Firefox 43 released with 64-bit version for Windows, better Private Browsing | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 43 released with 64-bit version for Windows, better Private Browsing

mozilla.org

165 pointsingve144 comments

I really really love Firefox as my personal browser, but I always find myself using Chrome to develop/debug my applications because it's dev tools outclasses those in Firefox.

I've tried the dev edition and firebug and neither comes close - the console is particularly bad. Sometimes expressions randomly don't show the evaluated results, stack traces don't use codemaps and the whole design makes me think of the python IDLE debugger. I've also spent ~2 days in total tracking down a reverse heisenbug, one that only appeared when the dev tools were open. Maddening.

I eagerly check the release notes each time for some improvements, but I'm still waiting :(

Edit: To be fair they do seem to add interesting developer features, but on the day-to-day usability front it's still pretty dire.

Interesting. Just a counterpoint: I also use FF as my main browser, but I have the happy circumstancing of far preferring to debug with FF than Chrome. Not sure when I last used Chrome, actually.

I typically debug with chrome, but the if I want to hunt down an event attached to an element I pull out fire fox dev.

It really seems great for developing I personally just have too much inertia to switch.

What are your specific problems with it?

If you are asking me, it's probably mostly inertia as well. My workflow is easier in FF, and I know where things are. I used to use Firebug exclusively, but it got buggy and I started with the web dev stuff with FF.

When I want to check the responsive stuff I use Chrome.

For responsive view, use ctrl-shift-m in Firefox. (Cmd-opt-m on Mac)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Responsive_De...

I have almost the opposite, I use chrome for browsing but find FF's dev tools a lot more intuitive. Different mindsets I guess, and while I do find that some FF debugging features are confusing (the difference between the console, the scratchpad and the GCLI is just an annoying distinction), overall I find FF has better console highlighting and is easier to browse objects because it'll expand a logged object to a sidebar on click, but in chrome it stays in that console.

There is a separate issue where Firefox can have much worse performance when the developer tools are open. This is something has been slowly being addressed but I think there's still a lot of work to get it to chrome levels.

> overall I find FF has better console highlighting and is easier to browse objects because it'll expand a logged object to a sidebar on click

I do actually like that feature, but in my experience the console is a lot less intuitive than the one in Chrome. I've pasted the output from running "$('a')" on github.com here[1] using both Chrome and Firefox. Firefox gives you a massive chunk of output that can't be minimized, while Chrome gives you a condensed output that you can actually navigate through (with pagination). It's annoying that outputting a large-ish object instantly destroys the log with way too much output.

Stack traces are another annoyance, in Chrome I get a trace that I can minimize and maximize, with all the line numbers resolved using sourcemaps and with hyperlinks to the debugger. My experience with Firefox has been an unresolved giant minimized stacktrace that is really no fun to look at. The debugger also often just takes me to my concatenated 100000 line app.js file rather than using the sourcemaps.

I guess it does come down to different mindsets, I've been playing with Firebug while writing this and it seems a lot better than I remember. I've also found this[2] post about them integrating Firebug into FF itself, so good things are on the horizon :)

1. http://paste.pound-python.org/show/lUuq1bnMzOnSbcl5bhvC/

2. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/10/firebug-devtools-integrati...

On the github.com home page, $('a') gives me the following in Firefox, with a nice attribute navigator panel:

Object { length: 33, prevObject: Object, context: HTMLDocument → github.com, selector: "a", 33 more… }

Chrome just spews a screenful of HTML to the console.

Another thing is that Firefox actually has a $ operator built in now, which is useful when the page does not even load jquery. (Chrome might have that as well?)

I also prefer to debug on Chrome rather than Firefox. I'd use Firefox with Firebug whenever weird stuff would happen in the Chrome tools console, like error messages getting cut off and things like that, but it's been months since that's happened.

Firefox's design dev tools are waaaay better. CSS, animations, etc. For JavaScript it's better for Chrome in some ways and better for Firefox in others. I end up using both kind of randomly for dev even though I'm 100% Firefox for normal browsing.

I debug network related stuff a lot, and in FireFox after a while the browser performance starts to degrade, while in Chrome the performance is still manageable.

Has the release happened yet that removed the ability to use unsigned extensions? I think this version is no longer safe to upgrade to if you want to keep that ability. As I understand it the behavior can't be disabled with a setting.

It will block unsigned extensions by default in 43, but you can disable it: set xpinstall.signatures.required to false in about:config. This option will be removed in 44. (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Timeline)

But what does this mean for my precious tree-style tabs?

This is answered in GP's link. You should read it.

"The Developer Edition and Nightly versions of Firefox will have a setting to disable signature enforcement. There will also be special unbranded versions of Release and Beta that will have this setting, so that add-on developers can work on their add-ons without having to sign every build."

While you can wait until it breaks and then switch to the developer version, it is just delay of execution.

For my main browser that has all the plugins I used to appreciate in Firefox I switched to Pale Moon [1]. On other machines I continue to use Firefox.

Very happy with Pale Moon, works perfect -including all my old plugins- and I'm no longer afraid that features I depend on will stop working because the mozilla dev's decided to try and change firefox into chrome.

[1] http://www.palemoon.org

Quick note: Pale Moon removed Tab Groups because it was unpopular. The add-on meant to replace it is hacky/buggy/fails to restore tabs. If your workflow depends heavily on tab groups, Pale Moon is not the answer.

If you don't care for tab groups - my experiences with Pale Moon were great! I can imagine it's remained as awesome since I stopped using it (which is when they removed tab groups...)

Also it's totally possible the add-on has been fixed. But I don't remember anyone maintaining it, it was just segmented away from the browser and made into an add-on without development/maintenance. It's possible that has changed and the above issue is no longer relevant.

Actually the ability to be able to continue to use tab groups was one of the main reasons I changed over to Pale Moon about a month ago. Firefox has plans to remove tab groups. [1] Haven't had any issue with it so far, but I might be using tab groups in another way as you or as you say they might have ironed out the issues you bumped into.

You are correct that tab groups is offered as an add-on. Had no problem installing it, it even kept all the tabs I had in tab groups in Firefox. For me the transition from Firefox to Pale Moon was very smooth.

[1] http://www.ghacks.net/2015/11/08/mozilla-to-remove-tab-group...

Are your tab groups remembered after a browser crash? YouTube has a tendency of crashing Firefox/FF forks (incl. Waterfox and Pale Moon). I'm forced to restart maybe once every other or every third week after YouTube hangs the browser. When this happens I lose all of my tabs which is completely unacceptable for me. Tabs were also lost when updating the browser which was the straw that broke the camel's back and caused me to ditch Pale Moon and return to Firefox.

If those two issues have been fixed I'd likely very quickly switch back to Pale Moon.

As an aside, I'm aware FF is removing them as well in the near future. I've already frozen myself on FF 40 for other reasons. Before anyone mentions - I'm aware of the potential security risks of doing so and have decided given my internet browsing habits it is very low risk. Low enough that I don't even consider publicly announcing my use of FF40 to be a significant security threat.

I've not had a browser crash in a long time.

But -if it helps- the tab groups are remembered after I kill firefox from Windows task manager.

Also no problem on updating Pale Moon. But I've got to admit that there was only one update since I switched over to Pale Moon.

The Tree Style Tab I have was installed via Mozilla's extension repository, which is automatically signed. It should™ continue working.

"Tab Tree"?

I'm talking about this extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

That one gets disabled with the new update, I believe.

I don't think so, it's hosted on AMO, these addons get signed automatically.

I'm currently running Firefox 43 on Arch Linux:

    $ pacman -Q firefox
    firefox 43.0-1

with Tree Style Tab 0.16.something from AMO and have `xpinstall.signatures.required` set to `true` (the default, I haven't changed anything).

Hm. Seems to be signed under Linux, but not on Windows.

Why would you believe so?

That extension has been clearly signed.

That's coming in 44 in 6 weeks:

> Firefox 44: Release and Beta versions of Firefox will not allow unsigned extensions to be installed, with no override.

Sigh.

Why are they doing this? It's condescending and insulting. "No, you're too stupid to be allowed to install what you want to."

Firefox is changing this because malware injects itself into Firefox using this mechanism. Power users who really want to install unsigned addons can switch to the Developer Edition.

I have cleaned my share of malware infections and I can't think of one were the attack vector seemed to be FF.

Now we seem to be nerfing the beast because someone might do stupid things.

I worked in university IT for a year, focused on student's personal machines. A good majority of malware we experienced installed extensions and reconfigured browser preferences.

I understand why Mozilla and Google have done similar things to restrict extension installation, but can't help but think there has to be a better way for users who know what they're doing.

You may not have seen one yourself, but browser vendors have data on this: there is a lot of malware out there that infects browsers.

Browsers are putting a lot of effort into preventing this, they wouldn't do it if they didn't have clear information showing the problem was serious.

I don't doubt that malware adds browser extensions, but is that the initial infection vector or just installed later after the malware is already in place?

the problem with that is the developer edition is also firefox nightly. Power users don't always want the absolute latest :-P

Developer Edition is different than Nightly. They both do update about once a day, but far fewer changes land on Developer Edition so it should be more stable.

Yes, I think it was formerly called "aurora".

Malware. That's why.

As others point out, they want to combat malware. But they've botched the process and particularly the timeframe quite badly; they should have started by

1. Fixing the extension "code review" process, which is a mess. Make it be actually automatic 99% of the time and not a big hassle.

2. Implementing non-mandatory signing a long time ago and let that run for at least a year before making it mandatory. (The initial announcement that extension signing was going to happen was Feb 10 2015.)

3. Waiting for at least half a year after making signing mandatory to start even announcing "we will change the API and severely break all non-trivial extensions in the near future".

Right now, I think Firefox has set themselves up to decimate the number of extensions, by telling extension devs they have a mountain of work ahead of them for very little benefit. I can't imagine it will do anything but further reduce the number of users. Not sure what will come off it in the end. As a pentadactyl addict, I'm worried that I'll be on the next LTS release (without signing) for years to come. Either that, or we'll see a fork.

Won't the next LTS release require signing, as well as the regular version? And by LTS here you mean the ESR version, right?

Yes, they call it ESR, but did we really need Yet Another TLA?

As for requiring signing, from the moz wiki: "The current plan is to have ESR 45 work like 40-42, with a preference that can turn off [signing] enforcement."

Edit: source: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing

I have more faith in the AV package I use than in Mozilla's part-time coders.

The people producing my AV package do just that, 8 hours a day, all year long. How much time does Mozilla's AV coders have? How much practical experience?

IMHO, Mozilla's FireFox team should concentrate on making the browser work fast and smooth. Period. FireFox has been slowly deteriorating for years while they've diddled with cutesy GUI crap.

Too many spoons in the pot.

Full time coders

>1. Fixing the extension "code review" process, which is a mess. Make it be actually automatic 99% of the time and not a big hassle

Also read as "doing the literally impossible (but not really)".

http://danstillman.com/2015/11/23/firefox-extension-scanning...

From the blog post you linked, a quote which goes to show just how stupid Firefox devs are being over this:

""" It’s been a maddening discussion, with Mozilla folks repeatedly suggesting that Zotero — a leading research tool put out by a large public research university as a non-profit open-source project and recommended by nearly every university worldwide — will either turn rogue or become an attack vector if we’re allowed to continue releasing it unimpeded as we have for nine years. """

I've switched to Pale Moon, a fork that respects my ability to make my own decisions about whether something is dangerous or not. I hope they get all this stuff sorted out, FF used to be my favorite browser.

Is there any way for me to sign extensions myself and trust my own root? I trust Mozilla about as far as I can throw them.

How long until they withhold their signature from an extension which blocks ads from one of their funders, or which supports a political cause they dislike, or are pressured to dislike?

In fact, what assurance at all does Mozilla's signature give me? As far as I can tell, none whatsoever.

The same can be said about any other security measure.

It's to ensure other apps don't install add-ons.

But will this do anything to address the problem of companies buying existing signed extensions, and then updating them to include shady tracking, ad redirects, etc.?

I checked just now and self-updating from 32bit on Windows does not give you 64bit on a 64bit system. You have to redownload and reinstall manually.

64-bit Firefox does not support as many NPAPI plugins as 32-bit Firefox and may have undiscovered compatibility or performance issues with add-ons or web content. Mozilla won't autoupgrade 32-bit users until some time next year.

Similarly, Internet Explorer has both a 32-bit and a 64-bit version.

This is my Firefox wish list:

* Make no distinction between tabs and bookmarks, so that I can search for tabs in the bookmark library and easily arrange them and move them to bookmark folders etc.

* Add optional tab auto-suspend for heavy JS web apps so that they don't eat all CPU cycles in the background.

* Please do something about graphics accelerated video playback. My machine runs hot with 460p YouTube videos, even with h264ify (110% CPU FF, and by comparison only 34% VLC!).

* Be more keyboard friendly: Escape to defocus the address and search bars, page up/down in the add-ons list.

I think you can't compare it to VLC, as Firefox also has to do more stuff while playing videos on YouTube. For a fair comparison you would have to compare Firefox playing a plain video file (without a website) vs VLC or YouTube on Chrome vs YouTube on Firefox.

You are right and I gave it a go: I've tested it with a 640x386 H264 movie clip averaged over the same time span with a blank Firefox profile:

    VLC: 14.0 %
    Firefox: 27.1 %

Edit: Interesting. I tried it with a different video (H264, 720p) and it turned the results around (33% VLC and 28% Firefox), there was more movement in this clip, so it turns out to be more complex to measure this.

Now you'll have to take into account, that H.264 is a patented codec. VideoLAN is based in France [1], but Mozilla is US. Therefore they can't just ship an implementation.

On Windows Firefox uses the Windows Media Feature Pack to play H.264, and on Linux a plugin by Cisco.

Considering this, I think 27 % vs 14 % doesn't look too bad :)

[1] http://www.videolan.org/legal.html

It's perhaps specifically a problem with YouTube, or the JS events for the video playback, or something related to that:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1163327

Oh well, I'll just use a bookmarklet/AppleScript to open YouTube videos in VLC, if is too sluggish (VLC supports YouTube URLs via menu item Open Network…).

btw, Firefox 43+ on Linux uses the system ffmpeg library. Before that it used GStreamer, which was very crashy and usually just called ffmpeg anyway. :) Firefox telemetry shows that 97% of Linux users have ffmpeg, but only 70% have GStreamer. So this change increases H.264 availability, reduces crashing, while removing code.

The Cisco OpenH264 plugin is currently only used for WebRTC, not MP4 video playback. OpenH264 only supports H.264 Baseline Profile, but YouTube, for example, uses the higher-quality H.264 Main Profile. Cisco or Mozilla could add Main Profile support to OpenH264, but people would still need an AAC decoder to watch most MP4 videos. ffmpeg solves both codec problems. For the 3% of Linux users (and 2% of Windows users) who don't already have H.264 and AAC codecs installed, Adobe's CDM (their DRM plugin for HTML5 video) will eventually allow Firefox to decode H.264 and AAC content that is not DRM'd. Props to Adobe! :)

What OS are you using? On Linux, Firefox and I believe VLC use the system library. Firefox on Linux doesn't yet support hardware-accelerated graphics rendering.

YouTube is doing DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) which involves stitching together an MPEG-4 file using JavaScript from multiple components retrieved over HTTP.

Here's mine:

Stop forcing automatic updates.

You can turn those off. Options > Advanced > Update > Check Never

Alternatively, he could switch to the Extended Support Release (ESR) channel -- which BTW I've been using happily for years. The ESR channel gets security updates, but otherwise updates itself only once a year:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/?q=E...

Then head on over to the options and turn them off?

I've never really understood this mindset. Browsers are big 'ol security holes, you want to shovel as many of the latest security updates into them as quickly as possible. Surely the risk of you getting owned by a patched exploit because you forgot to update outweighs most concerns?

Not to mention you can turn them off in the preferences.

+ reduced memory footprint and/or better swapping. It isn't practical to run Firefox on a machine with 2GB RAM.

"Don't open so many tabs!"

Swap my tabs to disk before the OS does!

(It's okay, I bought 16GB extra RAM so that I could run Firefox.)

The awesome little cheap Windows 8.1 (or 10) tablets with the quad core Atom processors and 1GB RAM are great, and Chrome/Opera runs just fine on them.

Firefox though, is like trying to run through molasses.

I run Firefox on my laptop, my phone (Firefox for Android + uBlock = Amazing) and desktop. I have to use Opera on the tablet.

Anything that drastically reduces memory usage, and preferably increases multicore utilization, would be greatly appreciated.

yay server-side console logs!!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Web_Console/C...

"NEW: Users can choose search suggestions from the Awesome Bar."

What does this mean? It sounds like a rephrasing of an antifeature, something like "NEW: Everything you type in the location field is now immediately sent to your search provider, just like in Chrome, making the distinction between the location field and search field pointless."

Navigation bar has accepted searches for ages. Keywords also made the search bar entirely redundant. Prior to keywords the search bar had the ability to switch which search engine was searched giving it a slight edge over the location bar.

I forget exactly when keywords came out but its been bloody ages.

I hate being post rate limited..

"TIL" in response to ptx. I've actually never bothered with the search bar so was unaware of that behavior.

I know you can search from the navigation bar (and keywords were there even in the Mozilla suite, weren't they?), but the difference from the search field is that the search field shows suggestions, which means that it has to send what you're typing to your search provider as you're typing it.

The navigation bar only searches locally (the history and bookmarks on your disk) and doesn't send anything anywhere until you press enter.

I was under the impression that this was considered a feature and the reason for keeping both fields even though they could easily have been unified long ago.

The new search suggestions in the URL bar are disabled by default in Firefox; there's a prompt to opt in or out.

> What does this mean? It sounds like a rephrasing of an antifeature, something like "NEW: Everything you type in the location field is now immediately sent to your search provider, just like in Chrome, making the distinction between the location field and search field pointless."

Maybe they changed it from the beta where I used it, but it was awful in a completely different way. It very highly preferred doing searches or visiting the top level of a domain to your bookmarks and history.

So, for example, typing "trans" brings up page title "Transmission" at 192.168.1.17, which is a page I visit several times a week, under the old Firefox. On the new Firefox, it brought up "Search {default search engine} for Transmission". If I just did "trans", again, instead of preferring "Transmission", it preferred Google Translate, which I visited once, six months ago, apparently because the URl begins with "translate.google.com"

As someone who has basically adapted with the AwesomeBar, I was previously hitting Ctrl + L, typing one or two letters, hitting tab, enter, DONE, and it worked for any website I visit. With the change it was always at least two tabs instead of one and sometimes more, or it just straight up required more typing.

Fortunately it could be turned off in about:config. If someone with the release version can provide any input on whether it's different than beta, that'd be nice. It honestly enraged me so much I don't even want to look. I was the guy that was telling people to move along with the less popular changes; I guess that was the one that did me in too. Made me think about downloading the long-term support release.

>Fortunately it could be turned off in about:config

What is the name of this setting?

Set browser.urlbar.unifiedcomplete to false.

Thanks!

Why was 64-bit Firefox for Windows so late to release?

Windows is indeed the last (64-bit on Linux and Mac has been there for a long time). I think the main issue was binary plugins, which are more common on Windows, and can be incompatible with a 64-bit browser.

I was wondering the same thing; I had to check on wikipedia that indeed consumer-grade 64 bit processors were on the market in 2003 (AMD Athlon 64). I also remember Windows XP and Mandriva had support for 64 bit processors at the time. This launch doesn't feel like the celebration it should be.

On the other hand, 64-bit XP wasn't really ready for prime time. Back in that era, I built up a system and was originally intending to run XP64 on it - until I read about its poor compatibility with the 32-bit world (especially drivers). I wound up returning the unopened XP64 and got 32-bit instead, which turned out to be the right call.

In retrospect, adding PAE support to XP SP2 would probably be less risky (though would still require new drivers).

I don't know why the release was so late, but I'd speculate that it took a while to find enough compelling reasons to go from 32 to 64 bits on Windows. Having run Waterfox, the third-party 64-bit build for Windows, for some time along with the 64-bit version of IE, I haven't seen any real difference in performance relative to the 32-bit versions of those browsers.

Websites like https://clara.io and https://www.onshape.com/ really appreciate having a 64 bit browser. Loading a large model on a 32-bit browser often results in random crashes.

The performance difference is substantial. Seems to be mostly due to memory usage patterns. With more than a few tabs open, the 32-bit version pauses annoyingly every few seconds. The 64-bit build does a lot better.

And they still hasn't properly fixed the JS JIT to comply with Windows x64 ABI including SEH! Interestingly, MS has promised to release their own JS JIT used in Edge and IE as open source.

Is there a compelling reason for a browser JIT to comply with platform ABI? Third party binaries are not going to be linked in or called from the JIT-ted code anyway.

Proper SEH support.

But why? Only sandboxed, JIT-ted js code is going to use this custom ABI. What exceptions do you expect to handle?

All exceptions including CPU exceptions like divide by zero or access violation uses SEH on Windows.

…which you shouldn't be getting in jitcode.

IIRC, in-process plug-ins from third parties that do not have a 64-bit version made using a 64-bit build unattractive for many.

If so, they either deem the impact of not supporting various plug-ins lower, or they run them out of process now, so that plug-ins that need it can run in a 32-bit process.

Chrome also took a long time to release 64-bit builds to Windows users. They weren't available on the stable channel until Chrome 37 was released in August 2014:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/chrome...

Compared to Chrome, Firefox had more problems with legacy add-on compatibility, because in addition to 32-bit NPAPI plugins it also has to deal with legacy binary extensions that link to Firefox's internal libraries.

(For further comparison, Microsoft released 64-bit builds of IE8 in 2008, but few people used them at first because there were no 64-bit versions of popular plugins like Flash until years later. Browsers on Mac OS X worked around this by shipping fat binaries that could launch in 32-bit mode when 32-bit plugin compatibility was necessary.)

Actually, IE has had 32-bit and 64-bit version since the beginning of 64-bit Windows, originally as separate items on the start menu.

Yep, I used it a few times on 64-bit XP in 2003ish.

Note this release disables the about:config "showOneOffButtons = false" bypass for the new-style search bar, so you're stuck with the new bar with the icons from now on.

please tell me there's an addon to fix this.

Thanks man.. I disabled automatic updates for now

Still no GTK3 support on Linux in default Mozilla build. And ffmpeg is disabled as well :( Why so? Especially since gstreamer 1.x isn't enabled either...

Another annoyance I noticed - old search UI is gone and can't be restored even with

    browser.search.showOneOffButtons = false

I had to use Classic Theme Restorer to do that (new search UI is very cluttered and annoying).

Still no GTK3 support on Linux in default Mozilla build

This will come in 45.

And ffmpeg is disabled as well :(

AFAIK, ffmpeg is enabled in 43.

> AFAIK, ffmpeg is enabled in 43.

So it should play mp3 and H.264? When I try to play this in stock Mozilla build (43) it uses Flash (which means it doesn't detect native mp3 support):

https://danielamosboots.bandcamp.com/track/er-uh-ummm

UPDATE: H.264 / mp4 is working though which is better than 42.

> [GTK3] This will come in 45.

Thanks. I guess it's good that it's somewhat delayed - Breeze-gtk can get in better shape by that time and fix colors integration for KDE Plasma 5.

Setting

    media.mp3.enabled = true

did it.

> Still no GTK3 support on Linux in default Mozilla build.

The ArchLinux build is gtk3 by default, it the UI is awfully slow, and freezes a lot.

Be glad you're still on a gtk2 build.

Good to know :)

And I opted to stay on Firefox 42 because I don't want to spend time learning the new search UI nor do I want to spend time learning CTR.

Just updated and hit a stupid bug right away (oldbar plugin is installed on Mac OSX Yosemite)

Open new tab-> in address bar start typing some previously visited site->list of suggestions appears-> use down arrow key to highlight first one->HIT Enter

NOTHING Happens. Very interesting that a basic usecase does not work

People turned away from Explorer to Firefox because Explorer became a bloated browser, full of bugs.

What did Firefox do with that market share? Created a bloated browser, full of bugs.

Can you still reproduce that after disabling oldbar?

No. oldbar integration is the issue, disabling it gives me the ghastly very large address that do work.

I try to switch to FF every 3mo. or so. EVERY TIME I try it gets sluggish if I have even a modest number of tabs open.

I really like what Mozilla is doing, but why is it that they just can't make a browser as snappy as Chrome?

What's your setup/laptop and OS? I am having a better experience with Firefox over Chrome, with 40+ tabs opened at any time.

Chrome (at least some time ago I tried it) crashes frequently and uses more memory.

What's a modest number? I regularly have about 30 open on my (Android) mobile and my desktop surpasses 100, 150 often enough.

How many tabs do you need? How many does Chrome handle, if I might ask?

I don't have the same behavior. It would be interesting to see details on your issue, response time differences, memory usage, etc.

That's gotta be a plugin, mate. I have the reverse problem: Chrome is slow, but Firefox is snappy. I know in the last few months FF fixed an issue where css cache was per-tab, which meant plug ins (like adblock plus) which add huge stylesheets to every tab had a huge memory load.

The only slowness I get with ff is when I have lots of heavy js tabs open for more than a day. In my case that's gInbox, gcal, ghangouts, trello (with heavy plugins), Facebook, and then my normal browsing tabs. Even then, I only notice the slowness when I instantiate a new window.

I haven't been rigorous about testing it, but I think Inbox messes with mine too. Firefox will eat an entire CPU core for multiple seconds every time I click in any text box, or close a tab, or load a new tab in the background. It's the main process that uses CPU, not the content process. This is on Win7, and my only add-ons are uBlock Origin, Ghostery, LastPass, HTTPS Everywhere.

Try disabling LastPass. I remember having similar problems on OS X when I was trying to switch from 1Password to LastPass. I didn't look into it any further and just stuck with 1Password.

It didn't seem to help much. Thanks for the tip though.

Snappy behavior depends on a lot of things: which sites you're on (some browsers are better at some sites than others, and none is great at all of them), multiprocess separation (e10s in Firefox, on in Nightly and it really helps a lot), your graphics card and whether the browser has blacklisted it, and of course if you happen to hit a rare perf bug (which all browsers have, not surprising given the amount of constant code churn).

Computer specs? I suspect you may be doing something wrong. Firefox runs great for me.

Also, try:

1) Help --> Troubleshooting --> Refresh Firefox (i.e. wipe all your data and settings so it's a clean install).

2) Tools --> Options --> General --> Tabs --> Don't Load tabs until selected. This let's you have hundreds of tabs open without having them all loaded in memory. When you click to a tab that you haven't visited in a while, it loads the page then.

> Don't Load tabs until selected.

For me this seems to not work - yes it doesn't refresh until clicked, but it seems the tabs consume the exact same memory when "not loaded" (after restarting firefox with a bunch of tabs from the prior session).

I have a low spec machine (2009 MBP Core 2 Duo, 4G Ram) and there is day / night difference in performance between Safari 9.0.2 and FireFox. I've also been testing the multi-process FF version with no luck.

Some website like Amazon are almost unusable with lots of pausing / unresponsiveness. No plugins, clean install.

May be you should try to disable or enable "Use hardware acceleration when available". "Use hardware acceleration when available" is problematic for me, I have disabled it.

I use Chrome, Chromium, and Firefox on Ubuntu. They all seems equally fast (or slow). On thing I noticed though is that they all became considerably slower when I upgraded from Ubuntu 14.04 to 15.04.

I've had problems with Firefox being sluggish to the point of stop responding to scroll events for ~1 second when loading tabs in the background, like when opening a Reddit thread in a new tab and then scrolling down on the front page. This seems to be fixed in 44 (current developer edition) if you enable three options in about:config: browser.tabs.remote.autostart [0] layers.async-pan-zoom.enabled [1] layers.offmainthreadcomposition.testing.enabled [2]

I didn't test this on previous versions, so they might work in those as well.

[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Async_Scrolling_in_e10s [2] https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2015/05/19/off-main-thread-...

Any chance you have reddit enhancement suite installed? That absolutely destroys loading times for reddit comment threads with default settings (ie: comment tweaks)

The Skype "Click to Call" plugin is another notorious performance problem, frequently crashing or hanging the UI for tens of seconds.

I do, but I have most of the settings turned off, like comment tweaks.

I had one site that would always load like crap on Firefox: blabbermouth.net. I would try with various cocktails of add-ons enabled and disabled, and could never figure out why my Firefox config hated that particular page so much.

At some point I installed NoScript, and the loading of that page turned snappy, so I stopped trying to troubleshoot it. I kinda assumed from then on that there must be some script running on that page that is either clobbering Firefox itself or clobbering one of the other add-ons I have running.

Personally I find this problem can be OS dependent, so you should mention your OS when saying things like this.

On OSX FF is slugish and can take a while to start up, however on Windows 7/10 its the snappiest browser I have. Weird i know but that's how it is for me.

I should mention neither use plugins.

"Subresource integrity allows developers to make their sites more secure"

Cryptographic verification of scripts and other linked resources is very cool. Not an official standard, but I'm glad to see this.

It is a W3C Candidate Recommendation: http://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/

For the first time in awhile I am stuck on an old version of Firefox 41.0.2

It is the last version with gDocument which was removed in 42+ and breaks several extensions that have not been updated.

download link?

https://firefox.com/

I didn't realised they finally got the guy to sell firefox.com. They had to use mozilla.org/getfirefox.com for ages.

Don't suppose anyone knows how much they paid for it?

Mozilla is a non-profit, so it might be public information?

"Better Private browsing" that still features the Pocket bundleware and button in the toolbar that's still not un-installable like other extensions and requires about:config edits to disable..

Since it's apparently obligatory that someone gripe about this on every single thread mentioning Firefox, I will post the obligatory link to the Bugzilla thread where they are working on breaking Pocket out into an add-on: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694

An add-on with a consumer-unfriendly opt-out mechanism.

You have to opt-out of it existing.

But it doesn't do anything unless you opt-in very strongly.

It's like saying "installing x doesnt do anything until you execute it!" Its true, but if applied is stupid hard-drive wise.

/flamewar

Except when you execute it all it does is sit there asking you to register.

And space-wise we're talking a couple kilobytes.

You can't really have an opt-in without a point at which you ask the user about the option. The easily-removed button does that, the fact that it's not truly purged from the browser is a geeky detail that they're working on fixing.

If it is just the Pocket toolbar button you are concerned about (I realize other people don't want the code in their browser at all), then you can easily remove it by using the Customize settings option.

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