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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.
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.