7 ms·

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

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.
    - mmphosis 9y ago
      That is a good work-around. Multiple devices, systems, users, locations, and other factors makes selecting the current profile a pain.
    - Maken 9y ago
      @mmphosis: you can always link different profiles to different Firefox account so they all get sync between devices.
  - ifdefdebug 9y ago
    firefox -p launches firefox into the profile manager. firefox -p work -new-instance launches your work profile. What are you missing? More options: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Line_Options https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Lin...
    - aapjesverkoper 9y ago
      Thanks, this seems to work. I found the no-remote option when looking around, but accidentally lauching private_dot_com (nsfw) a couple of times at work instead of my private profile ended my testing with this last time.
      - myfonj 9y ago
        Yup, c:\apps\firefox\firefox.exe -no-remote -profile "C:\profiles\some-clean-profile" was my was-to-go method for testing various configurations. Knowing about %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles.ini is also often helpful, eg. when you want to move certain profile folder.
  - Maken 9y ago
    You can launch Firefox with different profiles (including navigation history, Firefox account, extension, etc) in the same machine. It's a bit cumbersome since you need to select the profile as a launch option (firefox -p) or launch it from "about:profiles", but it works.
- 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.

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.
  - mmphosis 9y ago
    That is a good work-around. Multiple devices, systems, users, locations, and other factors makes selecting the current profile a pain.
  - Maken 9y ago
    @mmphosis: you can always link different profiles to different Firefox account so they all get sync between devices.
- ifdefdebug 9y ago
  firefox -p launches firefox into the profile manager. firefox -p work -new-instance launches your work profile. What are you missing? More options: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Line_Options https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Lin...
  - aapjesverkoper 9y ago
    Thanks, this seems to work. I found the no-remote option when looking around, but accidentally lauching private_dot_com (nsfw) a couple of times at work instead of my private profile ended my testing with this last time.
    - myfonj 9y ago
      Yup, c:\apps\firefox\firefox.exe -no-remote -profile "C:\profiles\some-clean-profile" was my was-to-go method for testing various configurations. Knowing about %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles.ini is also often helpful, eg. when you want to move certain profile folder.
- Maken 9y ago
  You can launch Firefox with different profiles (including navigation history, Firefox account, extension, etc) in the same machine. It's a bit cumbersome since you need to select the profile as a launch option (firefox -p) or launch it from "about:profiles", but it works.
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.