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Firefox 37 Released
Today Mozilla began rolling out Firefox version 37.0 to release channel users. This update mostly focuses on behind-the-scenes changes. Security improvements include opportunistic encryption where servers support it and improved protection against site impersonation. They also disabled insecure TLS version fallback and added a security panel within the developer tools. One of the things end users will see is the Heartbeat feedback collection system. It will pop up a small rating widget to a random selection of users every day. After a user rates Firefox, an "engagement" page may open in the background, with links to social media pages and a donation page. Here are the release notes and full changelist.
Thanks, Mozilla!
Older versions of the Certicom TLS stack used in older versions of WebLogic are affected for example (change to JSSE).
Why is it so hard to install on your server stuff like mozilla sync, hello and link share ? Mozilla, you have take back the web now you should help people to take back the services.
There's still no working support for the Media Source Extensions, and as a result it has incomplete support for YouTube's HTML5 player. Lame.
Here's the link https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/...
If it allows space for comments, I will be sure and let them know what I think of this terrible idea. Hopefully it will also include a checkbox 'Do not ask me again!'
I mourn the loss of the classic clean, lightweight Firefox and a rational version numbering system.
So basically Firefox is going to nag and annoy their users.
Good luck with that.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Oh, is it Firefox Tuesday already?
Chrome is at what? Version 41?
Only four more to go, Firefox team!
Hi,
anybody being annoyed to be asked over and over and over again?
My stance is, if "fucking" developers can't feel the vibe of the users or lack common sense, they should not develop software for common people. ..Rate me - shape me - anyway you want it - as long as I'm alive..
If Picasso would have also asked the people if they liked his early works, he would have commited suicide and not created something great.
Disabling Heartbeat
We understand that any interruption of your time on the internet can be annoying.
open about:config
set browser.selfsupport.url to ""
enjoy the rest of your day!
As a Firefox user, I'm very concerned when I see its market share dropping month after month.
These stats from US gov't websites show Firefox's market share at 11%.
Other global stats paint a very similar picture.
Globally, I suspect that Firefox's share of the market is only about 10%. That's pretty abysmal, especially for a browser that was so popular once. It used to hold well over 30% of the market at one time.
Chrome for Android alone now has a greater share of the market than Firefox on all platforms does. Even IE 11, by itself, has about as many users as Firefox does in total.
Why aren't trends like these scaring the living hell out of Mozilla, as an organization?
Don't they realize that Firefox is the only reason they have any sort of influence over the web? Nobody really cares about any of their other projects, I hate to say.
Why don't we hear more from Mozilla about this market share issue? The number of Firefox users keeps dropping month after month, probably because so many Firefox users are unhappy about the awful UI changes, and about how its memory usage and performance continues to lag Chrome and even IE. I want to see real results, not just unrealistic benchmarks showing mythical improvements that I don't actually get to experience as I browse the web!
Nobody will care what Mozilla thinks if the number of Firefox users continues to drop each month. This trend won't continue forever. At some point there will be a negligible number of Firefox users around, and Mozilla will be powerless at that point. Google already has enough power as it is. In that situation, they'd have almost full control over the web. That scares me a lot, and it should scare Mozilla, too!
Did you bring your coat?
Firefox has had a "Submit Feedback" menu option for some time now.
We can even view the results: https://input.mozilla.org/en-US/
As I write this, almost 10,000 people have responded within the past week. 88% of the responses are "Sad" ones! Only 12% are "Happy"!
I don't know why they need another system to tell them exactly what those stats say very clearly: Firefox users are just not happy with the product!
Even the most despised national leaders never get a popularity ranking that goddamn bad, even during the worst scandals and the greatest upheaval.
Something is really, really wrong with Firefox in order for it to be so consistently rated so badly by so many users. This isn't just about the usual unhappy people expressing their displeasure. This is about almost everyone being unhappy with Firefox!
Either: Don't ask me again.
Or: A link to download another browser that won't beg for money.
I dumped Firefox when they changed to the hipster bullshit minimalist interface known as Australis. For a while Waterfox and Palemoon were doing a decent job. One day I decided to try Chrome to see how 60fps video looked on Youtube. Talk about night and day. Chrome is so much more responsive and doesn't use as many resources. Grab the usual essential addons (uBlock, Flashblock, etc) and you're good to go. No wonder Firefox has a dwindling user base. Instead of improving whats already there I get a video chat client and a paper airplane button to alert people on social media? Is this like email forwarding of the 90s?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
How many 10+ year-old bugs in Firefox 36 are fixed in 37? Oh, is that none you say. Yawn!
Mozilla is a political organization, not software foundation. They produce Firefox as a legacy courtesy for minorities.
Google has only squandered their power, become bloated, and humiliated themselves and over with nothing but failure after failure (it's all OK if they call it a "moonshot"). They havent made anything good since the heydays of gmail and igoogle. They are bloated now and the engineers no longer run the show. Expect this to worsen until massive layoffs are required... think Microsoft's 18,000 (and counting)
Chrome is bloated and no longer on the top for ANY benchmarks - memory use, start up, page load speed, etc
Just in case you forgot to mention.
Most useless browser on the market, tries to disable flash and doesn't support HLS or MPEG-Dash or the H264 codec.......
Not into Firefox anymore, and from some latest browser stats which some even put Safari ahead of Firefox thanks to mobile. I think Firefox has some tough road ahead. We can all see how this came to be as Firefox choose to mimic Google and come out with rapid releases to somehow bring relevance back to Firefox as a browser that stays current. Unfortunately they kept losing a lot of the polish with every release and bugs kept creeping in and out of every release. Its really not
a bad browser except for those periods where they (Mozilla) break something important and you end up using another browser out of frustration. A real pity that the real important feature of a browser beyond extensions, or speed or compatibility is stability. I wish Firefox well but the loss of Google ad revenue, the somewhat questionable update path and the now desperate marriage to Yahoo only means more questions then answers as too what will happen to Firefox.
Have you ever tried to talk sense in a bug report on Bugzilla? Most of the Mozilla crew aren't interested in fixing bugs users want fixed, they're downright hostile. It's all about people's pet projects and inflated egos. Just go to Bugzilla yourself and look at how many of the top vote getting bugs are fixed and how many are over 10 YEARS old. At this point it's become a pissing match between users and Mozilla, with Mozilla thumbing their noses at users and daring them to use another browser if they don't like it. Users are taking them up on that offer.
We understand that any interruption of your time on the internet can be annoying.
I don't think you do!
I wonder how much of that is just perception - I have found that when comparing the latest Chrome and Firefox that Firefox has better performance, at least in terms of CPU usage and memory consumption. I was surprised by this because I generally use it with Firebug which drastically impairs the performance, I just didn't realize how bad it was.
Folks expect Mozilla to make Firefox better, but said folks get angry at Mozilla when they want to ask their users about Firefox. Do these people expect them to read minds through the monitor, or what?
As a Firefox user, I'm very concerned when I see its market share dropping month after month.
These stats from US gov't websites show Firefox's market share at 11%.
Other global stats paint a very similar picture.
Globally, I suspect that Firefox's share of the market is only about 10%. That's pretty abysmal, especially for a browser that was so popular once. It used to hold well over 30% of the market at one time.
Chrome for Android alone now has a greater share of the market than Firefox on all platforms does. Even IE 11, by itself, has about as many users as Firefox does in total.
Why aren't trends like these scaring the living hell out of Mozilla, as an organization?
Because the Firefox devs think their browser should pander to the tablet-interface loving users, with advanced features hidden and the GUI dumbed down - while a large part of their user base specifically wants an "advanced" browser with lots of addons which does NOT look like Chrome. So lots of users are leaving, and the Firefox devs in their ivory tower wonder why nobody likes their "vision" of the perfect browser and why the users do not "get" that the devs KNOW what's best.
This is awesome news. Congratulations to Mozilla for taking the lead on this.
Firefox on 64 bit does not seem to work for me...
Why aren't trends like these scaring the living hell out of Mozilla, as an organization?
I think they probably do. At least, that's the reason I've always felt explained the Chromification of Firefox. That dumbing-down and relative takeover of the project direction by "UX designers" and "social media engineers" was allowed because the powers at the top felt that it was the only way they could try and recover some of the userbase lost to Chrome.
What they don't realize is that Firefox was created to "take back the web" from the stagnating Internet Explorer 6. It was never about replacing IE as some overbearing dominant beast.
And Firefox succeeded! Development on IE was revitalized by Microsoft, Google released Chrome, and work was renewed on web standards (a whole 'nuther can of worms there, but a separate topic). How did Firefox accomplish this? By being fast, lean, developer-friendly, power-user friendly, absurdly extensible, and with simple and clear design goals.
If Mozilla had simply stuck to these principles, Firefox user share would still have gone down -- it was a certainty due to the additional options for reasonable browsers, mobile usage, Google bundling Chrome with everything they can get their hands on, etc. However, I think it would have gone down less, and maybe even a lot less if they'd remained the browser they were rather than turning into the little puppy following Chrome around.
People who left Firefox for Chrome because they liked Chrome's design better would still have left. But with ChromiFox, people who don't like Chrome are leaving too, because if you're stuck with either Chrome or Chrome Light, you may as well go for the real deal. Sure, there are projects like Ice Weasel and LucidFox which attempt to bring some of that back, but they're relatively niche and don't have the visibility or word-of-mouth needed to take off.
In short: Mozilla abandoned their primary design goals and principles, the same ones that made Firefox great, and the result is user loss, stagnation and, probably, eventual obscurity. As someone who used Firebird, this make me very sad.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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There's also an important change in Firefox 37.0--if you access YouTube, videos are played back with the HTML 5.0 player, eliminate the use of Adobe Flash to play back videos. Hopefully, this means smoother video playback at higher resolutions. Hopefully, this applies to embedded videos from other sources.
1. Open about:config in the browser
2. Change browser.selfsupport.url to “”
3. Go to https://input.mozilla.org/en-U... and tell Mozilla to stop wasting our time with bullshit like the "heartbeat feedback" and gratuitous GUI changes and focus on more important things like fixing the damn bugs.
Firefox has crashed so many times today...
You might be right, Firefox does seem to be experiencing a certain level of feature creep and bloat these days. Perhaps Mozilla should think about a new browser, one that is specifically designed to be fast and high-performance, while still adhering to the standards. They could call it Phoenix.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Firefox has become the Ubuntu of browsers, so I ditched it this month after 11 years of regular use.
Why does it seem to be a human tendency to fuck up something that works with endless change?
Did they pull the update? I updated at work just fine, but at home, it now claims I have the newest version with 36.0.4
As insecure as it is, I use FireFox ESR v10. But from PortableApps.com.
Why? Version 17 had issues related to stuff I had set up for it.
Mozilla should really consider security updates for their ESR versions. Maybe users would come back.
LucidFox
I have no idea where that came from, but it sure rolled off the keyboard easily enough. I'd actually intended to mention the PaleMoon fork of Firefox.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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I'd dump Firefox in a second if Safari 8.x had RSS feeds. I'm very impressed by Safari 8, but I use RSS for all my news browsing so it's a non-starter as a main browser. I don't want sites "pushing" their updates onto me. Unfortunately Firefox is a piece of junk that not only provides a often-buggy experience on sites, but continues to weigh it down with product features I do not want and never asked for in a browser. Ironically, the current state of Firefox reminds me of Mozilla Navigator, the browser which was the impetus for Firefox being born in the first place. Everything that happened before will happen again. And I'll never touch Chrome, a browser built by a company who considers me and my privacy as their product. So, I remain a grudging user of Firefox and count the days until I can get out of its bug-infested prison.
Thunderbird. Still the best email client. While it may not be in the top ten, all the others are so horribly broken as to be unusable. Especially Mac Mail and Outlook, which are both support nightmares.
https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/02/thunderbird-usage-continues-to-grow/
It is the best because it works reliably and maintains a traditional UI, the kind we have all been using for the last twenty years, which does not need to be changed.
That got them only bad press. The non loudmouths won't get firefox now as they leave a bad taste in our mouths.
The majority here will never admit it because it would create an internal conflict, but I think you're right. Firefox had some unrest with the constant UI changes, but it went downhill fast after Eich got ousted. Who would trust a browser made by people with such a one-sided agenda? Browsers know everything you do. We could all end up Eich'd. They can't admit it though, because they support that same agenda, by whatever hypocritical means necessary.
Because the Firefox devs think their browser should pander to the tablet-interface loving users, with advanced features hidden and the GUI dumbed down - while a large part of their user base specifically wants an "advanced" browser with lots of addons which does NOT look like Chrome.
I was rather shocked when I first ran Firefox on Android, I was expecting,well, Firefox, but what I got was some massively dumbed-down piece of junk that was worse than a range of no-name Android-only browsers from vendors I'd never heard of before. I eventually went with one of them, and at one point submitted a bug report. Within a few hours I had a reply, and a fix. It was everything Firefox should be, but isn't.
I've been a Firefox user since Phoenix 0.3, but none of my mobile devices runs it, and desktop is only hanging on because of all the plugins (of which, admittedly, about half are installed just to undo all the crap they've done to the browser in the last few years).
Still, at least they're hard at work on Firefox OS, which is what the market has been crying out for.
This is utter nonsense. I see more bugs closed than stay open, and there are a number of bugs where people complain without even realizing that there is work going on, just under a different bug number. YOUR pet bug might be ignored, but it's not the only one. Making it sound like they just ignore every important bug is self-motivated tripe.
Besides, yes there are certain bugs that get ignored, but that's true of EVERY software project of that size. What do you want them to do? Spin their wheels trying to please everyone? That's what gave Chrome the change to eat Firefox's lunch in the first place - they were busy keeping the piece of lumbering crap working just like the "fans" wanted, until it became clear they didn't have the resources to do so.
If Firefox had to be broken to fix it properly, then I'm glad they took that risk. Sure, that means it will settle into a smaller niche, and maybe never recover it's alleged 30% market share, but it's not one of two major browsers anymore, and it can't even effectively compete on many major (mobile) OSes, due to being blocked from even being installed in some cases.
I think the users who are leaving never really gave a shit about Firefox, not once the new car smell wore off. They just want to pretend they did so they don't feel as bad if it does implode. After all, it turns out that a browser is just a browser.
You're a moron.
What they don't realize is that Firefox was created to "take back the web" from the stagnating Internet Explorer 6. It was never about replacing IE as some overbearing dominant beast.
The problem is that it still ended up with an overbearing dominant beast, just a different one - Chrome (or rather WebKit/Blink, but Chrome is the lion's share of that). The good part is that we're still in the stage where stagnation is not a thing yet. The bad part is that it could change literally overnight.
What's that open H264 video codec add on, that's installed by default (and disabled in my browser), then if not for H264? It's been there for some releases already.
It's actually even more broken than before in Firefox 37.
Firefox on Windows has been suffering from their poorly polished attempt at "off main thread composition" since last September; leaving the feature enabled as it is by default (!) causes rendering glitches and hangs on a variety of systems. Now the non-OMTC codepath has started rotting and video elements don't render at the proper size with the feature disabled: https://bug1141433.bugzilla.mozilla.org/
At this point I wouldn't touch the browser at all if Chromium had better text rendering on Windows.
I have found quite the opposite. I build both firefox and chrome from source, and firefox's performance always lags behind chrome.
Who would trust a browser made by people with such a one-sided agenda?
Right. Like Google.
A really annoying thing is the forced UI changes. I have installed Firefox, with plugins and so on and learned a lot of older 60+ people use it. They really liked it and got use to it, they even got quite a lof of their friends using IE/chrome to change. With a few exceptions theyre mostly REALLY bad with computors, and dont know what to do when something pops up (just press the X to make it go away) so I have been using automatic updates on everything so they dont get asked questions, mayby notified that an update have been done.
They simply want to use a computor for what they do on the internet, saving camera pictures, email and so on.
And then Firefox makes forced UI changes.
Moving tabs around. Changing the search field function. And so on. REALLY popular with that userbase. Its not like it use to be and they cant find where things are anymore. For us posting here these changes are bad or annoying but we can fix it, adapt and so on. Not them. So for me it has been a lot of computor support, a lot of classic firefox addons, Pale moon, and so forth.
Odd I am routing for Spartan not identifying as webkit.
Reason being is if webmasters only see -webkit they will ignore W3C and Firefox will be toast as websites won't look right.
It will be 2004 all over again with a new IE 6. IE and Firefox are the ones fighting which is strange and so opposite of 10 years ago.
http://saveie6.com/
Speaking of this as Firefox was Netscape reborn after a complete rewrite ... Spartan is the Firefox of IE a complete rewrite.
IE/trident desperately needs this.
FYI IE was a great browser in the 1990s. Even IE 6 in 2001 had some bugs but was a decent 2000 era compliant and modernbrowser for its time. IE invented CSS, ajax, dynamic html, etc.
It because very buggy, insecure, extremely outdated, and poorly managed FAST last decade and by 2004 it was a POS compared to Opera and Mozilla (pre Firefox).
Spartan is still behind at 2012 levels but man it works well and is fast and has a future if MS keeps adding features into its new base.
http://saveie6.com/
'Never' I can't take it anymore.
The battery drain problem on Twitter and similar was fixed for laptop users.
Didn't Google used to support and develop Firefox in its efforts to overthrow Microsoft and IE? Then, with that war won, didn't this leave Google free to concentrate on their original goal all along: total control of internet advertising, marketing and commercial espionage? So then, enter Chrome... (I tried that, but didn't like it. Less freedom, obviously. Google really doesn't want me to browse anonymously and without adverts or tracking.) But what about Firefox? Wouldn't that still be a competitor to Chrome? Hmm. Maybe Google left enough clever people behind in Firefox to make sure that it tanks badly, but subtly, over time.
You can't build Chrome from source, since it's not an open-source browser. Chromium doesn't count as it's missing the Google "secret sauce".
So I had an interesting opportunity to talk to one of the Mozilla devs and the topic of Flash Support on Linux came up. When I suggested they could adopt Pepper API and have the ability to support Flash like Chrome does I got a "Plugins are evil, Javascript all the way" response and completely didn't consider the user aspect at all. I use Chrome on Linux (and Windows now too), because it's the only way to use Flash without dealing with Adobe abandonment issues. Because as much as I would like to think otherwise, Flash still crops up in some pretty useful places.
This attitude is kind of like both Apple and Microsoft. Makes me wonder.
I hope that last line was /s ...No one is crying out for Firefox OS. This is the kinda delusional thinking that got them where they are now.