Earlier today, Mozilla pushed Firefox 62 for desktop and Android. With the release, Mozilla has introduced an UI refresh for the new tabs page as well as several dialogs like for adding or editing a bookmark, several performance enhancements to speed up browsing, and some security enhancements.
The first change that users will notice is the refreshed new tab page; with Firefox 62 users can now display up to four rows of top sites, Pocket stories and highlights. Currently, you get one row of top sites, and depending on your location you may not even get shown Pocket stories. Another UI changes that you’ll notice is in the menu where you can toggle tracking protection on and off easily.
On the performance side of things, Windows users will now get improved graphics rendering without accelerated hardware using Parallel-Off-Main-Thread Painting. Additionally, support for CSS Shapes allows for richer web page layouts, and CSS Variable Fonts support allows the browser to render “beautiful typography” with a single font file.
I don’t feel it makes any sense to highlight every browser release, but randomly picking a release to talk about here on OSNews only makes sense – especially for a loyal mainstay like Firefox.
removed feature for this update: the description field for bookmarks. Probably most people don’t use it, but if you do, you’ve got something to work around
Also Firefox 52 ESR is no longer supported, so XP (or Server 2003) holdouts don’t have an up to date browser from Mozilla anymore. If you (or some forgotten device) are on XP still, the only option I can dig up for a maintained browser is Otter Browser ( https://otter-browser.org ) though releases this year are a bit scarce
Thanks for the Otter tip!
For 2k/XP builds of Firefox, K-Meleon and Pale.. I mean New Moon visit http://rtfreesoft.blogspot.com/ or the MSFN XP forum.
Please don’t scam yourself. Otter Browser is built with Qt 5 that will also receive its EOL on Windows XP in just a couple of months. Already now, the last XP-supported release is from September 2017 and there might actually be no additional release before the scheduled end-of-life for Qt 5.6 LTS at the end of this year.
Well that sucks.. I use the description field to keep notes in.
That also means rust is required now for a secure browser. This blocks several smaller projects from providing firefox.
Firefox is still a resource hog. Currently browsing 5 tabs, opening process explorer, each process are in the 350-740 MB range, with the main at 810 MB. 3GB for 5 opened tabs, seriously ? I remember a time when we could browse the Internet with a computer with 256 MB, have a load of tabs opened without pushing the computer to its limits.
You’re clearly doing something wrong, because i have 1 giga of RAM usage and I’ve got like 30 tabs open. Granted, I haven’t clicked all of them since opening Firefox, but most have been loaded.
Do you perhaps don’t use a blocker? Ad and tracking software stacks really are horrendous in terms of bloatedness.
There’s a few things here. First, note the web is not static and pages today are typically far more complex than 15 years ago, even if that complexity is not visually apparent. Second, be careful reading memory usage because that memory may not entirely consist of non-shared private pages, so the sum may be misleading. And third, I never really remember a “load of tabs” not being impactful; while browsing the web on 256Mb of RAM was certainly a real thing, this was happening when tabbed browsing was in its infancy. The expectations of the web have risen along with the hardware’s ability to provide it.
It’s just retarded to complain about memory usage anyway. Increased load on memory is a natural consequence of running separate components in separate processes to make the browser FASTER and MORE SECURE. Nobody wanted to use the old Firefox that was running everything in the same process/thread, because it was unbearably slow and sometimes even unstable.
What are you trying to achieve when you cry for going back to the slow and unusable Firefox? Just to buy some more RAM, unless you made the mistake of buying some crappy laptop with maybe 4 GBs of RAM soldered on the mobo…
Edited 2018-09-06 19:08 UTC
Classic Opera was light enough on resources to be nice with dozens of tabs opened since it introduced that feature…
There must be something wrong with your setup: I’ve got 14 tabs open at the moment and mine’s taking 1.8GB (64-bit build on 64-bit Windows).
I use FF on Windows/Mac/Android, sometimes I switch to Chrome for a couple of months, then I go back to FF. Both are good. On Windows, FF is probably much better than on Mac. Anyway, it’s probably an emotional choice, FF being open source.