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Firefox 61 Arrives With Better Search, Tab Warming, and Accessibility Tools Inspector (venturebeat.com)
On Tuesday, Mozilla released Firefox 61, the newest version of its web browser for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android platforms. The release builds on Firefox Quantum, which the company calls "by far the biggest update since Firefox 1.0 in 2004." VentureBeat: Version 61 brings TLS 1.3, the ability to add custom search engines to the location bar, tab warming, retained display lists, WebExtension tab management, and the Accessibility Tools Inspector. 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 have to consider.
My personal test case will be with the UniFi 5.7/5.8 Controller web interface page. I've found consistently under the last few versions of Firefox that, while it's fine for at least an hour, if I leave it up constantly for ease of monitoring then after a day or two the Firefox process inevitably ends up pegging an entire core. There is no video whatsoever or any particularly fancy graphical usage, and while they may be doing something odd internally (I haven't had time to really dig into it) I'm not sure Firefox should end up in that state there over time. It's relatively easily repeatable though (will take a day but requires no interaction on my part) so I look forward to testing it. Although if it does resolve the problem I'll be mildly bummed whatever fix it was didn't make it into ESR, but so it goes.
I like my browser meek and docile, not aggressively second-guessing me and doing all sorts of crap "just in case". It already does too much!
How about a way to stop all javascript when the tab isn't active? Or a way to block javascript by domain, instead of having to rely on an adblocker? Opera has had that last one for ages.
"Tab Warming" sounds like a great, well thought out feature! Yay!
Not necessarily.
Do you want the rendering of the current page to slow down because you flicked the mouse out of view, which happened to be over a tab?
Do you want the machine and network to slow to a crawl because you dragged the pointer across a great many tabs on the way to the one you wanted, and they all start rendering?
Do you want even higher memory/CPU use for a product that's already considered seriously bloated?
If Firefox could collect more data on its end users (or ideally - from a UX research point of view - everything you do, like I'm sure Chrome does its best to do), the developers would have a much better view of what people want.
Instead, the Firefox devs have to deal with us grouchy, "Don't track me!!", users. As a result, they have to make their best guesses based on their relatively meager datasets... Hell - Maybe that's why the Firefox UI is so much more like Chrome than it used to be: they had to get their UX market research from somewhere...