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.

Comments

Minor improvements, and yet ...

[fahrbot-bot]

Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 39.0, which brings an number of minor improvements ...

... again, there's bump in the major version number.

Moan moan moan

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Moan moan moan

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because the other browsers have problems it doesn't mean that Firefox doesn't have problems of its own.

Firefox's problems tend to be very visible to the user. People notice things like the unusable Australis UI and the slowness of Firefox. Things like that are much more apparent than behind the scenes data collection or tracking, or security flaws.

People are right to complain about Firefox. It deserves it!

Re:Moan moan moan

[nmb3000]

Here we go, the usual slashdot moan-fest when there's any Firefox news.

You know what, guys? Get over it.

So just because Firefox might be the least bad browser, we should just grin and bear it? That sounds like a recipe for mediocrity and a successful tyranny of the minority to me.

I love Firefox. I love what it stands for (and especially what it used to stand for). That's why seeing it in this death spiral bothers me so much. If it was some stupid new Chrome or Safari features being discussed, I wouldn't give a damn. We care about Firefox -- that's why we "moan moan moan moan".

everyone still wants to hate Firefox

We hate the direction Firefox is going, and the people who are mismanaging the browser into obscurity.