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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.

24 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. I'm still alive by kheldan · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    --
    Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
    1. Re:I'm still alive by nmb3000 · · Score: 2

      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".

      --
      "What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
      /)
    2. Re:I'm still alive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. Automatically? by agm · · Score: 3, Informative

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

    Not for those of us running Gentoo linux.

    1. Re:Automatically? by oodaloop · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

      --
      Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
    2. Re:Automatically? by danomac · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    3. Re:Automatically? by sirlark · · Score: 2

      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.

    4. Re:Automatically? by agm · · Score: 2

      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.

  3. Browsers are too heavy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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]

    1. Re:Browsers are too heavy by etash · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Browsers are too heavy by VortexCortex · · Score: 2

      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.

  4. Stability & performance Features by AbRASiON · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. VP9 by NapalmV · · Score: 2

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

    1. Re:VP9 by DMUTPeregrine · · Score: 3, Informative

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

      --
      Not a sentence!
    2. Re:VP9 by Lennie · · Score: 4, Informative

      Have you tried enabling it ?:

      http://youtube.com/html5

      It has been improving, but only very slowly.

      --
      New things are always on the horizon
  6. Re:Now is the time to turn automatic updates off by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:150 tabs? by DMUTPeregrine · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Not a sentence!
  8. Re:150 tabs? by AbRASiON · · Score: 2

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

  9. Re:Stability & performance Features by AbRASiON · · Score: 2

    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.

  10. Re:150 tabs? by sexconker · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  11. Re:Now is the time to turn automatic updates off by Dagger2 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  12. Re:150 tabs? by horza · · Score: 2

    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.

  13. Re:Stability & performance Features by L4t3r4lu5 · · Score: 2

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

    --
    Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
  14. Finally! Full Flexbox support! by Piata · · Score: 2

    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.