Firefox 84 Claims Speed Boost from Apple Silicon, Vows to End Flash Support (zdnet.com) 40
The Verge reports:
Firefox's latest update brings native support for Macs that run on Apple's Arm-based silicon, Mozilla announced on Tuesday. Mozilla claims that native Apple silicon support brings significant performance improvements: the browser apparently launches 2.5 times faster and web apps are twice as responsive than they were on the previous version of Firefox, which wasn't native to Apple's chips...
Firefox's support of Apple's Arm-based processors follows Chrome, which added support for Apple's new chips shortly after the M1-equipped MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini were released in November.
Firefox 84 will also be the very last release to support Adobe Flash, notes ZDNet, calling both developments "a reminder of the influence Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has had and continues to exert on software and hardware nine years after his death." Jobs wrote off Flash in 2010 as successful Adobe software but one that was a 'closed' product "created during the PC era — for PCs and mice" and not suitable for the then-brand-new iPad, nor any of its prior iPhones. Instead, Jobs said the future of the web was HTML5, JavaScript and CSS.
At the end of this year Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari also drop support for Flash.
Senior Apple execs recently reflected in an interview with Om Malik what the M1 would have meant to Jobs had been alive today. "Steve used to say that we make the whole widget," Greg Joswiak, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing told Malik.
"We've been making the whole widget for all our products, from the iPhone, to the iPads, to the watch. This was the final element to making the whole widget on the Mac."
ZDNet also notes that Firefox 84 offers WebRender, "Mozilla's faster GPU-based 2D rendering engine" for MacOS Big Sur, Windows devices with Intel Gen 6 GPUs, and Intel laptops running Windows 7 and 8. "Mozilla promises it will ship an accelerated rendering pipeline for Linux/GNOME/X11 users for the first time."
Firefox now also uses "more modern techniques for allocating shared memory on Linux," writes Mozilla, "improving performance and increasing compatibility with Docker."
And Firefox 85 will include a new network partitioning feature to make it harder for companies to track your web surfing.
Firefox's support of Apple's Arm-based processors follows Chrome, which added support for Apple's new chips shortly after the M1-equipped MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini were released in November.
Firefox 84 will also be the very last release to support Adobe Flash, notes ZDNet, calling both developments "a reminder of the influence Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has had and continues to exert on software and hardware nine years after his death." Jobs wrote off Flash in 2010 as successful Adobe software but one that was a 'closed' product "created during the PC era — for PCs and mice" and not suitable for the then-brand-new iPad, nor any of its prior iPhones. Instead, Jobs said the future of the web was HTML5, JavaScript and CSS.
At the end of this year Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari also drop support for Flash.
Senior Apple execs recently reflected in an interview with Om Malik what the M1 would have meant to Jobs had been alive today. "Steve used to say that we make the whole widget," Greg Joswiak, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing told Malik.
"We've been making the whole widget for all our products, from the iPhone, to the iPads, to the watch. This was the final element to making the whole widget on the Mac."
ZDNet also notes that Firefox 84 offers WebRender, "Mozilla's faster GPU-based 2D rendering engine" for MacOS Big Sur, Windows devices with Intel Gen 6 GPUs, and Intel laptops running Windows 7 and 8. "Mozilla promises it will ship an accelerated rendering pipeline for Linux/GNOME/X11 users for the first time."
Firefox now also uses "more modern techniques for allocating shared memory on Linux," writes Mozilla, "improving performance and increasing compatibility with Docker."
And Firefox 85 will include a new network partitioning feature to make it harder for companies to track your web surfing.
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They took away the functionality that add-ons used to use to save webpages locally, then they replaced it with a service that they host so they know what content you're saving so they can monetize your data, and they spent $20M on it that they could have spent hiring developers to fix long-standing bugs. Fuck pocket right in the... pocket.
Re: In B4 whining about pocket (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean you do not have to use Pocket. As long as it is optional I see no problem if it helps keep their lights on. Granted that is a big if, and I have no idea, but at any rate it is far tamer than what Google and Microsoft are doing.
Pocket seemed a strange acquisition to me but I assume if Mozilla did they did so because it helps their bottom line.
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My main objection, as usual, is that it is not an add-on.
It has no business being built in.
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I mean you do not have to use Pocket.
Last time I checked, it can only be hidden, not disabled. We're quickly approaching a point in time where you will be forced to use everything, whether you know it or not.
BTW, I tried to disable local storage in Firefox before, and apparently, setting local storage to 0 bytes doesn't disable it. You have to go through all sorts of gymnastics to "actually" turn it off, and the defaults tend to reset after a few updates. I trust Mozilla more than I trust Google, but that's not saying much.
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Fbook won't like this (Score:2)
And Firefox 85 will include a new network partitioning feature to make it harder for companies to track your web surfing.
Nor will google for that matter.
Well done Firefox team.
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What an incredibly inane, small-minded take on people trying to make their free open source product protect you better than the commercial competition.
Played as a pawn? Gonna pull a muscle with that gigantic stretch.
Get a fucking grip. If you like the corporate browser better just come out and say it. Don't pretend you're somehow doing it for philosophical reasons you fucking chode.
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Sorry, I somehow conflated this story and the one about Facebook's banner ads against Apple - hence the 'pissing on each other by proxy' comment. My bad - the cogs in my brain skipped a few teeth there.
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The problem with Firefox's container feature or 'network partitioning' is that most spyware (google) has gone well beyond the simple use of cookies to track users.
Since facebook, and (especially) Google have their script on a large majority of websites, they use browser fingerprinting (including use of mouse movements / keyboard usage) to track users, though I'm not sure what they do on mobiles (particularly iOS, since each config is virtually identical if the user uses safari).
It's also mouse movement whic
Jobs didn't kill Flash (Score:4, Insightful)
HTML 5 killed flash.
Jobs was just the first to admit there was no future for it publicly.
Re:Jobs didn't kill Flash (Score:4, Informative)
The debate of HTML 5 vs Adobe Flash back in 2010 was more about streaming video than all the other things that Flash could be used for. Flash was the dominant browser plugin used for video, but it had performance issues. HTML 5 has a video tag, which wasn't restricted to one proprietary code base.
In the case of Jobs, what had prompted his critique of Flash was less technical and more personal: a soured relationship with Adobe [bgr.com] after trying to get them to iron out bugs and other issues on their iPhone client.
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Jobs sentenced Flash to death and HTML5 was the executioner.
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Err no. The death of Flash was foretold long before Apple actually bothered to "kill" it. To the point where when Apple announced it wasn't going to support Flash on their iToys the world largely shrugged with efforts to depreciate Flash video well under way.
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We seem to be remembering events differently. Everyone here was calling the future death of the iPhone because of the lack of Flash support.
Flash (Score:3, Insightful)
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Then they did and [Flash] was buggy as hell.
Sounds like you had feature parity with the other platforms. ;)
Re: Flash (Score:1)
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I'm just glad that Flash is finally dead. I was around when they didn't have Linux support and everyone was using it, locking us out of websites. Then they did and it was buggy as hell. And it was Swiss cheese in terms of security. Rot in hell.
It definitely had issues.
That said, when it was king, it was for a reason. Browsers were themselves buggy security nightmares, animation and interactivity were difficult and often browser dependent, development tools were lacking. "Or we could do it in Flash" was a question that any serious business had to at least ask themselves.
Re: Flash (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of killing Flash and dancing on its grave. But I really wish there was some alternative for people who simply can't fully abandon it yet, because a pile of unpatched machines sitting around gives me heartburn.
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It's interesting how often it's necessary to kill things that are already dead.
There's no law that says Firefox needs to include support for the old plugin APIs, but given that the infrastructure already exists, I'm still pissed that support is being removed and our choices are frequently made for us. I'd very much like to continue running Flash, but in the respect, my only option is to use older or alternative browsers, support for which is frequently "killed" by web designers who only support the latest
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Turn off your caches. It will make your web browsing faster and more private. It all made sense when internet connections were measured in kilobits per second. The majority of the files on your computer are tiny blobs in your web cache. It's a strain on the file system and if you use anti-virus software (lol), you're wasting CPU and IO time on scanning many tens of thousands of files which will never be used again. Turn off your caches.
This is incredibly untrue.
I remember about five years ago I did that, thinking along your lines, but then most sites became incredible slow. Just looking at what was going on made it obvious why, as a lot of sites use the same little images over and over again, so instead of downloading it once and rendering it a hundred times I was waiting for it to download each time.
Turning off caching will increase your bandwidth requirements while slowing your browser down tremendously.
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I'm probably an outlier with my $80/m fully committed dedicated fiber, 100us RTT to ISP CO CDNs, 1ms to distric
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Help spread awareness of how all not-already-fully-compromised Internet users are treated.
You're mostly preaching to the converted here - except the rest of us already know that the main war has been lost and are resigned to small-scale guerilla warfare until the next regime change, if it ever arrives. So if you're going to preach the gospel, kindly move to somewhere you might win some actual converts and stop spamming Slashdot.
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The dog that didn't bark (Score:2, Insightful)
Firefox 84 Claims Speed Boost from Apple Silicon
It's too bad they can't claim a speed boost from an improved Firefox engineering team. But I'm guessing that ship already sailed.
Brave - The browser reimagined. [brave.com]
2.5 times faster? (Score:1)
RIP Flash (Score:1)
BRING BACK XUL (Score:2)