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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.
But Mozilla doesnâ(TM)t see this as a big problem, and says it is by design.
Yes, the shittyness of Firefox is by design.
Well, time to upgrade.
Which about:config preferences do I have to mess with to disable all the unwanted "features" in this version?
Did you guys hear something?
http://saveie6.com/
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.
Has Pocket been removed yet?
The version number almost says it all. How can you get excited about a new Firefox release with any feature, when it's just another rapid release. It could have true hard AI and no one would notice any more. It would get lost in the staggeringly mediocre array of non-features nobody wants, forced UI changes, broken addons, and developers that decide they know more about what people want than the users do.
Firefox adopted Google's rapid release cycle on a project that it was neither technically nor culturally suited for. One has to actually admire their dogged persistence to holding course in the face of what is an almost a completely unified chorus of "WHAT THE FUCK PEOPLE?!?!?".
I recommend Palemoon. A fork of the previous Firefox LTR, it has refused to add features unless they make sense, is compatible with most addons, and has its own growing body of its own addon developers that are quite loyal to the project for the simple reason that the project remains loyal to them. That's not to say that it's a static browser. Just one that took the best of what Firefox was and decided to continue in the direction of sensible goals and not alienating its user base.
Same problem every other 64bit browser has that uses plugin made under designs from 20 years ago
But with 64 bits, Firefox will finally be able to address all the memory it uses!
It's 64 bit now? Woo Hoo! I can wait faster!
Remember back when IE 6 refused to die because corporations had ActiveX stuff that prevented upgrading? NPAPI has become like that as well. I can't upgrade because I have apps that run as Java applets and I'll lose them. I already can't use Chrome...
So, here's to vendors migrating away from Java and issuing updates I guess...
(And I find it ironic that Flash gets some kind of exception even though even Adobe wants it dead.)
I think a thunk is a thought I had some time ago.
To me, the most important feature of Firefox is the add-ons. I like Session Manager, for example.
... provides a user-friendly interface to advanced preferences that would otherwise require manual editing of parameters, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming to do."
Question about Firefox: Microsoft's Process Explorer shows that Firefox uses the CPU while no Firefox windows are in the foreground. Why? Firefox's CPU use is especially intense when many windows and tabs are open. Also Process Explorer shows that often Firefox continually adds memory to its "Private Bytes" and "Working Set", even when there is no Again, why?
Someone above mentioned Pale Moon. Pale Moon has a 64-bit edition.
Joke:
Instead of browser.pocket.enabled = false in Firefox, try:
browser.adult.supervision.enabled = true in Pale Moon. (Not a real Pale Moon choice, of course.)
Pale Moon has tools for backup and migration. Adblock Latitude blocks ads. There are other Pale Moon ad-ons, and usually Firefox add-ons work perfectly.
"Pale Moon Commander
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?
As I posted earlier, there was a solution for *nix known as nspluginwrapper.
I remember using Minefield at least as far back at 2010, a bit earlier I think. So it was there for Windows, it just wasn't a fully legit release that you could get from the normal download page. It worked fine for nearly everything including plugins, although as mentioned Flash was a problem if you cared about Flash. I jumped over to Palemoon when the CEO thing happened at Mozilla, it had 64 bit as a regular download. Why it took Firefox so long.. hey, they have a lot of useless features to add and useful features to remove. It takes time!
At first I used windows, then I suffered massive tab loss while doing a research project. Next I used the Tab Group Manager plugin (tabs of tabs), which is awesome, but sadly the developer never came back after a natural disaster and it now has compatibility issues. Session manager and Tab Mix Manager are good enough for me now. If Firefox starts swapping when it's taking up GBs of memory then it doesn't crash. When it doesn't swap it crashes. I don't know why it works sometimes and not at other times.
Can we still use the same extensions, addons, etc.? Or do we have to get separate 64-bit versions? Speaking of separatation, does 64-bit Firefox install a different location?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I just moved to the 64-bit FF and it's lightning fast and my entire big list of extensions still work perfectly. I'm really impressed. My only gripe is that the about:config hack to restore the old drop-down search engine list isn't working yet. The string is still there though, so I assume it will come back to life eventually.
That same seven year old page explains how every single one of those features can be disabled. Directly in the Chrome options or by using a non-Google search engine.
Hell, just create your own query string as your Google.com[.localcountry] and you can use Google for your default search while still not sending the RLZ string.
That's all before adding any privacy/content blockers.
So the question still stands, where's the proof that Chrome tracks you and reports what you do back to Google?
Rational people who don't have an agenda know it doesn't, if set up properly, even before adding extensions. As one of them, I'm not afraid that Chrome does secret "conspiracy theory" stuff. With uBlock Origin added using additional blacklists, Ghostery (yes, I know they're part of the advice industry, they're honest about it and their tracking is ethically opt-in), Referrer Control, and one of IxQuick, StartPage, or DuckDuckGo as my default search, I am quite satisfied that Chrome doesn't "track me around the web".
There are reasons I still prefer and use Firefox or Firefox-derived browsers as my "daily driver", a switch back to that browser family I made about 2 years ago after a half-decade of Chrome preferences. But some loony "Chrome spies on everything you do" conspiracy nonsense isn't any part of my reasons. And I still do use Chrome too, at least several times weekly, for certain things sites it does better.
Maybe when the crazed Mozillians finish screwing up FF beyond the ability of CTR and Status-4-Evar, I'll go back to Chrome, Chromium, ironically a Chromium-based non-sleazy (rules out Iron and Dragon/Chromodo) browser. By then, Moonchild may also have screwed up Pale Moon enough in his quixotic attempt to remove all Firefox compatibility, so that the Chrome family is the only viable choice.
But until then, while I'm using a Mozilla-based browser, I'm still not giving in to nor spreading the unsubstantiated nonsense that Chrome spies on everything you do.
By the way, out of the box, Firefox reports back all the same types of things as does Chrome without turning off its defaults. And neither browser is necessarily "being evil" - Many people like search suggestions, typo correction, Safe Search, predictive page load, and/or localized search.
I don't, many technologists and sophisticated users don't like and use them, but those are valuable services for the "typical web user". Which services obviously need "what is the user doing" data sent to the browser maker and/or partner service providers, in order to do such things.
Make the browser choice for reasons, not FUD.
Posted from Mobile Aurora (Android equivalent to Firefox Developer Edition).
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.
Whoa. FF32 had a time travel feature?
This update broke my Tree Style Tabs and ScrapBook Plus. It was relatively easy to fix Tree Syle Tabs, it was possible to reinstall the extension, but they completely blocked ScrapBook Plus!!! Ok, I installed ScrapBook X, but it seems they are on the quest to kill the best extensions. Next time they will kill ScrapBook X and then I'll have scrapbook directory with years of precious saved pages and no way to view them.
You are presenting a very one-sided appraisal of the abilities of your software. There are plenty of things HOSTS files can't fix, but browser extensions can. Your dishonesty is staggering, but unfortunately not unexpected.
I think Googles stubborn attitude towards Chrome is ghastly, personally.
Does this sound like Microsoft and IE 15 years ago to anyone else?
Bring e10s and kill the old extensions, even XUL if it be although I've always liked it.
Likely most everyone is fed up now, users are less technical than ever too and so good luck explaining them that the browser making 5-second pauses all the time is good for them.
On a former story's comment someone compared it to Mac OS 9, which is about right. Mac OS 9 was a consumer OS from the 1980s, but sold around 1999. It was killing the parent company.
I'm sorry for you people with extension XYZ but extensions are updated, rewritten, replaced by something else or just die. There may be workarounds too : install developer or custom edition, disable e10s, install the unsigned old extension.
I do fine with a handful vital extensions instead of hoarding them. In fact over the years Firefox incorporated features such as crash recovery, opening text-only links etc. though there's been some dumb crap (removing setting to disable images? etc.)
And Flash doesn't even get killed yet if you still want it. Yes I'm a fairly traditional user (most applications must have a menu bar), tradition includes having Flash available and I still kind of like it.
Chrome has Session Buddy. I only just found it. https://chrome.google.com/webs...
After updating to v43.0 this morning (32-bit version), I found that the Avira Browser Safety extension had been auto-disabled. This extension is unsigned by Mozilla but, coming from Avira, can surely be trusted. That decision, IMHO, should ultimately rest with the user, not with Mozilla.
.xpi file and install it from a local file because Firefox now refuses outright to install any unsigned extension from a website.
To re-enable it, it was necessary to turn off signature checking for all extensions (xpinstall.signatures.required) -- a somewhat risky and therefore perhaps sketchy measure. To re-install it, it was necessary to manually download the extension
licet differant, aequabitur
All plugins in Firefox run under plugincontainer.exe, which talks to the main firefox process. There is no reason why plugincontainer.exe couldn't be a 32bit process and the main Firefox process 64bit.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Most of the thoughts in my head are spam.