You can trigger the Preview functionality by holding the Shift key while hovering over a URL.
This feels much snappier - and therefore more useful.
Additional settings can be found and adjusted via about:config.
What's New with Firefox 142
51–60 of 139 posts
Re: What's New with Firefox 142
#52Lately, I’ve experienced memory leaks in Firefox that I’m too amateur to diagnose, that leads to Firefox eating 8gb of memory in some web renderer process. So when I excitedly check the changelog hoping for a summary of possible changes, I’m disappointed that there isn’t a verbose changelog for advanced users. I’m sure I could search bugzilla, but it makes me sad that the only “important” things are the headlining fe…
about:memory will let you generate a report that tells you what the memory is being used for.
Re: What's New with Firefox 142
#53I'm genuinely perplexed why people find link previews useful. The page image is too small to really see, and it's not as if rapidly opening and closing a tab actually takes effort. It may be faster than the long click depending how comfortable you are with keyboard controls.
I have other questions as well -- does the link preview ignore your plugins? So if you loaded the web page, would uBlock Origin prevent tracking which is _not_ prevented when loading the preview? If you have a phishing test url with a unique identifier, do you flunk the test even if you don't click through?
Re: What's New with Firefox 142
#54Lately, I’ve experienced memory leaks in Firefox that I’m too amateur to diagnose, that leads to Firefox eating 8gb of memory in some web renderer process. So when I excitedly check the changelog hoping for a summary of possible changes, I’m disappointed that there isn’t a verbose changelog for advanced users. I’m sure I could search bugzilla, but it makes me sad that the only “important” things are the headlining fe…
When trying to diagnose performance or memory issues with a browser, always start with the installed and enabled extensions.
Re: What's New with Firefox 142
#55Lately, I’ve experienced memory leaks in Firefox that I’m too amateur to diagnose, that leads to Firefox eating 8gb of memory in some web renderer process. So when I excitedly check the changelog hoping for a summary of possible changes, I’m disappointed that there isn’t a verbose changelog for advanced users. I’m sure I could search bugzilla, but it makes me sad that the only “important” things are the headlining fe…
I've used firefox for 15+ years, but it starting to bug me too much. Memory issues, forced restarts that block navigation (wth!), clutter all around, having to disable sponsored crap, and random incompatibilities are starting to take a toll. I've been falling back to Edge for crying out loud.
Re: What's New with Firefox 142
#56> Link Previews show a snapshot of a page before you open it, helping you decide what’s worth your time. Just long press any link to preview and reduce distractions. On macOS there is a native affordance for this by using force click. It's kind of annoying that Firefox chose to not support this and instead made it click-and-hold only.
But wouldn't that render the preview with Safari?
No, this would be a custom implementation and they could trigger a Gecko-based preview.
Re: What's New with Firefox 142
#57Lately, I’ve experienced memory leaks in Firefox that I’m too amateur to diagnose, that leads to Firefox eating 8gb of memory in some web renderer process. So when I excitedly check the changelog hoping for a summary of possible changes, I’m disappointed that there isn’t a verbose changelog for advanced users. I’m sure I could search bugzilla, but it makes me sad that the only “important” things are the headlining fe…
Try about:processes and take a snapshot.
Google AI studio sitting doing nothing (not even a chat loaded) was eating 8 GB and lots of CPU.
Re: What's New with Firefox 142
#58Every new release of 2025 is full of AI features which end up being either useless and/or annoying. I always turn them off if I can. This is the most tiresome hypecycle in history.
Re: What's New with Firefox 142
#59Lately, I’ve experienced memory leaks in Firefox that I’m too amateur to diagnose, that leads to Firefox eating 8gb of memory in some web renderer process. So when I excitedly check the changelog hoping for a summary of possible changes, I’m disappointed that there isn’t a verbose changelog for advanced users. I’m sure I could search bugzilla, but it makes me sad that the only “important” things are the headlining fe…
Some of the new ai slop features lag our firefox
Go into about:config and search for browser.ml stuff. Some of it is just for text completion, but you can also load models - transformer js, and also send stuff to chat gpt.
Re: What's New with Firefox 142
#60> Link Previews show a snapshot of a page before you open it, helping you decide what’s worth your time. Just long press any link to preview and reduce distractions. On macOS there is a native affordance for this by using force click. It's kind of annoying that Firefox chose to not support this and instead made it click-and-hold only.
TIL.
I agree with the other comments that say it's not discoverable. I've been using MacOS for 10 years and I didn't even know that "Force Click" is a thing. This comment caused me to look it up and then try it.
I disagree that it's "everywhere". I just tried it in Spotlight Search (Command + Space). I can never remember how to see where a thing is located there and I hoped a force click might show me. Hint: pressing command will do it but it takes 250ms to 500ms to show up and somehow I never wait that long.
Not only does Spotlight Search not show me where it is, force clicking doesn't show me a preview, or seem to do anything else.
In Finder force click edits the name of the item you're clicking. So, this doesn't seem to be terribly universal.
I suppose I'll slowly figure out how this works now that I'm aware of it.