What's New with Firefox 142

I wonder if it addressed something practical and meaningful...like implementing a spell check that at least covers all of the English language. Maybe then they can start working on the 5 year trek to also make the spellchecker somewhat competent.

Or maybe we'll just keep packing features, because everyone here knows, features are what save products! Not usability!

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.

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.

I remember the original reasoning for creating Firefox (first Phoenix) was to create a more lightweight and faster version of the Mozilla browser, which initially was true.

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

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...

a big part of making it lightweight wasn't stripping away browser bits, but stripping away non-browser bits.

mail, newsgroups, irc. mozilla (the suite) was a lot more than a browser.

> at least covers all of the English language.

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

ftp support wasn't dropped from firefox until 2021.

The browser bit was also much, much snappier than anything else in common use, except maybe Opera. Including the Mozilla browser.

Performance took a giant hit some time in the 1.x series and never recovered, but before that, it was remarkably lightweight and snappy, so much so that normal people would notice.