Posts Tagged ‘Firefox’

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Mozilla readies to pull support plug on Firefox 3.6

January 6th, 2012
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Mozilla has announced a date for the end of support for Firefox 3.6. April 24, 2012. Mark it in your calendar, Firefox 3.6 users!

Why is this date significant? Because after this date there will be no more new releases to fix security patches. The browser will get real old (and real dangerous to use) real fast. Using Firefox 3.6 beyond the end of life date is NOT RECOMMENDED.

Something else is happening on that day too … Firefox 10 will be released, and it will be Mozilla’s first Extended Support Release (ESR) release.

Since Firefox 4.0, Mozilla has been on an aggressive update schedule which sees a new version pushed out every six weeks. While this might be acceptable to home users, business and enterprise uses find this aggressive update cycle to be too much to handle. Back in September of last year Mozilla announced plans for a Extended Support Release cycle that would see a version of the browser supported for 42 weeks. Initially Firefox 8 or 9 was slated for ESR, but this slipped.

It seems that a lot of regular users are sticking with Firefox 3.6 too, for one reason or another. Currently Firefox 3.6 is at #6 in the browser version charts. Mozilla has tried nudging Firefox 3.6 users to the latest release already. Now it’s putting the squeeze on them. While there’s no doubt that the latest releases offer far better JavaScript performance than 3.6, it’s not been enough to convince the stalwarts that upgrading is worthwhile.

ESR support for Firefox 10 will mean that Mozilla will backport security bugs qualified as “Critical” and “High” to the ESR where feasible. However, Mozilla is at pains to point out that there may be exceptional cases where a backport cannot be applied with reasonable effort. Other security and stability backports to the ESR will be included at Mozilla’s discretion.

When an ESR version reaches end-of-life, no further point releases will be offered to users, and an update to the latest supported version of the ESR (or Desktop Firefox, if the ESR for that platform is discontinued) will be offered to users of the end-of-lifed version.

While this decision won’t please some, I think it’s the right decision to make. Mozilla can’t remain committed to Firefox 3.6 (and its users) indefinitely.

Source:http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/mozilla-readies-to-pull-support-plug-on-firefox-36/17567

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Firefox 9 for Android shows off new tablet interface

December 22nd, 2011
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Firefox 9 hit Mozilla’s servers yesterday, and now it’s rolling out as an automatic update for both desktop and mobile users. On your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer, you’ll be enjoying JavaScript performance that’s up to 30% faster. The new Android version, however, offers some more in-your-face improvements.

The biggest change you’ll notice has to do with Firefox moving from Mozilla’s XUL interface to one built using Android’s native elements. That change has led to dramatically faster start-up times and reduced memory usage in Firefox 9 on Android.

The new Firefox tablet interface has finally landed as well. As you may have seen before in looks at the nightly or beta builds, Firefox 9 introduces a thumbnailed tab strip along the left edge for quick switching between web pages. Mozilla has also introduced the Action Bar (at the far right of the Awesome Bar), which you can tap to access your downloads and add-ons. Action items allow you to share pages, save as PDF, and search for text in-page — just as tapping the menu button on your Android smartphone does while browsing with Firefox.

There’s also a touch of Boot to Gecko at work in Firefox 9 for Android. Web developers can leverage a bit of direct access to smartphone or tablet hardware, as Mozilla has introduced camera access via HTML5 input fields. If you want to see the HTML5 camera input tag in action, head on over to the demo page Mozilla has posted. It’s a slick example of where things are headed, and it’ll allow web apps to let you do things like scan QR codes for input right inside your browser.

Source:http://www.geek.com/articles/news/firefox-9-for-android-shows-off-new-tablet-interface-20111221/

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Chrome overtakes Firefox as UK’s second most popular web browser

August 1st, 2011
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Chrome has overtaken Firefox to become browser number 2 in the UK, thanks to an extensive advertising campaign.

According to web metrics firm Statcounter, Chrome has seen its share of the web browser market rise to 22%, marginally ahead of rival Firefox.

Internet Explorer still dominates the top of the list with 45% market share, though it has been losing ground to competitors at a steady rate despite being pre-installed on the majority of PCs in Britain. Apple Safari rounds off the last of the major browsers, coming in 4th with 9% market share.

While an aggressive advertising campaign saw Chrome as the first Google product to be advertised on British television, much of its popularity can be attributed to its speed according to Chrome Engineer Lars Bak.

“Speed is a fundamental part of it, but it’s also about the minimal design and the way it handles security. If you as a user try [loading] a webpage and it feels snappy, it’s really hard to go back. It has shown that people spend more time interacting with the web,” concludes Bak.

Source:http://mybroadband.co.za/news/quick-news/30616-chrome-overtakes-firefox-as-uk%E2%80%99s-second-most-popular-web-browser.html

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Mozilla urges users to update graphics drivers for Firefox 4

March 8th, 2011
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Mozilla has urged users to update their graphics cards’ drivers if they want to take advantage of Firefox 4’s hardware acceleration.

Last Friday, Benoit Jacob, who works on Mozilla’s platform engineering team, spelled out why users should verify that their computers, especially PCs powered by Windows, have the latest graphics drivers.

“When we turned these features on by default in nightly builds around September last year, and then in [Firefox 4] Beta 7, crash statistics and bug reports quickly showed that bugs in graphics drivers were often making these features misbehave,” Jacob said in a blog post. “We reacted by selectively disabling these new features on buggy drivers, based on the large amounts of information collected by beta testers.”

To prevent crashes, Mozilla created a list of graphics drivers that Firefox 4 reads; if a driver is on the “blocklist,” the browser disables hardware acceleration.

Last year, Mozilla added hardware acceleration to Firefox 4. The technology shifts browser page rendering and composition chores from the computer’s CPU to its graphics processor.

Mozilla followed in Microsoft’s acceleration footsteps in August when it rolled out Firefox 4 Beta 4, the first preview which included the technology.

When Microsoft announced its Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) in November 2009, it kick-started the push for hardware acceleration by promising that the new browser would boost page content rendering and composition speeds on Windows Vista and Windows XP.

Unlike IE9, Firefox 4 supports partial hardware acceleration on Windows XP, still the most popular version of Windows. It does that by calling on the Direct3D API, which the old operating system supports, rather than Windows Direct2D and Direct3D APIs, which are available only in Vista and Windows 7.

Jacob said that Windows users must have a “very recent driver” if their machine sports an Intel graphics card; version 257.21 or newer for Nvidia cards; and version 10.6 or newer for AMD’s ATI-branded cards.

“Unfortunately, certain computer manufacturers do not allow end users to upgrade drivers on their own,” said Jacob on Friday. “Hopefully these manufacturers will eventually give their users these much needed graphics driver updates.”

Mozilla has published a more detailed list of the Intel graphics cards and associated drivers supported by Firefox 4’s hardware acceleration.

Firefox 4 on Mac OS X relies on OpenGL to accelerate some aspects of page construction and rendering. Mac users must have Mac OS X 10.6.3 or later to support all Firefox 4’s acceleration.

Some graphics cards and chipsets used in older Macs, including the ATI Radeon X1000 and older, Nvidia GeForce FX and older, and Intel GMA 950 and older, don’t support OpenGL and so won’t be able to use the technology. Among the Macs with unsupported graphics are the Mac Mini from mid-2007 (which uses the Intel GMA 950).

Mozilla has ended the Firefox 4 beta cycle, and plans to ship the first “release candidate,” or RC build, of the browser to the public shortly, possibly this week.

“Unless serious issues are found during in-house testing or its cycle of beta testing, this will be what we ship to users,” Mozilla stated on its Web site. “Historically, we have not shipped the first release candidate.”

A final version of Firefox 4 should appear this month.

Source:http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9213648/Mozilla_urges_users_to_update_graphics_drivers_for_Firefox_4?taxonomyId=64

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New Firefox beta offers audio API, menu tweaks

September 8th, 2010
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The fifth Firefox 4 beta makes some small feature changes to the in-development browser, bringing a new audio API to the table, revamping its menu, and turning on hardware acceleration by default. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Firefox 4 beta 5 continues Mozilla’s new beta release schedule, marked by more frequent releases and smaller feature revisions per update.
The most visual change to the beta is the redone menu in the Windows version, which returns a lot of functionality that had been missing from the menu in previous betas. The single-column menu has been replaced with a two-tiered, two-colored menu. The locally stored Help menu options have returned, and the add-ons menu is available in a tweaked color scheme as a secondary window again, too. Cut, copy, and paste have returned to the menu in icon-only form, and more of Firefox’s feature managers, such as bookmarks, history, and the Options menu, have their previous access options restored.
The audio data API is an under-the-hood coding option that gives programmers the ability to “interact with sound…in all the creative ways that video and images allow,” according to a blog post by Mozilla’s director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner. The API will allow developers to expose raw audio data, display the data visual using the HTML5 tag, calculate and visual demonstrate audio spectrum, apply audio filters, and other visual representations of the audio content.

Source:-http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-20015769-12.html

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More firefox 4 feature freeze delays?

September 8th, 2010
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Firefox 4 Beta 5 has been released, but it was not quite in the shape Mozilla would have hoped. It still has not all the features of the final version and there is a nasty rendering bug for OS X users. Beta 6 is now targeted as the feature freeze release, but Mozilla already says that they may not be able to keep the freeze date.

Mozilla recently said that it now aims for a release of the first release candidate of Firefox 4 in the second half of next month, but that goal may be too ambitious given the fact that Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner said that he does not believe that the development team will be able to keep the already delayed feature freeze date of September 10.
The next Beta (Beta 6) is targeted to be the feature freeze release. However, there is no officially set release date for this version yet and it appears that the new JavaScript Engine JaegerMonkey may have hit some hiccups and isn’t quite working as it should. We hear that it is close to be matching Webkit on the V8 benchmark, but it has still a distance to go on Sunspider, as it is right around a performance of 450 ms and will have to drop below 400 ms. Google, in comparison, is currently just above 300 ms with its latest Chromium 7 builds.
Following the feature freeze, Firefox 4 will not be getting any more “interactive” features, no new web platform features and will only allow limited string and API changes. We should expect mainly bugfixes as well as fine-tuning in the following betas until the RC1 release.
Beta 5 has worked out very well for Mozilla so far, with the exception of a rendering bug that affects Mac OS X and apparently was discovered too late. Meanwhile, hardware acceleration is activated by default and Mozilla is asking users to try this new feature and help out testing and improving it. The company posted a new extension called Grafx Bot that runs several tests and submits the results to Mozilla, if you agree. The goal is to evaluate how the feature is working and what may need improvement.
Overall, Firefox 4 offers two levels of hardware acceleration – content acceleration for text, images, CSS borders as well as 2 D canvas and compositing acceleration that combines those layers that already have been rendered. To see the full extent of this acceleration you will need Windows Vista or 7as content acceleration is not supported on Windows XP. Windows Vista/7 use Direct 2D for content acceleration and Direct 3D for compositing. By the way, under Mac OS X, Firefox uses Quartz for content acceleration and OpenGL for compositing.

Source:-http://www.conceivablytech.com/2655/products/more-firefox-4-feature-freeze-delays/

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New firefox 4 beta bolsters graphics, audio and security

September 8th, 2010
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Mozilla has delivered a new update to the Firefox 4 Beta, which features faster graphics, new audio capabilities and enhanced security. Mozilla continues to hone its browser with new beta updates every few weeks.

Mozilla has delivered a new update to the Firefox 4 Beta, which features faster graphics, new audio capabilities and enhanced security.

In a Sept. 7 blog post, Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s director of Firefox said the new update to the latest beta of the company’s popular open-source browser takes advantage of the built-in graphics hardware in Windows computers with DirectX 10 to improve performance on graphics-heavy websites.

“On supported hardware, Firefox will use Direct2D by default to speed up the display of content on graphically intensive websites, giving more power to the Web,” Beltzner said.

In a separate post, Bas Schouten, a Mozilla developer that works on the Firefox graphics engine, said: “Usually when we talk about hardware acceleration we mean using the graphics card of your computer to accelerate certain graphical operations. Nowadays the graphics cards in most people’s computers have an immense amount of computational power, often many times more than the normal processor. This computational power is very specialized and cannot just be used for anything. It’s most commonly used for video games, but obviously as web browsers use more and more graphical effects, we want to use it inside Firefox as well!”

Schouten describes Direct2D as a rendering system part of the DirectX package that is shipped with Windows. “It was introduced in Windows 7 and ported back to Windows Vista in the Vista Platform Update,” he said. “It allows us to access the hardware with a simple 2D graphics drawing API for all Mozilla drawing code, allowing hardware acceleration for a very large number of scenarios.”

Meanwhile, Beltzner said a new Audio API exposes the raw audio data housed within the and elements in HTML5; developers can use the API to build add-ons that will completely redefine how we experience sound on the Web.

“Until now, people haven’t had the ability to interact with sound on the Web in all the creative ways that video and images allow,” Beltzner said in his post. “Firefox 4 Beta introduces a new audio API to expose the raw audio data housed within the and elements in HTML5 to redefine how people experience sound on the Web. With this new API, developers can read and write raw audio data within the browser, presenting audio information in completely new ways that could allow, for example, for people to visually experience a speech or a song through Firefox.”

In addition, with this latest update of Firefox 4 Beta, the browser now supports the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) protocol for additional security, enabling sites to automatically direct the browser to an encrypted connection, Beltzner said.

“HSTS is a new security protocol in Firefox 4 Beta that allows websites to insist that Firefox always use secured connections,” Beltzner said. “Firefox 4 Beta now remembers what sites use the HSTS protocol and will only connect to those sites using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) in the future, helping to prevent“man in the middle” attacks.”

Source:http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/New-Firefox-4-Beta-Bolsters-Graphics-Audio-and-Security-263928/

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