Firefox in GNU/Linux, Firefox Nightly, and Neglect
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Best Firefox Add-ons to Improve Productivity in Linux
In this guide, we take a look at the 18 most used Firefox add-ons to enhance your productivity in Linux desktops.
Despite having lost its market share and popularity over the years to other browsers such as Google Chrome and Safari, Firefox still enjoys significant patronage from users who use it for one reason or another.
And just like other browsers, Firefox provides a rich set of add-ons or extensions, which provides added functionality to make browsing the web much more fun, faster and safer.
The add-ons can be classified into various categories such as language & support, search tools, appearance, alerts & updates, and so on.
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Firefox Nightly: PiP subtitles, screenshots in ‘about’ pages & more – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 125
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Hacks.Mozilla.Org: Improving Firefox responsiveness on macOS [Ed: Why not on GNU/Linux, the only major OS that pre-installs Firefox?]
If you’re running Firefox on macOS you might have noticed that its responsiveness has improved significantly in version 103, especially if you’ve got a lot of tabs, or when your machine is busy running other applications at the same time. This improvement was achieved via a small change in how locking is implemented within Firefox’s memory allocator.
Firefox uses a highly customized version of the jemalloc memory allocator across all architectures. We’ve diverged significantly from upstream jemalloc in order to guarantee optimal performance and memory usage on Firefox.
Memory allocators have to be thread safe and – in order to be performant – need to be able to serve a large number of concurrent requests from different threads. To achieve this, jemalloc uses locks within its internal structures that are usually only held very briefly.
Locking within the allocator is implemented differently than in the rest of the codebase. Specifically, creating mutexes and using them must not issue new memory allocations because that would lead to infinite recursion within the allocator itself. To achieve this the allocator tends to use thin locks native to the underlying operating system. On macOS we relied for a long time on OSSpinLock locks.