back to article Firefox 105 is here, and it's faster and more memory-frugal

The Mozilla Foundation has let Firefox 105 out of the gate, and if you use a Chrome-based browser, it's a good time to take another look. Firefox 105 appeared on Tuesday, and while this isn't a show-stopping release, there is some new stuff that is well worth having. It's not quite five months since Firefox 100 came out, which …

  1. Mayday
    Go

    Vertical Tabs

    I’m going to go d this one a crack I think.

    1. Mayday
      Stop

      Re: Vertical Tabs

      I might even give this one a crack, as opposed to typing like I’m smoking it.

      1. Lars
        Pint

        Re: Vertical Tabs

        @Mayday

        You could also have deleted your smoke affected comment.

        1. Hubert Cumberdale Silver badge

          Re: Vertical Tabs

          (but it was funnier not to)

    2. MrXonTR

      Re: Vertical Tabs

      Strange that Liam chose to recommend the barely known Vertical Tabs extension instead of the much more popular, tried and tested, and refined Tree Style Tabs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/). It's as if he doesn't use what he promotes and only copied the top result for "vertical".

      1. VoiceOfTruth

        Re: Vertical Tabs

        To be fair if you do a search for "vertical" on the Firefox add ons page, tree-style-tab is not shown. If I wanted vertical tabs and did not know about tree-style-tab, how would I find it? It's a bit like the supposed millions of apps on the Google Play store. Why do I keep seeing the same apps rather than some new ones?

      2. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: Vertical Tabs

        I still prefer the original Panorama/Tab Groups extension which got brought into Firefox and then unceremoniously dumped in Mozilla's continual efforts to turn the GUI into an empty interface with just one button in the middle.

        There is a similar extension, but it's less polished than the original because WebExtensions is gubbins.

      3. Craig 2

        Re: Vertical Tabs

        Big fan of tree style tabs here too. I went to check out the Vertical tabs extension page and the first thing I thought was "Only 4 reviews all 5*? Stinks."

      4. Ian 55

        Re: Vertical Tabs

        Tree Style Tabs is what I use - and from memory, it's in the five pages of 'recommended' addons - but it has started to be a bit unstable when you have thousands of tabs.

        I will have to check to see if the memory reclaiming feature means I can stop using an addon to do that.

    3. msknight

      Re: Vertical Tabs

      When you give it a run, please do report back on how annoying the forced automatic updates are, and the lack of a button to turn them off.

      Firefox devs believe it is their task to ensure everyone is updated, all the time, and ignoring the pop up eventually makes Firefox refuse to load anything in a new tab until you've restarted Firefox (and then had to reload all your tabs) ... and no, there is no option in the config: either, because they've removed that as well.

      This is the Firefox devs attitude, because I've been there and had that conversation with them... and switched to Vivaldi.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Vertical Tabs

        Yes, that attitude is typical of Mozilla, where their leftist politics will take your freedom away for your own good. They're into censorship too, with their "Internet Health Report". The whole organisation has been taken over by leftist, safetyist feminists.

        1. Hubert Cumberdale Silver badge

          Re: Vertical Tabs

          Err... whuuut?

      2. Ian Johnston Silver badge

        Re: Vertical Tabs

        When you give it a run, please do report back on how annoying the forced automatic updates are, and the lack of a button to turn them off.

        Are you a Linux user, by any chance? Last time I looked, standard Firefox still allowed control over updates but the Xubuntu (and I presume Ubuntu) version which I use didn't. Apparently that's because the OS team have designated Firefox updates as OS security ones, so they cannot be turned off or even postponed.

        That in turn means that Firefox in Xubuntu regularly restarts itself, losing all work in open tabs (which it rarely reopens properly) without any opportunity of a graceful exit or saving.

        Screw them. I have moved to Chrome.

        1. FIA Silver badge

          Re: Vertical Tabs

          Just looked in Windows, and FF 105 has options to auto update or not.

          I will also say FF on the mac has never restarted without asking me first. (That's the one I tend to leave running for weeks on end). Just looked, it's on 104 and isn't bugging me.

          Oh, as to their annoyance level, personally: zero.

        2. MarkTriumphant

          Re: Vertical Tabs

          Why would anyone move *to* Chrome? Google are not making it better, they are making it worse.

  2. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

    But does it support the extensions that stopped working in mobile version 69 yet?

    1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

      That ship has sailed

      I'm afraid.

    2. Tom Chiverton 1 Silver badge

      Yes, with some fiddling, so things like Tab Mix Plus for multi-row horizontal tabs work again: https://github.com/onemen/TabMixPlus/#readme

      Though not via Snap, but Snap FireFox has a ton of problems, like saving downloads to '/tmp/' actually being saved to some other folder under the real '/tmp/', so I've moved all our Ubuntu machines off the Snap and onto old school .tgz installs direct from Mozilla.

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        None of that is possible with the mobile version.

        The mobile version has a grand total of 16 "curated" extensions, it seems all work on making the rest work has ground to a halt.

        1. Graham Dawson

          On Android, install Fennec from the f-droid app store. It's a version of Firefox that comes without the extension restrictions and with most of the Mozilla tracking features removed.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          The mobile version still doesn't have zoom and reflow. It's utterly useless.

  3. Arthur the cat Silver badge
    Flame

    All very well but

    I'm probably going to waste yet more time finding out why all my menu & bookmark text is suddenly 72 point again. Mozilla keep changing the knobs that let you control non-web text sizes and don't document it clearly. Bloody annoying and no, I don't have a 96 DPI screen, not do I want shouty menus. Just stop fucking around with it!

    [I want a steam coming out of ears icon.]

    1. RobThBay

      Re: All very well but

      Stupidly large fonts. I was trying to fix that today, but couldn't find the settings for it.

      Where did they hide it (Windows).

      Thx

      1. Arthur the cat Silver badge

        Re: All very well but

        Not on Windows myself (my machines are FreeBSD), but maybe try this?

        It was creating ui.textScaleFactor that worked for me. Yet another new config parameter, different from the last one I had to tweak.

  4. Hubert Cumberdale Silver badge
    Go

    Keep at it, Moz! We need there to be someone challenging the big G at their monopoly. As it stands, I admit that FF is not quite as snappy as Chrome. However, this is a price I'm willing to pay for not being in thrall to the ad-slinger.* It would have to be actually unusable for me to switch to Chrom(e/ium)(/Edge/other skin).

    (*Yes, I know you're going to tell me FF is supported by Google's money. I don't care: it lets me use the web without wanting to gouge out my eyes.)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Can't say I've noticed any difference in performance between Chrome... well in Edge guise it seems slightly slower than FF but that may just be all the ads loading.....

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Performance

        In my experience as a webdev and after hours of profiling I find that Firefox is better at static stuff, in one memorable example I had a page with other a million elements and Chrome took 30 seconds to parse it all whereas Firefox measured in mere milliseconds! When it comes to dynamic stuff Chrome takes the lead, it's JavaScript engine is superior although in my subjective experience it also crashes more often.

    2. steviebuk Silver badge

      I was the same for years then the stupid company was at also made the stupid decision to move to gsuite (its shit) and "encouraged" us to use Chrome. I disliked it but discovered Google Keep. Actually really useful if you find a website interested in. Find a bit of a website interested in etc, you just highlight send to Google Keep. Essentially really quick note taking. Sadly no one has made one for Firefox, not an official extension for Google Keep for Firefox so I ended up moving perm to Chrome. Didn't help when I moved into my new home, due to having no room the PC that worked perfectly fine day before move. Decided, a year later of not being turned on, for Windows 7 to go all weird and refuse to update (before updates were ended) and then firefox detonated and kept crashing and killed all the bookmarks.

      So now on work laptop, even though no longer required, I sadly stuck with Chrome.

      1. Hubert Cumberdale Silver badge

        Apparently, Pocket in FF does something like Keep, But I've never personally had a use case for either. Printing as a PDF is fine for me. And if I want to take notes, beleive it or not, I use Notepad...

    3. Danny 2

      Hubert,

      I strongly recommend not gouging your eyes out. My eyesight is going and there is no update for that, yet.

      I've had to enlarge all the text now that all print is small print, which is fine for horizontal tabs but leaves no room for vertical tabs.

      Help the aged, one time they were just like you

      Coding, fixing bugs and developing GNU

  5. SammyB

    Just updated now. It certainly reloaded itself much faster than I remember the last update.

  6. aerogems Silver badge
    Megaphone

    My gripe

    It really has nothing at all to do with Firefox, but how we've come full circle and a lot of sites are only bothering to test with Chrome. Reddit, for example, has had a known bug for YEARS, in its comments. Pasting into a comment box with Firefox is completely borked, and despite there being a ticket open in Bugzilla for Firefox, it doesn't seem like it's high on anyone's priority to try to fix. Don't really blame them, Reddit's the one that is using a broken bit of JavaScript and should be the one fixing it, but... yeah. Their support staff is well aware of the issue, have been for years, and they seem about equally invested in fixing it as Mozilla.

    It is nice to know that Mozilla is still plugging away and providing a non-Chromium alternative for those who want/need it.

    1. Uncle Slacky Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: My gripe

      Is that in Old or New Reddit? I only ever use the old version, and I've never noticed a problem.

      1. Graham 32

        Re: My gripe

        New Reddit. It's the wysiwyg editor. Switching to markdown mode gets around it, but every so often I forget. It's a right PITA.

    2. Robert Grant

      Re: My gripe

      To be fair to Microsoft here, their new whizzy Playwright UI test automation tool supports Firefox out of the box.

    3. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: My gripe

      "Their support staff is well aware of the issue, have been for years, and they seem about equally invested in fixing it as Mozilla."

      As back in the day when stuff worked or didn't work with FF or IE, devs mark all those kind of problems as "will not fix" because the metrics say they are self-repairing. User get so sick of waiting for a fix, they just install the browser that works with that site, possibly only for the few incompatible sites they encounter. What the devs see is that "everyone" is using the browser that "works" and almost no one is using the "incompatible" browser, therefore it's not worth spending time and resources fixing a problem only a very few "whiney" people have.

  7. Kev99 Silver badge

    But does it still block sites arbitrarily?

  8. captain veg Silver badge

    Amateurs!

    "Chrome spawns a new process for each tab you open"

    Pah! How 20th century. Modern development requires that each tab gets its own Docker container.

    -A.

    1. David 132 Silver badge
      Happy

      Re: Amateurs!

      ...with associated NFT. In the cloud.

  9. Robert Grant

    Wow, an engineering-focused release

    This sounds worth upgrading for.

  10. ICam

    Already released in Linux Mint

    The Firefox packagers for Mint are mighty quick!

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: Already released in Linux Mint

      Not sure. I last did a pkg upgrade on FreeBSD a couple of days ago and got the new Firefox 105 then too. FreeBSD is normally a little behind Linux releases. Either there was almost no work involved[*] in FreeBSDing the source or Mint was late to the party :-)

      [*] That's not to denigrate all the much appreciated hard work the FreeBSD Ports team and the groups and individuals maintaining the ports and packages do, but they are not always in the same loop or have the same resources as the big Linux "distro" teams.

  11. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Quick Linux updates

    Since almost all new releases of Chrome, Chromium, and Firefox include some security fixes, quite a few Linux distros just treat all updates to these as security updates and get them built and packaged faster than they would for other software updates.

  12. Type something here

    Too many tabs open at once is unnecessary.

    You don't need to have thousands of tabs open! With 'Toby For Tabs' instead you have collections of tabs and open them in separate browser windows as required. Disclaimer: I'm an end user of Toby and have no affiliation.

    1. Ian 55

      Re: Too many tabs open at once is unnecessary.

      Some of us have thousands of tabs in multiple windows - 16 at the moment, albeit not all with thousands - already.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "If you're a heavy user and routinely have many dozens of tabs open, we highly recommend giving the Fox another try"

    Just a day after installing the update and it's the first time that FF has locked up solid... no other programs running... had to use the power button to shut the laptop down!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Another day, another upgrade (now 105.0.1)!

  14. elregidente

    Automatic tab unloading is a disaster.

    I'm often low on memory and it looks to me like Firefox is constantly unloading tabs - rather than letting the OS page *other* apps out.

    So my user experience is this;

    Before : tabs were instant.

    After : five seconds to switch between tabs.

    It's "browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory" to False to disable.

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