Slashdot Mirror
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.
Although the world has largely switched to Chrome, the remaining use for Firefox is as the one browser that is still willing to support Java applets. Lots of people who work in IT have a VM or a jumpbox whose only purpose is to run Java applets inside of Firefox (for example, to do maintenance on some piece of equipment with a Java-applet-based configuration tool -- I'm talking to you, EMC) -- and *never* *run* *updates* because changing the browser or java version even slightly will break the whole thing.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Is there any way to tell which extensions are blocking multiprocess? My about:support page says multiprocess is disabled because of extensions, but it doesn't say which ones. It seems like they should publish this information, perhaps in a field on AMO. A Google only turns up results for developer testing or small lists, it says nothing about a complete list of incompatible extensions.
I don't know if anyone at Mozilla reads Slashdot any longer, but I think this would be a worthwhile documentation project that would help users demand extension authors make their software compatible, thus aiding the roll-out.