June 2015

Firefox 41 ships with massive memory improvements for Adblock Plus

“Version 41 of the Firefox web browser ships with memory improvements that benefit all users of the browser but Adblock Plus users especially.“When Mozilla ran memory tests against a set of popular Firefox add-ons recently it noticed that the popular extension Adblock Plus was adding an average of 60-70 Megabytes to the browser’s memory usage.“It discovered furthermore that certain conditions could increase memory usage extremely so that the overall use of memory by Firefox would double, triple or even quadruple while sites remained open in the browser. …” Source: gHacks Tech NewsDetails 

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Releases Page Updates

The Releases page has been broken and outdated for nearly the past year. This page has been updated with the latest schedule and cleaned up.

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Pale Moon Fork and Why I Moved To It

I have been using Firefox for a long time – my old laptop has 1.1 on it – and was quite happy with it. I used to post links to it with the caption “Finally, a browser that works the way I want it to!!”Recently Mozilla has been making changes that made that statement somewhat deceptive though, and a source of increasing frustration/irritation for me and others. [GHacks Article]I had heard of Pale Moon but I use Linux and it was Windows only at the time. When a member of the community made a Linux version I jumped on it.I…

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Mozilla making Firefox bloated?

Over the course of the last year I have noticed Firefox is becoming more and more bloated. Martin Brinkmann (ghacks), talks about what Firefox was like when it was first introduced: Back then, the core development philosophy was to create and maintain a user-friendly browser with a high level of customization options and a powerful extension ecosystem that adds new features to the browser. This worked really well, kept the core browser rather slim without sacrificing features as users were able to install extensions or scripts, or use other customization options such as styles to modify the browser for their needs and…

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Thunderbird Numbering

After each major update there is always some people who are confused by the numbering scheme used for Thunderbird. Common question is why did the version number just jump up by 7? Thunderbird follows the Firefox ESR release numbering which means there is major release every 48 weeks or 7 regular updates of Firefox/Gecko. So, next big update will be Thunderbird 45 in March 2016. This is the tentative schedule for the next year: June 30th: Thunderbird 38.1.0 (Gecko 39) August 11th: Thunderbird 38.2.0 (Gecko 40) September 22nd: Thunderbird 38.3.0 (Gecko 41) November 3rd: Thunderbird 38.4.0 (Gecko 42) December 15th: Thunderbird 38.5.0…

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Favicon Bug

This is a really an odd one and it affects both Chrome and Firefox (possibly Safari as well), but NOT Internet Explorer. If you have had unexplained crashes while/after visiting a WordPress (WP) site, it is possible it could be caused by this bug. The good news is this bug has been reported to Mozilla [Bug 1174811] and it was patched on Wednesday (June 17th). Just not sure yet when it is going to be pushed out. Firefox 39 is due out in less than two weeks (June 30th), but then there could also be a 38.0.6 release between now and then (though…

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Thunderbird 38.x.x Info

First, updates from Thunderbird 31.7.0 to Thunderbird 38.0.1 via Help > About Thunderbird are now active as I just updated one my machines. Important to note you must have 31.7.0 (released May 12th) in order to update to Thunderbird 38.0.1 as the machine only had Thunderbird 31.6.0 on it. After updating to 31.7.0 then it download the full 30+ MB update for Thunderbird 38.0.1 version. In regards to the version numbering. Thunderbird 38 was suppose to be released on May 12th (same day as Firefox 38), but due to complications Mozilla could not release the full version of Thunderbird 38….

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Thunderbird 38.0.1 Released

Mozilla has released the next major update for Thunderbird with the release of Thunderbird 38.0.1 on June 11th. Note, there was NOT a Thunderbird 38.0.0 release due to several bugs (which were addressed and fixed with the 38.0.1 release). Currently the new release is only available via download and manual install from the getthunderbird.com site. Automatic and manual (Help > About Thunderbird) updates are not currently enabled for this release yet (allow 24-72 hours for those updates methods to become available). Some of the new changes with Thunderbird 38.0.x: Lightning (Calendar) add-on is now included and enabled by default (with the option…

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How to disable auto-playing Flash and HTML5 videos

“If I had to rate annoying things that I encounter on the Internet on a scale, auto-playing videos would certainly make it to the top of the list, especially if they are not configured to start muted by default. But even if videos start muted, they are a huge annoyance as they may distract users, suck up bandwidth or waste cpu cycles. …” Source: gHacks Tech News

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