
Firefox 51.0 - binaryanomaly
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/51.0/releasenotes/
======
debaserab2
Side note: I absolutely love the format that Firefox does their release notes
in. They're organized really well and do a good job of speaking with the right
language for the audience of each change.

I can't think of another product that does release notes as well as them.
Usually your hunting down ticket numbers (often on a private tracker) that are
referenced from a changelog.

~~~
LegNeato
Fun fact: Alex Keybl and I based them on 1Password's release notes
([https://app-updates.agilebits.com/product_history/OPM4](https://app-
updates.agilebits.com/product_history/OPM4)).

Here was the old style:

[http://website-
archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_r...](http://website-
archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_releasenotes/en-
US/firefox/9.0/releasenotes/)

And the new style:

[http://website-
archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_r...](http://website-
archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_releasenotes/en-
US/firefox/10.0/releasenotes/)

The new style has since been tweaked a bit since we left Mozilla.

They also always had a list of all bugs fixed (for example, [http://website-
archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_r...](http://website-
archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_releasenotes/en-
US/firefox/10.0/releasenotes/buglist.html)).

~~~
Esau
Props for giving props.

------
ramblenode
Firefox continues its commitment to privacy with this quiet change found in
the developer notes [0]:

> For privacy reasons, both BatteryManager.chargingTime and
> BatteryManager.dischargingTime now round the returned value to the closest
> 15 minutes (bug 1292655).

See [1] for an explanation of how the battery status API can be used to track
you.

[0] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/Firefox/Releases/51#Chan...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/Firefox/Releases/51#Changes_for_Web_developers)

[1] [https://www.hackread.com/smartphone-laptop-battery-
invading-...](https://www.hackread.com/smartphone-laptop-battery-invading-
privacy/)

~~~
r3bl
I've created a simple website that showcases the Battery API if you wanna see
if you're affected or not:
[https://r3bl.me/battery/](https://r3bl.me/battery/)

Done locally in JavaScript, info is not stored anyway (and, of course, you can
see that for yourself here: [https://github.com/aleksandar-
todorovic/battery](https://github.com/aleksandar-todorovic/battery)).

------
po1nter
This will be the first software that I use everyday (and that I know of) that
speaks my native tongue: Kabyle. It might not mean much to the rest of the
world, especially since we're not that many native speakers, but I'm loving
the fact that they've added it.

~~~
hackerboos
In the same release they removed Belarusian. Anyone know why?

~~~
dtparr
"This locale hasn't seen any activity in almost 2 years, and we failed to
revive the community effort."

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1307995](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1307995)

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1304743](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1304743)

------
anw
This release seems to help on the UX side of things regarding logins, along
with improved efficiency.

Some of the highlights:

* Users can view passwords in the save password prompt before saving them

* Firefox will save passwords even in forms that do not have “submit” events

* A warning is displayed when a login page does not have a secure connection

* Improved video performance for users without GPU acceleration for less CPU usage and a better full screen experience

* Added support for WebGL 2, with advanced graphics rendering features like transform feedback, improved texturing capabilities, and a new sophisticated shading language

* Added support for FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) playback

~~~
emn13
I'm not sure about the audience here on hacker news, but I can image many are
more interested in the developer release notes:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/Firefox/Releases/51#Chan...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/Firefox/Releases/51#Changes_for_Web_developers) (e.g. JS/CSS api changes).

Aside; the FF dev release notes always impress upon me the scale of modern
browsers. There's just so much new stuff, and lots of it isn't trivial at all,
and that's despite the rather rapid release calendar, and the need to be
pretty much rock solid on a huge variety of systems, and the list of tricky
non-functional aspects like perf, size, security, maintainability, etc. that
all this code needs to at least consider. It's daunting.

------
aorth
The WebGL demo "After the Flood" linked in their release summary post is
really beautiful. I don't play games but this technology is very impressive.
Try it for yourself if you're on an updated Firefox (51+):

[https://playcanv.as/e/p/44MRmJRU/](https://playcanv.as/e/p/44MRmJRU/)

~~~
bwhitty
Very cool demo. Worked fine on my 2015 rMBP even if Ultra settings ran at
about 10 FPS.

The web really has come a long, long ways.

~~~
StavrosK
Hell, I got 8 FPS on Ultra on my 2013 Air (that's on Firefox 52.0, though).
The Firefox 52b UI feels much snappier than the 51b UI, for some reason, which
is fantastic, because my main annoyance with 51 was the sluggish UI. The whole
browser would freeze while one tab was loading.

------
hannob
The password warning is a great move by Mozilla.

They tackle a very common misconception: Many people think it's enough to
transfer the password encrypted, because they think https is only about
secrecy. But it's crucial to also submit the form via https, otherwise
attackers can mess with the form itself.

A lot of webpages will be surprised by this, there are still quite a few who
have insecure login forms.

~~~
dmit
But you also need to serve the page that links to the form via https,
otherwise it's vulnerable to the same attack (just one step longer). Which
probably means you need to serve everything over https. And even then you need
HSTS in order to avoid MITM agents downgrading https back to http. And even
_then_ you want to register your site so that at least some of the major
browsers preload your HSTS info
([https://www.chromium.org/hsts](https://www.chromium.org/hsts)). And as a
user you just install HTTPS Everywhere, cross your fingers, and hope for the
best.

~~~
nandhp
> But you also need to serve the page that links to the form via https

Yes, in the limit. But current best-practices for user caution ("when you're
entering personal information, check the address bar for the domain name
you're expecting [and a lock icon]") would be enough to thwart that attack.

------
BoysenberryPi
I see the WebGL improvements and how on their blog they market it as "Firefox
Gets Better Video Gaming" and I really have to say, as a game developer, I
really don't want the future of gaming to be on the web. This is more than
just Javascript hate. It's hard to monetize games if you aren't going free to
play with microtransactions. And really, on a personal level, I just like
downloading games and playing them offline. I'm not always near internet
access.

~~~
bobajeff
You don't have to use JavaScript. (See emscripten, binaryen etc.)

The Web is basically just a runtime you don't have to host your files on a
server if you don't want. You can distribute them via CDs if you prefer. Also
you can use Service Workers now.

That said monetisation all depends on the product not the medium. Just look at
Minecraft. It didn't use ads or microtransactions and yet it was run from a
Java applet in a browser.

~~~
andrewmcwatters
Yeah, but many of us game developers don't want to use any of that either. At
the end of the day, those tools don't ensure that we obtain the same level of
quality out the other end.

Framerates aren't the same, memory usage isn't the same, and you can't easily
tweak these things once they've come out the other end. The web _isn't_ just a
runtime. It's abstracted like that, but browsers are glorified HTML renders
with JavaScript bindings, event handling, and sound and video playback to game
developers.

HN has a subset of the community constantly raving about these things for game
developers, but where are the game developers actually praising these things?
I don't know of any, personally. We're all too busy with desktop games.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Myself, I'm currently working on a game that targets both the web and the
desktop. I like the accessibility of the former (just go to the site and play,
nearly frictionless), but the latter has better FPS by an order of
magnitude[0] for the same C codebase, so I'd rather keep my options open.

[0] Mind you, said order of magnitude applies to uncapped framerate.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
*Sorry, it's quite a bit smaller than an order of magnitude. It's a non-trivial difference though.

------
stuaxo
Flac playback and more work on E10s, this is a pretty sweet release.

Switching to Skia on linux for rendering is interesting too, I wonder how this
affects rendering performance and correctness vs cairo ?

~~~
majewsky
So they use Skia now? I would have expected them to rather switch to
WebRender.

~~~
cpeterso
Gecko was already using Skia on Windows and Mac, so enabling Skia on Linux
helps consolidate the graphics code.

WebRender is actively being ported to Gecko (the "Quantum Render" project),
but it is a large effort and won't ship until late 2017. It's an all-or-
nothing feature, so it can't be enabled incrementally.

~~~
shmerl
I wonder if Quantum plans to use Vulkan for rendering when it's available?

~~~
yazaddaruvala
It seems it will happen eventually, but not at this time[0]. There are likely
higher priority changes which need to be made.

[0]
[https://github.com/servo/webrender/issues/186](https://github.com/servo/webrender/issues/186)

~~~
shmerl
Interesting, thanks!

------
mrmondo
From 2014: "Choose Firefox now, or you won't get a choice later"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12579163](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12579163)

~~~
2bitencryption
After reading that article in 2014, I switched to Firefox. I used it from that
point until just a few weeks ago when a program bypassed my defaults and
launched Chrome. And I immediately remembered why I preferred Chrome and how
much more responsive it feels, and how it handles plugins and per-tab
processes and uses a quarter the memory somehow.

So now I'm back on Chrome. Felt good to be on FF for awhile, felt like I was
preserving freedom or whatever. But now that I'm on Chrome, I won't switch
back until Firefox actually becomes a better browser.

~~~
scholia
_> and uses a quarter the memory somehow._

I thought Chrome was famous for being a resource hog. It consumes more RAM on
my Windows PCs, though I confess I use more tabs than are viable in Chrome....

~~~
StRoy
> I thought Chrome was famous for being a resource hog.

That's only in comparison to Safari and Edge. If you open enough tabs to cause
memory issues on Chrome, Firefox would have frozen and slowed down to a crawl
before filling the memory, anyhow, and electrolysis still isn't in a state
where it could change that: there's still one process for the renderer so if
enough intensive webpages are run your web browsing experience will still slow
down.

~~~
scholia
That's not what I find. How are you measuring memory use?

------
spacehacker
Tab switching has improved a lot. I also love the new zoom level indicator in
the URL bar. Very innovative. Nice.

~~~
lalalander
Is there a way to remove it from the URL bar? I find it rather distracting
actually...

~~~
kbrosnan
Via userChrome.css

    
    
        @namespace url(http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul);
        #urlbar-zoom-button {
            display: none !important;}

------
nautical
Was using Firefox from a very long time , but for some reason recently Firefox
is very slow on my machine . Even chromium starts up slowly . Google Chrome
opens the fastest and is very light on resources .

~~~
binaryanomaly
Not sure what exactly your issue is but in general Firefox was never faster
than it is now - since electrolysis support (multiprocess windows).

~~~
bonsai80
I use it as much as I can, although for development tasks Chrome performs much
better for me and certain sites load slower. I'm looking forward to a year
from now when servo/quantum/whatever is in there. In the mean time though, I'm
thankful to have a non-commercial party in the mix and am happy to use it.

~~~
binaryanomaly
Couldn't agree more, same here.

------
realusername
> Remove Belarusian (be) locale

Anyone knows why they removed it by curiosity?

~~~
olegkikin
Looks like they didn't find a volunteer to do the translations.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1304743](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1304743)

~~~
realusername
That's very sad, I've heard the language is slowly dying and replaced by
Russian, it's probably harder to find younger people contributing.

------
DavideNL
...still no "smooth pinch-to-zoom" like Safari and Chromium have had for years
:'(

Zooming is such a basic thing, and it really sucks in Firefox in my opinion
(using a Macbook with its trackpad that is.. if using a mouse it obviously
doesn't apply)

------
pjmlp
Nice to see WebGL 2.0 finally coming to FF as well, congratulations!

------
ejenk
Warning to Vimperator users: some Vimperator features are currently broken in
this release. See [https://github.com/vimperator/vimperator-
labs/issues/568](https://github.com/vimperator/vimperator-labs/issues/568)

~~~
Accacin
Sorry to be completely off-topic, but how can you disable keys in Vimperator?
I'm a Front End Dev so I use the 'Q' key a lot so it's annoying that I keep
trying to record macros (which I never need to do in Firefox).

------
bheesham
> Use 2D graphics library (Skia) for content rendering on Linux

What were they using before?

~~~
jhasse
Cairo

------
ggchappell
> Added support for WebGL 2, with advanced graphics rendering features like
> transform feedback, improved texturing capabilities, and a new sophisticated
> shading language

Can anyone explain that last bit. I know WebGL 2 goes with GLSL ES 3.0, but
that seems to be the same ol' GLSL with a few tweaks. Is this "new
sophisticated shading language" just overblown PR, or is there an actual new
shading language?

------
piyush_soni
Is anyone else facing trouble in updating Firefox from the 'Help->About'
dialog? Whenever a new Firefox version is released, this dialog promptly gives
me the new release, but this time it has decided to stick to 50.1.0 (while
going to the Firefox download site directly downloads 51.0)

------
dagurp
Does anyone else think the login popup is a bit annoying? Is there a way to go
back to the way it was before?

~~~
roryokane
The save password pop-up? You can disable it for all sites in the Firefox
settings, the same as in previous versions. All they changed was making it
recognize some login forms that it didn't recognize before; it's not a totally
new feature. Are you seeing false positives with it?

~~~
dagurp
It seems buggy. For example, I don't like that it keeps suggesting other login
names when I've already filled the field. I also don't understand what is
supposed to happen when the popup appears in the password field, if I choose
something the username isn't changed at least. Mostly I think it gets in the
way. I had no problem with the old functionality where I just wrote the
username and the password was filled out when I pressed tab.

------
ArtDev
Looks like they fixed smooth scrolling bug I was experiencing too. Thanks :)

------
yuhong
Another fix included:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1321357](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1321357)

------
pmoriarty
I can't see myself using Firefox for much longer due to it permanently
breaking Pentadactyl, and there being no good replacements.

------
akerro
More people speak Belarusian than Kabyle, why was Belarusian locale removed?

~~~
0x4a42
You can read about it here:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1304743](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1304743)

------
m-p-3
I guess this could mean direct playback of FLAC from Plex Web in the future!

------
agumonkey
And Firefox Nightly 54.

------
pyed
I tested the FLAC playback, it plays only the first 9 seconds!

~~~
nirv
Out of curiosity I've just dropped ~450MB FLAC file in a new Firefox tab, and
I must say I experience great stoner rock with no issues whatsoever.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
The Kyuss test is how I gauge all my new speakers and headphones, as well.

------
owly
FLAC FTW!!!

