Mozilla Firefox celebrates its 20th anniversary, will continue to support current content blockers

[Redaktion]

Although its market share is no longer what it used to be, Firefox became two decades old yesterday and it's not going away anytime soon. The first 0.1 release arrived on September 23, 2002 as Phoenix. Version 1.0 followed more than two years later, on November 9, 2004, which is often considered the browser's birthday.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Mozilla-Firefox-celebrates-its-20th-anniversary-will-continue-to-support-current-content-blockers.657297.0.html

[Hunter2020]

Everyone still using Windows XP pretty much stuck on FireFox 52.9 ESR. The only browser on XP that still works with most websites.

In 2022, FireFox is not really needed.  Chrome, Edge, FireFox are all data mining spyware.  Thank God there is the open source Chromium project.  About the only good Chromium browser today free from data mining is the one Deepin Linux compiled from the open source Chromium with a touch of their own ingenuity to the user interface!  Aptly called Deepin Browser is it just that the most clean  compile of Chromium open source code.

[NikoB]

I tried the latest versions starting from 104 and I did not like them at all - the speed of opening pages dropped sharply, including the response to the dns request. Which is simply obvious if you run two versions 94 and 104 side by side. 94 works much faster, although, alas, some sites are already buggy in it. I'm really annoyed by the laziness of developers to support still fairly recent versions (for example, these same sites work fine on Chrome 83).

I also want to note that they removed the already deliberately unsupported option in the settings for prohibiting the creation of more than one process in memory.

The main thing that ruined FF (in addition to poor compatibility with sites compared to Chrome) is that starting from version 69 it is impossible to use the correct black and white font smoothing without damage to vision (when there are no shadows on the vertical and horizontal lines of the letter elements, i.e. the black- white anti-aliasing adopted earlier in W2K / XP) - which made fans sit to the last on FireFox. Now the only option that still saves your eyesight (and which is not in Chrome, where fonts are always blurry compared to the correct anti-aliasing in versions before 49, i.e. without using the buggy Direct Write mode in the engine) is to turn off anti-aliasing altogether. The fonts will of course be slightly clumsy, but very sharp, so much so that your eyesight will even improve immediately on your monitor and laptop (I guarantee you this). Of course, this does not apply to panels with high ppi from 250 and smartphones, where ppi is almost always above 300 now. the turbidity of the fonts there is already simply invisible.

By the way, we must also remember the mockery of Mozilla developers over FireFox users in version 68, etc. (where else fonts could be adjusted to properly anti-alias), they intentionally removed the position of the drop-down menu on the tab - open a new contribution (next to the current one). Such experiments are rapidly reducing the user population. Then it was returned, but there were a lot of people who wanted to use FireFox.

All the Mozilla team needs to start squashing chrome on PC/laptops (they don't have a chance on smartphones anymore) is to bring back normal black and white anti-aliasing without muddy fonts. Give the ability to explicitly disable the update, without annoying offers to update constantly and give more flexibility to customize the interface, and also increase the speed of the browser's response.

And more importantly, FireFox works worse with hardware decoding and playing videos on YouTube. Here it is programmatically, on old PCs and laptops it works better (which is surprising). But when decoding 4k video, the desire to use it on YouTube instantly disappears and you quickly switch to Chrome, where even older versions behave perfectly without loading the processor and video part with an increased load like FireFox.

[NikoB]

In the last paragraph, I wanted to say (again a moronic translation from Google translator with "super" AI) that software decoding (not hardware) of video up to 2.5k on YouTube works better in chrome (even older versions) like 94, but here is hardware decoding 4k video on YouTube is clearly not the strong point of FireFox, here for some reason Chrome rules, although even there it will not be possible to achieve ideal smooth playback even on modern hardware, but the load on cpu and igpu will be clearly lower.

[NikoB]

Everyone still using Windows XP pretty much stuck on FireFox 52.9 ESR. The only browser on XP that still works with most websites.

In 2022, FireFox is not really needed.  Chrome, Edge, FireFox are all data mining spyware.  Thank God there is the open source Chromium project.  About the only good Chromium browser today free from data mining is the one Deepin Linux compiled from the open source Chromium with a touch of their own ingenuity to the user interface!  Aptly called Deepin Browser is it just that the most clean  compile of Chromium open source code.

I've been tinkering with Linux more than once - there the devil will break his leg with hardware video playback in the browser. This is clearly not a matter of ordinary mind and not a mass case. That is why the market share occupied by Linux versions has grown very little in 20 years. Those who wish are poking around in a bunch of settings in the console and downloading and installing something there, no. I personally had the "valuable" experience of installing Skype under the same clumsy Ubuntu. Usually a person will spit and install Windows for himself, where everything will come down to a few clicks. And from the point of view of security, all versions of Linux are so full of holes as a sieve, which has been proven many times in recent years. At the same time, the funniest thing is that Ubuntu eats more memory than W10! I once tried to run it on a machine with 4GB of memory and it couldn't even fully load the shell since the 18+ LTS version. Who needs that, except for a couple of sadomasochistic geeks?

FF52 is completely dead, just like XP. R.I.P.

I personally keep XP only for listening to music and watching movies on my old projector or monitor in headphone mode with the correct Dolby Headphone. I have a lot of old-time settings and baubles there for this and they can not be repeated in W7-W10. So far it works old hardware is good, it will live there. XP is no longer good for anything anymore.