Seems like every couple months people start crying ‘the sky is falling’ with Firefox and Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) plugins. Earlier this week there was a flurry of activity with Bug 1165981. Again people seem to think that Firefox is not going support NPAPI plugins anymore on Windows since the 64-Bit (Win64) versions does not (except for Flash). As a reminder the removal of NPAPI support only applies to the Win64 version of Firefox. The 32-bit Windows version still supports all the NPAPI plugins including Java and Silverlight. However, Mozilla does plan on discontinuing support in the future with the Firefox 32-bit…
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As we reported earlier, on December 17th NetFlix has started offering HTML5 videos for Firefox users. While this not a big deal for the Win32 users as they could still use Silverlight with Firefox, this is not the case for the Firefox Win64 users. The newly released Win64 Firefox browser does not support NPAPI plugins (except Flash). Note: Silverlight is planned on being supported with the upcoming Win64 version of Firefox 44. However, by the end of 2016 Mozilla plans on removing support for the very outdated NPAPI plugins (except Flash) from Win32 and Win64 versions of Firefox. Google Chrome ended support earlier this…
Mozilla released the next major update for Firefox on December 15th with Firefox 43. New features in this release included: Private Browsing with Tracking Protection offers choice of blocking additional trackers Improved API support for m4v video playback Firefox 64-bit for Windows is now available via the Firefox download page Users can choose search suggestions from the Awesome Bar On-screen keyboard displayed on selecting input field on devices running Windows 8 or greater Firefox Health Report has switched to use the same data collection mechanism as telemetry There were some fixes and other items in this release which can be…
…starting with Firefox 42 but you need to go to the Mozilla FTP site in order to download it. Once you click the link, find the most current version of Firefox and click that link, then click on the win64 link. Choose your localized (language) build then download the .exe setup file. At sometime in the future, the Win64 build will be offered directly from the Firefox downloads page. Per Bug 1181014, 32-bit Windows users who are running 64-Bit version of Windows will be offered an updated to the 64-bit version. This likely won’t happen until sometime next year after some…
At least for a while as Mozilla still plans on deprecating Silverlight support sometime in the future (much as Google and Microsoft already have). Bug 1225293 which was made public today indicates Mozilla’s short term plans to support Silverlight in the Win64 builds. When exactly Silverlight will return to the Firefox 64-Bit builds is not exactly known. It could (but not likely) be with Firefox 43 already in Beta and due out December 15th, 2015 or (more likely) Firefox 44 still in Developer’s Edition (Aurora) and due out in late January 2016 or Firefox 45 currently in Nightly builds and due out…
Following in the footsteps of Google and Microsoft, Mozilla plans to eliminate support for the ancient NPAPI plugins (with the exception of heavily sandboxed version of Flash) in the next year. This would include the 32-bit versions of Firefox. There has been a lot of heated discussions in the past few months in regards to Mozilla removing the support of NPAPI plugins (mainly Silverlight and Java) from the upcoming (Firefox 43?) Windows 64-bit (Win64) version of Firefox. I agree this needs to be done as NPAPI plugin technology is over 20-years old from the Netscape days and is badly outdated…
Mozilla release the next update to Firefox on Tuesday, September 22nd with Firefox 41.0. This release included many fixes, updates and changes which can be reviewed in the release notes. Also note: Extension Signing Validation can still be disabled in this version by changing xpinstall.signatures.required to False in about:config. There is not an official Windows 64-bit (Win64) version of Firefox 41, this is currently planned for Firefox 42. User should be prompted to update or can do so manually via Help > About Firefox or download and install the latest version via getfirefox.com. The next planned release is Firefox 42 on November 3rd….
People are still complaining about how Mozilla is removing support for NPAPI plugins (Silverlight and Java specifically) in the upcoming Windows 64-Bit release of Firefox (now tentatively scheduled for Firefox 42 in November) even though the move is not that unusual given the trend to move away from NPAPI plugins by other browsers. Microsoft’s Edge Browser (Windows 10 only) does not support Active X or any of the NPAPI plugins (Flash is integrated not a plugin). On Tuesday, September 1st Google released Chrome 45 which ended the browser’s support of NPAPI plugins as well. I found this out when I…
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.
Mozilla is moving right along with getting Firefox 41 ready to ship for the September 22nd release. Having had a chance to play with the current Beta version of Firefox 41, here are THREE major changes users should be aware of to avoid headaches upon updating/downloading: New ‘New Tab’ behavior. Gone are the days users could set their preference as to what comes up when they open a new tab via the browser.newtab.url preference in about:config. Nope, that was being ‘exploited’ so Mozilla removed this functionality that has been in Firefox since Firefox 13 (June 2012). There is a simple solution, Custom New…