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> I have a hard time seeing how any of that would be preferable. Not to you. But not everyone cares about the same things. I have used Firefox as my main brows

> I have a hard time seeing how any of that would be preferable. Not to you. But not everyone cares about the same things. I have used Firefox as my main browser ever since it split off from Mozilla Suite. Personally, I have never, in the whole history of Firefox had a problem with its speed. At various points I might have had some problems with stability, some problems with compatibility and some problems with memory usage. But speed is just not an issue for me. Even in the "slowest" browsers most of the time is spent on network latency anyway. But I have, over the years, customized my Firefox experience to some degree. I do not do anything crazy, I don't have a zillion of extensions, but I am really used to the few I do have. And this release broke those with no sufficient replacement. And the release was distributed as automatic upgrade, so I was not even asked if I want to upgrade. A warning of some sort would be nice before breaking so much functionality. And now that the upgrade happened, there is no clear way on how to revert it. A quick google search tells me that downgrading runs a chance of corrupting my profile. I might have to risk it anyway, since after using FF57 for a day at work, I feel that my productivity and workflow are seriously impaired. At this point I am not sure whether I should stay with the LTR version of FF, switch to an FF derivative like Waterfox or change browsers altogether. The FF57 experience is so vastly different from my pre-57 workflow that I might as well be using a different browser already. There were important features to FF that kept me a loyal user through many years. Those features are gone now.

throwanem 9y ago
I've been using Firefox for almost as long. Perf has been an issue for half a decade. Anecdotal evidence and telemetry analysis both suggest it's much more common to encounter the issue than not. Don't get me wrong! I'd love to have both. But if we can't - and it seems right now that indeed we cannot - then I think perf has to be the one to pick. Otherwise the browser dies and we're all SOL. Try backing up your profile and downgrading. I'd be surprised if anything breaks. Although I had also assumed anyone bringing legacy addons into 56 would be warned before the 57 update, so maybe I'm overly optimistic here.
kelnos 9y ago
> Personally, I have never, in the whole history of Firefox had a problem with its speed. That's... weird. To put it nicely. I've been using Mozilla since early in its milestone phases, and Firefox since it came out. Firefox was originally a pretty nimble browser, but fairly quickly became super slow. When Chrome came out I couldn't believe the difference in speed. Everything from UI responsiveness to rendering speed to reliability was better. At some point I moved back to Firefox for a single reason: I had an 8GB laptop and Chrome's memory usage would balloon with the number of tabs I usually keep around, to the point that it made my laptop unusable. I lived with Firefox being much slower in general because its worst-case performance was much better than Chrome's on a memory-constrained laptop. Since I force-enabled e10s a year or so ago things have gotten much better (despite the bugs). I still use Chrome every now and then for the odd website that chokes on some combination of Firefox plus the extensions I have installed, not to mention Chromecast support. But Firefox 57 is finally now faster than Chrome by default, and the difference is night and day. It's completely inconceivable to me that you suggest that Firefox hasn't had severe performance problems. The fact that Mozilla has been focusing so hard on perf for nearly a decade now is more than enough evidence to me that it's been a huge problem.
- MadWombat 9y ago
  > That's... weird. To put it nicely. I tried to explain it and I am not sure whether I am doing a bad job at it or people just don't believe me. I don't think browser speed matters. Even in the slowest days of Firefox, the time it took for content to download was longer or at least comparable to rendering time. Even now, with broadband access everywhere, if I look at dev tools, network access takes much longer than page rendering for most pages I access. So why should I care if rendering takes an extra second or two if it already takes just as long to actually get the content across the net. I do not expect web pages to be instantaneous, simply because they never are and so I do not get annoyed at render speed. I do get annoyed when a forced upgrade removes features I relied on in my workflow.
forapurpose 9y ago
> A warning of some sort would be nice before breaking so much functionality There have been periodic warnings on HN's front page for two years.
- MadWombat 9y ago
  No. A warning from the software itself. Something in the tube of "This is a major upgrade that drastically changes the browsing experience and breaks compatibility with addons you might rely on. Do you want to upgrade?". Instead, what I got was "Please restart Firefox to complete the upgrade".

throwanem 9y ago

I've been using Firefox for almost as long. Perf has been an issue for half a decade. Anecdotal evidence and telemetry analysis both suggest it's much more common to encounter the issue than not. Don't get me wrong! I'd love to have both. But if we can't - and it seems right now that indeed we cannot - then I think perf has to be the one to pick. Otherwise the browser dies and we're all SOL. Try backing up your profile and downgrading. I'd be surprised if anything breaks. Although I had also assumed anyone bringing legacy addons into 56 would be warned before the 57 update, so maybe I'm overly optimistic here.

kelnos 9y ago

> Personally, I have never, in the whole history of Firefox had a problem with its speed. That's... weird. To put it nicely. I've been using Mozilla since early in its milestone phases, and Firefox since it came out. Firefox was originally a pretty nimble browser, but fairly quickly became super slow. When Chrome came out I couldn't believe the difference in speed. Everything from UI responsiveness to rendering speed to reliability was better. At some point I moved back to Firefox for a single reason: I had an 8GB laptop and Chrome's memory usage would balloon with the number of tabs I usually keep around, to the point that it made my laptop unusable. I lived with Firefox being much slower in general because its worst-case performance was much better than Chrome's on a memory-constrained laptop. Since I force-enabled e10s a year or so ago things have gotten much better (despite the bugs). I still use Chrome every now and then for the odd website that chokes on some combination of Firefox plus the extensions I have installed, not to mention Chromecast support. But Firefox 57 is finally now faster than Chrome by default, and the difference is night and day. It's completely inconceivable to me that you suggest that Firefox hasn't had severe performance problems. The fact that Mozilla has been focusing so hard on perf for nearly a decade now is more than enough evidence to me that it's been a huge problem.

MadWombat 9y ago
> That's... weird. To put it nicely. I tried to explain it and I am not sure whether I am doing a bad job at it or people just don't believe me. I don't think browser speed matters. Even in the slowest days of Firefox, the time it took for content to download was longer or at least comparable to rendering time. Even now, with broadband access everywhere, if I look at dev tools, network access takes much longer than page rendering for most pages I access. So why should I care if rendering takes an extra second or two if it already takes just as long to actually get the content across the net. I do not expect web pages to be instantaneous, simply because they never are and so I do not get annoyed at render speed. I do get annoyed when a forced upgrade removes features I relied on in my workflow.

forapurpose 9y ago

> A warning of some sort would be nice before breaking so much functionality There have been periodic warnings on HN's front page for two years.

MadWombat 9y ago
No. A warning from the software itself. Something in the tube of "This is a major upgrade that drastically changes the browsing experience and breaks compatibility with addons you might rely on. Do you want to upgrade?". Instead, what I got was "Please restart Firefox to complete the upgrade".