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Firefox 22 Released, Boosts 3-D Gaming and Video Calls
Today Mozilla announced the launch of Firefox 22 for desktops and Android devices. For the desktop version, WebRTC, the open source browser-based communications API, is now enabled by default. "This technology makes it possible to place and receive video calls from a mobile or desktop browser or share live video, files and images with friends and family." Firefox 22 also has support for the asm.js subset of JavaScript, which allows for big performance boosts on graphically complex applications in the browser. (We saw a demonstration of this a while back.) Other new features include display scaling options for making text bigger on high-res displays, better WebGL rendering performance, word wrapping for text files displayed in the browser, and the ability to change the playback rate of HTML5 audio and video. The new Android version features include tablet UI support for smaller tablets, and a fix for scrolling in nested frames.
when can I use it to run emacs?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Is there something named Firefox that isn't a browser but uses the same silly exponentially increasing versioning scheme?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I have big hopes for asm.js. Even with its teething problems, it's the best chance we have for a truly multi-platform common ground to develop networked apps in.
At the same time, this awesomeness has traditionally been ignored by the big players who desired fragmentation. Hopefully this time is different, as all browser vendors have a lot to lose if they are the last to implement asm.js.
The big missing feature is threading - here's hoping for an extension to asm.js to make it complete.
Not trolling, straight question. I know nothing about webRTC; are communications 'secure' by default?
setTimeout(function(){window.locationmanageQueryStringParam('source','autorefresh');}, 600000);
this bit of code is a nightmare on FF mobile, iam trying to read the comments and bam iam looking at the slashdot homepage ? WTF ? i didnt press back
sort it out slashdot, your code needs much more work and if you cared about the user you would NEVER reload a page the user didnt request.
I don't know all use cases, but I personally use Firefox to browse. Why do I want 3D gaming and video conferencing integrated into it? What next, preparing taxes?
" WebRTC, the open source browser-based communications API, is now enabled by default. "This technology makes it possible to place and receive video calls from a mobile or desktop browser or share live video, files and images with friends and family."
This doesn't sound very convenient - there are times that I am "browsing" when I don't want a video call suddenly interrupting me.
Luckily I don't have a webcam on this PC
Not perfect, but better... http://mrdoob.github.io/three.js/examples/css3d_periodictable.html
Torbrowser, and you get the added benefit of Tor! Or, if you just want Firefox, download the latest ESR release (10.X I think). If you can find it.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
WebRTC is now enabled by default.
Useful!
support for the asm.js subset of JavaScript
Impressive!
word wrapping for text files displayed in the browser
Decidedly underwhelming.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Not trolling, straight question. I know nothing about webRTC; are communications 'secure' by default?
They use (S)RTP for the transport:
http://www.webrtc.org/reference/architecture#TOC-RTP-Stack
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_Transport_Protocol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Real-time_Transport_Protocol
The speicific protocol used is DTLS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datagram_Transport_Layer_Security
Lot better. it is now far faster than Chrome. I have switched back.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Have you thought that perhaps feature creep has bigger downside in context of browsers other than bigger footprint and wasted development time? Security for example.
Decades of constant battles with Java security should be abject lesson to anyone eager to swell functionality past any reason.
Consider how much better our browsing would be if Java never existed? I am eagerly await near future when marketing gets a hold of video conferencing and start throwing sales pitches at you or hackers figure out how to access video feed on your laptop.
For those who read the title and came here to moan about bloat:
The technologies mention in reference to 3D gaming are WebGL and asm.js. These serve to make things faster and their size is negligible (want to complain when the few extra bits in your JS engine make things go faster?). They can both be used in non-gaming situations, particularly processing-intensive stuff like dealing with images (processing, filters) and video (decoding - see ORBX.js). WebGL was already there, it's just better now.
You can disable it if you want, but WebRTC stuff doesn't load additional components (encoding/decoding video for instance) unless you're using them - which would be no worse than Flash (better actually). And just like with Geolocation, a site has to ask permission - to which you can say "never".
Chrome already has WebGL, WebRTC and is optimizing for asm.js. It's possible to land these without adversly impacting performance/responsiveness, and for the past year Mozilla has had their eye on the metrics.
Memory leaks are normally attributable to the plug-ins used, rather than Firefox, nowadays.
Unfortunately, memory leaks are usually blamed on the browser, not on a plug-in, regardless of the cause.
*Still* negative function...
Funny you should say that. I regularly use Firefox and Chrome on two very different machines: one, is an anemic laptop with a Pentium T4200, the other a desktop with 8 cores and lots of memory. On the weaker machine, Chrome is visibly snappier - and never slows down at the end of the day. Firefox seems quite spry in the beginning, but quickly becomes visibly slower - not its rendering, but its general reaction, the awful, XUL-based interface. By the end of the day, right-clicking on a page and/or opening a new tab has a very visible, very annoying lag and the overall reactivity has decreased greatly. It's not a problem induced by some esoteric extensions (I only use Ghostery), I have enough memory (8GB, and the system memory load never goes beyond 50-52%), I only read text (lots of pages, though), no video, no games, flash is disabled via click-to-run. The faster/newer machine exhibits the same behaviour, it only takes a while longer for the lag to be apparent (due, obviously, to the increased computing power). I've always been a supporter of Firefox, I've been using it continuously since the 0.x era (in its Phoenix incarnation), but I'm not blind and statements like "FF is faster than Chrome" simply make no sense to me (and my browsing habits).
Any Downsides to Upgrading?
For example are lots of extensions not working with the upgrade?
FYI: google chrome has this same "bloat" in development and stable builds as well as true bloat like NaCl - a brand new interpreted language on top of javascript that no one uses
Unfortunately, memory leaks are usually blamed on the browser, not on a plug-in, regardless of the cause.
Give me an easy way to trace which plug-in it is.
Surely Mozilla could do that?
They already tell me which plug-ins take a long time to load, why not some basic memory management?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Well, it turned out to be not a very good operating system, so it's losing to better ones.
But you'd probably have to agree that the web is a much more widely deployed operating system than any single phone operating system, and the APIs of IE 10 Trident, Gecko, WebKit, and Blink are much more similar than the APIs of Windows, OS X, GNU/Linux, Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.
The funny part is that, after they went to all that trouble, 'web apps' are now being replaced by plain old 'apps'.
Unless you have a Chromebook or a Firefox phone. Their API for "apps" is the HTML DOM, just like the API for "web apps".
I opened up a bunch of tabs (9 in total) in firefox 22.0 which came to a total of 398MB memory usage. I opened the SAME tabs in chrome and it came to 592MB. I opened the SAME tabs in IE10 and it was 354MB. I guess firefox is actually pretty good. Besides there are a stack of plugins that have been around for a long time that are not being integrated and probably never will. In any case IE10+ looks like a good option for you.
I find having a second browser is useful, such as Chromium, Midori or Epiphany - using the latter one lately. That way if you have to be stuck running a browser while you're out of ram and swapping you can quit or kill -9 the pig browser and still have some browser shit running in the secondary browser.
With 1GB, you ought to run a lightweight OS / environment (Windows XP, but it's deprecated, or LXDE, or some non xubuntu XFCE at best) and look for a memory upgrade unless you're on an old maxed out computer.