Mozilla Hacks

Aurora 17 it out, bringing better security and support for new standards

By Jean-Yves Perrier

Posted on August 31, 2012 in Featured Article, Firefox, and Firefox Aurora

About Jean-Yves Perrier

Jean-Yves is a program manager in the Developer Outreach team at Mozilla. Previous he was an MDN Technical Writer specialized in Web platform technologies (HTML, CSS, APIs), and for several years the MDN Content Lead.

More articles by Jean-Yves Perrier…

23 comments

  1. Antonio

    In the features list I don’t see any implementations of the CSS Flexible Box Layout module. When will Firefox begin to implement this spec?

    September 1st, 2012 at 02:46

    1. Jean-Yves Perrier

      The latest version of the specification is in progress of being implemented. The work is going well but is not yet finished. So it is “very soon”.

      September 1st, 2012 at 15:27

      1. with enthusiasm

        hooray

        September 7th, 2012 at 12:11

    2. Marc Diethelm

      Daniel Holbert has been working on implementing the new spec for quite a long time now. It’s incredibly complex, IMO.

      You can follow the progress here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666041

      September 2nd, 2012 at 01:54

    3. Antonio

      @Jean-Ives @Marc Thank you for the info…

      September 3rd, 2012 at 08:18

  2. Flaki

    Was the “sites-preventing-users-leaving-with-popups” that big of an issue that it needed such a direct approach of prohibiting popups alltogether on those events?
    Surely it had more than enough useful use cases (facebook using it to confirm leaving a messaging page when unsaved/unsent data was lost) for this to be useful (and at this point I can’t say how else that scenario be implemented).
    I’m just trying to understand the reasoning behind blocking those dialogs.

    September 1st, 2012 at 04:37

    1. Jean-Yves Perrier

      Have you really tried Facebook with Nightly or Aurora?

      September 1st, 2012 at 15:30

  3. SH

    Thanks for the great Aurora-Release!

    “Users will also see improvements when copying images to other programs. Until now, copying from the content area to a program like Photoshop caused transparency information to be lost. This is no longer the case!”

    Unfortunately I can not confirm. It is still the case.. :-(
    Tested with Aurora 17 and Nightly 18, pasted the images into Adobe Photoshop, transparency is lost, there is a black background…

    September 1st, 2012 at 07:53

    1. Jean-Yves Perrier

      Can you fill a bug with this info (with a link to the image, too)?

      September 1st, 2012 at 15:28

      1. SH

        yep: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=787741

        September 1st, 2012 at 17:09

        1. Jean-Yves Perrier

          Thank you very much!

          September 2nd, 2012 at 00:01

  4. fbender

    I see the new download panel but no text mentioning it. I’m confused and hopeful. Can somebody shed some light on this? :)

    (Sidenote: I couldn’t use my desired email address as it contains a plus ‘+’ sign in the username, which is a valid character in the username. Please correct this. I use it for a clever feature of GMail …)

    September 4th, 2012 at 01:44

    1. Jean-Yves Perrier

      The new download panel landed a few releases earlier but is still behind a configuration key. It is likely that you have this key set.

      September 4th, 2012 at 01:46

      1. fbender

        Is was actually talking about the blog post: There is a picture showing the download panel.

        But it’s good to know it has already landed … oh well, still a lot to do according to the bug …

        September 5th, 2012 at 14:54

        1. Jean-Yves Perrier

          Oh yes, you’re right. I did the image capture where the changes where very visible and completely forgot it is not on by default :-)

          September 6th, 2012 at 01:21

  5. Radu

    Keep working on memory and speed please… put ‘light windows’ at the end of the to do agenda…

    September 5th, 2012 at 11:37

    1. Jean-Yves Perrier

      Both the Snappy and MemShrink projects are on-going project. There are improvement with each release, though not necessary for everybody, or not necessary big.

      You can follow Taras’ blog for progress on reactivity: http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/category/snappy/
      and Nicholas’ blog for progress on memory management: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/

      But it is like security, it is a process, not a feature.

      September 6th, 2012 at 02:06

  6. Marco

    Async CSS animations are still experimental and preffed-off (and, I think, they aren’t supported on Windows yet).

    September 5th, 2012 at 14:58

    1. Jean-Yves Perrier

      I think it needs to have Off-main thread compositing which is experimental and not available on Windows. But yes, there are plenty of under-the-hood work to give animation/transitions/compositing a performance boost. That’s an ongoing work.

      September 6th, 2012 at 01:26

      1. Marco Castelluccio

        Yes, I guess async CSS animations are going to be a great performance boost (even for the browser UI).

        September 6th, 2012 at 17:44

        1. Jean-Yves Perrier

          More than a raw performance boost, it will lower the work needed to be done by the UI thread. That means that the interface will feel more reactive (snappy).

          It is a step of a long project, named Snappy, that aim at removing all long action from the main thread (minimal locking, minimal disk access, minimal network access, minimal big tasks like animation); this allows the interface to be much more responsive.

          This is a major architectural change that is on-going since more than one year!

          September 6th, 2012 at 23:36

  7. thinsoldier

    https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/-moz-image-rect

    Any chance of -moz-image-rect someday becoming a part of standard CSS?

    September 7th, 2012 at 12:30

  8. Juan Gutiérrez

    This article was not pushed to RSS feed, can’t assure that this is happening on other articles but you should check.

    October 9th, 2012 at 21:26

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