Firefox 36 Arrives With Full HTTP/2 Support, New Design For Android Tablets

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 36 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Additions to the browser include some security improvements, better HTML 5 support, and a new tablet user interface on Android. The biggest news for the browser is undoubtedly HTTP/2 support, the roadmap for which Mozilla outlined just last week. Mozilla plans to keep various draft levels of HTTP/2, already in Firefox, for a few versions. These will be removed "sometime in the near future." The full changelog is here.

Comments

Is Media Source Extensions supported?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't play 1080p videos or higher from Youtube without it. This is the absolute last thing that's holding me back from removing flash altogether. I know they mentioned specifically enabling MSE for youtube only on the bugtracker page (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=778617), because of some issues but I don't see this in the changelog.

Don't forget Firefox Hello!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget this version also comes with Firefox Hello! Firefox Hello allows you to voice chat with all your friends, right from your browser! You'll know about it because when you update to Firefox 36, Firefox sure as hell won't let you miss this new feature that you never wanted in a god-damned browser and will immediately remove from the toolbar because it's goddamned useless and WHY IS THIS IN A BROWSER AT ALL?!!!

(I know the answer to that last one: because VOIP is part of the increasingly bloated and useless HTML 5 spec and this uses the new HTML 5 VOIP junk. In case you wondered when HTML 5 jumped the shark...)

Re:Don't forget Firefox Hello!

[ChunderDownunder]

You say bloat, I say functionality.

Let's see there's skype (that requires installing a closed source binary from the evil empire), FaceTime (that only works on Apple hardware), Hangouts (that requires a Google account, and yes there are still people on the planet...) Other technologies exist but those are the most Grandma-friendly.

Videoconferencing from any device on the planet without installing any special software is bloat?

Re:Don't forget Firefox Hello!

[ChunderDownunder]

No, I'm not Lennart but I can see that the web has evolved from 25 years ago when it was a simple viewer for hypertext into an application platform. Some might harken for simpler days but that's progress.

If you want to do videoconferencing, install Skype. Or pick an open source solution, there are plenty.

Which fails the grandma test, since its another piece of technology that grandson has to support and maintain on her computer.

In any case, you're suggesting a browser plugin as an alternative and in the same breath talk about reducing the attack service... Mozilla are proactively reducing reliance on browser plugins, e.g. (1) by supporting HTML5 to create an alternative to Java applets, (2) Developing pdf.js to substitute for Acrobat Reader, (3) Supporting video formats formerly requiring flash (4) Developing shumway for other legacy content. All use the same sandboxing model which reduces the attack service from what plugins provided.

Now you talk about firefox stability with multiple tabs, which are slowly perhaps glacially being addressed by servo and electrolysis. Surely that's a limitation of the implementation that a flaw of videoconferencing?

[Perhaps I should apply for a job at Mozilla; I do spend a good deal of time defending it on here! :) ]

Re:Don't forget Firefox Hello!

[dns_server]

Webrtc is a standard that has been in the browser for the last year or more.
What the button does is open a web page that calls the standard api's.
Adding this button does not bloat the browser that much because the underlying api is already there.

I've posted this 1312 times

[AbRASiON]

No more features.
No more features.
No more features.
No more features.
Stability, performance.Stability, performance.
Stability, performance.Stability, performance.

Did I mention Stability, performance?

Stop.
This goes for Firefox, this goes for Android (VERY much)
Stop assuming there's always more powerful things coming. Stuff has slowed down the last 5 years. I can't believe how slow a modern browser can get on a decent machine. I shouldn't need 8 cores at 4.5ghz with 16gb of DDR4 or something ridiculous like that.

Stop fiddling and start cleaning up.
Oh and Firefox? It's 2015...... native 64bit as default already, for fucks sake.
and this, ASAP.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Elect... A.S.A.P

Re:I've posted this 1312 times

[AFCArchvile]

Installing NoScript onto Firefox is one of the best things I've done for Firefox memory usage. It's also more secure since it stifles most cross-site scripting connections, drastically reduces load times since said cross-site scripting isn't being loaded.

Then again, I'm still looking over at Pale Moon, and thinking that I should abandon Firefox entirely and shift my primary browsing over to Pale Moon. It accepts Noscript, and doesn't even need Classic Theme Restorer or Status-4-Evar installed, since it never messed with the UI, and never removed the status bar. (I don't know if Firefox 36 still has this problem, but Firefox 35, 34, 33, etc, all had an issue where a new window would sometimes result in the status bar not appearing. I like seeing a status bar in a windowed program, since it does what it says on the tin: provides status cues, as well as providing far less annoying insight than hovering the mouse over something and waiting for a tooltip to appear.

Re:I've posted this 1312 times

[thegarbz]

The modern browser isn't slow due it itself. The modern browser is slow due to the online experience bloating.

HTML5, fancy graphics, all elements on the screen moving relative to each other, every object being dynamic, pictures, did I mention dynamic objects? The constant reliance on a link between server and client to send push messages, and of course all the dynamic objects.

If you disable javascript and break most of the webpages then browsers run quite blazingly fast. It's not a Firefox related problem that the internet now demands the browser to be a borderline operating system with built in media player.

Maybe slashdot could release an autoplaying video description of why this trend is such a problem.

Re:What about the 87% of 'sad' feedback reports?

[Em Adespoton]

Actually, the general feedback rule is 20/80 -- usually 80% of feedback is negative. So this is your balance point. 87% negative means that they're getting 7% negative feedback from users who normally wouldn't be providing negative feedback, which is a concern, but not as big as the 87% number would indicate.

So the real question is: How long have they been on a downward trend with an 81%+ negative rating? Are there signs that they are adjusting something to deal with that feedback?

The secondary question is: what exactly is the negative feedback about? Is it that Firefox now uses a bundleware installer that attempts to foist third party products on you? Is it that the Yahoo search doesn't give the same results people are used to from Google? Is it that the software crashes regularly? Slow javascript? Unimplemented features? Is it that certain sites don't work with Flash disabled or NoScript enabled? People don't like the icon?

Personally, I'm not having any problems with Firefox, other than that it is starting to roll some features into the core browser that in all fairness should be plugins. I still prefer it to the privacy mess that is Chrome and the "nothing to see here" way Safari and IE have been hiding details of their browsing experience from the end user by default. That said, I still go to Safari when I want to see what components are actually running during a web session -- some of that doesn't show up too well in Firefox's Web Console.

Re:ARGH! They removed -remote!!

[Mike Van Pelt]

Never mind... firefox -new-tab www.mozilla.org apparently works like firefox -remote "openURL(www.mozilla.org, new-tab)" used to. (At least, for my use case.)

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello is just an interface for the HTML5 WebRTC standard. To disable this HTML5 spec behaviour go to

about:config?filter=media.peerconnection.enabled
 
and double-click that pref line to change the value to false.

You're welcome.

Apache has mod_spdy

[dwheeler]

I agree that Apache web server support is vital if HTTP/2 is to get much use. That said, the mod_spdy plug-in for Apache supports SPDY, and has been accepted into Apache trunk. See: http://googledevelopers.blogsp... https://svn.apache.org/viewvc/...

Since HTTP/2 is based on SPDY, it seems likely that this plug-in will be tweaked to support HTTP/2. That said, I suspect the Apache Foundation would say something like, "patches welcome".

Firewall through the Firewall?

[davidshewitt]

I updated Firefox on my windows machine and the Windows firewall dialog popped up and asked me to allow Firefox. I declined it. but WTF?! Why would a browser need to open up ports? This seems like quite a security risk. Anyone else seen this?

Re:What about the 87% of 'sad' feedback reports?

[Jane Q. Public]

People are genuinely disappointed with all of the Firefox products these days.

Well, I must not be "people" then. I've used Firefox for years and while Mozilla has made a slip or two, it's my go-to browser of choice.

At least on my system, it's smaller and faster than Chrome, and it has far more useful and privacy-protecting plugins. More plugins in general, I think.

No complaints here.