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Firefox 51 Arrives With HTTP Warning, WebGL 2 and FLAC Support (venturebeat.com)
Reader Krystalo writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 51 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The new version includes a new warning for websites which collect passwords but don't use HTTPS, WebGL 2 support for better 3D graphics, and FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) playback. Mozilla doesn't break out the exact numbers for Firefox, though the company does say "half a billion people around the world" use the browser. In other words, it's a major platform that web developers target -- even in a world increasingly dominated by mobile apps.
you still my choice on all desktops and smartphones
Been using Firefox since the first beta release. Will always be my favorite.
Is it really?
One of the recent updates (48/49/50( absolutely KILLED the performance. Particularly annoying is the URL bar. Autocomplete results take longer to populate and my usual pattern of opening tabs was broken. I used to type in a few characters, select the entry, and hit enter. For example: sl, down (or tab), enter, ctrl+t, ca, down (or tab), enter, ctrl+t, etc. would open up slashdot, then a new tab for my calendar, then a new tab for... Ever since the performance tanked, I couldn't do that anymore without deliberately slowing down at each step.
I even tried blowing out all of my old history (years and years of browsing data on one machine). This was particularly annoying as clearing out everything older than 6 months will do so based on the FIRST access date, not the last access date. So clearing out everything older than 6 months blows out slashdot even though I access it daily. I had to go into each subfolder in the history control and sort by last access date, then blow out everything older than a threshold of a few months back. This took almost an hour of constant work because deleting history this way causes FF to update the UI constantly. CPU usage spiked to 100% of a single core while FF deleted an entry, updated the scroll bar, scrolled the list, then deleted the next entry. To prevent FF from locking up completely and crashing I had to work in batches of a few thousand and let it stew for a couple of minutes before hitting the next batch.
And after all that work, with a history file that was in the hundreds of thousands instead of tens of millions, performance was still ass.
Webkit can probably count all the mobile users who use the default browser as part of its user count. Similarly, maybe Firefox is the browser being used on ATM screens on mall info terminals, that would add a lot of 'users' who are actually clueless as to which browser is underlying their UX.
Yet? I'll give it a chance when it's at least as sandboxed as chrome.
Who is Mozilla to assume that every damn website is important enough to require encryption?
They haven't. HTTPS-less are still going to work.
Slashdot didn't support HTTPS for a good 18 years and we all survived.
Yes, having done things one way in the past is an excellent reason for continuing to do them.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Although the world has largely switched to Chrome, the remaining use for Firefox is as the one browser that is still willing to support Java applets. Lots of people who work in IT have a VM or a jumpbox whose only purpose is to run Java applets inside of Firefox (for example, to do maintenance on some piece of equipment with a Java-applet-based configuration tool -- I'm talking to you, EMC) -- and *never* *run* *updates* because changing the browser or java version even slightly will break the whole thing.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
In other words, itâ(TM)s a major platform that web developers target -- even in a world increasingly dominated by mobile apps.
I'm not sure I understand this comment. I use Firefox as my main browser on both of my mobile platforms (phone and tablet). It probably just beats Twitter as my #1 app used on those devices. Why would someone imply they are some incompatible with each other?
You mean it's appier?
Not relevant to the HTTP/S issue, but not too long ago, the UK was spoofing slashdot to attack their targets, so it could happen.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Try with a fresh Fx profile to compare performance to your usual one. Nine times out of ten, I find that it's some obscure setting people flipped in about:config or an addon that's causing their massive performance problems. The rest are generally caused by people using the heaviest web apps out there, and wondering why their browsers aren't running as well as they did years ago before all of these resource-hungry apps.
...it's a major platform that web developers target...
I dunno about that. I am finding more and more websites where Firefox does not render the page properly. I retry Firefox in safe mode, and there still are problems rendering the page. So I switch to (gasp!) IE, and the page renders fine.
.
In my experience, it appears that web developers are beginning to abandon Firefox compatibility, probably because of its very low marketshare.
'Half a billion' refers to their memory usage.
Less than half a GB? That would be great!
are still going to work.
Still going to work implies that it won't dick the user about for trivial things.
Yes, having done things one way in the past is an excellent reason for continuing to do them.
I noticed you sidestepped the question. The way we do something in the past is an intrinsic defence against change. If you can't come up with a good reason for a change then the way we have done something in the past is in fact an excellent reason not to change something.
I think its the Rust code. Firefox has been quite unstable the last few months, with tabs crashing and pages failing to render images.
...Even if Firefox had retained its market share on desktops, they would have had the same problem....
I disagree, but I'm not going to argue the hypothetical.
I noticed you sidestepped the question.
The only question you asked was a) rhetorical and b) logically fallacious, so yes, I did "sidestep" it. I don't remember agreeing to be the one to answer it, anyway, so I'm not sure you're getting snippy with me.
If you can't come up with a good reason for a change then the way we have done something in the past is in fact an excellent reason not to change something.
You really can't think of a good reason not to submit passwords in the clear? Or that a warning about same won't help to alert a user that he's on a spoofed page?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Is there any way to tell which extensions are blocking multiprocess? My about:support page says multiprocess is disabled because of extensions, but it doesn't say which ones. It seems like they should publish this information, perhaps in a field on AMO. A Google only turns up results for developer testing or small lists, it says nothing about a complete list of incompatible extensions.
I don't know if anyone at Mozilla reads Slashdot any longer, but I think this would be a worthwhile documentation project that would help users demand extension authors make their software compatible, thus aiding the roll-out.
I don't need a bunch of annoying security messages that either tell me something I already know, or that tell me something I have already decided to ignore. What, I think, _everybody_ wants from a browser is: - decent memory management (I don't care if I page takes 2ms more to load, especially if the price is to have a browser taking 2gb of RAM and making my system unusable) - minimalist interface - fast startup time - fast page load Extra points if it also has: - add-on support - sound and videos on page load disabled by default - address autocomplete That's it. Really. It's a fucking browser. It's sole purpose is to render web-pages. I don't need another operating system. If I wanted that, I'd install a VM or emacs.
I don't need a bunch of annoying security messages that either tell me something I already know, or that tell me something I have already decided to ignore. What, I think _everybody_ wants from a browser is:
- decent memory management (I don't care if I page takes 2ms more to load, especially if the price is to have a browser taking 2gb of RAM and making my system unusable)
- minimalist interface
- fast startup time
- fast page load
Extra points if it also has:
- add-on support
- sound and videos on page load disabled by default
- address autocomplete That's it. Really. It's a fucking browser. It's sole purpose is to render web-pages. I don't need another operating system. If I wanted that, I'd install a VM or emacs.
The problem is likely the internal sqlite database fragmentation. On Windows you can run tools like "speedyfox" in order to defrag the database.
Bad performance is likely caused by having lots of extensions enabled.
Mozilla today launched Firefox 51 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android
And the on-line world responded with a huge, jaw-cracking yawn.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Adding a browser vendor prefix is the proper way to add features that are not yet standardized. The fact that they're not removing support for those prefixes is so old websites won't stop working on the newest versions of browsers.
The only thing you can be annoyed about when a browser adds someone else's prefixes to their own, i.e. Firefox should not be adding -webkit prefixes anymore than Apple adding -edge prefixes.
#DeleteFacebook
Firefox was just getting too heavy for me. I'm on Linux, (Mint 18 XFCE) and it was taking 30-45 seconds to become responsive after launching. It would just sit there. Even if I launched it from the command line with a url, it refused to do anything for that time period was up. CPU and memory were not taxed or even being used by FF. I have an older processor, but plenty to handle a damn web browser. (Intel Core2 Quad Core, 8GB of RAM) Unless I open a ton of tabs and GIMP, I barely ever get past 4GB used. I have used FF almost exclusively since at least 1999. I went to Chromium for about a year a while ago, but came back to FF.
After a few months of putting up with its freezing issue, and hoping updates would fix it, I just had to quit using it. If I left it open, I would notice that the CPU would spike for several seconds on occasion, and hang out around 20% for a while. While no page was loaded. I could only put up with it for so long.
I have a few other browsers installed... Don't really like Chrome or Chromium. I like certain specific things about FF that other browsers don't have, at least not in the way I like them. Then I found Pale Moon , and it seems to fit the bill. There are still a few things I would like to be able to customize better, but so far it's the winner in my book. That may change, I don't know. But FF seems to just keep pushing me away.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Even numbered versions or odd numbered versions that are good for FireFox
I know one thing you can count on is that a new version will change the UI just to be annoying
oh, and break all the add-ons
One of these days I 'll switdh to just using SeaMonky
Re God forbid the NSA could pose as thegarbz on Slashdot, oh noes!
The security services got to use quantum insert.
GCHQ Created Spoofed LinkedIn and Slashdot Sites To Serve Malware (November 11, 2013)
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
UK spies continue “quantum insert” attack via LinkedIn, Slashdot page (11/11/2013)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Who is Mozilla to assume that every damn website is important enough to require encryption?
Answer: password re-use.
Yes, that obscure website that you use to get movie reviews and choose which session you're going to watch in which theatre isn't that much important.
Except that most of the dumb users will have used the exact same password in other much more critical places :
- their bank account
- their gmail account, which serves as the e-mail fall back for all the "password lost" on nearly any other website
So by stealing "a" password on some obscure website, an attacker could completely steal the online indentity of a user just because the user was stupid enough to reuse passwords.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Well I haven't so stick your fanboi bullshit up your arse
I only have a few extensions - Adblock Plus or Ublock Origins (some machines have one, some have the other; no machines have both), New Tab Override (just takes me to about:blank instead of about:tab for new tabs), NoScript, and Ghostery (only on some machines).
I figured the database was the issue, which is why I went through blowing out history. I'll try speedyfox and see if it helps. Firefox occasionally tells me "Hey, refresh your shit!" and I'm like "Fuck you! I have it set up to make it usable!".
Speedyfox is the real deal. Shit's FIXED!
Christ. Heaven forbid someone points out that problems are often solved by troubleshooting, rather than pissing and moaning.
>Why do I have to reset my Firefox profile every couple of months just to get it to kind of work better, while I never have to do that for Chrome?
I don't know. Why do so many other people NOT have to do that, yet you have to? If you don't want to find out, then fuck off with your holier-than-thou attitude about how Firefox sucks because it's just not stroking you off the right way.
>I've used the same Chrome profile for years now
>Chrome works perfectly.
Yes, and there are many people who would say the same about Firefox, because people's needs from a browser aren't exactly the same as yours.
Look. I'm glad Chrome works perfectly for you. I'm also perfectly willing to accept that Firefox doesn't work for you. The question is still why? And why are you so against figuring that out, instead of felating Chrome like a cheap whore and then accusing others of doing the same for Firefox?
>Why is Firefox so much worse than Chrome? Why are Firefox's users constantly told to use fresh profiles, while Chrome's users don't have to do this?
Gee, I don't know, maybe it's because Firefox allows you to customize far more than Chrome, to the point of letting you screw up? Or that it has many more third party apps like shitty A/V software fucking with it? Perhaps because it's is so much older than Chrome that it has needed extreme overhauls, while not breaking everything for all of its users as it does so?
I seriously wonder if you guys who say these things have even tried to reset your profiles, or if you're just avoiding any troubleshooting at all. Maybe if you collectively spent less time bitching in vain online while stroking Chrome's ego, you could have helped to diagnose whatever problems you're having, they would have been fixed, and all of this finger-waggling of yours wouldn't be necessary anymore.
The problem with the database Firefox uses is it doesn't actually delete entries when you delete them. It just marks them as deleted so apparently database queries still spend time skipping over them. They aren't actually removed until you perform a vacuum operation on the database. As you found out, there are tools like Speedyfox which do that for you.
Firefox has tons of issues. I'm amazed it's gotten as far as it has with so many fundamental design mistakes. But I guess that really just shows you the sorry state browsers are in. Granted they're required to do a lot, but they implement the basics so poorly.
The thing is, SQLite supports vacuuming and 2 different autovacuum modes. At a minimum, I would think Mozilla would set them to vacuum after emptying large amounts of data, or incrementally when idle.
Either way, download the official SQLite CLI client and vacuum the databases yourself and you can see a dramatic difference if it have been awhile since the last time you did.
The funny thing is that if you'd have just reset your profile in Firefox and settled for the same relatively limited experience Pale Moon offers you, then you would probably have better performance then even Pale Moon offers. Firefox is often only truly slow because of all the customizations and unexpectedly heavy addons people toss at it, and when you switch to another browser you end up losing a lot of those things in the process. It's only later on that you realize that Pale Moon suffers the same problems, and you're left worried about whether they'll be able to keep it going or whether it will collapse as it cannot adopt the very necessary improvements that Firefox is making right now, because the core of Pale Moon is too obsolete.
So somehow they're saying that there are 10 billion people in the world?
Yup. And of those 10 billion, at last four billion love, love, love Australis. And another two billion want Pocket integrated into Firefox. The only downside to the Mozilla... sorry, MI//lla://: whatever it's called now good-news tour is that one or possibly two people have complained about problems with memory leaks, but luckily that affects so few people that it's not worth addressing.
That's the sad truth about Chrome vs. Firefox. I've been a FF user since Phoenix 0.3, and conversely really dislike Chrome, but for some things you just have to use Chrome because FF sucks so much at it. The other day I was forced to use Chrome and was amazed at how responsive it was, doing things where FF just slows to a crawl for a minute or more didn't even bother Chrome. And other things can't even compare, the first time I printed off some web pages using Chrome (it was the only browser installed on the machine I was using) I was astounded at what I got, an actual copy of the web page as rendered, not a single blank page, headers and footers only, images broken or spread onto their own page, missing text, everything squashed into a single narrow column down the centre of the page, etc etc. Ever since then I haven't even bothered trying to print with FF any more, it's so unlikely to get a printed page that resembles the on-screen rendered page that you're just wasting paper and time trying to do it with FF.
Firefox does seem to automatically clean places.sqlite. Not sure what the interval (or trigger) is, but I've got an about:config value, storage.vacuum.last.places.sqlite, which seems to store an epoch time for the last time it was done. In my case, it corresponds to 24 Dec. 2016, or a little under a month ago. So they're not leaving it wholly uncleaned it appears.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Did they really roll out Firefox 51 for Android?
F-Droid, Google Play, and their own direct download link all seem to still have 50.1.0. Clicking the "check for updates" on the "About Firefox" screen says "no updates available".
I would, but it does not appear to be supported on any OS that I use.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I personally hope they sorted out that thing where after you switch tabs the browser still thinks you're on the previous tab
Yes, I have experienced this also. Firefox doesn't update the window title when closing a tab and quite a few times when switching tabs. Also, it sometimes doesn't update the address bar. I have many FF windows open and need the window title to be correct in the task bar.
Using phpMyAdmin in FF takes a very long time to show a table structure. Most of the time FF pops up a message that says "This page is slowing FF down".
And right click on a page and select 'View Page Source' and FF yields a window that is blank.
I sure miss the old Firefox. Sigh.
I'd never really thought about this before, but you are completely right - printing in FF is absolutely terrible. The number of times I have printed something at work to read later, and found myself giving up to read it from the screen instead because the print out was unusable.
I've never understood how FF manages to fsck up printing so badly. Under Windows at least with the unified model you create a device context and then render your document either to a display or to a printer via GDI calls, depending on which sort of DC you've created. Somehow though FF manages to get totally different results depending on whether it's rendering the same document to a display context or to a print context. I don't think I've ever found another app that's that bad at producing a printed version of the same document that it's just successfully rendered on the screen.
I am curious - how is market share being defined?
Number of users; number of installations; number of hits on a collection of websites; survey or market research results?
Avoiding splitting certain things across pages, such as a line of text or a small table or image, is one major difference between screen and print layout. Print also has stronger preference for black on white because of consumables costs proportional to ink coverage.
Enjoying your $4 to $10/mo subscription to each site you visit, even momentarily, in an ad-free world?
If a particular browser publisher ought to implement only its own prefixes, then how ought the public to encourage ignorant (I.e. the majority of) web developers to make sites that work in browsers other than -webkit-?
The funny thing is that if you'd have just reset your profile in Firefox and settled for the same relatively limited experience Pale Moon offers you, then you would probably have better performance then even Pale Moon offers. Firefox is often only truly slow because of all the customizations and unexpectedly heavy addons people toss at it, and when you switch to another browser you end up losing a lot of those things in the process. It's only later on that you realize that Pale Moon suffers the same problems, and you're left worried about whether they'll be able to keep it going or whether it will collapse as it cannot adopt the very necessary improvements that Firefox is making right now, because the core of Pale Moon is too obsolete.
I use Adblocker Plus and a Gestures addon. That's it. No customizations. I even tested it out with a new profile, thinking maybe it was my browsing history or something that was causing it. I search my browsing history a lot when trying remember something I had looked at in the past. I have a lot of bookmarks, many of them old and I haven't cleaned them out. But I imported all of those into PaleMoon.
So while I appreciate the idea, that isn't what was slowing down my Firefox. It was just Firefox.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
What I would do is give all the Firefox developers a 10 years old computer with 2 GB of memory and an old fashioned hard disk, and tell them to program a browser that works well on that. Simple. It is incredible how Firefox works now in comparison to Firefox 3 or 4. The code is terribly slow and inefficient. Opening tabs, new pages, and doing pretty much anything is lagging on a 4-core with 12 GB of RAM! I understand that the webpages are the culprit, too, but everything I do in Firefox now is just laggy. I would so like to say that it's working well, but I can't, and I'm using FF ESR in Linux which is at v45.6 currently. Reading this thread I'm not at all thrilled at what v51 brings to the table. What I'd like to hear is: we programmed it in C++ from ground up for efficiency and optimised the code kinda thing. Yes, I know that's not going to happen. We need a brand new open-source browser like FF but written differently-- that!
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Regarding printing in FF, I must say that under Linux it works great. I often print to PDF from FF. Well at least something works great in FF... and I'm so sorry to have to say that. No wonder not so many people use FF these days. Chrome really is a better browser, but I've got lots of other problems with it, not so much its speed... and with Microsoft browsers. An Open Soource browser is the only browser I will ever use, and if that means I should cope with FF's sluggishness, then so be it.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Regarding printing in FF, I must say that under Linux it works great. I often print to PDF from FF.
Ah, and that's the trick with FF, print first to PDF and then print the PDF from a PDF reader. You still get broken printed docs sometimes, but it's not nearly as bad as printing directly to the printer. Just out of interest, what happens if you go straight to printer under Linux?
Don't use the stable release, have FF Developer (Aurora) and FF Nightly. After the rust code was implemented (its gotten better) many larger sized images on pages would just plain fail to render at all.
While that should be true. The rust code is not interfacing properly with the non-rust code - or timing issues or something... I've never had tabs crash like they have over the last 6+ weeks -- and I've been running FF Aurora (or Nightly) with hundreds of tabs since 2012 when Opera fucked off.
When you go straight to printer you can print into a PS [postscript] file that can be read by some programs like Ghostscript and printed into PDF but honestly I've never bothered with that.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti