Firefox 54 released

[Posted June 13, 2017 by ris]

Firefox 54.0 has been released. The release notes are somewhat sparse, however this blog post contains more information about some changes under-the-hood. "To make Firefox run even complex sites faster, we’ve been changing it to run using multiple operating system processes. Translation? The old Firefox used a single process to run all the tabs in a browser. Modern browsers split the load into several independent processes. We named our project to split Firefox into multiple processes ‘Electrolysis (E10S)’ after the chemical process that divides water into its core elements. E10S is the largest change to Firefox code in our history. And today we’re launching our next big phase of the E10S initiative."

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Firefox 54 released

Posted Jun 13, 2017 21:42 UTC (Tue) by mokki (subscriber, #33200) [Link] (2 responses)

The developer release notes say:
"HTTP/1 Pipelining support has been removed in Firefox 54. Maintaining it as we make the move into a new world full of HTTP/2 and other substantial, standardized improvements to networking performance is not worthwhile given pipelining's compatibility and performance issues."

Better start upgrading all your apache/nginx etc servers to HTTP/2 variants before other browsers do the same.

HTTP/1.1 pipelining is long dead

Posted Jun 14, 2017 5:21 UTC (Wed) by dtlin (subscriber, #36537) [Link]

Removing HTTP/1.1 pipelining support doesn't actually change anything for most users, because they weren't using it anyway.

From HTTP_pipelining § Implementation_in_web_browsers (Wikipedia):

Of all the major browsers, only Opera based on Presto layout engine had a fully working implementation that was enabled by default. In all other browsers HTTP pipelining is disabled or not implemented.

Internet Explorer 8 does not pipeline requests, due to concerns regarding buggy proxies and head-of-line blocking.

Internet Explorer 11 does not support pipelining.

Mozilla browsers (such as Mozilla Firefox, SeaMonkey and Camino) support pipelining; however, it is disabled by default. Pipelining is disabled by default to avoid issues with misbehaving servers. When pipelining is enabled, Mozilla browsers use some heuristics, especially to turn pipelining off for older IIS servers. Support for H1 Pipeline was removed from Mozilla Firefox in Version 54.

Konqueror 2.0 supports pipelining, but it's disabled by default.

Google Chrome previously supported pipelining, but it has been disabled due to bugs and problems with poorly behaving servers.

Firefox 54 released

Posted Jun 14, 2017 9:45 UTC (Wed) by MarcB (subscriber, #101804) [Link]

Are you, you are not confusing this with Keepalive?

HTTP Pipelining has never been widely used and client support is relatively rare, even outside of browsers.

Firefox 54 released

Posted Jun 13, 2017 22:04 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (4 responses)

>It’s our goal to make Firefox the fastest and smoothest browser for PCs and mobile devices.
One day I may even be able to watch SD VP8/9 on my laptop in Firefox like I could with Chromium, without it showing one frame per 10 seconds...

Firefox 54 released

Posted Jun 13, 2017 23:33 UTC (Tue) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

"Works for me".

Seriously, I'm sure the media team would appreciate a detailed bug report.

VP8/9 examples?

Posted Jun 13, 2017 23:35 UTC (Tue) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link] (1 responses)

Have you link to some actual VP8/VP9 example clips, or to a bug report?

Smells like a misconfiguration issue.

VP8/9 examples?

Posted Jun 16, 2017 1:16 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

It's everything I've tried on that device, with all recent versions of Firefox. Steps to reproduce:

1. Obtain realistic hardware. You may have difficulty seeing this issue on a $2000 MacBook. I use a 1.8GHz Atom with i945 graphics and working drivers.
2. Create a blank, new profile.
3. Browse to youtube.com and pick any video at random, which defaults to 360p30 VP9, something that should be trivial to decode.
4. Less than 10 seconds in the video starts dropping all frames (as confirmed by the statistics popup) while the sound continues.

Sometimes if I get lucky I can trick Firefox into playing videos by letting them buffer for a minute and seeking around randomly, but that's a ridiculous workaround. Only Firefox is this slow (and this is but one of many things wrong with it): mpv can cope with 720p60 on there, and Chrome worked - while it existed.

Firefox 54 released

Posted Jun 14, 2017 2:48 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

> SD VP8/9 on my laptop in Firefox like I could with Chromium, without it showing one frame per 10 seconds

I can watch HD VP8 and VP9 on my laptop at full 60fps, with no issue.

Please file a bug report, including your hardware configuration and video/site used to reproduce. If Chromium manages it on the same hardware, then likely there's a codec, configuration, or driver issue. And you probably aren't the only person with the same issue, so please file it to help others with the same problem.

Firefox 54 released

Posted Jun 14, 2017 7:41 UTC (Wed) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] (4 responses)

Sigh.

> the same size as the original version of the game Doom, according to Wired.

Yep and immediately and very quickly verifiably false. DOOM.WAD itself was 11M: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/DOOM.WAD

The shareware IWAD is 4M https://doomwiki.org/wiki/DOOM1.WAD

Firefox 54 released

Posted Jun 14, 2017 8:18 UTC (Wed) by Jonno (guest, #49613) [Link] (2 responses)

> > the same size as the original version of the game Doom, according to Wired.
> Yep and immediately and very quickly verifiably false. DOOM.WAD itself was 11M:
> https://doomwiki.org/wiki/DOOM.WAD

That is for version 1.9. According to your own link, the original version 0.2 DOOM.WAD was under half a megabyte.

Firefox 54 released

Posted Jun 14, 2017 9:09 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Indeed, I seem to recall the initial release being three floppy images.

Firefox 54 released

Posted Jun 14, 2017 12:49 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

0.2 wasn't really "doom", it was only an internal tech demo that was very limited. Version 0.99 for the shareware version, or 1.1 for the full game was the first actual release.

Firefox 54 released

Posted Jun 14, 2017 14:51 UTC (Wed) by smcv (subscriber, #53363) [Link]

The Wired article that originated that comparison clarified that they meant the compressed installer for shareware Doom, ~ 2.3M including engine and IWAD, which they compared with a 2.5M web page.