updates Meet the browser: Firefox Next

[+Zlip792 MVC]

- NIGHTLY is now 34.
- Firefox for Android dropped code relevant to Android 2.2.
- Working on Service Workers
- MicroData API is finally dropped from W3C, so I think Firefox might remove it.
- Work on EME and OpenH264 is also in full momentum.
- Recent work on JS Strings in Firefox JS Engine - https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2014/07/21/slimmer-and-faster-javascript-strings-in-firefox/ 
 
Few landings:
 
Enhanced Tiles - New Tab Page
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1036288
 
Firefox Translation
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1027024
 
[MemShrink] Avoid some allocations - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1039162
Various cleanups in Ion and Odin Monkey codes - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1040785
[LANDED & BACKED OUT] Enable OMTC on Linux with Basic Compositor - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=994541
[bACKED OUT] Enable password sync with FxA and master password - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1013064
Scroll issue through thumb drag on profile manage (with more than 5 profiles) - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1041207
getBoundingClientRect on range with scaled (transformed) element returns wrong offset - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=863618
[REGRESSION] Opacity does not work with box-shadow, unless the background-color set - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1003425
OdinMonkey: add async stack-walking support - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1027885
Enabled GC: Exact Stack Rooting everywhere (B2G as well) - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=753203
Implement support for font-variant-position fallback behavior - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1024804
Improving USS (Unique Set Size) Gecko Profiler performance on Linux - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1035396
Redraw issue on tab switching on full page zoomed in - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1041200
[MEMSHRINK] JS array elements clownshoes [COULD BE BACKED OUT] - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1039965
[bACKEDOUT] oes_texture_float test failures fix - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1041830
TextureClient cleanup - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1040028
Remove Latin1 strings flag - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1041469
Nightly 33.0a1 crashes on ANGLE_instanced_arrays WebGL demo - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1041785

Layout performance improvement on nested flexboxes (reflow fix) - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=946167

[LANDED & BACKEDOUT] OMTC flashes in Addon Manager on "Search" text - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1015718
 
Image decoding (and handling more scaled images) [API refactoring] - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1031576 ; https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1034209
 
Code cleaups - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1037100 ; https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1037103 ; https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1037686
 
Add back "min-width:auto" / "min-height:auto" for flex items - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=984711 ; https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1037177 ; https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1015474

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

So we have Microformats, Microdata, RDFa and RDFa Lite. Surely one of them will catch on.

[+M2Ys4U Subscriber¹]

So we have Microformats, Microdata, RDFa and RDFa Lite. Surely one of them will catch on.

 

Don't forget JSON-LD!

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

I read about JSON-LD then instantly purged it from my memory, I wonder why :laugh:

I'm not sure why I find RDFa so funny, might be because of the early days where the only way to embed it into HTML involved wrapping it in a comment block, making it completely opaque to browsers. RDFa Lite looks much better though (It's a superset of Microdata and a subset of full RDFa)

[+Zlip792 MVC]

New Tab Page - On New Profile so you might not be able to see what tiles look like for you. Although for me on regular profile they look really ugly because of reddish brown text color.

 

[bawz]

In-content prefs should be nightly-only until ready https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1042300

[BooBerry]

In-content prefs should be nightly-only until ready https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1042300

Unified Complete coming to Firefox 34

[BooBerry]

TBPL is going to be replaced with something called "Treeherder".

 

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/

[+Zlip792 MVC]

Dark Color Text on New Tab Page now and I must say now it looks much better:

 

[BooBerry]

Firefox users don't know is that it is possible to configure the browser so that all video resolutions are displayed on YouTube when users connect to the site.

 

1. Load about:config in the browser's address bar and hit enter.
2. Confirm that you are careful when the prompt is displayed.
3. Search for media.mediasource.enabled. The preference is set to false by default.
4. Double-click the preference name to set it to true and enable it.
5. You may need to restart the browser before the change takes effect.

 

Note: If you have Adobe Flash installed, you may need to switch to YouTube's HTML5 player. To do so, load https://www.youtube.com/html5 and click on the "Request the HMTL5 player" button.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

That gets you WebM playback, but it also doesn't work due to the quality adaption being broken (Or more precisely, Firefox breaks it due to discarding bits of the stream when it should actually be playing them, causing playback to stall)

If you enable MSE and disable auto quality it might work then (And most likely cause CPU usage to skyrocket and stop Firefox from exiting properly due to bugs).

Edit: Also, support for H.264 and AAC playback landed in the latest nightly, not ready for the prime time yet (H.264 playback instantly crashes for me, and AAC works but requires the new MP4 demuxer which also has issues and likes to break) Basically while they're working on making this all work nicely, and for the most part it does work, they're also uncovering new issues on an almost daily basis, so it's still not at a state where they can enable it for testing.

[Boo Berry]

Also keep in mind when using that setting and YouTube that H.264 won't work on OS X right now, but should on Windows and Linux.

[BooBerry]

Landed

 

New click-to-play state should influence how plugins are sorted in the Add-ons Manager UI


Investigate approach for highlighting search terms in the address bar

[BooBerry]

[BooBerry]

[rsnn]

 

lol that mockup, OSX text rendering in Windows :P

[BooBerry]

[Max Norris]

lol that mockup, OSX text rendering in Windows :p

You can change your font rendering engine in Windows to something else.. my day to day applications render pretty much exactly like that.

[BooBerry]

http://blog.bitops.com/blog/2014/07/31/css-and-vr-integration/

[Karl-Johan]

You can change your font rendering engine in Windows to something else.. my day to day applications render pretty much exactly like that.

You wanna share your settings maybe?

[Max Norris]

You wanna share your settings maybe?

Well you can go two routes. You can either stick with Windows built in, leave DirectWrite enabled (which is stuck with Windows font rendering regardless), and install something like Anti-Aliasing Tuner, it's on the Firefox extension site, fiddle with the settings until you get it where you like it.  All in all the results are decent once you play with it a bit.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/anti-aliasing-tuner/

 

Or, you can replace it entirely with something else (MacType, GDI++, etc etc), disable DirectWrite and go for broke. I went with the latter (MacType as a service) as it works with near any Windows desktop application, not just the browser. Lots of presets or you can fiddle with the numbers.

 

For example, Firefox on Windows 7, although I usually use Chrome now:

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

MacType/GDI++ are going to be slower than DirectWrite and give you lower quality output (GDI style glyph positioning), what you really want is to keep using DirectWrite but disable hinting, which can't be done at the moment unfortunately.

[BooBerry]

Digging into Firefox update sizes

[Max Norris]

MacType/GDI++ are going to be slower than DirectWrite and give you lower quality output (GDI style glyph positioning), what you really want is to keep using DirectWrite but disable hinting, which can't be done at the moment unfortunately.

Not denying it but never really noticed any performance hits myself although I know there's no font acceleration, "feels" identical and yet looks 1000% better, at least on this particular setup, probably wouldn't say the same on a lower-end setup.  Of course there's mileage, variance and all that, I just prefer it as it covers (almost) all programs running.  And yea, there's a bunch of fiddling you can do with Firefox's antialiasing but no settings for hinting though.. can definitely improve the out-of-the-box settings though, but again personal preference... I know some people who prefer the Windows renderer but *shrug*.  

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

Windows has like 4 different font renderers built in, so what most people refer to is GDI (Which is really awful in nearly every regard), DirectWrite is much closer to what OS X and FreeType does (Actually exceeds it in most cases), only difference is that OS X ignores hinting, while DirectWrite doesn't (And Freetype can do both) You also have problem that a lot of Windows fonts are actually designed for how GDI renders, so they look odd on other renderers.

It's a rather interesting (yet annoying) subject, it really boils down to 2 things the renderers do differently, sub-pixel positioning and hinting. Freetype is the most flexible as it can do pretty much whatever the host app wants (Which is a problem, as barely any of them implement sub-pixel positioning) and can do anything from no hinting (What OS X does) to full blown hinting like GDI does or even hint the font itself while rendering. DirectWrite is kind of a middle of the road renderer, it does really good sub-pixel positioning (Something like 1/48th of a pixel), but also does partial hinting (It only hints in one direction, because you can't have hinting and sub-pixel positioning) and can even operate without hinting like OS X/Freetype (While GDI would render unhinted characters awfully)

And a rather annoying side effect, is that applications written to use one API depend on how that API renders, so something like MacType hooking GDI rendering need to match how GDI renders characters, it can't extend outside the area GDI would touch as it would give you rendering issues (That was actually a huge problem with the initial releases of GDI++, text would either be bunched up to match GDI, or overflow the bounds and lead to invalidation problems)