14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 66 will introduce a series of changes for extensions, which Mozilla says should improve the performance of these add-ons, while also reducing the memory footprint of the browser.
The upcoming version of the application will require extensions to use IndexedDB as the backend for local storage, thus giving up on JSON files.
The migration will be conducted all automatically and neither developers nor users need to do anything about it, as the whole process would be performed when Firefox 66 is installed.
“This change is completely transparent to extension developers – you do not need to do anything to take advantage of this improvement. When users upgrade to Firefox 66, the local storage JSON file is silently migrated to IndexedDB,” Mike Conca, Product Manager, Firefox WebExtensions, explains.
“All extensions using the storage.local() API immediately realize the benefits, especially if they store small changes to large structures, as is true for ad-blockers, the most common and popular type of extension used in Firefox.”
Faster browsing, reduced memory footprint
For the average Joe, this change means extensions will load faster and thus improve browsing speed, while at the same time helping Firefox reduce the amount of memory that it uses. As we learned the hard way, browsers tend to eat more and more memory as you open more tabs, and Google Chrome is clearly the best example in this regard.
A live demo of the new changes in Firefox 66 can be seen below, as Mozilla shows that opening the browser with an ad blocker installed takes less time than before thanks to the new storage system.
These updates are already available for testing in the beta build of Firefox and will go live for everyone with the release of Firefox 66 on March 19, 2019.
