Mozilla today published their Firefox 156.0 release binaries ahead of the official Tuesday announcement.
With Firefox 156 they are promoting their built-in PDF viewer as now starting up to 45% faster. Also on the performance side is improved memory and CPU usage when Firefox is displaying large JPEG images that in turn are scaled down to fit on a web page.
There are also a number of fixes in Firefox 156 like for high-sample-rate FLAC audio in MP4 failing on some websites, fixing various platform-specific issues, and other minor adjustments.
Within the Firefox 156 nightly builds was also enabling Vulkan Video decoding for newer NVIDIA GPUs on recent versions of the NVIDIA driver, but sadly that didn’t make it for the Firefox 156 release with it still being gated to nightly builds.
This isn’t the most exciting Firefox update for Linux users in recent history, but if wanting this latest update you can grab Firefox 156 right now via ftp.mozilla.org.
well i guess this one is for the people who wanted mozilla to improve efficiency instead of aesthetics.
Dude I love the new PDF features in Firefox! Only thing that’s missing is to make them a little more obvious so that people realize they’re there
Looks like no changes for Android so I can expect Ironfox to continue being slow like winter-time molasses.
Have you considered an alternative to the browser as a PDF reader?
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.gitlab.mudlej.MjPdfReader/
I like this one, it’s plenty quick, and it doesn’t sit atop a whole web browser. (For desktops, I use SumatraPDF which is similarly snappy.)
MJ PDF is so good. The only advantage of Firefox for Android is that the PDFs are sandboxes in the browser so you’re mostly protected from malicious files
I dont think its ironfox’s fault but it seems to be triggering somekinda flag on almost every “normal” internet site that causes the site to just not connect or be incredibly slow. Works just fine on some personal blog sites and loads my own selfhosted stuff just fine
it’s pretty snappy for me and i have an old & cheap android
Have you tried Ice Raven?
I thought iceraven hadn’t been updated in a while? I switched to waterfox this summer, and it works better.
Their updates are slower than some other forks, but it is getting regular updates.
I think I just got an update the other day? I’ll have to check, using it for mobile. Also one of the only browsers I have an extension for removing paywalls on articles. Otherwise for desktop I definitely use Waterfox or Librewolf.
