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 However, by the end of 2016 Mozilla plans on removing support for the very outdated NPAPI plugins (except Flash) from Win32 and Win64 versions of Firefox.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…
Chrome
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…
The title of this post sounds quite like a marketing gimmick by Microsoft to promote their new Windows 10 browser. It could be for a TV commercial or online advertisement. Actually it is the messages Windows 10 users may see if a new ‘feature’ in a forthcoming Windows 10 update is left in place when they attempt to change their default browser to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Microsoft has already made it a pain for users to change their default browser by making them do it from within the Windows 10 settings instead of allowing from within the browser itself. But, now…
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 I agree this needs to be done as NPAPI plugin technology is over 20-years old from the Netscape days and is badly outdated…
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…
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…
I understand what Mozilla is doing with in the Win64 Firefox in regards to only allowing the Flash NPAPI plugin. It starts to make sense if you look at the browser ‘market’ as a whole. Microsoft’s new Edge browser (Windows 10) does not support SilverLight and Java and neither does/will Chrome (Google plans to phase out NPAPI plugins by end of 2015). All of these browsers including the Win64 Firefox do support Flash. Also, remember Flash is integrated (no plugin) into Chrome as Google bribed paid Adobe to build a custom version of Flash directly into Chrome. It is almost painful…
What do the upcoming Firefox 41 (Windows 64-Bit) and Chrome 45 have in common? Neither will support Microsoft Silverlight. However, Netflix will continue to work on Chrome 45, because Netflix on Chrome use HTML5, not Silverlight. The same can not be said for Firefox though, where Netflix still uses Silverlight. Up until Firefox 33 in October 2014, with the introduction of the Open H.264 Video Codec provided by Cisco Systems plugin Firefox did not support HTML5. But, Netflix (being a paid service) uses DRM which was not supported until Firefox 38 in May 2015 when Mozilla added the Primetime Content Decryption Module by Adobe…
One of the first things I wanted to check out was how Mozilla had worked around Microsoft disabling the default browser API. I downloaded and installed Firefox 40 Beta on the freshly upgraded Windows 10 machine and upon first run I was asked if I wanted to make Firefox my default browser (Chrome was currently default and then I had switched it to Edge later for testing purposes). Firefox detected it was NOT the default browser Once you click the Use Firefox as my default browser button the Windows 10 Settings > System > Default Apps screen opens which is a…
“Pale Moon 25.6 ships with anti-fingerprinting option“We talked about a fingerprinting technique using Canvas before and explained how companies make use of the feature supported by all modern web browsers to track users across the Internet.“We also told you how to block Canvas fingerprinting in Firefox and Chrome. … “ Source: gHacks Tech News Pale Moon 25.6 ships with anti-fingerprinting option