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Firefox 156 Available With Its Built-In PDF Viewer Starting Up To 45% Faster (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/opensource@programming.dev
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Mozilla today published their Firefox 156.0 release binaries ahead of the official Tuesday announcement.

With Firefox 156 they are promoting their built-in PDF viewer as now starting up to 45% faster. Also on the performance side is improved memory and CPU usage when Firefox is displaying large JPEG images that in turn are scaled down to fit on a web page.

There are also a number of fixes in Firefox 156 like for high-sample-rate FLAC audio in MP4 failing on some websites, fixing various platform-specific issues, and other minor adjustments.

Within the Firefox 156 nightly builds was also enabling Vulkan Video decoding for newer NVIDIA GPUs on recent versions of the NVIDIA driver, but sadly that didn't make it for the Firefox 156 release with it still being gated to nightly builds.

This isn't the most exciting Firefox update for Linux users in recent history, but if wanting this latest update you can grab Firefox 156 right now via ftp.mozilla.org.

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[–] 37 points 1 month ago (1 child)

This isn’t the most exciting Firefox update for Linux users in recent history

Hard disagree, they made it better and faster without adding shit no one asked for, this is very exciting to see.

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    [–] 27 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Dude I love the new PDF features in Firefox! Only thing that's missing is to make them a little more obvious so that people realize they're there

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Doesn't pdf viewing just work in the background? Does one need any technical skills to access the improvement?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    They added the ability to fill PDF forms a few years ago and much more recently added the ability to rearrange documents, copy/remove pages, etc. but each are kinda difficult to find features if you don't know what to look for

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    • [–] 19 points 1 month ago

    well i guess this one is for the people who wanted mozilla to improve efficiency instead of aesthetics.

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    [–] 29 points 1 month ago (10 children)

    Looks like no changes for Android so I can expect Ironfox to continue being slow like winter-time molasses.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Have you considered an alternative to the browser as a PDF reader?

    https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.gitlab.mudlej.MjPdfReader/

    I like this one, it's plenty quick, and it doesn't sit atop a whole web browser. (For desktops, I use SumatraPDF which is similarly snappy.)

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  • [–] 12 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I dont think its ironfox's fault but it seems to be triggering somekinda flag on almost every "normal" internet site that causes the site to just not connect or be incredibly slow. Works just fine on some personal blog sites and loads my own selfhosted stuff just fine

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (4 children)

    Have you tried Ice Raven?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    I thought iceraven hadn't been updated in a while? I switched to waterfox this summer, and it works better.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    I think I just got an update the other day? I'll have to check, using it for mobile. Also one of the only browsers I have an extension for removing paywalls on articles. Otherwise for desktop I definitely use Waterfox or Librewolf.

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    • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    Though I don’t trust default Firefox post ad debacle, it is the best PDF viewer, signer, and light markup for Linux.

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