Firefox 35 stamps out critical bugs Mozilla has crushed nine bugs, some rather dangerous, in the latest version of its flagship browser. The fixes include a patch for a critical sandbox escape (CVE-2014-8643) in the Gecko Media Plugin used for h.264 video playback affecting Windows machines (but not OS X or Linux). Another critical hole addressed a read-after- …
I'm still happy with version 12. I have tried going up to the new versions a few times but they aren't as nice as version 12. Always have a job trying to get back to it, since they don't seem to have a way to do this built in, but fortunately I keep a backup on my NAS...
shyea, riiiight.... :P :)
HTML is no longer 99% of what makes a webpage...
there's now...
browser detection, to decide what scripts are used
self-modifying code to get around various quirks from bots/ ddos users...
lots of 'temporary' pages, just to set up the scripts, activex, lookup tables...
then tons of google syndication code... and other pageranking sites...
then eventually you get the page, the title *modified* so the dumb user thinks its ok... >:(
"Still, I'm sure the antivirus will make up for having an unpatched browser (Norton since before the Semantic takeover I suppose)."
Oh ,dear, do you work for Microsoft?. You probably have Microsoft 'professional' qualifications. Clearly someone who keeps up with all the patches for bugs that might affect 1 in 10 trillion people. And those are the people working for the security companies whose livelihood depends on finding a continuous stream of holes in software.
Switch to SRWare Iron instead then...
I tried it in the early days and dumped it after a few tries. As I've mentioned here before, when I logged into an SSL-secured site it made simultaneous connections to an SSL server owned by Google. Nein danke.
Companies only have to lose my trust once.
Classic Theme Restorer is good, yes, but a LOT of work for something that does not quite work as quickly and easily as 'just using version 28...' :/
I use tons of extensions to make various browsing tasks easy, and also to make it 'less frightening' for those used to IE... there is SO much removed/missing from australis, it is a battle to find tons of **extra** addons, just to get what a simple version 28 install will give!!
I use Pale Moon as a result. A forked version of Firefox which retains the classic interface, but still receives updates and the likes. The introduction of Australis signaled the end of my usage of Firefox and its market share recently shows that I'm far from the only one that jumped ship.
"Will there ever come a time when Firefox (or any mass usage) software is bug free? There are, I assume, a finite number of 'lines' of code in Firefox, so if they keep fixing bugs then eventually, surely, all bugs will be fixed. Roughly when will this be?"
Spoken like a manager...
No there will be no such thing as a bug free browser.
The number of (new and existing) standards it must implement, the number of real world web sites it must work against, the performance it must deliver and the finite resources like time and money always means it will have bugs. There are also tradeoffs between keeping the user safe from harm and delivering the best browser experience, e.g. disabling JS by default would be a good security move but it would break virtually every site in the world.
The best you can hope for is that the development process does it's best to catch and fix bugs (preferably before they end up in the software) and mitigates the potential harm for those they don't already know about by providing sensible defaults.
With older versions of FF (e.g. 31) when you opened a new tab you could configure the browser to show you a grid of "favourite" website thumbnails to click on. By default this was set to a 3x3 matrix - but could be changed to show more sites in more rows and/or columns, albeit with smaller thumbnails of each one.
In FF34 this feature was "improved" to fix the grid to 3x3, no matter what about:config parameter the user set. In FF35 Mozilla have applied their infinite wisdom and decided that users should want LARGE thumbnails, rather than to allow the users to choose smaller ones but more of them. So now it *is* possible to have more columns (maybe even more rows, too - but I don't have a screen large enough) but the size of each thumbnail is fixed, irrespective of the size or resolution of the screen I have.
What are the unwanted features?
I didn't like them hiding everything in the menu off on the right-hand side, but I have v35 on Suse and it seems to have a full set of menus (File, Edit, View, History, Bookmarks, Tools, Help) at the top as well.
Unrelated but I just wish they'd stop tinkering with the UI, then trumpeting as if it's a great revolution in web browser UI, when usually it just looks like Chrome from 3 versions ago.
There's no shame in just saying, "you know what, we absolutely nailed it with Firefox 4, so we're just gonna keep that if it's ok with you?". Don't like it? Change the theme or install some addons to add/remove bits.
Also it seems loads of work goes into the integrated developer tools. I ditched Firebug after Australis arrived because it started to take about 10s to load each time. The FF developer tools are pretty good to be fair. But are they actually needed by 90% of users, probably not. In which case they should still be an addon.
And talking of bloat, a built-in PDF viewer? Written in JS? Give me a break. It's bad enough when Adobe Reader tries to pump itself into your browser. Let alone having JavaScript trying to decode a 50MB 1000+ page PDF without even asking. The answer... pdfjs.disabled;true
The next thing they're going to break in the name of becoming Chrome, is the separate search box. You might need this pref... browser.search.showOneOffButtons
I noticed that a default changed around v32/33 that stopped the DNS suffix being appended to URLs that don't have a domain extension. So if your users find that typing support or intranet into the URL bar ("awesome bar" apparently) thinking that they are going to a web address when it actually ends up googling for it, then you'll need this pref... keyword.enabled;false
I've built up quite a library of these preferences and addons since it started becoming Chrome. Still miles better than Chrome though for power users IMO.
</ramble>
I think the pdf viewer was a response to frustration with adobe's bug-ridden viewer. Auto-executing is a way to stop the virus-vector from starting and as you mention, it can be turned off. Or you can use, "save as" in most cases.
Googling for something rather than appending random suffixes is probably a safer way to do things. The correct way would be to parse what's been entered and just hand it over to DNS which can add the site suffixes as appropriate.
DailymotionVideoDownloader{1.0.6}.xpi
aboutaddons-memory{8}.xpi
AlertStopper{200.000}.xpi
All-in-OneSidebar{0.7.20}.xpi
AntVideoDownloader{2.4.7.11}.xpi
BlackYoutubeTheme{5.5}.xpi
BritishEnglishDictionary{1.19.1}.xpi
CloseButton{0.4.0}.xpi
CompleteYouTubeSaver{5.5.1}.xpi
CookiesManager+{1.5.2}.xpi
DownloadStatusbarFixed{1.2.00}.xpi
DownloadStatusbar{0.9.10}.xpi
EasyYoutubeVideoDownloaderExpress{7.32}.xpi
FasterfoxLite{3.9.9Lite}.xpi
FEBE{7.3.0.1}.xpi
Flashblock{1.5.17}.xpi
FlashOnOff{0.3.1}.xpi
FlashVideoDownloader-YouTubeFullHDDownload{6.1.2}.xpi
MozillaArchiveFormat{3.0.2}.xpi
Noia4ThemeManager{1.8.9}.xpi
Noia4{1.8.9}.jar
NoSquint{2.1.9}.xpi
pdfit{1.15}.xpi
SmartVideoForYouTube{0.979}.xpi
SpeedDial{0.9.6.16}.xpi
TabFlick{0.4}.xpi
TabMixPlus{0.4.1.4}.xpi
ToolbarButtons{1.0}.xpi
UIFixer{1.4.4}.xpi
UniversalPrint{0.4.25}.xpi
URLTooltip{1.2.2}.xpi
YesScript{2.0}.xpi
They probably aren't caused by Firefox but some crappy extension, theme or plug-in you have installed.
Disable all your add-ons and re-enable one at time* until you find the culprit.
A base installation of Firefox is always 100% stable for me on both Windows and Linux. The only issues are extensions and that's not very often.
* I disable half of them first of all. If the issue stops then I know it's in the other half. It's bit quicker to do it this way.
The half and half trick, fondly remembered from days spent fixing peoples' Quark XPress.
It's a real time saver to eliminate half of many possibilities in one go.
Many years back I took a car to the dealer to have a warped brake disc changed under warranty. The symptoms were the brake pedal "pumping" in use and the disc wear warning light going on and off. The receptionist told me it would be a long job as they had to take all the wheels off and check the brake assemblies to determine which one it was. I told them that I knew which one it was because I had unplugged the sensor cable from each brake in turn, a simple process of elimination that took less than 15 minutes. The receptionist looked gobsmacked that there was a better, faster way than following the manufacturer's bible.
The receptionist told me it would be a long job as they had to take all the wheels off and check the brake assemblies to determine which one it was.
Since it's the brakes, it's probably not about a simple diagnosis, but more about liability.
In your case, the mechanic's probably just as happy to skip all the unnecessary steps, because you told him not to do them. Then if there's Something Else wrong, you can't sue him for not doing what you told him not to do.
Nice picture. Too bad a firefox is not a red fox. It's another name for the Chinese Red Panda, and looks nothing like any of the pictures that have ever been used for Mozilla's browser - much more like a cross between a very cute red puppy and a raccoon.
http://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/firefox-name-faq.html
Mozilla has always chosen very different 'mascots' for its browser... the name comes from 'mosiac' and 'godzilla' - the older projects..
I think firefox may well have had military ispiration..
http://www.urbanghostsmedia.com/2013/02/firefox-what-happened-to-clint-eastwoods-soviet-super-fighter-mock-up/
fire = fast and hot
fox = military shorthand for 'missile fired'
though I guess they changed it to something softer...
It wiped out the store.json file under the OneTab directory in my current profile. The file had hundreds of bookmarks stored and categorised. Months of research gone with one fell swoop of FF developers "bug fixes".
I followed a VLC plugin bug report where the FF developer repeatedly put his head in the sand and refused to acknowledge that a plugin can have a different version number to a standalone application. If this is the level of developer working on FF, I will be moving everything to one of my other browser choices Lock, Stock and Barrel.
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