Firefox 26 is released

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/26.0/releasenotes/

by lambda_cube • 13 years ago

305 200 13 years ago

mozilla.org

nodata2• 13 years ago

"has been released" or "is out".

JangoSteve• 13 years ago

Technically speaking, "released" can also be a state, so "is released" (as in "is in the released state") works too.

nodata2• 13 years ago

Technically maybe, but when has a native speaker ever written that?

prteja112• 13 years ago

Love this - All Java plug-ins are defaulted to 'click to play'

I tried convincing my coworkers to disable java and failed (we are not developers).

csmuk2• 13 years ago

This is great news!

It means I can actually have a full java plugin installation and just activate the applets I know are safe!

I can have my java and eat it, but people can't make it eat me :)

fredsted• 13 years ago

Hasn't this been possible with extensions though?

a1a• 13 years ago

I do not think this is a good solution. This is once again just smashing another security trade-off in the face of the end-user. Once the user is responsible they can be blamed and the browser is considered secure with stupid users.

If the developers at mozilla can't verify the security of the applet, how on earth would my grandmother be able to?

Note: This is not an attack against mozilla in particular, almost all vendors does this (e.g. "antivirus: wanna allow suspicious file?" or "browser: invalid certificate". These questions are asked as if everyone is a computer scientist. We developers need to start formulating these questions so they can be answered by a normal person.

Note 2: I guess it's better than doing nothing at all, since it might stop some drive-by attacks.

prteja112• 13 years ago

I think this feature will protect users on websites where java applets load inconspicuously. With this feature user wouldn't click on the blocked plugin/applet because they don't have a use for it. This is not the solution that will end all our problems but hey this is one step closer and I'll take that!

revasm2• 13 years ago

The main security benefit of click-to-play plugin schemes is not to question the user about the security of an object, which is unknown in most cases anyway, but to prevent accidental drive-by loading and other annoying (and risky) usage. Clicking an overlay to run a plugin should be as natural as clicking on a video to begin playback.

zobzu4• 13 years ago

its actually pretty good since drive by are the most common attacks. grandma won't click the button if she doesn't care about the content

hcarvalhoalves• 13 years ago

... and this breaks a bunch of banking sites that use hidden applets.

kps2• 13 years ago

Any such site was already broken. This change at most makes that apparent to a few more people.

tom9729• 13 years ago

Looks like a notification[1] is shown. I assume "Allow" will whitelist the site. Of course this doesn't help if a trusted site is compromised, but I think C2P is better than nothing.

[1] http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/firefo...

caissy2• 13 years ago

There is no longer a prompt when websites use appcache.

Quite happy with this one. I had to develop an offline web-based application a few weeks ago and it really bugged me that I had to allow the application to use the offline cache.

pwnna4• 13 years ago

This could be both good and bad..

I would like to enable the prompt.

kps2• 13 years ago

about:config → offline-apps.allow_by_default → false

super_mario2• 13 years ago

I'd like to know if some web developer has decided to use 5 GB of offline storage for their app.

caissy2• 13 years ago

Well, AppCache works just as an offline caching system for webpage assets (html files, images, javascripts, css, etc). So yeah it's technically possible to have a 5 GB offline cache, but the browser will need to download all the data first.

untog2• 13 years ago

IIRC most (all?) browsers prompt you when usage goes above a certain limit (5MB, I think). Firefox was the only one that asked you before the site saved a single byte.

eps• 13 years ago

Aye. Those pesky visitors who block, purge and otherwise mess with my tracking cookies shall finally be profiled and analyzed. Great development indeed.

pwnna4• 13 years ago

Support for H.264 on Linux if the appropriate gstreamer plug-ins are installed

\o/

GhotiFish• 13 years ago

If Google didn't buckle like a house of cards on this. I wonder where we'd be?

arg.

gcr• 13 years ago

Are you referring to this? http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/61927.html

acdha5• 13 years ago

If Google didn't buckle like a house of cards on this. I wonder where we'd be?

Content providers weren't jumping to more double their storage costs or deal with another immature toolchain so I rather suspect we'd be where we are now: Flash got an extra couple years reprieve until everyone accepts reality and implements H.264. This is particularly true since no matter WebM's merits it was going to be worse when transcoded from the H.264 almost everyone is actually uploading.

The real fight needs to be over the next generation of codecs. If H.265 has serious competition there's a lot more reason to believe things will go differently, as they did with e.g. Opus where the open solution was also better in addition to being free.

spindritf2• 13 years ago

What are the appropriate plugins and how do I find out if I have them? I have an Intel card and normally use mplayer-vaapi[1] to get hardware acceleration for decoding.

[1] https://launchpad.net/~sander-vangrieken/+archive/vaapi

padenot2• 13 years ago

I'm not sure we have done the necessary work for vaapi to work sanely. However, software h264/aac video work just fine, here. mp3 also works on this release (same deal, you have to have the right gstreamer plugins), iirc (it certainly works on Nightly, which is what I use).

revasm2• 13 years ago

At a minimum you'll need gstreamer1.0 and gst-plugins-ugly[1]. Perhaps gst-libav[2] would be an alternative to plugins-ugly.

OT: Check out http://mpv.io/. It's a forked mplayer2 with native support for libva:

  mpv --hwdec=vaapi --vo=vaapi

[1] http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/plugins.html

[2] http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/modules/gst-libav.html

lawl• 13 years ago

I don't think that's a good thing for the open web.

:'(

Then again I do like that I can watch more YouTube Videos in a reasonable resolution now. Most webm transcodes are just available in low quality.

spindritf2• 13 years ago

I just download youtube videos[1]. It has many advantages over youtube.com. Hardware acceleration is one but also no stalling when skipping ahead, no disappearing videos that you planned to watch later, no need to sign in.

Actually, youtube as a repository of material for download works much better than youtube as a streaming site.

[1] http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

zobzu4• 13 years ago

I remember reading mozilla saying this is a battle they have lost.

If they had more marketshare, they'd have won. The open web would have won.

shmerl11• 13 years ago

This was available already in the previous release, but disabled by default (media.gstreamer.enabled)

crb002• 13 years ago

Lol. I like the unresolved finger given to Flash.

scrabble• 13 years ago

I encounter this issue frequently, so I'd prefer if it was resolved.

kibwen• 13 years ago

According to the #ux channel on irc.mozilla.org, Australis will be relegated to Nightly builds (Firefox 29) for a while yet, and might be as late as Firefox 30 depending on the speed at which bugfixes roll in. Sorry, Aurora users. :(

JohnTHaller• 13 years ago

That still means it would only be about 5 months.

yeukhon2• 13 years ago

Yeah. to clarify for people who are not clear, see this https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar

robcee• 13 years ago

you can still use it on Nightly.

http://nightly.mozilla.org/

Ygg22• 13 years ago

I have a silly request, can timings on Network tab be displayed on mouse hover? I hate having to click to measure which part took much time? This is @Mozilla Web inspector

phaer• 13 years ago

I think bugzilla, mailinglists and irc channels might be better places to request a feature request than a comment on hacker news.

d0ugie• 13 years ago

perhaps, so long as it's not a request for WebP support

Ygg22• 13 years ago

I got no clue how to get to Bugzilla. I made other bug request, but I have no idea where those went (It was one of those Feedback sites for Mozilla with I have an idea, etc.)

handsomeransoms• 13 years ago

Should be pretty easy to add that functionality! File a bug on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org. In fact, this would make a great first bug for a new contributor :)

jevinskie• 13 years ago

EXIF rotation was long overdue but I'm happy it finally landed!

riquito2• 13 years ago

Improved page load times due to no longer decoding images that aren't visible (847223) ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=847223 )

This is pretty cool

verytrivial2• 13 years ago

And it was even cooler when Opera did it several years ago.

Groxx• 13 years ago

And Lynx before that!

untog2• 13 years ago

Maybe we can just agree that it's cool when users get great features?

benihana• 13 years ago

Ha! I bet it sure feels good knowing you use a superior product that gets features well before the masses who use Firefox (psssh how uncool) get them.

nhebb• 13 years ago

If you were to construct a graph of all the features implemented by one browser and then copied by the others, after a while it would look like a chain link fence.

iamjustin2• 13 years ago

Yeah, Opera was really innovative for a while before it became another Chromium clone.

verytrivial2• 13 years ago

-3 points for an honest opinion? Please, relax. When Opera introduced this feature, computers had far less memory than they do now. I known because I raised an Opera bug report when that delay-decode feature regressed in one of their releases. Only Opera made my low-end workstation useful. it was cool. I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings.

ahrjay• 13 years ago

Hopefully the next step is to take image decoding off the main thread.

mcpherrinm2• 13 years ago

I think multi-threaded (and thus off main thread) image decoding landed on Aurora 22, and I assume made it into that release.

nnethercote4• 13 years ago

It saves tons of memory too. See https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2013/10/01/memshrink-pr...

benjamincburns2• 13 years ago

Maybe I'm biased, but jor1k is my FF benchmark of choice these days. Sadly I'm not seeing any major performance increase over FF 25 (posting this from jor1k via links [1]).

1: http://s-macke.github.io/jor1k (had to edit in the link as the ':' and '-' keys don't appear to be working)

dijit2• 13 years ago

hm, that's simple 'does this use case run 1 thing particularly well.'

EXIF rotation and ability to use gstreamer for video are massive feature improvements that may result in slower page generation, but the returns are far more significant.

not everything has to be 'better, faster, smaller' making things generally better with _no_ regressions is difficult enough.

benjamincburns2• 13 years ago

Yeah, I phrased that poorly (was fighting with links and not thinking about my words too carefully). I didn't mean to knock the release by any means. I was only making the observation that there didn't appear to be much in the way of asm.js performance improvement this time around.

And you're absolutely right; the fact that there are additional features/improvements and I get to keep the same (awesome) performance from FF 25 is very impressive and laudable. I can enumerate several FOSS projects for which this sort of thing is an issue.

yeukhon2• 13 years ago

Give Firefox time. Mozilla is really small, compared to Chrome... and Firefox is stable! Hehehe. css transform is still a major performance sucker.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=css%20t...

bzbarsky2• 13 years ago

Firefox beats the pants off Chrome on benjamincburns's testcase, at least for me.

jakub_g• 13 years ago

Looking at the last graph in [1] there were certain improvements in certain areas in recent months, both in Firefox and Chrome, however memory usage has been slowly but steadily increasing [2].

However I'm not an expert regarding those graphs.

[1] http://arewefastyet.com/ [2] https://areweslimyet.com/

bzbarsky2• 13 years ago

I get about 170MIPS in Firefox 25 on that link. I get about 173MIPS in Firefox 26. A nightly is at about 179MIPS.

Chrome on the same hardware is at 80MIPS for me, so I think Firefox is doing OK here...

dijit2• 13 years ago

Support for H.264 on Linux if the appropriate gstreamer plug-ins are installed

I was trying to do this for ages using plug-ins, nothing works- was told to run nightly- but I need this browser.

can't wait until it makes it's way into repo's :D

dear5• 13 years ago

Anyone with memory problem with Firefox? My FF is currently using 2G memory while I only have 13 tabs opened and most of them are just plain simple pages. I am sure it will keep sucking up memory until I do restart. This problem is not new. Is there a memory leak problem with FF?

robin_reala• 13 years ago

Sounds like a rogue addon. You could try disabling them and seeing if that helps?

dear5• 13 years ago

No addon. It's new install on a fresh new machine.

mhurron3• 13 years ago

There has been for a very long time. However, now after the image rendering changes in 26, I believe most of the issues now should be related to various plugins and add-ons.

dear5• 13 years ago

Upgrading to v26 now. Will see if it helps at all.

mccr8• 13 years ago

If you look at about:memory, it can give you information about where the memory is going. If you file a bug on bugzilla with the [MemShrink] whiteboard, we can look into it and try to figure out what is happening.

dear5• 13 years ago

Thanks! I have used about:memory and 'CC', 'GC', etc, but they didn't help. I will see if this is a problem with the new version. At least older versions (25 or before) all had the similar issue.

bad_user• 13 years ago

First of all, it's hard to tell how much memory a process uses. If you're on Linux or on OS X and you're using "top", there's difficulty in interpreting the results.

For example right now my Firefox 26 with about 20 tabs is being reported by "top" as using 2190MB VIRT and ~1030MB RES. VIRT reports the total amount of memory allocated, including memory that's shared between processes, including memory-mapped files, including virtual memory, including the loaded shared libraries, or anything that takes up address space, but address space is not real, the measure is next to useless. RES is the relevant measure, which in my case reports about 1 GB, however that's a little misleading too because it also counts memory that's shared between processes, although in my case I think 1 GB is an accurate measure. And if you're using some kind of GUI that doesn't specify exactly how it calculates memory consumption, then you can't trust what it says.

Second, free memory is unused memory. Browsers are caching stuff for example. Unused caches in memory-strained systems end up being flushed to disk. The kernel is quite efficient in flushing memory pages on disk and reloading them later when needed. That's why it's very hard to tell how much memory a process needs to be usable.

If you want to claim that some application leaks memory, then you need to look at growth. And if you want to claim that it's a memory hog, then you need to take a look at how it behaves on top of memory constrained systems.

In my experience, Firefox is very memory efficient, which is why I'm using it and not Chrome. And I'm on the beta channel now, so I've been on Firefox 26 since a week ago and it's OK.

clarry• 13 years ago

And if you want to claim that it's a memory hog, then you need to take a look at how it behaves on top of memory constrained systems.

I can confirm that Firefox regularly runs out of memory and dies on a system with a total of 1G of ram and 512M data segment limit.

dear5• 13 years ago

In my case, everytime I open a new tab, the mem usage goes up. But when I close a tab, it does not necessarily go down, or just goes down a little. So the overall trend is it goes up, until it can no longer function (freezed up on my old 4G computer). Then I have to kill and restart it.

I use OSX's Activity Monitor to see the mem usage.

notjustanymike• 13 years ago

As a developer, it would just peachy if they'd start supporting HTML5 input elements.

acdha5• 13 years ago

Firefox has support for a bunch of them and that's been steadily improving – i.e. the input type=range landed in (IIRC) FF 23.

You can see the current status for just about everything here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=344614 As you can see from reading some of the linked tickets not all of the remaining work is trivial – there are questions about the spec, compatibility with webkit, etc:

type=color: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=547004 type=number: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=344616 type=date: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=446510

daleharvey• 13 years ago

Just tested on nightly, looks like range and color are implemented, date seems to be the last major one

lucb1e2• 13 years ago

Firefox 3: Yay!

Firefox 3.6: Let's see what's new!

Firefox 4: oooh pretty UI (at least that's what most thought)

Firefox 26: sigh another one?

I think only every 10 versions should be news. Since they moved to this useless release cycle (basically replacing bugfix releases with major releases), we should shift our news upvoting from major releases to major-major releases (i.e. treat the decimal sign as if it were 2.6x instead of 26.x).

acdha5• 13 years ago

I think only every 10 versions should be news

Numbers aren't intrinsically important – what would be really nice is saving the announcements for specific features of note.

lucb1e2• 13 years ago

Numbers aren't intrinsically important

True, so yeah I stand corrected about that. Now, can we tell Mozilla this and get off this ridicul^H^H^Hrapid release cycle?

nine_k• 13 years ago

For me personally FF 26 adds a major feature, specifically h.264 video playback in Linux. Finally I'll stop needing Flash to view videos on Vimeo (and a few other sites).

shmerl11• 13 years ago

It actually was already available in 25, it was just off by default.

sp332• 13 years ago

The Firefox release is on a schedule. There's a new version every 6 weeks. Whatever features are ready to go are included. Sometimes they are big features and sometimes not. This one has some pretty major changes, that's why it's news.

_sabe_• 13 years ago

How can this tiny minor changes be worthy of a whole version number? Firefox is the software equivalent of the Zimbabwe dollar.

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

Because of Chrome. Until it came along version numbers meant something. Now a major version just means 6 weeks has passed since the last major version.

iamjustin2• 13 years ago

Yes, because of Chrome we no longer have to wait a ridiculous amount of time for new features. Do you remember how long it took for v4.0 to be ready?

Version numbers don't have to mean something. They're just numbers, after all.

Lagged2Death• 13 years ago

Blame Google for that one - Chrome started the crazy-fast browser version numbering that's now in vogue. Chrome went from v24 to v31 this year.

I think it's partly security-through-psychology; if Joe User's installation quickly winds up three versions behind, he'll be more motivated to update or to allow an update.

bryanlarsen2• 13 years ago

A lot of software is developed via some sort of agile software process these days. This means a new version of the software quite regularly, released on a time basis rather than a feature basis. This is what made version numbers meaningless. There are three common solutions:

time based: Ubuntu 12.04

increment the major number: Chrome 31

increment the minor number, never or rarely changing the major numbers: Linux 2.6.39

None of these solutions work well.

winslow• 13 years ago

What is your solution then if these don't work well?

mythmon_• 13 years ago

Because the version of Firefox increments by one every 6 weeks, and whatever features are ready get included. This is a over simplification of the process. For more info you can read this: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Release_Process.

footpath• 13 years ago

The Android version has received a facelift as well, and it looks nice. However, I suppose there still isn't a way to manually pin sites to the about:home page if they do not show up there already?

padenot2• 13 years ago

This is possible in Nightly, so it's likely to be live in release in a couple months or so.

3rd3• 13 years ago

I wished they would improve the PDF viewer.

RussianCow• 13 years ago

How would you like it improved? I rather like it as it is--I've completely stopped using Adobe Reader, in fact--but I'm curious to know what you think is missing.

omaranto• 13 years ago

Speed mainly: it's unbearable on my machines. But maybe I'm a niche market: cheapskates with 5 year old laptops.

jimmaswell2• 13 years ago

It never renders anything as well as external viewers for me. Often missing things, more aliasing, etc

gjm11• 13 years ago

I find that it

1. is really slow, especially for long documents or ones containing large images (so, e.g., for lengthy scanned documents it's frequently just unusable);

2. renders less nicely, scanned text again being particularly awful;

3. on at least one machine I have, prints documents very badly (text comes out all fuzzy, as if the anti-aliasing is messed up somehow);

4. it has no facing-pages view.

I keep using it because (a) it's the default and I'm lazy and (b) in principle I like the idea of supporting a completely free PDF viewer. But compared even with Adobe Reader (still more something like Sumatra or Foxit) the experience is grossly inferior far too often.

erichurkman2• 13 years ago

See also the Firefox 26 for Developers: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/26

And Site Compatibility for Firefox 26, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/26/Site...

Of note, images with EXIF rotation data are now rotated correctly! And you can inspect :before and :after elements in the built-in inspector finally.

achairapart2• 13 years ago

Firefox 25 hanged most of the time, it seems was because of Firebug. I disabled Firebug.

Firefox 26 hangs at start up. CPU stuck at 100%. Almost 1 GB of ram used with 1 tab open (I can't even open a new one).

What happened, Mozilla?

I'm giving up with this browser.

fzzzy2• 13 years ago

File a bug

jdlshore• 13 years ago

Help --> Troubleshooting Information --> Reset Firefox

(if you can)

saidajigumi• 13 years ago

Anecdata: I use FF<current> heavily on a daily basis and haven't seen any of these problems. Issues of this magnitude are "set the internet on fire" problems. If a few web searches don't turn up tons of other users having these problems then it's best to assume there are local issues that need troubleshooting. Some suggestions on that:

1. Have you tried troubleshooting Firefox via Safe Mode? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-is...

2. If troubleshooting via #1 doesn't help, consider using the Profile Manager[1] to create a new, blank profile and see if your problems reproduce there.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Profile_Manager

achairapart2• 13 years ago

I didn't want to be so negative but I'm actually frustrated with this. Because:

1. I used to be in love with Firefox. So much.

2. A few web searches turn up tons of other problems [1], maybe mine also. Maybe not.

3. At this point, this is not just a one shot problem to sort out. This is something mining my daily productivity.

[1] https://www.google.com/?q=firefox+hangs&safe=off

nnethercote4• 13 years ago

I call this "your experience is not universal" (YEINU).

skybrian• 13 years ago

Try it with a fresh profile to try to narrow it down.

raverbashing• 13 years ago

Just clicked on "About Firefox", the upgrade was downloaded and installed.

And a smaller download than downloading the new version.

shmerl11• 13 years ago

Is there any way to update Firefox on Linux without resorting to ugly methods like running it as root and using update UI, or downloading the mar file manually and running the updater CLI tool with that file (as sudo / root)?

The issue is that I use stock Mozilla build (I prefer it to Iceweasel on Debian), so I just placed it in /opt, but I don't want to give write permissions to the firefox directory to my primary user (it's kind of bad security wise). Because of no write permissions, updating UI can't update the browser naturally, unless I run it as root. And manual mar + updater method isn't nice either.

Potentially there can be some better ways for updating:

1. Firefox can work with policykit and request authorization for updating (if user has it - it can ask for password). That's much better than running as root.

2. updater CLI tool can detect all the settings, channels sources and etc. from Firefox local DBs, and instead of forcing the user to manually grab some mar file, it can go and perform all that automatically. updater can be run with sudo still, but avoid all the manual steps.

Both these methods would be much neater than what I usually do now.

dkhenry• 13 years ago

If you have the files dropped in /opt just chown them to your primary user. I have been running like that for some time now and there shouldn't be any issues.

shmerl11• 13 years ago

I can chown them, but isn't that bad in general? If something breaks out from the browser, it can overwrite the binary with malicious code or whatever. Is it a real concern? Regular Linux packages aren't accessible for writing for the ordniary user offering some security barrier.

thristian• 13 years ago

Honestly, when I've used official Firefox builds, I've just downloaded the tarball and extracted it to my home directory. Any malicious code that could corrupt your Firefox install can trash your entire home directory anyway, so there's not much gained by making it non-writable.

Also, running a browser (or anything as complex as a GUI app, but especially anything as wildly complex as a browser) as root is probably a bad idea security-wise anyway.

shmerl11• 13 years ago

Also, running a browser (or anything as complex as a GUI app, but especially anything as wildly complex as a browser) as root is probably a bad idea security-wise anyway.

Yes, that's why using mar + updater is probably the only "right" option, but it's way too manual. I even thought about writing some script which would extract http sources for mar file based on the current update channel but didn't figure out yet where it's configured.

SkyMarshal• 13 years ago

Since you're on Debian and are already putting it in /opt, try the Debian Alternatives tool [1], it's great for managing multiple versions of software you don't install from Deb repos.

It lets you put multiple versions of the same program in /opt or anywhere else (say, /opt/firefox/25, /opt/firefox/26, etc) and config one of them to be the system version (soft links all the bins and man into /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/share/man, etc), then swap between versions, rollback if there's a problem, etc as necessary with a single command: `update-alternatives --config firefox`.

It works very similarly to those Ruby version managers, RVM and RBENV, by holding multiple versions somewhere out of the way and soft-linking the chosen one into the system folders. So similar in fact, that the Debian repo RBENV package has been rewritten to use Debian Alternatives instead of its home-brewed linker code.

Takes some upfront setup but that's scriptable and reusable for all subsequent versions [2], and is well worth it, especially for programs where you don't want to use the Debian repo version, don't want to install a 3rd party .deb, and don't want to compile directly to your system folders.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianAlternatives

[2] https://github.com/byrongibson/scripts/tree/master/install/h..., https://github.com/byrongibson/scripts/tree/master/install/j..., https://github.com/byrongibson/scripts/tree/master/install/s...

shmerl11• 13 years ago

That can be useful but it doesn't solve my problem of more automatic updating really. What I need is something close to native pacakge updating - i.e. replace old files with new ones when update is available with minimal hassle.

techwizrd• 13 years ago

On Ubuntu, you can use the Official Mozilla Daily PPA[1] to get the latest versions of Firefox. They have PPAs for each channel and you can then use the normal package manager to update your Firefox.

1: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-daily/+archive/ppa

shmerl11• 13 years ago

Using Ubuntu PPA is not a good idea for Debian in general. I tried a similar method with LMDE though which is much closer to Debian testing, but managing those repositories was somewhat messy, so I stopped doing it.

junktest• 13 years ago

On Debian and Ubuntu, you can try using ubuntuzilla's firefox builds http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/ubuntuzilla/index.php?...

drill_sarge3• 13 years ago

Add the Debian repos from Linux Mint Debian Edition (something like deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main import backport upstream). Use Google for the exact source and how to import the keys for this server. Then install standard Firefox

shmerl11• 13 years ago

About gstreamer video playback: I didn't find a way to prioritize formats. Let's say some video is available in VPx (WebM) and H.264 (mp4). Firefox will pick first whatever is listed first on the page. So for me it always picks H.264 on Youtube. I prefer to use open codecs though when there is a choice, but there is no apparent way to set the priority.

russellsprouts• 13 years ago

I think the browser is supposed to load them by the order listed in the HTML.

    <video>
      <source src="foo.mp4">
      <source src="foo.webm">
    </video>

Unfortunately, I think there were bugs in older browsers, so they broke if mp4 was not listed first. So most websites list mp4 first.

shmerl11• 13 years ago

May be an add-on can allow overriding the priority. I'll take a look if it's possible.

anymane2• 13 years ago

I am curious about this change in the changelog. "Password manager now supports script-generated password fields" I couldn't easily find any details about. Would someone be kind enough to elaborate on what it does and where it is useful?

_doug_• 13 years ago

see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=355063

anymane2• 13 years ago

Thanks

snogglethorpe• 13 years ago

Wow, that bug is over seven years old!

It's oddly gratifying to see bugs that old getting fixed...

xfalcox• 13 years ago

Can we see the gzipped size side by side with real size on network panel?

super_mario2• 13 years ago

These frequent updates are going to kill Firefox and it's partially Google's fault. Basically, Google has managed somehow to coax Firefox developers to rapid release cycle with frequent Chrome updates. But this goes against Firefox users.

Why do people use Firefox? Most users claim extensions. What breaks extensions? Frequent updates. Effectively annulling the most compelling reason to use Firefox.

This is certainly my experience. Pentadactyl, the most compelling reason for me personally to keep using Firefox is more broken than not. Every single update in the last year has broken it and sometimes in non-trivial ways, and stretching my patience to the limit. If I have to abandon Pentadactyl, I really don't have a reason to use Firefox anymore.

UI changes proposed in Australis are not something to look forward to either esp. if you like hiding Firefox UI elements and basically just keeping undecorated minimal window with Pentadactyl.

dewiz• 13 years ago

I've used FF since the first release and I remember how everyone was stuck with a slow FF 3.X. I welcome these frequent changes, FF is reborn, faster, better. If only this happened before perhaps not many users would be using Chrome these days.

Edvik• 13 years ago

I switched to Chrome because it was faster and I didn't care about extensions.

I switched back to Firefox because it became faster than Chrome (from my user experience, I don't know about tests and whatnot)

Many of these updates are helping them stay fast and haven't resulted in any bloat (yet), so at least from my perspective, great!

mcpherrinm2• 13 years ago

It looks to me like Pentadactyl hasn't had an update on addons.mozilla.org since over a year ago, while the "other side" of the political fork, Vimperator, was updated just under 4 weeks ago. I use Vimperator on Nightly with very few perceived bugs (nonzero, but that comes with the Nightly territory).

In my mind, the quicker iteration on features and improved code quality that came from rapid releases is well worth breaking a year-old addon, especially one as invasive into the browser as Vimperator.

Addons written with the Add-on SDK (aka Jetpack) are also much more stable across versions, though they're not the browser-transforming beasts that Vimperator is.

I don't really like web browsers as a platform, but I don't think restricting the pace that new features are released is productive.

yukkurishite• 13 years ago

I think he's talking about the nightly builds from pentadactyl ( http://5digits.org/nightlies ), considering the version on mozilla's website broke ages ago.

zobzu4• 13 years ago

Is that a troll attempt? Not sure.

Haven't had any of my 15 extensions break in 20 releases. I don't expect any breakage any time.

The reason for rapid release is that they need to get new features out to load stuff properly like google docs, yes.

The main reason to use firefox IMO is that its as fast or faster than others (and has all the features of course) AND has this: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ to tip things on it's favors.

Also, I'm using Australis and its just fine. I switch back to release sometimes and I don't really notice the difference anymore. I do prefer the australis tabs contrast.

stewbrew• 13 years ago

They are changing the js API all the time. E.g. in ff26 they disabled the old download manager and replaced it with a new module that's available only since ff26. When the extensions you use didn't break, it's because the developers are busy updating them.

cpeterso• 13 years ago

You might prefer Mozilla's Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release). ESR is targeted at large organizations that want to deploy a stable browser that will continue to receive security updates. Mozilla supports ESR for 12 months. The current version is based on Firefox 24; the previous was Firefox 17.

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all.html

known• 13 years ago

Great Browser. Thank you Mozilla.

mar1• 13 years ago

I'm using Archlinux and I have the H.264 GStreamer plugin installed (as well as base+bad+good+ugly codecs), but with Firefox 26 I still can't play a lot of YouTube videos when Flash is disabled, for example when I try to play Gangnam Style it tells me "The Adobe Flash Player is required for video playback".

Is that related to advertisements? Would it be possible to develop a plugin or a GreaseMonkey script that would allow to play every YouTube video in HTML5 with Firefox? If yes, does it exist?

drill_sarge3• 13 years ago

https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/87011

No need for Flash anymore, works on every video

drill_sarge3• 13 years ago

If you are on beta channel and the integrated updater is too slow for you, you can grab 27b1 here: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/27....

Firefox 26 is released

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