Firefox 22 released

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/22.0/releasenotes/

by Techasura • 13 years ago

247 152 13 years ago

mozilla.org

decklin• 13 years ago

Release notes might be a more useful link: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/22.0/releasenotes/

MrBra• 13 years ago

tnx mate :)

Sven7• 13 years ago

Wondering about the Web Speech API and speech input...Chrome does a great job, but doesn't seem to allow hooking up to 3rd party recognizers like Nuance or even something local.

Anyone know how Mozilla is going to handle this? Are they going to use Google's recognizers in the cloud?

SideburnsOfDoom• 13 years ago

Release notes are here: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/22.0/releasenotes/

callahad• 13 years ago

Not sure linking to the FTP mirror is all that useful. Here are the release notes: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/22.0/releasenotes/

Highlights: WebRTC, asm.js, flexbox, and web notifications are present and enabled by default.

masklinn6• 13 years ago

Also, clipboard data access. With Opera's switch to chromium, Firefox was the last browser without programmatic access to the clipboard[0] (though as usual MSIE has a non-standard implementation) so you had to listen for the paste event and post-process whatever garbage had been dumped in your paste area (and of course couldn't access high-level media types)

[0] Opera, as far as I remember, has neither clipboard access nor a "paste" event, the POS.

giorgosts2• 13 years ago

So can a website read a users clipboard, and if yes, how can we disable this "feature"?

joelthelion• 13 years ago

Are there any good web applications based on WebRTC yet?

shacharz3• 13 years ago

Tell me what you think of this one: http://www.sharefest.me/

mwarkentin• 13 years ago

Group video chat: https://talky.io/

changdizzle• 13 years ago

or build your own!

www.tokbox.com

disclaimer: BD @ tokbox

willaaye• 13 years ago

Check out LiveNinja http://www.liveninja.com which is based on WebRTC for the video calls

numbnuts• 13 years ago

Don't forget ES6 fat arrows! That and right-dockable dev tools excites me more than they probably should.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...

blueveek5• 13 years ago

The devtools are indeed dockable on the right now in FF 22, but not responsive yet (so when little horizontal real estate is available, the tools will look and feel very cramped).

The upcoming versions address this issue (in the end, it's all just CSS; for example: [0]).

[0] http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/themes...

_greim_• 13 years ago

Oh weird. I remember trying out FlexBox three years ago and having it work in FF. Does this just mean they dropped the -moz- prefix requirement?

masklinn6• 13 years ago

It's a bit more complex: there are actually 2 flexbox specs with different syntaxes, one from 2009 (now deprecated) and one from 2011[0]. Firefox has supported the old syntax circa Firefox 2 (Safari from 3.1, Chrome from the first version).

This is about the new syntax and current CR.

[0] http://css-tricks.com/old-flexbox-and-new-flexbox/

ck2• 13 years ago

Some users are going to need to modify layout.css.devPixelsPerPx if you have overly large layout.

My window size became massively zoomed.

kstop2• 13 years ago

Looking forward to 25% of my automated functional tests failing for the next week!

robin_reala2• 13 years ago

Why? Surely your code isn’t that fragile?

kstop2• 13 years ago

er, no... /shifty_eyes

I'm being melodramatic is all. The Selenium FF driver lags a little behind Firefox releases (totally understandable).

Not a problem on my actual test boxes as I control the FF version on those, but it will lead to a week or so of devs (with FF auto-update set) complaining that tests are breaking locally. (Despite the fact that this situation and its remedy has been explained to them repeatedly.)

It is possible that S2.33 will work fine with FF22, making all this moot. And it's just a passing annoyance. I have nothing but love for both applications.

epmatsw2• 13 years ago

I've felt like Firefox has been pretty light on features in its releases since it switched to rapid release, but this one is packed with stuff. Awesome!

It's becoming more and more rare for me to have to switch to Chrome to get a website to work correctly/acceptably, and I love it! Great job by the Mozilla team

bjustin• 13 years ago

Which websites work better in Chrome? I use Safari these days, but when I used Firefox full time last year I didn't see any broken-ness.

davidjohnstone• 13 years ago

The only broken-ness I can remember seeing for a long time in Firefox is in those demos and other little projects that pop up here where the developer forgot that browsers other than Chrome exist (or, are using Chrome only features).

epmatsw2• 13 years ago

I've had some issues with internal sites I use at work that are auto-generated Microsoft stuff. And for a while I couldn't get the new Google Maps to load every time on Firefox. It seems to be have been fixed at some point since it runs fine in Nightly now though.

hosay123• 13 years ago

I am for all intents and purposes a massive Mozilla fanboy, however I regularly switch to Chromium to use any nontrivial 2D graphics js (e.g. the Python plop profiler).

Not sure why, but Firefox definitely seems to have a weak spot around 2d (SVG?) performance

zanny3• 13 years ago

It randomly segfaults on Arch with no error report and a trace says it comes from libgobject.

So I went up the stack, every one except nightly is segfaulting.

Guess I'm on nightly for a while!

PedroBatista• 13 years ago

Well, you are on Arch, so that is the default version you should use. :-D

yogo• 13 years ago

Arch has never been that bleeding edge.

diegocg• 13 years ago

I'm using arch and it works fine

mrspeaker• 13 years ago

Oh yeah - short function syntax goes into the wild!

    let square = x => x * x

Time to move over to stalking the Chrome devs...

siddboots2• 13 years ago

Yay. Sometimes I wish we still did release parties.

creatio• 13 years ago

Can this syntax be also used with the other browsers? i.e. IE and Chrome?

siddboots2• 13 years ago

Not yet, but it is in the ECMAScript 6 draft, so it will most likely be adopted eventually.

ajryan• 13 years ago

TypeScript supports this syntax. I believe they are trying to align with ECMAScript 6 as much as possible.

blueveek5• 13 years ago

Not to mention that |this| is lexically bound in the case of fat arrow functions. No more ".bind(this)" or "let self = this;" everywhere!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

mmuro2• 13 years ago

I love Firefox. But, it's about damn time to remove the scroll bars on Mac OS X. This was a Lion feature and we're almost two versions removed from that.

AaronMT• 13 years ago

Not a whole lot of Mac OSX dev's contributing to the project these days. Doing what we can.

Yoric2• 13 years ago

Actually, it's more "not a whole lot of MacOSX devs contributing to the UX these days." Plenty of MacOS X devs contributing everywhere else.

msujaws• 13 years ago

The scrollbars are fixed in version 23. Download Firefox Beta, Aurora, or Nightly and you will get them :)

mmuro2• 13 years ago

That's fantastic! I guess it's coming in July or August?

abrowne2• 13 years ago

They're in Nightly[1]. I've been running UX nightly[2] for the new tab design for a few months with little to no issues with stability.

[1] http://nightly.mozilla.org/

[2] http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/

dschep2• 13 years ago

The UI looks identical to me. It's supposed to be like this right? http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design...

pnathan• 13 years ago

I generally put the scrollbars back in on my OSX installation.

noelwelsh• 13 years ago

If you're a fan of Firefox I recommend using Aurora:

   http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/aurora/

Aurora is basically the beta of Firefox. It seems to get incremental updates more regularly than Firefox. It very occasionally has issues with compatibility with plugins (usually when a version number is bumped) but I can't recall any stability issues in the few years I've been using it.

shacharz3• 13 years ago

There is Firefox beta channel, aurora is a bit less stable. Usually aurora still gets uncooked features pushed in, while beta only receives preffed features, unpreffed stable features or bug fixes

sandyarmstrong2• 13 years ago

Yeah, in my experience Aurora is occasional work-interrupting pain, whereas beta is blissful:

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/beta/

It doesn't update super frequently during the 6-week release cycle. Maybe once a week tops, I think? Hard to be sure, as I restart FF every few days anyway.

pjmlp3• 13 years ago

Still no resizable bookmarks window.

brokenparser2• 13 years ago

Except for the bookmarks window. Can you elaborate?

pjmlp3• 13 years ago

Since the days Firefox 3 it is no longer possible to resize the bookmarks window you get when you press Ctrl+D or click star.

The solution was to hack userchrome.css or install OpenBook add on.

However it is no longer being kept up to date with Firefox.

A possible update for it is to use Edit Bookmark Plus instead.

Some information here, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=418864

kbrosnan2• 13 years ago

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/edit-bookmark... covers that use case.

Narretz• 13 years ago

I think the bookmark overlay has not received updates in a long time. If you use it often with many tabs, it's actually quite a pain to use it.

MattDL2• 13 years ago

Looking nice, hope they continue to improve performance and stability too.

Having a huge amount of issues with the flash plugin at the moment, not sure if that's their fault or Adobe's though.

brokenparser2• 13 years ago

Firefox can't do anything to prevent a plugin from crashing. That and I'd wager most of the Flash movies are very poorly coded, resulting in exceptions that could've been prevented. You can tell by browsing the web with a debug build of Flash.

niutech• 13 years ago

The OdinMonkey engine performance is impressive. The Lua VM benchmark[1] jumped from 110 points in Firefox 21 to 318 points in Firefox 22! Not to mention poor performance of Chrome.

Next, have a look at the Epic Citadel[2], which runs very smoothly in Firefox 22. Well done!

[1] http://kripken.github.io/lua.vm.js/lua.vm.js.html [2] http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/

masklinn6• 13 years ago

The Lua VM benchmark seems to be compiled to asm.js though, how does chrome fare when not targeting asmjs?

pornel• 13 years ago

• Chrome 29.0.1546.0 canary: 91 points

• Firefox nightly 25.0a1 (2013-06-26): 403 points

MBP i7 2.2Ghz

azakai8• 13 years ago

It would probably be slower with emscripten in non-asm.js mode (asm.js format is more careful to not change types at runtime, etc.), based on benchmarks I've tested in the past. Have not tested on this particular one, though, if you check it out please let us know.

fhd2• 13 years ago

It's a bit unfair to mention Chrome performing poorly on these. Both are asm.js, which OdinMonkey is optimised for, V8 not.

That said, I'm very excited about asm.js (using it, in fact) and the performance in FF 22 blows me away as well. The V8 team appears to be working on asm.js optimisations, so soon we can have a fair contest :)

The best thing about asm.js is that the optimisations are really optional, unless your application is actually CPU-bound. The Unreal Engine probably is, to some degree. A simple 2D game like the one I'm working on certainly isn't. Not seeing it run any faster with FF 22, it's already smooth in older versions.

azakai8• 13 years ago

It's a bit unfair to mention Chrome performing poorly on these. Both are asm.js, which OdinMonkey is optimised for, V8 not.

Actually Chrome has been optimizing for compiled C++ for a long time - Google even added Mandreel code to the Octane benchmark - and for asm.js specifically (which is a particular type of compiled C++) in recent months, as you can track here

http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=11&view=breakdown&suite=asm... http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=11&view=breakdown&suite=asm...

bad_user3• 13 years ago

On my laptop, I got 419 points for Firefox 22 and 120 points for Chrome 28.

Of course, the Lua VM test is compiled to asm.js, so of course Firefox does really well right now. Exciting nonetheless - this opens so many possibilities.

marcosscriven• 13 years ago

So glad asm.js optimisations have been released.

Though sadly it coincides with me having to pull something offline I cross-compiled to asm.js, due to GPL violations. But that's another story.

hesselink• 13 years ago

This is a great release! I wonder about this, though:

The stack trace is now shown as a breadcrumb near the top

Who thought this was a good idea? This leaves room for about 3 items, whereas most stacks nowadays are much larger. A normal vertical list makes much more sense than a horizontal breadcrumb, IMHO.

blueveek5• 13 years ago

If you right click on a breadcrumb, you'll get the vertical stack. But there's certainly room for some polishing.

sunils342• 13 years ago

There were rumors about third-party cookies being disabled by default in v22. I downloaded it and found this not to be true. Can anyone shed some light on when Mozilla plans on doing this? http://www.pcworld.com/article/2038956/mozilla-postpones-def...

Yoric2• 13 years ago

We're busy investigating possible unintended side-effects. So no precise calendar yet.

sunils342• 13 years ago

Thanks for the update! We're working to have expected functionality when third party cookies being disabled. I'll keep an eye on when it's planned to be released.

opsmgmt• 13 years ago

Is there a config flag to enable this?

jmilkbal• 13 years ago

The expectation of this release has been a fun ride for me. We were using long-live HTTP requests in our product for pushing data to the browser, a very elegant method but only implemented by Mozilla. Now were transitioning to websockets which aren't nearly as nice for this use, but I'm enjoying putting the newer, better-supported method in place on front- and back-ends.

milhous• 13 years ago

Aside from compatibility testing, does anyone here really use Firefox much? I use Safari, with Chrome on occasion. That's about it.

I also recall that Firefox leaked a lot of memory, not sure if that's been fixed now.

If it's the case that IE is now a decent browser and Windows people use that or Chrome, and Mac people using Safari, I'm just wondering what spot or niche Firefox fills. I suppose in the Linux world, Firefox and Chrome are the only major options.

omaranto• 13 years ago

Well, if you are a keyboard person and don't want to go to a niche browser (like dwb, vimperator or jumanji), then Firefox+pentadactyl is better than anything available for Chrome.

darkstalker• 13 years ago

Don't forget about Tree Style Tab

roryokane2• 13 years ago

I use Firefox on both Mac and Windows because of its extensions. Firefox allows its extensions to change more of the browser experience than other browsers do.

I really love Tab Utilities (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-utilities...), which helps me use my browser despite my 914 open tabs by making the New Tab command open the new tab directly to the right of the current tab, not all the way at the right. Other extensions that can only exist in Firefox include Copy Urls Expert (http://www.kashiif.com/firefox-extensions/copy-urls-expert/) and Tree Style Tab (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...).

nnethercote2• 13 years ago

I also recall that Firefox leaked a lot of memory, not sure if that's been fixed now.

It has. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink for details.

dotmanish• 13 years ago

As a Firefox mobile user, this one is the nicest one of them all for me:

"Plain text files displayed within Firefox will now word-wrap"

It was a pain to scroll sideways.

elmindreda3• 13 years ago

Lots of nice changes, but Pentadactyl won't work with it. If you're using that, you may want to wait a few days.

Deadsunrise• 13 years ago

you can go back to vimperator. I'm using it on 23.0a2 without problems.

elmindreda3• 13 years ago

I really don't like the way Vimperator works nowadays. It's why I moved to Pentadactyl.

super_mario• 13 years ago

Quit Firefox, vi into pentadactyl.xpi in your profile, edit install.rdf inside the xpi file (it's just a ZIP file) and modify the max supported version to 23. Save the install.rdf file, quit vi and start Firefox.

Pentadactyl will work, with some minor regressions (e.g. Google home page search box now steals focus) and 's' (google search) command prints error message: Error: TypeError: keywords in null, but the search works.

But otherwise everything else seems to work.

elmindreda3• 13 years ago

Cool, it worked. Thank you!

SilasX• 13 years ago

Doesn't work, still thinks the version is incompatible. Still using 21 for now.

trailfox2• 13 years ago

Interesting to see where Firefox is the most popular these days: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Countries_by_most_used_web...

kijin• 13 years ago

According to the infographic, Firefox seems to be popular in North Korea, with 33.79% market share. I suppose they don't censor StatCounter in Pyongyang? /jk

trailfox2• 13 years ago

Firefox is very popular in central and north africa.

rrdharan• 13 years ago

Anyone know when it will be possible to remove the title bar on OS X? With tabs on top it's redundant and Firefox uses more vertical space than Safari or Chrome.

There are various extensions floating around that claim to do this but they generally target much older versions of Firefox and don't work very well.

blueveek5• 13 years ago

You may be interested in Australis, which removes the title bar by default. Scheduled for Firefox 25. Some (rather old) mockups here: https://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/ux-presentation/ux-pr...

MattDL2• 13 years ago

They're implementing it at the moment, release channel FF doesn't have the capability yet.

ianstormtaylor• 13 years ago

Flexbox. It's finally almost here. I cannot tell you how long I've waited for this to be supported by default in all of these browsers... as soon as Safari 7 is released, us developer sites will actually be able to make the switch. I honestly think wrangling the hacky current layout solutions is 25% or more of my time spent with CSS on a project, so hopefully we'll be able to build things much more quickly.

Happy day.

ymn_ayk• 13 years ago

I am very exited for webrtc in Firefox stable.

quackerhacker2• 13 years ago

Some devs didn't know this, so since it's relevant...

Firefox 21 and 22 support streaming MP4 in HTML5.

kbrosnan2• 13 years ago

Only on Windows 7 and 8. Linux Gstreamer support just landed in nightly, preffed off. https://mobile.twitter.com/FirefoxNightly/status/34910062265...

OS X is a bit more complicated due to needing to poke at Quicktime for the codecs.

quackerhacker2• 13 years ago

Didn't know that about nix, nice. I forgot to mention that about it being only supported on windows for now.

Still waiting on Opera to make a move for mp4...especially with the promises that H.265 make in regards to reduced file sizes with great qualities.

Although I know mp4 is patent encumbered, it's too prevalent to ignore (thanks to Apple and Microsoft products).

Claudus• 13 years ago

I was hoping they'd restore the old "split" Inspect Element UI, instead they added the option to dock it on the right side of the browser.

Not what I was looking for, I wanted the Rules on the side in a column, and the inspector along the bottom like it used to be.

Disappointed.

josteink• 13 years ago

It seems snappier, but I'm not sure I like the new text-scaling on high-DPI displays.

Basically I just felt like I lost a lot of screen real-estate when surfing the news, like I was back in 1356x768 country.

There needs to be some toggles which can be disabled or some other middle ground here.

roryokane2• 13 years ago

You can zoom each affected site out from the View > Zoom menu. And the add-ons NoSquint (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nosquint/) or Default FullZoom Level (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/default-fullz...) let you set the default zoom for all sites.

arj• 13 years ago

This is so much better in Windows on a retina display

vasi• 13 years ago

My feature, progress bars for downloads in the OS X Dock, made Firefox 22! Hope you all like it, and be sure to report any bugs.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548763

Sami_Lehtinen• 13 years ago

Yet no TLS 1.2 support, vote for it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=480514

bad_user3• 13 years ago

If you want to enjoy the asm.js optimizations, see this Unreal Engine demo: http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/

Firefox is awesome.

sheldor• 13 years ago

On my home PC , the third party cookie blocking was available since I was on the beta channel. The new stable version 22 does not include the option.

Edit : It's officially off. So much for the privacy concerns ..

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240218/Mozilla_again...

Shivetya• 13 years ago

Out of curiosity, does this solve the memory issues caused by bad websites? Example, I have open three sites and my firefox memory usage is constantly increasing.

maps.google.com with route determined. Hackers News, this story.

and the offending site, cycletrader.com where I chose a random ad from the front page that had more than one photo. All I did was cycle through the photos and leave the tab open.

Internet Explorer to the same sites does not even come close to the memory usage. In the time it took me to write this I have seen firefox go from 235m to 1.2g memory and IE stayed steady at 100m

Firefox 22 released

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