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Firefox 55 Arrives With WebVR on Windows, Performance Panel, and Click-to-Play Flash (venturebeat.com)
Mozilla today made available a new update to Firefox for Windows to introduce support for WebVR, that the company says, will enable desktop VR users to dive into web-based experiences with ease. Firefox 55 also includes performance panel, faster startup when restoring multiple tabs, a quicker way to search across various search engines, and click-to-play Flash by default. From a report: WebVR is an experimental JavaScript API that provides support for virtual reality devices, such as the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Google Cardboard. As its name implies, the technology is meant for browsers. If you find a web game or app that supports VR, just click the VR goggles icon visible on the web page to experience it using your VR headset. WebVR supports navigating and controlling VR experiences with handset controllers or your movements in physical space. [...] Firefox 55 also allows users to adjust the number of processes and how much resources they want to allocate to any of them. This setting is at the bottom of the General section in Options. In fact, if your computer has more than 8GB of RAM, Mozilla recommends "bumping up the number of content processes that Firefox uses" because it will make Firefox faster, though at the expense of using more memory. In its own tests on Windows 10, the company found that Firefox uses less memory than Chrome, even with eight content processes running.
As a long time Firefox user, I'm scared about the upcoming Firefox 57 release. According to that Mozilla blog post, as of Firefox 57 "Firefox will only run WebExtensions." So that could mean a lot of existing extensions will no longer work.
Firefox's market share has already fallen precipitously. The most-used release, Firefox 54, only has 3.75% of the market. The next most popular release of Firefox, Firefox 52, has only 0.52%. Firefox for Android has only 0.04% of the market. Overall, Firefox has only about 5% of the market.
5% is dangerously low. Chrome, for example, is over 50%. Safari has over 10%. UC Browser for Android has over 9%. Firefox is now in the range of Opera Mini, with its 3% of the market.
I think that Firefox 57, and this switch to WebExtensions, will be what finally eliminates Firefox as a viable web browser. Broken extensions will no doubt anger many of Firefox's few remaining users. I would not be surprised if many of them will move to some other browser. And these are users that Firefox can't afford to lose.
Firefox 57 takes away one of the few remaining strong points of Firefox: its flexible and powerful extension system.
Firefox doesn't even have privacy working in its favor any longer. Firefox's privacy policy shows that it sends a lot of information to Mozilla and others. For example, it indicates that even Firefox's geolocation capabilities can use Google's service, and this involves sending information to Google.
So Firefox will soon become an almost identical clone of Chrome, including its own imitation of Chrome's UI, Chrome's extension model, and Chrome's privacy concerns. Yet Firefox still can't match Chrome's performance, even if some Firefox fanatics claim otherwise. Firefox users have clearly indicated that they find Firefox to be too slow, too bloated, and to use too much memory.
For all intents and purposes, we should probably consider Firefox to be a "dead" browser at this point. Its market share is dropping, and could very well be under 1% by this time next year. It has dropped to such a low range that web developers no longer test with it. This will likely result in more and more web sites that don't work well with Firefox, making the Firefox user experience even worse.
Users won't waste their time with Firefox when they can just use Chrome instead, and get the same UI and privacy experience, but with much better performance and reliability.
The worst part of all of this is that it didn't have to be like this. Firefox's developers didn't need to copy Chrome. They didn't need to ruin the Firefox user experience that Firefox users had come to love. Firefox could have been its own independent browser. Yet all of this potential has been discarded, and the end result is disturbing: Firefox is, or soon will be, an unusable browser for most of its users.
What "world"? Out of 15 extensions I have enabled 14 are currently are showing [LEGACY] flag on the options page.
Looks to me like firefox is about to die.
Really now, Mozilla. Who on Earth wants VR support in their browser?
Stop dumbing it down. Stop adding useless garbage bloat. Make the damn browser better.
So how do we go back in time and convince Mike and Matt Chapman to use a product other than Flash to make Homestar Runner?
Or how do we track down the author of every SWF vector animation and every SWF game on Newgrounds, Dagobah, Albino Blacksheep, and Kongregate, have the author dig up the original FLA, and provide a one-month rental of Adobe Animate CC so that the author can reexport everything to HTML5?
The process must be very hard to convert an add-on to the new standard. Even Mozilla's own "Add-on Compatibility Reporter" is listed as legacy.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...
If Mozilla can't even do it then how do they expect others to do it it??
Most all my add-ins are listed as Legacy. Some are listed a compatible with Multiprocess and some are not.
Well, welcome to the wonderfull world of FireFox ESR.
Firefox ESR 52 will allow you to keep your old time extensions until Aprox April next year.
Also, your NPAPI plug-ins (Like the ones you have to use for SabaMeeting, Cisco WebEx, and al sorts of ILO plugins for server and network gear).
Just install (or downgrade to) Firefox ESR52.
While this is not optimal, It will bid you time so that your Plug-ins and AdOns are ported to the new FireFox framework (which is SIMILAR BUT NOT EQUAL to that of chrome). Or ported to chrome, or whatever other solution your provider of said Plug-ins or AdOns considers...
I've been on the ESR channel since its inception (I can not have my workflow disrupted every three months or so, when the firefox devs decide to change another thing).
While is not a bed of roses (specially at the end of the life of the ESR, when pretty much all sites believe your browser is "out of date and insecure" [which it is NOT]), is better than the alternative for people like us who use the browser as a WORK tool first and foremost, with recreational uses in the backseat...
Having said that, I believe that the Direction Firefox is taking under the hood (I will NOT enter a UI/UX holly war) in order to increase performance and security is the right one, and a little pain in the short term is whorthwile for the performance and security rewards that will be collcted later on....
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Broken extensions will be EXTREMELY destructive to Firefox, in my opinion. Broken extensions will be as though Mozilla Foundation spent $100 million on advertising to kill Firefox. Extensions are the main reason I use Firefox and Pale Moon (Pale Moon had a 64-bit version before Firefox).
I installed Google's Chrome browser a long time ago. I discovered Chrome had installed 3 system services. So Chrome and Google had more control over my computer than I normally allow myself. Now, no more Chrome on any of my computers.
Why do software company managers become self-destructive? Firefox managers are EXTREMELY self-destructive, in my opinion. Google is rapidly traveling from "Do no evil" to "Do evil if it make money" if that initially makes money, in my opinion.
My Firefox and Pale Moon extensions
The first is a Pale Moon ad-blocker. Some Firefox extensions don't work in Pale Moon:
"This add-on will stop working when Firefox 57 arrives in November 2017."
"This add-on will stop working when Firefox 57 arrives in November 2017 and Mozilla drops support for XUL / XPCOM / legacy add-ons. It should still work on Firefox 52 ESR until ESR moves to Firefox 59 ESR in 2018 (~Q2).
"There is no 'please port it' or 'please add support for it' this time, because the entire add-on eco system changes and the technology behind this kind of add-on gets dropped without replacement."
USE THIS: ghostery-5.4.10-sm+an+fx.xpi Link: Version 5.4.10
Ghostery sells data it collects. (Business Insider, Jun 18, 2013)
Ghostery web site
I've been trying to use firefox again due to privacy concerns with Chrome. I've been really frustrated by the poor performance, despite the new multi-process.
I just realized, now that there's a GUI (performance panel) that I multi-process wasn't enabled because I had a single legacy addon. I disabled that addon and now FireFox is MUCH faster.
I know everyone hates that the legacy addons are going away--and I do think FireFox needs to do something about this--support them longer, fund development of the most popular addons, something... but MultiProcess FF is amazingly faster than before. I would never want to go back...
-=Lothsahn=-
So how do we go back in time and convince Mike and Matt Chapman to use a product other than Flash to make Homestar Runner?
I saw a documentary which explained how.
Or how do we track down the author of every SWF vector animation
Or maybe just build a Flash runtime in WebAssembly. It's more productive than bemoaning the demise of Flash. The proprietor of Flash doesn't care about their proprietary platform anymore. So if you do care for some reason, then you're the one who's going to have to build it.