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

Re:More bloat, less marketshare

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

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)

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.

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.