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Comment by ape4 | Hacker News Reader

The new Firefox is actually faster.

My only complaint is the marketing.

Firefox isn't slow, sure enough. But it wasn't slow last week either. I've been using it as my primary browser for a long time, and performance was never an issue.

Also, 'Quantum'? Come on now. If they're aiming Firefox at power-users (which they should be), they should know that kind of buzzword abuse is only going to annoy.

Anecdotal evidence, so take it with a grain of salt.

I switched to Firefox 2 days ago, after reading a post about how Firefox has recently got faster. I have been a Chrome user for more than a couple of years now, when I switched from Firefox because it was slow in comparison.

After using Firefox for 1 day, it already seemed slower than what I was used to in Chrome. This was most noticeable on ad-laden sites that displayed video ads or similar. I hadn't installed ad-blockers I had on Chrome yet, so maybe it was just that.

After 1 day of use, I was ready to switch back. But then I installed Quantam yesterday, and boy has it been amazing! It is noticeably faster, without any ad-blockers or extensions.

So atleast for me, it was slower last week, and just got fast.

Why did you switch 2 days ago instead of waiting for 57?

Just a co-incidence?

Yes. :)

Exactly the same situation here. As a new (returned) FF user, v57 is noticeable faster than v56.

Agree about marketing. Mozilla needs to get the word out to those who don't follow the tech scene in any way, shape or form. That's the real challenge, but there also lie the bulk of its potential user base. Not sure exactly how they can do that without resorting to annoying, almost sleazy stuff that Google do (like bundling their browser with many other s/w and OEM system builders)...

Quantum... I like to think of 57 and beyond as a quantum leap from before. They did after all let go of XUL overnight, and people do praise its speed overnight. :-)

> quantum leap from before

So, the smallest possible leap? :P

I like to think that it's loosely related to the multithreaded work-stealing features, breaking as much as possible up into "quanta" of work to be grabbed by the next available thread.

It's a decently memorable codename in any case, and works well enough for that purpose.

I think of it less as "the smallest possible" and more as just "one indivisible unit"- going from 56 to 57 without rewriting the style system in Rust would be a long and probably impossible task.

"quantum" doesn't mean "small".

"quantum leap" means an abrupt, large, leap.

See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quantum_leap

It's a joke. A quantum leap is what you say, but a quantum in physics is all about being the smallest discrete unit of some physical property such as energy.

Right, but it doesn't mean "small", some quanta are quite large.

I agree, not small (seems subjective), but still the smallest! The smallest leap is probably not very large :D

No, a quantum leap is any abrupt leap between any two energy levels (i.e. you can span multiple), it characterizes the abruptness, not the size.

IIRC the term's usage in English derives both from the fact that it is an abrupt leap, and also from the radical change to physics brought forth by quantum mechanics.

Firefox was, up until today, noticeably slower than Chrome. Today it's faster.

Especially on Mac. In my experience, FF on Windows was pretty snappy. Quantum is on a whole other level though.

I agree, to me Firefox and Chrome were both seemingly to the naked eye for me at about the same speed but now I notice some pages Chrome chokes up on Firefox just keeps on rolling along. As for the Quantum comment, I just think of Nuka Cola Quantum and it amuses me a bit, but maybe I just play a little too much Fallout 4.

I don't think Quantum is a buzzword here. It's a code name that is more memorable than "57".

And yes, it was slow. Performance was not an issue for me either, I've been using it for a long time, but solely because of the features, not the speed, and the difference is noticeable.

It was, but lacking NoScript support triggered a speedy manual downgrade to 56.0.2

YEP really!

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