Slashdot Mirror
Firefox 52 Borrows One More Privacy Feature From the Tor Browser (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla engineers have added a mechanism to Firefox 52 that prevents websites from fingerprinting users using system fonts. The user privacy protection system was borrowed from the Tor Browser, where a similar mechanism blocks websites from identifying users based on the fonts installed on their computers, only returning a list of "default fonts" per each OS. While sabotaging system font queries won't stop user fingerprinting as a whole, this is just one of the latest privacy-related updates Mozilla has added to Firefox, taken from Tor. Back in July 2016, Mozilla engineers started the Tor Uplift project, which aims to improve Firefox's privacy features with the ones present in the Tor Browser.
Let's see: - Firefox still has a customizable UI and chrome doesn't, you can have everything back with classic theme restorer, even UI elements from 10 years ago, and you can export your customization to a file for everyone to enjoy. - Firefox is rolling out a multiprocess model that doesn't just blindly give a process to every tab - Firefox still has better resource usage when you open more than 5 tabs - Firefox ESR has been much more stable for me than any chrom*
The same goes for memory usage. I wouldn't say that Chrome is as much of a winner here, but it isn't unusual for me to look at top or some other process manager and seeing Firefox with many gigabytes of resident memory. Yeah, RAM is "cheap" these days, but that doesn't mean I want it to be wasted. Browsing Slashdot and a few other web sites shouldn't lead to gigabyte after gigabyte of memory being consumed!
At least on Windows, the memory and CPU usage is somewhat difficult to compare due to the Chrome being in lots of smallish chunks, but based on my own anecdotal experience, Chrome keeps chugging quite a bit of memory and plenty of CPU per process after a while, so when you count all the processes together, Firefox is often using less CPU and about the same amount of memory than Chrome. I do use the Chrome dev tools more (better source view), but closing them does not seem to help at all.
It is what it is.