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."

Comments

Re:Honestly?

[Tumbleweed]

Feel free to use the LTR and only upgrade once a year if you like. Nobody's forcing you to upgrade with every release.

Quit whining

[mcrbids]

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.

Re:Quit whining

[Bill_the_Engineer]

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/

Re:Quit whining

[Vaphell]

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

Re:Quit whining

[mcrbids]

Do you know why Microsoft only releases patches once a month for its operating systems? Because corporate environments can become violently ill when something is updated without it being tested first.

We even offered to have a "stable" release version with updates only every 1 to 6 months, and have every released version have a 30 day trial period so that they could preview changes. We asked a 5% premium for this service. We thought as much as half of our client base would go for it based on the loud verbal feedback. But as soon as our clients found that they were choosing between having last year's product, totally stable with no updates or getting the new one with all the latest new features, bells, and whistles, guess how popular this option was? How many clients do you think signed that contract?

Not one.

My "narrow-mindedness" comes from my past experience... so now we listen to the whining carefully, and try to identify ways to better disseminate our change logs.

And for the record, a product that doesn't need to be updated is something some programmers strive for: It means they've made something that does its job so well there's no need to change it.

It's also a sign of a stagnant industry/marketplace. Needs change as circumstances change, and if the software doesn't change with the customer, it tends to disappear.

PDF.js

[oever]

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.

Re:PDF.js

[DuckDodgers]

They did that because an awful lot of PCs hacked by a website were hacked through security flaws in the PDF viewer. Writing the PDF viewer in Javascript means that the Mozilla developers only need to make Javascript in Firefox secure to protect the machine from intentionally badly formed PDFs, and of course they already needed to secure Javascript so that's no extra security work.

As a scripting language, Javascript is still slow compared to something like well-written C++. But Firefox 18 is pretty close to the latest version of Chrome for Javascript performance (e.g. arewefastyet.com ), so I bet the PDF viewer in Javascript works quickly enough.

OTOH

[dogsbreath]

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.

Re:IonMonkey

[A10Mechanic]

"Firefox" , . Remember, you must post in Russian.

Re:There is no PDF viewer, yet

[MarcoAtWork]

there sure is, although it wasn't on by default for me: enable pdfjs inside about:config and set the pdf in content to 'preview in firefox'

a plugin full or security issue

[JcMorin]

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...