Firefox 33 Arrives With OpenH264 Support

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today officially launched Firefox 33 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Additions include OpenH264 support as well as the ability to send video content from webpages to a second screen. Firefox 33 for the desktop is available for download now 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. Full changelogs are available here: desktop and Android."

Comments

More bloat, less marketshare

[QuietLagoon]

... and Firefox continues to lose track of its origins and continues to add to the bloat, while hemorrhaging market share....

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, since it traces back to Netscape, its becoming one with its origins.

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[Spy Handler]

I haven't looked into it in detail, but Firefox still feels less bloated than Chrome. I'm using 31.1.1 ESR.

Javascript rendering seems faster on Firefox than Chrome also.

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[QuietLagoon]

...Firefox still feels less bloated than Chrome...

I was comparing to the time before the recent development fiascos (new UI, etc.). Firefox just seems to be getting larger and larger and larger.

.
It appears the Firefox developers are looking to please themselves, and not the users, because the Firefox marketshare is dropping in spite of all the additional bloat being added.

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[TheRealMindChild]

Chrome gains market share the same way IE had. It is default on the fafillion android devices out there, even if that device can't handle it.

Breaking everything out into a plugin because the system only allows SO much and native code is rarely an option due to the plethora of exotic hardware firefox runs on. Do you want to decode advanced compressed video or decrypt cpu intensive encryption in a lowest-common-demoninator interpreted language on an ARM device with 256 MB of ram that runs like a 486? I don't.

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[Spazmania]

All versions of Netscape had a menu bar. Firefox long since passed Netscape's degree of awfulness.

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[Anonymous Coward]

My 486 didn't have that much RAM. And I can tell you todays mobile devices are much more capable than it. Last year I brought back a Pentium III from the dead, installed free software and none of the browsers were able to render medium to complex pages due to the javascript. But my HTC android from three years ago could. Seriously, the devices you carry around have some serious horsepower, don't belittle them because of their size.

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[Anonymous Coward]

> due to the plethora of exotic hardware firefox runs on
Fuck them then. I don;t give a shit if FF runs at all on not desktop systems. In fact, FF shouldn't run on non-desktop systems. Making a desktop system run a fucking mobile browser is awful.

FF has added plenty of shitty bloat it never needed to that lived perfectly fine in addons that no one used. Tab Candy and sync are two off the top of my head. It's shit like mainlining a devs pet project that no one wants that made phoenix the pile of failure it has become.

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you on drugs? If Firefox stayed a desktop browser it would be dead in a matter of a few years. Desktops are dying, and Firefox has no choice but to move on as well. Since they're unable to compete on iOS or Windows Phone, and Chrome is bundled on Droids, all they can do now is make their own phone OS or simply fade away period.

Besides that, every time Firefox tries to remove bloat, people whine and moan that it's not really bloat after all. Change the UI and remove a checkbox? Shit, that's grounds for a divorce. Making us install addons? They're worse than Hitler. Adding features that we don't think should be in the browser? Stalin has nothin' on Mozilla.

They just can't win. No matter what they do, they're failures in your eyes.

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice, if the Mozilla provided a official 64bit Windows build. Quite likely it would get more positive impressions than their "improved search experience" (whatever that means) or "qubic bezier curves editor". If they could also try to make the browser windows' Javascripts to run in parallel, so the whole browser would not get frozen and unresponsive when a single advertisement script decides to loop forever. Please, please make one release where there would not be a single new or removed feature, but fixes for existing bugs.

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice, if the Mozilla provided a official 64bit Windows build.

Done.
If they could also try to make the browser windows' Javascripts to run in parallel, so the whole browser would not get frozen and unresponsive when a single advertisement script decides to loop forever.

and done. You're welcome.

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[narcc]

It's scheduled for Firefox 37, to be released at the end of March next year.

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[Anonymous Coward]

They fix bugs all the bloody time, but nobody cares. If you try a Firefox from a year or two ago the difference is plain to see (yes, even with these ads, which were far worse before). They've replaced their entire Javascript engine, have mostly multi-threaded the browser and now moved on to multi-process support, have been replacing their entire graphics stack for years, and even managed to find the time to get a generational garbage collector and massive RAM usage improvements... but because they also put in something neat for web developers, none of that matters.

And note that people who move to Pale Moon/Waterfox/etc don't care about the shortcomings of that branded distribution of Firefox... they only care when it's still called Firefox. Mozilla has had nightly 64-bit builds for many months now, but nobody wants to use them to help test and get things working more quickly. They would rather use a third-party build that strips out the testing suite, tears out crash reports and telemetry, and then wonder aloud why there still isn't a 64-bit version. It's not all Mozilla's fault.

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[Anonymous Coward]

FFS. It's a configurable option. If you want Firefox to have a menu bar, just turn it on and stop whining.

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[nctritech]

http://www.palemoon.org/palemo...

64-bit and rock solid and steadily improving. I have no complaints.

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[RebelWebmaster]

Other than being a fork of Gecko 24 (released over a year ago) and no plans to pick up anything newer, yeah, it's great.

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[hairyfeet]

Riiight, because everyone is gonna throw away the billion and a half PCs on the planet so they can get assraped by the MB to surf on a fucking phone. PC sales have slowed because PCs are uber powerful so there simply is no need to throw them away every year like most do with the shitty phones.

Google is losing over a billion a year on Android and shows NO sign of EVER making a ROI, in fact the only one making bank on mobile is Apple thanks to their boutique pricing and even they are having trouble keeping that mobile gravy train rolling, see the company going against Jobs wishes by making the iPhablet Now that phones are running into the power wall you will see sales continue at current rates for maybe a year and a half as all those with older phones get new multicore units but after that? Just like the PC the OEMs are gonna be grasping at straws trying to come up with features to lure buyers, because short of a new battery tech AND a new programming language that makes scaling cores as easy as taking advantage of raw MHZ? they just don't have anywhere left to go.

As for TFA? Firefox has become the Metro of browsers so this won't help stop the bleeding, you go to any forum talking about browsers and you find that FF users are bailing for PaleMoon or IceDragon or Waterfox because they HATE the ersatz Chrome UI, all you read over and over is "If I wanted Chrome I'd have took Chrome!" and I have to agree, give me PaleMoon any day, at least it looks like itself and the UI is stable.

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[slashdot_commentator]

How does Waterfox differ from Mozilla's 64 bit test builds?

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[Anonymous Coward]

Desktops are dying

Just like cars died half a century ago.

Up until recently, if you were going to run new software, you bought a new computer every year and a half. If not, every three years would do.

Then we hit a physical limit. My old PC lasted ten years. It was a 2.4 GHz P4. I replaced it with a 3.6 GHz i5, rather than buying a new 4.8 GHz after a year and a half.

Oh yeah, that was four and a half years ago. By now, I should be able to upgrade from 3.6 to 28.8 GHz (double every 1.5 years).

When a computer lasts five times as long, sales dropping to one fifth of what it used to be is to be expected. That's not dying, that's a mature market.

Combine that with the financial crisis that hit about the same time, and you should expect a much larger drop than that.

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[Spazmania]

I'm not whining. But until and unless "classic compact" catches up with the nasty new interface, I'm not upgrading either.

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[Dagger2]

Mozilla has had nightly 64-bit builds for many months now, but nobody wants to use them to help test and get things working more quickly

You have this backwards. Mozilla tried to kill 64-bit Nightly builds two years ago, even though about 50% of Nightly users were using them at the time. Those users (somewhat predictably) weren't too happy and complained, and Mozilla eventually left 64-bit builds running, but disabled crash reports and automated testing, and refused to commit paid dev time to keeping it compiling or passing the tests. Plus they originally planned to automatically migrate those users to 32-bit, though that never actually happened. That's not exactly "nobody wants to use them to help test".

(References: [1] and [2].)

Of course, fast forward to a few months ago and Chrome's announcements of 64-bit, and suddenly it's "oh, we've been doing 64-bit builds for years".

Caveat, baseline and high profiles only?

[Anonymous Coward]

Note: Firefox currently uses OpenH264 only for WebRTC and not for the <video> tag, because OpenH264 does not yet support the high profile format frequently used for streaming video. We will reconsider this once support has been added.

Send video content from webpages to a second scr..

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a shame the "send video content from webpages to a second screen" feature is only for the Android version. I could actually see myself using this on my PC.

Finally

[ArcadeMan]

Firefox finally supports H.264 playback. No need to support WebM anymore.

Re:Finally

[ArcadeMan]

Note: Firefox currently uses OpenH264 only for WebRTC and not for the tag, because OpenH264 does not yet support the high profile format frequently used for streaming video. We will reconsider this once support has been added.

Don't we need to not use the high profile format to support older devices anyway?

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone ever supported WebM in the first place?

There were basically two classes of browsers: Browsers that support OGM, and browsers that support H.264. Browsers that support WebM were strictly a subset of those two sets.

Which means you'd encode to OGM to give Freetards their blurtastic crapovision video and H.264 to give everyone else high quality video.

Since WebM was barely better than OGM and anything that supported WebM also supported OGM, there was never any reason to ever bother with WebM. Unless you hate yourself and really felt like dealing with the horrible almost nonexistent WebM tools.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

4chan's Adult GIFs section now also hosts webm. That's the only use I know of. Of course I never checked myself, I was told by a friend!

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. Most phones that old or junky aren't worth bothering. Even an iPhone 4s and an iPad 2 can play 1080p30 High Profile. And since the Fandroids like to bleat about how their devices are so superior to anything running iOS their devices should be no problem with playing High Profile, no?

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

and there's no guarantee that MPEG LA won't begin charging for streams in the future

Sure there is.

http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MP...

Where the title is:

MPEG LA’s AVC License Will Not Charge Royalties for Internet Video that is Free to End Users through Life of License

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to reread that citation, because it does not say what you claim it says. They aren't charging endusers for it, that's all it says. That says nothing about the developers of software that uses their patents. Also, that's Internet transmission only as far as I can tell, it doesn't appear to include any rights to encode or decode the streams.

Just upgraded, lost cookies

[trawg]

Just upgraded then with that grim sense of foreboding that I now get with Firefox upgrades ("what's going to stop working this time? how is the UI I've been using for many years changed now?")

I lost all my cookies - upon reload after the upgrade, I noticed I was logged out of a bunch of websites (including anything using Google Accounts and Slashdot). YMMV.

Re:Just upgraded, lost cookies

[narcc]

YMMV

My certainly did. It restarted and reloaded my tabs, including this one, without a hitch.

that grim sense of foreboding that I now get with Firefox upgrades ("what's going to stop working this time? how is the UI I've been using for many years changed now?")

Just curious, what has been breaking for you? What UI features have changed in some significant way since Australis? I only ask because I switched back to Firefox from Chrome when Australis hit and have seen nothing but positive improvements with each release.

Re:Just upgraded, lost cookies

[trawg]

Just curious, what has been breaking for you? What UI features have changed in some significant way since Australis?

SINCE Australis? Nothing major. In a recent version they changed the right click context menu to include icons for reload/back/forward, which irritated me - change for the sake of change. (Also the keyboard shortcut for Private Browsing no longer works - might be a plugin? Not sure.)

Things like that seem little but when you've been using Firefox for years - which I have, every day, for work - little changes like that mean the platform loses a lot of stability, which is one of the things that is most important when you're trying to get things done.

I'm not at all opposed to new features. I don't even care about feature bloat that much. But they should be opt-in. And at the very least, you should be able to opt-out without having to install some third party plugin. Having a new UI/UX forced on me just feels ... rude.

Australis prompted me to install Classic Theme Restorer so I could restore the browser to the way I'd been using it for /years/. (Here's my +5 post about why I disliked Australis.) Enough has been written about Australis so I won't whine about that any more.

Re:Just upgraded, lost cookies

[tlhIngan]

SINCE Australis? Nothing major. In a recent version they changed the right click context menu to include icons for reload/back/forward, which irritated me - change for the sake of change. (Also the keyboard shortcut for Private Browsing no longer works - might be a plugin? Not sure.)

Things like that seem little but when you've been using Firefox for years - which I have, every day, for work - little changes like that mean the platform loses a lot of stability, which is one of the things that is most important when you're trying to get things done.

For me, it's that autocomplete stopped using the history and started using partial, so if you routinely went to a deep link, it would be suggested and may even be the first suggestion, but it won't autocomplete the entire URL. Just the domain, or one more level, etc.

Really annoying when you routinely have deep URLs and where the upper directories return errors.

Still haven't found a way to undo that change and just have it pull the autocomplete suggestion off the history.

I think I thappened somewhere between 23 and 24. (e.g., if you used to type "www.a" and it would suggest "www.abig.com/long/example/of/a/long/url" as a completion. Now if you type "www.a" it just gives you "www.abig.com/" and the drop down would give you that full link, so you have to type a downarrow too).

There have been many other little UI ding-a-lings that really screw up muscle memory.

The "Bring tab to front" option is also an annoyance - sometimes you want to open a new tab to a site and not use an existing one...Oh yeah, did I mention that usually gets first on the dropdown, so now you have to do two down arrows?

Funny enough, Chrome doesn't seem to break so many UI things every version - things still react the same way they always have.

Re:Just upgraded, lost cookies

[MMC Monster]

I just like applications to go along with the UI guidelines set by the OS. Chrome breaks that, and so does the new Firefox UI.

Simple things:
1 - Menu items visible right under the title bar
2 - A title bar that can be double-clicked to maximize or restore the screen
3 - Minimize/Maximize/Restore buttons where the OS says they should be. (Chrome hard-codes them to the right side of the top of the window.)
4 - If you allow customization of the top of the screen, as Firefox does, why can't I hide the Open Menu widget when I'm showing the menu items otherwise?

Re:Just upgraded, lost cookies

[Anonymous Coward]

I run cookie monster with default to allow temporary cookie, so this is normal for me when restarting FF.

Re:Just upgraded, lost cookies

[Anonymous Coward]

The "Bring tab to front" option is also an annoyance - sometimes you want to open a new tab to a site and not use an existing one...Oh yeah, did I mention that usually gets first on the dropdown, so now you have to do two down arrows?

As I recall, there's a way to disable that one. But also, [shift]+[enter] overrides that to open a new window when it says "bring to front".

Re:Just upgraded, lost cookies

[narcc]

Thanks. Having returned to FireFox after years of Chrome, I'm not likely to notice, or be irritated, by those kinds of changes.

Re:Just upgraded, lost cookies

[Anonymous Coward]

I use pentadactyl.
There isn't much they can change about the ui that I would notice.

Re:Just upgraded, lost cookies

[caseih]

MS Windows is still the dominant platform, and it doesn't seem to have any guidelines or standard widgets anymore. Every app seems to use s different set of widgets and owner-drawn window decorations are a plague in certain spaces like anti-malware and anti-virus. MS themselves started this trend by using a different set of widgets with every release of MS Office. I just laugh when people talk about Linux apps being all different and not fitting into together. Windows is at least as bad these days, if not worse. And yes Chrome has made the problem even worse, and now Firefox.

If I could use classic theme restorer plus the GTK theme addon for Firefox I'd be a happy camper. As it is I'm stuck on ESR 24 for the time being.

Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, the amount of misinformation on this is mindblowing. The patents covering this still exist and there's no guarantee that MPEG LA won't begin charging for streams in the future. What's more, You're supposed to be paying for the patents to encode and decode the format, they've just made the streaming gratis.

Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

At least for as long as Cisco is willing to pay maximum royalties to MPEGLA, and as long as you are willing to pay royalties to MPEGLA, and you bought properly licensed h.264 encoders, and you made sure not to shoot commercial video on consumer grade cameras (which don't come with commercial MPEGLA licenses), etc...

The weakest link is Cisco - MPEGLA is most certainly going to look towards raising that h.264 cap in the coming years, and the only reason why Firefox can support h.264 is because it's Cisco's binaries. I'm assuming you remembered to get your MPEGLA royalties in order, or at the very least you are distributing non-commercial video and are hoping that MPEGLA continues their moratorium on royalties for non-commercial internet video.

Or you can just use WebM, and not pay anyone. But then you don't play on IE or Safari, because Apple and Microsoft have been ardently against royalty-free video formats for various reasons. (Microsoft because they think MPEGLA is indestructible; Apple because they don't want to put hardware WebM decoders on their phones)

No way will I support Firefox ever again

[SuperKendall]

After what the Firefox board did to the creator of Javascript (Brendan Eich), I think everyone should simply ignore Firefox and let them die as a warning to all other companies unable to tolerate diversity of thought.

Never forget.

Re: No way will I support Firefox ever again

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh oh, better be careful, if you haven't noticed, this is SJWdot. News for SJWs, Outrage over Stuff that Doesn't Matter.

Please return to your desk so the SJWs can lecture you on how evil it is to have apologized about comments made six years ago and how all men are rapists and IT is inherently sexist.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[lgw]

I just hope Pale Moon starts keeping more current. Recent IEs are pretty good, but naturally Windows-only. I'm trying to live a Google-free life, so Chrome is out.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[Anonymous Coward]

Your "diversity of thought" ends where you try to deny others of their rights.

It's like how there is a large difference between spewing racism vs contributing money to a hypothetical campaign to legalize segregation again.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[Anonymous Coward]

Just answer me one thing: are you religious?

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[Anonymous Coward]

If Mozilla dies, Pale Moon will be even more of a footnote than it currently is. Where do you think they got their browser, and it's glorious 64-bitness? It's basically Mozilla's work, rebranded, and doing nothing to help them back. Sure, it might feel nice to pretend it isn't, but that won't save it from near-instant death once the hand that feeds it dies. Unless all the thankless sods who despise Mozilla now actually find their helpfulness and start contributing something other than bile, maybe.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that the same Brendan Eich who posted in his personal blog, that "under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader."? Yeah that's why I am waiting for when your explaination that the reputation of the CEO never affects how the community or the public views a company ....nope CEO reputation affecting company reputation never happens (Gates, Jobs, Musk)

Oh and yes that the Firefox board forced the overall community to attack him soon after the board chose him as CEO -- because the board totally wanted that to happen. I don't think the board did anything horrible by not protecting him ....I don't agree with what they did but they did not attack him a subset of the Firefox community and the public attacked him the board left him to deal with it and his choice as the CEO was to resign.

The board had the diversity of thought to hire him as CEO but they realized that the public did not have the same view of Eich as they did and allowed Eich to deal with his partialy self imposed tempest in a Tea Pot .... he dealt with it by resigning becasue he believed he was too much of a lightening rod to be an effective leader.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[Anonymous Coward]

You know why no one likes you Millennial SJW fucks? Because you preach "tolerance" but are utterly incapable of tolerating anyone who doesn't think exactly like you.

This place was so much better before the fucking Millennials invaded.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[Anonymous Coward]

After what the Firefox board did to the creator of Javascript (Brendan Eich), I think everyone should simply ignore Firefox and let them die as a warning to all other companies unable to tolerate diversity of thought.

Never forget.

They had no choice when a large number of Firefox devs and contributors refused to work for someone they considered bigoted. The board's responsibility is to the best for the organizations goals.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[Anonymous Coward]

You know why no one likes you Millennial SJW fucks? Because you preach "tolerance" but are utterly incapable of tolerating anyone who doesn't think exactly like you.

This place was so much better before the fucking Millennials invaded.

oh, the irony

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[SuperKendall]

Is that the same Brendan Eich who posted in his personal blog, that "under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader."?

Yes, because the board were entirely against him. Even LGBT workers at Mozilla supported him, but the board would not - he resigned "voluntarily", because he had no support from the people who cared only about the witch hunt, not Mozilla.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[jopsen]

After what the Firefox board....

Where to start, where to start... First off there is no firefox board. Mozilla Corporation has a board, as does Mozilla Foundation.
Having followed this, rather closely, I can assure you that Brendan made the decision to resign, the message was delivered by internal email.
Later in an internal meeting the board explained that they had strongly recommended and hoped that Brendan would ride out the storm.

Any allegations that the board force Brendan to resign is pure fiction. Sure, I can promise you that there wasn't an elaborate conspiracy to lie to all employees and community members, but if there was Brendan was in on that "conspiracy" :)
The truth is that given the storm and the level and amount of personal attacks, I understand how someone does not wish to ride it out.

All being said and done, let's move a long... Mozilla is not a political organization. It about building a better free and open web.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[PopeRatzo]

I'm not smart enough to contribute code to the Mozilla project, but does throwing a few bucks there way now and then count?

It's all going to suck once all browsers are fully DRM complaint, so I don't really see the benefit in one over the other at the moment. I use Epic Privacy Browser most of the time, but there are things that don't work there, so I'm stuck.

Tell me something: If I use Chrome, with all the DoNotTrackMe and Disconnect and Privacy Badger and https everywhere extensions enabled, am I still doing any favors for Google?

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[Anonymous Coward]

Eich's personal beliefs should never have been brought up to begin with. It's a dangerous thing that's going to have dire consequences for the future. A lot of people post a lot of stuff to the public net, it's going to come back to haunt them in ways that even Eich never thought to imagine.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps they should have let go of folks who put their brand of "social justice" first and the needs of the project second.

Mozilla's products can never be trusted now.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[lgw]

throwing a few bucks there way now and then count?

I bought a copy of the Mozilla browser once. Remember when?

It's all going to suck once all browsers are fully DRM complaint

Nothing will be worse for browsers being able to play Netflix crap like Flash or Silverlight. Flash especially needs to die the death.

I use Chrome, with all the DoNotTrackMe and Disconnect and Privacy Badger and https everywhere extensions enabled, am I still doing any favors for Google?

Pretty sure Chrome always sends every URL you type to Google, though it would be neat if you could disable that (in IE and FF you turn off the features that warn you of well-known attack sites). There are chromium ports that claim to be entirely evil-free, but I haven't looked into them as I just don't like Chrome's UI (or the recent FF). They might be great.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a copy of the Mozilla browser once. Remember when?

Never? Mozilla has always been free. Netscape Navigator was paid for a while, as was some early Mosiac based browsers/internet suites.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla is not a political organization. It about building a better free and open web.

That's hilarious.

Whether it was the board, Okstupid, or the general public.. Mozilla did not do anything to protect freedom and openness. It stood by (or perhaps weakly defended) their CEO as he was driven out of his position by a marauding horde of protestors attacking his personal beliefs. This was bullying on an epic scale. People who identified themselves as Firefox developers even described the situation here saying they were too scared to stand up for Eich because they didn't want to be next.

Perhaps the drop in usage has less to do with the browser software and more to do with disgust over Mozilla's failure to stand up to its mission statement.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[lgw]

Grrr. "play Netflix without crap". Can't seem to type today.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[Anonymous Coward]

call orkin pest control...

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[SuperKendall]

Just answer me one thing: are you religious?

Not at all, and I FULLY support gay marriage (as in I have been a part in a ceremony of a gay friend to his partner). I just don't support witch-hunts in any form.

The fact you want be to qualify that is pathetic.

Even if I WERE, why would you bring that up - it just proves my point on the dangers of intolerance. You have chosen to demonize an entire group of people simply because of how they want to live, which makes you no better than any religious evangelist preaching against gay marriage that ever lived. You just have a different religion, a different reason to hate...

How about trying NO HATE? You ever think about that?

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[Anonymous Coward]

What? The board are the ones who voted him in in the first place. If you're going to be mad at someone, be mad at the assholes who put so much pressure on him it didn't matter WHAT Mozilla did, and Eich felt it would harm Mozilla more to stay than leave. I seriously don't understand this childish "I want to support Eich more than Mozilla" nonsense. If you have a problem with the board, then why are you punishing the myriad workers under them who didn't have a say? This is just grandstanding because you want a cause to fight for, but don't want to fight the actual problem - just a handy scapegoat. Which is exactly what the jerks who went after Eich in the first place were doing.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[Anonymous Coward]

Hatred shaming is bullying is what I get from your post.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[PopeRatzo]

Does Chrome send my URLs to Google even if I'm in incognito mode?

So, let me make sure I've got this right: Chromium is just the rendering engine and Epic can use it to make a privacy browser but Chrome is the Google flagship browser with all the phoning home written in. Chromium is open source, but Chrome isn't. Is that right?

You don't have to take the time to answer, I'll go look it up. I need to learn these things. I'm trying to unplug myself as much as I can from companies like Google, but I don't want to give up the basic functionality of the Internet.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[PopeRatzo]

You know, I really don't get the importance of "Netflix in the browser". Why is having a Netflix app such a big problem for people? I mean, if I want to participate in Netflix's business model, OK, I'd be happy to buy into their app and their DRM, just like I do on a mobile device. But I hate the idea of this "DRM by default" that is being planned for HTML5 (at least the way I understand it).

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[lgw]

Because Netflix is something like 1/3rd of internet traffic. If you haven't worked on a standards committee this might not be obvious, but the point of a standard is to document what the big players are doing, so that the little guys can interoperate. It's a descriptive, not proscriptive, process. A standard that the major players don't actually follow is worthless, and a failure of the committee.

It's simple not the role or purpose of a standards committee to spout stuff like "we won't standardize X because we feel that X is bad". Heck, the ISO rules probably prohibit that sort of thing.

But HTML5 will in no way create more DRM than there would otherwise have been - all it does is recognize that that this is a common thing done over the web, and provide a standard way of doing it, albeit as a sort of plug-in architecture. Moving the DRM out of a large, exploitable general-purpose framework like Flash or Silverlight, and into a well-defined (and contained) DRM module is a solid win.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. Because conservatives and/or religious folks aren't hated by these groups. Even the President had the same opinion back then before the polls and his teleprompter told him he needed those votes. The irony is that the groups that left the closet are now trying to shove everyone else into it. He donated to a cause he believed in, then was bullied out of a job by the proponents of tolerance. That's seriously fucked. What if it was a crowd demanding that a pro-LGBT CEO step down? I bet you'd see things differently.

Seems there's a shortage of techies on the left coast, they're recruiting like mad on the east coast. I wonder why that is. It's such a beautiful progressive, pro-tolerance paradise that no one who could afford to leave still lives there?

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[jez9999]

Uh, I don't think a large number of them refused to work under Eich. He had been at the organization for years.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, I don't think a large number of them refused to work under Eich. He had been at the organization for years.

Yes, they did, at least according to most news reports, the board and acknowledged by Eich himself when he explained why he stepped down.

What you can ask is why didn't it become an issue before, and that is a good question. Partly because it wasn't known before, and partly because being the CEO and head of an organization is different, you are the figurehead representing the organization, internally and externally.

Re:No way will I support Firefox ever again

[jopsen]

Mozilla is not a political organization. It about building a better free and open web.

That's hilarious.

How so... I'm not afraid to say that I support Mozilla, and that I'm very very very very far from agreeing most Americans on serious and important political issues. You now the kind of issues where America murders innocent civilians. I could go on... But Mozilla is not the platform for these issues.

Re:A Non-story

[ArhcAngel]

It's telling that their web site looks like it was designed for browsers from 1995. I'll stick with WaterFox

Sour grapes much?

[Anonymous Coward]

It not catering to your whims precisely doesn't make it bloated, not make Mozilla not care about their users. It's fine to be upset that it isn't fondling your balls just right, but stop reaching for such petty and obviously incorrect excuses to hate Firefox for that.

Its marketshare dropping has nothing to do with the UI, since usage rose after the release that introduced the revamped UI. The marketshare is dropping not because of fewer users. Actually their userbase has grown, just not as quickly as Chrome's. That's because they don't have the marketing budget to compete, plus they can't get a foothold on the much more important mobile OSes - they are either prohibited outright from running their own browser (just a reskin) or have to compete with the built-in browser in an era where virtually no one bothers to install a replacement browser.

I'd actually like to know what the real bloat is? Adding new web features? Because it certainly isn't them trimming down the UI. And if you're going to be upset that they're adding web features, then it's the web you're upset with, not Firefox. All the browsers are bloating up from that perspective and every time Mozilla try to take a stand against it, they're the only ones who suffer.

Re:Sour grapes much?

[QuietLagoon]

It not catering to your whims precisely doesn't make it bloated...

I never said that is was bloated because it does not cater to my whims.

... not make Mozilla not care about their users not make Mozilla not care about their users...

Nor did I say that it not catering to my whims means that Mozilla does not care about its users.

Re:Sour grapes much?

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't say a whole lot of anything, so I had to read between the lines. But good job deflecting this so you don't have to address the rest of what I wrote. Stay classy.

Hamburger button

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I finally move (or remove) the hamburger button?
I mean, it is like 2014?

Re:Hamburger button

[Anonymous Coward]

Just install the Classic theme restorer extension, so you can get rid of all that Australis junk. At least until the Mozilla decides to remove the possibility of removal of Australis, as it is a bit bad PR for their UX department that 400k users actually take the time to install an extension to override the dumb corporate decisions.

Re:A Non-story

[Anonymous Coward]

Waterfox is Windows only.

Firefox is not winning

[Anonymous Coward]

I have nothing against Firefox, but the numbers keep shrinking albeit slowly. No matter if you hate Chrome, Google and its questionable privacy issues. It seems for now Chrome is winning. I actually forgot about Firefox for a year or so, and just recently was working on my wife's laptop and noticed she still has Firefox on it.
Her school district used to swear by Firefox but last quarter they moved totally to Chrome. I think its probably due to a plan to purchase Chromebook's soon.
Never the less, it made Firefox a orphan. What's probably even worse is my wife has said Chrome is better to use and crashes less. Not something Mozilla wants to hear I suppose. Me, I don't care much either way on browsers. Give me one that does not crash and renders pages correctly and I am fine. Probably what most users typically want. They end result, is that Firefox is becoming a niche browser rapidly and I am not sure today how Mozilla can survive with such a browser.
They have resorted to pretty much copying Google and that's a desperate move for sure. If Google was to yank funding to Mozilla. I think Firefox becomes another
starving open source project.

Epic

[PopeRatzo]

Epic Privacy Browser is the way to go.

https://www.epicbrowser.com/

Netscape

[dysmal]

Yet another FF release.

Yawn.

Meantime, Netscape Navigator is 20 years old today.

Meanwhile, on Pale Moon

[hackertourist]

After the Australis debacle I decided to move my Windows machines to Pale Moon. The change has been surprisingly painless, I could pretty much copy my Firefox profile wholesale without a hitch. All of the extensions work too and the interface is such a relief.
Now to find something similar for my Mac...

Re:Meanwhile, on Pale Moon

[Anonymous Coward]

Mileage sure seems to vary a lot with Pale Moon. Some users are now reporting that Pale Moon has completely broken in the latest upgrade, not even starting for them. So now they can't even switch their profile back to Firefox easily. Most people willing to take the plunge to a third-party unstable build like Pale Moon would probably be better off just running the nightly 64-bit builds and at least sending Mozilla some crash reports and telemetry.

Re:Meanwhile, on Pale Moon

[nctritech]

When Australis becomes optional, those people who left Firefox because of it will then have your suggested option available.

Re:Meanwhile, on Pale Moon

[Anonymous Coward]

They can already install Classic Theme Restorer or other addons or skins to customer it, but they're too damn lazy. They would rather stick to Firefox 24 ESR (Pale Moon) and pretend that's the superior solution, even though Australis helps pave the way to a multi-process Firefox, improved OS integration, and other niceties. But to hell with the inconvenience of helping them test it! Let's use an outdated fork that doesn't send any crash reports or telemetry. Let's not bother installing skins/addons to get our square tabs, movable refresh button, etc back. Whatever is less inconvenient for me today and let's me come crawling back to Firefox once others have shaken out the problems!

Re:Meanwhile, on Pale Moon

[hackertourist]

I used Firefox with Classic Theme Restorer before moving to Pale Moon. CTR helps, but it wasn't able to undo all of the crappiness that Australis brought. For example, the new tab design in Australis meant that very narrow tabs (anything below ~60 px) didn't work well anymore. I used the Custom Tab Width extension to adjust the minimum tab width. After Australis, there would be a ghost region around each tab, making the tabs overlap each other.
CTR also didn't bring back the Status bar. Having status text overlap the main window is annoying.

Re:Meanwhile, on Pale Moon

[hackertourist]

Over the past few years, the Mozilla foundation hasn't given the impression it'll listen to user feedback at all. If the rivers of vitriol over the Australis UI changes haven't had any effect, why would I bother giving them one more data point?

Re:Meanwhile, on Pale Moon

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, I understand this is the popular opinion, but it's completely unjustified. First you people demand that Mozilla fix things like the lack of a multi-process browser, a bad graphics subsystem, and poor OS/window manager integration. Then they replace their UI code so they do all of those things, and because you don't like it missing some features, you complain even more.

Which do you want? The same shitty Firefox you've had for years, or one willing to break things in the short-term to improve? Would you rather have a browser you can still customize away from the defaults, or something like Firefox 2 or 3, where you have to sacrifice a lamb to change the UI substantially and then have it completely break when the next Firefox release happens anyway?

Everyone is always so quick to assume the worst of Mozilla, completely ignore the good things they do, and presume that the only thing they need to do in order to get their way is spew more and more vitriol. All of that energy could have solved a real problem by now, not constant complaints about the widths of tabs and such (all it takes is one person to make a CTR option for that, but apparently it's better to just complain than actually do it).

Re:Meanwhile, on Pale Moon

[Anonymous Coward]

Making changes like this were ten times more obnoxious in the days before Australis, however. Do you remember the hell it was to create XUL overlays and pray they didn't break when Firefox sneezed or the next version came out? This is the price of progress. One person will have to figure it out for everyone else. The fact that someone was able to create CTR while everyone else just moaned about things breaking is evidence of that fact. Sure, it doesn't solve everything for you. Sure it's a pain to tweak things when Mozilla doesn't feel they have the time or energy to do it for you anymore. But you know what's more obnoxious? Not having any ability to customize things, or being stuck with a fragile, buggy UI because some people can't stand the thought that they'll have to customize Firefox again.

Pale Moon is basically ESR 24, so of course it was "easier" than adopting Australis. But that's just spackling gloss over your lazyness. Now that the 24 ESR is out, you're going to have to scramble to figure things out anyway. Pale Moon is already breaking things to desperately cloy for the anti-Australis fans - version 25 just broke compatibility with a shit-ton of addons, a scenario that hasn't happened to many people in Firefox in years. It's going to be funny to watch the third-party builds scramble now, especially since Mozilla has finally found someone willing to fix their 64-bit Windows testing suite (something which the third-party builds did nothing to help with, which is the biggest reason why a 64-bit Windows Firefox hasn't happened yet). There are trade-offs everywhere, and if all you care about is a few minor things in the UI you're doomed to suffer worse in other departments.

Re:Meanwhile, on Pale Moon

[Dagger2]

Then they replace their UI code so they do all of those things

Nope, different projects. Australis wasn't part of any of those.

and because you don't like it missing some features

More like, Mozilla deliberately killed some features because they thought we were too stupid to handle them, and when people asked them not to, they basically said "sod off, we don't care".

Would you rather have a browser you can still customize away from the defaults, or something like Firefox 2 or 3, where you have to sacrifice a lamb to change the UI substantially

Hm. I'm on Firefox 3.6 and it's a ton easier to customize than Australis. I prefer to have my stop and reload buttons between back/forward and the address bar. On 3.6 I just do it, on Australis I can't do it at all. Same deal with a bunch of other stuff. I guess I can't easily rearrange icons on the status bar, but then I can't do that with Australis either, can I?

presume that the only thing they need to do in order to get their way is spew more and more vitriol

It's more like: we've tried every other option and Mozilla just doesn't give a shit, so what's left to do but to bitch? If we shut up about it, they'll just assume we were complaining because stuff changed, rather than because we didn't like what it changed *to*.

All of that energy could have solved a real problem by now

"My browser pisses me off every time I use it" actually is a real problem for some of us. I groan every time I need to launch Australis to test some newly committed feature, there's no way in hell I could deal with that every single time I need to open a webpage -- and I'd have a hard time getting any other problems solved if I was that pissed off all the time.

Firefox: The most unstable software in common use.

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox traces back to Netscape in that it still has the memory hogging and instability of Netscape when lots of windows and tabs are open. Firefox is the most unstable software in common use.

Recently Mozilla Foundation released a new version of Thunderbird with crazy changes in the user interface.

The basic problem? Sometimes Mozilla Foundation has amazingly bad management. There is apparently insufficient overall coordination. Mozilla Foundation needs a technically competent top manager who is also socially sophisticated.

Two Browsers, Two Goals.

[enter to exit]

Chrome is a good competitor to Firefox, it might be winning on various fronts at the moment but it's still a browser owned and controlled by a corporation with only profits in mind. Google made chrome to make it easier for them to track you and push their services on you.

Every time I've used Chrome, it's constantly nagged me to sign in to Google services, asks to change what mailto: does and in recent versions (on Windows) they've included a notification icon that ties in with Google Now. I feel Chrome gets a free pass on a lot of this stuff because it's considered fast. A lot of that perception is in UI responsiveness as the millisecond rendering differences are practically indistinguishable. Firefox should really consider moving away from XUL.

Firefox is a run by Mozilla (an NFP) who can only justify it's existence by making a good browser. Firefox needs to improve on a few fronts, but it's still a browser for the people. The only incentive they have is survival (which mean people using Firefox). The Mozilla Foundation has clearly become overly bureaucratic and focused on the survival of it's own bureaucracy to the detriment of their software. It needs a good shakedown. There are too many people looking for things to do - go to mozilla.org and check out the half-dead list of projects and 1000+ employees.

Re:Two Browsers, Two Goals.

[thegarbz]

I feel Chrome gets a free pass on a lot of this stuff because it's considered fast.

I don't think Chrome is getting any free pass. The endless bitchfest on here is just as bad for Chrome as it is for Firefox. The thing about Chrome is that some of the things that people are most vocal about are also some of the features that other people care.

I use Chrome for the dead simple and automatic syncing between all accounts, my desktop and my phone, and the information I voluntarily give Google helps make my day easier. I search for the local Mitre10 store on my desktop at work, when I get to the car my phone automatically prompts me if I want to navigate there. Even if I don't at the very least Google Now offers traffic suggestions.

Don't believe that Chrome gets a free pass. It gets a pass from users who value the features and services provided, and it (and its users) get a resounding and vocal vote of hate from everyone else.

What's the classic complaint about Firefox? Not wanting it to mimic Chrome?

Re:Two Browsers, Two Goals.

[KozmoStevnNaut]

I also use Chrome and other Google services, for the same reasons. I'm selling a bit of privacy to buy a gigantic helping of convenience. It is very likely that that particular bit of privacy was imaginary anyway.

Oh no, someone is going to use my search requests and subsequent clicks for statistical purposes, when will the madness end? Google doesn't give a shit about anyone individually, they want broad statistics so their ads can hit the largest possible interest groups.

Tabs in titlebar

[Grincho]

At least for #2, you can fix that in Firefox by setting browser.tabs.drawInTitlebar to false in about:config.

Finally, single-word search isn't broken

[bi$hop]

Kudos to Mozilla for fixing a really, really, really annoying bug.

SeaMonkey v2.29...

[antdude]

I upgraded v2.26.1 to v2.29 over a month ago, and my history got corrupted and I had to export and import bookmarks.html aftere reinstalling v2.26.1 (still on it). Also, v2.29 had sorting problems with its addressbooks. Thunderbird has the same problems from what I read. There are many QA issues lately with Mozilla products. :(

Re:A Non-story

[Anonymous Coward]

And Centos is probably way behind on a bunch of packages including Firefox.

So what?

I use Pale Moon.. I don't want a browser update every fucking day.

What is openh264?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't find any clear information of what this is or how it could be useful. What does the plugin do, and do I need it? Thanks.

Re:What is openh264?

[ArchieBunker]

A copy of a commercial codec that nobody but neckbeards will use.

Re:What is openh264?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can view h264 encoded videos with it. I disabled mine immediately.

Re:A Non-story

[nctritech]

If the website is the browser itself, you have sound logic. If not...

Why all the hate?

[pandronic]

Every time there's a new Firefox release, I sit back and watch a very vocal group spewing the same old tired rants and lies:

1. Firefox is released too often. Why would you want to wait a year or more between releases as it was the case in the 3.x days? It's better to have features released as they are ready and improved upon and not wait years to release them at once and have most of them not work properly. Why does it matter if it's Firefox 33, or firefox 4.33 or Firefox 2014-10?
2. The UI is a copy of Chrome's. There are not many ways you could do a minimalist browser interface. If you don't know shit about design, don't talk about design. Shit, probably these people think that design is some useless, time wasting activity that hipsters do and then jerk off to it. Why would you want to see more of the UI when you could see more of the content. Also there are multiple ways to customize Firefox and make it look as bad or as complicated you wish. You can even make it look like your grandma's browser for 1999.
3. Firefox uses a lot of memory and has memory leaks. Firefox is the most frugal browser when it comes to memory and doesn't have more memory leaks than other browsers. It fact it's the best browser to use if you use lots of tabs. Sure, maybe you can find a corner case or some extension that sucks memory, but I bet you can find that in any browser or application of the same complexity. I have Firefox installed on a lot of 512mb,1gb,2gb and 4gb machines and it works just fine.
4. Firefox is unstable. It might be unstable if you use shitty extensions. Just stop using shitty extensions that crash your browser. You wouldn't use apps that crash your OS, would you?
5. Firefox is going extinct. No it is not, even by a long shot. It still has 500mil users. People are still using it because it's a good product, not because it's pushed down their throat by every means possible as is the case with Chrome or was the case with Internet Explorer back in the 90s. (Not saying Chrome is a bad browser, just that the difference in market share is because of marketing not because of quality).
6. Firefox is breaking addons with every upgrade. This probably hasn't happened in years and years and even if it did it's understandable and forgivable when an addon hasn't been updated in years and uses antiquated APIs that are incompatible with the speed and security we've come to expect from modern browsers. I'm not running DOS apps on the latest version of Windows, why would you want to run old, slow and unsecure addons?

Besides that let me tell you some of the positive things that none of you assholes mention, because you like to talk out of your ass without even using the damn browser - it has the best looking and most intuitive developer tools out of any browser, a fast and feature complete Android browser with extensions, the best extensions out there out of any desktop browser, they offer an awesome email client and let's not forget that Mozilla is one of the best and most trustworthy organizations out there.

Re:Why all the hate?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Firefox since before it was a mozilla product and if the UI changes were so intuitive, I wouldn't have to search for basic functionality every few releases (my addon bar has a ton of things I toggle constantly; I like to stop gif animations on ugly pages; when I find a term in one tab I expect to be able to find that term in my other tabs without retyping it; the awesomebar was released before it was able to run quickly).

That said, this release is pretty incremental from an interface standpoint and is not harder to use. It's still leagues better than any other browser on both a desktop and android. I don't think I've crashed the desktop version of firefox more than once a month for several releases now.

But I wouldn't call any web browser's interface intuitive and it annoys me when my learning is chucked out the window without a rationale besides prettiness. I'm not excited when I have to waste my time because something got prettier.

Re:Why all the hate?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just for "prettiness". At least try to fathom why they would change something so fundamental if they didn't have to. Assuming the worst of them is about as thankless as you can get toward a company that has been releasing a high-quality and free browser for almost a decade, and who have helped make (and keep) the Internet a viable place to browser.

The UI changes were necessary to do a bunch of things, not the least of which were: being able to support a multi-threaded and multi-process browser more easily, being more easy to customize with less insane effort and tendency of breaking from version to version, increasing support for new OSes and graphics technologies, and reducing the learning curve for new users (us preexisting users aren't the only people out there, you know).

In fact if you've been burned before by breakage, then you should be especially happy that they're finally working on this now even though they can't make the changeover as smooth as we wish they could (they DID botch the release of Australis). But this way you will not have to worry about addons and skins that tinker with the UI breaking so much between versions, because it's much more easily customized and only stands to improve without breaking things so badly you'll need to sacrifice a lamb to fix it.

There's being upset about change, and then there's going out of your way to vilify it and its agents needlessly. Just because a few features need an addon now, and you're the one who has to install a skin now doesn't mean you won't be able to adapt. But if Firefox doesn't adapt, it will die and you won't have a Firefox at all to complain about.

Re:Why all the hate?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know I'm late to this party, so I'll keep this short.

I use a grand total of three (3) extensions: AdBlock Edge, NoScript, and RequestPolicy. Firefox still crashes on a daily basis for me. Not that I really mind all that much; a few seconds to kill the process and relaunching restores (most of) my tabs.

I've been a supporter and advocate for Firefox since the Phoenix/Firebird days, but I started falling out of love almost 30 releases ago. It seems every release has be flinching and groaning and getting pissed off over something. This one is the last straw. I did not ask for a binary plugin from an untrusted third party to be installed on my system (this upsetting discovery is what led me here today). Frankly, I'm disappointed that the community here didn't think to look beyond the fact that "open" is in the name.

Re:Why all the hate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever read the discussions on mozilla's bugzilla? I think you're assuming great purpose where there is none. The discussions on the twenty or so (usually small ui things like keyboard nav) issues I've tried to contribute on tend to have tons of back and forth and end with mozilla devs making a decision by fiat and ignoring further discussion. If there's a good rationale besides the preference of the in-house dev(s), it must be hidden in some other communication channel. But I stopped trying to contribute over 8 years ago, so maybe it's a radically different culture now.

Nice but..

[sarguin]

Can Firefox (and Chrome!) add a descent support for HiDPI screen please?! On my laptop (Linux, QHD 3200x1800), those browsers are almost unusable. Yeah I know about the "layout.css.devPixelsPerPx" configuration in Firefox but it's not perfect. Stop adding new features and back to basic : display web pages correctly on today monitors. Please! Thanks :)

Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

... and you bought properly licensed h.264 encoders, and you made sure not to shoot commercial video on consumer grade cameras (which don't come with commercial MPEGLA licenses), etc...

This is a common FUD but I am pretty sure it is not true at all. Nobody cares what you encoded or shot your video with, the possible content royalties come regardless of that, and are only based on the fact whether user pays for your content (you pay royalties for distribution) or whether the content is free for him/her (then you don't pay distribution royalties). You could use an encoder bought/downloaded from somebody who doesn't pay MPEG-LA royalties for H.264 encoding/decoding products, but that has no effect on liability for distribution fees.

You should at least base your claims with some *valid* data (and by valid I don't mean some random blogger who "thinks" it is like that).

"Informative", my butt... well, it's slashdot after all :)