Firefox 33 New Features In Firefox 33 For Desktop And Android

[sujith]

All versions of the Firefox web browser will be updated to the next major version in the coming 24 hour period. This means that the stable version of the browser, currently at version 32.0.3, will be updated to version 33.

In addition, Firefox Beta, Aurora and Nightly versions will be updated to version 34, 35 and 36 respectively.

It is interesting to note that this Firefox ESR 24.x reaches end of support and that Firefox ESR 31.x will take over from this point onwards.

It is expected that Mozilla will publish all updates on October 14, 2014. The update announcement will be published on the same date and users with automatic updates enabled will receive the new version automatically.

Tip: You can find out which version of the browser you are running by loading about:support in the address bar. There you find the current version listed under Application Basics.

Firefox 33 Changes

Firefox 33 introduces several changes to the browser. Some of the changes are visible on the frontend while others improve the browser in the backend.

Windows Off Main Thread Compositing (OMTC)

This new feature provides a smoother browsing experience while consuming less resources. It would get too technical to get into details only this much: Mozilla moved compositing to a second thread to make the main thread loop more responsive.

You find all details on Benoit Girard's blog post about the new feature.

OpenH264 Support

When you open Firefox 33 for the first time after upgrading the browser or installing it anew, you will notice that the OpenH264 plugin is now included under plugins automatically.

This can be used by the browser to decode and encode H.264 video so that these videos play in the browser now. If you check the HTML5 page on YouTube for instance you will notice that Firefox supports H.264 now which it did not before.

Search Suggestions on about:home and about:newtab

Firefox displays a Google search form on the new tab page and the home page by default (click here for instructions to remove it).

The search has been improved so that it displays suggestions now when you use it on the page.

Location bar search improvements

Mozilla has improved how single-word queries and local query searches are handled in the browser. If you search for a number such as 8676586 for instance, you were previously taken to the .com domain regardless of whether it existed or not.

While you could prevent that by adding a ? in front of the query, this is no longer necessary in Firefox 33 as the browser will search automatically by default and without delay.

A prompt is displayed however that you can use to go to the domain instead if that is where you wanted to go in first place. The result is that single-word queries are displayed much faster now by the browser.

Session restore reliability improvements

Mozilla improved the backup process of Firefox sessions in Firefox 33. The new process introduces new files and locations for session restore data.

In the end, it should make the feature more robust so that it is less likely that session restore won't work (for instance because of corruption or after an upgrade).

You can read about the new session restore in Firefox 33 here.

Enhanced Tiles did not land in Firefox 33. The feature that populates the new tab page with tiles will land in Firefox 34 instead.

Other Changes

• Slimmer and faster JavaScript strings in Firefox. Mozilla has optimized how Latin1 strings are stored in Firefox bringing the requirements down from two bytes to 1 byte. This can save memory on websites as Jan de Mooij points out.
• Support for connecting to HTTP proxy over HTTPS added. Check out the bug on Bugzilla for additional details.
• New Content Security Policy backend. You can read more about that on Bugzilla.
• Azerbaijani [az] locale added

Developer Changes

• DOMMatrix interface implemented
• WebCrypto: RSA-OAEP, PBKDF2 and AES-KW support, wrapKey and unwrapKey implemented, Import/export of JWK-formatted keys
• Event listeners popup. Ev icons show up in Inspector which you can click on to display a list of event listeners attached to the element.
• New @media sidebar which displays all @media rules and shortcuts to them in the stylesheet.
• Right-click to add new rules in the Inspector.
• @keyframes rules are now displayed in the Rules section of the Inspector.
• Cubic Bezier Editor added.
• You can hover over any transform CSS property in Inspector to display its original position and see how it transformed.
• You can disable cache in the settings tab and the selection persists now.
• Three new commands have been added to the Developer Toolbar: inject, highlight and folder. Inject to inject jQuery or JavaScript libraries into a page, highlight to highlight all nodes matching a selector, and folder to open a directory on the system.
• WebIDE has landed but it is not enabled by default. To enable it toggle devtools.webide.enabled on about:config.

Unresolved issues

• When you are using pdf.js, Firefox's built-in pdf reader, you may get wrong colors on some images.

Firefox 33 for Android

Some features that landed in the desktop version of Firefox landed in the Android version as well. This includes JavaScript string improvements and the new CSP backend.

1. Firefox supports sending videos to Chromecast or Roku devices now.
2. A new option has been added to clear browsing data when the browser is closed. To enable it tap on the menu icon in the top right corner and select settings from the context menu that opens up. Select privacy in the settings window and check the option "always clear when quitting". This opens a customization menu to select the items that you want deleted on exit.
3. Tab management improvements: list recently closed tabs, close all tabs at once, tab quick switching and undo closed tabs.
4. Locales added: Aragonese [an], Frisian [fy-NL], Kazakh [kk] and Khmer [km]

Security updates / fixes

Security updates are published after the release of Firefox. We will add those once they become available.

Source

FF 33 release notes

[jackieo]

[november_ra1n]

New Features In Firefox 33 For Desktop And Android

Firefox 33 is out for both Desktop and Android. You should be prompted to upgrade the next time you launch it and if you’re a developer, you might want to upgrade right now. This latest instalment is a treat for developers with two new noteworthy features; a media sidebar in the Style editor and a paint flashing tool. End users will want to upgrade for the improved search functions and the more reliable session restore feature. Firefox for Android is also supporting the new Paint Flash tool for developers. For End users the new option to delete data when you quit the app is very promising as is the ability to stream video content to Chromecast and Roku

Firefox 33 Desktop

Improved Search Experience

We’re bundling two features under one head; Firefox 33 does two things to speed up search. It offers search suggestion on the Firefox home page (about:home) and the new tab page (about:newtab). It additionally does something different to speed up the search result. With prior versions, if you were to type in a single word or mathematical expression, the browser would take a considerable time to give you any results. It was looking for locally hosted sites that would correspond to the search term. With this update, it now searches online first while conducting a local search in the background.

Session Restore Is More Reliable

This is a feature that has often failed on me in the past so I’m glad Mozilla paid some attention to it. Session restore is now more reliable which means that message you get about Firefox not being able to restore your previous session will be seen far less frequently.

Media Sidebar In Style Editor

This is a new bar that appears when you have the style editor open. It lists rules and links to line numbers of a CSS sheet if it detects any media rules have been used.

Firefox 33 For Android

Clear Data When You Quit Firefox

Each time you quit Firefox, you can now delete all your data with it. The feature can be found under Settings>Privacy and you can select what data to delete. Once set, Firefox will remove data for the items you’ve selected.

Paint Flashing

This feature has been added in both the desktop and the Android versions of the app. Before we go into any details, take a look at what the feature looks like in action on both platforms.

To activate paint flashing on the desktop, open the Developer toolbar and type ‘Paintflashing on’. To activate the feature on Android, go to Settings> Developer Tools and check the Paint Flashing option. What this tool does is that it highlights which parts of a page may have been repainted by actions such as hovering the cursor over a page element or scrolling. It makes it easy to spot if the browser is having to repaint a page more than is needed.

For more details about the new changes, read the release notes for Firefox 33 for desktop and Android. The biggest addition for end users is no doubt on the Android version where better security and the ability to stream video to Chromecast and Roku have been added

Source: addictivetips

[Mr Orus]

Merged alike threads. :)

[shamu726]

Security updates in Firefox 33

MFSA 2014-82 Accessing cross-origin objects via the Alarms API
MFSA 2014-81 Inconsistent video sharing within iframe
MFSA 2014-80 Key pinning bypasses
MFSA 2014-79 Use-after-free interacting with text directionality
MFSA 2014-78 Further uninitialized memory use during GIF
MFSA 2014-77 Out-of-bounds write with WebM video
MFSA 2014-76 Web Audio memory corruption issues with custom waveforms
MFSA 2014-75 Buffer overflow during CSS manipulation
MFSA 2014-74 Miscellaneous memory safety hazards (rv:33.0 / rv:31.2)

https://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/