this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
32 points (97.1% liked)

Firefox

1058 readers
80 users here now

The latest news and developments on Firefox and Mozilla, a global non-profit that strives to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the web.

You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:

Related

Rules

While we are not an official Mozilla community, we have adopted the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines as far as it can be applied to a bin.

Rules

  1. Always be civil and respectful
    Don't be toxic, hostile, or a troll, especially towards Mozilla employees. This includes gratuitous use of profanity.

  2. Don't be a bigot
    No form of bigotry will be tolerated.

  3. Don't post security compromising suggestions
    If you do, include an obvious and clear warning.

  4. Don't post conspiracy theories
    Especially ones about nefarious intentions or funding. If you're concerned: Ask. Please don’t fuel conspiracy thinking here. Don’t try to spread FUD, especially against reliable privacy-enhancing software. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Show credible sources.

  5. Don't accuse others of shilling
    Send honest concerns to the moderators and/or admins, and we will investigate.

  6. Do not remove your help posts after they receive replies
    Half the point of asking questions in a public sub is so that everyone can benefit from the answers—which is impossible if you go deleting everything behind yourself once you've gotten yours.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Is Firefox ESR more stable? Uses less memory? Have you tried it?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Firefox ESR is basically the LTS of Firefox. Over a portion of the normal ("stable") Firefox's release cycle, ESR will get security fixes and backports, but nothing that changes interface or expected UX behaviours. It's basically there for keeping an environment that is consistent and predictable over a reasonably long term (~1 y) which is why it's the Firefox version that gets shipped with eg.: Debian.

In general, ESR is the default version I install for anything clients-wise that for some reason requires that we don't intervene client machines too much (including maintenance). It's fire-and-forget once you have the usual extensions rolling like uBlock Origin.

Memory wise it's also quite reasonable in its usage and I've found it's far more responsive to customization of in-RAM memory usage patterns than stable, nightly or develiper Firefox, who tend to ignore or misinterpret my requests such as "only use up to 16 MB of cache in RAM".

One part where maybe ESR is too conservative is the HTML / CSS lexer. Because it's intended to stay stable over very long periods it gets stuck with stuff like still not accepting CSS :has(), and it seems the next ESR won't support it either, whereas Nightly does already. Also, because behaviours are retained as long as possible, bug UI breaking changes such as the migration off Australis or the incorporation of the Extensions Button are a more jarring clash in ESR than in normal Firefox, because you get all those workflow-changing changes in one BIG update.