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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
I already abandoned ship for Palemoon after they changed the search bar.
Can't wait till we get to Firefox 100.0.
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.
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.
Nope, it's Firefox. Plaintext files often don't have a mime type so present as unknown.
Here's the nearly 15 year old bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...
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.
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.
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?!