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Firefox 25 is released

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131–140 of 236 posts

Re: Firefox 25 is released

#131
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So do what the spec says by default (and if the feature appears to exist), and only deviate for particular UAs.

Assume good faith.

Re: Firefox 25 is released

#133
post #60

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…

I'm getting the full version download. It might just be location (UK) or maybe random. I don't know. Edit: It's probably just that I'm using Linux.

Yeah, the stub installer only applies to Windows. Mac and Linux users are always given a full binary.

Re: Firefox 25 is released

#134
post #48

I know a guy who still runs FF3. It's really incredible how fast Mozilla can push out new releases now!

Maybe this comment was meant to be sarcastic, but the version number is not an indication of progress as it was with prior development. When Chrome went all nutty with frequent new version numbers, Mozilla followed suit.

You know that there is a point to it, right? Now there are always 4 versions: fresh nightly builds, dev, beta, and stable. Every ~6 weeks dev becomes beta and beta becomes the new stable version. This way you get a higher degree of parallelization. There is no global feature or whatever freeze. New stuff is added all the time.

The version number is now basically just a step counter.

Re: Firefox 25 is released

#135

I developed a patch that added the VAO WebGL extensions earlier this year and it's finally out there! So. Cool. And everyone at mozilla is really helpful if you're thinking about contributing for the first time.

Thank you for your contribution!

Re: Firefox 25 is released

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, you could wait for the folks over at PortableApps to update: http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

Uh, no thanks. That site does not readily provide hashes for their binaries (MD5, SHA512, whatever), and the page is smeared with ads. There's no way to know if the site is trustworthy. And, anyway, where would I get the trustworthy hashes? They'd need to be communicated to me, directly from the horse's mouth. I'd need to visit ftp.firefox.com, to find out what the correct hashes are in the first place, and then chec…

Umm... Hm. I'm seeing just one ad on that page (a very conservatively placed Google AdSense ad): http://puu.sh/530fg.png

Also, I see the hash right there on the page: http://puu.sh/530kX.png

Re: Firefox 25 is released

#137
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be coming along nicely but it looks like almost nothing made it into IE11 - so doesn't that mean we missed the boat for a few more years? I want to use this stuff so badly already. Gah.

Since TypeScript is somewhat tracking ES6 proposals it looks like Microsoft will be quick to include it once the spec is finalized.

Will the spec be finalized before IE11 ships? Seems unlikely.

Re: Firefox 25 is released

#138

Pleased to see they've backed off on the draconian Java restrictions. I now see (with an up-to-date plug-in) three options: always or never active, or ask to activate, with the latter then prompting as a one-time or remembered choice. This seems a much more reasonable balance between trying to protect security and making sure people can get work done than some of the other proposals in recent discussions.

Look at it this way; I love a good debate. Even where more extreme measures are proposed. In fact, when starting a discussion about a problem, not having proposals (i.e. solutions) of your own, tends to leave your debate dead in the water.

Merely stating that Java is a security problem hasn't really sped up a solution to the problem. It's like the talk about how terrible PHP and JavaScript are, but it isn't really helping, is it?

So while my personal experience would not have been ruined by the initial proposal from Mozilla (as I do not use any plugins in my Firefox, I leave that for my Chromium browser), I do agree that they made the right call in the end. But it did at least spark a debate on the matter, and an interesting one at that. And it'll probably come up again, when another Java security issue appears.

Re: Firefox 25 is released

#139

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…

The stub itself pulls down the full installer, and you can always get that from download/FTP if needed.

The intention is to provide a better download experience: there was a gap between the number of people who begin downloading Firefox (counted via hits on download.m.o), and the ones who open it for the first time (counted via hits on the firstrun page). The stub installer is intended to address this. It also checksums the full file to make sure you're getting what you think you're getting.

(Disclaimers: I work for Mozilla, and am responsible for download.mozilla.org among other behind the scenes web things. I don't work on the installers, but we had to change the download scripts to support the stub. I do not speak for Mozilla.)

Re: Firefox 25 is released

#140
post #128

I do like the release schedule for Firefox. However, I haven't used it in years, except for testing. Philosophically, I agree more with Mozilla than Google, but I just can't seem to get past three things: 1) Chrome gets out of my way. The UI is unobtrusive. Firefox is still bulkier here. 2) For whatever reason, more websites render oddly in Firefox/Gecko than in Chrome/Webkit. 3) Chrome, being a part of the Google ec…

Try Tree Style Tab and you'll see how hard it is to leave Firefox.

Yes, this add-on is amazing. It's a critical part of my web browsing experience.
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