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After 12 Years, Mozilla Kills 'Firebug' Dev Tool (infoworld.com)
An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld:
The Firebug web development tool, an open source add-on to the Firefox browser, is being discontinued after 12 years, replaced by Firefox Developer Tools. Firebug will be dropped with next month's release of Firefox Quantum (version 57). The Firebug tool lets developers inspect, edit, and debug code in the Firefox browser as well as monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript in webpages. It still has more than a million people using it, said Jan Honza Odvarko, who has been the leader of the Firebug project. Many extensions were built for Firebug, which is itself is an extension to Firefox... The goal is to make debugging native to Firefox. "Sometimes, it's better to start from scratch, which is especially true for software development," Odvarko said.
I did this on all my Linux boxes:
sudo apt-mark hold firefox firefox-locale-en
Now when I update my system, I won't get the FF57 update. The reason is, about half the extensions I'm using are unavailable in FF57 due to the deprecation of the XUL framework.
Until I sort out what to do (maybe move to a Firefox fork), I'm staying on FF56. Unfortunately most of the alternative browsers like Chrome are much worse from a privacy standpoint. But with FF57, I've heard rumors (not verified, but troubling...) that the former privacy extensions that are being ported to 57 won't be able to offer as much privacy as before. For example, instead of blocking the fetch of various ad trackers, they have to fetch them but then not display them. The fetching is the part I want to block.
So until I find replacements for the non-ported extensions, and until everything resolves itself in some adequate way, I'm not moving to FF57. The apt-mark hold above will help anyone else who is riding the same ship.
What on earth are you talking about? You clearly DO NOT use Firefox at all. None of what you described has been a thing in Firefox for years. Memory leaks in the Firefox 4 days were a major issue but they're barely even on the radar today.
Actually, I've seen it bloat up to 3GB quite a lot lately on Windows at work. No idea what's causing it. Prior to v56 it was generally using about 500MB tops, but now it regularly goes over 2GB after an hour or so of casual use. And this is a bit of a problem because the work laptops only have 8GB and our dev environment wants most of that.