updates Meet the browser: Firefox Next

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

Windows has like 4 different font renderers built in, so what most people refer to is GDI (Which is really awful in nearly every regard), DirectWrite is much closer to what OS X and FreeType does (Actually exceeds it in most cases), only difference is that OS X ignores hinting, while DirectWrite doesn't (And Freetype can do both) You also have problem that a lot of Windows fonts are actually designed for how GDI renders, so they look odd on other renderers.

It's a rather interesting (yet annoying) subject, it really boils down to 2 things the renderers do differently, sub-pixel positioning and hinting. Freetype is the most flexible as it can do pretty much whatever the host app wants (Which is a problem, as barely any of them implement sub-pixel positioning) and can do anything from no hinting (What OS X does) to full blown hinting like GDI does or even hint the font itself while rendering. DirectWrite is kind of a middle of the road renderer, it does really good sub-pixel positioning (Something like 1/48th of a pixel), but also does partial hinting (It only hints in one direction, because you can't have hinting and sub-pixel positioning) and can even operate without hinting like OS X/Freetype (While GDI would render unhinted characters awfully)

And a rather annoying side effect, is that applications written to use one API depend on how that API renders, so something like MacType hooking GDI rendering need to match how GDI renders characters, it can't extend outside the area GDI would touch as it would give you rendering issues (That was actually a huge problem with the initial releases of GDI++, text would either be bunched up to match GDI, or overflow the bounds and lead to invalidation problems)

[Konstantine]

Hello everyone. Any way to disable that horrible HTML5 video on YouTube? My laptop is slow so html5 videos slow it down. I haven't enabled anything, and if I have, I have disabled it(I saw some settings in about:config in here)

 

The youtube.com/html5 says "The HTML5 player is currently used when possible." It also doesn't display anything in order to disable it(if I recall correctly there was a button to disable the html5 player but now it has disappeared)

 

 

Edit: OpenH264 Video Codec provided by Cisco Systems is also disabled.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

Use a release version of Firefox, Google isn't sending the Flash player to development versions of Firefox any more (For 99.9% of videos)

OpenH264 is only used for WebRTC anyway, disabling it won't do anything for normal video playback.

[rsnn]

Well you can go two routes. You can either stick with Windows built in, leave DirectWrite enabled (which is stuck with Windows font rendering regardless), and install something like Anti-Aliasing Tuner, it's on the Firefox extension site, fiddle with the settings until you get it where you like it.  All in all the results are decent once you play with it a bit.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/anti-aliasing-tuner/

 

Or, you can replace it entirely with something else (MacType, GDI++, etc etc), disable DirectWrite and go for broke. I went with the latter (MacType as a service) as it works with near any Windows desktop application, not just the browser. Lots of presets or you can fiddle with the numbers.

 

For example, Firefox on Windows 7, although I usually use Chrome now:

 

I already use Mactype, but i need to disable partially 3D acc if i want mactype in Firefox

[torrentthief]

Hello everyone. Any way to disable that horrible HTML5 video on YouTube? My laptop is slow so html5 videos slow it down. I haven't enabled anything, and if I have, I have disabled it(I saw some settings in about:config in here)

 

The youtube.com/html5 says "The HTML5 player is currently used when possible." It also doesn't display anything in order to disable it(if I recall correctly there was a button to disable the html5 player but now it has disappeared)

 

 

Edit: OpenH264 Video Codec provided by Cisco Systems is also disabled.#

 

 

Your video is slow not because of html5 but because google is sending you vp9 codec video now. If you right click a youtube video and click on stats it will say vp9. This requires quite a lot of cpu to decode. Click the button on youtube.com/html5 to disable and it will use h264 using flash player.

[BooBerry]

Mozilla improves single-word searches and local queries in Firefox 33

 

When you type 8675309 or 867-5309, or any other similar query, Firefox will run a search immediately without any delays.  The browser will however displays a prompt asking you if you meant to go to a locally hosted resource accessible under that name.

You can select Yes, take me to "query" to go there, or "not thanks" to remain on the search results page. The browser remembers the selection and will act automatically accordingly from that moment on.

For single-word searches, results are displayed a lot quicker than before as well.

According to Mozilla, Firefox users will see search results for these type of queries on average 5 seconds quicker than before.

Whitelist sites

Sites can be whitelisted so that they are always loaded directly when entered. Localhost is whitelisted automatically, while all other sites can be added in the following way:

1. Type about:config in the browser's address bar.
2. Confirm you will be careful if the prompt appears.
3. Right-click there and select New > Boolean to create a new preference.
4. Name it browser.fixup.domainwhitelist.WORD
5. WORD in this case is the query that you want whitelisted.
6. Set the preference to true and search will be skipped automatically when you enter that word into the browser's address bar.

Bugs

Two cases are not resolved yet and need to be addressed. Queries will still fail if they end with a period. Mozilla will fix that issue soon [bug 1042519].

Queries with periods in the middle will also fail. Mozilla is not working on it right now, but the bug can be tracked as well [bug 494092].

 

[BooBerry]

Faster and snappier searches now in Firefox 33

[ViperAFK]

Faster and snappier searches now in Firefox 33

About time, this is the main reason I've always used the omnibar extension rather than just using the vanilla awesomebar for everything.

[BooBerry]

http2-draft14

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

Draft 14 is totally going to be the last draft! (Just like the last 2 drafts!)

I think Draft 13 mandated AEAD ciphers (i.e. AES-GCM, or the Google ones), which is actually a pretty welcome change though :laugh:

Edit: Now we just need TLS 1.3 to encrypt the plain text parts of the handshake.

[BooBerry]

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-14

http/2 draft 14

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1046892

They are also planning to enable it on beta too

[BooBerry]

Enabled http2 and alpn by default will land in tomorrows nightly

[BooBerry]

Mozilla has been working on project Janus for some time without revealing much about it to the public. The goal of the project is to improve the browsing experience of the user. Here it is mobile users that Janus is targeting mainly but desktop users will gain access to the same technology as well.

The official wiki entry lists the goals of the project:

1. Reduce page load times
2. Reduce bandwidth requirements
3. Increase user privacy
4. Increase responsiveness for slow sites.
5. Reduce radio time.

Like Opera Turbo and Max, and Google's Off-Road modus, it is making use of a proxy server that sits between the user's device and the Internet.

Traffic flows through the proxy server, and several methods are used to ensure that the goals listed above are met.

Among other things, this includes compressing images, text and certain types of streams, utilizing caching technologies, or reducing HTTPS round trips.

Mozilla notes that compression should not have an impact on the visual quality of the image. This means that it will work well on images that are not optimized, while you may not see a large difference in size when it comes to images that have been optimized by the webmaster.

The majority of features up until now are similar to other proxy technologies. Mozilla has additional ideas on how to improve it further. This includes converting gifs to videos to reduce their size, entering readability mode automatically for some sites, ad blocking, Opera Mini-like pre-rendering of pages, and adding support for adaptive-streaming.

 

Try it out right now

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

So HTTP2 landed and bounced yesterday because Twitter enabled a broken version of it on their servers and enough people complained that it had to be backed out, but since then twitter fixed their servers so as of the latest nightly Firefox talks HTTP2 to compatible servers by default (Y)

Now all we need is TLS 1.3 and support for ChaCha+Poly

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

A whole bunch of bug fixes for Media Source Extensions landed in the latest nightly, one of which fixes "rate adaptation" in the YouTube player, meaning it won't freeze a couple of seconds into the video now (And will play the whole video switching quality if needed)

Still not ready to be enabled by default though, there's a bad bug where seeking can cause the entire browser to hang and require it to be killed in a task manager. But hey, 720p VP9 looks pretty good (for 2Mbps)

[Boo Berry]

A whole bunch of bug fixes for Media Source Extensions landed in the latest nightly, one of which fixes "rate adaptation" in the YouTube player, meaning it won't freeze a couple of seconds into the video now (And will play the whole video switching quality if needed)

Still not ready to be enabled by default though, there's a bad bug where seeking can cause the entire browser to hang and require it to be killed in a task manager. But hey, 720p VP9 looks pretty good (for 2Mbps)

Interesting. Do any of you know if they're working on MSE + M.264 or if it'll be dependant on OpenH264 or something like that?

[JJ_]

I'm still on the slow release cycle

 

[Konstantine]

@JJ_ how about some Nightly? :p

[JJ_]

That's a bit sudden. I've been happy with 0.9 since 2004 until I skipped to 27 :)

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

Interesting. Do any of you know if they're working on MSE + M.264 or if it'll be dependant on OpenH264 or something like that?

OpenH264 doesn't have anything to do with MSE or normal <video> playback*, confusing but separate ;) They are working on H.264 support in MSE, but they're focusing on getting WebM stabilised first (Because they have the most control over that) and since the majority of MSE work is codec agnostic, once WebM works then all that's left is the H.264 decoder itself.

And even with me saying YouTube works fine, since that post and now they've already landed 2 more fixes for it :laugh:

* Well you could use it for such, but it's optimised for video calls so it's a very limited H.264 decoder.

Edit: If you toggle "media.fragmented-mp4.exposed" in a nightly you'll switch <video> playback to the MSE H.264 demuxer/decoder. Doesn't work entirely well (I've got a video it fails to play) but it does work.

[Boo Berry]

Is there a bug posted for H.264 in MSE to follow? Anyways awesome, thanks for the info.

[taim]

I'm still on the slow release cycle

 

firefox.jpg

ESR are a good thing, it helps promote some companies to move away from older versions of Internet Explorer.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

Is there a bug posted for H.264 in MSE to follow? Anyways awesome, thanks for the info.

There's no one bug for H.264 support in MSE (Since support is already in the nightlies, just disabled via a hidden preference), but if you follow the main metabug you can see some of the H.264 specific issues that pop up.

One of the side effects of the MSE work is that now Firefox parses MP4 files itself (rather than giving it to the OS) and the way decoding works is done much differently. Windows support for the new method is probably the best at the moment (Since Windows has really good APIs in this regard), on Linux they hook into ffmpeg (touch and go from what I can gather) and on OS X they're basically reverse engineering the API to see what it wants (And it doesn't work at all on Yosemite, something changed since Mavericks and it crashes instantly)

[+Zlip792 MVC]

WebIDE is now default enabled - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1007059 

Compacting GC (true exact rooting) initial work has been landed as well no memory saving measurements yet.

Firefox is now working tedious in improving its GC performance - meta bug link - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1008333

 

New Addon Manager look to match with InContent Option:

 

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=989469

 

[+Zlip792 MVC]

New InContent based Default Browser bar and I must say I welcome this Chrome copy since it moves away from old stupid dialog.