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Firefox 20 Arrives With Per-Window Private Browsing, New Download Manager
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla on Tuesday officially launched Firefox 20 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The improvements include per-window private browsing, a new download manager in the Firefox toolbar, and the ability to close hanging plugins without the browser hanging. The new desktop version was available as of yesterday on the organization's FTP servers, but that was just the initial release of the installers. Firefox 20 has now officially been made available over on Firefox.com and all users of old Firefox versions should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on the official Google Play Store. The changelogs are here: desktop and Android."
Chrome had it for 5 years now... talk about slow to catch up. Why is this even news?
Sigs are for the weak.
Firefox still needs better privacy controls on android. Instead of necessitating an extra step for a private browsing experience, why not make it that way by default? Or at least, have that as an option? Firefox still won't let me choose a homepage of my own, and instead displays a 'top sites' page everytime I startup. I don't want my history tracked, ever, for any reason -- and yet there is no way to turn this off (in the v20 beta at least).
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/firefox-23.0a1.en-US.win32.installer.exe
Firefox is going exponential. Can't wait for the next version, Firefox v2^5
When did that happen? I thought we were still in single digit version numbers or was that last week?
Firefox devs have contracted a severe case of "me-too-itis" from Chrome.
I know it's been said to death, but I'm going to say it again:
Where's it written that bigger numbers equal more features?
This could be FF 5.11 and the only real difference would be the version number.
Captcha: pride, indeed!
I'm going to be so confused when they this version 2013 later this year.
Every time I upgrade to a newer version of Firefox, there's always some unwelcome surprise lurking in the shadows. From past experience:
- Butt-ugly default skin
- Fucking with the location bar icon
-"Tabs on top" option gone
- Outright refusal to run an outdated plugin on Flash (for various reasons, 11.2 is the last version that will work on portable Firefox)
- Broken extensions, always broken extensions
- Removal of status bar
- Default zaniness with hiding and showing the back/forward button
So what did they take away this time?
When did that happen? I thought we were still in single digit version numbers or was that last week?
Firefox devs have contracted a severe case of "me-too-itis" from Chrome.
Fools not to adopt good ideas. Same goes for Chrome.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
v21 will have auto-sausage-fapping capability - it'll even wipe up after you
seriously ?, the new download "manager" is nothing of the sort, it manages nothing, as soon as i click the downloads button it opens the entire library (and the cpu sucking waiting time for it to open), which is asking to show me ALL my history, bookmarks AND downloads in a whole another window, not a little onobtrusive window like before, and no that terrible chromeless!!? overlay doesn't count, good job iam not disabled egh ? what a total waste of time
as for information, it wastes space like nothing else, 200px tall rows for 1 line of 12px text ? (the name of the downloaded file whoo), no extra info or details about the download at all other than apparently its on my hard drive, no exact link, speed, time completed, size, referer, server details etc etc
absolute garbage, an embarrasment to mention it other than WTF have you done ?, and iam looking for a replacement addon as we speak HALP
...I'll wait for version 20.0.1 which will be released, if history is any indicator, on Thursday.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I wonder how long for the first 'Firefox doesn't have $x feeture' poast :)
AccountKiller
Chrome did not initially have incognito, that came later.
Firefox has had private browsing longer than Chrome has had it. The difference was that you could have a normal and incognito Chrome window open at the same time, Firefox was all or nothing.
Chrome was playing catch up a long time ago. It's a game of leap frog. Chrome is now in the back seat.
Well, that's freaky.
I routinely delete things like download history when I've no further need for the files, partly as a tidiness thing and partly as a privacy thing. (This is a work machine that I use for my consulting/contracting gigs, including screen sharing for presentations/teleconferencing from time to time, so both tidiness and discretion are often called for.)
Suddenly, when I go to Tools->Downloads, there's a whole list of everything I downloaded since forever, not least a few potentially sensitive financial records and a whole trail of breadcrumbs identifying clients and various commercial research I've been doing on their behalf. The files are long gone, of course, but it's a good thing that lot didn't show up in the middle of a screen-sharing session with a different client.
What's more disturbing is that despite being reasonably careful about these things, or so I thought, Firefox has apparently been keeping a detailed record of these downloads even though I'd been clearing the old Downloads dialog regularly. What else is it storing away somewhere that I don't know about?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I say "No!" to such mathematical pretentiousness. Personally, I will not be upgrading until they give their version numbers in binary to prove they still employ actual programmers. Besides, everyone knows that you should never use anything below version 50 of any software because that's when all the bugs have been worked out.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
I don't understand why they don't natively incorporate download managers like DownThemAll into Firefox. Segmented transfers, speed limiting, link catchers...
I still can't stand the way FF mobile handles tabs. I want to see all my tabs without having to press a button yo open the tabs menu.
It might be an appropriate means of dealing with low-res or small screens, but not on tablets 7" and up. Until that changes, I can't see FFm being my regular mobile browser.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
I don't understand why Mozilla never just worked with the author of Download Statusbar to integrate it. That extension has been one of the most popular addons since it was released in 2004. In fact, the addons site show it is currently the 7th most-used plugin with 1,930,345 current users.
Your only on version 20? Shiiiiit. Version 20 is sooo 15 minutes ago. The cool kids are already on Firefox 55.
They're up to Firefox 21 already? I wonder what features this new Firefox 22 contains, and whether it's worth getting this Firefox 23.
Has anyone downloaded Firefox 24 yet? I want to know if Firefox 25 is any good.
(Hope I'm not falling too far behind in my version numbers since starting this post).
They switched to a rapid-release schedule of a new full version number every few weeks as of v5 in summer 2011... I can't tell you when we actually went from 9 to 10, though -- I'm on the auto-updating beta (or the auto-bloating, to be snide about it) and the new numbering system makes all of the releases blur together.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
And since when this version number escalating thing is a good idea?
factor 966971: 966971
Firefox devs have contracted a severe case of "me-too-itis" from Chrome.
Hopefully someone will find a cure soon; "me-too-itis" can be fatal when not properly treated.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
Uhhh...what? What do you mean? I'm confused...
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I can't drive 55. I can't run 55 either, but that's an entirely different issue...
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Netscape 6.1 was the word in both security and ease of use.
I'd much prefer per-tab private browsing.
I like a separate window for my "private browsing". Doing it per window could lead to accidents.
Why can't you Google it? It's pretty obvious for anyone with a brain, the rest can figure it out by searching themselves.
This comment is straight outta 1995
Do your research before you start typing a relpy, dumbass.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#cite_note-150
Notice the date retrieved: September 4, 2008. Chrome's launch date. Incognito was there from the start. The only major browser to have a privacy mode before Chrome was Safari.
It puts a new spin on the ancient meme "wake me when it gets to three eleven" - not three dot eleven but version three hundred and eleven. Which by my reckoning is due to be released next Thursday.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
Now me "normal" porn tab won't know what I'm really looking at in the other window!
hey guys...I've had that for several years now. Just keep looking to me for what "new" features to "innovate."
*sigh*
Unlike Chrome and Internet Explorer on Vista/7/8, Firefox doesn't run a child process in a sandbox to better protect the browser against exploits. Firefox runs entirely as a normal user process, and thus can access anything that regular processes can. An exploit running as an ordinary user can steal your bank account passwords and act as a zombie almost as effectively as an exploit running with root access.
I stay with Firefox only because I dislike tabs. Unlike Chrome, Firefox still has an option to open links in new windows instead of tabs.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Time to close all your browser windows.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Firefox freezes and crashes with no plugins in windows 7/8 on my amd machine but in Linux it's fine. I'm using IE in windows 8 and it runs fast with no issues.
> Chrome did not initially have incognito, that came later.
WRONG. It was there since day 1. It was even in the fricking comic -- page 22.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
What I want is private browsing a on a per-site basis. So when I am on the NYTimes, there is one cookie store for the NYTimes (and all the embedded stuff on the NYTimes pages) and when I am on ESPN it is a completely seperate cookie store for ESPN and embeds. That way if both NYTimes and ESPN use some of the same trackers, each tracker gets a different cookie from me based on the site the tracker was embedded in.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
So Firefox is now at 20, Chrome is now at 26.
Looks like they are finally going to reach their goal of overtaking chrome.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Hey, Mozilla. Fix your craptastic PDF viewer. I just spent the greater part of today trying to undo the S-storm the Firefox built-in PDF viewer did to a slew of network printers when users in my company's tax department tried to print PDF documents from investment sites - using the native PDF viewer. It magically caused a 5 page document to clog up the print queue with over 20000 pages of garbage on over half the printers in that department and it completely vapor locked the printers until I was able to get the queue deleted. I'm just glad it didn't take down the print server.
I can fap to my porn in one window while doing important research in the other!
I could have sworn they said 19 would have one-private, one-not as a feature so I had a ton of Windows open and ctrl-alt-p, NOPE! Closed, lol. So this will finally be nice!
Been running FF18 on a Fedora 16 system (yeah, not so super-early adopter)... that combo periodically and pontlessly likes to thrash the hard drive and locks up the system for up to several minutes, effectively acting like nice --200. Anyone know yet if FF20 improves such situations (in combo with Fedora 16+)?
Also, what would be the least problematic Linux "brand" to use with FF in general? (Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, etc)
HOW did this get modded +5 Informative? It's blatantly WRONG. Incognito has been in since Chrome launch. It was one of the main advertised features of the damn thing.
"relpy"
lol
If Mozilla did take Firefox seriously, they would implement TLS1.1 and TLS1.2 support instead of these useless features.
If Mozilla did take Firefox seriously, they would implement TLS1.1 and TLS1.2 support instead of these useless features.
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
Some of us liked Firefox. Others liked Chrome.
Making Firefox more like Chrome, is not likely to bring back the second group of users, unless Firefox becomes just like Chrome but BETTER. However, for the first group, why choose the crappy imitation of what you don't like, when the only difference left is that Chrome just works?
I'm using Chrome (or Chromium) for most things nowadays. Yet, I'm one of those who liked Firefox much better. But Firefox started to make everything like Chrome, breaking things in the process, and never fixing anything. With Firefox every new major release has broken a lot of things. It used to be that you'd wait several minor releases before even trying to update to a new major release, but nowadays you get at most one minor release, and every six weeks there is a new major release breaking things.
Meanwhile, Chrome updates may change some tiny details, but the changes are usually so small that unless you are waiting for a specific change, you won't even notice when it gets updated.
I don't like Chrome. But given the choice between using a browser that I don't like, but at least it works, and another browser I don't like, that keeps breaking, I have chosen the one that works.
Glad I'm still using Firefox 14 and have disabled updates. Looking at the UI for Firefox 20, I see an awful looking theme almost identical to Chrome, and an inferior download manager. It looks wholly inferior to what I have now (I have the Firefox 3 theme enabled so no nasty monochrome interface).
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I've been using Firefox on Mac for a while now, but it starts to piss me off. I don't really care about their version numbering, but if they keep adding bullshit such as download managers, facebook candy or other fancy pants and because of that don't have time fix things like lack of Lion-style scrolling (Lion came out 2 years ago!) or... I don't know... like slowing down the whole system when downloading big files for long time? On top of that, Firefox 19 broke flash video, so when you want to watch something, you have to perform dance of the scrolling bars so it works again. In 20 it's still broken, and that's why I will have stick to 18 for now (It will be probably fixed around version 35). If someone knows how to have cool vertical tabs (such as provided by Tree Style Tab plugin) for other browser than Firefox, let me know.
My Windows is NOT slow, it's special!
Firefox devs have contracted a severe case of "me-too-itis" from Chrome.
Yes, it can't have been that it's obviously more convenient not to scrap your current browsing session in order to open a private window, or that users actually wanted this.
Could we please get a stable UI? The new extension download thing was bad enough (really? An entire bubble to tell me an extension is downloading? And then takes me to the old extension installer window? WTF?) but now this new download manager that just sucks.
Enough already! Stop changing things that don't need to be changed! If you can't make it better, don't make it worse. Here's a hint: You haven't made it better.
They have completed the circle, starting the new, even moarly accelerated release schedule with the current version 2^0.
January 2012, so more than a year ago.
But don't worry, whining about Firefox version numbers is still totally hilarious even though it's been in the comments for every Firefox article for the past year and a half.
I updated to Firefox 20.0 and boom. Pandora radio stopped working... Seriously???
Starting in Firefox 20 private browser #1. Log into my Dev server using login ID DEVuser. Open a new private browser #2. Log into Prod server using login ID PRODuser. Now my private browser #1 is no longer DEVuser on the Dev box - it's the Prod login to the Prod server. In either Private browser window, logout. The other Private browser window is also logged out of whichever server it was logged into. So the "Private" browser windows are sharing (at the very least) cookie info.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Oh, stop it. I have five machines, all configured to delete browsing history, download history, and cookies on exit, and not one of them have shown what you three have described.
Of course not; you're not doing the same thing as we are describing.
You're talking about auto-deleting the entire history of a certain type.
But we don't want to do that, because most of the time the history is useful. We're talking about selectively deleting individual items from the history that are sensitive for whatever reason, and then those items coming back again after this update in the exact same screen where they were gone before, as well as obviously not having been deleted properly originally even though they appeared to be removed in any accessible part of the user interface before the update.
There is absolutely no way you can explain the kinds of behaviour that I and others have been reporting throughout this discussion as anything but a set of serious blunders by the Firefox developers regarding both usability and privacy. If there's even a question over whether software dealing with sensitive information is still storing that data after a user believes they've explicitly deleted it via the UI then you automatically have a serious problem.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Chrome can teleport many goats per second, firefox not even one.
Just curious.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
It's an article about web browsers. You can take facts and rationality and throw it out the window as neither have a place here.
I can summarize the last two years of comments:
1. ZMG VERSION NUMBERS! +5 me please!
2. I SMUGLY SWITCHED TO ______. It really is important for me to let everyone know, I'll take my +5 now.
3. ZMG EVERY EXTENSION BREAKS EVERY TIME! Yes EVERY last one EVERY last point release. YES FF should support plugins from 1993 like Chrome does! I need +5 even though I get the basic facts wrong. I put a lot of passion into it, that's good enough.
4. ZMG BLOAT.
5. ZMG ____ had that feature for the last 30 years! +5 me because I commented about bloat 3 comments up too!
6. ZMG TEH MEMORY LEAK! +5 me or we'll run out of memories!
It's usually about that level of quality too.
Right clicking anything brings up EVERY option for the context menu. I'm seeing items like "Play", "Pause", "Mute", "Email Audio, "Email Video", etc, even right clicking on plain HTML pages.
Is it just me? I updated to 20 as soon as I saw this article (from mozilla.org) (Win7 64 bit) and Firefox immediately stopped working. No matter where I go, example: yahoo.com or youtube.com, Firefox will sit there not responding and will eventually pop up that a script is misbehaving. Clicking on either "continue" or "stop script" and the results are the same -- it'll go back to "not responding" and eventually the popup will return. Chrome and IE work fine going to the same sites. (Or as fine as IE ever works...)
I don't expect you-all to fix this, just wondering if anyone else saw this behavior.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I like the old way for firefox. Is there a setting to revert back? I don't want to close private windows one by one if I could just Ctrl-Shift-P to go from private browsing back to normal browsing (even retaining the pages I was on in previous normal browsing).
If I want multiple private/normal windows on screen, I could just go with Chrome.
Help please?
Thanks.
I forgot I posted in Anonymous mode...hopefully I get alerts on new messages now.