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Firefox 25 is released

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Re: Firefox 25 is released

#101

Post by oblio »

Yoric wrote: post #30
asdasf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not suggest the size of any given update, or the schedule they are released at was evidence of stagnation. The fact that firefox is the problem browser now instead of IE is what I pointed to. It is nearly 2014. Firefox still doesn't have html 5 form elements even. Remember making internal use sites and telling people "we're not supporting IE, use firefox"? Now we're doing "we're not supporting firefox, use chro…

I'm not sure what you mean. As far as I can remember, Firefox has had HTML 5 forms since Firefox 4 ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/HTML/Form... ). What exactly are you talking about?

I think he means these: http://caniuse.com/#search=input

Firefox doesn't support advanced (and more user friendly) input types. Number, color, date/time.

At least that's what I'm guessing.

Re: Firefox 25 is released

#102

Post by josso »

beagle3 wrote: post #86

Can someone shed some light on the rationale and usefulness of the inline "iframe" and "srcdoc" attributes? I read the description, I understand how they work, but I'm not sure what they are good for.

Mike West, developer advocate at Google Chrome in Münich, had a great talk, recently at GOTO Aarhus, where this was mention. The talk was focused on security and mentions the new sandboxed iframes[1]. With the inline iframe, iframe's can now be used as div – a sandboxed div.

The idea is that you can sandbox e.g. social buttons by putting them in a sandboxed iframe. You can also populate the iframe's without extra HTTP-requests by the iframe, by using "srcdoc". This is a perfect way to sandbox user generated comments on your blog.

I recommend reading [1] as it covers all of this.

[1]: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/security/sandboxed-if...

Re: Firefox 25 is released

#103

Post by kevingadd »

pasbesoin wrote: post #92
qwerty_asdf wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know. I know. Believe me, I know. That detail is not lost on me. My complaint is simply that it's hard to find, and for those who want it, there's no real road map or sign postings for where to get it.

Preface: I wrote the following from a more general perspective. Perhaps Mozilla can and will speak to the specific changes under discussion in this thread (e.g. keeping the majority of "non-technical" users on the right/current release). A bit like the so-called "Chromification" of the UI: I don't want to see too much "power" obscured or sacrificed for the sake of usability. Keep things sane, also, for the "power use…

It's fair to be annoyed by these design changes, but there's nothing you can do. It's already impossible to truly bundle every single dependency into one installer for an application like a web browser. They can and will change on an hourly basis, and having out-of-date (or worse, missing) data for things like blacklists can compromise your security.

It's only natural that an application that's designed to communicate live with servers on the internet would, at some point, have to pull more and more of its configuration and application logic from the same internet. The browser's still open source, so if it bugs you, you're free to compile a build yourself and gather all the dependencies manually.

The fact is that there are still stand alone installers available for all sorts of configurations, right there on the Mozilla FTP where they've been for something like a decade. If you're a power user and you're saying you can't figure out how to hit an FTP server or type 'firefox standalone installer' into a search engine, I don't know what to tell you.

Calling this a dark pattern is absurd. Nobody's being tricked, you're not being conned into opting something other than what you intended. The same Firefox gets installed either way, the install process is just streamlined in ways that increase success rates and simplify it for most users.

Re: Firefox 25 is released

#104

Post by dmunoz »

untog wrote: post #83
lillycat wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not yet ready. Expected for Fx 28 (but would not sign it with my blood). There is a UX Nightly with Australis (the name of the redesign) out there.

Really looking forward to it. Maybe it makes me sound superficial but that might be what finally makes me switch back from Chrome - the compactness of the Chrome UI is great. Firefox on OSX is really in need of a boost.

I don't know how well it works on a OS X, but I have been using the firefox-ux nightly build on Windows for awhile now. You can find them at [0]. It's been as stable for me as the other nightly builds tend to be, which is very stable, but do be aware that going this route can lead to running into bugs. I understand why these things take a long time to shake out, but it is massively disappointing to hear that the new UI won't be released until Firefox 28 or later!

[0] https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/late...

Re: Firefox 25 is released

#105

Post by lobster_johnson »

Wow, on my MacBook Pro Retina, Firefox is now faster than Chrome. It's noticeable during any graphics update, scrolling pages in particular.

I wonder if this is because Firefox has been optimized, or whether Chrome has simply stagnated. I suspect it's the latter; when I got the Retina MBP I immediately noticed that graphics performance was laggy compared to what I was used to on my previous (slower but non-Retina) MBP.

Re: Firefox 25 is released

#106

Post by smickie »

qwerty_asdf wrote: post #14

I find it irritating that Mozilla now herds its Firefox users toward the Stub installer, and not the full offline-install redistributable binary. The actual download itself is available on the "Systems & Languages" page: > https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/ This kind of download is important, when you want to try out a new release, without committing yourself to it. For example, let's say you want to load it…

If anything "Mozilla herds its Firefox users" into using the auto update system inside Firefox, which is very convenient and helpful.

You're talking about a very small number of people who will update the way you described.

Most Firefox users will update by having Firefox automatically update in the background and then be prompted to restart.

I just downloaded the latest version (in my language) by going to 'About Firefox' and hitting the update button.

Re: Firefox 25 is released

#107

Post by kamjam »

mverwijs wrote: post #44
qwerty_asdf wrote: post #14

I find it irritating that Mozilla now herds its Firefox users toward the Stub installer, and not the full offline-install redistributable binary. The actual download itself is available on the "Systems & Languages" page: > https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/ This kind of download is important, when you want to try out a new release, without committing yourself to it. For example, let's say you want to load it…

Or: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/

But that's so much hassle, I have to click on the link and then navigate a whole bunch of folders, and possibly know what version and language I need!

Users of VMs are more than likely power users at the very least, and if you want to test different versions then you should probably also be testing beta and even nightly. I don't think a full exe just to install in your VM really needs to be "homepage" visible.

Re: Firefox 25 is released

#108

Post by kevingadd »

sp332 wrote: post #2

Hey, web audio is now in Firefox! That means all the web apps that did user-agent detection instead of feature detection will have to be updated.

Even if apps using Web Audio didn't do user-agent detection, many of them would need to be updated anyway because Web Audio (as it shipped in Chrome, at least) is a steaming pile. It's incredibly poorly specified in areas that matter when it comes to compatibility - for example:

You can't reliably detect the audio formats Web Audio can decode, and they vary both across hardware and software configurations (because the spec doesn't specify them), so your only choice is to download an entire audio file, try to decode it, and if you fail, download another and try that. Worse still, the mechanism of handing the browser a list of sources (so it can try to aggressively reduce wasted bandwidth) doesn't work because Web Audio requires you to download a full file before it can be decoded. Oops!

Shipped demos out there rely on Chrome-only Web Audio features that never made it into the spec, because Web Audio was written first as a non-portable implementation and then haphazardly turned into a spec while people were already building code against that implementation.

The spec changed after Google shipped it to the public (without putting it behind a flag or otherwise versioning it) so there are corner cases (albeit mostly small ones) where two spec-compliant implementations (Firefox and Chrome's for example) will produce different output. The only way to address some of these is update the application.

On the bright side, devs from both Mozilla and Google (among others) are working hard on addressing the issues, so it'll probably be fine in a year or so.

Re: Firefox 25 is released

#109

Post by crazygringo »

graue wrote: post #85
sp332 wrote: post #2

Hey, web audio is now in Firefox! That means all the web apps that did user-agent detection instead of feature detection will have to be updated.

Ugh, why do people do that to begin with? :( I've had Web Audio for a while since I'm on the Aurora channel, and there's so many demos that refuse to work for no reason. I try to do my part by submitting pull requests that fix it, when possible, but most of those pull requests have been sitting ignored for months. Clearly more people need to be educated that user-agent sniffing = bad.

Sorry, you're wrong. I hate to be rude about it, but I'm really getting tired of people, who don't know any better, acting like feature detection is always the way to go.

Feature detection simply doesn't work it many cases, and there's no alternative. Especially with new stuff like audio, sometimes function calls need to be called in different orders, have subtly different behaviors, etc., and user-agent sniffing is literally the only thing you can do.

When I programmed an HTML5 music player, calling .load() before .play() on one platform was necessary, and on another it would crash the Android browser IIRC. No choice but to use user-agent sniffing -- I probably had 20 different things that depended not just on the browser, but on the browser version.

I'd love if we could use just feature detection. Unfortunately, we have to program in the real world.

Re: Firefox 25 is released

#110

Post by Yoric »

Aldo_MX wrote: post #100
Yoric wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in that case, you can easily put (or link to) the full download, can't you? Or am I missing something?

You are missing his point that it's not easy to find. "Systems & Languages" doesn't tell me anything about being able to find the offline installer there. Either changing the phrasing to something more explicit like "Other downloads", and/or adding a title attribute explaining what can you find there could be a good improvement. Also, giving a hint at the "thank you" page (ex. Having trouble? Try the offline installe…

Well, if I understand his post correctly, his process was "putting Firefox installer in a file share and be done." Well, this process still works.

> You are missing his point that it's not easy to find [...]

That, on the other hand, is a valid point.

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