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Thanks Mozilla Firefox

40 points by diminish ↗ HN
This morning I woke up - feeling good for some reason which then I remembered: I had installed Firefox 57 on Ubuntu and Android and experienced the new speed. It may seem a small update in some small open source software but it results in an improvement in the lives of hundreds of millions of people in 1 day.

So thanks Mozilla, Firefox and open source software in general.

12 comments

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[dead] shumo
I don't know how that is improvement. Opened 1 tab in new firefox on windows7 - 4 processes in task manager and 500MB RAM consumption, in old firefox 1 process and 200MB RAM. On my old PC I don't feel speed improvement. Shame Firefox
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MightySCollins
I have been using Nightly for sending time and glad people get to experience the numerous improvements
dabockster
Same here. I remember trying Nightly in 2010 and having be super unstable. Coming back after years on Google Chrome, Nightly feels super stable and responsive.

I do get the occasional rendering issue, but that's my only nitpick.

ekr
I've also been using Nightly since about 2 months ago, when I noticed how fast it became. However, it does have its share of glitches. For instance switching between tabs with C-S-Tab, doesn't take me to the previous tab, but jumps seemingly at random (this doesn't always happen but it does happen often enough to be annoying).
woumn
Unfortunately, the update for Mac doesn't solve the battery usage issue.
wirddin
Can confirm this. It drains the battery.
kazinator
Looks like complete shit; breaks add-ons.

I reverted back to 56 after 5 minutes of using this garbage release.

kazinator
Wife has 57 running on her older model laptop (Win7, 32 bit). Just found her trying to kill firefox because it was too slow; she was dismayed by the proliferation of multiple firefox.exe processes instead of the usual one. (I advised about "kill process tree"; seems to have worked).

Faster, my left foot.

Not in any real sense for the everyday user.

Task manager is still your best friend.

To add insult to injury, the "Restart firefox" extension (your other best friend) is gone.

xcoding
Loving Firefox since 2005 on Windows, Linux. Awesome release.

A bit annoying is crashing on Android while using more than 5 tabs, phone is completely crashing, have to restart again.