Firefox 112.0 improves performance with Intel GPU, bugfixes, and more

[Alfonso Maruccia]

What just happened? There's a new Firefox version available on Mozilla servers, an update that brings some interesting new features next to performance improvements for owners of Intel GPUs. The update also includes bugfixes for many security vulnerabilities and changes for developers.

Mozilla has just released the first stable version of Firefox 112.0, the open-source browser available for the most popular desktop platforms and Android. The release is particularly interesting for customers rocking a GPU made by Intel, a scenario where the new browser should provide some much-desired performance improvements with video content.

According to Mozilla's official release notes, Firefox 112.0 now has a new command in the contextual menu users can open while the mouse cursor is focused on a password field to reveal the masked password. No need to inspect web elements and change a page's code through developer tools to get the same result anymore, then.

Firefox 112.0 can import browser data from the Chromium Snap package on Ubuntu Linux, and there's a new way to close tabs from the tab list panel by simply middle-clicking items in said list. The keyboard shortcut previously used to "un-close" a tab (Ctrl+Shift+T) can now be used to restore the previous sessions – if there are no more closed tabs from the same session to re-open.

Firefox 112.0 also improves the Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) feature, extending the list of known profiling parameters used by major websites that the browser can remove from the URL. The browser now enables overlay of software-decoded video on Intel GPUs by default (on Windows), improving video downscaling quality and reducing GPU usage.

The new Firefox also fixes 22 security vulnerabilities, many of which are rated with a "high" risk level. Furthermore, the deprecated U2F Javascript API is now disabled by default while the protocol can still be used by the WebAuthn API without manually changing the browser's preferences.

Firefox 112 also includes policy updates and "specific bug fixes" for enterprise users, while web developers have many changes to dev tools, CSS, API and WebDriver support to look at. The most recent version of Firefox for desktop platforms can be downloaded through Mozilla official servers as usual. Existing users can also update their browser to the latest stable version by checking for available updates in the "About Firefox" window.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/98283-firefox-1120-improves-performance-intel-gpu-bugfixes-more.html

 

[KofeViR]

Faster and faster, I hope so, because it's noticeably slower than Chrome and Edge on my machine.. All fully updated. Especially with alot of tabs, Firefox gets sloooow.

 

[dangh]

Faster and faster, I hope so, because it's noticeably slower than Chrome and Edge on my machine.. All fully updated. Especially with alot of tabs, Firefox gets sloooow.

If you go a few articles earlier you will find there was a Windows bug causing poor ff performance. With that gone ff should be more or less on pair with chrome. And it is definitely more user friendly browser. I come back to it and I'm very happy with the features.

 

[Plutoisaplanet]

Faster and faster, I hope so, because it's noticeably slower than Chrome and Edge on my machine.. All fully updated. Especially with alot of tabs, Firefox gets sloooow.

I would just point out that in any browser, there's a chance that an extension could cause it to slow down significantly. I had this happen to Chrome a while back; I downloaded an extension and never used it and it used tons of resources. You can check this in any web browser by using the task manager with the shortcut Shift+Esc (similar to opening up Windows' task manager with Ctrl+Shift+Esc). Specifically for Firefox, if you see a problem with extensions, it doesn't break those into multiple entries unless you instead go to:

about:performance

 

[ShadowDeath]

Faster and faster, I hope so, because it's noticeably slower than Chrome and Edge on my machine.. All fully updated. Especially with alot of tabs, Firefox gets sloooow.

I haven't had any issues with Firefox on my rig even with a lot of tabs open. The only time I had issues with Firefox being noticably slow was when I used to use LastPass. Even with the extension disabled it would slow my browser to a crawl. The only way to fix it was to remove the extension all together.

 

[Alfonso Maruccia]

Faster and faster, I hope so, because it's noticeably slower than Chrome and Edge on my machine.. All fully updated. Especially with alot of tabs, Firefox gets sloooow.

I usually open hundreds of new tabs at once, with an old version of Firefox. Except for some loading issue here and there, performance is never affected even when the browser tries to eat half of my 32GB of RAM :-D

 

[trparky]

If they can get the memory leaks fixed, then I'll use it; until then, I'll continue to use Microsoft Edge.

 

[zamroni111]

Microsoft should have chosen firefox than chromium for edge engine

 

[MakeMSGreatAgain]

FF has been great for me the last few years. I remember 5+ years ago it would have stability issues for me, crashing fairly often, and this was across multiple versions and OS's (Linux, Mac, Windows). I've been using it though for about 3 years now and its been fantastic - really no complaints other than the iOS version is hampered by Apple's stupid webkit requirement.

 

[Hodor]

Faster and faster, I hope so, because it's noticeably slower than Chrome and Edge on my machine.. All fully updated. Especially with alot of tabs, Firefox gets sloooow.

Chrome and Edge are memory hogs. It's incredible how much memory can they eat. Firefox is much more conservative AFAIK.