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

Cool. Now ...

[fahrbot-bot]

Anyone have a list of the about:config settings required to disable the new "useful" and/or annoying "features" added and/or changed by this release?

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

[T.E.D.]

Good luck with that. Android doesn't let me uninstall it, and Google's search widget uses it and cannot be configured to use another browser.

Remember when Microsoft got a legal finding of anti-trust violation against them for doing this exact same thing?

Re:Improvements

[lgw]

Are you one of those people that wish MS would still stick with the Windows 2000 UI?

That's pretty much the usable Windows UI. It got a bit better with Win7 in that the taskbar can combine launching programs and switching to them, if you prefer it that way (I do). Other than that, Win7 UI as configured by a geek looks very much like the Win2k UI.

Almost every UI change in the past 15 years - to bascially any established software product - was wrong-headed, stupid, and abandoned in the next version.