
Firefox 36.0 released - Smibu
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/36.0/releasenotes/
======
agumonkey
Meanwhile, in firefox 39a (current nightly), a reader view
(readability/printfriendly)

[http://imgur.com/DONqb30](http://imgur.com/DONqb30)

~~~
Scarbutt
I see font rendering in linux is still pretty horrible.

~~~
aw3c2
You know, you might be looking at a screenshot that has font settings (hinting
etc) which work on the originating display and fail on yours. No reason to
jump to snarkiness.

~~~
Scarbutt
You do realize the screenshot is an image right?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
That doesn't matter. The pixel output of subpixel rendering only works on
monitors with the pixel layout it's intended for.

~~~
zem
whoa, that is something i never thought about before.

~~~
aw3c2
Take a screenshot and zoom in on text, chances are that you will see lots of
subtly colored pixels around it.

------
mcdoug
Wow this is a big release! HTTP 2.0, phasing out 1024 certs, sync, will-
change.

BTW, is there already support for 4096 certs? Or is that coming later?

~~~
blinkingled
Yeah, the full HTTP/2 support was a pleasant surprise! Wonder if Google's (and
other prominent ones) web properties have switched over to HTTP/2 from SPDY
yet.

~~~
sp332
According to
[http://spdycheck.org/#google.com](http://spdycheck.org/#google.com)
google.com supports "h2-14" and "h2-15" which I'm guessing are drafts of
HTTP/2?

~~~
gsnedders
Right. "h2" is what the final spec should give.

~~~
patrickmcmanus
firefox 36 will negotiate any of {h2, h2-14, h2-15}

------
h43k3r
I recently switched back to Firefox from Chrome. They have done a nice job in
speeding it up. My Chrome seems like more of a bottleneck than my internet
connection.

~~~
Shivetya
my concern with firefox, at least on the mac, I tend to find video play back
just stops whereas I can take the same video to Safari and have zero issues.

I really wish there were a way to more easily identify if the problem is an
addon or inherent to Firefox.

~~~
maxerickson
It's pretty easy to create a blank profile. That isn't magic wand easy, but
it's a low bar.

~~~
hackuser

      firefox.exe -p -new-instance
    

Should open a new instance of Firefox in the profile dialog, where you can
create a new profile.

I'm not sure about "-new-instance". I've only used -no-remote but the release
notes say remote commands have been removed. Some quick research turned up
-new-instance as a substitute.

~~~
Excavator
-no-remote is the same as -new-instance except that the instance won't listen to remote commands.

------
jherdman
I'm presently in the middle of an experiment to use Firefox (and its Developer
Edition) as my primary browser when performing my duties as a web developer.
So far... It's been kind of rocky. Daily usage of the browser isn't that bad,
but the developer tools are lacking compared to Chrome.

A good example is the Network tab. In Chrome, I need only have the developer
tools open to capture information about requests. In FF, I must not only have
the tools open, but I must also be viewing the tab.

Another minor annoyance is the state of add-ons. It seems that new versions of
the add-ons I use regularly are several versions behind their Chrome
counterparts. And have you tried to develop an add-on? Wow. The docs are kind
of harsh. They could really use a guided example.

~~~
izolate
One minor grievance I have with the Firefox console is the input line is all
the way at the bottom. I quite like Chrome's approach of starting at the top.

Firefox has a few of these irritating UX quirks that I just can't get over.
Having to restart after installing an extension is another. Every time I see
the request, I can't help lose a bit of respect for it.

~~~
Brakenshire
> Firefox has a few of these irritating UX quirks that I just can't get over.

Another one is not being able to use shift-home or shift-end to select to the
beginning or end of a css property.

~~~
okbake
Wow, this drives me insane. I've always meant to file a bug report about this
but I'm not sure if its supposed to be a feature instead. It appears to let
you cycle through valid properties but I really wish it was assigned to
another key.

------
lewisl9029
Not quite related to this particular release, but I kind of wish sync for
extension data wasn't Opt-In.

Having to hunt down the option to turn on Sync for each extension explicitly
and not even having that option for some extensions makes for a rather poor
user experience.

Also, as someone who customizes the browser layout rather extensively, I'd
like to see layout settings included in Sync as well (which toolbars are
visible/how buttons are organized on toolbars/etc).

~~~
Nanzikambe
Totally disagree I find the present trend towards opt-in-by-default to be an
anathema.

It's totally unreasonable that I should have to start up applications in a
sandbox after each upgrade and/or hire a team of lawyers to go over the
EULA/TOS to find what new & interesting ways have been found to sell my
personal info.

(Responding to your general point btw rather than specifically against
Mozilla, who compared to the alternatives do seem to care about their users
privacy, nor Sync which which you have to opt in for)

~~~
lewisl9029
For what it's worth, I was talking specifically about Sync's behavior for
extension data, and wasn't trying to make any general point about opt-in-by-
default.

------
snarfy
I switched back to Firefox and stopped using Chrome when it wanted me to 'sign
in'. Even IE does not make me do that. I have to say their technical people
are top notch, but their business leadership not so much. If they keep in this
direction soon Chrome will look like the old AOL app.

If you are unfamiliar, I recommend you also checkout firefox developer
edition.

~~~
AceJohnny2
Chrome SignIn is basically the same thing as Firefox Sync. It keeps your
bookmarks, extensions, and stored passwords (all controllable) in sync between
the different devices you use the browser on.

~~~
Millennium
The key difference being that Firefox's implementation gives you all this
without having to let Google rifle through the data you want to sync.

~~~
wtbob
Not anymore: as I posted last night[1], Mozilla could choose to give
themselves access to your password, when you create your account or when you
change its password. Anyone who is able to successfully MITM you & Mozilla
(say, someone with a Komodia cert if you're infested with Superfish, or any of
the CAs in the world, or anyone who can compel them to certify a MITM cert)
can do the same.

Google do allow you to use your own passphrase, so conceivably at this point
Chrome is at least somewhat more secure than Mozilla.

It's a crying shame.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9098459](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9098459)

------
neokya
Recently switched back to Firefox. Their search engine selection option is so
easy and excellent.

On Chrome, non-technical people won't be able to change default search engine.

Thanks Mozilla.

~~~
sorenjan
I strongly prefer the previous search bar UI, and thankfully it's still
available through a setting. about:config -> browser.search.showOneOffButtons
= false.

~~~
ptx
Thank you! The new design makes my various Arch Linux-related search options
impossible to use as they all have the same icon (which shouldn't be a problem
– I don't want to have to design a unique icon for every possible thing I want
to search).

Aside from that, what is the benefit of the new design supposed to be? It
looks like it's designed for touch, but Firefox on touch-based platforms has a
completely different UI anyway. And even if someone were to use the desktop
version of Firefox with touch input, the targets look a bit small. So I don't
understand the point of making the UI worse for keyboard and mouse input.

------
kolanos
OSX Voiceover support has "improved" but is still pretty broken. Anyone know
if Voiceover support is on the roadmap? Would ditch Safari in a minute if
Firefox had proper Voiceover support. Considering how much attention Mozilla
gives to accessibility...

~~~
Excavator
Firefox accessibility bugs are listed here:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=34298...](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=342989&hide_resolved=1)

------
hokkos
The share and hello icons reappeared in FF 36 after I removed them, this is
annoying.

~~~
mconley
This was not intentional. I've filed
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1136300](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1136300).

------
glittershark
Pretty astounded at the changes they made to ES6 generators. Twenty-two times
faster[1] is incredible

[1]: [https://wingolog.org/archives/2014/11/14/generators-in-
firef...](https://wingolog.org/archives/2014/11/14/generators-in-firefox-now-
twenty-two-times-faster)

------
eloy
> No longer accept insecure RC4 ciphers whenever possible

What do they mean with "whenever possible"? If there is a downgrade attack
ongoing, will it be possible to avoid RC4?

~~~
sp332
Here are more details, with links to the discussions on specific issues.
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/Firefox/Releases/36#Secu...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/Firefox/Releases/36#Security)

------
_jomo
_Fix some unexpected logout from Facebook or Google after restart_

What sort of bug is this that only affects Facebook & Google?

~~~
IvyMike
Looks like it's probably this bug, which (to my reading) was a problem
handling domain cookies:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=950399](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=950399)

This would of course affect any site, but the two common instances were FB and
google.

------
walkon
Good to see they fixed this security bug:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1095859](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1095859)

A proxy could inject cookies on a 407 response and even bypass the
authentication prompt - could have been used for session fixation attacks.

------
sauere
Semi-OT: is anyone on HN using a "alternative" Browser such as Midori or
Vivaldi on a daily basis? I love what Midori is doing but it still crashes on
me to often.

~~~
ubolonton_
I use Conkeror [http://conkeror.org/](http://conkeror.org/).

~~~
MagaManGo
Me too! The "f" command is sweet bliss for keyboarders.

------
romanovcode
Thank you for the best browser out there!

------
renaudg
Years after switching to Chrome, I've given FF 35 another chance as my main
browser in the past week.

The major drive was Chrome's poor handling of dozens of open tabs, which was
slowing down my Macbook to a crawl (8GB Core i7 2012 13" Retina on Yosemite)
way too often. "The great suspender" extension helped somewhat, but it felt
like a lot of manual work for something I believe the browser should handle
much more smartly on its own.

Firefox is better in this respect, with sane native behavior like not trying
to restore 100+ tabs in parallel upon restart, and extensions like UnloadTab
that automatically suspend tabs after some timeout.

However, I'm about to switch back to Chrome :

\- I only have 3-4 active tabs in FF at the moment, but as I type this I can
feel noticeable lag, and firefox+WindowServer fighting for CPU.

\- Embedded video is jerky and looks like it's 10-12fps no matter what the
site. Going full screen fixes it, but still..

\- No FF extension I've found integrates Google Translate as seamlessly as
Chrome does.

I'm not looking forward to handling dozens of tabs in Chrome again, but its
baseline performance for everything else is noticeably better for me.

~~~
memla
Opera has built in tab hibernation that seems to work pretty well:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/operabrowser/comments/2vkdjr/tab_hib...](http://www.reddit.com/r/operabrowser/comments/2vkdjr/tab_hibernation_is_awesome/)

------
teekert
Just tested FF Hello. A very nice experience! Too bad it didn't work with a
recipient on osX/safari. I will be using this more often!

------
riquito
The immutable Symbol is interesting, I wonder if React and such would benefit
from it (using polyfills for the browsers that do not support it yet)

------
Chri3e
As an OS X Yosemite user I'd love to go back to Firefox from Safari, but the
memory usage just isn't good enough. i get over an hour more battery life with
Safari compared to Firefox. Please do something about this.

------
shmerl
Unfortunately MSE are still broken:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1129039](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1129039)

------
edward
Why was -remote removed?

~~~
pmontra
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1080319](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1080319)

tl;dr there are other command line options to do everything -remote does in a
more sensible way.

------
joelthelion
How can you tell if you're using HTTP2?

~~~
cpeterso
The "HTTP/2 and SPDY indicator" add-on adds lightning bolt icon to your
address bar: blue for HTTP/2, green for SPDY:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/spdy-
indicato...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/spdy-indicator/)

------
tdkl
Can we please get a non horrible scrolling behaviour in the Android build
regarding rest of the platform ?

------
owly
I don't recall FF asking to accept incoming connections upon upgrading to a
new version, 36 does.

------
sparaker
Interested in testing out HTTP/2

------
Spiritus
Still now swipe animation (or "scroll bounce") on OS X _sigh_.

------
lurkinggrue
Wow, Damn Hello is back even though I disabled it.

Gee, Thanks.

------
kapilsriram
cool

------
hamitron
I just updated and it broke my selenium scripts.

~~~
hamitron
thanks for the downvotes, but I've literally spent all day trying to fix my QA
environment after updating to firefox 36.

~~~
etimberg
It seems to be a known issue with Selenium 2.44. Hopefully it gets fixed ASAP

------
ajjai
Your web, the way you like it.

------
tete
Great release, but not so happy about HTTP/2 being used by people now. I mean
they kind of have to implement it, but the standard is still rather awful in
many regards, like no caching by default (but at least headers get
compressed?), bad security, ...

See also: [https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-
wg/2015JanMar...](https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-
wg/2015JanMar/0043.html)

I really wonder whether there is a measurable change in traffic and whether it
goes up or down.

------
monk_e_boy
Yay! Time for another firefox rant. I love the idea of firefox and I used to
love it a lot. But not now. I keep trying it and always go back to chrome.

It crashes. A lot. Like, at least once a day I have to ctrl+alt+del and
restart it on my laptop. It freezes and the window stops responding, it
doesn't even paint.

In the inspector, the DOM breadcrumb area scrolls and moves around. It's like
the blink tag, only worse.

JS debugger feels worse and clunky compared to Chrome.

Element inspector feels like duplo to chromes lego (does that make sense?)

I opened firefox yesterday and found a new speach bubble icon asking me to
connect to O2 for something. WTF?! WTactualF is that all about?

/rant

~~~
drzaiusapelord
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted so much. I assume the usual FOSS
fanboyism that rules HN.

I used Chrome, IE11, and Firefox all day. FF is the only one that locks up and
crashes on me. Its so rare in the other browsers I'm shocked when it happens
in FF. I run almost no extensions and I think my copy at work has zero
extensions and I don't even have flash installed, so the idea that it must be
a plugin problem is questionable. Once a day lockups or crashes are still,
unfortunately, common. I really wish it was a better QA'd project. Its such a
nice piece of software, but I imagine its reached the point where it can and
should be forked to a lightweight browser the same way FF forked from the big
ugly Mozilla suite. Current leadership at Mozilla just don't seem to make
crashes and resource usage a priority.

I also dont like how it switched on me from google to yahoo as my default
search engine. If MS did this in IE people on HN would be losing their shit,
but because this project is a FOSS darling, everyone just made excuses for it.
At the very least it should have asked me if I wanted to change to whatever
search engine they've gotten into bed with this year.

~~~
dochtman
This sounds very different from my experience. Have you ever looked at
about:crashes and checked into any bugs hanging off your crash signatures?
(And if not, please file bugs!) If you make a list of your crashes available,
I'd be happy to take a look and see if I can dig out some explanation for your
problems, or make sure the appropriate bugs are on file with Mozilla.

I know for a fact that Mozilla leadership does prioritize crashes and resource
usage (in fact, this is one reason for all of the work on the process
separation feature called Electrolysis), but of course they will prioritize
crashes that affect lots of users. For various reasons, it could be that your
crashes are different from those. (I'll assume that you're on the most recent
version of Firefox already.)

~~~
dblohm7
THIS. Developers on HN with problems have the requisite skills to be able to
file good bugs.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
I've been filing bugs for years yet the QA of the product is still at
unaccepatable levels. FF's constant passing of the buck is bothersome. When
they can't blame extensions they blame people for not participating. Yet
somehow Chrome/Chromium exists just fine without me writing big reports for
it, same for Safari, IE, etc.

FF just has poor QA. That's a problem and all the excuse making actually hurts
the product as FF leadership isn't seeing enough complaints apparantly, when
an army of nerds are refusing to acknowledged these problems.

~~~
dblohm7
"When they can't blame extensions they blame people for not participating."

Extensions are commonly blamed because of the way that Firefox implements
extensions.

They essentially become a fully integrated part of the browser with full
privileges. When extensions do things that they shouldn't be doing (but can
anyway, because what's stopping them?), the extensions are blamed.

Of course there have been many lessons learned from a decade-old extension
ecosystem. Other, newer browsers have benefitted from those lessons (ie.
Chrome). Mozillians know the problems with the current extension model but the
hard part is having the resources to do something about it.

"Yet somehow Chrome/Chromium exists just fine without me writing big reports
for it, same for Safari, IE, etc."

SOMEBODY is writing bug reports. FWIW, there are what, 50000 Google employees,
a majority of which could be dogfooding prerelease Chrome and filing bugs.
Mozilla has 1/50 of that to dogfood Firefox and depends heavily on its
community to make contributions.

------
Karunamon
While it's nice to see the progress being made here, it's a little bit..
what's the word here? Strange? Disheartening? Annoying? Infuriating?

..to see long-standing issues being ignored or back-burnered in the march to
add all the new features. Duplicate SSL certs still cause sites to be
unviewable without stupid and security-breaking workarounds that are not
necessary in other browsers, for nearly 7 years now[1], making the browser
completely unsuited to enterprise administration uses. One misbehaving tab can
still kill your entire session. I understand that they're working on this with
the electrolysis project, but end of 2015 goal?[2] I don't mean to be overly
snarky here, but congratulations on getting to where Chrome/ium was back in
2008.

I seriously question how the priorities are being decided at Mozilla. These
are basic usability things that were solved in other browsers a long time ago.

[1]:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435013](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435013)

[2]:
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis)

~~~
sp332
Adding multi-process to a large project that was not designed for multi-
process is an astronomical amount of work. And Firefox's approach has
advantages over Chrome's, so they're not simply playing catch-up.

~~~
Karunamon
Understood, but I'm speaking from the viewpoint of a user, here. It's a
massive annoyance for a crashed tab to annihilate the other 49. (And the
session restore being activated is generally grounds for a smoke break,
because your system will be tied up for a while...)

~~~
Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd
Session restore in Firefox has been lazy for a long time now (the tab only
loads when you activate it). It doesn't take longer than loading a single
page.

How often do tabs crash for you? That's the real issue if you ask me. I'm on
Nightly (with Electrolysis!) and the last crash was over 2 months ago.

~~~
iopq
I have a crash probably every day. Usual culprit is Flash.

~~~
icebraining
That's weird, since Flash runs on its own process (plugin-container). Is it
actually crashing the whole browser?

~~~
oblio
It shouldn't. At least on Windows I've gotten used to killing the plugin
container about once ever 2 days. Firefox itself crashes once per month, maybe
less.

Firefox = rock solid. Flash = porous rock, at best :)

~~~
RyanMcGreal
I find when Flash (plugin-container) goes down, it takes both Firefox and
Chrome down with it. Running Windows 7 at work.

