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Firefox 21 Arrives

Posted by Soulskill on from the can-now-legally-drink dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla on Tuesday officially launched Firefox 21 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Improvements include the addition of multiple social providers on the desktop as well as open source fonts on Android. In the changelog, the company included an interesting point that's worth elaborating on: 'Preliminary implementation of Firefox Health Report.' Mozilla has revealed that FHR so far logs 'basic health information' about Firefox: time to start up, total running time, and number of crashes. Mozilla says the initial report is pretty simple but will grow 'in the coming months.' You can get it now from Mozilla."

8 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Meh by Kid+Zero · · Score: 1, Informative

    Mine went painlessly quick.

  2. Firebug is awesome by schneidafunk · · Score: 4, Informative

    Firebug is a good reason to use it. I don't really understand your justification for not testing web design in Firefox, considering it has a decent following.

    --
    Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
  3. Re:multiple social providers on the desktop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I updated after reading this, and I have no idea what a "social provider on the desktop" means. I see no change in Firefox.

  4. Re:Oookkkaaayyy.... by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Informative

    But, to be frank, apart from those, I can't tell the difference between 18, and 20. And looking at the changelog, I can't see anything that says, "I'm a major new version that breaks compatibility with previous versions".

    FF20 added that horrendous download box, for starters...

    Of course, you can revert it back to the more sane old download list by setting browser.download.useToolkitUI to TRUE.

    It isn't that hard to miss in FF20. Not sure what UI breakage they did in 21, though.

  5. Re:Oookkkaaayyy.... by Cochonou · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is supposed to be an important new feature in Firefox 21 (which was not talked about in the summary): h.264 playback with system codecs enabled by default. It is present in Firefox 20, but needed to be enabled manually through about:config.

  6. Re:We need an alternative/fork by rudy_wayne · · Score: 5, Informative

    I am seriously tired of all the new crap that they keep adding to FF. On new installations I must spend a good amount of time turning stuff off. Most of the features I turn off would be better in an extension or at leasr off by default.

    That's the irony of Firefox. They remove features that people actually find useful, forcing people to create extensions to get the feature back, while at the same time add new useless features that should be implemented as extensions.

  7. Re: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    You should consider installing the ESR version if you don't want to deal with the rapid upgrades. It is currently version 17.0.6. The "ESR channel" gets only security patches, no new features, until it reaches end of life after about a year, at which point you upgrade to the next ESR (Extended Support Release). Firefox version 3, 10, 17 (and future 24) are ESRs.

    See http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq

  8. Revert to old download window by InvisiBill · · Score: 5, Informative

    FYI, you can revert to the old download window by setting the browser.download.useToolkitUI option to true in about:config. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/955204