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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.
Older versions of the Certicom TLS stack used in older versions of WebLogic are affected for example (change to JSSE).
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.
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?
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!
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.
How many 10+ year-old bugs in Firefox 36 are fixed in 37? Oh, is that none you say. Yawn!
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.
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.
I just did the opposite: switched to Firefox because Chrome was too resource intensive. And Firefox, at least in Linux, follows the system look and feel. For Youtube, I just disabled Flash (at all), so I have the same HTML5 player.
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.
Firefox and Chrome have very similar UIs, Any difference is minor. They have very similar performance from user perspective, and are both much better than IE.
I choose to use Firefox as my main browser, mainly because Google have enough control of the internet they don't need to own the browser too.
absolute power corrupts absolutely
If Google wanted not to be evil (I know that's no longer one of their stated goals), then they wouldn't try to have their sticky fingers in everything.
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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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