9 ms·

Firefox 55: WebVR and more

245 points by jhatax 9y ago

clumsysmurf 9y ago
I'm using 55 and am really impressed. Startup times have improved. A nice UI feature is in Settings -> General -> Performance. I still notice, compared to Chrome, that if I use 1 content process, no matter how many tabs I have open, or how many I have closed, the process just grows and grows over time. In contrast, Chrome may use more memory but its size dependably follows the number of tabs open / closed. Even though FF is recommending 1 Content Process now as default on my low spec machine, I have set it to 2 to increase the likelihood that one of those processes has no tabs, and gets destroyed, along with whatever garbage accumulates. I think Mozilla could do more research on migrating tabs to processes to minimize memory usage, and accumulated garbage from the runtime that doesn't seem to be collected. Perhaps after a certain threshold (time, size) content processes should be destroyed and tabs migrated to a new one.
- ronjouch 9y ago
  The default number of content processes is already 4 in Nightly (57), they're just rolling it progressively in case things break :)
  - 482794793792894 9y ago
    No, the number of processes is already at its intended value for the near future, as of Firefox 54. The default just varies for different hardware. If you look in the Firefox settings under General -> Performance, then it says there that it's optimized for your hardware, so I'm pretty sure that's the case and not just marketing fluff. What I'm not entirely sure of, is how it's decided how many processes it uses. I think it's either largely dependent on the number of CPU cores or just straight-up that value. And then the vast majority of people has a quad-core, which is why it might seem like 4 is the default for everyone.
    - ronjouch 9y ago
      Thanks, you must be right about the "optimized for your hardware", didn't know about that feature. That being said, it's not just about CPU cores, there is some fixed number of content processes, and it was increased during the last recent months; when e10s was in infancy it was set to 1, then bumped a few times. Source: developers blogposts, and https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_processes#Release_Plan https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_proce... mentions Fx 55 is at 4 and expirements at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Experiments#List_of_e10s-multi_experiments https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Experiments#List_of_e1... mention 8
- karolg 9y ago
  I use e10s for about a year and I have processCount set to 4. It worked almost flawlessly and content process crashed maybe 1-2 times in this time. I enabled "Recommended performance settings" and Firefox changed processCount to 1. I have dual-core (4-thread) CPU so I think they don't use number of cores as base for this setting but make some A/B testing on users. Check in about:config 'e10s.rollout.cohort' and 'extensions.e10s' and you will see that every user is put in some kind of testing 'bucket'.
adamnemecek 9y ago
I've posted this some three years ago and it still blows my gourd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db-7J5OaSag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db-7J5OaSag
- spartanatreyu 9y ago
  If only resolution wasn't an issue
  - mncharity 9y ago
    The weeks-away(?) new Microsoft-associated 1440x1440/eye headsets will be an improvement over the Vive/Rift 1080x1200 PenTile. Higher risk, but almost "retina", is foveated displays like Varjo http://www.ubergizmo.com/2017/06/varjo-20-20-vr-headset/ http://www.ubergizmo.com/2017/06/varjo-20-20-vr-headset/ http://www.kguttag.com/2017/07/10/varjo-foveated-display-regions/ http://www.kguttag.com/2017/07/10/varjo-foveated-display-reg... .
  - andybak 9y ago
    Whilst more resolution would of course be nice, it's fairly low on my list of important advances I desire in VR. I use VR almost daily and my top 3 list is probably: 1. A wider FOV, 2. a lighter headset and 3. Wireless In terms of encouraging broader adoption - cost and lower required specs for the GPU is probably top.
supernintendo 9y ago
IntersectionObserver looks like a nice alternative to the janky event handlers that many sites employ for style changes on scroll. Now we just have to wait 10 years for it to be implemented in Safari.
- givehimagun 9y ago
  Use the polyfill from WICG - https://github.com/WICG/IntersectionObserver/tree/gh-pages/polyfill#browser-support https://github.com/WICG/IntersectionObserver/tree/gh-pages/p...
undoware 9y ago
Still no Linux love for WebVR :( Since I have no intention of switching to Windows after 20+ years on Linux, I'm going to have to wait, as usual.
- undoware 9y ago
  This wouldn't even be worth commenting on it's so normal, except that Mozilla has a strong history of getting all their stuff working on all platforms before letting a release drop, so as much as I love VR, Mozilla, and Linux, I'm going to sit here and pout until I can do my thing on my tower. <3
  - mncharity 9y ago
    > Mozilla has a strong history of getting all their stuff working on all platforms That mindset has been starkly absent with WebVR. As in... * "Mozilla Brings Virtual Reality to all Firefox Users" means "WebVR will ship on by default for all Windows users" [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/06/01/mozilla-brings-virtual-reality-to-all-firefox-users/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/06/01/mozilla-brings-virt... * "Announcing WebVR on Mac via Firefox Nightly"[2] says "web developers can build and test content on their preferred platform, whether it’s Windows, MacOS, or Linux (also available!)", where "available" means "crashes within seconds"[3] for almost a year, with no fix in sight. [2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/06/announcing-webvr-on-mac/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/06/announcing-webvr-on-mac/ [3] https://github.com/OSVR/OSVR-Docs/issues/83 https://github.com/OSVR/OSVR-Docs/issues/83 * The alleged blocker, "direct mode", is needed to get acceptable performance on Windows... but not on linux. [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/6lepou/linux_gamers_anyone_with_steam_running_fine_with/djugskl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/6lepou/linux_gamers_a... Once upon a time, Microsoft would create Windows-only web extensions, to the detriment of the web. Nowadays, Mozilla does it for them. A good rule of thumb for WebVR has been that there's always an unstated "on Windows", and anything said about non-Windows platforms working, is at best misleading. Especially anything said by Mozilla - it's been very bizarre. https://webvr.rocks/ https://webvr.rocks/ doesn't even bother to have a linux column.
    - 9y ago
batmansmk 9y ago
I'm really happy with Firefox these days. It is faster for my usage, except on Facebook and Google products, which I barely use these days.
- christophilus 9y ago
  I've been using it for the past 3 months as my primary browser. The mobile experience is superior to Chrome, in my opinion. (Particularly, the reader mode on mobile makes certain sites usable due to lack of JS, and proper font sizes.)
  - hobarrera 9y ago
    The mobile version is generally okay, but it takes way way much more than safari to start up, which absolutely sucks when you just when to quickly look something up.
    - mintplant 9y ago
      You might be interested in Firefox Focus, which is purpose-built for the "I just want to quickly look something up" usecase. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/focus/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/focus/
      - hobarrera 9y ago
        I do, actually. But I really like to keep a history so I can later recall what I looked up (or sometimes, the other way around: I need to look at my history).
    - posguy 9y ago
      Firefox & Chrome are essentially skins of Safari on iOS, Apple has purposefully kneecapped both from using their own rendering engines.
      - hobarrera 9y ago
JosephLark 9y ago
Great to see FF continue to progress. I moved back to FF from Chrome when I ditched a Win7 install for Ubuntu after building a new computer. It hasn't been without issue, but I'm enjoying FF and very happy to see it evolve. If it continues through beta just fine, looks like media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground will finally ship [0]. This is something I've been tracking through [1] since it was called out in the 54 release notes although it was not actually released. I was always a bit surprised that this wasn't the default behavior as it was in Chrome. Major use case for me: queuing up several YouTube videos from either search results or directly through the list of a users videos. [2] "Firefox Fights Back: Inside Mozilla, CEO Chris Beard and his team are preparing to outmaneuver Google’s Chrome browser" is linked from the submitted article and looks like an interesting read. Only got a few comments on HN when it was submitted 5 days ago. [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1387917 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1387917 [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1308154 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1308154 [2] https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/mozilla-firefox-fights-back-against-google-chrome/ https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/mozilla-firefox-fights-...
ChrisSD 9y ago
I'm very glad they've drastically reduced the resources taken up by restored (but not activated) tabs. I tend to hoard tabs which I swear I'll organise into bookmarks "soon" but never quite get round to it. There's more info on this here: https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/ https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/
- kakarot 9y ago
  It's a problem... I just ended up accepting who I am and gave up on bookmarks. I have a single bookmarks bar for frequently-visited websites like email, webcomics, aggregators, blogs, etc. It's populated with just favicons, no labels. And then, spread between 4 virtual machines, I have Firefox instances that each contain on average 20-200 tabs at a time. It takes me weeks to whittle these down only to have them drastically inflate again. On the rare occasion a bug / data corruption leads to losing my tabs on one of my machines, it's more relieving than anything else.
cdevs 9y ago
Grabbed Firefox 55 just for the grid tool in the inspector as I just got into CSS grids and their awesomeness.
- callahad 9y ago
  The out Firefox Nightly! https://nightly.mozilla.org/ https://nightly.mozilla.org/ -- we've made huge improvements to the Grid tool. Details in Jen's video at https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/07/tour-the-latest-features-of-the-css-grid-inspector-july-2017/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/07/tour-the-latest-features-o...
  - callahad 9y ago
    That was supposed to be "Try out." :( I blame Android.
dmix 9y ago
> Dietrich Ayala has a Firefox profile with 1,691 open tabs. With Firefox 54, starting up his instance of Firefox took 300 seconds and 2 GB of memory. Today, with Firefox 55, it takes just 15 seconds and 0.5 GB of memory. This improvement is primarily thanks to the tireless work of an external contributor, Kevin Jones, who virtually eliminated the fixed costs associated with restoring tabs. This sounds more exciting to me than WebVR. Great work FF team.
- rasz 9y ago
  Its not exciting at all, those are not "1,691 open tabs", those are 1,690 bookmarks/at very best suspended tabs. Opera 12.xx could hold ~200 open/rendered/active/fully responsive tabs at ~2-3GB ram.
  - oblio 9y ago
    While Opera might have had some very impressive tricks (I should know, I used it for years), the reason it could do that at the time is because those tabs were not webapps or much fewer were webapps. The browsers are a lot less bloated than people think they are. Sites on the other hand... we've moved from 800x600 images to 1920x1080 images and animations, tens of assets to hundreds, megabytes of Javascript, etc.
  - littlestymaar 9y ago
    What's really exiting is the improvement in start-up time, which was abnormally high for this use-case. Firefox can handle 200 open (rendered / active/ responsive) tabs for a very long time now. Source: when I'm browsing news sites or community sites (9gag, reddit, HN) I usually scroll the main page looking for stuff that looks interesting and open them in new tabs. I don't always open 200 tabs at once but it definetely happens from time to time. I'm using a desktop from 2009 with 4GB of RAM and and a dual core CPU in case you're wondering. Edit: I have 4GB of RAM, not 2 as written earlier
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jonathanlb 9y ago
I especially like how the browser renders raw API data. E.g., http://api.dronestre.am/data http://api.dronestre.am/data
bigbugbag 9y ago
So firefox is again using the marketing and PR machine to pretend it is relevant and not heading towards its demise due to ignoring their users and not delivering. It's crazy to see them continue to believe that firefox is great and continually improving and that losing users is due to something outside of their reach when they're piling up decisions accelerating firefox towards irrelevance. We don't want WebVR on windows only, we want freedom of choice instead of being forced to submit to whatever mozilla unilaterally decide, we want the features that were provided by extensions that firefox decided to kill, we want an adblocker (content-blocker), we want an option to protect our privacy by killing trackers, we want a way for us users to reach developers and have our voice heard, and so on. we don't want more marketing and bs.
- veeti 9y ago
  > we want an option to protect our privacy by killing trackers You mean like https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-pbm https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-pbm?
- ohthehugemanate 9y ago
  WebVR is on Windows only because the valve components it relies on are in Beta on OSX and Linux. They (correctly) won't ship someone else's beta as their "stable". So you'll have to use beta or nightly for it. As for the other stuff... I've been using Firefox beta as my daily driver for a year and a half, because it's WAY FASTER than chrome, has better bookmarks handling, better built in tracker killing. The speed is only getting better as more parts of Quantum make it to beta. It sucks that it has to be so slow, but they are rebuilding an airplane while in the air with a few million passengers. Seems like the rest of your post is just upset about the move to Webextensions. Massive API rewrites are awful. But they also bring big benefits. It is better for them to make this shift while Firefox still has some market share, so there is pressure on developers to rewrite. All told, FF is pretty aggressively moving ahead of the pack in terms of speed and standards compliance. They already are ahead of the pack on privacy. It's not inappropriate to have marketing that pushes that excitement.
  - 9y ago
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mrspeaker 9y ago
Has anyone got this working with the Oculus Rift DK2 on a Mac? When Mozilla first released their WebVR offering (I thought it was WebVR.com, now it seems to be gone) the WebVR build of Firefox supported it fine - but it doesn't appear to detect it now.
- dmarcos 9y ago
  Oculus dropped Mac support a long time ago to focus on Windows so Firefox cannot interface with their hardware anymore. Besides, the DK2 is no longer officially supported by Oculus so it won't probably work on Windows either (I have not tried myself)
m_st 9y ago
It hurts to lose 'Self-Destructing Cookies'. What a great piece of software! It was marked as being incompatible with FF 55+ and e10s. See https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destructing-cookies/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct... Does anyone know an alternative?
- ronjouch 9y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode... , feature-equivalent except for localstorage cleaning, pending an addition to a WebExtensions API: https://github.com/mrdokenny/Cookie-AutoDelete/issues/44 https://github.com/mrdokenny/Cookie-AutoDelete/issues/44 / https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1388428 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1388428
psandersen 9y ago
Good to see firefox progressing, I've started using it again ever since the multi process work in 54 and been relatively happy with it. Only thing really missing for someone that always has about 50 tabs open is de-prioritising background tabs. I don't have music playing in the browser and just want it to use no more than 10% CPU on tabs I'm not actively browsing. There should be options to prioritize responsiveness over everything. Sick of cpu fans spinning up and browser taking time to respond to tab switches.
madmax108 9y ago
Anecdote time: I've been a lifelong supporter on Firefox (and Mozilla at a higher level), both as an end consumer, and philosophically: This is how to build a company around human beings and respecting their rights and privacy. Even had a Firefox download link on my blog footer for over half a decade (back in the days of footer images)! In the last few years, it was becoming harder and harder to support Firefox as a browser simply because the cons had started to outweigh the pros: It became slow, bulky, and hung multiple times, on a system with 16 Gig RAM nonetheless . Even though I was the only Firefox guy in my team (So many teams I know develop and test ONLY on chrome), I still stuck with it. But was beginning to feel that I was supporting FFx, more out of philosophy than out of it being good software (like RMS insisting on browsing the web by wget-ing pages). I'm glad to note the last 2-3 releases for firefox have been EPIC! So many improvements for power users (I have 120+ tabs open right now and it's all buttery smooth), and focussing on what FIrefox does best: Be an awesome browser! Next time someone tells me how Chrome is hogging their system memory, I'll (once again) be proud to point them to the Firefox download page. Ffx dev team, You guys are awesome! :D

245 points by jhatax 9y ago

I'm using 55 and am really impressed. Startup times have improved. A nice UI feature is in Settings -> General -> Performance. I still notice, compared to Chrome, that if I use 1 content process, no matter how many tabs I have open, or how many I have closed, the process just grows and grows over time. In contrast, Chrome may use more memory but its size dependably follows the number of tabs open / closed. Even though FF is recommending 1 Content Process now as default on my low spec machine, I have set it to 2 to increase the likelihood that one of those processes has no tabs, and gets destroyed, along with whatever garbage accumulates. I think Mozilla could do more research on migrating tabs to processes to minimize memory usage, and accumulated garbage from the runtime that doesn't seem to be collected. Perhaps after a certain threshold (time, size) content processes should be destroyed and tabs migrated to a new one.

ronjouch 9y ago
The default number of content processes is already 4 in Nightly (57), they're just rolling it progressively in case things break :)
- 482794793792894 9y ago
  No, the number of processes is already at its intended value for the near future, as of Firefox 54. The default just varies for different hardware. If you look in the Firefox settings under General -> Performance, then it says there that it's optimized for your hardware, so I'm pretty sure that's the case and not just marketing fluff. What I'm not entirely sure of, is how it's decided how many processes it uses. I think it's either largely dependent on the number of CPU cores or just straight-up that value. And then the vast majority of people has a quad-core, which is why it might seem like 4 is the default for everyone.
  - ronjouch 9y ago
    Thanks, you must be right about the "optimized for your hardware", didn't know about that feature. That being said, it's not just about CPU cores, there is some fixed number of content processes, and it was increased during the last recent months; when e10s was in infancy it was set to 1, then bumped a few times. Source: developers blogposts, and https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_processes#Release_Plan https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Multiple_content_proce... mentions Fx 55 is at 4 and expirements at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Experiments#List_of_e10s-multi_experiments https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Experiments#List_of_e1... mention 8
karolg 9y ago
I use e10s for about a year and I have processCount set to 4. It worked almost flawlessly and content process crashed maybe 1-2 times in this time. I enabled "Recommended performance settings" and Firefox changed processCount to 1. I have dual-core (4-thread) CPU so I think they don't use number of cores as base for this setting but make some A/B testing on users. Check in about:config 'e10s.rollout.cohort' and 'extensions.e10s' and you will see that every user is put in some kind of testing 'bucket'.

adamnemecek 9y ago

I've posted this some three years ago and it still blows my gourd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db-7J5OaSag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db-7J5OaSag

spartanatreyu 9y ago
If only resolution wasn't an issue
- mncharity 9y ago
  The weeks-away(?) new Microsoft-associated 1440x1440/eye headsets will be an improvement over the Vive/Rift 1080x1200 PenTile. Higher risk, but almost "retina", is foveated displays like Varjo http://www.ubergizmo.com/2017/06/varjo-20-20-vr-headset/ http://www.ubergizmo.com/2017/06/varjo-20-20-vr-headset/ http://www.kguttag.com/2017/07/10/varjo-foveated-display-regions/ http://www.kguttag.com/2017/07/10/varjo-foveated-display-reg... .
- andybak 9y ago
  Whilst more resolution would of course be nice, it's fairly low on my list of important advances I desire in VR. I use VR almost daily and my top 3 list is probably: 1. A wider FOV, 2. a lighter headset and 3. Wireless In terms of encouraging broader adoption - cost and lower required specs for the GPU is probably top.

supernintendo 9y ago

IntersectionObserver looks like a nice alternative to the janky event handlers that many sites employ for style changes on scroll. Now we just have to wait 10 years for it to be implemented in Safari.

givehimagun 9y ago
Use the polyfill from WICG - https://github.com/WICG/IntersectionObserver/tree/gh-pages/polyfill#browser-support https://github.com/WICG/IntersectionObserver/tree/gh-pages/p...

undoware 9y ago

Still no Linux love for WebVR :( Since I have no intention of switching to Windows after 20+ years on Linux, I'm going to have to wait, as usual.

undoware 9y ago
This wouldn't even be worth commenting on it's so normal, except that Mozilla has a strong history of getting all their stuff working on all platforms before letting a release drop, so as much as I love VR, Mozilla, and Linux, I'm going to sit here and pout until I can do my thing on my tower. <3
- mncharity 9y ago
  > Mozilla has a strong history of getting all their stuff working on all platforms That mindset has been starkly absent with WebVR. As in... * "Mozilla Brings Virtual Reality to all Firefox Users" means "WebVR will ship on by default for all Windows users" [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/06/01/mozilla-brings-virtual-reality-to-all-firefox-users/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/06/01/mozilla-brings-virt... * "Announcing WebVR on Mac via Firefox Nightly"[2] says "web developers can build and test content on their preferred platform, whether it’s Windows, MacOS, or Linux (also available!)", where "available" means "crashes within seconds"[3] for almost a year, with no fix in sight. [2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/06/announcing-webvr-on-mac/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/06/announcing-webvr-on-mac/ [3] https://github.com/OSVR/OSVR-Docs/issues/83 https://github.com/OSVR/OSVR-Docs/issues/83 * The alleged blocker, "direct mode", is needed to get acceptable performance on Windows... but not on linux. [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/6lepou/linux_gamers_anyone_with_steam_running_fine_with/djugskl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/6lepou/linux_gamers_a... Once upon a time, Microsoft would create Windows-only web extensions, to the detriment of the web. Nowadays, Mozilla does it for them. A good rule of thumb for WebVR has been that there's always an unstated "on Windows", and anything said about non-Windows platforms working, is at best misleading. Especially anything said by Mozilla - it's been very bizarre. https://webvr.rocks/ https://webvr.rocks/ doesn't even bother to have a linux column.
  - 9y ago

batmansmk 9y ago

I'm really happy with Firefox these days. It is faster for my usage, except on Facebook and Google products, which I barely use these days.

christophilus 9y ago
I've been using it for the past 3 months as my primary browser. The mobile experience is superior to Chrome, in my opinion. (Particularly, the reader mode on mobile makes certain sites usable due to lack of JS, and proper font sizes.)
- hobarrera 9y ago
  The mobile version is generally okay, but it takes way way much more than safari to start up, which absolutely sucks when you just when to quickly look something up.
  - mintplant 9y ago
    You might be interested in Firefox Focus, which is purpose-built for the "I just want to quickly look something up" usecase. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/focus/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/focus/
    - hobarrera 9y ago
      I do, actually. But I really like to keep a history so I can later recall what I looked up (or sometimes, the other way around: I need to look at my history).
  - posguy 9y ago
    Firefox & Chrome are essentially skins of Safari on iOS, Apple has purposefully kneecapped both from using their own rendering engines.
    - hobarrera 9y ago

JosephLark 9y ago

Great to see FF continue to progress. I moved back to FF from Chrome when I ditched a Win7 install for Ubuntu after building a new computer. It hasn't been without issue, but I'm enjoying FF and very happy to see it evolve. If it continues through beta just fine, looks like media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground will finally ship [0]. This is something I've been tracking through [1] since it was called out in the 54 release notes although it was not actually released. I was always a bit surprised that this wasn't the default behavior as it was in Chrome. Major use case for me: queuing up several YouTube videos from either search results or directly through the list of a users videos. [2] "Firefox Fights Back: Inside Mozilla, CEO Chris Beard and his team are preparing to outmaneuver Google’s Chrome browser" is linked from the submitted article and looks like an interesting read. Only got a few comments on HN when it was submitted 5 days ago. [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1387917 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1387917 [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1308154 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1308154 [2] https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/mozilla-firefox-fights-back-against-google-chrome/ https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/mozilla-firefox-fights-...

ChrisSD 9y ago

I'm very glad they've drastically reduced the resources taken up by restored (but not activated) tabs. I tend to hoard tabs which I swear I'll organise into bookmarks "soon" but never quite get round to it. There's more info on this here: https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/ https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/

kakarot 9y ago
It's a problem... I just ended up accepting who I am and gave up on bookmarks. I have a single bookmarks bar for frequently-visited websites like email, webcomics, aggregators, blogs, etc. It's populated with just favicons, no labels. And then, spread between 4 virtual machines, I have Firefox instances that each contain on average 20-200 tabs at a time. It takes me weeks to whittle these down only to have them drastically inflate again. On the rare occasion a bug / data corruption leads to losing my tabs on one of my machines, it's more relieving than anything else.

cdevs 9y ago

Grabbed Firefox 55 just for the grid tool in the inspector as I just got into CSS grids and their awesomeness.

callahad 9y ago
The out Firefox Nightly! https://nightly.mozilla.org/ https://nightly.mozilla.org/ -- we've made huge improvements to the Grid tool. Details in Jen's video at https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/07/tour-the-latest-features-of-the-css-grid-inspector-july-2017/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/07/tour-the-latest-features-o...
- callahad 9y ago
  That was supposed to be "Try out." :( I blame Android.

dmix 9y ago

> Dietrich Ayala has a Firefox profile with 1,691 open tabs. With Firefox 54, starting up his instance of Firefox took 300 seconds and 2 GB of memory. Today, with Firefox 55, it takes just 15 seconds and 0.5 GB of memory. This improvement is primarily thanks to the tireless work of an external contributor, Kevin Jones, who virtually eliminated the fixed costs associated with restoring tabs. This sounds more exciting to me than WebVR. Great work FF team.

rasz 9y ago
Its not exciting at all, those are not "1,691 open tabs", those are 1,690 bookmarks/at very best suspended tabs. Opera 12.xx could hold ~200 open/rendered/active/fully responsive tabs at ~2-3GB ram.
- oblio 9y ago
  While Opera might have had some very impressive tricks (I should know, I used it for years), the reason it could do that at the time is because those tabs were not webapps or much fewer were webapps. The browsers are a lot less bloated than people think they are. Sites on the other hand... we've moved from 800x600 images to 1920x1080 images and animations, tens of assets to hundreds, megabytes of Javascript, etc.
- littlestymaar 9y ago
  What's really exiting is the improvement in start-up time, which was abnormally high for this use-case. Firefox can handle 200 open (rendered / active/ responsive) tabs for a very long time now. Source: when I'm browsing news sites or community sites (9gag, reddit, HN) I usually scroll the main page looking for stuff that looks interesting and open them in new tabs. I don't always open 200 tabs at once but it definetely happens from time to time. I'm using a desktop from 2009 with 4GB of RAM and and a dual core CPU in case you're wondering. Edit: I have 4GB of RAM, not 2 as written earlier

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jonathanlb 9y ago

I especially like how the browser renders raw API data. E.g., http://api.dronestre.am/data http://api.dronestre.am/data

bigbugbag 9y ago

So firefox is again using the marketing and PR machine to pretend it is relevant and not heading towards its demise due to ignoring their users and not delivering. It's crazy to see them continue to believe that firefox is great and continually improving and that losing users is due to something outside of their reach when they're piling up decisions accelerating firefox towards irrelevance. We don't want WebVR on windows only, we want freedom of choice instead of being forced to submit to whatever mozilla unilaterally decide, we want the features that were provided by extensions that firefox decided to kill, we want an adblocker (content-blocker), we want an option to protect our privacy by killing trackers, we want a way for us users to reach developers and have our voice heard, and so on. we don't want more marketing and bs.

veeti 9y ago
> we want an option to protect our privacy by killing trackers You mean like https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-pbm https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-pbm?
ohthehugemanate 9y ago
WebVR is on Windows only because the valve components it relies on are in Beta on OSX and Linux. They (correctly) won't ship someone else's beta as their "stable". So you'll have to use beta or nightly for it. As for the other stuff... I've been using Firefox beta as my daily driver for a year and a half, because it's WAY FASTER than chrome, has better bookmarks handling, better built in tracker killing. The speed is only getting better as more parts of Quantum make it to beta. It sucks that it has to be so slow, but they are rebuilding an airplane while in the air with a few million passengers. Seems like the rest of your post is just upset about the move to Webextensions. Massive API rewrites are awful. But they also bring big benefits. It is better for them to make this shift while Firefox still has some market share, so there is pressure on developers to rewrite. All told, FF is pretty aggressively moving ahead of the pack in terms of speed and standards compliance. They already are ahead of the pack on privacy. It's not inappropriate to have marketing that pushes that excitement.
- 9y ago

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mrspeaker 9y ago

Has anyone got this working with the Oculus Rift DK2 on a Mac? When Mozilla first released their WebVR offering (I thought it was WebVR.com, now it seems to be gone) the WebVR build of Firefox supported it fine - but it doesn't appear to detect it now.

dmarcos 9y ago
Oculus dropped Mac support a long time ago to focus on Windows so Firefox cannot interface with their hardware anymore. Besides, the DK2 is no longer officially supported by Oculus so it won't probably work on Windows either (I have not tried myself)

m_st 9y ago

It hurts to lose 'Self-Destructing Cookies'. What a great piece of software! It was marked as being incompatible with FF 55+ and e10s. See https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destructing-cookies/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct... Does anyone know an alternative?

ronjouch 9y ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode... , feature-equivalent except for localstorage cleaning, pending an addition to a WebExtensions API: https://github.com/mrdokenny/Cookie-AutoDelete/issues/44 https://github.com/mrdokenny/Cookie-AutoDelete/issues/44 / https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1388428 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1388428

psandersen 9y ago

Good to see firefox progressing, I've started using it again ever since the multi process work in 54 and been relatively happy with it. Only thing really missing for someone that always has about 50 tabs open is de-prioritising background tabs. I don't have music playing in the browser and just want it to use no more than 10% CPU on tabs I'm not actively browsing. There should be options to prioritize responsiveness over everything. Sick of cpu fans spinning up and browser taking time to respond to tab switches.

madmax108 9y ago

Anecdote time: I've been a lifelong supporter on Firefox (and Mozilla at a higher level), both as an end consumer, and philosophically: This is how to build a company around human beings and respecting their rights and privacy. Even had a Firefox download link on my blog footer for over half a decade (back in the days of footer images)! In the last few years, it was becoming harder and harder to support Firefox as a browser simply because the cons had started to outweigh the pros: It became slow, bulky, and hung multiple times, on a system with 16 Gig RAM nonetheless . Even though I was the only Firefox guy in my team (So many teams I know develop and test ONLY on chrome), I still stuck with it. But was beginning to feel that I was supporting FFx, more out of philosophy than out of it being good software (like RMS insisting on browsing the web by wget-ing pages). I'm glad to note the last 2-3 releases for firefox have been EPIC! So many improvements for power users (I have 120+ tabs open right now and it's all buttery smooth), and focussing on what FIrefox does best: Be an awesome browser! Next time someone tells me how Chrome is hogging their system memory, I'll (once again) be proud to point them to the Firefox download page. Ffx dev team, You guys are awesome! :D