Mozilla Releases FireFox 128 57
williamyf writes: Mozilla has released version 128 of the Firefox web browser. Some noteworthy features include: "Firefox can now translate selections of text and hyperlinked text to other languages from the context menu. [...] Firefox now has a simpler and more unified dialog for clearing user data. In addition to streamlining data categories, the new dialog also provides insights into the site data size corresponding to the selected time range. [...] On macOS, microphone capture through getUserMedia will now use system-provided voice processing when applicable, improving audio quality." More info in the release notes here.
But the most important feature of 128 is that it is the newest ESR. Why is this important? Glad you asked:
* Firefox ESR is the browser of choice for many Linux distros (including Debian), so this is important for the Linux community at large.
* Many downstream projects (like Thunderbird or KAiOS) use Firefox ESR as their base, so whatever is included in 128 will determine the capabilities of those projects for the next year.
* Many ISVs (software makers), both big and small, test/certify their software only against the ESR version of Firefox. For users of such software, the new ESR is very important.
* Many companies and individuals value stability of the UI/Workflow over new bells and whistles, for them, ESR is important.
* When an OS is discontinued, Mozilla lets the ESR be the last browser on the platform, exceeding the support window of the likes of Alphabeth, Apple or Microsoft, so for people on older OSs, ESR is important.
Link to download (the ESR) here.
But the most important feature of 128 is that it is the newest ESR. Why is this important? Glad you asked:
* Firefox ESR is the browser of choice for many Linux distros (including Debian), so this is important for the Linux community at large.
* Many downstream projects (like Thunderbird or KAiOS) use Firefox ESR as their base, so whatever is included in 128 will determine the capabilities of those projects for the next year.
* Many ISVs (software makers), both big and small, test/certify their software only against the ESR version of Firefox. For users of such software, the new ESR is very important.
* Many companies and individuals value stability of the UI/Workflow over new bells and whistles, for them, ESR is important.
* When an OS is discontinued, Mozilla lets the ESR be the last browser on the platform, exceeding the support window of the likes of Alphabeth, Apple or Microsoft, so for people on older OSs, ESR is important.
Link to download (the ESR) here.
Obviously... (Score:2)
Hope they... (Score:5, Funny)
...used an unsigned byte!
You forgot to mention this controversial feature (Score:5, Informative)
There's also this:
Firefox now supports the experimental Privacy Preserving Attribution API [mozilla.org], which provides an alternative to user tracking for ad attribution. This experiment is only enabled via origin trial and can be disabled in the new Website Advertising Preferences section in the Privacy and Security settings.
For now, this "Privacy Preserving [sic]" feature can be disabled, but who knows how long that will last? This is a real step backward for Mozilla.
Re: (Score:2)
Pure FUD.
Re: You forgot to mention this controversial featu (Score:1)
Re: You forgot to mention this controversial feat (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I complain about anything that tries to make it easier for advertisers. IMO, we need to kill off advertising as a business model on the Internet.
No, I don't know what can replace it.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I complain about anything that tries to make it easier for advertisers. IMO, we need to kill off advertising as a business model on the Internet.
No, I don't know what can replace it.
Yes. Kill off advertising. I can't wait to pay $2.95/mo to subscribe to Slashdot only to have it jacked to $14.95/mo when traffic plummets and users flee to other platforms. Then in its death-knell phase they'll jack it to $19.95 and only show you "limited ads".
Just do what everyone else does, load adblock or an extension that occasionally background clicks ads so the advertisers pay more money, you don't get bugged by shit you don't want cluttering up the information you *do* want, and bide your time
Re:You forgot to mention this controversial featur (Score:5, Informative)
I use multiple ad-blockers and hardly see ads. But this has not stopped the enshittification of the Internet due to it's crappy business model.
I do support a couple of sites (LWN.net, The Globe and Mail) by subscribing to them and have donated to Wikipedia. No, I probably wouldn't subscribe to Slashdot. Yes, a lot of sites would probably go under.
Good. Any site not good enough to survive on subscriptions should go under. The S/N ration of the Internet would improve tremendously.
Re:You forgot to mention this controversial featur (Score:5, Interesting)
but who knows how long that will last? This is a real step backward for Mozilla.
It'll last until Google starts to disable Firefox on most of their sites. There's already a whole thing where Firefox is letting Manifest 2 ad-block remain and getting punished for it. [ghacks.net] The thing is, there's a bit of writing on the wall. As much as EU regulators or anti-monopoly people in the US like to protest. Filing suit on Google will take time and if Netscape is any indicator, just because you sue someone doesn't mean they'll stop acting up or that you win the day and become the biggest web browser on the market.
The vast majority of the web is dictated by Google like or leave it. PPA is a conciliation of this in light of Google's new Topics API, which is just Floc all over again. Regulators and anti-trust didn't stop that. So PPA exists because if it doesn't, large parts of the web will no longer work in Firefox. That's a very clear part of the web in this age. Firefox wants to survive to see another day. Nobody is backing them up to beat Google's monopoly. That's just where we are today. People pining for the early 90s web need to wake up that it's dead. It's never coming back. I highly suggest people leave the web, maybe head over to Gemini protocol, there's lots of Gopher sites still up, return to IRC, or take a look at the molerat protocol. But Google owns HTTP and there's never going to be a changing that.
If PPA pisses you off. Get off the web. More than happy to see everyone here on bubble on port 1965, just head on over to gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/. But the web is dead, Google won it. You don't have a problem with Firefox, you have a problem with the current owners of the web.
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If what you write is true, and I sadly suspect it is, Google won't be placated by PPA. PPA makes targeted advertising more-or-less impossible and that's unacceptable to Google.
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
Literally nothing in your link targets Firefox or punishes Firefox specifically. It literally says the issue is related to specific plugins right at the top of the article. Please go back to complaining the moon landing was fake and that the CIA blew up the world trade centre.
Re:You forgot to mention this controversial featur (Score:5, Informative)
Literally nothing in your link targets Firefox or punishes Firefox specifically.
It is punishing Manifest v2 users. Of which the folks that still support the standard are Firefox and Brave, which the latter is already removing most support for it.
It literally says the issue is related to specific plugins right at the top of the article
Wow, wow. Hold on let's review what I said.
The vast majority of the web is dictated by Google like or leave it. PPA is a conciliation of this in light of Google's new Topics API, which is just Floc all over again
So Google has a standard, enforces it on everyone by slowing down the people who are late to adopt it. PPA is Firefox's way to appease the Google gods.
You are sitting there attempting very poorly to twist my words that Google is attempting to write "if firefox { sleep(5000); }" That's not what any of this is about. It's about Firefox has to adopt PPA OR they will suffer the slowdown that Google has demonstrated.
Please go back to complaining the moon landing was fake and that the CIA blew up the world trade centre
Go back to sucking Google's dick. I can not fix poor reading comprehension.
Re:You forgot to mention this controversial featur (Score:4, Informative)
It is punishing Manifest v2 users.
No it's not. It's punishing users which have a specific version of Adblock plugin in place. That's not the same thing.
So Google has a standard, enforces it on everyone by slowing down the people who are late to adopt it.
Again, no. Firefox isn't the issue here.
Seriously read your own link.
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The throttling of YouTube is specific to two extensions: "Adblock" and "Adblock Plus", and has to do with how those extensions interact with YouTube.
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It'll last until Google starts to disable Firefox on most of their sites.
I don't want to use most of Google's sites.
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Firefox now supports the experimental Privacy Preserving Attribution API [mozilla.org], which provides an alternative to user tracking for ad attribution. This experiment is only enabled via origin trial and can be disabled in the new Website Advertising Preferences section in the Privacy and Security settings.
Whenever I see articles about Firefox updates, I look for posts that tell us what's to disable this time. This is what makes /. useful.
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This feature will probably die soon anyway, as nobody will support it. Apple and Google already have their own alternatives that will be adopted instead. Mozilla has largely lost its ability to affect web standards because Firefox's market share is low single digit percent.
The alternatives have some benefits and some disadvantages. Basically instead of sending a ping when an ad is viewed, they add a random delay before sending a more limited bit of information that is supposed to be both too much effort to
I'm not downloading Firefox 128! (Score:2, Troll)
Knowing Mozilla, it will show up as Firefox version -1 and screw up my package manager.
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So desperate to get out a joke already made that you didn't even get the joke right. A signed byte rolls from 127 to -128 and not -1.
Firefox keeps relying on Google (Score:5, Interesting)
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Interesting! Looking forward to the Alpha release of Ladybird. Although the Ladybird people are claiming it's an entirely new engine? Also, I poked around their website and found this tidbit:
I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL
In 2018, I created the SerenityOS project after completing a drug rehab program. ...
Seems they're in desperate need of a PR guy.
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I switched to Brave and it's not half bad. It's not awesome but it's also not terrible. I;d say it's perfectly servicable for 95% of users.
Add-on support is okay (nowhere close to Firefox though) but quite a few add-ons and extensions have been ported over or written anew.
It does include a pretty good ad blocker and I never see ads. As nice as NoScript and AdBlock were, it's nicer not to have to fiddle with them for every new site I visit.
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Firefox is in many ways better than Chrome, but Chrome isn't bad enough that people feel the need to abandon it. Maybe when Manifest V2 goes away and ad blockers get crippled, if that does actually happen.
The only major area where Firefox is weaker than Chrome is Android support. It's okay, but is worse for battery life (even with ad blocking extensions), some sites don't render in a usable way (e.g. classic Slashdot), and the UI is quite poor, particularly tab handling. Because you can't easily sync betwee
So what... (Score:2)
Re:So what... (Score:4, Informative)
They have stopped supporting folks that still use Windows 7 because it's still better than Windows 10/11, oh wait Chrome did the same thing. F! em both!
Original poster here. Firefox STILL supports Windows 7, and supported it long after MS and Google stoped. Early june last year, all users of firefox on Win7 (and 8 and 8.1) were put on Firefox ESR 115, and will be supported until ~sept this year. Much more time than MS or Google gave.
https://support.mozilla.org/en... [mozilla.org]
Something similar happened to older version s of MacOS (particularly, mojave).
And this is a confirmation of the importance of the ESR in the Firefox ecosystem
Re: So what... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Not sure why it's so hard to provided newer versions to win 7.
Well if you want to keep using Win7 (and RADIUS with MD5 while you are at it) go ahead, no onee is stoping you, there are firefox derivatives that still support Win7, one of the advantages of FOSS
Also, remember that, between FF115 and FF128 a year of development has lapsed, who knows if anything in the codebase changed that made the browser incompatible with Win7, is not "one more version" more like 13 "incrementals"
Some other people want to to keep their computing systems secure, starting with the foundati
Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Disappointed to see no mention in the summary or in the linked article that Firefox 128 drops support for Windows 7.
Yes, it's an old operating system and yes Microsoft ended most if not all support for it. But unless there are meaningful technical reasons or hurdles that prevent continued support in Firefox, I strongly disagree with the decision. Giving people a reliable browser to use on older computers is a worthwhile effort and Firefox is supposed to be for users, not for megacorps. You'd think with a dwindling user base, they'd do what small things they can to retain people.
I've still got a couple of Windows 7 machines that cannot or will not run Windows 10. Not sure what I'll do with them - maybe take a look at Thorium [thorium.rocks], a Chromium fork with continued support for Win7, even though I really don't like Chromium. Or just stay on Firefox 115 until it becomes unusable.
Hurrah, "progress".
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One feature not supported on Windows 7 is a security feature where a process can be denied access to the system calls of Win32K.sys. Making it only allowed to use the system calls of ntoskrnl.exe.
Such a process cannot create windows, draw anything to the screen, make use of 3D acceleration, etc. It will have to communicate through files, pipes, or shared memory.
ESR! (Score:2)
Mozilla still supports it for now.
Unfortunately. . . (Score:2)
And yet (Score:2)
No way to not be harassed there's a new update. Still only the option to delay until you want.
Something so simple, it was in for years, and yet, nowhere to be seen.
That's a new one for me (Score:2)
"alphabeth"!
Re:FireFox 128... (Score:4, Insightful)
Firefox remains my primary browser, in part because of its far superior tab handling. Your post is pure FUD. Firefox is arguably leaner than chrome, and the move to Rust has reduced the chronic memory leakage immensely. Still some way to go, but current Firefox is better than it ever has been and I rely on it.
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Not to mention Mozilla is the only browser company that gives a flying about privacy. There's Brave, sure, but I don't think people use it.
ESR (Score:2)
Would it kill you to note that ESR means Extended Support Release. This is a term only used by Mozilla. The industry uses LTS.
FireFox? (Score:2)
Firefox. FTFY.
Firefox cannot play videos smoothly (Score:1)
I have a 3ghz 4-core 64-bit processor and 12gb or ram. I am running RHEL 8.5. Firefox just cannot run videos smoothly. Videos work fine with chrome browser.
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I have a 3gHz 12 core 64 bit processor with 64 GB of RAM (and a fancy GPU). Chrome just cannot run videos smoothly.
impressive (Score:2)
Wow, impressive. We are soon approaching 100 versions to which I have not upgraded.
Have they fixed the new window bug? (Score:2)
Where you click "new window" from the file menu, and it DUPLICATES the existing window, with all 75 tabs?
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File > New Window doesn't duplicate the window for me. (Firefox 128.0 snap on Xubuntu 24.04 x86-64.) I wonder if you might have saved a large set of tabs as your home page, or if you have a saved previous session that's gumming things up.