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Firefox 62.0 Released

mozilla.org

221–230 of 275 posts

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#221

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.

you're not alone. I'm quite happy with Firefox, and it's my #2 browser on my Mac (I use Safari first) and my #1 browser on Windows and Linux.

The only reason that I have Chrome installed is for the occasional website that absolutely requires something in Flash, and that's usually some online training thing.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#222
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Two things at play here: First, browser engines intentionally hold onto memory to re-use (they are allocating large-ish chunks at a time) until there is a Memory pressure Event. It‘s not leaked memory. Second, it sounds like you have quite a few addons running that each hold quite a bit of data in memory (like ad blockers). Try safe mode and see if behavior changes (though ads may now swallow quite a bit of memory no…

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Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#223
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Funny, I have around 200 tabs open and FF is using around 2.5GB. Thats with close to a dozen add-ons. Chrome would’ve choked and died long before reaching 100 tabs. Memory-wise, I'm quite happy with FF now. Now they just need to make their session API less garbage.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#224
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop trying to do things in your browser that should be their own independent programs.

Well they are a user and not the programmer so they may not have that option.

I'm also a user and not a programmer. There are things I use a browser for, and things I use proper programs for. There is some overlap, in the space of email, video watching (I'm entirely too lazy to stream every video I watch through VLC), and to a small degree gaming (i.e. Flash). There are a great many things I do not do because I hold to my beliefs. Overall, I don't feel I lose anything. If anything, I gain peace of mind that my browser doesn't have more data leaking out to servers than I'm willing to accommodate.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#225
post #21

Not related to this particular release, but I wish Mozilla implemented tree-style tabs as core feature (or at least provided core API). The current "Tree style tab" plugin in indispensable for me, but has to be a hack, however exquisite, especially around tab context menus.

This is the primary reason why I'm able to use FF. Tree style tabs make a huge quality of life difference

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#226
post #77
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…

That was really dumb "to reduce UI hangs " Instead of removing the ability for fetching site descriptions(that no one care about, and probably the core reason of "UI hangs" ), they remove the entire field(that is actually a useful feature) that could be used to add site info by the user.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#227
There is no non hacky way to make chrome not close window when you close the last tab. That's enough for me to drop it as my main browser. That's like literally the only thing I look for in a browser

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#228
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The community still has XUL thanks to Pale Moon.

Not really. I stuck to Pale Moon for a while, but it gets untenable: Stuck with dead extensions, or ancient versions of live ones. Left behind with no support for essentials like grid-view display, which the Pale Moon maintainer seems to consider a kind of personal affront. And knowing with close to absolute certainty that you are setting yourself up with a variety of gaping, unpatched security holes.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

May be it's because I come from a different culture, I am not so entitled. Firefox is free, as in speech and beer. It also doesn't phone home with your private data as a payload. That Is good enough for me to be happy. If something doesn't work for me, I find a workaround or a plug-in and am happy again. If there's something needs to be fixed, I write bug reports. So it might seem to you that no power user could poss…

So in your culture one is supposed to be grateful for free things unquestioningly? Why does culture need to be brought into this? If, one day, churches started handing out rat poison to the hungry instead of food; are the hungry entitled to happily eat that rat poison because it is free?

The problem is that Firefox makes these promises and builds a platform (in this case, old-school XUL-powered extensions), builds a profitable user-base from said platform, and then yanks features at a whim. It is almost like a classic bait-and-switch but played in slow motion. In the case of Firefox there simply aren't suitable replacements available for many add-ons because the APIs and underlying features they relied on are being pulled. And they are being pulled because of managerial decisions, made to metrics that only highlight majority use-cases, in the name of "saving programmer bandwidth". As a result, a popular, powerful, useful program more and becomes more like a disposable appliance and less like an extension of the mind.

"Who cares about nice ideals like mind extensions blah blah blah" you think? Well, a lot of users do (especially us old nerds), many of us who have stuck by Mozilla and will willingly dance to their beat in exchange for the company's historical sense of economy in its asks and respect for its userbase.

If Mozilla were making Firefox out of the kindness of their hearts, maybe you would have an argument. But Mozilla is a million-dollar business and much of what has become of their flagship browser lately is a result of business decisions to bring in more money, so I have a hard time understanding how legitimate user complaints could be considered "entitled".

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#230
post #194
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

> It basically means: worth tailoring to, given precious UI space and limited developer resources. How much precious developer time is required maintain a user-facing text field on an entity with only a handful of other fields? Certainly not enough to properly justify a feature regression with user-data loss. > Do you think 50% of power users used this feature? How about 10%? 5%? 1%? IMHO, you're thinking about power…

How is that supposed to be sustainable?
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