Firefox 28 Arrives With VP9 Video Decoding, HTML5 Volume Controls

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla today officially launched Firefox 28 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Additions include VP9 video decoding, Web notifications on OS X, and volume controls for HTML5 video and audio. Firefox 28 has been released over on Firefox.com and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. The full release notes are available. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play (Android release notes)." Mozilla also announced tools to bring the Unity game engine to WebGL and asm.js.

Comments

Stability & performance Features

[AbRASiON]

I've had a love / hate relationship with Firefox for many years - but for about the past 18 months it's been mostly stable.
I'm an extremely heavy browser, ranging from 20 to 150 tabs open at a time.
This latest build (27.0.1) has been utter shite for stability, so I sure hope that was a priority for them. It would be nice if a single tab crashed it would just take out that tab. If that means more processes or memory, so be it. Also please copy chrome ASAP with the little microphone representing the noisy tab.

Re:Now is the time to turn automatic updates off

[Billly Gates]

If you currently have automatic updates on, this release of Firefox is the one where you probably want to turn them off.

You would be INSANE TO DO THIS. Ask any security guru about holes. Firefox 3.6 has +100 exploits! Think about that one when tempted to go back to the old good old days?

Here is what I use aka ESR release which gets updated only once a year. But for regular viewing I have upgraded to Chrome. FF is for corporate sites these days and firebug. Though it has improved vastly and plugins do not break as much like they used too.

Chrome and IE 9+ (no you did not misread that), both have multiprocess models and lowrights mode in WIndows 7 and higher. They are modern in that all cpus are used for each tab. One bad site wont take down the rest of your 60. It means increased security as privilege escalations are issues with firefox even with a standard user. I like the fact that my 2010 era cpu which is a 6 core phenom II can distribute loads since it is aging but can scale well. Firefox is getting slower on it as a result, chrome and IE both can distribute the loads on all cores.

There is adblock plus for IE now too and it has been in Chrome for ages.

Until Firefox gets modern I will stay away. It is old and out of date. Yes they add element support for newer things but the rendering engine, memory, security, and even the plugins are not modern.