Side note: I absolutely love the format that Firefox does their release notes in. They're organized really well and do a good job of speaking with the right language for the audience of each change.
I can't think of another product that does release notes as well as them. Usually your hunting down ticket numbers (often on a private tracker) that are referenced from a changelog.
Nice! Another one I can think of is how Blizzard releases their patch notes. Gamers are especially picky to game changes, so you can tell they put some thought into how they announce changes. Example:
Makes me wonder if there is a market for a release notes platform for keeping customer up to date, something that's more focused on how changes are announced to customers than bug tickets.
Sketch app also redid their updates page to look really nice, and not overload with the minutia by default but allows you to dig in if needed. Bonus points for directly linking to all the old version installers too.
That parts good but the presentation is really bad on mobile for me. There is a position sticky header eating up a third of the page at the top and no option for reader mode on safari mobile. Firefox mobile has the sticky issue but it's reader mode seems to work.
Firefox continues its commitment to privacy with this quiet change found in the developer notes [0]:
> For privacy reasons, both BatteryManager.chargingTime and BatteryManager.dischargingTime now round the returned value to the closest 15 minutes (bug 1292655).
See [1] for an explanation of how the battery status API can be used to track you.
It's interesting that you mention privacy because I filed a bug report[1] just yesterday that is a potential privacy issue.
Basically Firefox no longer allows you to deny websites access to camera individually. This means that while on a voice call on messenger.com, the camera is still always on, even if the video is "muted".
This will be the first software that I use everyday (and that I know of) that speaks my native tongue: Kabyle. It might not mean much to the rest of the world, especially since we're not that many native speakers, but I'm loving the fact that they've added it.
Kabyle has about 20 times more native speakers than my native language, Icelandic. In contrast I have been using software in my native language for as long as I remember.
Well, Kabyle looks like the language of a minority in Algeria. On the other hand, Icelandic is the national (and official) language of a sovereign state. In other words, Icelandic has more cultural and financial backing, which is why it's more widespread.
By the way, I'd really love to visit Iceland some day. My cousin went there a few years back and he said it was amazing!
I hate to continue the OT but this is important. Funny to see that people feel that way about Iceland. I lived and worked in France for 6 months and I feel exactly as you describe. As an American my opinion is that life is too short to not life in France (or some place like it). Unfortunately it's unlikely I'll ever be back for any decent period of time but I do know what suits me.
Certain people like different things and cultures but now I'm convinced I must see Iceland.
Iceland is great in a different way: It's the allure of the raw force of nature. You go to Iceland and see the weather shaping things around you, and the volcanoes erupting (if you're lucky) and the northern lights shimmering in the sky. You scuba dive in a fissure where the two continental plates split apart and filled the crack with millenia-old glacier water. You see a guy with a waterfall for a yard fountain[1].
Localization is done by volunteers. If the team that is providing the translations does not complete the translations then the localization is dropped
> This locale hasn't seen any activity in almost 2 years, and we failed to revive the community effort.
> The plan is to stop building Firefox Beta and Firefox Release, and move existing users to Russian.
> I think it would also be a good idea to stop building Firefox Aurora, and remove Belarusian from product-details, but I'm open to different opinions.
As someone already explained, Mozilla localization is done completely by volunteers.
You reach a point where the amount of English strings is so high in the UI that is more confusing than helpful to ship a localized version like that. Also considering the target of localized builds.
The good news is that we can start shipping back Belarusian if there are new volunteers working on it steadily (it just happened for Georgian in 51).
This release seems to help on the UX side of things regarding logins, along with improved efficiency.
Some of the highlights:
* Users can view passwords in the save password prompt before saving them
* Firefox will save passwords even in forms that do not have “submit” events
* A warning is displayed when a login page does not have a secure connection
* Improved video performance for users without GPU acceleration for less CPU usage and a better full screen experience
* Added support for WebGL 2, with advanced graphics rendering features like transform feedback, improved texturing capabilities, and a new sophisticated shading language
* Added support for FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) playback
Aside; the FF dev release notes always impress upon me the scale of modern browsers. There's just so much new stuff, and lots of it isn't trivial at all, and that's despite the rather rapid release calendar, and the need to be pretty much rock solid on a huge variety of systems, and the list of tricky non-functional aspects like perf, size, security, maintainability, etc. that all this code needs to at least consider. It's daunting.
Does that address the instances where you can click login and save password, but the next time you go to log in, it won't remember your username and password?
The WebGL demo "After the Flood" linked in their release summary post is really beautiful. I don't play games but this technology is very impressive. Try it for yourself if you're on an updated Firefox (51+):
Hell, I got 8 FPS on Ultra on my 2013 Air (that's on Firefox 52.0, though). The Firefox 52b UI feels much snappier than the 51b UI, for some reason, which is fantastic, because my main annoyance with 51 was the sluggish UI. The whole browser would freeze while one tab was loading.
They tackle a very common misconception: Many people think it's enough to transfer the password encrypted, because they think https is only about secrecy. But it's crucial to also submit the form via https, otherwise attackers can mess with the form itself.
A lot of webpages will be surprised by this, there are still quite a few who have insecure login forms.
But you also need to serve the page that links to the form via https, otherwise it's vulnerable to the same attack (just one step longer). Which probably means you need to serve everything over https. And even then you need HSTS in order to avoid MITM agents downgrading https back to http. And even then you want to register your site so that at least some of the major browsers preload your HSTS info (https://www.chromium.org/hsts). And as a user you just install HTTPS Everywhere, cross your fingers, and hope for the best.
> But you also need to serve the page that links to the form via https
Yes, in the limit. But current best-practices for user caution ("when you're entering personal information, check the address bar for the domain name you're expecting [and a lock icon]") would be enough to thwart that attack.
I see the WebGL improvements and how on their blog they market it as "Firefox Gets Better Video Gaming" and I really have to say, as a game developer, I really don't want the future of gaming to be on the web. This is more than just Javascript hate. It's hard to monetize games if you aren't going free to play with microtransactions. And really, on a personal level, I just like downloading games and playing them offline. I'm not always near internet access.
You don't have to use JavaScript. (See emscripten, binaryen etc.)
The Web is basically just a runtime you don't have to host your files on a server if you don't want. You can distribute them via CDs if you prefer. Also you can use Service Workers now.
That said monetisation all depends on the product not the medium. Just look at Minecraft. It didn't use ads or microtransactions and yet it was run from a Java applet in a browser.
Yeah, but many of us game developers don't want to use any of that either. At the end of the day, those tools don't ensure that we obtain the same level of quality out the other end.
Framerates aren't the same, memory usage isn't the same, and you can't easily tweak these things once they've come out the other end. The web _isn't_ just a runtime. It's abstracted like that, but browsers are glorified HTML renders with JavaScript bindings, event handling, and sound and video playback to game developers.
HN has a subset of the community constantly raving about these things for game developers, but where are the game developers actually praising these things? I don't know of any, personally. We're all too busy with desktop games.
Myself, I'm currently working on a game that targets both the web and the desktop. I like the accessibility of the former (just go to the site and play, nearly frictionless), but the latter has better FPS by an order of magnitude[0] for the same C codebase, so I'd rather keep my options open.
[0] Mind you, said order of magnitude applies to uncapped framerate.
I don't think I'm understanding you. What tools ensure you get the same level of quality on the user's setup? Things are always different on the user's hardware/system.
I assume they mean same quality in the browser versus on the desktop. The difference is noticeable. Yes, there's differences between machines, but if you're offering only the browser version, the people with the least powerful machines could get a bad experience.
Distribution via CDs is not even realistic. That might work for Linux distributions who want to sell CDs to the 10 people who want to buy them but for games when most sells are made via Steam that isn't even a serious idea.
Minecraft also notoriously performs terrible. Given what Minecraft is sure that might work for Minecraft. It wouldn't work for an AAA game.
OK use what ever distribution and monetisation strategy you want. The point was that you are not restricted to serving your files from a online server or making money via ads/microtransactions just because you are using the Web.
FWIW, Service Workers allow content to be downloaded in the background and to be made offline.
Mainstream gaming will never catch on the Web. But Mozilla is working on WebVR to create an open and distributed platform for VR (https://mozvr.com). You'll be able to publish VR content in seconds and traverse from world to world. WebGL2 is exciting for that space.
Service Workers allow content to be downloaded in the background and to be made offline.
In practice, service workers seem to mostly be drive-by installs of forms of hostile code. Look at "about:serviceworkers" in Firefox to see what's running. Did you ask for any of those? I have, excluding sites where I have a login:
* https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net - No idea what this is. Going there returns XML with "<Message>Access denied.</Message><Details>Anonymous users does not have storage.objects.list access to bucket itchio.</Details>".
* https://fee.org - "Foundation for Economic Education", a right-wing think tank. Does a drive-by install for any home page access.
what is the downside? There doesn't seem to be any permissioning other than completely turning them off, and these could be used to implement another form of supercookie.
Gaming on the web isn't really that new: see the popularity of Flash games. All this progress just means that doesn't have to be based on old closed plugins.
I thought with the WebAssembly we can have (sort of) both? (not really binaries because it's bytecode and not really on the web because it runs somewhat in a different context, but then again, are web workers not on the web? Perhaps it's hard to define what "on the web" means).
Yeah, I meant OS-specific binaries. For performance reasons I'm way more interested in important services being delivered by Linux binaries than Chrome or Firefox binaries.
According to http://www.slideshare.net/SamsungOSG/duel-of-two-libraries-c... Skia is faster than Cairo in most benchmarks, but the settings are very fiddly and it's easy to get incorrect results if you're not careful. It's owned by Google though, so I'd expect it to be possible to get good results. Also it says the API is not stable? That sounds like a big downside. I hope the speed gains are worth it.
Gecko was already using Skia on Windows and Mac, so enabling Skia on Linux helps consolidate the graphics code.
WebRender is actively being ported to Gecko (the "Quantum Render" project), but it is a large effort and won't ship until late 2017. It's an all-or-nothing feature, so it can't be enabled incrementally.
After reading that article in 2014, I switched to Firefox. I used it from that point until just a few weeks ago when a program bypassed my defaults and launched Chrome. And I immediately remembered why I preferred Chrome and how much more responsive it feels, and how it handles plugins and per-tab processes and uses a quarter the memory somehow.
So now I'm back on Chrome. Felt good to be on FF for awhile, felt like I was preserving freedom or whatever. But now that I'm on Chrome, I won't switch back until Firefox actually becomes a better browser.
I've heard this same thing from many people, and the problem almost always turns out to be accumulated cruft in the Firefox profile. Switching to a "fresh" browser usually makes it feel much more responsive because you don't have the cruft. If that's the case for you, following the steps at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a... may help.
It's not. FF is slower then Chrome. I formatted my Macbook recently so I know it was clean. FF is significantly slower than Chrome, especially on JS heavy sites like Amazon.
It's also worse on power. FF tends to drain my battery much faster than Chrome. That's with <20 tabs open, mostly light weight sites.
I'm still using FF as my main browser but will probably switch to Chrome again.
> how it handles plugins and per-tab processes and uses a quarter the memory somehow.
Swings and roundabouts. I find chrome uses much more memory, and the plugins I care about (tab group view, NoScript) don't have effective parallels in chrome last I looked. I also have a pet hate for any application which decides that it needs its own look-and-feel and you should discard your own window decorations.
Also, the mozilla entity is much more about preserving freedom, and I think that's worth the minor inconveniences you get from webdevs who think that chrome is the only browser in existence.
I thought Chrome was famous for being a resource hog. It consumes more RAM on my Windows PCs, though I confess I use more tabs than are viable in Chrome....
> I thought Chrome was famous for being a resource hog.
That's only in comparison to Safari and Edge. If you open enough tabs to cause memory issues on Chrome, Firefox would have frozen and slowed down to a crawl before filling the memory, anyhow, and electrolysis still isn't in a state where it could change that: there's still one process for the renderer so if enough intensive webpages are run your web browsing experience will still slow down.
You can clear out memory use in Firefox by restarting it. It doesn't create a firestorm of reloads that cripple your PC because it only reloads tabs when you click on them.
I use FF for almost everything but when it comes to Google stuff (Gmail, Docs, Sheets, etc.) I use Chromium. Firefox crashes on me too much with those apps and though I generally don't lose work it's a pain to have to relaunch and get back to where I was.
Mozilla's marketing annoys me. They aren't freedom fighters, and they aren't actually protecting the web. They aren't big or powerful enough to protect the web, so their desire to protect it makes no difference.
That kind of marketing is an admission that their browser is not as good as its competitors. If Firefox was the best, Mozilla would drop the freedom-fighter baloney and simply say "Choose Firefox because it has the best features and user experience."
Firefox was launched at a time when web browsing was dominated by IE. [0] It is open-source in a world where browsers are either completely (IE/Edge) or somewhat (Chrome) closed source.
People say that IE didn't adapt fast enough, and that's why it died. But imagine how behind we'd be today if Firefox had never come along!
In a world where almost every piece of software you run (from your OS to your favorite toolbar) and every site you visit, tries to gather as much information about you. Mozilla's open-source stance and mission to improve privacy is protecting the web, by protecting us.
Perhaps privacy is not your favorite feature, perhaps it does not enhance your user experience, but for many others it does. It serves an important niche, and I hope that it succeeds and continues to disrupt what could otherwise be a browser monopoly.
Firefox was released in 2004. It did a great deal to break up IE's market share at that time. I remember it very well, and I liked it a lot back then.
But it is now 2017, and when I decide which browser I should use, I choose one that is good today, and I don't care about the blows its parent company struck for or against freedom 13 years ago.
I also disagree with the assertion that Firefox is better for security or privacy than Chrome is. They are comparable in their security and privacy features.
Security and privacy isn't only prevalent on browser frontend features. There are battles happening within every standardized Web specification. Without more than one major player, one company would be allowed to dictate the level of security and private within every API. There are also initiatives that push the Web forward in security like with Let's Encrypt or Do Not Track. Mozilla also advances into new areas of technology to try to ensure they remain open.
It's totally fine to prefer one browser or the other. It's great to have an actual choice. But the ideals and values aren't just for show.
Ideas and values don't matter if you don't have enough power to make a difference in the world.
What has Mozilla actually done in the past few years to push the web forward in security or ensure that a web specification protects user freedom?
Things that Microsoft or Google or Apple were also trying to do don't count -- what good things did Mozilla succeed in doing that the other browser companies opposed?
Was using Firefox from a very long time , but for some reason recently Firefox is very slow on my machine . Even chromium starts up slowly . Google Chrome opens the fastest and is very light on resources .
I use it as much as I can, although for development tasks Chrome performs much better for me and certain sites load slower. I'm looking forward to a year from now when servo/quantum/whatever is in there. In the mean time though, I'm thankful to have a non-commercial party in the mix and am happy to use it.
I thought that only rolled out to a small percent of users, and only users without extensions, and it's not even "per-thread tabs" but rather "one thread for UI, one thread for content."
To "refresh" your Firefox user profile, open the about:support and click the "Refresh" button. It should preserve your tabs, bookmarks, and saved passwords but will lose your installed add-ons (so note which add-ons you have now that you will want to re-install).
I thought this was the case too, so I tried letting Firefox stay in memory using the Minimizetotray extension but it was still lagging. I had e10s enabled with just ublock origin enabled. I quit trying to optimize it further and switched back to Chrome.
If you are on Linux, it might help to run profile-cleaner [0] on your Firefox install to vacuum and reindex the assorted sqlite databases it uses. Probably wont help general performance, but might help startup time.
You are not alone. I also stopped using Firefox six months ago or so because it was incredibly slow. I'm keeping an eye on it to see if the performance improves, but unless something big happens, I don't think I will go back to it.
I've found the specific sites you have open matter too. Google products (inbox especially) and AWS in particular are awful if you leave them open for a while. I stopped doing that as soon as I noticed.
On linux I also saw a lot of benefit to making sure hardware acceleration was force enabled (it's disabled on the platform by default for some reason; I also had to start optirun-ing it on my laptop). Firefox has literally never been faster or behaved better since making those two changes.
Chrome is cheating. It runs as a service and starts when you boot the computer. Then it's loaded from memory.
Startup times are only comparable when you start Firefox for the second time and at least for me, Firefox is faster then. Rendering and the developer tools however seem to be slower in Firefox indeed, sometimes significantly.
...still no "smooth pinch-to-zoom" like Safari and Chromium have had for years :'(
Zooming is such a basic thing, and it really sucks in Firefox in my opinion (using a Macbook with its trackpad that is.. if using a mouse it obviously doesn't apply)
Sorry to be completely off-topic, but how can you disable keys in Vimperator? I'm a Front End Dev so I use the 'Q' key a lot so it's annoying that I keep trying to record macros (which I never need to do in Firefox).
> Added support for WebGL 2, with advanced graphics rendering features like transform feedback, improved texturing capabilities, and a new sophisticated shading language
Can anyone explain that last bit. I know WebGL 2 goes with GLSL ES 3.0, but that seems to be the same ol' GLSL with a few tweaks. Is this "new sophisticated shading language" just overblown PR, or is there an actual new shading language?
Is anyone else facing trouble in updating Firefox from the 'Help->About' dialog? Whenever a new Firefox version is released, this dialog promptly gives me the new release, but this time it has decided to stick to 50.1.0 (while going to the Firefox download site directly downloads 51.0)
The save password pop-up? You can disable it for all sites in the Firefox settings, the same as in previous versions. All they changed was making it recognize some login forms that it didn't recognize before; it's not a totally new feature. Are you seeing false positives with it?
It seems buggy. For example, I don't like that it keeps suggesting other login names when I've already filled the field. I also don't understand what is supposed to happen when the popup appears in the password field, if I choose something the username isn't changed at least.
Mostly I think it gets in the way. I had no problem with the old functionality where I just wrote the username and the password was filled out when I pressed tab.
Because Kabyle contributors are translating everyday :) . I'am a Kabyle localizer. I=We tried to build a team to keep it up-to-date. It's not a matter of number!!!
I can't think of another product that does release notes as well as them. Usually your hunting down ticket numbers (often on a private tracker) that are referenced from a changelog.