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

I just switched to Chrome at work

[xenobyte]

Running with the exact same number of tabs (pinned and regular) in two windows and similar extensions I get:

Startup and tab load:
Firefox: 72 seconds
Chrome: 15 seconds

Launch a new zendesk.com tab from a link in a mail (I do this a lot):
Firefox: 35 seconds
Chrome: 1 second

Memory use:
Firefox: 1750 MB
Chrome 114 MB

Firefox really needs to pick up its game!