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Firefox 42 Arrives With Tracking Protection, Tab Audio Indicators
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 42 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Notable additions to the browser include tracking protection, tab audio indicators, and background link opening on Android. The new private browsing mode goes further than just not saving your browsing history (read: porn sites) — the added tracking protection means Firefox also blocks website elements (ads, analytics trackers, and social share buttons) that could track you while you're surfing the web, and it works on all four platforms. The feature is almost like a built-in ad blocker, though it's really closer to browser add-ons like Ghostery and Privacy Badger because ads that don't track you are allowed through.
It looks like the current marketshare is under 12% and in a decline.
"Notable additions to the browser..."
Stop adding shit!
The builds are available for anyone in the know. Just not yet directed from download page.
Waiting on partner before it gets publicised.
Seriously, this is becoming a major problem. It's not even funny. If I go to cnn.com, it doesn't mean I want to WATCH cnn. If I wanted that, I'd turn on the fucking TV.
Oh sorry. I was using that feature for online banking and occasionally logging into my social media accounts on other people's computers. How embarassing, I'll stop right away.
What? Wait... Oh, OK. Never mind.
The new private browsing mode goes further than just not saving your browsing history (read: porn sites)
Oh really?
Don't tell your mom...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/... release notes for the nerds.
now if mozilla could only remove the targeted advertisement feature, the video chat, and firefox sync we'd be getting somewhere. Firefox used to have a code of ethics and 10 user rights, but those went right out the window once that sweet sweet Google cash started rolling in.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The tracking protection is not enabled (perhaps not available) for regular non-private browsing. What would make [$$$] Mozilla overlook such [$$$] an obviously good option [$$$] for the end user?
I find these stats to be more in line with what I'm seeing with many of my websites. The 12% you mention is high for Firefox. It's most likely closer to only 8%.
But you are correct, Firefox's market share does continue to decline month after month, with no end in sight.
My question is, when the fuck will Mozilla realize that everything they've done since Firefox 4 has been universally disliked?
I mean, how much further does Firefox's market share have to decline? Does it need to hit 5%? Or 1%? Or are they just going to drive head-on into 0%?
Mozilla totally missed the boat on mobile. Firefox for Android is universally disliked, and has at most 0.1% (yes, that's a fraction of 1%!) of the browser market. Chrome for Android has over 15%, and iOS Safari has over 5%.
Mozilla has repeatedly ignored what users have wanted for Firefox on the desktop. Despite a huge outcry from the community, all we've gotten is one unwanted change after another. Mozilla trashed Firefox's UI. They trashed Firefox's usability. They put ads into Firefox. They forced in totally unwanted and unnecessary social media integration. They still haven't done much to improve Firefox's remarkably slow performance or its excessively high resource usage.
Desktop Firefox is the only product that Mozilla offers that even has a small number of users. Since they abandoned Thunderbird, we've seen that gradually become avoided by users. None of Mozilla's other efforts have seen much success. Persona is a failure. Servo is perpetually going nowhere. Rust took forever to get to 1.0, and now that C++14 is out and is better there is no need for Rust. Let's Encrypt has been taking forever. Firefox OS has gotten some of the most scathing software reviews ever seen, and is seeing no uptake.
With its continually dropping share of the market, at some point soon Firefox is going to become completely irrelevant. It's close enough, as it is. Once that finally happens, Mozilla's influence will evaporate. The small number of remaining Firefox users are the only thing keeping Mozilla even remotely relevant. When Firefox's market share percentage is measured on one finger, nobody will care what Mozilla and its handful of users will think about the direction that the web is taking.
The saddest thing about all of this is that it's something that Mozilla has done to itself! It wasn't Microsoft, or Google, or Apple, or Opera, or anyone else who destroyed Firefox. It was Mozilla, and Mozilla alone! Even Firefox's users can't be blamed, because they did what they could and protested each and every awful change that Mozilla has forced. It's all so goddamn unnecessary!
So which plugins do I lose if I update? How many more toolbar buttons do I need to disable? How much more proprietary software is dumped in the "open source" Firefox that you can no longer build from source?
These are important things to know before upgrading.
No kidding it continues to decline. There's two main reasons:
1. Go to google.com and you det an advert for chrome. So, the world's largest advertiser it heavily avertising on one of the highest traffic sites in the world.
2. Chrome is installed on the majority of mobile devices, and that's now a HUGE segment, and hardly anyone seems to install a better browser on their phone.
I'm inclined to say the latter is more important. If you look at the stats on wikipedia, the decline of firefox mirrors the rise in mobile devices, not the rise in chrome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So, massive advertising campaign and aggressive bundling from one of the largest companies in the world? What chance do they stand?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Instead of linking to blogspam, why not link to the actual release notes?
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/42.0/releasenotes/
Nice. They finally have tab audio indicators.
I (and some others) suggested indicators / volume controls per tab about 7-8 years ago, back when they had this feature brainstorm for 3.x or maybe 4.0.
Maybe I should have just coded it myself in the meantime.
Does it still come with forced updates? If so, fuck you Firefox. I'll stay on FF 30.
The tracking protection only appears to work in Private Windows. It should work by default if you want it to, with or without Private Windows. I have NO interest in being tracked regardless of mode unless I opt-in to such tracking. (can't imagine me doing that but I should control the option)
That would be a more valuable feature to me. There are times when I start firefox and I know there is a tab that is going haywire but I can't figure out which one it is...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
But unfortunately, it's not the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.
Fight for your bitcoins!
yeah... it protects the trackers
Silly timothy, that's not how you use porn sites!
Fight for your bitcoins!
Back to 'vi' and editing directly the config.xml.
Surprisingly fairly easy to use the new No Tracking windows.
That given, I should warn you that your actual keyboard, mouse controller, and CPU GPU are all directly accessible by the NSA GCHQ CSES and all the other p3rvs.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Is there another browser that can be configured like FF with the Tree-Style tabs add-on? I've gotten so used to having the tabs along the left side of the browser, that I can't stand using a browser with them across the top. I tend to have a lot of windows open, 14 at the moment. And currently have 7 to 22 tabs open in each window. If I'm researching something, that number can go up more. When the number of tabs gets past 8 or so, it's too difficult to figure out what's in them if they are across the top. I can resize them to be wider if they are along the side.
I've looked at PaleMoon, but it won't work with that add-on, and I couldn't find one that worked. Chrome also doesn't seem to allow for it, or at least the last time I looked. Nor do any of the other dozen or so browsers I've tried.
Thanks in advance.
How do you make money to keep the project going? Well, you have to have some give and take (*cough* yahoo default search engine *cough*).
Firefox has ~10% market share and is not installed as a default in Windows, IOS, OSX, or Android. Google does not recommend it every time you run a search on a non Chrome browser either. 10% is pretty damn good all things considered.
The doom and gloom claim is simply wrong. Sure, they may leverage some technology better than others but moving to the point it's not relevant? Last I checked, Steve Balmer as not running them into the ground too. (sorry, easy MS shot and I took it)
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
What a load of bunk!
Does Google getting the word out about Chrome help inform people about Chrome's existence? Of course.
But advertising alone doesn't make people continue to use a given product, and that's exactly what market share measures.
Just alerting somebody to the existence of Chrome doesn't cause them to install it, it doesn't cause them to use it at first, and it doesn't cause them to start using it consistently.
What does cause people to keep using Chrome, however, is the fact that it gives a better experience than Firefox. Chrome is noticeably faster. Chrome is lightweight. Chrome's UI doesn't change drastically every other month. Chrome doesn't break extensions with each major release. Chrome doesn't include Pocket, Hello, ads, and other totally unwanted shit like that by default. Chrome doesn't remove useful existing functionality with little notice. Google doesn't ignore the loudly expressed wishes of Chrome's users like Mozilla ignores the wishes of Firefox's users.
As for mobile devices, it sure doesn't help that Firefox for Android is awful compared to the mobile versions of Chrome. Even if Firefox for Android came bundled with every mobile device out there, people would still go out of their way to install Chrome, just because Chrome is so much better.
Mozilla/Firefox supporters such as yourself need to stop blaming Google, and instead look in the mirror.
Mozilla, and only Mozilla, is responsible for Firefox's drastic decline in market share, and its total non-existence in the mobile market. It wasn't Google that has made one unwanted and despised change after another to Firefox; it was Mozilla who did that! It wasn't Google who bungled Firefox for Android, and didn't even bother creating a viable iOS version; it was Mozilla who did that!
The longer that Mozilla and its supporters refuse to look in the mirror and see who is truly responsible for Firefox's sad state of affairs, the worse things will continue to get for it. Continually blaming Google for Mozilla's problems will never actually result in Mozilla's problems getting solved!
It should be a plugin. I don't want it, don't need it, and it gets in my way because it's on by default. I've deactivated it on three systems this week alone.
That's exactly why it should be available to you as a plugin.
Firefox was created because Mozilla (now seamonkey) was too bloated. The stated design philosophy of FF was that a browser should browse the web, and have no other features except as provided by way of rich plugin support.
I don't run FF without SDC and Noscript. But I wouldn't dream of inflicting my needs on everyone else who runs the browser... apparently the devs of sync, pocket and hello feel differently.
Probably not too many extensions to worry about until FireFox 44 - that is where the current usage of "let" and "const" will be deprecated. That change breaks almost everything. Any extension that doesn't get an update for FF44 will (likely) no longer work --- Most FF extensions that I've unpacked use least one if not dozens of let's and const's. I had to downgrade Nightly to 44.0a1 (2015-10-05) within the last three weeks --- I haven't tested a more recently Nightly since almost none of my "active" extensions have gotten an update to resolve that issue yet.
Netscape Navigator wasn't there by default either.
Nonetheless it gained market share over Internet Explorer.
Repeated by Firefox.
Netscape Navigator became bloated and irrelevant and people stopped installing it when it had no advantage over what they could get elsewhere.
Being repeated by Firefox as we speak.
Mozilla corp and the die hard fans would make good ostriches.
i guess thats why that linus guy wont let these vermin in his backyard, so his masterace stuff wont turn into a big pile of horse shite, the only reason i still use firefox is because im too fucking lazy to install one of the derivatives, but thats it, they are irrelevant to me, their addons are 10 times more important
i dont even care about running a derivative that maybe does not have the ultimate security patch until a week later since im running all my shit sandboxed ANYWAY, i could do it right fucking now
I wonder how well the tracking protection really works.
Just looking at the huge amounts of ways that your browser can be fingerprinted - https://wiki.mozilla.org/Finge... - it seems virtually impossible. To start with they already have your IP and there's about a dozen other standard parameters the uniquely identify you. Then there's some crazy shit, like checking system clock time skew.
I'm on Chrome (work computer). Used to use FF on it, but FF looks so much like Chrome, I often forget that I am not using it.