14 ms·

Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

454 points by bpierre 9y ago

zerocrates 9y ago
> I can't use the Conde Nast CMS in anything other than Chrome, so I can't switch completely. Highlight of the article tucked in at the end there.
- zlynx 9y ago
  Chrome is IE6 all over again.
  - mseebach 9y ago
    It shares a fraction of one property with IE6. It's nothing like IE6 in all other respects. A quick refresher for those that perhaps was not around in those heady days: to build even moderately advanced (dynamic) web pages that were cross browser compatible was not merely a question of remembering to test in both, it was a significant engineering commitment. To add to the badness, Netscape in those years was frankly just not a very good browser, so it was not a particularly easy sell. Thus a lot of apps built in those years only (and quite rationally, too) targeted IE4, 5 and finally 6, Microsoft being very focused on backwards compatibility. IE7 was the first browser standards compliant enough to make cross browser development reasonably easy, also being the first browser in the line to have to compete with Firefox. It broke backwards compatibility, which is why IE6 ended up hanging around for so long and being so hated, even if was the DHTML API of IE4 that was the original culprit. Today, there is no good excuse to build web apps that does not work in all the major browsers, it's just so (relatively) easy. But that was emphatically not the case 15-20 years ago.
- spystath 9y ago
  You'd think that a technology-oriented magazine like wired would at least try to aim for cross-browser compatibility in their infrastructure. But why bother, make your CMS Chrome-only a policy and free yourself of extra testing. And it's not only wired. I've come across a lot of internal sites and intranets that are poorly tested on anything but Chrome. I know, it's not exactly the same thing as the old IE/ActiveX but it still grinds my gears when it happens.
  - TAForObvReasons 9y ago
    If Firefox had a larger market share, it would be easy to make the argument for cross-browser compatibility. But when Firefox is not even 12% of Chrome's usage globally http://gs.statcounter.com/ http://gs.statcounter.com/ and likely much less for your customers it's difficult to appeal to ideals
    - eitland 9y ago
      Oh come on. We've been pushing this since IE6 ruled. :-) Cross browser compability should be easier than ever so it should just be a matter of being a professional developer.
      - TAForObvReasons 9y ago
        There are a different and arguably smaller set of warts in 2017 compared to 1999 but that doesn't mean that it's easy to reproduce the exact layout, pixel for pixel, across Firefox, Edge, Opera, UC Browser, Safari, Chrome and other browsers in use.
        eitland 9y ago
        That's true and to be honest I don’t care too much about pixel perfect. But I think this thread started with a CMS that didn't even work except in Chrome.
        the8472 9y ago
        There is a difference between "it works" and pixel-identical results. Those are probably impossible due to font rendering differences anyway.
        richardknop 9y ago
        Nobody cares about pixel for pixel perfection. But as a professional developer you should make sure that functionally it works in all major browsers.
        9y ago
- infogulch 9y ago
  I always wondered why they branded Chromecast with Chrome, it has almost nothing to do with a browser besides the funny gimmick where you could show a web page through it. Maybe an implementation detail. I suppose I get it now. It was originally just branding to promote a Chrome monopoly, and now it's an artificial exclusive feature. I love the idea of Chromecast but it's sad that it's still so closed off.
  - Grazester 9y ago
    Closed off how if I may ask? Is it not free for anyone to implement in their applications?
    - firloop 9y ago
      To implement Cast support in an application, you have to link a closed source binary to your project. Google only provides binaries for iOS and Android (via Play Services), and has a closed source implementation in Chrome.
      - notatoad 9y ago
        doesn't cast implement the dial protocol, which is open? http://www.dial-multiscreen.org/ http://www.dial-multiscreen.org/
    - Nullabillity 9y ago
      Where are the open source Chromecast receivers?
  - hamandcheese 9y ago
    Also Google is just sort of terrible at consistent branding.
  - mseebach 9y ago
    What does the Condé Nast CMS have to do with Chromecast (or other bits of Chrome branding strategy)?
- combatentropy 9y ago
  Websites and -apps that run in just one browser are worse than ones that haven't yet switched to HTTPS. It is 2017. This has been going on for 20 years. Browsers are more like each other than ever before. There is no reason for this in a new app.
- zanedb 9y ago
  Couldn't you just fake a user-agent, or does the website require components only available in Chrome?
rgrieselhuber 9y ago
After years of being a Chrome user, I've been trying to work myself off of Google's infrastructure as much as possible. Firefox is great, but I was very disappointed to learn that they are partnering with political activists to block sites that they deem to be "fake news." Edit: makeee below posted a good source describing what Mozilla is currently doing, which appears to be limited to "researching" the problem of fake news. I would love to support Firefox so I hope they come up with something more innovative than blocking (which they do not appear to be doing now - I stand corrected) or labeling (which has its own problems). As I mentioned below, browsers, search engines, or social networks should not be, IMO, attempting to block or de-rank websites based on political activism, regardless of the source.
- kevinh 9y ago
  Oh, that's great news. Blocking fake news sources would get me to try to switch some relatives back over to Firefox.
  - catshirt 9y ago
    in addition to the closet racists, the last election seems to be outing the closet fascists.
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      Maybe it would be more helpful to stop trying to categorize people based on single posts?
      - catshirt 9y ago
        come on. read between the lines. i'm saying that blocking websites is fascist behavior, not noble work. don't abuse your family's trust by imposing political censorship on them.
    - kevinh 9y ago
      Fake news sites (real fake news, not how Trump uses it) are malware for the mind. These are things that are 100% fictional and made up to deceive readers for clicks.
fatagun 9y ago
This is bullshit.
- dang 9y ago
  Could you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN? We ban accounts that do that, and you've posted good things in the past so I don't want to have to.
schemathings 9y ago
I'm a pretty heavy user of Chrome profiles .. definitely doesn't feel as well thought out in Firefox.
- lol768 9y ago
  As someone who's not really used Chrome aside from browser testing (which used to involve a lot of cursing because flexbox min sizing was broken), can you explain what Chrome profiles offer over e.g. container tabs? Are you using them as separate cookie jars, to install different extensions or something else?
  - scotu 9y ago
    they allow different sets of extensions (and cookie jar and so on) and they are basically segregated by window (no tabs with different profile in the same window). In the end they are different from containers in the general purpose (they are geared towards having a multi user experience more than firefox's multi identity/privacy) but chrome's take is much less frustrating to manage in my experience because you can't open the wrong type of tab involuntarly. That said I switched to firefox and this (and lack of U2F 2nd factor auth) is the only pain point so far
    - hadrien01 9y ago
      What you're looking for is called Firefox profiles. Just launch firefox -P.
      - scotu 9y ago
        I'd love a combination of the two maybe, but profiles are probably good enough, thanks
    - lol768 9y ago
      > That said I switched to firefox and this (and lack of U2F 2nd factor auth) is the only pain point so far You should be able to flip "security.webauth.u2f" depending on your release channel. If not available yet, I think it will be soon in any case.
chrstphrhrt 9y ago
Anyone have thoughts on the opt-out telemetry default? I had to read the privacy notice they open on start to find out that telemetry was enabled by default.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  My gut reaction was to be suspicious of Mozilla, but then I remembered that they're Mozilla. They're probably just trying to figure out which features are confusing for users. It's strange because we do this type of tracking in all facets of webapps, but desktop apps trigger our suspicion meter.
  - doiwin 9y ago
    Desktop apps are much more intrusive then web apps.
  - chrstphrhrt 9y ago
    Yeah definitely. I think the scope of desktop apps is often wider though. With web apps any telemetry data is pretty much limited to things on that domain. Browsers have access to more in principle. I guess if the data transmitted is not personally-identifying or profile-building then it's fine. E.g. number of sites only, not urls. On second glance at the new FF page https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ it seems like the stuff they collect is pretty innocuous. Paranoia ftw.
  - Tomte 9y ago
    Firefox is actually the only software where I've reviewed the privacy settings when asked and allowed it to send more information than the default setting to the vendor. Because Mozilla.
    - blub 9y ago
      How about sending the URLs you visit? This could actually happen to you, since you likely live in Germany based on your comments: http://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-which-slurps-user-browsing-data/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whic...
dheera 9y ago
I wish they had some better UX designers. Hit the download button and I get a .bz2 file with no install scripts whatsoever. $ tar jxvf firefox-57.0.tar.bz2 $ cd firefox $ mkdir /usr/local/firefox mkdir: cannot create directory '/usr/local/firefox': Permission denied $ sudo su Password: # mkdir /usr/local/firefox # cp -rv * /usr/local/firefox/ ... # ln -s /usr/local/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox ln: failed to create symbolic link '/usr/bin/firefox': File exists # mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox.bac # ln -s /usr/local/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox Why couldn't they go the extra mile and give me a .deb file I can just click and install or dpkg -i, like Chrome does? Make it absolutely frictionless -- lubricate the whole process -- if you want people to use it instead of Chrome.
- kleptako 9y ago
  Why not use your package manager?
  - dheera 9y ago
    Interesting! Didn't realize Ubuntu had included it already. I almost always assumed Ubuntu package manager is always behind by a few versions (like it is for everything else).
    - bad_user 9y ago
      Ubuntu tends to keep Firefox up to date, although I haven't used Ubuntu for a few months already. But regardless, this is the "official PPA" for the Beta channel: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/firefox-next https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/firefox-n...
    - finchisko 9y ago
      for firefox there is really not any other way, because security updates are not backported. So either you have (ubuntu, ...) to pick latest or ancient ESR.
- aibara 9y ago
jedberg 9y ago
And yet 95% of the time I try to watch YouTube in Firefox, it just hangs, never actually playing. Yet Chrome works flawlessly every time. I'm not saying Google is doing anything malicious here, I think it's more of a "we put a lot more effort into making YouTube work" kinda thing.
- zzzcpan 9y ago
  It doesn't hang for me, but it is slow and even lags in Quantum on an underpowered machine on Ubuntu. Works fine in Chrome though.
- pault 9y ago
  Just as a counter anecdote, I'm a heavy youtube watcher and I haven't had any issues with high res video playback on osx 10.12.
- mook 9y ago
  I've seen something similar — because I turned off auto playing videos. Manually scrubbing the video forward and back seems to fix it for me. It's also not that surprising that Google has less of an incentive to test interoperability with their competitor's product…
  - Raphael 9y ago
    I've just been clicking the small play button.
- arianon 9y ago
  YouTube is now written in Polymer, a library made by Google that uses the Web Components specifications, which currently only Chrome supports natively[1], so they have to rely on polyfills on the rest of the browsers, so it's understandable that YouTube can perform bad on browsers other than Chrome. [1]: https://caniuse.com/#search=web%20components https://caniuse.com/#search=web%20components
  - kuschku 9y ago
mgiannopoulos 9y ago
The speed increase in Firefox has been something I haven't seen in a browser update for years.
- fdej 9y ago
  It reminds me of Phoenix (to become Firefox), and how much of an improvement it was over the Mozilla browser. It makes me wonder where things went wrong, as I recall the Firefox of ~2005 being snappier than the one of ~2015. The only discrete drop in performance that I can remember was the addition of the AwesomeBar (which was worth it, but it really annoyed me at the time that just typing in an address became sluggish). Of course, my memory about these things could be completely wrong, and in any case web 2.0 gradually took over and websites accreted JavaScript faster than the hardware could improve, so comparing today with 10-15 years ago isn't really fair... Well, congrats to the Firefox developers, because it really is a pleasure to use again.
  - DiThi 9y ago
    > It makes me wonder where things went wrong, as I recall the Firefox of ~2005 being snappier than the one of ~2015. If you visit any page made in 2005 with any recent browser it will be unbelievably fast. Pages became more bloated in the last decade because they could.
    - cat199 9y ago
      this + stuck js + single threading.. chrome's day-one multiprocess support was really the big shift since it allowed js bloat to not kill your session, which in turn allowed more js bloat to exist, which in turn made ff slower..
      - staticassertion 9y ago
        Yeah, when you think about Chrome's being selling points - a browser that won't crash just because one tab does, sandboxing, and responsiveness - it's literally all just from their multiproc architecture. It bought them so much to have that from the state. But, like Firefox, they now have a big codebase to maintain and it's not so easy to get massive perf improvements because changing up architecture is painful.
knodi 9y ago
I wish there was a way to import passwords in to Firefox Quantum.
- Tomte 9y ago
  I think it imported my passwords from Chrome (but then again, memory is a fickle thing).
- icc97 9y ago
  If you use keepass the you can export your passwords from Chrome in there and then use that for both Firefox and Chrome
- menacingly 9y ago
  I did! for me it was hidden in the bookmarks menu. When I imported bookmarks from Chrome, it grabbed passwords and history as well. This would have been a blocker for me as I don't really know any password.
  - knodi 9y ago
    It doesn't have password option in Firefox 57
  - knodi 9y ago
    It looks like import password is only available on Windows.
- kiriakasis 9y ago
  I did on firefox 56 (from chrome together with everything i could have thought), not sure about quantum.
agumonkey 9y ago
Used Nightly for a few weeks before and after Quantum. Definitely a huge improvement. The web response showed it. But I went back to chrome for the last few days. For 2 windows / 20 tabs it's definitely faster in just enough places to make a difference.
- criddell 9y ago
  I really like Quantum's UI, but for some things (esp Google Inbox) it's significantly slower than Chrome.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    I wasn't even asking for fancy + perf. Even average website would take a second to show their tab. I don't have a recent machine, but chrome (even stable) has no issue at all flying with my x200. I wonder how firefox perf will evolve with more and more rewrites (rust modules etc)
trumbitta2 9y ago
I'll stop using Chrome for work (UX Engineer) and personal use when safari mobile, chrome for iOS, and chrome for Android will each become Firefox. A browser I'm the only one using, has no use for me.
- pitaj 9y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean that you want Firefox mobile to be the default browser? Firefox mobile is available on Android and also on iOS, though the iOS variant is only a wrap around Safari because of Apple's walked garden.
  - trumbitta2 9y ago
    I mean that I work with my browser and I write web applications. Chrome is more than dominant, so I'll use Chrome because my users use - for the most part - Chrome.
fastball 9y ago
Except for video playback. Makes my mac catch fire and still stutters. edit: downvotes? you guys using some build I'm not? Because I'm on nightly.
- frik 9y ago
  On Windows too, MP4 videos spins up fan - only with new Firefox (neither with Chrome nor IE)
- bsaul 9y ago
  just realized this today as well. The video player is a complete disaster, even with forced h264 extension. EDIT : this is really really weird. I'm pretty sure youtube played perfectly fine yesterday on firefox (mac os x here too). Call me paranoid, but could it be possible that they altered something to have the video stutter on firefox in the meantime ??
jtl999 9y ago
I find something is off with Firefox Quantum, possibly the font rendering and it hurts my eyes. Running Chrome 62 on OSX 10.11.6 and it is fine. I had similar problems with Chrome on Windows after they implemented DirectWrite with anti aliasing.
- ekvintroj 9y ago
  I feel the same too!
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- discreteevent 9y ago
  I switched from chrome to Firefox because of the font rendering on Windows. It seemed to do a better job particularly on those effete sites with thin fonts and weak contrast. Haven't noticed any disimprovement in quantum but I'll watch out for it.
  - tomi0000 9y ago
    I had the same problem, try the Font Rendering Enhancer extension for Chrome.
mastax 9y ago
I'm surprised at the success of Mozilla's PR push for this. It seems the time is right for this. Probably helps that tech sites seem to compete to have an article on every "current" topic.
- Certhas 9y ago
  Mozilla is running Firefox adverts in my city. I don't remember seeing browser adverts since the initial chrome push.
  - eitland 9y ago
    Does Chrome spam on the google home page count? I've heard that is one of the most valuable ad spots in the world and I've seen a lot of Chrome ads there.
    - dingo_bat 9y ago
      > I've heard that is one of the most valuable ad spots in the world Yeah since they literally won't sell that spot, I'd say it's worth billions of dollars.
  - sjwright 9y ago
    It would be fascinating to know if Mozilla's financing model makes advertising a no-brainer, i.e. the cost of switching 1,000 users is more/less than the search bar revenue from 1,000 users.
  - CapacitorSet 9y ago
    For starters, Google Translate has had a Chrome advert for as long as I remember.
    - Certhas 9y ago
      Just to make it clear, I was talking about physical billboard adverts.
- 9y ago
nearmuse 9y ago
> Conde Nast CMS > they are partnering with political activists to block sites that they deem to be "fake news." > I'm a pretty heavy user of Chrome profiles .. definitely doesn't feel as well thought out in Firefox. ... and any extension incompatibility complaints These are kind of secondary, or have little to do with the new browser itself. They are not really an argument against an everyday tool that is faster, more customizable and more practical out of the box.
injvstice 9y ago
Apparently they still didn't fix the issue with edit boxes and dark themes on linux. There are two things that keep me on Chromium - that, and the ability to appify a website.
- _keats 9y ago
  The dark text boxes can be fixed by doing a bit of configuration editing[0], not ideal I'll admit but it goes a long way to making it usable on linux. [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/firefox#Unreadable_input_fields_with_dark_GTK.2B_themes https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/firefox#Unreadable_inpu...
  - injvstice 9y ago
    Or they could just fix the bug, and show they give a damn.
- jopsen 9y ago
  there is talk on the bug... and options in about:config see https://bug635044.bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1158076#c158 https://bug635044.bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11580...
  - injvstice 9y ago
    Opened 3 years ago. And I would argue forcing a light FF theme while using a dark GTK theme is not a "fix". Oh, and, why doesn't it "just work"?
softwarelimits 9y ago
Now if they only did respect user privacy! Still every Firefox user gets a never-expiring google cookie by default, a practice that is going on now for many years! Also cookies are accepted from everywhere and last forever by default without user consent, overriding the freedom of internet users in a brutal and privacy destroying way. It is a great bigbrotheristic marketing lie by mozilla to obscure this anti-privacy behaviour with glorious blabla about how they respect privacy, when in fact they help the trackers to track you even better, doing so since many years. Cookie privacy must be handled more restrictive by default, e.g. there is no reason to save any cookie after the browser has been closed if user did not explicitely set that for a site. Hopefully some journous finally check the facts before mindless re-babbling of mozilla propaganda.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jonchang 9y ago
  This is disingenuous. I assume you’re referring to the safe browsing service, which is run by Google and protects users from phishing and malware sites. In Firefox the requests made to Google's safe browsing are sent using a completely separate cookie jar that is isolated from the rest of the browser, so that even if Google is tracking the requests to its safe browsing service it wouldn't be able to identify you on the basis of the unique cookie alone. Of course if you’re still uncomfortable with this you can always turn it off. I don’t know where the claims for permanent cookies comes from. Cookies have expiration dates like all other browsers and can be cleared by the user. I in fact use an add on that clears cookies on tab close except for a set of whitelisted sites.
- aibara 9y ago
  I'm a big weirdo and have all my cookies set to delete every time I close the browser, but, importantly, I recognize that I'm weird. I think the vast majority of people want their cookies to stay around, especially so they can close and open the browser again and still be logged into whatever services they use. Yes, they could explicatively set it for each site, but why do so when they'd want to stay logged in? A super-restrictive cookie policy would suit me just fine, but I think it would annoy a ton of users.
lossolo 9y ago
Am I the only one on HN that dosen't see any significant difference in performance vs Chrome 62 ? and developer tools in Chrome are still superior. I am using both browsers on my ultrabook with mobile low power processor and on my desktop with flagship intel i7 and I don't see any reason to switch to firefox completely. It seems that Mozilla just uncovered how to make PR/marketing successfully after years of failures in this department. Good because competition is good for end-users. It's shame that Mozilla is doing things like this though: "I stopped using firefox since they are delivering cliqz with every 100th download which will analyze and store your browsing history" [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15771719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15771719
- konart 9y ago
  >significant difference in performance vs Chrome 62 Firefox without WebRender is still slower than Chrome. The difference is noticable if you compare it with the old versions.
nbzs 9y ago
Waiting for High Sierra optimization and totally ignoring everything else for browsing. Ideal choice for old os X installations. Running it on Mavericks was a blast.
vxl 9y ago
Keyword searches have become unreliable in Quantum for me; it often goes to the homepage of the search site instead. If this affects you too please file a bug report, thanks!
- detaro 9y ago
  Why don't you file a bug report?
drinchev 9y ago
Kudos to Mozilla for the new Firefox. I really like it! Though I'm quite sure I won't switch from Safari, since I don't want to exercise my fans anymore. Tried Firefox Quantum and it really feels fast, but it's still on top of my "significant energy" battery list. When I think about it it would be really hard to beat a native GUI browser with something made for cross-platform, so I feel a bit desperate.
- mattnewton 9y ago
  I think it is more that many of the safari folks work at a hardware company where people will file bugs and show up at their offices if need be when battery life is affected for said hardware.
- Sylos 9y ago
  I think, there's still some bug that's draining abnormal amounts of battery on macOS for some people, so maybe do check back in a few months or so.
natural219 9y ago
I'm still extremely sad that Firefox OS was sidelined and Mozilla appears to be permanently stuck on "faster browser tech" instead of innovating on open standards where it actually matters (like mobile phones, social data standardization, etc).
- r3bl 9y ago
  To counter this, Firefox is the only desktop browser that supports VR out of the box. In fact, Mozilla has an entire team dedicated to emerging technologies[0] and you can see what that team is focusing on on their website. [0] https://research.mozilla.org/ https://research.mozilla.org/ Disclaimer: Associated with Mozilla (Foundation), not Firefox (Mozilla Corporation).
casta 9y ago
Offtopic: 'ciao' doesn't mean only 'goodbye' as the author seems to imply given the title. It means both 'hello' or 'goodbye'. It is similar to the Hawaiian 'aloha' when used as a greeting.
- ecesena 9y ago
  I'm Italian and agree with you. This said, I'm reasonably sure that in countries like Brazil ciao is only used as good bye, so maybe this explains the confusion. FWIW, I've also saw it written as "chao", which made me rofl.
  - kmundnic 9y ago
    "Chao" is used in some spanish-speaking countries for bye. So technically it is not misspelled :-)
  - schoen 9y ago
    Brazilians spell it "tchau" (due to ch representing /ʃ/ rather than /tʃ/ in Portuguese -- like German sch for /ʃ/ and tsch for /tʃ/).
    - Sylos 9y ago
      Funnily enough, in German we do sometimes spell it "Tschau".
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      Like any other Portuguese speaking country, it is not Brazilian specific. :)
  - Anthony-G 9y ago
    The word has been incorporated into other European languages with spellings that make sense for that language. Other commentators have mentioned the Portuguese, Spanish and German forms. To add to those, I've come across "Čau" in a number of Slavic languages.
  - pdimitar 9y ago
vhiremath4 9y ago
With all this push for Quantum, I wonder what the extension landscape is like. I’ve heard people complain about FF dropping support for old extension APIs (absolutely no idea if this is true - just murmurs). As a Dev, would now technically be a good time to consider building an extension for Firefox?
- libertyEQ 9y ago
  From what I understand the Webextension API is somewhat standardized, and intended for the long haul. So, now would seem like the time.
- kenning 9y ago
  I switched to quantum and the only complaint is that I can't use Video Speed Controller on it. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-controller/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro... That application is so useful, everyone I know who has tried it gets used to it and can't live without it.
  - clouddrover 9y ago
    Video Speed Controller is MIT licensed: https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed So you could have a go at porting it to Firefox: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Porting_a_Google_Chrome_extension https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Po...
    - clouddrover 9y ago
      I correct myself. There's no need to port it because it has already been ported: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/videospeed/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/videospeed/
      - kenning 9y ago
        Doesn't work with quantum
jalopy 9y ago
I tried Quantum and it crushed the battery of my MacBook Air. Activity Monitor showed much more energy usage than chrome. Anyone experience the same?
- frik 9y ago
  There seem to be a bug with MP4 video processing it eats CPU and battery like crazy (for me both on macOS and Win7), but otherwise, the new FF is great.
  - rene_bg 9y ago
    You can use [1] to force YouTube videos being streamed as H.264 instead of VP8/9. This helps with the battery issue (at least on YouTube). [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/
    - vim_wannabe 9y ago
      I think browser makers (or whoever it needs to be) should offer an option to save battery over a little bit of extra bandwidth. Maybe even make it the default.
      - the8472 9y ago
        youtube's logic selects the codec, not the browser
        ComputerGuru 9y ago
        No, it’s a negotiation wherein the client submits its list of supported protocols and the server chooses between them.
        icebraining 9y ago
        And since FF supports both, it's YouTube which is choosing the codec, as the8472 wrote.
OverThere 9y ago
"built for 2017" but doesn't support pinch to zoom on a mac
- mcintyre1994 9y ago
  I really miss the back/forward arrows on the swipe gestures too - the gesture works but it feels wrong not to have that visual feedback.
menacingly 9y ago
I bet it was 2009 since I last used firefox, other than testing for reported bugs in it. I've been using it exclusively since the Quantum launch, and I really enjoy it. I liked the idea of having real browser diversity before, but it wasn't practical for me. Now it's practical and awesome.
- remir 9y ago
  Same for me. I tried to switch back to Firefox a couple of times in the past and couldn't do it. Performance wasn't there and the UI would often hang without response. But Quantum changed everything. I've been using Nightly since this summer and it's wonderful. I now use it as my default browser.
DaniFong 9y ago
Night Mode!!!
- DaniFong 9y ago
  Ugh, the journalist jumped the gun, there is no native night mode. Firefox, hear my plea, help my night browsing eyes, I have too large a screen in my VR dome, and your browser, alongside all others, is still blinding, and I do not trust your add ons with all of my data.
nbzs 9y ago
Someone has deleted my comment. Why? I will say it again. Firefox 57 is faster, with better UI design, i love dark theme option and it works under old Os X Mavericks perfectly. Waiting for High Sierra optimization (is very heavy on cpu) and will use it exclusively.
mdip 9y ago
On my end, I never actually stopped using Firefox after Chrome came out. I had Chrome installed and used it mostly for testing and validation of web code, but my day-to-day was Firefox. I had my extensions configured and setup in it and my large collection of bookmarks was there (I guess I was just too lazy to import them into Chrome). I think the main reason I stuck with Firefox was because I used Android and the Firefox browser on Android supported my extensions -- the most important being uBlock Origin, so the browsing experience was better even though the overall performance wasn't great -- and since my bookmarks were synced, it just worked out better for me that way. I ran Developer edition, so I received the updated that killed most of my extensions earlier than most and I realized that the main reason I used Firefox was because of my collection of extensions -- many of which now didn't work. So I abandoned Firefox on all but mobile earlier this year and switched to Vivaldi (chromium based)[0]. Now that my most important extensions are available (though still haven't found uBlock Protector), I've started using Quantum again. I'm really enjoying the fact that HTML5/Flask autoplay can be disabled in "about:config" (and that it works, unlike the myriad of extensions I installed for Vivaldi claiming to do the same but which mostly broke things like gifv playback and random non-YouTube video sites that would still autoplay or would simply refuse to play). Firefox Quantum is faster and I'm back to being a (mostly) happy Firefox user, again. Last night I removed the icons for Opera and Vivaldi from my task bar to keep me from accidentally starting them due to muscle memory (and therefore adding bookmarks in a place where I will lose them). [0] No, I don't have a thing against Google, I just preferred the high-degree of customization that Firefox/Vivaldi gave me over Chrome. I don't like Chrome's opinionated configuration panel -- I'm a developer and I like knobs to turn. Though Vivaldi lacked the conveniences of syncing things between my various machine so I ended up on Opera rather regularly.
- aquova 9y ago
  As an avid Vivaldi user, I was impressed with what Firefox Quantum had to offer. I hadn't used Firefox since Chrome became dominant, it was interesting to see what Firefox had to offer compared to the Chromium-based ecosystem. Personally, I would consider Firefox Quantum to be a step up over Chrome, but it's still missing much of the customization that I grew to love under Vivaldi. Simply being unable to change keybindings or the speed dial selection were enough to draw me back to Vivaldi, but I'll be keeping a keen eye on Firefox development from now on. I do agree however, the lack of syncing is a major drawback to Vivaldi, and one I hope they will add in the near future.
bsaul 9y ago
wish i could zoom the page with pinch on the trackpad like i did with chrome..
subbz 9y ago
Firefox is a great browser, but what bothers me: - Design: On Windows it integrates better but on MacOS the header is just somehow ugly. Chrome just feels more stable in this point. Also the scrolling to top when Chrome goes over the 0px line and bounces back - that's just a nicer behaviour. - Clearing history and cookies: I yet didn't manage to find a fast solution to do this in Firefox. Please, dear Firefox team, if you read this, improve it and you got me back!
- merb 9y ago
  why is the header ugly on MacOS? it actually has the same color and looks like it's part of the menu bar.
  - subbz 9y ago
    The tabs don't hang in the top left corner but there's some space. I don't get this design decision. Also I dislike the hard dark outlines on some icons (e.g. for folders).
    - kuschku 9y ago
      > The tabs don't hang in the top left corner but there's some space. Which is configurable.
      - Ermenwyr 9y ago
        It is? I've been trying to figure out how to get rid of this, but Googling various combinations of "remove space to left of tabs Firefox 57" has not yielded anything helpful.
        Sylos 9y ago
        I think, it should be Configurable under Customize and then one of the checkboxes at the bottom.
        altern8tif 9y ago
intopieces 9y ago
Does it still kill the battery on the Mac or has that been fixed?
131hn 9y ago
I'm all into the "switch firefox on again" and removed my chrome from my quicklaunch. It's fast as a browser should be, and I trust mozilla a lot more than google. Yet, webkit/blink powers today a lot more than google chrome. I think headless mode & nodejs(v8) integration (e.g. nwjs/electron) is still a major missing feature to call it "a browser build for 2017"
- detaro 9y ago
  Firefox has headless mode. I'm not sure why "use the JS engine from Chrome" is a good requirement for a non-Chrome browser, or what do you mean by "nodejs(v8) integration"?
  - johnny22 9y ago
    probably a backend or binding or whatever they call it for node in the same way ChakraCore from Microsoft can be. https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore
neogodless 9y ago
Anyone use LastPass? It seems like a deal breaker when it comes to Firefox. On my phone, where I really don't want to be typing 16 digit passwords, I can't get it to play nicely with Firefox mobile. If I can get it working, I can really try switching back.
- Belphemur 9y ago
  Personally I replaced it by bitwarden. Free and open source alternative to last pass. Work flawlessly as a Firefox Android/desktop extension or as it's own app in Android.
  - neogodless 9y ago
    Working flawlessly would be a nice upgrade from LastPass. Thanks for the suggestion!
- h43k3r 9y ago
  Why don't you use LastPass mobile app, it seems to work for me.
  - neogodless 9y ago
    That's an option. I've grown used to having LastPass mobile open automatically for password fields using Chrome, and it won't for Firefox. If there's a setting to enable that, I haven't found it. It's several more steps to switch between apps and copy/paste username and password individually, so it's probably a non-starter. I tried the extension, but it hangs on the LastPass login screen.
Walkman 9y ago
I don't know what's up with the memory usage claims, but on OS X it eats 2x as much as Chrome :o
- Sylos 9y ago
  Maybe see what memory usage is like in a new Firefox profile. That'll be essentially like a factory-reset Firefox, but you can always switch back to your old profile, if it does not change anything. Type "about:profiles" into the URL-bar and from there it should be mostly self-explanatory.
  - Walkman 9y ago
    I wiped out Firefox and observed this memory hungriness with a completely clean install with no add-ons whatsoever versus a Fully configured Chrome.
foobarbazetc 9y ago
On my machine (nMP with dual FirePro D700’s) there’s a noticeable “stall” when Quantum navigates to a page. This isn’t there on Blink or WebKit. I’m not sure how to go about trying to get it looked at.
- sjwright 9y ago
  I had the same problem; I tracked it down to a problem with my particular macOS user account most likely caused by me changing the home directory name post-facto. (https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT201548 https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT201548) I made the change because I didn't want my full name as the account name. The problem didn't present itself prior to (IIRC) updating to macOS Sierra. To determine whether this is the cause for your particular problem, create a fresh new macOS user account, log into it and see if you can replicate the slow-down there. If there's no slowdown, it's probably this bug. To work around the problem, I created a temporary admin account and logged into it. I then renamed my current account, created a new one with the correct details, then transferred most of my stuff from the old account to the new one, including the full contents of Library. Last step, chown the new profile directory: sudo chown -R youruser /Users/youruser
  - foobarbazetc 9y ago
    I’ve always had the same 4 letter username and homedir so I’m not sure this is it. It’s a really annoying issue because the “stall” is like 0.75-1 second every time I navigate anywhere.
    - sjwright 9y ago
      I was only able to hypothesise the cause, as that happened to correlate well in my minuscule sample size; your data point appears to have invalidated that. I regret not being able to isolate the cause properly. I would still run the user account experiment — your described symptom matches exactly what I experienced. It should only take a few minutes to make an account, log into it and run Firefox. What I do know: * The problem started after a major macOS version upgrade, almost certainly Sierra. * The problem occurred on my desktop and my laptop, but not my wife's computers that saw largely similar install history but more plain-vanilla usage patterns. * The contents of the Firefox profile directory do not matter; the problem occurs with a completely fresh profile. * The contents of the ~/Library directory do not seem to matter; creating a new user account and moving the entire contents of ~/Library back fixed it. * The problem could not be replicated within any other user accounts on the same machine where the problem occurred. * I was unable to create a faulty user account.
cageface 9y ago
The welcome resurgence of Firefox makes Apple’s ban on third party browser engines on iOS even less justifiable. This is about control, not security.
- ac2u 9y ago
  It does give them enviable control, but the security is a valid point. A browser engine has a wide surface area for attack vectors as it features multiple parsers and a JS engine.
  - cageface 9y ago
    It's taken from the same playbook as their refusal to support open video codecs in WebRTC. Apple is the new IBM, using money and market share to keep out challengers. If Steve Jobs were getting started today we'd have a picture of him standing in front of the Apple logo giving it the finger.
  - Sylos 9y ago
    Right, but does a monoculture actually help that in any way? It's not like Apple is always at the forefront of innovation with WebKit.
- brogrammernot 9y ago
  Honestly, I don’t really care to see any other browsers on iOS. Safari works perfectly fine and I’d rather download an app than use a mobile experience of a website. Most companies suck at mobile web apps whereas the native experience is much better.
  - muddi900 9y ago
    Safari has 2 basic problems; - The Interface is obtuse and inefficient in practice. - All major updates only happen once a year for so that the OS announcement can have more bullet points Which, I guess is the problem with iOS as a whole. Marketing is the primary driver of all innovation on that platform and it works for them. Except the iPad.
HugoDaniel 9y ago
2017 ? :/
tmnvix 9y ago
Unfortunately, at this point I am just too comfortable with Chrome's inspector. It might seem like a small thing, but I have a dozen other 'small things' to familiarise myself with every day, so reacquainting myself with Firebug is likely to never become a priority. At this stage it'll take something stupid on Chrome's behalf to encourage me to make a move. Having said that, I might start using FF as my non-work browser again.
- eganist 9y ago
  Took me a bit to switch from Firebug to Chrome's inspector when Chrome became better a number of years ago. Took me not as much to switch back. You can do it. It just takes some getting used to and perhaps a few compromises until the next updates are released, but it'll encourage Google to actually play nice with the web again.
- clivestaples 9y ago
  I thought the same thing regarding the inspector in previous versions of Firefox, but the dev tools in Quantum feel right.
bla2 9y ago
Great pr, but Quantum sounds like they finally ported some of chrome 1's tech over. It's great that they're multiprocess now, but it seems more like they've caught up after 9 years, not like they're ahead much. And the UI is still off on macOS.
- Daishiman 9y ago
  No, there is seriously new and innovative tech in the case engine with parallel layouts as well as safety improvements with Rust.
- Sylos 9y ago
  In a lot of ways, yes, Firefox had a lot of technical cruft that they got rid of with this release and in those respects have now mainly just caught up with Chrome. But Mozilla has been optimizing around this technical cruft for so long now that not having this technical cruft anymore leaves them with the architecture of Chrome plus those optimizations. And they are innovating on top of it as well. They packed in a written-from-scratch CSS engine into this release, which utilizes parallelism. That's something we haven't yet seen in other browsers. In a few releases from now, we should also get WebRender, which essentially makes it so that Firefox renders webpages in the way that video games render things. So, if you've ever wondered why your graphics card can pump out cinematic space battles at 60 FPS, but your browsers stutters when playing a flimsy CSS animation, this will mostly fix that.
pwdisswordfish2 9y ago
"Built for 2017." Most of 2017 is in the past. There are only a couple of months left. I want a modern browser built for the future.
thejosh 9y ago
I really want to love the new Firefox, it's really great... Except I can't debug promises in JavaScript, and JavaScript debugging seems very subpar compared to chrome.
brogrammernot 9y ago
Can someone help me understand why this browser will improve my day to day life as a developer? I like Chrome Dev Tools, they fulfill the vast majority of my needs and Postman covers the rest. I just don’t exactly understand the gains for a developer to switch when the contextual switch is high.
gamekathu 9y ago
Probably irrelevant but I found default Bengali font rendering is broken on FF Quantum.
- spoiler 9y ago
  FF always had issues with rendering fonts. It generally over-sizes them. It's not a huge deal most of the time, though.
kyriakos 9y ago
One thing holding me back : No websocket monitor in dev tools. And the extension that was offering this in the previous version no longer works.
XorNot 9y ago
Think it's time I tried switching back to Firefox it sounds like. Adblock on my mobile browser is probably what's going to do it for me.
turblety 9y ago
It's really so great to see Firefox actually competing with Chrome on performance. I had to stop using Firefox a few years ago, when visiting most websites would spin up my fans, use all my battery and still be slow. I've been using Firefox now for about a month, and it's become my main browser. I'm really loving Firefox again, and hope they keep this up. Maybe time for a donations? https://donate.mozilla.org/ https://donate.mozilla.org/
BuckRogers 9y ago
I never left Firefox, and started when it was Phoenix (beta). I've always been a Firefox and/or native browser guy. On my desktop (Windows10) it's FF with Edge backup. On my laptop (macOS), it's FF and Safari backup. I see each browser as having certain natural incentives and they run this way: Native browsers (Safari/Edge)- tend to try their best to grant a good user experience all around for the device you bought, so they should never be discarded. Pretty safe for people to just stick to these as a result. Firefox- user focused on customization, privacy, features (Send to Device, RSS toolbar feeds, etc). Chrome- focused on Google's best interests. No real privacy guarantee since that's in their profit incentive. Mostly a marketing backed browser, shiny Google adverts on Google services insisting Chrome is what you want. I tend to recommend native browsers or Firefox, if the user has the inclination towards being a power user. I really can't see a purpose to Chrome, and it's hard to separate truth from fiction because there's a massive boatload of corporate Google fanboys out there that promote everything they create. I'm more of the anti-profit incentive type, and prefer people simply do what they want to. It's worth considering if no one would build Google Chrome without a for-profit incentive (and it's highly unlikely it would exist without Google existing), then how could it possibly improve things for the better? It doesn't, it serves Google's best interests. Everything that does, are temporarily mutually aligned interests. Most people don't see this for what it is, and think Google is their friend.
knowThySelfx 9y ago
It needs Websocket inspector. Is it there? Couldn't find it.
pjmlp 9y ago
I always used all four major browsers, as I do need to do web development occasionally. However Firefox has always been the default browser since the days it was Netscape Navigator. Mozilla is the only organization whose agenda is done in the name of the consumers.
zaro 9y ago
So many articles praising the new Firefox. Feels good but I am wondering now, or let's say 2018 when ff will for sure be faster than chrome, will Google change the annoyng notification they show you when you open Google that says browse Internet faster try Chrome? Will they change that to Firefox?
leandot 9y ago
I really want to switch back to FF, especially because of the containers extension, but on macOS (i7 + 16gb ram) the fan spins like crazy and the overall feeling is that it is definitely slower than Chrome. Does anyone else have this experience?
- virgilp 9y ago
  Happened to me once, but definitely not a constant occurrence

454 points by bpierre 9y ago

> I can't use the Conde Nast CMS in anything other than Chrome, so I can't switch completely. Highlight of the article tucked in at the end there.

zlynx 9y ago
Chrome is IE6 all over again.
- mseebach 9y ago
  It shares a fraction of one property with IE6. It's nothing like IE6 in all other respects. A quick refresher for those that perhaps was not around in those heady days: to build even moderately advanced (dynamic) web pages that were cross browser compatible was not merely a question of remembering to test in both, it was a significant engineering commitment. To add to the badness, Netscape in those years was frankly just not a very good browser, so it was not a particularly easy sell. Thus a lot of apps built in those years only (and quite rationally, too) targeted IE4, 5 and finally 6, Microsoft being very focused on backwards compatibility. IE7 was the first browser standards compliant enough to make cross browser development reasonably easy, also being the first browser in the line to have to compete with Firefox. It broke backwards compatibility, which is why IE6 ended up hanging around for so long and being so hated, even if was the DHTML API of IE4 that was the original culprit. Today, there is no good excuse to build web apps that does not work in all the major browsers, it's just so (relatively) easy. But that was emphatically not the case 15-20 years ago.
spystath 9y ago
You'd think that a technology-oriented magazine like wired would at least try to aim for cross-browser compatibility in their infrastructure. But why bother, make your CMS Chrome-only a policy and free yourself of extra testing. And it's not only wired. I've come across a lot of internal sites and intranets that are poorly tested on anything but Chrome. I know, it's not exactly the same thing as the old IE/ActiveX but it still grinds my gears when it happens.
- TAForObvReasons 9y ago
  If Firefox had a larger market share, it would be easy to make the argument for cross-browser compatibility. But when Firefox is not even 12% of Chrome's usage globally http://gs.statcounter.com/ http://gs.statcounter.com/ and likely much less for your customers it's difficult to appeal to ideals
  - eitland 9y ago
    Oh come on. We've been pushing this since IE6 ruled. :-) Cross browser compability should be easier than ever so it should just be a matter of being a professional developer.
    - TAForObvReasons 9y ago
      There are a different and arguably smaller set of warts in 2017 compared to 1999 but that doesn't mean that it's easy to reproduce the exact layout, pixel for pixel, across Firefox, Edge, Opera, UC Browser, Safari, Chrome and other browsers in use.
      - eitland 9y ago
        That's true and to be honest I don’t care too much about pixel perfect. But I think this thread started with a CMS that didn't even work except in Chrome.
      - the8472 9y ago
        There is a difference between "it works" and pixel-identical results. Those are probably impossible due to font rendering differences anyway.
      - richardknop 9y ago
        Nobody cares about pixel for pixel perfection. But as a professional developer you should make sure that functionally it works in all major browsers.
      - 9y ago
infogulch 9y ago
I always wondered why they branded Chromecast with Chrome, it has almost nothing to do with a browser besides the funny gimmick where you could show a web page through it. Maybe an implementation detail. I suppose I get it now. It was originally just branding to promote a Chrome monopoly, and now it's an artificial exclusive feature. I love the idea of Chromecast but it's sad that it's still so closed off.
- Grazester 9y ago
  Closed off how if I may ask? Is it not free for anyone to implement in their applications?
  - firloop 9y ago
    To implement Cast support in an application, you have to link a closed source binary to your project. Google only provides binaries for iOS and Android (via Play Services), and has a closed source implementation in Chrome.
    - notatoad 9y ago
      doesn't cast implement the dial protocol, which is open? http://www.dial-multiscreen.org/ http://www.dial-multiscreen.org/
  - Nullabillity 9y ago
    Where are the open source Chromecast receivers?
- hamandcheese 9y ago
  Also Google is just sort of terrible at consistent branding.
- mseebach 9y ago
  What does the Condé Nast CMS have to do with Chromecast (or other bits of Chrome branding strategy)?
combatentropy 9y ago
Websites and -apps that run in just one browser are worse than ones that haven't yet switched to HTTPS. It is 2017. This has been going on for 20 years. Browsers are more like each other than ever before. There is no reason for this in a new app.
zanedb 9y ago
Couldn't you just fake a user-agent, or does the website require components only available in Chrome?

rgrieselhuber 9y ago

After years of being a Chrome user, I've been trying to work myself off of Google's infrastructure as much as possible. Firefox is great, but I was very disappointed to learn that they are partnering with political activists to block sites that they deem to be "fake news." Edit: makeee below posted a good source describing what Mozilla is currently doing, which appears to be limited to "researching" the problem of fake news. I would love to support Firefox so I hope they come up with something more innovative than blocking (which they do not appear to be doing now - I stand corrected) or labeling (which has its own problems). As I mentioned below, browsers, search engines, or social networks should not be, IMO, attempting to block or de-rank websites based on political activism, regardless of the source.

kevinh 9y ago
Oh, that's great news. Blocking fake news sources would get me to try to switch some relatives back over to Firefox.
- catshirt 9y ago
  in addition to the closet racists, the last election seems to be outing the closet fascists.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    Maybe it would be more helpful to stop trying to categorize people based on single posts?
    - catshirt 9y ago
      come on. read between the lines. i'm saying that blocking websites is fascist behavior, not noble work. don't abuse your family's trust by imposing political censorship on them.
  - kevinh 9y ago
    Fake news sites (real fake news, not how Trump uses it) are malware for the mind. These are things that are 100% fictional and made up to deceive readers for clicks.

fatagun 9y ago

This is bullshit.

dang 9y ago
Could you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN? We ban accounts that do that, and you've posted good things in the past so I don't want to have to.

schemathings 9y ago

I'm a pretty heavy user of Chrome profiles .. definitely doesn't feel as well thought out in Firefox.

lol768 9y ago
As someone who's not really used Chrome aside from browser testing (which used to involve a lot of cursing because flexbox min sizing was broken), can you explain what Chrome profiles offer over e.g. container tabs? Are you using them as separate cookie jars, to install different extensions or something else?
- scotu 9y ago
  they allow different sets of extensions (and cookie jar and so on) and they are basically segregated by window (no tabs with different profile in the same window). In the end they are different from containers in the general purpose (they are geared towards having a multi user experience more than firefox's multi identity/privacy) but chrome's take is much less frustrating to manage in my experience because you can't open the wrong type of tab involuntarly. That said I switched to firefox and this (and lack of U2F 2nd factor auth) is the only pain point so far
  - hadrien01 9y ago
    What you're looking for is called Firefox profiles. Just launch firefox -P.
    - scotu 9y ago
      I'd love a combination of the two maybe, but profiles are probably good enough, thanks
  - lol768 9y ago
    > That said I switched to firefox and this (and lack of U2F 2nd factor auth) is the only pain point so far You should be able to flip "security.webauth.u2f" depending on your release channel. If not available yet, I think it will be soon in any case.

chrstphrhrt 9y ago

Anyone have thoughts on the opt-out telemetry default? I had to read the privacy notice they open on start to find out that telemetry was enabled by default.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
My gut reaction was to be suspicious of Mozilla, but then I remembered that they're Mozilla. They're probably just trying to figure out which features are confusing for users. It's strange because we do this type of tracking in all facets of webapps, but desktop apps trigger our suspicion meter.
- doiwin 9y ago
  Desktop apps are much more intrusive then web apps.
- chrstphrhrt 9y ago
  Yeah definitely. I think the scope of desktop apps is often wider though. With web apps any telemetry data is pretty much limited to things on that domain. Browsers have access to more in principle. I guess if the data transmitted is not personally-identifying or profile-building then it's fine. E.g. number of sites only, not urls. On second glance at the new FF page https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ it seems like the stuff they collect is pretty innocuous. Paranoia ftw.
- Tomte 9y ago
  Firefox is actually the only software where I've reviewed the privacy settings when asked and allowed it to send more information than the default setting to the vendor. Because Mozilla.
  - blub 9y ago
    How about sending the URLs you visit? This could actually happen to you, since you likely live in Germany based on your comments: http://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-which-slurps-user-browsing-data/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whic...

dheera 9y ago

I wish they had some better UX designers. Hit the download button and I get a .bz2 file with no install scripts whatsoever. $ tar jxvf firefox-57.0.tar.bz2 $ cd firefox $ mkdir /usr/local/firefox mkdir: cannot create directory '/usr/local/firefox': Permission denied $ sudo su Password: # mkdir /usr/local/firefox # cp -rv * /usr/local/firefox/ ... # ln -s /usr/local/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox ln: failed to create symbolic link '/usr/bin/firefox': File exists # mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox.bac # ln -s /usr/local/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox Why couldn't they go the extra mile and give me a .deb file I can just click and install or dpkg -i, like Chrome does? Make it absolutely frictionless -- lubricate the whole process -- if you want people to use it instead of Chrome.

kleptako 9y ago
Why not use your package manager?
- dheera 9y ago
  Interesting! Didn't realize Ubuntu had included it already. I almost always assumed Ubuntu package manager is always behind by a few versions (like it is for everything else).
  - bad_user 9y ago
    Ubuntu tends to keep Firefox up to date, although I haven't used Ubuntu for a few months already. But regardless, this is the "official PPA" for the Beta channel: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/firefox-next https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/firefox-n...
  - finchisko 9y ago
    for firefox there is really not any other way, because security updates are not backported. So either you have (ubuntu, ...) to pick latest or ancient ESR.
aibara 9y ago

jedberg 9y ago

And yet 95% of the time I try to watch YouTube in Firefox, it just hangs, never actually playing. Yet Chrome works flawlessly every time. I'm not saying Google is doing anything malicious here, I think it's more of a "we put a lot more effort into making YouTube work" kinda thing.

zzzcpan 9y ago
It doesn't hang for me, but it is slow and even lags in Quantum on an underpowered machine on Ubuntu. Works fine in Chrome though.
pault 9y ago
Just as a counter anecdote, I'm a heavy youtube watcher and I haven't had any issues with high res video playback on osx 10.12.
mook 9y ago
I've seen something similar — because I turned off auto playing videos. Manually scrubbing the video forward and back seems to fix it for me. It's also not that surprising that Google has less of an incentive to test interoperability with their competitor's product…
- Raphael 9y ago
  I've just been clicking the small play button.
arianon 9y ago
YouTube is now written in Polymer, a library made by Google that uses the Web Components specifications, which currently only Chrome supports natively[1], so they have to rely on polyfills on the rest of the browsers, so it's understandable that YouTube can perform bad on browsers other than Chrome. [1]: https://caniuse.com/#search=web%20components https://caniuse.com/#search=web%20components
- kuschku 9y ago

mgiannopoulos 9y ago

The speed increase in Firefox has been something I haven't seen in a browser update for years.

fdej 9y ago
It reminds me of Phoenix (to become Firefox), and how much of an improvement it was over the Mozilla browser. It makes me wonder where things went wrong, as I recall the Firefox of ~2005 being snappier than the one of ~2015. The only discrete drop in performance that I can remember was the addition of the AwesomeBar (which was worth it, but it really annoyed me at the time that just typing in an address became sluggish). Of course, my memory about these things could be completely wrong, and in any case web 2.0 gradually took over and websites accreted JavaScript faster than the hardware could improve, so comparing today with 10-15 years ago isn't really fair... Well, congrats to the Firefox developers, because it really is a pleasure to use again.
- DiThi 9y ago
  > It makes me wonder where things went wrong, as I recall the Firefox of ~2005 being snappier than the one of ~2015. If you visit any page made in 2005 with any recent browser it will be unbelievably fast. Pages became more bloated in the last decade because they could.
  - cat199 9y ago
    this + stuck js + single threading.. chrome's day-one multiprocess support was really the big shift since it allowed js bloat to not kill your session, which in turn allowed more js bloat to exist, which in turn made ff slower..
    - staticassertion 9y ago
      Yeah, when you think about Chrome's being selling points - a browser that won't crash just because one tab does, sandboxing, and responsiveness - it's literally all just from their multiproc architecture. It bought them so much to have that from the state. But, like Firefox, they now have a big codebase to maintain and it's not so easy to get massive perf improvements because changing up architecture is painful.

knodi 9y ago

I wish there was a way to import passwords in to Firefox Quantum.

Tomte 9y ago
I think it imported my passwords from Chrome (but then again, memory is a fickle thing).
icc97 9y ago
If you use keepass the you can export your passwords from Chrome in there and then use that for both Firefox and Chrome
menacingly 9y ago
I did! for me it was hidden in the bookmarks menu. When I imported bookmarks from Chrome, it grabbed passwords and history as well. This would have been a blocker for me as I don't really know any password.
- knodi 9y ago
  It doesn't have password option in Firefox 57
- knodi 9y ago
  It looks like import password is only available on Windows.
kiriakasis 9y ago
I did on firefox 56 (from chrome together with everything i could have thought), not sure about quantum.

agumonkey 9y ago

Used Nightly for a few weeks before and after Quantum. Definitely a huge improvement. The web response showed it. But I went back to chrome for the last few days. For 2 windows / 20 tabs it's definitely faster in just enough places to make a difference.

criddell 9y ago
I really like Quantum's UI, but for some things (esp Google Inbox) it's significantly slower than Chrome.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  I wasn't even asking for fancy + perf. Even average website would take a second to show their tab. I don't have a recent machine, but chrome (even stable) has no issue at all flying with my x200. I wonder how firefox perf will evolve with more and more rewrites (rust modules etc)

trumbitta2 9y ago

I'll stop using Chrome for work (UX Engineer) and personal use when safari mobile, chrome for iOS, and chrome for Android will each become Firefox. A browser I'm the only one using, has no use for me.

pitaj 9y ago
I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean that you want Firefox mobile to be the default browser? Firefox mobile is available on Android and also on iOS, though the iOS variant is only a wrap around Safari because of Apple's walked garden.
- trumbitta2 9y ago
  I mean that I work with my browser and I write web applications. Chrome is more than dominant, so I'll use Chrome because my users use - for the most part - Chrome.

fastball 9y ago

Except for video playback. Makes my mac catch fire and still stutters. edit: downvotes? you guys using some build I'm not? Because I'm on nightly.

frik 9y ago
On Windows too, MP4 videos spins up fan - only with new Firefox (neither with Chrome nor IE)
bsaul 9y ago
just realized this today as well. The video player is a complete disaster, even with forced h264 extension. EDIT : this is really really weird. I'm pretty sure youtube played perfectly fine yesterday on firefox (mac os x here too). Call me paranoid, but could it be possible that they altered something to have the video stutter on firefox in the meantime ??

jtl999 9y ago

I find something is off with Firefox Quantum, possibly the font rendering and it hurts my eyes. Running Chrome 62 on OSX 10.11.6 and it is fine. I had similar problems with Chrome on Windows after they implemented DirectWrite with anti aliasing.

ekvintroj 9y ago
I feel the same too!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
discreteevent 9y ago
I switched from chrome to Firefox because of the font rendering on Windows. It seemed to do a better job particularly on those effete sites with thin fonts and weak contrast. Haven't noticed any disimprovement in quantum but I'll watch out for it.
- tomi0000 9y ago
  I had the same problem, try the Font Rendering Enhancer extension for Chrome.

mastax 9y ago

I'm surprised at the success of Mozilla's PR push for this. It seems the time is right for this. Probably helps that tech sites seem to compete to have an article on every "current" topic.

Certhas 9y ago
Mozilla is running Firefox adverts in my city. I don't remember seeing browser adverts since the initial chrome push.
- eitland 9y ago
  Does Chrome spam on the google home page count? I've heard that is one of the most valuable ad spots in the world and I've seen a lot of Chrome ads there.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    > I've heard that is one of the most valuable ad spots in the world Yeah since they literally won't sell that spot, I'd say it's worth billions of dollars.
- sjwright 9y ago
  It would be fascinating to know if Mozilla's financing model makes advertising a no-brainer, i.e. the cost of switching 1,000 users is more/less than the search bar revenue from 1,000 users.
- CapacitorSet 9y ago
  For starters, Google Translate has had a Chrome advert for as long as I remember.
  - Certhas 9y ago
    Just to make it clear, I was talking about physical billboard adverts.
9y ago

nearmuse 9y ago

> Conde Nast CMS > they are partnering with political activists to block sites that they deem to be "fake news." > I'm a pretty heavy user of Chrome profiles .. definitely doesn't feel as well thought out in Firefox. ... and any extension incompatibility complaints These are kind of secondary, or have little to do with the new browser itself. They are not really an argument against an everyday tool that is faster, more customizable and more practical out of the box.

injvstice 9y ago

Apparently they still didn't fix the issue with edit boxes and dark themes on linux. There are two things that keep me on Chromium - that, and the ability to appify a website.

_keats 9y ago
The dark text boxes can be fixed by doing a bit of configuration editing[0], not ideal I'll admit but it goes a long way to making it usable on linux. [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/firefox#Unreadable_input_fields_with_dark_GTK.2B_themes https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/firefox#Unreadable_inpu...
- injvstice 9y ago
  Or they could just fix the bug, and show they give a damn.
jopsen 9y ago
there is talk on the bug... and options in about:config see https://bug635044.bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1158076#c158 https://bug635044.bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11580...
- injvstice 9y ago
  Opened 3 years ago. And I would argue forcing a light FF theme while using a dark GTK theme is not a "fix". Oh, and, why doesn't it "just work"?

softwarelimits 9y ago

Now if they only did respect user privacy! Still every Firefox user gets a never-expiring google cookie by default, a practice that is going on now for many years! Also cookies are accepted from everywhere and last forever by default without user consent, overriding the freedom of internet users in a brutal and privacy destroying way. It is a great bigbrotheristic marketing lie by mozilla to obscure this anti-privacy behaviour with glorious blabla about how they respect privacy, when in fact they help the trackers to track you even better, doing so since many years. Cookie privacy must be handled more restrictive by default, e.g. there is no reason to save any cookie after the browser has been closed if user did not explicitely set that for a site. Hopefully some journous finally check the facts before mindless re-babbling of mozilla propaganda.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jonchang 9y ago
This is disingenuous. I assume you’re referring to the safe browsing service, which is run by Google and protects users from phishing and malware sites. In Firefox the requests made to Google's safe browsing are sent using a completely separate cookie jar that is isolated from the rest of the browser, so that even if Google is tracking the requests to its safe browsing service it wouldn't be able to identify you on the basis of the unique cookie alone. Of course if you’re still uncomfortable with this you can always turn it off. I don’t know where the claims for permanent cookies comes from. Cookies have expiration dates like all other browsers and can be cleared by the user. I in fact use an add on that clears cookies on tab close except for a set of whitelisted sites.
aibara 9y ago
I'm a big weirdo and have all my cookies set to delete every time I close the browser, but, importantly, I recognize that I'm weird. I think the vast majority of people want their cookies to stay around, especially so they can close and open the browser again and still be logged into whatever services they use. Yes, they could explicatively set it for each site, but why do so when they'd want to stay logged in? A super-restrictive cookie policy would suit me just fine, but I think it would annoy a ton of users.

lossolo 9y ago

Am I the only one on HN that dosen't see any significant difference in performance vs Chrome 62 ? and developer tools in Chrome are still superior. I am using both browsers on my ultrabook with mobile low power processor and on my desktop with flagship intel i7 and I don't see any reason to switch to firefox completely. It seems that Mozilla just uncovered how to make PR/marketing successfully after years of failures in this department. Good because competition is good for end-users. It's shame that Mozilla is doing things like this though: "I stopped using firefox since they are delivering cliqz with every 100th download which will analyze and store your browsing history" [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15771719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15771719

konart 9y ago
>significant difference in performance vs Chrome 62 Firefox without WebRender is still slower than Chrome. The difference is noticable if you compare it with the old versions.

nbzs 9y ago

Waiting for High Sierra optimization and totally ignoring everything else for browsing. Ideal choice for old os X installations. Running it on Mavericks was a blast.

vxl 9y ago

Keyword searches have become unreliable in Quantum for me; it often goes to the homepage of the search site instead. If this affects you too please file a bug report, thanks!

detaro 9y ago
Why don't you file a bug report?

drinchev 9y ago

Kudos to Mozilla for the new Firefox. I really like it! Though I'm quite sure I won't switch from Safari, since I don't want to exercise my fans anymore. Tried Firefox Quantum and it really feels fast, but it's still on top of my "significant energy" battery list. When I think about it it would be really hard to beat a native GUI browser with something made for cross-platform, so I feel a bit desperate.

mattnewton 9y ago
I think it is more that many of the safari folks work at a hardware company where people will file bugs and show up at their offices if need be when battery life is affected for said hardware.
Sylos 9y ago
I think, there's still some bug that's draining abnormal amounts of battery on macOS for some people, so maybe do check back in a few months or so.

natural219 9y ago

I'm still extremely sad that Firefox OS was sidelined and Mozilla appears to be permanently stuck on "faster browser tech" instead of innovating on open standards where it actually matters (like mobile phones, social data standardization, etc).

r3bl 9y ago
To counter this, Firefox is the only desktop browser that supports VR out of the box. In fact, Mozilla has an entire team dedicated to emerging technologies[0] and you can see what that team is focusing on on their website. [0] https://research.mozilla.org/ https://research.mozilla.org/ Disclaimer: Associated with Mozilla (Foundation), not Firefox (Mozilla Corporation).

casta 9y ago

Offtopic: 'ciao' doesn't mean only 'goodbye' as the author seems to imply given the title. It means both 'hello' or 'goodbye'. It is similar to the Hawaiian 'aloha' when used as a greeting.

ecesena 9y ago
I'm Italian and agree with you. This said, I'm reasonably sure that in countries like Brazil ciao is only used as good bye, so maybe this explains the confusion. FWIW, I've also saw it written as "chao", which made me rofl.
- kmundnic 9y ago
  "Chao" is used in some spanish-speaking countries for bye. So technically it is not misspelled :-)
- schoen 9y ago
  Brazilians spell it "tchau" (due to ch representing /ʃ/ rather than /tʃ/ in Portuguese -- like German sch for /ʃ/ and tsch for /tʃ/).
  - Sylos 9y ago
    Funnily enough, in German we do sometimes spell it "Tschau".
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Like any other Portuguese speaking country, it is not Brazilian specific. :)
- Anthony-G 9y ago
  The word has been incorporated into other European languages with spellings that make sense for that language. Other commentators have mentioned the Portuguese, Spanish and German forms. To add to those, I've come across "Čau" in a number of Slavic languages.
- pdimitar 9y ago

vhiremath4 9y ago

With all this push for Quantum, I wonder what the extension landscape is like. I’ve heard people complain about FF dropping support for old extension APIs (absolutely no idea if this is true - just murmurs). As a Dev, would now technically be a good time to consider building an extension for Firefox?

libertyEQ 9y ago
From what I understand the Webextension API is somewhat standardized, and intended for the long haul. So, now would seem like the time.
kenning 9y ago
I switched to quantum and the only complaint is that I can't use Video Speed Controller on it. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-controller/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro... That application is so useful, everyone I know who has tried it gets used to it and can't live without it.
- clouddrover 9y ago
  Video Speed Controller is MIT licensed: https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed So you could have a go at porting it to Firefox: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Porting_a_Google_Chrome_extension https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Po...
  - clouddrover 9y ago
    I correct myself. There's no need to port it because it has already been ported: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/videospeed/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/videospeed/
    - kenning 9y ago
      Doesn't work with quantum

jalopy 9y ago

I tried Quantum and it crushed the battery of my MacBook Air. Activity Monitor showed much more energy usage than chrome. Anyone experience the same?

frik 9y ago
There seem to be a bug with MP4 video processing it eats CPU and battery like crazy (for me both on macOS and Win7), but otherwise, the new FF is great.
- rene_bg 9y ago
  You can use [1] to force YouTube videos being streamed as H.264 instead of VP8/9. This helps with the battery issue (at least on YouTube). [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/
  - vim_wannabe 9y ago
    I think browser makers (or whoever it needs to be) should offer an option to save battery over a little bit of extra bandwidth. Maybe even make it the default.
    - the8472 9y ago
      youtube's logic selects the codec, not the browser
      - ComputerGuru 9y ago
        No, it’s a negotiation wherein the client submits its list of supported protocols and the server chooses between them.
        icebraining 9y ago
        And since FF supports both, it's YouTube which is choosing the codec, as the8472 wrote.

OverThere 9y ago

"built for 2017" but doesn't support pinch to zoom on a mac

mcintyre1994 9y ago
I really miss the back/forward arrows on the swipe gestures too - the gesture works but it feels wrong not to have that visual feedback.

menacingly 9y ago

I bet it was 2009 since I last used firefox, other than testing for reported bugs in it. I've been using it exclusively since the Quantum launch, and I really enjoy it. I liked the idea of having real browser diversity before, but it wasn't practical for me. Now it's practical and awesome.

remir 9y ago
Same for me. I tried to switch back to Firefox a couple of times in the past and couldn't do it. Performance wasn't there and the UI would often hang without response. But Quantum changed everything. I've been using Nightly since this summer and it's wonderful. I now use it as my default browser.

DaniFong 9y ago

Night Mode!!!

DaniFong 9y ago
Ugh, the journalist jumped the gun, there is no native night mode. Firefox, hear my plea, help my night browsing eyes, I have too large a screen in my VR dome, and your browser, alongside all others, is still blinding, and I do not trust your add ons with all of my data.

nbzs 9y ago

Someone has deleted my comment. Why? I will say it again. Firefox 57 is faster, with better UI design, i love dark theme option and it works under old Os X Mavericks perfectly. Waiting for High Sierra optimization (is very heavy on cpu) and will use it exclusively.

mdip 9y ago

On my end, I never actually stopped using Firefox after Chrome came out. I had Chrome installed and used it mostly for testing and validation of web code, but my day-to-day was Firefox. I had my extensions configured and setup in it and my large collection of bookmarks was there (I guess I was just too lazy to import them into Chrome). I think the main reason I stuck with Firefox was because I used Android and the Firefox browser on Android supported my extensions -- the most important being uBlock Origin, so the browsing experience was better even though the overall performance wasn't great -- and since my bookmarks were synced, it just worked out better for me that way. I ran Developer edition, so I received the updated that killed most of my extensions earlier than most and I realized that the main reason I used Firefox was because of my collection of extensions -- many of which now didn't work. So I abandoned Firefox on all but mobile earlier this year and switched to Vivaldi (chromium based)[0]. Now that my most important extensions are available (though still haven't found uBlock Protector), I've started using Quantum again. I'm really enjoying the fact that HTML5/Flask autoplay can be disabled in "about:config" (and that it works, unlike the myriad of extensions I installed for Vivaldi claiming to do the same but which mostly broke things like gifv playback and random non-YouTube video sites that would still autoplay or would simply refuse to play). Firefox Quantum is faster and I'm back to being a (mostly) happy Firefox user, again. Last night I removed the icons for Opera and Vivaldi from my task bar to keep me from accidentally starting them due to muscle memory (and therefore adding bookmarks in a place where I will lose them). [0] No, I don't have a thing against Google, I just preferred the high-degree of customization that Firefox/Vivaldi gave me over Chrome. I don't like Chrome's opinionated configuration panel -- I'm a developer and I like knobs to turn. Though Vivaldi lacked the conveniences of syncing things between my various machine so I ended up on Opera rather regularly.

aquova 9y ago
As an avid Vivaldi user, I was impressed with what Firefox Quantum had to offer. I hadn't used Firefox since Chrome became dominant, it was interesting to see what Firefox had to offer compared to the Chromium-based ecosystem. Personally, I would consider Firefox Quantum to be a step up over Chrome, but it's still missing much of the customization that I grew to love under Vivaldi. Simply being unable to change keybindings or the speed dial selection were enough to draw me back to Vivaldi, but I'll be keeping a keen eye on Firefox development from now on. I do agree however, the lack of syncing is a major drawback to Vivaldi, and one I hope they will add in the near future.

bsaul 9y ago

wish i could zoom the page with pinch on the trackpad like i did with chrome..

subbz 9y ago

Firefox is a great browser, but what bothers me: - Design: On Windows it integrates better but on MacOS the header is just somehow ugly. Chrome just feels more stable in this point. Also the scrolling to top when Chrome goes over the 0px line and bounces back - that's just a nicer behaviour. - Clearing history and cookies: I yet didn't manage to find a fast solution to do this in Firefox. Please, dear Firefox team, if you read this, improve it and you got me back!

merb 9y ago
why is the header ugly on MacOS? it actually has the same color and looks like it's part of the menu bar.
- subbz 9y ago
  The tabs don't hang in the top left corner but there's some space. I don't get this design decision. Also I dislike the hard dark outlines on some icons (e.g. for folders).
  - kuschku 9y ago
    > The tabs don't hang in the top left corner but there's some space. Which is configurable.
    - Ermenwyr 9y ago
      It is? I've been trying to figure out how to get rid of this, but Googling various combinations of "remove space to left of tabs Firefox 57" has not yielded anything helpful.
      - Sylos 9y ago
        I think, it should be Configurable under Customize and then one of the checkboxes at the bottom.
      - altern8tif 9y ago

intopieces 9y ago

Does it still kill the battery on the Mac or has that been fixed?

131hn 9y ago

I'm all into the "switch firefox on again" and removed my chrome from my quicklaunch. It's fast as a browser should be, and I trust mozilla a lot more than google. Yet, webkit/blink powers today a lot more than google chrome. I think headless mode & nodejs(v8) integration (e.g. nwjs/electron) is still a major missing feature to call it "a browser build for 2017"

detaro 9y ago
Firefox has headless mode. I'm not sure why "use the JS engine from Chrome" is a good requirement for a non-Chrome browser, or what do you mean by "nodejs(v8) integration"?
- johnny22 9y ago
  probably a backend or binding or whatever they call it for node in the same way ChakraCore from Microsoft can be. https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore

neogodless 9y ago

Anyone use LastPass? It seems like a deal breaker when it comes to Firefox. On my phone, where I really don't want to be typing 16 digit passwords, I can't get it to play nicely with Firefox mobile. If I can get it working, I can really try switching back.

Belphemur 9y ago
Personally I replaced it by bitwarden. Free and open source alternative to last pass. Work flawlessly as a Firefox Android/desktop extension or as it's own app in Android.
- neogodless 9y ago
  Working flawlessly would be a nice upgrade from LastPass. Thanks for the suggestion!
h43k3r 9y ago
Why don't you use LastPass mobile app, it seems to work for me.
- neogodless 9y ago
  That's an option. I've grown used to having LastPass mobile open automatically for password fields using Chrome, and it won't for Firefox. If there's a setting to enable that, I haven't found it. It's several more steps to switch between apps and copy/paste username and password individually, so it's probably a non-starter. I tried the extension, but it hangs on the LastPass login screen.

Walkman 9y ago

I don't know what's up with the memory usage claims, but on OS X it eats 2x as much as Chrome :o

Sylos 9y ago
Maybe see what memory usage is like in a new Firefox profile. That'll be essentially like a factory-reset Firefox, but you can always switch back to your old profile, if it does not change anything. Type "about:profiles" into the URL-bar and from there it should be mostly self-explanatory.
- Walkman 9y ago
  I wiped out Firefox and observed this memory hungriness with a completely clean install with no add-ons whatsoever versus a Fully configured Chrome.

foobarbazetc 9y ago

On my machine (nMP with dual FirePro D700’s) there’s a noticeable “stall” when Quantum navigates to a page. This isn’t there on Blink or WebKit. I’m not sure how to go about trying to get it looked at.

sjwright 9y ago
I had the same problem; I tracked it down to a problem with my particular macOS user account most likely caused by me changing the home directory name post-facto. (https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT201548 https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT201548) I made the change because I didn't want my full name as the account name. The problem didn't present itself prior to (IIRC) updating to macOS Sierra. To determine whether this is the cause for your particular problem, create a fresh new macOS user account, log into it and see if you can replicate the slow-down there. If there's no slowdown, it's probably this bug. To work around the problem, I created a temporary admin account and logged into it. I then renamed my current account, created a new one with the correct details, then transferred most of my stuff from the old account to the new one, including the full contents of Library. Last step, chown the new profile directory: sudo chown -R youruser /Users/youruser
- foobarbazetc 9y ago
  I’ve always had the same 4 letter username and homedir so I’m not sure this is it. It’s a really annoying issue because the “stall” is like 0.75-1 second every time I navigate anywhere.
  - sjwright 9y ago
    I was only able to hypothesise the cause, as that happened to correlate well in my minuscule sample size; your data point appears to have invalidated that. I regret not being able to isolate the cause properly. I would still run the user account experiment — your described symptom matches exactly what I experienced. It should only take a few minutes to make an account, log into it and run Firefox. What I do know: * The problem started after a major macOS version upgrade, almost certainly Sierra. * The problem occurred on my desktop and my laptop, but not my wife's computers that saw largely similar install history but more plain-vanilla usage patterns. * The contents of the Firefox profile directory do not matter; the problem occurs with a completely fresh profile. * The contents of the ~/Library directory do not seem to matter; creating a new user account and moving the entire contents of ~/Library back fixed it. * The problem could not be replicated within any other user accounts on the same machine where the problem occurred. * I was unable to create a faulty user account.

cageface 9y ago

The welcome resurgence of Firefox makes Apple’s ban on third party browser engines on iOS even less justifiable. This is about control, not security.

ac2u 9y ago
It does give them enviable control, but the security is a valid point. A browser engine has a wide surface area for attack vectors as it features multiple parsers and a JS engine.
- cageface 9y ago
  It's taken from the same playbook as their refusal to support open video codecs in WebRTC. Apple is the new IBM, using money and market share to keep out challengers. If Steve Jobs were getting started today we'd have a picture of him standing in front of the Apple logo giving it the finger.
- Sylos 9y ago
  Right, but does a monoculture actually help that in any way? It's not like Apple is always at the forefront of innovation with WebKit.
brogrammernot 9y ago
Honestly, I don’t really care to see any other browsers on iOS. Safari works perfectly fine and I’d rather download an app than use a mobile experience of a website. Most companies suck at mobile web apps whereas the native experience is much better.
- muddi900 9y ago
  Safari has 2 basic problems; - The Interface is obtuse and inefficient in practice. - All major updates only happen once a year for so that the OS announcement can have more bullet points Which, I guess is the problem with iOS as a whole. Marketing is the primary driver of all innovation on that platform and it works for them. Except the iPad.

HugoDaniel 9y ago

2017 ? :/

tmnvix 9y ago

Unfortunately, at this point I am just too comfortable with Chrome's inspector. It might seem like a small thing, but I have a dozen other 'small things' to familiarise myself with every day, so reacquainting myself with Firebug is likely to never become a priority. At this stage it'll take something stupid on Chrome's behalf to encourage me to make a move. Having said that, I might start using FF as my non-work browser again.

eganist 9y ago
Took me a bit to switch from Firebug to Chrome's inspector when Chrome became better a number of years ago. Took me not as much to switch back. You can do it. It just takes some getting used to and perhaps a few compromises until the next updates are released, but it'll encourage Google to actually play nice with the web again.
clivestaples 9y ago
I thought the same thing regarding the inspector in previous versions of Firefox, but the dev tools in Quantum feel right.

bla2 9y ago

Great pr, but Quantum sounds like they finally ported some of chrome 1's tech over. It's great that they're multiprocess now, but it seems more like they've caught up after 9 years, not like they're ahead much. And the UI is still off on macOS.

Daishiman 9y ago
No, there is seriously new and innovative tech in the case engine with parallel layouts as well as safety improvements with Rust.
Sylos 9y ago
In a lot of ways, yes, Firefox had a lot of technical cruft that they got rid of with this release and in those respects have now mainly just caught up with Chrome. But Mozilla has been optimizing around this technical cruft for so long now that not having this technical cruft anymore leaves them with the architecture of Chrome plus those optimizations. And they are innovating on top of it as well. They packed in a written-from-scratch CSS engine into this release, which utilizes parallelism. That's something we haven't yet seen in other browsers. In a few releases from now, we should also get WebRender, which essentially makes it so that Firefox renders webpages in the way that video games render things. So, if you've ever wondered why your graphics card can pump out cinematic space battles at 60 FPS, but your browsers stutters when playing a flimsy CSS animation, this will mostly fix that.

pwdisswordfish2 9y ago

"Built for 2017." Most of 2017 is in the past. There are only a couple of months left. I want a modern browser built for the future.

thejosh 9y ago

I really want to love the new Firefox, it's really great... Except I can't debug promises in JavaScript, and JavaScript debugging seems very subpar compared to chrome.

brogrammernot 9y ago

Can someone help me understand why this browser will improve my day to day life as a developer? I like Chrome Dev Tools, they fulfill the vast majority of my needs and Postman covers the rest. I just don’t exactly understand the gains for a developer to switch when the contextual switch is high.

gamekathu 9y ago

Probably irrelevant but I found default Bengali font rendering is broken on FF Quantum.

spoiler 9y ago
FF always had issues with rendering fonts. It generally over-sizes them. It's not a huge deal most of the time, though.

kyriakos 9y ago

One thing holding me back : No websocket monitor in dev tools. And the extension that was offering this in the previous version no longer works.

XorNot 9y ago

Think it's time I tried switching back to Firefox it sounds like. Adblock on my mobile browser is probably what's going to do it for me.

turblety 9y ago

It's really so great to see Firefox actually competing with Chrome on performance. I had to stop using Firefox a few years ago, when visiting most websites would spin up my fans, use all my battery and still be slow. I've been using Firefox now for about a month, and it's become my main browser. I'm really loving Firefox again, and hope they keep this up. Maybe time for a donations? https://donate.mozilla.org/ https://donate.mozilla.org/

BuckRogers 9y ago

I never left Firefox, and started when it was Phoenix (beta). I've always been a Firefox and/or native browser guy. On my desktop (Windows10) it's FF with Edge backup. On my laptop (macOS), it's FF and Safari backup. I see each browser as having certain natural incentives and they run this way: Native browsers (Safari/Edge)- tend to try their best to grant a good user experience all around for the device you bought, so they should never be discarded. Pretty safe for people to just stick to these as a result. Firefox- user focused on customization, privacy, features (Send to Device, RSS toolbar feeds, etc). Chrome- focused on Google's best interests. No real privacy guarantee since that's in their profit incentive. Mostly a marketing backed browser, shiny Google adverts on Google services insisting Chrome is what you want. I tend to recommend native browsers or Firefox, if the user has the inclination towards being a power user. I really can't see a purpose to Chrome, and it's hard to separate truth from fiction because there's a massive boatload of corporate Google fanboys out there that promote everything they create. I'm more of the anti-profit incentive type, and prefer people simply do what they want to. It's worth considering if no one would build Google Chrome without a for-profit incentive (and it's highly unlikely it would exist without Google existing), then how could it possibly improve things for the better? It doesn't, it serves Google's best interests. Everything that does, are temporarily mutually aligned interests. Most people don't see this for what it is, and think Google is their friend.

knowThySelfx 9y ago

It needs Websocket inspector. Is it there? Couldn't find it.

pjmlp 9y ago

I always used all four major browsers, as I do need to do web development occasionally. However Firefox has always been the default browser since the days it was Netscape Navigator. Mozilla is the only organization whose agenda is done in the name of the consumers.

zaro 9y ago

So many articles praising the new Firefox. Feels good but I am wondering now, or let's say 2018 when ff will for sure be faster than chrome, will Google change the annoyng notification they show you when you open Google that says browse Internet faster try Chrome? Will they change that to Firefox?

leandot 9y ago

I really want to switch back to FF, especially because of the containers extension, but on macOS (i7 + 16gb ram) the fan spins like crazy and the overall feeling is that it is definitely slower than Chrome. Does anyone else have this experience?

virgilp 9y ago
Happened to me once, but definitely not a constant occurrence