Firefox 49 Postponed One Week Due To Unexpected Bugs (softpedia.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes Softpedia: Mozilla has announced this week that it is delaying the release of Firefox 49 for one week to address two unexpected bugs. Firefox 49, which was set for release on Tuesday, September 13, will now launch the following Tuesday, on September 20... Firefox 49 is an important release in Mozilla's grand scheme of things when it comes to Firefox. This is the version when Mozilla will finish multi-process support rollout (a.k.a. e10s, or Electrolysis), and the version when Firefox launches the new WebExtensions API that replaces the old Add-ons API, making Firefox compatible with Chromium extensions.
Firefox's release manager explained the delays as "two blocking issues and the need for a bit more time to evaluate the results of their fixes/backouts" -- one of which apparently involves opening Giphy GIFS on Twitter.

Comments

Re:Ah.. another week....

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on what you mean by browser speed. Firefox slows down massively when you use a ton of tabs. There must be some 2^N algorithms under the hood as that's the only conclusion I can come up with to explain the massive UI jitters. Closing many of those tabs does speed the browser up again, but it never releases a corresponding amount memory. If you're a heavy tab user and like to keep Firefox open, you eventually run out of memory or are forced to restart it due to the frustration of 15-25 second UI freezes when you open a page in a new tab. Oddly enough Firefox tends to crash a lot on closing when you're near max memory limits, so you can keep using a slow browser or close and crash. Then you reopen a profile with a thousand or more suspended tabs and it can take over 10 minutes until the UI responds to anything. Think about that. While very few people use that many tabs, there's no reason it should take 10 minutes. These are suspended tabs. Firefox is database focused, so all the browsers needs to do is load a 1000 list of tab ids, 1000 looks ups for the tab names, and 1000 look ups for tab icons yet it spends over 10 minutes doing that ( meaning 5 operations a second). Something is just not right with its performance, though I doubt the other browsers can handle that may tabs at all. Despite how advanced browsers are, they're also horribly designed pieces of software.

Hopefully their multi-process support will help, but considering there's something fundamentally wrong with how they manage tabs I doubt they're going to handle this properly too.

Re:WebExtensions API

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

It's also a massive security problem, having no security model.

LMAO. Pretty much all Chrome extensions require access to "all websites" and your "entire browser history" which means they can gather all your browser information, including keystrokes, aka passwords.

So much security, my ass.

More details on the Bugs

[sciengin]

- UI still made some people not throw up
- Slowness not increased by 50% as promised by the dev team, some pages unfortunately still load as fast as in the times of ISDN
- Critically low use of memory: Some memory is still not used up by Firefox despite our best efforts
- Android port does not crash often enough
- Not quite like Chrome yet

Firefox doesn't get a break

[LichtSpektren]

I was a pretty harsh critic of the 'personalized ads', but Mozilla removed that, so now Firefox is back to being the best browser. Its performance is slightly shy of Chromium in my experience, but it has better features, customizability and a selection of add-ons.

Anyway, what I'm taking from the comments on this article is that Mozilla really shouldn't read Slashdot, because most commenters here hold that Mozilla really cannot do anything right. I'm sure Firefox would've been heavily criticized if a major release was too buggy, so it seems to be the right course of action to delay its release, but they're getting shit for that too. Oh well. Some people are just unpleasable and can be safely ignored for that reason.