UbuntuHandbook

Mozilla Firefox has reached the 35 release which brings improved “Hello” video chat tool, built-in support for H.264 on OS X via native APIs, improved high quality image resizing performance, support for the CSS Font Loading API, updated PDF.js, and numerous other changes.

Here’s the full list of changes (via the official release note):

Firefox Hello with new rooms-based conversations model
New search UI improved and enabled for more locales
Access the Firefox Marketplace from the Tools menu and optional toolbar button
Built-in support for H264 (MP4) on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) and newer through native APIs
Use tiled rendering on OS X
Improved high quality image resizing performance
Improved handling of dynamic styling changes to increase responsiveness
Implemented HTTP Public Key Pinning Extension (for enhanced authentication of encrypted connections)
Added support for the CSS Font Loading API
Resource Timing API implemented
CSS filters enabled by default
Changed JavaScript ‘let’ semantics to match the ES6 specification
Support for inspecting ::before and ::after pseudo elements
Computed view: Nodes matching the hovered selector are now highlighted
Network Monitor: New request/response headers view (more info)
Added support for the EXT_blend_minmax WebGL extension
Show DOM Properties context menu item in inspector
Reduced resource usage for scaled images
PDF.js updated to version 1.0.907
Non-HTTP(S) XHR now returns correct status code
Various security fixes

Upgrade Firefox in Ubuntu:

For Ubuntu 12.04, Ubuntu 14.04, and Ubuntu 14.10, Firefox 35 will be soon made into the official Ubuntu repositories, available for upgrade through the Software Updater:

There are a variety of ways to improve your Firefox browser’s page load times. If you have a lot of RAM to spare in Ubuntu, moving Cache to RAM can speed up Firefox since computer can access data in RAM much faster than on a hard drive.

Firefox has a built-in feature that uses the browser cache in memory instead of disk. Below I’ll you how to enable it:

1. In address bar of Firefox, type in about:config and hit Enter. Click the button says “I’ll be careful, I promise!” to pass the warning page.

2. Stop Firefox from caching to disk.

In the filter bar, type in browser.cache.disk.enable. Double-click on the result line to set value to false.

3. Enable cache to RAM and assign cache size.

To enable cache to RAM, type “browser.cache.memory.enable” in the filter bar and make sure the value of result preference is true!

To assign cache size, create a new preference:

right click on blank area -> select “New” -> Integer
type in name “browser.cache.memory.capacity” (without quotes)
type in a value, number in KB (for example, 100000 means 100,000KB or 100MB). You can set the value to -1 to tell Firefox to dynamically determine the cache size.