11 ms·

Upcoming Firefox update will decrease power usage on macOS by up to three times

331 points by n1000 7y ago

Nr7 7y ago
I hope this will allow me to finally ditch Chrome on Mac. On Windows I changed to Firefox when Quantum was released but on my old Macbook Air it has been too slow to use as my main browser.
- n1000 7y ago
  I am not a huge fan of Safari, but it seems so much more optimised for macOS that it has become my default regardless. I mean an hour extra battery life is really nice.
  - lethologica 7y ago
    Over the last 5 years I've been slowly shifting into the Apple ecosystem. It started with a 2015 Macbook Pro which I immediately installed Chrome on because what the hell even was Safari? Chrome was basically the only browser in my universe. Then I switched to Firefox but I had so many issues with it. It was slow and buggy and made my laptop chugg along for some reason. Quantum was a good step forward, though. But now I own three Apple devices and have fully made the switch to Safari. I'm so locked into the Apple eco system now though but it has made my life many times easier using the browser that's designed by the hardware manufacturer of all my devices.
    - dewey 7y ago
      I went through exactly the same steps. Safari finally showing Favicons in the tab bar gave me the final push. This is probably the case for a bunch of "power users" I'd guess. As Gruber (https://daringfireball.net/2017/08/safari_should_display_favicons_in_its_tabs https://daringfireball.net/2017/08/safari_should_display_fav...) said: > It might sound silly if you’re not a heavy user of browser tabs, but I am convinced that the lack of favicons is holding back Safari’s market share.
      - dantondwa 7y ago
        If only Safari had proper extensions, I'd give it a go. Unfortunately, Apple has crippled them so badly.
    - neuronic 7y ago
      After being a long time Linux/Android/Chrome user I got dragged into the Apple ecosystem as I received a used iPhone 6 as a student back in the day. For my daily life, this has been a blessing. A lot of the complaints about Apple that people have (and I used to have as an avid Android user) are absolutely valid. MacBook Pros are hardly "Pro", missing ports are simply annoying, weird multi-display handling and breaking butterfly keyboards... all that is true to some extent. BUT... at risk of sounding like marketing shill, in general my workflow and private usage of my Apple devices is a wonderful fresh breeze. 99.8% of the time things just work and I don't have to install third party drivers and adjust my fan speed to a Fibonacci percentage so that Ubuntu's WiFi works after waking the laptop from sleep. Hell, a large portion of the added cost (at worse specs) compared to Dell or ThinkPad is completely worth it in order to have an amazing trackpad which is still miles ahead of any other device. Maybe I should finally give Safari a serious go as well. I always avoided it due to its image of a less feature-rich browser.
      - infecto 7y ago
        I probably sound like a shill too but while there are definitely many valid complaints, I still feel like being in the ecosystem makes my life a lot easier. I don't have to do any hacky workarounds. My favorite one that I discovered last year was sharing WiFi passwords. I was at my buddies house and asked for his WiFi password but we both have iPhones and it automatically asked him to share the WiFi password with me. It was a beautiful experience.
  - kace91 7y ago
    The main issue with safari, for me at least, is extensions. I use vim-like shortcuts on chrome/firefox and I feel awfully slow without them. Safari has very few extensions, and the few that exist don't really work well.
    - n1000 7y ago
      Yes – did not find a decent (up-to-date) adblocker yet.
      - lloeki 7y ago
        I was using uBlock Origin until the move to the App Store (Mojave). 1blocker works well enough ever since then that I had to look it up on my laptop. Also available on iOS but I use Purify there.
      - auiya 7y ago
        With how good reader view is on both Safari and Firefox, I tend to rely on the ad-blocker less and simply use reader view when the page is finished rendering.
      - Sangeppato 7y ago
        Try Wipr, it's super simple and minimal and it works very well, but it costs $2. If you want something free with more customization options (and open source) there's Adguard
  - bharath_bhushan 7y ago
    +1 to Safari as default. One issue is that if you login to some sites (e.g. Gmail) in a private window and then close it, some processes keep running forever. They seem to use lot of memory and a bit of cpu. Terminating the entire browser is the only way to kill them.
tylerchr 7y ago
> This, according to a series of tests, has put Firefox on par with Chrome, in regards to power usage. So still not awesome, but a round of applause to the team nonetheless. Not a small achievement.
- philjohn 7y ago
  Whic is odd, as I find FF better than Chrome for energy usage, but still trailing Safari.
  - derefr 7y ago
    The big X-factor is extensions. I think these stats usually measure the browsers where neither has any extensions installed.
    - andy_ppp 7y ago
      And I think Safari Extensions are pretty much non-existent now, so it's probably never going to be a fair comparison.
      - eivarv 7y ago
        They're mostly distributed on the App Store these days. The old distribution channels are still available, but installation using these trigger a warning.
  - GeekyBear 7y ago
    You didn't see the worst of the power usage issues manifest themselves until you ran the program on a Retina display using scaled windows.
    - ihattendorf 7y ago
      Yep, it's unusable for me at work on my scaled display. It isn't just power consumption, scrolling is noticeably slower. I've been checking in on this issue every release, looks like I'll finally be able to go back to Firefox after 70 is released.
jbverschoor 7y ago
duplicate
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sokoloff 7y ago
Presumably it reduces power usage by up to 2/3rds, not 3x. (You won’t be using Firefox to charge your MacBook.)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Heliosmaster 7y ago
  Having it decrease by 3x is the same as dividing by 3...
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    If the reference power level was 30W (purely to make the math easy to do), and the “power increased by three times” what would the new power level be? 50W, 90W, or 120W? If 120W, then why is a “decrease by three times” different?
    - stonemasonn 7y ago
      30 * 3 is 90... 30 / 3 is 10.
      - sokoloff 7y ago
        Unambiguously true math. If 30 “increases by three times”, does it become 90 or 120? If 90, what happens if 30 “increases by 1 times”? Does it stay 30 or become 60? If 60, then what does 30 “increases by 2 times mean?” Also 60?
        inimino 7y ago
        These things are contextual. "x increases three times" means 3x to most people. This is different from "increases by 300%" which usually means 4x. The article says "by a factor of up to three" in the first sentence but that is too wordy for a headline. > what happens if 30 “increases by 1 times”? Nobody would ever say this. We would say it doubled or stayed the same, or "increased by 100%" perhaps, but never "increased by 1 time". > 30 “increases by 2 times mean?” Nobody would ever say this either.
kristofferR 7y ago
Let's hope this marks a care for Firefox on macOS by the developers, it has been neglected for years now. I hope proper trackpad support is next.
- goda90 7y ago
  From the bugzilla[0] about Pinch to Zoom last year: "We definitely haven't forgotten about this, and we are working on it (as other priorities permit)." [0]https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688990 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688990
- Sangeppato 7y ago
  If you are on 69 or higher, go to "about:config" and enable "apz..allow_zooming". It's still a little buggy, but it works quite well
liability 7y ago
Does anybody know if these changes will benifit users who only have intel GPUs and non-retina screens? I can't complain about performance as-is, but even better would still be nice of course.
- n1000 7y ago
  I’d assume so, because activating the secondary GPU means a lot more power consumption and is therefore avoided anyway.
- abhinavk 7y ago
  The change for avoiding secondary GPUs as much as possible has already landed in Firefox 69. This one is about using CoreAnimation.
Vinnl 7y ago
Previous: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20857892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20857892 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20864255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20864255
vbezhenar 7y ago
How does one optimize applications for power usage? Should it avoid using GPU? Should it run computations in batches?
- roca 7y ago
  The main change in Firefox is to use the system compositor (via CoreAnimation) to composite components of Firefox windows. Until just recently, Firefox composited its entire window into a buffer using OpenGL, and then sent that to the system compositor. Unfortunately, with that method, you have to send the entire window to the system compositor on every frame (because the APIs are just limited that way), which uses a lot of power when just one little caret is blinking, for example. With CoreAnimation you can set things up so that large chunks of the window that aren't changing never get recomposited. Unfortunately this change is somewhat invasive, which is why it wasn't done long ago.
  - brians 7y ago
    Long ago? That is what enabled the original Mac GUI in the 1980s. I am having trouble understanding why anyone would have shipped anything else—what was missing in the time of earlier Firefox?
    - princekolt 7y ago
      Because of "Write once, deploy anywhere".
    - pcwalton 7y ago
      Core Animation wasn't integrated into the OS window server until somewhere around Mac OS X 10.7. Before then, Core Animation on Mac OS X ran in your own process, so there wasn't really an advantage to using it over just doing your compositing yourself.
    - mstange 7y ago
      APIs for partial compositing in combination with hardware accelerated compositing was the thing that was missing. If you don't use hardware accelerated compositing, repainting only part of the window, and letting the system compositor know about those areas, is not a problem. It's only the GPU acceleration and the lack of convenient APIs that makes this a problem. Before Firefox got hardware acceleration, so up until Firefox 3.6, we were using CPU-side painting and sending accurate dirty areas to the windowing system. With Firefox 4, we added hardware accelerated compositing, which made scrolling and transform / opacity animations a lot more performant. However, it also meant that we switched to using OpenGL for the compositor, and macOS does not expose any APIs for invalidating only parts of an OpenGL context. And at the time Firefox 4 shipped, "retina" displays were not a thing yet, so the impact of recompositing the entire window was not apparent. And there was the pervasive notion that "modern GPUs are fast, fill rate is not a problem". It was only as pixel count grew and grew that this started becoming problematic. And it took some amount of research and a lot of surgery to switch Firefox to an approach that gets OpenGL content to the screen while also allowing for partial updates of that OpenGL content.
SanderSantema 7y ago
Is this fix already available in the dev version of firefox? Edit: The improvements are already available on nightly https://twitter.com/whimboo/status/1168437524357898240 https://twitter.com/whimboo/status/1168437524357898240
- Fnoord 7y ago
  The first part of the improvements is the most important one. This is already included in the Developer Edition as well. Not sure about the second part as of today.
vezycash 7y ago
Firefox has been my only browser since quantum appeared. However, on my 10inch 2-in-1 tablet with 2gb ram and an Atom Processor, Firefox's performance has been subpar. Pages will freeze, tabs become unresponsive. Closing the browser doesn't work. It remains in process, eating up 70-80% of CPU until I terminate the process with task manager. Because of this, I'm back with chromium (Opera and Edge). I thought Firefox 69 would change things but it hasn't. For touch screen friendliness, all desktop browsers suck at the moment (Classic edge's basically unusable for me.) Firefox is definitely better than opera in this regard though. But I want a button to switch to touch mode - make buttons bigger. No need for AI to guess which mode I'm currently on.
- Krasnol 7y ago
  I have the opposite experience with my old Lenovo B8080-F (Android 4.4.2) 2GB RAM that I use in the bath. If it wasn't for Firefox, this thing would be useless. Chrome takes forever to start up and is pretty much unusable on any modern page.
  - dr_zoidberg 7y ago
    Yeah, but that's Firefox for Android, versus Firefox (Quantum) for Windows. Not the same "beast" underneath.
- jchw 7y ago
  Using Firefox on a 2-in-1 indeed leaves things to be desired. When pinch zooming, it seems to treat the pinching like normal page zooming instead of having a smooth viewport zoom.
  - rocky1138 7y ago
    That sounds like the sort of decision made as time to meet the launch deadline ran low, with the intention of circling back and fixing it over time. The result is that the text and imagery does get bigger and easier to read but it's not yet optimal. I have no insight into their dev process but this theory can make sense based on my experience working in the industry.
neallindsay 7y ago
Save you a click: They switched to core animation.
- neallindsay 7y ago
  Also, is it journalistic best practice to put the only information that's not in the headline in the last paragraph of the story? That's the opposite of what I learned in school.
  - mfer 7y ago
    For ad revenue they optimize around time on the page. Putting the key information at the end is becoming a more common practice.
sorryitstrue 7y ago
I am suffering silently through using Safari.. might this be the end?
- Sangeppato 7y ago
  What do you dislike about safari?
- ansonhoyt 7y ago
  Yes, you've now spoken, making you a vocal sufferer ;-)
LinuxBender 7y ago
Will this change be backported to 68.x esr?
- yifanl 7y ago
  I would strongly doubt it, switching out the core graphics driver doesn't seem like something sensible to push into an ESR release.
gnicholas 7y ago
I would love to be back on FF, which was my daily driver for most of the last two decades. I had high hopes for Quantum, but I didn't love it. When I heard that Brave had switched to Chromium (and supports most Chrome extensions), I tried it and haven't looked back. I will try this new version of FF, and I hope it can win me back. Tree Style Tabs is unparalleled, and I've yet to find a Chromium-compatible version that works as well (currently using Sidewise, but don't like that it's in a separate window). But Brave is so darn fast, I will not be surprised if FF doesn't win me back. Glad they're improving though, and at the very least pushing the whole field forward!
Sangeppato 7y ago
You can also try "pinch to zoom" on the trackpad, enabling the "apz.allow_zooming" flag

331 points by n1000 7y ago

Nr7 7y ago

I hope this will allow me to finally ditch Chrome on Mac. On Windows I changed to Firefox when Quantum was released but on my old Macbook Air it has been too slow to use as my main browser.

n1000 7y ago
I am not a huge fan of Safari, but it seems so much more optimised for macOS that it has become my default regardless. I mean an hour extra battery life is really nice.
- lethologica 7y ago
  Over the last 5 years I've been slowly shifting into the Apple ecosystem. It started with a 2015 Macbook Pro which I immediately installed Chrome on because what the hell even was Safari? Chrome was basically the only browser in my universe. Then I switched to Firefox but I had so many issues with it. It was slow and buggy and made my laptop chugg along for some reason. Quantum was a good step forward, though. But now I own three Apple devices and have fully made the switch to Safari. I'm so locked into the Apple eco system now though but it has made my life many times easier using the browser that's designed by the hardware manufacturer of all my devices.
  - dewey 7y ago
    I went through exactly the same steps. Safari finally showing Favicons in the tab bar gave me the final push. This is probably the case for a bunch of "power users" I'd guess. As Gruber (https://daringfireball.net/2017/08/safari_should_display_favicons_in_its_tabs https://daringfireball.net/2017/08/safari_should_display_fav...) said: > It might sound silly if you’re not a heavy user of browser tabs, but I am convinced that the lack of favicons is holding back Safari’s market share.
    - dantondwa 7y ago
      If only Safari had proper extensions, I'd give it a go. Unfortunately, Apple has crippled them so badly.
  - neuronic 7y ago
    After being a long time Linux/Android/Chrome user I got dragged into the Apple ecosystem as I received a used iPhone 6 as a student back in the day. For my daily life, this has been a blessing. A lot of the complaints about Apple that people have (and I used to have as an avid Android user) are absolutely valid. MacBook Pros are hardly "Pro", missing ports are simply annoying, weird multi-display handling and breaking butterfly keyboards... all that is true to some extent. BUT... at risk of sounding like marketing shill, in general my workflow and private usage of my Apple devices is a wonderful fresh breeze. 99.8% of the time things just work and I don't have to install third party drivers and adjust my fan speed to a Fibonacci percentage so that Ubuntu's WiFi works after waking the laptop from sleep. Hell, a large portion of the added cost (at worse specs) compared to Dell or ThinkPad is completely worth it in order to have an amazing trackpad which is still miles ahead of any other device. Maybe I should finally give Safari a serious go as well. I always avoided it due to its image of a less feature-rich browser.
    - infecto 7y ago
      I probably sound like a shill too but while there are definitely many valid complaints, I still feel like being in the ecosystem makes my life a lot easier. I don't have to do any hacky workarounds. My favorite one that I discovered last year was sharing WiFi passwords. I was at my buddies house and asked for his WiFi password but we both have iPhones and it automatically asked him to share the WiFi password with me. It was a beautiful experience.
- kace91 7y ago
  The main issue with safari, for me at least, is extensions. I use vim-like shortcuts on chrome/firefox and I feel awfully slow without them. Safari has very few extensions, and the few that exist don't really work well.
  - n1000 7y ago
    Yes – did not find a decent (up-to-date) adblocker yet.
    - lloeki 7y ago
      I was using uBlock Origin until the move to the App Store (Mojave). 1blocker works well enough ever since then that I had to look it up on my laptop. Also available on iOS but I use Purify there.
    - auiya 7y ago
      With how good reader view is on both Safari and Firefox, I tend to rely on the ad-blocker less and simply use reader view when the page is finished rendering.
    - Sangeppato 7y ago
      Try Wipr, it's super simple and minimal and it works very well, but it costs $2. If you want something free with more customization options (and open source) there's Adguard
- bharath_bhushan 7y ago
  +1 to Safari as default. One issue is that if you login to some sites (e.g. Gmail) in a private window and then close it, some processes keep running forever. They seem to use lot of memory and a bit of cpu. Terminating the entire browser is the only way to kill them.

tylerchr 7y ago

> This, according to a series of tests, has put Firefox on par with Chrome, in regards to power usage. So still not awesome, but a round of applause to the team nonetheless. Not a small achievement.

philjohn 7y ago
Whic is odd, as I find FF better than Chrome for energy usage, but still trailing Safari.
- derefr 7y ago
  The big X-factor is extensions. I think these stats usually measure the browsers where neither has any extensions installed.
  - andy_ppp 7y ago
    And I think Safari Extensions are pretty much non-existent now, so it's probably never going to be a fair comparison.
    - eivarv 7y ago
      They're mostly distributed on the App Store these days. The old distribution channels are still available, but installation using these trigger a warning.
- GeekyBear 7y ago
  You didn't see the worst of the power usage issues manifest themselves until you ran the program on a Retina display using scaled windows.
  - ihattendorf 7y ago
    Yep, it's unusable for me at work on my scaled display. It isn't just power consumption, scrolling is noticeably slower. I've been checking in on this issue every release, looks like I'll finally be able to go back to Firefox after 70 is released.

jbverschoor 7y ago

duplicate

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sokoloff 7y ago

Presumably it reduces power usage by up to 2/3rds, not 3x. (You won’t be using Firefox to charge your MacBook.)

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Heliosmaster 7y ago
Having it decrease by 3x is the same as dividing by 3...
- sokoloff 7y ago
  If the reference power level was 30W (purely to make the math easy to do), and the “power increased by three times” what would the new power level be? 50W, 90W, or 120W? If 120W, then why is a “decrease by three times” different?
  - stonemasonn 7y ago
    30 * 3 is 90... 30 / 3 is 10.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      Unambiguously true math. If 30 “increases by three times”, does it become 90 or 120? If 90, what happens if 30 “increases by 1 times”? Does it stay 30 or become 60? If 60, then what does 30 “increases by 2 times mean?” Also 60?
      - inimino 7y ago
        These things are contextual. "x increases three times" means 3x to most people. This is different from "increases by 300%" which usually means 4x. The article says "by a factor of up to three" in the first sentence but that is too wordy for a headline. > what happens if 30 “increases by 1 times”? Nobody would ever say this. We would say it doubled or stayed the same, or "increased by 100%" perhaps, but never "increased by 1 time". > 30 “increases by 2 times mean?” Nobody would ever say this either.

kristofferR 7y ago

Let's hope this marks a care for Firefox on macOS by the developers, it has been neglected for years now. I hope proper trackpad support is next.

goda90 7y ago
From the bugzilla[0] about Pinch to Zoom last year: "We definitely haven't forgotten about this, and we are working on it (as other priorities permit)." [0]https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688990 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688990
Sangeppato 7y ago
If you are on 69 or higher, go to "about:config" and enable "apz..allow_zooming". It's still a little buggy, but it works quite well

liability 7y ago

Does anybody know if these changes will benifit users who only have intel GPUs and non-retina screens? I can't complain about performance as-is, but even better would still be nice of course.

n1000 7y ago
I’d assume so, because activating the secondary GPU means a lot more power consumption and is therefore avoided anyway.
abhinavk 7y ago
The change for avoiding secondary GPUs as much as possible has already landed in Firefox 69. This one is about using CoreAnimation.

Vinnl 7y ago

Previous: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20857892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20857892 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20864255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20864255

vbezhenar 7y ago

How does one optimize applications for power usage? Should it avoid using GPU? Should it run computations in batches?

roca 7y ago
The main change in Firefox is to use the system compositor (via CoreAnimation) to composite components of Firefox windows. Until just recently, Firefox composited its entire window into a buffer using OpenGL, and then sent that to the system compositor. Unfortunately, with that method, you have to send the entire window to the system compositor on every frame (because the APIs are just limited that way), which uses a lot of power when just one little caret is blinking, for example. With CoreAnimation you can set things up so that large chunks of the window that aren't changing never get recomposited. Unfortunately this change is somewhat invasive, which is why it wasn't done long ago.
- brians 7y ago
  Long ago? That is what enabled the original Mac GUI in the 1980s. I am having trouble understanding why anyone would have shipped anything else—what was missing in the time of earlier Firefox?
  - princekolt 7y ago
    Because of "Write once, deploy anywhere".
  - pcwalton 7y ago
    Core Animation wasn't integrated into the OS window server until somewhere around Mac OS X 10.7. Before then, Core Animation on Mac OS X ran in your own process, so there wasn't really an advantage to using it over just doing your compositing yourself.
  - mstange 7y ago
    APIs for partial compositing in combination with hardware accelerated compositing was the thing that was missing. If you don't use hardware accelerated compositing, repainting only part of the window, and letting the system compositor know about those areas, is not a problem. It's only the GPU acceleration and the lack of convenient APIs that makes this a problem. Before Firefox got hardware acceleration, so up until Firefox 3.6, we were using CPU-side painting and sending accurate dirty areas to the windowing system. With Firefox 4, we added hardware accelerated compositing, which made scrolling and transform / opacity animations a lot more performant. However, it also meant that we switched to using OpenGL for the compositor, and macOS does not expose any APIs for invalidating only parts of an OpenGL context. And at the time Firefox 4 shipped, "retina" displays were not a thing yet, so the impact of recompositing the entire window was not apparent. And there was the pervasive notion that "modern GPUs are fast, fill rate is not a problem". It was only as pixel count grew and grew that this started becoming problematic. And it took some amount of research and a lot of surgery to switch Firefox to an approach that gets OpenGL content to the screen while also allowing for partial updates of that OpenGL content.

SanderSantema 7y ago

Is this fix already available in the dev version of firefox? Edit: The improvements are already available on nightly https://twitter.com/whimboo/status/1168437524357898240 https://twitter.com/whimboo/status/1168437524357898240

Fnoord 7y ago
The first part of the improvements is the most important one. This is already included in the Developer Edition as well. Not sure about the second part as of today.

vezycash 7y ago

Firefox has been my only browser since quantum appeared. However, on my 10inch 2-in-1 tablet with 2gb ram and an Atom Processor, Firefox's performance has been subpar. Pages will freeze, tabs become unresponsive. Closing the browser doesn't work. It remains in process, eating up 70-80% of CPU until I terminate the process with task manager. Because of this, I'm back with chromium (Opera and Edge). I thought Firefox 69 would change things but it hasn't. For touch screen friendliness, all desktop browsers suck at the moment (Classic edge's basically unusable for me.) Firefox is definitely better than opera in this regard though. But I want a button to switch to touch mode - make buttons bigger. No need for AI to guess which mode I'm currently on.

Krasnol 7y ago
I have the opposite experience with my old Lenovo B8080-F (Android 4.4.2) 2GB RAM that I use in the bath. If it wasn't for Firefox, this thing would be useless. Chrome takes forever to start up and is pretty much unusable on any modern page.
- dr_zoidberg 7y ago
  Yeah, but that's Firefox for Android, versus Firefox (Quantum) for Windows. Not the same "beast" underneath.
jchw 7y ago
Using Firefox on a 2-in-1 indeed leaves things to be desired. When pinch zooming, it seems to treat the pinching like normal page zooming instead of having a smooth viewport zoom.
- rocky1138 7y ago
  That sounds like the sort of decision made as time to meet the launch deadline ran low, with the intention of circling back and fixing it over time. The result is that the text and imagery does get bigger and easier to read but it's not yet optimal. I have no insight into their dev process but this theory can make sense based on my experience working in the industry.

neallindsay 7y ago

Save you a click: They switched to core animation.

neallindsay 7y ago
Also, is it journalistic best practice to put the only information that's not in the headline in the last paragraph of the story? That's the opposite of what I learned in school.
- mfer 7y ago
  For ad revenue they optimize around time on the page. Putting the key information at the end is becoming a more common practice.

sorryitstrue 7y ago

I am suffering silently through using Safari.. might this be the end?

Sangeppato 7y ago
What do you dislike about safari?
ansonhoyt 7y ago
Yes, you've now spoken, making you a vocal sufferer ;-)

LinuxBender 7y ago

Will this change be backported to 68.x esr?

yifanl 7y ago
I would strongly doubt it, switching out the core graphics driver doesn't seem like something sensible to push into an ESR release.

gnicholas 7y ago

I would love to be back on FF, which was my daily driver for most of the last two decades. I had high hopes for Quantum, but I didn't love it. When I heard that Brave had switched to Chromium (and supports most Chrome extensions), I tried it and haven't looked back. I will try this new version of FF, and I hope it can win me back. Tree Style Tabs is unparalleled, and I've yet to find a Chromium-compatible version that works as well (currently using Sidewise, but don't like that it's in a separate window). But Brave is so darn fast, I will not be surprised if FF doesn't win me back. Glad they're improving though, and at the very least pushing the whole field forward!

Sangeppato 7y ago

You can also try "pinch to zoom" on the trackpad, enabling the "apz.allow_zooming" flag