Mozilla Releases Firefox 58 for Mac With Performance Optimizations

[jagooch]

Firefox was once my favorite browser, but now Chrome is. As a developer , it’s easy to find courses on Lynda.com and other sites for using Chrome developer, it has a ton a plugins on the Chrome store, is cross-platform, and integrates well with my G Suite setup. I’d love to use Safari as my primary browser, but my employer forces us to use Windows, plus a I have a few Windows VM’s that I use a browser on.

Firefox has a very small niche that it fills . People in that niche will love it , the rest of the world will use something else.

 

[mikzn]

love the "search box" and glad to see it's still there after the "Quantum" update. Was a bit of a bumpy road for a while with add-ons and customization's that needed to be tweaked and fixed after upgrading to 57.

moved the icons for add-ons and tools into the "more tools" drop down menu to make more room in the tool bar and expanded the search box to view more text.

Have all the add ons and tools back up to speed and using "Firefox Sync" to sync iPhone and iPads

Definitely much faster than the "pre Quantum" versions

 

[cubbie5150]

Spinning beachball every single time I try to shut down Firefox; about 50% of the time I have to Force Quit. Zero issues on version 57.

 

[joshen]

Firefox has been an insane power hog on my MBP for quite some time now (I'd say around two years), even with a single tab open cpu usage will jump to 200%+ and fans will start spinning. I've tried a clean reinstall and no addons but nothing changed. Safari and Chrome never gave me such issues, it's a shame cause I love the customizability of FF but right now it's unusable. Has anyone experience the same?

 

[mikzn]

just found out about the firefox screen capture feature - awesome feature for screen shots of pages that extend past the size of the screen - you can scroll and select the entire page even if several times larger than the window screen. Also lets you share them directly from Firefox very cool.

 

[mpainesyd]

I stopped regularly using Firefox several months ago. I find the cross-platform functionality of Safari more useful, despite Safari’s limitations.
Anyway, a few days ago I needed to load Firefox. It immediately started to update (i thought I had disable auto-update). I then got a ClamXAV warning of an infected file with a trojan and chose to delete the file. I don’t intend using Firefox again but will note any advice posted here.

 

[jasonkratz]

I stopped regularly using Firefox several months ago. I find the cross-platform functionality of Safari more useful, despite Safari’s limitations.
Anyway, a few days ago I needed to load Firefox. It immediately started to update (i thought I had disable auto-update). I then got a ClamXAV warning of an infected file with a trojan and chose to delete the file. I don’t intend using Firefox again but will note any advice posted here.

I suspect a false positive, especially if it's thru the auto-update mechanism.

 

[Martyimac]

I suspect a false positive, especially if it's thru the auto-update mechanism.

I also suspect a false positive. Bitdefender has never alerted when Firefox updates. In fact, just withing the last few days I have updated to FF 59, no issues.

 

[laz232]

Come on Mozilla... Pinch to zoom still not available....??? Can't be so hard?

I'll go with FF when Pinch to zoom will be available - and I mean real pinch to zoom - not this CMD+/- stuff and about:config changes.

This - it's insane that the developers cannot understand platform defaults and insist the users edit about:config to get, what is now, basic functionality.

This IMO, perfectly explains FF languishing market share... (NB I prefer it to the other choices, but am frustrated by a number of things in the development)

 

[mpainesyd]

I suspect a false positive, especially if it's thru the auto-update mechanism.

I just tried a fresh install of Firefox by deleting the old app and downloading 59.0.2 from the Firefox website. I got the same trojan warning:

 

[mpainesyd]

OK - tried it on another Mac and got the same warning. I suspect the infection is in an add-on. I started Firefox and went to preferences to disable auto-updates (of Firefox and add-ons) but by the time I did this the add-ons were updating and one of them evidently had the Trojan. It was probably a Flash downloader add-on.

 

[Martyimac]

I am starting to believe FF has been the problem i have had with my macs. In youtube, while using my mini, sometimes the screen will go black even though the audio continues. in my MacPro, I believe FF graphics issues, causes an actual crash requiring me to do a hard S/D followed by a restart.
I am now shutting off hardware acceleration and will see if that helps. i also noticed that Firefox caused my mini temps to go to almost 80℃ vs 65℃ when using Safari all on the same pages. That is a pretty large difference in temps that FF is causing.