What's New with Firefox 142

It's an idea that makes a lot of sense on Wikipedia, because every page there explicitly starts with a short summary, and often an image that can be pulled from the infobox. I'm not yet convinced it will work well on the rest of the Web.

>> it's not as if rapidly opening and closing a tab actually takes effort. It may be faster than the long click depending how comfortable you are with keyboard controls.

For normal people, i.e. those who aren't techies, you have your answer right there on why this may be useful. We are very efficient with our browser usage. Normal people struggle with this task because they get lost in the steps. Even if they can do the steps at a slow pace, it doesn't stick because it's too slow. The leap to using keyboard shortcuts just won't happen for the majority of people.

I think your points on how this is implemented are fairer. That said, that said it seems like the best approach is to follow the simplest and most efficient approach, which is to not load extensions, or use what is loaded.

The success of features like this is known with technical users like us. We don't like them because we have a workflow that avoids the issue like the phishing one you describe. It's unclear whether this helps users and is likely somewhat experimental. I think it's a much better place to be doing work that other areas where they have invested even if it has many issues.

It's just horrible. For me the preview doesn't show until I've hovered for ~3 seconds (even before I turned on AI), in which time I could have long since middle clicked the page, skimmed, and closed it again.

This is the content for the preview:

> www.mozilla.org

> What's new with Firefox 142

> What's New | Firefox 142

> 3-4 mins reading time

No OpenGraph descriptions are good, so I can't see it ever being better than this. I don't know why this reading time metric has become a thing, it's useless because it doesn't know which parts of the page I'm interested in. I could actually see the full url from the immediate link preview, so having only the domain here is worse than useless.

The AI summary is both too short and too slow to be useful (unless maybe you're running an RTX 6000 or whatever). For this link, it only mentions Relay.

And even the basic behaviour seems broken. The preview appears at seemingly random locations on the page, sometimes under the cursor and sometimes far below. When it does decide to appear away from the cursor, releasing the mouse button actually follows the link, completely negating the purpose of the preview!

Mostly in agreement, though I could perhaps find them useful if not for:

Four times of five the link previews are blocked by a cookie consent or newsletter signup modal anyway.

I quite prefer the link "peek" in Zen, which I'm led to understand is based on the one in Arc. Shift click a link, it opens up in a configurable-size floating modal (90% by default) on top of the current page, with controls to pop it out into a full tab or close it. It's only a small improvement over "open in new tab, switch to new tab, close new tab", but it feels nice.

The new link preview in Firefox seems a lot less useful.

> I have other questions as well -- does the link preview ignore your plugins? So if you loaded the web page, would uBlock Origin prevent tracking which is _not_ prevented when loading the preview?

This was the primary reason I'd never used Vivaldi browser's long-standing feature of being able to set sites within a side panel, since it ignored addons. Was only last year that was changed to allow addons.

> I have other questions as well -- does the link preview ignore your plugins?

If it’s anything like Reader View in Firefox, I would expect it to ignore plugins, which is absurd in the Reader View case, and would be in the link preview case as well. So much for my browser being a user agent.

They would be very useful if they were instead in form of a META image and then just the website text. Not the entire website design.

It is very likely that one single site is responsible for this. For example in my usage, Jenkins portal is leaking memory like hell, will fill up a few GBs in a a day and jack up CPU utilization to 100%.

I has hundreds of tabs at that point, so I had to find out the culprit. What I did was open a task manager and expand Fifefox process to see dozens of subprocesses. I then sorted by memory (or by cpu) to find out worst offender and killed only that single subprocess without touching others. And after doing that I've looked at the list of tabs and saw that one of them has changed to the crash report tab, with a visibly different icon. And looking at it I saw that it was originally Jenkins portal. Now I proactively close it's tabs and leaks stopped. Maybe this will help you.

When trying to diagnose performance or memory issues with a browser, always start with the installed and enabled extensions.

You mean more verbose than the landing page or the release notes which are also linked in the landing page: https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/142.0.1/releasenotes/ ? This is a point release, even more changes are linked at the bottom of the release notes page.

I’ve had similar issues running the latest Firefox (currently 142 as per this discussion) on the latest Fedora (42). I used to be able to lock the screen and go home but I’ve recently had a couple of mornings where I’d come into work and find my system unresponsive. I use the Magic SysRq command to trigger the OOM (out-of-memory) killer as many times as required to free up enough resources that I could log in on a virtual console (Alt-Ctrl-F2). This would allow me to manually kill Firefox, freeing up about 15GB of RAM and all 16GB of the swap file.

I’ve been too busy with work to spend any time investigating the cause. At first I had been blaming the `teams-for-linux` electron app but figured that wasn’t the culprit because I close it every evening. In Firefox, `about:processes` is useful while actually using the application but I’m not really sure how best to diagnose what’s happening after the fact.

If you click on "See full release notes", there's the link "Complete list of changes for this release" at the bottom of the page on the right that points to this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?j_top=OR&f1=target_...

Is that what you're looking for? If you sort it by updated, I assume everything after the 27th is probably in the current release.

about:memory will let you generate a report that tells you what the memory is being used for.

Try about:processes and take a snapshot.

I've used firefox for 15+ years, but it starting to bug me too much. Memory issues, forced restarts that block navigation (wth!), clutter all around, having to disable sponsored crap, and random incompatibilities are starting to take a toll. I've been falling back to Edge for crying out loud.

TIL.

I agree with the other comments that say it's not discoverable. I've been using MacOS for 10 years and I didn't even know that "Force Click" is a thing. This comment caused me to look it up and then try it.

I disagree that it's "everywhere". I just tried it in Spotlight Search (Command + Space). I can never remember how to see where a thing is located there and I hoped a force click might show me. Hint: pressing command will do it but it takes 250ms to 500ms to show up and somehow I never wait that long.

Not only does Spotlight Search not show me where it is, force clicking doesn't show me a preview, or seem to do anything else.

In Finder force click edits the name of the item you're clicking. So, this doesn't seem to be terribly universal.

I suppose I'll slowly figure out how this works now that I'm aware of it.

Pretty typical of browsers and especially of Firefox. Took them 7 years to use native scrollbars post Lion, it looked like cross-platform junk for the longest time.

Back when Chrome was still trying to gain traction, they came out supporting native Keychain Access for password management. Firefox, which had a 4 year head start, never implemented it.

This seems to be exclusive to Safari, I can't get it to work in Chrome either (and didn't know about the feature before right now, the discoverability is terrible).

But wouldn't that render the preview with Safari?

They still haven't gotten correct fullscreen behavior on macOS and thats ~15 years ago.

It's a three finger touch for me.

At this speed Ladybird might be the browser to use in a couple years, even though I find their decision to use a memory unsafe language for their core tech foolish in the year 2025.

Or maybe fixing a few dozen open bugs about losing all open tabs to a /dev/null once in a while. I had it happen twice this year and now extremely vary about even simply normally using browser. Sigh...

I should probably bug report this, but I don't even know where to start. For as long as I can remember "find" has been semi-broken.

Hit Ctrl+f to search for a word you know for sure is on a page and Firefox might not find it. You type in the first five characters and Firefox goes "Nope, can't find it", then enter character number six, and then Firefox sees it, enter another character and nope, lost it, can't find it anymore.

You look stare right at a word and find will be unable to locate it.

But yeah, there's nothing I really care about, haven't been in a while. Funny enough, given how Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix started, I just want a slimmed down browser without a ton of features. Tabs and an extension API, that's it.

Doesn’t FF use the system Hunspell? And if not, maybe making it do so would be better?

> at least covers all of the English language.

Why am I reminded of the Blackadder episode, "Ink and Incapability"?

I'm still ambivalent on the rest of the AI features, but the AI translation is absolutely amazing. The translation quality isn't perfect, but being able to seamlessly translate 20+ languages 100% locally is amazing.

I moved long ago, I don't regret anything.

Tab groups is pretty useful. My partner refused to try firefox in the past because it didn't have tab groups and now they're able to use it as their main browser.