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Firefox 24 Arrives: WebRTC Support and NFC Sharing On Android
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla today officially launched Firefox 24 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Improvements include a new option to mass close tabs 'to the right,' as well as WebRTC support and NFC sharing on Android. Firefox 24 has now been released over on Firefox.com and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. Compared to Firefox 23, this isn’t a big release for the desktop. Mac users will notice a new scrollbar style on OS X 10.7 and users of the browsers social features will appreciate the ability to tear-off chat windows by just dragging (full release notes: desktop, mobile)."
It can make my first post faster?
What features did they now remove in the name of dumbing down the user interface for mentally challenged user group? Address bar? Right mouse button context menu? Bookmarks?
I just upgraded to 24, and I see the same cookie controls it always had.
I think blocking cookies is turned off by default in the new version, but that's not the same as "hiding controls". If you upgrade, your settings should be the same as before. Mine are.
I think peer sharing via the browser is a wonderful idea. I've been waiting for something like this for a long time.
Can't you morons just display the scrollbar in the normal default style the OS is giving you? That's what I hate about Firefox, it looks like an ugly Windows program on every OS.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Pale Moon is a Firefox variant that largely keeps a traditional browser layout and has the latest security patches. It works with the few plugins I use, including NoScript.
If you hold down on the thumbnails the option to pin the site is there so that it always shows when opening firefox. Simply pin down 6 sites you don't mind displaying at startup. Also, there is an addon called clean quit that can be set to clear out history, cookies and such when you choose it as an option to exit the browser.
Perhaps system-level controls have more overhead than application-drawn controls. Consider the "system resources" in Windows 3.1 and Windows 9x. All applications shared a single 65536 byte GDI heap and a single 65536 byte USER heap. Each system-level control, such as a window or a scrollbar, used up space in the GDI heap. One advantage of NetCaptor's tabbed browsing in the Windows 9x days was the ability to keep more pages open without taking up a whole window's worth of GDI heap space. Fortunately, this shared heap wasn't present in 32-bit applications for Windows NT, and once Windows XP displaced Windows 9x, there wasn't much of a problem anymore. I don't think OS X has precisely this concept of "system resources", but it may still impose overhead for each scrollbar, or it may impose overhead when CSS changes a particular box between scrollable and not scrollable.
[Raises hand].
My PC at work is 32-bit.
What they need to do is release both 32 and 64 bit versions.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
LOL, but now I still need to figure out how the hell to upgrade from 9.0.1, which seems to be proving quite annoying. The built in mechanism seems useless.
It's most likely a corrupted profile. I heard they were working on a profile cleaner feature, but I don't know if it ever got released or not. I'd backup your Firefox with MozBackup, then run the standalone installer and hope it fixes it. If not, reinstall the old version and restore via MozBackup.
"I won't be downloading any new versions of Firefox--nor will I enable automatic updates--until they fix the danged memory leaks that have been present since they began their whirlwind upgrade cycle with FF 4.0. Chrome is a handy replacement for what used to be a reliable friend--Firefox."
Oh man, as someone that hung onto 3.62 forever I can feel your pain, but Chrome? That thing is so creepy I couldnt keep it installed for a week.
I have found that the Firefox ESR with a LOT of customisation, including downloading extensions to fix some of the breakage, is the best option out there for me. Firefox "17" with bugfixes but no feature additions seems reasonably stable and has no noticeable memory leaks for me. If they are happening on the order of hours the best solution may be the fast restart extension.
Still eagerly awaiting a sane fork of firefox. I would be happy to pitch in some but I am far from capable of coding or funding it without lots of others onboard.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Replace "FF" with "Google Chrome" and you'll see that Google beat Mozilla to the punch :-) Remember that Chrome is on version 29 (5 ahead of Firefox) and now uses more RAM than Firefox! You've also conveniently forgotten the Firefox ESR release (Chrome has *nothing* like it, so is a complete disaster for corporate use). Also, the performance gap has been gradually closing between Chrome and Firefox in the last year or so. For the first time in a couple of years, Firefox recent actually beat Chrome in Tom's Hardware Browser Grand Prix.
The lack of extensions on Android Chrome is utterly appalling, which is why Firefox on Android basically destroys Android Chrome. Now if Mozilla could fix the dodgy graphics issue with Firefox on the Nexus 10 (pages often half-rendering and needing a screen rotation to render them properly!), then I wouldn't have to double-rotate my tablet so often :-)
I won't be downloading any new versions of Firefox--nor will I enable automatic updates--until they fix the danged memory leaks that have been present since they began their whirlwind upgrade cycle with FF 4.0.
What memory leaks? If you've found new ones, have you reported them? Significant progress has been made in Firefox's memory usage in the last three years. Do you read the memshrink progress reports? If you don't, maybe you should.
Chrome is a handy replacement for what used to be a reliable friend--Firefox.
Surely you realise that Chrome uses more memory than Firefox. Look at a comparison of browser memory usage with a single tab open and multiple tabs open. If you're happy with Chrome's memory usage, you'll be happy with any browser's memory usage.
This link should help you out. Just download the latest version and install it over the top of your current version. It will upgrade your current install.
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/#desktop
NFC is kinda pointless until the iPhone supports it. There isn't a single large company that'll move until then. I can't tell you the let down it was when the iPhone 5 didn't have it. As near as I can tell the problem is iPhone users have lots of money and they spend it, so they're a required demographic for any major push forward.
You're right, you do sound like a troll.
With Android outselling Iphones 3 to 1, it really doesn't matter what Apple does. Android eclipsed Iphone long ago.
You'll notice most Iphone features came out on Android first, WiFi and cable tethering, copy and paste, the "new" data usage meter in IOS 7 has been in Android since version 2.
With features, the Android modding community is really the test bed, people who use community ROMS get the features first. The ones that are good get rolled into Android propper in 6 months, Iphone users get them 18 to 24 months after that.. Maybe, if Apple feels like it.
So it really doesn't matter what Apple does, the only ones who will be harmed by Apple choosing not to use NFC will be Iphone users who are no longer a significant audience.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Whatever floats your boat.
And in other ways, it's inferior, take for example their POSIX support. Despite having UNIX certification, it doesn't follow the specification as it should because the testing performed to get the certification didn't try everything. One example of this is that OS X requires you to fork() and exec() when it cannot guarantee you that the libraries you are using are async-signal-safe. It cannot guarantee your code can be forked even in a signal handler at any time and this is what the POSIX standard demands. So when you try to port an application that does is trying to fork() without exec() and attempt to use it, which is permitted in POSIX standards, OS X cannot guarantee that the libraries in use are 'async-signal-safe', and so it crashes the thread.
There is a reason why MacPorts, Darwin ports etc. have so many unstable applications.
Here is the funny bit, even Windows' POSIX support is more compliant and "just works" than OS X.
In case you're wondering: Apple took my defect reports and did nothing. The open group gave me a response that OS X had already passed certification (so much for UNIX 03 Conformance Requirements).
I could also ramble on about OS X's POSIX threads, OpenGL support and graphic drivers, the C++ std libraries etc. but I think I have made my point that OS X has some fairly large glaring holes and really shouldn't be considered superior when it can't get the general basics right.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.