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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."
Actually, since it traces back to Netscape, its becoming one with its origins.
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.
...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.
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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.
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)
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.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
All versions of Netscape had a menu bar. Firefox long since passed Netscape's degree of awfulness.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
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.
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.
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?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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:
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.