Firefox 78: Protections Dashboard, New Developer Features, and the End of the Line For Older MacOS Versions (theregister.com) 51
williamyf shares a report from The Register: Mozilla has released Firefox 78 with a new Protections Dashboard and a bunch of updates for web developers. This is also the last supported version of Firefox for macOS El Capitan (10.11) and earlier. Firefox is on a "rapid release plan," which means a new version every four to five weeks. This means that major new features should not be expected every time. That said, Firefox 78 is also an extended support release (ESR), which means users who stick with ESR get updates from this and the previous 10 releases. The main new user-facing feature in Firefox 78 is the Protections Dashboard, a screen which shows trackers and scripts blocked, a link to the settings, a link to Firefox Monitor for checking your email address against known data breaches, and a button for password management.
Developers get a bunch of new features. The Accessibility inspector is out of beta -- this is a tab in the developer tools that will check a page for accessibility issues when enabled. Source maps are a JavaScript feature that map minified code back to the original code to make debugging easier. Firefox has a Map option that lets you use source maps in the debugger, and this now works with logpoints, a type of breakpoint that writes a message to the console rather than pausing execution, so that you see the original variable names. Mozilla has also worked on debugging JavaScript promises, so you can see more detail when exceptions are thrown.
A big feature for debugging web applications when running on mobile is the ability to connect an Android phone with USB, and navigate and refresh mobile web pages from the desktop. Patience is required though, since this will only work with a forthcoming new version of Firefox for Android. Mozilla has been working on a new Regular Expression (RegExp) evaluator and this is included in SpiderMonkey (Mozilla's JavaScript engine) in Firefox 78. This brings the evaluator up to date with the requirements of ECMAScript 2018.
Developers get a bunch of new features. The Accessibility inspector is out of beta -- this is a tab in the developer tools that will check a page for accessibility issues when enabled. Source maps are a JavaScript feature that map minified code back to the original code to make debugging easier. Firefox has a Map option that lets you use source maps in the debugger, and this now works with logpoints, a type of breakpoint that writes a message to the console rather than pausing execution, so that you see the original variable names. Mozilla has also worked on debugging JavaScript promises, so you can see more detail when exceptions are thrown.
A big feature for debugging web applications when running on mobile is the ability to connect an Android phone with USB, and navigate and refresh mobile web pages from the desktop. Patience is required though, since this will only work with a forthcoming new version of Firefox for Android. Mozilla has been working on a new Regular Expression (RegExp) evaluator and this is included in SpiderMonkey (Mozilla's JavaScript engine) in Firefox 78. This brings the evaluator up to date with the requirements of ECMAScript 2018.
ESR 78 keeps support for flash until Aug 2021 (Score:5, Informative)
For all those Adobe Flash junkies, be it that you are interested in the encyclopaedia of electornic music, or some flash games, or a weird flash application in your intranet.
since ESR is updated once a year, NPAPI support for the plug-in will remain until about aug 2021. Of course, the plug-in itself will stop being mantained on Dec 2020, but at least it will remain functional in ESR 78, a Blessing for some, a Curse for others.
YMMV
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WRT what people may still use flash for: I'm still using the flash "googlepano" swf object for street view. I had the sense the scrape it will all its dependencies while it was still live, and was able to locally integrate with an OpenLayers map.
Even on modern hardware, the javascript interface to street view is unbearably slow and choppy; even more so on Firefox where it's completely unusable.
I wonder what is the cause of this: what kind of features is flash offering that canvas + webgl + jit-compiled java
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It's a shame there isn't some way to translate Flash to Javascript or something so Flash content can be preserved. Despite it being 99.99% crap there are a few things worth keeping for posterity.
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It's a shame there isn't some way to translate Flash to Javascript or something so Flash content can be preserved. Despite it being 99.99% crap there are a few things worth keeping for posterity.
There are tools to do just that. Made by adobe and others.
Sadly, we users can not do it. Is up to the content owners to do the translation.
As users our only recourse is to install 78ESR on a guest VM, Scrape the site we are interested in, and browse localy using the VM.
That's what I plan to do with the encyclopaedia of Electronic music
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Shouldn't it be possible, at least in theory, to write a JS interpreter for the flash file that outputs to an HTML5 canvas?
Also, this is an important release for KaiOS (Score:4, Interesting)
Since Firefox 78 is also an ESR, and KaiOS and Mozilla signed an agreement back in march to better syncronize their development efforts.
https://techweez.com/2020/03/1... [techweez.com]
So, whatever is in this release, will have a great influence on KaiOS for the next year.
El Capitan: 2018? (Score:2)
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Mozilla traded in their userbase for Google [wikipedia.org].
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this shocks you that a product whose developers have treated its user base like shit would abandon more of them?
I don't know the details but my money would be on Apple releasing a version of Xcode that won't work any more.
Could Mozilla keep old Macs around to compile it? Probably, but it's a pain in the ass and might need a whole bunch of #ifdefs in the code for backwards compatibility.
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I don't know the details but my money would be on Apple releasing a version of Xcode that won't work any more.
...and the reason I say that is that I fired up my MacBook the other day and Xcode refused to run on it, even though it used to work just fine.
Then I had to update the OS to some annoying new version before I could download the latest Xcode. The new OS version had a constant nag to turn on cloud sync and send all my files to Apple. You could only make it go away via some arcane command line voodoo, not by clicking "no thanks".
After that, Xcode finally decided to start working again.
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Xcode 12 beta still allows you to compile with the -mmacosx-version-min=10.9 compiler flag.
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It looks like "El Capitan" came out in 2018. Does that mean that Firefox now doesn't support a two year old OS?
No. Firefox 78 supports El Cap. This is the last version of FF that will.
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There are millions of machines that can't be upgraded without hacks and they are throwing away that userbase because they can't get xcode to make versions for both? MacOS has fat binaries for a reason. Learn how to build code. You can make images that will run on the latest ARM systems, all versions of x86 and PPC. The problem is you need 3 versions of xcode to do it and you have to do the final build outside of xcode but it can be done. Apple will even sign the silly thing and approve it for their wal
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There are millions of machines that can't be upgraded without hacks and they are throwing away that userbase because they can't get xcode to make versions for both?
Yeah, Xcode is like that.
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Have you actually tried to build anything on a Mac. This is Apples fault, they really hate non-updated software. It's not like Visual Studio where you can wrangle it to build for older OS's or just run an older version of Visual Studio to support them. You literally can't run the older versions of XCode once you've updated your Mac OS, and each version of XCode will only build for a very narrow range of MacOS versions. I tried it once, never again.
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You're wrong about targetting older versions, which is trivial with Xcode. The beta of Xcode 12 can target OS X 10.7 (released in 2011). They haven't liked libstdc++ for a long time though. It's Linux that's the pain in the arse because of the whole glibc thing - you actually have to build on a system with an ancient glibc if you have users that need that, which of course might force you to use a much older compiler too.
$ cc --version
Apple clang version 12.0.0 (clang-1200.0.22.19)
Target: x86_64-apple-darw
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http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/f... [mozilla.org] says:
"Version 78.0, first offered to Release channel users on June 30, 2020
Firefox 78 is the last major release with support for macOS versions 10.9, 10.10 and 10.11. If you use one of these versions, youâ(TM)ll be supported through Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) 78.x for the coming year..."
So, they will still get ESR for now.
However, this 2008 MBP's Mac OS X El Capitan v10.11.6's Firefox v77.0.1 doesn't see v78.0.1 update at all today. So, why no internal v78.
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I'm surprised they would throw away any not-insignificant chunk of users, given their small marketshare. Why can't they at least put out a "lite" version of Firefox for older operating systems, rather than leave users to the wolves (no security updates).
People talk about bringing the next billion people online or whatever, but that means realizing that not everyone has money falling out their ass to do pointless machine upgrades, let alone even buying a brand new computer. A 2008 machine is just fine for
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That's not really the fault of browser vendors, it's the fault of your operating system vendor for leaving you stuck on an abandoned OS that no longer gets updates. Why should browser vendors try to support an operating system that isn't supported? How could that ever be considered safe?
My Linux PC is ten years old and the current versions of Firefox and Chrome run fine.
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No it didn't. OS X 10.11 El Capitan came out in Sept 2015, and was maintained through to July 2018.
This is the last version of OS X that some old hardware like my late 2007 MacBook Pro can run. The next step up is macOS 10.13 High Sierra, which is the -mmacosx-version-min that a lot of companies compile for now.
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The great thing about free OS updates is that if you don't want them/can't take them even apps start to abandon you!
Slower than S*** (Score:1)
Prvacy dashboard... (Score:1)
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You don't browse the web, when you do that. You micromanage it, dedicating time and effort to making each piece of content work. Fuck that for a joke.
I browse the internet because I want to actually see content not because I want to play a game of whack a mole until the high score allows me to see what I want.
Will Windows 7 get the ESR treatment? (Score:2)
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Macs have always been an afterthought. I'm surprised anyone still bothers, to be honest.
Because iOS app devs are influencers (Score:2)
Developers of applications for iOS and iPadOS use macOS because Xcode is exclusive to macOS. Developers of applications for iOS and iPadOS also tend to be influencers in other ways. This causes to target macOS in order to target iOS and iPadOS app developers in their role as influencer.
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Considering Windows 7 is way older than the MacOS versions getting treated this way. It looks like Mozilla devs actually still use Windows 7 and see Macs as an afterthought.
It's not so much that Mozilla sees them as an afterthought as Apple sees them as an after thought. Look, I'm not one to defend MICROS~1, so this is all relative, but apple sucks. Having a mac build farm is miserable, because you need to manage physical macs in person (there are no servers with ILM, and the lack of good virtualisation an
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Yeah pretty much this. For all their faults, Microsoft does actually give a shit about backwards compatibility, as much as possible. I've put Windows 10 on some machines up to about 12 years old, and it can probably run on older tech than that.
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Yeah pretty much this. For all their faults, Microsoft does actually give a shit about backwards compatibility, as much as possible. I've put Windows 10 on some machines up to about 12 years old, and it can probably run on older tech than that.
From what I gather it gets slower and shitter, but support only really drops when they start relying on some "new" instruction that the CPU doesn't support. This machine (Thinkpad W510) is around 10 years old now, runs Ubuntu 18.04 fine (I skip every second LTS), and
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One nice thing about Visual Studio is that it's fine with multiple old versions installed. It's common on embedded platforms to support old versions simultaneously but rare for desktop.
If some small change needs to be made to some ancient project you don't have to upgrade it to the latest version of all the development tools. You can just use the exact same version you built it with 15 years go.
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How the fuck is this a troll? I think I've got a mod stalker again.
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Actually Microsoft turned off XP support in VS2015 and changed the compiler defines and linker flags to default to Vista or Win7. It was possible to install an XP toolset as an advanced configuration option in the installer though. In fact they have not removed this from VS2019 either, and you can still install an XP toolset via it's installer too.
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Sounds about right. What did you think would happen when you chose to use a platform that is such a PITA to support? The hardware costs more for less performance and it has only a small fraction of installed base, and Apple is constantly jerking developers and users around alike. Of COURSE it's not as well-supported. Commercial and OSS developers alike are obviously less likely to support it.
Linux is well-supported because it's easy. Windows is well-supported because it's dominant. MacOS is poorly supported
Doesn't fix broken color management (Score:2)
Firefox 77 broke color management, in that it no longer applies the sRGB ICC profile to untagged images. This means that if I view the same uploaded photograph side-by-side in Chrome and Firefox, the Chrome version will look as intended while the Firefox version will look more saturated.
This is the bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1639584
And this is a good browser test:
https://cameratico.com/tools/web-browser-color-management-test/
I really hoped they'd have fixed it, but apparently they don'
Wish it would stop writing to disk so much (Score:2)
Firefox, after a day of use, has written 10-20GB of data to disk. That's a lot; that's the majority of wear and tear on my SSD, far more than other applications ever write (with the possible exception of Visual Studio). Is it really necessary to have a dozen processes active, all writing constantly?
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Firefox, after a day of use, has written 10-20GB of data to disk.
firefox, sure, oh by the way did you know you can stream porn now?
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I am (I occasionally use youtube as background noise), but right now I have only Slashdot and Facebook open (two tabs total), and I see 9 Firefox processes, and all of them are writing all the time. As in, in task manager I see the column with "IO write bytes" increase constantly for all of these. One process is up to 5 gigabytes written, the rest together is about 2GB as well. This is after about 3 hours of use.
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Excessive disk writes have been a problem in firefox for quite a while. Last time I looked, a major contributor was that it saved a enormous amount of session information to disk every few seconds, regardless of whether you were interacting with any of the open pages.
I don't know how it has changed in recent versions. What directories it's writing to? Maybe we can reduce the SSD abuse by mounting a ramdisk in the right place? In any case, getting these wasteful writes documented and reported would be helpfu
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I raised it as an issue with Mozilla. No idea if they are willing and able to take action...
Info for Apple users, from original Poster (Score:2)
Guys, first a disclaimer, I am writing this from a Mac running Mojave (by choice, both my Mini and my Air support Big Sur). And I use Firefox ESR as my Work Browser (entertainment browser is chrome, while Safari is the fallback).
The reason Mozilla stoped support for El Capitan is that Apple stopped security patches for El Capitan since Oct 2018 (and older OSs even before that), so, using el Capitan to Browse the web is highly unsecure. and yes, yes, I know you use your El Capitan (and older) Mac only on t
Regular Experssions More of a Liability than Help (Score:2)