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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.
I already abandoned ship for Palemoon after they changed the search bar.
This was exactly the reason that gave the final push to ditch Firefox for me as well. Seriously, how can a page that's seen by millions of people everyday - Amazon - bring Firefox to a crawl and the devs instead of fixing the problem keep adding video chat to the bloated thing? It's just insane.
Installed Chrome recently because EVERY BLOODY STUPID TAB I open in Firefox stalls the entire browser for eternity. And that includes Slashdot tabs.
Not having that problem here. It's Iceweasel but it should behave identically to Firefox. Lots of extensions. A five year old CPU and only 4GB of RAM. Two instances open (in different desktops) each with about a dozen tabs open. No freezes - ever.
Do you have Ad-block enabled? NoScript? (I find those two extensions tend to actually speed Firefox/Iceweasel up on many sites).
Have you tried Qupzilla?
Chrome (and Chromium) seem to be a bit quicker but not enough that I want to give up all the extensions I use.
Don't know how I feel about social sharing built-in - if I can't see it or notice it I probably don't care (I'll wait and see).
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.
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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?!