> Dietrich Ayala has a Firefox profile with 1,691 open tabs. With Firefox 54, starting up his instance of Firefox took 300 seconds and 2 GB of memory. Today, with Firefox 55, it takes just 15 seconds and 0.5 GB of memory. This improvement is primarily thanks to the tireless work of an external contributor, Kevin Jones, who virtually eliminated the fixed costs associated with restoring tabs.<p>This sounds more exciting to me than WebVR. Great work FF team.
I'm using 55 and am really impressed. Startup times have improved.<p>A nice UI feature is in Settings -> General -> Performance.<p>I still notice, compared to Chrome, that if I use 1 content process, no matter how many tabs I have open, or how many I have closed, the process just grows and grows over time. In contrast, Chrome may use more memory but its size dependably follows the number of tabs open / closed.<p>Even though FF is recommending 1 Content Process now as default on my low spec machine, I have set it to 2 to increase the likelihood that one of those processes has no tabs, and gets destroyed, along with whatever garbage accumulates.<p>I think Mozilla could do more research on migrating tabs to processes to minimize memory usage, and accumulated garbage from the runtime that doesn't seem to be collected. Perhaps after a certain threshold (time, size) content processes should be destroyed and tabs migrated to a new one.
Great to see FF continue to progress. I moved back to FF from Chrome when I ditched a Win7 install for Ubuntu after building a new computer. It hasn't been without issue, but I'm enjoying FF and very happy to see it evolve.<p>If it continues through beta just fine, looks like media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground will finally ship [0]. This is something I've been tracking through [1] since it was called out in the 54 release notes although it was not actually released. I was always a bit surprised that this wasn't the default behavior as it was in Chrome. Major use case for me: queuing up several YouTube videos from either search results or directly through the list of a users videos.<p>[2] "Firefox Fights Back: Inside Mozilla, CEO Chris Beard and his team are preparing to outmaneuver Google’s Chrome browser" is linked from the submitted article and looks like an interesting read. Only got a few comments on HN when it was submitted 5 days ago.<p>[0] <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1387917" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1387917</a><p>[1] <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1308154" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1308154</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/mozilla-firefox-fights-back-against-google-chrome/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/mozilla-firefox-fights-...</a>
I'm very glad they've drastically reduced the resources taken up by restored (but not activated) tabs. I tend to hoard tabs which I swear I'll organise into bookmarks "soon" but never quite get round to it.<p>There's more info on this here: <a href="https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/" rel="nofollow">https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/</a>
Still no Linux love for WebVR :(<p>Since I have no intention of switching to Windows after 20+ years on Linux, I'm going to have to wait, as usual.
I've posted this some three years ago and it still blows my gourd <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db-7J5OaSag" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db-7J5OaSag</a>
It hurts to lose 'Self-Destructing Cookies'. What a great piece of software!<p>It was marked as being incompatible with FF 55+ and e10s. See <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destructing-cookies/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct...</a><p>Does anyone know an alternative?
IntersectionObserver looks like a nice alternative to the janky event handlers that many sites employ for style changes on scroll. Now we just have to wait 10 years for it to be implemented in Safari.
Anecdote time: I've been a lifelong supporter on Firefox (and Mozilla at a higher level), both as an end consumer, and philosophically: This is how to build a company around human beings and respecting their rights and privacy. Even had a Firefox download link on my blog footer for over half a decade (back in the days of footer images)!<p>In the last few years, it was becoming harder and harder to support Firefox as a browser simply because the cons had started to outweigh the pros: It became slow, bulky, and hung multiple times, on a system with 16 Gig RAM nonetheless . Even though I was the only Firefox guy in my team (So many teams I know develop and test ONLY on chrome), I still stuck with it. But was beginning to feel that I was supporting FFx, more out of philosophy than out of it being good software (like RMS insisting on browsing the web by wget-ing pages).<p>I'm glad to note the last 2-3 releases for firefox have been EPIC! So many improvements for power users (I have 120+ tabs open right now and it's all buttery smooth), and focussing on what FIrefox does best: Be an awesome browser! Next time someone tells me how Chrome is hogging their system memory, I'll (once again) be proud to point them to the Firefox download page.<p>Ffx dev team, You guys are awesome! :D
Good to see firefox progressing, I've started using it again ever since the multi process work in 54 and been relatively happy with it.<p>Only thing really missing for someone that always has about 50 tabs open is de-prioritising background tabs. I don't have music playing in the browser and just want it to use no more than 10% CPU on tabs I'm not actively browsing. There should be options to prioritize responsiveness over everything. Sick of cpu fans spinning up and browser taking time to respond to tab switches.
Has anyone got this working with the Oculus Rift DK2 on a Mac? When Mozilla first released their WebVR offering (I thought it was WebVR.com, now it seems to be gone) the WebVR build of Firefox supported it fine - but it doesn't appear to detect it now.
So firefox is again using the marketing and PR machine to pretend it is relevant and not heading towards its demise due to ignoring their users and not delivering.<p>It's crazy to see them continue to believe that firefox is great and continually improving and that losing users is due to something outside of their reach when they're piling up decisions accelerating firefox towards irrelevance.<p>We don't want WebVR on windows only, we want freedom of choice instead of being forced to submit to whatever mozilla unilaterally decide, we want the features that were provided by extensions that firefox decided to kill, we want an adblocker (content-blocker), we want an option to protect our privacy by killing trackers, we want a way for us users to reach developers and have our voice heard, and so on. we don't want more marketing and bs.