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Firefox 48 Released With Multi-Process Support, Mandatory Add-On Signing (softpedia.com)
Mozilla on Tuesday released Firefox v48, touted as one of the most important updates the browser has ever received. With the new version, Firefox starts migrating users to using mullti-process threads (e10s, Electrolysis), and it is also the first version to ship with Rust component. In addition, Firefox is now also making add-on signing mandatory. From a Softpedia article: Announced last year, Electrolysis, e10s, or multi-process support is Firefox's ability to process core browser operations separately from the content viewed on a Web page. Multi-process support allows a page to crash without bringing the entire browser down with it and improves the browser's overall performance. e10s rollout will take place in two phases, first in Firefox 48, and it will finish in Firefox 49, set for release on September 13, 2016. Mandatory add-on signing refers to Firefox preventing users from installing any add-ons that have not been approved by Mozilla's testers. This is something similar to what Chrome employs, but Firefox users have been spoiled all these years, always having the capability of installing any add-on they've desired. Rust is a programming language that's a revamped and improved version of C++ but that protects developers from accidentally including dangerous memory bugs in their code. It achieves this by how the language was constructed and by how developers write the code.
accidentally including dangerous memory bugs in their code
Good, now I can be assured that all of my dangerous memory bugs in my code are intentional.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I've been on Nightly for awhile now and the performance with e10s is now almost as good as Chrome's. Firefox Hello is thankfully going to get axed in a future release, and if Mozilla continues to fine-tune the performance a bit more and rips out Pocket, I think Firefox will be back on top.
I was about to rush and grab it until...
"Firefox is now also making add-on signing mandatory"
Firefox has about 10% market share (several studies collected here), which is hundreds of millions of people.
Can we please stop posting about minor, useless OSS software releases? It's not like anyone uses this piece of shit anymore.
Really? Wow and here I thought I was using Firefox to type this. Thanks for letting me know that I'm not really using the browser I think I am.
No changes in the UI. And Classic Theme Restorer still works: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...
I was kind of excited by this so updated immediately instead of my usual process of waiting a couple days.
While it was updating I did another unsual thing - clicked through to the article - where I read the following:
That's probably going to drop a bit it they break all the add-ons.
(Again...)
No sig today...
Firefox users have been spoiled all these years, always having the capability of installing any add-on they've desired.
Yes how pampered a life I've led in my fantasy-land where the computer performs in accordance with my instruction. oh i was a fool to think personal computing would remain my own personal fucking shangri-la. Thank god Mozilla has come to the rescue and spirited me away from this dubotcherous land of sodom called personal computing. But hey, you know, whatever it takes for your corporate masters to reign in ad blocking, cookie whitelisting, and script blocking. I just cant wait to watch another taylor swift autoplay video.
Good people go to bed earlier.
"mandatory add-on signing refers to Firefox preventing users from installing any add-ons that have not been approved by mozilla's testers. ... firefox users have been spoiled all these years, always having the capability of installing any add-on they've desired."
of course doing what we "desire" should not be allowed.
stay within the plantation and obey the rules, that way nothing gets broken or get crashed (hopefully). and nobody gets "spoiled", god forbid!
we, the user children, should not be 'spoiled" by allowing us to make mistakes, by too much freedom to do what we 'desire'.
be calm, be correct, be at peace, ... as in "rest in peace"? in mozilla's politically correct heaven.
That's probably going to drop a bit it they break all the add-ons.
(Again...)
My interpretation of Mozilla's plans is that they plan to gradually deprecate XUL in order to give time for developers to keep their extensions working with every version of Firefox. So it's not as if they're all going to break overnight. Some will break and won't get fixed if they're not maintained, but that happens on every platform.
Have you tried using the Extended Support Release instead of the stable branch?
Telling them to "stop with the useless bells and whistles" and instead "stabilize the code" is exactly what they're doing these days.
The largest problem with mandatory signing is that you must send your source-code to mozilla to be signed and they do not (and really, can not) guarantee that it won't leak out to someone else. So if you have an in-house developed extension that contains proprietary business information, you must choose between getting it signed or running versions of firefox that do not receive regular security updates and do not have signature checking for any extensions at all, so are basically the worst of both worlds. They could avoid this problem with one level of abstraction, you sign your own extension then they sign that signature. They could even automate it so the extra layer of indirection is invisible to anyone who is OK with sending their source to mozilla for signing.
But even that's brittle in the face of unexpected circumstances. Which is the fundamental problem with the "everything not explicitly allowed is forbidden" security models. They have their place, but they do take the "general" out of "general computing." Unforeseen consequences and all that.
The correct solution would be to have a signature checking config setting stored somewhere that is writeable only by an administrator account. All the major OSes have that kind of ability.
The firefox executable is also admin writeable, so if someone were inclined they could run a binary patcher to hack out the signature checking in the binary itself. Might as well just put it in a config setting with the equivalent permissions. Save us all the trouble of having different builds.
I'd even go one step further and make it a list of extensions that don't need a valid signature so you don't give up the benefits of signature checking for all the other extensions just because you want to run one unsigned extension.
Splitting Firefox's tab data over into the "plugin container for Firefox" hasn't done much to improve Firefox's GUI performance. Once FF hits certain ram limits, it will start ignoring mouse clicks and keyboard shortcuts. So while FF may claim its NOT unresponsive, I think the fact that now it's acceptable for FF to IGNORE hardware input from the user, instead of delaying it until it can process is far worse.
I can't wait to get off this sinking ship. Maybe Piro could crowdfund Tree Style Tab for Chrome.
Not satisfied with alienating the general public, Mozilla, who are hell-bent on losing all market share, have now successfully alienated their remaining userbase: enterprise users, with this:
"Mandatory add-on signing refers to Firefox preventing users from installing any add-ons that have not been approved by Mozilla's testers."
They will no longer have to listen to the userbase complaining about the many memory leaks and race conditions in Firefox because they have finally gotten rid of the annoying users.
Seriously folks.. do you really expect proprietary extensions used by various companies to be signed and submitted to the Mozilla repository? No, I don't think so. Many of us use Firefox not for its performance (it sucks), its compliance to standards (again, it sucks), but for its extensibility. Now that you have made it inflexible as well as slow, bloated, and crappy, what userbase are you now targeting?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
You can turn it off. In Nightly, right now the setting is in Options -> General -> "Enable multi-process Nightly [Firefox]"
Chrome 1.0 and IE 8 are happy you can have security in lowrights mode in appdata and can use more than 1 core wahoo
http://saveie6.com/
You want to hand all the browser control to corporate conglomerates?
That being said, I'll wait for a few months for the kinks to be worked out. I'll let others be guinea pigs. Hopefully no security holes are found in version 47.
What if add-ons don't sign? Can we still "force" them in?
Table-ized A.I.
You can still use unsigned addons in the Developer and Nightly branches. If you're willing to void any promise for support, you can also use an unbranded version of the stable branch: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-o...
What if add-ons don't sign? Can we still "force" them in?
See here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-o...
They could avoid this problem with one level of abstraction, you sign your own extension then they sign that signature.
Mozilla won't blindly countersign extensions because it wants to avoid a situation where you sign an extension and then distribute it to the public without Mozilla having a chance to check it for the most obvious malicious patterns.
The correct solution would be to have a signature checking config setting stored somewhere that is writeable only by an administrator account.
Firefox ESR releases have such a setting. Firefox current lacks this setting because Mozilla wants to avoid a situation where it becomes common to social-engineer users into elevating to change this setting. Home users are more likely to use Firefox current, but they're also less likely to need an in-house private extension. Home users who make their own extensions can use Firefox Developer Edition.
Look, the grammer chekker addon already broken
Table-ized A.I.
Three showstoppers:
1) I have a bunch of old extensions that are not signed. Things like FLST, OpenNewWindowFromHere, and others. I'm not much interested in losing that functionality.
2) I sometimes like to edit extensions with, you know, emacs or something. Things like FLST, where I like the tab flip behavior but not the focus last selected tab itself, which the developer didn't provide a way to turn off while keeping tab flipping.
3) Some extensions have code that can't be given to Mozilla for verification because the code is proprietary.
I'm fine with signing to be enabled by default. I'm not fine with not having a workaround for that. I want to decide for myself what gates I want closed.
I have to know. What are you doing with those 120 tabs? It takes me all of 3 seconds to see if a page is worth my time before closing it. Are you a hoarder?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
That's no big thing. When will we get an OS where a page crash doesn't bring the whole system down?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
There's one change I've noticed - the awesomebar dropdown has changed. I think it's the "Searching for something already in your bookmarks or open tabs? We added super smart icons to let you know" referred to in the official release notes.
The icons look different and the layout of the content is slightly different. Here's a shot of the previous version and the new version.
Classic Theme Restorer -> Location bar (3) -> Alternative appearance seems to restore the previous layout but it seems to still have a new font.
Fun times.
Checking for the most common patterns just means people will find less common patterns. It isn't hard to avoid with trivial obfuscation.
Obfuscation kicks an extension into the manual review queue.
Mozilla is not capable of hand-inspecting add-ons to that level of certainty, they either automate signatures or they take way too long.
Mozilla automates signatures for easy cases and admits to "tak[ing] way too long" for hard cases.
Someone that naive can be social-engineered into running a binary patcher too.
There exist both branded builds and unbranded builds. Unbranded builds allow use of unsigned extensions but lack the Firefox name and logo. This gives Mozilla a hook to sue the distributor of such a binary patcher for trademark infringement.
Make it warn at every startup before the add-on is initialized that they are using a questionable add-on.
Or provide a separate way to install unsigned extensions in such a way that they're automatically uninstalled when Firefox is restarted. This appears to be the current policy, implemented through about:debugging.
More often than not, I will open a bunch of tabs to read when I finish with the first one. Say, Google news for instance, I have to open all the stories I want to read before the front page refreshes and a story I wanted to catch disappears. Other reasons are for multiple easy quick references to a single topic. My way around it has been to save the page locally so I can read it later, even when the internet cuts out. But I shouldn't have to do that.
And he's right about Chrome. I can't even open ten tabs before the whole system locks up where I can't even break out into a terminal (Alt-F1) to reboot cleanly. Which brings up another point, where the fuck is our reset button?! Taking away that and the disk activity light are crimes against humanity.
Oh how I long for an operating system that is protected from the applications. A simple keystroke should get some response no matter what.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Except they haven't done that. ALL of Firefox's tabs are within the same "plugin-container.exe" process.
FF has not been listening to the user for a long time. You can just use a fork. There are a few out there.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
What if add-ons don't sign? Can we still "force" them in?
For the regular builds, no.
The developer build and the "unbranded" builds will let you, for now. This too will go away at some point.
Note that the "unbranded" builds are auto updating to the regular Firefox builds, so if you use one of those you need to disable automatic updates. It's a "bug".
So what do you use? Edge?
No idea; go visit the manufacturer's Web site for your router and see if there's a new firmware release that removes the deprecated ciphers.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Alternately, you can grab the add-on and push it to the add-ons server for signing yourself -- it's all automated. The point of signing is that it allows Mozilla to shut off malicious add-ons when they arise. As mentioned elsewhere, all add-ons hosted on Mozilla's servers have already been signed, so you'd only have to do this if you found some unmaintained add-on lying around elsewhere on the web. To be honest, that sounds kind of fishy, so I'd proceed with caution.
The developer and nightly builds will require signing soon.
And there's no EME-free unbranded build.
And the unbranded builds currently auto update to the branded builds.
It's been "fixed" in the sense that FF and Chrome will just tell you to eat a dick if you so much as try to look at SSLv3 encrypted content.
Download a portable release of FF 31 or something.
So what do you use? Edge?
Lol, "Edge", also known as The Little Browser That Couldn't.
Couldn't load slashdot or yahoo or any moderately complex page without choking and then helpfully informing you that "Edge has stopped and is restarting". Only to crash AGAIN, and again, and again. But who needs a browser that understands CSS, Javascript, or those new-fangled "image" thingys, right?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The ioccc is merely unreadable, it makes code really stand out. Instead, you want Underhanded C where code must be clear, appear good and pass code review.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Laptop
Most new laptops are the same. No disk light, no button.. and in some cases (Sony), no removable battery, which is really horrible because I had one machine where even the power button was locked out and had to wait for the battery to run down. All because the damn browser froze. Non removable batteries should be legally prohibited anyway for the obvious safety reasons. The problem goes back over five years, or maybe even ten. And yes, that does make them "shit ass". But since it was a gift, I'm not going to ask the guy to take it back.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Opposite situation confirmed here.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
It would be nice if Firefox allowed extensions signed by trusted certs, rather than just their own. The infrastructure is already there for certs uses for TLS.
Since they didn't do that:
> So if you have an in-house developed extension that contains proprietary business information, you must choose between getting it signed or running versions of firefox that do not receive regular security updates
A third option is to separate your proprietary logic algorithms from the user interface. Firefox is one UI. Your magic logic is ALREADY a seperate component if your development standards are at all secure, so it should be straightforward to run that proprietary logic in a separate process. The extension can communicate with the logic via SOAP or anybof several other methods.
Intel Core i7 920 Bloomfield (2.66GHZ, 8MB L2 CACHE), 24GB DDR3 Triple channel RAM (module size 4GB), 2x MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 using SLI, 1TB SSD for Firefox program files, 2TB SSHD for Windows profile and Windows 10 with anniversary update.
The only thing I ever updated/replaced over the years on this system is the harddrives and the graphic cards. The motherboard can't even do EFI booting (Windows 7 was the latest OS at the time), it doesn't support the latest PCI-e and SATA standards, the processor doesn't even have AVX. I can't justify getting a new PC though, this thing still runs all my new games with no problem at 60fps.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Heads up, FF 48 has removed the browser.urlbar.unifiedcomplete setting. This setting was introduced in Firefox 43 to disable the annoying Unified Complete system introduced in that build. Unified Complete is what causes the first drop-down result to be "Visit/Search With [domain]" rather than the most relevant result, as was the default before Firefox 43.
Since the preference has been removed entirely, there is no current way to get this behavior back. It would need to be fixed by an extension.
"How to Use Quotation Marks" by Mignon Fogarty states: "in British English periods and commas can go inside or outside (kind of like the American rules for question marks and exclamation points)." I write in American English with two exceptions that I can think of: periods and commas interact with quotation marks in the British manner, and dates are in international form (yyyy-mm-dd). I've chosen to mix select aspects of one national style into another where I find it justifiable, and if that's inherently wrong, Oxford University Press must also be wrong for using -ize in otherwise British English publications.
While what you say is true on some level - a compromised process can dick with your system, including other processes, just fine - you're missing the point of having a multi-process browser for security. The vast majority of what a browser does requires almost no access to the rest of the computer. You can have one container process that runs with user privileges and implements the few things the browser needs to be able to do to the system at large (save downloaded files, etc.) in a very secure manner, and is also responsible for launching sandboxed, low-privilege sub-processes that do the dangerous work of a browser (parsing web server responses, running plugins, executing javascript, etc.). If these sandboxed processes are compromised, the attacker can still fuck with your browser... but they can't get out into the rest of your system.
This is how Chrome and IE have worked for years (though Chrome's sandbox is a lot tighter than IE's). It's not just about stability/reliability, there's also a very real element of security here. Chrome's sandboxed render processes are so underprivileged that there's practically nothing a compromised one can do (to the rest of the computer) except try to attack its full-user-privilege container / broker process (through the IPC channels that let it do things like say "Please ask the user where they want to save this downloaded file"), but that is a very small attack surface compared to most of what a browser does, and the trusted process can have that attack surface very well-hardened.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The developer and nightly builds will require signing soon.
Citation needed. I thought the whole point of the developer build was to let its users develop websites and extensions, possibly using experimental features that'll be introduced two releases from now.
The plan is actually to drop extensions completely. They're also adding support for what are roughly Greasemonkey scripts, but those aren't going to be anywhere near as capable as extensions are.
If your extension can be ported to a content script easily, then great, but otherwise you're screwed and won't even be allowed to keep your extension working.
That's the question with Mozilla, isn't it? Firefox is wonderfully customizeable, but they get pissy if you don't like their wondeful innovations... first they give you a check-box to disable it, they they yank that and you have to mess with about:config, then after awhile they yank that...
But remember, they're "Commited to you"! It says so right there on the web site.
Firefox Developer at least by default does not crap out like that. The default is only one 'Web Content' process and even RAM use is not bad.
It's not that the browser froze. I used to get to the same pains and think how slow it is when a machine is heavily swapping.. (though with dual core CPUs and hard drives that use DMA, swapping is less worse than it used to be).
Now, even with lots of swapping and 100% CPU use you can still use the PC. It's when you run out of both RAM *and* swap that you're toasted, as good as dead unless you're lucky (sitting right over the fence) and can manage to kill a process.
I blame Linux : at this point the "OOM killer" should probably kill a recent, hungry process.
Also, by this point managing the mouse cursor is a cheap routine but the X11 server gets useless. Ctrl-Alt-F1 might work (after 30 seconds or several minutes) but log in is too heavy an operation, i.e. launching bash and before that whatever is needed for a log in.
An already logged in console or ssh session might work, and I'm not even sure (you'd have to be able to run the kill or killall command, too)
"Magic" Alt + SysRq might be the best option left, if you have a "Print Screen" key on the keyboard (the dual PrintScreen / SysRq key). It's disabled by default, the kernel itself needs the option enabled (or compiled in)
I used to get to the same pains and think how slow it is when a machine is heavily swapping..
Without the disk light, I can't tell if it's swapping...
launching bash
In Slack tty1 is always running (but not logged in), and I have no trouble getting there if the keyboard still works after the X server freezes.
"Magic" Alt + SysRq might be the best option left...
Now I have to find something that's as effective for Windows.
Still, there was no reason to take away our reset switch. They could have just made it recessed (needing a paperclip) to prevent accidents. We need a real mechanical way to force an instant restart/shutdown of the machine. Failure to provide one is actually dangerous.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If you really want in a browser provide a PLUGIN to.
Mobile browsers don't support plug-ins. Desktop browsers require a separate plug-in for each (browser, operating system) pair. Chrome uses PPAPI, Firefox uses NPAPI, and IE uses (used?) ActiveX. If you use a different browser or a different operating system from that used by the plug-in developer, you will miss out on the use of this plug-in. Besides, this sort of thinking led to the security hole we call Flash Player.
So what do you use? Edge?
They probably use Netscape Navigator 4.7.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
The plan is actually to drop extensions completely.
This is blatantly false. Either back up your statements with citations (which you can't) or stop spreading FUD.
I'm going to the casino. Don't gamble.
The Sarcasm Detector is also broken.
Table-ized A.I.
Yes. Even branded desktop PCs lack the reset switch.
I remember killing a PC/AT by flipping the switch of and on after crashing some DOS game, and doing that all to often. I killed the PSU, and it might have worked still but the hard drive was dead too. It was an almost 20-year-old freebie, but killing the hardware by being impatient was silly.
Software ought to improve, likely.
I did some googling (duckducking?) for the OOM condiiton in linux : I found something about linux 4.6 having a better OOM killer (so, Ubuntu 16.04.2 and Mint 18.1 might have better OOM behavior).
There are also, hum, passionate slashdot users who insist a real OS like FreeBSD and Solaris properly survive very high loads unlike the toy OS trash we run.
SysRq is some kind of lore to me, when I presume it was still popular I was priding myself on having Windows 98se blue screens that can be survived without rebooting the entire machine or OS.
Here's the inevitable bug report - which has since been dismissed and closed by the developers:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...