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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.
Anyone who needs 52ESR will be out of luck soon as its the last patch cycle. Those with Windows XP, XUL and NPAPI requirements are affected. Also Chrome is discontinuing Marvericks support, which also throws perfectly working Macs into the trash. Don’t give me the “it’s old” spiel, Mavericks is less than 5 years old.
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.
That and getting rid of the Pocket spyware.
Disable Pocket for Firefox
If you prefer not to use Pocket for Firefox, follow these steps to disable it:
- In the address bar, type about:config and press Enter.
The about:config "This might void your warranty!" warning page may appear. Click I accept the risk! to continue to the about:config page.
- Type pocket in the Search box above the list of preferences.
- Double-click the extensions.pocket.enabled preference to toggle its value to false.
Note: Disabling Pocket does not remove Recommended by Pocket entries, if present, on the New Tab page. If you would also like to remove those Pocket recommendations, click the cogwheel at the top right corner of the New Tab page and uncheck Recommended by Pocket. See Hide or display content in New Tab for more information.
Ever since Nov, 2017 when they broke the extensions, their market share has gone down each month. They are currently at only 5.27%. They are irrelevant.
"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?
This is what I do to. My first reaction after looking up the buzzword was, "People use the mouse to change tabs?"
"How much more electricity will "tab warming"
Minimal.
Firefox Tab Warming explained:
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/01...
From TFA:
There’s also a small update to extensions built using the WebExtension API. WebExtensions can now hide tabs and manage the behavior of the browser when a tab is opened or closed.
And how do I disable it? Seriously, why would we want the browser to do stuff like this? Just what I need, more seemingly random things happening that I can't see and/or presumably control ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
If 15% is your cutoff, only Chrome will count: http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
Yeah... that's pretty much how they think.
Former Firebug user here: No, the Firebug replacement doesn't have the community extensions that made Firebug better, but I've found that the built-in Firefox replacement has come around to where it's solid enough as a replacement. And it's definitely not as buggy as Firebug was at times.
The tradeoff of a few extra add-ons for the speed and better stability is a fair tradeoff, IMO.
Indeed we use the mouse to switch tabs, how else to quickly jump from tab 14 to tab 48?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."