Firefox 22 Released, Boosts 3-D Gaming and Video Calls 156
Today Mozilla announced the launch of Firefox 22 for desktops and Android devices. For the desktop version, WebRTC, the open source browser-based communications API, is now enabled by default. "This technology makes it possible to place and receive video calls from a mobile or desktop browser or share live video, files and images with friends and family." Firefox 22 also has support for the asm.js subset of JavaScript, which allows for big performance boosts on graphically complex applications in the browser. (We saw a demonstration of this a while back.) Other new features include display scaling options for making text bigger on high-res displays, better WebGL rendering performance, word wrapping for text files displayed in the browser, and the ability to change the playback rate of HTML5 audio and video. The new Android version features include tablet UI support for smaller tablets, and a fix for scrolling in nested frames.
Re:Since we're all paranoid now, how secure is thi (Score:2, Informative)
Not trolling, straight question. I know nothing about webRTC; are communications 'secure' by default?
They use (S)RTP for the transport:
http://www.webrtc.org/reference/architecture#TOC-RTP-Stack
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_Transport_Protocol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Real-time_Transport_Protocol
The speicific protocol used is DTLS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datagram_Transport_Layer_Security
Re:Are there still memory leaks? (Score:5, Informative)
Lot better. it is now far faster than Chrome. I have switched back.
Re:nabled by default (Score:5, Informative)
For the Whiners (Score:5, Informative)
For those who read the title and came here to moan about bloat:
The technologies mention in reference to 3D gaming are WebGL and asm.js. These serve to make things faster and their size is negligible (want to complain when the few extra bits in your JS engine make things go faster?). They can both be used in non-gaming situations, particularly processing-intensive stuff like dealing with images (processing, filters) and video (decoding - see ORBX.js). WebGL was already there, it's just better now.
You can disable it if you want, but WebRTC stuff doesn't load additional components (encoding/decoding video for instance) unless you're using them - which would be no worse than Flash (better actually). And just like with Geolocation, a site has to ask permission - to which you can say "never".
Chrome already has WebGL, WebRTC and is optimizing for asm.js. It's possible to land these without adversly impacting performance/responsiveness, and for the past year Mozilla has had their eye on the metrics.
Re:Are there still memory leaks? (Score:4, Informative)
Memory leaks are normally attributable to the plug-ins used, rather than Firefox, nowadays.
Unfortunately, memory leaks are usually blamed on the browser, not on a plug-in, regardless of the cause.