4 ms·

Is anyone else getting tired of Mozilla shilling how fast their new version of Firefox is? If it's really that good, let the product speak for itself.

proaralyst 9y ago
a) is it shilling if it's self-promotion? Edit: a quick check in a dictionary points out that a shill is someone pretending to be impartial. I'm not sure Mozilla could do that about their own browser. b) if they didn't make noise about this no one would try to switch to this fairly big release. It's a bit like the hype around Firefox 3.
- infinityplus1 9y ago
  And Firefox 4. That was a pretty big release.
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
oh no, they didn't get a third party blogger to write about them, it looks so laaaaaame when it comes from the one person that knows about their accomplishment /s
atonse 9y ago
They should be proud of their accomplishments and show them off. One thing I've learned in life is, you can do great work, but if people don't know about it or appreciate it, it simply won't help you.
cJ0th 9y ago
Well, I don't blame them for promoting their product. Speed, however, is probably among the least important things when it comes to incognito mode. I would have appreciated it if they had spent more time figuring out how to reduce fingerprints.
- callahad 9y ago
  We are. It's not quite polished yet, but check out privacy.resistFingerprinting (and privacy.firstparty.isolate) in about:config. This all dovetails with our work to upstream the relevant patches from the Tor Browser Bundle, which is also proceeding apace. More info at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Fingerprinting https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Fingerprinting
  - cJ0th 9y ago
    That's great to hear :)
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    > privacy.resistFingerprinting Is there a reason that setting does so many different things? I've been trying it for a few days but it's a real problem when I want some of those settings but not others. For example the protection against canvas image extraction needs work. It's stuck on 'ask' with constant popups, and once you pick yes/no on a domain it's impossible to see the permission or change it ever again. Until it forgets on browser restart and starts bugging you all over again.
- daxorid 9y ago
  The privacy afforded by anti-fingerprinting features is kind of useless as long as the browser remains a member of the UAF-vuln-of-the-week club.
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
Chrome and Edge do the same, what's your point? Also please stop using that stupid alt-right language inappropriately.
jasonkostempski 9y ago
It think it's a pretty silly thing to focus marketing on considering they've been fast enough for the average user for years. I saw a TV commercial for it during The Walking Dead last night, surely that money could have been spent in a much better way. I think the marketing should focus on being the only major browser to allow ad blockers to be installed on Android devices.
- floatingatoll 9y ago
  I was very happy to see how we’re using the advertising spend for this release. The “Hot Firefox” custom New York coffee cup is to die for, and a lot of folks in the real world have said thank you to us to my face, unprompted, for making the web suck less for them. Every percent we make the browser faster makes it more usable for people (and libraries!) with older, slower computers. A lot of the world can’t afford to upgrade. When we make it faster for everyone, we make it faster for them too. If we save 0.3 seconds per page view, how many millions of hours do we save humanity from waiting for their browser to do something it could do faster if we just worked hard enough? That’s why faster is good, to me, and so this campaign aligns well with my personal reasons for working here.
  - apetrovic 9y ago
    >If we save 0.3 seconds per page view, how many millions of hours do we save humanity from waiting for their browser to do something it could do faster if we just worked hard enough? That’s why faster is good, to me, and so this campaign aligns well with my personal reasons for working here. Can you explain in a just a bit more details how Firefox "save humanity" 3 seconds if I and nine more people around shave off 0.3 seconds from some web page load and what exactly that mean?
    - floatingatoll 9y ago
      For ten people, shaving 0.3 seconds per page load would save 3 seconds of their total shared lives from sitting and watching a page load. For a million^ people who load web pages at least once, you technically have created an opportunity to save 0.3 * 1_000_000 = 300_000 seconds of cumulative lifetimes across them, which is 3-4 days of reality. Practically, I'm not sure how I feel about this metric on the 0.3 second level, but I sure do understand it at the 5 second level. I've stared at useless pages that are stuck on some tracking JS so many times I can't count, so if those stop making me stuck, that's invaluable once and multiply that win by a million. But that's just time. If you also consider the resources that are needed to execute the page JavaScript, we're probably saving megawatts of power per interval (totaled across all Firefox users) with each small efficiency gain. The changes that are "parallelize all the work" may cost more, less, or same amount of power; the ones that are "use fewer CPU cycles" will definitely cost less power. And so there's a very real theory that we could probably measure how many gigawatt^-hours Quantum has saved the world to date, which appeals to me greatly :) ^ I arbitrarily picked "a million" and "gigawatts". This does not offer any guidance whatsoever on specific or approximate user counts. EDIT: My UPS says that my entire desk has a load of ~75 watts @ 120V, times a million^ users = 75 megawatts. I haven't the faintest idea how much power it takes to evaluate Javascript inefficiently, but saving 0.3 seconds of any amount of power times a million^ users per page view quickly balloons into reality-impacting figures.
INTPenis 9y ago
They lost a lot of market share when Chrome came on the scene. Partly because it was faster but also because Google promoted it and it actually had some sweet process/tab separation. I remained a loyal FF user myself and actually wanted to take this opportunity to promote Firefox Focus which makes it real easy to browse sensitive things like porn on a tablet shared by the family or SO. It's oriented around privacy so it saves nothing and provides easy to access shortcuts for clearing browser history when you're done.
- rplnt 9y ago
  Google promoted it HEAVILY. TV, radio, outdoor, print, (and web of course). Must have been millions of dollars poured into advertising for Chrome. I'm not sure I've seen all that for any software, let alone a free one. Not to mention prominent native ads on such little pages like google.com or youtube.com. And all that wasn't enough since they also shadily (based on user agent for no good reason) blocked features for other browsers in their products.
  - floatingatoll 9y ago
    If Google had to charge itself actual market prices for the google.com homepage banners promoting Chrome, the costs would be well into a billion dollars per release.
  - INTPenis 9y ago
    Yes but weren't they brought up on charges by the EU for monopolization?
    - robin_reala 9y ago
      Not to do with Chrome, the EU charge was around shopping comparisons.
  - bzbarsky 9y ago
    > Must have been millions of dollars poured into advertising for Chrome. For what it's worth, "millions of dollars" is probably understating things by 2-3 orders of magnitude. The ad budget for Chrome was likely comparable to Mozilla's entire budget for a few years there, even if you ignore the free product placement on google.com...
elgenie 9y ago
The problem is that "Let the product speak for itself" is actually Step 2. Step 1 is "Get people to (re)try the product". Unless there's a magic wand waved that gets people unaware of a milestone release to (re)install and (re)launch FF57, Mozilla needs to put out some marketing just to even seed the basis for word-of-mouth of the product's merits.

proaralyst 9y ago

a) is it shilling if it's self-promotion? Edit: a quick check in a dictionary points out that a shill is someone pretending to be impartial. I'm not sure Mozilla could do that about their own browser. b) if they didn't make noise about this no one would try to switch to this fairly big release. It's a bit like the hype around Firefox 3.

infinityplus1 9y ago
And Firefox 4. That was a pretty big release.

ringaroundthetx 9y ago

oh no, they didn't get a third party blogger to write about them, it looks so laaaaaame when it comes from the one person that knows about their accomplishment /s

atonse 9y ago

They should be proud of their accomplishments and show them off. One thing I've learned in life is, you can do great work, but if people don't know about it or appreciate it, it simply won't help you.

cJ0th 9y ago

Well, I don't blame them for promoting their product. Speed, however, is probably among the least important things when it comes to incognito mode. I would have appreciated it if they had spent more time figuring out how to reduce fingerprints.

callahad 9y ago
We are. It's not quite polished yet, but check out privacy.resistFingerprinting (and privacy.firstparty.isolate) in about:config. This all dovetails with our work to upstream the relevant patches from the Tor Browser Bundle, which is also proceeding apace. More info at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Fingerprinting https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Fingerprinting
- cJ0th 9y ago
  That's great to hear :)
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  > privacy.resistFingerprinting Is there a reason that setting does so many different things? I've been trying it for a few days but it's a real problem when I want some of those settings but not others. For example the protection against canvas image extraction needs work. It's stuck on 'ask' with constant popups, and once you pick yes/no on a domain it's impossible to see the permission or change it ever again. Until it forgets on browser restart and starts bugging you all over again.
daxorid 9y ago
The privacy afforded by anti-fingerprinting features is kind of useless as long as the browser remains a member of the UAF-vuln-of-the-week club.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago

Chrome and Edge do the same, what's your point? Also please stop using that stupid alt-right language inappropriately.

jasonkostempski 9y ago

It think it's a pretty silly thing to focus marketing on considering they've been fast enough for the average user for years. I saw a TV commercial for it during The Walking Dead last night, surely that money could have been spent in a much better way. I think the marketing should focus on being the only major browser to allow ad blockers to be installed on Android devices.

floatingatoll 9y ago
I was very happy to see how we’re using the advertising spend for this release. The “Hot Firefox” custom New York coffee cup is to die for, and a lot of folks in the real world have said thank you to us to my face, unprompted, for making the web suck less for them. Every percent we make the browser faster makes it more usable for people (and libraries!) with older, slower computers. A lot of the world can’t afford to upgrade. When we make it faster for everyone, we make it faster for them too. If we save 0.3 seconds per page view, how many millions of hours do we save humanity from waiting for their browser to do something it could do faster if we just worked hard enough? That’s why faster is good, to me, and so this campaign aligns well with my personal reasons for working here.
- apetrovic 9y ago
  >If we save 0.3 seconds per page view, how many millions of hours do we save humanity from waiting for their browser to do something it could do faster if we just worked hard enough? That’s why faster is good, to me, and so this campaign aligns well with my personal reasons for working here. Can you explain in a just a bit more details how Firefox "save humanity" 3 seconds if I and nine more people around shave off 0.3 seconds from some web page load and what exactly that mean?
  - floatingatoll 9y ago
    For ten people, shaving 0.3 seconds per page load would save 3 seconds of their total shared lives from sitting and watching a page load. For a million^ people who load web pages at least once, you technically have created an opportunity to save 0.3 * 1_000_000 = 300_000 seconds of cumulative lifetimes across them, which is 3-4 days of reality. Practically, I'm not sure how I feel about this metric on the 0.3 second level, but I sure do understand it at the 5 second level. I've stared at useless pages that are stuck on some tracking JS so many times I can't count, so if those stop making me stuck, that's invaluable once and multiply that win by a million. But that's just time. If you also consider the resources that are needed to execute the page JavaScript, we're probably saving megawatts of power per interval (totaled across all Firefox users) with each small efficiency gain. The changes that are "parallelize all the work" may cost more, less, or same amount of power; the ones that are "use fewer CPU cycles" will definitely cost less power. And so there's a very real theory that we could probably measure how many gigawatt^-hours Quantum has saved the world to date, which appeals to me greatly :) ^ I arbitrarily picked "a million" and "gigawatts". This does not offer any guidance whatsoever on specific or approximate user counts. EDIT: My UPS says that my entire desk has a load of ~75 watts @ 120V, times a million^ users = 75 megawatts. I haven't the faintest idea how much power it takes to evaluate Javascript inefficiently, but saving 0.3 seconds of any amount of power times a million^ users per page view quickly balloons into reality-impacting figures.

INTPenis 9y ago

They lost a lot of market share when Chrome came on the scene. Partly because it was faster but also because Google promoted it and it actually had some sweet process/tab separation. I remained a loyal FF user myself and actually wanted to take this opportunity to promote Firefox Focus which makes it real easy to browse sensitive things like porn on a tablet shared by the family or SO. It's oriented around privacy so it saves nothing and provides easy to access shortcuts for clearing browser history when you're done.

rplnt 9y ago
Google promoted it HEAVILY. TV, radio, outdoor, print, (and web of course). Must have been millions of dollars poured into advertising for Chrome. I'm not sure I've seen all that for any software, let alone a free one. Not to mention prominent native ads on such little pages like google.com or youtube.com. And all that wasn't enough since they also shadily (based on user agent for no good reason) blocked features for other browsers in their products.
- floatingatoll 9y ago
  If Google had to charge itself actual market prices for the google.com homepage banners promoting Chrome, the costs would be well into a billion dollars per release.
- INTPenis 9y ago
  Yes but weren't they brought up on charges by the EU for monopolization?
  - robin_reala 9y ago
    Not to do with Chrome, the EU charge was around shopping comparisons.
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  > Must have been millions of dollars poured into advertising for Chrome. For what it's worth, "millions of dollars" is probably understating things by 2-3 orders of magnitude. The ad budget for Chrome was likely comparable to Mozilla's entire budget for a few years there, even if you ignore the free product placement on google.com...

elgenie 9y ago

The problem is that "Let the product speak for itself" is actually Step 2. Step 1 is "Get people to (re)try the product". Unless there's a magic wand waved that gets people unaware of a milestone release to (re)install and (re)launch FF57, Mozilla needs to put out some marketing just to even seed the basis for word-of-mouth of the product's merits.