Firefox 35 Arrives With MP4 Playback On Mac, Android Download Manager Support 177
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 35 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Major additions to the browser include room-based Firefox Hello conversations, H.264 (MP4 files) playback on OS X, and integration with the Android download manager. Mozilla has opened up the Firefox Marketplace for the desktop, currently in beta. While Firefox Marketplace is already available on Firefox OS and Firefox for Android, the company is now asking users to help test apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Full changelogs: desktop and Android.
MORE SHIT??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck off Mozilla, we do NOT want this cesspool of added crap. Light, fast and bulletproof is what is wanted, not this repulsive nonsense.
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Couldn't agree more. And I also want the classical UI back, you know the one that was actually usable.
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Just press F10 to get the old menus back.
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Together wit classical theme restorer, that is actually usable. Thanks!
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Pale Moon [palemoon.org] for the win !!!!
I switched from Firefox about two months ago and I haven't looked back.
Take back the web with Pale Moon :)
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I am hoping for that. I already have it installed on a memory stick, just did not have the time to test it out. I very much like their commitment to keep the UI and not experiment recklessly on their user-base. And with FF as basis, it should be able to get a good security track-record as well.
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Or right-click almost anywhere.
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Re: MORE SHIT??? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Hey, assholes! Stop trying to make some money! You should just be happy that a few people donate to you at all, rather than trying to pay your employees, compete with the three biggest tech firms on earth, and do all those other initiatives that should obviously cost nothing!
Why is it necessary for Mozilla to have paid employees, let alone an actual corporate structure?
Why does Mozilla need to "compete" with Google. Mozilla is a non-profit. What's the endgame here?
Why can't they just write their software for people who want it and let people use Chrome who want to use Chrome.
There's lots of open-source software projects out there that continue to run based solely on the contributions of their developers.
Given the choice between "Commercial Mozilla" trying to compete with Chrome, and a slower changing, community run affair, I'll take the latter.
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>Why can't they just write their software for people who want it
Um, they are doing so. It's just that there are a lot of different people who want it, and many of them have conflicting interests, needs, and outlooks on what Firefox should be.
As for the rest of what you say, sure, if you're happy with Mozilla giving up entirely on trying to steer the web, and just letting Google, Apple and Microsoft dictate the way the web evolves, then you won't see a need for Mozilla to make money and compete. But a "sl
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As for the rest of what you say, sure, if you're happy with Mozilla giving up entirely on trying to steer the web, and just letting Google, Apple and Microsoft dictate the way the web evolves, then you won't see a need for Mozilla to make money and compete.
Mozilla had already given up trying to "steer the web" the moment they stopped trying to do things their own way and started copying Chrome. At that point they are simply helping Google control things better than Microsoft or Apple.
Frankly speaking, you're asking the wrong questions. The real one is: why does Mozilla need to exist? Shouldn't there already be an OSS community creating and maintaining a web browser, and keeping Google, Apple and Microsoft on their toes? Until that happens, I'd say we need Mozilla to do the job for us. And that's assuming it's feasible to begin with.
And all of this still ignores that everyone is getting upset about a few features that Mozilla are using to try to make some money.
Mozilla's attempts to "make some money" are increasingly making the product a more commercial affair and less user-focused one. Treating the users like a product to deliver to advertisers is exactly the reason many people don't use Chrome, even if at this point it is the faster b
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Because they complete with Microsoft and Google, and have done a good job at it.
Staying relevant and keeping up with standards, and delivering a browser with updates on a timely basis.
Because in short while
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I guess they think that they need paid developers to keep their browser up to date. Apple and Google, as well as many others, have thrown considerable resources at Webkit and their browsers, and it seems to be paying off if you judge by market share. Moz started with a crap code base that needed massive amounts of work to keep it competitive in terms of speed and robustness, not to mention standards compliance.
The problems started when they fixed most of the architectural issues (except add-ons, which are s
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Why is it necessary for Mozilla to have paid employees, let alone an actual corporate structure?
There's lots of open-source software projects out there that continue to run based solely on the contributions of their developers.
How soon we forget.
Firefox had the money and manpower needed to develop the first credible open source alternative to Internet Explorer on the mainstream Windows platform.
The uncomfortable and unspoken truth about open source is that projects beyond a certain size and complexity need a formal organization, full-time staff and funding that rivals their commercial --- proprietary --- alternatives.
This is never more true when the target audience or market is not the computer geek.
More Importantly... (Score:2)
considering that Google is by far the largest contributor to Mozilla, it would actually be in the best interests NOT to compete with Google.
Though upon reading the wiki, it seems they are now getting the Money from Yahoo, of which MS takes a 12% cut as it actually goes though Bing, so it may not be in the best interests to compete with anyone really! :)
Re:MORE SHIT??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck off Mozilla, we do NOT want this cesspool of added crap.
Then don't use it. Installing Firefox is optional, you know. Or do you feel Mozilla should be beholden to you in return for all those thousands of dollars you never quite got around to donating?
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It's not advertised, but key pinning is an important security feature that's finally made it into the base program.
Now, if only they wouldn't throw up so many roadblocks with self-signed certs. But cert pinning is a good start that they recognize the old model of secure vs insecure based on a cert alone is no longer sufficient. I say, switch to a new model based on the grade of security. E.g.:
Secure and authentic (green)
Secure but maybe not authentic (yellow)
Authentic but possibly insecure, also mixed conte
Re: MORE SHIT??? (Score:1)
MORE SHIT??? (Score:2)
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You'd rather have to rely on the Flash plugin? You realize you can now watch YouTube and other sites flash-free but you don't see that as reducing bloat?
Related - MP4 in Firefox fixes one of the most irritating bugs in the history of the web - the fact that browser shortcuts don't work while you are watching a flash video.
Pat
Breaks my Adobe Reader plugin (Score:1)
Now FF thinks it has both version 10 and version 11.
Someone messed up bad. Real bad.
Re:Breaks my Adobe Reader plugin (Score:5, Insightful)
yeah, the guy who installed adobe reader :-P
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Some of us use PDF for almost everything, especially in research.
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But with so many good FLOSS PDF viewers that refuse to run Adobe-compatible malware, why would you use the bloated Adobe reader?
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If your OS can't handle a PDF file natively, it's time to change your OS.
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Re:Breaks my Adobe Reader plugin (Score:5, Insightful)
Shame that Firefox does not have a good embedded PDF reader.
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Shame that your OS of choice can't seem to download a PDF and open it with the default application.
PDF in the browser is a security nightmare. So is PDF in Acrobat Reader, but at least you have a bit more control about what can poke the PDF that way.
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PDF in the browser is a security nightmare.
Why? It's a data format. By this logic, HTML and JPEG and PNG in the browser are security nightmares and we should remove them as well.
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Now, if Firefox could finally render TeX, we could get off of HTML altogether.
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Now, if Firefox could finally render TeXt, we could get off of HTML altogether.
There! FTFY! You need a good spellchecker and you're done! ;-)
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Do you mean the default embedded one that is so slow I'm better off drawing the PDF by hand?
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Everything breaks the Adobe reader. Get rid of it and install Sumatra PDF.
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Now FF thinks it has both version 10 and version 11.
All your versions are belong to us?
What's scary is (Score:5, Interesting)
...that Firefox is still my favorite browser. I really don't care for any of the rest, but my gods, what kinds of drugs are they doing over at the Mozilla compound?
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obviously none they are willing to share.
Re:What's scary is (Score:4, Informative)
Also, I noticed this quote from the Firefox Hello page:
"Recently, we introduced Firefox Hello, the first global communications system built directly into a browser to help make things easier."
Have they never heard of Virtual Places? It was a browser with built-in chat rooms for each web page. Every web page you visited put you in a chat with everyone else on that page. There were avatars you moved around on the page, and "gestures" and, whatever. This was 1994 or so...
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tried palemoon and had to give it up.
some extensions do not work and I see no reason for that. some of the adblockers refuse to run. this is NOT good!
youtube and other flash sites still are broken. has been for months.
I gave up. its not worth this effort.
I strongly dislike the current FF UI but palemoon just doesn't 'get it' when it comes to working with existing plugins. if you ask me to run alternate ones, you just DON'T GET IT and I won't spend any more time on using your product.
pity..
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The only issues I've hit is that you can't get at Adblock Plus's settings, which is kind of weird. There's a fork you can install that fixes it. The only other glitch I've seen is that the search bar on Google's Play store disappears. That can be worked around by modifying the user-agent string. Other than that, it works fine. No issues with Youtube, even with plugins to download videos from it.
This is with the x64 build. I've been using it ever since the CEO firing thing happened.
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you should have read the warning when you selected the 64bit installer. same happens with firefox and chrome.
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I'm using PaleMoon 25 on Linux (64-bit) and am pretty happy with it. Unlike Firefox, on Linux it defaults to highlighting the url and seach box contents when you click on them, which makes middle-click pasting impossible. Fortunately for the URL bar, there's a setting to not highlight it on click (browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll). For the search box for now I use a add-on to add a clear button to the box. People talk like the highlight then middle click feature of X11 is an outdated feature that's quaint
Self-signed SSL is badly broken in recent firefox (Score:2)
Hmm I just found out that Firefox over 31 changed the way certificates are handled and now all my internal certs signed by own CA are broken. Can't even get an exception dialog box. Just an error about how it can't load the page. And from the bug reports, it sounds like a lot of devices are broken now too. Arguably I should comply with some 46-page document on CA Cert best practices. What a mess. Why does Firefox and Google keep pushing the idea that self-signed certs are not secure? In any case, with
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I also should comply with RFCs too as my cert appears to violate part of one RFC. Problem was I'm not an SSL expert so I didn't know where to look. In any case, the devs have been fairly responsive on bugzilla to this issue and I've received a lot of help, which really impressed me. I've also suggested that in the future, the failure modes of SSL verification, particularly in Thunderbird, should pop up more descriptive messages than simply "unknown error occurred." Ideally a utility to check certificate
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Wow, I never thought about middle click pasting on Wayland. It's a feature I don't think about anymore, and I find myself mistakingly trying to use it while under Windows.
I will thus keep running X11 forever if Wayland can't get its act together about it, or alternatively I will run Wayland with the built-in X11 server on top to manage the entire desktop or if that's possible every window or surface except the panels and video games.
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It's a feature I don't think about anymore, and I find myself mistakingly trying to use it while under Windows.
Then remap the action of your middle mouse button. I've been able to do that with every mouse I've owned in Windows for more than 15 years.
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Looks nice, but no OSX support.
Praise His Noodliness....
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Re:What's scary is (Score:4, Informative)
You shouldn't put all the blame on Mozilla. HTML5, the one standard to rule them all, is the real issue here. HTML5 essentially is the specification for an operating system over the web. It's a monstrosity that never should have been born.
Mozilla still gets the blame for the constant UI changes. But the real demon is HTML5.
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Is this a "they couldn't help themselves, it was just too tempting" kind of defense? :)
I think the constant UI changes are worse, but both are annoying.
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...Firefox is still my favorite browser..
You're in a dwindling minority.
.
It looks like [w3schools.com] Firefox started 2014 with a 26.9% market share, and ended 2014 with a 23.6% market share.
Yup, those Mozilla people must be doing something right.
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Here are the stats for a general insurance website, so it should be visited by a good range of users:
1. Internet Explorer 34.73%
2. Chrome 28.93%
3. Safari 24.33%
4. Firefox 8.90%
5. Android Browser 1.57%
And does it have a decent UI? (Score:2)
I guess it has the same one as the last version, so no.
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Vimperator still works, so yeah it does have a decent UI.
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Unfortunately, I am an Emacs person....
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Emacs probably includes its own web browser anyway.
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It does. But text-mode browsing is a bit tedious these days...
Dumped it already (Score:2)
First I started with Palemoon because the interface wasn't that abortion they call Australis. But Palemoon seemed to be getting slower so I gave Chrome a try and liked it. Not without a few essential addons like Adblock, Flashblock, and a home button. We're at a crossroads right now like when Netscape 4 came out and IE really improved.
Great. More "things I don't need" in my browse ... (Score:2)
Isn't there a version of Firefox that simply supports, you know, Web Browsing?
Re:Great. More "things I don't need" in my browse (Score:4, Interesting)
And I'd like to follow up by asking the Firefox developers if they can add something like a "Features" tab under (perhaps) "Tools->Add-ons" to allow users to easily en/disable the various (non web-browsing) Firefox features, like WebIDE, WebRTC, Marketplace, Social, Taskbar Lists, Geo, Beacon, UI Tour, yada, yada, yada... -- so I don't have to scan through "about:config" looking for new things ending in ".enabled" (and the like) to set to "false" with every new Firefox release. Thank you in advance.
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Careful what you wish for, next they'll take the "about:config" away.
also changes your default search engine (Score:3)
...to "Yahoo!". Easy to change back, though. :)
They horribly broke sessions (Score:2)
I've been updating FF and successfully restoring my previous session for years.
Now sessions don't even work with a brand new, fresh profile.
Epic FAIL.
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Discovered that session support is silently disabled in 35 if com.indexedDB.enabled = false.
And no, I did not set that to false myself--don't know what addon did it nor when.
FF provides no logging about the fact either.
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The point is that FF 34 didn't depend on this setting while FF 35 *does*--and no warning was issued to explain the sudden loss of functionality.
I can't remember (Score:2)
the last time they put out a release that actually had something that I used.
Microsoft PAYS people and orgs. to use Bing! (Score:2)
I don't understand how that works. Can someone make a software robot to do searches and visit ads, and then get paid? Why have a job when your computer can make money unaided?
Microsoft pays Yahoo, Yahoo then paid Mozilla Foundation to sneakily make Bing the default search engine, and not Google search, realizing that most people don't have the technical ability to know
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I don't understand how that works. Can someone make a software robot to do searches and visit ads, and then get paid? Why have a job when your computer can make money unaided?
Yes, Google (or Bing) for bing rewards bot. You, too, can raise your utility bill while earning a whopping $5 worth of credits per month to apply to your XBox Live account. Don't quit your day job just yet.
Zawinski's Law (sort of) (Score:1)
“Every program attempts to expand until it includes a marketplace/appstore/.... Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which do.”
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iOS has a store. Android has a store. Unsurprisingly, Firefox OS has a store.
What they're doing is extending same said store to the desktop, so that you can run the apps from your phone on your PC.
Quite handy if you're in the minority (myself included) that are blessed with a Firefox OS handset!
Firefox jumped the shark (Score:2)
Firefox jumped the shark when they finally did away with a functional search bar. Now it's all about the forks, like Palemoon.
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Care to elaborate on what makes the new search bar so much more complicated?
Native admx controls (Score:1)
pretty please
Mozzila Foundation, you need an intervention (Score:1)
Seriously guys, nobody gives a damn about these nonsense features. Work on the memory hog that Firefox has become and work on fixing the crescent number of bugs and working on making it light again. Nobody cares about the stuff you keep adding anymore and it's just making the problem even worst.
Image mouseover is borked (Score:2)
Comment (Score:2)
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Like the 20 previous times you posted this?
I found this today I had marked it apparently.
Here is the kraken benchmark results from v6
http://krakenbenchmark.mozilla.org/kraken-1.1/results.html?%7B%22v%22:%20%22kraken-1.1%22,%20%22ai-astar%22:%5B852,857,858,861,858,854,865,859,866,855%5D,%22audio-beat-detection%22:%5B458,480,458,456,458,458,483,457,457,484%5D,%22audio-dft%22:%5B435,441,434,431,427,701,425,431,439,431%5D,%22audio-fft%22:%5B353,352,359,357,357,357,357,372,354,354%5D,%22audio-oscillator%22:%5B62
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Which benchmark is suggested?
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But have they fixed the memory leaks yet? :-P
*ducks*
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Could you not tell by the ":-P" that I was joking? The aspergers is strong in this one.
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Re:owners of older machines, behold... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's still less memory hungry than Chrome.
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chrome uses more memory, but doesn't get slow as molasses after a few hours.
not even when installing flashblock. most youtube videos skip frames here on my i5 laptop.
surf over 30 tabs and close them and you will see ram use over 1 gig on firefox
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i always use the latest version on my hp i5 laptop with 8gb ram. Right now, firefox is consuming 750mb of ram.
I relate the issue with the flash plugin.
Re:owners of older machines, behold... (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox is also a smaller download, a smaller install, starts faster, runs JavaScript faster, allows plugins on the mobile version, and allows users to run their own sync server, compared with Chrome.
Mozilla's work is really shining these days. Firefox is a better browser by every metric I can think of.
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How's that Electrolysis project coming along? Will they ever be done?
I switched to a modern browser years ago simply because multi-process is better. With Firefox there is no way to know which tab is draining your battery or consuming all you memory. Actually memory stopped being an issue for me when I switched to Chrome, so perhaps Firefox was just leaking it everywhere, but being able to identify pages using a lot of CPU and selectively killing them is the must-have feature that all the other major bro
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there was an announcement a couple of months ago that Electrolysis was enabled by default in the nightlies.
Trunk is several versions ahead of release.
So probably the release after this one, i.e. 36
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Firefox is also a smaller download (...)
I'm not so sure any more.
v35 was a 46 MB update: firefox-35.0.complete.mar 09-Jan-2015 09:23 46M
Offline installers are 38 MB.
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allows plugins on the mobile version
This is the big one for me. Firefox on Android is the only Android browser that I've found that lets me have a decent policy for cookie management. The Self-Destructing Cookies plugin is the main reason that I switched to Firefox on my phone and tablet. The lack of tab sandboxing is the main reason that I stick with Safari on the desktop.
Memory woes, but Extensions flow! (Score:2)
Well I don't use Firefox anymore other than as another alternate browser for weird instances... However I remember two things both good and bad:
1) Memory management in Firefox was terrible (at least in the last version I used).
2) Some Firefox extensions were very useful for certain things... Like Firebug and debugging JavaScript.
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I agree that FF is better than the other browsers except for one obviously glaring problem: choppy flash video. It is a real problem and no fault of my own so don't throw it back at me.
I only have this problem with non-fullscreen video on Linux. On Win7, everything is fine.
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Please name a major browser vendor that has less money than Firefox. Mozilla is the only one of the "big four" browser vendors that isn't a huge multi-national corporation.
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And yet Mozilla receive north of $100 Million a year in income - just how large a budget do you need to write a web browser full time?
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That isn't new this time around. It was added a few versions back.
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Title says "MP4 support on Mac", does that mean Firefox still doesn't support it on Windows and Linux?