August 2015

No Win64 Firefox Until Firefox 42?

The plans to ‘officially’ release a Win64 release of Firefox have now been pushed back to Firefox 42 (November 2015). As you may recall it was suppose to be Firefox 40 (August 2015) then was pushed to Firefox 41 (September 2015). The reason for the delay as described in Bug 1185532 has to do with the sandboxing feature for the 64-Bit Flash not working correctly.

Read More

Firefox 40.0.3 Released

Mozilla release an emergency update for the Firefox 40 branch on Thursday, August 27th with Firefox 40.0.3 release. This release addressed the following issues: Disable the asynchronous plugin initialization (1198590) Fix a segmentation fault in the GStreamer support (GNU/Linux) (1145230) Fix a startup crash when using DisplayLink (Windows Only) (1195844) Fix a regression with some Japanese fonts used in the <input> field (1194055) On some sites, the selection in a select combox box using the mouse could be broken (1194733) Some search partner codes were missing (1195683) Various security fixes   User should be prompted to update or can do…

Read More

Mozilla Ruining Firefox?

I’m using Pale Moon but not because standard FF was crashing (I don’t remember the last time it did), I just hated the new UI. “A week ago, Mozilla shed some light on its future, laying out a plan on how the browser is going to dramatically change in the upcoming months. While most of us understood “Chrome extensions are coming to Firefox,” it is not as simple as we all thought.“… The Mozilla dev team has a pretty solid plan on how they can change the browser “always crashing” image, and even if we don’t like it, this includes…

Read More

How to Limit Windows 10 Forced Updates

Note: I use the word ‘limit’ in lieu of ‘stop’ because Windows 10 Home users can not stop Security Updates, which there is really no reason as for the most part Security Updates have been trouble free. There are three different methods you can try, to stop Windows 10 from automatically installing updates (new drivers and software features). These updates have been particularly troublesome for ‘fast ring’ users and the patches to fix these broken updates have caused endless crashing loops. The method which use choose to use will depend if you are a Home, Pro or Enterprise user as well as the type…

Read More

Dealing with WordPress White Screen of Death

A White Screen of Death in WordPress occurs when PHP has crashed. Usually this is caused by malformed coding which causes the interpreter to stop processing the page. Most common reasons include installing incompatible plugins or themes. Remember many years ago troubleshooting a White Screen for someone and determined that they had installed a Joomla theme in WordPress. While they both used the same file structure there are vast differences between WordPress and Joomla.  WordPress has made several enhancements over the last couple years that greatly reduce the likelihood of there being a White Screen of Death such as performing…

Read More

Experimental Private Browsing now in Firefox Beta

As mentioned in the Three Pillars of Firefox from July 2015. The Uniquely Firefox Pillar hinted towards an improved private browsing mode. In the past Private Browsing would not show up in your history, or keep cookies and temporary files. So, now Mozilla has expanded on what happens in a private browsing session and has rolled this out in the current Firefox 40 Beta. Our hypothesis is that when you open a Private Browsing window in Firefox you’re sending a signal that you want more control over your privacy than current private browsing experiences actually provide. The experimental Private Browsing enhancements ready…

Read More

Mozilla to Depreciate add-ons using XUL, XPCOM, or XBL

Back in July Mozilla’s Dave Camp had talked about in his email how to get Firefox away from being dependent on XBL and XUL. At that time, many on mozillaZine were concerned that this could have dire consequences on the future of Firefox as trying to move away from a development system that has been used for the past decade would not be easy. If anything, it would require a complete rewrite/redesign of the desktop version of Firefox. Many had hoped this would be like a campaign promise and people would forget about it. Unfortunately, Mozilla has lived up their…

Read More

Coming This Weekend…

Been busy adapting to a new work schedule (and soon will be adding school into the mix), so posting is somewhat limited to the weekends. There are some Firefox related news items that have come out during the week which I will be posting over the weekend. Some of these have to do with the ‘announcements‘ that were made this past summer during Mozilla’s annual retreat in Whistler, BC. Including New Experimental Private Browsing and depreciation of XBL/XUL/XPCOM based addons. The latter could have a huge negative impact on the desktop based Firefox browser and also seems to support Mozilla’s (unofficial) plan to make…

Read More

Extension Signing in Thunderbird?

Apparently someone thought it would be a good idea to introduce extension signing into Mozilla Thunderbird. At the end of May 2015 Magnus Melin filed Bug 1168571: consider force signing add-ons requirements on in beta/release for thunderbird (too). So Mozilla is going to shoot themselves in the other foot if they are stupid enough to do this. A couple interesting points against this: Unlike Firefox, Thunderbird does not have issues with rogue add-ons Thunderbird dropped the ESR Branch a while back which would likely have to be reintroduced in order to support proprietary enterprise add-ons that shouldn’t be hosted on AMO. It…

Read More

Enable 1080p YouTube Support in Firefox 40 for Linux

“You can check if your browser supports all the codecs for YouTube by checking the YouTube HTML5 Video Player website, which list everything supported on your PC. If you have a Linux systems and Firefox 40, it’s likely that some of those codecs will have a red sign, meaning that they are not enabled. All you have to do is open about:config and make the following changes. Please make sure that you don’t change anything else. …” Source: Softpedia

Read More