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Firefox 40 Arrives With Windows 10 Support, Expanded Malware Protection
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 40 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Notable additions to the browser include official Windows 10 support, added protection against unwanted software downloads, and new navigational gestures on Android. Firefox 40 for the desktop is available for download now on Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. Changelogs are here: desktop and Android.
After using windows 10 edge i felt that without ad blocker was useless in this ad ridden web, so which are the options?, a slow and bloated firefox, or the alphabet privacy nightmare and memory hog Chrome.
I installed the latest Opera and was surprised, is fast, based in chromium so is very compatible and has the gestures and usual goodies of every opera install, it is even a universal app in windows 10, so it looks great too.
For me Opera is my alternative browser for years to come
I did the upgrade to 10 (finally!), and now Firefox doesn't come back from sleep properly anymore. It gets weird visual glitches that look like refresh issues, and none of the tab gadgets are visible (or clickable). I pretty much have to kill it and restart it every time I wake my PC. Hopefully the "supported" version won't do that.
"Firefox 40 Arrives With Windows 10 Support, Expanded Malware Protection"
That seems like a contradiction, given what I've read about Windows 10.
I've found bugs in Firefox that date back to not only before it was called Firefox but before Firefox even existed.
My personal favorite is this bug which is over 15 years old now. The practical effect is that if your screen resolution ever changes, Firefox breaks and you have to restart it. (Basically tooltips start appearing over the wrong areas and anything that's supposed to not go off the screen uses the wrong screen values.)
A practical example of why that might happen is projecting, say, a web app in a meeting. Doing that means you have to restart Firefox after hooking up the projector and then again when done. Another example is docking a laptop. 15 years with absolutely no progress.
you know, it fucking drives me nuts that each browser hides the refresh button somewhere different sometimes with an un-intuitive icon. Yes, I'm aware I can press F5 to refresh, and yes I'm aware that F5 doesn't actually always reload the page.
UI/UX designers have simply gone off the reservation. Hiding basic features we know and expect, to what, streamline the ads? This makes no sense. And now I have to click through 4 menus to get to my addons? Chrome is the worst now, they've stripped out all the settings and you have to know to use chrome://whateversettingyouneedtofix to actually get at them.
Lync 2013. It's 2015, this app is branded part of office 2013. The chat window is one big ugly white box with no title bar. So what? you say? So, now I have to click around trying to find the magic pixel that will allow me to drag the window, as only the title bar is click draggable, but there is nothing separating that from the chat window.
windows 10 removes everything and instead wants you to search by name for everything? what the fuck is this Dos?
I've avoided FF for some time now, but chrome is such a shit show I have to bounce back and forth. Regular browsing = FF. Streaming video = chrome. Adblock plus on FF, adblock PRO on chrome because with these new ad bombs, adblock plus goes insane and uses up all of your cpu, if you leave the blocked counter going and stream something from veetle, you'll see what I mean. It will usually get to about 7500 blocked ads in maybe 2 minutes, then the cpu starts lagging out, and if you check the processes, one of the chrome.exe processes is literally going insane. Adblock pro doesn't do this.
Maybe I'm crazy but in 2015 I don't expect to have to use a combination of 4 different browsers to get shit done. And I certainly should not have to re-learn how to computer just to use an updated web browser.
15 steps back people, we need to move forward not backwards
Debian just looked into this, while considering how to appropriately hack FF into Iceweasel. The URLs are hashed, and a partial hash is sent to Google. Google then sends back a list of dangerous URLs (if any) which match that partial hash.
One can quibble about how long the partial hash should be (too short, and you waste time and bandwidth downloading lists of false positives all the time; too long, and Google may be able to start inferring which sites you're visiting by looking for patterns), but overall, it seems like an excellent compromise between the contrasting needs of security and privacy. Debian ultimately decided to keep the feature, and keep it enabled by default, which says a lot to me. But, of course, you can disable it in either FF or Iceweasel, if you're unhappy with it.