
Firefox 52 released - gaul
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/52.0/releasenotes/
======
jwarren
Firefox is the first major browser to support CSS Grids out of the box.

[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/01/css-
grid](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/01/css-grid) is a simple
introduction to it.

[http://gridbyexample.com/](http://gridbyexample.com/) is probably the best
reference site.

[https://tympanus.net/codrops/css_reference/grid/](https://tympanus.net/codrops/css_reference/grid/)
is another very nice single-page reference.

Some technical examples from Igalia, who have been implementing Grid in Blink
and Webkit: [http://igalia.github.io/css-grid-
layout/](http://igalia.github.io/css-grid-layout/)

Some lovely creative examples from Mozilla's Jen Simmons:

[http://labs.jensimmons.com/](http://labs.jensimmons.com/)

[http://labs.jensimmons.com/2016/](http://labs.jensimmons.com/2016/)

~~~
marc_omorain
What's the difference between grids and flexbox? To the untrained eye, they
look like two alternate layout systems where one should suffice.

~~~
rachelandrew
I wrote up an explanation here:
[https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2016/03/30/should-i-
use-...](https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2016/03/30/should-i-use-grid-or-
flexbox/)

~~~
Esau
Very nice. Thanks.

------
sigvef
Firefox is one of those projects that just keeps on giving, and it's all
thanks to the hard work put in by all the contributors. It's easy to forget
that sometimes. We use Firefox headlessly to render videos at
[https://www.musicvideodispenser.com](https://www.musicvideodispenser.com) , a
task that certainly wasn't the initial intended use-case for that browser, but
it still works, and we have the Firefox team to thank for that!

~~~
marios
Can you elaborate on the "using Firefox headlessly" ?

I recently had to deal with WebRTC on a headless machine and managed to hack
up something with some Python scripting and GStreamer. I didn't know it was
possible to run Firefox headlessly and now you got me wondering whether that
would have been preferable to my stitched up solution.

~~~
vacri
Firefox is basically the first port of call for running web tests on
buildservers. Run Firefox headlessly in xvfb, then throw Selenium or similar
at it. It's a pretty mature setup.

~~~
extra88
I would think PhantomJS, being a headless, scriptable browser (plus built on
WebKit so closer rendering to the most popular browser), would be the "first
port of call."

~~~
bad_login
I have used phantomjs (with casperjs) for scrapping a website, it was complete
nightmare.

1\. It use javascript to script so writting sequential code wasn't possible so
the code ended up using continuation passing style.

2\. The very first example snippet on the front page don't work in the repl
([https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/11180](https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/11180)).
So the repl is useless.

3\. When an error occur in your script (not the one on the webpage) there is
no message anywhere no matter what you do.

My mistake was to continue with phantomjs the hype around made me think others
options would have been worst.

I have used selenium+firefox+php to do a quick test it was wayyyy better, just
for n°1 using sequential php remove a lot headaches.

------
jaas
I did a lot of work on Firefox's NPAPI implementation over the past decade.
Improving that code was rewarding in that it had very tangible benefits for
Firefox users but it was pretty clear that improving Firefox's code was only
going to get us so far, and not far enough. The system is a mess and I
couldn't be happier to see Firefox dropping support. I hope I can be the one
to rip out the code altogether some day.

------
tmaly
What I like most about firefox is the mobile version supports addons like
ublock origin. In mobile Chrome the support for add blockers is not really
well supported.

~~~
mediocrejoker
Is this for Android only or iOS also? I can't find an option for addons in iOS
Firefox.

~~~
quadrangle
Firefox for iOS is a lie. It's a non-Firefox browser just set up to sync FF
settings and bookmarks and kinda look like Firefox.

~~~
josteink
> Firefox for iOS is a lie.

That's a bit harsh.

> It's a non-Firefox browser just set up to sync FF settings and bookmarks and
> kinda look like Firefox.

It's a WebView-wrapper like all other iOS "browsers" because that's everything
Apple will allow. To be fair though, synced data, history, passwords and
settings is probably one of the most important things for a mobile user, where
entering things manually is a pain in the ass.

Basically NOT having this would risk losing users on the desktop (to something
which _does_ sync). And right now, Firefox can't afford to do that.

~~~
caipre
I'm not too familiar with how heavily locked down iOS is: does this "WebView
only" policy only apply to apps released via the AppStore? Meaning, can I
build locally and sideload install an app that uses my own engine? And if that
existed, could I open source it for others to use?

~~~
TD-Linux
Yes and yes, though that would require your users to pay $100 per year,
install Xcode, and compile your app.

~~~
josteink
> and compile your app

Which in turn would mean that lots of people would have to shell out several
hundred dollars more for a Mac just to build it.

It's not exactly a stellar deployment-model when you try to push it at scale.

------
wiremine
> Added support for WebAssembly, an emerging standard that brings near-native
> performance to Web-based games, apps, and software libraries without the use
> of plugins.

I've been watching this from the sidelines... what's the best way to dive into
WebAssembly? Or is it just waiting for tooling to catchup to produce it for
WebAssembly-enabled browsers to execute?

~~~
callahad
The WASM Explorer is a good place to start. I wrote up a little blurb about
it: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/03/previewing-the-
webassembly...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/03/previewing-the-webassembly-
explorer/)

Lin Clark's Cartoon Intro to WebAssembly is also great:
[https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/a-cartoon-intro-to-
webasse...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/a-cartoon-intro-to-webassembly/)

Rasumus Andersson's WASM Intro dives deeper into the binary format and wasm
semantics: [https://rsms.me/wasm-intro](https://rsms.me/wasm-intro)

Lastly, the WASM Community Group's page at
[http://webassembly.org](http://webassembly.org) is quite good.

The tooling story is currently the same as it was for asm.js: Use the
Emscripten fork of LLVM. Upstream support is being worked on in LLVM, and Rust
has a cross-compiler in the works.

~~~
vanderZwan
Given that WASM is a stack-based language, do you think it would be a good
target for a modern concatenative language? Something like, say, Kitten?

[http://kittenlang.org/](http://kittenlang.org/)

------
jvehent
> Enhanced Sync to allow users to send and open tabs from one device to
> another.

If you haven't used this, try it out, it's a fantastic feature. I use it all
the time to send a page I'm reading on my phone to my laptop, and vice versa.

~~~
ronjouch
On desktop, does it still require installation of this addon to get the UI
bits? [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/send-tab-
to-d...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/send-tab-to-device/)

EDIT asking because it's been this way for a long time, see
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/PushTabToDevice#Desktop_Im...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/PushTabToDevice#Desktop_Implementation)
which says _" Currently, push-tab-to-device on desktop must be used through an
addon: [send-tab-to-device]"_

~~~
sp332
No, I don't have any extensions like that installed, and the feature just
showed up for me.

~~~
eoger
Indeed, we added a "Send Page/Tab/Link to device" menu item to the contextual
menu.

~~~
lifthrasiir
Is it new to 52? I hadn't seen a menu until today and really wanted to have
that feature.

~~~
eoger
Yes this UI is new, there was an unofficial add-on [0] before that did
something similar.

During my internship this summer we also added Push capabilities to decrease
the time it takes to send a tab to another device (it used to be in the order
of minutes).

[0] [https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/send-tab-
to-d...](https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/send-tab-to-device/)

~~~
BuckRogers
It appears you don't have to have tab sync on for it to work. Mine does take a
very long time to be received. Definitely a great feature, I don't want full
tab sync just this.

------
andreyv
Starting from this release, Firefox now requires PulseAudio for sound on Linux
[1]. ALSA can still be enabled at build time for now, but is not supported.

[1]
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247056](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247056)

~~~
Mister_Snuggles
How does this fit in with the current state of sound on Linux?

I'd guess that this would impact relatively few people if they're willing to
require it.

~~~
coldpie
I do most of the audio work on the Wine project.

I personally think it's a bad move to drop official support for ALSA. Not
everyone can or wants to use PulseAudio, for various good and bad reasons.
Supporting multiple backends also keeps you "honest," so to speak, preventing
you from relying on certain behaviors or features that only some platforms
support.

But, I can understand the practical arguments behind dropping support for
ALSA. The ALSA API really sucks to work with. There's a fair number of bugs
and device quirks and whatnot that you have to take care of as an application
developer. Standardizing around PulseAudio means only PulseAudio has to care
about those quirks, instead of every single application. In practice, the vast
majority of users use PulseAudio; there's a small (but vocal) minority that
don't.

So really there's no clear winner on whether to provide support for ALSA.

~~~
majewsky
Like many Poettering products, PulseAudio polarizes. There's one minority of
users with either quirky setups or just bad luck for whom it just doesn't
work, so they have to stick with ALSA. One minority of users (including me)
who really loves the features it puts on the table (e.g. per-app volume
control, effortless network transparency).

And of course, there's a large majority of users who couldn't care less, and
who will just choose whatever their distribution installs (which is why I
think the most Linux users not using PulseAudio are on those distros which
don't install any sound stuff by default, e.g. Arch).

~~~
bigbugbag
> Like many Poettering products

I didn't know pulseaudio was a Poettering product, but I know very well that
pulseaudio has been a nightmare for me over the years on most setups with a
variety of linux boxes and distros. And the fix when an audio problem arise is
simply to uninstall pulseaudio and use alsa.

Now that I know pulseaudio is Poettering work, this makes a lot of sense.

~~~
digi_owl
Pulseaudio, Avahi and Systemd are his. Seems to be directly or indirectly
inspired by Apple.

I have seen claims that Network Manager is his as well, but so far i have
found no clear link.

------
pkrumins
I just added Firefox 52 to Browserling. You can try this new version at this
URL without installing it:

[https://www.browserling.com/firefox/52/news.ycombinator.com](https://www.browserling.com/firefox/52/news.ycombinator.com)

If the demand is too high then you'll have to wait in a queue for a while to
try it. I'm adding more servers right now to let more people try it without
waiting.

~~~
chipperyman573
Out of curiosity, what's the difference between browserling and a service like
browserstack?

~~~
pkrumins
Biggest difference is that Browserling is powered by alien technology, unlike
Browserstack that is powered by puny human technology.

------
kyoji
Congrats Firefox team! I've been using the latest Nightly releases (for
container tabs!) as my daily driver and it has been a rock-solid experience.

Thanks for the hard work

~~~
nachtigall
There's now also a Firefox Testpilot experiment for container tabs:
[https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers](https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers)

~~~
amarraja
Thank you! I've been eagerly awaiting containers for a while, but didn't want
to switch to nightly

------
kamac
> Removed support for Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI) plugins other than Flash.
> Silverlight, Java, Acrobat and the like are no longer supported.

Good bye, you will be missed (not).

~~~
kuschku
They were the only way to get hardware accelerated video on Linux.

Even today, Firefox decodes all video (even h264) on CPU.

Which causes, with 4K 60fps video, 50% CPU load on an entire core for me.

~~~
alphapapa
> Which causes, with 4K 60fps video, 50% CPU load on an entire core for me.

Is that a punch line? Because it sounds like one. What is that, like, 6.25% of
your total CPU power?

I say this because many people have machines with CPUs that can't decode 4K
60fps video in realtime at all. So your stat sounds like a great deal to me.

Having said that, hardware video decoding is important for this very reason.
It's a shame that the situation isn't better on Linux. It seems like, no
matter what site or browser--Chrome or Firefox--VLC always plays the same
video with far less CPU usage.

~~~
robert_foss
It is problematic especially for newer codecs like h265 which uses
approximately 3x the CPU cycles.

Which pushes you beyond what a single core is capable off.

------
yoavm
And still no support for <input type="date"> . I just can't believe Firefox is
behind Edge on this one. I'm using Firefox as main browser for years now, and
it feels so bad when I always need to use a polyfill when developing a form
with date field - to support Firefox. It's embrassing that Chrome supported it
since... Chrome 20, in 2012.

~~~
nachtigall
I think this is in Nightly and now Firefox Developer Edition (54) behing a
pref:
[https://twitter.com/mozhacks/status/821005161602646016](https://twitter.com/mozhacks/status/821005161602646016)

------
sp332
You might want to switch yourself to the ESR branch if you depend on add-ons
that will not update to the new Web Extensions API. The old extensions model
is scheduled to be removed in FF 57, later this year. But 52 ESR will be
supported until at least mid-2018.

Edit: switched "plugins" to "add-ons".

~~~
WalterGR
Based on
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal)
it looks like 52 ESR will be the latest ESR when 57 is released. Is that
right?

~~~
digi_owl
Seems i need to consider a full time move to Palemoon, as i am currently on
45esr (their last GTK2 based esr).

Its really "funny" how it seems i can get Qt5 to work on an "old" X11 install,
but GTK3 balks at same.

If the FOSS world really wants a foot in the door on the desktop they really
need to learn to properly do backwards compatibility. Yes, it is not a
glorious job unlike working on the latest shiny framework or language. But it
is what has kept the likes of Microsoft in the top spot all this time.

Frankly i fear that once Torvalds steps down as kernel boss, Linux as a whole
will fragment into a million variants with diverging APIs.

------
__s
Past few days I've been making a Befunge JIT that targets WASM:
[https://github.com/serprex/Befunge/blob/master/funge.js](https://github.com/serprex/Befunge/blob/master/funge.js)

Ended up finding that Firefox 52 is overly accepting in validation. Dead code
is allowed to pop from an empty stack, whereas in Chrome that's not allowed
(as per spec). It's fixed already in next versions of Fx

~~~
Pxtl
> Past few days I've been making a Befunge JIT that targets WASM

 _why??????????????_

~~~
majewsky
Science isn't about _why?_ , it's about _why not!?_.

~~~
Pxtl
This isn't science, this is art. Specifically, this is like making Pollock's
Autumn Rythm out of play-dough.

~~~
majewsky
I see you haven't recognized the reference?

------
hedora
_sigh_ I had to switch to Chromium because they've broken + disabled HW
acceleration on Linux, and my 2016 netbook is too slow to browse amazon or
read news without it. Here is the bug:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594876](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594876)

In the release notes for 52, it says hangouts is broken. I wonder if this
means all of webrtc is broken or not.

Regressing "stable" features like these is creating serious problems for end
users. I wish they'd focus on keeping the ship afloat instead of continuing to
chase the new shiny. I really don't like relying on google (or any other
ad/surveillance shop) for my web browser.

~~~
rebelwebmaster
Here's Google's official post about the Hangouts issue:
[https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/02/google-
hangouts...](https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/02/google-hangouts-
temporary-issues-with-firefox.html)

~~~
hackuser
And the HN discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13763759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13763759)

------
nfriedly
Firefox for Android recently stopped showing me the "Send to Firefox" option
in the share menu. I previously used it all the time to send tabs to my
desktop. Does anyone know what happened or how to get it back?

~~~
eoger
Is this related?
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1342881](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1342881)

~~~
nfriedly
Yea, that looks similar. I'm not in the beta channel, though, I'm on 51.0.3.

I am signed in and have synced recently.

~~~
nfriedly
I think it is the same issue. Changing my clock makes the option re-appear,
just as described in the issue comments.

------
floatboth
WASM, Grid, deprecation of NPAPI and SHA-1 certs, all in one release. That is
huge. A very important release!

------
Joeboy
Doesn't mention if the major problem I have with Firefox 51 is fixed. It makes
a new, unauthenticated request every time I do View Source rather than showing
the source of the page I'm looking at, which is an extreme PITA.

If View Source works properly, that'd be worth upgrading for immediately.

~~~
sp332
That is annoying, but does the Inspector in the Developer Tools show what
you're looking for?

~~~
Joeboy
As far as I know the way to get the unmodified source in the Developer tools
is to find the html request in the Network tab, click on it, go to the
Response tab of the small panel on the right and read the source out of said
small panel (it's about 65x11 chars here). I'd much, much rather be able to
just hit Ctrl-U and read it in a new tab. If there's an easier way then I'd
like to know about it.

~~~
Drdrdrq
For me it suffices, though I too would prefer if "View source" just showed
this same content. Maybe an extension could hijack Ctrl-U and display fetched
source?

------
axelfontaine
And so the age of WebAssembly begins...

~~~
k__
What I ask myself, is this really the end of JavaScript?

WASM reminds me of the NDK on Android. A way to write high performance GC-less
code, but nobody started to use it for other things than high performance
computations.

Will people really start to port runtime environments to WASM so they can run
Ruby, Python and Java in browsers?

Or will this mainly be a place for C/C++, Rust and co to get some niche high
end stuff running?

~~~
judah
Definitely not the end of JavaScript. But it is the end of JavaScript-only.

It's likely we'll see other languages targeting WebAssembly in the next few
years. I heard rumors Microsoft is working on something in that area. If I
were to guess, I'd expect a TypeScript-to-WASM and C#-to-WASM to follow. Java,
Rust, Go, and others will likely have something too.

Additionally, I expect to see some JS-heavy frameworks (React, Angular, etc.)
write performance-critical sections with WASM, thus benefiting a great number
of web apps.

~~~
tmccrmck
Where did you hear these rumors? I could see a WebAssembly target for MSVC in
the near future (say hello to Office in the browser) but the CoreCLR needs GC
so it's currently out of the question.

~~~
judah
I heard this directly from a higher up at MS during a conference afterparty.
He said he couldn't wait for browser support for Web Assembly to go live so he
can show the things they're working on.

And yeah, for C# to WASM, we'd need garbage collection support in WASM. That
doesn't exist yet, though it's on the list of future enhancements[0].

[0]: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/where-is-webassembly-
now-a...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/where-is-webassembly-now-and-
whats-next/)

------
beefman
If you're using Tree Style Tab and this upgrade causes new tabs to appear
after a delay of many seconds... setting browser.tabs.animate to false
resolved it for me (macOS 10.12).

------
simonsquiff
Mozilla says 'Enabled multi-process Firefox for Windows users with touch
screens', however on my Dell XPS 13 it still says multiprocess windows are
'Disabled by accessibility tools' in about:support, which was the touch screen
issue. Any ideas?

~~~
bzbarsky
Are you running a 32-bit Firefox or 64-bit? I _think_ the touchscreen thing
was only fixed for 32-bit for the Firefox 52 release, and the fix for 64-bit
will be in Firefox 54.

I'll see about getting the release notes fixed to reflect that.

------
jadbox
I'd love to see some webassymbly benchmarks now with 52 stable.

------
fenollp
Most important to me from this release: webdriver finally supports self-signed
certificates.

~~~
fohara
Nice. Maybe it's finally time to upgrade to the latest Firefox for testing. We
had been pegged at an older version because we ran into some issues with the
new (at the time) MarionetteDriver[1], but I imagine the migration might be
smoother now.

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/QA/Marionet...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/QA/Marionette)

------
akmittal
Can't wait for servo to be shipped so that everyone can move back again to
Firefox.

------
conductor
Despite of my media.gmp-provider.enabled setting being set to false Firefox
makes a connection to ciscobinary.openh264.org on port 80 and downloads the
h264 decoder binary provided by Cisco.

Does this mean that the library is being downloaded (and executed) using plain
HTTP without any authentication? Sounds like a nice target for QUANTUM style
MITM attacks.

------
exodust
I'm still rockin Firefox 33 (released 2014) on one of my PCs. Sad to observe
websites which fail and throw errors without any grace including big sites
like Netflix and others.

Strange errors and broken functionality usually without any mention of my
browser being the problem. That's sloppy development. A browser from 2014
isn't "Netscape 3".

Signed up to Google Firebase recently. Tried navigating to the console on my
PC with Firefox 33, "there was an error completing your request". That's
because I was using a browser from 2014. No mention of that in the error. At
first I thought the service was down, then I tried a newer browser.

Backwards compatibility or at least graceful degradation and error handling is
accessibility. Your site either has it or it doesn't.

~~~
DominoTree
Why are you using such an old browser? Part of the reason sites are built for
current browsers is that responsible users should be updating their browsers
frequently.

With as many ways as you can have your machine compromised by simply browsing
to a website that had some malicious advertising code embedded, I can't
imagine why anybody would use such an old browser if they weren't absolutely
forced to.

~~~
apostacy
I use Firefox 29 for most of my profiles. Because I have a very specific
workflow with add-ons, that runs circles around any Chrome user.

It's also more secure, because of my external sandboxing.

I also have my own container mechanism for Firefox that I have been using for
years.

And this is what the web is all about. It used to be that the web was
accessible to people in remote parts of the world, using old hardware, and
anyone could write and add to it.

Now it's quickly becoming a black box that only wealthy people can access.

~~~
oatmealsnap
That's quite the hyperbole.

The performance gains that come with newer browsers (generally) should allow
websites to run on older hardware. Not to mention support for new protocols
and compression that lead to smaller assets being sent to all devices.

~~~
apostacy
I can see how my comment wasn't clear. The fact that disadvantaged people are
being driven off the web has nothing to do with the fact that I have a highly
customized browser setup. I probably should have made that more clear.

------
carbolymer
> Removed support for Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI) plugins other than Flash.
> Silverlight, Java, Acrobat and the like are no longer supported.

That's really, really bad. At this point Firefox was the only browser which
was supporting Java on Linux. I am forced to stick to the 51 version (52 64bit
ESR does not support Java also).

You may ask, why on earth do you need Java inside your browser in 2017? My
company, which does not support Linux, uses Java applet to create system-wide
VPN connections to the client's networks and Firefox was the only choice.

------
liminal
It's frustrating that multi-process is _still_ not enabled on my touchscreen
windows laptop. The about:support page says "Disabled by accessibility tools".
Feel like I've been waiting for this feature to arrive for years.

~~~
cpeterso
Multi-process support for Windows touchscreens should be coming in Firefox 53,
according to the release notes. 53 will enter the Firefox Beta channel this
week or next.

[https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/53.0a2/releasenotes/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/53.0a2/releasenotes/)

~~~
theandrewbailey
Since "Enabled multi-process Firefox for Windows users with touch screens" is
in the Firefox 52 release notes, it should be enabled now. I don't understand
how else that note could be interpreted.

~~~
dblohm7
I'm the developer responsible for multiprocess on touch screens. There was a
mixup in the release notes.

This is what the realities of the situation are:

Touchscreen Windows users running 32-bit Firefox 52 should have multiprocess.

Touchscreen Windows users running 64-bit Firefox will not have multiprocess
until version 54.

~~~
theandrewbailey
Thanks for the clarification. And thank you for the work.

------
nachtigall
Here's a more hacker oriented write-up at
[https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/03/firefox-52-introducing-
web...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/03/firefox-52-introducing-web-assembly-
css-grid-and-the-grid-inspector/) (published today). Discussion (if it comes)
at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13812145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13812145)

------
keda
How is Firefox Android working for everyone? I can't seem to get video player
working on some website like bloomberg.com, otherwise I'm a fan of it.

~~~
Drdrdrq
Another fan here. There are some rough spots and there doesn't seem to be much
done to fix them. I have already cloned the source but haven't found the time
to build it yet.

My main gripe is that it doesn't treat closing the window as "exit", which
means you must go to menu and select Exit if you want to remove session
cookies and similar.

Another one is that selecting text is clumsy because standard Android lens is
not used.

But I still prefer FF to its "all-your-data-are-belong-to-us" competition.

~~~
diminish
actually a whole session is the phone turning on and off. So I like this
session behavior better. Otherwise unlike apps I have to login again and again
to some websites.

------
FullyFunctional
What happened to TLS 1.3 which was supposed to land in Firefox 52? (At least
according to [https://threatpost.com/mozilla-turning-tls-1-3-on-by-
default...](https://threatpost.com/mozilla-turning-tls-1-3-on-by-default-with-
firefox-52/121461/))

Not that I'm ungrateful; Firefox is my preferred browser.

------
naibafo
It is annoying that I have to install pulseaudio if I want to continue using
Firefox for media consumption.

------
branchless
I have one question: when I hit "." in twitter.com will the whole thing hang
whilst it crunches through the updates?

I moved from chrome to firefox and so far this is my one complaint. This and I
believe the CPU usage is higher for the same number of tabs open.

------
simplehuman
Why does Mozilla make it hard to run the sync server (easily) on our own? Just
give a docker file. Instead you need a sync server, your own account server..
such poor technical design. These are small features that will make many stick
to Firefox.

~~~
simias
Thank you for pointing that out, I don't use the sync feature because I don't
like giving too much info to 3rd party services but I never considered running
it on one of my servers.

I've just skimmed through this guide:
[https://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-
sync-1.5.html#h...](https://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-
sync-1.5.html#howto-run-sync15)

It doesn't look too difficult and it says that running your own account server
is optional. Or does it mean that you can run your own sync server using a
mozilla account? I'm not sure I understand how sync server and accounts server
interact exactly...

~~~
simplehuman
This is exactly the problem. They have just made it hard for no reason. I want
concrete information as well with an easy to run guide. It's not clear why I
need to use Mozilla accounts.

~~~
kebolio
> for no reason

What's the reason that they should accommodate you and write you a dockerfile?

------
digi_owl
Did they bump the minimum Android version required?

I do not see the release via the Play store app, but the web site shows it.

For a project that seems to bill itself as being for the people, they seems
awful quick at dropping backwards compatibility.

------
MichaelMoser123
What are the supported operating systems, I don't see any list of supported
OS's ? i did the upgrade and it just crashed on startup (on windows 7
enterprise edition), Installing from scratch didn't help either.

~~~
bzbarsky
[https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/52.0/system-
requiremen...](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/52.0/system-
requirements/) has the list. Windows 7 is supported...

------
dsschnau
woohoo CSS Grid! It's happening!

------
midgetjones
I hope this update doesn't break Vimperator again.

~~~
ronjouch
VimFx is enough for me, maybe it's for you too.
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/vimfx/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/vimfx/)

~~~
midgetjones
Thanks! I hadn't seen it, but Vimperator was what finally got me to switch
from Chrome/Vimium. If it's customizable enough that I can remap `d` to close
a tab and `u` to reopen, I'll be happy... but then I guess I don't need to be
happy, as I won't have a choice soon enough :)

~~~
majewsky
Oh, I feel you. I had a hard time remapping Vimperator "Ctrl-u/d" to VimFX
"u/d" and Vimperator "u/d" to VimFX "x/X" in my muscle memory.

On the other hand, some parts of VimFX's language are more logical, e.g. "yf"
instead of ";y" to select a link into the clipboard.

------
TekMol
Still no hardware accelerated video on Linux. Everytime Mozilla adds new
features, I am reminded of this:

[https://xkcd.com/619/](https://xkcd.com/619/)

------
pmoriarty
Does Pentadactyl still work in this release?

------
threepipeproblm
What percent of Google Voice users will abandon Firefox now that v52 breaks a
key component of their workflow?

[https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/02/google-
hangouts...](https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/02/google-hangouts-
temporary-issues-with-firefox.html)

Ironically, Mozilla has stated that breaking all these user plugins is part of
some strategy to _regain_ market share and "influence web standards". Now that
it's actually happening, I'm hoping more people will see how it's not going to
work.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Why is Google relying on an NPAPI plugin for Hangouts, rather than using
WebRTC?

~~~
mavhc
This is the old version of hangouts, so I guess a) because WebRTC didn't
exist/was too new at the time, and b) hats

~~~
cpeterso
Hangouts switched from NPAPI to WebRTC in Chrome back in 2014, but still uses
plugins (NPAPI or ActiveX) for other browsers. Hangouts depends on some non-
standard WebRTC functionality in Chrome. Google has had almost three years to
adapt to other browsers' WebRTC stacks, but it is not a priority because the
plugins have still worked (in Firefox < 52 and IE).

[https://plus.google.com/103171586947853434456/posts/39TCW3Pc...](https://plus.google.com/103171586947853434456/posts/39TCW3PcLye)

