Kind of neat… Don’t know if really useful at all, but cool anyway
- No More Forced Restarts: This is a huge relief for many!. Firefox on Linux no longer requires a forced restart after your package manager applies an update. This means smoother, uninterrupted browsing, even during system updates.
- Reduced Memory Usage: ForkServer leads to a significant reduction in memory consumption for content processes. The base resident memory for a content process is now around 50% lower. This helps Firefox run more efficiently, especially if you have many tabs open.
- Faster Process Startup: You’ll notice that content process startup times are reduced by approximately 35%. This translates to snappier new tab openings and overall improved responsiveness.
Sounds actually too good to be true to me.
Reduced Memory Usage:
This is the one that really matters. Both Chrome and FF are brutal on memory use.
I for one am extremely happy about the no force restart. It’s quite minor in the grand scheme of things, but it is so annoying.
True, its annoying, bit this does not take away the need for a restart of the process, obviously, just you can do it at a more convenient time.
Absolutely, it’s only about convenience. I often miss the fact that firefox is in the list of all the packages that are getting updated and realize it only when I open a new tab and I get the error message, and that’s annoying. Very much a first world problem for sure!
The in-memory version of the tab template prevents having to restart FF to load the new one from disk now, but, at some point you’re still going to have to restart…
I tend to hibernate my laptop, so it doesn’t reboot often… so surely I’m going to get to the point where FF needs a restart…
The no restart is kind of awesome. WebGPU progress is also great, even if not on Linux yet.
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The problem is that if Firefox does not support features like WebGPU, people will switch to Chrome once they notice web sites don’t work correctly.
I guess not using it when everyone else is would be another way of fingerprinting too
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‘those pesky “restart required” messages after an update?’
Hmm so they want to make modifying my system without my permission even more seamless ?
I’m not sure I like that very much…
I think this happens only when your firefox upgraded while you were using it. In Linux, that usually happens when you manually run an upgrade.
See, when you update firefox while it’s running, opening a tab shows a big “Restart to continue browsing” screen
