Firefox 18 Launches With Faster IonMonkey-Enabled JavaScript, Built-In PDF Viewe

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla on Tuesday officially launched Firefox 18 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The improvements include a new JavaScript compiler, a built-in PDF viewer, as well as Retina and touch support. The release notes are available, as is a list of changes for devs."

Re:Honestly?

[Shikaku]

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

ESR versions are yearly if you care so much about fast releases.

Re:Honestly?

[Tumbleweed]

Feel free to use the LTR and only upgrade once a year if you like. Nobody's forcing you to upgrade with every release.

Re:Wasn't this supposed to happen silently?

[ChronoReverse]

It already happened. Check your settings to see if it's turned on.

PDF.js

[oever]

The PDF viewer in Firefox, PDF.js [github.com] is an amazing piece of software. It is written entirely in JavaScript and runs in the same sandbox in which a webpage runs. So it is very safe. The layout accuracy and speed of PDF.js are simply amazing. Text selection happens just like it does in the browser. Some PDF viewers only allow you to draw a rectangle on which to do OCR. PDF.js simply lets you select the glyphs.

This viewer has been available as an add-on [mozilla.org] for a while already.

Re:Quit whining

[girlintraining]

And your complaining about the mainstream version of Firefox while ignoring the existence of the enterprise version of Firefox makes your argument disingenuous.

I'm well aware of it. It has support for all of... 1 year [mozilla.org]. Also, to quote directly from the same page: "Backports of any functional enhancements and/or stability fixes are not in scope."

So, who's being more disingenuous here... the person who makes the argument that "release early, release often" may not be suitable for all applications, or the guy that handwaves the argument, claims a lie of omission, and then makes a lie of omission of his own? Stupid facts, getting in the way of a good internet roasting...

Re:There is no PDF viewer, yet

[MarcoAtWork]

there sure is, although it wasn't on by default for me: enable pdfjs inside about:config and set the pdf in content to 'preview in firefox'

Re:PDF.js

[DuckDodgers]

They did that because an awful lot of PCs hacked by a website were hacked through security flaws in the PDF viewer. Writing the PDF viewer in Javascript means that the Mozilla developers only need to make Javascript in Firefox secure to protect the machine from intentionally badly formed PDFs, and of course they already needed to secure Javascript so that's no extra security work.

As a scripting language, Javascript is still slow compared to something like well-written C++. But Firefox 18 is pretty close to the latest version of Chrome for Javascript performance (e.g. arewefastyet.com ), so I bet the PDF viewer in Javascript works quickly enough.

Last crash: 1 hour ago.

[Futurepower(R)]

Firefox is the most unstable software in common use. One percent of the time it crashes: Crashes per 100 Active Daily Users [mozilla.com]

I use it only because it has add-ons I need.