HN Gopher Feed (2017-11-13) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
How Firefox Got Fast Again
1223 points by bpierre
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/entering-the-quantum-era-how-f...___________________________________________________________________
esturk - 1 hours ago
One thing I particularly like about the Mozilla Devtool is that
when I highlight an element, I can see the horizontal and vertical
lines that extend beyond the element box model which is great to
see if other items are leveled with the one selected. Does anyone
know if this is supported in Chrome or might there be an extension
that can reproduce this functionality?
steveadoo - 1 hours ago
"Show Rulers" in the chrome dev console settings.
esturk - 1 hours ago
Oh awesome! Thanks for the quick response.
JepZ - 2 hours ago
I hope it will not take too long until FF gets hardware
acceleration for videos on Linux (VAAPI/VDPAU). A few days ago I
installed Arch Linux on a Netbook and was shocked to see that FF
still doesn't have hardware acceleration for videos (VDPAU exists
since 2008).Some might say this is not much of an issue as most
modern CPUs can handle 1080p, but actually pre-Ryzen AMD CPUs are
too slow and power saving Intel CPUs Laptops are too slow too. So
the only excuse might be, that nobody uses that open source OS, but
especially from Mozilla I would not expect such an attitude towards
open source software.
Symmetry - 1 hours ago
A question as I consider moving to Firefox. On Chrome I've set my
search engine keywoards so I can open a new tab and type "w foo" to
search Wikipedia for "foo". And similar things for DuckDuckGo,
Hoogle, Amazon, etc. On Firefox I can do something similar if i'm
willing to click on a small icon rather than hitting enter or move
to the search bar with ctrl-k, type my term, then press tab a bunch
of times to select the right engine. Is there any good extension
to give Firefox Chrome's ergonomics here?
cadecairos - 1 hours ago
In Firefox, you can right click on any search box and there's an
option to "add a keyword search"For a Wikipedia search, you'd set
the keyword to "w" and then you'd get the identical behaviour you
have in Chrome when typing "w foo" in your Awesome Bar.
Symmetry - 57 minutes ago
Ah, there we go. I don't get the same visual cues which
confused me a bit but those aren't actually important at all.
Thank you very much.
mayhew - 1 hours ago
You can do this in Firefox by going to Preferences > Search > Set
"w" as the keyword for Wikipedia
Nition - 1 hours ago
No extension needed. Right-click in any search box on a website
and select "Add a Keyword for this Search." It looks like a
normal bookmark, but if you set a keyword on it, it'll work just
like Chrome.
eridius - 1 hours ago
If you just set your default search engine to DuckDuckGo, DDG has
!commands that do basically the same thing. So I can type "!wiki
foo" to search Wikipedia for "foo". And the other benefit is
you're not letting Google (or Bing or Yahoo or whatever) see your
search traffic anymore!
thisacctforreal - 34 minutes ago
Tangentially, is there a way to remove the &t=ffab query tag?
Presumably for "Firefox Address Bar"I noticed it on DDG searches
and couldn't figure a way to remove it. The "App Store for Search
Engines" seemed super overkill, I just want to specify my URLs
without the indentifier tags, like I can in chrom{e,ium}.
Viper007Bond - 27 minutes ago
That's been built into Firefox for well over a
decade:https://www.ghacks.net/2015/06/22/how-to-use-dynamic-
bookmar...
xf86alsa - 52 minutes ago
If DuckDuckGo is your default search engine, you can simply use
its bangs instead.Such as "!w term" for Wikipedia, "!a someitem"
for Amazon, "!yt video name" for YouTube etc. Also see "!g term"
for Google and/or "!s term" for Startpage, Google without
tracking.
campuscodi - 5 hours ago
Buuuuut.... if you delete more than 5 older passwords at a time, it
will crash. #truestorybroh
k__ - 2 hours ago
How long will it take to forget about this again?The whole story
reminds me of something a project manager, who worked at the Google
homepage, once said.They worked their asses off to get the page
smaller and smaller so the UX was unbeatable. Then, after they got
enough users, they focused on different things, and more and more
stuff was included.Somehow Firefox went the same way, right?First
they created it so it would be small, fast and modular, then it got
bloated to the max and now they set it on a diet again.Don't get me
wrong, I prefer Mozilla to Google, and I like that they even
explored experimental stuff like Rust and Servo to get on the right
track again.But for how long?
euyyn - 2 hours ago
The article mentions they're adding automatic tracking of
performance to their tests.> we?re adding lots of new tracking,
including improvements to CI automation running performance
tests, telemetry to track what users experience, and regression
management inside of bugs.
k__ - 1 hours ago
I'm not saying this is a technical problem.I'm saying, what
prohibits them in the future from stopping to care again?
Splines - 2 hours ago
Performance is usually death by a thousand cuts, and (imo) the
best way of mitigating this is by standardizing some measurements
and making that automated. Block changes that move performance
past this bar, make sure the organization buys off on this
approach. Any changes to a critical area that impact performance
need to be zero-sum - if you add something, you need to take
something away.
k__ - 1 hours ago
I'm not saying they can't do this.They are all real smart
people.I just have the fear they will forget about it in a few
years again.
oconnor663 - 2 hours ago
The cost of doing this in a large organization seem high
though. Are there good ways to solve problems like this:- A
newbie developer adds small feature, triggering some
performance test that was already close to failing. Now newbie
has to learn all about the performance of this large project
before they can land their first change.- The performance test
has a reasonable amount of noise. At first, 10% of test runs
fail it, and people just rerun them. Eventually 90% of test
runs fail, and people need to start dealing with it, but the
effort required to get it all the way back down to 10% is
unrealistic for any one person.- The product is something like
Microsoft Excel, that has a strong guarantee of backwards
compatibility across a wide variety of hardware and OS versions
that are difficult to test. Asking developers to delete code
from parts of the product they're not experts in, is likely to
break stuff.
Splines - 1 hours ago
> The performance test has a reasonable amount of noise. At
first, 10% of test runs fail it, and people just rerun them.
Eventually 90% of test runs fail, and people need to start
dealing with it, but the effort required to get it all the
way back down to 10% is unrealistic for any one person.This
is a tricky thing to deal with - (imo, again) how you deal
with this is twofold:1.) The automated test that measures
performance needs to be rock solid - whatever you measure
needs to be deterministic. Wall-clock time isn't always the
way to go (although it's the easiest), maybe you profile and
measure cpu cycles consumed by your application.2.) If you
capture performance over time then hopefully you can capture
a trend-line that shows performance degrading from other
changes that push the app past the performance bar. If your
dev loop is fast enough you can isolate performance
degradations to a small set of changes. Ideally if you
handle #1 above this won't be much of an issue. In my
experience changes that tank performance usually do so beyond
the threshold of noise.Regarding "newbie developer needs to
learn all about performance" and "asking developers to delete
code", that's why you need organizational buy-off. If your
changes are regressing performance in a core area that is
complex with a lot of legacy, maybe you shouldn't be making
changes there, or the org needs to be aware of and sign off
on letting your change go through. It doesn't always need to
be a hard and fast "reject all changes", but there needs to
be a discussion.
repsilat - 2 hours ago
It's not all them -- I think the saying that "Moore given and
Gates taketh away probably translates across to browsers and web
pages, too. Browser speed increases to render HTML and run JS
faster, people worry less about performance and write slower
pages because browsers are faster now, rinse and repeat. This
applies even more so to served ad code, where there are no
incentives to perform well.
nkkollaw - 2 hours ago
IMHO, there is even too much focusing on speed. Firefox got _cool_
again. It looks great, the logo looks great, animations are great.I
look at the thing most of the day, looks are important just as much
as speed.
shmerl - 6 hours ago
I'm waiting for full switch to Webrender and as result GPU
accelerated video decoding on Linux and switch to Wayland at last.
Danihan - 6 hours ago
The one major benchmark I use for browser speed is how fast Tagpro
runs, and it's definitely gotten much slower on Firefox recently,
to the extent that I need to generally play it on Chrome, even
though I normally much prefer Firefox to Chrome.
AnkhMorporkian - 6 hours ago
When the new Pixi version is dropped into place (I finished
coding that recently) it performs much better on Firefox. I agree
that with the current version it's definitely not great.Edit:
Just to be clear, when I say much better, I don't mean much
better than chrome, just better than it performs now. When I drop
RAF and just run the rendering loop as fast as possible, they get
roughly the same FPS on my cheapo laptop.
Danihan - 6 hours ago
Haha, crazy to see a core dev on here. Great work on the game,
been my favorite for years now.
heydonovan - 5 hours ago
I know this is just one data point, but I just downloaded Firefox
56, and it is still as slow as I remember. Loading YouTube seems to
lag behind Chrome, and viewing .gifv videos causes a noticeable
stutter. I'll give it another shot next version.
[deleted]
sp332 - 5 hours ago
Do you have one of these blacklisted GPUs?
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drive...
Barrin92 - 5 hours ago
57 is the big improvement with a huge jump in performance.
Definitely give it a try.
alkonaut - 5 hours ago
Are Google doing anything along the lines of Servo/WebRender
etc?I'm assuming the Chrome code suffers from the same issues the
FF did/does: you simply don't shoehorn in shared memory concurrency
in some nontrivial piece of C++ code.Mozilla threw some serious
research and time at the problem. Is Google doing that too? Or are
they confident enough that Chrome will be fast enough in the future
without major architectural refactoring?
SubiculumCode - 3 hours ago
Firefox Nightly user, and I honestly love it.
SadWebDeveloper - 2 hours ago
> This is the opportunity that the Chrome engineers foresaw. We saw
it too, but we had a bumpier path to get there. Since we had an
existing code base we needed to plan for how to split up that code
base to take advantage of multiple coresThe "bumpier path" is that
they removed XUL-based/legacy addons, only chrome-like addons (aka
WebExtensions) are now supported on FF57. Personally i still have
some extensions that are marked as Legacy, mainly for web
development so m going be slightly affected with this release, i
hope the performance gains are worth it.
ripdog - 1 hours ago
They're talking about Electrolysis there, which happened several
versions ago. XUL addons did indeed work with Electrolysis, but
required some modifications to work well. Most unmodified addons
continues to work through some magic cross-process API wrappers.
They didn't implement everything, had some bugs, and were quite
slow, but the fact that mozilla managed to keep most legacy
addons functional through the biggest architectural shakeup in
Firefox history shows their dedication and skill. It also
illustrates how much engineering effort went into keeping XUL
addons functional as firefox was re-architected, and thus why the
decision was made to abandon them and move to webextensions.What
addons are you missing for webdev?
sp332 - 1 hours ago
And before that, they added a ton of shims so that most old
extensions still worked with the new multiprocess model. A huge
amount of work.
bastijn - 3 hours ago
I want to put a comment on how awesome the drawings are. Just
skimming the drawings is sufficient to get the concepts. Style is
awesome too. Whoever drew them deserves a moment of attention.
tardo99 - 4 minutes ago
Does it still default to Yahoo search?
beemboy - 3 hours ago
I can still remember:* that moment I was overjoyed to use Lynx over
dialup in South India back in the mid-90s allowing me to browse the
World Wide Web!* ...And then that moment being surpassed when I wet
myself running the Netscape "GUI browser" on Windows 95 using a
brilliant hack by a pair of brothers I knew that wrote a
winsock.dll shim on top of Lynx over dialup (called Blue Laser;
those guys went on to become CS PhDs doing microprocessor
research)* ...And then that moment being surpassed when IE4 came
out in '97 and I couldn't imagine what a faster browser could be or
do.* ...And then that moment when FF 1 came out in '04 and I
thought this is incredible, Netscape is alive!! and kicked IE's a55
and me thinking the "browser wars" are over* ...And then that
moment when Google Chrome came out and I went "who needs another
browser??" and then switching wholesale to it in short order*
...Many moments in between thinking "Wow, the browser wars really
are over in my lifetime"* ...And that moment 2 weeks ago when I
installed Firefox Quantum beta (Firefox??) and went "Holy crap,
this thing is FAST!" and then switched all my browsers everywhere
to it. To a beta browser.It sure is a good time to be a nerd.Keep
up the great work moz://aPS - edited to reformat
abraae - 1 hours ago
I still remember seeing Netscape for the first time. Seeing web
pages was astonishing enough, then I suddenly realised you could
browse the web in multiple windows, at the same time. Blew my
mind.
vim_wannabe - 1 hours ago
Then subsequently lost my focus. And as they say, the rest is
history.
maephisto - 6 hours ago
One thing that troubles me is why does a non profit open source
browser buy premium offline ad space to promote itself? There's a
huge "The new Firefox" ad in down-town Berlin.
Mathnerd314 - 6 hours ago
There's a non-profit Mozilla Foundation and a for-profit Mozilla
Corporation. Presumably MoCo bought the ad.
acdha - 6 hours ago
Mozilla makes money from having users ? it may be open-source but
the developers still need to be paid. They don't have a captive
audience like Windows or Google.com users to advertise on, so
public ads seem necessary.
pmoriarty - 6 hours ago
"Mozilla makes money from having users"Wait, how does that work
again? Last I checked you couldn't deposit users at the bank
or pay your rent with them.
r3bl - 6 hours ago
ELI5 example: The more users you have, the more the search
providers (like Google, Yahoo and Yandex) may pay you to be
the default search provider in a certain region.
addicted - 6 hours ago
When a user searches Google from the Firefox toolbar (or
Yahoo, or Bing) the relevant search engine pays them a little
bit of money.
fabrice_d - 6 hours ago
Not really "per search"... the deals are negotiated for N
years. If that was per search Mozilla's finances would not
be in such good shape, which could actually help them focus
on chasing the right targets.
ksk - 6 hours ago
Why does it trouble you?
maephisto - 5 hours ago
Wasn't really aware about MoCo and their deals with all major
search engines.
eliben - 5 hours ago
Did it? With FF 56 on Ubuntu lately I have to restart Firefox once
in a day or two because its memory usage balloons out of
proportions (> 1 GB for 4 open tabs) and it starts getting
sluggish. It felt speedier a few months ago
r3bl - 5 hours ago
The entire premise of that article is that it applies to v57,
which is going to be released tomorrow.
shadowtree - 6 hours ago
Been using FF consistently on OSX the last years, the improvements
are really great - Kudos!The various channels, like Quantum to stay
on Beta, seem to have worked. Easy to understand as a user and
hopefully helpful for the devs to gather important info. Plus a
native dark theme, yay!One thing that remains is performance of
Youtube. For some reason HD videos start crushing the processor
after a while. Chrome, Safari stay calm.
[deleted]
ameshkov - 2 minutes ago
FF has indeed become faster now, but man, how bad is it's dev
tools. I remember this time when I kept FF for development purposes
solely due to firebug. Things might reverse this time as Chrome's
dev tools are Superior to FF's counterpart.
graphememes - 3 hours ago
To everyone using "54" and "57" use the Nightly build, it is
actually a lot better.I was going to comment about the slow
scrolling, laggy input, and horrific experience that I have
normally using Firefox. Then, I decided to try out the Nightly
build.It removes all of that.However, it still has a horrible
developer tools experience.
oatmealsnap - 1 hours ago
Even better than 57? I moved from Nightly to the Beta channel
along with 57.
5ourpu55 - 6 hours ago
Firefox mobile has extensions, specifically an ad-blocker
extension.
PascLeRasc - 2 hours ago
I decided to give FirefoxNightly a chance as a longtime Chrome
user/apologist. It's impressive and I like the design changes, but
it's still keeping my MBP very warm and listed as "Using
Significant Energy" in the battery info while I've been using it
for ~3 hours. Not to mention it feels kinda laggy, especially in
text input. Still, I like the changes like seeing zoom percent in
the omnibar and the preferences menu design. I won't be switching
over fully, but I'll keep it around and continue to check out
changes.
voidmain - 4 hours ago
I wonder if better use of multiple cores by a single webpage (what
they are calling "fine grained parallelism") is actually a good
idea. It seems like web developers can and probably will eat up any
improvement in performance by building slower sites. So in the long
run equilibrium, your computer's performance and energy consumption
suffer, while the web remains just barely fast enough to tolerate.
balajics - 5 hours ago
Using 57 for few days, speed improvements are impressive.But two
things which is going to stop me from complete switch. 1. There is
no native websocket inspector. websocket-monitor[0] add-on which
supported websocket inspection is not compatible with quantum.
Really wish they speed up native support development[1] 2. Double
tap zoom really makes it easy to find UI issues. Really wish it get
implemented in firefox too.[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/websocket-mon... [1]
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508
fiatjaf - 5 hours ago
Ok. It is indeed great. I've switched to Firefox completely since
57. But it is not as fast as Chrome yet.There was a page with
performance charts comparing it with Chrome from the FF dev team
somewhere. Where is it?
m_st - 7 hours ago
I switched from Chrome to Firefox 57 beta and couldn't be happier.
Only issue so far was the ugly black title bar on the Mac, but
switching to the integrated 'Light' theme fixed that. Too bad
'Light' isn't the default on macOS.Also note their updated Firefox
on iOS. It looks and works just fine now and comes with Firefox
Sync which gives you access to your tabs, bookmarks and history.
nikisweeting - 2 hours ago
"Light" themes hurt my eyes and look horrible, dark all the way
for me. To each their own :)
_greim_ - 3 hours ago
> Also note their updated Firefox on iOSI was under the
impression Apple didn't allow any web rendering engines on iOS
except the one mobile Safari uses, thus Chrome, Firefox, etc, on
iOS are just wrappers around the Safari engine. Is that not the
case anymore? It would be nice to see these speedups on iOS.
Sylos - 2 hours ago
That is still the case. Firefox for iOS is also just a WebKit
wrapper. Mozilla mainly released it for the people that use
Firefox on the desktop and want to sync their stuff.
robin_reala - 7 hours ago
I?m using Firefox on iOS fulltime now, as in the last couple of
releases ad blockers and 1Password have gained support.
luhn - 6 hours ago
How do you use 1Password with Firefox on iOS? It's not an
option for me in the Share modal, so I've been having to switch
to Safari.
robin_reala - 4 hours ago
It was only added in the last couple of weeks I think.
Clicking the menu button in the address bar then ?Share page
with? shows it for me.
luhn - 2 hours ago
Yeah, seems to have been fixed in 10.0 and I was running
several versions behind. (For whatever reason iOS didn't
list it as an available update.) I reinstalled Firefox and
now it works.
okneil - 7 hours ago
Firefox on iOS supports content blockers? I thought that was
Safari only.
robin_reala - 6 hours ago
Public APIs landed in March:
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=150479
okneil - 6 hours ago
This looks like tracking protection has been enabled in
WebKit; content blocking is something else.https://develope
r.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Ge...
konart - 5 hours ago
>ugly black title barOne of the best thins in the new FF to me
though (also macos). I still hope apple will to something to
their gray ui. I'd love to have dark theme for the ui, not only
for menubar and dock.
wbkang - 7 hours ago
Same on Windows, I wish the light theme was the default.
m_st - 6 hours ago
I prefer the default theme on Windows 10 as there the title
bars of the other windows like Settings and Explorer use the
same style, which is the color defined in 'Colors' in the
settings. Using the 'Light' theme makes Firefox looking
different which isn't nice.Haven't seen any other black title
bar on my Mac though...
contravariant - 6 hours ago
I think light is the default for the release version, but devs
seem to like dark UIs for some reason.
alex_duf - 6 hours ago
The reason is eye strain in poorly lit offices :)
Sylos - 2 hours ago
There's a Light theme, a Normal theme and a Dark theme.Dark
is the default for the Developer Edition, which is what
you're thinking of. But Normal is the default for Stable.
Light is almost the same as Normal, but with a few more
elements in white.
weihanglo - 5 hours ago
I thought it is a translucent title bar. At least in Firefox
Nightly 59 it is.
agumonkey - 4 hours ago
I think it just got pushed for the fresh 59.0a release
(memories of changelog)
ubercore - 3 hours ago
Grey bar for me on OS X, 59.0a1 (2017-11-13)
adregan - 5 hours ago
Well how about that?! I always run "reduce transparency" and
"increase contrast" as I never really like the translucent
items (System Preferences > Accessibility > Display), and I too
thought the new UI was a black bar with a light colored window.
I have been enjoying the dark theme in both the developer
edition (work) and nightly (home).
[deleted]
[deleted]
darrmit - 5 hours ago
I'm patiently waiting for improved profile support and better
Chrome add-on support before I can abandon Chrome entirely.Been
running Firefox for my personal browsing almost exclusively for
years (with the occasional Chrome use) but I still can't ditch
Chrome for work because of a few add-ons that don't work in Firefox
- mainly Mixmax.
mattmanser - 7 hours ago
Serious question, is this too little too late?Firefox has taken a
massive nosedive in the last few years, in the UK at least. My two
big clients have them on less than 2% share.Just checked one, 5
years ago they had 9.55% share, today it's 1.8%. Even taking into
account the growth of mobile, that's dire.
digi_owl - 6 hours ago
It may even be worse than that. They have effectively thrown out
all that made Firefox distinct in any user facing sense to
achieve this.
fauigerzigerk - 5 hours ago
Firefox does have some distinct features that are important to
me. I want to open links from Gmail or Inbox without being
logged in to my Google account. Firefox containers are perfect
for that. I also like snoozing tabs and quick tab switching by
typing % into the address bar.Some of these things can be done
in other browsers using third party extensions, but I am
extremely reluctant when it comes to third party extensions for
security reasons.[Edit] Very important to me as well is built-
in reader view.
anirudhan - 4 hours ago
I didn't know we can switch tabs by typing '%' in the address
bar. Helpful indeed.
Manishearth - 3 hours ago
You can also just type something matching the tab name or
URL and "switch to tab" will be in the results in the
address bar, usually at the top. It's very nice especially
for when you have lots of tabs and you want to do "Open the
page matching this from my history unless that tab is
already open, in which case switch to tab" because you can
just type into the address bar and press enter and it will
work.
unethical_ban - 2 hours ago
I understand the concern about the extensions/addons changes,
but FF is still a distinct browser.Several things immediately
come to mind:* Mozilla is a more trustworthy company than
Google, so all things being equal, I'll take their product.*
Container tabs (or multi-account tabs now) are a killer feature
for privacy and greatly improve the "multi profile" use case*
Firefox Mobile allows extensions, where Chrome doesn't support
it.The only negative for me with FF is that in the enterprise,
FF Kerberos/SSO function seems inferior to Chrome, which "just
works".But for it being closed source, I think Vivaldi is a
better experience than Chrome. Sure it's "just" a reskin, but
point is, Chrome is in 3rd place in my opinion.
iterati - 6 hours ago
This is sadly true. I switched off Chrome 5+ years ago due to
the "vim-like" plugins being much better on FF than Chrome
(specifically, my keybindings not working on built-in pages)
and since FF56, vimperator and pentadactly no longer function.
There have been months of back-and-forth between some
developers and the FF team, but the functionality required for
these plugins has never been prioritized and I had to disable
automatic updating and download FF54 so that everything would
function. Today I just gave up caring and installed cVim on
Vivaldi (https://vivaldi.com/) which is Good Enough for now.
gfodor - 5 hours ago
Saka keys on Firefox has been a suitable replacement for me.
nindalf - 5 hours ago
Not me personally, but there will always be a vocal
minority who will complain about having their workflow
broken. Any replacement will be missing some critical
feature. For a person affected by this, it is a painful
experience having their entire workflow broken so they
resort to dire warnings on forums such as this one
('Firefox is finished without
').In this
case, I think Firefox made a good choice in modernising the
codebase and the extension APIs. In 2 years we'll find out
if the vim people were right or they were indulging in
hyperbole.
iterati - 3 hours ago
Less "dire warnings on forums" and more "slow development
pace for required pieces to make my workflow even
possible again".Here's an issue opened June 9 that hasn't
been addressed by the Mozilla team and hasn't had any
updates in a month: https://github.com/cmcaine/keyboard-
api/issues/1Here's the request for a better keyboard API
(referenced in the above) that's been open for over 2
years with no end in sight:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061I'm
sure the new FF is going to make some users happy, but as
you said, having your workflow broken is quite painful,
and the Mozilla team has known about this for years but
still not made the upgrade path bearable.
CaptSpify - 2 hours ago
eh... I use it now, and it's OK. It's missing a ton of
features that Vimperator had, and it will likely never get
them.
catamorphismic - 4 hours ago
Search for Tridactyl, which is aiming to reimplement the
Vimperator/Pentadactyl feature set in WebExtensions Firefox.
It's still in early stages of development but there is
already an initial release on AMO with some basic features
implemented and with a very familiar feel.
iterati - 3 hours ago
I've tried Tridactyl, but the plugin not working on Firefox
pages is the same frustration I had with vim plugins for
Chrome.
pweissbrod - 4 hours ago
If you were heavily utilizing the nmemonics provided by those
vim-like plugins (I was before the upgrade) you may be quite
pleased by the fast minimal experience bought by qute-browser
which is basically webkit wrapped in python/qt bringing a
browser built centrally around vim interaction (as opposed to
a plugin)
iterati - 3 hours ago
If the vim stuff was the only plugin I needed, I'd move
over in a heartbeat.
DiThi - 5 hours ago
Give it some time. I was expecting not to switch because of
lack of Tree Style Tabs until around end of year. But I
switched some weeks ago. Some addon authors use this
opportunity to make a better addon. A few days ago
GreaseMonkey has been released with a new API. And of course
there will be new addons made by other people to replace lost
functionality. It's happening, just not overnight.
iterati - 3 hours ago
That's the issue - there's no real path to making these
legacy plugins work. There are open issues for a keyboard
api for FF that has had very little movement over months,
so while I'm sure it'll eventually get to a point where I
can use FF as I used to, that not being the case now has
given me little reason to stay with FF and so back to
Chrome I went.
DiThi - 2 hours ago
It's too soon to judge, I think. I would be happy using
the old FF if the new one didn't have already the things
I need. In the mean time I would try to collaborate. Once
FF 57 is out of beta officially, there will eventually be
enough people with itches to scratch. It was in my plans
to implement Tree Style Tabs properly if no alternative
appeared before end of the year.
konart - 5 hours ago
>specifically, my keybindings not working on built-in
pagesThis is a restriction for chrome-store extensions. You
can install one manually without with "feature"
pessimizer - 5 hours ago
Which means that they have to compete on marketing against
Google.
eitland - 6 hours ago
Depends a bit: if devs switch back I'd say definitely.If devs are
ready to repeat the IE 6 story, this time with Chrome.Getting
companies to do cross browser testing seems hard even if it it
should be simpler than ever before.. :-/
zamalek - 5 hours ago
I switched to Quantum as my daily driver a few weeks ago, I
love it as a user. It has made me hate the Chrome dev tools
with white hot passion. Firebug might be gone, but the new dev
tools are a masterpiece of usability. I emphatically recommend
developer edition as a development browser.
DiThi - 2 hours ago
Indeed, I didn't think it could surpass Chrome's dev tools
quality so quickly.
Manishearth - 3 hours ago
Yeah, the new devtools are pretty nice! The revamp is missing
some bits (e.g. the pretty printer is missing for files
without a sourcemap) but I suspect that will trickle through
slowly.I've noticed that a lot of folks don't realize there
are a bunch more devtools tabs that you can enable hidden in
the settings (including a shader editor, a canvas debugger,
and a DOM inspector). They're less useful than the main four
(inspector/console/debugger/network) but are pretty neat and
help a lot.
fabrice_d - 6 hours ago
Until they figure out a way to address their irrelevance on
Mobile, devs will never fully switch since they have to do
testing on mobile devices.It is really sad that Gecko is
becoming so good, but is mainly used to power a product in what
is becoming a niche market (yes, desktop is becoming a niche in
terms of users relative to mobile).
eitland - 6 hours ago
I posting from Firefox monile now. It's my main browser.If I
use Chrome only it is for my sockpuppet accounts.I far prefer
FF even on mobile.
mattmanser - 3 hours ago
I found it ate all my memory and crashed frequent. Nexus
5X.
CaptSpify - 2 hours ago
One of the things I found was that I had to use their
Beta. Their main build wouldn't even start for me.
fabrice_d - 6 hours ago
Sure, I'm not saying that no one uses Firefox on
Android.But their mobile marketshare is totally irrelevant
compared to Chrome, UCBrowser or the Samsung browser (even
this one alone has about as many users as Fx Desktop).
hsivonen - 4 hours ago
The amount of desktop usage hasn't gone down with mobile
usage going up. Desktop isn't niche.That said, more market
share for Fennec would be nice.(This comment written in
Fennec.)
Paul-ish - 5 hours ago
Percentage of total users is deceptive in some ways. The absolute
number of FF users can stay the same, or even rise, and their %
share can decline. It is absolute number of users that impacts
the deals they can make. That's not to say a larger % wouldn't be
good for FF.
Brakenshire - 4 hours ago
Firefox needs a serious presence in mobile. If the browser is
competitive with Chrome, and also supports webextensions, it
stands a fairly good chance, at least boosting up a few
percentage points.
chungy - 4 hours ago
Firefox Focus/Klar is a pretty compelling app. :-)
frostwhale - 7 hours ago
Firefox is about more than market share. A state of the art free
non for profit browser makes the market much more competitive and
better for the consumer. They are there to keep chrome/ other
browsers honest. If chrome / google does something too corporate
you don't like, there's an alternative.
tjoff - 6 hours ago
That is all so very true. But it is also utterly irrelevant if
market share drops too much. That will unavoidably lead to
incompatibilities which will without doubt ensure that only die
hard enthusiasts will use it.Which means it won't be an
alternative anymore and it will die.
frostwhale - 5 hours ago
Very fair point. This is why Firefox 57 is so great IMO, i
started using firefox again and now I don't think I'll leave
it again soon. I think i'm not alone.
[deleted]
sillysaurus3 - 7 hours ago
That seems a dangerous line of thinking, like arguing that
startups are about more than growth.Firefox is looking like
Apple circa 1997. They can still recover, but they have to
focus on what people want.
MaxBarraclough - 6 hours ago
Your Apple analogy might be quite apt. Mac has a market-share
of something like 14%, but that's not Apple failing, that's
Apple succeeding in targeting the expensive end of the
market.Firefox has a chance at doing the same thing with
privacy-aware users and/or power users.To that end, they need
to stop dumbing-down the browser and endlessly playing catch-
up with Chrome.
nachosgalore - 5 hours ago
Spot on. Chrome is not the standard by which all others are
judged. Like some others here, I've used Firefox since it
existed, even when it was Phoenix and Firebird. The only
other browser I will use besides FF-based browsers is Uzbl.
Firefox allows me to lock down and customise my browser in
ways Chrome does not. Let's not even go into the privacy
nightmare that is Chrome.
Santosh83 - 2 hours ago
They're doing well now, especially since Electrolysis. But
they can't beat Chrome being bundled in literally everywhere.
Most average Joes will never switch from the bundled browser.
Firefox needs to cut some deals to get bundled in as well.
Sadly I doubt they have resources for this...
jasonkostempski - 6 hours ago
I think most users don't care how fast the browser is at the
level they're boasting about. They've been fast enough for
many years for most use cases. They should do a commercial
showing they can run uBlock Origin on Android, how fast sites
load compared to without it, and jump on the "annoying ad"
train Apple and Google seem to be bragging about fixing
latley by "solving" a few problems uO had solved, the right
way, for years.
jonnytran - 4 hours ago
I completely disagree. I care a lot about privacy, but
I've been unable to use Firefox for a long time now because
of speed. Up until now, Chrome has just been significantly
faster, to the point where I couldn't justify Firefox for
everyday usage. I think a lot of people feel the same,
especially those who know less about privacy. I hope the
situation changes. If they were in the same ballpark in
terms of speed, then my choice would be clear, but they
haven't been.It would be like using Tor all the time. You
know it's better, but the difference in speed is so great,
that you have to make a conscious choice. I think I speak
for a lot of people when I say that I want the benefits
_without_ compromising speed.
addicted - 3 hours ago
I agree. Browser speed does not affect consumer choice
directly. Very few people chose Chrome over Firefox
because it was slightly faster or slightly more stable.
The vast majority of users chose Chrome because it felt
better.Also, Google's pushing it helped. Otherwise
consider how Chrome has occupied an IE like market share
despite the quality Delta between Chrome and IE/Edge,
Firefox or Safari is significantly lesser than the Delta
between Firefox and IE was a decade ago, yet Firefox
peaked at a much lower marketshare than Chrome's today.
frostwhale - 6 hours ago
They are not like apple because their goal is not the same as
a for profit company. While you could still argue they're
failing, i was just saying market share isn't the only
indicator for a corporation in their position.
icebraining - 7 hours ago
As a dedicated FF user since Phoenix, I fully agree, but if few
people actually use the alternative, it probably gets harder to
get any kind of revenue deals :|
TylerE - 7 hours ago
Mozilla is NOT a non-
profit.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
r3bl - 6 hours ago
Mozilla Corporation is, as you can see on the first sentence
of that page, a subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation[0], which is
itself a non-profit.[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
lmkg - 6 hours ago
The Mozilla Foundation IS a non-profit, with Mozilla
Corporation as a wholly-owned
subsidiary.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
AznHisoka - 7 hours ago
I personally think so. I also think their latest work on
replacing Firebug and PhantomJS are way way late as well. I
commend them on improving their tools, but man, Google has just
eaten their lunch the past 10 years.
kuschku - 7 hours ago
> but man, Google has just eaten their lunch the past 10
years.Maybe because Google actively pays people to install
Chrome without the users knowledge, and force it as default.
That?s pretty much the definition of malware already.It?s hard
to win against someone that does such hostile behaviour.
mastax - 5 hours ago
Also because Mozilla wasted a lot of effort on FirefoxOS.
That's when the browser really stagnated.
fauigerzigerk - 4 hours ago
They had to try. Mobile devices are way more restrictive
than the PC ever was. The companies that dominate the OS
have unprecedented power and leverage.If Mozilla's goal is
to strengthen the interests of a wide range of users
against the narrow interests of two or three oligopolists
they have to consider entering the OS game in spite of the
immense difficulties.
fabrice_d - 5 hours ago
You are totally wrong on the wasted effort. FirefoxOS
actually pushed a lot of the performance improvements that
are seen as wonderful in this release. I kind of LOLed when
people re-discovered things like how sync layout was bad.
So much knowledge was lost in Moz when they killed FxOS
that it's a showcase of bad leadership.The desktop browser
was stagnating because the browser owners had no idea where
to drive it, and some people with the castle keys were
change adverse (some finally "left"). They took as an
excuse that they could not get support from the platform
team, so the platform team killed FxOS support and ended up
being absorbed by the Firefox organization to become just
the fx backend team (great strategy!). I guess the platform
VP was so frightened by the Tofino experiment and Fx
Desktop moving away from Gecko that he didn't understand
that was betting on the wrong horse long term.
pcwalton - 5 hours ago
Well, in general, I don't see Quantum as elevating the
concerns of desktop over mobile. Moving to parallel
implementations of functionality can help even more on
mobile than on desktop, since Android phones have tended
to embrace multicore faster than desktop has. (Apple
phones are a different story, but Gecko obviously can't
be relevant there, and even Apple is finally moving to
high core counts in the past year.)
fabrice_d - 5 hours ago
Patrick, you know that the MoCo has focused 110% on
desktop the last 1.5 year. Or if you don't, you should
ask the Android platform team (eg. snorp).
keithnz - 2 hours ago
I don't think it's too late, always room for a better browser,
I've swapped to Quantum and I think it's better than chrome,
especially as a dev. I swapped to chrome when it came out, and
it's been the better browser for a long time, but I think that's
changed. I'm certainly recommending it. Even Edge feels better
than chrome at the moment.The other thing I'm trialing is using
duckduckgo as a search engine which is quite good, but google is
still mostly better, but since you can google from ddg, I'm
sticking with it for the moment.
nachtigall - 2 hours ago
FWIW, Firefox is still number one in Germany (desktop only) which
is not an to be underrated economy.
jasonlotito - 6 hours ago
Considering where Firefox started and the dominant browser at the
time, it's in a much better position than the first time
around.Remember, Firefox was never the dominant browser, and
where it is now is where it has almost always been.
skizm - 6 hours ago
Chrome remote desktop is just too good for me to ditch chrome
entirely. Can anyone suggest a good (free) alternative?
huntie - 3 hours ago
I've been pretty happy with FF57. One thing I've noticed is that
opening a new tab seems to block the browser. I have my new tab
page set to a personal web page, which takes 150ms to fetch. If I
open a new tab and press F6 before the page is loaded, it doesn't
read the input.Other than that the only thing I really want is tab
groups.
philippeback - 1 hours ago
Dev edition is fast. The other ones not so much indeed.
hateful - 6 hours ago
I've started switching back last week. I'm only using Chrome for
any Google Services (drive, gmail, hangouts) and development (for
now, but only since I'm used to it and have deadlines). I am very
hopeful at this point.
serveboy - 4 hours ago
I tried making the switch from Chrome but ran into three issues :1)
Firefox does not import Chrome logins and passwords. Major pain.2)
Firefox freezes when importing Chrome history and bookmarks. I get
a "script is taking too long" message. If I force close and reopen,
then try to delete the partially imported content, it freezes as
well with the same message. Tried deleting profile and restarting
restarting to no avail.3) (more of a nuisance than a real issue) I
need to use the same browser on all devices so that everything is
in sync. Google Search in Firefox Android looks like a page from
the 90s and is missing Search Tools. Maybe Google isn't playing
nice?Did people migrating from Chrome experience issues 1) and 2)?
Tried the initial import on Linux and macOS, same issue.
dzaragozar - 2 hours ago
Cute drawings in the page, but a distinct lack of benchmarks.
have_faith - 5 hours ago
I can't remember the last time I thought about how "fast" a browser
is except for edge cases like complex WebGL stuff.I don't think
focusing on speed will plug the gap of users leaving for other
browsers except for the minority of us on HN. I can't remember the
last time a non-technical person I know complained about browser
speed beyond a website itself being slow.
a_imho - 5 hours ago
Are you using a vanilla browser or do you have a content blocker
installed perhaps? There is a very noticeable difference in load
times and I would definitely consider the former 'slow'.I agree
though, that rendering performance is not the bottleneck of the
browsing experience.
andrew3726 - 5 hours ago
Well, for me at least, I always recognize if a button click/UI
interaction doesn't force a visible and immediate UI response.
That's one of the main reasons why I switched a couple of years
to Chromium and now back to Firefox. It really responds fast. I
totally agree that there were _very_ few instances where I
noticed a rendering time difference.
elliotec - 4 hours ago
Are you talking about the UI of the browser itself or websites
you're viewing? If it's the latter, it's probably the website
being slow.
hendersoon - 3 hours ago
Mouse gestures in Linux and MacOS are completely broken due to a
known bug. They have a Linux patch likely slated for version 58 (in
6 weeks) but no MacOS patch
yet.https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1360278Mouse
gestures are critically important to me, so I'm sticking with
Vivaldi until this is fixed.
lucb1e - 3 hours ago
Same here. I'm just not updating...
rayascott - 4 hours ago
Long live Rust.
jaux - 1 hours ago
I have tried to switch back to ff from chrome several times now
(first try was when developer edition came out, second try was when
multi-tasking came out) but failed, because ff has been too slow in
comparison.Downloading the new developer edition now... Hope it can
stay on my dock this time!
metmirr - 6 hours ago
It?s great progress with `rust` and people behind it. I loved night
mode on iOS. But on Linux still first launch is slow. _ubuntu17.04_
heavenlyblue - 4 hours ago
Could you please elaborate on the "night mode"?
srathi - 5 hours ago
I've moved completely to Firefox from Chrome about a month back,
but haven't found a way to use my Chromecast from Firefox. Does
Anyone have a possible solution?
Sir_Cmpwn - 6 hours ago
I appreciate that Firefox is doing great work getting it faster,
but at the same time they're doing awful work by baking in shitty
cloud features and turning their add-on ecosystem into a walled
garden. One step forward, two steps back.
millstone - 5 hours ago
I tried Firefox 57 hoping to like it, and I found it's still too
alien feeling on the Mac. The scroll bar looks, behaves, and
animates differently. Text selection looks and behaves differently.
Even the cursor blinks differently. It feels out-of-place.I wish
there were a community effort to build a true native Firefox
version, instead of trying to recreate standard Mac behaviors.
kristofferR - 3 hours ago
Camino used to be exactly that:
https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/7548/camino
HaoZeke - 2 hours ago
Firefox lost its biggest use case.. The extensions. Besides, the
new version is similar to Chrome in memory usage for multiple tabs
which is HUGE disappointment.
Spivak - 1 hours ago
I mean it's not an order of magnitude improvement but it's still
significant.The extension ecosystem is great right now. A few
high profile extensions aren't being ported but there are a lot
of cool new extensions popping up and it's never been easier to
port between browsers.
eref - 2 hours ago
It is a great opportunity to shake up the sphere of extension
development a bit. New alternatives pop up every day and
eventually the best will stick. Here is a list:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECI...
mnm1 - 4 hours ago
Nice work. Now all they have to do is work out the bugs with their
dev tools and convince thousands of programmers to update their old
FF addons and it might be a browser worth using as a primary
browser again someday. One step forward, two steps back seems to be
Mozilla's motto these last few years.
karllager - 6 hours ago
Firefox 56 had some kind of performance regression[1], but FF
Quantum is a joy to use.[1]
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74irm5/is_ff_super...
acqq - 6 hours ago
Yes, for my girlfriend, during some last few months Firefox is
much slower than before: she uses it mostly for Facebook and
Youtube, she doesn't have any extensions installed by herself
(not counting the stuff that is in Firefox because Firefox
marketing initiatives, like Pocket) and no adbockers, but Firefox
uses so much CPU that it gets completely unusable.And she is not
any extreme Facebook user: she has less than 500 "friends." And
she doesn't have big "subscriptions" list in Youtube.So it's
completely opposite of the propaganda: the average user, using
the most common sites, is hit to the that much CPU more use that
the most common sites are unusable.So what's going on here? It's
just the propaganda machine claiming the opposite of what is
actually happening at the moment. They maybe have good goals but
at the moment it's worse than, for example, a year ago.Maybe it's
because she doesn't have a newly bought computer, which are the
ones used by those who test? And I guess those who test don't use
Facebook and Youtube?I also use Firefox but spend zero time in
Facebook and minimal time on Youtube and block Javascript
wherever I can, so I don't see the same. But I saw the CPU on her
computer staying completely blocked by something Firefox is
doing. The only thing I was able to figure out: around 40 percent
is spent in kernel according to the task manager. Both cores are
used more than 90 percent, and the Firefox is not responsive. She
doesn't do anything more than scrolling down her Facebook to see
that effect. It's not always that bad, obviously depends on the
content on the Facebook, but it's bad often enough for her to see
the slowness regularly, and when it really gets stuck to complain
to me.What I personally observe is the pages embedding more
linked Youtube videos got to be very slow to even display them.
Those are the pages I stumble on occasionally, so I didn't
investigate. The second effect I've observed is writing a longer
post for HN on Firefox getting much slower (less responsive) the
longer the post is. Like writing these words now.So, dear Firefox
people, your product is really SLOWER for me too in the last
versions, and not faster. And it is extremely slower for a
"normal" user using the "normal" Facebook and
Youtube.(Additionally, I use a number of extensions, and only one
will remain available soon when they turn off the support for
what they mark as "legacy" extensions. That is really strange
decision, deciding to remove the major difference between them
and Chrome, becoming just as limited as Chrome is for extensions
and wasting the work of most of the extension developers.)
sp332 - 5 hours ago
Firefox's Webextensions APIs are much more expansive than
Chrome's. They still have an active developer community so the
ecosystem will recover quickly.
DiThi - 5 hours ago
Did any of you try FF 57? I also used a lot of extensions, but
basically all the ones that mattered to me work again. (For
tree style tabs I have to add a bit of CSS in a file to make it
not awkward, though)
acqq - 5 hours ago
I've just installed 57 for me. The English Dictionary is gone
-- now all the words I type here are with wiggly lines, I see
"add dictionaries" but I had the darned dictionary already
and what's the use trying to add the same? I don't know what
to do next. The extensions are all gone, including the
NoScript for which the developer claimed that he's adding
support for new Firefox -- I checked noscript.net -- I have
had the very last version. The mozilla site writes "Not
compatible with Firefox Quantum". Noscript was the most used
extension from a dozen I have had.From the less used ones, as
an example I've used "Copy Plain Text 2." Now I see there's a
new similar and compatible extension by somebody else I
guess, but it's obviously more limited: "Note: WebExtension
API does not allow setting Copy PlainText as the default copy
function of the browser at the moment, neither does it allow
user defined keyboard shorts. Once there are such an APIs, I
will add the feature."Others have no replacements at all, not
surprising seeing the limitations even for the simple "Copy
Plain Text."(Edit: regarding performance details see my other
posts here.)It's really as bad as it can be.It's really bad.
DiThi - 5 hours ago
I was rather asking about performance for your
girlfriend.Regarding addons, I'd say give it time. It's a
chicken and egg problem that will be solved with time. I
was not expecting to switch until end of the year.
pcwalton - 4 hours ago
> So what's going on here? It's just the propaganda machine
claiming the opposite of what is actually happening at the
moment. They maybe have good goals but at the moment it's worse
than, for example, a year ago.It sounds like you are hitting
some kind of bug. Feel free to file issues about it if it's
reproducible; the telemetry should also be automatically
reporting the issues you're seeing.I would like to respectfully
suggest that you hitting a bug is not evidence of a "propaganda
machine".
acqq - 4 hours ago
Slowdown on Facebook and Youtube up to getting stuck (exactly
what I talk about) was reported in some form at least since
February this year, e.g. this Reddit:https://www.reddit.com/r
/firefox/comments/5sikxt/firefox_unb...I've found that link
after my GF complained many times, and I've seen the CPU at
more than 90% (40% in Kernel) and Firefox stuck after only
her visiting Facebook and scrolling down. It was hard even to
kill the Firefox. I saw bugzilla entries too. Some quadratic
loops for every element, triggering recalculating
"everything" even if the result shouldn't change were
mentioned if I remember.What I claim is that on 56.0.2 (the
most recent version until tomorrow) is still not better, FF
getting stuck and CPU being fully stressed, and that the
"subscriptions" can't be the only issue (which is the only
scenario that the developers accused if I remember correctly
the bugzilla conversations). The computer seeing this at
almost 100% CPU and Firefox remaining unresponsive has only
two cores, AMD CPU. If it's accidentally "better" on 16-core
machine of some developer who doesn't use the mentioned sites
anyway, my girlfriend can't change it.Of course nobody is
going to give FF developers her own Facebook access for them
to reproduce it.As for my GF the most of the internet are
Facebook and Youtube, I suspect she'll really have to switch
to Chrome if it continues. She already did "refresh Firefox"
or however it is called now more than once. No change. And
she is certainly not an outlier (and regarding the slowdown I
see, I type these words on Firefox 57 (I downloaded it after
reading other comments about the FTP availability, I see
"Stylo true (enabled by default)") on 4 core / HT Intel and
typing these last lines is also quite unresponsive and my
notebook fan started at maximum even if unsurprisingly for 8
virtual cores I don't see much CPU use on the indicator --
something is still obviously wrong even on the very light
site like HN and on the more powerful machine -- I guarantee
you I see this only in Firefox and when I use native
programming editors everything flies all the time).
pcwalton - 3 hours ago
If it is indeed style recalculation that is causing the
problem, then Quantum (57) may well solve the issue, as
Stylo both improves the dynamic restyling behavior (the
style sharing optimization is more flexible) and
accelerates the slow case in which restyling needs to occur
from scratch (via parallelism). I can't promise anything
without being able to reproduce, of course.Naturally, like
all browser engines, Gecko takes performance on popular
sites such as Facebook very seriously.
masterleep - 5 hours ago
The thing I can't stand about it is closing a window causes a
multi-second beachball on latest Firefox / macOS. Really
annoying. This is with a cleaned out profile and no extensions.
nikisweeting - 2 hours ago
There are so many Firefox features that I love, and Mozilla is an
awesome company that I want to support, but Safari and even Chrome
are both still significantly faster than Quantum on my Mac.Even
with 50+ tabs open in Chrome, it still loads uncached pages 2-3
seconds faster than FF Quantum, with fewer flashes of unstyled
content as well.I had high hopes for this refactor, but it looks
like I'll have to wait to switch browsers until the speed really
beats Chrome.
eref - 2 hours ago
You can maybe find a alternatives here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECI...
nikisweeting - 1 hours ago
I think you replied to the wrong comment, mine isn't about
extensions/add-ons.
known - 5 hours ago
I just installed. Wow I am impressed :)
peterhadlaw - 6 hours ago
Has anyone else noticed significant CPU usage in the new Firefox
Nightly? My computer fan goes full blast when I use the new
browser. I like the speed but that level of heat is just not
generated by Chrome.
cdubzzz - 5 hours ago
I noticed that last week as well, but got 59.0a1 (2017-11-13)
this morning and so far have not seen it again. Hopefully just a
minor issue that was fixed...
jonstewart - 7 hours ago
Does this mean Firefox is comparable to Chrome wrt/ sandboxing?
seba_dos1 - 6 hours ago
http://www.morbo.org/2017/11/linux-sandboxing-improvements-i...
sp332 - 7 hours ago
No. Now that they have multi-process in good shape they can start
getting there though.
gressquel - 3 hours ago
if they modernise their developer tools I would jump back to FF.
Chrome has got too much power is not abusing it.
Rauchg - 4 hours ago
I've been extremely happy with Firefox Nightly. Highly recommend it
to everyone here
theduality - 8 hours ago
I have been using 57 in beta, and I have to say, I'm impressed. It
is a huge improvement. Whether it keeps me off Chrome in the future
remains to be seen though!
agumonkey - 7 hours ago
Similar conclusion here. So far I stopped using Chrome (stable or
canary). I do miss it, Firefox Nightly (as I mention in other
threads) have responsiveness issues a bit too much even for
average websites (no video, no webgl, no audio) and I know that
chrome doesn't suffer from that. But so far I'm still using
Firefox for a few weeks.Few things that I do prefer in Firefox:-
bookmarks with tags- nightly/testmode snooze tabs. Wonderful
idea- reader view (not sure if chrome has that out of the box
nowadays)I don't use containers even though they seem lovely
r3bl - 7 hours ago
> reader view (not sure if chrome has that out of the box
nowadays)As far as I can tell, Firefox, Safari and Edge all
seem to have it, and Chrome does not. Not on mobile, and not on
desktop.There are some extensions that accomplish the same.
I've had some good (but very limited) experience using Mercury
Viewer some time ago: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail
/mercury-reader/okn...
milankragujevic - 6 hours ago
I think Chrome does have it on mobile, because it prompts me
to "reader view" a page when it isn't properly formatted for
reading, on Android 7.
hawski - 6 hours ago
Mobile Chrome has some broken heuristic to prompt it. I
never know when I can expect it to appear. Sometimes the
website already looks good and it appears. Sometimes it
looks horrible and it does not appear.Also sometimes this
"reader view" looks worse then the original. It has too
small font for my taste. When you pinch to zoom it looks
like it changes the font size, but also the viewport. So it
is entirely useless.I expect that it will be removed (or
replaced) in future.
r3bl - 6 hours ago
Ah, you are correct, it does have it for non-mobile-
optimized pages. Completely forgot about that.I would still
argue that its function is different than the "reader view"
functions of other browsers, but it does have it.
mariusmg - 7 hours ago
Why shouldn't it keep you away from Chrome ? It's faster, uses
less memory, and the "maker", Mozilla is more trustworthy
compared with Google.What's missing ?
konart - 7 hours ago
>It's fasterFaster than old fox? Yes. Faster than Chrome? Nope.
Still long way to go.
[deleted]
[deleted]
Osiris - 7 hours ago
Faster in what way? There are multiple subsystems in a
browser.
seba_dos1 - 6 hours ago
Nothing can beat Chrome in being the fastest to become
unusable when opening many tabs ;)
konart - 6 hours ago
How many? I typically have 2 windows with ~30-50 tabs
opened in each of them. No problem at all, never was.
seba_dos1 - 6 hours ago
I typically have hundreds, sometimes low thousands of
tabs opened in Firefox on 8GB RAM and it works well,
while ~30-50 is an upper limit of what Chrome can do
without bringing the whole system to swapping hell. Plus,
Chrome's tab UI makes more tabs completely unusable,
while vanilla Firefox works well and can also offer
massive improvements like vertical tabs.
ko27 - 5 hours ago
> I typically have hundreds, sometimes low thousands of
tabsThey should probably ditch all in-memory stuff, and
just use the drive, so they can support those cases when
you really want to have a "low millions of tabs open."
laken - 6 hours ago
Very true. Chrome can never handle my 150+ tabs per window
that Firefox can.
nkkollaw - 3 hours ago
What do you do with 150 tabs?When I have 20 open I
already start to get confused about where stuff is...
nachtigall - 2 hours ago
With Tree Style Tabs plus the Awesome bar it is not a
problem to handle and it's easy to get up to this number
over the day.
nkkollaw - 2 hours ago
But, so I guess you open links in a new tab and don't
bother closing them?
unicornporn - 2 hours ago
I easily reach a hundred tabs with Tree Style Tabs when
researching a topic. The tree structure makes it easy to
understand how you've navigated the web and to traceback
where you came from. When I found what I've what I was
looking for I start closing tabs. The ones that remain is
my catch and I save the URLs and/or contents.
nkkollaw - 1 hours ago
Gotcha. Interesting. :-)
unicornporn - 2 hours ago
Came here to say that. Tree Style Tabs makes ut possible
to navigate an unhealthy amount of tabs.
ko27 - 5 hours ago
There is so much FF PR talk here.
lvh - 6 hours ago
So far, Chrome has better sandboxing support on most platforms
(especially Linux), though Chrome's catching up quickly.I'm
generally optimistic about Rust code having fewer exploitable
defects, although it's a reasonable argument to suggest that
the previous C++ parts had a lot more public scrutiny.Also, for
me personally: I use a lot of different profiles and using
multiple Firefox profiles simultaneously is a mess. The only UX
that still works is about:profiles (all of the profile switcher
extensions broke since the move to WebExtensions) and I've had
Firefox beachball (hang -- I'm on macOS) on me twice while
doing that.Don't get me wrong! I love Firefox and I'm really
excited about this change.
callahad - 6 hours ago
Hey lvh. As imron suggested, I've found containers have
largely replaced my need for multiple profiles day-to-day,
with the main exception of throwaway profiles, which `firefox
--profile $(mktemp -d) --new-instance` handles well
enough.I'd love to talk to you more about the ergonomics of
containers / profiles for your use case. You know how to
reach me. :)
fauigerzigerk - 4 hours ago
Containers are great, but there needs to be an easier way
to open a link in a new container. Right now it's burried
in a sub menu of the context menu. Lifting the menu item to
the top level of the context menu would be a great
improvement. Ideally there should also be a configurable
keyboard shortcut.
rahiel - 33 minutes ago
> firefox --profile $(mktemp -d) --new-instanceThanks for
that, I can now replace `chromium --temp-profile`.
imron - 6 hours ago
> and using multiple Firefox profiles simultaneously is a
mess.Not sure if it meets your use case, but checkout Firefox
containers.
onli - 6 hours ago
Is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-
account... really broken? That was a test pilot experiment
till two month ago, it would be very bad (and a bit
ridiculous) if that addon were already broken.
unicornporn - 2 hours ago
Not broken. Using it on FF57 stable.
kodablah - 5 hours ago
Embeddability. I've mentioned it on this site before, but
Chrome's embeddability story (Electron, nw.js, CEF, Qt, etc)
affects adoption more significantly than Mozilla prioritizers
are giving credit for. Sure it's not an effect of Google
itself, but that it exists only on one browser is something
Mozilla should actively target. Of course there are a few
attempts here and there, e.g. positron, but there needs to be a
real effort to make the entire browser easily buildable and
embeddable w/ an easy C API (doesn't have to conform to CEF
like Servo was/is trying). Provide prebuilt libs and the
headers and you will see adoption go up.
lightedman - 7 hours ago
" It's faster"FireFox 52 - BYOND game written by myself -
60FPS. FireFox 57 - 10FPS.Not even.
robin_reala - 7 hours ago
Sounds like an edge case the developers would be interested
in. Have you got a reproducable testcase?
lightedman - 3 hours ago
Play "Space Station 13" and see for yourself. And that game
normally lags and stutters bad enough as-is on any browser.
It's worse in FF57.
callahad - 5 hours ago
Can confirm. Would be very interested in a link that shows
a regression of that degree.
aaronharder - 7 hours ago
I find the absence of Smart Zoom on Mac Firefox to be very
painful indeed. The "double right tap" gesture works in both
Safari and Chrome, and zooms in exactly on the div/image you're
interested in. I've searched for alternatives in FF, but even
the half-working ones I found don't work in Quantum. Sad
because I'm rooting for Mozilla, but just can't function in
their browser without Smart Zoom.
kristofferR - 6 hours ago
Yeah, it's a shame that macOS support in Firefox is so bad. I
hope Mozilla can start making Firefox feel like a first-grade
browser in macOS, like Safari and Chrome, now that it's
speedy.Smart Zoom and Handoff is completely missing and
Applescript scripting support is extremely poor.
enraged_camel - 6 hours ago
Chrome Dev Tools. Firefox?s dev tools simply aren?t as
good.There are also many features in Chrome that I?ve come to
appreciate, such as right clicking a tab and selecting
?duplicate?, which opens a copy of the tab and retains the
browser history of the original one.
leoc - 5 hours ago
The (apparently) continuing lack of tab duplication is my
major reason not to switch back.
DiThi - 5 hours ago
FF 57 has it.
leoc - 5 hours ago
Thanks. Right, that's it, I'm probably on my way back.
KwanEsq - 10 minutes ago
It's actually had it for years (probably even always,
almost certainly since about 1.5) via middle-clicking the
refresh button.
DiThi - 5 hours ago
Have you tried the dev tools in FF 57? As a FF user with
Chrome-as-debugger for 3-4 years, I'm honestly impressed.FF
57 also has "duplicate tab" with duplicate history.
nindalf - 4 hours ago
Thanks for pointing out "duplicate tab". I loved that
feature and really missed it on Firefox.
cheshire_cat - 5 hours ago
To be fair you can have a duplicate browser tab in almost any
browser by clicking the back or forward button with mouse3.
[deleted]
Kubuxu - 3 hours ago
Ctrl-Click on Refresh button acts as duplicate tab in FF for
a long time. I am not sure why this option is so hidden but
it works.
tzs - 6 hours ago
Faster at what things?On my 2017 iMac (3.4 GHz Core i5, Radeon
Pro 570) I get 60 on Mozilla's Speedometer 2.0 [1] test with
Firefox 57.0. I get 90 on Chrome and 93 on Safari.On my Surface
Pro 4 that gap is smaller, but Chrome is still about 15% faster
on that test.[1] https://mozilla.github.io/arewefastyet-
speedometer/2.0/
callahad - 3 hours ago
Benchmarks are not comprehensive, nor are they gospel; it's
entirely possible for a browser to score lower on a benchmark
while also feeling faster in real-world use. For a long time,
this was true of Chrome versus Firefox on JavaScript
benchmarks: SpiderMonkey is routinely on par with V8, yet
Firefox also felt significantly slower.In the case of
Speedometer, it's measuring one specific type of webapp
interaction in a single tab; it's not capturing things like
perceived speed of opening or closing the browser, switching
tabs, loading pages, etc. It doesn't test how the browser
performs when many JS-heavy tabs are loaded in the
background. It also has lots of corner cases: installing a
common password manager halves the score, and a common
adblocker nearly does the same again, yet neither show that
kind of noticeable degradation in real-world
browsing.Benchmarks are useful for saying "we've improved our
browser this much in this area compared to where we were last
year," but they're much less useful for making broad
generalizations across heterogeneous browsers; there are too
many other variables at play.
Manishearth - 3 hours ago
Whilst benchmarking stylo for example we noticed there were
perceptible wins on interaction time on real world sites;
but speedometer didn't budge as much because it tends
towards small DOM trees which stylo can't parallelize much.
ko27 - 5 hours ago
Yeah, they even recently officially posted the speedometer
result and it was a few percent behind Chrome. Also some
consider Speedometer to be the closest thing to a real user
performance benchmark.
mozoldie - 1 hours ago
Chrome has a better security model. That's big for some.
countryslicker - 6 hours ago
es6 import
aapjesverkoper - 7 hours ago
I have been thinking of switching back from Chrome to Firefox.
I haven't been able to find decent profile support though (so I
can keep work and private data separate), and all profiles
addons are broken at the moment.
CapacitorSet - 7 hours ago
What stops you from launching Firefox with the profile
manager twice (there's a flag for that), and selecting the
two profiles? It takes a couple of seconds to select the
profile.
mmphosis - 7 hours ago
That is a good work-around. Multiple devices, systems,
users, locations, and other factors makes selecting the
current profile a pain.
Maken - 7 hours ago
@mmphosis: you can always link different profiles to
different Firefox account so they all get sync between
devices.
ifdefdebug - 7 hours ago
firefox -p launches firefox into the profile manager. firefox
-p work -new-instance launches your work profile. What are
you missing?More options: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Lin...
aapjesverkoper - 6 hours ago
Thanks, this seems to work. I found the no-remote option
when looking around, but accidentally lauching
private_dot_com (nsfw) a couple of times at work instead of
my private profile ended my testing with this last time.
myfonj - 5 hours ago
Yup, c:\apps\firefox\firefox.exe -no-remote -profile
"C:\profiles\some-clean-profile" was my was-to-go method
for testing various configurations.Knowing about %USER
PROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles.ini is
also often helpful, eg. when you want to move certain
profile folder.
Maken - 7 hours ago
You can launch Firefox with different profiles (including
navigation history, Firefox account, extension, etc) in the
same machine. It's a bit cumbersome since you need to select
the profile as a launch option (firefox -p) or launch it from
"about:profiles", but it works.
heliostatic - 7 hours ago
The Firefox Multi-Account containers are great:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-
account...Multiple profiles within a single window, visually
distinguished by tab highlight color.
aapjesverkoper - 7 hours ago
It looks like this doesn't allow you to separate history,
addons, bookmarks, or move your current tab to a container.
I am sticking with google for now.
[deleted]
dralley - 5 hours ago
You can use multiple profiles with Firefox, the UX for
doing so just isn't as fleshed out as Chromium.Create a
new profile by going to about:profiles, and thereafter
when you start Firefox it should present you with an
option to pick which profile to use.
callahad - 6 hours ago
You can use about:profiles or the profile manager
(https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-
create-...) to handle that. The UX isn't as polished, but
for just a handful of uses (work, personal, etc.) it's
easy enough to make shortcuts which call `firefox --new-
instance --profile `.
imron - 6 hours ago
Yep. I love containers.
IceyEC - 6 hours ago
Google Hangouts :-/
mda - 6 hours ago
It is probably sometimes marginally faster and sometimes
slower, same with memory use. Its security is still lacking
compared to Chrome. Personally I don't see any pressing
incentive to switch.
AsyncAwait - 23 minutes ago
Supporting a browser that actually has your interests in
mind, so they have some power at the web standards bodies
might be it.
EGreg - 6 hours ago
Developer Tools needs to have better UI
vdnkh - 6 hours ago
And they need to work better in general. I use dev edition
which has a much better UI (it's pretty much Chrome) but it's
much slower and has weird bugs - if you disable sourcemaps,
it won't let you inspect sources, because sourcemaps is null.
robin_reala - 6 hours ago
That?s a bit ? vague. I mean, Fx Dev Tools has a grid
visualisation that?s much better than anyone else?s, so
that?s better UI right there.
theduality - 7 hours ago
Nothing, so far. I have completely switched in the hope that I
don't hit a showstopper that makes me switch back.
daveFNbuck - 6 hours ago
For me, it's missing Chromecast and my MacBook Pro heats up
enough that the keys become warm to the touch when using
Firefox.
nullspace - 6 hours ago
Personally, it has to a large extent. Somethings that are not
yet there:1. Since Webextensions are new, some extensions that
I use in chrome, need to be ported over. Most are not must
haves to be fair.2. Hangouts for work. :(3. A solution to
manage different personas - Chrome has the "user profile" thing
linked to google accounts, firefox as container tabs. I think
user profile is better than container tabs, although both are
kinda bad.Except hangouts, none are deal breakers - I use
firefox as much as I can, and in fact overall it feels more
faster and more repsonsive than Chrome starting with Quantum.
It also looks and feels better than chrome.
greggman - 1 hours ago
does hangouts.google.com work in FF (too lazy to try it)
callahad - 25 minutes ago
No. Hangouts only works on Chrome and Safari (with a
plugin). It does not work in Edge or Firefox, as we've
phased out support for third-party plugins.
callahad - 6 hours ago
Thank you for choosing Firefox.1. Are there any specific
extensions you need? Happy to add them to our outreach
list.2. Sorry about Hangouts; follows a trend of Chrome-only
product launches/re-launches from Google (five this year so
far). Wish we could do more, but if Google's OK shipping
things that only work on one browser, that's their
prerogative.3. Firefox also has completely separate profiles,
in addition to container tabs. The UI isn't as polished as in
Chrome, but it works: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb
/profile-manager-create-...
fernandotakai - 1 hours ago
> 1. Are there any specific extensions you need? Happy to
add them to our outreach list.for me,
vimperator/pentadactyl and tab groups. i can't use a
browser without them so i won't be upgrading :(
PuffinBlue - 2 hours ago
> 1. Are there any specific extensions you need? Happy to
add them to our outreach list.LastPass please. I'm sure
it's on your list already, and I'm sure they know about it
too but every little helps.I am happy to use pass/keepass
(whatever version) but the family says only LastPass is
acceptable.
CUViper - 2 hours ago
LastPass updated a few days ago -- I'm using it with FF57
now!
zeveb - 3 hours ago
> Are there any specific extensions you need?Keysnail. It
requires the ability to override C-n, though.
idle_processor - 54 minutes ago
> 3. Firefox also has completely separate profiles, in
addition to container tabs. The UI isn't as polished as in
Chrome, but it works: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb
/profile-manager-create-...Chrome allows users to
simultaneously run multiple profile instances, each with it
own profile. Firefox didn't seem to support
that.https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-
account... (or a similar addon) might bring me back to
using Firefox.With Chrome, one set up a profile shortcut to
a given profile, and then all tabs/windows within the
instance corresponded to the same profile. This meant
hitting Ctrl+T to open new tabs, rather than having to
click and dig through a menu to pick the right profile.I'd
like the containers addon to support easy shortcuts. Maybe
on hitting ctrl+t, one can then press 1-5 (or some other
selector) to determine which profile the new tab opens in.
Alternatively, more safely and less confusingly, just
having windows sticky to a specific profile, so all new
tabs predictably open into the same profile.
callahad - 46 minutes ago
Firefox does support multiple isolated instances, just
without a prominent UI. You can use the Profile Manager
(https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-
create-...) or command-line flags to launch and manage
separate profiles.The UX around multi-account containers
is still being worked on, but the contextualIdentities
WebExtension API (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US
/Add-ons/WebExtensions/AP...) allows add-ons to interact
with containers, so a third party developer could create
exactly the experience you've requested.
nachtigall - 2 hours ago
> 3. Firefox also has completely separate profiles, in
addition to container tabs.hey callahad, thanks for shiming
in. My biggest pain with profiles is that you cannot use
separate profiles at the same time. A Firefox instance can
only run one at the same time, making it useless to run
e.g. a work and a private profile together. Container tabs
also do not help here because they share the same history
which I do not want for privacy reasons.Nonetheless, thanks
for a great release!
callahad - 2 hours ago
> A Firefox instance can only run one at the same time,
making it useless to run e.g. a work and a private
profile together.I may be misunderstanding what you mean,
but I believe you actually can do that. If you navigate
to about:profiles, there should be a "launch profile in
new browser" button that runs multiple profiles at the
same time, each in their own, isolated Firefox process.To
make this a bit easier, you can create desktop shortcuts
which launch a specific profile like `firefox --new-
instance --profile Work` (on Windows, use --no-remote
instead of --new-instance).
r3bl - 6 hours ago
As for your third point, yes, Firefox does have containers
now, but it has the profiles feature as well.
`about:profiles` and starting your Firefox with `-p` flag
will help you out.
infogulch - 6 hours ago
Yeah, without the UI it's 80% useless.
r3bl - 5 hours ago
`about:profiles` is the UI. It allows you to create new
profiles, restart Firefox with a specific profile, and
manage profiles. Starting Firefox with `-p` (and no
passed argument) starts a window which allows you to do
the same.
infogulch - 4 hours ago
Sorry I wasn't clear. Chrome profiles is a usable UI.
Easy to find, switch, manage, create, delete, all with
just a couple clicks, never very far away.about:profiles
is not discoverable (obviously), easily usable (you have
to restart), or easily switchable (you have to open
about:profiles or the terminal).By the technical
definition of "UI", the raw filesystem and terminal
counts, sure. Opaque and unknown about: pages count,
sure. But that doesn't make it good.For features like
this the UI is the feature. about:profiles is not a good
UI, so the feature is 80% useless.
Manishearth - 3 hours ago
Container tabs have a much nicer UI. They're a bit
experimental but they're easy to use.
staticassertion - 5 hours ago
I still trust Chrome's sandbox - I have less understanding of
where Firefox does sandboxing, how it works across platforms,
etc. Whereas I have a solid understanding of how Chrome uses
seccomp on Linux.While pieces of Firefox are moving to Rust the
majority of attack surface is still in C++, so I want a strong
sandbox if I'm going to run that browser.
pcwalton - 5 hours ago
> I have less understanding of where Firefox does sandboxing,
how it works across platforms, etc. Whereas I have a solid
understanding of how Chrome uses seccomp on Linux.It's
described in detail here:*
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox*
http://www.morbo.org/2017/11/linux-sandboxing-
improvements-i...
dom96 - 56 minutes ago
For those, like myself, that were thinking "huh, I haven't seen any
noticeable differences" when reading the article/comments: FF 57 is
the version you want and it is officially releasing
tomorrow.https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/quantum/
methochris - 7 hours ago
tried out the 57 beta on macOS (10.13) this weekend and watching in
the activity monitor, the main firefox process grabbed a whopping
~800mb of my 8gb of ram + spawned sub-processes needing 20-100mb
per website tab. compare this to safari and chrome that have a
minimal main-process (~40mb) and then the per-tab amount. i like
mozilla and firefox but it just always seems to be something with
firefox that pushes me away and now that they have the speed fixed,
it's eating up my finite resources.
sgift - 6 hours ago
On the other hand Chrome eats RAM like there's no tomorrow on my
system, while the Firefox' footprint is pretty much contained.
Different systems, different experiences.(Two different machines,
both Windows 10)
gvb - 5 hours ago
Linux too. Chrome was eating all my ram to the point where my
laptop was dogging down horribly, sometime even swapping
(excruciating).FF is fast and much lighter on RAM. My laptop is
fast again. Thanks, Mozilla!
[deleted]
mywittyname - 7 hours ago
I love Firefox and I'm glad to see they are doing what it takes to
stay relevant.That being said, the "quantum" branding here is
completely ridiculous. Quantum already had a definite meaning in
computing and Firefox's "quantum era" has absolutely nothing to do
with it. It's like Ford making a "hybrid" Mustang, that has zero
electrification, it's just faster than all previous Mustangs.I was
honestly expecting a Firefox build for quantum computers.
FireBeyond - 4 hours ago
You were downvoted, but I rather agree. I saw the picture of the
turbofan diagram, with pointers to arbitrary parts of the engine
and naming them as parts of the "Quantum Engine", DOM, CSS,
etc.Tufte referred to chartjunk - that was graphicjunk.However...
I love the browser again.
Touche - 7 hours ago
Am I the only one that is confused by Firefox's "fast again"
narrative? I remember that they launched the
https://arewefastyet.com/ site a few years ago to fight the idea
that FF was slow. It feels like there's a new blog post that
essentially says the same thing "we're fast now" every couple of
months.So I find this all confusing. Am I just remembering
incorrectly, or haven't they already declared "we're as fast as
Chrome now" several times in the past. Were those lies/incorrect?
Or again, am I remembering incorrectly. Can someone explain this?
sushibowl - 6 hours ago
> Am I just remembering incorrectly, or haven't they already
declared "we're as fast as Chrome now" several times in the
past.https://arewefastyet.com/ refers specifically and only to
Firefox's javascript engine. It runs js benchmarks only, not
whole websites, and doesn't test responsiveness or rendering
performance.Javascript performance in firefox has been on par
with competing browsers for a while now. The current initiative,
called Quantum, is complementary to this effort. It is supposed
to make the rest of the browser components fast, using among
other things a new renderer, a CSS styling engine, and
multiprocessing support.
asdgkknio - 5 hours ago
I'm confused by it, too. The main reason I've preferred Firefox
to Chrome for years has been performance. It's pretty much the
same in responsiveness and uses far less memory.Chrome being the
fastest browser is ancient history.
ocdtrekkie - 5 hours ago
The main reason I originally left Firefox (for Edge, mind you,
I don't touch Google software anymore) was the single-process
issues they fixed with electrolysis which came out in Firefox
48.Bloated websites (usually Google ones) would actually lock
up the entire Firefox UI, and Windows would recognize the
browser application as "Not responding" until the page finished
loading. In the case of a super bloated site like the old
Google+, that could be as much as twelve seconds non-responsive
while all the cruft loaded up.I am back on Firefox release
channel now, and pretty satisfied with current performance, but
looking forward to Quantum.
BuckRogers - 34 minutes ago
I'm a Firefox or native-platform browser guy. Some sites are
laggy on anything except Chrome. Browsing around Groupon
causes periodic freezes for me in Firefox. I haven't noticed
this particular case in Edge but it does lag over time on
other sites.The whole issue of sites freezing and lagging
without using Chrome is concerning, and it's not pushing me
to use Chrome. I think that's Google's aim by creating that
situation but I'm not budging.It's pushing me to more native
apps in both the iOS AppStore and Microsoft Store.
oatmealsnap - 1 hours ago
I had major problems using LiveReload and BrowserSync during
development (two tools that automatically refresh a local
website when you make changes to your code). After a few saves,
it was too slow to use. Chrome and Safari would refresh about
twice as quickly, and remain fast.57, once it got closer to
Beta, was the first version I could develop with.
wpietri - 4 hours ago
Performance is a Red Queen problem. [1] People keep expecting
more from computers. On the web, pages keep getting bigger and
more complicated. Firefox's competition isn't going to stop
trying to improve performance, and people's baseline for "fast"
will mainly be other things they use. If Mozilla isn't always
trying to be faster, they're going to be getting slower.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
cookiecaper - 26 minutes ago
Jevon's Paradox [0] is probably more appropriate.As resources
become more plentiful (available performance-units, whether
delivered through faster software or faster hardware), demand
counter-intuitively increase, in part because the cheaper per-
unit price makes people feel they can use the resource more
freely.This phenomenon describes why no matter how fast our
computers get, it's unlikely that they will ever be "fast
enough".[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
[deleted]
robin_reala - 6 hours ago
That wasn?t a marketing site, it was a tracker to measure the
increase in performance over time due to the ongoing work the
newly-spun-up performance team was doing.
Touche - 6 hours ago
Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to imply it was a marketing site.
But there was marketing surrounded it, and I distinctly
remember it being used to show that they were, indeed, as fast
as the other browsers. I remember a narrative being that the
problem wasn't Firefox being slow, but FF being slow in certain
perceived-speed areas (like new tab speed).That's why I find
these sorts of announcements confusing, I can remember them
saying that there are already as fast as Chrome several times
in the past. But maybe my mind is playing tricks on me.
AndrewDucker - 6 hours ago
No, you're right.They'd declare that the JS engine was just
as fast (or faster) - but that didn't cover the whole of the
UI, and laggy bits of the UI could slow things down no matter
how fast the JS engine was.Thankfully they now seem to have
improved the whole UI.
JohnTHaller - 6 hours ago
There have been multiple separate initiatives over the years to
speed up various aspects of Firefox. The largest one is
culminating in the release of Firefox Quantum, which is launching
as Firefox 57 tomorrow. You've heard this more lately as the
Quantum version of Firefox was released to Nightly and then
Beta/Developer channels over the past couple months.
[deleted]
davesque - 4 hours ago
I recently (a couple of weeks ago) finished giving Firefox
another try for about two weeks. Sorry to say, but it just felt
laggy compared with Chrome. I'll give it another shot when the
new rendering engine is fully integrated into the release
channel.
bjz_ - 2 hours ago
Did you try the nightly or Beta version? If not, you weren't
experiencing the new changes. These will drop on the stable
channel within the next day or so.
n72 - 4 hours ago
Multiprocessing did nothing for me, since I apparently hadn't
configured it to use more than one process. Some extensions I had
were keeping it from doing so. Once I got all that sorted out, it
flew. If you're still on a slowish FF, make sure you're actually
multiprocess.
Endy - 2 hours ago
I'm going to guess that the answer is: by not being Firefox
anymore. Since that seems to be Mozilla's answer to just about
anything. Then again, I never had a problem with Firefox, it's
Chrome taking up so much proces time that kills me. I need a
single-process browser that doesn't gum up the rest of my machine
the way Chrome and multiprocess Firefox do.Then again, I remain on
a 32-bit processor & OS, and I don't expect to update in the next
century.
KaoruAoiShiho - 1 hours ago
She's so famous for her react stuff that I thought she worked for
FB.
CmdrKrool - 4 hours ago
I'm hoping these developments might eventually clear the way to a
somewhat supported Firefox browser core sans UI to embed in our own
applications (ala WebKit and Chromium via QtWebEngine), and then I
might switch back. I'm tired of being pushed around by UI churn in
the applications I use.
callahad - 4 hours ago
There's been some renewed interest in this direction, at least on
Android, in the form of GeckoView:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322573Servo,
Mozilla Research's next-generation parallel browser engine, also
has embedding as an explicit top-level goal: https://servo.org/
[deleted]
pimeys - 1 hours ago
Now already on Nightly and enabling the WebRender on my Linux
laptop. It hasn't crashed anymore, but there are still some low-
hanging fruits to be gained to make it faster. 2018 will be big for
Firefox, even bigger than the Stylo.Long live Rust! :)
symlinkk - 6 hours ago
I'm still worried about how secure Firefox is in relation to
Chrome. From what I understand, Firefox exploits only go for $30k
at Pwn2Own, while Chrome exploits go for $80k. Should I be worried?
orthecreedence - 4 hours ago
I'd be more worried about chrome tracking and selling my data
than I would about Firefox being p0wned.
callahad - 5 hours ago
I'm not sufficiently familiar with Chrome's architecture to speak
comparatively, but Firefox Quantum (57) has a significantly
improved sandbox thanks to finally going fully multi-process
(full status at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox), and
replacing C++ components with Rust prevents certain classes of
potentially exploitable issues at compile time.
StavrosK - 6 hours ago
It depends, are you worth between $30k and $80k to someone? If
yes, I would switch to Chrome.
symlinkk - 5 hours ago
It's not like someone would buy an exploit and only use it on
one person.
mikeytown2 - 4 hours ago
I'll be looking to downgrade to Firefox Extended Support Release
52.4.1 [1] and using the hidden settings to enable Electrolysis
[2]. Currently on 56 and it's very fast but with 57 tabs mix plus
is gone [3].[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/organizations/all/#en-...[2] https://fossbytes.com/how-
to-make-firefox-faster-by-enabling...[3] https://addons.mozilla.org
/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/
51Cards - 4 hours ago
I will be doing the same. The enhancements in 57 don't out-
weight the productivity loss from my critical extensions. I'll
be waiting until more of them are ported forward. For the record
I don't actually find Firefox 56 slow at the moment either.
lucb1e - 3 hours ago
I have two critical extensions and a few others that would all
break with 56 or 57. No thanks, I'll stick with what
works.Shoving webextensions down everyone's throat, and only
afterwards starting to work on implementing APIs and giving
anyone a chance to start working on porting stuff. No thanks.
woolvalley - 3 hours ago
Has anyone tried firefox 57 or 56 on macOS and still found it to be
slower on a bunch of sites? Like facebook is unusably slow on
firefox compared to chrome still. Google maps has slow downs too.
Propen - 3 hours ago
I keep having the feeling like Google is making its sites
unusable on FFX. Same with FB, for example with Chrome
m.facebook.com & mbasic.facebook.com serve different pages
whereas Firefox gets the dumbed down mbasic content on both
domains. I think there are several examples out there where
Google does the same.
zachwood - 3 hours ago
you should try to refresh your FF profile.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...
woolvalley - 2 hours ago
This happened with a fresh install with nothing else installed,
I don't know how much that would help.
supernintendo - 2 hours ago
Yeah, YouTube is completely unusable for me on macOS Firefox 57.
The video will completely stop while the audio continues playing
and the only way to fix it is to adjust the current playback
time. This is on a Retina MBP with 16GB of RAM. Doesn?t occur
with the same version of Firefox on Windows.
ArmandGrillet - 5 hours ago
I just installed Firefox 57 (thanks jacek for the link) and the
first things I noticed are:- The cross to close a tab and the one
to create a tab are aligned in a weird way.- Opening a tab is laggy
(I'm on a MBP with an Intel Iris chip and 16GB of RAM).- The
scrolling still does not feel native (I'm on macOS High Sierra).I'm
very impressed by the work that has been done for this release as a
dev but this does not give me a great first impression as a user (I
haven't used Firefox these past 5 years). Google Chrome since its
Material UI redesign (https://medium.com/google-design/redesigning-
chrome-desktop-...) is snappy and has a clean UI, I hope that
Firefox will also reach this point.Anyway, this release is a major
achievement. Congrats to the contributors!
catamorphismic - 4 hours ago
That's weird, Firefox feels much snappier than Chrome to me. It
also uses significantly less memory.
bowlich - 4 hours ago
Latest one seems like it has a memory leak on linux. Starts off
fast, but I've found that I need to close out all of Firefox
about once a day. Not sure if that's the vanilla build, or the
multi-account containers extension that's causing the issue.
callahad - 3 hours ago
If you set your screen resolution to "default for display" in
System Preferences, does the scrolling feel closer to native?
bjterry - 1 hours ago
This seems to have fixed it for me! Not that I could actually
live with this fix, but now I could report it to them or
something. When I turned it to default scaling it was snappy
again. And when I move the window over to one of my 4K monitors
it is also fast, so it's something unique to the laptop monitor
with scaling.
bjterry - 4 hours ago
It also feels laggy to me. It's weird given the reports of all
these other users. I am also using a 16GB Ram, Intel Iris MBP.
There is a noticeable pause while switching tabs, and there is a
very noticeable lag while typing (for example in this box). Pages
do seem to render fast, but it feels very laggy in terms of user
interaction.Edit: The scrolling is also very laggy, which I
forgot to mention, much more so than Chrome.
kuschku - 3 hours ago
> Edit: The scrolling is also very laggy, which I forgot to
mention, much more so than Chrome.Firefox uses smooth
scrolling, while Chrome always uses very jerky, jumping
scrolling.Have you tried disabling that?
bjterry - 1 hours ago
I use a magic trackpad for scrolling and the delay before
scrolling is there in either case, but it was off.
n72 - 4 hours ago
Check about:support and look for a number higher than 0 in the
"Multiprocess Windows" entry. Old extensions or something may
be keeping you from running multi-process.
bjterry - 1 hours ago
I have a 1/1 there, and the only extension I have loaded is
the new version of Tree Style Tabs.
_frog - 3 hours ago
The scrolling thing is a real shame, and it?s shocking to me that
they haven?t implemented bouncy overscrolling when macOS has had
it for something like 6 years.
s_chaudhary - 3 hours ago
Just use the Firefox Android nightly and beta build. The new UI is
super clean and the performance is very good.Up until this point I
always felt that there was no good Google free alternatives for
chrome mobile browser, but this perception has definitely change
now with the new Firefox Beta build.I am switching to Firefox
nightly for my default Android browser now.
lucb1e - 3 hours ago
On my phone it often uses 100% CPU for extended periods of time,
and does lots of writes to storage. And it has never been fast to
begin with.I mean, a five year old phone isn't top of the line
anymore, but if other browsers work just fine, I'm reasonably
sure where the blame lies...
johansch - 6 hours ago
At a high level my main question is:Why has Mozilla generally been
so slow to react to market trends and taken so insanely long to
deliver products that are competitive in other ways than fuzzy
aspects like openness, freedom etc?This goes back back all the way
to like 1998. My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I remember it feeling
like they were in rebuilding mode until like 2005-2006. And then
Chrome launched in 2008...The first time around I guess it was
massive amounts of technical debt and some questionable
architectural choices (e.g. XPCOM), but how about the past decade?
b0rsuk - 6 hours ago
I think Mozilla wasted some effort on some questionable
initiatives, like Firefox OS. They became a little complacent and
didn't put money(?) where their mouth
is.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mozilla_productsIn
particular, check out the list of their abandoned projects. But
some experimentation is necessary. You're never completely sure
when you strike gold.
[deleted]
johansch - 6 hours ago
Maybe the complacency came from having too much money from the
first rounds of Google search deals in like 2004-2008?They had
already fulfilled their primary goals (openness, transparency
etc.)...I worked at Opera Software between 2004-2015. We also
got loads of Google search placement money in that period, but
for all of their other faults, our exec team(s) were able to
keep us hungry for more.
digi_owl - 6 hours ago
Possibly. FOSS projects are notorious for going with rewrites
rather than throttle back and maintain what is already there.
mapgrep - 6 hours ago
I switched back to Firefox 54 from Chrome when multiprocess
browsing ("Electrolysis") came out of beta. It's been absolutely
great. It's fast and I trust and like the nonprofit behind it. And
all the extensions I care about are available.My main issue with
Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account, and
just generally wanting less dependence on Google. I also like that
Firefox has a built in tracking protection (not just Do Not Track
toggle but actual blocking of trackers). That's something that's
just not in Google's interest to put in Chrome.Browsers are
becoming more and more aggressive in protecting the interests of
users. Becoming true "User Agents," in other words. See also Safari
iOS allowing content blockers and now in iOS 11 blocking some
popular tracking behaviors by default. It's absolutely great. And
it's not surprising to me that Chrome is not a leader here. It's
owned by the biggest advertising company on the internet. I predict
Chrome will continue to lag on pro-privacy, anti-nag features.
e40 - 5 hours ago
The signing into an account in chrome is the killer feature for
me. I have work and a couple of personal accounts that I have
signed in in different browser windows. That allows me to keep
things separate (extensions, mail, browsing, bookmarks, etc).How
do FF users do this?
zeveb - 4 hours ago
I use separate Firefox profiles. Try 'firefox
--ProfileManager' to create one.
geekamongus - 3 hours ago
-P for the lazy.
_puk - 3 hours ago
For most Google SPAs I use an appify tool, that contains the
site in a single app webview with no shared cookie store. Then
in my main FF browser I have cookie crushing on, so that when I
navigate away from a domain, all cookies that were created are
destroyed.Ok, I spend my life filling in captchas, but to me
that?s a signal that it is working and Google aren?t overly
sure who I am.
Thorncorona - 5 hours ago
FF just came out with multi account containers about a month
ago ->https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-
account...
kronos29296 - 10 minutes ago
Thanks to you I found something really useful. With this I
can finally have the convenient replacement for the good old
private window which gets overused for logging in to multiple
accounts simultaneously.
jwillmer - 3 hours ago
Do they sync?
eli - 4 hours ago
And prior to that you could run multiple Firefox instances
with different profiles. Not super hard.
nachtigall - 3 hours ago
> you could run multiple Firefox instances with different
profilesBut not at the same time, which is a showstopper to
me (still using Firefox Nightly as main browser).
rhn_mk1 - 2 hours ago
You can absolutely run multiple different instances at
the same time.I've been using Firefox this way for over a
year, 2 instances open right now.
drdaeman - 2 hours ago
It is possible, but it's messy in terms of which one is
the default (clicking on links outside of the browser),
taskbar/launcher buttons (OS- and DE-dependent, some
configurations have issues e.g. with pinning) etc. I
think there was something else - minor and just slightly
inconvenient - but I forgot.Compared to ProfileManager,
Container Tabs are absolutely awesome. Completely
different experience, smooth and nice.
jakub_g - 2 hours ago
ProfileManager is a bit awkward indeed. You can pass `-p
primaryprofile` and `-p secondaryprofile -no-remote` to
make sure that links from OS are not opened in the 2nd
instance, but then, when you close Firefox and click an
external link, it will open Firefox with the last opened
profile, which might be `secondaryprofile`.The solution
for me was to use one Firefox installation per profile:
primary = stable, secondary = nightly.Container tabs are
way nicer than this, but since I open lots of tabs, I
still like the distinction between stable and nightly
(stable = regular browsing, nightly = FB).
[deleted]
icc97 - 3 hours ago
Firefox containers are awesome. Once you've got a GMail
account it's really easy to fall into the trap of letting
Google track your everything. GMail, Google searches, Google
Maps, You Tube.Containers splits them out beautifully, with
minimal tracking.With Chrome / Chromium, Google wants you to
log-in using a Google account, so you fall into the trap
again.
Manishearth - 3 hours ago
Does Google actually track web activity when logged out
whilst logged in to Chrome? By this I mean connecting e.g.
searches done on google maps with your account, not just
storing the history.Google of course has all the
information server-side to do this; I'm unsure if they
actually use it. There's usually a line on tracking that
(you think) a company won't cross; e.g. I wouldn't expect
Google to use browser fingerprinting to track you when
logged out in a different browser, but I'm not sure about
web activity in Chrome. Sounds plausible either way.
inferiorhuman - 9 minutes ago
Why wouldn't they? Judging from the RLZ related files I
had to clean off of my Mac, Google is bundling RLZ
(Google's tracking library) with Chrome on all OSes. I'd
be shocked if they're deploying but not using something
like that.
bonsai80 - 3 hours ago
The use case for this is that you want to leave your
gmail/youtube/etc all logged in, but not let Google track
you all over the internet. My primary use for this
feature is this specific use case. I created a "Google
Spyware" container and configured Google-related things
to open in there. If I go to google.com outside of that
container, I'm a non-logged-in user. If I open it in the
container I AM logged in, so I get all the convenience of
staying logged in without the downside of all the
surveillance. Of course there are other means to track
me, but this is a big step in the right direction.
Manishearth - 3 hours ago
I know. I've been using containers ever since it was an
experiment :)My question is independent of container
tabs, it's a question of whether we know the level of
tracking Google does on a signed-in chrome where your
google account is not signed in in the session (is this
even possible?)
icc97 - 3 hours ago
You can find pretty much all the data that Google has on
you - they allow you to examine the history of it. As far
as I know they don't track your entire web browsing
history but they do record all uses of their sites with
your account.But personally I certainly don't need to be
logged in using any of Googles services except for GMail
so I'd rather just not build up the history rather than
having to go about deleting it (or not because there's so
many other things to get distracted by)
type0 - 1 hours ago
> don't track your entire web browsing historyEntire or
not, does Google analytics apply here?
icc97 - 17 minutes ago
Yeah, I think this is where things start to get fairly
pointless with avoiding being tracked. I'm imagining that
even at a basic level they can match up any Google
searches / GMail you use to your IP address and then
follow that via Google Analytics.I'm happily using DDG as
a replacemet for most Google searches. But I guess I need
to stop using GMail.
fiatjaf - 5 hours ago
Firefox 58 has "persona" tabs. Coloured tabs that keep their
own sessions. You can just configure multiple personas and work
on them all simultaneously from the same window (or you can use
different windows, if you prefer).It's good even for creating
fake accounts, test accounts, testing apps from the perspective
of different user sessions etc.
wtetzner - 5 hours ago
They're available in earlier versions, but I think you have
to turn in on in about:config.
Myrmornis - 4 hours ago
Can I check I understand: Firefox has- Profiles- Containers-
Persona tabs?
callahad - 4 hours ago
Just two things: Profiles and Multi-Account Containers. The
original poster was referring to Containers when saying
"persona tabs."
ghostcluster - 5 hours ago
But now that Google has fundamentally broken users' trust by
locking people out of their own Google Docs through automated
machine learning algorithm, can't you see why people are
wanting to protect themselves from a corporate culture that
allows those kinds of zealous and intrusive policies?It was
locking out journalists drafting stories!How can you trust
Google anymore? There's something rotten festering in Mountain
View.
DonHopkins - 3 hours ago
Sign up for Google Gold and you can make as many abusive
documents as you want, without any risk of automated
censorship!https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/31/google-docs-
users-locked...
acgIssues - 2 hours ago
Now this is ridiculous. Thanks for sharing this article.
Johnny555 - 2 hours ago
But weren't they locking those users because their algorithm
thought it saw malware? It's not like Google said "You're
writing a story about bombs or some other inappropriate
subject so we're locking you out".This sounds like one of
those "damned if you do, damned if you don't" no-win
solutions for Google. Users (and Google) don't want Google to
allow people to use Google Docs to distribute malware and
harvest passwords, they don't want someone at Google to look
at their documents to see if they are "safe" (which Google
couldn't realistically do even if they wanted to), so then
people got upset when the automated software Google uses to
look for these problems did a bad job for some people.While
it'd be nice if every system and process worked well 100% of
the time and had no bugs, that's just not a realistic
expectation.
orbat - 4 hours ago
People seem to have the laughable idea that somehow only
government censorship is bad, or that corporations aren't
capable of censorship in the first place because they're
private entities. I mean, yes, the world will look like that
if you reduce everything to contractual relationships like
libertarians seem to do, but personally I hope we could hold
corporations accountable for actions like these. Like it or
not, we've become extremely reliant on cloud services; Google
closing someone's account without the possibility of appeal
may not be politically motivated censorship, but it's still
arbitrary censorship (even if you did click on the "agree"
button on the EULA nobody ever reads).Why shouldn't we hold
corporations to the same standards as governments? If we
don't want the government arbitrarily censoring people, why
are we OK with corporations doing it?
deong - 4 hours ago
> If we don't want the government arbitrarily censoring
people, why are we OK with corporations doing it?Because
the "opt-out" process is orders of magnitude easier. You
don't have to use Google. Microsoft has online document
creation applications, as does Apple, assuming iWork still
exists. Or you can just write documents offline using any
of several thousand tools.Corporate censorship is entirely
under your control. You can always stop the censorship by
simply not saying it using that corporation's tools.
Corporations can control how you say something, but not
what you say. Governments can control the act of saying it.
One is far worse than the other.
SapphireSun - 3 hours ago
This argument doesn't apply if you are suddenly locked
out of your account. Then your option to switch still
incurs the tremendous costs of the loss of possibly years
of work. The original provider must still be accountable.
Moseman23 - 3 hours ago
I'm sorry but in most areas of online life the system
monopolies of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and
Microsoft are crushing our freedom and choice in tons of
ways. You DO have to use Google Docs(for your PTA, your
kids soccer team, your communication with your accountant
or your church), because everyone else does. Most people
won't be running their own mail server or Diaspora.
There are many many examples of this by now, and this
technolibertarian babble among many of my colleagues in
Tech is getting pretty old.
Santosh83 - 4 hours ago
Until all the big corps start censoring the same kinds of
contents and behaviour by an unspoken consensus. At that
point it becomes effectively as easy to live without all
the major online services as it would be to live as an
outlaw.Easier or more difficult to get by without
shouldn't distract us from the core point GP made, that
corporate (arbitrary) censorship, with no redress, should
be taken as seriously as govt censorship. These days they
are just two arms on the same chimera.
moomin - 3 hours ago
Consider this: imagine the guy sat next to you at work
starts yelling at you with a loudhailer all day. Every
day. And he never ever shuts up. (Alternatively, imagine
that he just whispers "fuck santosh" all day.) Would you
expect him to be free to continue doing it? Would you
expect the government to stop him? Or would you expect
your employer to stop him?The answer is: groups of people
(and corporations are groups of people) are free to limit
speech according to whatever rules the group decides
upon. What you're proposing is that certain large
corporations be treated as quasi-governmental entities.
Which is a _free-speech restriction_.Not saying it's a
bad idea, necessarily. But I'd rather my freedom to say
that certain types of speech are unacceptable was
guaranteed.
Santosh83 - 3 hours ago
In which case there needs to be easy to employ mechanisms
to redress grievances, which tech corps currently don't
have. For example, account lockouts and DMCA takedowns
(when done by error or if the user thinks is unfair) are
pretty much permanent. Your best option is to accept the
data loss, move on and create another account.My point is
censorship is a huge responsibility and power, especially
when it is done at the scale govts and multi-national
corps do, and therefore it needs serious transparency and
checks and balances, in both cases.I don't see this
happening to satisfaction. Instances of regrettable
censorship stay regrettable, and keep recurring.
xorcist - 52 minutes ago
There used to be phonebooks on the Internet where you
could put in your personal information and if everyone
else did so too then you had this giant database of
contact info where you could look people up. These of
course had to make money somehow, but when you're sitting
on a giant pile of personal information that's quite
valuable in itself. It's a pity most uses of personal
information for financial gain is morally dubious, but as
long as you stay cash flow positive you don't have to
turn evil.Everybody understood implicitly that you only
put in your own information. Giving away other people's
personal information to a some company for which it is
clearly valuable is not considered nice. It's simply not
yours to give away. For the few who didn't understand
this most companies had this in their terms of service
anyway, as there could be legal risks involved.All those
companies are gone now. They are out-competed by a select
few very large companies who did everything possible to
make it very easy for people to input everyone else's
contact information in their database, including making
that behaviour default in the software that ships with
your phone. In the beginning you could ask people nicely
not to input all your personal info in third party phone
book services. That's not really possible anymore.The
days when you could practically opt out of these
companies are long gone.
voidmain - 4 hours ago
> Why shouldn't we hold corporations to the same standards
as governments?Because one of these organizations can throw
you into a cage to be raped and tortured for the rest of
your life, and the other can deny you access to some fairly
useful web apps.
eloisant - 3 hours ago
Denying someone's access to his own email inbox can have
dramatic consequences on his life. Not as dramatic as
being detained and tortured obviously, but still pretty
serious.There is already a case where private companies
can't shut down their service to you as they wish, it's
utilities (water, electricity, gas). I hope we can
recognize at some point that Internet access should count
as a utility too, and some core services like email
service too.
voidmain - 3 hours ago
So if that risk is so scary, build an e-mail service that
protects someone's access to their inbox by contractual
or technical means, and try to convince them to
switch.Any power that you take away from (comparatively
weak, subject to competition) Google by giving it to
(already terrifyingly powerful and monopolistic) USG is
not a move in the right direction.
kbenson - 1 hours ago
I think you're getting downvoted mostly because of
calling Google "comparatively weak", but I think your
point and your comparison is correct. Google is weak in
comparison to the U.S. Government and, importantly, is
subject to competition.There are other email services
which offer what people want. Want people are proposing
is imposing their will on Google and the people that run
it, even though there is competition out there that
people could use instead and get what they want. Gmail
and Google Apps are far from the only options people
have, and far from the only free options people have.
But if it is so important that people have an email
address, then the USG could actually offer that (I've
long thought the USPS should offer verified email
addresses with strict spam protection by aggressively
pursuing violators). Otherwise, let people pay what they
want for the level of assurance they want.The other side
of this argument is that there are some things we do want
to enforce companies do, such as offer a base level of
health care in a package. I support this as well,
because that solves an endemic problem where people have
restricted choice and it also hurts society as a whole.
That is, I think Hobby Lobby should have to provide birth
control in their health plans because of the reasons
outlined above, but I don't think any non governmental
service provider that isn't a monopoly (and Google isn't
a monopoly in cloud apps, even if there is an argument
that can be made about them being one in search) should
have to adhere to dictates about what what content they
must allow on their service. That's a pretty slippery
slope in my view.
kbenson - 3 hours ago
> Why shouldn't we hold corporations to the same standards
as governments?Because you have choice of what to use. You
don't always (or even often) have choice of what country to
live in, and there's not a lot of unclaimed land that's
hospitable. Some people may want a service they know the
operators of will be proactive about keeping certain
content off. Others will want a service that makes it
their goal to not do that and protect everything on it.
Choice is key here, and the government stipulating what
needs to be done is actually restrictive, not freeing
(you're just imposing your own views on others
systematically). When there isn't a choice of what
service/product to use, that's when other laws may come
into effect. Anti-trust laws.
jrwiegand - 3 hours ago
Yes, as other people have said containers does this magically.
I even have Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp sign-ins in their
own container. Everything is separate and I honestly feel safer
on the net because of it.
JoshMnem - 2 hours ago
Firefox containers[1] are new, but you could always do this
with Firefox profiles. If you're on Linux or Mac, open a
terminal and type: firefox -ProfileManager -no-remote & (I
alias it to `ff`.)Create different profiles[2] for each
separate browser you need, and then make shortcuts to launch
them.[3] Each Firefox profile will work like a completely
separate browser.[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/multi-account...[2]
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-
create-...[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Lin...
madeofpalk - 4 hours ago
That's got nothing to do with 'signing into an account in
Chrome'.Chrome supports multiple profiles, which may optionally
be associated with a Google account. Firefox has the same
thing, minus the Google account.
remedan - 5 hours ago
Firefox has supported multiple profiles for ages. Just run it
with -P. It allows you to have separate history, extensions,
bookmarks, everything.The new panel containers are also handy.
They allow you to have shared history and bookmarks but
separate cookies and sessions. You can be logged into the same
site on different accounts in two tabs in the same window.
freeone3000 - 5 hours ago
There's no easy way of switching between them, starting a new
firefox instance requires running from a command interpreter
with -P specified, even the selection window isn't great. The
containers feature is the alternative you want to propose
here.
Myrmornis - 4 hours ago
I went deeply into trying to use containers as a profile
replacement, replacing Chrome with the new Firefox beta for
one month, and I can report that it is not the right
direction to go in:- New tabs do not inherit current
container- No way to make Ctrl-T do this by customization
(I investigated extensions (can't remap Ctrl-T) and even
system-wide Ctrl-T remapping with Karibiner; neither gives
you what you want)- History is shared across containers. So
e.g. work URLs mixed up with personal. That's contra to one
of the main purposes of Profiles.- External applications do
not open a tab in the current container. So e.g. clicking
in a link in work slack will fail because it will not open
in a tab which has work cookies / google account
etc.Evidently Containers are not designed as a Profile
replacement. I'm not sure what they are for but I don't
think it's a need that I have.As I understand it using the
long-standing Firefox profiles feature is the way to go,
but personally I switched back to Chrome after a month of
the new Firefox Beta because of the convenience of Chrome
profiles. I should try Firefox profiles, but I exhausted my
experimentation energy on Containers.
mr_johnson22 - 3 hours ago
> - New tabs do not inherit current containerMiddle-
clicking or Ctrl+clicking the New Tab button does inherit
the current container. It also opens the new tab to the
right of the current tab instead of at the far right of
the tab strip. These actions are one in the same, so any
extension that opens a tab to the right of the current
tab (like Always Right or All Tabs Helper) also make the
tab inherit the current container.It's strange that such
a useful feature is barely advertised at all in the UI,
but it's there.But your other criticisms of using
containers as profiles are spot-on.
remedan - 5 hours ago
Well, you could add about:profiles to your bookmarks. But I
agree that the UX around profiles in FF is a bit clunky.But
containers don't have separate extensions, bookmarks and
history so they can't completely replace profiles.
wheresmyusern - 4 hours ago
exactly. i cant believe nobody here seems to know about
profiles or about:profiles. its the perfect solution. my
setup is tree-style tabs (recently made to work with 57)
and a different profile for each task (one profile for
each language im learning, one for music, and one for
each research topic i might be pursuing). whats your
setup like?
Santosh83 - 3 hours ago
But does about:profiles work bug-free for you? From my
experience it has had a long standing bug: when you
select a different profile to the one you're currently
using and click the "Open profile in new window" button,
it actually loads the current profile again in another
window. I read on a forum somewhere (forget the link)
that this was an acknowledged problem and would be fixed
sometime in future.So at least until then, about:profiles
is no replacement for using the -P command-line switch to
start the profile manager.Using multiple profiles
seamlessly is one area Firefox can and should seriously
improve, or Chrome's "User" feature will always have the
edge.
acqq - 5 hours ago
You can make OS links (e.g. different shortcuts on the
desktop to different profiles) to start with different -p
[profilename] then starting different profile is just a
click away. I do it all the time using such configurations.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Shortcut_to_a_specific_profileAls
o don't forget to add -no-remote option to each of the
links to enable starting such browsers in parallel. Sadly
it's not mentioned behind the URL above.
Santosh83 - 3 hours ago
This works fine, but the problem is that it is not near
as layman friendly as Chrome's "Switch User" feature that
is available a click away on every Chrome window. Only
tech aware people will fiddle with command-line switches
and create shortcuts, yet even an average user would like
to use multiple simultaneous profiles/users.Firefox needs
to improve on Chrome here. The erstwhile "Profile
Switcher" addon provided a nice UI but is sadly gone
after the WebExtensions transition and I cannot find an
equivalent so far.
e40 - 2 hours ago
Just playing with profiles and I can't see in way to make the
different windows stand out, which are in different
profiles.Anyone know how to make the windows visually
distinct?
Santosh83 - 1 hours ago
Yes, use a different theme for each profile?
nathan_long - 4 hours ago
I've been using Pinboard for bookmarks since before browsers
started offering sync. I can create and search those bookmarks
in any browser, and since I use multiple browsers on multile
machines, that's handy. My webmail is also accessible from any
browser.Syncing extensions and browsing history is not
something I feel I need.
geekamongus - 3 hours ago
Pinboard seems to be minimally maintained. I've tried
contacting the developer (it is just one guy) and have had no
response. A bit concerning, if you ask me.
scholia - 28 minutes ago
I have seen him being very responsive to paying customers
and his charges are reasonable. However, it seems he did
get deluged with delicious users whining at him after he
saved that service, and you wouldn't reasonably expect a
one-man business to be able to handle that.You could always
try tweeting him. He's also on HN.
taway12340x0 - 5 hours ago
> I have work and a couple of personal accounts that I have
signed in in different browser windows.Don't do that. On one
hand you mix work and personal related issues (not recommended)
on the other hand it makes it easier to track you (as your
accounts can be correlated). As a dev I have my own (personal,
work, ...) users/accounts even at home (if I do remote) to
separate the stuff - maybe that's paranoid, but for me it was
great to improve work-life balance.
blt - 1 hours ago
I am also worried about this, but how do you deal with it on
mobile?
Myrmornis - 4 hours ago
Yes, it's paranoid, but I respect your decision to do it.
However the imperative mood used in your first sentence is
totally inappropriate. That's exactly what Profiles are for;
the vast majority of people are going to want to process
personal issues and work issues without signing in as a
different user.
fencepost - 4 hours ago
The signing into an account in Chrome almost got someone fired
at a small customer of mine a few weeks ago. Fortunately they
called me first to look into it, I pointed out that the porn
bookmarks in question were years old and that since Chrome was
signed into a personal account it was pretty likely that the
same account had been used by other family members at home.I
also wrote this up for the owners to send to their staff, feel
free to reuse if appropriate for you:We?ve seen at least one
situation recently where a user ?signed in? to Chrome when
prompted, which brought that user?s personal bookmarks and
website logins onto their work computer. While Chrome offers
this as an option, there are no situations where your personal
account should be linked to a browser at work ? if you need to
be using personal email, etc. please do so from your own phone
or other device on your own time. This is for your own privacy
and security as well as for the practice ? we want to not have
your personal data on our systems, and you don?t want your
private email, bookmarks, etc. accessible to anyone else who
happens to be at your desk while you?ve stepped away.If you
have linked your browser to a personal account, please remove
that connection using the instructions below.You can check
whether Chrome is linked to an online account by clicking on
the small person icon at the top right corner of the window ?
just to the left of the ?X? to close the window. ? If
you click on that and it asks you to sign in, you?re not linked
to an account. ? If you click on that and it lists a
personal account, click on ?Manage People? to open a new window
listing connected accounts. On each account there are 3 dots in
the top right corner ? click those and ?Remove this person? ?
If you see a name rather than a generic person icon, click on
that and use ?Manage People? to remove that connected
account.Firefox offers a similar but less-used version of this
that would have required creating a Firefox account to use
Firefox Sync. If you have done this with Firefox please
disconnect it; if you?re not sure then you almost certainly
haven?t done this in Firefox and don?t need to worry about it.
sangnoir - 1 hours ago
> I pointed out that the porn bookmarks in question were
years old and that since Chrome was signed into a personal
account it was pretty likely that the same account had been
used by other family members at home.So the offence was
merely having porn bookmarks in their browser - not visiting
porn sites at work? Wow.
dewiz - 1 hours ago
This story would deserve a blog post of its own. Google might
not realize it, but the ease of being tracked by them is also
a risk in work place.
Manishearth - 3 hours ago
Container tabs in Firefox lets you do this within a single
window.about:profiles gives you the same functionality as
Chrome's profiles; it's just a bit harder to discover.
merb - 1 hours ago
you need to use the dev edition. this is fast...I found
Electrolysis still quite slow. but the new engine ("Quantum"), is
ridiculous fast. The last ~5 versions were such big improvements,
that I even switched from Chrome. It's so good know that there is
no need to keep Chrome. Firefox isn't good enough again, Firefox
is the browser again.
feelin_googley - 1 hours ago
"Becoming true "User Agents," in other words"I remember the early
browsers as smaller programs that were oriented around retrieving
content for further viewing/interaction using other applications.
As I understood it, this was one of the ways that MIME was
useful.The problems with "modern" web browsing that annoy users
probably have less to do with what, back then, would have been
separate programs. They have more to do with the retrieval step.
User have little control over 1. the content the browser requests
and retrieves and 2. whether and how that content is processed
(i.e. the "default settings" of the browser decide and to my
knowledge few users today manually adjust MIME settings or
whatever today's equivalent is). Because users today expect the
browser to do everything. It is more than a user agent i.e. http
client, it is an "all-in-one" program that can seemingly do
anything. No auxiliary programs are needed. This comes at a
cost. I would argue that cost includes many hassles that users
experience, including "speed".The point is that this blog post is
talking about #2, the processing of retrieved content. But is
that really what causes most of the user annoyances? Is that
what ultimately affects "speed"?Or could it be, at least in part,
that some web page is controlling the web browser to have it make
dozens upon dozens of DNS and HTTP requests, not only for
tracking, but in some cases for "content" the user does not
want.The first task of the user agent, #1, to retrieve content,
is not nearly as complex as the second, #2. It probably has not
changed much since the early days of the www. (I still use
original netcat from 1996 as well as other 1990's tcp clients to
great effect.) Retrieval of content can be user controlled. The
complexity is manageable. The "user agent" can be small, open
source and easily compiled by the user. And with todays memory
and networking retrieval can be very fast.When I think of a "user
agent" I think of a tcp or http client, a small program that can
make TCP connections and HTTP requests, not one that is also a
graphics rendering engine, a video player, a programming language
interpreter or a PDF viewer, etc.It is the disappearance of the
MIME idea in favor of a highly complex, all-in-one application
called a "modern web browser" that is at the source of every
known problem I can think of that is associated with "modern web
browsers" today, whether it is browser "speed" or privacy or
security or whatever. It is the price one must pay for not
having separate programs with separate privileges to accomplish
separate tasks.
Santosh83 - 1 hours ago
How would you propose "splitting" a modern web app between two
programs, one to retrieve its content and another to render it,
without the sort of tight integration between these two
programs that would be needed to again lead to the kind of
"kitchen sink" situation that we have today??IMO the problem is
not the kitchen sink nature of web browsers, the problem is the
kitchen sink nature of the web itself. It needs to be split
into functionally separate parts that can be interfaced with
different programs and workflows, instead of being a huge,
integrated 'web' that is in turn parsed by a similarly huge,
integrated program, the browser.
on_and_off - 3 hours ago
>My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a
Google account, and just generally wanting less dependence on
GoogleOne thing they have been doing very well is allowing
history to sync between multiple devices on different OSes.Right
now I use Chrome everywhere because :- It feels pretty fast (I
still have to try the new FF)- Any replacement needs to come with
an extension covering this feature and working across all my
OSes.
bergheim - 1 hours ago
Funny how you are replying to a comment about privacy and less
reliance on google and you are saying chrome is good becuase
you can send all your browser history to google.
DiThi - 2 hours ago
I've been using FF sync for at least 3 years now, probably
more. And FF 57 is definitely on par with Chrome in browsing
speed. Still not quite there with WebGL, though. The debugger
is much better now, too, and surprisingly more responsive than
Chrome's.
kaycebasques - 1 hours ago
JS debugging in particular or do you mean the developer tools
in general?(I'm the Chrome DevTools tech writer / advocate)
ared38 - 3 hours ago
Firefox has had syncing built in for a while:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/sync/Haven't
tried it on iOS yet, but it worked great on my Android.
on_and_off - 2 hours ago
and this is where Chrome has a good hook on me.In order to
switch, both FF desktop and mobile need to be better than
Chrome.Does FF support a version of Chrome tabs too ?Damn,
they have built themselves a good moat just with features I
will miss.
allenz - 2 hours ago
I prefer FF over Chrome on mobile. FF mobile allows
extensions such as uBlock Origin and Google Link Fixer
which I find essential. FF supports sending tabs to other
devices, if that's what you mean by Chrome tabs.
jazoom - 2 hours ago
Firefox on Android has awful scrolling physics. I will
never be able to use it while the scrolling is different
to every other app on my phone.
allenz - 1 hours ago
I guess it depends on the phone. Scrolling is smooth on
my HTC One.
jazoom - 1 hours ago
It's definitely smooth. Too smooth, in fact. It feels
like my finger is slipping on the screen. No other app
does this.
mozoldie - 1 hours ago
Last I checked they were using the native Android
scrolling physics. I could be mistaken though.
jazoom - 1 hours ago
If so then I don't know why it has felt so different to
every other app on all 3 of my Nexus devices (currently
the 6P).
NikolaeVarius - 1 hours ago
FF is insanely slow on mobile. Scrolling in janky and
rendering seems to be about 50% slower than Chromium
Y_Y - 45 minutes ago
Maybe it's your phone?
Spivak - 2 hours ago
Yes it does. The feature is called Custom Tabs in FF but
it's there.
on_and_off - 20 minutes ago
Will it sync with another browser though.That's asking a
lot (chrome does not do that AFAIK) but that's the only
way to allow me to use multiple browsers on different
devices fluidly (and also to continue using chrome where
it has an edge, like on mobile with chrome tabs)
inanutshellus - 2 hours ago
I don't know about iOS but the Firefox Android app is great
and works with Firefox Sync, of course.
frik - 4 hours ago
Firefox 56 is actually pretty good. It's now fast again. I am
using a fresh new profile.Please let me increase "content process
count" higher than 7. Chrome opens hundreds of child-processes
(no problem at all on my PC).And I am still keeping an older
Firefox 48 around, as it's the last version that runs Firebug and
other good but now unsupported addons. Firebug had this "DOM"
panel which showed the non-default DOM attributes in a different
color and showed them as first few entries, and the rest below.
The DevTools in new Firefox has a less useful DOM panel (it shows
all attributes not grouped or colored differently, makes the DOM
panel useless and chaotic) - please improve the DOM panel to be
feature-equalent to the old Firebug DOM panel!!
seba_dos1 - 4 hours ago
dom.ipc.processCount in about:config
frik - 3 hours ago
Thanks a lot! I increased it to 50, it Works great. Please
remove the UI restriction with the next release.
inDigiNeous - 38 minutes ago
You will be pleasantaly surprised when you get updated to 57 :)
Have been running the beta for 3 weeks now, very stable, fast,
snappy. Amazing work.
[deleted]
madeofpalk - 4 hours ago
> I also like that Firefox has a built in tracking protection
(not just Do Not Track toggle but actual blocking of
trackersHere's something I find curious.When Apple does it, it's
because they want to kill the open web and drive more people to
their closed Apple News platform. When Mozilla does it, it's
because they're saints.How am I able to reconcile these two?
JustSomeNobody - 4 hours ago
> How am I able to reconcile these two?It's like reviews on
Amazon. You skim the highs and the lows and you read the rest.
People who say Apple is killing the open web are at the
extreme. Skim what they say just to be familiar with their
argument, but be careful not to get sucked in.
kwhitefoot - 4 hours ago
Perhaps because Mozilla doesn't have a News platform? So it is
easier to believe that they are doing it for you. I don't mean
to imply that Apple have any other motives, I know nothing
about them except that there appears to be a greater likelihood
of a conflict of interest.
mtgx - 6 hours ago
For those who don't know, if you sign in to your Google account
in Chrome, Google will automatically save all the searches you've
done in the omnibox.I don't remember Google ever warning me
specifically that this was happening in the background, and after
I checked https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity and noticed it
was doing that, I was so furious that I deleted all the data
Google kept on me there, and paused all tracking in the Activity
Controls page. I also stopped signing in to the Google account in
Chrome.This is why I'm a big supporter of EU's "explicit consent"
idea. I should be knowing stuff like that without having to read
a 5-page privacy policy that's often hidden somewhere on the Help
page.Speaking of Firefox, version 57 also makes it easier to
enable Tracking Protection in settings now (before you had to
switch to the private windows to benefit from it, although you
could make it so that FF always opened private windows by
default).https://www.ghacks.net/2017/11/07/firefox-57-full-
tracking-p...You can download FF57 from their FTP servers (they
published it today), if you can't wait for the auto-update
tomorrow:https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/57.0/
ihale - 6 hours ago
That data is never truly deleted, not for a while at least.I
suppose it has benefit now with Android, and multiple devices,
but Google, and Youtube both started saving searches long
before the release of Chrome.Quite terrible.
colanderman - 6 hours ago
It's pretty easy to accidentally enable uploading all your
cleartext passwords to Google's cloud service too (the dialog
to do so is a dark pattern). I similarly was furious when I
discovered that. Firefox is now my go-to, and what I recommend
to friends and family.
zeveb - 4 hours ago
Do note that if you enable Firefox's sync functionality, all
of your passwords will be encrypted with a function of your
Mozilla Account password, and that Mozilla can target your
browser instance with JavaScript to steal your account
password at will (their protocol specifies that they never
see your plaintext password, but they serve JavaScript to
hash the password ? which means they could serve JavaScript
to send the password anywhere they like).Firefox is more
secure than Chrome, but it's not very secure. The sad thing
is that it used to be more secure and Mozilla deliberately
weakened their security.
mgbmtl - 4 hours ago
I agree that is a valid issue, but it's still quite a
different scale than using Google.If I understand
correctly, you're saying that we should be careful about
saving passwords in Firefox if we could be the target of a
National Security Letter from the US. The attack would be
detectable, so it cannot be used very often (and they would
need a really good excuse for doing so).By contrast, Google
takes all our data and can do whatever they want with it,
without a warrant/NSL?
[deleted]
clairity - 3 hours ago
thanks for the direct ftp link, and congrats to the firefox
team! i've been using 57 (and 58) via the developer edition and
really like the improvements.but i think i'll stick with 56 as
my default browser for a little longer since quantum breaks
some great legacy add-ons: * NoScript -- control script
execution * RequestPolicy (and its variants) -- control
content requests * Blend In -- use the most common user agent
string ublock origin can somewhat replace the first two
(although i think its UI could use some improvement) but the
latter one and a few more that i use don't have direct
equivalents (yet).
Sylos - 2 hours ago
NoScript should be released either today/tomorrow or soon.
The dev was planning to have it ready for 57, but I don't
know how far exactly he got.It won't be quite full-featured
yet, though. He's planning that for Firefox 59, which will be
the next Extended Support Release and what Tor Browser will
be based on (which needs NoScript).There's a handful of
compatible user-agent switchers already...
wtallis - 1 hours ago
I switched from RequestPolicy to uMatrix earlier this year
and have found it to be an acceptable substitute. I think my
motivation was RequestPolicy being incompatible with
multiprocess.
tgb - 5 hours ago
I hate that it saves it enough that I often perform 'dumb'
googles in an incognito window just so it'll never suggest "how
do I parallel park" again. But how is this unexpected behavior?
It also saves every URL you visit - in your browser history.
And those URLs encode the search terms. If you want it to not
save what you do, then you use incognito mode.
catamorphismic - 5 hours ago
How is it not unexpected that a piece of software uploads and
saves everything you search for on a remote corporate server?
When did this become so commonplace that users don't even
blink an eye to it? And more importantly, why would anyone
find this acceptable?
[deleted]
[deleted]
GuB-42 - 5 hours ago
Isn't it the same thing no matter the browser?If you are logged
in you Google account, every Google search will end up in your
Google history. It doesn't matter if you search from Chrome's
omnibox, google.com or Firefox's search bar.Does Chrome also
uploads search made with other search engines? That would be a
bit more worrisome. Though considering that Firefox saves your
history in your "Firefox Sync" account, I wouldn't be surprised
if Google did the same.
callahad - 4 hours ago
Firefox Sync is intentionally designed so that we can't read
or recover your data; it's all encrypted client-side.Chrome
is specifically designed to do the opposite: Google
explicitly states that when you sign into Chrome, "your
experience in other Google products is personalized by
including your Chrome history with your Web & App Activity."
(https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/185277)
GuB-42 - 3 hours ago
A good point. Firefox sync has zero-knowledge encryption,
Chrome sync doesn't. It is just that if Firefox sync stores
your history, Chrome sync probably does it too.And
interestingly, you could have a page showing your search
history with Firefox sync just like with Google. Just
because a page shows you private data doesn't mean someone
else has access to it, and the more common opposite is also
true.
Griffinsauce - 5 hours ago
It's a Google box... did you not assume that this went to
Google?
def_true_false - 5 hours ago
Google is just the default, you can set it to whatever search
engine you like.
ieshaholley - 4 hours ago
Good luck with it all
mtmail - 6 hours ago
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium removes many of the
nagging and background features related to Google services.
teamhappy - 6 hours ago
Browser vendors influence upcoming web standards. If you use
ungoogled-chromium then your vote still goes to Google.
bad_user - 5 hours ago
Unless Chrome has features you can't survive without (and I
admit its dev tools are pretty good), then I don't see the
purpose of this.If staying free of Google becomes a goal, then
by using Chrome you're still helping them, even if your Chrome
is un-googlified.This is because you help Chrome become a
monopoly in the marketplace, I view it as the new Internet
Explorer already. Many people here probably don't remember, but
IExplorer also won on technical merits, version 5 being an
excellent browser compared with its competition. Market
dominance that allowed Microsoft to screw the web for a decade
at least. And no, in this context its open source nature does
not matter much for as long as Google controls its
implementation and distribution.Firefox is right now truly the
best browser, at least for my usage patterns and needs, but
even if it weren't, I would still use it, because when web
standards are endangered due to a monopoly, then I consider it
my duty to support the underdog.Now don't get me wrong, it is
true that Google and Chrome have helped the open web. But that
doesn't matter that much, because they can always turn and you
can see how lately Chrome is making bold changes without
waiting confirmation from W3C or the other browser vendors ?
like disabling forms auto-complete or deprecating certificating
pining.They are at a point where Chrome has enough market share
to implement whatever the heck they want. DRM? H.264? Lost
battles after they ended up in Chrome.
[deleted]
zach43 - 5 hours ago
> Firefox is right now truly the best browser, at least for
my usage patterns and needs, but even if it weren't, I would
still use it, because when web standards are endangered due
to a monopoly, then I consider it my duty to support the
underdog.I just love that the web community actually thinks
about this, and actively works to avoid monopolization and
nonstandard behavior on the different browsers.Recently, I
have moved into desktop development (using Qt and GTK+), and
it is atrocious just how difficult it is to deploy a non-
trivially sized native application on the three common
operating systems. I really wish that the desktop development
community could have unified around a similar set of
standards for all the OSes when it comes to desktop
applications too.The web application platform is painful in
several ways too, but I think they have nailed it with
attention to standards compliance and weeding-out
monopolistic behavior
pjmlp - 5 hours ago
As someone that has been doing desktop development since
the MS-DOS/Amiga days, and is quite happy to only touch Web
development when obliged to do so, I wonder what those
problems are.
cannam - 4 hours ago
Without knowing what the parent really intended, I
assumed they were talking about the difficulty of
deploying the same application across platforms rather
than with desktop development on any single
platform.Different system libraries, different window
management environments and user expectations for layout
and interaction, different handling of hi-dpi displays,
different filesystems with different filename
restrictions and different handling of filename
encodings, different application packaging, different
code signing and sandboxing requirements, different
package distribution mechanisms. I've probably missed a
few, but those cover some memorable enough annoyances for
me in recent years.I don't enjoy web development, but I
do enjoy web publication and distribution.
[deleted]
kodablah - 5 hours ago
They are a good ways behind stable: https://github.com/Eloston
/ungoogled-chromium/issues/262. You might be opening yourself
to security issues being this far behind.
tspike - 2 hours ago
Thanks for the reminder. I just downloaded the latest FF beta and
exiled Chrome to an "only when needed" role.All the back-and-
forth about speed and features is understandable, but misses the
point that Firefox needs our support if we are to have any real
non-proprietary options for what is quickly becoming the base
system abstraction layer for most computing.
mtgx - 1 hours ago
FF57 stable is arriving tomorrow. But you can get it from the
FTP server
today:https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/57.0/
Santosh83 - 1 hours ago
Indeed this is the main point, and the reason I've stuck with
Firefox ever since it launched, despite being rather slow a few
years back. This is the only browser engine that is not shaped
by major corporate interests. And frankly it has no major
downsides as compared to Chrome. The latter only enjoys the
market share it does (in my opinion) because of being
aggressively pushed on Google.com and being bundled everywhere.
Kluny - 4 minutes ago
I gave Firefox a try a month or two ago when people started
saying it was good again. I think I had a problem with uBlock
origin not working well enough - too much crap was getting
through. What are people using for adblock?
jakub_g - 2 hours ago
BTW: if using Android, if FF is not for you, try Brave instead
of Chrome.It feels exactly like Chrome (it's Chromium-based),
but has a built-in adblocker, tracker blocking, HTTPS
everywhere, no nagging to sign in, and does not throw
"suggested news" (with no opt-out) upon you. Brave's founder is
ex-Mozilla's CEO (Brendan Eich).However latest FF on Android is
actually not bad, at least if you have a modern phone (the UI
feels slowish though on pre-2016 phones).
leeoniya - 2 hours ago
i would be using FF on Android if the scrolling was not so
crappy. It's pretty terrible :(
Drdrdrq - 1 hours ago
... ...What do you mean?
colanderman - 1 hours ago
There are two distinct problems I've noticed with FF
scrolling vs. Chrome on Android.First is that certain
elements block scrolling. I use FF primarily for
Facebook (since FF allows me to use my ? shameless plug ?
idle-time faker extension [1]). If my scrolling thumb
lands on the "Like" button of a post, the screen just
stays put. So about 1/3 of my "scroll" gestures are in
vain.Second is that "flinging" motions don't register
very well with Firefox. With Chrome, "flinging" sends
the web page flying at a predictable speed; with Firefox,
it lags for a fraction of a second before scrolling at a
random speed which is usually much slower than that in
Chrome. It's as if Firefox doesn't register the final
thumb flick of a "fling", but Chrome does. Since
"flinging" is my primary method of browsing longer web
pages, ultimately my thumb has to physically do more
work, and gets exhausted more quickly, when using Firefox
than Chrome.A third nitpick is that, while (non-flinging)
page scrolling keeps up with my thumb, it does so in a
jerky manner, like it can't quite keep up with rendering,
or it doesn't see all the touch events. Reminds me of an
old PDA. In contrast, scrolling in Chrome is very
smooth. This looks ugly but I could live with it.It is
the first to two issues that prevent me from using
Firefox on Android for anything but Facebook.[1]
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/social-
networ...
mwilliaams - 2 hours ago
Use FF nightly on Android. It's got the quantum update and
it's great. I haven't had it break on me yet, but I keep a
working APK just in case.
ethagnawl - 1 hours ago
Do you have to install the nightly build manually or can
you opt-in via the default version?
teamhappy - 1 hours ago
Nightly and beta releases are available as separate apps.
JoshMnem - 2 hours ago
From what I've read, Brave doesn't block ads -- it replaces
them with other ads. I don't think that it's a good
idea.Firefox for Android also allows browser extensions,
which gives some control of the software back to the user.
rahiel - 1 hours ago
I'm using Brave on Android and it does block ads, here is
the ad block engine they use: https://github.com/brave/ad-
block. The replacing of ads thing isn't implemented yet,
and I expect that it can be turned off when that feature
has landed, like the Brave payments thing that is currently
opt-in on the desktop version:
https://www.brave.com/publishers/.
jakub_g - 2 hours ago
I was not aware of it - thx for info. A bit strange
indeed.Link for the other if interested:
https://www.brave.com/about-ad-replacement/Edit: from the
link content, I understand they actually backtracked from
this proposal after a backlash from publishers.
fabrice_d - 1 hours ago
Except that it does actually block ads and doesn't replace
them. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet
when you can just try the product :)
0x6c6f6c - 1 hours ago
Except it does. It has the functionality to do BOTH.The
tagline of giving the option to either disable ads or
replace ads is to provide a way to enjoy an ad-free
experience or to receive only optimized advertisements.A
big reason some users dislike ads isn't because of their
entire existance but rather their tendency as of late to
be malware-ridden or cause drops in webpage performance.
These are the things that cause some users to enable ad-
blockers, and Brave is the only way I've heard of that
has pushed the envelope of a BETTER ad experience.From
their blog, the first is a great introduction to what
Brave is about[1], as well as their response to an attack
on their ad-replacement
ideology[2].[1]:https://www.brave.com/how-brave-works-
for-you/[2]:https://www.brave.com/braves-response-to-the-
naa-a-better-de...Also a quote directly from Brave:
[The user interface] shows the major choices that Brave
enables: You?re game to try our default mode of
operation, for a better ad-supported Web. Just leave the
Replace Ads item checked. This is the default mode of
operation. We insert ads after blocking without hurting
page load speed, and those ads will support the sites you
browse. We choose ads based on browser-private user data
with no remote tracking ? not even by our servers.
You want to block all ads and trackers, but you?re not
sure about our plan to insert better ads with high
performance and privacy. You can do this with Brave by
checking Block Ads. We want you on board even if you?re
just blocking everything. You?d like to try Brave
without ad blocking or replacing, to get whatever ads and
trackers you would experience in other browsers. Check
Allow Ads and Tracking. We still protect you with HTTPS
Everywhere and other defense by default.
Santosh83 - 1 hours ago
>A big reason some users dislike ads isn't because of
their entire existance but rather their tendency as of
late to be malware-ridden or cause drops in webpage
performance. These are the things that cause some users
to enable ad-blockers, and Brave is the only way I've
heard of that has pushed the envelope of a BETTER ad
experience.AdBlock Plus also does something equivalent
through their default option to show "Unobtrusive ads."
InitialLastName - 55 minutes ago
The problem with AdBlock Plus is that, as far as I can
tell, the way to get on their "unobtrusive ads" list
isn't to actually be "unobtrusive" to any meaningful
standard, it's to pay them to qualify you as unobtrusive.
Moyamo - 56 minutes ago
Anecdotally, I have found that Brave chokes on some obscure
websites (i.e. it won't play video or audio).
nerdwaller - 5 hours ago
I've been on Firefox since I can remember it being out, but the
latest versions, 56+, have me using it only intermittently due to
battery drain issues on Mac[0] :(. I am really hoping they get
this fixed
shortly.[0]https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
acqq - 5 hours ago
Exactly, Firefox is slower for both me and my girlfriend, I am
a kind of "typical non-typical" and she "typical typical" user,
and it got annoyingly slower for both. And now I've just lost
all the extensions too, including NoScript and the
dictionary(?!?)! See my other post here for details.
sverige - 5 hours ago
I've been using firefox since forever too. (Actually, since
Mozilla 1.0 (aka Nutscrape) in 1993 or thereabouts.) I'm at
that point where I'm about to dump it again, as I have
periodically in the past.They keep making it more and more
like Chrome. If I wanted to use Chrome, I would. It's gotten
to bloat maximum.It's slow as hell. It's less flexible and
less easy to personalize. They have broken some of my
favorite add-ons.This piece is pure propaganda.
mgbmtl - 4 hours ago
I was feeling the same, but FF57 really is much better.It
does break some extensions, but many have converted. Which
are you having trouble with? The main one I'm missing is
"Disable Ctrl+Q".My notes:
https://www.bidon.ca/fr/random/2017-10-05-webextensions-
supp...
sverige - 2 hours ago
The main one I've been missing is Pentadactyl (for quite
a while). Vimium-FF is ok I guess.My main objection is
still the sheer size and the amount of memory it takes,
and the continual feature creep to make it more and more
like Chrome. I know I'm in the minority, and also that
it's heresy to say anything bad about Mozilla here. Oh
well.I only wish I had lots of money and/or time so I
could help revive the development of xombrero, but at
least it's still available.
codexon - 2 hours ago
I think most people don't know this, but you need to download
the nightly, NOT the regular version of Firefox (56 as of
now) to see the speed increase.The regular Firefox is much
slower than Chrome still. The nightly is now noticeably
faster than Chrome.
rehemiau - 17 minutes ago
This all mozilla's bragging about speed is premature. They
should've published this article after firefox 57 reaches
stable.
codexon - 6 minutes ago
Yup this article confused me as well.The current stable
release 56 just can't compare to chrome.Apparently they
have decided 57 is stable already but plan to make it
official tomorrow.From my unscientific testing, 57 is
only as fast as chrome, while the nightly (59) seems to
be faster than chrome. They should have waited until 59
was stable.I would be using the nightly as my main
browser if I didn't have experience with crashes and bugs
with nightly versions before.
jorvi - 4 hours ago
Honestly, if you are on macOS, just use Safari. Most extension
you want/need are there (or the are suitable replacements. cVim
and sVim are pretty close if you don't dive to deep, for
example). Adblocking is actually faster than on any other
browser because the blockers use the same Content Blocking API
as on iOS Safari. And then the battery life... you easily get
2-4h more just by using Safari.Which brings me to my other
point (which I always keep hammering on in browser threads):
why don't 3rd-party browser focus more on battery? If you're on
Windows, Edge is king in battery use. On macOS, its Safari. On
Linux, none (but then Linux doesn't have good power management
in general). We live in a mobile-first world these days, why
not focus browser development there?Edit: I'm not dissing the
Firefox or Chrome team their efforts, but almost all the news
articles or blogs I see speak about Chrome or Firefox getting
faster. And they do, by significant jumps. But when there are
battery improvements, they are usually pretty middling (say
10-20m more battery life). So all I'm saying: why not flip the
focus?
chipotle_coyote - 4 hours ago
It looks like people are downvoting this. Perhaps it's
because of the tone of the first sentence; if we rephrase it
to "If you're on macOS, why not just use Safari?" I think
it's a reasonable question.There are reasonable answers --
Safari's extensions aren't quite as capable as the other two,
so it's possible you're relying on an extension that Safari
doesn't have and can never duplicate, and of course if you
need to sync bookmarks and other browser data across OS
platforms, Safari falls down in the way all iCloud-backed
apps do. But Safari does focus a lot on battery conservation,
and if you're on a laptop that can make a big difference.
And, while I'm sure there are benchmarks out there to quibble
over, in practice Safari seems to be just as fast and just as
compliant as Chrome and Firefox are.I've been using Safari as
my main web browser for years without feeling like I'm
missing out on either performance or killer features. I keep
copies of Firefox and Chrome around and keep them up to date,
mostly for web site testing purposes; neither of them have
added features compelling enough to make me want to switch
back. I doubt Firefox 57 is likely to change that equation,
although I'm happy to hear that they've got their groove
back, as it were.
snuxoll - 3 hours ago
Firefox is my default browser anywhere but macOS, owning an
iPhone and iPad I end up using the continuity features in
Safari quite heavily when I've been browsing something on
my phone or tablet and want to pick it up on my iMac.I love
Firefox, and owning an iMac I'm not terribly concerned
about the power efficiency difference between the two - but
damn if it isn't convenient to have the ability to just
pick up where I left off.
BuckRogers - 1 hours ago
I've long held your viewpoint. I push friends and family to
use their platform's native browser. Most often than not, it
saves on battery and reduces energy usage. I use Safari on
iOS and on my desktop I've always used 2 browsers. 1 for
browsing and a 2nd for long-running media. Thus on my desktop
I use Firefox and for media, Edge.I don't have a laptop, but
will when the Qualcomm Snapdragon Windows10 machines land,
and will probably use Edge exclusively there.It's important
to watch where incentives run. Google has the incentive to
profit from you. Microsoft and Apple have the incentive to
make sure your browser and device work as efficiently and
well together as possible. Mozilla focuses on privacy as
their main feature.
SomeHacker44 - 1 hours ago
The most anti-user "User Agent" thing of Chrome, in my
experience, is their refusal to let me open my myriad dev sites
with bogus certificates claiming some bullshit HSTS problem,
without giving me a "do it anyway, you stupid browser" button.So,
literally, I still use Chrome (because I'm too used to it), but I
do all my dev work on Firefox, which has a dev-friendly user
policy.
dylz - 1 hours ago
type badidea
Retr0spectrum - 1 hours ago
I believe if you type "badidea" at the error page it will let
you through unconditionally.
pzduniak - 53 minutes ago
I wish I knew that when adding auto-HTTPS and HSTS
functionality to a product - typing out "chrome://net-
internals/#hsts" almost became muscle memory.
SomeHacker44 - 53 minutes ago
Holy crap. I have Google'd a zillion times for a workaround
and they all were insane "do about a zillion steps on
Keychain access or just fix your server." THANK YOU BOTH.
gkfasdfasdf - 1 hours ago
FWIW blocking sites with bogus certs and not allowing a user
bypass is exactly what the HSTS RFC requires. If you were
testing the HSTS feature of your website, Chrome is doing the
right thing. It's possible to clear Chrome's cache of HSTS-
enabled sites btw: https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/clear-hsts-
settings-chrome-...
tasty_freeze - 1 hours ago
On html5test.com, FF56 scores 478 (on my windows 7 machine). Does
FF57 increase compliance at all, or is this purely a performance
boost?
oatmealsnap - 1 hours ago
You can see here: http://html5test.com/results/desktop.htmlFF57
gives me 483
dogprez - 6 hours ago
Somewhat tangentially, I really like the cartoons Lin has made.
I?ve found I?ve naturally anthropomorphized code. Often when I
start working with someone new they get confused when I start
talking about constructs like people. I think it?s given me a
different perspective on encapsulation and concurrency than most
people.I don?t know if I?ve ever worked with someone that thinks
the same way. When I work on code that wasn?t designed that way I
force my brain to think like the CPU instead of in terms of little
elves with different job... Not sure if anyone else has experienced
this 2 modes of thinking about code. It seems like FF engineer?s
might be thinking in the same terms as they tackle concurrency
refactors.
grigory - 4 hours ago
When I explain various aspects of concurrency and multi-threaded
programming to non-programmers, using analogy of people doing
some tasks really helps.I've picked this up from Feynman's
lectures on computing - highly recommend them!
whatever_dude - 4 hours ago
I feel I've always done that because I learned programming
through Usborne's books, and her work reminds me of that. Usborne
books helped me grok difficult things very fast when I was about
10 years old. For a while, when using variables and arrays, I
would always think of robots grabbing things from
shelves.Examples and PDF downloads (!):
https://boingboing.net/2016/02/07/usborne-releases-free-pdfs...I
wish those were still around when I was learning about pointers.
Would have made things so much easier!
mxuribe - 5 hours ago
You are not alone in your way of thinking!Also, I had never
previously seen the code cartoons produced by @linclark...but now
seeing them (and digging a little deeper), count myself a fan!
dogprez - 5 hours ago
If I had to guess why, I'd say that I am mostly self taught and
more of an extrovert. It's probably the only way my brain
could trick me into sitting in front of a computer all day
instead of talking with other people. I also played with
action figures late, until I was 12... around the same time I
started programming... I think I'm having a psychological
breakthrough, haha.
snikeris - 4 hours ago
Didn't Djikstra write about this? I wasn't able to pull anything
up, but maybe this will jog someone's memory.
snikeris - 4 hours ago
Found it:http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD1
0xx/EW...Section beginning, "My next linguistical suggestion is
more rigorous"...
[deleted]
Matterrr - 6 hours ago
One extension I don't find a replacement for is Hide caption
titlebar plus. It makes it so there's a permanent title bar even
when Firefox is maximized. I had to change an xfce setting to hide
the title bar when a window is maximized, meaning I lose the title
bar for every application... Not ideal. Does anyone know if there
is an argument to launch firefox without a title bar? Or set it in
xfce for only one application?
bkor - 6 hours ago
Apparently client side decorations might appear in Firefox 59 at
the earliest. For me having that negates the need to hide the
title bar while maximized.Under X11 there are various tools to
hide the titlebar (entire chrome basically), see devilspie.
boriselec - 6 hours ago
Sadly, GUI tweaks is very limited on new extensions api
chippy - 6 hours ago
This is my favourite extension also. When using a laptop or other
small screen, being able to remove the title bar is essential.
I'm not upgrading to 57 until I can find a good
workaround.Apparently, one used to be able to manually modify
Firefox's userchrome.css to do something similar, but I've yet to
find descriptions on what to do with this new version of
Firefox.A different broken family of extensions that is impacted
is mouse gestures, even for things like moving along tabs when
hovering over them using the mouse wheel (default Chrome
experience). I don't think this behaviour is possible with the
new version of FF, sadly.
r3bl - 6 hours ago
userChrome.css is still present on Quantum. I haven't played
around with it a lot, but if you feel like getting your hands
dirty, this should be a relevant resource to you:
https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx/issues/1
jacek - 6 hours ago
Stable Firefox 57.0 is already available on Mozilla's FTP server:
https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/57.0/I am already
using it, but had to reinstall uBlock Origin.
darrmit - 5 hours ago
Thanks for this. Was waiting patiently for the push this week
after getting tired of Nightly builds.