On May 9, a new version of Firefox was released by Mozilla. Since version 29.0.1 is considered a minor (‘dot’) release, there was no formal announcement.
The release notes provide some clues as to the changes in 29.0.1. A few minor bugs were fixed, but none of them appear to be security-related. The colour of unselected tabs was changed to make them more visible than they are in Firefox 29.
Another new version of Firefox was announced on April 29.
Version 29 is touted by Mozilla as ‘elegant’ and ‘the most customizable’ Firefox ever, but there’s been a lot of noise on the web from people who are unhappy with the user interface changes.
It’s not really clear why many major browser developers are trying to make their browser look exactly like Google’s Chrome, but that does seem to be what’s happening. A few months ago, Opera chucked their browser engine in favour of WebKit, with the result being that Opera is now almost indistinguishable from Chrome. Mozilla hasn’t gone that far: their browser engine hasn’t changed, but in terms of appearance, Firefox now looks a lot more like Chrome. Perhaps they think that if Firefox looks like Chrome, users won’t realize they’re not actually using Chrome.
Has anyone done any actual usability studies on these UI elements that are now so popular among developers, like rounded corners on everything? Do rounded corners make people more productive? I doubt it. Another example is Firefox 29’s tab bar, which (besides having those awesome rounded corners we should apparently care so much about) now makes unselected tabs fade out so that they are hardly visible. How is this a good thing? Mozilla seems to think that being able to read what’s on those unselected tabs is a major distraction. Nope.
As for Firefox 29 being more customizable, I beg to differ. I was previously able to open and close the bookmark toolbar with a single click of a toolbar icon. That icon is nowhere to be seen in Firefox 29. Instead, I now have to click the ‘Show your bookmarks’ icon, then click ‘View bookmarks sidebar’. This is progress?
The release notes page for Firefox 29 lists several new features and changes, none of which are particularly useful or interesting.
The best thing about Firefox 29, in my opinion, is that web site favicons – those little icons that appear next to the page title in the tab bar and desktop shortcuts – now seem to work reliably. Previous Firefox versions had a lot of trouble with some favicons.
Several security issues were fixed in version 29, so even if you think you’ll hate the new UI, you should probably upgrade anyway.
On a related note, despite my having diligently reported my problems with the Firefox release notes pages (bug #973335) and version announcement pages (bug #973330), Mozilla has done nothing to improve them, as you can see from the pages for Firefox 29.
Ars Technica has their own review of the changes in Firefox 29.
Recently, Mozilla announced that they plan to gradually eliminate plugins from Firefox.
Plugins are used in Firefox to allow certain types of content to be embedded in a web page. Common plugins are those for Flash, Adobe Reader (PDFs), Java, Silverlight and Shockwave. According to Mozilla, plugins are often a source of performance and security issues, and they are being made increasingly redundant, given new technologies like HTML5.
It’s important to distinguish between Firefox plugins and Firefox extensions. Extensions provide new functionality to the browser, and include SEO tools, debugging tools, media helpers, interface customizations, and so on. Mozilla has no plans to phase out extensions, only plugins. A post over at ColonelPanic provides additional information about the distinction between plugins and extensions.
For now, the main thing you need to know about plugins in Firefox is that they can now be configured to remain inactive until explicitly activated by the user. I’ve changed all my Firefox plugins to ‘Ask to activate’ and so far it’s working well. It means there’s an extra step whenever I want to display embedded content, but it also means that content doesn’t do anything automatically, and I always know exactly what’s generating that content (Java, Flash, etc.) I highly recommend doing this. From the Firefox menu, select ‘Add-ons’ to configure your plugins.
There was yet another stealth release of Firefox yesterday. Version 28 was not announced on any of the myriad Mozilla blogs. I only discovered it because of release announcements on CERT and SANS blogs.
According to SANS, at least some of the security fixes in Firefox 28 are the result of successful hacks at the recent Pwn2Own contest. There’s a full list of the security fixes in this version at the top of the ‘Known Vulnerabilities‘ (aka ‘Security Advisories for Firefox’) page for Firefox.
The official release notes page for version 28 shows no improvement over previous release notes pages. But it does list the changes in the latest version, none of which are worthy of note.
Aside: I recently submitted two bugs to the Mozilla bug tracking system for Firefox. Bug #973330 is about the lack of proper announcements for new Firefox versions. Bug #973335 covers the many issues with the release notes pages for Firefox. So far the responses from Mozilla workers have not been encouraging.
Is it just me, or is Firefox behaving more like a lead weight than a web browser lately? Since about version 26, any time I browse a media-heavy site, Firefox starts consuming all my CPU, and doing a ton of I/O. This usually calms down after a while, but it’s extremely annoying.
Sometimes the excessive CPU use is associated with playing Flash videos, in which case a task viewer will usually show that it’s the plugin container and the Flash plugin that are consuming all the CPU. But that’s not always the case.
The Flash plugin seems to crash a lot these days as well. Like every other time I play a video in Firefox. Normally, I’d be happy to blame Adobe, but I’m not convinced it’s their fault this time, because Flash is currently working fine in my other browsers.
One other annoyance in recent versions of Firefox is the way animated GIFs play. They stop, start again, play really fast, then really slow, and so on. Eventually they seem to settle down, but it takes a while.
Is anyone else seeing these problems?
Update 2014Mar11: Disabling all my add-ons seems to have resolved this problem. Now to identify which one.
There was another stealth release of Firefox on February 13. It’s not clear from the release notes exactly what’s different in version 27.0.1, aside from two minor Javascript fixes. No security vulnerabilities are listed as fixed in this version.
Another new version of Firefox slid quietly off the production line yesterday. Version 27 improves interactivity with certain social web sites, and fixes a few bugs, including a dozen security vulnerabilities.
As usual, the only announcement of the new version was in the form of a post on the Mozilla Blog, which fails to mention that the post is actually about a new version of Firefox. The official release notes for the new version are as usual a total mess, barely even mentioning the new version identifier.
Tuesday saw another stealth release of Firefox: version 26. As usual, the new version was not announced by Mozilla; I learned about it from a post on the CERT Current Activity blog. The official release notes for version 26 describe some of the changes in this version: nothing worthy of note. Version 26 does include fixes for some security issues, so you should upgrade as soon as possible.
Update 2013Dec16: One notable change in Firefox 26 is that Java is now blocked on all sites by default. This behaviour can be changed, but we recommend using the default setting.
Another stealth release of Firefox happened on November 15. Version 25.0.1 apparently fixes some security vulnerabilities and other bugs. With the total lack of any kind of announcement for this release, and the way the release notes include changes in previous releases, it’s difficult to be certain what’s new in this version. For instance, the version 25.0.1 release notes point to the ‘Known vulnerabilities‘ page, but there’s nothing listed there that’s specific to version 25.0.1. The release notes for 25.0.1 also point to Bugzilla (‘complete list of changes‘), but the list of fixed bugs shows everything for version 25, and nothing specific to version 25.0.1. What a mess.
Update 2013Nov23: EWeek has more information about the security vulnerabilities fixed in Firefox 25.0.1 (even if Mozilla doesn’t).
Mozilla released Firefox 25 on October 29, with the usual lack of any kind of announcement. I was alerted to the new version via posts on the SANS ISC Diary and the CERT alerts list.
The only thing even close to an announcement of the new version from Mozilla is a blog post from the 29th that describes one of the new features in Firefox 25. The blog post never even mentions the new version.
The version 25 release notes list the changes in this version, which consist of several security vulnerability fixes, a few other bug fixes, Web Audio support, and some CSS and HTML standards tweaks.
The Known Vulnerabilities page shows the security-related fixes in version 25.
boot13