Friday, April 17, 2020

TenFourFox FPR22b1 available

TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 22 beta 1 is now available (downloads, hashes, release notes). I have abandoned trying to write that AltiVec GCM routine because it really needs 64-bit elements, something that 32-bit AltiVec obviously doesn't have, and the 32-bit version I attempted to throw together ended up being not much faster (if at all) than a scalar approach. Since this seemed like a lot of risk for no gain, I just threw in the towel. Instead, this release has a syntactic update to JavaScript and also improves the performance of H.264 streams using the MP4 Enabler, especially on multiprocessor systems. This now by default uses the lower "fast" quality mode of ffmpeg and because it is not spec-compliant may cause odd behaviour on a few videos. If you notice this, advise which URL, and then set tenfourfox.mp4.high_quality to true (you may need to add this preference). TenFourFox FPR22 final will come out parallel with Firefox 76/68.8 on or around May 5.

Saturday, April 4, 2020

TenFourFox FPR21 available

TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 21 final is now available for testing (downloads, hashes, release notes). Since the beta looks like it's working well, this release simply completes the upgrade with updates to the ATSUI font blacklist and all outstanding security patches, including backported fixes from the recent Mozilla security chemspill for CVE-2020-6819 and CVE-2020-6820. Note that while we are indeed vulnerable to those security issues and they are fixed in FPR21, they would require a PowerPC-specific attack to be successful. Assuming no issues, this will go live Monday evening Pacific time as usual.

In addition, language pack users should note that new langpacks are available for FPR21, thanks to Chris T's hard work as always. These updated langpacks have additional strings related to TLS 1.3 plus other sundry fixes; simply run the installer as in prior updates. They will go live on Monday too.