Firefox 12 released

http://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/04/24/firefox-introduces-a-simpler-update-process-and-more-than-85-improvements-to-developer-tools/

by aritraghosh007 • 14 years ago

162 121 14 years ago

blog.mozilla.org

melling4• 14 years ago

This is the one with a full silent update? Soon most people will be running one version of Firefox? Chrome + Firefox means 40%-50% of the Internet is getting a browser update every six weeks. This will be a boon for software developers.

mbrubeck5• 14 years ago

The major change to updates in Fx12 is that the Windows UAC prompt will no longer appear for every update (by default). Some additional changes (like finishing the update in the background instead of at the next startup) are coming in a later version:

http://www.brianbondy.com/blog/id/133/

cpeterso4• 14 years ago

You can disable Firefox's "an update is available" nag dialog with about:config app.update.silent=true.

This pref has been available in Firefox for a long time, but I believe it wasn't enabled because people who don't restart their browser often would not get security updates in a timely manner.

Silhouette13• 14 years ago

Chrome + Firefox means 40%-50% of the Internet is getting a browser update every six weeks. This will be a boon for software developers.

I never understand this argument.

All we have now is two different fast-moving targets, both with a track record of introducing breaking changes. IME this just results in a significantly higher number of customers complaining to our customer support team (not Mozilla's or Google's) that our web pages/embedded UIs don't work properly any more.

I have yet to be convinced that this obsession with releasing every six weeks really gets useful features out there in a way that benefits most users anyway. As far as I can tell, about 99% of the developers using those features are people writing tech demos for the browser makers and/or trendy web design blogs. Much of the content on those sites doesn't even work on both Gecko and WebKit at the same time, never mind IE. Meanwhile, real sites still have to cope with a majority of visitors who don't have the latest shiny new features.

In any case, a lot of those features frankly aren't all that beneficial anyway compared to basic things like not freezing the entire browser UI because one tab is taking a while to load. That is something Firefox still can't do even though it's several years after every other major browser had it, and the apologists are getting awfully boring now.

sciurus• 14 years ago

"Meanwhile, real sites still have to cope with a majority of visitors who don't have the latest shiny new features."

Umm, isn't that what the 6-week-automatic-update cycle that you're arguing against is intended to address?

wickedchicken• 14 years ago

> I have yet to be convinced that this obsession with releasing every six weeks really gets useful features out there in a way that benefits most users anyway.

Security updates.

drivebyacct23• 14 years ago

>In any case, a lot of those features frankly aren't all that beneficial anyway

You're clearly not on the edge of new experimental features or you wouldn't be making such a claim.

melling4• 14 years ago

No one is saying that the day a feature is released that it will be widely adopted. CSS animations, for example, can be incorporated in sites, and as performance improves, etc it will become more widely used. Some "features" are simply performance improvements (e.g. GPU acceleration, better JS JIT, WebGL improvements; Chrome added software WebGL support on the last update).

Developers will be able to clean up their CSS more often (e.g. -webkit-border-radius, -moz-border-radius => border-radius). Sure, somethings will be only for developers at first but after a burn-in and Chrome/Firefox adoption, certain features and techniques will become mainstream. IE users will get the more "generic" page. Not a lot can be done about that.

Finally, let me add that it reduces testing for developers because now you only have to test on one version of Firefox. FF 3.6 is under %3 market share, and it was retired today.

As for the not freezing, that's a different unrelated issue. I've been running the Firefox and Chrome nightly's for a year and I'm pretty happy with both.

ricardobeat2• 14 years ago

So? If you ignore the "shiny new features", it doesn't make much difference if the updates are 6 weeks or months apart. They are not fast-moving targets because the already standardized technologies don't change. Pages render 99.9% alike on Chrome 4 to 19, same goes to FF > 3.5.

Derbasti2• 14 years ago

Will there be a Lion fullscreen-mode and Lion-style floating scrollbars? That would make my day!

Edit: Apparently, not so. A pity.

Does anyone know when we will see them?

mbrubeck5• 14 years ago

Lion fullscreen is coming in Firefox 14: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=639705

You can use it today on the Nightly builds from http://nightly.mozilla.org/ or in a few days on the Aurora channel: https://mozilla.org/firefox/aurora/

Lion-style scrollbars are still in progress: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636564

You can test them on the UX branch: https://msujaws.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/mozillas-ux-nightly...

Derbasti2• 14 years ago

So that's like, three months? Ok, not exactly the first ones on the field, but good enough for me ;)

poodougnut• 14 years ago

Lion scrollbars landed on the UX channel a few days ago.

masklinn2• 14 years ago

> Lion fullscreen-mode

Why would you want that?

Terretta• 14 years ago

So you can run apps full screen and swipe between them. It's like focus mode for apps, switching becomes very fast, and it unifies the Macbook Air experience and iPad experience for multitasking.

spenvo• 14 years ago

To the contrary: it will be a shame when they implement full screen if take away the current layered option. Firefox is the last major OSX browser to work in fullscreen while still allowing apps to be above or below it. With Moom's hotkeyed window positions--it's extremely convenient to bring a text editor to focus and still be able to scroll the web in the background. Mozilla, please don't let this happen!

dfischer• 14 years ago

We're going to have Firefox 50 in a year at this rate.

aritraghosh007• 14 years ago

With silent updates in place , I think even 100 is a possibility !

mbrubeck5• 14 years ago

Both Firefox and Chrome increment their version number every six weeks, so it's easy to see that at this rate in a year we will have Chrome 26 and Firefox 20. :)

melling4• 14 years ago

In an ideal world, we'd get an update every day. Continuous integration, a comprehensive test suite, a few million hackers test for a day, then and out the door. There's always a train leaving the station.

eps• 14 years ago

Anyone else noticed a significant improvement in overall responsiveness or am I seeing things?

jmathai• 14 years ago

I've been using Nightly for a few weeks and definitely noticed. It's been about as fast as Chrome which used to be way faster.

cpeterso4• 14 years ago

I've been using Nightly for months now and it is surprisingly stable.

bnr• 14 years ago

I still have my fingers crossed for Electrolysis (out of process tabs/sandboxing) to ship before Firefox 30.

zobzu8• 14 years ago

It ain't going to happen until they rewrite Gecko in rust. But there might be things that are close enough to it.

sanxiyn2• 14 years ago

No, Electrolysis is unrelated to Rust. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

A big problem for Gecko which does not exist for WebKit is XUL extensions. If you think about it, XUL extensions must run in UI process (unlike Chrome extensions), but XUL extensions can also access web content which lives in web process. It is nearly impossible to make this 100% compatible...

notJim• 14 years ago

Just curious: why is this something you're excited about?

superxor• 14 years ago

Obligatory release notes: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/12.0/releasenotes/

Complete list of changes: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/12.0/releasenotes/bugli...

typicalrunt• 14 years ago

In case anyone opens their Firefox 11 client and it doesn't automatically recognize there is an update available, you can go to Help -> About Firefox and it will grab the update.

Wait for the download to finish, then click the "Apply Update" button and you will be updated to Firefox 12.

cpher• 14 years ago

Thanks, worked just like you said.

cpeterso4• 14 years ago

I believe Mozilla sometimes "soft launches" auto-updates to a subset of Firefox users to find any new issues before opening the flood gates to update everyone. But, as you point out, manually checking for updates should always find the latest version.

notatoad• 14 years ago

I don't think the soft launch is so much for finding issues, it's just so their download servers don't get slaughtered.

Gormo2• 14 years ago

Be careful, though. If you go to the About dialog, it will begin downloading and installing the update automatically, without getting your permission, and you won't be able to cancel it from within the browser.

shin_lao2• 14 years ago

They're installing a service that runs with elevated privileges to bypass UAC.

I don't think it's a good thing to install that kind of loophole on your PC.

ars• 14 years ago

It's even worse to have people with ancient versions because firefox was installed by admin, but they (as they should) run as a regular user.

RDeckard2• 14 years ago

As long as it's done right and only installs updates signed by Mozilla, then it is secure.

shin_lao2• 14 years ago

I'll bet you a beer or whatever you like to drink we're going to see a flurry of exploits around this service.

I happen to have written a similar service a couple of years ago for a very different purpose and let me tell you one thing: this is nothing less than a backdoor.

You run a program from the service and make sure it runs in the user's session. The problem is, how do you decide a program is "legit"?

You're going to tell me "you check against a digital signature". Except it doesn't work. You can only check parts of the binary, not the whole binary (as some content is unpredictable once it runs).

The other big problem - assuming they have a perfect gateway - is that a vulnerability in Firefox could become catastrophic as it could go through the service to run as a privileged user and wreak havoc.

jlongster2• 14 years ago

It's how Chrome does it too, I believe.

zobzu8• 14 years ago

That's actually the right way to do it. How do you think Chromes does? Right, they're installing in the user area, not in the application area, to bypass UAC. That's wrong.

Using a service that uses authenticated connections and signed installs is similar to what Windows Update does, for the right reasons.

Best would be that Windows Update would be open to let any app hook into it for updates of course, but til then, that's as close as it gets.

Dylan168072• 14 years ago

A service to handle updates is good. A service per application to handle updates is not very good.

Why is chrome bad? It at least can't lead to a system compromise.

huhtenberg3• 14 years ago

> That's actually the right way to do it.

No, it's not. If Firefox is installed by a non-admin user, it should go into the user's directory. If it is installed by an admin, then it should ask if this is an OS-wide installation and only then drop it into %ProgramFiles%. Chrome got it absolutely right.

Gormo2• 14 years ago

How is it responsible for them to bypass UAC at all? When did it become OK to circumvent the security features of the user's OS in order to install software without his knowledge?

ranit8• 14 years ago

Chrome and Flash are installing services, but they also create tasks in Task Scheduler. Will Firefox do this as well? Can one delete the services and have only the tasks running?

antihero• 14 years ago

Isn't this basically the equivalent of suexec?

Silhouette13• 14 years ago

Has anyone got a link to a clear explanation of this new Mozilla Maintenance Service, please? I'm trying to find reliable information, but it's hard to see the wood for the trees in most of the documentation/commentary I'm finding.

I did notice that something popped up on one of my computers, having triggered an alarm in one of my security tools. I automatically told it to block the installation, the same as I do for anything else that presumes to invite itself onto my system without first explaining what it does and asking my permission.

It does seem to have sneaked in on my work PC, but seems to have configured the service to run with manual startup only. So what exactly triggers this service, and what kind of security implications are there? In short, do I really want this (given that I really don't care about absurdly frequent updates unless there's a security alert that requires an immediate fix) or should I nuke it?

mmuro2• 14 years ago

I don't know how Mozilla came to the conclusion that their Web inspector is actually usable.

The HTML doesn't appear when inspecting (no, that takes an extra click). The CSS appears in an extra vertical sidebar taking up even more room on the screen. You can't add a Console button, but 3D View is worthy?

I love Firefox, but this it's just plain odd they didn't integrate Firebug into core.

padenot• 14 years ago

In my Nightly (don't know about current release), I just have to click once on the show html button, and if I inspect another page later, it brings the HTML panel along.

I actually find the vertical CSS sidebar to be an excellent choice. CSS (and code in general) is an inherently vertical thing (short line length), whereas the number of rules displayed is maximized using a vertical panel. A console button would maybe be a good idea, but I only use the keyboard shortcuts, so I don't mind, this prevent reducing the visual clutter.

Firebug is a seriously old and not that sufficiently maintened code base, hence the choice to write new tools, more integrated with the browser.

Jgrubb• 14 years ago

I was under the impression that Firebug was being actively developed again. Is that not right? They had some really cool features that Webkit inspector did not last I tried it, which was fairly recently.

dangoor2• 14 years ago

Yes, the style inspector is vertical for exactly the reason you cite. We're also working on a better solution so that it doesn't cause issues with responsive designs.

Firebug is still actively maintained and continues to have new releases and improvements. Firebug 1.10 (currently in alpha), for example, is now restartless and has less impact on page performance.

c_t_montgomery• 14 years ago

Completely agree. I've heard some people like it - I am struggling to see how it'd be useful, or have any benefits over firebug.

devicenull• 14 years ago

I'm not even sure why they're trying to create a Firebug replacement. Isn't this how we get browser bloat, by including every possible tool with the core browser?

bzbarsky2• 14 years ago

Two things:

1) The Firebug team had their own priorities, development timeframes, and goals, and wasn't interested in being integrated in the core, exactly.

2) The Firebug code is .... not easy to work with. Actually trying to make any sort of significant changes to it without introducing some serious problems is pretty hard.

mmuro2• 14 years ago

I totally understand it's way easier to start from scratch. It's a little disappointing to hear that the Firebug team didn't want to play ball.

It's not a big deal and I can continue to use Firebug, but the UI decisions still baffle me. Safari and Chrome display the HTML (which 90% of the time is what I'm after to begin with anyways) upon inspection with the CSS on the side. Being able to turn these off would be fine by me, but don't make me opt in every single time. Also, having the Console and other browser inspections would really take it to the next level.

Functionality notwithstanding, I really like the look and feel of it.

jomohke• 14 years ago

It will remember that you last had the CSS/HTML windows open when you reopen them.

I like that it takes less screen space by default, given that most of my usage is just selecting and analysing the CSS. It's great on a Macbook air.

ComputerGuru• 14 years ago

They haven't gotten rid of the "checking for compatibility updates" dialog - which was the worst part of the Firefox upgrade process in the first place.

Until FF fixes their extension compatibility, stops breaking plugins with each release, gets rid of version verification for all the popular plugins, and finds a more streamlined way (non-modal, ffs!) of prompting you to enable/disable extensions that are now broken or require more permissions, they'll still be playing catchup to Chrome's autoupdate procedure.

zobzu8• 14 years ago

Well, they're playing catch up on that, that's for sure. But my understanding is that they're adding the necessary features one by one. Next is silent updates (=no dialogs). This one is just "no UAC prompt".

tvon• 14 years ago

FWIW, the Web Inspector looked horrible until I switched to the default theme.

tomflack2• 14 years ago

Lion native full-screen mode: what's the difficulty stopping this?

potch• 14 years ago

Nothing, actually! It's already in our Nightly builds, and will be appearing in Aurora some time this week. You can grab Nightly at http://nightly.mozilla.org

tomflack2• 14 years ago

Can you give us some insight in to the decision making process when prioritizing feature additions then? It seems bizzare to me that it's taken since the first developer preview in Feburary of 2011 to get the feature in to merely the nightlies.

kijin2• 14 years ago

Updated both Firefox and Thunderbird today. As usual, no problems whatsoever.

On the other hand, I'm still waiting for the Thunderbird team to fix this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=449299

smhinsey3• 14 years ago

It seems to have subtly broken TreeStyleTabs on OS X, which is a shame because I am addicted to it, but at least it's still usable (the tabs take up ~150 pixels of vertical space). Hopefully this will resolve itself with a TST update.

That said, wow, the OS X improvements are huge. Previously I could only force quit if I wanted to shut down to free memory or whatever, but now it closes normally. I'm also not seeing the same kind of memory usage, but it's early so I'm not sure how long that will last.

rkudeshi• 14 years ago

What part of Tree Style Tabs does it break?

I was about to upgrade, but TST is by far my most important extension (and the number one reason I've never seriously considered switching to Chrome).

smhinsey3• 14 years ago

It's purely the visual component I mentioned, the functionality seems to be okay, although it's reported as broken in the add-on manager. I have the tab bar docked on the left vertically and the tabs are ~3x taller than they should be.

I'm the same way about switching to Chrome, by the way. I would love to but I just can't picture life without TST after so many years.

jasonkester• 14 years ago

Glad to see they've finally moved to silent updates. That's the feature that lost me years ago, and as nice to see it finally make it, I don't think I'm coming back from Chrome.

The problem with the "hey, before we're going to let you use Firefox, we need to download a new version for you. Wait a few minutes" screen is that it stops you dead from being able to do whatever you opened the browser to do. It's jarring enough to make you avoid Firefox for anything except the times when you absolutely need to test something on it.

That means you use it less often, which means that opening it always puts you through that annoying process. Every Single Time you use Firefox.

So over the years, they've trained me that "Firefox == Pain". It'll take them a long time to train me back.

But I applaud them for finally trying.

Firefox 12 released

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