Firefox 26 Arrives With Click-To-Play For Java Plugins

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla today officially launched Firefox 26 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Additions include Click-to-Play turned on by default for all Java plugins, more seamless updates on Windows, and a new Home design for Android. Firefox 26 has 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. Release notes are here: desktop and mobile."

Comments

Plug-ins

[fluffythdestroy]

The only problem i've seen with Firefox today is the updates are way too fast. The plug-ins and extentions aren't fast enough to follow becomes obsolete and break. It's not all the updates but I've seen some of it not compatible anymore

Re:Plug-ins

[lennier1]

Depends.
A third-party web application our company uses encountered Javascript problems in Firefox 24. Waiting for five minutes until Firefox 25 showed up fixed the problem again.

Re:Plug-ins

[Tridus]

Nice try, but do it again starting at Firefox 4. That was released in March of 2011, and now we're up to 26. That's 22 versions in 2 years and 9 months, or 8 a year.

Re:Plug-ins

[Gordo_1]

It's true. The overall rate at which Firefox adds features is not really much different than in the past. The difference is that they trickle the features out every 6 weeks instead of a big dump once a year. That's just fine with me, as plugins rarely break anymore and overall stability and speed is much better than Firefox 4.0 and older. Yes, I said that and believe it to be true.

"Click-to-pay"...

[zarthrag]

...was the first thing I saw. Talk about a panic attack!

Re:"Click-to-pay"...

[Russ1642]

Same here. I made some popcorn before opening the comments.

great...

[lyapunov]

In the mean time they have made it substantially more difficult to configure the rejection of cookies.

Jesus... I'm actually thinking IE is better at this point.

Re:great...

[bill_mcgonigle]

Are you using CookieMonster? It's much better than any stock cookie controller that I've seen.

Re:great...

[magic maverick]

If you care about cookies, use an addon/extension that gives you a better interface, and finer control, than the built in systems. I use CookieMonster (set to deny all cookies by default), but there are others.

CookieMonster allows you to set per website permissions, both temporary (until you close the browser, and then permissions revert to deny), per session (deletes every time you close your browser), and ordinary (hangs around until they expire). You can also set third party cookie controls.

What makes Firefox great is the addon/extension ecosystem. If you're not going to use it, why even use Firefox? (OK, it's less evil.)

Re:great...

[DMUTPeregrine]

Try the self-destructing cookies addon.
When you close a tab, the cookies created by that tab are removed. You can whitelist domains to prevent their cookies from being deleted.
This way, sites see cookies as being enabled, but can't track you after you close the tab.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destructing-cookies/

Java should just die

[Anonymous Coward]

This is 2013 and I'm really tired of having my browser freeze for 2 seconds with a grey box every time a Java app has to load. With the latest JavaScript features there's no reason to be using Java in web pages anymore.

Re:my dream browser

[EMG at MU]

- support java/javascript/whatever code.

As someone that runs NoScript, almost all of the websites on the modern Internet just don't work without JavaScript. They aren't even written to fail gracefully if JavaScript support isn't detected.

Re:my dream browser

[Anonymous Coward]

My dream browser would:

- render text

- render static images

- block ads

My dream browser would NOT:

- play sounds

- play movies

- animate anything

- open up additional windows

- support java/javascript/whatever code

- support cookies

- store any information

Oh well, I guess it will never happen.

Oh, I think you really ought to actually configure Firefox this way and try it out.

Set all plugins to never activate in Tools > Add Ons
Set "Accept cookies" to never, and clear all offline data under Advanced.
Go into about:config and turn off audio and video, set cookies to never in preferences
Install Adblock and Noscript. (You could turn off javascript for reals, but that would prevent Adblock from working. Noscript can do muc the same thing if configured right..)

Try it. Try to get through one day on the real web with your browser set up this way.

You'd need a fantasy dream Internet to make your dream browser work.

Re:my dream browser

[strength_of_10_men]

Some sites don't even get that far. It requires you load 3rd party JS to even load the content. Until then, it happily displays a blank page. WTF?

Download Window Completely Removed?

[LeRaldo]

Starting somewhere around version 21 of Firefox, they turned off the "downloads" window and took the ability to turn it on/off out of the options. In order to turn something on that had been in Firefox since it was called Phoenix, you had to go into about:config and change "browser.download.useToolkitUI" to true. Now for some reason, it appears to me that Firefox v26 has completely removed the download window altogether. I cannot for the life of me get the old downloads window back. Maybe I'm just blind/dumb, but I can't imagine why Mozilla continues to make changes like this.

Re:Download Window Completely Removed?

[xombo]

I suspect that as apps are rewritten to improve support for "Metro" interfaces, most windowed dialogues will be phased out.

Re:A good start..

[bsmedberg]

We studied doing this for Flash as well. Check out the user research study. We determined that the vast majority of users would merely be annoyed by making Flash click-to-play, and we wouldn't actually be improving security or performance for most users.

As noted in other comments here, you can mark Flash as click-to-activate yourself in the Firefox addons manager, or get more fine-grained control over which Flash actually runs by installing an addon like Adblock.

Our long-term strategy is to make it so that nobody needs to use plugins by adding new web APIs; to reimplement content like PDF and Flash in JS so that we can have control over the performance; and to use the mobile web as leverage to get new sites to use native HTML APIs like <video> to wean the world off of plugins.

Re:Unintended consequences

[hairyfeet]

But whose fault is that? Put the blame where it lies, Steve jobs trying to push his appstore crapstore lock in. I have flash on my fricking THREE YEAR OLD single core cellphone and ya know what? plays great. try HTML V5 with H.264 on anything less than a dual core and see what you get,even with hardware acceleration its a fricking pig.

So call a spade a spade, the killing of flash on mobile didn't have a damned thing to do with compatibility, or battery life, it had to do with Steve jobs making damned sure you weren't getting shit on that iPad without giving him 30%.