It’s time to give Firefox another chance
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
But here I am, running Nightly because holy shit this thing flies. Their work has paid off and they're not even done yet. Webrender is coming, it's not quite stable enough for daily use yet (mostly just graphics glitching and integration performance issues as far as I could see), but there's a lot of work being done and it's only getting better.
Their whole "Project Quantum" eliminated the UI performance issues that used to plague the browser and they're improving security sandboxing all the time.
To those who loved the power and control like myself, they still offer a ridiculous level of configuration flexibility and extension APIs - while no longer as powerful as they were - are still better than other browsers on the market today.
Since then they got Rust off ground, servo yielding good fruits, firefox cool n quiet.
Once again kudos.
They have absolutely no excuse for falling this far behind. They squandered a lot of money, while neglecting their core business (their web browser).
I still hope they’ll keep it up. I have been a Firefox fan ever since beta 1. Hopefully they can recover their market share loss.
Chrome didn’t start from scratch (they used WebKit to start) and they didn’t overtake them overnight. Mozilla couldn’t decide what their focus should be for many years, and in that time Chrome grew thanks to Google’s infinite wallet. They made worthwhile risks that didn’t work out in the end, and during this period their core product stopped improving and they eventually needed an extensive and expensive rewrite.
I think the lesson here is this: if you’re going to invest in experimental products, don’t forget about keeping your core technology up to date.
If Apple hadn't open-sourced WebKit, it's unlikely Chrome would have happened.
Nope, they started with webkit and wininet for networking which together might be make a good browser demo.
I may actually make the switch.
I never left Firefox though, it's been my primary browser for ~12 years. Fuck Chrome! I can say without a doubt that 57.0b4 is more performant than any Chrome / Chromium version that I've begrudgingly used to check if my client's sites are cross-browser compatible.
And ublock origin must have saved me hundreds of euros and days of time already. (God the internet with ads and trackers is terrible. Gizmodo has a dozen trackers, one of them is called summerhamster. True story).
(1) Though I'm sure it's better than that.
Also chrome has had privacy oriented counterpart since the early days such as srware iron[1].
(Mind you, Chrome/Webkit did a similar thing 5-10 years ago wrt. JS performance. Basically, this is the good kind of back-and-forth competition we're seeing.)
Disabled Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)
Disabled Web Runtime (deprecated as of 2015)
Removed Pocket
Removed Telemetry
Removed data collection
Removed startup profiling
Allow running of all 64-Bit NPAPI plugins
Allow running of unsigned extensions
Removal of Sponsored Tiles on New Tab Page
Addition of Duplicate Tab option
Locale selector in about:preferences > General
I've moved to waterfox which offers support for the legacy addons and this move actually fixed a few of the annoying bugs I had with firefox. Among which speed was not one.
BTW, also using DDG for search, Outlook for email.
The reason that Firefox switched to webextensions was in order to switch to a formal extension API that could be supported long term, instead of the old open integration API which made it difficult to readable without breaking all sorts of extensions.
There reason they adapted the web extension API that chrome uses, was because it largely made sense, was already pretty fleshed out and would allow extension writers that were already familiar with that to also target Firefox.
I don't think they've been "waiting" to solve the UI issues: it's been years of slowly deprecating old systems like XUL, and implementing new systems like e10s. That's been years of anger or at least angst for extension developers, as much backwards compatibility was broken one piece at a time.
The fruit after all that hard work is the new UI.
But as some point, too much was too much. Unable to bear vanilla, Google-owned Chrome, I ended up in (closed-source!) Vivaldi. It was...alright.
About two months ago, I tried out FF Nightly. And by god, it's the best browser I've ever used. And the Nightly builds are (typically) _more_ stable than production-issue from other vendors.
So very happy to be back! Mozilla may have their issues, but I'll gladly take imperfect and pro-user over differently imperfect and profit-driven any day.
Yeah, I switched to Nightly a couple releases ago (I'd use Dev edition before that because in the past Nightly used to be really unstable) and it's been great. The only time I've been getting crashes are when I flipped stylo on early (which was to be expected), and a couple of random crashes here and there.
In fact, I've had more problems in Chrome (Stable) these last two weeks, where their devtools hanged everything in multiple cases and Netflix wasn't working at all. And Chrome isn't my primary browser -- I only use it for Hangouts and Netflix (Netflix is force of habit, it works great in Firefox now). (I used the devtools because I'm using the new rewritten devtools in Firefox Nightly and they don't have a prettyprint button right now)
Netflix doesn't work great in either Firefox or Chrome, but that's not the browser's fault. Netflix only streams 720p video to Firefox, Opera, and Chrome whereas it will stream 1080p or better to Safari, IE 11, and Edge:
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742
You can see the playback details (formats, resolution, bit rate, etc.) of the video you're currently watching on Netflix by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Alt+D.
I use Safari to view Netflix though I'd prefer to use Firefox. I'm paying Netflix for access to 1080p video, but I only actually get 1080p video with Safari.
I actually managed to crash nightly yesterday! Maybe this seems like it ought to be banal, but I think it says something admirable when users are surprised to remember that your pre-beta software is pre-beta. :P
-an extension to allow to treat chrome + firefox history and open tabs as one on all devices (basically what I already have with chrome on desktop + mobile)
-a password manager that integrates with both (this one should be easy enough .. just buy lastpass or an alternative).
I was so harsh with them only because I strongly believe that Firefox is my only hope for a free web.
But then I tried 57, and I must admit, boy was I wrong. This thing is fast! I haven't stopped recommending it to friends and colleagues!
Good job folks!
It seems at some point they became aware of how unsuited C++ is for parallel processing, and how important it would be for browsers in the future. Even compartmentalization or running tabs in their own process is a form of parallelization. This requires an efficient way of sharing memory and preventing race conditions and errant writes, as well as a way to protect these processes from cross-site scripting attacks, buffer over- and underruns, etc.
Computing hardware has also moved on from the CPU-centric world and the gains in battery life from dedicated GPU hardware being used even for rendering tasks, and now for font processing and other things were too good to pass up.
I'm a long time follower of Mozilla's development, and extremely excited about what's happening with Firefox.
(I'm also currently a Chrome user, leaving in large part due to profile corruption issues and inferior built-in development tools. I hope to be able to run Firefox and WebRender on both Ubuntu and Windows.)
Glad to see they got it to work.
Edit: if there is any, can someone give me a link to the part of the source tree that has it?
For these reasons I switched to waterfox.
I remember reading that comic that Google made to describe how Chrome worked back in 2009 or so, and thinking process-based tabs were a cool idea, but the experience I was having with Firefox was not bad enough to merit the switch, especially with all of the privacy invasion that switching to Chrome would have entailed. I also reckoned that Google would eventually start to block or make it harder to install add-ons like ad blockers - they are, after all, fundamentally an advertising company.
I'm glad I stuck it out with Mozilla. They're one of the few web companies worth trusting.
Maybe it's different under windows ?
When a client calls me because his browsing is slow, it was usually caused by a malware ridden computer not by firefox.
On the other hand, running chrome often felt slower for some reason and the rest of the time both were comparable speed.
However, the new beta is purely awesome. I don't think I've ever been so excited about a new software version release! What a fantastic validation of Rust too in the process.
At times firefox was slower but it always turned out to be due to a malware ridden computer or a combination of dubious firefox extensions. srware iron did feel faster than both iunder certain conditions though.
The "built-in video chat service" is a webstandard. Called WebRTC, got mainly pushed by Google. Every modern browser implements this. Mozilla just decided to build a service which implements the server-side of this protocol. Which they needed anyways to test their client-side implementation.
So, the only squandered time and energy is that of the UX people that polished that server-side implementation up for public use.
And in return for that, Mozilla got excellent testing of their client-side implementation and direct feedback, if maybe people would want the Foundation to allocate some money to run such a service.
I also previously had problems with single tabs causing stuff to lock up or at least respond slowly. This happened with SoundCloud a couple times. Seems good now!
Nightly always helped a bit, but I had trouble with that too. This nightly has yet to crash once across the 4 computers and 2 Android devices I've installed it to, so I'm very impressed. I previously used LastPass which broke several times on Nightly builds in the past. Since then I've migrated to 1password, an unrelated but definitely pleasant change for using Firefox.
But mostly, boy those perf improvements are real. Side by side, it's hard to believe how fast performance changed between versions.
And please, donate to Mozilla, if you can. They really do deserve some help. Fighting against giants like Google, MS and Apple... They have products running on all kinds of possible platforms, also on old Android phones! And they have some of the best extensions.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/
The Corporation (which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Foundation i.e. only has a single shareholder, the Foundation) brings in revenue mostly through search engine deals, which is how it's able to pay staff to work on Firefox.
Unsurprisingly, it's a bit confusing... I think having the ultimate owner of the Corporation and the trademarks etc. be the Foundation is a good thing, even though it makes actually funding everything appropriately a bit complex.
Don't forget that Firefox is an open-source project, so contributions of time are always welcome! https://whatcanidoformozilla.org
Sadly 11 of the 14 extensions i use do not work on Firefox 57 (i just tried it). The browser is indeed faster - it feels faster than Chrome and Edge - but i never really had an issue with its performance. On the other hand i have a very big issue with the functionality that is lost. Stylish, FireFTP, Greasemonkey (with its own extensions), Better Reader, DownThemAll and a bunch of other addons are things i rely on almost daily (e.g. the internet became way brighter the moment Stylish stopped working :-P) and there are either no plans to update, no alternatives or the alternatives are simply way inferior (e.g. FireFTP is my favorite (S)FTP client for years now, i use DownThemAll for pretty much every download, i use Stylish themes in many sites to tone the sunburns down, i use Better Reader to make Reader mode actually usable, etc.
Firefox is sadly solving a problem i never had and in the process it introduces a problem that for me is a showstopper.
it's a big dealbreaker for me.
The best way to help them out is to help get the marketshare back up, so that the next time they sign a contract for the default search provider, they have more negotiating power.
What is the basis for these statements? Mozilla's budget is far less than its competitors, Google, Apple, and Microsoft; I expect they could find good uses for a little more.
Now, I don't think they are poor, but being a company that doesn't sell your data, doesn't show ads, etc...
I mean, frankly, I think that such products are really hard to find nowadays. Their revenues come primarily by Google competitors (Yahoo, etc., which try to appear as default search engine).
Mozilla overplay the “not for profit” card but with Google you can be sure they are collecting and archiving absolutely everything that passes through their servers.
Sure, Firefox's private browsing does offer tracking protection. But most "normal" users don't seem to use that. And some would argue there's little value in blocking tracking in a session that will be wiped anyway.
Chrome did a lot of things right and for a while, it was the browser I installed on friends and family PCs because it was trouble free and I knew they would always have the latest version installed automatically.
The other thing that I've been waiting for is better multi-profile support. You can get a (pre-release) version of that now by opting into the Containers experiment: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers
I have one Chrome profile for my personal apps, and one for work -- creating a new tab in one of the windows will automatically open it with the same context as the rest of the window. My experience with Firefox was that I'd have to manually choose which profile to open the tab in.
1. This required me to use my mouse (geh, maybe I could use keybindings to change this though? not quite sure how difficult that would be) 2. I'm not sure if this is just a me thing, but if I create a tab stemming from my 'personal' gmail account there's a pretty strong chance that it should also be a 'personal' tab. Maybe this is just a difference in how me and the Firefox team use tabs though?
Once I figure out how to get around those issues, (and when Streak's gmail extension works on Firefox...) that's when I'd be able to move over.
edit: apparently Firefox has had true instance profiles for ages! awesome. now I'm just waiting on Streak lol.
Unfortunately the UI has always been sort of hidden.
You can launch with `-P` or `-ProfileManager` to get a profile selection menu. Or nav to `about:profiles` for a slightly more convenient (but less attractive) version.
Firefox profiles are great. Better than Chrome profiles, though less convenient, for now. Interested to see how Containers fits in.
And it's definitely a reason to switch to Firefox. Keeping personal and work Google and AWS accounts open and separate simultaneously is really nice.
The current container extension uses the default container for new tabs and windows, which is a bit cumbersome, because you have to remember to open new tabs and windows in the current container. If it were associated with a space, it's just inherit the container from the current space.
What's it changing to, moving forward?
I had more trouble finding this setting than I should have. Appears to be hamburger menu -> customize -> (bottom of page) density drop-down -> select compact. Still not sure if I like it. The tabs alone are still way too big for my liking.
Coupled with Ubuntu 17.10 and the Gnome that brings, the top of screen is going to be eaten up by way more UI than I would like. Is there any way to get Gnome to have a unified Ubuntu/application menubar like Unity?
Putting this into there should shrink it down a bit further:
@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");
#TabsToolbar {
height: 24px !important;
--tab-min-height: 24px !important;
}
You can load the URL "chrome://browser/content/browser.xul" to get the browser UI displayed like a webpage, allowing you to easily use the devtools to inspect the different CSS identifiers, so that you can mess around a bit by yourself.
[1] http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=UserChrome.css
It probably won't land in time for 57, but hopefully soon!
Assuming it's the same as every Firefox since they started copying Chrome, the alt key should bring up the old-fashioned (and much more usable) menu bar.
But maybe I'll explore this.
I just have to remember like two or three substrings from an URL or page title and bam! the page is there.
For comparison, Chrome's omnibox generally only searches for whole words, while the Google search suggestions take up much precious space, while it is known that most web browsing is directed to pages already visited. Firefox's decision to keep the URL bar and the search bar separate seems sensible.
https://portableapps.com/news/2017-09-28--try-firefox-quantu...
I'm still missing one extension (Join for Android), but I can live without it for now and might actually just help joaoapps in developing it.
One thing that annoyed me was the large min tab size as I didn't like scrolling tabs. Someone on Reddit pointed me to the right userChrome.css tweak though [1]
Overall I'm pretty happy being back on Firefox after many, many years.
[0]: https://github.com/smorks/keepasshttp-connector/releases
[1]: https://github.com/Timvde/UserChrome-Tweaks/blob/master/tabs...
AFAIK Firefox extension is pending addition of push API support in extensions. Joao has filed a bug report[0] for that, but there hasn't been much activity on it for some time.
I'm not using the beta or nightly builds because I'm lazy. However, Firefox with containers has sold me and I've switched to it for everything except development. I'm too used to Chrome Dev tools it's been hard to switch :|
I absolutely love Firefox+Containers though. I just wish I could make it auto-open-in-container with wildcards. For example, open all *.mywork.com pages in my Work profile.
Of course, now it's up to the developers to allow U2F support via Firefox (instead of hard-coding it to Chrome/Chromium). I've successfully verified that it works on three different services that don't hard-code the support to Chrome/Chromium.
...except for Google.com, which still hardcodes it to Chrome (doesn’t even seem to work in Chromium there for me).
Chrome FFNightly Safari Safari
OSX OSX OSX iOS
---------------------------------------------------
MotionMark(↑) 348.82 190.23 474.55 295.12
JetStream (↑) 166.84 173.96 239.03 171.27
Sunspider (↓) 225.2ms 178.4ms 115.2ms 198.5ms
What I really care about was that with previous versions of Firefox, my MacbookPro would start getting hot as soon as I would fire it up, and every page load would feel like a drag.
With 57, my Macbook is cool and everything feels snappy.
Actually, extremely impressed. I normally do dev with Chrome for heavy JS (even compared to new devel edition ff) and even though Brave's devtools seem to match up to an older version compared to Chrome, page updates etc are just so much faster in Brave than in Chrome. Fast renders matters a LOT when you're developing. (Btw, there's a bug in the install script if you're using Brave on Debian[2].)
It's still early days and doesn't have as many features as FF and Chrome (in particular for me, Stylish is missing, but the privacy and ad blockers that I prefer are there), but, wow... rendering is faster than Chrome in the common case, or at least strongly feels that way.
I also like how they're focused first and foremost on privacy and ad blocking, but also make it easy to donate to your favorite sites in place of ad revenue. It seems like a balanced approach. Brave seems to be very similar to Mozilla with its strong focus on user privacy.
It's nice to see competition heating up in the browser space again.
1. https://brave.com 2. https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/6902
Maybe Brave is more heavily customized than I thought?
Add-on developer are still catching up, but I think that the majority will be ready for the 57 release in November. I tried switching maybe two weeks ago, and I couldn't, simply because of one extension that wasn't ported.
Looking around, and I was able to find out that they've been working on it and two days ago I've installed the testing version of the add-on and made a complete switch to Nightly.
And just as well, most of these performance improvements would not have been realistically doable, if Mozilla were still forced to not break compatibility.
What you can do, is to move to Firefox 52 ESR. It won't have the performance, but it has the legacy extensions and will continue to get security updates until June 26, 2018.
There's also some forks, namely Pale Moon and Waterfox, which seem motivated to try to keep this legacy extension system alive for longer, so maybe that works for you, too. Personally, I doubt they're able to. The old extension system was a major maintenance burden for Mozilla, so I can't imagine the far smaller teams behind Pale Moon and Waterfox taking that on.
Lastly it should be noted that Tab-Tree-like extensions will be possible with the new extension API and some implementations are already underway:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/
(Not a tree, but tabs in a sidebar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-re...)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/27/tree-style-tab-is-a-webext...
I've always been a Firefox user and one of my favourite addons is Tab Groups. Unfortunately it will stop working with 57.
I'm really keen to update to 57 but until Tab Groups gets updated I'm going to be sticking to 56.
Please someone take over the dev!
For me, privacy was always a large advantage of Firefox but now I also trust Apple, Safari, and Apple’s privacy stance.
Honest question: what privacy advantages does Firefox have over Safari?
However after a lot of searching I found Yomichan, which seems to be better in every way when compared to Rikaisama, but its fairly difficult to find. I highly recommend it to any Japanese learners looking for a replacement.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=firefox-...
Just one study among many, but, worth keeping in mind. Firefox is making strides, but Mozilla still has work to do if they want to stop losing market share. I say this as a Firefox user.
But yeah, while the technical crowd sees Mozilla as favorable at roughly equal performance, the vast majority of unknowing users are probably more influenced by the world's most popular webpage, video portal, e-mail service, operating system etc. all nudging them to use Chrome.
It'll be interesting to see, if Firefox 57 can generate another major bump in that user graph like it happened with Firefox 48, or if 48 was at sort of the sweet spot where Firefox became acceptable again for most of the tech crowd and now we'd be digging into the non-tech crowd, which is much harder to pull away from what they're habitually using.
That's a comparison on real websites rather than browser benchmarks.
The old Firefox UI always felt old fashioned and made the adjustment that much harder.
This new version of firefox has been great - as others have mentioned it's really fast and the UI is simplistic with a side panel for bookmarks to boot.
Definitely kudos where kudos is due, looking forward to using firefox for the foreseeable future.
But often it's the small things that make or break it. For me it was that HTML5 videos don't fullscreen to a new workspace on macOS like they do in Chrome or Safari.
If you've tried the stable version, the stable version is still one version behind the changes that are coming.
I honestly recommend giving it a go again in two months.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...
If it still happens and you want to dig into it a little further the profiler at http://perf-html.io/ allows you to gather and dig into + share details that can help fix.
Edit: typo
https://github.com/Koushien/keyboard-shortcut-api
This is one of the last requirements for having a viable product. cmcaine's working on replacement successor:
https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl
It still a long ways off, but its possible.
Extremely disappointed that Mozilla has basically given a big middle finger to the SeaMonkey/Thunderbird (comm-central) communities with the removal of XUL/XPCOM add-ons, necessity of multi-process, introduction of webextensions, removal of support for complete themes (show me a single Persona that doesn't look like shit), etc. in FF 57.
The reverberations of this decision are so stark that the SeaMonkey council has announced that it can no longer build off of the nightly mozilla-central tree; they're in the process of building RELEASES from the Firefox ESR branch. It's an absolute mess.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/herbal-guitar... — especially with the new Photon UI (57)
Firefox has always been my main browser, with Chrome only used if required, although I generally have them both open. I am a heavy user of tabs and multiple windows, and Firefox eats Chrome's lunch in this area, while using far less memory.
Still, very good to see Mozilla back on track again and producing great browser software. Keep it up Mozilla!
Why should I take browser advice from someone who doesn't pay attention? Especially someone who lauds the "simplicity" of Chrome...
I do love how fast Firefox 57 is though.
Speed improvements are good, but the lack of basic features is what kills Firefox. It is not ready for heavy duty web app.
Additionally, mouse gestures are completely broken on both linux and MacOS due to Firefox's implementation of right-clicking and that is not slated to be fixed before v57 releases.
Oh-- and there's no functional LastPass addon yet either. And 57 is in beta 4 and will be released very soon.
It is pretty fast, though. Good for benchmarks if not for actually using. Personally, I switched to Vivaldi.
It also is not the end of all Firefox development. Just because it's not necessarily done for 57, doesn't mean that it won't get fixed or that it will "NEVER" work well.
It's also nonsense to make assumptions about what will work in Firefox in the future based on what works in Chrome, as Mozilla is introducing additional APIs that Chrome does not have.
If you're happy with Vivaldi, your thing. But there also is Firefox 52 ESR, which will continue to get security updates until the 26th June 2018.
Sounds like FF Is making a comeback, I'll definitely try it out once it becomes stable.
Others have mentioned pocket's integration, but I can't wait to see the open-source code, I've already set-up my own Shaarli and Wallabag instances.
I'm still evaluating Brave and Vivaldi after being a long time (2+ years) user of Chomium. The only thing that's hardest to find is the separate identity management and Sync that comes so easily in Chrome/Chromium.
Is there any way I can easily objectively measure the impact from moving to FF? Like taking average memory footprints for a few days with each browser?
I have tried switching away at points before this, and something would bring me back to Chrome/Chromium, but not this time.
From first impressions though, I'm very impressed by how snappy it feels.
One downside is a personal site I host uses client side certs for auth, and that stopped working in Firefox (whereas it was fine in Chrome), turns out the Javascript fetch API needs you to structure the request like
`fetch(someUrl, { credentials: 'include' })`
So I had to go through the code to fix that.
Presumably this is a web standard that Firefox is adhering to, whereas Chrome is a bit more relaxed on this?
We need to give Firefox as many chances as it needs because it’s one of the most important projects on the Internet today.
And has Firefox on Linux always been more performant? Because over the years, as everyone else migrated away to Chrome, I never really noticed all of the things that were supposed to be so horrible about Firefox.
But after that bad first impression, launching Firefox 57 is very snappy.
https://www.waterfoxproject.org/blog/waterfox-55.0-release-d...
I'm on 56 atm in Windows 10 / 16 GB RAM / Core i5-3570K and for whatever reason when I press F12 to open up the console it is really sluggish and takes a good whole second to draw itself.
Does 57 solve that?
That said I could see myself just using Chrome for development and FIrefox as main browser. I did the opposite for a while until Firebug was phased out and Chrome Dev Tools became better.
Both browsers use threads extensively within each process as well.
Another big factor is the new UI. It's partially just more efficient, partially uses animations to make it look faster / more responsive, partially enables new performance features, such as "tab warmup", which starts loading in a tab as you hover your mouse over it, so that it's instantly there when you actually click.
Then they're still benefitting from the new multiprocess architecture. A lot of performance problems can be solved by just throwing a lengthy task into a background thread.
Then the deprecation of the old extension API is also significant. The old extension API had essentially no abstraction from Firefox's source code, so Mozilla couldn't even really refactor code without breaking extensions. Now that that's deprecated, they were able to throw out big chunks of code [1] and refactor what's left.
I presume that made it a lot easier to work with the code and find performance problems, but also just in general, they put a lot of effort into fixing hundreds of smaller performance issues that taken together did make a big difference, too.
Not to mention that lots of those old extensions had performance problems themselves as well.
And lastly, they also just made sure that the right things have the right priorities. Your background tab is not as important as the tab that you're looking at and so on. Again benefitting from the multiprocess architecture.
It starts to be fully multicore, CSS engine was re-written in Rust, there's a new design (that they've named Photon), Pocket integration is now slightly tighter, WebExtensions become the default, and they've redesigned the developer tools.
"Is Firefox Quantum significantly better than Chrome? No. But they are on par again"
Well this ringing endorsement sure sold me. Anyone else? Bonus: you can mix your own Firefox Quantum using two regular Firefox Colas, some Jet and Nuclear Materials at any crafting bench.
Looks like some interesting ideas on the user interface in the new Firefox.
Anyone worked out how to hide the tab bar with a single tab in 57 yet? (I'm odd, and I like to use my window manager to manage Web sites in windows.)
https://pasteboard.co/GMJ4vn9.jpg
Still some problems to fix in rendering, u could notice upvote button rendered in chrome and Firefox above
Never forgive never forget.
Never forgive, never forget.
Most of my monitors are high Hz (144 or higher), and the scrolling is definitely smoother than Chrome when there's plenty of images to be loaded. Like butter.
Immediately upon loaded CNN, my fan starts spinning up loudly (2016 macbook pro). When I loaded USAToday in another tab, I had to just quit FF because CPU was maxed out and laptop was overheating.
So...?
Has anyone else seen this problem?
Also I would encourage you to try Firefox Beta, currently on version 57, to see if the issue is present there (also that is the version of Firefox the article is talking about).
EDIT: And is it possible to block third party cookies?
No idea, though, how well it works, I don't have a touchscreen...
This is a great slogan, but actions speak louder than words. Why hasn't FF implemented basic privacy protections and block trackers like Safari does? If Firefox is really "for people," this seems like an area they should be leading in. A cynic (like me) might suggest that it is because Mozilla has become utterly dependent on ad revenue for their survival.
Long gone are the days when Mozilla was funded by donations and t-shirt sales. There was a time when it was more than just a browser maker, it was the spearhead of an internet movement for open source. I miss those days.
What's more, with Google at 60% market share and growing, and not offering such protections for their users, it becomes increasingly more likely for webpage owners to just drop Firefox completely. It's not worth the effort compared to the money they make off of oblivious Chrome users.
You also seem to not be aware of Tracking Protection. Firefox blocks trackers by default in Private Browsing. There's more examples where Firefox goes the extra mile to protect user privacy, but Tracking Protection really is just exactly what you said. You should've seen the outcry from webpage owners when that was pushed out to users.
What's the best way to visualize the relative $BAR usage of browser tabs in real time in the browser UI?
Could each tab have an instantaneous or averaging resource demand indicator shown? ...by a font modification, performance dial, color scheme, or animation...?
What's the best way to sort or select from all tabs, or a selection of tabs, by $BAR usage or a query on $BAR usage?
But there are builds of Chromium that support Firefox Sync – Samsung’s Android browser even uses Firefox Sync by default
If you have passwords Xmarks isn't a webextension but you can use it on Firefox 56 and then upgrade.
Chromecast is a closed protocol. There are SDKs for it, but you only have three options: Android, iOS, and Chrome.
It's a different story if you are just browsing, like the 95% or more of the internet consumers.
One thing I like about firefox is that its debugger is a just a React webapp : https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html. So it's fairly easy to add to it !
One essential feature for me is being able to pause the debugger and use the mouse selector on DOM elements, which doesn't work in Firefox right now. This is pretty much the only way I know how to inspect and debug popups.
While FF 57 is usable on my Thinkpad 42p I can not say it is twice as fast as the previous version. Maybe the speedup depends on having a multi-core CPU, something which is notably absent in this 2004-vintage machine. Be that as it may, I think FF 57 is about as fast as its predecessor in general: faster in some tasks, slower in others, notably slower in scrolling.
I think their specific claim was twice as fast as Firefox 52 on one benchmark:
Back to Chrome it is.
I can use Hangouts for simple messaging from Firefox, but as soon as we need to hop on a call I need to boot up Chrome. Often I forget and try to answer in Firefox just to get the error message. Then I have to start Chrome, login to gmail if it's logged out, wait for everything to load, and then answer the call. Ends up taking a fairly long time to answer an incoming call sometimes.
It was faster and had a smaller memory footprint than I remember, which was great. It also started stuttering on my macs every ~5 seconds or so. The page would just lock up. Couldn't find a solution. The only hints were to disable graphics acceleration, but those were years old.
On my windows machines it crashed, and crashed hard. Single tab has an issue, the entire browser crashed. Lost work.
No thanks FF, I'll try again in another decade.
You should hope that you'll have the option to do so in a decade, or maybe by then we'll all be getting extorted by Google after they've strangled the open web to death.
But good news, Firefox 57 will probably actually fix that. By 1) breaking unmaintained extensions for good and 2) switching to an extension API which makes it much harder for extension developers to make such mistakes.
Also, I don't know if this will be in 57, but extensions will probably eventually run in individual processes as well. And then you could just shoot down the process of the offending extension.
Something else is wrong. For years, I've regularly had >100 tabs open for weeks at a time.
Surely one would only offer Mozilla another chance once they have extended an olive branch, rather than a closed-circuit television camera?
You can make Chrome more private and secure then Firefox with few command line options. Or use ungoogled-chromium.
do shell script "open -n -a 'Google Chrome' --args --incognito --disable-sync --disable-reading-from-canvas --disable-voice-input --disable-system-timezone-automatic-detection --connectivity-check-url=" & quoted form of url204 & " --disable-remote-fonts --no-referrers --disable-physical-keyboard-autocorrect --no-pings --enable-fast-unload --enable-media-suspend --enable-offline-auto-reload-visible-only --use-simple-cache-backend --aggressive-cache-discard --disk-cache-size=100663296 --proxy-server=" & quoted form of proxy_url
Checked Firefox 57/58 but can't confirm any visible performance gain. Documentation is lacking. And Firefox 57 has at the moment 58 extensions compatible. And it still has Pocket buil-in.