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Firefox Mozilla Open Source Security The Internet

Firefox 39 Released, Bringing Security Improvements and Social Sharing 172

An anonymous reader writes: Today Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 39.0, which brings an number of minor improvements to the open source browser. (Full release notes.) They've integrated Firefox Share with Firefox Hello, which means that users will be able to open video calls through links sent over social media. Internally, the browser dropped support for the insecure SSLv3 and disabled use of RC4 except where explicitly whitelisted. The SafeBrowsing malware detection now works for downloads on OS X and Linux. (Full list of security changes.) The Mac OS X version of Firefox is now running Project Silk, which makes animations and scrolling noticeably smoother. Developers now have access to the powerful Fetch API, which should provide a better interface for grabbing things over a network.
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Firefox 39 Released, Bringing Security Improvements and Social Sharing

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  • by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Friday July 03, 2015 @10:47AM (#50039561)

    Better video chat and social media sharing? Just what I'm lacking in a web browser. Ditched the Palemoon build long ago for Chrome and couldn't be happier.

    • Re:Oh boy! (Score:4, Informative)

      by RabidReindeer ( 2625839 ) on Friday July 03, 2015 @10:54AM (#50039591)

      Installed Chrome recently because EVERY BLOODY STUPID TAB I open in Firefox stalls the entire browser for eternity. And that includes Slashdot tabs.

      I know that a lot of it is because everyone+dog feels obliged to dump 3.5GB of unwanted slop from other sites on my client for every page visited/updated - and that's AFTER the blockers have whittled it down.

      But Chrome at least lets me read stuff almost as soon as the page renders.

      • Re:Oh boy! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by jbssm ( 961115 ) on Friday July 03, 2015 @11:16AM (#50039707)
        This was exactly the reason that gave the final push to ditch Firefox for me as well. Seriously, how can a page that's seen by millions of people everyday - Amazon - bring Firefox to a crawl and the devs instead of fixing the problem keep adding video chat to the bloated thing? It's just insane.
        • This was exactly the reason that gave the final push to ditch Firefox for me as well. Seriously, how can a page that's seen by millions of people everyday - Amazon - bring Firefox to a crawl and the devs instead of fixing the problem keep adding video chat to the bloated thing? It's just insane.

          And they still don't handle html5 date fields like 5 years later. Seriously, this is just sad to see the once mighty firefox turn into IE6. Even worse: at least with IE6 Microsoft could credibly say "we're not developing that anymore". With Firefox they're still adding worthless features while ignoring standards.

          Michael

        • by radtea ( 464814 )

          Yeah, I've gotta say I'm within a hair of dumping Firefox. I'm not a Chrome fan, and IE is just not on. I've tried some other open source browsers and they have the usability of a jello hammer.

          At this point I'd be willing to pay money for a browser that just didn't flatline my CPU every time I loaded a page, that didn't stall for tens of seconds at random intervals (this is after I turned off hardware acceleration, which make things tens times worse on Windows in 38) and is simply, utterly and completely un

          • by allo ( 1728082 )

            the new search engine chooser (ugly as it is) makes it dead easy to see how to switch to a different search engine.

        • Maybe you should complain to Amazon to optimize their unresponsive web page? :)

      • Re:Oh boy! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Demonoid-Penguin ( 1669014 ) on Friday July 03, 2015 @11:24AM (#50039729) Homepage

        Installed Chrome recently because EVERY BLOODY STUPID TAB I open in Firefox stalls the entire browser for eternity. And that includes Slashdot tabs.

        Not having that problem here. It's Iceweasel but it should behave identically to Firefox. Lots of extensions. A five year old CPU and only 4GB of RAM. Two instances open (in different desktops) each with about a dozen tabs open. No freezes - ever.

        Do you have Ad-block enabled? NoScript? (I find those two extensions tend to actually speed Firefox/Iceweasel up on many sites).

        Have you tried Qupzilla?

        Chrome (and Chromium) seem to be a bit quicker but not enough that I want to give up all the extensions I use.

        Don't know how I feel about social sharing built-in - if I can't see it or notice it I probably don't care (I'll wait and see).

        • Pretty much every Firefox extension exists for Chrome. uBlock and FlashControl are all I use.

          • How about NoScript? How's that one coming along?

          • uBlock (/ uBlock Origin) are faster than Adblock Plus. That was one reason I moved over to Chrome. Plus I have a Chromecast which only works in Chrome.

            There is the odd extension that is Firefox-only. I'll use Firefox only when required.

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • Pretty much every Firefox extension exists for Chrome. uBlock and FlashControl are all I use.

            Agreed, pretty much. Though the key ones for my regular browsing are FlashBlock, NoScript and AdBlock Plus. The last two don't have complete replacements in Chrome. Note - we're only discussing personal preferences, not which is better. I recommend various browsers to others depending on their usage.

            Chrome doesn't, yet, have equivalents for all the extensions I use for work.

            Adblock Plus, CacheViewer2, cliget, Exify, Flashblock, GoogleSharing, Greasemonkey, Live HTTP headers, LocalLink, Modify Heade

            • No wonder your browser is slow with all that shit.

        • by allo ( 1728082 )

          iceweasel is an older firefox and ESR release, currently both is an advantage

          • iceweasel is an older firefox and ESR release, currently both is an advantage

            Actually Iceweasel is available in the same versioning as Firefox - the difference is that the Debian packagers backport security patches to older versions. i.e. I'm running v39.0 (39.0-1~bpo70+1 on Wheezy as I type)

            If I chose the default version that comes with oldoldstable (squeeze) I'd be running 3.5.16-20.

            Every release [debian.org] from oldoldstable to testing can make use of various releases [debian.net]. All releases except the latest get security patches backported - so if you don't like new features you can keep the older ve

            • by allo ( 1728082 )

              > https://packages.debian.org/je... [debian.org]
              is 31.x here and afaik built on the latest ESR release. you're using backports, that's a different deal (like ubuntu PPAs).
              And iirc backports have no guarantee for security patches, but just ship the new version (with new fixes and new bugs)

              • > https://packages.debian.org/je... [debian.org] is 31.x here and afaik built on the latest ESR release. you're using backports, that's a different deal (like ubuntu PPAs).

                Apropos of what? I run the same version Iceweasel on oldstable, stable, testing and unstable. Identical features, functionality, and extension support - the difference is the external libraries they use.

                And iirc backports have no guarantee for security patches, but just ship the new version (with new fixes and new bugs)

                Guarantee no - at least not for ever (nor did I say there was). Security patches are provided on the basis of the version number - not whether it's a backport or not (see glandium.org, the debian security list and the sources I've provided previously for up-to-date details). Backports are different only in t

      • When I tried Chrome, I noticed that it changes the system http proxy settings, instead of just changing the browser's proxy settings. In other words, when I set Chrome to use my privoxy proxy, Chrome then changes the global http proxy for Windows, so that everything else on the PC uses privoxy (which I do not want to happen). Does Chrome still have this behavior?
        • by allo ( 1728082 )

          This is a feature, not a bug. Chrome uses system proxy, password manager, etc. This is why the chrome passwordmanager is more safe when a better passwordsafe (i.e. kwallet instead of windows' implementation) is used.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        I just don't get Mozilla. Firefox's share of the market has dropped so much. Recent browser market share stats [caniuse.com] show that all versions of Firefox Desktop are only around 8% of the market. Firefox 38 is only at 7.45%, so we can expect Firefox 39 to be below that, possibly forever. Firefox for Android is at 0.14% (yes, that's a leading 0!), and Firefox isn't really a viable option on iOS.

        To put things in perspective, the latest version of Chrome for Android by itself, at 13.77%, has almost twice the number of

        • by Anonymous Coward

          I think to some degree they panicked over mobile and never recovered. Rather than re-focus on the desktop, where a lot of more serious web browsing is done, they just ran around in circles. Chrome, Safari and Opera are all now effectively using the same rendering engine, and it's not Gecko. They've also effectively killed Thunderbird. It's pretty sad how far they've fallen.

        • I just don't get Mozilla. Firefox's share of the market has dropped so much. Recent browser market share stats [caniuse.com] show that all versions of Firefox Desktop are only around 8% of the market.

          Have you allowed for the vast changes in the market i.e desktop no longer is the majority platform type? And the flaws in the reporting i.e. Firefox is counted as Firefox, but Iceweasel, PaleMoon, and a myriad of other builds of Firefox aren't.

          Notes:- PaleMoon is listed as a type that is not listed - but others variants aren't even acknowledged. Mobile platform browser figure sources aren't given, Desktop platform figures come from StatCounter - I don't know who the fuck they are - and no one I know does e

      • 75% of the right-click open-in-new-windows actions in Firefox 38 result in a bare window with no menu, controls, or scrollbars. Tried a few config setting which resulted in 5x5 pixel windows. Really useful.

        sPh

      • by Anonymous Coward

        If you have a fast box you can get deeper into the config:page of FF and set the "paintdelay" to 0, etc etc.. but if sending all traffic through Google floats your boat, by all means.

    • I finally left firefox build around 35 or 36. I tried 64 bit versions and had the same problems. I had been using it since way back when it was mozilla and netscape.

      Just couldnt take it anymore. First, when I only had 2 or 3 tabs open, say shopping on amazon, ebay and google, it would totally freeze for 5-10 seconds all the time. No reason for that on a machine with 4 to 6 core cpu and 8 to 20+GB of ram. Then you open firefox, visit one page, and it's using 900MB of ram, open 3 tabs and it taking over a
  • by Anonymous Coward

    ...randomly to where they are awkward to get to. Coz ya know chrome might have done the same thing. Gotta keep up.

  • Palemoon (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dwedit ( 232252 ) on Friday July 03, 2015 @10:49AM (#50039577) Homepage

    I already abandoned ship for Palemoon after they changed the search bar.

    • by vux984 ( 928602 )

      I looked at palemoon hard. Its pretty much just one guy is it not. I think its great what he's doing; but I'd prefer to see Firefox fixed properly rather than rely on Moonchild to maintain a browser for me -- something that is going to get increasingly harder as Mozilla diverges further and further from his fork.

      • by trabby ( 4123953 )
        There seems to be a few other contributors along the way.

        https://github.com/MoonchildPr... [github.com]

        wolfbeast (Moonchild) makes up the majority though.
        • One man does better job than whole Mozilla organization. I bet Mozilla developers themselves aren't too happy with latest developments - rumor was they were making Pocket native client when it was canned by the management and replaced by 3rd party version + $$.

      • by allo ( 1728082 )

        and it has license / trademark issues. and is mostly windows only, with some half baked older linux binaries. Not packages.
          waiting for a better fork.

  • Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 39.0, which brings an number of minor improvements ...

    ... again, there's bump in the major version number.

  • ...more useless bloat that I'm going to have to disable when practical things like being able to view text files in the browser is STILL broken after years of waiting.

    • ...more useless bloat that I'm going to have to disable when practical things like being able to view text files in the browser is STILL broken after years of waiting.

      Seriously?! Your install of Firefox won't render plain text files?? I've never had that problem and I definitely don't recall have to change any configs.

      It sounds like either it's a Windows thing; you accidentally set the filetype handling behaviour; or you have installed a downloader extension that changed things. Take a look at your mimetypes. It's easily fixable. [mozillazine.org]

      • Nope, it's Firefox. Plaintext files often don't have a mime type so present as unknown.

        Here's the nearly 15 year old bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s... [mozilla.org]

        • Nope, it's Firefox. Plaintext files often don't have a mime type so present as unknown.

          Here's the nearly 15 year old bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s... [mozilla.org]

          You appear to be confused. That (wishlist) bug is not that Firefox can't or won't show plain text files (it certainly will, ftp, http, or local) - it's Add "View as Text/HTML/..." option for unknown mime content-type. As a typical /. reader I can appreciate how you missed reading the description or saw words that plain weren't there. i.e. conflated that with your claim that "Firefox will not render plain text files". Tricky.

          The reason that hasn't been "fixed", and may never be fixed is because it's blocked

  • by Anonymous Coward

    And it still can't handle HTML5 video worth a damn? As of now, I have to use Chrome just to watch Youtube videos. What the fuck, Mozilla.

  • Moan moan moan (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03, 2015 @11:24AM (#50039731)

    Here we go, the usual slashdot moan-fest when there's any Firefox news.

    You know what, guys? Get over it.

    Let's step back and look at the available browsers, shall we?

    * Chrome: Google are getting more and more hungry for your personal data. If you trust them with it, use Chrome. I don't. Oh, and judging by the number of sites I'm seeing now that say "this site works best in Chrome", it looks like we might be heading back to the bad old days of the browser wars. Devs, please stop doing this: I for one do not want to be forced to use Chrome just because you happen to like it's new shiny features.
    * IE/Edge: Sure. Actually, it's a decent browser. But are you ready to forgive the past? No? I thought not. This is slashdot, after all. And yes, they're probably after your personal data too.
    * Safari: Yeah, right. You're using Safari are you? Wake me up when Apple starts actually doing some dev work on it again.
    * Opera: Hahahahahaha. Oh, sorry. Is Opera still a thing?
    * Firefox: Aparently, despite all the above, everyone still wants to hate Firefox. Oh well.

    • by Anonymous Coward
      If I had modpoints I'd mod this up. Seriously, He's more than right.
    • Re: Moan moan moan (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Just because the other browsers have problems it doesn't mean that Firefox doesn't have problems of its own.

      Firefox's problems tend to be very visible to the user. People notice things like the unusable Australis UI and the slowness of Firefox. Things like that are much more apparent than behind the scenes data collection or tracking, or security flaws.

      People are right to complain about Firefox. It deserves it!

      • Just because the other browsers have problems it doesn't mean that Firefox doesn't have problems of its own....

        It's Mozilla's problems, not Firefox's.

        .
        Mozilla has become so full of itself, it's lost in a cul-de-sac of self-importance.

        Mozilla needs to grow past the "we know better" phase and start listening to its users again.

        Unless and until Mozilla does that, Firefox will continue losing market share to Chrome.

    • Re:Moan moan moan (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nmb3000 ( 741169 ) on Friday July 03, 2015 @02:22PM (#50040541) Journal

      Here we go, the usual slashdot moan-fest when there's any Firefox news.

      You know what, guys? Get over it.

      So just because Firefox might be the least bad browser, we should just grin and bear it? That sounds like a recipe for mediocrity and a successful tyranny of the minority to me.

      I love Firefox. I love what it stands for (and especially what it used to stand for). That's why seeing it in this death spiral bothers me so much. If it was some stupid new Chrome or Safari features being discussed, I wouldn't give a damn. We care about Firefox -- that's why we "moan moan moan moan".

      everyone still wants to hate Firefox

      We hate the direction Firefox is going, and the people who are mismanaging the browser into obscurity.

    • ...You know what, guys? Get over it....

      Maybe Mozilla should "get over it", bring Firefox back to its roots, and stop making Firefox more and more bloated with superficial features whilst significant architectural issues remain unresolved.

    • >"Let's step back and look at the available browsers, shall we?"

      And "available" depends on your OS. IE and Safari are not an option under Linux (not that we would use either if they were). Opera really is a joke still. So that leaves the anti-friendly spyware called Chrome or the bloated Firefox from your list. There are some other piddly forks of Firefox, and a few obscure webkit browsers, but from my experience none of them are stable or great.

    • by Dogers ( 446369 )

      Well, Opera is now based on Chromium, so should be a valid choice again..

      There's always the new Vivaldi browser, which the original Opera devs split off to do.. https://vivaldi.com/ [vivaldi.com] ?

    • by jez9999 ( 618189 )

      You missed out SeaMonkey and Pale Moon. Both of them are better.

      • Palemoon would be great if it didn't have a massive memory management problem. When I use Firefox, SRWare Iron (an adaptation of Chrome), or Palemoon to access the same game (GeoGuessr, a challenge based on Google Walk), Palemoon alone is the one that contrives to eat up every single spare Gig of my RAM.
        I have 6GB, which surely isn't that small?

    • by jbssm ( 961115 )
      You know. What you say would actually make sense in a world where Firefox market share remains steady. But in the real word it doesn't, Firefox market share is taking a very hard hit, so it means that no, Firefox it's not the least bad browser, Firefox is actually an worst browser for many people that stopped using it in the past months/couple of years. Myself included.
  • Or is it still the same you will do it the Mozilla way Australis [sp?] mess?
  • by hawkeyeMI ( 412577 ) <brock@NOSPaM.brocktice.com> on Friday July 03, 2015 @11:57AM (#50039873) Homepage
    I won't be going back to Firefox until they have proper threading. I wish I could, I've tried a few times, but it just bogs down so much and so quickly if you open a bunch of tabs. No problem in Chrome. I used it for something like ten years before I finally tried Chrome and was blown away by the speed difference. Why are the working on this other stuff when such a fundamental problem, a problem they've acknowledged and worked on some, remains? I know it's hard to fix in such a complex codebase, but at least from my experience and what I've heard from others, it's a crucial issue affecting whether people use Firefox or not.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Single PROCESS. It is multi-threaded, but everything still runs in a single process, so one tab or extension can freeze up the whole browser. Chrome is multi-threaded and multi-process, so if one tabs acts up, it doesn't affect the rest of the tabs.
      • I've never seen it use more than one core for rendering of complex sites or multiple tags. It might be multi-threaded, but looks like only one thread is dedicated to rendering of all tabs.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Believe it or not, they've been trying to implement multi-process Firefox (electrolysis or e10s), but lack of funding and proper direction from management means they haven't been on top of this for a few years.

      Sadly the homo community forced Brenden Eich* out, otherwise he was a clear leader [pcworld.com] and wanted to put e10s as the top-most priority. [twitter.com]

      Anyway, after something like 8 years now, they're finally almost reaching a point of releasing a (limited) multi-process firefox, but it's been held back primarily due to

      • >Sadly the homo community forced Brenden Eich* out, otherwise he was a clear leader [pcworld.com] and wanted to put e10s as the top-most priority. [twitter.com]

        This is truly tragic. A multi-process firefox will make me ditch chrome so fast that google's ai bots won't know what hit 'em.

    • Firefox is multi-threaded although all those threads currently reside in the same process. So one tab can easily bog down entire browser.
      Multiprocess Firefox [mozilla.org] is coming soon.
  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Friday July 03, 2015 @11:58AM (#50039877)

    Support for social media? This means an NNTP client, right?

    • by Opyros ( 1153335 )
      That would be Thunderbird.
      • Does Seamonkey include an NNTP client? I remember using the one in Netscape Communicator way back in the day, until I finally forked out the money to buy Forte Agent. Good times.

  • the browser dropped support for the insecure SSLv3

    **fake gripe mode engaged**

    Oh great, now I have to have at least one machine on my network with an older web browser so I can manage those older network devices that still use SSL3- or other-broken-security-protocol-based web-management.

    Now maybe my company's bean-counters will understand when I say "it's time to replace that 5-year-old photocopier/scanner/printer since we can't simultaneously run the monthly usage reports and keep our computers as secure as we would like."

    **end fake gripe mode** ...but seriously...

    This (removing support for broken protocols) is a good thing, in that it will make sure that all the computers in my business that do NOT need to run those billing reports are up-to-date with respect to security. I can keep my eye on the one machine (which I will likely re-build as a VM) that needs to have a less-than-secure web browser and make sure that nobody uses that web browser for anything except running these reports. There isn't really any need to replace this copier as long as the cost to the business of keeping that one computer with the old web browser up and secure is close enough to zero to be mere "noise" in the budget, which it is, at least for now.

  • by sremick ( 91371 ) on Friday July 03, 2015 @12:19PM (#50039977)

    This isn't Firefox 39. This is Firefox 4.39

    The idiots have totally jumped the track and lost all sanity and reason when it comes to proper practices in versioning. I haven't seen anything that warranted a +1 on the major version in ages, yet every time they integrate some stupid new advertising/social gimmick that should've been left as an extension, they bump the major version number. Or if no one has offered them cash recently to whore themselves out, they just bump it because they're bored out of some version-penis envy with Chrome.

    And this coming from one of the historically biggest Firefox fans amongst my friends, family and colleagues. I've been promoting it since Phoenix, being a longtime Netscape and Mozilla user for many years before that.

    • ...I've been promoting it since Phoenix,...

      I've still got my Firefox "Take Back The Web" t-shirt.

      .
      Maybe there should be a "Take Back Firefox" t-shirt....

    • This isn't Firefox 39. This is Firefox 4.39

      The idiots have totally jumped the track and lost all sanity and reason when it comes to proper practices in versioning.

      Remember back when people actually got excited about new Firefox versions? Version 2.0 was released on October 24, 2006. Firefox 3.0 was released on June 17, 2008. I remember the 3.0 release. Everyone was lined up waiting for it to drop so they could break download records on release day.

      Now every release of Firefox every 6 weeks going "Ugg, how did they make the menu more useless / shove in more social stuff this time?"

  • by CrashNBrn ( 1143981 ) on Friday July 03, 2015 @12:23PM (#50039997)
    How is the "standard release" of Firefox, newsworthy in the least (to nerds)?

    Nightly is at 41. Threading is improving, but most extensions still don't support the API that is needed in order to access "page content".

    Firefox is about the only browser you can open dozens of tabs in. Even Opera 12 crumbles - if those pages contain primarily images... Opera (pre-blink) started falling apart years ago, as images in the 2000x3000px size or larger started becoming the norm.
    • This,
      I open around 400~1100 tabs before it starts to show any sign of slowness when I'm ready manga. Of course with adb and noscript and a bunch of other stuff to keep the pages clean. otherwise it slows down at around 150 tabs.
      Haven't cleaned history since march 2011. (profile is around 1900 MB)
    • Really? My experience is that Firefox I'd the only browser that crumbled under the load of several tabs. Wake me when they run each in a separate process so that the computer doesn't shit itself because of one page.

      I try to like Firefox because it's the only browser that supports native color management, but I fail every time.

  • As long as this https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s... [mozilla.org] BUG is present, Firefox is a far cry from being a secure browser. Since I know about this, I advise anybody that needs to have secure browser to stear away from Firefox!
  • How much do you think Pocket, etc paid Mozilla to make their services an integral part of the browser?
    How long do you think it will be before advertisers pay Mozilla to route around adblock extensions and display their ads?

  • Why is it that when I hear there's a new Firefox update, I always think "Oh no -- what did they mess up now?" Other groups' updates aren't met with instinctive dread.

  • How rounded are the tabs? A bit rounded in the corners? No straight lines at all? Or all fractally with curves on curves, looking like the result of a foolish encounter between heraldic nebuly and a Mandelbrot set.

  • Chat! Yay! I already HAVE apps that allow me to do that.
    Social media! Yay! I already HAVE apps that allow me to do that. And I hate the fuck out of social media to begin with!

    What I WANT is a rock-solid fucking browser again goddammit!

    All these stupid, hacked-on "features" that nobody uses are simply contributing to a browsing experience that's almost as stable as Chuck Manson on a bad acid trip!

    You want to make a social media application? GO AHEAD! Stop fucking up a perfectly acceptable browser in t

  • Its astonishing to me that this thing still doesnt do a sandbox. They keep adding stuff like video chat, great, but if you can spend time on that you can find time for getting the sandbox in. They have been talking about the sandbox for years. Implement it by default already and if for some reason a plugin a user is incompatable allow the user to select to go back to single process. There is no reason why the sandbox should have taken this long. Yes you have go to a multi process model but it shouldnt be TH

  • ...so are the Firefox releases of our lives."

Keep up the good work! But please don't ask me to help.

Working...