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Firefox 49 Arrives With Improvements (venturebeat.com)

Posted by msmash on from the browser-delights dept.

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.

6 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Improvements by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re:Improvements by lgw · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  2. Does it.. by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

    --
    I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
  3. Re:Isn't it supposed to play Netflix too? by T.E.D. · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  4. Re:FF49, still a pig by grumpy-cowboy · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
  5. Re:Isn't it supposed to play Netflix too? by Stephen+Chadfield · · Score: 3, Informative

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