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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.
"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.
Firefox now has only about 6% to 7% of the market.
Considering that this includes mobile, where google thanks to being OS vendor has a head start, and where firefox came far too late to the game, and with a far too bad product, this number is quite high. It means millions of users world wide entrust firefox with their data.
Something is seriously wrong when a product goes from having 30% or more of the market down to 6% within only a few years.
The market has seen a giant growth (mostly caused by android) in the recent years. Before that, the market share was higher. If you look at absolute numbers, firefox didn't lose that much.
Rust and Servo are going nowhere.
I couldn't disagree more. Rust is being adopted by more and more people, although other languages like swift are more popular. And Servo is being improved right this moment, even though its still beta software.
Rust doesn't really improve on C++14
There is one huge improvement C++ never will dare to make: backwards compatibility. Rust is *not* backwards compatible with C, or earlier (and broken) versions of C++. If you don't use modern C++14 consistently, there might be benefits, but the actual potential is unleashed if you use 100% of the modern language. In a language which is backwards compatible to older versions of C++ or C, legacy programs won't likely migrate, or you will accidentially miss some pieces here and there.
a steep learning curve
That's where Rust is much better than C++14 at. C++ is a giant mess of trillions of different programming styles and legacy stuff down to pure C. Rust lacks these things.
only one implementation
I rather have something where there is one but working implementation of, than five different but non working ones. Also, there is much slower progress if multiple implementors have to find the best way to make a feature. Also consider that Rust is a very young language, and stable for since about one year.
Last but not least there is no real reason for somebody to start a second implementation. gcc was started because of proprietary compilers. clang was started because apple hated the GPL. If e.g. apple wants to integrate rustc into xcode, nobody stops them, rustc is MIT licensed.
lots of dead library projects
C++ has even more! Its the living projects that matter, not the dead ones.
Why would any company throw money at Mozilla if there aren't any Firefox users to perform searches or otherwise advertise to?
For now, it has worked out for Mozilla. But I agree, they should really do something about this situation.
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.