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

I'm still alive

[kheldan]

Installed the update and it didn't turn my laptop into a smoking crater on my desk; so far, so good..

Re:I'm still alive

[Anonymous Coward]

Try the same test with Windows 8.1....

Re:I'm still alive

[kheldan]

Why would I want to do that? I'd sooner take a hammer to the thing and smash it to bits.

Re:I'm still alive

[Billly Gates]

You should see what happens to websites when you upgrade IE then?

There is a reason corps are afraid of change when it comes to a new IE flavored browser.

Re:I'm still alive

[nmb3000]

Installed the update and it didn't turn my laptop into a smoking crater on my desk; so far, so good..

Are you on Windows 7 with IE 10 installed? Or Windows 8.1?

Text Rendering Issues on Windows 7 with Platform Update KB2670838 (MSIE 10 Prerequisite) or on Windows 8.1

It boggles my mind that they released the browser with this bug unresolved. Almost 500 comments on the Bugzilla entry and the end result was "ship it!" I mean, look at some of these screenshots:

https://bug812695.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=682682
https://bug812695.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=735090
https://bug812695.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=797936
https://bug812695.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=720401

Who gives a damn if a large number of users can't even read the text on a page because, OMG!, we've just gotta have an HTML5 volume control! Someone probably should mention to Mozilla that just ripping off Chrome's look and release cycle doesn't really work if you don't also have Google's engineering and QA teams.

I don't think we need any more evidence that nobody is left steering the Firefox ship these days besides the cabin boy "designers".

Re:I'm still alive

[rudy_wayne]

Installed the update and it didn't turn my laptop into a smoking crater on my desk; so far, so good..

Just wait till Firefox 29, aka Australisaurus (assuming they stick to their release schedule).

If you haven't had the displeasure yet, check out one of the recent beta builds. It is a marvel of stupidity and in one fell swoop Mozilla has managed to destroy almost everything that made Firefox popular in the first place.

Re:I'm still alive

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not partial to Australis either, but overreact much? You make it sound like everything's changed. It hasn't. Australis is a GUI change that only really breaks some stuff for really uptight people like me and people using addons that were destined to break as Firefox modernized their code anyway.

Besides, if you're THAT offended by change, there's an addon to revert the most "offensive" changes, a planned ESR release that will buy you 9 weeks of extra non-Australis Firefox, AND you always have the option to change to one of those Firefox knockoffs like Waterfox or Palemoon.

Re:I'm still alive

[plover]

I'm reading this on Firefox 28 running on Windows 8.1. No issues so far, but to be fair, this is the only page I've surfed to so far.

Windows 8.1 doesn't have stability problems. It has UX problems, but the OS beneath has been fine.

Re:I'm still alive

[edibobb]

>Windows 8 still sucks and is pointless, but with the addition of the new Update 1 it's a lot closer to what Windows 8 should have been in the first place. Closer to Windows 7, in other words.

Re:I'm still alive

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you on Windows 7 with IE 10 installed and broken R600 graphics drivers?

FTFO.

It boggles my mind that they released the browser with this bug unresolved.

You can only resolve bugs in your code. That's a bug in ATI's drivers, what they can do is to work around the bug, which they did.

Re:I'm still alive

[epyT-R]

No. He just likes to get work done with an interface designed for the hardware used.

Re:I'm still alive

[epyT-R]

a. there's more to an interface than color
b. the start screen is one of the problems. changing its tiles solves nothing.
c. 'clearly' traditional menus are better. I'm already used to them and they autohide after clicking an item or by clicking elsewhere. no need for carets. (see? I can do it too)

The biggest problem with windows 8 is windows 8.

Re:I'm still alive

[epyT-R]

Try making arguments without ad-hominem. Just because someone objects to change doesn't mean it's due to fear.

Re:I'm still alive

[LordLimecat]

As another poster stated this appears to be a radeon bug, not a firefox bug. The person experiencing the issue stopped seeing it after a driver upgrade.

Re:I'm still alive

[causality]

Why would I want to do that? I'd sooner take a hammer to the thing and smash it to bits.

I know someone who actually did that ... with a sledgehammer.

I asked him if that was an expensive outburst. He said yes. I asked him if it was gratifying. He said "you have no idea".

Automatically?

[agm]

...and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically

Not for those of us running Gentoo linux.

Re:Automatically?

[oodaloop]

Not for those of us running Gentoo linux.

Then you're in luck! You get to do it the hard way, which should please you since you're using Gentoo.

Re:Automatically?

[danomac]

Gentoo users probably get more entertainment watching the game compile rather than actually playing the game. Go figure.

Re:Automatically?

[danomac]

Whoops, wrong article. But it still applies! Sort of...

Re:Automatically?

[agm]

Not for those of us running Gentoo linux.

Then you're in luck! You get to do it the hard way, which should please you since you're using Gentoo.

Typing emerge --sync && emerge -uDNvt world is hardly what I would call "hard". The point of my post is that not all users can automatically update as the article summary suggested.

Re:Automatically?

[danomac]

Have you actually used portage lately? There's so many circular dependencies that it usually breaks and it can't work them out; it's up to the user to sort it out. You used to update world, then rebuild dependencies - now portage tries to do that beforehand (which takes forever) and in most cases barfs because it can't figure it out.

Re:Automatically?

[sirlark]

I use Gentoo on my primary machine and on my home media centre. I sync and update weekly. I've not had any circular dependencies portage couldn't work out (except in the enlightenment overlay) for months. Yes, using a high backtrace value (which is the default) means it takes a long time to calculate dependencies, but honestly, that's not time *I* have to spend figuring crap out. I can go and get a cup of tea, and gosh, since I have a multi-core machine, I can even get work done while it compiles in the background. The problems come in when you don't update regularly, and there's basically half the portage tree to update, but then updating regularly is the whole idea behind a rolling release. At least I'm not stuck with an outdated git version, or kernel, or django ... you get the point.

Re:Automatically?

[agm]

I update at least once every two days and I very rarely experience problems caused by portage. It pulls in all requred dependencies for me automatically and I can stop it from installing crap I don't want via USE flags. I've run a number of linux distributions and gentoo is my favourite.

Re:Automatically?

[epyT-R]

Yes.. adding >=www-client/firefox-28 to /etc/portage/package.mask/firefox is extremely difficult, especially for the people who post here. Installing it is even harder as 'emerge firefox' must be typed into the console.

Browsers are too heavy

[Anonymous Coward]

We have come full circle. The rationale for 'puting x in the browser' is so that I wouldn't need x software for y platform...just a browser.

Nowadays browsers have so much functionality built-in they weigh a ton[in memory]. I don't want all that shit. Just show me the static content. Keep the spinning rims for the simpletons.

TLDR; I long for the days when all my browser could do display static content. All I ever wanted was standardized media formats[without DRM]

Re:Browsers are too heavy

[etash]

We have come full circle. The rationale for 'putting x in the pc' so that i wouldn't need to write code for y platform...just a pc nowadays pcs have so much functionaly built-in they weigh a ton. I don't want all that shit, just show me a 320x240 screen with asci chars. Keep the UI and mice and soundcards and network cards for the simpletons. TLDR; I long for the days when all my computer could do was display characters on a black and white screen. All I ever wanted was to show off my idiocy on slashdot.

Re:Browsers are too heavy

[Billly Gates]

I would rather have X in a browser than to use an insecure DRM plugin with security holes to make up for a lack of functionality in ancient browsers. Cough Java cough Adobe flash cough Adobe reader.

I like where the web is heading. No I do not think a chromebook with html5 apps is the equivalent of a real os but to use basic logic in javascript, use hardware accelerated media with css 3 and html 5 inside an app like an applet or even in a browser is great.

Look at the internethistory project or whatever it is called to see how horrible the IE 6 & Netscape oriented web was 13 years ago? Yahoo looked like freaking Craigslist.

It felt like a wordpad viewer with a few animations added and basic functionality. SOmething like www.weatherunderground.com or www.imdb.com or netflix is so much better and you can do advanced graphics and layout options for mobile users with css of today.

Re:Browsers are too heavy

[Blaskowicz]

Then use dillo.
I would use it much more often if it could open tabs in background and the tab bar was less thin, but it works. (within those limits. can't log in to a particular forum which is mostly "web 1.0")

Re:Browsers are too heavy

[tepples]

Reductio ad absurdum

Which isn't a fallacy unless it's a straw man argument.

Re:Browsers are too heavy

[VortexCortex]

I feel the same way. However note that all we have really needed the entire time is a way to position and display sets of graphic primitives. Curves, lines, gradients, polygons, rasters, audio, input, etc. and a bytecode language to control it all. Essentially a general purpose media player / platform for a game engine. We could then compile our web pages down from whatever markup language we wanted into a cross platform display system.

Instead we fixated on the high level constructs and wrote many redundant back-ends for it, e.g., Canvas, WebGL, Fonts, Box Model, Flash, PDF, etc. We could have one lightweight system to work the bugs out of and be pretty much done -- The further improvements coming from video drivers and hardware. We could then ditch HTML altogether for a visual composition tool, or have a myriad of web programming languages with different features. Think about it. You get one hardcoded set of instructions for your CPU, then you can write whatever high level language you want that compiles down into that. Time and again this is what we've been doing throughout computing history -- Until the "Web".

The web is a moronic monstrosity of a centralized static document display system with no session persistence and a hugely inefficient scripting tool for talking to Java Applets which we now demand unrealistic performance from since we've essentially ditched Java for the web as it was a huge API kitchen sink instead of a lean content rendering engine. With the centralized static stateless doc display and slow script language we attempt to leverage the decentralized Internet to build stateful high performance dynamic web applications. To this end we have elected to butcher the very systems in place creating CSS to make up for the fact that the high level systems didn't give enough control over display of primitives (and still don't), and creating ASM.js instead of just making a bytecode language for browsers. It's so ridiculous that native apps for mobile devices are actually better choices rather than the wanna-be cross platform web rendering system.

Don't even get me started on the cluster fuck of security theater that is SSL. Hello, take HTTP Auth's proof of knowledge HMAC and key your stream cipher. Done, but nooo HTTP can't know about TLS... morons. Protip: If your resources were referenced by infohash then mixed content wouldn't be a problem, and you could have the decentralized anonymous web that the Internet deserves.

Long live the Internet, but fuck the web.

Re:Browsers are too heavy

[LordLimecat]

There IS no static content, everything is laced with JS and cross site dependencies

Re:Browsers are too heavy

[epyT-R]

I think his point was that what browsers offer is redundant while modern improvements brought benefits to pcs. Browsers were simply meant to show static content. Making them scriptable is what killed the original point of http: platform independent documents. It also brought a slew of security problems that are still dealt with today... Oh, and it encourages hostile user/developer relationships a la SaaS.

Re:Browsers are too heavy

[epyT-R]

Statically linked or dynamically linked, it'll be insecure.

Compared with today's 'designs', loaded with useless whitespace, content barren marketing speak, and tons of video ads? I'll take 1998's www any day.

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.

150 tabs?

[Chas]

No. Seriously?

I can see 20-40 tabs. But 150?

Re:150 tabs?

[fahrbot-bot]

No. Seriously?
I can see 20-40 tabs. But 150?

GP thinks # open tabs == manliness *or* has IMAX screen for monitor and really tiny font.

Re:150 tabs?

[DMUTPeregrine]

I have tons of tabs open, because bookmarks suck. EG if I'm working on a project with a new framework I might need to reference 3-4 APIs, and 5 classes in each, and 2-3 methods per class in a given hour or two. I want a tab for each method, with a tree of the parent classes and APIs. Tree-Style tabs lets me have that, but Firefox's bookmarks don't. So I leave tabs open. That results in 50-60 tabs or so. Sure, I close the tab group when the project is done, and subsets when I'm done with them, and use different windows to separate different projects/activities, but it results in lots of tabs. "Normal" people use tabs for current pages, I like to have both the current pages and a herarchical history of how I got to those pages. I also open all links in tabs. Tab hierarchies provide a combined history (with list of what lead where,) bookmarks, and tabs, all in one convenient interface. If bookmarks supported this nicely it would be great, but they don't.

Re:150 tabs?

[antdude]

I had 150 before too. Basically, I had a bunch of web page with data forms intact.

Re:150 tabs?

[AbRASiON]

People use computers differently to other people, more news at 11.

Re:150 tabs?

[sexconker]

I have tons of tabs open, because bookmarks suck. EG if I'm working on a project with a new framework I might need to reference 3-4 APIs, and 5 classes in each, and 2-3 methods per class in a given hour or two. I want a tab for each method, with a tree of the parent classes and APIs. Tree-Style tabs lets me have that, but Firefox's bookmarks don't. So I leave tabs open. That results in 50-60 tabs or so. Sure, I close the tab group when the project is done, and subsets when I'm done with them, and use different windows to separate different projects/activities, but it results in lots of tabs. "Normal" people use tabs for current pages, I like to have both the current pages and a herarchical history of how I got to those pages. I also open all links in tabs. Tab hierarchies provide a combined history (with list of what lead where,) bookmarks, and tabs, all in one convenient interface. If bookmarks supported this nicely it would be great, but they don't.

That's a terrible way to work. Here's how to do it.

1: Look up what you need.
2: Do what you need.
3: Close the tab when you're done with it.

The URL bar will automatically populate shit. Need to look up a method or class again? Type that shit in and your browser will autocomplete that shit from history. But you'd rather paw through a hierarchical list of 60 tabs. That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of. You might as well just crawl the docs and index every link. That's not how the modern internet works. It's akin to putting one of those Post-It flags on the front of a dictionary, then one on the first page for the letter D, then another on the 2nd to last page for D, then another on that same page on the word "dumbass". You're literally rebuilding an index that already exists for no damned reason.

Re:150 tabs?

[Blaskowicz]

Opening tons of basic html pages in a modern browser doesn't use too many resources.

Re:150 tabs?

[aliquis]

Tab outliner say 280 for me currently..

It happens all the time.

Re:150 tabs?

[aliquis]

http://i62.tinypic.com/ienozb.... (Check tab outliner icon up to the right.)

Though I wouldn't call it "work."

Re:150 tabs?

[horza]

I work in real estate and will daily go through several thousand properties for each and every client. I go through all the inter-agency databases and agency web sites, hitting open in a new tab each time there is something interesting. Having 150 tabs open is not unusual if working on more than one client at once. I have tree-style tab installed, which makes it easy to manage. I can drag and drop duplicate properties from different agencies onto each other to group them. I will then, after many many hours, eliminate properties by closing each tab until I have a top 10 open for each client.

I do not care if you do not believe me, and are telling everbody I am a liar, to everyone else I can confirm OP is not the only person.

Phillip.

Re:150 tabs?

[MrNemesis]

Different people respond better to different ways of working. Frankly, looking something up and then closing it drivers me utterly crazy - since I'm the kind of person that forgets about something once they can't see it. Doorway amnesia, out of sight, out of mind and all that. Please don't assume that because you find the "having lots of tabs" approach not your cup of tea that everyone is like that.

I suspect that much like the GP I've got a highly spatial memory, so I'll know pretty instinctively that the web GUI for the SAN was opened about 15 tabs to the left of where I am now. I'll know that cluster of about ten tabs over yonder is where I'm keeping some pages open for the IRPStackSize issue I'm looking at - stuff I might have had a fix applied but will want to keep my reference docs on hand after the users get back to me with testing reports in 48hrs time - because not all problems are things where I can go "there, I've fixed it, don't need to think about it again now". Going to the lengths of categorising it as a bookmark for something that you might only need once is a lot of overhead, and relying on page content search in the address bar doesn't give me context of whether it was a page I had open that had useful information on it, or whether it was useless fluff that happened to have a particular term in it. So keeping some windows/tabs open for comparatively long periods of time is what works best for me.

I don't like to use tree-style tabs or tab grouping as I find them visually cluttered.

Unlike the GP however, personally I haven't had any significant problems with FF27 and ninety hojillion tabs. I used to be one of those FF users who would continually bitch and moan about resource usage (because my FF would hit the 1.8GB ceiling every 24-48hrs and either slow to a crawl or crash) but since about version 20 or 24 or something, memory utilisation has dropped - both in the amount of memory used for particular dataset and the amount at which the memory bloats/leaks/fragments over time. Commit rarely goes over 1GB now (although when it does it usually means FF will soon need to be restarted). my biggest problems with FF now are its inherently single-threaded nature; load a set of tabs for certain websites and you'll often see a core pegged at 100% for 30s or more. Annoying.

All the above is YMMV, my 2 pence, etc.

Re:150 tabs?

[drinkypoo]

Isn't this just an argument for a new tool? Clearly what you have now is working for some value of working, and Firefox has finally (in the last couple of years) gotten good at actually restoring my tabs after a crash. But it seems like some tool that scraped these sites and put them into a database for you would be a lot more useful.

Re:150 tabs?

[WuphonsReach]

Obviously you have a job where you can focus on one project at a time (maybe two) and work without constant interruptions.

Right now, I have half a dozen Firefox windows open:

#1 is the corporate intranet applications (task tracking, project tracking and a bunch of other things). This window typically has anywhere from 6-30 tabs open.

#2 is currently open to a wiki with technical documentation for the software I am working with. That has at least a few tabs and sometimes as many as 10-15 because the vendor's wiki sucks and is poorly indexed. So if you find something useful, may as well leave the tab open to refer to again in a few hours.

#3 has a bunch of Linux man pages open along with other reference pages. Typically 6-12 pages, depending on how many different Linux commands I am referring to.

#4 has up flight schedules, hotel bookings, etc. because I am planning a trip in a few months, but keep getting interrupted. There's another 6-12 tabs.

#5 has SlashDot open with a handful of tabs for stories with comments that I want to read later. Or other news articles that I want to look at through the day.

And since I am juggling multiple projects at the moment, windows #6-#9 are open to various technical resources dealing with that topic. Each with a handful of tabs open. And if someone calls me with a technical issue, I open up a new Firefox window and can end up with 12-24 tabs open by the end of figuring out the issue. If it was an easy fix, that window gets closed right away, but if it was a "try this and let me know" solution, then I am better off keeping that window around for a few hours or days.

Usual memory usage for me is about 1GB for Firefox, sometimes 1.5GB (out of 8GB RAM). It's not difficult to get up to 100+ tabs across multiple windows.

Re:150 tabs?

[causality]

In this thread: people who never have to work on more than one thing on any given day.

In this thread: Assmunch dipshits. No one works with 150 tabs at once, and no one believes anyone who claims to.

*I* don't personally use that many. In fact I have never needed anything close to 100.

I'm also not automatically hostile to someone who says they do. They have their reasons, and no number of tabs they use on their own equipment is going to infringe on the way I personally want to use my own browser.

So I just don't see a problem here. With a guy who says he uses so many tabs, that is. The flimsy excuse for hostility, on the other hand ... it's a means by which you are shaming yourself. The prevalence of this attitude is destroying Slashdot much faster than the Beta redesign. When so many users engage in this, it tends to repel those who want to converse like adults. Remember that the userbase and the discussions are what actually bring you to this site. Anyone can get a copy of the Slashcode and get some cheap Web hosting.

Re:150 tabs?

[causality]

Different people respond better to different ways of working. Frankly, looking something up and then closing it drivers me utterly crazy - since I'm the kind of person that forgets about something once they can't see it. Doorway amnesia, out of sight, out of mind and all that. Please don't assume that because you find the "having lots of tabs" approach not your cup of tea that everyone is like that.

(Emphasis added). That's the basis of egotism, also known as childishness.

When it operates in politics, you wind up with imbecilic laws like Prohibition and the current War on Drugs. The basis is, "*I* don't want to do that, therefore no one else should ever be allowed to do that either!"

Does anyone else remember this site years ago, back when occurrences of it on Slashdot were relatively rare events?

Re:150 tabs?

[DMUTPeregrine]

Folders don't quite work. Think of it as an outline Let's say I have tabs A, B, and C. Tab A has children 1 and 2, B has 3 and 4, and C has one child, 5. 1 has I and II and III, 2 has IV and VI, etc.
With folders, there's no way to preserve the links between levels easily, except perhaps naming the folders to match their corresponding tabs. With multiple tabs at one level, each of which has multiple subtabs it's hard to distinguish what came from where, it's just not well-suited to organizing things in this way. It's possible, but not worth the effort.

Re:150 tabs?

[DMUTPeregrine]

I do not have a left-to-right order to my tabs. I have a hierarchical tree:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

The relations between the tabs are important to me, bookmarks don't provide a good way to preserve the relational information.

Of course I could store it all in a SQL database and write scripts to manage opening and closing the pages with an HTML viewer or such, but that's far more effort than using the tools already available.

VP9

[NapalmV]

So what's the use for VP9, I just tried youtube and it still wants adobe flash...

Re:VP9

[Anonymous Coward]

It's for Google to get everyone to spend a lot of time supporting a promising new codec to replace h264, so they can then never replace h264 in Chrome and waste everyone's collective time. But it's ok! It'll be useful for WebRTC! They promise!

Re:VP9

[Jack Griffin]

I long for the day when websites will stop asking me to install Flash. I thought we had this debate already and Steve Jobs won?

Re:VP9

[DMUTPeregrine]

You have to enable HTML5. https://www.youtube.com/html5

Re:VP9

[Lennie]

Have you tried enabling it ?:

http://youtube.com/html5

It has been improving, but only very slowly.

Re:VP9

[Trongy]

I have flash installed but disabled in Firefox on my work machine (because it made Firerox lock up). It's surprising how little I miss it. Embedded videos on most sites play just fine.

I often find an embedded Youtube video will play fine, but if I try to watch the same video on Youtube (because I want a higher resolution), it won't play without flash because Google wants to display advertising.

Re:VP9

[RR]

Have you tried enabling it ?:

http://youtube.com/html5

It has been improving, but only very slowly.

Yes, I tried it.

Actually, I tried it in extreme form. I no longer install the Flash player plugin. I'm fed up with the updater.

And what I found was that most YouTube videos don't work in HTML5. So I use Firefox for my main browsing and Google Chrome for interacting with Google web sites.

If Google ends up with a distorted view of browser use statistics, that's their fault.

Re:Stability & performance Features

[complete loony]

There's got to be a point where open tabs are treated like temporary bookmarks. Trying to keep all of those tabs alive and ready to click on is a huge waste of resources.

Re:Stability & performance Features

[bigCstyle]

I have had issues with this for quite some time... I try chrome every now and again, only to be disgusted with the lack of decent addons. heh

Re:Now is the time to turn automatic updates off

[wonkey_monkey]

Is it supposed to be obvious why?

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.

Re:Stability & performance Features

[AbRASiON]

I don't like the UI for chrome, some of the decisions Google have made are quite gross, they really are becoming Apple with their "our way or the highway" approach.
No question chrome is fast, won't deny that for a second - but I just prefer FF - I can customise it to my needs.

(Disable tabs on top, add "tabs menu" addon, use tab mix plus - with very specific open / close / foreground and background ruleset) - stuff like that.

Re:Stability & performance Features

[evilviper]

I've had a love / hate relationship with Firefox for many years - but for about the past 18 months it's been mostly stable.

Unless you're going to be submitting bug reports about the browser, or need bleeding-edge features (like VP9), you should just stay on the ESR branch:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/...

They make it hard to find, but I wouldn't use anything else... Those are the REAL stable releases, while their numbered releases are just betas.

With distros like CentOS/RHEL, the ESR version is in the yum repo, so you get a stable browser, updates are seamless, and you may not even notice the change when a new version gets installed.

Maybe they (mozilla org) just don't care about

[Johnny Loves Linux]

Windows anymore? Didn't they just ditch Firefox for WIndows 8 metro mode a few days ago?

Re:Now is the time to turn automatic updates off

[bolek_b]

I'm writing this on Firefox 22.0 / WinXP. Updates disabled for both. No antivirus, unless Sysinternals tools and system debugger count as one. Running it this way for more than ~3 years. Would you point out how exactly is a virus going to infect this machine, if I strictly adhere to a couple of basic information hygiene rules?

New Firefox Sync pairing method?

[SeaFox]

What happened to that new, easier method of Firefox Sync device pairing that was supposed to come out in Firefox 27?

The big issue with the current method is to add a new Firefox instance to the group, it pretty much requires you to have access to both your new device and an existing device simultaneously. Unless you save the authentication key file it's impossible to sync different Firefox installs on a dual/multi-boot computer or recover your saved passwords and bookmarks if a device is non-usable from damage or outright lost/stolen.

Re:New Firefox Sync pairing method?

[Dagger2]

It's in 29.0. Just be aware that your data will be encrypted using the password you use to login to Sync, so ideally your password needs to have the same amount of entropy as your current sync key (meaning you'll need to get it from your existing browser anyway.)

Also, I can't quite get my head around how you can do authentication with a password, use the same password as an encryption key, and keep that key a secret from the party doing the authentication. There's a document describing the protocol here if you want to have a go at working that out.

Vector animation

[tepples]

Good luck watching vector animated short films on Newgrounds or Albino Blacksheep or Dagobah without Flash. Rendering them to video (such as for YouTube) just makes them ten times bigger in my experience.

Videos with ads or claims

[tepples]

I was under the impression that Partner videos and videos with music in them didn't play in HTML5 mode.

Re:Videos with ads or claims

[ArcadeMan]

Change your user agent to iPad, a lot of those will work anyway.

Re:Videos with ads or claims

[tepples]

Change your user agent to iPad, a lot of those will work anyway.

And a lot of others will say "The content owner has not made this video available on mobile. Add to playlist to watch it later on a PC."

Re:Now is the time to turn automatic updates off

[Anonymous Coward]

The moment someone hacks a site you trust, which exploits an old browser vulnerability? The moment that an un-updated XP box is attacked by a machine through some ancient vulnerability you haven't patched? Maybe you'll open some attachment by accident that likewise ruins your day?

These kinds of things DO happen. Just because it hasn't happened to you yet doesn't mean you're safe. Do revel in your luck, but don't revel in false security. For all you know your PC is already part of a botnet.

Re:Linux?

[Blaskowicz]

"3D hardware acceleration" on linux may mean any of slowness, glitches, instability, overheating, high CPU usage. e.g. folks with a Radeon 4000 series graphics card encounter problems with the 3D accelerated desktops (Gnome 3, Cinnamon). Or I don't really want my 8 year old GPU to be constantly used.

So, maybe hardware acceleration can be of use for some people. I don't care about it much but it might be useful.. But given the problems with drivers and old hardware (and possible lack of any GPU power management on a lot of machines) it would be best disabled by default I think.

Straw

[tepples]

Reductio ad absurdum is mutually exclusive of straw man not a subset.

Straw man is a common error when trying to build a reductio ad absurdum, if Wikipedia's article about the latter is to be believed. A lot of people end up reducing the wrong premise to an abomination or contradiction.

Re:Straw

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing personal against you, but anyone who you uses the term "Straw Man" is a big fag that needs to take a break from the Internet for awhile. Maybe take a shower.

Re:Straw

[Anonymous Coward]

That's ad hominem!

Re:Straw

[causality]

Nothing personal against you, but anyone who you uses the term "Straw Man" is a big fag that needs to take a break from the Internet for awhile. Maybe take a shower.

That would be much more accurate if you said "No True Scotsman" and not "Straw Man".

Observation: about a year ago, Slashdot users finally discovered, in a collective groupthink style, that there was such a thing as the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. Since then, they have tried to invoke it in every possible conversation, even where it does not apply. Conclusion: there are a lot of insecure nerds who are eager to show off their perceived superior intelligence. Since they are driven by insecurity, they do this not by creating or contributing anything of their own, but by trying to invent flaws in what others say. The other guy made a mistake if you just wish for it hard enough!

I'll give an example. A while back, I personally had some imbecile jump on this bandwagon in response to a post of mine. I mentioned that people who call themselves Christians but then commit acts of violence, for flimsy reasons and without provocation, are not in fact practicing Christianity. Some fool cried "hehe I guss there is No True Scotsman then huh?!" while patting himself on the back fiercely. Apparently this fool decided that knowing nothing about the teachings of Jesus Christ does not actually disqualify him from commenting on the subject. After all, he knew in his twisted little heart that I was wrong, and that only he was clever enough to invent the reason why.

This infantile fevered-ego shit is killing Slashdot much faster than a shitty Beta redesign ever could hope to do. It's just far less trendy to protest it.

Re:Stability & performance Features

[HatofPig]

I use the Tree Style Tab plugin and usually have over a hundred tabs open as well. I'll keep the session open for days, too. It's easier than searching through your history to find that thing you saw a few days ago and the page is intact from when you loaded it last which is useful for dynamic content. Plus, everything is automatically hierarchically sorted, so it's easy to push and pop my browsing stack! Since I no longer own a a 4:3 monitor it's the perfect way to fill up the extra vertical space. It's an essential plugin for me now, up there with Noscript, Autopager, AdBlock+ and Ghostery.

Re:Linux?

[jones_supa]

"3D hardware acceleration" on linux may mean any of slowness, glitches, instability, overheating, high CPU usage. e.g. folks with a Radeon 4000 series graphics card encounter problems with the 3D accelerated desktops (Gnome 3, Cinnamon).

I have similar experiences with newer low-end Radeons (6290 and 6320). Even the basic desktop effects are choppy. Not to speak of games: for example Half-Life 2 has terrible frame rate. Both the open source and fglrx drivers are kind of crappy.

Re:Now is the time to turn automatic updates off

[Dagger2]

As covered on Slashdot previously: Australis is landing. If you read the official blog post you'll get the impression that this is all about improvements, but if you pay a bit more attention you'll see it's actually more about removing most of the in-browser customizability.

That's such a big change in direction that I don't think it's reasonable to consider Firefox 29 the same browser as previous versions, and I don't think anybody should automatically move from one to the other.

Re:Stability & performance Features

[aliquis]

Right now I have Chrome running and tab outliner say 280 tabs.

This machine only have 8 GB of RAM but the idea was to get a new one with 32 GB and as such I have 16 GB of swap allocated on the HDD. Once it reach 5-6 GB the machine get awfully slow though so the 50% recommendation (Linux partitioning) is likely good.

I like Firefox but I use to kill -9 it to free up RAM and if necessary be able to go back later by using restore (eventually it will stop saving such info though, I have no idea why.)

The thing with Chrome (unstable) as I run now is that either some tab died or I killed it and I got that message about bla bla killed or ran out of memory. But you had a reloadbutton to get back!

Awesome. So now I run chrome and when the machine starts trashing I run top and sort after memory usage and kill a bunch of chrome threads and back my memory comes and I can keep on running.

Sure the tabs belonging to processes I killed will unload but it's no worse than just reloading them later.

So that would be my recommendation for you I guess :)

Re:Stability & performance Features

[Blaskowicz]

Killing -9 is not nice, I suggest you install a "restart firefox" extension like I used to have.
Or may be you do that too for getting the start up dialog that allows to clear the junk by unticking tabs.. Sucks that Firefox doesn't allow that without force killing it!, and there's no command line argument for that. There's probably an extension but it should be part of the default software. Or I need a "Crash" menu item.

Top 21 Excuses for not fixing Firefox

[Futurepower(R)]

Mozilla Foundation
Top 21 Excuses
for Not Fixing the
Firefox Memory and CPU Hogging bugs

These are actual excuses given at one time or another. They are not all the excuses, just the top 20.

1) Maybe this bug is fixed in the nightly build. [The same memory and CPU hogging bug has been reported many, many times over a period of TEN years.]

2) Yes, this bug exists, but other things are more important. [The bug eventually causes Firefox to take 100% of the power of one CPU, and makes Windows 7 unusable, even after Firefox is killed. The bug affects the heaviest users of Firefox, those who do a lot of research online.]

3) Yes, this bug exists, but it is not a common occurrence. [Numerous users have reported the bug. See the links.]

4) Works for me. [The bug is complicated to reproduce, so the developers did a simplified test, which didn't show the bug.]

5) No one has posted a TalkBack report. [If they had read the bug report, they would know that there is often no TalkBack report, because the bug crashes TalkBack, too, or a TalkBack report is not generated. TalkBack does not generate a report if Firefox is hogging the CPU. TalkBack cannot generate a report if the bug takes 100% of the CPU time.]

6) If you would just give us more information, we would fix this bug. [They didn't bother to reproduce the bug using the detailed information provided.]

7) This bug report is a composite of other bugs, so this bug report is invalid. [The other bugs aren't specified.]

8) You are using Firefox in a way that would crash any software. [But the same use does not crash any version of Chrome or Opera.]

9) I don't like the way you worded your bug report. [So, he didn't read it or think about it.]

10) You should run a debugger and find what causes this problem yourself. [Then when you have done most of the work, tell us what causes the problem, and we may fix it.]

11) Many bugs that are filed aren't important to 99.99% of the users.

12) If you are saying bad things about Mozilla and Firefox, you must be trolling. [They say this even though Firefox and Mozilla instability is beginning to be reported in media such as Information Week. See the links to magazine articles in this Slashdot comment: Firefox is the most unstable program in common use [slashdot.org].]

13) Your problem is probably caused by using extensions. [These are extensions advertised on the Firefox and Mozilla web site, and recommended.]

14) Your problem is probably caused by a corrupt profile. [The same bug has been reported many times over a period of five years. One of the reports discusses an extensive test in both Linux and Windows that used a completely clean installation of the operating systems, not just a clean profile. The CPU hogging bug and instability was just as severe.]

15) If you are technically knowledgeable, you can spend several hours (or days) trying to discover the problem: Standard diagnostic - Firefox [mozillazine.org]. [Firefox has "Standard Diagnostics". It has become accepted that some users will have severe problems. !!! ]

16) I won't actually read the (many) bug reports, but I will give you some complicated technical speculation. [This pretends to be helpful but, on investigation, is shown to have nothing to do with the bugs.]

17) It's understandable that Firefox developers become defensive when users report so many problems. [Translation: Firefox management is childlike, not adult.]

18) To spend smart developers' time going over reports of bugs generated by analysis tools would be a waste. [There have been 3 analysis tools recently used to find Firefox bugs, and many have been found: 1) A special tool designed by a Firefox developer. 2) Software by Coverity. 3) Klocwork's K

Re:Stability & performance Features

[L4t3r4lu5]

Ghostery collects and sells data from the plugin. Disconnect is equally functional, without the data collection.

Re:Now is the time to turn automatic updates off

[AmiMoJo]

The problem is that sometimes the update break things horribly and they don't do an emergency fix for it, you just have to wait until the next release cycle. Insufficient testing and an insanely short release cycle are major issues for Firefox. Chrome has some similar problems but they seem to be better at testing because so far I have not had any that make the browser actually unusable.

Re:Linux?

[drinkypoo]

I have similar experiences with newer low-end Radeons (6290 and 6320). Even the basic desktop effects are choppy.

Some of us have been telling you that ATI is a crock for years now, that their Linux support is a lie and that their hardware itself is unstable dookie. nVidia ain't perfect but if you're a Linux user it is the only practical choice. Sure you can get working ATI graphics by choosing the correct and perfectly antiquated (not too old, but certainly not new) GPU. Or, odds are, J.Random nVidia card will Just Work.

I have literally been watching ATI graphics drivers crash my OS since Mach32 on Windows 3.1.

Re:Now is the time to turn automatic updates off

[Billly Gates]

Go to anywebsite and you get infected. Done.

Just last week I did a fresh re-image I installed plugins and installed java (needed eclipse). I launched IE before I disabled the java plugin to download software. My webcam instantly came on!! MSN.com had a rogue adserver that launched a java based attack.

I had to get my image stick and start over again.

Flash ads can get in through buffer overflows, sandbox errors, exception handling techniques, and privledge escalation bugs. I had this debate without another slashdotter who was saying it is impossible for a standard user to run admin code??! I showed that there was 200+ exploits in the last decade of hackers doing just that by overflowing a variable with executable code in the end so when the buffer fills it runs as full admin (one example). There are 199 others.

Yes your system is probably owned unless you run noscript and only go on a few sparring sites.

Re:Now is the time to turn automatic updates off

[Billly Gates]

The reason why is design.

Chrome is designed to be updated from the gecko (no pun intended). It's plugin is seperate with the api designed to be indepdent of constant updating. Webkit is designed to be embedded into things which is not only why Google uses it but Steam uses it as well. They tried with Firefox first but had problems as everything is kludged together browser style.

This is what I mean by modern design. IE is like a new browser after version 9 and it too can be updated more frequently where changing one thing wont impact another.

Firefox needs a rebirth rather than a refinement of the existing.

Finally! Full Flexbox support!

[Piata]

At long last Firefox has full Flexbox support. Even Interent Explorer beat them to full support of this standard. If you regularly work with CSS + HTML, Flexbox is a god send and now we can finally start using it.

[meta] NTS, hypocrisy, and misunderstood words

[tepples]

I mentioned that people who call themselves Christians but then commit acts of violence, for flimsy reasons and without provocation, are not in fact practicing Christianity. Some fool cried "hehe I guss there is No True Scotsman then huh?!" while patting himself on the back fiercely.

If someone wrongfully accuses you of creating a no true Scotsman (NTS) fallacy when discussing hypocrisy among self-proclaimed Christians, here's how I'd reply: "I've always defined 'Christian' as someone who follows the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Anyone who claims Christianity but materially fails to practice it is something else: a 'hypocrite'. In Jesus's time, there were hypocrites in the leadership of Pharisaic Judaism, and he tore them a new anus in a speech recorded at Matthew 23." Clearly defining the goalposts early on shifts the debate from "you moved the goalposts" to "is this person really practicing?".

This infantile fevered-ego shit is killing Slashdot much faster than a shitty Beta redesign ever could hope to do. It's just far less trendy to protest it.

The NTS fallacy usually has roots in disputes over definitions. Even Scientology recognizes the problems that misunderstood words cause. One can prevent the fallacy by agreeing upon definitions before proceeding, such as "Christian == one practicing Jesus's teachings". This is an anti-NTS step that any Slashdot user can help stop, unlike forced beta for which the only cure is leaving Slashdot in favor of Soylent News or Pipedot. Right now, one can turn off beta, but once Slashdot forces it, the only course of action will be to follow reasoning analogous to Jesus's advice to body integrity identity disorder sufferers in Mark 9:45: "If [Slashdot beta] causes you to stumble, cut it off."