This one isn't fixed. Perhaps it should be changed to "Broken support ticket links..." to be more clear. Unless it's only me?

stupid auto-merge:
Looks like GOG is playing around with the back-end DB for the forums. No doubt related to the read/unread problems. Page 1 of 1, 68 replies and empty search in general according to the top bar. No doubt a good idea to give it a few days. Refreshing seems to fix most of it. That one thread is still showing the wrong number of replies. Hopefully they are just re-indexing things.

I'm using Firefox 38 on Win7 currently, haven't noticed any GOG related problems yet, but some of my addons were found to be incompatible with 38 which kind of sucks. I just wanted to pass on some info to other Firefox users that like me might be big fans of addons... Mozilla has been developing a major feature for years now called Electrolysis which they're slowly factoring into new Firefox releases, it was supposed to debut in 36 or 37 but seems that they keep holding it back due to complex technical issues that will affect the compatibility of many addons. At some point they will release a new version of Firefox that will have Electrolysis built in fully and be turned on by default though and while it is an awesome step forward for security, privacy, performance and stability of the browser when it lands, the very nature of the technical changes will totally break MANY firefox extensions if their authors have not been following along and adapting their addons to work with the new Electrolysis framework. It's possible that they've begun some of the changes already and that it could be interfering with bad extensions that have been abandoned or just not updated yet.

I thought I'd mention this here because such changes could end up causing website related breakage/problems in the near future. Short term pain for long term gain and all of that. :)

Yeah. For anyone who wants to know more, Electrolysis is basically "Let's solve all of the problems people complain about most by changing to a chrome-style multi-process browser but using read-only or copy-on-write shared memory to keep memory consumption down"

The three biggest benefits should be:

1. With the OS doing preemptive multitasking rather than the browser [badly] reinventing Windows 3.1-style cooperative multitasking, the browser should stay snappy under load and tab content shouldn't be able to freeze it.

2. With a Chrome-style architecture, it'll be possible to provide a Chrome-style process manager to easily see which extension is at fault when Firefox is guzzling gigs of memory and the Mozilla guys are pointing to AreWeSlimYet.com and wiping their hands of it.

3. The browser can throw up developer console warnings every time an extension uses the "synchronous cross-platform wrappers" compatibility hack that is the only way extensions should be able to disproportionately bog down content pages.

(The reason Chrome was made so quickly but it's taking Firefox years to retrofit this is because they're doing their damndest to keep the extension ecosystem from breaking despite extensions originally being "Here's root access to the internals of the Firefox instance. Muck away!" to allow things like NoScript, HTTPS Everywhere, and DownThemAll! which Chrome couldn't have until they wrote special plugin APIs for them.)

A pleasure to read. Thank you.

Yep, I was finally able to test and confirm this here also. I'm using the Firefox 38 build that does not contain the new video DRM. Avatars appear everywhere else fine though. I just tested in Chrome and in Galaxy and the avatars for chat work fine so it appears to be a problem just in Firefox 38. The only difference I'm aware of for my own browser is that I use the RequestPolicy extension in Firefox and that is currently disabled as incompatible with Firefox 38. I can't see how that could cause a problem of this nature though as the extension missing just removes the functionality and if anything would make problems _less_ likely to occur since more is being allowed.

Strange.

Interesting way of putting it, but I agree with some of your take on that. Firefox always had a rich extension infrastructure that allowed access to a lot of internals as you mention, and it does end up biting them in the ass when they want to make major architectural changes that are at odds with preserving compatibility. That's the nature of compatibility though to a degree. One major thing they've done to try to help move things forward was the introduction of the newer Jetpack style extension infrastructure. A lot of extensions use that now and it has a lot of advantages if the features an author needs are present in the Jetpack APIs and they use it. Those extensions should be much more resilient towards changes like Electrolysis, or at least that's the intention anyway. I only wish more of my extensions would adapt to Jetpack as I fear a number of them are going to soon be murdered due to stagnancy.

Ultimately though Electrolysis is a much superior approach when looked at purely from an architecture perspective unconstrained by compatibility issues. I only hope that they can evolve it slowly in a mostly painless way in small bumps over time before the final kablam, and that extension authors wake up and adapt their software sooner rather than later. I'm very much looking forward to the improved performance as I'm a _heavy_ power user often with hundreds of tabs open, about 50 extensions installed, and with all that content going on the browser usually slams up against the 3GB memory wall and crashes. With Electrolysis the content will be spread across multiple processes and be able to tap into more of my 32GB of RAM without going OOM and dying, plus if any one web page causes things to go south, just that one tab crashes but the rest of the browser stays alive. Then there's the integrated task manager as you mention and that'd be a damn nice thing to have too. :)

But, I suspect there will be a bit of a rocky road getting from point A to B with Electrolysis yet to come... it's only been what... 8 years in the making or it seems that way anyway. :)

Likewise but I'm a 64-bit Linux user and my Firefox tends to idle around 5GiB resident.

My main issue is jank due to the GC not scaling well, even with incremental GC... something which would be fixed by splitting it up across multiple processes.

It's already been enabled by default in limited two-process form (one for chrome, one for content) in the nightly builds for quite a while now so they can dogfood it and identify extensions that break without direct DOM access.
No argument. For me, the straw that broke the camel's back was when they forced "hide http:// in the address bar", spent a year "soliciting feedback", and then locked and closed the bug because all they got was requests to explain their rationale (something Mozilla did very well for tabs on top) and reasonable arguments that it served no useful purpose beyond making copy-paste buggier and limiting people's ability to copy paste exactly what they intended.

That's when I switched back to Firefox where, if they do do something stupid like moving the RSS icon out of the address bar or hiding http:// or spitting in the face of decades of research into why menus should show keyboard shortcuts, you can just reach for about:config or install an extension like Classic Theme Restorer to get a more sane mix of Firefox and Chrome.

To me Firefox is sort of the web browser equivalent of a girlfriend. You don't always agree with each other, but you love them anyway even if you have to have a shouting match from time to time and maybe someone has to sleep on the couch for a while.

I've got all major browsers installed on my machine as I do some web development and need to test in all browsers, but Firefox is my browser and while they all have their pros and cons and different browsers appeal to different types of users with different needs - absolutely none of the other browsers come even remotely close to meeting my personal needs. I'm a die hard power user and all of the other browsers have a very minimalistic approach to their designs. They were all designed for my mom or my grandma or joe user 1000 times more in mind than anyone like me. Firefox on the other hand always was about having lots of options and control, lots of addons and configurability/customization etc. All the browsers have some overlap of course, and they're all customizeable, but I just feel like I'm driving a car with no gas pedals when I use non-Firefox browsers.

So I am a big Firefox fanboy, but I am not in love with every decision Mozilla.org makes for the browser and I do make it sleep on the couch sometimes. The Australis UI changes gave me purple balls for example. But.. every time they make some annoying change, within a short time period I find some option, hidden setting in about:config, extension or other hack via web search on how to "put things back the way they should be" so to speak, and I'm happy again. Then Firefox and I kiss and have great makeup hex. :)



Mozilla offers a specialized version of Firefox intended for business customers that need a browser that has less frequent changes happening to it all of the time. It's known as "Firefox ESR", which is what ships with many enterprise Linux distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS etc. although most non-business users probably don't even know it exists as it is not advertised much out there.

Firefox ESR

I feel the same for SeaMonkey, I always keep coming back missing something.

Well, one of the key cornerstones of SeaMonkey is a consistent and OS integrated user interface which did not change significantly since its first release 10 years ago (if you count the Netscape Communicator as a first version, 17 years ago). If you want this sort of continuing consistency, then you will adore this communication suite (it is not just a browser).

Still, I'd love to see SeaMonkey more widespread, but it will stay niche. It is a trusty workhorse, though.

I know, but the life cycle for this ESR is too short and due the overuse of browser agent sniffing, you will encounter more and more websites which insist on "newer" Firefox versions which in turn alienates the (company) users.

Indeed. When my Firefox climbs up over 2.5GB resident I start doing a manual GC with it and sadly it appears to never really do much. I might shave a few megs off but it rarely drops any significant amount. That might be due to it already GC'ing regularly and nothing left to clear out but either way I end up having to restart to free up memory eventually. To be completely fair though, the problem is not due to Firefox itself but due to extensions that memory leak, namely AdBlock Plus which is a terrible leaker.

A 64bit build of the browser would postpone needing to care about it as I have 32GB of RAM, but that would have some consequences over time also. :)

Yeah, I haven't braved that as I know it is highly likely to murder some of my core "must have" extensions although I go back and forth between the stable public releases and the beta/Aurora builds from time to time. I've never used the nightlies though although I do often go into about:config and enable features that are included but disabled by default if I want to test them. Deferred tab loading, pdf.js, the happy-eyeballs algorithm support to name but a few I opted into using in the past. I'm both highly anticipating electrolysis and at the same time fearing the breakage it is likely to cause. :) I really wish they'd put out an official Win64 build of the browser though. I used 64bit Firefox in Linux 10+ years ago for crap sake as my main browser for years, and we still have no official stable 64bit Windows build yet just unofficial builds. GRRR :)

Yep, hiding the protocol identifier, tabs on top, austrailis, overall UI minimalistic look and feel changes and many more things they've done have irked me. Not that they did it, but that they did a lot of it as a mandatory "screw you if you don't like it" thing rather than making some of it visibly configurable even though almost all of it is configurable via about:config or via an extension. So I grumble for a few minutes/hours/days until I find a workaround and I'm back to my good ole browser again. My firefox visually looks today almost identical to how Firefox 4 looked. I embrace and adapt to some things and others I have resistance to unless I personally see a gain to myself which I often do not. The search bar changes not long ago removed functionality I use all the time and I had to find a hack to turn it back into the old search again for example. But... in the end Firefox and I always kiss and make up. :)

Yup, precisely. I hope they never make any drastic changes that are technologically not possible to tweak or undo via about:config or an addon either completely or partially. So far I've managed to survive their changes with about:config and Classic Theme Restorer and other hacks as it sounds like you have too, but I always fear they're going to turn it into Chrome which would make me have a panic attack to say the least. :)
A very very long time ago I too preferred the all-in-one solution such like Netscape Communicator provided, but for various reasons I ended up changing my mind to prefer individual applications over time. I've used Seamonkey and appreciate that it exists as an option for people but it doesn't appeal to me directly compared to having Firefox and Thunderbird as standalone apps, etc. I should install the latest version sometime though and see where it's at these days as it's been eons since I checked it out.

I'm not personally fond of the Firefox ESR release for my own usage as I like to stay current with my browser but I understand and respect why the ESR release exists and it makes sense. I do however wish the Linux distributions that include it would either include the mainstream Firefox instead, or provide both releases as I always have to either go to 3rd party builds which I don't care for, or make my own rpms which is time consuming. I end up doing most of my browsing in Windows instead due to that because it is just a much easier solution that doesn't involve futzing around or engineering my own solution. :) Another option is the Mozilla tarball builds but ... meh... :)

I run Aurora exclusively. Aside from occasionally causing hiccups with DownThemAll!, I've never had a problem with it and it gives me some breathing room above and beyond switching to ESR should I ever run into another Australis launch where I need room to retreat while I wait for extension devs to catch up.

My Firefox 4 already looked very much like Chrome, but much more featureful so, when Australis came out, I started walking the release channels from Aurora down to Stable until Classic Theme Restorer came out, then I turned back on things like the traditional menu button and the addon bar. (I actually like Australis more since Classic Theme Restorer gets me closer to the pre-Australis Windows menu button than pre-Australis Linux did)

Subscribing to Planet Mozilla also helps.

My Firefox 4 already looked very much like Chrome, but much more featureful so, when Australis came out, I started walking the release channels from Aurora down to Stable until Classic Theme Restorer came out, then I turned back on things like the traditional menu button and the addon bar. (I actually like Australis more since Classic Theme Restorer gets me closer to the pre-Australis Windows menu button than pre-Australis Linux did)

They actually featured Classic Theme Restorer as one of the two best examples of how, internally, Australis was designed to make the UI easier for addon devs to modify. (The other one being something that went even further in the other direction with a ton of auto-hiding stuff)

I actually just saw a post on Planet Mozilla about a script which automates the process of installing and desktop-integrating the Mozilla tarball builds.

http://blog.monotonous.org/2015/05/06/using-pre-release-firefox-on-linux/

updated again :)

So I got an official response: So we are stuck for the moment, I would propose not updating your Firefox if you are still below version 38.