Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Firefox 40 Arrives With Windows 10 Support, Expanded Malware Protection

Posted by timothy on from the does-make-it-over-the-hill? dept.

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.

17 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Still not as good as Google Chrome... by jcfandino · · Score: 5, Funny

    because Chrome version is 44. This is 10% better.

    1. Re:Still not as good as Google Chrome... by MagickalMyst · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes but Chrome still sucks.

      --
      Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
    2. Re:Still not as good as Google Chrome... by aaron4801 · · Score: 4, Funny

      But 40x better than Edge.

  2. alternative browsers, Opera? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  3. Also some improvements for Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    "New: Improved scrolling, graphics, and video playback performance with off main thread compositing (GNU/Linux only)."

  4. Good by T.E.D. · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Good by Mousit · · Score: 3, Informative

      Even worse, "themed to look like Windows 10" means it actively ignores the Win10 system colors settings. FF39 had darker window borders because that's what I set my accent color to. I figured out how to override that stupid fucking "all titlebars must be white" shit that Win10 enforced too, so I could have properly dark-themed titlebars. So my whole Win10 system is dark-themed as I prefer. FF39 handled that just fine and matched the system theme settings.

      FF 40 ignores all of it. It enforces the white window on its own, regardless of system settings. Even worse, there is no color change between a window that is active and one that is inactive, so unless I have overlapping windows I keep losing track of whether I have the Firefox window active or not. It's literally just a flat white AT ALL TIMES.

      Who in the fuck thought ignoring system colors as the default theme was EVER a good idea?

  5. Thoughtful tweaks by dstyle5 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We’ve made thoughtful tweaks to the interface to give Firefox a streamlined feel. You’ll also notice bigger, bolder design elements as well as more space for viewing the Web.

    Translation: We tried to hide more buttons and functionality from users with Firefox 40, but in the end people complained about the lack of a field to enter addresses into and the removal of the back button. Users, tsk, tsk... Rest assured that in the future we will continue to add more useful buttons and features like Pocket and voice chat.

    Regards,
    The Firefox "UX" Team

    In all seriousness the "new look" for Windows 10 doesn't look all that different from FF 38 that I've been using for months in the Tech Preview. I can't wait to try and find what other menus, options and functionality they have "designed" out of FF 40.

    1. Re:Thoughtful tweaks by westlake · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Translation: We tried to hide more buttons and functionality from users with Firefox 40

      Monday, the geek will post about wanting a no-frills browser that "just works."

      Tuesday, he'll post about wanting more menus, options and functionality. Which most users won't have a clue how to configure and won't want to deal with.

      ------

      For those unaware of Pocket:

      Save web pages for later with Pocket for Firefox

    2. Re:Thoughtful tweaks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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

  6. Re:All URLs are going to Google by new_01 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's how to disable it. Not sure yet how this is implemented. https://support.mozilla.org/en...

  7. Incoherent headling by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "Firefox 40 Arrives With Windows 10 Support, Expanded Malware Protection"

    That seems like a contradiction, given what I've read about Windows 10.

  8. East to block most malware by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Don't allow any downloading from any link that is flagged as an "AD" on google.

    99% of the time I have to clean someone's computer it's because, "I searched for XXX and installed it from the first link from a google search."

    Google sponsored links from a search needs to have dark red borders around them with "WARNING DO NOT CLICK ON THIS"

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  9. Re:All URLs are going to Google by new_01 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Apparently version 3 of the API downloads the hashed list to the client side rather than sending URL's to mother Google: https://developers.google.com/... So I think I'm going to leave it enabled on my machines. This is reasonable and actually a fairly decent service if that's true.

  10. Re:Let me check... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  11. Re:Let's do it! by Dahan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You expect every button in an application to have text on the button itself fully describing what it does?

    Yes. Most people only read what is on the button itself, if even that. Expecting them to have read the entire page to know what it is that they will be doing (it's not even mentioned in the page title) is too much.

    No, I think it's just you... you must have a huge problem when using any GUI interface these days--"OK or Cancel? OK to what?? Cancel what??? I have no idea what it's talking about!"

  12. Re:All URLs are going to Google by Xtifr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.