updates Meet the browser: Firefox Next

[bawz]

I think mozilla is slowly becoming a closed source browser.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

Alright? What does that have to do with anything (If it was even true)

[BooBerry]

Asynchronous Plugin Initialization: Landed

[+M2Ys4U Subscriber¹]

I think mozilla is slowly becoming a closed source browser.

 

Please show me the parts of Firefox that don't have source code released for them. Otherwise, why on Earth do you keep making this ridiculous assertion?

[BooBerry]

Mozilla needs to do improve support for add-ons

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

Apart from freezing the APIs indefinitely, there's not much they can do to improve add-on compatibility (And to be clear, we're talking about compatibility with abandoned add-ons)

And that type of backwards compatibility code incurs a cost, a lot of issues with add-ons and E10S involve add-ons using the old backwards compatibility APIs rather than the newer (Still like 3 years old though) APIs that work across processes, if those old APIs were aggressively deprecated then updates add-ons would work better, at the cost of breaking abandoned ones, etc.

[rsnn]

Almost 45MB last update

[Neyht Member]

Almost 45MB last update

Did that to me too, looks like the partial update failed.

 

Full update installed fine though.

[+Zlip792 MVC]

Almost 45MB last update

 

 

Did that to me too, looks like the partial update failed.

 

Full update installed fine though.

 

Yesterday they jumped Firefox Nightly to 38 bandwagon, so you might have missed yesterday respin for version pickup. So that's why with today's Nightly you get full update.

[rsnn]

 

 

 

Yesterday they jumped Firefox Nightly to 38 bandwagon, so you might have missed yesterday respin for version pickup. So that's why with today's Nightly you get full update.

 

I'm talking about release channel. From 34 to 35

[+Zlip792 MVC]

I'm talking about release channel. From 34 to 35

 

Sorry then it could be partial update failure.

[rsnn]

Sorry then it could be partial update failure.

 

Yes, never happened before

[BooBerry]

Mozilla's Servo Engine that's written in the Rust programming language and designed to be a highly parallel layout engine continues to be advancing very well and could see an alpha release this year.

Jack Moffitt of Mozilla talked at last week's Linux.Conf.Au 2015 conference about the work he and a dozen or so other Mozilla engineers have been doing on the experimental Servo engine.

As explained during a status update from November, Servo's performance has been very fast compared to Gecko and other web layout engines. As mentioned in that update and reaffirmed last week, Servo developers are indeed hoping to have an alpha quality release of the engine out in 2015.

Besides being fast and written to offer greater standards compliance, Servo should be more secure with being written in Rust. Servo has also been designed to be embeddable from the start. The first bits of Servo support in Firefox OS are now working in experimental form -- at least for booting to the ACID2 test. Jack said during his presentation that he hopes to have about 50% of standard web features implemented this year while the most popular web pages are all rendering well.

The performance of Servo has been described as "amazingly well" compared to Gecko and that even a single thread ofServo is faster than Gecko. However, the results for now should be taken for a grain of salt given that more functionality still needs to be implemented. CNN and Reddit were frequently mentioned as popular sites rendering well with Servo. The goal with Servo is to deliver better responsiveness and lower power use than Gecko (and alternatives).

With Servo coming along, the developers hope to eventually begin landing Servo and Rust support within Gecko to allow more developers to begin familiarizing themselves with the new engine. The first component likely to find its way implemented in Gecko/Firefox from Servo is probably the BMP decoder, given that it's a small piece of the puzzle and shouldn't cause too much fallout in the case of problems. Other Servo/Rust components likely to get green lit early on is also a new HTML parser and URL parsing library.


Those wishing to watch Jack Moffitt's LCA2015 presentation can find it embedded
 

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

Servo is very interesting, it's parallelism done right (Compared to the current multi-process implementation that IE/Safari/Chrome/Firefox do/want to do), it'll probably still end up running in multiple processes though because JavaScript has some crappy semantics (Which is the main reason why we do multi-process stuff currently)

 

I'm surprised they're going to replace something as simple as the BMP decoder with a Rust variant, but it does make sense considering the only thing it's really used for these days if site icons (And even then they're being replaced with PNGs over time). A new HTML parser would be interesting too, currently it's implemented as a machine translation of a Java parser and I think they're still actually keeping the old parser around just for the special "about:blank" page.

[rsnn]

uBlock finally have a Firefox version, give it a try! I started using it and disabled ABP, Firefox feels "smooth"

 

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases

[Lamp0]

This is the kind of glitch I am frequently getting:

 

 

I am on 33.0.3

 

I am still having this kind of issue. Is anyone else having anything simlar happen?

[BooBerry]

Mozilla Lands VR Support Into Firefox Nightly

[BooBerry]

You can refresh Firefox on the Mozilla website now


 

[BooBerry]

In 2015, we have two high-level goals for Servo:

 

Release an alpha-quality browser that uses Servo as its rendering engine

Land a Servo component that is authored in Rust into Gecko

Q1 2015

   

Extensive CSS property coverage (> 70%)
Android browser and APK
OSX and Linux platform daily builds of "miniservo"
Get the browser "safe enough" to use for basic browsing scenarios
Identify and begin building a Rust component inside of Firefox
Begin reporting and tracking Servo's Web Platform conformance, performance, and power usage over time
Initial fragmentation (multicol)
Initial flexbox
Upgrade SpiderMonkey
Zero-copy HTML & CSS parsing

Q2 2015

   

Create dynamic test suite
Add high impact platform features
Add a Rust component to Gecko

Critical 2015 work

Layout

   

variables
transforms
transitions
animations
tables: the rest of colspan,rowspan,percantage heights & web-compat bugs will-change

Other

   

Explore using Servo as a UI toolkit
Visualization support
multiprocess
multimedia
sandboxing
addons
prefs
bookmarks
history
cookies

[FiB3R]

ffs, what have they done to the search bar!?!?

I want the address bar to always use my default search engine, and the search bar to stay on whatever I have set it to for the time being.

Would be nice if the Right Click menu gave the option to search with the default and also the currently selected.

Wish I knew how to write addons

[ViperAFK]

ffs, what have they done to the search bar!?!?

I want the address bar to always use my default search engine, and the search bar to stay on whatever I have set it to for the time being.

Would be nice if the Right Click menu gave the option to search with the default and also the currently selected.

Wish I knew how to write addons

No need for an addon, you can revert to the old search by going to about:config and setting browser.search.showOneOffButtons to false

[+Zlip792 MVC]

New Tab Crash in Firefox Nightly, way better than previous one IMO:

 

[BooBerry]

New Tab Crash in Firefox Nightly, way better than previous one IMO:

 

 

 

Looks good but no new functionality added

[BooBerry]

New SVG/CSS Filter support in Firefox

[FiB3R]

No need for an addon, you can revert to the old search by going to about:config and setting browser.search.showOneOffButtons to false

Thanks

I saw Warwagon post the same tip somewhere too.