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How Firefox Got Fast Again

• jonstewart 9y ago
  Does this mean Firefox is comparable to Chrome wrt/ sandboxing?
  • sp332 9y ago
    No. Now that they have multi-process in good shape they can start getting there though.
  • seba_dos1 9y ago
    http://www.morbo.org/2017/11/linux-sandboxing-improvements-in.html http://www.morbo.org/2017/11/linux-sandboxing-improvements-i...
• theduality 9y ago
  I have been using 57 in beta, and I have to say, I'm impressed. It is a huge improvement. Whether it keeps me off Chrome in the future remains to be seen though!
  • mariusmg 9y ago
    Why shouldn't it keep you away from Chrome ? It's faster, uses less memory, and the "maker", Mozilla is more trustworthy compared with Google. What's missing ?
    • aapjesverkoper 9y ago
      I have been thinking of switching back from Chrome to Firefox. I haven't been able to find decent profile support though (so I can keep work and private data separate), and all profiles addons are broken at the moment.
      • heliostatic 9y ago
        The Firefox Multi-Account containers are great: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... Multiple profiles within a single window, visually distinguished by tab highlight color.
        • aapjesverkoper 9y ago
          It looks like this doesn't allow you to separate history, addons, bookmarks, or move your current tab to a container. I am sticking with google for now.
          • deleted 9y ago
            [deleted]
          • callahad 9y ago
            You can use about:profiles or the profile manager (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...) to handle that. The UX isn't as polished, but for just a handful of uses (work, personal, etc.) it's easy enough to make shortcuts which call `firefox --new-instance --profile <profilename>`.
          • dralley 9y ago
            You can use multiple profiles with Firefox, the UX for doing so just isn't as fleshed out as Chromium. Create a new profile by going to about:profiles, and thereafter when you start Firefox it should present you with an option to pick which profile to use.
        • imron 9y ago
          Yep. I love containers.
      • CapacitorSet 9y ago
        What stops you from launching Firefox with the profile manager twice (there's a flag for that), and selecting the two profiles? It takes a couple of seconds to select the profile.
    • theduality 9y ago
      Nothing, so far. I have completely switched in the hope that I don't hit a showstopper that makes me switch back.
    • konart 9y ago
      >It's faster Faster than old fox? Yes. Faster than Chrome? Nope. Still long way to go.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      • Osiris 9y ago
        Faster in what way? There are multiple subsystems in a browser.
      • seba_dos1 9y ago
        Nothing can beat Chrome in being the fastest to become unusable when opening many tabs ;)
        • konart 9y ago
          How many? I typically have 2 windows with ~30-50 tabs opened in each of them. No problem at all, never was.
          • seba_dos1 9y ago
            I typically have hundreds, sometimes low thousands of tabs opened in Firefox on 8GB RAM and it works well, while ~30-50 is an upper limit of what Chrome can do without bringing the whole system to swapping hell. Plus, Chrome's tab UI makes more tabs completely unusable, while vanilla Firefox works well and can also offer massive improvements like vertical tabs.
            • konart 9y ago
              Okay. Hands down here. Never could get this kind of use case, never had such an experience either, so may be by the time you have 1000+ tubs Chrome does kill itself. >Chrome's tab UI makes more tabs completely unusable True, thankfully we have extensions that deal with this (I've been using Keepin' Tabs for this, until I started using cVim)
            • 9y ago
    • lightedman 9y ago
      " It's faster" FireFox 52 - BYOND game written by myself - 60FPS. FireFox 57 - 10FPS. Not even.
      • robin_reala 9y ago
        Sounds like an edge case the developers would be interested in. Have you got a reproducable testcase?
        • callahad 9y ago
          Can confirm. Would be very interested in a link that shows a regression of that degree.
        • lightedman 9y ago
          Play "Space Station 13" and see for yourself. And that game normally lags and stutters bad enough as-is on any browser. It's worse in FF57.
    • aaronharder 9y ago
      I find the absence of Smart Zoom on Mac Firefox to be very painful indeed. The "double right tap" gesture works in both Safari and Chrome, and zooms in exactly on the div/image you're interested in. I've searched for alternatives in FF, but even the half-working ones I found don't work in Quantum. Sad because I'm rooting for Mozilla, but just can't function in their browser without Smart Zoom.
      • kristofferR 9y ago
        Yeah, it's a shame that macOS support in Firefox is so bad. I hope Mozilla can start making Firefox feel like a first-grade browser in macOS, like Safari and Chrome, now that it's speedy. Smart Zoom and Handoff is completely missing and Applescript scripting support is extremely poor.
    • mda 9y ago
      It is probably sometimes marginally faster and sometimes slower, same with memory use. Its security is still lacking compared to Chrome. Personally I don't see any pressing incentive to switch.
      • AsyncAwait 9y ago
        Supporting a browser that actually has your interests in mind, so they have some power at the web standards bodies might be it.
    • EGreg 9y ago
      Developer Tools needs to have better UI
      • robin_reala 9y ago
        That’s a bit … vague. I mean, Fx Dev Tools has a grid visualisation that’s much better than anyone else’s, so that’s better UI right there.
      • vdnkh 9y ago
        And they need to work better in general. I use dev edition which has a much better UI (it's pretty much Chrome) but it's much slower and has weird bugs - if you disable sourcemaps, it won't let you inspect sources, because sourcemaps is null.
    • daveFNbuck 9y ago
      For me, it's missing Chromecast and my MacBook Pro heats up enough that the keys become warm to the touch when using Firefox.
      • benbristow 9y ago
        Unless it's reverse engineered I doubt you'll be getting Chromecast. It's kind of in the name.
        • daveFNbuck 9y ago
          Yeah, that's an unfortunate reason I'll probably have to keep using chrome fairly regularly.
    • lvh 9y ago
      So far, Chrome has better sandboxing support on most platforms (especially Linux), though Chrome's catching up quickly. I'm generally optimistic about Rust code having fewer exploitable defects, although it's a reasonable argument to suggest that the previous C++ parts had a lot more public scrutiny. Also, for me personally: I use a lot of different profiles and using multiple Firefox profiles simultaneously is a mess. The only UX that still works is about:profiles (all of the profile switcher extensions broke since the move to WebExtensions) and I've had Firefox beachball (hang -- I'm on macOS) on me twice while doing that. Don't get me wrong! I love Firefox and I'm really excited about this change.
      • imron 9y ago
        > and using multiple Firefox profiles simultaneously is a mess. Not sure if it meets your use case, but checkout Firefox containers.
      • onli 9y ago
        Is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... really broken? That was a test pilot experiment till two month ago, it would be very bad (and a bit ridiculous) if that addon were already broken.
        • unicornporn 9y ago
          Not broken. Using it on FF57 stable.
        • Sylos 9y ago
          Containers are different from Profiles. Containers only separate Cookies and login data, to make you look towards the internet like multiple people. Profiles on the other hand separate everything, as if you had two completely independent Firefox installations. Different browsing history, bookmarks, themes, extensions. They work very well for allowing multiple people to all have their own Firefox, even though it's the same installation. But also really well for single-person use, for example I have a normal Profile for everyday browsing and then a webdev Profile, where I don't put in content/tracking blockers. You can manage Profiles by typing "about:profiles" into the URL bar or with this: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
    • IceyEC 9y ago
      Google Hangouts :-/
    • nullspace 9y ago
      Personally, it has to a large extent. Somethings that are not yet there: 1. Since Webextensions are new, some extensions that I use in chrome, need to be ported over. Most are not must haves to be fair. 2. Hangouts for work. :( 3. A solution to manage different personas - Chrome has the "user profile" thing linked to google accounts, firefox as container tabs. I think user profile is better than container tabs, although both are kinda bad. Except hangouts, none are deal breakers - I use firefox as much as I can, and in fact overall it feels more faster and more repsonsive than Chrome starting with Quantum. It also looks and feels better than chrome.
      • callahad 9y ago
        Thank you for choosing Firefox. 1. Are there any specific extensions you need? Happy to add them to our outreach list. 2. Sorry about Hangouts; follows a trend of Chrome-only product launches/re-launches from Google (five this year so far). Wish we could do more, but if Google's OK shipping things that only work on one browser, that's their prerogative. 3. Firefox also has completely separate profiles, in addition to container tabs. The UI isn't as polished as in Chrome, but it works: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
        • zeveb 9y ago
          > Are there any specific extensions you need? Keysnail. It requires the ability to override C-n, though.
        • nachtigall 9y ago
          > 3. Firefox also has completely separate profiles, in addition to container tabs. hey callahad, thanks for shiming in. My biggest pain with profiles is that you cannot use separate profiles at the same time. A Firefox instance can only run one at the same time, making it useless to run e.g. a work and a private profile together. Container tabs also do not help here because they share the same history which I do not want for privacy reasons. Nonetheless, thanks for a great release!
    • enraged_camel 9y ago
      Chrome Dev Tools. Firefox’s dev tools simply aren’t as good. There are also many features in Chrome that I’ve come to appreciate, such as right clicking a tab and selecting “duplicate”, which opens a copy of the tab and retains the browser history of the original one.
      • leoc 9y ago
        The (apparently) continuing lack of tab duplication is my major reason not to switch back.
        • DiThi 9y ago
          FF 57 has it.
          • leoc 9y ago
            Thanks. Right, that's it, I'm probably on my way back.
            • KwanEsq 9y ago
              It's actually had it for years (probably even always, almost certainly since about 1.5) via middle-clicking the refresh button.
              • Sylos 9y ago
                Well, Firefox has existed since before tabs were a thing in browsers, so can't have been always, but yeah, wouldn't surprise me, if this was relatively quickly added after the introduction of tabs. These kind of hidden features don't require a whole lot of designing and forethought, so it's something that usually only really needs one dev thinking that it'd be nifty to have them implement it.
      • DiThi 9y ago
        Have you tried the dev tools in FF 57? As a FF user with Chrome-as-debugger for 3-4 years, I'm honestly impressed. FF 57 also has "duplicate tab" with duplicate history.
    • tzs 9y ago
      Faster at what things? On my 2017 iMac (3.4 GHz Core i5, Radeon Pro 570) I get 60 on Mozilla's Speedometer 2.0 [1] test with Firefox 57.0. I get 90 on Chrome and 93 on Safari. On my Surface Pro 4 that gap is smaller, but Chrome is still about 15% faster on that test. [1] https://mozilla.github.io/arewefastyet-speedometer/2.0/ https://mozilla.github.io/arewefastyet-speedometer/2.0/
      • ko27 9y ago
        Yeah, they even recently officially posted the speedometer result and it was a few percent behind Chrome. Also some consider Speedometer to be the closest thing to a real user performance benchmark.
      • callahad 9y ago
        Benchmarks are not comprehensive, nor are they gospel; it's entirely possible for a browser to score lower on a benchmark while also feeling faster in real-world use. For a long time, this was true of Chrome versus Firefox on JavaScript benchmarks: SpiderMonkey is routinely on par with V8, yet Firefox also felt significantly slower. In the case of Speedometer, it's measuring one specific type of webapp interaction in a single tab; it's not capturing things like perceived speed of opening or closing the browser, switching tabs, loading pages, etc. It doesn't test how the browser performs when many JS-heavy tabs are loaded in the background. It also has lots of corner cases: installing a common password manager halves the score, and a common adblocker nearly does the same again, yet neither show that kind of noticeable degradation in real-world browsing. Benchmarks are useful for saying "we've improved our browser this much in this area compared to where we were last year," but they're much less useful for making broad generalizations across heterogeneous browsers; there are too many other variables at play.
        • Manishearth 9y ago
          Whilst benchmarking stylo for example we noticed there were perceptible wins on interaction time on real world sites; but speedometer didn't budge as much because it tends towards small DOM trees which stylo can't parallelize much.
    • countryslicker 9y ago
      es6 import
    • staticassertion 9y ago
      I still trust Chrome's sandbox - I have less understanding of where Firefox does sandboxing, how it works across platforms, etc. Whereas I have a solid understanding of how Chrome uses seccomp on Linux. While pieces of Firefox are moving to Rust the majority of attack surface is still in C++, so I want a strong sandbox if I'm going to run that browser.
      • pcwalton 9y ago
        > I have less understanding of where Firefox does sandboxing, how it works across platforms, etc. Whereas I have a solid understanding of how Chrome uses seccomp on Linux. It's described in detail here: * https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox * http://www.morbo.org/2017/11/linux-sandboxing-improvements-in.html http://www.morbo.org/2017/11/linux-sandboxing-improvements-i...
    • kodablah 9y ago
      Embeddability. I've mentioned it on this site before, but Chrome's embeddability story (Electron, nw.js, CEF, Qt, etc) affects adoption more significantly than Mozilla prioritizers are giving credit for. Sure it's not an effect of Google itself, but that it exists only on one browser is something Mozilla should actively target. Of course there are a few attempts here and there, e.g. positron, but there needs to be a real effort to make the entire browser easily buildable and embeddable w/ an easy C API (doesn't have to conform to CEF like Servo was/is trying). Provide prebuilt libs and the headers and you will see adoption go up.
    • mozoldie 9y ago
      Chrome has a better security model. That's big for some.
      • Sylos 9y ago
        Not really anymore. Mozilla has been doing a lot here in recent months, too. The foundation for most of these performance improvements is the recent introduction of multiprocess, which also allowed them to introduce sandboxing in many more places. To my knowledge, the only bigger architectural difference now is that Chrome sandboxes each tab individually, unless they're from the same domain as another tab, whereas Firefox by default only uses as many processes as you have CPU cores and then round-robins your tabs among those. This is for performance reasons: You still get almost the same parallelism, but much less RAM usage especially with lots of tabs, and then that free RAM can again be used to speed things up elsewhere. You can however configure this. Set dom.ipc.processCount in about:config to as many processes as you want to maximally use. If you set it to a really high number, like 1000, then it will create a new process for each tab (until you open your 1001st tab) and those will then all be individually sandboxed. Another big security difference were extensions. Firefox previously with the classic Linux approach of "If it's installed, it's trusted". Now they have the same extension model as Chrome with a number of additional APIs. Those APIs are potential security holes, but also allow the implementation of better security, for example NoScript is being ported to Firefox 57, still can't be ported to Chrome. Well, and then going away from the model itself, Mozilla enables much better security on the extension side, again with the Linux approach, by reviewing extensions and extension updates before they allow the publication. I'd have no concern with my mum installing whatever extension she wants in her Firefox. With Chrome, I would be concerned. Lastly, only some of us are security super humans. Chrome always gives an option for security to calm security people, but if it benefits Google, they'll leave this option off by default, even if it should clearly be default on. For example Sync in Firefox is end-to-end-encrypted by default. Only one password needed. In Chrome, it's not. Because Google wants to evaluate your browsing history, bookmarks etc. You can have E2EE, but you need to separately enable it and use a second password for it. Again, fine for security super humans, but the fewest of us understand browsers enough to know about all potential security holes and we simply do need to rely on browser vendors for our own security. Don't think Google has actually fixed that Auto-Fill phishing attack either yet, which comes up around here every half year or so.
  • agumonkey 9y ago
    Similar conclusion here. So far I stopped using Chrome (stable or canary). I do miss it, Firefox Nightly (as I mention in other threads) have responsiveness issues a bit too much even for average websites (no video, no webgl, no audio) and I know that chrome doesn't suffer from that. But so far I'm still using Firefox for a few weeks. Few things that I do prefer in Firefox: - bookmarks with tags - nightly/testmode snooze tabs. Wonderful idea - reader view (not sure if chrome has that out of the box nowadays) I don't use containers even though they seem lovely
    • r3bl 9y ago
      > reader view (not sure if chrome has that out of the box nowadays) As far as I can tell, Firefox, Safari and Edge all seem to have it, and Chrome does not. Not on mobile, and not on desktop. There are some extensions that accomplish the same. I've had some good (but very limited) experience using Mercury Viewer some time ago: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mercury-reader/oknpjjbmpnndlpmnhmekjpocelpnlfdi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mercury-reader/okn...
      • milankragujevic 9y ago
        I think Chrome does have it on mobile, because it prompts me to "reader view" a page when it isn't properly formatted for reading, on Android 7.
        • r3bl 9y ago
          Ah, you are correct, it does have it for non-mobile-optimized pages. Completely forgot about that. I would still argue that its function is different than the "reader view" functions of other browsers, but it does have it.
        • hawski 9y ago
          Mobile Chrome has some broken heuristic to prompt it. I never know when I can expect it to appear. Sometimes the website already looks good and it appears. Sometimes it looks horrible and it does not appear. Also sometimes this "reader view" looks worse then the original. It has too small font for my taste. When you pinch to zoom it looks like it changes the font size, but also the viewport. So it is entirely useless. I expect that it will be removed (or replaced) in future.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• m_st 9y ago
  I switched from Chrome to Firefox 57 beta and couldn't be happier. Only issue so far was the ugly black title bar on the Mac, but switching to the integrated 'Light' theme fixed that. Too bad 'Light' isn't the default on macOS. Also note their updated Firefox on iOS. It looks and works just fine now and comes with Firefox Sync which gives you access to your tabs, bookmarks and history.
  • robin_reala 9y ago
    I’m using Firefox on iOS fulltime now, as in the last couple of releases ad blockers and 1Password have gained support.
    • okneil 9y ago
      Firefox on iOS supports content blockers? I thought that was Safari only.
      • robin_reala 9y ago
        Public APIs landed in March: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=150479 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=150479
        • okneil 9y ago
          This looks like tracking protection has been enabled in WebKit; content blocking is something else. https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/General/Conceptual/ExtensibilityPG/ContentBlocker.html https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Ge...
    • luhn 9y ago
      How do you use 1Password with Firefox on iOS? It's not an option for me in the Share modal, so I've been having to switch to Safari.
      • robin_reala 9y ago
• mattmanser 9y ago
  Serious question, is this too little too late? Firefox has taken a massive nosedive in the last few years, in the UK at least. My two big clients have them on less than 2% share. Just checked one, 5 years ago they had 9.55% share, today it's 1.8%. Even taking into account the growth of mobile, that's dire.
  • frostwhale 9y ago
    Firefox is about more than market share. A state of the art free non for profit browser makes the market much more competitive and better for the consumer. They are there to keep chrome/ other browsers honest. If chrome / google does something too corporate you don't like, there's an alternative.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • sillysaurus3 9y ago
      That seems a dangerous line of thinking, like arguing that startups are about more than growth. Firefox is looking like Apple circa 1997. They can still recover, but they have to focus on what people want.
      • frostwhale 9y ago
        They are not like apple because their goal is not the same as a for profit company. While you could still argue they're failing, i was just saying market share isn't the only indicator for a corporation in their position.
      • MaxBarraclough 9y ago
        Your Apple analogy might be quite apt. Mac has a market-share of something like 14%, but that's not Apple failing, that's Apple succeeding in targeting the expensive end of the market. Firefox has a chance at doing the same thing with privacy-aware users and/or power users. To that end, they need to stop dumbing-down the browser and endlessly playing catch-up with Chrome.
• methochris 9y ago
  tried out the 57 beta on macOS (10.13) this weekend and watching in the activity monitor, the main firefox process grabbed a whopping ~800mb of my 8gb of ram + spawned sub-processes needing 20-100mb per website tab. compare this to safari and chrome that have a minimal main-process (~40mb) and then the per-tab amount. i like mozilla and firefox but it just always seems to be something with firefox that pushes me away and now that they have the speed fixed, it's eating up my finite resources.
  • sgift 9y ago
    On the other hand Chrome eats RAM like there's no tomorrow on my system, while the Firefox' footprint is pretty much contained. Different systems, different experiences. (Two different machines, both Windows 10)
    • gvb 9y ago
      Linux too. Chrome was eating all my ram to the point where my laptop was dogging down horribly, sometime even swapping (excruciating). FF is fast and much lighter on RAM. My laptop is fast again. Thanks, Mozilla!
• mywittyname 9y ago
  I love Firefox and I'm glad to see they are doing what it takes to stay relevant. That being said, the "quantum" branding here is completely ridiculous. Quantum already had a definite meaning in computing and Firefox's "quantum era" has absolutely nothing to do with it. It's like Ford making a "hybrid" Mustang, that has zero electrification, it's just faster than all previous Mustangs. I was honestly expecting a Firefox build for quantum computers.
  • FireBeyond 9y ago
    You were downvoted, but I rather agree. I saw the picture of the turbofan diagram, with pointers to arbitrary parts of the engine and naming them as parts of the "Quantum Engine", DOM, CSS, etc. Tufte referred to chartjunk - that was graphicjunk. However... I love the browser again.
• Touche 9y ago
  Am I the only one that is confused by Firefox's "fast again" narrative? I remember that they launched the https://arewefastyet.com/ https://arewefastyet.com/ site a few years ago to fight the idea that FF was slow. It feels like there's a new blog post that essentially says the same thing "we're fast now" every couple of months. So I find this all confusing. Am I just remembering incorrectly, or haven't they already declared "we're as fast as Chrome now" several times in the past. Were those lies/incorrect? Or again, am I remembering incorrectly. Can someone explain this?
  • robin_reala 9y ago
    That wasn’t a marketing site, it was a tracker to measure the increase in performance over time due to the ongoing work the newly-spun-up performance team was doing.
    • Touche 9y ago
      Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to imply it was a marketing site. But there was marketing surrounded it, and I distinctly remember it being used to show that they were, indeed, as fast as the other browsers. I remember a narrative being that the problem wasn't Firefox being slow, but FF being slow in certain perceived-speed areas (like new tab speed). That's why I find these sorts of announcements confusing, I can remember them saying that there are already as fast as Chrome several times in the past. But maybe my mind is playing tricks on me.
      • AndrewDucker 9y ago
        No, you're right. They'd declare that the JS engine was just as fast (or faster) - but that didn't cover the whole of the UI, and laggy bits of the UI could slow things down no matter how fast the JS engine was. Thankfully they now seem to have improved the whole UI.
  • JohnTHaller 9y ago
    There have been multiple separate initiatives over the years to speed up various aspects of Firefox. The largest one is culminating in the release of Firefox Quantum, which is launching as Firefox 57 tomorrow. You've heard this more lately as the Quantum version of Firefox was released to Nightly and then Beta/Developer channels over the past couple months.
• ihaveahadron 9y ago
  browsers are too important to have one even two choices
• johansch 9y ago
  At a high level my main question is: Why has Mozilla generally been so slow to react to market trends and taken so insanely long to deliver products that are competitive in other ways than fuzzy aspects like openness, freedom etc? This goes back back all the way to like 1998. My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I remember it feeling like they were in rebuilding mode until like 2005-2006. And then Chrome launched in 2008... The first time around I guess it was massive amounts of technical debt and some questionable architectural choices (e.g. XPCOM), but how about the past decade?
  • b0rsuk 9y ago
    I think Mozilla wasted some effort on some questionable initiatives, like Firefox OS. They became a little complacent and didn't put money(?) where their mouth is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mozilla_products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mozilla_products In particular, check out the list of their abandoned projects. But some experimentation is necessary. You're never completely sure when you strike gold.
    • johansch 9y ago
      Maybe the complacency came from having too much money from the first rounds of Google search deals in like 2004-2008? They had already fulfilled their primary goals (openness, transparency etc.)... I worked at Opera Software between 2004-2015. We also got loads of Google search placement money in that period, but for all of their other faults, our exec team(s) were able to keep us hungry for more.
      • digi_owl 9y ago
        Possibly. FOSS projects are notorious for going with rewrites rather than throttle back and maintain what is already there.
    • digi_owl 9y ago
      Effectively Mozilla, like a growing number of big name FOSS projects, got hijacked by SJW busybodies wanting to pad their resume. Thus they spun up a bunch of "social consciousness" projects that sapped time and resources. And now they have decided that to make Firefox competitive they have to throw out all that made Firefox distinct, and clone Chrome behavior by behavior. Just watch them up and decide that maintaining their own engine will be too much and go Blink in a few years...
• mapgrep 9y ago
  I switched back to Firefox 54 from Chrome when multiprocess browsing ("Electrolysis") came out of beta. It's been absolutely great. It's fast and I trust and like the nonprofit behind it. And all the extensions I care about are available. My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account, and just generally wanting less dependence on Google. I also like that Firefox has a built in tracking protection (not just Do Not Track toggle but actual blocking of trackers). That's something that's just not in Google's interest to put in Chrome. Browsers are becoming more and more aggressive in protecting the interests of users. Becoming true "User Agents," in other words. See also Safari iOS allowing content blockers and now in iOS 11 blocking some popular tracking behaviors by default. It's absolutely great. And it's not surprising to me that Chrome is not a leader here. It's owned by the biggest advertising company on the internet. I predict Chrome will continue to lag on pro-privacy, anti-nag features.
  • mtgx 9y ago
    For those who don't know, if you sign in to your Google account in Chrome, Google will automatically save all the searches you've done in the omnibox. I don't remember Google ever warning me specifically that this was happening in the background, and after I checked https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity and noticed it was doing that, I was so furious that I deleted all the data Google kept on me there, and paused all tracking in the Activity Controls page. I also stopped signing in to the Google account in Chrome. This is why I'm a big supporter of EU's "explicit consent" idea. I should be knowing stuff like that without having to read a 5-page privacy policy that's often hidden somewhere on the Help page. Speaking of Firefox, version 57 also makes it easier to enable Tracking Protection in settings now (before you had to switch to the private windows to benefit from it, although you could make it so that FF always opened private windows by default). https://www.ghacks.net/2017/11/07/firefox-57-full-tracking-protection-functionality-included/ https://www.ghacks.net/2017/11/07/firefox-57-full-tracking-p... You can download FF57 from their FTP servers (they published it today), if you can't wait for the auto-update tomorrow: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/57.0/ https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/57.0/
    • 9y ago
• ihaveahadron 9y ago
  according to the internet the browsers are comparable with html ability. that's good because it wasnt when the one browser with a monopoly was completely website technology incapable. unreal chrome is still the most internet capable though. but saying that is kind of not important anymore since chrome is only a little more internet capable than other browsers
• Matterrr 9y ago
  One extension I don't find a replacement for is Hide caption titlebar plus. It makes it so there's a permanent title bar even when Firefox is maximized. I had to change an xfce setting to hide the title bar when a window is maximized, meaning I lose the title bar for every application... Not ideal. Does anyone know if there is an argument to launch firefox without a title bar? Or set it in xfce for only one application?
  • boriselec 9y ago
    Sadly, GUI tweaks is very limited on new extensions api
  • chippy 9y ago
    This is my favourite extension also. When using a laptop or other small screen, being able to remove the title bar is essential. I'm not upgrading to 57 until I can find a good workaround. Apparently, one used to be able to manually modify Firefox's userchrome.css to do something similar, but I've yet to find descriptions on what to do with this new version of Firefox. A different broken family of extensions that is impacted is mouse gestures, even for things like moving along tabs when hovering over them using the mouse wheel (default Chrome experience). I don't think this behaviour is possible with the new version of FF, sadly.
    • r3bl 9y ago
      userChrome.css is still present on Quantum. I haven't played around with it a lot, but if you feel like getting your hands dirty, this should be a relevant resource to you: https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx/issues/1 https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx/issues/1
  • bkor 9y ago
    Apparently client side decorations might appear in Firefox 59 at the earliest. For me having that negates the need to hide the title bar while maximized. Under X11 there are various tools to hide the titlebar (entire chrome basically), see devilspie.
• jacek 9y ago
  Stable Firefox 57.0 is already available on Mozilla's FTP server: https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/57.0/ https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/57.0/ I am already using it, but had to reinstall uBlock Origin.
  • darrmit 9y ago
    Thanks for this. Was waiting patiently for the push this week after getting tired of Nightly builds.
  • gsnedders 9y ago
    Note that that build isn't technically guaranteed to be the 57.0 release, and there have been 11th hour updates pushed out before.
• shmerl 9y ago
  I'm waiting for full switch to Webrender and as result GPU accelerated video decoding on Linux and switch to Wayland at last.
• maephisto 9y ago
  One thing that troubles me is why does a non profit open source browser buy premium offline ad space to promote itself? There's a huge "The new Firefox" ad in down-town Berlin.
  • Mathnerd314 9y ago
    There's a non-profit Mozilla Foundation and a for-profit Mozilla Corporation. Presumably MoCo bought the ad.
  • acdha 9y ago
    Mozilla makes money from having users — it may be open-source but the developers still need to be paid. They don't have a captive audience like Windows or Google.com users to advertise on, so public ads seem necessary.
    • pmoriarty 9y ago
      "Mozilla makes money from having users" Wait, how does that work again? Last I checked you couldn't deposit users at the bank or pay your rent with them.
      • addicted 9y ago
        When a user searches Google from the Firefox toolbar (or Yahoo, or Bing) the relevant search engine pays them a little bit of money.
        • fabrice_d 9y ago
          Not really "per search"... the deals are negotiated for N years. If that was per search Mozilla's finances would not be in such good shape, which could actually help them focus on chasing the right targets.
      • r3bl 9y ago
        ELI5 example: The more users you have, the more the search providers (like Google, Yahoo and Yandex) may pay you to be the default search provider in a certain region.
• shadowtree 9y ago
  Been using FF consistently on OSX the last years, the improvements are really great - Kudos! The various channels, like Quantum to stay on Beta, seem to have worked. Easy to understand as a user and hopefully helpful for the devs to gather important info. Plus a native dark theme, yay! One thing that remains is performance of Youtube. For some reason HD videos start crushing the processor after a while. Chrome, Safari stay calm.
• hateful 9y ago
  I've started switching back last week. I'm only using Chrome for any Google Services (drive, gmail, hangouts) and development (for now, but only since I'm used to it and have deadlines). I am very hopeful at this point.
• metmirr 9y ago
  It’s great progress with `rust` and people behind it. I loved night mode on iOS. But on Linux still first launch is slow. _ubuntu17.04_
  • heavenlyblue 9y ago
    Could you please elaborate on the "night mode"?
    • metmirr 9y ago
      night mode turn background to the black for all website. It’s good if you reading things on browser.
• karllager 9y ago
  Firefox 56 had some kind of performance regression[1], but FF Quantum is a joy to use. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74irm5/is_ff_super_slow_after_this_last_update/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74irm5/is_ff_super...
  • acqq 9y ago
    Yes, for my girlfriend, during some last few months Firefox is much slower than before: she uses it mostly for Facebook and Youtube, she doesn't have any extensions installed by herself (not counting the stuff that is in Firefox because Firefox marketing initiatives, like Pocket) and no adbockers, but Firefox uses so much CPU that it gets completely unusable. And she is not any extreme Facebook user: she has less than 500 "friends." And she doesn't have big "subscriptions" list in Youtube. So it's completely opposite of the propaganda: the average user, using the most common sites, is hit to the that much CPU more use that the most common sites are unusable. So what's going on here? It's just the propaganda machine claiming the opposite of what is actually happening at the moment. They maybe have good goals but at the moment it's worse than, for example, a year ago. Maybe it's because she doesn't have a newly bought computer, which are the ones used by those who test? And I guess those who test don't use Facebook and Youtube? I also use Firefox but spend zero time in Facebook and minimal time on Youtube and block Javascript wherever I can, so I don't see the same. But I saw the CPU on her computer staying completely blocked by something Firefox is doing. The only thing I was able to figure out: around 40 percent is spent in kernel according to the task manager. Both cores are used more than 90 percent, and the Firefox is not responsive. She doesn't do anything more than scrolling down her Facebook to see that effect. It's not always that bad, obviously depends on the content on the Facebook, but it's bad often enough for her to see the slowness regularly, and when it really gets stuck to complain to me. What I personally observe is the pages embedding more linked Youtube videos got to be very slow to even display them. Those are the pages I stumble on occasionally, so I didn't investigate. The second effect I've observed is writing a longer post for HN on Firefox getting much slower (less responsive) the longer the post is. Like writing these words now. So, dear Firefox people, your product is really SLOWER for me too in the last versions, and not faster. And it is extremely slower for a "normal" user using the "normal" Facebook and Youtube. (Additionally, I use a number of extensions, and only one will remain available soon when they turn off the support for what they mark as "legacy" extensions. That is really strange decision, deciding to remove the major difference between them and Chrome, becoming just as limited as Chrome is for extensions and wasting the work of most of the extension developers.)
• symlinkk 9y ago
  I'm still worried about how secure Firefox is in relation to Chrome. From what I understand, Firefox exploits only go for $30k at Pwn2Own, while Chrome exploits go for $80k. Should I be worried?
  • StavrosK 9y ago
    It depends, are you worth between $30k and $80k to someone? If yes, I would switch to Chrome.
    • symlinkk 9y ago
      It's not like someone would buy an exploit and only use it on one person.
  • callahad 9y ago
    I'm not sufficiently familiar with Chrome's architecture to speak comparatively, but Firefox Quantum (57) has a significantly improved sandbox thanks to finally going fully multi-process (full status at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox), and replacing C++ components with Rust prevents certain classes of potentially exploitable issues at compile time.
  • orthecreedence 9y ago
    I'd be more worried about chrome tracking and selling my data than I would about Firefox being p0wned.
• dogprez 9y ago
  Somewhat tangentially, I really like the cartoons Lin has made. I’ve found I’ve naturally anthropomorphized code. Often when I start working with someone new they get confused when I start talking about constructs like people. I think it’s given me a different perspective on encapsulation and concurrency than most people. I don’t know if I’ve ever worked with someone that thinks the same way. When I work on code that wasn’t designed that way I force my brain to think like the CPU instead of in terms of little elves with different job... Not sure if anyone else has experienced this 2 modes of thinking about code. It seems like FF engineer’s might be thinking in the same terms as they tackle concurrency refactors.
  • mxuribe 9y ago
    You are not alone in your way of thinking! Also, I had never previously seen the code cartoons produced by @linclark...but now seeing them (and digging a little deeper), count myself a fan!
    • dogprez 9y ago
      If I had to guess why, I'd say that I am mostly self taught and more of an extrovert. It's probably the only way my brain could trick me into sitting in front of a computer all day instead of talking with other people. I also played with action figures late, until I was 12... around the same time I started programming... I think I'm having a psychological breakthrough, haha.
  • grigory 9y ago
    When I explain various aspects of concurrency and multi-threaded programming to non-programmers, using analogy of people doing some tasks really helps. I've picked this up from Feynman's lectures on computing - highly recommend them!
  • whatever_dude 9y ago
    I feel I've always done that because I learned programming through Usborne's books, and her work reminds me of that. Usborne books helped me grok difficult things very fast when I was about 10 years old. For a while, when using variables and arrays, I would always think of robots grabbing things from shelves. Examples and PDF downloads (!): https://boingboing.net/2016/02/07/usborne-releases-free-pdfs-of.html https://boingboing.net/2016/02/07/usborne-releases-free-pdfs... I wish those were still around when I was learning about pointers. Would have made things so much easier!
• Danihan 9y ago
  The one major benchmark I use for browser speed is how fast Tagpro runs, and it's definitely gotten much slower on Firefox recently, to the extent that I need to generally play it on Chrome, even though I normally much prefer Firefox to Chrome.
  • AnkhMorporkian 9y ago
    When the new Pixi version is dropped into place (I finished coding that recently) it performs much better on Firefox. I agree that with the current version it's definitely not great. Edit: Just to be clear, when I say much better, I don't mean much better than chrome, just better than it performs now. When I drop RAF and just run the rendering loop as fast as possible, they get roughly the same FPS on my cheapo laptop.
    • Danihan 9y ago
      Haha, crazy to see a core dev on here. Great work on the game, been my favorite for years now.
• 5ourpu55 9y ago
  Firefox mobile has extensions, specifically an ad-blocker extension.
• skizm 9y ago
  Chrome remote desktop is just too good for me to ditch chrome entirely. Can anyone suggest a good (free) alternative?
• Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  I appreciate that Firefox is doing great work getting it faster, but at the same time they're doing awful work by baking in shitty cloud features and turning their add-on ecosystem into a walled garden. One step forward, two steps back.
• peterhadlaw 9y ago
  Has anyone else noticed significant CPU usage in the new Firefox Nightly? My computer fan goes full blast when I use the new browser. I like the speed but that level of heat is just not generated by Chrome.
  • cdubzzz 9y ago
    I noticed that last week as well, but got 59.0a1 (2017-11-13) this morning and so far have not seen it again. Hopefully just a minor issue that was fixed...
• ArmandGrillet 9y ago
  I just installed Firefox 57 (thanks jacek for the link) and the first things I noticed are: - The cross to close a tab and the one to create a tab are aligned in a weird way. - Opening a tab is laggy (I'm on a MBP with an Intel Iris chip and 16GB of RAM). - The scrolling still does not feel native (I'm on macOS High Sierra). I'm very impressed by the work that has been done for this release as a dev but this does not give me a great first impression as a user (I haven't used Firefox these past 5 years). Google Chrome since its Material UI redesign (https://medium.com/google-design/redesigning-chrome-desktop-769aeb5ab987 https://medium.com/google-design/redesigning-chrome-desktop-...) is snappy and has a clean UI, I hope that Firefox will also reach this point. Anyway, this release is a major achievement. Congrats to the contributors!
  • catamorphismic 9y ago
    That's weird, Firefox feels much snappier than Chrome to me. It also uses significantly less memory.
  • bjterry 9y ago
    It also feels laggy to me. It's weird given the reports of all these other users. I am also using a 16GB Ram, Intel Iris MBP. There is a noticeable pause while switching tabs, and there is a very noticeable lag while typing (for example in this box). Pages do seem to render fast, but it feels very laggy in terms of user interaction. Edit: The scrolling is also very laggy, which I forgot to mention, much more so than Chrome.
    • n72 9y ago
      Check about:support and look for a number higher than 0 in the "Multiprocess Windows" entry. Old extensions or something may be keeping you from running multi-process.
      • bjterry 9y ago
        I have a 1/1 there, and the only extension I have loaded is the new version of Tree Style Tabs.
• campuscodi 9y ago
  Buuuuut.... if you delete more than 5 older passwords at a time, it will crash. #truestorybroh
• heydonovan 9y ago
  I know this is just one data point, but I just downloaded Firefox 56, and it is still as slow as I remember. Loading YouTube seems to lag behind Chrome, and viewing .gifv videos causes a noticeable stutter. I'll give it another shot next version.
  • Barrin92 9y ago
    57 is the big improvement with a huge jump in performance. Definitely give it a try.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • sp332 9y ago
    Do you have one of these blacklisted GPUs? https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drivers https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drive...
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• balajics 9y ago
  Using 57 for few days, speed improvements are impressive. But two things which is going to stop me from complete switch. 1. There is no native websocket inspector. websocket-monitor[0] add-on which supported websocket inspection is not compatible with quantum. Really wish they speed up native support development[1] 2. Double tap zoom really makes it easy to find UI issues. Really wish it get implemented in firefox too. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/websocket-monitor/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/websocket-mon... [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508
• darrmit 9y ago
  I'm patiently waiting for improved profile support and better Chrome add-on support before I can abandon Chrome entirely. Been running Firefox for my personal browsing almost exclusively for years (with the occasional Chrome use) but I still can't ditch Chrome for work because of a few add-ons that don't work in Firefox - mainly Mixmax.
• have_faith 9y ago
  I can't remember the last time I thought about how "fast" a browser is except for edge cases like complex WebGL stuff. I don't think focusing on speed will plug the gap of users leaving for other browsers except for the minority of us on HN. I can't remember the last time a non-technical person I know complained about browser speed beyond a website itself being slow.
  • andrew3726 9y ago
    Well, for me at least, I always recognize if a button click/UI interaction doesn't force a visible and immediate UI response. That's one of the main reasons why I switched a couple of years to Chromium and now back to Firefox. It really responds fast. I totally agree that there were _very_ few instances where I noticed a rendering time difference.
    • elliotec 9y ago
      Are you talking about the UI of the browser itself or websites you're viewing? If it's the latter, it's probably the website being slow.
      • andrew3726 9y ago
        UI of the browser.
  • a_imho 9y ago
    Are you using a vanilla browser or do you have a content blocker installed perhaps? There is a very noticeable difference in load times and I would definitely consider the former 'slow'. I agree though, that rendering performance is not the bottleneck of the browsing experience.
• millstone 9y ago
  I tried Firefox 57 hoping to like it, and I found it's still too alien feeling on the Mac. The scroll bar looks, behaves, and animates differently. Text selection looks and behaves differently. Even the cursor blinks differently. It feels out-of-place. I wish there were a community effort to build a true native Firefox version, instead of trying to recreate standard Mac behaviors.
  • kristofferR 9y ago
    Camino used to be exactly that: https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/7548/camino https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/7548/camino
• known 9y ago
  I just installed. Wow I am impressed :)
• alkonaut 9y ago
  Are Google doing anything along the lines of Servo/WebRender etc? I'm assuming the Chrome code suffers from the same issues the FF did/does: you simply don't shoehorn in shared memory concurrency in some nontrivial piece of C++ code. Mozilla threw some serious research and time at the problem. Is Google doing that too? Or are they confident enough that Chrome will be fast enough in the future without major architectural refactoring?
• eliben 9y ago
  Did it? With FF 56 on Ubuntu lately I have to restart Firefox once in a day or two because its memory usage balloons out of proportions (> 1 GB for 4 open tabs) and it starts getting sluggish. It felt speedier a few months ago
  • r3bl 9y ago
    The entire premise of that article is that it applies to v57, which is going to be released tomorrow.
• fiatjaf 9y ago
  Ok. It is indeed great. I've switched to Firefox completely since 57. But it is not as fast as Chrome yet. There was a page with performance charts comparing it with Chrome from the FF dev team somewhere. Where is it?
• Kenji 9y ago
  Sounds like Mozilla is borrowing part of the Trump motto! That certainly makes them significantly less likable in my eyes.
• srathi 9y ago
  I've moved completely to Firefox from Chrome about a month back, but haven't found a way to use my Chromecast from Firefox. Does Anyone have a possible solution?
• kittens321 9y ago
  I don't mind the speed, I just hope it stops constantly crashing.
• mnm1 9y ago
  Nice work. Now all they have to do is work out the bugs with their dev tools and convince thousands of programmers to update their old FF addons and it might be a browser worth using as a primary browser again someday. One step forward, two steps back seems to be Mozilla's motto these last few years.
• n72 9y ago
  Multiprocessing did nothing for me, since I apparently hadn't configured it to use more than one process. Some extensions I had were keeping it from doing so. Once I got all that sorted out, it flew. If you're still on a slowish FF, make sure you're actually multiprocess.
• mikeytown2 9y ago
  I'll be looking to downgrade to Firefox Extended Support Release 52.4.1 [1] and using the hidden settings to enable Electrolysis [2]. Currently on 56 and it's very fast but with 57 tabs mix plus is gone [3]. [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/#en-US https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/#en-... [2] https://fossbytes.com/how-to-make-firefox-faster-by-enabling-multi-process-e10s-manually/ https://fossbytes.com/how-to-make-firefox-faster-by-enabling... [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/
  • 51Cards 9y ago
    I will be doing the same. The enhancements in 57 don't out-weight the productivity loss from my critical extensions. I'll be waiting until more of them are ported forward. For the record I don't actually find Firefox 56 slow at the moment either.
    • lucb1e 9y ago
      I have two critical extensions and a few others that would all break with 56 or 57. No thanks, I'll stick with what works. Shoving webextensions down everyone's throat, and only afterwards starting to work on implementing APIs and giving anyone a chance to start working on porting stuff. No thanks.
• rayascott 9y ago
  Long live Rust.
• Rauchg 9y ago
  I've been extremely happy with Firefox Nightly. Highly recommend it to everyone here
• CmdrKrool 9y ago
  I'm hoping these developments might eventually clear the way to a somewhat supported Firefox browser core sans UI to embed in our own applications (ala WebKit and Chromium via QtWebEngine), and then I might switch back. I'm tired of being pushed around by UI churn in the applications I use.
  • callahad 9y ago
    There's been some renewed interest in this direction, at least on Android, in the form of GeckoView: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322573 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322573 Servo, Mozilla Research's next-generation parallel browser engine, also has embedding as an explicit top-level goal: https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/
• voidmain 9y ago
  I wonder if better use of multiple cores by a single webpage (what they are calling "fine grained parallelism") is actually a good idea. It seems like web developers can and probably will eat up any improvement in performance by building slower sites. So in the long run equilibrium, your computer's performance and energy consumption suffer, while the web remains just barely fast enough to tolerate.
• serveboy 9y ago
  I tried making the switch from Chrome but ran into three issues : 1) Firefox does not import Chrome logins and passwords. Major pain. 2) Firefox freezes when importing Chrome history and bookmarks. I get a "script is taking too long" message. If I force close and reopen, then try to delete the partially imported content, it freezes as well with the same message. Tried deleting profile and restarting restarting to no avail. 3) (more of a nuisance than a real issue) I need to use the same browser on all devices so that everything is in sync. Google Search in Firefox Android looks like a page from the 90s and is missing Search Tools. Maybe Google isn't playing nice? Did people migrating from Chrome experience issues 1) and 2)? Tried the initial import on Linux and macOS, same issue.
• hendersoon 9y ago
  Mouse gestures in Linux and MacOS are completely broken due to a known bug. They have a Linux patch likely slated for version 58 (in 6 weeks) but no MacOS patch yet. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1360278 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1360278 Mouse gestures are critically important to me, so I'm sticking with Vivaldi until this is fixed.
  • lucb1e 9y ago
    Same here. I'm just not updating...
• SubiculumCode 9y ago
  Firefox Nightly user, and I honestly love it.
• beemboy 9y ago
  I can still remember: * that moment I was overjoyed to use Lynx over dialup in South India back in the mid-90s allowing me to browse the World Wide Web! * ...And then that moment being surpassed when I wet myself running the Netscape "GUI browser" on Windows 95 using a brilliant hack by a pair of brothers I knew that wrote a winsock.dll shim on top of Lynx over dialup (called Blue Laser; those guys went on to become CS PhDs doing microprocessor research) * ...And then that moment being surpassed when IE4 came out in '97 and I couldn't imagine what a faster browser could be or do. * ...And then that moment when FF 1 came out in '04 and I thought this is incredible, Netscape is alive!! and kicked IE's a55 and me thinking the "browser wars" are over * ...And then that moment when Google Chrome came out and I went "who needs another browser??" and then switching wholesale to it in short order * ...Many moments in between thinking "Wow, the browser wars really are over in my lifetime" * ...And that moment 2 weeks ago when I installed Firefox Quantum beta (Firefox??) and went "Holy crap, this thing is FAST!" and then switched all my browsers everywhere to it. To a beta browser. It sure is a good time to be a nerd. Keep up the great work moz://a PS - edited to reformat
  • abraae 9y ago
    I still remember seeing Netscape for the first time. Seeing web pages was astonishing enough, then I suddenly realised you could browse the web in multiple windows, at the same time. Blew my mind.
    • vim_wannabe 9y ago
      Then subsequently lost my focus. And as they say, the rest is history.
  • dmix 9y ago
    It's always a good time to be a nerd. Just slowly at a continually faster pace, thanks to the work of other nerds.
  • cyberjunkie 9y ago
    Shellshock? Were you using the Rs. students shell account using the bonafide certificate or the Rs. 5,000 standard shell account?
• graphememes 9y ago
  To everyone using "54" and "57" use the Nightly build, it is actually a lot better. I was going to comment about the slow scrolling, laggy input, and horrific experience that I have normally using Firefox. Then, I decided to try out the Nightly build. It removes all of that. However, it still has a horrible developer tools experience.
  • oatmealsnap 9y ago
    Even better than 57? I moved from Nightly to the Beta channel along with 57.
• gressquel 9y ago
  if they modernise their developer tools I would jump back to FF. Chrome has got too much power is not abusing it.
• woolvalley 9y ago
  Has anyone tried firefox 57 or 56 on macOS and still found it to be slower on a bunch of sites? Like facebook is unusably slow on firefox compared to chrome still. Google maps has slow downs too.
  • Propen 9y ago
    I keep having the feeling like Google is making its sites unusable on FFX. Same with FB, for example with Chrome m.facebook.com & mbasic.facebook.com serve different pages whereas Firefox gets the dumbed down mbasic content on both domains. I think there are several examples out there where Google does the same.
  • zachwood 9y ago
    you should try to refresh your FF profile. 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...
    • woolvalley 9y ago
      This happened with a fresh install with nothing else installed, I don't know how much that would help.
  • supernintendo 9y ago
    Yeah, YouTube is completely unusable for me on macOS Firefox 57. The video will completely stop while the audio continues playing and the only way to fix it is to adjust the current playback time. This is on a Retina MBP with 16GB of RAM. Doesn’t occur with the same version of Firefox on Windows.
• s_chaudhary 9y ago
  Just use the Firefox Android nightly and beta build. The new UI is super clean and the performance is very good. Up until this point I always felt that there was no good Google free alternatives for chrome mobile browser, but this perception has definitely change now with the new Firefox Beta build. I am switching to Firefox nightly for my default Android browser now.
  • lucb1e 9y ago
    On my phone it often uses 100% CPU for extended periods of time, and does lots of writes to storage. And it has never been fast to begin with. I mean, a five year old phone isn't top of the line anymore, but if other browsers work just fine, I'm reasonably sure where the blame lies...
• bastijn 9y ago
  I want to put a comment on how awesome the drawings are. Just skimming the drawings is sufficient to get the concepts. Style is awesome too. Whoever drew them deserves a moment of attention.
• huntie 9y ago
  I've been pretty happy with FF57. One thing I've noticed is that opening a new tab seems to block the browser. I have my new tab page set to a personal web page, which takes 150ms to fetch. If I open a new tab and press F6 before the page is loaded, it doesn't read the input. Other than that the only thing I really want is tab groups.
• Endy 9y ago
  I'm going to guess that the answer is: by not being Firefox anymore. Since that seems to be Mozilla's answer to just about anything. Then again, I never had a problem with Firefox, it's Chrome taking up so much proces time that kills me. I need a single-process browser that doesn't gum up the rest of my machine the way Chrome and multiprocess Firefox do. Then again, I remain on a 32-bit processor & OS, and I don't expect to update in the next century.
• JepZ 9y ago
  I hope it will not take too long until FF gets hardware acceleration for videos on Linux (VAAPI/VDPAU). A few days ago I installed Arch Linux on a Netbook and was shocked to see that FF still doesn't have hardware acceleration for videos (VDPAU exists since 2008). Some might say this is not much of an issue as most modern CPUs can handle 1080p, but actually pre-Ryzen AMD CPUs are too slow and power saving Intel CPUs Laptops are too slow too. So the only excuse might be, that nobody uses that open source OS, but especially from Mozilla I would not expect such an attitude towards open source software.
  • kosinus 9y ago
    I keep trying Firefox versions every now and then, including 57, but always run into obstacles. After installing 57, I went to Twitch and saw my cpu spike and MacBook drastically heat up. So it’s not just Linux. I hope more Quantum/Servo stuff will solve all these issues soon. I just want to ditch Google as much as I can. Now trying Safari for casual browsing, and using Chrome just for dev stuff.
    • XzetaU8 9y ago
      High CPU on twitch TV stream https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1403823 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1403823 Poor battery life on OSX https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
  • hsivonen 9y ago
    VDPAU existing since 2008 isn't the main thing. The main problem is that in order to have a benefit from decoding in the GPU, the frame needs to be displayed on the GPU without reading it into CPU-addressable memory. The video frame needs to participate in the compositing of the whole Web page, which means the simpler approaches that video player-only apps can used aren't really available. Rather, it's necessary to be able to treat the video frame as some kind of OpenGL surface. However, the Linux graphics drivers situation being as messy as it is, Firefox doesn't yet enable OpenGL compositing by default on Linux. So getting Firefox to composite the Web page using OpenGL by default on Linux is the big prerequisite. I don't work on graphics, so I don't really know what I'm talking about in this sentence, but I'm hopeful that Wayland will eventually force Linux into the Mac-like situation where some baseline of OpenGL support can be assumed to be available and working just because the windowing system wouldn't work otherwise. Sadly, due to LTS distros, it will take a while for various legacy configurations to get upgraded out of the ecosystem.
• k__ 9y ago
  How long will it take to forget about this again? The whole story reminds me of something a project manager, who worked at the Google homepage, once said. They worked their asses off to get the page smaller and smaller so the UX was unbeatable. Then, after they got enough users, they focused on different things, and more and more stuff was included. Somehow Firefox went the same way, right? First they created it so it would be small, fast and modular, then it got bloated to the max and now they set it on a diet again. Don't get me wrong, I prefer Mozilla to Google, and I like that they even explored experimental stuff like Rust and Servo to get on the right track again. But for how long?
  • Splines 9y ago
    Performance is usually death by a thousand cuts, and (imo) the best way of mitigating this is by standardizing some measurements and making that automated. Block changes that move performance past this bar, make sure the organization buys off on this approach. Any changes to a critical area that impact performance need to be zero-sum - if you add something, you need to take something away.
    • oconnor663 9y ago
      The cost of doing this in a large organization seem high though. Are there good ways to solve problems like this: - A newbie developer adds small feature, triggering some performance test that was already close to failing. Now newbie has to learn all about the performance of this large project before they can land their first change. - The performance test has a reasonable amount of noise. At first, 10% of test runs fail it, and people just rerun them. Eventually 90% of test runs fail, and people need to start dealing with it, but the effort required to get it all the way back down to 10% is unrealistic for any one person. - The product is something like Microsoft Excel, that has a strong guarantee of backwards compatibility across a wide variety of hardware and OS versions that are difficult to test. Asking developers to delete code from parts of the product they're not experts in, is likely to break stuff.
      • Splines 9y ago
• nkkollaw 9y ago
  IMHO, there is even too much focusing on speed. Firefox got _cool_ again. It looks great, the logo looks great, animations are great. I look at the thing most of the day, looks are important just as much as speed.
• SadWebDeveloper 9y ago
  > This is the opportunity that the Chrome engineers foresaw. We saw it too, but we had a bumpier path to get there. Since we had an existing code base we needed to plan for how to split up that code base to take advantage of multiple cores The "bumpier path" is that they removed XUL-based/legacy addons, only chrome-like addons (aka WebExtensions) are now supported on FF57. Personally i still have some extensions that are marked as Legacy, mainly for web development so m going be slightly affected with this release, i hope the performance gains are worth it.
  • ripdog 9y ago
    They're talking about Electrolysis there, which happened several versions ago. XUL addons did indeed work with Electrolysis, but required some modifications to work well. Most unmodified addons continues to work through some magic cross-process API wrappers. They didn't implement everything, had some bugs, and were quite slow, but the fact that mozilla managed to keep most legacy addons functional through the biggest architectural shakeup in Firefox history shows their dedication and skill. It also illustrates how much engineering effort went into keeping XUL addons functional as firefox was re-architected, and thus why the decision was made to abandon them and move to webextensions. What addons are you missing for webdev?
    • cesnja 9y ago
      All that work only to drop the addons anyway with the migration to WebExtensions. Personally, the extension I miss the most is vimperator. Mainly the fact it worked everywhere. Now you land on new tab page (or about:*) and the extension just won't load. The highlight features would be macros (automating some signin and signup workflows) and quickmarks - opens a predefined page in precisely 3 keypresses. With the way WebExtensions are right now in Firefox, a quickmarks feature just won't work sometimes, which is very irritating.
  • sp332 9y ago
    And before that, they added a ton of shims so that most old extensions still worked with the new multiprocess model. A huge amount of work.
• dzaragozar 9y ago
  Cute drawings in the page, but a distinct lack of benchmarks.
• PascLeRasc 9y ago
  I decided to give FirefoxNightly a chance as a longtime Chrome user/apologist. It's impressive and I like the design changes, but it's still keeping my MBP very warm and listed as "Using Significant Energy" in the battery info while I've been using it for ~3 hours. Not to mention it feels kinda laggy, especially in text input. Still, I like the changes like seeing zoom percent in the omnibar and the preferences menu design. I won't be switching over fully, but I'll keep it around and continue to check out changes.
• HaoZeke 9y ago
  Firefox lost its biggest use case.. The extensions. Besides, the new version is similar to Chrome in memory usage for multiple tabs which is HUGE disappointment.
  • eref 9y ago
    It is a great opportunity to shake up the sphere of extension development a bit. New alternatives pop up every day and eventually the best will stick. Here is a list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECIVyBU0GPoSmRqZ7A0VBvqeKYVSww/edit?usp=sheets_home&ths=true https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECI...
  • Spivak 9y ago
    I mean it's not an order of magnitude improvement but it's still significant. The extension ecosystem is great right now. A few high profile extensions aren't being ported but there are a lot of cool new extensions popping up and it's never been easier to port between browsers.
• nikisweeting 9y ago
  There are so many Firefox features that I love, and Mozilla is an awesome company that I want to support, but Safari and even Chrome are both still significantly faster than Quantum on my Mac. Even with 50+ tabs open in Chrome, it still loads uncached pages 2-3 seconds faster than FF Quantum, with fewer flashes of unstyled content as well. I had high hopes for this refactor, but it looks like I'll have to wait to switch browsers until the speed really beats Chrome.
  • eref 9y ago
    You can maybe find a alternatives here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECIVyBU0GPoSmRqZ7A0VBvqeKYVSww/edit?usp=sheets_home&ths=true https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECI...
    • nikisweeting 9y ago
      I think you replied to the wrong comment, mine isn't about extensions/add-ons.
• KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago
  She's so famous for her react stuff that I thought she worked for FB.
• pimeys 9y ago
  Now already on Nightly and enabling the WebRender on my Linux laptop. It hasn't crashed anymore, but there are still some low-hanging fruits to be gained to make it faster. 2018 will be big for Firefox, even bigger than the Stylo. Long live Rust! :)
• tasty_freeze 9y ago
  On html5test.com, FF56 scores 478 (on my windows 7 machine). Does FF57 increase compliance at all, or is this purely a performance boost?
  • oatmealsnap 9y ago
    You can see here: http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html FF57 gives me 483
    • tasty_freeze 9y ago
      That chart only shows up to FF55.
• esturk 9y ago
  One thing I particularly like about the Mozilla Devtool is that when I highlight an element, I can see the horizontal and vertical lines that extend beyond the element box model which is great to see if other items are leveled with the one selected. Does anyone know if this is supported in Chrome or might there be an extension that can reproduce this functionality?
  • steveadoo 9y ago
    "Show Rulers" in the chrome dev console settings.
    • esturk 9y ago
      Oh awesome! Thanks for the quick response.
• philippeback 9y ago
  Dev edition is fast. The other ones not so much indeed.
• jaux 9y ago
  I have tried to switch back to ff from chrome several times now (first try was when developer edition came out, second try was when multi-tasking came out) but failed, because ff has been too slow in comparison. Downloading the new developer edition now... Hope it can stay on my dock this time!
• Symmetry 9y ago
  A question as I consider moving to Firefox. On Chrome I've set my search engine keywoards so I can open a new tab and type "w foo" to search Wikipedia for "foo". And similar things for DuckDuckGo, Hoogle, Amazon, etc. On Firefox I can do something similar if i'm willing to click on a small icon rather than hitting enter or move to the search bar with ctrl-k, type my term, then press tab a bunch of times to select the right engine. Is there any good extension to give Firefox Chrome's ergonomics here?
  • cadecairos 9y ago
    In Firefox, you can right click on any search box and there's an option to "add a keyword search" For a Wikipedia search, you'd set the keyword to "w" and then you'd get the identical behaviour you have in Chrome when typing "w foo" in your Awesome Bar.
    • Symmetry 9y ago
      Ah, there we go. I don't get the same visual cues which confused me a bit but those aren't actually important at all. Thank you very much.
  • mayhew 9y ago
    You can do this in Firefox by going to Preferences > Search > Set "w" as the keyword for Wikipedia
  • Nition 9y ago
    No extension needed. Right-click in any search box on a website and select "Add a Keyword for this Search." It looks like a normal bookmark, but if you set a keyword on it, it'll work just like Chrome.
  • eridius 9y ago
    If you just set your default search engine to DuckDuckGo, DDG has !commands that do basically the same thing. So I can type "!wiki foo" to search Wikipedia for "foo". And the other benefit is you're not letting Google (or Bing or Yahoo or whatever) see your search traffic anymore!
• dom96 9y ago
  For those, like myself, that were thinking "huh, I haven't seen any noticeable differences" when reading the article/comments: FF 57 is the version you want and it is officially releasing tomorrow. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/quantum/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/quantum/
• tardo99 9y ago
  Does it still default to Yahoo search?
• ameshkov 9y ago
  FF has indeed become faster now, but man, how bad is it's dev tools. I remember this time when I kept FF for development purposes solely due to firebug. Things might reverse this time as Chrome's dev tools are Superior to FF's counterpart.
• hathawsh 9y ago
  I'm primarily a Firefox user, but I've been using Chromium for certain sites due to rendering performance. This page in particular was rendering slowly enough in Firefox that switching browsers was worth the trouble: http://reprap.org/wiki/G-code http://reprap.org/wiki/G-code I'm happy to report that Firefox 57 renders that page much more smoothly than before. Thanks! FF 57 does blank the page temporarily when I scroll quickly, though. Chromium seems to render it with no gaps at all. Anyone else have a favorite page that Firefox doesn't like?
  • degenerate 9y ago
    Adwords used to run really, really, really, really slow in Firefox. It now runs pretty good in FF 57. About as good as Chrome.
• EugeneOZ 9y ago
  As a Rust programmer, I’ll be happy to use something what has Rust code inside. In Rust I trust.
• nmca 9y ago
  (honestly not a joke comment) I couldn't find a VIM extension that's compatible with firefox quantum! Will extensions become compatible when it's generally released? Bit of a deal-breaker for me, as much as I'd like to support mozilla.
  • K0nserv 9y ago
    I feel you and I was scared when I updated to the FF 57 beta and VimFx stopped working. However luckily since there’s now support for WebExtensions vimium is gaining more and more features in the Firefox version everyday
• TeeWEE 9y ago
  Wow this is super, Rust based browser with true concurrency support. Chromes processes where a nice idea, but lots of memory required, and slow heavy on the hardware. I just switched to Firefox. +1 for the "do not track" feature.
• stcredzero 9y ago
  One common theme I've read in threads here, is that there is a general problem with ads, add-ons, and extensions having malware or taking up too much memory or CPU. Shouldn't those all be sandboxed?
• balajics 9y ago
  Using 57 for few days, speed improvements are impressive. But two things which is going to stop me from complete switch. 1. There is no native websocket inspector. websocket-monitor[0] add-on which supported websocket inspection is not compatible with quantum. Really wish they speed up native support development[1] 2. Double tap zoom really makes it easy to find UI issues. Really wish it get implemented in firefox too. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/websocket-monitor/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/websocket-mon... [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508 [edit] corrected link
• euske 9y ago
  Browsers I have been using... 2002: phoenix-0.1 (former name of Firebird) and Lynx 2003: Firebird-0.6 (former name of Firefox) and Lynx 2004: Firefox-1.0 and Lynx ... 2017: Firefox-57.0 and Lynx, yes.
• Cyclone_ 9y ago
  I can't in good conscience ever use Firefox after how they treated Brendan Eich. What a bunch of pigs.
• dvcrn 9y ago
  And here I am, still using Safari as my main browser on Mac for battery performance. I’m wishing the safari team would be a bit more aggressive with pushing features and performance
• Abishek_Muthian 9y ago
  Guys, did any one switch to proprietary GPU drivers on Linux to take (better) advantage of GPU Renderer?
• pers0n 9y ago
  I never switched to chrome, even when it was faster, I just never trusted google even back in the Web 2.0 days. I installed the first nightly at work and the beta at home as I have to have quantum now, it’s just fast and lightweight. Finally it’s taken time but hope Mozilla ends up back at the top, better for privacy, security and speed
• beaconfield 9y ago
  I've been using Firefox 57 since beta and it's fantastic. Chrome users should definitely give this a shot. It's super fast, nimble, and easy on your RAM. I also love that it's made by Mozilla and that they're all about user privacy and security. #FirefoxFTW Thank you moz://a
• et416 9y ago
  Let's not forget that FF is also introducing support for U2F devices!
• aryehof 9y ago
  Can one run the new version alongside a previous version? I need to access occasionally extensions unsupported in the new version: namely Scrapbook and the extension that provides maff file support.
• sj4nz 9y ago
  I've been using the developer edition of Firefox and have been finding it to be a joy. It is very odd how Chrome stopped having the "knack" of being extremely fast. Edge on Windows 10 claimed to be fast, but I think that it was doing more "cheating" with the UX than actually being fast.
• Teerees 9y ago
  Firefox Developer Edition 57 Facing SSL error with various https sites. https://mail.google.com/mail/ https://mail.google.com/mail/ Secure Connection Failed An error occurred during a connection to mail.google.com. Peer received a valid certificate, but access was denied. Error code: SSL_ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED_ALERT
• bpanon 9y ago
  I have been using chrome for years. I would regularly use other browsers for testing or other reasons but always came back to chrome because it was the fastest for me. After hearing someone here mention how fast the new Firefox was, I downloaded Nightly and I never went back to Chrome. Before firefox was ugly and slow, now it's fast and slick. So glad that I'm not giving google all of my browser data anymore.
• tnsengimana 9y ago
  I just installed the beta version, and my impression is mostly page load and new tab. They are incredibly fast. I also like that FF has made some noticeable improvements on the UI. It looks a bit cleaner now. I think this might be the turning point to ditch Chrome & its parent.
• tempestn 9y ago
  I was really excited for Quantum, but it appears the switch to WebExtensions is going to gut most of my favourite addons, and completely kill the rest. About half of the addons I use have been updated to be compatible with Firefox 57, so the rest will stop working as soon as I update. Of the ones that have updated, most are missing significant features. The most significant example is Lastpass, which can no longer fill in http authentication boxes, and can't even copy usernames and passwords to the clipboard anymore. (The Chrome version has never been able to do the former, but can at least do the latter.) Lastpass fills many auth modals for me every day, so losing that feature is going to be a huge annoyance. NzbFox is gone. Hilarious webcomic manager gone. Foxyproxy missing features. This just sucks. I understand the logic behind this move, but addons were one of Firefox's strengths. Now it appears they will be a sort of poor cousin to their Chrome counterparts. I would happily sacrifice speed to not completely hamstring the capabilities of addons. Obviously it's too late for this, but the could have added the WebExtension system to provide greater stability, security, and developer ease for new addons (and those that wished to migrate), while maintaining the more powerful system for major things that required those capabilities. Yes, in theory it means a bad addon could compromise security, but that's true of any program I choose to install on my computer. I certainly wouldn't trade my general purpose PC for some locked down app store box regardless!
  • stesch 9y ago
    You don't know before the update if an extension is supported or not. Firefox 56 doesn't support all of the new features of web extensions so some add-ons (and versions) are only available for Firefox 57. Too bad Mozilla changed the Add-On website a few days ago. You don't see any indication of supported Firefox version anymore. You only see the extensions that work in your current browser, not the extensions for the next version. (Unless you switch to the old layout in an link hidden in the footer.) Some extensions will be delayed because the deadline (2 years?) wasn't long enough. Some extensions need additional features and may only be available with Firefox 58 or later. Some never. And you need to invest some time to research this. One starting point is https://arewewebextensionsyet.com/ https://arewewebextensionsyet.com/
    • 9y ago
• rorykoehler 9y ago
  I use 4 different browsers all day everyday. I'm sure that there is a memory leak or something similar in Firefoz. It performs fine for a while and then gets slower and slower until it hangs and I have to restart.
• jernejzen 9y ago
  It's pretty fun. I put FF in a high privacy mode, now Pocket login doesn't work anymore ;)
• baby 9y ago
  Does anyone else use Tree Style Tabs and is having huge lag issues in Nightly? Since Firefox 57 browsing on Firefox has become a real pain :/ unfortunately it's the only browser with something like tree style tab so I'm sticking with the pain.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• batushka 9y ago
  Are you joking? Memory footprint on MAC is unbearable up to 3GB for few tabs. And is ever growing problem with this leaking memory on FF.
• pydox 9y ago
  Where can I get update to my existing Firefox 56?
• aszantu 9y ago
  damn, I just switched to pale moon for speed, cuz ff was hogging my ram :|
• ainiriand 9y ago
  If only my corporate network would implement this solution... : https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER?as=u#w_the-error-occurs-on-multiple-secure-sites https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-SEC_ERROR_...
• DrHow 9y ago
  I would use it but facebook doesn't work on it for me