Firefox 49 Arrives With Improvements (venturebeat.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 49 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The new version includes expanded multi-process support, improvements to Reader Mode, and offline page viewing on Android. The built-in voice and video calling feature Firefox Hello, meanwhile, has been removed from the browser. First up, Firefox 49 brings two improvements to Reader Mode. You can now adjust the text (width and line spacing), fonts, and even change the theme from light to dark. There is also a new Narrate option that reads the content of the page aloud. Next is the Mozilla's crusade to enable multi-process support, a feature that has been in development for years as part of the Electrolysis project. With the release of Firefox 48, Mozilla enabled multi-process support for 1 percent of users, slowly ramping up to nearly half of the Firefox Release channel. Initial tests showed a 400 percent improvement in overall responsiveness.Mozilla says at least "half a billion people around the world" use its Firefox browser.

Comments

Re:Does it..

[wonkey_monkey]

Or, y'know, press Alt...

Re:Improvements

[Anonymous Coward]

Improvements? They put the UI back to how it was in version 38?

Surely you meant version 3.6. Firefox 4.0 is when everything started to go downhill fast.

Google brought out Firefox developers to start Chrome, they gave Mozilla filthy amounts of money, the developers left or returning started to make Firefox into a dumb Chrome clone badly targeted at novices (shit UI is shit UI for everybody) who are obviously stopping to use Firefox as they upgrade their PC (because their geek friends and family members are not installing it anymore on their PC), and we went from 30% market share back then, to less than 10% today.

That's a number they seem to fail seeing, among the shit-ton of data they are harvesting from users, pissing on everyone's privacy.

Re:FF49, still a pig

[grumpy-cowboy]

I installed the Tab Momory Usage addon on FF and what I noted is site like Gmail, Facebook, ... consume a LOT of memory because of all the Javascript bloat they use. My Gmail tab alone consumed almost 200 MB of memory! So I switch to the basic HTML version of GMail and memory usage dropped to 3.5 MB only! Yes I lost all the keyboard shortcuts, draft auto-save, ... (come on Google, you can at least enable keyboard shortcuts!), but I can leave with the basic version.

So yes maybe browsers need optimization but some sites are responsible for outrageous memory consumption.

Re:Isn't it supposed to play Netflix too?

[Stephen Chadfield]

Ahh - it works if you configure a user agent add-on to report the browser as Chrome on Linux. Neat...