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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 durin

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.
- keypress 9y ago
  There are faster 'cheats' such as pre-fetching. I'd have thought that bandwidth management would be the hottest area for improvement/features for mobile users. In the UK, mobile tariffs have about 1GB per month included (and these aren't cheap), and as a regular web user, you could so easily loose track of your use and exceed that. Default blocking of animation, and other media controls could help here. I do like speed improvements though. I had to ditch Firefox for a long period of time because it was too great a resource hog. Wayward and ill considered programming from page authors doesn't help. I still have to dial back to a no-js browser to view many sites.
ozmodiar 9y ago
"Fast enough" is relative, and for most people when it comes to web browsing only the fastest is fast enough. I can't blame them, with all the time spent on the web the seconds add up. Firefox has been quite a bit behind Chrome in usage for awhile now, and developing a reputation as the slow browser you use if Google starts creeping you out too much. Personally it got me to start running Firefox again. I probably wouldn't have bothered if they hadn't been making such a hubbub about it.

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.
keypress 9y ago
There are faster 'cheats' such as pre-fetching. I'd have thought that bandwidth management would be the hottest area for improvement/features for mobile users. In the UK, mobile tariffs have about 1GB per month included (and these aren't cheap), and as a regular web user, you could so easily loose track of your use and exceed that. Default blocking of animation, and other media controls could help here. I do like speed improvements though. I had to ditch Firefox for a long period of time because it was too great a resource hog. Wayward and ill considered programming from page authors doesn't help. I still have to dial back to a no-js browser to view many sites.

ozmodiar 9y ago

"Fast enough" is relative, and for most people when it comes to web browsing only the fastest is fast enough. I can't blame them, with all the time spent on the web the seconds add up. Firefox has been quite a bit behind Chrome in usage for awhile now, and developing a reputation as the slow browser you use if Google starts creeping you out too much. Personally it got me to start running Firefox again. I probably wouldn't have bothered if they hadn't been making such a hubbub about it.