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Firefox 43 Arrives With 64-bit Version For Windows, Android Tab Audio Indicators (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 43 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Notable additions to the browser include a 64-bit version for Windows (finally!), a new strict blocklist for the browser's tracking protection feature, and tab audio indicators on Android. "There is, however, a bit of a caveat. Firefox 64-bit for Windows has limited support for plugins. Certain sites that require plugins and work in Firefox 32-bit might not work in this 64-bit version. But Mozilla doesn’t see this as a big problem, and says it is by design. After all, the company plans to drop support for NPAPI plugins in Firefox by the end of the year (though it will keep Flash around). Mozilla has just over two weeks to deliver on that promise." Here are the changelogs: desktop and Android.
Chrome. Now before anyone mentions calling home to Google and spying on you, can anyone demonstrate this behavior? Surely by now someone has captured packets of what is being sent.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
So I'm a bit of a Firefox loony, maybe visible from my post history.
I've been a "hardcore" web browser, ever since using NetCaptor (a shell replacement for Internet Explorer which offered tabbed browsing, IIRC the first tabbed browser)
Anyhow, I like Chrome performance but GREATLY dislike my ability to customise it, specifically tab control (which tab will the app go to if I close the current tab, left or right? will a new tab open in the foreground? what if I middle click a URL, foreground / background?)
I've loved FireFox for years, but the 32bit builds are frankly, unstable dog shit for me, crash extremely regularly. .5 to 3 seconds. Clicking some buttons can be slow to react. Generally after a few seconds of switching into a tab though, it responds /mostly/ ok (Don't even think about Flash Video in a tab though, I just put that into Chrome and drop it on to a second monitor)
I switched maybe 12 to 18 months back to WaterFox, some dude compiling up the 64bit code of FireFox and packaging it. It runs exactly the same as FireFox for me, all plugins work and it virtually never crashes. Problem is, as an "extreme" browser (anywhere from 30 to 300 tabs open at a time) FireFox / WaterFox can get slow.
REALLY slow, CTRL-TAB to change tab? Can take
I just checked, I currently have 393 tabs open (working on getting this down) of all the things I'm currently reading / researching etc.
So to get to the point,..... :/ the one surprising thing I'd say is it's stable as heck for me. I notice almost no different between WaterFox and Nightly 45.
I was hoping that E10s (Electrolysis, multi-threaded Firefox) would fix my problems, when it finally got better. I installed said nightly builds and I have to report that sadly. The performance difference between WaterFox and standard 64bit FF Nightly 45 (with E10s) virtually identical to one and other.
I've confirmed E10s is on and being a nerd but without programming skills, I kind of blindly, optimistically figured, hey, latest builds, 64bit official, e10s, I bet if anything nightly might be less stable but fast as hell!
Not in the slightest, it really is virtually identical
Note: I did try this, with and without my plugins to make FF nice and usable.
For what it's worth, my #1 plugin I can't live without is Tab Mix Plus. That fine control on tab behaviour and the fact I'm an extensive keyboard shortcut guy, makes the browser far, far more usable for me. I'd say I browse between 4 to 12 hours a day, every day.
Please note, I do COMPLETELY realise that running in excess of 30 to 50 tabs is ridiculous, but back 6 years ago, I could do this under FF32 and while it was unstable, the performance of the primary UI for FF was fine.
All I want the damn code to do is HIGHLY prioritise the current tab in front of the user and HIGHLY prioritise the ability to switch tabs, preferably the ones nearby (left, right of the active tab) - the process of going between them shouldn't be slow. Considering I've got 4 threads at my disposal here, it's a bit of a shame.
At least it's stable and at least I can control the behaviour and look, how I like. I think Googles stubborn attitude towards Chrome is ghastly, personally.
I was not familiar with the term "bikeshedding". Now I am -- thanks for that. And I was delighted to learn the term in the context of Firefox's constant breaking of the browser's U.I. for no good reason. Thanks to the many of other commentors who have articulated in their own different ways what I too believe about Firefox's usability destroying "upgrades". When I first heard about another FF "upgrade", my first reaction was to wonder, what part of the user interface that didn't need changing was going to be destroyed this time?
No, a browser not being able to handle 50 tabs is ridiculous. That's like a document editor that fails after 100 pages (or all the text editors that crap out when you have 0.5MB of text on a single line). I use Firefox with under 2500 tabs. Anything over 1500 and Firefox starts crapping all over itself, but I've been up to around 2500 before (most of these are suspended tabs, though they seem to take up far more resources than they should. Suspended tabs should be the equivalent of bookmarks but they aren't.) I search for something or go to a site like Slashdot and open up every link or article I'd like to read as new tabs. Then I go through each tab closing as I finish. Many pages have more interesting links, so the tabs tend to grow faster than I consume them. I could use bookmarks, but I really like the contextual info tabs give you. I can scroll through my tab bar and remember what I was thinking about when dealing with tabs from that time. They show the thought pattern I had at the time and make it easier to pick up where I left off. Bookmarks don't give you that. Bookmarks force you to try to organize them in some way. My tabs are self organizing.
Using so many tabs really brings out some horrible design decisions Firefox has. GIFs and animations keep playing in other tabs. They shouldn't. There's no reason for the stupid flashing background to keep flashing when you're not looking at it but it does. The animated download arrow is super annoying. The entire browser freezes when that thing plays and the animation freezes while whatever was downloaded gets saved to disk. Why it takes 2-5 seconds to save a 1MB image I have no idea, but that's how long it takes the browser to process it even when the webpage (which has the image and a bunch of other content) loaded faster than that. Clearing the download history reduces the frozen time... WTF is up with that? Adding something to a download database should be a constant time operation no matter how big the database is. What's going on under the hood?