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

Improvements

[Hognoxious]

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

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: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.

Does it..

[TechyImmigrant]

Does it come with a real menu bar with file, edit and other proper menus? Or do I have to play "hunt the secret glyph" to unlock a menu?

Re:Does it..

[wonkey_monkey]

Or, y'know, press Alt...

Re: Does it..

[oddware]

Pressing the ALT key will reveal the menu your are asking about.

Re:Does it..

[thegarbz]

What do you need a menu for? All functions of a modern app should be managed by making funny faces at the camera to will it into submission.

Re:Does it..

[Barefoot Monkey]

Yes, it does. You can enable it by right-clicking on the toolbar and ticking the "Menu Bar" option. To make the menu bar a fixture rather than appearing only when you press alt. When the menu bar is enabled in this way you can still toggle its visibility by pressing F10.

Personally I find the menu bar occupying a whole row on its own to be a waste of space, so I install the Personal Titlebar extension, which allows me to use the "Customise" screen to add a page title next to the menu.

Here's what my browser looks like at the moment.

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:Cool. Now ...

[Raenex]

Just be happy you're still getting those, and 3rd party plugins for the rest of the stuff they fuck up that can't be changed through config. I would have abandoned Firefox a long time ago if it weren't for that.

"Exact numbers"? Half a billion users?

[UnknownSoldier]

Mozilla doesnâ(TM)t break out the exact numbers for Firefox, though the company does say âoehalf a billion people around the worldâ use the browser.

Translation: We're in decline but don't want to confirm that by looking at the actual data. We'll just hand wave that for everyone else.

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?

FF49, still a pig

[fyngyrz]

I still have it installed on my Mac, too. And FF49 still eats memory by the gigabyte and slows down grossly after operating for as little as an hour with no more surfing that reading Slashdot and surfing Amazon a little bit. Has to be restarted many times a day if I want it to perform reasonably. It's been like that for years. They're so busy adding features, they don't bother to do even the most basic debugging.

However, Safari is terrible, Chrome is a joke, Opera has repeatedly sent me running from CSS problems, and Omniweb... basically lost in the past. As long as I keep restarting it, FF works better than anything else.

I just wish they had someone on the team that could put it through the wringer and kill these horrific memory-eating habits it's got.

Re:FF49, still a pig

[rudy_wayne]

And FF49 still eats memory by the gigabyte

I've been hearing this complaint for years and yet I've never experienced it. Not even once.

Right now, for me, Firefox is using 340 MB which is the most I've seen in quite a while.

Re:FF49, still a pig

[Yvan256]

This seems to be the key, Firefox seems to have memory leaks on OS X but not on other platforms.

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:Firefox Hello

[Fruit]

The core functionality (WebRTC) is still there, they just removed their frontend. You can still use WebRTC in Firefox (or Chromium/Chrome) by visiting https://opentokrtc.com/. Chromium may be a better bet if you're behind a crappy firewall, because it supports TCP as well as UDP (Firefox only supports UDP).

Re:Permanently a pig.

[Anonymous Coward]

So fuck me, I guess.

No, thanks. You seem a bit needy and high maintenance.

Get real

[mister_playboy]

Hardware lacking SSE2 support (i.e. pre-Pentium 4) is barely capable of accessing the web as it currently exists, and would probably be better served by running a browser a lot more lightweight than current builds of FF anyway.

To be fair to google

[rsilvergun]

half of an anti-trust violation is having a strong enough market position to abuse. Google has fairly strong competition with Firefox on Android. I primarily use FF Android because it's nearly as fast, displays the real page without me having to mess around and does a better job of displaying that real page. Tabs also work a lot better.

Now with Apple, who won't even let another company make a browser for iOS (any browser on iOS is really just a skin on Safari) and therefore has no competition you might have a point. But we don't like to speak ill of Apple around here. I think mostly because they're a godawful company that makes gadgets folks love and it's kinda like how you don't talk about how sausage is made at a barbecue...

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...

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!

Re: "Improvements"

[xiando]

They haven't taken away Addons from us - yet. The ironic thing is that half my addons just restore functionality that was previously built-in but was taken away.