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Firefox 51 Arrives With HTTP Warning, WebGL 2 and FLAC Support (venturebeat.com)
Reader Krystalo writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 51 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The new version includes a new warning for websites which collect passwords but don't use HTTPS, WebGL 2 support for better 3D graphics, and FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) playback. Mozilla doesn't break out the exact numbers for Firefox, though the company does say "half a billion people around the world" use the browser. In other words, it's a major platform that web developers target -- even in a world increasingly dominated by mobile apps.
Is it really?
One of the recent updates (48/49/50( absolutely KILLED the performance. Particularly annoying is the URL bar. Autocomplete results take longer to populate and my usual pattern of opening tabs was broken. I used to type in a few characters, select the entry, and hit enter. For example: sl, down (or tab), enter, ctrl+t, ca, down (or tab), enter, ctrl+t, etc. would open up slashdot, then a new tab for my calendar, then a new tab for... Ever since the performance tanked, I couldn't do that anymore without deliberately slowing down at each step.
I even tried blowing out all of my old history (years and years of browsing data on one machine). This was particularly annoying as clearing out everything older than 6 months will do so based on the FIRST access date, not the last access date. So clearing out everything older than 6 months blows out slashdot even though I access it daily. I had to go into each subfolder in the history control and sort by last access date, then blow out everything older than a threshold of a few months back. This took almost an hour of constant work because deleting history this way causes FF to update the UI constantly. CPU usage spiked to 100% of a single core while FF deleted an entry, updated the scroll bar, scrolled the list, then deleted the next entry. To prevent FF from locking up completely and crashing I had to work in batches of a few thousand and let it stew for a couple of minutes before hitting the next batch.
And after all that work, with a history file that was in the hundreds of thousands instead of tens of millions, performance was still ass.
The Firefox developers have been working on Electrolysis for years. I think they started around 2009. It's only very recently that they've started to enable it in the release builds for small numbers of users.
It hasn't been a smooth process. Aside from taking many, many years to get something that kind of works, it has caused problems for a lot of users. There are some extensions that it doesn't work well with. Even if you aren't using any problematic extensions, it has been known to cause problems.
I haven't tried it with Firefox 51 yet, but when I enabled it in Firefox 50 (this was a clean profile with no extensions installed), it made Firefox feel a lot slower than with it disabled. So I haven't been using it.
If you're waiting for something comparable to what Chrome has, well, I think you may just be waiting a very, very, very long time. What they've put together so far leaves a lot to be desired.
Try with a fresh Fx profile to compare performance to your usual one. Nine times out of ten, I find that it's some obscure setting people flipped in about:config or an addon that's causing their massive performance problems. The rest are generally caused by people using the heaviest web apps out there, and wondering why their browsers aren't running as well as they did years ago before all of these resource-hungry apps.
The problem is likely the internal sqlite database fragmentation. On Windows you can run tools like "speedyfox" in order to defrag the database.
Bad performance is likely caused by having lots of extensions enabled.
Yes, You can download the Add-on Compatibility Reporter, it is a Mozilla created add-on, it then shows on the extensions screen if each add-on is compatible with multi-process.