Firefox 49

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes.

I’m getting better at parsing Mozilla blog posts. I only had to read a few paragraphs of the latest post (“Latest Firefox Expands Multi-Process Support and Delivers New Features for Desktop and Android”) to be fairly certain that it’s talking about a new, just-released version of Firefox. The new version number (49) isn’t mentioned, and neither is there any definite indication of when the new version was released. But there is a link to the version 49 release notes, way down at the bottom of the post.

Why is that bad? Because the Mozilla blog also routinely includes posts that are not related to new versions of Firefox, and those posts are almost indistinguishable from posts about new Firefox versions. Of course, if your goal is to confuse and obfuscate, well, nice work, Mozilla.

According to the release notes, Firefox 49 enables multi-process tabs for even more users. After installing, you can determine whether your Firefox is using multi-process tabs by entering ‘about:support‘ in Firefox’s address bar and looking for the ‘Multiprocess Windows’ entry. In my case, that entry shows as 0/1 (Disabled by add-ons). I’m using add-ons that Mozilla hasn’t tested, I guess.

Also in Firefox 49, Reader Mode has been improved, and offline page viewing has been enabled for Android users.

About jrivett

Jeff Rivett has worked with and written about computers since the early 1980s. His first computer was an Apple II+, built by his father and heavily customized. Jeff's writing appeared in Computist Magazine in the 1980s, and he created and sold a game utility (Ultimaker 2, reviewed in the December 1983 Washington Apple Pi Journal) to international markets during the same period. Proceeds from writing, software sales, and contract programming gigs paid his way through university, earning him a Bachelor of Science (Computer Science) degree at UWO. Jeff went on to work as a programmer, sysadmin, and manager in various industries. There's more on the About page, and on the Jeff Rivett Consulting site.

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