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Firefox 39 Released, Bringing Security Improvements and Social Sharing
An anonymous reader writes: Today Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 39.0, which brings an number of minor improvements to the open source browser. (Full release notes.) They've integrated Firefox Share with Firefox Hello, which means that users will be able to open video calls through links sent over social media. Internally, the browser dropped support for the insecure SSLv3 and disabled use of RC4 except where explicitly whitelisted. The SafeBrowsing malware detection now works for downloads on OS X and Linux. (Full list of security changes.) The Mac OS X version of Firefox is now running Project Silk, which makes animations and scrolling noticeably smoother. Developers now have access to the powerful Fetch API, which should provide a better interface for grabbing things over a network.
Better video chat and social media sharing? Just what I'm lacking in a web browser. Ditched the Palemoon build long ago for Chrome and couldn't be happier.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
...randomly to where they are awkward to get to. Coz ya know chrome might have done the same thing. Gotta keep up.
I already abandoned ship for Palemoon after they changed the search bar.
Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 39.0, which brings an number of minor improvements ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
...more useless bloat that I'm going to have to disable when practical things like being able to view text files in the browser is STILL broken after years of waiting.
And it still can't handle HTML5 video worth a damn? As of now, I have to use Chrome just to watch Youtube videos. What the fuck, Mozilla.
Like if we needed one more..
Is Seamonkey still going and does it ship without all this bullshit?
Here we go, the usual slashdot moan-fest when there's any Firefox news.
You know what, guys? Get over it.
Let's step back and look at the available browsers, shall we?
* Chrome: Google are getting more and more hungry for your personal data. If you trust them with it, use Chrome. I don't. Oh, and judging by the number of sites I'm seeing now that say "this site works best in Chrome", it looks like we might be heading back to the bad old days of the browser wars. Devs, please stop doing this: I for one do not want to be forced to use Chrome just because you happen to like it's new shiny features.
* IE/Edge: Sure. Actually, it's a decent browser. But are you ready to forgive the past? No? I thought not. This is slashdot, after all. And yes, they're probably after your personal data too.
* Safari: Yeah, right. You're using Safari are you? Wake me up when Apple starts actually doing some dev work on it again.
* Opera: Hahahahahaha. Oh, sorry. Is Opera still a thing?
* Firefox: Aparently, despite all the above, everyone still wants to hate Firefox. Oh well.
Firefox 11 hundred is where it's at.
Or is it still the same you will do it the Mozilla way Australis [sp?] mess?
I won't be going back to Firefox until they have proper threading. I wish I could, I've tried a few times, but it just bogs down so much and so quickly if you open a bunch of tabs. No problem in Chrome. I used it for something like ten years before I finally tried Chrome and was blown away by the speed difference. Why are the working on this other stuff when such a fundamental problem, a problem they've acknowledged and worked on some, remains? I know it's hard to fix in such a complex codebase, but at least from my experience and what I've heard from others, it's a crucial issue affecting whether people use Firefox or not.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
Support for social media? This means an NNTP client, right?
Have gnu, will travel.
the browser dropped support for the insecure SSLv3
**fake gripe mode engaged**
Oh great, now I have to have at least one machine on my network with an older web browser so I can manage those older network devices that still use SSL3- or other-broken-security-protocol-based web-management.
Now maybe my company's bean-counters will understand when I say "it's time to replace that 5-year-old photocopier/scanner/printer since we can't simultaneously run the monthly usage reports and keep our computers as secure as we would like."
**end fake gripe mode** ...but seriously...
This (removing support for broken protocols) is a good thing, in that it will make sure that all the computers in my business that do NOT need to run those billing reports are up-to-date with respect to security. I can keep my eye on the one machine (which I will likely re-build as a VM) that needs to have a less-than-secure web browser and make sure that nobody uses that web browser for anything except running these reports. There isn't really any need to replace this copier as long as the cost to the business of keeping that one computer with the old web browser up and secure is close enough to zero to be mere "noise" in the budget, which it is, at least for now.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This isn't Firefox 39. This is Firefox 4.39
The idiots have totally jumped the track and lost all sanity and reason when it comes to proper practices in versioning. I haven't seen anything that warranted a +1 on the major version in ages, yet every time they integrate some stupid new advertising/social gimmick that should've been left as an extension, they bump the major version number. Or if no one has offered them cash recently to whore themselves out, they just bump it because they're bored out of some version-penis envy with Chrome.
And this coming from one of the historically biggest Firefox fans amongst my friends, family and colleagues. I've been promoting it since Phoenix, being a longtime Netscape and Mozilla user for many years before that.
It was their biggest problem! Meanwhile FF is becoming worse with every release and falls further behind competition.
How is the "standard release" of Firefox, newsworthy in the least (to nerds)?
Nightly is at 41. Threading is improving, but most extensions still don't support the API that is needed in order to access "page content".
Firefox is about the only browser you can open dozens of tabs in. Even Opera 12 crumbles - if those pages contain primarily images... Opera (pre-blink) started falling apart years ago, as images in the 2000x3000px size or larger started becoming the norm.
Are you familiar with the "oldbar" extension (which restores the original search bar) ?
This is why SJWs are the cancer killing this industry.
Have you ever heard of Xeno's Paradox? To get to Firefox 100, first you have to get half the updates from 39 to 100, which is 69.5. Then you need to get half the updates from 69.5 to 100, which is 84.7.5. Halfway again is 92.3.7.5. Halfway again is 96.1.8.7.5. Halfway again is 98.0.9.3.7.5. Ad nauseum...
I just don't get Mozilla. Firefox's share of the market has dropped so much. Recent browser market share stats show that all versions of Firefox Desktop are only around 8% of the market. Firefox 38 is only at 7.45%, so we can expect Firefox 39 to be below that, possibly forever. Firefox for Android is at 0.14% (yes, that's a leading 0!), and Firefox isn't really a viable option on iOS.
To put things in perspective, the latest version of Chrome for Android by itself, at 13.77%, has almost twice the number of users as Firefox has in total! IE 11 at 7.60%, and Safari for iOS 8.3 at 6.42%, both almost exceed Firefox's total number of users!
Clearly desktop users are fleeing Firefox, and nobody wants to use Firefox for Android. Mozilla has no other projects of significance aside from Firefox. Nobody uses Firefox OS, even the third-worlders they tried to force it on. Bugzilla is a relic. They put Thunderbird out to pasture some time ago. Let's Encrypt has yet to deliver anything useful. Rust is unimpressive and unwieldy, even now that 1.0 was finally released after so many years. Servo is very experimental, and its progress is crawling along slower than even Rust's did!
This decline in the usage of Firefox, combined with the total lack of future prospects, should have everyone involved with Mozilla in a total panic! This is an organization that should be shitting its pants, so to speak. The only reason it still exists, Firefox, is rapidly evaporating. What, do they really think that Yahoo! will keep throwing money at them once Firefox has almost no users to target?
Yet instead of the unrestrained panic that we should be seeing out of Mozilla, we instead see them continuing down the same path of failure that has dogged them for so many years now. They make more dumb and unwanted social media changes to Firefox that nobody actually wants. Heck, they most notable part of this release is that they removed or disabled existing functionality!
I used to like Firefox. I want Mozilla to succeed. But son of a bitch, it's like they're doing everything they can to speed up their demise, while being totally oblivious to it the whole time! Why won't they, as a collective group of people, wake up to what's happening?!
WTF? Is it really that difficult, AMERICANS?
It's just one "Slashdot editor". No need to smear 300 million people with that slur. Geez, do I call all EUROPEANS "Hitler"? Or everyone from Southeast ASIANS "Pol Pot"?
75% of the right-click open-in-new-windows actions in Firefox 38 result in a bare window with no menu, controls, or scrollbars. Tried a few config setting which resulted in 5x5 pixel windows. Really useful.
sPh
I went from the old Mozilla takeoff on Netscape's combined browser/email client after they came out with the Firefox/Thunderbird split (10-ish years ago?), and have enjoyed its much more gradual and sane evolution. I can still read my old Netscape emails from 1999 (probably from the OS/2 version). That is continuity. I had found that I needed Firefox in the past to view some websites, but that is not so much the case now as SM seems able to handle most. Much of SM's codebase is shared with FF, but apparently not so much of the weirdness - works for me.
About the only real gripe I have with SM is that for some years now, the Linux email client has not been able to delete email from POP servers, whereas the Windows client has (even with same settings for the same email servers, and same client versions). I have learned to live with that mostly by going to the web email version to clean up once in a while since I don't like to use Windows on the Internet much even for its SM email deleting ability, but now I can delete the email from various Android clients, including the native one, so that works for me as I make a first pass on my tablet in the mornings (if the mail item is not too large/complex, and/or needing web site follow-up, in which case, the full-featured PC Linux SM on large screen is my preference).
Give it a try.
YMMV
It's my go to browser for viewing and downloading pr0n - for everything else there's Chrome.
As long as this https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s... BUG is present, Firefox is a far cry from being a secure browser. Since I know about this, I advise anybody that needs to have secure browser to stear away from Firefox!
How much do you think Pocket, etc paid Mozilla to make their services an integral part of the browser?
How long do you think it will be before advertisers pay Mozilla to route around adblock extensions and display their ads?
Why is it that when I hear there's a new Firefox update, I always think "Oh no -- what did they mess up now?" Other groups' updates aren't met with instinctive dread.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Thanks -- even although it was a somewhat rhetorical question meant to point out the irony of phoenix (now firefox) being envisioned as a lightweight alternative to the Mozilla suite.
I probably will try SeaMonkey again at some point, I ran Mozilla from fairly early on with only a brief switch to IE (before abandoning Windows) when Netscape 5 was cancelled.
Old account, does it not support IMAP?
I keep my mail on my PC's via POP. I will use IMAP where I don't have that archiving need like on some tablets. Anyway, the deletion issue is not an issue with the Windows SM client where it is with the Linux one, so something is inconsistent there when using POP access for same accounts on same servers - oh well....
YMMV
By simply bookmarking about:config?filter=browser.sessionstore.privacy_level on my bookmarks toolbar I can click on it to change the value of that pref to 2 which solves this without the need to spread FUD or "stear" anyone elsewhere.
How rounded are the tabs? A bit rounded in the corners? No straight lines at all? Or all fractally with curves on curves, looking like the result of a foolish encounter between heraldic nebuly and a Mandelbrot set.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Chat! Yay! I already HAVE apps that allow me to do that.
Social media! Yay! I already HAVE apps that allow me to do that. And I hate the fuck out of social media to begin with!
What I WANT is a rock-solid fucking browser again goddammit!
All these stupid, hacked-on "features" that nobody uses are simply contributing to a browsing experience that's almost as stable as Chuck Manson on a bad acid trip!
You want to make a social media application? GO AHEAD! Stop fucking up a perfectly acceptable browser in the chase to do so!
IE blows (we're going to bend over and....)
Chrome blows for the opposite reason (we're going to protect you from yourself!)
And the more Mozilla deviates from Firefox = Web Browser, the more Firefox blows.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I kept having so many issues with Firefox that I ended up using Internet Explorer for a few days. Hard to believe it ran better then Firefox! Last I tried Firefox was on a weak Celeron HP Stream 11 and unfortunately I think the memory problems still exist with Firefox and with only 2GB RAM it nearly maxed out that with two tabs opened. I can see why Firefox never made it in mobile. Guess I will have to consider Chrome but its become a RAM hog of late too. Really its hard to say, but IE 11 is pretty decent on weak hardware running Windows 8.1. Some say Edge is going to be even better? Sorry Mozilla, I have nothing personally against you, I am not against what you set out to do. I just think you have forked your path too many times and lost your way.
If you read the linked page, they discuss several modifications in order to make animations in the browser smoother. I seriously question the competence of these programmers. Consider their discussion on resampling touch inputs, which is linked to inside that page. So you see them attempting to quantify error by using standard deviation, and you think these people are on the right track and know some math, right? Yeah, right.
For anyone familiar with signal processing, their touch resampling article is shockingly bad. Even the terminology shows ignorance of the large body of engineering that solves asynchronous sample rate conversion and the tradeoffs of various resampling filters — who the hell calls phase noise and jitter (problems studied for many decades) "jank"? Instead of picking a good low-delay filter, such as are common in a ton of real-time audio DSPs, some ad hoc algorithms are invented. So we have programmers reinventing the wheel, and poorly at that... well, at least they're consistent (and I say that as someone who is also a developer, but also versed in analog EE). I mean for crying out loud, you don't even have to go outside the computer science world, as the image processing people would have told them all this and how to optimally solve the issue, instead of implementing a shitty hackish solution.
What is fun is that NSS still has not removed SSLv2 code thanks to RedHat.
chrome has it's own flash version and this is why it's somewhat more stable than FF and IE. If i disable flash in FF and IE both browsers run excellent without issue.
"remember back when Google used to be behind Firefox?"
Google paid Mozilla Foundation $300 million each year.
Now, I understand, Mozilla Foundation now gets most of its money from Microsoft. Microsoft pays Yahoo. Yahoo pays Mozilla Foundation to make "Yahoo search" (actually mostly Microsoft Bing search) the default search engine in Firefox. Most people don't have the technical knowledge to know how they've been manipulated, or how to restore the default search engine to Google search.
The Thunderbird and SeaMonkey Composer GUIs have been damaged, apparently deliberately. Every time you do a file save, the newer versions of both ask for a new file name, and don't suggest the last one chosen. The damage was reported several months ago, but has not been fixed. Is that another example of Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? People who feel forced away from Thunderbird may choose Microsoft software to replace it. Is that something Microsoft is trying to accomplish?
Its astonishing to me that this thing still doesnt do a sandbox. They keep adding stuff like video chat, great, but if you can spend time on that you can find time for getting the sandbox in. They have been talking about the sandbox for years. Implement it by default already and if for some reason a plugin a user is incompatable allow the user to select to go back to single process. There is no reason why the sandbox should have taken this long. Yes you have go to a multi process model but it shouldnt be THAT big of a job to take years.
...so are the Firefox releases of our lives."
There's nothing funnier than a Mozilla-related thread where somebody comments on the toxicity of the social justice warriors (in this particular case, the gay mafia division who demand the destruction of anybody who disagrees rather than two-way "tolerance") and the immediate response is that some SJW mods the guy's post down to -1.....
As predictable as the tick of a clock.
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IIt has IMAP. SM's email is bascially based off Thunderbird's.
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