Firefox 73
hacks.mozilla.org
hacks.mozilla.org
Great to see the emphasis on DevTools in this release. DevTools have definitely much improved since I last tried, but they are still glitchy compared to Chrome. For example, I was using the JS debugger, and for some reason breakpoints wouldn't "hold"—after being stopped for some period of time (not long), the page would refresh. Also little things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1613957, which I was able to report. It was frustrating. Had to go back to Chrome for development. Still, it was nice to see many features that Chrome doesn't have, like breakpoint logging, which is nice when you want to insert a log into third party code.
And as a browser from a non-dev perspective, it's great. Great to know this browser is all about privacy instead of just trying to provide the bare minimum to keep people on board. Great to have the Facebook Container.
Thank you Firefox!
For large pages where source changes cause problems I will sometimes put logic inside conditional breakpoints. It's not great for huge changes (though you technically can put a lot of code in there) but for small things like quickly sanitizing null inputs it works fine.
Having uBlock + Dark Reader on my phone has felt like a god-send.
TBH chrome still has an edge (slightly slicker, slightly leaner). But it's not worth it.
If they would just release it for Linux already I’d be using it everywhere.
Multi-Account Contaners lets me set up permanent containers for (groups of) sites I want to stay logged in to. I check the "always open this site in <container name>" box.
Temporary Containers is set up to open new sites (on middle / control click) in new, temporary containers. These containers work like private browsing windows, but store their data for 10 minutes after being closed. So undo close tab works, history works, but each new site is in its own container. And 10 minutes after its closed (or when the browser as a whole closes) all the cookies get deleted.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...
The only thing I'm really missing is how easily you can set up and switch between different profiles in Chrome.
Wish I could have reported the breakpoint page refresh bug, but I wasn't sure how I could possibly isolate/replicate or describe beyond what I described above. And that's probably not very useful? The small one I linked was easy to describe and replicate.
Anyway, reporting bugs to Firefox definitely seems worth the time spent because it means having a browser that doesn't exist solely to benefit Google. Long live the World Wide Web!
PS. Really like so many other DevTools details I didn't mention in my post above. For example, the '...', 'scroll' and 'flex' indicators/toggles: https://imgur.com/a/yIlhDcJ. Also the console reverse-search with Ctrl-R. And many others.
I'm working on code where sometimes infinite loops occurs. When I want to investigate on these loops, I cannot use any breakpoints because it's using the same route than it used 10 000 times before, so I usually log a lot of data, then manually kill the Chrome tab and I can still run through 1 million console lines smoothly.
Really hope Firefox will be able to handle that one day.
> then manually kill the Chrome tab and I can still run through 1 million console lines smoothly
How does that work with DevTools – closing the tab and reading logs?
https://www.hurricanelabs.com/blog/making-easy-dom-xss-actua...
* have switched from Chrome because <...> reasons why Chrome is worse or has become worse
* have always used Firefox and never left it
* have used Firefox but have faced issues and would want to try it if <...>
What I, as a long time Firefox user and evangelist, would like to know is how we can have Firefox thrive and grow, what Mozilla Corporation is doing (or not doing) to get more funding for Firefox, and why we aren't seeing all those services that they wanted to sell to generate revenue. The Firefox team has reduced in size recently, and more money might probably help avoid such situations (or postpone them).
P.S.: Donations on mozilla.org go to Mozilla Foundation, which is the non-profit parent of Mozilla Corporation (the maker of Firefox). I do not know of any direct way for end users/supporters to fund Firefox development.
I debugged something similar in Angular about 18 months ago, didn't have time to report it and blamed it on Google not testing in other browsers.
That probably got a lot of people's attention.
The issue was reported (7 years ago) by Chris Wilson, who's been at Google working on WebAudio stuff for years and has published lots of related articles and repos. I'm a big fan. https://github.com/cwilso
There's even a comment from someone at Ableton, expressing interest and support ("testing with preliminary builds as well as providing hardware for implementers to test with"). That was 2 years ago, and no one from Firefox engaged them?! Sounds like a huge missed opportunity.
Sadly, the last comment a year ago was from a person no longer at Mozilla, saying the issue is stalled and that it's "very low priority work".
---
Edit: Aah, now I'm imagining what might have been, a collaboration between Firefox and Ableton, would have been so cool..
Not that anyone is asking me, but I think the mobile browser is a limiter. No matter how much I like a given desktop browser, I like bookmark & password syncing more. Unfortunately for me I find the Firefox desktop browser is first class, but the mobile browser is not. As a result it's almost immediately ruled out.
I've never seen anyone else mention this so I might be a tiny minority.
I vehemently disagree. With support for add-ons including uBlock Origin, it's one of the very few usable browsers on mobile.
That said, new Firefox mobile is way faster and the nightly build already has uBlock support. Best of both worlds.
(I don't use uBlock on mobile, but I might go look into it...)
My only complaint is that it doesn't integrate quite as well as Chrome, but I don't think that's Mozilla's fault.
There's a reason Mozilla is rewriting the whole thing.
That LG v35 outspecs my BlackBerry KEYone by a good margin, and Firefox is just as fast as Chrome for me. Which is to say, snappy.
I read more details about your performance problems in another comment, and it sounds horrible; I can't imagine anyone using that. Sounds like a nasty bug, I guess..?
Things got a bit better over time, but unfortunately the thing that eventually fixed it was when I got a new phone. Now I get around 2-3 90Hz frames, which is still worse than chrome, but far less noticeable. I have not measured "New Firefox"/Fenix/Preview yet, but it does feel like it's a bit closer to chrome.
Whenever I've tried other browsers - Chrome, Brave, DDG - having to click "I accept" on every single webpage to remove the "This site uses cookies!" pop-up is really tedious. I hope the Firefox on Mobile add-ons support doesn't just start and end at ublock origin.
Unless I am wrong, which I hope I am.
AFAIK, you cannot install uBlock (or any add-on) on Firefox for iOS.
My issue with stable is that it's slow. Everything about it is slow. Pages that load immediately in Chrome take double digit seconds in Firefox. When they do load, scrolling lags my finger and jerks around, and zooming is noticeable unresponsive. The acceleration curves feel off too. On my mid-range tablet performance is so bad it gives me a headache.
On heavier sites it's inevitable that it will crash. Years ago Chrome/Chrome Beta also had this problem (the root cause is with the phone hardware/android) but somehow they managed to catch it and not bring down the whole browser app.
I still use it despite the other main drawback (being slower than chrome beta on heavy sites, like say twitter) because I like my uBlock and tab-sync, but every so often I get so annoyed at it that I avoid it for about a month until Chrome even with basic adblocking via Blokada makes me mad enough to switch back.
So I might open a link in my email app, then when I tap the back button on the phone, the expected behaviour is it will close the tab and return to the email app. Instead I'm finding it navigating back to the page that was open previously on the tab that was already open.
Plugins support is lacking, that is true.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-android-display...
[2] https://www.xda-developers.com/mozilla-transition-users-from...
When I first heard of people complaining that it is atrocious, it was as much news to me as it is to you that it is excellent in my experience. I agree it's a weird phenomenon.
The Android version was released a year later, three years after (the frankly pretty unappealing) Android 1.0 release. It was within months of Opera's Android launch. Hardly "very late."
Now that's normal and I've sorta acclimated for the past 3 years.
Probably the same as anything else: find a USP that resonates with a large number of potential users.
It used to be customisation and extensions, but it's been more than 2 years since Quantum and there are still numerous ways that my everyday browsing experience is worse now than it was before. I suspect that for a lot of people, Firefox is no longer particularly associated with being more customisable than any other browser, even if it was before.
Today I suspect the best shot for a solid USP is the privacy/security angle, which is what kept me on Firefox as my default browser in the end despite it being much inferior after 57. But the marketing for that is inconsistent and gets drowned out in all the who-cares features that Firefox keeps introducing.
Ironically, the breakage of extensions has probably contributed significantly to the loss of confidence in the security/privacy side, since it took out a lot of useful enhancements in those areas. Normal people don't understand tools like uBlock Origin, which are powerful but have UIs that make Git's look intuitive and well-designed, and in 2020 a simple, effective ad-blocker is entry-level for a decent browsing experience.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adguard-adblo...
If you want to jump right in and look for bugs that match your skills/interest, try: https://codetribute.mozilla.org/
By satisfying the needs of users who
> have used Firefox but have faced issues and would want to try it if <...>
You’re right that every time there’s a Firefox release, it rises to the top of HN with the same comments. I’ve stopped commenting, but I’ll do so now since you asked.
Gripes with Firefox I’ve seen on HN include bad midi support and lack of (or broken) support for macOS features such as the Keychain.
My reason for not using Firefox (and I inadvertently get people out of it) is that it’s atrocious for automation on macOS. It’s the only major browser without AppleScript support, and the bug report open for it is old enough to vote.
When I’ve talked to people from Mozilla about it, I’ve gotten the reply that AppleScript is a power user feature that regular users don’t care for. What they fail to understand is that power users build features for others. I have several tools that interact with web browsers that are relatively popular with non-power users. Every time they ask “can you add support for Firefox?” my answer needs to be “I’d like to, but they don’t provide the functionality”. You can be certain that several of those abandon Firefox, because they’d rather have the convenience of the tool.
You can have Firefox “thrive and grow” by giving its users what they need. It doesn’t matter how “private” Firefox is (and Mozilla has done plenty to not be trusted blindly on that regard) if people can’t use it as their daily browser.
The solution is to partner with celebrities, the biggest ones, to make Firefox more popular as a choice for better privacy.
I use a slightly more compact layout that saves space and lets me see more tabs; put this in "Advanced->Extra style rules" in the addon preferences:
/* Compact tab layout */
:root { --tab-height: 20px !important; }
.tab { height: 20px !important; }
/* Shrink space between pinned tabs and tab bar, only when pins are present */
#tabbar[style*="margin"] { margin-top: 20px !important; }
A square viewport on a widescreen monitor leaves loads of space for a sidebar.
Does it reduce memory because it's more like a temporary bookmark system?
Why does it look so ugly :(
IMO you should just be thankful that your workflow/habits haven't develop in such a way that you benefit from the organizational power of tree style tabs ;-P
A problem with browser UI is that - given our monitor form factor - it makes text hard to read. Studies show that very wide columns of text are harder to read than something relatively narrower.
By changing the viewing pane of the browser, moving the tabs off the top and to the side, we mitigate that extra-wide shape somewhat, making the text more easily readable while giving ourselves a bit more vertical space.
As for the use case, I don't think it's an understatement to say it changed how I browse the web. Before I discovered Tree Style Tabs, I was like you -- I only kept a few tabs open and was diligent about maintaining a coherent working set.
Now, I build hierarchical structures of nested tabs based on what I'm working on, and I easily reach the 60+ tab range on a daily basis. Instead of those tabs feeling like a burden, it's trivial to make use of all of them without feeling like anything is cluttered. I can maintain so much more organized information at my finger tips in Firefox than I ever could before.
With a bit of work, it can look however you want. Here's mine: https://i.imgur.com/13jfRup.png
I know this is a small improvement (s/warning/error), but like it nevertheless. What I would _LOVE_ however is that CORS errors would be displayed where it would make sense - in the Network tab. When I'm debugging connections I am looking there, not in Console.
That said, it does happen that Firefox gives a cryptic error message, and running in Chromium gives enough clues to solve the problem. But usually FF is much better with CSP, at least in my experience (and I work with CSP pretty often).
[0] EDIT: "miss" meaning that the request, forbidden by CSP rules, is not stopped. Firefox correctly stops the same request.
https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2019/06/24/on-the-road-to-fed...
In practice most users not using fedora are "apt" to see wayland not sooner than they upgrade to ubuntu 24.04 LTS or Debian 11 or later and as users will naturally upgrade when they feel like it as opposed to release day one would expect the majority to transition between 2024 and 2028.
Apps which don't work on X before this period would be even more niche than usual.
The Nvidia card I have now is silent and works pretty well.
One day I'll get to take Wayland for a test drive.
Ha ha, oh my... Sooo many recruiting ads coming our way!
[Edit: also the WebSocket inspector is really awesome. I wish I had that years ago!]
Seems like a good way to detect when someone opens the console.
Edit: Actually I am wrong
The severity of a bug is far from the only thing which determines what gets worked on.
Console log background was worked on by a contributor as its a good first bug.
I hope more people take the leap.
That's what I do. I use Firefox as my daily. But I still have chrome installed and boot it up probably once a month. So it's there, but I don't stay logged in, and I don't use it very often.
In any case we have a dedicated environment with lighthouse-ci and this is where the real pre-release benchmarks are executed.
Also the blue icon looks better I think
There was an extension that did this, but the API it relies on was removed in FF 57 with the switch to the extension API.
While entering my passwords into FF and exporting/importing bookmarks was a minor (and brief) annoyance, the utter joy of using a feature rich and secure browser with no ads made it worth the switch, even if I don't have keychain integration.
Give it a go, even just for a week.
Firefox sitting at 12 gigs Vivaldi sitting at 5 gigs
This is on MacOS, so mileage may vary and all that, but with the same tabs open, why would there be such a difference?
Edit: And there's no difference in the plugins. I use the same plugins on both browsers: password manager, uBlock Origin, React dev tools, and Redux dev tools and that's it.
Is that really the only feature people care about?
(That said I continue to use Firefox exclusively b/c 1) Firefox is really good now, 2) best addon/extension support, 3) Google’s leadership is Evil now, and 4) I don’t want a rendering engine monoculture).
I used to do something similar too with Opera (the original one with Presto engine) but with their "Speed Dial" feature. I miss Presto Opera - it was light-weight, fast and wasn't bogged down by even with 100's of open tabs and had fantastic browser features that nearly all their competitors copied.
I am skeptical about this part. If you tag your bookmark's, it then becomes easy to look it up right from the address bar by just typing a tag name. That is actually much easier and faster than searching through 100's or 1000's of tabs.
> ... and it also stores history
That's a very good point that I hadn't considered.
I usually don't close my research tabs until I've completed the task I was working on. Not having to worry about memory means I don't have to worry about finding useful webpages again.
If I have too many tabs open, I just bookmark and tag the site I still may want to want peruse later, and close the tab.
The problem with bookmarks is my list of bookmarks eventually grows even larger than my open tabs, far larger, and stuff just gets lost in there. Once out of site, then out of mind. Leaving it open in a tab I’m more likely to go back and read it when I have time.
Multi tasking (each task can easily have a good number of tasks open)
I'm fairly certain I used to have hundreds of tabs open back in the old Firefox with even less lag than I see today.
I care about the feature but i don't see any reason to switch away from Firefox for it...
Which browser?
I also do this, but my definition of done is very flexible and blurry.
- Why keep a site open when you are done with it?
- Too many tabs and it gets difficult and irritating to find and open the site you want.
- Have never needed to keep many, many sites open in the first place.
> - Why keep a site open when you are done with it?
Why assume you're done with it? I have a number of tabs just for Grafana dashboards I'm monitoring. Re-finding the particular configuration from the home page every time would be annoying, bookmarks would require reloading the page (and thus re-running the slow queries that happen on load instead of on data update), etc.
> - Too many tabs and it gets difficult and irritating to find and open the site you want.
That's what tree-style tabs solves. Tabs are a hierarchy, just like bookmarks or folders normally are. It's much easier to navigate.
> - Have never needed to keep many, many sites open in the first place.
I've got email, calendar, a bunch of Grafana tabs, plus a few datasheets, a schematic, Jira, Confluence, and Github.
And that's just for work, for news I tend to open articles in tabs with HN comments in child tabs and then go through & read them in sequence, but I keep work & non-work in different windows.
I'm up to around 500 tabs across 3 windows. Maybe a dozen root trees. Youtube, Android docs, HN, Reddit, etc, for example. Because opening links in a new tab creates a child tab in the tree, they're automatically well-organized in a way that follows my thoughts, collapsible when I'm done with one for the moment, and rearrangeable if I don't like where they were put in the tree.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
I'm a front end and back end developer that uses multiple libraries and tech stacks and need to find answers to stuff immediately. I leave them open as a resource while I'm working, which may be on multiple things at once. In addition, I have mail, messaging, music, and other work-related things open in the browser.
It's really one of the only features that matters.
Now if Apple could just fix their damn flexbox bugs and implement web app features...
- Maxthon - https://www.maxthon.com/mx5/features/dual-core/
- Midori - https://www.midori-browser.org/
I'd say the scenario is similar to Firefox/Gecko and Chrome/Blink. Sure there are clones that use the Gecko and Blink engines, but none of these really are as popular as their original.
I am waiting for another Opera / Presto browser platform to emerge. Till it did, the browser market dominated by Internet Explorer was literally stagnant. Opera with a Presto engine was a game changer with their light-weight and super fast browser engine with feature sets that all other browsers copied (and still lack even today).
edit: FF cycles smoothly (although with a weird white strobing effect with the main blank content area) if I open a bunch of blank tabs, but not if they're actual web pages.
Both approaches are needed to maintain a balance and to preserve real choice for users — there is no practical difference between Chrome, MS Edge, and Brave because their differences are skin-deep at best.
MSHTML.DLL
> Start with Blink and modify as they see fit and eventually fork if needed
One of the foundational ideas behind the web is that you have a set of open standards that specify the web, and then people can go ahead and implement those standards and provide some unique set of features on top of those standards. For example: privacy.
I believe that Google and other big-tech actors are working to make the scope of these standards so vast and so fast-moving that it becomes impossible for a small or mid-range operation to implement and maintain a web browser. I mean, who was able to successfully fork and maintain a fork of KHTML/Webkit? Google! No small organization is capable of this. These are massive, complicated codebases that must keep up with evolving standards.
Therefore, even though you theoretically have "open standards," we're seeing a future with possibly a single implementation of those standards. And if you only have one implementation, then the whole foundation doesn't hold, i.e. you can't make a privacy-oriented browser because you can't make a browser in the first place. What if some day Google decides to stop contributing to Blink, to fork Blink and only update it closed source, against a set of fast-moving standards that they de-facto control? Or what if, at that point, with total domination, they stop following open standards entirely. I think that would be the end of the web.
Furthermore, all these forks result in bugfixes and new features making it back into Chromium. That allows Chromium to evolve faster than other browsers. That's not to say that Firefox hasn't been keeping up and pushing past Chrome on some important fronts (CSS Sub-Grid, for one), but I'm afraid a point will come where Firefox can't keep up with all the new web APIs that developers will want to use.
Another fork of Chromium doesn't lessen Google's influence over the market.
> It means that Google can push technologies that benefit their ad tracking business, or choose to use non-standard APIs to make their apps run faster than competitors. Both of these things they're already doing.
That's at the core of their whole thing.
Was the 12GB with another RAM-intensive app running? Or just Firefox by itself.
Browser > OK we can purge these tabs first
is how it should work. If the first step doesnt happen, its not clear if the second one should execute by itself. Id be much more concerned about background CPU usage. Eats battery, and actually slows the computer down.
That all said, its pretty clear that browsers are leaking RAM sometimes. I remember bed bath and beyond using 9 or 12GB of ram the other month.
That's not how it works. Browser might monitor free system memory actively and release memory if the system runs low, but at least Firefox doesn't do that.
There is no mechanism (in Windows, Linux) that allows the OS to notify applications of memory pressure or that allows the application to tell the OS that some allocations can be thrown out if need be. (Windows has a mechanism - MEM_RESET - that only works with paged out allocations)
Edit: Windows 10 (8?) actually expands on MEM_RESET with Offer/ReclaimVirtualMemory, but I kinda doubt browsers use this, because these have similar semantics to MEM_RESET (except they seem to work without paging, which is good). For an application that wants to cache not-well-defined amounts of data itself these might be very useful though, because you can make the data structure simple enough that it works with these.
There are mechanisms for both of these in up-to-date Linux - pressure stall information and volatile ranges, respectively.
If all of my memory is "in use" but half of it is cached file pages, should Firefox compact its heap and evict cached images? What if all of my memory is spoken for but a bunch of it isn't actually committed, due to overcommit?
Browser> So this memory here, I don't really care if you swipe it in the future.
(later)
OS> Yum yum
(later)
Browser> Oh, that buffer is empty, let me fill it again.
Firefox uses it, IIRC, for decoded image buffers.
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/memory/volatile...
Unlike MEM_RESET, this allows you to prioritize the memory you offer, as well as provides some extra safeguards it seems.
No idea if Firefox uses this or MEM_RESET.
[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/memoryapi...
[2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/memoryapi...
This actually looks exactly like the malloc/free use case.
memory wise it will consume quite a bit when managing streaming content and even leave the code in memory when all related tabs are gone; I assume this happens because of the dearth of video content on many web pages
Here is how it looks on my system.
firefox-bin─┬─GPU Process───35*[{GPU Process}]
├─Privileged Cont───27*[{Privileged Cont}]
├─RDD Process───5*[{RDD Process}]
├─Socket Process───5*[{Socket Process}]
├─Web Content───28*[{Web Content}]
├─2*[Web Content───27*[{Web Content}]]
├─Web Content───33*[{Web Content}]
├─Web Content───22*[{Web Content}]
├─Web Content───30*[{Web Content}]
├─Web Content───32*[{Web Content}]
├─WebExtensions───27*[{WebExtensions}]
├─firefox-bin
└─97*[{firefox-bin}]
#!/bin/bash
b=${1:-0}; d=''; s=0; S=(Bytes {K,M,G,T,P,E,Z,Y}iB)
while ((b > 1024)); do
d="$(printf ".%02d" $((b % 1024 * 100 / 1024)))"
b=$((b / 1024))
let s++
done
echo "$b$d ${S[$s]}"
echo 1024\*(pgrep foo| xargs pmap -x|grep total|awk '{print $5}'| paste -sd+ -)|bc|xargs human
function meminfo
pgrep $argv| each pmap -x|g total|nth 5|sumof|multiplyby 1024|each human
end
meminfo firefox returns only 250MB right now but meminfo 'firefox|Web' returns 1.5GB
If you are looking at just firefox you are definitely not getting the whole picture.
For context
pgrep --full /usr/lib/firefox/firefox | wc -l
pgrep 'firefox|Web' | wc -l
Your posted command formatted and a missing $ added (I'm using bash):
echo 1024\*\
$(\
pgrep --full /usr/lib/firefox/firefox \
| xargs pmap -x \
| grep total \
| awk '{print $5}'\
| paste -sd+ - \
)\
| bc \
| xargs ./human
Here's my htop excerpt:
3532M 286M 97512 S 0.0 9.6 9:20.59 │ └─ /usr/lib/firefox/firefox
2325M 74708 56596 S 0.0 2.4 0:00.42 │ ├─ /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 41
2509M 121M 85300 S 0.0 4.1 0:15.84 │ ├─ /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 40
2489M 173M 103M S 0.0 5.8 0:18.64 │ ├─ /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 39
2389M 74172 57060 S 0.0 2.4 0:13.49 │ ├─ /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 23
2540M 112M 89996 S 0.0 3.8 0:50.95 │ ├─ /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 22
2513M 72396 58300 S 0.0 2.4 0:14.88 │ ├─ /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 17
2413M 46488 34892 S 0.0 1.5 0:18.37 │ ├─ /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 16
250M 2132 1916 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.13 │ ├─ /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -parentBuil
26.4G 85844 35008 S 0.0 2.8 0:57.39 │ └─ /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 3
On chrome I've had 60+ tabs open for weeks without my system taking a dive.
This is on an ubuntu 19.10 system with 32gb of ram.
Waited a bit and now have:
* Resident Set Size: ~ 500 MB
* Virtual memory: ~ 3300 MB
Not much, IMO, especially as virt. memory doesn't tells one much.
Sure, let me just go download some more RAM. It's not like it's a finite resource in my machine or anything.
On one Windows PC, I keep 2-3 tabs constantly open (may as well pin them tbh), and open/close others as needed. Average tab footprint is probably 3-8 tabs. Average RAM footprint is 1700MB. I have different tab footprints on different machines, of all sorts of different hardware and OS combinations; let's say the general tab footprint is 5-30 tabs, and general memory footprint is 800MB-3GB.
On the other hand, one user here reported a few thousand tabs at ~500MB RSS.
Obviously factors like assets and JavaScript affect RAM consumption, but a lot of these heavy tab users have to be running a good number of web apps. There must be something else at play.
I think it is worth it since I have been using FF since forever for free.
I've asked about this here before (how to support MoCo and Firefox with money), but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that so far. This is one of the reasons Mozilla Corporation has been looking at other services, like the VPN service we've heard of, to get more revenue. Mozilla Corporation also laid off several people from the Firefox team recently because...not enough money, in very simple terms! This is not to say that one must not donate to Mozilla Foundation. Just be aware of where your money can go and what it can be used for.
On the other hand, donations to Mozilla Thunderbird go directly to Thunderbird development, maintenance, etc.
Edit: Removed an erroneous statement about the search engine partnerships.
If I could donate directly towards ff development, I would probably choose to do so. Anyway from your comment I get the impression that donating to Moz Foundation is not such a great idea. If so, could you elaborate why?
My reasoning is this: I wish to donate to the people that brought me FF. If they believe those funds are better allocated to something else (instead of FF development), I guess it is should be their choice. Unless they start neglecting FF I see no reason not to donate some small amount anyway.
Back when Firefox switched to the new UI backend and broke approximately all of the addons, it was promised that the missing APIs they'd ditched would be re-added post release as JS APIs. This is now many years overdue.
Frnakly, I disagree that it should be their choice, and will not donate until they give me an avenue to donate to Firefox Browser specifically.
Sorry, that wasn't my intention. Donating to Mozilla Foundation does a lot of good around the world. It just doesn't support Firefox development. I just wanted to make that distinction clearer.
While it would be a noble cause to support the browser directly, it sounds like Mozilla Corp could make better use of the funds.
Firefox is working great currently.
I have one gripe and it's that the DevTools frame doesn't let you drag-resize on the _entire_ bar. That is, the tab bar (Inspector, Console, Network, Debugger, etc). On Chrome, you can click anywhere on the bar and drag it up. As a web developer, I'm constantly resizing the viewport, and sometimes it's nice to have a larger console, but I have roughly ~2px to work with every time, and it takes some trial and error a lot of the time.
Would be nice for a fix to that soon.
[0] https://github.com/ghacksuserjs/ghacks-user.js
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...
> and the Acid Tests are correspondingly no longer being maintained. Acid3, in particular, contains some controversial tests and no longer reflects the consensus of the Web standards it purports to test, especially when it comes to issues affecting mobile browsers. The tests remain available for historical purposes and for use by browser vendors. It would be inappropriate, however, to use them as part of a certification process, especially for mobile browsers.
This is terrific! I have been shocked that this has not been a feature with accessibility otherwise having decent focus from major software vendors.
I no longer have to have the zoom level preference in my toolbar to tune every site.
There doesn’t appear to be any notion of paging. A good example is the console. I should be able to have an infinite log, limited by my available memory. Under no circumstances should the tools crash or get slow when dealing with a large or complicated console output. It feels like that although I’m only viewing a few dozen lines of the console the entire buffer is rendered and then clipped out. The console and many other features get slower and slower the more data I’m working with. Expanding and inspecting an array with 100 items should be no different from inspecting a list with 50 million items. This is something that chrome devtools just works, so whatever they are doing Firefox just needs to copy that in order for the tools to be useable on anything other than trivial demo’s.
If the goal is to be able to develop UI’s in Firefox that can manage large datasets in the browser the devtools themselves need to be able to work with such data. Otherwise, what’s the point?
The CSS + HTML specs (and the general nature of the primitives involved) make it very very difficult to get this right in every case.
Your issue is almost certainly not a question of 'high quality scaling' and instead a question of how the heuristics are selecting the source resolution to rasterize the text at.
fwiw in the long run it would be possible to solve many quality issues specifically for transformed text by using variable-rate shading (like Slug, maybe Pathfinder) but this is still effectively a research area, I'm not aware of it being shipped in real software.
The voice to text feature on Chrome is really useful too when you’re searching for something and don’t want to type it all out. Stunningly accurate. iOS has a built-in voice-to-text feature on their keyboard but it’s not as good.
I've been using Firefox since it was Phoenix. I never switched to Chrome at any point. This behavior is so damn annoying that it might be the one thing that actually gets me to switch.
On Windows it should background update now as well.
Any idea if there has been any progress on this issue? Last time I tried a few months ago it still wasn't fixed.
Is this my fault?
It's what prevents me from using Firefox.
Personally, I've never had a problem with my daily firefox usage, perf is basically indistinguishable from other major browsers like Chrome and Edge.
I used to blame my computer for not having enough free space, but now that I have 200GB of SSD free, I suppose I need to blame the software at some point.
Mozilla never actually caring about user features: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1520119
Mozilla introducing unnecessary complexity and denying sane configuration management in the name of performance: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/08/03/new-backend-for-s...
Mozilla just being bored I guess: https://www.techsupportalert.com/content/how-get-old-firefox...
(a link to a fixed bug)
also, still not having custom search engines via keywords in the url bar, like chrome, is so lame.
I thought they also had some defaults, but I use "g $word1 $word2" for Google search from the address bar for what feels like over a decade. The don't have the fancy UI to go with it that Chrome has.
Right-click in a search field; "Add a Keyword for this Search..."
What are you talking about?
Firefox has had this since before Chrome even existed? I’m using it all the time.
Maybe do some research next time?
How this works: Chrome automatically detects when a website supports OpenSearch.
So for instance, if I have previously visited English Wikipedia, next time I start typing "en.w" Chrome will not suggest autocompletiong to en.wikipedia.org, but will also say: "Press TAB to search Wikipedia(en)".
This is much easier than creating custom search keywords. For instance, it also adds quick searching for e-commerce sites I frequent, even though I'd never add a custom search keyword for it.
If there's a Firefox extension that replicates this functionality (autodetection of OpenSearch and integrating with the URL bar) I'd uninstall Chrome today.
If you click on the gear icon on the welcome screen you can turn off all of those things in the Firefox Home Content settings. My welcome screen is completely blank.