All posts tagged ‘firefox’

File Under: Browsers, Mobile
Jan
8
2013

Mozilla Offers Sneak Peek at New Tricks in Firefox for Android

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Image: Mozilla

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has, thus far, been short on jaw-dropping new Android hardware. But fear not, Android fans, while new devices may still be just over the horizon, Mozilla has a sneak peek at a few new tricks coming soon to Firefox for Android.

To get the new year started Mozilla has released Firefox 18 for Android, which you can grab from the Google Play Store.

This release brings search suggestion to Firefox for Android, along with new phishing and malware protection. Once you opt-in to the new search suggestions, Firefox will — much like Google’s search page — start suggesting search terms as you type, making it faster to find what you’re after.

Like its desktop cousin, Firefox for Android will also now warn you whenever you visit a site that may be used for malware or phishing to protect users from malicious websites.

While Firefox 18 is a welcome upgrade for Android users, Mozilla has much more coming soon. The company recently posted a sneak peek at what’s in store for Firefox for Android in 2013.

The highlights include support for Private Browsing mode in the Android incarnation of Firefox. Private Browsing is getting an overhaul on the desktop side as well, with Firefox 20 expected to include a way to open Private Browsing tabs right alongside your normal tabs.

Presumably the new approach to Private Browsing will also ship with Firefox for Android, rather than the current, more cumbersome way of browsing privately, which requires hiding your current windows and opening an entirely new set of private windows.

Private Browsing is often dismissed as “porn mode,” but in truth there are plenty of uses beyond simply keeping your cookies and browsing history private. Think simultaneous logins, debugging with a “clean” visit to a site and anything else that requires separate cookies or sessions.

Next up on the Firefox for Android agenda is more device and language support. Unfortunately, the Mozilla blog doesn’t say which models might be added to the list of devices Firefox for Android supports, noting only that Mozilla is “bringing support for more devices all the time.”

The third sneak peek Mozilla is offering means more customization for Firefox on mobile — themes and more start page options will be coming soon.

Naturally, these three things aren’t the only changes due for Firefox for Android in 2013, but hopefully, now that the under-the-hood migration to native Android tools is done, Mozilla can focus its attention on new features and speed improvements.

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File Under: Browsers
Jan
8
2013

Mozilla Delivers Faster, Sharper Firefox 18

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Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired

Mozilla has released Firefox 18, which gives the company’s flagship desktop browser a new, faster JavaScript engine, support for Retina screen Macs and preliminary support for WebRTC.

Existing users will be automatically updated. If you’ve opted out of auto-update or just want to try out the latest version of Firefox, head on over to the Mozilla downloads page.

This release is largely focused on speeding up Firefox and marks the public debut of a new faster JavaScript JIT compiler dubbed “IonMonkey.” IonMonkey replaces the older TraceMonkey and joins JagerMonkey as one of the two JIT compilers that make up Firefox’s SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine.

Too many monkeys? Here’s the bottom line: Firefox 18 has a faster JIT compiler, which means JavaScript-heavy web apps, games and pages like Gmail should be faster. If you’d like more of the gory details on Firefox’s various JavaScript monkeys, see our review of the beta channel release.

Web developers get a few new features to test in this release, including support for more of WebRTC and the latest CSS 3 Flexible Box Model syntax. The latter is still disabled by default. To enable it open up about:config and search for “flexbox.”

Another welcome, but disabled-by-default feature is a setting to stop insecure content from loading on secure websites. Turning it on may break a lot of sites (mixing HTTP and HTTPS content on the same page is, sadly, quite common), but it will make your browsing more secure. Head to about:config and search for “mixed,” which will bring up the relevant options.

For more details on everything that’s new in Firefox 18 — including a new HTML scaling algorithm that promises to make images sharper — be sure to read through Mozilla’s release notes.

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File Under: Browsers, JavaScript, Web Standards
Dec
3
2012

Mozilla Blends Social API, WebRTC for More Social Apps

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Mozilla is making good on its promise to take its fledgling Social API beyond the simple Facebook integration it showcased for the launch of Firefox 17. In fact, the company’s newest Social API demo removes the need for social websites entirely, tapping emerging web standards to create a real-time video calling, data sharing app — one part Skype, one part Facebook, all parts web-native.

The direct peer-to-peer video calls and file sharing features come from WebRTC, a proposed web standard that Mozilla and others are working on in conjunction with the W3C. The RTC in WebRTC stands for Real-Time Communications, and the core of WebRTC is the getUserMedia JavaScript API, which gives the browser access to hardware features like the camera and microphone.

Much of the enthusiasm around WebRTC comes from the fact that it enables web apps to do many of the same things that, without WebRTC support, require platform-native APIs. WebRTC will help developers build web apps that can compete with native apps, but it has other tricks up its sleeve — like a whole new way to connect with your friends on the web.

“While many of us are excited about WebRTC because it will enable several cool gaming applications and improve the performance and availability of video conferencing apps, WebRTC is proving to be a great tool for social apps,” writes Mozilla’s Maire Reavy on the Mozilla blog.

Reavy goes on to paint a picture of seamless social sharing through WebRTC and Mozilla’s Social API:

Sometimes when you’re chatting with a friend, you just want to click on their name and see and talk with them in real-time. Imagine being able to do that without any glitches or hassles, and then while talking with them, easily share almost anything on your computer or device: vacation photos, memorable videos — or even just a link to a news story you thought they might be interested in — simply by dragging the item into your video chat window.

Mozilla’s Social API-WebRTC mashup goes beyond previous demos, using a new WebRTC feature, one which Firefox is the first to support, DataChannels. DataChannels offer a way to send data from one WebRTC-enabled browser to another. DataChannels can send pretty much any data the browser can access, be it images, videos, webpages or local files.

For more details on how the DataChannel API works, check out this earlier post on the Mozilla Hacks blog. If you’d like to see exactly what’s happening behind the scenes of Mozilla’s Social API-WebRTC demo, the code is available on GitHub.

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File Under: Browsers, Mobile, Multimedia
Nov
30
2012

Firefox for Android, Now With Video That ‘Just Works’

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H.264 video in Firefox for Android. Image: Scott Gilbertson.

Mozilla has added support for the H.264 video codec to its Firefox for Android mobile web browser.

Right now support is limited to Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and Samsung phones running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Mozilla is working to fix some bugs that currently prevent H.264 from working on other devices. Support for older Gingerbread and Honeycomb Android devices is still in the works.

This is the first time Mozilla has released a web browser with support for the popular H.264 codec. The company previously refused to support H.264, citing royalty and licensing concerns. Instead Mozilla touted Google’s WebM codec, which offers many of the benefits of H.264 in a royalty-free package. Unfortunately for Firefox fans WebM has failed to gain ground against H.264.

Adobe’s Flash Player plugin can also play H.264 video and, until Adobe decided to abandon Flash for Android, that was Mozilla’s solution for H.264 video in Firefox for Android.

With WebM adoption lagging and Flash for Android dead, Mozilla found itself in a bind. Some estimates claim up to 80 percent of video on the web is encoded in H.264, forcing Mozilla to choose between supporting H.264 on Android or leaving Firefox users with no way to watch video on mobile devices. Fortunately for Firefox users, Mozilla decided to be practical and support H.264.

Technically the new H.264 support is not a part of Firefox, rather the browser is tapping into Android’s underlying H.264 support to decode video. That means royalty payments are covered by hardware makers, not Mozilla.

I tested Firefox for Android’s H.264 on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.1 and for the most part H.264 video worked without issue. Some popular video sharing sites, however, appear to be doing OS/browser detection rather than feature detection — I’m looking at you Vimeo — which means that, even though your phone can play the video, Vimeo thinks it can’t.

Hopefully Vimeo and other sites doing the same thing will fix this soon because Mozilla is planning to bring the same H.264 support to the desktop. As with Firefox for Android, desktop Firefox won’t have its own decoder, but will rely on OS-level H.264 decoders. For end users though the result will be the same — video that just works.

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File Under: Browsers
Nov
27
2012

IonMonkey, Retina Support Make for a Faster, Sharper Firefox

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Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired

With Firefox 17 out the door, Mozilla is turning its attention to Firefox 18, which is now available in the Firefox beta channel. The focus for this release is speed, with Mozilla set to deliver a new faster JavaScript JIT compiler dubbed IonMonkey.

If you’d like to switch to Firefox’s beta channel, just head over to the beta downloads page.

IonMonkey will replace TraceMonkey and join JagerMonkey as one of the two JIT compilers that make up Firefox’s SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine. Too many monkeys? Here’s the bottom line: Firefox 18 has a faster JIT compiler, which means JavaScript-heavy web apps, games and pages like Gmail should be faster.

If you’d like to know more about the finer points of Firefox’s various JavaScript monkeys, check out this earlier post by Mozilla developer David Mandelin and this series of posts on the Mozilla blog, which get into all the gory details of Firefox’s JavaScript optimization tools.

There are quite a few new features for web developers in this release, including support for the CSS 3 @supports rule I wrote about yesterday. Firefox 18 also supports the latest CSS 3 Flexible Box Model syntax, though it’s disabled, ahem, out of the box. To test out your Flexbox layout in Firefox 18, open up about:config and search for “flexbox.”

Developers working on nice shiny new Mac laptops will be happy to hear that Firefox beta now supports Retina Displays.

The security-conscious have cause to celebrate as well: Firefox 18 has, at long last, landed a setting to disable insecure content on secure websites. It’s off by default since it would probably break a lot of websites (mixing HTTP and HTTPS content on the same page is, sadly, quite common), but if you’d like to give it a try, head to about:config and search for “mixed” which will bring up the relevant options.

For more details on everything that’s new in Firefox beta, be sure to read through Mozilla’s release notes. If you’d rather not use beta-quality software for your everyday browsing, you’ll need to wait until second week of January when Firefox 18 is scheduled to arrive.

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