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Firefox 22 released

247 points| Techasura | 12 years ago |mozilla.org | reply

152 comments

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[+] callahad|12 years ago|reply
Not sure linking to the FTP mirror is all that useful. Here are the release notes: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/22.0/releasenotes/

Highlights: WebRTC, asm.js, flexbox, and web notifications are present and enabled by default.

[+] masklinn|12 years ago|reply
Also, clipboard data access. With Opera's switch to chromium, Firefox was the last browser without programmatic access to the clipboard[0] (though as usual MSIE has a non-standard implementation) so you had to listen for the paste event and post-process whatever garbage had been dumped in your paste area (and of course couldn't access high-level media types)

[0] Opera, as far as I remember, has neither clipboard access nor a "paste" event, the POS.

[+] joelthelion|12 years ago|reply
Are there any good web applications based on WebRTC yet?
[+] _greim_|12 years ago|reply
Oh weird. I remember trying out FlexBox three years ago and having it work in FF. Does this just mean they dropped the -moz- prefix requirement?
[+] niutech|12 years ago|reply
The OdinMonkey engine performance is impressive. The Lua VM benchmark[1] jumped from 110 points in Firefox 21 to 318 points in Firefox 22! Not to mention poor performance of Chrome.

Next, have a look at the Epic Citadel[2], which runs very smoothly in Firefox 22. Well done!

[1] http://kripken.github.io/lua.vm.js/lua.vm.js.html [2] http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/

[+] fhd2|12 years ago|reply
It's a bit unfair to mention Chrome performing poorly on these. Both are asm.js, which OdinMonkey is optimised for, V8 not.

That said, I'm very excited about asm.js (using it, in fact) and the performance in FF 22 blows me away as well. The V8 team appears to be working on asm.js optimisations, so soon we can have a fair contest :)

The best thing about asm.js is that the optimisations are really optional, unless your application is actually CPU-bound. The Unreal Engine probably is, to some degree. A simple 2D game like the one I'm working on certainly isn't. Not seeing it run any faster with FF 22, it's already smooth in older versions.

[+] bad_user|12 years ago|reply
On my laptop, I got 419 points for Firefox 22 and 120 points for Chrome 28.

Of course, the Lua VM test is compiled to asm.js, so of course Firefox does really well right now. Exciting nonetheless - this opens so many possibilities.

[+] masklinn|12 years ago|reply
The Lua VM benchmark seems to be compiled to asm.js though, how does chrome fare when not targeting asmjs?
[+] mrspeaker|12 years ago|reply
Oh yeah - short function syntax goes into the wild!

    let square = x => x * x
Time to move over to stalking the Chrome devs...
[+] siddboots|12 years ago|reply
Yay. Sometimes I wish we still did release parties.
[+] creatio|12 years ago|reply
Can this syntax be also used with the other browsers? i.e. IE and Chrome?
[+] noelwelsh|12 years ago|reply
If you're a fan of Firefox I recommend using Aurora:

   http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/aurora/
Aurora is basically the beta of Firefox. It seems to get incremental updates more regularly than Firefox. It very occasionally has issues with compatibility with plugins (usually when a version number is bumped) but I can't recall any stability issues in the few years I've been using it.
[+] shacharz|12 years ago|reply
There is Firefox beta channel, aurora is a bit less stable. Usually aurora still gets uncooked features pushed in, while beta only receives preffed features, unpreffed stable features or bug fixes
[+] epmatsw|12 years ago|reply
I've felt like Firefox has been pretty light on features in its releases since it switched to rapid release, but this one is packed with stuff. Awesome!

It's becoming more and more rare for me to have to switch to Chrome to get a website to work correctly/acceptably, and I love it! Great job by the Mozilla team

[+] bjustin|12 years ago|reply
Which websites work better in Chrome? I use Safari these days, but when I used Firefox full time last year I didn't see any broken-ness.
[+] ianstormtaylor|12 years ago|reply
Flexbox. It's finally almost here. I cannot tell you how long I've waited for this to be supported by default in all of these browsers... as soon as Safari 7 is released, us developer sites will actually be able to make the switch. I honestly think wrangling the hacky current layout solutions is 25% or more of my time spent with CSS on a project, so hopefully we'll be able to build things much more quickly.

Happy day.

[+] dotmanish|12 years ago|reply
As a Firefox mobile user, this one is the nicest one of them all for me:

"Plain text files displayed within Firefox will now word-wrap"

It was a pain to scroll sideways.

[+] decklin|12 years ago|reply
Release notes might be a more useful link: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/22.0/releasenotes/
[+] Sven7|12 years ago|reply
Wondering about the Web Speech API and speech input...Chrome does a great job, but doesn't seem to allow hooking up to 3rd party recognizers like Nuance or even something local.

Anyone know how Mozilla is going to handle this? Are they going to use Google's recognizers in the cloud?

[+] zanny|12 years ago|reply
It randomly segfaults on Arch with no error report and a trace says it comes from libgobject.

So I went up the stack, every one except nightly is segfaulting.

Guess I'm on nightly for a while!

[+] diegocg|12 years ago|reply
I'm using arch and it works fine
[+] PedroBatista|12 years ago|reply
Well, you are on Arch, so that is the default version you should use. :-D
[+] josteink|12 years ago|reply
It seems snappier, but I'm not sure I like the new text-scaling on high-DPI displays.

Basically I just felt like I lost a lot of screen real-estate when surfing the news, like I was back in 1356x768 country.

There needs to be some toggles which can be disabled or some other middle ground here.

[+] kstop|12 years ago|reply
Looking forward to 25% of my automated functional tests failing for the next week!
[+] robin_reala|12 years ago|reply
Why? Surely your code isn’t that fragile?
[+] Shivetya|12 years ago|reply
Out of curiosity, does this solve the memory issues caused by bad websites? Example, I have open three sites and my firefox memory usage is constantly increasing.

maps.google.com with route determined. Hackers News, this story.

and the offending site, cycletrader.com where I chose a random ad from the front page that had more than one photo. All I did was cycle through the photos and leave the tab open.

Internet Explorer to the same sites does not even come close to the memory usage. In the time it took me to write this I have seen firefox go from 235m to 1.2g memory and IE stayed steady at 100m

[+] arj|12 years ago|reply
This is so much better in Windows on a retina display
[+] jmilkbal|12 years ago|reply
The expectation of this release has been a fun ride for me. We were using long-live HTTP requests in our product for pushing data to the browser, a very elegant method but only implemented by Mozilla. Now were transitioning to websockets which aren't nearly as nice for this use, but I'm enjoying putting the newer, better-supported method in place on front- and back-ends.