Fire Fox Three Was Better Than Fire Fox Four

Now with Firefox 13. On average it uses about half the memory compared to Firefox 12.

Looks about the same to me, especially idling. But then, I only just launched it about ten or fifteen minutes ago. I'll have to give it a while to build up a memory leak.

After more hours into it I have to agree. It seems to rise more slowly though. Just used Process Explorer and it shows Firefox takes more than 1 gig of memory. Notice that it has far less lag though. Firefox 12 is really laggy when it exceeds 700 meg of memory.

At this rate, when will the version number exceed 9000?

They theoretically release a new version every 6 weeks, so they'll hit version 9000 in 1033 years 5 months.

So which Fire Fox are we on now? I've lost track.

13.0.1. I can't remember if this is the one that hsa a lot of mobile/Android/something upgrades, or if that one's still a couple away.

Yeah, there was a big Mobile for Android update. They basically scrapped everything that wasn't the Gecko engine and started over.

Text entry is still buggy as hell, but otherwise it's a more pleasant experience. And it renders animated GIFs (Android has a stupid measure in it where if you have less than a jillion bytes of memory it only displays the first frame by default. I think Opera and Firefox get around this by rendering images independently of the system image renderer). It also finally supports Flash. It was an incredible embarrassment to them to be the only opt-in mobile browser without Flash support. In short, it's a much better experience, but the text input is still a deal-breaker for me. My primary mobile browser is still Dolphin, but I now use Firefox when I want to see GIFs.

edited 4th Jul '12 12:10:12 AM by TParadox

Can someone please explain how Firefox 13 chooses which page to show on the new tab page. It's totally different from New Tab Jump Start.

^ Rolls a virtual pair of dice?

I ultimately went with the addon Tab Utilities to at least approximate the old behavior, though I can't seem to find the setting combo to give behavior exactly like pre-v13 versions of FF.

I swear, it's like Mozilla is intentionally changing things just to annoy its users.

edited 14th Jul '12 10:10:21 AM by Nohbody

Now with Firefox 14.0.1, hopefully it at least resolved the freeze and stop consuming 1+ gig of memory.

Mine is currently idling at about 350 MB.

Firefox 15.0 now. It rarely exceeds 300 Meg of memory, yay.

I think competition with Chrome might be responsible for them finally getting serious about memory leak.

I remember the worst, laggiest version of Firefox had the misfortune of releasing the same month Chrome released. Not good for making comparisons.

This one is great! Finally, the amount of memory it uses will go down as tabs are closed.

A little off-topic, but Thunderbird just updated, and while I disliked having tabs in Thunderbird (mainly the fact that you can't hide them, and the only add-on that does so is out of date), the new version changed the nice square Firefox-style tabs into those ugly, space-hogging, tapered Chrome tabs.

Well, actually they're not all that ugly, I just hate how much extra space they take up.

In light of some script issues I switched back to fire fox 2...well I thought I was on Fire Fox 3 but then realized I was actually on Fire Fox 30. You know what has changed between 2 and 30? Because I cannot really tell (well it looks different but you know, function).

30? How'd you manage to do that? The latest stable is version 24...

Maybe he means 3.0?

I was looking to download an earlier versions of Fire Fox in an effort to get around a script issue and came across this, I was looking to get three back but I read that as thirty. I saw no higher update so I figured that was what my firefox had most recently updated itself to before my downgrade.

The site is apparently using their own arbitrary version numbering system for some reason, chopping off the first of the two digits in the version number. The only version numbers that matter are those listed on mozilla.org or are websites using mozilla.org info.

edited 10th Oct '13 6:32:01 AM by Nohbody

I may have to go back to Firefox. Last night I updated Chromium on our Linux media center and discovered Chromium broke all plugins that don't run on Google's Pepper plugin API, destroying the way we get Netflix on it as well as requiring me to install a new version of Flash even though Flash is supposed to be baked into Chrome/Chromium.

Today I Xkit stopped working on my desktop machine, and I found out that the latest Chrome requires HTTPS for all extension connections, which disables pretty much everything Xkit does (the Tumblr API doesn't use HTTPS), and the developer's attempt to work around this by sending all requests securely to the Xkit server to handle nonsecurely, broke the server.

"Chrome: Screw your favorite extensions."

edited 9th Oct '14 2:43:42 PM by TParadox

I remember the older version of Firefox before it upgraded. Hated it, but in time I got used to it. I still use the modern version now for bookmark reasons and such, but I have moved on to using other programs.

Has anyone looked at the developer's comments on the Mozilla bug tracker in the last decade? There can be thousands of forum topics on other sites, trying to figure out things like disabling favorite icons in bookmarks or getting the downloads history to auto-delete like before, but little of it seems to get back to the developers, and when it does they dismiss them because of the few people that use Bugzilla to report their problems. There's also basic problems that remain unfixed for years. I can't help but think Mozilla is running into the same problem as Bethesda: they know that user add-ons will fix most their problems and seem to stop focusing on stability.

On a more positive note, I am of the opinion that with the Classic Theme Restorer extension and a security-build like IceDragon, the browser is still one of the best out there (as of typing). Though I do use Chrome for flash videos as it has PPAPI, which is more secure, unlike the NPAPI still used by Firefox, which is focused on compatibility.

The most recent update I saw to Firefox was 47. I still need to update to it. (It came out like 3 days ago.)