William Gallagher
Mozilla has released a new version of Firefox for Mac that it says has cut down on the browser's CPU and power usage, plus added new security technology.
A month after it revamped its visual design in Firefox 94, Mozilla has released Firefox 95 and concentrated on improving usability under the hood.
"We've reduced CPU usage on macOS in Firefox and WindowServer during event processing," says the company, in a blog post. "We've also reduced the power usage of software decoded video on macOS, especially in fullscreen. This includes streaming sites such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video."
Mozilla also says that users will "see a faster content process startup on macOS," and that it has improved page load performance. The existing Picture-in-Picture option has also been improved and users can move the control "to the opposite side of the video."
Firefox 95 is also about adding security. The major update is the inclusion of RLBox on all Firefox platforms. Mozilla describes this as "a new technology that hardens Firefox against potential vulnerabilities in third-party libraries."
The new version can be downloaded from the official site, where there are also detailed release notes.
Wesley Hilliard
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8 Comments
In a Chrome and Safari dominated industry, I really appreciate Firefox. I hope they'll be able to regain some market share and balance things out a bit.
I would normally be in here defending Safari but version 15 (I’m on 15.2 beta for Catalina) has been very glitchy for me personally. One of the online newspapers I subscribe to freezes a lot on certain pages. Neither Firefox nor Edge freeze on those pages. One of my banking sites refuses to print check images with Safari, I get a blank page inserted of an image. Firefox and Edge print those images without issues. The Mac Rumors website main page goes wonky sometimes, refusing to display the page properly. Firefox and Edge don’t have that issue. Things start to add up after awhile.
I still use Safari for 98% of my browsing but Firefox is my goto when problems with Safari arise. Some say it’s because many developers still don’t test and code for Safari but Safari has a lot of presence on the web because of macOS and iOS so I doubt that’s a reason.
Firefox is my go-to browser on all platforms. I still use Safari on occasion but it’s gotten so bug ridden that I can barely stand it any more. The iCloud syncing is terribly broken especially when it comes to the Recently accessed sites. No two instances of Safari on any two platforms show the same Recently accessed content. The toggles to select starting page content have little effect and seem to work in a random fashion.