Mozilla Firefox Browser Stable Version Releases

+1

 

While running Firefox 38.0 on Ubuntu Linux 12.04.5 LTS, it had the following problems:

1) it was not able to load any of my RSS feeds
2) it was not able to Show All Bookmarks

I have since reverted back to using Firefox 37.0.2 for Linux, at least until the above problems are solved with a new release.

-- Tom

 

Cheers for the info on changing it back to the old style JRViejo

 

Thank you, JRViejo!

 

Any thoughts on this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/12/that_drm_support_in_firefox_you_never_asked_for_its_here/
and the EME free version?

 

If I understand correctly disabling/removing DRM support from the browser would result in being unable to watch protected content. I get that some people dislike DRM in principal, but since the plugin has no other purpose or impact I don't see a problem (unless of course I'm missing something).

 

There's also the question if you trust the plugin:

 

People dislike DRM in principal because DRM in practice has negative consequences for consumers. We are dancing with devils here and there are security/privacy gotchas that would go unappreciated unless we carefully studied everything involved. Has anyone here read the EME spec? Looked at the CDM Host source code? Thought about other potential usage cases not currently being discussed? Thought about how things may evolve, for the worse, over time and lead to even broader use of DRM against us?

I went back over the Reconciling Mozilla's Mission and W3C EME blog post from a year ago and I feel it is light on some technical details plus some things were still up in the air. The Update on Digital Rights Management and Firefox blog post from the other day is largely worthless. Are there any limitations in the sandbox that could lead to undesirable manipulation of hardware, fingerprinting, or message passing? The unique identifier would be a big deal from the privacy POV. Is the brief description from a year ago still valid? Is there a way to completely destroy that identifier *and* prevent the same identifier from being generated in another browser or later context?

It is an important enough subject to have its own thread, but are there people with hours in already and/or people willing to put hours in?

 

At this point I don't. I am also finding that though I have been having a lot of Firefox crashes lately the EME free build is more stable for me. I will keep if for now.

 

Can you say more about that? How might it be less trustworthy than any other plugin and how can we know?

 

Why does the new DRM Plugin, "Primetime Content Decryption Module", only has two options available: "Always Activate" and "Never activate"? Why isn't there "Ask to Activate" option available with this plugin? Does anybody know?

 

Go to Options > Content > to uncheck Play DRM content

 

That checkbox toggles the media.eme.enabled pref, which would affect all sites. Some people care enough that they will give up many things (such as watching DRM'd Netflix movies) in order to maintain security, privacy, etc. However, even those who are like that may eventually run into a case where the need to access something is substantial enough to make an exception. So per-site, and in some cases per-element, controls are rather important. I think Raza0007 was inquiring about that. FWIW, I haven't come across a justification for not providing granular control over EME/CDMs.

Note: Bug 1144875 wanted to "disable EME in ESR (38) so we and Adobe do not need to maintain EME and CDM compatibility for the next twelve months". Glancing at the diff, I think they went with:

browser.eme.ui.enabled = false
media.eme.enabled = false
media.eme.apiVisible = false

On another subject, and if anyone is interested, these are default permissions I exported from 38.0:

Code:

Host, Type, Capability, ExpireType, ExpireTime
"addons.mozilla.org","install","ALLOW_ACTION","EXPIRE_NEVER","Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT"
"input.mozilla.org","remote-troubleshooting","ALLOW_ACTION","EXPIRE_NEVER","Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT"
"marketplace.firefox.com","install","ALLOW_ACTION","EXPIRE_NEVER","Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT"
"moz-safe-about:home","uitour","ALLOW_ACTION","EXPIRE_NEVER","Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT"
"self-repair.mozilla.org","uitour","ALLOW_ACTION","EXPIRE_NEVER","Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT"
"support.mozilla.org","remote-troubleshooting","ALLOW_ACTION","EXPIRE_NEVER","Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT"
"support.mozilla.org","uitour","ALLOW_ACTION","EXPIRE_NEVER","Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT"
"www.mozilla.org","uitour","ALLOW_ACTION","EXPIRE_NEVER","Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT"

Edit: Which I now see appears to come from https://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-release/source/browser/app/permissions

PS: Firefox 38.0.1 – coming this week to fix stability issues reported in both desktop and mobile

 

@JRViejo: And if you set media.eme.ui.enabled to false that notification isn't shown?

 

Oh man, I goofed and said media. I'm sorry. It is browser.eme.ui.enabled. I would expect those three pref changes made to ESR should be "complete" but I'm not yet at the point where I can go online with 38 and see things for myself. So I thought I'd try to catch you while you were playing around with it. I don't want to put you out though, so what you do from here is up to you. I appreciate the info you provided already, thank you.

 

Firefox 38.0 is auto-updating to 38.0.1.
The Release Notes are posted.

• Fixed
  Systems with first generation NVidia Optimus graphics cards may crash on start-up
  
  
• Fixed
  Users who import cookies from Google Chrome can end up with broken websites
  
  
• Fixed
  Large animated images may fail to play and may stop other images from loading
  
  
• Fixed
  WebRTC H264 video streams from CiscoSpark native clients are not decoded correctly. (Fixed in Firefox ESR 38.0.1; was already fixed in Firefox 38.0)

 

Choosing "Never Activate" from the Add-ons > Plugins page will do the same thing. I actually wanted to put it to "Ask to Activate" mode and for some reason that mode is not available for this plugin.

EDIT: After reading JRViejo post # 517, I may give your suggestion a try. I do not have Netflix, so I can not confirm the plugin's asking to activate behavior.

Yeah, I was asking for user control over this plugin, where I can set it to "Ask to Activate" mode and Firefox will then prompt me if some website required this plugin. However, for some unknown reason, FF chose not to enable "Ask to Activate" for this plugin, as well as for the OpenH264 Video Codec plugin. I asked because I thought maybe this issue was already discussed in this thread. I could not find any discussion on this issue from google search.

So, does anybody know why Mozilla does not provide "Ask to Activate" for the above mentioned two plugins?

 

Firefox integrates their added default plug-ins by 'all or nothing'. Simpler to implement....