31 ms·

It’s time to give Firefox another chance

• rightos 9y ago
  I was extremely skeptical of all the changes they were doing - I said it myself 100 times, "they're just building a Chrome clone, they're killing all the features I like in favor of speed". But here I am, running Nightly because holy shit this thing flies. Their work has paid off and they're not even done yet. Webrender is coming, it's not quite stable enough for daily use yet (mostly just graphics glitching and integration performance issues as far as I could see), but there's a lot of work being done and it's only getting better. Their whole "Project Quantum" eliminated the UI performance issues that used to plague the browser and they're improving security sandboxing all the time. To those who loved the power and control like myself, they still offer a ridiculous level of configuration flexibility and extension APIs - while no longer as powerful as they were - are still better than other browsers on the market today.
  • Sideloader 9y ago
    And FF Developer Edition still lets you install unsigned extensions.
    • earenndil 9y ago
      Actually, in stock chrome, it's much easier to install 3rd-party extensions than in stock ff.
      • kuschku 9y ago
        Unless you are on Windows, there Chrome makes them impossible.
        • dannyw 9y ago
          No, you just load an unpacked extension in developer mode. Hard but not impossible
          • kuschku 9y ago
            That’s removed on every restart of the browser on Windows nowadays.
    • bigbugbag 9y ago
      waterfox has been doing since firefox stopped doing it, actually waterfox is doing right everything firefox does wrong: Disabled Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) Disabled Web Runtime (deprecated as of 2015) Removed Pocket Removed Telemetry Removed data collection Removed startup profiling Allow running of all 64-Bit NPAPI plugins Allow running of unsigned extensions Removal of Sponsored Tiles on New Tab Page Addition of Duplicate Tab option Locale selector in about:preferences > General https://www.waterfoxproject.org/ https://www.waterfoxproject.org/
  • teleproto 9y ago
    One wonders why all the UI issues weren't solved long ago. Good that they're fixing them now, but what were they waiting for to decide to do it? (Rendering performance is a separate topic, that's been waiting on rust/servo.)
    • craftyguy 9y ago
      One might argue because they were "distracted" with making a phone OS and other endeavors.
      • 482794793792894 9y ago
        Yeah, but that's nonsense that bad journalists write or Mozilla marketing people say, because it's more understandable for normal readers and makes it more credible that things will change. The truth is that they were in a dilemma situation where they had to choose between not killing all extensions or fixing performance by introducing a multiprocess architecture (which required breaking all extensions). So, the first thing they did was to simply wait. The performance issues were not that bad yet, so it just didn't yet weigh up to kill all extensions. Eventually they started work on the multiprocess architecture. That was around 2012, if I remember correctly. They've been doing that in the background without visible results for the public for a long time. It's considered the biggest architectural change that Firefox ever went through, so yeah, that just takes time. Cleaning up technical debt that Chrome never had. And then they also figured, if they already break all extensions, they should also switch to a new extension API in the same breath (because the old one has had big problems for as long as its existed). So, then they implemented that, too, in the background, in parallel, just to be able to throw it all on the table one day, so that extension authors would only have to rewrite their stuff once.
        • kibwen 9y ago
          If this is referring to Electrolysis, that has been in stable Firefox for about a year now, and it was an initiative whose planning began in 2009. Seven years from inception to delivery is a long time, and indeed was largely attributable to trying to find ways to avoid breaking every extension in the universe, and then being forced to break every extension anyway, and then laboriously fixing up all the broken extensions over a very long period. After such a grueling task I don't blame them for coming to the painful conclusion that Firefox simply can't keep pace with other browsers while maintaining the all-pervasive legacy extension system, especially since Electrolysis was just a first tentative step towards effective multiprocessing. Indeed, I'm one of the people who has suffered from losing legacy Firefox extensions (find me a substitute for LeechBlock, please!), but I can see how much of a burden it was for the developers to compete on performance and security, which I value more. I'm hopeful that Firefox will continue to add sane extension APIs to help close the gap with what was previously possible without regressing to the old quagmire. Fingers crossed, but they've done well delivering so far with 57.
  • hdhzy 9y ago
    Not to mention Firefox for Android that supports extensions (uBlock etc.).
    • ATsch 9y ago
      Unfortunately, for me at least, it's not a viable option. Firefox on android still feels significantly more sluggish than chrome. Plus, googles questionable business practice of embedding chrome into many apps, while making opening links very fast, adds another three clicks to someone not using chrome.
      • eldridgea 9y ago
        I use the Brave browser to address this. It's based on Chromium with built in features based on Privacy Badger and HTTPS everywhere. It also replaces "Chrome view" so that if you click a link from an app and it opens up with the app, you're still getting the privacy features. And since it's Chromium based I don't see the sluggishness I do in Firefox for Android.
        • Fnoord 9y ago
          Hmm, you're saying apps use Brave instead of Chrome? That'd be amazing. I mean, you could block ads in apps that way. How does one enable that? > And since it's Chromium based I don't see the sluggishness I do in Firefox for Android. The point of the article is that you'll be able to have a quick experience with Android, without using that one tracker called Google.
      • kibwen 9y ago
        > Firefox on android still feels significantly more sluggish than chrome. Note that none of the Quantum work has been turned on for mobile Firefox yet. I hear it will be coming online in nightly this cycle, targeting Firefox 58.
        • Manishearth 9y ago
          This is incorrect. The Quantum Flow work affects mobile Firefox. The thing that is not on mobile Firefox is Stylo.
  • gotofritz 9y ago
    Even if "they were just building a Chrome clone", it would still be valuable because of the privacy concerns
    • MBCook 9y ago
      If they could only get near-Chrome speeds with significantly better battery impact that would also be a huge win.
      • Ygg2 9y ago
        Servo's multi threading actually improves battery life. Not sure how that translates to Firefox.
    • rdiddly 9y ago
      Right, and even if its latency is, say 1.5X that of Chrome(1), it's still better, for the same reason. (1) Though I'm sure it's better than that.
      • StavrosK 9y ago
        That's why I've kept using it despite the slowness, but it's certainly great that now the lag is 0.9x that of Chrome!
    • bigbugbag 9y ago
      what do you mean privacy concerns ? firefox is far from being a privacy browser outside of marketing. Also chrome has had privacy oriented counterpart since the early days such as srware iron[1]. [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRWare_Iron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRWare_Iron
  • kkylin 9y ago
    I'm not even running Nightly, just switched to 57 beta. It's a big improvement on 55 & 56 (which already felt faster than older versions).
    • ReverseCold 9y ago
      They broke something in the latest nightlies, my fans become really loud when I open it for a while (high CPU usage). You're better off in beta right now until they fix it.
  • agumonkey 9y ago
    The amount of work, the extent for how long they've been doing so, all relative to the funding they got.. it's even painful to think about. Chrome shadowed them overnight, had Google infinite wallet and started from scratch. Mozilla became the old slug.. Since then they got Rust off ground, servo yielding good fruits, firefox cool n quiet. Once again kudos.
    • jldugger 9y ago
      When you consider where the funding they do have comes from, it's not surprising it happened. Especially with Bing / Yahoo starting to bid up traffic acquisition at the time, it's a strategic no-brainer.
    • nextos 9y ago
      Firefox beta is very nice. My only (big) regret is that APIs that make Vimperator work are getting phased out. I can't live without Vimperator.
      • tomc1985 9y ago
        Or VideoDownloadHelper, or DownThemAll! :-( That said my dev edition self-updated last night and... holy shit, the new Firefox flies!
        • kuzimoto 9y ago
          Not sure what you're downloading, but have you ever given youtube-dl (https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/) a try? It's got support for tons of other sites than just YouTube. It doesn't have a GUI, but it's pretty simple to use.
          • disillusioned1 9y ago
            youtube-dl-gui (https://mrs0m30n3.github.io/youtube-dl-gui/ https://mrs0m30n3.github.io/youtube-dl-gui/) is a cross-platform GUI for youtube-dl. It works well for me.
  • themihai 9y ago
    After years of Chrome I'm back on Firefox(beta).
  • lomnakkus 9y ago
    The long game, man. The long game. It can be devastating. (Mind you, Chrome/Webkit did a similar thing 5-10 years ago wrt. JS performance. Basically, this is the good kind of back-and-forth competition we're seeing.)
  • JoBrad 9y ago
    You're not lying - I just downloaded it, and it is crazy fast. GMail (maybe not the best metric, but an important one for me) loads about twice as fast as in Chrome, and scrolling has no stuttering at all, even on very long pages. I may actually make the switch.
    • criddell 9y ago
      I was actually thinking about switching to Chrome because of GMail (or rather Inbox). When I open Inbox in Firefox, it can take 20 to 30 seconds for the cursor to stop spinning and I have a 300 Mbps connection.
      • andrew3726 9y ago
        on which firefox version? have you tried nightly?
        • rhelmer 9y ago
          The first Quantum release (57) is now on Beta, so if you want something a little more stable than Nightly it's a solid choice. It's always a good idea to back up your profile first (where your bookmarks/passwords/etc. live), especially when downgrading: https://support.mozilla.org/kb/back-and-restore-information-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/kb/back-and-restore-information-...
        • pivotal 9y ago
          I've been running Nightly and experienced the same thing with inbox. If I attempt to interact with it before fully loaded, inbox will freeze up for minutes at a time. Love everything else about nightly, this is my biggest issue.
          • mconley 9y ago
            Hi! Firefox engineer here, and I want to understand why your Firefox is misbehaving. Would you be willing to provide us a performance profile? Instructions are here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance/Reporting_a_Performance_Problem https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance... Feel free to email it to me if you don't want to post the link publicly. I'm mconley at mozilla dot com.
  • mshenfield 9y ago
    I felt guilty choosing Chrome over Firefox, but it was just so much damn faster. Writing from Nightly now, glad that I don't have to sacrifice performance to switch over.
  • rqs 9y ago
    A Chrome clone? How that opinion came out of you?
    • dannyw 9y ago
      Not GP, but I imagine he is referring to the use of Chrome’s extension API, Chrome’s PDF viewer instead of PDF.js, etc.
  • tomxor 9y ago
    Just chiming in... I knew they were doing major replacements in parts of their engine but it started to become observably and blatantly obvious to me when doing cross browser testing. That thing makes chrome look like a lawnmower, it renders CSS with ease - here's hoping the reset of the browser gets the love it needs to bring it all together.
  • bigbugbag 9y ago
    It flies towards the trash can. It could be fast as lightning it would a fast as lightning piece of crap without the couple dozen extensions I had to add to restore the features they removed, remove the unwanted change they made and just to add the basic but missing features. I've moved to waterfox which offers support for the legacy addons and this move actually fixed a few of the annoying bugs I had with firefox. Among which speed was not one.
  • kumarvvr 9y ago
    It's truly awesome. Overtime I associated FF with hung pages and poor performance but stuck to it just to get away from Google software. Am really happy with FF 57 (Quantum). It's really really good. BTW, also using DDG for search, Outlook for email.
  • lithos 9y ago
    No worries. Faster browsers just mean that web developers can put more stuff in web pages, so everything will be back to normal.
• mmcru 9y ago
  If you’re like me, you switched your default browser over to Chrome years ago and never looked back. Why should I take browser advice from someone who doesn't pay attention? Especially someone who lauds the "simplicity" of Chrome... I do love how fast Firefox 57 is though.
  • jdoliner 9y ago
    I think "never looked back" is more a turn of phrase than anything here. Obviously the author has looked back, otherwise he wouldn't be writing this article.
• Sideloader 9y ago
  Firefox has been my daily driver for 2-3 years now. I’d switched to Chrome several years before that but when FF fixed its lag issues I went back right away. Mozilla overplay the “not for profit” card but with Google you can be sure they are collecting and archiving absolutely everything that passes through their servers.
  • teleproto 9y ago
    Assuming that one switches to Google as the default search engine (I'd love to know how many do - additionally I beleive Google is the default outside the US anyway), there's effectively no difference. Neither browser does anything special wrt privacy, the same resources and scripts are loaded in both. Safari are the only browser brave enough to try anythng more exciting in this area. (OK, Brave are also in this area, but they're not of much significance right now.) Sure, Firefox's private browsing does offer tracking protection. But most "normal" users don't seem to use that. And some would argue there's little value in blocking tracking in a session that will be wiped anyway.
    • eridius 9y ago
      One can assume Google is tracking a ton of data beyond just what Google searches users do. Firefox users who pick Google as the search engine are still giving a lot of info to Google, but less info than Google would have had if the user was using Chrome.
      • kenhwang 9y ago
        You can also turn off search suggestions for the address bar so it only sends things to Google when you search. It's still giving search information to Google, but that's much more preferable to sending literally everything you type in the box.
        • KGIII 9y ago
          Privacy is a tricky thing and a bit of a spectrum. I will happily give up some information in exchange for a service that I like. I'll happily give Google my search history, including typos in the search bar, in exchange for them tailoring my responses. Why? The difference in results is huge. I don't need to specific that I'm looking for Linux answers, math functions, or scientific results. Google knows this, it has learned it from the many years of data that I have given them. Searching anonymously makes my search much less productive and less efficient. At the same time, I don't want Google watching me poop. I'm okay with then knowing some things, but not others. I've been pretty open with Google, knowingly so, just to get these tailored responses and, to me, they are worth it. There's still lots of things I don't tell Google. There are still lots of companies that don't give me anything I value, so I don't willingly give them information. It's a sliding scale and needs recipricocity from the business entity, I expect a return from my giving up information. It's also a very individual choice and best decided at the individual level. I give Google info, but I'd never say someone else should have to. I think it possible to optimize for just that.
• misnamed 9y ago
  "It feels fast and light and I may just make it my default browser again once the stable version comes around." "Is Firefox Quantum significantly better than Chrome? No. But they are on par again" Well this ringing endorsement sure sold me. Anyone else? Bonus: you can mix your own Firefox Quantum using two regular Firefox Colas, some Jet and Nuclear Materials at any crafting bench.
  • bananicorn 9y ago
    Is that fallout 4 specific, or could you do that in fallout NV too?
    • misnamed 9y ago
      Need the Firefox World expansion pack for F4
• justboxing 9y ago
  Am I the only one here who thinks that nothing can beat the Chrome debugger ? Nothing comes even close. It's a different story if you are just browsing, like the 95% or more of the internet consumers.
  • roblabla 9y ago
    While it's true the firefox debugger is lacking in certain areas, it's also better than chrome in others. Debugging CSS animations is much easier in firefox, but firefox lacks a way to look at websocket packets. One thing I like about firefox is that its debugger is a just a React webapp : https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html. So it's fairly easy to add to it !
    • Klathmon 9y ago
      I know the chrome dev tools are also just a web app themselves (or at least for the most part are). I don't know the stack, but I do remember there is a way to open dev tools FOR the dev tools window.
      • justboxing 9y ago
        > there is a way to open dev tools FOR the dev tools window I did not know that.
        • deleted 9y ago
          [deleted]
        • vickychijwani 9y ago
          Open DevTools > pop it out into a separate window > Ctrl+Shift+I (on Linux) > Ctrl+Shift+I ad infinitum > enjoy devtools-ception.
      • marumari 9y ago
        You can do the same in Firefox. It's under Tools -> Web Developer -> Browser Toolbox.
• tjr225 9y ago
  Switched to Firefox a while ago. I love it. My little tip is to go into add-ons > Appearance, and change over to a compact theme. It looks a lot better than the default theme imo!
  • JosephLark 9y ago
    Damn it, I was hoping this was going to alleviate my main worry with this new Firefox - the UI. It's so Microsoft Edge-ified. I had more trouble finding this setting than I should have. Appears to be hamburger menu -> customize -> (bottom of page) density drop-down -> select compact. Still not sure if I like it. The tabs alone are still way too big for my liking. Coupled with Ubuntu 17.10 and the Gnome that brings, the top of screen is going to be eaten up by way more UI than I would like. Is there any way to get Gnome to have a unified Ubuntu/application menubar like Unity?
    • rainbowmverse 9y ago
      >> I had more trouble finding this setting than I should have. Appears to be hamburger menu -> customize -> (bottom of page) density drop-down -> select compact. Still not sure if I like it. The tabs alone are still way too big for my liking. Assuming it's the same as every Firefox since they started copying Chrome, the alt key should bring up the old-fashioned (and much more usable) menu bar.
    • TD-Linux 9y ago
      There's work to use Gnome client-side decorations for the title bar here, which should help with screen real estate: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1283299 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1283299 It probably won't land in time for 57, but hopefully soon!
    • khc 9y ago
      I use "No Title Bar" gnome extension and "Tab center redux" plus userChrome.css to move the tab bar to the side. The top side is actually quite compact.
    • 482794793792894 9y ago
• noncoml 9y ago
  I was very critical of Mozilla in the past about all their "science projects" like Rust. While I appreciate Rust, I thought it was wrong for Mozilla to be wasting resources on it, instead of focusing on Firefox. I was so harsh with them only because I strongly believe that Firefox is my only hope for a free web. But then I tried 57, and I must admit, boy was I wrong. This thing is fast! I haven't stopped recommending it to friends and colleagues! Good job folks!
  • kenhwang 9y ago
    Rust was pretty much designed to solve problems for Firefox. It's IMO the best bet Mozilla has made these last few years and we're just starting to see them reaping the rewards.
    • MBCook 9y ago
      It was denintely a long term play. The worry i had was what if they get 80% down that road and find out it would t work for some reason (say they wouldn't be able to get performance high enough)? They’d have lost a TON of time and resources. Glad to see they got it to work.
    • tmzt 9y ago
      I don't know how this relates to the creator of Rust or its actual origin story, but Mozilla has been trying to get many of the same results out of C++ for a long time. You can look at the evolution of smart pointers in the codebase, along with more formal ways of representing error return codes (borrowed from MS COM), and general good practices. It seems at some point they became aware of how unsuited C++ is for parallel processing, and how important it would be for browsers in the future. Even compartmentalization or running tabs in their own process is a form of parallelization. This requires an efficient way of sharing memory and preventing race conditions and errant writes, as well as a way to protect these processes from cross-site scripting attacks, buffer over- and underruns, etc. Computing hardware has also moved on from the CPU-centric world and the gains in battery life from dedicated GPU hardware being used even for rendering tasks, and now for font processing and other things were too good to pass up. I'm a long time follower of Mozilla's development, and extremely excited about what's happening with Firefox. (I'm also currently a Chrome user, leaving in large part due to profile corruption issues and inferior built-in development tools. I hope to be able to run Firefox and WebRender on both Ubuntu and Windows.)
• richdougherty 9y ago
  Just switched to Firefox beta to test this out. Looking good so far! The other thing that I've been waiting for is better multi-profile support. You can get a (pre-release) version of that now by opting into the Containers experiment: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers
  • rocky1138 9y ago
    I've been using multiple profiles for months on Firefox via `firefox -P profile1`, `firefox -P profile2`. What's it changing to, moving forward?
    • Spivak 9y ago
      Those aren't changing, the new feature, "Containers", is like having multiple isolated browser sessions running concurrently. So you can organize your tabs by purpose, isolate sensitive accounts, or just be logged into both your Facebook/Google/Twitter accounts at the same time.
      • quesera 9y ago
        The confusion is reasonable though -- your description above is exactly how I use Firefox Profiles today (and for many years). What does Containers add? If the only answer is "a more convenient UI", then that's good enough for me!
        • kenhwang 9y ago
          It's not quite a new profile since the container retains all your configuration and extensions and a profile doesn't. It's more similar to a private browsing session, except things aren't forgotten, and you can have as many as you like. And they're tab level so you can treat them they same way you would a tab.
          • chimeracoder 9y ago
• tmrmn 9y ago
  I tried to like the new Firefox, maybe I didn't give it a fair chance, but it instantly disappointed me.I opened 5 gifs in new tabs and CPU usage rushed to 100% an all cores for half a minute. But often it's the small things that make or break it. For me it was that HTML5 videos don't fullscreen to a new workspace on macOS like they do in Chrome or Safari.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • r3bl 9y ago
    Hey, if you've tried the beta or nightly versions, you can't expect them to be stable until the enter the stable version. If you've tried the stable version, the stable version is still one version behind the changes that are coming. I honestly recommend giving it a go again in two months.
  • rhelmer 9y ago
    That sounds pretty odd... if you've used previous versions of Firefox on this device you might try refreshing: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a... If it still happens and you want to dig into it a little further the profiler at http://perf-html.io/ http://perf-html.io/ allows you to gather and dig into + share details that can help fix.
• AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
  Worth looking at this resource, which seems to suggest that Chrome still leads in some of the benchmarks, even in memory usage: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=firefox-quantum-bench&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=firefox-... Just one study among many, but, worth keeping in mind. Firefox is making strides, but Mozilla still has work to do if they want to stop losing market share. I say this as a Firefox user.
  • amaranth 9y ago
    Most of those benchmarks are (directly or indirectly) benchmarks of the JavaScript engine. The few that aren't are instead benchmarking the <canvas> implementation or the compositor. The main speedups in Firefox 57 are in styling and the DOM which are more of a "feels faster" thing than something you can easily benchmark in real-world scenarios other than "how long does this page take to load?"
  • nnethercote 9y ago
    Here's a blog post from this week about memory usage: http://www.erahm.org/2017/09/25/firefox-memory-usage-in-the-quantum-era/ http://www.erahm.org/2017/09/25/firefox-memory-usage-in-the-... That's a comparison on real websites rather than browser benchmarks.
  • 482794793792894 9y ago
    For now, it's already been enough to stop the losing of market share. The introduction of multiprocess in Firefox 48 (2nd August 2016) seems to have made the difference: http://netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=1&qpaf=&qpcustom=Firefox&qpcustomb=0&qpsp=200&qpnp=24&qptimeframe=M http://netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=1&qpaf=&qpcustom... But yeah, while the technical crowd sees Mozilla as favorable at roughly equal performance, the vast majority of unknowing users are probably more influenced by the world's most popular webpage, video portal, e-mail service, operating system etc. all nudging them to use Chrome. It'll be interesting to see, if Firefox 57 can generate another major bump in that user graph like it happened with Firefox 48, or if 48 was at sort of the sweet spot where Firefox became acceptable again for most of the tech crowd and now we'd be digging into the non-tech crowd, which is much harder to pull away from what they're habitually using.
• downrightmike 9y ago
  It'd be great if they fixed the memory leak so I could leave tabs open for more than a day. at about 2.4 gigs it crashes. Edit: valid problems get downvoted. Great job guys.
  • Sylos 9y ago
    That's usually a problem with one of your extensions. Maybe you can identify it through about:memory. But good news, Firefox 57 will probably actually fix that. By 1) breaking unmaintained extensions for good and 2) switching to an extension API which makes it much harder for extension developers to make such mistakes. Also, I don't know if this will be in 57, but extensions will probably eventually run in individual processes as well. And then you could just shoot down the process of the offending extension.
  • forapurpose 9y ago
    > It'd be great if they fixed the memory leak so I could leave tabs open for more than a day Something else is wrong. For years, I've regularly had >100 tabs open for weeks at a time.
• wkirby 9y ago
  I wanted to try Firefox, but 2 hours into using it I had a meeting in Google Hangouts. Firefox no longer supports Google Hangouts. Back to Chrome it is.
  • jacquesm 9y ago
    I think it is not up to Firefox to support Google Hangouts but the other way around.
  • JosephLark 9y ago
    Yeah, that situation is a mess and should be embarrassing for those involved. I can use Hangouts for simple messaging from Firefox, but as soon as we need to hop on a call I need to boot up Chrome. Often I forget and try to answer in Firefox just to get the error message. Then I have to start Chrome, login to gmail if it's logged out, wait for everything to load, and then answer the call. Ends up taking a fairly long time to answer an incoming call sometimes.
    • JosephLark 9y ago
      I'm really not worried about some downvotes, but am surprised to see them. How is it not embarrassing that as much progress we have made with web standards, a major feature in one of the most popular email services is browser specific? There is no need to point any fingers, but I find it interesting that for years now we've had key players in major browsers sit around at conferences and talk up how much they're working together on standards yet this is where we end up.
  • Sylos 9y ago
    Complain to Google. They're the ones not complying with webstandards.
• cosmiccartel 9y ago
  I was a Firefox user since it was called Phoenix, and finally switched to Chrome in mid 2015. With the latest release, I finally feel comfortable enough to switch back. FF is a true competitor in the browser space again.
• jsdario 9y ago
  Can't agree more. Plus the developer edition is just great.
• nameless912 9y ago
  The battery usage on MacOS has been atrocious in Firefox 57. Has anyone else had this problem? Am I doing something wrong?
  • JosephLark 9y ago
    I have plenty of battery issues on MacOS with both Firefox and Chrome. When it's a concern, I try to use Safari. I would probably use it all the time, but it's still awful when it comes to speeding up HTML5 videos (edit: including the latest Safari technology preview). It wasn't all that long ago that it didn't even do pitch correction. Now it does, but it's weirdly tinny and echoey. Firefox and Chrome both handle it fine.
  • ashark 9y ago
    That's too bad. Battery on my work MacBook (and making my whole system beachball constantly, even with only a handful of tabs open) is what got me to switch from Firefox to Chrome ~6 years ago, and from there to Safari for even better battery life (and avoiding Google).
  • dsego 9y ago
    For me too, on some pages it heats up and fans start to whirl. But lets wait and see. What made me switch is that the new safari has some really aggressive caching of css and js files.
• Yetanfou 9y ago
  I use Firefox, Seamonkey and Chromium in rotation to make sure that anything web-related I build works is somewhat cross-browser compatible. While FF 57 is usable on my Thinkpad 42p I can not say it is twice as fast as the previous version. Maybe the speedup depends on having a multi-core CPU, something which is notably absent in this 2004-vintage machine. Be that as it may, I think FF 57 is about as fast as its predecessor in general: faster in some tasks, slower in others, notably slower in scrolling.
  • clouddrover 9y ago
    > While FF 57 is usable on my Thinkpad 42p I can not say it is twice as fast as the previous version. I think their specific claim was twice as fast as Firefox 52 on one benchmark: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/quantum-performance-test/ https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/quantum-performance-test/
• jd3 9y ago
  SeaMonkey (mozilla suite) is the only web browser I have ever truly enjoyed using. I use the browser, email client, irc client, address book, and calendar every single day. Extremely disappointed that Mozilla has basically given a big middle finger to the SeaMonkey/Thunderbird (comm-central) communities with the removal of XUL/XPCOM add-ons, necessity of multi-process, introduction of webextensions, removal of support for complete themes (show me a single Persona that doesn't look like shit), etc. in FF 57. The reverberations of this decision are so stark that the SeaMonkey council has announced that it can no longer build off of the nightly mozilla-central tree; they're in the process of building RELEASES from the Firefox ESR branch. It's an absolute mess.
  • floatboth 9y ago
    > show me a single Persona that doesn't look like shit https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/herbal-guitar/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/herbal-guitar... — especially with the new Photon UI (57)
    • jd3 9y ago
      ehh I know taste is subjective, but (on Win10, at least) I find this very very ugly. latest nightly. https://i.imgur.com/z3cM8ve.jpg https://i.imgur.com/z3cM8ve.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Oa875od.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Oa875od.jpg
      • 51Cards 9y ago
        I find it incredibly cluttered. Seems like the push for vertical page space has lead to crunching everything together into 2 lines while ignoring usability.
        • jd3 9y ago
          I agree that the Firefox user interface feels way too cluttered these days. I know this is a highly unpopular opinion, but I find the way that the Suite (SeaMonkey) allows you to collapse/expand title bars infinitely more functional than whatever Mozilla has been doing over the past decade. https://i.imgur.com/b5ZpLaO.jpg https://i.imgur.com/b5ZpLaO.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Se4rYJc.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Se4rYJc.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ynphRKv.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ynphRKv.jpg
• Arubis 9y ago
  Boy, I _really_ didn't want to swap to Chrome. I'd held on through about a year ago, even despite knowing it was slower, a memory hog, and so on; at least this way, _someone_ on my team was viewing our site in FF and would notice discrepancies. I hated to let Google manage yet another aspect of my life. But as some point, too much was too much. Unable to bear vanilla, Google-owned Chrome, I ended up in (closed-source!) Vivaldi. It was...alright. About two months ago, I tried out FF Nightly. And by god, it's the best browser I've ever used. And the Nightly builds are (typically) _more_ stable than production-issue from other vendors. So very happy to be back! Mozilla may have their issues, but I'll gladly take imperfect and pro-user over differently imperfect and profit-driven any day.
  • kibwen 9y ago
    > And the Nightly builds are (typically) _more_ stable than production-issue from other vendors. I actually managed to crash nightly yesterday! Maybe this seems like it ought to be banal, but I think it says something admirable when users are surprised to remember that your pre-beta software is pre-beta. :P
  • starrychloe 9y ago
    Profits pay your salary, commie.
    • lishzen 9y ago
      I think you're joking but it's the third time I heard someone say something like this today, so... profits don't pay your salary, your work pays for it.
      • nickrivadeneira 9y ago
        Work with no profits (or revenue) would likely mean no salary. On the other hand, profits with no work sounds like a great situation.
        • viraptor 9y ago
• jdlyga 9y ago
  Firefox 57 is great. The interface is no longer ugly, and it's no longer oddly sluggish. Once Lastpass has their extension updated to work with WebExtensions, I'll switch.
  • rocky1138 9y ago
    After the most recent LastPass extension vulnerability, I no longer run LastPass extension in my default browser (Firefox). I have it installed on a different browser then copy/paste as needed.
    • sf_rob 9y ago
      More convenient to just disable auto-fill, which prevents the exploit.
      • rocky1138 9y ago
        Until the next one, then the next one, then the next one. I just figured at some point it's safer to trade a slight inconvenience of copy/paste to not have my passwords available via JavaScript.
  • pps 9y ago
    This was what I was thinking, until three days ago someone mentioned here about Bitwarden. It's perfect, no more LP for me, you should try it too :) https://bitwarden.com/ https://bitwarden.com/
    • robto 9y ago
      I'm going to go ahead and second this - I switched a couple of days ago as well and my jaw just dropped at how much better it is than lastpass. The ui is better, the interface is snappy!, and it's gpl. I just wish I had learned about this earlier.
    • smnrchrds 9y ago
      It looks good. And I don't want to come off as dismissive, I am just genuinely wondering: How can I know they are trustworthy? Has it been recommended by any security or cryptography experts? This is the first time I am hearing about Bitwarden and not being a security expert, I don't know how I can ascertain their trustworthiness.
• Semaphor 9y ago
  Switched from Chrome to Nightly as my main browser 2 days ago when KeepassHttpConnector [0] got it's 1.0 release. Speed is absolutely on par with Chrome (which is something I never had in my earlier tries, usually gave FF a chance 2 times per year). Had 1 full browser crash which never happened with Chrome (in recent years), but then I was also running stable vs nightly now. I'm still missing one extension (Join for Android), but I can live without it for now and might actually just help joaoapps in developing it. One thing that annoyed me was the large min tab size as I didn't like scrolling tabs. Someone on Reddit pointed me to the right userChrome.css tweak though [1] Overall I'm pretty happy being back on Firefox after many, many years. [0]: https://github.com/smorks/keepasshttp-connector/releases https://github.com/smorks/keepasshttp-connector/releases [1]: https://github.com/Timvde/UserChrome-Tweaks/blob/master/tabs/prevent-tab-overflow.css https://github.com/Timvde/UserChrome-Tweaks/blob/master/tabs...
  • gravity_123 9y ago
    > I'm still missing one extension (Join for Android) AFAIK Firefox extension is pending addition of push API support in extensions. Joao has filed a bug report[0] for that, but there hasn't been much activity on it for some time. [0]:https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1378096 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1378096
• tyteen4a03 9y ago
  The only thing that is keeping me on Chrome is buttery-smooth gestures (swipe left / right to go to previous / next page) on a MBP touchpad. If they have that built in I'd probably switch.
  • Flockster 9y ago
    Well I'm running FF 57 right now on my Macs and there is no problem using these gestures.
  • looki 9y ago
    Also, Chrome has proper two finger pinch zooming on touchscreens. Firefox just simulates ctrl+scroll wheel, which is 1. slow and 2. not nearly as useful for the user. But that's not something I use often, I gladly switched over to Firefox again, this new version is really something.
    • tyteen4a03 9y ago
      This is a deal breaker for me as well.
• xahrepap 9y ago
  I've been a Chrome user since it was first available. I've tried to go back to Firefox multiple times. When the containers plugin hit the front page a week or two ago I decided to try it out. I'm not using the beta or nightly builds because I'm lazy. However, Firefox with containers has sold me and I've switched to it for everything except development. I'm too used to Chrome Dev tools it's been hard to switch :| I absolutely love Firefox+Containers though. I just wish I could make it auto-open-in-container with wildcards. For example, open all *.mywork.com pages in my Work profile.
  • 482794793792894 9y ago
    Mozilla provided an add-on API for the Container Tabs, so maybe someone writes an add-on to do this. Or if you want to get your hands dirty yourself, you can try writing one yourself. I imagine hard-coding a few URLs and respective Container Tabs wouldn't be that much work.
• neves 9y ago
  I was using developer extension and it disabled all of my beloved plugins. I hurried back to the "normal version". How is the update of the plugins to the new browser? Will it go live with uBlock, Tree tabs etc?
  • r3bl 9y ago
    This is the version that breaks the legacy plugins and switches over to WebExtensions API. Add-on developer are still catching up, but I think that the majority will be ready for the 57 release in November. I tried switching maybe two weeks ago, and I couldn't, simply because of one extension that wasn't ported. Looking around, and I was able to find out that they've been working on it and two days ago I've installed the testing version of the add-on and made a complete switch to Nightly.
    • 482794793792894 9y ago
      There's a lot of add-ons that are unmaintained and those won't get ported. For those, you'll want to look for alternatives.
  • marumari 9y ago
    Both uBlock Origin and Tree Style Tabs (as well as Tab Center Redux, which I prefer) are already compatible with Firefox 57.
    • sf_rob 9y ago
      Tree Style Tabs was a recent update, so OP may have missed that.
• proactivesvcs 9y ago
  Give Firefox another chance, after Mozilla recently announced opt-out telemetry? Give them another chance now that they're siding with the likes of privacy-ignorant Microsoft? The same vendor that keeps bolting on features that seem irrelevant to its user base, such as "assumed touch", app store etc? Surely one would only offer Mozilla another chance once they have extended an olive branch, rather than a closed-circuit television camera?
  • Sylos 9y ago
    They did not announce opt-out telemetry, they started a discussion on the topic.
  • floatboth 9y ago
    Telemetry doesn't collect any private data. It's all performance measurements. I run Nightly with all the additional opt-in telemetry flags because I want to help Firefox development.
    • pseudalopex 9y ago
      Firefox telemetry includes a unique identifier and system information. The data Mozilla is proposing to collect includes what sites a user visits.
      • floatboth 9y ago
        The proposed study would use differential privacy and no unique identifiers. (And presumably wouldn't include Private Browsing windows.) Honestly, (unpopular opinion probably but) I'm really tired of this privacy-mania…
  • nnethercote 9y ago
    How is Mozilla siding with Microsoft?
• 482794793792894 9y ago
  > It’s no secret that Mozilla squandered a lot of time and energy on various projects that went nowhere (think its mobile phone OS, IoT services, creating a built-in video chat service, etc.). The "built-in video chat service" is a webstandard. Called WebRTC, got mainly pushed by Google. Every modern browser implements this. Mozilla just decided to build a service which implements the server-side of this protocol. Which they needed anyways to test their client-side implementation. So, the only squandered time and energy is that of the UX people that polished that server-side implementation up for public use. And in return for that, Mozilla got excellent testing of their client-side implementation and direct feedback, if maybe people would want the Foundation to allocate some money to run such a service.
  • cpeterso 9y ago
    The WebRTC servers for the "Firefox Hello" service were maintained by Telefonica. Mozilla just built the front-end UI and WebRTC client.
• makmanalp 9y ago
  AFAIK this quantum release was mostly about a new/better CSS engine, right? If this helps this much, I'm very excited for webrender.
  • r3bl 9y ago
    No, this version has so many groundbreaking changes. It starts to be fully multicore, CSS engine was re-written in Rust, there's a new design (that they've named Photon), Pocket integration is now slightly tighter, WebExtensions become the default, and they've redesigned the developer tools.
  • Sylos 9y ago
    The new (written from scratch) CSS engine definitely did give a big performance boost, but I'd say it was only about 1/4 of the increase from 56 to 57. Another big factor is the new UI. It's partially just more efficient, partially uses animations to make it look faster / more responsive, partially enables new performance features, such as "tab warmup", which starts loading in a tab as you hover your mouse over it, so that it's instantly there when you actually click. Then they're still benefitting from the new multiprocess architecture. A lot of performance problems can be solved by just throwing a lengthy task into a background thread. Then the deprecation of the old extension API is also significant. The old extension API had essentially no abstraction from Firefox's source code, so Mozilla couldn't even really refactor code without breaking extensions. Now that that's deprecated, they were able to throw out big chunks of code [1] and refactor what's left. I presume that made it a lot easier to work with the code and find performance problems, but also just in general, they put a lot of effort into fixing hundreds of smaller performance issues that taken together did make a big difference, too. Not to mention that lots of those old extensions had performance problems themselves as well. And lastly, they also just made sure that the right things have the right priorities. Your background tab is not as important as the tab that you're looking at and so on. Again benefitting from the multiprocess architecture. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1347507 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1347507
• throwaway613834 9y ago
  Does the upcoming Firefox start as fast as Chrome? Rendering was never what I had problems with; startup speed is literally the one reason why I haven't switched.
  • copperx 9y ago
    Do you close your browser that often?
    • throwaway613834 9y ago
      Yeah, I close tabs when I don't need them which pretty often means I have nothing open. It's just cognitive overload and a distraction to constantly have tabs open.
      • 482794793792894 9y ago
        For my mental cleanup it works to have about:config?filter=browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab set to false.
        • throwaway613834 9y ago
          Windows and tabs are both cognitive overload for me, I don't treat regular windows any differently from browser tabs.
          • copperx 9y ago
            Command-H does the trick for me.
            • throwaway613834 9y ago
              Hiding stuff doesn't do it for me haha :\ if it's running then it's taking some of my attention...
  • 9y ago
• bvi 9y ago
  I'm on Firefox 56. Is there a way to see if my extensions (and FT DeepDark theme) works on 57?
  • sgift 9y ago
    If you go to the add-on page of your extension there's a "Works with FF57+" if it works.
  • NuDinNou 9y ago
    It does not. But FF57 comes with a compact and dark theme, you can select it in the Customize window.
• sevensor 9y ago
  Firefox's strength was originally that technically astute people liked it and people who saw them liking it followed suit. They lost a lot of geek mindshare to Chrome when Chrome hit the scene, but I see this as a return to roots. People who know enough to understand the difference, see that very interesting things are happening with Firefox, and in addition it's not offered by the world's biggest advertising company.
  • remir 9y ago
    Firefox was better than IE, but eventually, Chrome became better than Firefox for a majority of people. Silent auto-update, anti-phishing, sandboxing, extensions that "just worked". It also came with it's own flash plug-in, which was great for non-technical people back when Flash was relevant. Chrome did a lot of things right and for a while, it was the browser I installed on friends and family PCs because it was trouble free and I knew they would always have the latest version installed automatically.
    • digi_owl 9y ago
      Well that, and paying every adware from here to eternity to bundle a Chrome installer...
      • Spivak 9y ago
        And sticking 'Google service X is better with Chrome' on all of their sites probably didn't hurt either.
        • robin_reala 9y ago
          Along with multiple prime time TV ad campaigns.
        • remir 9y ago
          I would have problem with this if Chrome was total anti-user garbage, but like I said, it was (and still is) a solid product that brought forth a lot of good things for non-technical users, plus Chromium is open source. Google is not a charity, so they used their sites to advertise their own product. Microsoft is doing the same thing with Edge, even on Windows 10.
• Markoff 9y ago
  I gave it chance, just 2-3 days ago with Forefox Nightly. Again. I am giving Firefox chance maybe twice a year for last couple of years (before went through couple of browsers as daily drivers). This time it could not even properly render my Outlook.com mailbox, when I edit draft and go to end page (CTRL+END) screen scroll properly in Chrome to end of page, while in Forefox it stayed on top until I moved cursor in editing field with arrow and then it jumped where it should be in the first place. Also scrolling with scrollbars was veru unresponsive on many ocassions. So sorry, but for me Firefox is just huge fail if they can't get even one of the biggest webmails to work properly or scrollbars. And better not complain about start times, unresponsiveness, etc. I like idea of Mozilla and would be very happy to switch away from Google (only reason why I don't install microG on my Android phone is Google Photos which are ireplacable and AFAIK backup doesn't work with microG) but they provide inferior products. It's even worse on Android, it's bunch of stubborn nerds who don't even give people option to Pull down to refresh, so people like me will never switch to FF on mobile, no matter if they would be at least on par with Chrome for Android or faster browsers like Brave (which they are not, firefox on android is slowest browser you gonna ever see if you bother to try and compare with other browsers). I expect nothing else than being downvoted to oblivion by local FF fanboys.
• Robdel12 9y ago
  Honestly chrome sticks around because: 1. it's not bad 2. CMD + Shift + C opens the dev tools and allows you to select DOM nodes. I use that religiously...
  • NuDinNou 9y ago
    Ctrl+Shitf+C does the same thing in firefox on my PC
  • bananicorn 9y ago
    Doesn't that work in firefox on the mac? It works with ctrl+shift+c on win+linux, so I'm personally not missing anything here.
  • ricardonunez 9y ago
    Option + CMD + C works in FF57b and also in the developers edition.
• chank 9y ago
  Still comes bundled with Pocket. No thanks.
  • NuDinNou 9y ago
    Chrome comes bundled with Flash. Firefox wins here.
  • 62747478182 9y ago
    You can disable it completely in about:config
    • cpeterso 9y ago
      You can also disable Pocket by clicking the new tab's gear icon and unchecking the "Recommended by Pocket" setting.
  • superkuh 9y ago
    Even worse, it's a walled garden. You can't edit or make your own extensions without getting each change approved by Mozilla first. They say to use the alpha(dev) or unbranded versions but the former is unstable and the later has no packaging or language support.
    • floatboth 9y ago
      Yes, if you want to run unsigned addons, you need Dev or Nightly. That makes sense. Not letting "normal" users accidentally install malware extensions is really good. "is unstable" isn't a good reason to avoid it. I've been using Nightly as my daily (heh) driver for a long time. It's been awesome. BTW, approval is really fast now: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/09/21/review-wait-times-get-shorter/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/09/21/review-wait-times...
      • superkuh 9y ago
        > Not letting "normal" users accidentally install I strongly disagree. Browser functionality for everyone shouldn't be gimped to protect a small subset of users from themselves. >"is unstable" isn't a good reason to avoid it. I'm not holding a controversial opinion in thinking that alphas are generally buggy for significant subset of the userbase. I get that it might work fine for you but there's a reason aurora isn't release.
• mk89 9y ago
  Never abandoned Firefox. Now what? :) And please, donate to Mozilla, if you can. They really do deserve some help. Fighting against giants like Google, MS and Apple... They have products running on all kinds of possible platforms, also on old Android phones! And they have some of the best extensions.
  • fabrice_d 9y ago
    They have a lot of money in the bank. Donations are a drop in the bucket and I would even argue that there are other orgs that deserve your money more than Mozilla.
    • forapurpose 9y ago
      > They have a lot of money in the bank. Donations are a drop in the bucket What is the basis for these statements? Mozilla's budget is far less than its competitors, Google, Apple, and Microsoft; I expect they could find good uses for a little more.
      • fabrice_d 9y ago
        I was a Mozilla employee so I kind of know the numbers. The CEO is always claiming during the all hands that Mozilla's financial situation is better than ever.
      • fabrice_d 9y ago
        Oh, and about finding good use for their money: they laid off excellent system platform engineers earlier this year, while keeping some failed execs on payroll. That tells a lot about what the priorities of the leadership are.
      • cgag 9y ago
        They've got 1000+ employees (in 2015 at least). I don't imagine them having more money really helping anything. edit: in response to fabrice's comment about other orgs, checkout http://www.givewell.org/ http://www.givewell.org/
• r3bl 9y ago
  FYI the U2F key support landed in Nightly (probably stable in 58). Enable "security.webauth.u2f" and "security.webauth.webauthn" to enable it. Of course, now it's up to the developers to allow U2F support via Firefox (instead of hard-coding it to Chrome/Chromium). I've successfully verified that it works on three different services that don't hard-code the support to Chrome/Chromium.
  • kuschku 9y ago
    Works with all test sites, and most other sites... ...except for Google.com, which still hardcodes it to Chrome (doesn’t even seem to work in Chromium there for me).
• maxxxxx 9y ago
  FF56 has a weird problem. It seems all keyboard shortcuts are extremely slow with a delay of several seconds. For example closing a tab with "X" is fast, but pressing "Command+W" causes several seconds delay. Has anyone else seen this problem?
  • Aaronn 9y ago
    I haven't had that issue but please report it on bugzilla.mozilla.org if you can. Also I would encourage you to try Firefox Beta, currently on version 57, to see if the issue is present there (also that is the version of Firefox the article is talking about).
  • cpeterso 9y ago
    Maybe check the macOS Activity Monitor or top to see if there are any processes hogging the CPU.
    • maxxxxx 9y ago
      It's only the keyboard. the same action with the mouse is fast.
• rosstex 9y ago
  TBH, Lazarus Form Recovery was one of the only things keeping me on Chrome. But since all development has stopped, maybe the doors to Firefox have opened again.
• anthonybsd 9y ago
  I'm a little confused on how they tested loading speed. I.e. they use webpagetest suite which is made for testing website speed NOT web browser speed. In other words it's being tested on live websites, subject to network latencies and what not? Doesn't seem like a very robust methodology. Am I just confused here?
• keypusher 9y ago
  There are certain legacy extensions I simply cannot live without. Tab Tree is one. Are there any routes to move forward with legacy extensions?
  • Sylos 9y ago
    Forward, not really. Mozilla has very much already used the opportunity to rip out tons of legacy code and so most legacy extensions are already not anymore compatible, even if you tell Firefox to load them. And just as well, most of these performance improvements would not have been realistically doable, if Mozilla were still forced to not break compatibility. What you can do, is to move to Firefox 52 ESR. It won't have the performance, but it has the legacy extensions and will continue to get security updates until June 26, 2018. There's also some forks, namely Pale Moon and Waterfox, which seem motivated to try to keep this legacy extension system alive for longer, so maybe that works for you, too. Personally, I doubt they're able to. The old extension system was a major maintenance burden for Mozilla, so I can't imagine the far smaller teams behind Pale Moon and Waterfox taking that on. Lastly it should be noted that Tab-Tree-like extensions will be possible with the new extension API and some implementations are already underway: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/ (Not a tree, but tabs in a sidebar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-redux/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-re...)
  • Manishearth 9y ago
    Tree Style Tabs is a webextension now.
  • cpeterso 9y ago
    I don't know about Tab Tree, but the popular Tree Style Tabs extension is now a WebExtension that is compatible with Firefox 57+. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/27/tree-style-tab-is-a-webextension-now/ https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/27/tree-style-tab-is-a-webext...
• dade_ 9y ago
  Firefox has been great for a few years, except I can't figure out how to get a good Windows touch experience. Is there an add on or theme anyone recommends? The touch points are too small and close.
  • 482794793792894 9y ago
    The new Photon UI in Firefox 57 comes with a Touch UI. It's under Customize -> at the bottom "Density" -> Touch. No idea, though, how well it works, I don't have a touchscreen...
    • dade_ 9y ago
      Thanks for the note, it is much better for a touchscreen.
• moretai 9y ago
  It's time to stop posting techcrunch
  • rmrfrmrf 9y ago
    Seriously, this is a giant advertisement. The diagram of the jet engine with literally zero technical value is particularly egregious.
    • moretai 9y ago
      They did this to Jesus too, don't worry
• starrychloe 9y ago
  I wish Opera got another chance. It was so fast. Faster than Chrome. But it didn't render some pages properly, so Chrome it was.
• crispinb 9y ago
  I tried it again on my notebook having seen the Project Quantum dev edition announcement here. Initially impressed by its speed, I've been using it since (3 days I think?). I've found after a few hours it slows down in two very irritating respects -- scrolling gets very janky and reluctant, and switching tabs takes nearly a second. I suppose this may be due to an extension, but given I only use my notebook for work, I don't think I'm going to go through a process of elimination to find which one right now. Back to Chrome for the time being, but I like the current FF incarnation enough to give it another go.
  • SubiculumCode 9y ago
    One suggestion re scrolling. In about:config turn off smooth scrolling. Its for compatability, but most systems work better with it off. The scrolling is much snappier with it off.
    • crispinb 9y ago
      Thanks, I'll try that next time if it reoccurs. It's an accumulating problem of some sort, so memory-related presumably. Scrolling is smooth except on the very heaviest pages initially, and gets jankier over time.
  • asadotzler 9y ago
    Can you run the profiler https://perf-html.io/ https://perf-html.io/ and when this happens next, capture a profile of some janky tab switching. Once you've captured a profile you can share it which gives you a link. Then can you file a bug at https:/bugzilla.mozilla.org and include the link to your profile and a description of the symptoms.
    • asadotzler 9y ago
      I should have said more about the profiler in case you're new to it. Let it run. It's overhead is really quite low. Then when you notice the slow tab switching or janky scrolling, you hit Capture Profile and that stops the profiler and loads the profile for you to view. IN that view you'll find a "share" button in the top right that makes the profile remotely available and gives you a link you can use to file a bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org https://bugzilla.mozilla.org
• ferongr 9y ago
  I'd like to, but on Android Firefox is lightyears behind Chrome in many ways (including performance), and I get too much utility out of password/history/bookmark syncing between various devices to switch.
  • paulryanrogers 9y ago
    Xmarks is still around, albeit less capable than fully integrated Chrome
• whyenot 9y ago
  "Internt for people, not for profit" This is a great slogan, but actions speak louder than words. Why hasn't FF implemented basic privacy protections and block trackers like Safari does? If Firefox is really "for people," this seems like an area they should be leading in. A cynic (like me) might suggest that it is because Mozilla has become utterly dependent on ad revenue for their survival. Long gone are the days when Mozilla was funded by donations and t-shirt sales. There was a time when it was more than just a browser maker, it was the spearhead of an internet movement for open source. I miss those days.
  • sf_rob 9y ago
    I think that it's likely because Apple has much more leverage and their major source of funding isn't their browser. I could imagine a world where ad-based services started blocking/paywalling Firefox user-agents. Hopefully now that Apple has opened the door Mozilla is safe to walk through too.
    • Jerry2 9y ago
      You actually think that websites would ban Firefox' user agent?!?
      • KGIII 9y ago
        That depends, really. Firefox usage is barely in the double digits and has been steadily declining for quite a while. If it becomes a hassle, then maybe. I'd expect them to boot Safari users first. We will have to see how it goes.
      • sf_rob 9y ago
        Publishers are already treating adblock (not tracking protection) users far more aggressively than they have in the past. I imagine if the number of users that are hampering advertiser value went up by an order of magnitude that these publishers may react in a far more aggressive way.
      • kuschku 9y ago
• iloveluce 9y ago
  Just downloaded and it's been super fast and beautiful so far, going to try it out for a week and see how it goes!
• amelius 9y ago
  I hope they make it easy to rebrand their browser, just like webkit did. That way, companies don't feel compelled to develop their own code, with of course all sorts of compatibility problems that come with it.
• JohnTHaller 9y ago
  If you'd like to try out Firefox Quantum on Windows without impacting your existing local or portable version, you can grab either the 57 Beta or the 57 Developer version in portable form from PortableApps.com. It's self-contained with its own profile and settings that are kept separate from the normal install. It doesn't require admin rights to extract it and try it out. And you can "uninstall" it just by deleting a folder. https://portableapps.com/news/2017-09-28--try-firefox-quantum-57-risk-free https://portableapps.com/news/2017-09-28--try-firefox-quantu...
• Sidious 9y ago
  Can't wait to see privacy centric forks on ff quantum. How long will that take I wonder.
• vvpan 9y ago
  I like 57 as much as the next guy and it's my main browser, but I still develop with Chrome, cause inspector is so much better :/
• keithpeter 9y ago
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447 Looks like some interesting ideas on the user interface in the new Firefox. Anyone worked out how to hide the tab bar with a single tab in 57 yet? (I'm odd, and I like to use my window manager to manage Web sites in windows.)
• johnbrodie 9y ago
  I wish I could be as excited as everyone else re: the new Firefox. I've never switched to Chrome, and dealt with some of the previous performance issues. I dealt with these issues because of Vimperator, which as far as I know, won't work with the new version of Firefox. A real bummer.
  • gfodor 9y ago
    It's not as sophisticated but I've found Saka Keys to be a suitable replacement: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/saka-key/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/saka-key/
  • Jaepa 9y ago
    Good news! It won't (Ok that part sucks). Good news it looks like the Keyboard API has approved. https://github.com/Koushien/keyboard-shortcut-api https://github.com/Koushien/keyboard-shortcut-api This is one of the last requirements for having a viable product. cmcaine's working on replacement successor: https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl It still a long ways off, but its possible.
• Myrmornis 9y ago
  Can someone explain the difference between the process / thread architecture of chrome and firefox desktop apps and the implications of this difference? On MacOS Chrome appears as many processes named Chrome helper or something, whereas Firefox appears as a single process with many threads. Given that the two are trying to solve the same problem and are so superficially similar, is the difference in architecture surprising?
  • nnethercote 9y ago
    Firefox now uses multiple processes too. By default Firefox is limited to one UI process and four web content processes. Chrome will use roughly one content process per tab (though that's an oversimplification). Firefox's choice to use fewer web content processes result in less memory usage, but if a content process crashes you'll have to reload 1/4 of your tabs. Both browsers use threads extensively within each process as well.
• nevster 9y ago
  So torn by this. I've always been a Firefox user and one of my favourite addons is Tab Groups. Unfortunately it will stop working with 57. I'm really keen to update to 57 but until Tab Groups gets updated I'm going to be sticking to 56. Please someone take over the dev!
  • yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
    I'm in the same boat; I might see if I can replace tab groups with tree style tabs, which is supported.
  • hawski 9y ago
    It seem that there will be alternatives as people answered me in different thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15342731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15342731
• largote 9y ago
  Is there a plugin for it to use Chrome sync? I'm way too invested in Chrome sync to lose it at this point.
  • teddyfrozevelt 9y ago
    What would you lose? You can just import the bookmarks and find alternate addons. If you have passwords Xmarks isn't a webextension but you can use it on Firefox 56 and then upgrade.
    • anotherevan 9y ago
      FYI, it looks like they are working on a webextension version of Xmarks. https://forums.lastpass.com/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=266745&start=10 https://forums.lastpass.com/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=266745&star... This was a big relief for me, as it was the one extension I was really sweating on. That said, I would love if there was a Chrome sync for Firefox, or Firefox sync for Chrome capability to sync bookmarks across them both.
  • kuschku 9y ago
    No, Chrome sync is Google’s proprietary service, and no one except for Google and some homebrew solutions supports it. But there are builds of Chromium that support Firefox Sync – Samsung’s Android browser even uses Firefox Sync by default
• tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
  Does the latest version get video hardware decoding when it is stable? I like the new Firefox’s speed but YouTube videos shoot up to 40–100% CPU usage while Safari’s impact is so low the fan doesn’t even spin up. Tested Firefox Dev Edition 57 beta on macOS High Sierra.
• HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
  I switched from FF to chromium (not chrome), because I don't spend a lot of money on computers. I use fairly slow hardware and FF was very sluggish. Sounds like FF Is making a comeback, I'll definitely try it out once it becomes stable.
• homulilly 9y ago
  The beta seems pretty good, but after noticing some bugs im reminded again of one of the reasons I quit using Firefox in the first place: Tabs look fucked up on MacOS and some Linux themes, a fix exists, but it's been pushed back to version 58 even though 57 is still in beta. If you don't prioritize user experience in a web browser, then what's the point?
  • charrondev 9y ago
    Do you have any further details on this? The tabs always looked weird to me but I don't know why.
• lukewrites 9y ago
  I've been running Nightly for several weeks, and am _so_ impressed. It's fast, stable, and the combo of Containers and CookieAutoDelete (which allows you to set per-container rules) is killing it for me.
• bobwaycott 9y ago
  Started using Firefox Developer Edition today. Ye gods, it’s incredibly fast. Killer job, FF team!
• EpicEng 9y ago
  I did, didn't work, went back to Chrome. It was faster and had a smaller memory footprint than I remember, which was great. It also started stuttering on my macs every ~5 seconds or so. The page would just lock up. Couldn't find a solution. The only hints were to disable graphics acceleration, but those were years old. On my windows machines it crashed, and crashed hard. Single tab has an issue, the entire browser crashed. Lost work. No thanks FF, I'll try again in another decade.
  • eat_veggies 9y ago
    For pre beta software, that's perfectly understandable.
    • EpicEng 9y ago
      Not pre-beta, it was the official stable version. I should have made that clear.
  • 3131s 9y ago
    > No thanks FF, I'll try again in another decade. You should hope that you'll have the option to do so in a decade, or maybe by then we'll all be getting extorted by Google after they've strangled the open web to death.
    • EpicEng 9y ago
      Right. A bit dramatic, but I guess I'm in the same camp as the vast majority of other people out there who just wants a browser that doesn't get in my way.
  • EpicEng 9y ago
    To be clear; this was the stable version. I apologize that your favorite browser didn't work well for me.
• kilolima 9y ago
  If it's really that fast they should rename it "Phoenix"...
• jccalhoun 9y ago
  Someone started a spreadsheet of webextension alternatives to addons https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECIVyBU0GPoSmRqZ7A0VBvqeKYVSww/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECIVyBU...
• dingo_bat 9y ago
  I've switched completely to nightly from Chrome over the past month. However there is one extension that's keeping me from uninstalling Chrome. It's called secure SSH or secure shell, and it's the best SSH client that exists on windows!
• ddingus 9y ago
  Never left. Thanks for the hard work guys :D
• jchw 9y ago
  I had tried to migrate back to Firefox so many times that I got burned on it and decided it wasn't worth trying again. Despite this, when I heard the Quantum announcement I decided to give it a download and immediately fell in love again. Photon looks great, the dev tools are wonderful, and it's Fast. And this thing doesn't have annoying Chrome idiosyncrasies - I can tell Firefox to permanently trust my Kubernetes cert without painstakingly adding it to the OS trusted certificates list. Firefox Sync works well and I like being able to send tabs to my phone. Speaking of which, you know what really rules? Installing plain old uBlock Origin on my phone. Which I did. I am loving everything about this and I really hope we're turning a new corner. Say Google, want to get Hangouts working in Firefox yet?
  • noobermin 9y ago
    Curious, before this last time, when was the last time you tried to migrate back? Because I've been enjoying the majority of the things you've cited (other than quantum) for the last few years or so now.
    • jchw 9y ago
      A couple major releases ago. To be fair, most of this isn't new, but other problems had precluded my ability to move for a long time to enjoy these features. For example, the app we developed at my workplace was painfully unusably slow in Firefox (even slower than Edge sometimes!) I also previously had problems with single tabs causing stuff to lock up or at least respond slowly. This happened with SoundCloud a couple times. Seems good now! Nightly always helped a bit, but I had trouble with that too. This nightly has yet to crash once across the 4 computers and 2 Android devices I've installed it to, so I'm very impressed. I previously used LastPass which broke several times on Nightly builds in the past. Since then I've migrated to 1password, an unrelated but definitely pleasant change for using Firefox. But mostly, boy those perf improvements are real. Side by side, it's hard to believe how fast performance changed between versions.
      • yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
        > the app we developed at my workplace was painfully unusably slow in Firefox Have you considered addressing this bug?
• NDlurker 9y ago
  I hate Chrome. Never stopped using Firefox
• gigatexal 9y ago
  I’ve stopped using chrome everywhere because of all the goodness in Firefox since 55
• kahlonel 9y ago
  Curious to see what results will look like versus Safari on macOS.
• Larrikin 9y ago
  I expressed fear in the last Firefox thread about losing my most essential add-on, Rikaisama, and it seems that the latest version of Firefox has officially killed it off. However after a lot of searching I found Yomichan, which seems to be better in every way when compared to Rikaisama, but its fairly difficult to find. I highly recommend it to any Japanese learners looking for a replacement. https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/ https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/
  • TD-Linux 9y ago
    Thanks for this! Rikaisama had already sort of broken with e10s, and I had considered trying to port the Chrome version, but this is far better!
• AlexCoventry 9y ago
  How does Firefox's sandbox stack up against Chrome's?
  • rhelmer 9y ago
    Per https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox/Specifics https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox/Specifics "The core of the Windows sandbox is Google's chromium sandbox" so I'd expect it to compare favorably.
• gxs 9y ago
  This new UI is exactly what I've been waiting - I've been wanting to switch off chrome for the same reason I switched off of android - to simply diversify the services I use a little bit. The old Firefox UI always felt old fashioned and made the adjustment that much harder. This new version of firefox has been great - as others have mentioned it's really fast and the UI is simplistic with a side panel for bookmarks to boot. Definitely kudos where kudos is due, looking forward to using firefox for the foreseeable future.
• hendersoon 9y ago
  Tons of extensions don't work. My personal blocker is mouse gestures; the webextensions API simply doesn't support the workflow I've been following for 15+ years. Mouse gestures will NEVER work well on Firefox 57+, just as they will NEVER work well on Chrome. Additionally, mouse gestures are completely broken on both linux and MacOS due to Firefox's implementation of right-clicking and that is not slated to be fixed before v57 releases. Oh-- and there's no functional LastPass addon yet either. And 57 is in beta 4 and will be released very soon. It is pretty fast, though. Good for benchmarks if not for actually using. Personally, I switched to Vivaldi.
  • 482794793792894 9y ago
    57 just entered Beta. It will be released on the 14th November. That's a whole 6 weeks still. It also is not the end of all Firefox development. Just because it's not necessarily done for 57, doesn't mean that it won't get fixed or that it will "NEVER" work well. It's also nonsense to make assumptions about what will work in Firefox in the future based on what works in Chrome, as Mozilla is introducing additional APIs that Chrome does not have. If you're happy with Vivaldi, your thing. But there also is Firefox 52 ESR, which will continue to get security updates until the 26th June 2018.
    • hendersoon 9y ago
      Unfortunately many of my blockers, such as functioning in new tab and other internal pages and anywhere on the chrome of the browser, are WONTFIX.
• linkmotif 9y ago
  I was just thinking I need to try Firefox again the other day. We need to give Firefox as many chances as it needs because it’s one of the most important projects on the Internet today.
  • 3131s 9y ago
    Please do. There is something to be said for using open source technologies even when they are not the fastest or most full-featured. And has Firefox on Linux always been more performant? Because over the years, as everyone else migrated away to Chrome, I never really noticed all of the things that were supposed to be so horrible about Firefox.
• quietriot 9y ago
  for $BAR :: CPU, GPU, MEM, IO What's the best way to visualize the relative $BAR usage of browser tabs in real time in the browser UI? Could each tab have an instantaneous or averaging resource demand indicator shown? ...by a font modification, performance dial, color scheme, or animation...? What's the best way to sort or select from all tabs, or a selection of tabs, by $BAR usage or a query on $BAR usage?
• s_m_t 9y ago
  Is webgl still slow on firefox?
• chewz 9y ago
  I had been using exclusively Firefox for five years until six months ago but I prefer using Chrome now. Poor documentation, tons of telemetry, shady deals like Pocket or Hallo. You can make Chrome more private and secure then Firefox with few command line options. Or use ungoogled-chromium. do shell script "open -n -a 'Google Chrome' --args --incognito --disable-sync --disable-reading-from-canvas --disable-voice-input --disable-system-timezone-automatic-detection --connectivity-check-url=" & quoted form of url204 & " --disable-remote-fonts --no-referrers --disable-physical-keyboard-autocorrect --no-pings --enable-fast-unload --enable-media-suspend --enable-offline-auto-reload-visible-only --use-simple-cache-backend --aggressive-cache-discard --disk-cache-size=100663296 --proxy-server=" & quoted form of proxy_url Checked Firefox 57/58 but can't confirm any visible performance gain. Documentation is lacking. And Firefox 57 has at the moment 58 extensions compatible. And it still has Pocket buil-in.
• efangs 9y ago
  Can it use Chromecast?
  • beckler 9y ago
    Unlikely, and I doubt Google would ever allow it. Chromecast is a closed protocol. There are SDKs for it, but you only have three options: Android, iOS, and Chrome.
• Walf 9y ago
  I could never make the switch to Chrome in the first place. Sure, I use Chrome for the things it does better, like live editing of script in debugger, but Firefox was always streets ahead for customisation – both plugin- and preference-wise. I always found Chrome's preemptive tendencies frustrating, and its general "Chrome knows what's best for you" attitude intolerable for web development work. I also trust Mozilla a hell of a lot more than Google.
• geordee 9y ago
  Chrome user from the early days of Chrome. I tried switching to Firefox/Safari multiple times. It was Chrome Devtools which was holding me back in the end. Now I use Safari for most of the browsing. Getting started with Firefox for everything else. I miss the floating bookmarks in Chrome though.
• gravelc 9y ago
  Wow! Just installed the beta, and it's great. Waiting for the LastPass extension now before it can become a daily driver. Most of my monitors are high Hz (144 or higher), and the scrolling is definitely smoother than Chrome when there's plenty of images to be loaded. Like butter.
• ASipos 9y ago
  I use Firefox primarily because of the Awesome Bar. I just have to remember like two or three substrings from an URL or page title and bam! the page is there. For comparison, Chrome's omnibox generally only searches for whole words, while the Google search suggestions take up much precious space, while it is known that most web browsing is directed to pages already visited. Firefox's decision to keep the URL bar and the search bar separate seems sensible.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• jeshwanth 9y ago
  https://pasteboard.co/GMJ4leH.jpg https://pasteboard.co/GMJ4leH.jpg https://pasteboard.co/GMJ4vn9.jpg https://pasteboard.co/GMJ4vn9.jpg Still some problems to fix in rendering, u could notice upvote button rendered in chrome and Firefox above
• erikrothoff 9y ago
  As a Chrome extension developer with 500,000+ installs the number of requests for a Firefox version has increased enornmously the last couple of months. It seems that Firefox is gathering a lot of momentum recently.
• qbaqbaqba 9y ago
  I wonder what will be google's response. Faster chrome would be nice. And Firefox - it's still Firefox, with obligatory pocket integration, no full themes support. It's more a company culture than technology thing.
• wingerlang 9y ago
  My laptop is slow in general (Mac 2008) and I've considered Chrome as a culprit. Is there any way I can easily objectively measure the impact from moving to FF? Like taking average memory footprints for a few days with each browser?
  • ece 9y ago
    I can tell the difference in daily usage, where I would have to restart Chrome every day or two on Linux because of excessive RAM usage (I do keep a lot of tabs open, and simultaneously run IntelliJ IDEA among other JVM programs/docker containers), and I don't have to with FF 54/55+ anymore. Each tab in a new process became the default in 54/55 as long as all of your extensions are updated. I haven't looked back since. I have tried switching away at points before this, and something would bring me back to Chrome/Chromium, but not this time.
• earlybike 9y ago
  Did benchmarks on an i7-MBPr (4 cores @2.7Ghz) and an iPhone 7. I'm aware that JetStream and SunSpider aren't about the CSS and rendering but I was curious: Chrome FFNightly Safari Safari OSX OSX OSX iOS --------------------------------------------------- MotionMark(↑) 348.82 190.23 474.55 295.12 JetStream (↑) 166.84 173.96 239.03 171.27 Sunspider (↓) 225.2ms 178.4ms 115.2ms 198.5ms I was surprised about FFNightly's MotionMark result, so I did a second run which again returned a low score of 182.79. Maybe some could double-check and test this too.
  • noncoml 9y ago
    Although benchmarks can be valuable tools for the developers, as end user I don't care about them. What I really care about was that with previous versions of Firefox, my MacbookPro would start getting hot as soon as I would fire it up, and every page load would feel like a drag. With 57, my Macbook is cool and everything feels snappy.
• submeta 9y ago
  Is there a seamless way sync all my Safari bookmarks with Firefox? I detest Google, that's why I'll never use Chrome. Would love to use Firefox on my MacBook. But I keep going back to Safari because it gives me an increadibly streamlined experience on all of my Apple devices (bookmarks, reading list) Edit: typo
• Supersonic112 9y ago
  As someone with lots of tabs (multiple hundreds) and windows (usually about two dozens) open in a session, I was very surprised and amazed how quickly the latest few Firefox versions started up. Before, there would be this constant fear of having to close the browser more often than every couple of months (due to updates or high ram usage, which also seems to have gotten better) because it would take several minutes of waiting idle until all windows and contents were slowly loaded and usable, whereas now everything is available in a minute or two at worst.
• mark_l_watson 9y ago
  Nice to see competition with multiple good options. For me, privacy was always a large advantage of Firefox but now I also trust Apple, Safari, and Apple’s privacy stance. Honest question: what privacy advantages does Firefox have over Safari?
• jhgjklj 9y ago
  Tried chrome but never switched to chrome. What feature were you missing in firefox that made you switch to chrome.
  • Synaesthesia 9y ago
    What made me switch was the performance basically, from the beta I had never used such a fast and responsive browser.
• j-pb 9y ago
  The firefox team killed the ready to go WebSQL which could have also nicely standardised SQLite and pushed IndexedDB a standart thats broken and only half implemented across browsers even today. And ironically they still use SQLite for their IndexedDB implementation. Never forgive never forget.
  • woranl 9y ago
    The Firefox team killed the ready to go Filesystem api, which could have also nicely standardized. Never forgive, never forget.
• norswap 9y ago
  About 80% of my addons might stop working with Firefox 57, seeing as they are plastered with the "legacy" label currently. If that happens, it's bye bye Firefox for me. This matters far more than some tiny rendering speed improvement.
• sleavey 9y ago
  I don't know what everyone's problem was with Firefox. I never noticed significant slow down with the browser, or at least the slow down I saw I blamed on Javascript bloat on websites these days (it started around the time Bootstrap and jQuery really took off). I was even running Adblock+ / later uBlock, had lots of tabs open all the time and browsed heavy websites. I remember reading that comic that Google made to describe how Chrome worked back in 2009 or so, and thinking process-based tabs were a cool idea, but the experience I was having with Firefox was not bad enough to merit the switch, especially with all of the privacy invasion that switching to Chrome would have entailed. I also reckoned that Google would eventually start to block or make it harder to install add-ons like ad blockers - they are, after all, fundamentally an advertising company. I'm glad I stuck it out with Mozilla. They're one of the few web companies worth trusting.
  • mda 9y ago
    It was slow, janky unresponsive compared to Chrome. Also security was much weaker. I think they addressed some of the issues now.
    • 3131s 9y ago
      I agree with the GP -- I never noticed this in Firefox and years back I was surprised to learn after the fact that Chrome had come to dominate in market share. Was Firefox less performant on Windows or something? I never really got what people were complaining about as a user of Firefox on Linux... However, the new beta is purely awesome. I don't think I've ever been so excited about a new software version release! What a fantastic validation of Rust too in the process.
      • amiga-workbench 9y ago
        I've used them side by side before and the default scrolling behaviour felt janky as hell. I'll be very pleased if they have improved performance as much as everybody is saying, I want off the Google botnet.
        • 9y ago
• zyngaro 9y ago
  The problem of firefox is not the desktop, it's on android where it really need to catch-up with chrome. I am not sure everything that was said here also applied to firefox for android. Also I would have done the speed comparison on mobile. The new UI of firefox and android is really ugly. It actually looks like you are in a webview.
• Skinney 9y ago
  From what I've gathered, the new Firefox is fast because it makes better use of multiple cores. But is F57 still faster on a single core?
• johndoe489 9y ago
  I am definitely willing to give it a shot but they need to fix the dev tools. I'm on 56 atm in Windows 10 / 16 GB RAM / Core i5-3570K and for whatever reason when I press F12 to open up the console it is really sluggish and takes a good whole second to draw itself. Does 57 solve that? That said I could see myself just using Chrome for development and FIrefox as main browser. I did the opposite for a while until Firebug was phased out and Chrome Dev Tools became better.
• belly 9y ago
  I use Brave. It's by far the fastest browser in the market.
• eth0up 9y ago
  Not much about privacy in the comments here, surprisingly. I'd have a lot more jollier sentiments for Firefox if they'd address the sort of issues exemplified here: https://browserleaks.com/ https://browserleaks.com/ FF is my preferred (chromium 2nd) browser, but there aren't many alternatives. I'm not a dev, but my impression is that modern browsers are designed as advertisement and data-leak protocols with incidental browsing capabilities.
• leoc 9y ago
  Can you duplicate tabs yet?
• yalogin 9y ago
  I am glad I never gave up on Firefox. Of course I did not give chrome a shot as I did not want to shift from Firefox. I never found it to be slow either.
• seriocomic 9y ago
  This has been nice timing for me as I've been looking to cut my ties from "being the product" with Google. I'm using the current beta FirefoxDeveloperEdition and am looking forward to the upcoming rewrite in 57 (59?). Others have mentioned pocket's integration, but I can't wait to see the open-source code, I've already set-up my own Shaarli and Wallabag instances. I'm still evaluating Brave and Vivaldi after being a long time (2+ years) user of Chomium. The only thing that's hardest to find is the separate identity management and Sync that comes so easily in Chrome/Chromium.
• arca_vorago 9y ago
  I rather think it's time to give emacs-eww another chance as well.
• woranl 9y ago
  I found Firefox very inefficient when working with large file says a 2GB file. It doesn't have filesystem api like Chrome does. There is no ability to do low-level create, read, update and delete (CRUD) file operations. For example, you cannot write bytes in the end of a file and continues to grow it. IndexedDB only allows adding and removing whole files. As the file size get big, the inefficient file handling will cause Firefox to run out of offline storage and the processing time will get longer exponentially as the file size increases. Speed improvements are good, but the lack of basic features is what kills Firefox. It is not ready for heavy duty web app.
• jamiesonbecker 9y ago
  As well as the vastly better Firefox, I've been very impressed by the new Brave browser[1]. Actually, extremely impressed. I normally do dev with Chrome for heavy JS (even compared to new devel edition ff) and even though Brave's devtools seem to match up to an older version compared to Chrome, page updates etc are just so much faster in Brave than in Chrome. Fast renders matters a LOT when you're developing. (Btw, there's a bug in the install script if you're using Brave on Debian[2].) It's still early days and doesn't have as many features as FF and Chrome (in particular for me, Stylish is missing, but the privacy and ad blockers that I prefer are there), but, wow... rendering is faster than Chrome in the common case, or at least strongly feels that way. I also like how they're focused first and foremost on privacy and ad blocking, but also make it easy to donate to your favorite sites in place of ad revenue. It seems like a balanced approach. Brave seems to be very similar to Mozilla with its strong focus on user privacy. It's nice to see competition heating up in the browser space again. 1. https://brave.com https://brave.com 2. https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/6902 https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/6902
  • JosephLark 9y ago
    Maybe I'm missing something, but my impression of Brave was that behind the scenes it was just another Chromium browser. All the same little issues I have with Chromium were present in Brave when I tried it - exact same configuration tweaks (other than privacy stuff in Chrome) I needed to make to get me to a happy state. So aren't any of the visible speedups just a matter of the native adblocking? Are you comparing the speeds to Chrome/Chromium with adblocking? Maybe Brave is more heavily customized than I thought?
    • jamiesonbecker 9y ago
      Right, so it is definitely a fork from Chromium (or at least the devtools seem to match an older version of Chrome's), and agreed completely with regards to config tweaks, but I definitely see a huge speedup versus using adblockers (ABP+UBO+PB) in Chromium, including on local dev sites with no ads/privacy to block. It (at least seems to) render much, much faster. Always take non-indie benchmarks with a grain of salt, of course, but given that their CEO is the developer of JS, it's probably not too much of a stretch to imagine that this is a true or mostly-true claim from their main website page[1]: "Brave loads major news sites 2 to 8 times faster than Chrome and Safari on mobile. And Brave is 2 times faster than Chrome on desktop." I haven't tried installing chrome extensions in it yet, but if that works, then Brave is definitely my new browser. It seems simple and clean; a worthy successor to both FF and Chrome. 1. https://brave.com https://brave.com
• m3kw9 9y ago
  Safari wait time to me is pretty much non existent already. Even if it is a bit faster, do I want to change browsers for an example 100% speed increase from 100 to 50ms?
• k__ 9y ago
  Are the quantum changes also in the Android version of Firefox?
• SeanDav 9y ago
  I have said this multiple times, but I am going to say it again. I have always used Firefox and Chrome, side by side since Chrome first came out and I have never, ever, in all that time, even once thought that Chrome was faster than Firefox (or vice-versa) for my day to day use. Speed has just never been an issue, yet I see it quoted in almost every comparison between Firefox and Chrome... Firefox has always been my main browser, with Chrome only used if required, although I generally have them both open. I am a heavy user of tabs and multiple windows, and Firefox eats Chrome's lunch in this area, while using far less memory. Still, very good to see Mozilla back on track again and producing great browser software. Keep it up Mozilla!
• Herodotus_2 9y ago
  I actually set a reminder for Firefox 57 in my calendar...
• AtomicOrbital 9y ago
  Firefox Nightly on Android has the best tab management work flow far more usable than Chrome ... have been using FF nightly on linux laptop for past several years and love how Sync seamlessly shares bookmarks and open tabs across devices ... in general I find FF uses less RAM and CPU than Chrome ... Congrats on the hard work over at Mozilla !!!
• osrec 9y ago
  On Android, the nightly build looks pretty good, however, GPU accelerated CSS animations are fairly choppy. By comparison, on Chrome or Safari, they're really nice and smooth.
• RasputinsBro 9y ago
  I'm a bit confused. I can't tell the difference between normal windows and incognito windows. I mean visually, they have nothing that distinguishes them, at least as far as I can tell. EDIT: And is it possible to block third party cookies?
• MadWombat 9y ago
  I am not trolling, I am asking seriously, but who the hell cares about a couple of extra seconds of page rendering? As long as the page looks and works correctly in the end. But the features that Firefox drops in favor of doing browser equivalent of street racing with Chrome are not being replaced with anything. So far, I am pretty sure I am dropping Firefox once release 57 hits. If it is going to become a Chrome clone, I might as well use Chrome.
• cup-of-tea 9y ago
  I never switched from Firefox. I have no idea why everyone else did. Chrome had fewer extensions, wasn't faster and was a huge security risk. I can't remember Firefox ever having a problem with speed. I say that as someone who is unhappy if a command line tool takes more than a few milliseconds to do its thing. I think all that happened is people tried Chrome because Google told them to, and they found it was faster because they had a hundred extensions in Firefox and none in Chrome.
• djhworld 9y ago
  Going to switch over to the beta for a week and see how I get on. From first impressions though, I'm very impressed by how snappy it feels. One downside is a personal site I host uses client side certs for auth, and that stopped working in Firefox (whereas it was fine in Chrome), turns out the Javascript fetch API needs you to structure the request like `fetch(someUrl, { credentials: 'include' })` So I had to go through the code to fix that. Presumably this is a web standard that Firefox is adhering to, whereas Chrome is a bit more relaxed on this?
• grv_07 9y ago
  Lat time uninstall it when it drop support for firebug.
• brightball 9y ago
  Great to see all this work from Mozilla paying off. Never would have thought I'd see momentum like this.
• khazhoux 9y ago
  Wait... I just downloaded 57beta, and loaded CNN and USAToday, two sites with terrible video autoplay. Immediately upon loaded CNN, my fan starts spinning up loudly (2016 macbook pro). When I loaded USAToday in another tab, I had to just quit FF because CPU was maxed out and laptop was overheating. So...?
• bigbugbag 9y ago
  More like it's time to quit firefox for waterfox which has the added benefits of removing most of the unnecessary crap (signed extension, pocket, telemetry, EME, profiling, sponsored tiles, data collection) and will not drop support for legacy extensions. https://www.waterfoxproject.org/blog/waterfox-55.0-release-download https://www.waterfoxproject.org/blog/waterfox-55.0-release-d...
• alexnewman 9y ago
  And brave
• shmerl 9y ago
  Never switched to Chrome. Firefox worked just fine for me all this time.
• smith333 9y ago
  I never switched to Chrome and stuck with Firefox since Firefox is user pro and not profit pro.
• hellbanner 9y ago
  Wasn't there hate on HN recently for Firefox sharing data with Google trackers?
• squarefoot 9y ago
  Thankfully I never switched to Chrome/ium; at first there were some FF extensions still not ported to Chrome that kept me from switching, then came privacy concerns keeping me away from it, finally when I was still running a slow machine as main PC and FF started to become slow and bloated it came Palemoon offering the same functionality at higher speed. Now Although I still run Palemoon on my main PC and all netbooks/laptops, I install Firefox on all customers/friends/relatives PC plus a basic set of addons for privacy protection (ublock origin + disconnect + https everywhere) and have to admit it got really better with time.