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Firefox 62.0 Released

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Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#161

Post by buovjaga »

polkadotted wrote: post #109
bovine3dom wrote: post #56

Coinciding with this release, Firefox 52 ESR is no longer supported, so no supported versions of Firefox support the legacy extensions. I'm mentioning this here just so I can tell Vimperator / Pentadactyl / VimFx users that there are loads of options you can replace your old extensions with, some of which are... okay. Links follow in increasing order of user-friendliness: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl [^] ht…

Thank you for your work. I'm currently a tridactyl user. However I'd like to point out that none of these replacements can currently compete with the previous extensions in term of usability. Simply put, you cannot count on the keyboard shortcuts to work consistently throughout Firefox. They do not work in built-in pages (such as errors). They do not work when inside an input field in GTK. There's no way to consisten…

Relevant WebExtensions metabug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061 "Better keyboard shortcut support"

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#162

Post by SllX »

wongarsu wrote: post #61
SllX wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another satisfied user, but it comes with the caveat that my habits let me use it. Firefox really knows how to make memory leak and if I weren’t the type to aggressively close windows/tabs I don’t need and not keep the browser going 24/7 I would probably end up switching to Safari as my default.

I currently have 76 tabs open and last closed Firefox approximately 2 days ago. Firefox sits at about 5GB RAM usage and 3% CPU, which I find very acceptable. In my experience Firefox handles a large amount of tabs very well, while Chrome tends to eat a lot more RAM in the same situation (while doing its best to hide that fact). On the other hand there are some websites that will easily demand a gigabyte of RAM on the…

I've been using Firefox since 1.5, I've accepted memory leaks as a fact of life.

For comparison, I currently have two browser windows open and zero tabs. One is this comment box, the other is a GitHub page. Firefox is using a grand total of 3GB RAM, about 700MB of which is for the WebExtensions process so figure about 2.3GB for a grand total of two pages.

This is actually an improvement on the way things used to be, but if I quit the browser now (as I probably will soon regardless), these same two pages would take up only about 200MB, which is still a lot for what it is displaying and running, and the WebExtensions process would reset to about 200-300MB. I have Waterfox running in the background too, basically Firefox 56, which I use for a single website with exactly one extension taking up over a gig by itself with a single page open.

I'm not complaining, again, it's a fact of life that I've accepted and it doesn't hurt me any, but if I changed my habits I have doubts about how much I would actually use Firefox. Maybe I still would after considering my other options, but the web isn't as interesting as it used to be and I have other means of getting what I want off it now so I don't really require a web browser I can throw a million tabs at since tabs themselves are pretty harmful.

That said, if there are browsers that do a better job nowadays, and I stopped looking a long time ago, I'm not convinced they would do much better than Firefox currently does.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#163

Post by tomc1985 »

phakding wrote: post #23

With all these posters complaining, am I the only one who is totally satisfied with Firefox? I never had many issues using firefox. I did use Chrome briefly, but came back to firefox. If it matters, I mostly use firefox on Debian Linux and am also not a web developer.

It's a little hard to believe a Firefox power user over any real length of time would be totally satisfied with it; they've been ripping out much-loved features right and left and stuffing it with mandatory sponsored add-ons.

Still, it doesn't force report megabytes worth of data per day to the mothership, unlike Chrome...

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#164

Post by ploxiln »

jaas wrote: post #77
nathcd wrote: post #38

> Removed the description field for bookmarks. Users who have stored descriptions using the field may wish to export these descriptions as html or json files, as they will be removed in a future release. Does anyone know if there's an explanation for this somewhere? Between removing live bookmarks (a simple feed reader) and this, it seems like they're paring down user-facing features. I don't think these are the feat…

The Firefox bookmarking implementation is unnecessarily complicated and I'm guessing very few features are actually used. It's a maintenance burden, I'm not surprised they want to slim it down. To give you an example of a maintenance burden in the bookmarking system, the bookmarking system uses a bunch of synchronous APIs. Mozilla is trying to cut down or eliminate use of those APIs, to reduce UI hangs among other re…

It is true that some features can be maintenance burdens for software projects.

But bookmark descriptions? Really? That's ridiculous. WebGL, or WebVR, or Pocket, maybe, those could be a burden. But BOOKMARK DESCRIPTIONS?

Maybe the existing bookmarking system is crap and you need to re-implement it. You can put descriptions in the new implementation, in a few minutes - it's just another optional text field/property. Unless the goal is just to remove all bookmarking whatsoever. And instead of being honest about that, you're passive-aggressively trying to get people to stop using them first, by crippling them in various ways for obviously bogus reasons.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#165

Post by [deleted] »

fasafasfsf wrote: post #82
fasafsafsf wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have disabled all the Pocket stuff on my Firefox so I didn't see this, but it does not surprise me (even though it disappoints me) that the Mozilla Corporation is using the Firefox home page to push left-wing news.

What's the left-wing news that they are posting?

[deleted]

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#166

Post by exodust »

If the status bar is still missing, I'm not interested in Firefox 62. They should never have taken that option away in their pathetic "make it look like Chrome" weakness of product strategy.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#167

Post by dao- »

snaky wrote: post #156
dao- wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how exactly the description field for bookmarks was a relevant feature for a significant share of power users?

> a significant share I don't know what is 'a significant share' when we are talking about power users. Not to say a significant share of power users disabled telemetry completely so we can't say anything about their share using this feature.

> I don't know what is 'a significant share' when we are talking about power users.

It basically means: worth tailoring to, given precious UI space and limited developer resources. Of course there's no fixed share that "worth tailoring to" can be translated to universally. It's a judgement call.

Do you think 50% of power users used this feature? How about 10%? 5%? 1%?

I doubt this one even met the 1% bar. Would you agree that it's reasonable if not necessary to draw a line somewhere?

> Not to say a significant share of power users disabled telemetry completely so we can't say anything about their share using this feature.

What we can at the very least do is reason about features and why and how people would use them, and we can collect anecdotal evidence.

I consider myself a power user. I have never used this feature in more than a decade, and have a hard time imagining what important thing people would do with it.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#168

Post by snaky »

tomc1985 wrote: post #160
snaky wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating XUL, really? You cannot create an restricted API for everything, the very point of extensions, plugins, addons is community is always bigger than your developers team, and much, much more diverse. The 'long tail' effect is what extensions community is about, not '90 per cent of users'. 90 per cent of users might need just a couple of the same extensions, the other 10 per cent of users need a thousand of diff…

Well, we had XUL (which was awesome), now it's gone

I need to say at least one relatively good thing about Firefox - it has extensions on Android. I don't know for how long but still.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#169

Post by fencepost »

bratao wrote: post #13

I'm a die-hard Firefox fan. While all my colleagues develop in Chrome, I'm the weird one who uses Firefox and always catches some problem in rendering when testing. But recently I installed an 4K monitor. I use the Latest Windows 10 and have an GTX 1050 graphic card. The Firefox on this resolution is VERY slow. I have no problem in Edge or Chrome. Please, if any dev is around, check this use case.

Are you running any new software packages related to the monitor, e.g. LG's software for screen rearrangement and split screen use? I didn't dig into the actual cause and what was being hooked, but I was seeing enormous lag with no apparent cause when it was running.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#170

Post by qbrass »

tomc1985 wrote: post #163
phakding wrote: post #23

With all these posters complaining, am I the only one who is totally satisfied with Firefox? I never had many issues using firefox. I did use Chrome briefly, but came back to firefox. If it matters, I mostly use firefox on Debian Linux and am also not a web developer.

It's a little hard to believe a Firefox power user over any real length of time would be totally satisfied with it; they've been ripping out much-loved features right and left and stuffing it with mandatory sponsored add-ons. Still, it doesn't force report megabytes worth of data per day to the mothership, unlike Chrome...

As much as I don't like Firefox with each new release, the alternatives are worse. So I've settled for FF until it falls far enough to lose the title of "least worst browser".

But I've quit suggesting it to others. They can use Chrome all they want.

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