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.

Comments

Glad for YouTube fix

[meadow]

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.

Re:How does the Synced Tabs sidebar work?

[NotInHere]

Firefox encrypts the synced data on the client side, the plaintext content never reaches the mothership. Chrome, coming from google, obviously does not.

Mandatory Addon Signing

[nmb3000]

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.

Re:Mandatory Addon Signing

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience, 99% of the time, it's because it makes some unmaintained addons not work. Or they simply think issues with it aren't being addressed, despite Mozilla delaying in part to address any issues that are raised.

Once in a while you get someone who thinks that it's creating a "walled garden", but they're people who clearly have no idea what a walled garden is, or don't know how easy it is to bypass the restriction if they really wish to, or how easy it is to get non-questionable addons signed. Those people don't have much of an argument that doesn't boil down to "I don't trust Mozilla enough to let them do this, though I paradoxically trust them enough to run their browser in the first place."

Re:Anyone get that "undisclosed 0-day" figured yet

[donaldm]

"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.