in 2002. Funnily enough, IT support guys would come to my desk to install stuff and I had win NT running in a VM fullscreen and the IT guys never realized I was running linux as the native host.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
You can enable the "save tab prompt" when quitting. I saves all open tabs and you get re-logged automatically into the sites you were logged in when FF restarts. I close random tabs to leave only the tabs I need to work open when I restart because FF takes to much memory. about:config, preference browser.tabs.warnOnClose, browser.warnOnQuit, browser.warnOnRestart
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/796107
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/935532
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-restore-my-tabs-last-time#w_restore-the-previous-session-every-time-you-open-firefox
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Would you rather use Adobe software to read PDFs?
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.
I don't, I use foxit. Most people use Adobe, because they're told to download Acrobat reader if they're unable to view the document.