5 ms·

I just tried the Nightly on Windows and I'm very impressed. Much faster and better looking. Long time Firefox user and have been dreading the extensions going

I just tried the Nightly on Windows and I'm very impressed. Much faster and better looking. Long time Firefox user and have been dreading the extensions going away, but it looks like Nightly has resolved some of the problems I was using extensions for (i.e. duplicate tab context menu) and I know some of the more prominent extensions (like NoScript) are being worked on.

jorvi 9y ago
just tried it on macOS and I have to agree it feels very well made. Some issues though: instead of going for 'native', they still seem to feel like Firefox is a little planet of its own. It doesn't use macOS-style menus, nor transparency. Not that Chrome uses all macOS style elements, but it at least feels like it has had some effort put into making it feel at home on macOS. There's also some weird defaults / ignorance of convention: every browser launches a private window with cmd+shift+n, Firefox uses cmd+shift+p. There's still a separate search field next to an URL&search field. Probably a few more that I missed.
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  In Firefox, cmd+shift+n is "undo close window" and has been for a very long time. Possibly even predating private browsing mode... Other browsers don't have to have "undo close window" as a feature at all, so had the shortcut free for private browsing.
- zbraniecki 9y ago
  Glad you like it! On the issues - what you listed is the eternal dilemma of cross-platform software. Balancing cross-platform behavior vs. platform-compliance. There are choices that are just "Firefox-specific" like the shortcut to open private window. Other items like "Gecko menus vs MacOS menus" are tradeoffs of productivity. Having one set of menus for all platforms is easier to maintain than separate for each. Those choices are hard to make perfect. I've been recently fixing the drop-down menu lists styling [0] to allow websites to style some of it, while keeping it looking native when they don't. It's pretty tricky to get it right :) [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1386015 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1386015
  - jorvi 9y ago
    Oh, I fully understand there are some trade-offs, its just something that always makes it like something feels 'off' when I use cross platform apps. There's small touches that help a lot though.. a big one is UI elements transparency, like the Chrome window bar. Firefox actually had this until it was inexplicably ripped out in 43 (even more inexplicable when Firefox _does_ adapt to GTK styling on Linux). Let me be clear that these are minor annoyances and I respect the effort you guys do and am pretty amazed that you can make ground on a browser backed by a behemoth like Google. I'm also pretty stoked for when you guys will have fully Servo'd Firefox, or have released Servo as a standalone product. When I tried Servo it was already oh-so-smooth :)
  - megous 9y ago
    > There are choices that are just "Firefox-specific" like the shortcut to open private window. Other items like "Gecko menus vs MacOS menus" are tradeoffs of productivity. Having one set of menus for all platforms is easier to maintain than separate for each. Also if you're a user who don't care about any particular platform and want just to use your trusty Firefox browser, it's annoying to learn different shortucts for the same thing in the browser on windows, linux, and macos.
  - JohnBooty 9y ago
    I always favor native over non-native, but the FF's non-native bits are tasteful enough for me not to care. Do I wish FF used native tabs on macOS? Sure, but FF's tabs are functional enough and visually innocuous enough for me to simply not really care. And, wow does FF57 "feel" fast. Not sure if it's because I have Stylo enabled, or what, but the UI feels faster now. I'm not sure if I've felt that way about any other FF release. And I have used them all.
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    As long as you're implementing your own platform independent menus, then why don't you implement pie menus, like I implemented for the HyperTIES hypermedia browser at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab in the 1980's? (For another more recent example, see the pie menus in The Sims from 2000.) Demo of The Sims Pie Menus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland. Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, A.V. Williams Bldg., University of Maryland, College Park MD 20742, U.S.A. http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/102 http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/102 http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/362/CS-TR-2433.pdf?sequence=2 http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/362/CS-TR-2433... Pie menus to permit low cognitive load actions: To avoid distraction of common operations such as page turning or window selection, pie menus were used to provide gestural input. This rapid technique avoids the annoyance of moving the mouse or the cursor to stationary menu items at the top or bottom of the screen. 3. PIE MENUS TO PERMIT LOW COGNITIVE LOAD ACTION The Hyperties browser uses pie menus as accelerators, to make commonly used commands quickly and easily available. A pie menu is a type of pop up menu whose selections are laid out in a circle around the menu center (18). The menu pops up centered on the cursor, so that each selection is adjacent to the cursor but in a different direction (Figure 1 and 6). A selection is made by moving the cursor in the direction of the desired selection, and clicking. Experienced pie menu users can make selections from familiar menus quickly and reliably without even having to look at the menu, because the menu selection depends on the direction between the two mouse clicks that invoke and select from the menu. The distance of cursor motion does not effect the selection, but the further away from the center the cursor is, the more precise the control of the selection is. The browser has a control panel at the bottom of the screen, with buttons showing the names of available commands, to turn the page, return to the previous article, show the index, etc. When users are browsing a document by pointing and clicking on highlighted text links in the main contents window, they move the cursor down to the bottom of the screen to press buttons in the control panel, and back up to continue browsing. The permanent display of those controls is important for the novice and occasional users. On the other hand, pop up menus reduce the distraction of moving the cursor by making these commands available wherever the cursor currently is. This reduces perceptual and motor load. Pie menus are arranged with their items in easy to remember directions. For example the BACK page turning commands are to the left (and the NEXT page is to the right) (Figure 6). This arrangement facilitates gestural input and encourages development of muscle memory. Experienced users can make gestural selections from these menus so comfortably and rapidly that it is often unnecessary to display the menu. This is called "mouse ahead display suppression", and its point is to reduce the perceptual distraction.
- cat199 9y ago
  > There's also some weird defaults / ignorance of convention: every browser launches a private window with cmd+shift+n, Firefox uses cmd+shift+p. Wasn't Firefox (or even Mozilla) the first to have this feature and possibly even before there was any alternative? If so, did this keyboard shortcut change in the new FF? If not, then the 'convention' is whatever FF has always done, which the others then broke..
  - cat199 9y ago
    Or there was never a convention..
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  Actually more browsers use Ctrl+Shift+P. Only chrome and its derivatives use Ctrl+Shift+N. And P makes more sense too.
- JohnBooty 9y ago
  Humorously (at least to me) Safari has a at least a couple of standout non-native UI quirks. One is the location of the red/yellow/green titlebar buttons. Like FF, Safari eschews a traditional titlebar and puts those buttons level with the main browser chrome. (IMHO I think this is a good trade-off to make for a browser; I'm not complaining) Two is Safari's scrolling behavior. It seems to use its own scrolling behavior, separate from the standard scrolling behavior provided by MacOS. I've tried a few apps that modify system-wide scrolling behavior, and they work everywhere but Safari. They make Safari's scrolling insanely twitchy, with a single click of the mousewheel causing Safari to scroll 10x or 100x faster than anything else on the system.
_ix 9y ago
I haven't been a serious FireFox user since Chrome hit the streets nearly 10 years ago. I've gone back to try it many times. I've really wanted to like it, but it's always felt really slow and stiff. I just installed the Nightly and I totally agree – I'm impressed! It feels like modern browser again.
zbraniecki 9y ago
I can't even express how awesome it feels to hear it. Particularly, because the "duplicate tab context menu" landed just yesterday and I happened to write the final patch [0] :) [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455722 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455722
- darrmit 9y ago
  That and native containers knocks out two extensions for me. Three if you count Testpilot. By the way, is multi-process going to make it more feasible to introduce a more robust profile feature like Chrome? I have it working mostly on Windows but it still feels pretty rudimentary. That's the only major feature for me that Chrome is really just so much better than Firefox.
  - Sylos 9y ago
    What do you mean with "more robust"? You are talking about the actual Firefox Profiles and not about Container Tabs, right? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-... You can also get to an alternative, somewhat more Chrome-like profile manager by typing "about:profiles" into the URL-bar.
    - JohnBooty 9y ago
      Thanks, I didn't know about "about:profiles"! Might be a reasonable substitute for Chrome's functionality. I'm a FF user since the days of Phoenix but the profile management is something I've relied upon Chrome for in recent years. That "create as many arbitrary profiles as you like!" feature is awesome for testing some kinds of web applications. Last year, I worked on an in-browser chat project. At some points I really needed to have 4-5 different users logged in simultaneously so I could send messages back and forth and track down some bugs. Another common scenario: suppose you're developing, testing, or supporting a web application where the user experience differs depending on a user's permissions. Can be a lifesaver to have multiple browser windows, each using a different browser profile + app login, simultaneously. Rather than repeatedly logging in/out with a single browser window. FF's Container Tabs are an interesting feature. They could get some adoption. Similar underlying technology I guess, but different (more restrictive) UI meant to guide users down a specific path. That's cool; hopefully it can be extended at some point to allow a set of arbitrary accounts to be created by devs, testers, support folks, and others.
fgonzag 9y ago
I switched to FF nightly after reading a comment here in HN. I had tried FF stable with electrolysis and still went back to chrome. FF nightly is SERIOUSLY fast and snappy, like ridiculously so. I recommend it to everyone.
xfer 9y ago
I use an old thinkpad x201 for everything, and chrome works great. Firefox flickers during scrolling(disabling hw accelaration doesn't help) and no alsa support in the builds(no i will not install pulseaudio just for firefox).

jorvi 9y ago

just tried it on macOS and I have to agree it feels very well made. Some issues though: instead of going for 'native', they still seem to feel like Firefox is a little planet of its own. It doesn't use macOS-style menus, nor transparency. Not that Chrome uses all macOS style elements, but it at least feels like it has had some effort put into making it feel at home on macOS. There's also some weird defaults / ignorance of convention: every browser launches a private window with cmd+shift+n, Firefox uses cmd+shift+p. There's still a separate search field next to an URL&search field. Probably a few more that I missed.

bzbarsky 9y ago
In Firefox, cmd+shift+n is "undo close window" and has been for a very long time. Possibly even predating private browsing mode... Other browsers don't have to have "undo close window" as a feature at all, so had the shortcut free for private browsing.
zbraniecki 9y ago
Glad you like it! On the issues - what you listed is the eternal dilemma of cross-platform software. Balancing cross-platform behavior vs. platform-compliance. There are choices that are just "Firefox-specific" like the shortcut to open private window. Other items like "Gecko menus vs MacOS menus" are tradeoffs of productivity. Having one set of menus for all platforms is easier to maintain than separate for each. Those choices are hard to make perfect. I've been recently fixing the drop-down menu lists styling [0] to allow websites to style some of it, while keeping it looking native when they don't. It's pretty tricky to get it right :) [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1386015 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1386015
- jorvi 9y ago
  Oh, I fully understand there are some trade-offs, its just something that always makes it like something feels 'off' when I use cross platform apps. There's small touches that help a lot though.. a big one is UI elements transparency, like the Chrome window bar. Firefox actually had this until it was inexplicably ripped out in 43 (even more inexplicable when Firefox _does_ adapt to GTK styling on Linux). Let me be clear that these are minor annoyances and I respect the effort you guys do and am pretty amazed that you can make ground on a browser backed by a behemoth like Google. I'm also pretty stoked for when you guys will have fully Servo'd Firefox, or have released Servo as a standalone product. When I tried Servo it was already oh-so-smooth :)
- megous 9y ago
  > There are choices that are just "Firefox-specific" like the shortcut to open private window. Other items like "Gecko menus vs MacOS menus" are tradeoffs of productivity. Having one set of menus for all platforms is easier to maintain than separate for each. Also if you're a user who don't care about any particular platform and want just to use your trusty Firefox browser, it's annoying to learn different shortucts for the same thing in the browser on windows, linux, and macos.
- JohnBooty 9y ago
  I always favor native over non-native, but the FF's non-native bits are tasteful enough for me not to care. Do I wish FF used native tabs on macOS? Sure, but FF's tabs are functional enough and visually innocuous enough for me to simply not really care. And, wow does FF57 "feel" fast. Not sure if it's because I have Stylo enabled, or what, but the UI feels faster now. I'm not sure if I've felt that way about any other FF release. And I have used them all.
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  As long as you're implementing your own platform independent menus, then why don't you implement pie menus, like I implemented for the HyperTIES hypermedia browser at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab in the 1980's? (For another more recent example, see the pie menus in The Sims from 2000.) Demo of The Sims Pie Menus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland. Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, A.V. Williams Bldg., University of Maryland, College Park MD 20742, U.S.A. http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/102 http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/102 http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/362/CS-TR-2433.pdf?sequence=2 http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/362/CS-TR-2433... Pie menus to permit low cognitive load actions: To avoid distraction of common operations such as page turning or window selection, pie menus were used to provide gestural input. This rapid technique avoids the annoyance of moving the mouse or the cursor to stationary menu items at the top or bottom of the screen. 3. PIE MENUS TO PERMIT LOW COGNITIVE LOAD ACTION The Hyperties browser uses pie menus as accelerators, to make commonly used commands quickly and easily available. A pie menu is a type of pop up menu whose selections are laid out in a circle around the menu center (18). The menu pops up centered on the cursor, so that each selection is adjacent to the cursor but in a different direction (Figure 1 and 6). A selection is made by moving the cursor in the direction of the desired selection, and clicking. Experienced pie menu users can make selections from familiar menus quickly and reliably without even having to look at the menu, because the menu selection depends on the direction between the two mouse clicks that invoke and select from the menu. The distance of cursor motion does not effect the selection, but the further away from the center the cursor is, the more precise the control of the selection is. The browser has a control panel at the bottom of the screen, with buttons showing the names of available commands, to turn the page, return to the previous article, show the index, etc. When users are browsing a document by pointing and clicking on highlighted text links in the main contents window, they move the cursor down to the bottom of the screen to press buttons in the control panel, and back up to continue browsing. The permanent display of those controls is important for the novice and occasional users. On the other hand, pop up menus reduce the distraction of moving the cursor by making these commands available wherever the cursor currently is. This reduces perceptual and motor load. Pie menus are arranged with their items in easy to remember directions. For example the BACK page turning commands are to the left (and the NEXT page is to the right) (Figure 6). This arrangement facilitates gestural input and encourages development of muscle memory. Experienced users can make gestural selections from these menus so comfortably and rapidly that it is often unnecessary to display the menu. This is called "mouse ahead display suppression", and its point is to reduce the perceptual distraction.
cat199 9y ago
> There's also some weird defaults / ignorance of convention: every browser launches a private window with cmd+shift+n, Firefox uses cmd+shift+p. Wasn't Firefox (or even Mozilla) the first to have this feature and possibly even before there was any alternative? If so, did this keyboard shortcut change in the new FF? If not, then the 'convention' is whatever FF has always done, which the others then broke..
- cat199 9y ago
  Or there was never a convention..
dingo_bat 9y ago
Actually more browsers use Ctrl+Shift+P. Only chrome and its derivatives use Ctrl+Shift+N. And P makes more sense too.
JohnBooty 9y ago
Humorously (at least to me) Safari has a at least a couple of standout non-native UI quirks. One is the location of the red/yellow/green titlebar buttons. Like FF, Safari eschews a traditional titlebar and puts those buttons level with the main browser chrome. (IMHO I think this is a good trade-off to make for a browser; I'm not complaining) Two is Safari's scrolling behavior. It seems to use its own scrolling behavior, separate from the standard scrolling behavior provided by MacOS. I've tried a few apps that modify system-wide scrolling behavior, and they work everywhere but Safari. They make Safari's scrolling insanely twitchy, with a single click of the mousewheel causing Safari to scroll 10x or 100x faster than anything else on the system.

_ix 9y ago

I haven't been a serious FireFox user since Chrome hit the streets nearly 10 years ago. I've gone back to try it many times. I've really wanted to like it, but it's always felt really slow and stiff. I just installed the Nightly and I totally agree – I'm impressed! It feels like modern browser again.

zbraniecki 9y ago

I can't even express how awesome it feels to hear it. Particularly, because the "duplicate tab context menu" landed just yesterday and I happened to write the final patch [0] :) [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455722 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455722

darrmit 9y ago
That and native containers knocks out two extensions for me. Three if you count Testpilot. By the way, is multi-process going to make it more feasible to introduce a more robust profile feature like Chrome? I have it working mostly on Windows but it still feels pretty rudimentary. That's the only major feature for me that Chrome is really just so much better than Firefox.
- Sylos 9y ago
  What do you mean with "more robust"? You are talking about the actual Firefox Profiles and not about Container Tabs, right? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-... You can also get to an alternative, somewhat more Chrome-like profile manager by typing "about:profiles" into the URL-bar.
  - JohnBooty 9y ago
    Thanks, I didn't know about "about:profiles"! Might be a reasonable substitute for Chrome's functionality. I'm a FF user since the days of Phoenix but the profile management is something I've relied upon Chrome for in recent years. That "create as many arbitrary profiles as you like!" feature is awesome for testing some kinds of web applications. Last year, I worked on an in-browser chat project. At some points I really needed to have 4-5 different users logged in simultaneously so I could send messages back and forth and track down some bugs. Another common scenario: suppose you're developing, testing, or supporting a web application where the user experience differs depending on a user's permissions. Can be a lifesaver to have multiple browser windows, each using a different browser profile + app login, simultaneously. Rather than repeatedly logging in/out with a single browser window. FF's Container Tabs are an interesting feature. They could get some adoption. Similar underlying technology I guess, but different (more restrictive) UI meant to guide users down a specific path. That's cool; hopefully it can be extended at some point to allow a set of arbitrary accounts to be created by devs, testers, support folks, and others.

fgonzag 9y ago

I switched to FF nightly after reading a comment here in HN. I had tried FF stable with electrolysis and still went back to chrome. FF nightly is SERIOUSLY fast and snappy, like ridiculously so. I recommend it to everyone.

xfer 9y ago

I use an old thinkpad x201 for everything, and chrome works great. Firefox flickers during scrolling(disabling hw accelaration doesn't help) and no alsa support in the builds(no i will not install pulseaudio just for firefox).