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Firefox 15 Released: Silent Updates, Compressed Textures, Add-on Memory Leak Fix
Mozilla released Firefox 15 today, and it brings a number of interesting changes. First, the browser is finally switching to a "silent" update model, like Chrome. (No doubt in answer to endless complaints about their rapid release cycle.) In addition, Mozilla says they have "now plugged the main cause of memory leaks in Firefox add-ons." Add-ons commonly hold extra copies of sites in memory when they don't need to, and the browser now has a mechanism to detect this and reclaim the memory. Another significant improvement is the addition of native support for compressed textures in WebGL, which is a boost for high-res 3D gaming. Here are release notes for the desktop and mobile versions.
Last thing I need is for an idiot in some far and distant place to think it fun to roll out a new version and trigger an update on all my computers that may render all the corporate apps unusable. No, thank you. FF joins Chrome in the sandboxed "use only if indispensable" bin.
"Fixing" Flash properly is beyond the capability of mere mortals.
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"Fixing" Flash properly is beyond the capability of mere mortals.
The only way to fix Flash is to not install it.
Flashblock fixes the problem with Flash freezing. If I could marry it, I would.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
Oh please no! High-res 3D "punch the monkey ads" :(
I do. Daily. 100+ tabs open is not uncommon. Firefox hasn't crashed for years. The rest of your comment is OffTopic.
The memory improvements are nice and all, but the support for the Opus audio codec will have a much bigger impact on the Web. Opus is open source, royalty-free, and superior to previous formats in latency, flexibility, and audio quality. It handles speech, music, and general audio well, and scales fluidly from a 6kbps mono narrowband VOIP bandwidth all the way up to perceptually-transparent multichannel music. It's been approved as an IETF standard and should be published as an RFC this week.
Finally having a best-of-breed standardized codec which is universally implementable without patent royalties means that HTML5 audio - especially real-time communications - can finally take off.
Firefox is the second major end-user application to add support. (The first was the foobar2k audio player.)
Having run into memory problems repeatedly for years, Firefox 15 is shockingly better at memory management. They completely change the model they used to help clean up after add-ons that don't clean up after themselves and very few of them have had to be fixed to work with it. Memory usage for me has been cut by more than half.
Mozilla also went out of its way to make the updater service run with as few rights as possible with code that revokes rights that it does not need. There were about three dozen permissions explicitly dropped when it was first developed around FF12. That number may have changed slightly but it's still a long list.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Why are you using WinRar when 7zip exists?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
What you describe is solely due to Firebug, and it's kind of a side-effect of it's features, not truely a bug that should be resolved.
I would recommend you simply run 2 firefox sessions.
Setup firefox with 2 profiles
- keep the Default profile for your regular browsing, enable day-to-day addons like adblock, pretty theme, no firebug)
- Create a development profile, enable firebug and the like, different homepage, no adblock etc, firebug enabled
Alter the Shortcut(s) on your desktop so you have 2 firefox shortcuts, one starting with the default profile /-P default/, and the other one automatically using the developer profile (also use the no-remote commandline switch for this one).
Now you simply have 2 firefox sessions, the developer one has a seperate (boring) theme so its easy to recognise and you can reboot it whenever you feel like it. The default profile has your regular browsing tabs and you can leave this running for months (i do, never any probs). Whenever you click a hyperlink in an external application they will all open in your regular browsing session (even if that firefox wasnt running yet) due to the no-remote flag on the developer shortcut.
It might take you a few days to get used to doing your developing in the seperate browsing session, but you'll be used to it after that and you'll love it. I do web development myself aswell and use a similar setup. Some additional benefits:
- I love adblock/noscript/etc for regular browsing sessions, and now that my development is done in a seperate session (without those addons) i no longer have those weird situations where i add stuff to a site i'm working on and it doesnt show due to being adblocked.
- If you manage to do really wicked shit during development and cause a race condition or browser crash or the like (not likely for regular HTML/JS stuff, but start messing with native client, vrml, plugins or other less common parts and it can happen), your regular browsing session doesn't get affected.
- My regular profile has Google as homepage, my development profile has my current project as homepage
- I spend a lot of time everyday inside my browser (like most ppl here), so i like to tweak every little thing to my taste, having seperate profiles means my development profile can remain mostly "factory default" eliminating the chance that some weird shit i did to firefox is having an effect on the page im developing.
mail me the 1000 bucks for a new laptop asshole
Your laptop has an asshole?
What's wrong with it?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Sounds like it has a case of memoroids!