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Firefox 47 Arrives With Synced Tabs Sidebar, Better YouTube Playback (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Mozilla today launched Firefox 47 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The browser has gained a sidebar for synced tabs from other devices, improvements to YouTube playback and HTML5 support, and is seeing the end of support for Android Gingerbread. [If you're logged in with your Firefox Account, the sidebar will show all your open tabs from your smartphone and other computers. The sidebar even lets you search for specific tabs. Next, Firefox 47 supports the open source VP9 video codec on machines with powerful multiprocessors. VP9 is the successor to VP8, both of which fall under Google's WebM project of freeing web codecs from royalty constraints.] Firefox 47 is available for download on Firefox.com, and will be slowly released on Google Play. You can view the full Firefox 47 changelog here. If you're a developer, Firefox 47 for developers offers more details for you.
Does this mean Netflix in Firefox will finally run at 1080p? I almost switched to Chrome for this, but I'm too ingrained into Fx with the UI and my favorite plugins.
"If you're logged in with your Firefox Account, the sidebar will show all your open tabs from your smartphone and other computers"
That seems useful. Get hacked on all your devices at once. If it will speed the luddite uprising, I'm for it.
Without knowing the exact details, am really glad for the YouTube fix. Was having a *lot* of issues and sometimes multiple-daily crashes when playing YouTube videos in FF recently to the extent that I dedicated Chrome browser to being the YouTube viewer. There definitely was something going on, although I wish they had mentioned more about the details in their blog post today.
Is amazing what Firefox has evolved into - what web browsers themselves have evolved into - and Firefox is really at the forefront of this in good ways although I wish it was more stable.
I had high hopes for Firefox on Android but it always crashes. Then they say they have fixed issues so i install again and then like clockwork it crashes. Useless in mobile so how are these new features of any use to me.
Thanks, you sellouts.
I upgraded to FF47 and found that the zoom stopped working
both buttons in the toolbar and the CNTRL + key
I looked at the latest browser market share stats after hearing about this new version of Firefox.
Firefox now has only about 6% to 7% of the market. That's across all versions, on desktop and mobile.
To put that into perspective, Firefox is well behind desktop Chrome, which is over 25%, and Chrome for Android, which is at 18%. Even UC Browser for Android is well above Firefox now, at almost 10% of the market.
Firefox is about as popular now as Safari for iOS 9.3 and IE 11. That's right, individual versions of non-Chrome browsers that support pretty much just one platform now have roughly the same number of users as Firefox does across all platforms and devices!
Even Opera Mini nearly has more users than Firefox does!
This decline in Firefox's market share should be sending shockwaves through Mozilla. Firefox is the only product of theirs that sees any significant use. They basically gave up on Thunderbird, the only other product of theirs that saw much use. Seamonkey never had many users to begin with. Persona and Firefox OS were total failures. Bugzilla is a legacy product. Rust and Servo are going nowhere.
Why, despite becoming more and more irrelevant each day, do we see such a complete lack of action on the part of Mozilla? Don't they realize that their existence depends on people using Firefox? Why would any company throw money at Mozilla if there aren't any Firefox users to perform searches or otherwise advertise to?
In any other organization there would be massive changes going on right now. Something is seriously wrong when a product goes from having 30% or more of the market down to 6% within only a few years.
Yet the best we've seen out of Mozilla has been the rather pointless Rust and Servo. Rust doesn't really improve on C++14, while having a lot of drawbacks (like only one implementation, lots of bugs in that implementation, a limited standard library, a steep learning curve, and lots of dead library projects, among others) that C++14 doesn't have. Servo is decades behind today's browsers, with no obvious hope of catching up any time soon.
It's so surreal when I look at this situation. The loss of market share and the response to it are unbelievable. But it's no wonder why it's happening. All of the unwanted changes made to Firefox starting with Firefox 4 explain perfectly why Firefox's market share has dropped. Imagine that, if users are treated like shit then they'll move to a competing product!
The same "right" that allows you to dump on AC. The same right that allows me to dump on you.
Dump. Dump. Dump.
TRUMP 2016!
I use it, that gives me all the right I need.
"If you're logged in with your Firefox Account, the sidebar will show all your open tabs from your smartphone and other computers"
That seems useful. Get hacked on all your devices at once. If it will speed the luddite uprising, I'm for it.
LONG LIVE NED LUDD! * Logs out and smashes computer~!!!
You're right that the Firefox developers can do as they wish, but not listening to their users is driving people away. If they truly supported privacy and freedom, they wouldn't have tried to sneak advertising into Firefox. Modding people down won't encourage support for Firefox or get people to start using that browser again. Also, mod points are not your tool to suppress views you disagree with, though that happens far too often on here. I sincerely hope you're trolling and aren't one of those people who uses mod points to reduce the visibility of posts on the grounds that they disagree with them. Grow up.
Does it include other Windows Firefox versions? (example my desktop, laptop and work machine? not just tablets / phones) so I can see what's open on what PC?
Can I "switch to" my work tab listing - without losing my home tab listing? Then switch back to home?
This finally sounds like an Ok feature, (for a change!)
I've recently found some plugins to FINALLY make Chrome a little more usable. (Refined tab control, closing order, opening position etc) - those Chrome features work on Sync too.
I've always been super hesitant about using Sync, just feels very much like a tracking and privacy concern - but the functionality of it in Chrome, means that every time I use chrome (and sign in) it's actually a "usable" browser to me now AND all the idiot stuff I need to do, to make Chrome usable, follows me.
Should I be considering this for Firefox too?
I used curl to post this.
I imagine that the decline in market share for Firefox has absolutely nothing to do with "the developers being unable to resist destroying it". Sure, on slashdot you'll hear people endlessly bitch and moan about Firefox (and frequently for good reason) but the average user probably doesn't give a shit about that stuff. The market share decline in Firefox is almost certainly due to one single reason: People opting into the ecosystem that their phone uses. What is killing Firefox is not having a dominate mobile platform to entice people to use Firefox everywhere.
Your comment is a perfect example of why Firefox is in such dire straights.
The GP listed numerous serious and very real problems that have been affecting Firefox for a long time now.
Yet instead of acknowledging the existence of these problems and the very negative effects that they have on Firefox's few remaining users, you (and others like you in the Mozilla community) totally ignore these problems.
Instead of doing something that would help fix these problems, you blabber on about "rights" and "principles" and nonsense like that.
It's no wonder users are fleeing Firefox and using Chrome instead: they're tired of being treated like shit by the Firefox community!
Instead of attacking and insulting those few Firefox users who are left, what if you and your kind started listening to these users?
When the users say they don't like Australis and the other unwanted UI changes, the correct response is to revert those changes, and not to insult those users.
When the users say they don't want Pocket, Hello, and other unwanted functionality forced on them, the correct response is to remove that functionality, and not to attack those users.
When the users say they want to see the performance improved and the memory usage decreased, the correct response is to improve the performance and decrease the memory usage, and not to belittle those users.
Firefox is on its death bed right now. The only hope it has for survival is if people like you start showing some respect to those Firefox users who still remain. That means offering them the browser that they want and are even begging for, rather than throwing disrespect and animosity at them!
Pale Moon is Firefox 29 with some cherry-picked updates. I'd rather chew off my own leg than use an outdated browser that's basically maintained by one guy, especially when it doesn't really perform any better for me. But keep trying to hype PM up! Maybe one day it actually will become something significantly different from Firefox, and less of a security nightmare waiting to happen.
I did a comparison. A 1080p 60fps youtube video (HTML5) used 28-44% of my quad-core in Firefox 46 (usually around 33%). Upgraded to Firefox 47, and it only used 4-6%. I turned off Firefox's hardware acceleration and it still only used 22-25%. I know my friend with a core 2 duo was having trouble with HD youtube videos on Firefox.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Noooooo! I loved the 3D view. It was so useful.
Though it is rather esoteric for a built-in feature. I wonder if it's possible to implement with an extension...
For the curious, sanity continues to prevail: mandatory addon signing has been pushed back again and xpinstall.signatures.required continues to function. Originally planned for version 46 it's now sitting at a possible version 48 release. With any luck the entire idea will be scrapped, but I encourage anyone who disagrees with this horrible signing policy to voice their opinion.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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" or use another."
Been doing just that for a while now hence the dropped market share. Just the same that you can have a opinion of his comments, he can have a opinion of Mozilla. Just because you don't agree with that opinion doesn't mean he isn't allowed to have it. If you think no one is allowed to have a opinion and express it then why are you reading the comments here? 99% of the comments will be opinions.
This is the internet, not the US. Don't assume everyone you speak with on the internet is in the US. Many people have and can be killed for comments made on the internet because of their local laws/government.
Last but not least there is no real reason for somebody to start a second implementation.
Yes there is. A language with only one implementation cannot so easily become a formal International Standard the way C and C++ are. Nor can a language with only one implementation support David A. Wheeler's diverse double-compiling, the most practical countermeasure to the "Trusting Trust" attack described by Ken Thompson.
SlashdotMedia is a U.S. corporation.
Well there was a history of how the Rust compiler was "first" compiled: in the beginning, it was written in OCaml, and then they re-implemented it in Rust, using the OCaml compiler to bootstrap it. Theoretically you could now check out the sources of the OCaml compiler and then compile the Rust compiler with it, step by step. This way you can "bootstrap" the trust from the OCaml compiler.
I can see from your comment that you've probably never actually written a line of code in Rust, nor have you actually tried Servo.
You wouldn't be defending either of them if you had actually used them.
My guess is that you've read some of Mozilla's blog posts, and maybe read some comments from Mozilla's employees or contributors over at Hacker News, and you have a very rosy (but totally unrealistic) picture of what Rust and Servo are like.
I tried Servo recently. It is exceedingly immature. I think you'd get a better experience today using the early versions of Phoenix, Servo is that immature.
Keep in mind that Servo doesn't just have to rapidly catch up with today's engines. It has to quickly exceed them, and bring some benefit that Gecko, Blink, WebKit and the other engines don't already bring.
The fact that Servo is taking so long to get to where browsers were 10 to 15 years ago is a very bad sign. It also indicates that Rust isn't all that it's cracked up to be.
If Rust were any good, then it would allow the Servo developers to be making much faster progress than we're seeing. I suspect that Rust is actually holding them back, and they would be better off had they used modern C++ instead.
The Rust implementation, which is written in Rust by the people who created Rust, is riddled with bugs. Go check their bug tracker. That's not a good sign, either.
Rust and Servo are, to put it mildly, failures in my opinion. I see no evidence to suggest they will ever succeed in any meaningful way.
What gives him the right? Free speech. Just because something's free doesn't mean it's except from criticism.
And hopefully better video playback, in general. (I was told that) watching porn on Chrome gives a better experience than on FF.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
If I had mod points I'd mod you down. What gives you a right to dump on them? Its an Open Source project, totally free, totally dedicated to the right principles of freedom which is vastly more than much software. If you don't like it, develop your own or use another.
I don't recommend modding AC's down since it is a waste of your mod points. Sure you do get trolling which is not just confined to AC's but most people on Slashdot ignore them although some (not all) do deserve sarcastic, but not abusive replies.
On occasion, you do get AC's that come up with statements that are worth modding up.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
"If you're logged in with your Firefox Account, the sidebar will show all your open tabs from your smartphone and other computers"
That seems useful. Get hacked on all your devices at once. If it will speed the luddite uprising, I'm for it.
I hate to burst your bubble but Chrome does this as well and please don't get me started on the Edge Browser. Looks like we are all doomed.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
What is weird is that apparently Firefox can still be compiled against GTK2, but Mozilla can't be bothered to provide a version.
This even though they still provide 32-bit version across every platform, and even continue to support Windows XP...
Swift, Go, Dart, and many other languages have (or until recently, had) this "problem" as well. There is a difference between a language growing steadily and gaining acceptance where it should, and people trying their hardest to deny that it's growing, useful, or stands a chance of gaining acceptance. Especially a language that is neither backed by one of the biggest tech companies on earth, and that aims to solve engineering problems, rather than just be another decent language. Some Slashdotters seem to have an irrational view of Rust that borders on the levels for climate change deniers.
So you choose to bootstrap from OCaml through old Rust to current Rust the way one would bootstrap from a C implementation through old g++ to modern g++. But this just shifts the bottleneck of the trojan origin to the OCaml binary. Is there an implementation of OCaml that is not from INRIA?
I did exactly what you suggest over a year ago, for pretty much the same reasons. I haven't looked back.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Youtube in Chrome will choose VP9 on weak CPUs as well, with no hw acceleration (Atom CPUs). Choppy playback in 1080p. It's total BS.
That's the fault of those oppressive governments not people from other countries. Why do you want (relatively) free people to compromise with tyranny?
You can setup Firefox to use whatever server you want for syncing. e.g. your local machine, or a $5 Digital Ocean droplet. It takes a little bit to set up - afterwards though, you could point all your various browsers to your own server for syncing any of your FF data.
" grinding the CPU in the background doing fuck knows what"
This is called "programming by people who always had gigs of Hertz and RAM".
What important features did they remove this time? Does the Cassic-ui-plugin still work? Hopefully the new process model will help in finding out which tab is constantly eating CPU. It would also be great, if the Youtube videos could be resumed after XFCE4 system has awaken from sleep mode. Now the play-button just sucks 100% of CPU for running the progress-ball.
I've noticed that many web sites I visit no longer work correctly with Firefox. Using Pale Moon is like browsing with a 6+ month old version of Firefox, which is even worse. Chrome has such a large (and still growing) market share that more and more web developers appear to be using Chrome's proprietary scripting capabilities. I have three web browsers on my machine, starting with Pale Moon and then switching until the web site I want to visit actually fucking works.
At least in the old days, if you were using IE6, pages would render with graphic bugs and overlapping sections, at worst. Use Pale Moon, and many web sites won't even display at all, to say nothing of dynamic loading problems. This has nothing to do with Pale Moon and Firefox being terrible browsers. It's that browsers based on Blink have such high market share, that all that hoopla a few years ago about "standards compliance" no longer matters. Web developers don't care.
I for one do not want to live in a monoculture where every web browser is based on Blink, and the web is effectively controlled by the world's largest advertising company. I don't want Mozilla to die, even if they are completely hell-bent on committing suicide. If the Firefox community can't beat sense into Mozilla, somebody has to find a way.
And the sky is blue. Still don't mean shit.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Overentitled with cpu cycles millenials. Now get off my lawn! (thanks to the housing situation my lawn will be played by a small potted plant)
Yeah, well. I'm sure if it was Chrome the release would be almost instantly.
But that *may* be a good sign, after all: Firefox still seems to be relevant, at least in Google's opinion.
Please tell me you aren't one of those people who believe just because something's provided free of charge, it's therefore exempt from criticism.
If somebody leaves a bag of dog feces on your porch "for free", along with a note telling you how wonderful it will be when you scatter the contents around your garden, does that mean they're doing you a service?
I was an early adopter of Firefox. I started losing my enthusiasm a couple of years ago, with their decision to progressively get rid of all the things I liked about their browser in a futile effort to become more and more like Chrome.
I use Pale Moon now. Firefox can go eff itself.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Please tell me you aren't one of those people who believe just because something's provided free of charge, it's therefore exempt from criticism.
This is why I have four web browsers I can call on at a moments notice. I do have Chrome as my default browser but I don't have an issue with having to use a different browser on occasion since most actually support cross-transfer of your bookmarks. Personally, I don't have any issue with Firefox. If you don't like it or any browser for that matter you are perfectly entitled to do so. Constructive criticism I don't mind and I strongly encourage it, however, destructive criticism by swearing with little if any facts at to why the product deserves criticism doesn't achieve anything.
If somebody leaves a bag of dog feces on your porch "for free", along with a note telling you how wonderful it will be when you scatter the contents around your garden, does that mean they're doing you a service?
I was not aware that Firefox was forced on people. You are free to choose to install it, update it or remove it as you see fit. Not only that unlike "dog feces" it really does not leave a bad smell unless you really hate it yet have been rolling in it for a while.
What those words do fit though is "Windows 10" and "yes" I did install it by ISO in a virtual machine since I am not stupid. The sneaky and almost forced upgrade mechanism (see the web for more details) and if you do install it the "phone-home" freatures that are all turned on by default do (again see the web) the same thing that malware does, except Microsoft, tells us it's for our own good.
I was an early adopter of Firefox. I started losing my enthusiasm a couple of years ago, with their decision to progressively get rid of all the things I liked about their browser in a futile effort to become more and more like Chrome.
I use Pale Moon now. Firefox can go eff itself
I have use Firefox since inception and I do agree that they are trying to be more like Crome although personally I always liked the cleaner lines of Chrome especially tabbing although you could probably say the same thing with most modern web browsers.
I run Fedora 23 and if it ain't in the repositories or a repository is not available (eg Chrome, rpmfusion and Handbrake) since I like to get updates when they are available not go hunting for them then I won't use the package, so I won't install Pale Moon. If I am interested in specific software that needs to be manually downloaded then I normally lock it down but never install it on my system.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Let's see how many of the most highly voted bugs older than 10 years have been fixed with this release. Oh look, none. Fuck you Mozilla.
That's the fault of those oppressive governments not people from other countries. Why do you want (relatively) free people to compromise with tyranny?
My horse for a +1 point.
"...and will be slowly released on Google Play."
What does that mean?
How does something get "slowly released"? Does that mean only certain people will see it available for download, or...?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
If you don't like it, develop your own or use another.
That's what everyone did, and why Firefox is now barely relevant anymore.
They still haven't fixed the scrollbar problem for Ubuntu dark themes they introduced in 46. Back to 45 for me again.
--- Keep the choice with the user..