“Mozilla released the first major interface refresh for Firefox on Tuesday since relaunching the browser in 2011, with new menus and new features in a bid to keep the browser competitive,” Seth Rosenblatt reports for CNET. “The massive overhaul comes at a challenging time for the company’s leaders. Mozilla has been beset with internal strife as company co-founder and longtime CTO Brendan Eich was elevated to chief executive and then resigned 11 days later, following a public outcry over his financial support for an anti-gay marriage law in California.”
“Among the more than 1,300 changes, the sweeping improvements in Firefox 29 for desktops introduce a new Firefox Account to simplify its cross-browser Sync feature, a customizable graphical menu, and rounded tabs that emphasize the tab you’re in over the others,” Rosenblatt reports. “The visual changes take some cues from adjustments that Google has made to Chrome and Microsoft has made to Internet Explorer, such as the triple-line menu icon that now lives on the righthand side of the browser. Gone from Windows and Linux is the orange Firefox menu button.”
“The menu button has jumped completely from the left to the right side of the browser, and introduces a touch-friendly, icon-based, customizable menu to Firefox fans.,” Rosenblatt reports. “Firefox 29 positions Mozilla’s pieces on the board for a strong future. But the question remains: Will erstwhile fans will return to play the game?”
Read more in the full article here.
I quit Firefox years ago because it was a memory black hole. I tried it again when they said it would stop being a black hole and it was still that. Am I wrong?
Probably. It’s more likely a third party extension or something else on your computer is causing a memory than Firefox itself. Try a clean Firefox install if you’re actually interested.
Wow! An update for Firefox! That never happens.
Mozilla is capitalizing on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer faux pau. It should work.
faux pau? That’s an interesting faux pas!
Just pulling your leg!
Mozilla dropped 1st Amendment Rights, so I dropped Mozilla. Goodbye Firefox.
Please elaborate upon ‘dropped 1st Amendment Rights’. Do you perhaps mean 4th Amendment Rights?
Free speech- to call queers homos and homes queers.
So this is version 8375.1?
“[T]he sweeping improvements,” C|net calls them.
How much did Mozilla/Google pay C”|net?
I’ve been playing with recent versions of Chromium lately and want to KILL IT. The thing lies to me that I ever logged into Google using it, NAGGING ME to log in again. F-OFF.
Firefox ain’t so perfect, with crap page renders that FORCE me to dump its cache and try again, INFURIATING. But it doesn’t try to turn me into a zombie sucker to Google. So I’m keeping it.
Meanwhile, I’m making a huge deposit onto fracking Chromium, then flushing it. No crawling back home! Stay in the sewer and rot. Make friends with the rats as they nibble on your tabs.
Safari, for all the memory management hell of version 6 (stuck using it when I’m on my old MacBook) still WINS THE CONTEST! Hurray. And I have iCab in reserve for particularly strange websites and rainy days.
Safari is my preferred browser because it just “feels” better than the rest. Chrome is a close second, but I stopped using it since they moved to their own rendering engine. Now Firefox is finally catching up with a slick and beautiful user interface that feels worthy of being on my Mac.
I take this back. Much of my JavaScript no longer works properly in the new Firefox. There seems to be a difference in the order that things are loaded, and JavaScript dies on the first error that’s encountered. Yuck! This is not going to be a fun week.
Version 29: So far, so good. It does look better and the new features are nice additions. Not that I have anything against Safari, but the reason I prefer Firefox is for the third-party NoScript add-on. It gives me full control over JavaScript, which is really important to me.
Webkit (the Safari nightlies) is my default browser. But, since I so enjoy living on the edge, I also use the Firefox Nightlies, and Chrome Canary and Opera Next. It’s all mostly webkit based these days, anyway.
“Am I gonna have to teach you boys everything? It’s all done with ball bearings these days!”.
Been on the beta of this for a while, hopefully they’ve fixed it for release but I kept encountering a bug where if you didn’t quit it before shut down (i.e., you let everything quit by itself AFTER shutdown), it gets stuck in some sort of infinite loop and can’t even be force quit, meaning you have to force a shut down – never a good thing to do.
Just something to watch out for in case they’ve not fixed it, it certainly still happens on the newest beta…