Yo! Anarcho-Capitalists: Firefox 22 download available now, adds super-fast JavaScript

It seems like Google’s Chrome browser gets all the attention these days with big developer conferences and WebKit dominating mobile, but we can’t forget Firefox. Mozilla broke Microsoft’s browser hegemony before Chrome was ever conceived. The newest version of Firefox has just been released, and it looks to make up some ground in the browser wars with better performance. There’s a Firefox 22 download waiting for you, and it won’t cost you a cent.

Yo! Anarcho-Capitalists: Firefox 22 download available now, adds super-fast JavaScript 9yfs

It might not show up in bullet point feature lists on the main Mozilla site, but Firefox 22 adds asm.js support to the stable version, and that’s a big deal. This is a new feature created by Mozilla that allows the browser to compile JavaScript to assembly code, which can then be run natively.

JavaScript runs something on virtually every website on the internet, and it’s the cause of plenty of slowdowns too. JavaScript is necessary, but it adds a significant amount of overhead when loading websites — it’s often 30 to 40 times slower than native C++ code. Mozilla’s asm.js speeds up the process dramatically, making the same JavaScript perhaps just twice as slow as native code.

Firefox with asm.js is capable of cranking away at serious 3D web apps utilizing JavaScript, WebGL, and HTML5. In May, the company showed off a version of Epic Citadel (a benchmarking demo) it had ported to JavaScript and WebGL with just a few days of work using the Emscripten development tool. This version of Epic Citadel ran entirely in the browser at HD resolutions, and did so quite well. The technology that made that possible is now in Firefox 22. It was previously only in beta and alpha builds.

Another aspect of the new version is built in Web Real-Time Communications (WebRTC) for video calls. It is now trivial to add support for video calls in web apps for Firefox. The browser is currently designed to support 1-to-1 calls, but conference calling is possible with a little extra work. NATs and firewalls may interfere with Firefox’s WebRTC implementation, but version 23 will be addressing that issue.

WebRTC can also make file-sharing through a browser hassle-free, which is not the case with most browsers. It could enable features like drag-and-drop transfers to mobile devices, or automatic file sync without installing any additional software.

The desktop version of Firefox is getting most of the hype with this update, but the main Android build has been bumped up to version 22 today as well. The boost in JavaScript performance is nice on desktops, but it’s essential on mobile devices, which typically have much less horsepower to spare.

Firefox 22 is available on Mozilla’s site, ready to continue fighting the good fight. The new version is also in Google Play where it can be installed on almost any Android device.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/159677-firefox-22-download-available-now-adds-super-fast-javascript

Firefox 22: No automatic plugin reactivation anymore

I have been using Firefox as my main browser for a long time. Currently, I'm running a stable version of Firefox next to a Nightly build, and switch between both builds regularly. It has happened in the past that plugins that I had disabled in the browser re-enabled themselves automatically after updates, often when I switched between both browser versions on the system.

I could never really figure out why this happened, only that it was annoying and a security issue as plugins were suddenly enabled again that I had disabled previously.

This is all changing with the release of Firefox 22 as Mozilla has made a major change to how the browser stores plugin information.

Mozilla has tackled several issues in this new version including the following:

Disabled plugins do not get activated automatically anymore.
Click to Play preferences for each plugin are remembered.

Mozilla is not storing plugin information in the pluginreg.dat file anymore starting in Firefox 22. Instead, the state of each plugin is saved in the advanced configuration (about:config) of the browser.

Type about:config into the browser's address bar and hit the enter key.
Confirm you will be careful.
Search for plugin.state and hit enter.

Yo! Anarcho-Capitalists: Firefox 22 download available now, adds super-fast JavaScript Vua

A value of 0 indicates that a plugin is disabled, a value of 1 that it is enabled in the browser. Note that changes that you make here are only visible after a browser restart.

Mozilla switched from storing the information per file name to storing them per mimetype instead which resolves many of the issues that users experienced in the past in regards to plugins. Plugins may change file names during updates, for instance to increase the version number of the plugin. When that happened, they were recognized as new plugins by Firefox.

The change in Firefox 22 ignores the file name and uses the mimetype instead so that a plugin is recognized as the "same" even if its file name changes.

This makes sure that custom click to play preferences and the plugins state in the browser are left untouched when this happens.

Changes to plugins in Firefox does not change here though. You may know that you can display the list of installed plugins in Firefox by loading about:plugins in the browser's address bar.

Firefox did not display the full plugin path on the system by default which you had to enable first by setting plugin.expose_full_path to true.

Mozilla is now displaying the full path right away on the page so that the preference is no longer needed. It will be removed from the browser in version 24.

http://www.ghacks.net/2013/06/25/firefox-22-no-automatic-plugin-reactivation-anymore/

:Rubber Smiley:

Well, I upgraded, but don't notice anything faster...

Maybe pr0n movies will render better, but I haven't tested yet...

Yo! Anarcho-Capitalists: Firefox 22 download available now, adds super-fast JavaScript

Yo! Anarcho-Capitalists: Firefox 22 download available now, adds super-fast JavaScript

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