Firefox 42.0 Improves Private Browsing, Better WebRTC

[yzsolt]

The real big news with this release is that it's the first with a stable 64-bit build for Windows.

Where? Give me a download link, please.

[89c51]

Anyone knows when MSE for linux will be enabled by default?

[nanonyme]

Anyone knows when MSE for linux will be enabled by default?

You mean it's not? Release notes seemed to imply this release would enable it. Of course, you probably need gstreamer with relevant codecs anyway...

[r1348]

Anyone knows when MSE for linux will be enabled by default?

^this. Why is MSE even OS dependent?

[89c51]

You mean it's not? Release notes seemed to imply this release would enable it. Of course, you probably need gstreamer with relevant codecs anyway...

They had it enabled on Youtube only (or maybe a few more sites) for the previous releases. And this for win and mac. On linux it is not enabled by default.

Gstreamer works with the occasional bug depending on your graphic card HW. But that is not a firefox or gstreamer problem.

[Michael_S]

Also, there's the whole "Mozilla is fucking everything up" part. Requiring signed addons? Removing your Add-on SDK in favor of Chrome's extension API??
The powerful addons are literally the reason 50% of your userbase use your browser...

Mozilla's own add-on SDK allowed add-ons to do anything, including things like silently enabling unsigned add-ons and installing other add-ons automatically and changing any content in pages or menus. So if you put just one bad add-on on your machine, your browser was completely in control of the add-on developer and they could hijack all of the ads you see so other similar things.

With signed add-ons by default they make it harder for people to install malicious add-ons. With the Chrome extension API they get two wins (Edit: oops, evidently I can't count.):
1. The attack surface of potential security flaws that malicious add-ons can exploit is much smaller.
2. The selection of add-ons in the Chrome web store is growing rapidly and Chrome OS is gaining sales. By using the same extension API, Firefox can now better position itself as a Chrome alternative for people using Desktop Chrome and add-ons and even as a Chrome OS alternative.
3. If you still want unsigned add-ons you can get the developer edition or nightly builds.

All that being said, the Mozilla sponsored Servo engine is coming along pretty well and that's gonna be amazing when it arrives.

I hope so too.

I find that Firefox actually well enough for me with dozens of tabs... for about two days. Then everything goes to hell - runaway memory usage, hangs with CPU pegged at 100% for 30 seconds at a time, crashes. I actually run Firefox Nightly because it automatically restarts itself once per day to apply updates. That keeps it working fine for me, but it's a pretty ridiculous workaround.

Servo is supposed to greatly speed page load times while reducing memory use, and hopefully it also fixes some of the stability problems.

[mmmbop]

Looks like GTK3 was bumped to F43: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo.../releasenotes/

[89c51]

Looks like GTK3 was bumped to F43: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo.../releasenotes/

Wayland is a bit quiet though. There are patches by a redhat dev but since he published them no further news.

[finalzone]

Wayland is a bit quiet though. There are patches by a redhat dev but since he published them no further news.

Not to mention Fedora users have GTK3 version of Firefox for a while and further integration of Wayland is expected for Fedora 24.

[verde]

Firefox w/ Gecko is dead to me. I think Firefox's UI and customization is leagues ahead of any other browser, but even with e10s the responsiveness is slower than I'd like (especially on a 6-core, 8GB ram machine...).

Also, there's the whole "Mozilla is fucking everything up" part. Requiring signed addons? Removing your Add-on SDK in favor of Chrome's extension API??
The powerful addons are literally the reason 50% of your userbase use your browser...

All that being said, the Mozilla sponsored Servo engine is coming along pretty well and that's gonna be amazing when it arrives.

Cant agree more. Its slow. I mean its S L O W. Lets hope Servo will "fix" that. If not, Firefox is dead.