Firefox 16 live: Here's What's New

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/16.0/releasenotes/

by lforrest • 14 years ago

72 81 14 years ago

mozilla.org

MatthewPhillips• 14 years ago

So it adds Webapp support, but the Firefox Marketplace is not yet open to the public, is this correct?

gkoberger2• 14 years ago

That is correct. The Firefox parts have to land before the Marketplace can open, otherwise the Marketplace is useless.

freehunter7• 14 years ago

I wish they'd just bump the version number to 30 then save major revision numbers for major revisions. I don't see anything in here that would warrant anything but a bump from 15 to 15.5 under the old Firefox revision standards.

Scene_Cast2• 14 years ago

Yep, same feeling here. There seems to be a new trend of a shifted decimal point: "beta"-ish feel until version 10, and a .1 version bump is now a new release.

superxor• 14 years ago

I think it's time to cut this 'version number' debate. Mozilla has been pretty clear about the plan to use such a system. The only problem was from enterprise users which Mozilla has addressed. The background auto-update is in the stable builds now, should be enough to keep FF updated. I am really tired of this versioning non-sense. Users complained, Mozilla addressed legitimate concerns. Now it's just a difference in perspective. Seems like the new system is actually helping Mozilla put out updates faster. Lets move on.

freehunter7• 14 years ago

I know they've been very open about why they're using major revision numbers for minor features. I don't like it when Chrome does it either. I just don't like the arms race that is developing to have the higher revision number. I just get a little disappointed when I see a new major number and the changelog is minor additions and bugfixes.

Just because Mozilla has their reason for making the change doesn't mean everyone has to be happy about the change. I'm not complaining about Firefox, I'm complaining about the number, and the corruption of what that number is supposed to mean.

sabret00the7• 14 years ago

It's worth mentioning that the complete bug list is a lot larger: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/16.0/releasenotes/bugli...

gulbrandr• 14 years ago

Indeed, there seems to be 1989 bug fixes!

darkstalker2• 14 years ago

How come no one complains about Chrome version numbers?

freehunter7• 14 years ago

In a reply to someone else, I did complain about Chrome's version numbers. That too bothers me. I have to imagine this issue is similar to people who complain about Windows RT's app model. Apple did it from day one, so there are few complaints. Microsoft switched to it just to keep up, which causes a lot of complaints. In this situation, Chrome is Apple who did it from day one without causing a major fuss, and Firefox is Microsoft who switched to it to great fanfare in order to keep up with the competition.

bryanlarsen• 14 years ago

I think even the Firefox team would agree with you in saying that their version numbers are now meaningless. Which is why they are slowly removing the version number from every user visible interaction.

The point is that Firefox never wants to ever have a "major release" again. Small frequent changes work much better for everybody. So what are their options? Keep incrementing the minor number? The major major number then becomes meaningless and you end up with absurdities like "2.6.39".

I think the solution they chose is much better than the one Linus chose. What's the difference between 2.6.39 and 3.0? About the same as 2.6.38 to 2.6.39, and 3.0 to 3.1. Eventually they'll get up to 3.BIG and he'll call it 4.0 for no particularly reason.

chousuke• 14 years ago

The thing is, given the Firefox project's new development model, their old versioning scheme makes absolutely no sense. Deciding which version numbner to bump would be completely arbitrary and exactly as informative as just using a single number that tells the user "this version is newer than the one with a lower number", which is the only useful information they can convey using version numbers.

Would you also be one to complain about the Linux kernel versioning scheme? It conveys exactly as much information as Firefox' does and works on the same principle. They just happen to have that extra first "major" number there, but it exists only for compatibility reasons. The change from 2.6.39 to 3.0 was exactly as "major" as pretty much every "point" release since 2.6.0. Yet I don't see people complaining about the version numbers every time a new kernel version is released.

freehunter7• 14 years ago

I had originally included Linux in my complaint, but removed it because I didn't want to open that can of worms.

cutie• 14 years ago

Linux versioning now makes more sense--in that every new release is a minor release. Fits better with the historical use of such numbers.

mbchandar• 14 years ago

i am worried. even though it touched 16, it still sucks most of my memory and slows down the system and drains the battery immediately (1 hour of power)

Firefox still needs to improve its memory usage.

abraham3• 14 years ago

Check what extensions you are using. Firefox by itself uses much less memory and is very fast now.

mccr8• 14 years ago

Can you be more specific about the kinds of problems you are seeing? Can you reproduce these problems in safe mode? You should file a bug at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ and put [MemShrink] in the whiteboard.

freehunter7• 14 years ago

I cleaned up a lot of my extensions, and the memory usage went way down. I still get leaks where having a dozen or so tabs open will, over time, use up much of my free memory. This happens in Chrome as well, so I just keep that in mind and occasionally restart the browser.

webwanderings4• 14 years ago

After being a FF user for so many years (since at least there was no hype behind it among average users), I caved in to Chrome finally and completely. Moved my bookmarks (lost tagging), history and sync, all to Google.

shardling6• 14 years ago

So, that's great for you and all, but what the fuck does it have to do with the article?

tadfisher• 14 years ago

> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

webwanderings4• 14 years ago

I know one person's opinion doesn't matter, but I owe it as my duty to tell a parting friend that I am parting ways. Given that this friend has no interest in taking people's opinions (there is no official mechanism in place to take opinions), HN is as good as any other place to make statements.

Now, why the "fuck" do you care if what I write here has anything to do with the article or not? Perhaps something is lurking behind the shadow you may want to look after?

Ensorceled• 14 years ago

Is 16 worth installing? Firefox used to be my favourite browser, but I stopped using it when the almost daily install and "reload or disable" addons cycle became too painful.

abraham3• 14 years ago

That cycle should be invisible now. It updates silently in the background and should only notify you if an extension gets disabled.

shardling6• 14 years ago

And unlike in previous eras of Firefox, extensions are not typically disabled by the version bump.

thwest• 14 years ago

Yes. I switched to Chrome for a while because of performance, and for my use cases, they are back close enough to parity. I would also recommend Aurora, which gets newer features faster, but is much more stable than the nightly binaries.

Aardwolf2• 14 years ago

Still not the feature I'd like in there: A way to open link here instead of in new tab or window

sabret00the7• 14 years ago

Hasn't that been a feature from day one. Are you sure you haven't got the option ticked that forces links to open in external tabs/windows?

Aardwolf2• 14 years ago

If I right click on a link, I see options "Open link in new tab" and "Open link in new window". What's missing there is "Open link in this tab", to circumvent these pesky websites that configure every single link to open in a new tab/window.

shardling6• 14 years ago

Sounds like a trivial extension.

jamesbritt• 14 years ago

I have a bookmarklet script that removes any "target" attributes on anchors, but it may be harder to circumvent "new window" URLs if they're initiated via scripting.

vnuk3• 14 years ago

Why does Firefox's roadmap look like "copy everything that Chrome has"?

If Firefox users needed (or wanted) marketplace for (web) apps (or any other Chrome feature) they'd already be using Chrome ...

sabret00the7• 14 years ago

Web Apps are a very real part of the future of the web. The fact that this space exists in the first place whereby there was only desktop apps previously should be testament enough to that. I may not personally agree with Mozilla in regards to the role of web apps, but I think that we all agree, it's better to be in a position to allow users to make their own minds up rather than go off of what a few loud naysayers want.

vnuk3• 14 years ago

If Wev Apps are a very real part of the future of the web why isn't there a standard for that? Or in another words, if it is the future why haven't they all sat down and agreed upon a standard??

This way we'll be begging jQuery for Web Apps or some other abstraction layer that will do all the dirty work of cross browser compatibility...

I don't see a standard for Web Apps on http://www1.webplatform.org/ anywhere ...

SeanDav2• 14 years ago

Still my favourite browser by far. I usually have 3-4 windows open and up to several hundred tabs and Firefox handles this better than anything else.

darkstalker2• 14 years ago

With the "Tree Style Tab" extension you can manage tons of tabs in a comfortable and ordered way.

sabret00the7• 14 years ago

Hopefully someone will take on the enormous undertaking that will be fixing Panorama/Tab Candy to work properly. Where's Santa? That's all I want for Christmas.

Achshar2• 14 years ago

I can't fathom a reason for "several hundred tabs" unless your job specifically requires you to open that number of tabs for some (albeit strange) reason.

msbarnett• 14 years ago

Just hazarding a guess, but I've noticed that people who have $TEXAS tabs open tend to use tabs the way I use Instapaper -- as a means of tracking interesting content they want to remember to read at some point.

deltaqueue• 14 years ago

I realize this is OT, but speaking as a tab hoarder, there's no justifiable reason for the behavior. And I'm not exaggerating when I use the term hoarder -- it's the same principle as hoarding physical goods, since the personal justification is always "they're important and I might need them someday". At any given moment I have 2 windows with about 30-40 tabs each. I even downloaded a chrome plugin called session buddy that lets me restore previous windows in the event of an accidental computer restart.

The unfinished reading weighs me down every day, but I keep them open anyway. Some days I get productive and read a half dozen tabs, but never anything substantial. It's an embarrassing "problem."

Awesome / useless plugin idea: an artificial time bomb that removes the tab and all traces of the website from your history after being open longer than some period of time (e.g. one week). Obviously a bookmark circumvents this dilemma, but the problem itself isn't rational to begin with.

dbaupp• 14 years ago

I use them as a replacement for bookmarks. My browser chrome is ridiculously small, just tabs, so no bookmark bar, and if I did bookmark everything into the bookmark system (which is hidden under several mouse clicks), I'd have to keep it organised, whereas tabs are at least in chronological order (approximately), which is more useful than alphabetic order when I'm looking for something without knowing what it is called.

melling• 14 years ago

How many people here have stuck with 3.6? It looks like it's only a few percent of FF users (<1% of all users).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox

It was a really long road but with 3.6 essentially gone and silent updates, developers can worry a lot less about legacy in the Firefox world.

freehunter7• 14 years ago

There are a few dozen support staff employees at my company still using Firefox 3.6, as that is all the vendor of our product supports. Luckily, they are on a local network, with no Internet access from these machines.

Timmy_C• 14 years ago

Anecdotally, I have an oddly large population of vistors to my site with Firefox 9. I don't know what changes were made to how Firefox updates around that time. But it seems like the update train has unwittingly left few users behind.

leif• 14 years ago

As a reference, Firefox 9 is the version in the packages repo for FreeBSD 9.0-STABLE and it's probably the same for a fair number of other oses that peg versions on release.

DEinspanjer• 14 years ago

That is correct, only a few percent of active Firefox installations still run 3.6, and the majority of those are active less than once per week.

ineedtosleep• 14 years ago

I hope they keep plugging away at making their developer tools better. I use Firefox as my main browser, but I often have to switch to Chrome because Firebug's performance is pretty crappy even on my Ivy Bridge laptop (with 16GB of RAM).

dangoor2• 14 years ago

We are indeed plugging away on the tools (and they are getting better each release :)

Firebug will be getting faster as well as they are working on putting Firebug on top of the new debugging API in Firefox (which has much better performance than the old).

uulbiy• 14 years ago

My solution is to create various profiles for my different browsing needs. I have my "webdev" profile which has a lot of web development extensions including firebug, I also have my "main" profile for most browsing, the "wastetime" profile and some other profiles.

While my main profile is open most of the time, I can open webdev using "firefox -profileManager -no-remote" for some javascript debugging and close it when I am done without messing with my other open profiles. If I get bored I might fire up "wastetime" to browse some websites, or the "noextensions" profile to check a website with no extensions (sometimes noscript, better privacy, adblock plus, ghostery or even pentadactyl might mess up some website that I visit).

A really cool bonus is that with each profile I can save the opened tabs, so for example I have a "coursera" profile and it has all the tabs I need for the course I am taking (functional programming with scala). So, when I am studying I only need to open that profile either by itself or in addition to other profiles.

sahaskatta2• 14 years ago

Was hoping for HDPI support, doesn't look like this update includes it.

lillycat• 14 years ago

It will likely be in Firefox 18. It is on Nightly right now.

asadotzler• 14 years ago

HiDPI is available in Aurora this week (the code that will become Firefox 18).

sahaskatta2• 14 years ago

Thanks, will checkout the Aurora build when I get a chance.

AdamGibbins• 14 years ago

One of the primary reasons I switched to Chrome was due to the awesome syncing abilities with Android Chrome.

Does anyone know if Firefox Mobile has matured to a point where it doesn't lag incredibly due to the huge memory footprint on Android?

gkoberger2• 14 years ago

It has. They semi-recently switched from XUL to native Java, which has made it as fast (maybe faster?) compared to Chrome or Browser on Android. Definitely worth checking out again.

cgranade• 14 years ago

My only real complaint with Firefox Mobile is that it doesn't play that well with Intent filters like the one the YouTube app uses to catch http://*.youtube.com/* requests. That said, I'm not sure how to fix that without introducing the annoying per-link popup asking me if I want to use Chrome or Firefox.

estacado• 14 years ago

I still use FF, but switch to Chrome for JS heavy stuff. Even amazon.com is laggy on FF. The things that's stopping me from switching to Chrome full-time is the Extensions that FF has. I can really customize things to work exactly the way I want. My biggest gripe about Chrome is that the download bar at the bottom doesn't go away when you finish a download.

johnyzee• 14 years ago

Tabs in separate processes is the only thing I care about when considering switching back to Firefox. As long as a single poorly coded site or plugin can freeze or kill the entire browser, I simply cannot use Firefox.

Firefox 16 live: Here's What's New

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