mozilla Firefox 52 Nightly: Plugin Support (Except Flash) Dropped + Firefox 52: Skia Enabled By Default On Windows + Firefox 52 Devtools: New Responsive Design Mode

[vissha]

Firefox 52 Nightly: Plugin Support (Except Flash) Dropped

 

If you run Firefox Nightly, currently at version 52, you may have noticed that plugins that you may have used in the past are no longer supported in the browser.

 

So-called NPAPI plugins such as Java, Silverlight or Flash are on their way out. While the time frame varies browser by browser, all major browser developers announced the end of NPAPI support.

 

Mozilla did so about a year ago on October 8, 2015 stating that plugins were the source for performance, crash and security incidents.

 

The organization published a schedule recently that details when support for NPAPI plugins end in Firefox.

 

The first Firefox version to ship without support for NPAPI plugins by default -- except for Adobe Flash -- is Firefox 52.

 

Mozilla plans to ship that version with an override that allows you to turn support back on in Firefox 52. This override is removed from Firefox 53 however, and the only Firefox version with support for NPAPI plugins onward is Firefox 52 ESR.

 

Firefox 52: end of NPAPI

 

 

The end of NPAPI in Firefox 52 affects all plugins except for Adobe Flash. Flash is still widely used, and the chance is high that this won't change in the coming six months.

 

Note: You may still see content listed under plugins, namely Content Decryption Modules or Video Codecs. These don't use NPAPI and will continue to work just fine in Firefox.

 

Eventually though, Flash NPAPI support will also be removed from Firefox. This may coincide with Mozilla bringing Pepper Flash, the same that is used by Google Chrome, to Firefox.

 

First, lets take a look at the timeline of events:

1. March 7, 2017 -- Firefox 52 and Firefox 52 ESR are released. All plugins but Flash are disabled by default. Mozilla Firefox users may flip a preference switch to enable support for non-Flash NPAPI plugins in Firefox 52. Firefox 52 ESR will support plugins throughout its lifecycle (until Firefox 60 ESR is released). Firefox users may flip the preference plugin.load_flash_only to false to re-enable support for other NPAPI plugins.
2. April 18, 2017 -- The release of Firefox 53 marks the end of NPAPI plugin support in Firefox. The override preference is removed. Flash is the only plugin left standing.
3. First half of 2018 (May) -- Firefox 60 ESR is released.

So, Enterprise customers and users who rely on plugins may switch over to Firefox 52 ESR for the time being to extend support for another year.

 

Starting today, new profiles that you create in Firefox 52 Nightly will block all plugins but Flash from being used by the browser. From tomorrow onward, this will also be the case for existing Firefox profiles.

 

You can track the removal of NPAPI support on Bugzilla. (via Sören Hentzschel)

 

Source

 

Firefox 52: Skia Enabled By Default On Windows

 

When Firefox detects your computer graphic card doesn’t support hardware acceleration, the browser turns it off by default. You can check whether Firefox browser using hardware acceleration or not by visiting ‘Graphics’ section in about:support page.

 

Till now Mozilla has used its 2D graphics engine, Azure, which has multiple backends enabled for Windows such as Direct 2D, Direct2D 1.1, Skia and Cairo. The Firefox browser vendor has decided to use Google’s Skia as the default software rendering backend for content on Windows from Firefox 52 onwards when Direct2D is not in use.

 

 

With this change, if you visit about:support page, you can notice the ‘Diagnostics’ section under ‘Graphics’ displays both AzureCanvasBackend and AzureContentBackend report skia has been used as backend. With Skia enabled, font rendering gets somewhat better when compared without it when HWA is off.

 

Behind the scenes, Mozilla changes below the preferences values to Skia, Cairo.

 

gfx.canvas.azure.backends = skia,cairo
gfx.content.azure.backends = skia,cairo

 

Check this bug link – Bug 1007702 – (skia-windows) Enable skia content on Windows by default when not using D2D,– for more details.

 

Source

 

Firefox 52 Devtools: New Responsive Design Mode

 

The Responsive Design Mode available till now in Firefox browser has been redesigned and enabled by default in Firefox 52 Nightly. The new RDM looks awesome and even better when compared with Chrome’s, comes with redesigned UI, device selector and it has been completely rewritten using HTML, React and Redux and other technologies by Mozilla.

 

Firefox 52 devtools: New Responsive Design Mode

 

To see it in action, ensure e10s is enabled and you’re using latest version Nightly and press Ctrl+Shift+M to open or click on the Firefox menu, click Devtools and select Responsive Design Mode.

 

Want to see how the old RDM looks? Change this preference in about:config “devtools.responsive.html.enabled’ to false. Restart the browser. To get new RDM back, change the above preference value to true again.

 

 

Mozilla to add more features to RDM, including Network Throttling, Zoom to fit for working with large viewports and UI to change device pixelratio.

 

Source

 

[Ice Frog]

its good mozilla moving with times but at same time mustnot lose identity.

[steven36]

Firefox sandbox on Linux tightened

 

As just announced on mozilla.dev.platform, we landed a set of changes in today's Nightly that tightens our sandboxing on Linux. The content process, which is the part of Firefox that renders webpages and executes any JavaScript on them, had been previously restricted in the amount of system calls that it could access. As of today, it no longer has write access to the filesystem, barring an exception for shared memory and /tmp. We plan to also remove the latter, eventually.

As promised, we're continuing to batten down the hatches gradually, making it harder for an attacker to successfully exploit Firefox. The changes that landed this night are an important step, but far from the end of the road, and we'll be continuing to put out iterative improvements.

Some of our next steps will be to address the interactions with the X11 windowing system, as well as implementing read restrictions.

 

Source:

http://www.morbo.org/2016/10/firefox-sandbox-on-linux-tightened.html

 

[steven36]

9 hours ago, Ice Frog said:

its good mozilla moving with times but at same time mustnot lose identity.

Cyberfox never had support  for NPAPI  plugins on windows but flash  no ways and  they had  x64 on windows years before Firefox  so Firefox is just catching up with its forks years latter . Linux  has Firefox x64 for years already before windows did  and the end of NPAPI  on Linux  will be the end of Development  of many plugins in Linux . Its taking away peoples freedoms . Just like there putting  DRMED HtML5  into all browsers too replace flash  you will no longer be able to download videos anymore at all or even stream them without DRM . That's taking away you're freedoms too. I will pirate  the video or music  before I would use DRM  in  my Browser.