
What's new in Firefox 17 (shipping today) - ck2
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/17.0/releasenotes/
======
debacle
I don't really ever want my browser to have Facebook integration. They have
toolbars for that.

~~~
asadotzler
If you don't explicitly enable it, you'll never know it's there. We were very
careful about that.

~~~
muuh-gnu
> We were very careful about that.

You still have to have in mind that even knowing that the FB parasite is
somehow "in my browser and I cant remove it", even if it is not activated,
makes me want to immediately toss it away in disgust and go Chrome
exclusively.

16 is the latest FF I will be using and recommending and I am very likely not
alone. Mozilla forcing FB on us is high treason, and many of us will start
recommending Chrome instaed of FF to people we can influence just to harm
Mozilla because of this betrayal.

The FF user base rose quickly by word of mouth and by word of mouth it can
even more quickly disappear in Chrome's mighty shadow. FF needs us more than
we need FF. Keep that in mind when you make decisions like pushing FB on us.
You cannot afford playing a dictator.

~~~
stephenhuey
It is not high treason, and it is far more than integration with Facebook.
Here's a bit of explanation from the following article:

"The idea is to be able to have a quick view into a site without having to
switch back and forth between tabs...The Social API doesn’t have to work with
only social sites. The API could be used by financial and sports sites to
maintain a ticker or email providers could use it to make it easy to check in-
coming messages. And since Firefox is open source, other browser makers could
implement the Social API, though no other company has announced their
intention to do so."

[http://gigaom.com/2012/11/20/firefox-17-launches-with-
social...](http://gigaom.com/2012/11/20/firefox-17-launches-with-social-api-
and-facebook-messenger-support/)

It's fine if you want to debate whether such functionality belongs in a web
browser, but this isn't the 90s, and I think these capabilities make sense
given what I often do on the web. You can find out more about its capabilities
here:

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Social_API>

Cheers!

------
ck2
Also Firefox 17 Changes for Web developers

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Firefox_17_for_deve...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Firefox_17_for_developers)

The sandbox support for iframes looks particularly helpful.

Sadly this is the first version of Firefox in a year or two that actually
breaks things for me: the "animate once" setting is no longer being obeyed for
GIFs in some cases and the "secure login" plugin seems to have stopped working
despite a recent update.

Mostly intact though and I've finally turned off Flash completely since enough
of the web and youtube supports it properly with pure html5

~~~
imurray
_"secure login" plugin seems to have stopped working despite a recent update_

I believe secure login stopped working on several popular sites due to changes
in those sites' webforms. A while ago I applied a patch mentioned in the
addons.mozilla.org comments, and the extension worked again.

I've just checked out and diff'd the most recent v1 update. The only change is
the addition of a pretty spammy looking URL that appears on first launch. No
bugs were fixed. Sad.

The version I'm using (works in Firefox 17 for me) is:
[http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/tmp/secure_login-0.9....](http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/tmp/secure_login-0.9.9-fix-
fx.xpi) I suggest unzipping and doing a "diff -r" against the unzipped
contents of the official version to check I'm not evil.

~~~
Deutscher
Does the 'Activate JavaScript protection on login' option work for you with
'Secure Login'? It has been working for me for a long time now; I am just
wondering if I am doing something wrong.

------
d0m
Request to firefox devs hanging here. Please make the linux version better.. I
use firefox on Windows but have to use Chromium on Linux. I'm mostly talking
about the UI interface, it's really not the same standard.

~~~
paulrouget
As a Firefox dev and a Linux user, I also want a better user experience on
Linux. Hopefully, the work we're doing on Australis (new firefox theme) will
satisfy most of the Linux users.

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streptomycin
> FIXED Page scrolling on sites with fixed headers
> <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=780345>

Praise God, that has been a pet peeve of mine for years.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Funny, my pet peeve is sites that have fixed headers.

~~~
CmdrKrool
Yep, this annoys me mightily too but I've always thought of it as a web-design
fail rather than a browser fail.

I was about to ask how the new Firefox knows what constitutes a "fixed header"
and what doesn't - like, what if the overlay only goes part way across the
page, or something? Then I read at the above link that they've drawn up some
clever heuristics to guess the 'right' scroll amount in each case.

"It works well on many pages. No doubt there are some pages it doesn't work
on. It seems like a good idea to start conservatively here."

I cautiously welcome this 'fix' for my own casual web browsing, while fearing
for the rare trouble it might cause a responsible web dev who might have a
legitimate need for a particular kind of overlay while having page up/down
still work in the currently established way. No such need springs to mind but
I'm sure that if I thought about it for long enough, in this age of games in
the browser and whatnot... (some sort of fancy web comic perhaps?). Now
needing to workaround what is more complex and unpredictable behaviour, this
is the kind of push/pull between web developers and browser implementers which
a few years down the line could turn into a bloody impossible mess for all
concerned.

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Derbasti
I wish they implemented OSX Lion style scroll bars already.

~~~
zalew
as long as I can turn it off

~~~
sjmulder
That shouldn’t be a Firefox-specific setting. You can opt to always show
scrollbars from System Preferences already.

~~~
zalew
I'm a Firefox user, not a Mac user.

~~~
duaneb
So why are you giving input to the Mac version? It would be awfully strange to
have lion style scroll bars in windows 8.

~~~
zalew
I thought it's a general ff feature request.

~~~
wtallis
The request was to use native scroll bars, not to use non-native scroll bars
that emulate Lion's defaults.

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leeoniya
the big announcement here is in the Mobile section: "Android 4/4.1: hardware
and software decoder support for h.264 video"

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mrjbq7
And still doesn't support the Retina Display, disappointing.

~~~
stusmall
What do they need to do special for retina displays?

~~~
AdamGibbins
Firefox has its own font rendering, it displays horribly with retina scaling.
See for example [http://media02.hongkiat.com/mbp-retina/chrome-vs-firefox-
vs-...](http://media02.hongkiat.com/mbp-retina/chrome-vs-firefox-vs-
safari.jpg)

It may seem picky, but its very obvious when browsing.

~~~
smacktoward
That screenshot looks less like "Firefox displays horribly with retina
scaling" and more like "everything other than Safari displays horribly with
retina scaling."

Which Apple may consider a feature rather than a bug :-D

~~~
plorkyeran
It's an old screenshot from before Chrome got Retina support.

------
stackcollision
I miss when Firefox did minor versions more often. This is just getting
rediculous.

~~~
Flow
No, this is great. It will make version numbers not matter anymore. Either you
use the latest version or you can't really complain about security, stability
or feature issues.

~~~
hackinthebochs
I totally disagree with this philosophy. I do not want my software to be a
living-breathing entity. My browser even less so. Security issues aside, I do
not want to ever update until a new feature is released that compels me to
upgrade. God knows how many times I've upgraded a perfectly good piece of
software just to be greeted with unwanted bloat or regressions in features. I
hate this trend towards removing the meaning of version numbers. Don't get me
wrong, I understand the massive boon to security that this model will bring.
But there's no reason why software can't auto-update just security releases.

~~~
mccr8
As a practical matter, the more releases that have to be supported with
security fixes, the less secure each will end up being, as there is less
testing of each individual version, and divergent code bases may need
different security fixes.

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feefie
If you click on the yellow star in the URL bar and the pop-up window doesn't
open to let you pick a folder to save the bookmark in, see if you are running
HTTPS-Everywhere. Turning off that extension got bookmarks working for me
again. Alternatively, you can copy and paste the URL into a new tab and
bookmark it there fine, even with the extension on. If you're trying to
reproduce this bug/?feature? consistently I can give you steps that make it
occur 100% of the time.

------
olgeni
I can't wait to get Firefox 21.

At last it will be able to drink beer too.

------
captaincrowbar
It looks like they still haven't supported H.264, which is the main reason I'm
still using Chrome and haven't switched back to Firefox.

~~~
paulrouget
Not yet. Work in progress.

------
technojunkie
I commented on the previous release of FF15 when they fixed the plugin memory
leak fixes, but since I've used it a lot for responsive design, I've noticed
this is still a big problem for normal everyday use, even with just two tabs
open. I'm not sure what FF15 fixed, but I just don't notice the improvement I
was hoping for.

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ksec
List of features still waiting for. Generational GC OMTC - Off main thread
composition SuperSnappy - a mini e10s Support of H.264 Codec - aka playing
H.264 using the codec that comes default in Windows Vista, 7 & 8\. XP Users
get fallback to Flash

Four Big features, lets hope Mozilla will finish them off in 2013.

------
agumonkey
random aside, I just discovered (I use firefox nightly now version 20) the
about:preferences page.

~~~
Offler
Why is that not the default way to access preferences? It just seems so much
nicer than a dialog box. Death to all dialog boxes.

~~~
agumonkey
No idea. Few years ago it was announced as a soon to be implemented feature.
Every update I clicked on the preference button just to be disappointed-ish, I
totally forgot it thinking it was at the bottom of the todo-list, and now I
stumble upon it randomly browsing about:about.

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lewisflude
"Click-to-play blocklisting implemented to prevent vulnerable plugin versions
from running without the user's permission" interesting...

~~~
stusmall
I was using click-to-play whitelisting for all plugins for a bit and it didn't
work really well for me. There are some services that use hidden flash movies,
like how grooveshark plays audio. There is no where to click to allow it so
you just can't use the service with that feature enabled.

I've been using noscript intstead. It provides an easier interface for
approving plugins and more.

~~~
CUViper
Whenever a plugin is blocked, you should see a Lego-looking icon in the
address bar which will let you activate everything on the page.

~~~
stusmall
Oh very cool! Thank you for pointing that out.

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frou_dh
Nice work. I haven't tried Firefox for a long time, but this handles well. The
integrated dev tools look good, too.

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scott_karana
I suspect they still haven't fixed the Cmd-arrow in Gmail issue. Yeesh. Not
exactly an uncommon usage case.

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senorcastro
Every time a new Firefox ships, I start thinking about Firefox 99.

~~~
stuaxo
Tonight we're gonna party like it's Firefox 99

