As someone that jumped ship from how slow Chrome has gotten and went to Nightly /w Stylo and (CPU threads - 1) e10s processes enabled about 2 monthsish ago...
Holy damn Firefox is actually fast.
Fair comparison, both having Pocket, uBlock, Evernote, OneNote, Pushbullet, and Bitwarden; neither of them having an extension the other doesn't. Above described Firefox Nightly config vs Chrome Dev.
Test machines are a workstation with a i7-4771 @ 3.9ghz, 32GB DDR3-2133, Radeon 7970 with a trio of 1080p screens (a very fast modern machine from the Haswell era) and a laptop with a i5-32120M, 8GB of DDR3-1600, Intel HD4000 iGPU feeding a 13" 2560x1600 @ 200% hidpi (an Ivy Bridge era MBPr 13" Late 2012). Both machines run Win10.
Both machines have less real world wait on Firefox than Chrome, and the interface has less latency between when I do something and it even begins processing the request. Also, under a ton of windows and tabs, Firefox seems to use less RAM and the speed gap seems to widen.
I don't care about about artificial benchmarks, btw, they never seem to measure what actually makes browsers slower for humans.
Edit: Even though I just said I don't care about benchmarks, using Speedometer 2.0-r2216: On the workstation: Firefox 58.0a1 2017-09-26 64bit 61.18 vs Chrome 63.0.3217.0 dev 64-bit 51.67; on the laptop, same versions: Firefox 28.58 vs Chrome 26.74
So, arguably, flat out benchmarkable performance is the same, with Firefox just slightly edging ahead (18% and 6% faster). It isn't enough to explain how fast Firefox feels now.
Edit 2: And now with Edge 40.15063.0.0/EdgeHTML 15.15063: Workstation, 46.72; Laptop 21.37. Firefox is 34% and 31% faster, Chrome is 25% and 11% faster.
> It isn't enough to explain how fast Firefox feels now.
That's because we've been making a dedicated effort to find and stamp out sources of UI lag! It's called Quantum Flow; see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum/Flow for more.
I beg you to boost performance at least upto the level of chrome even WITH addons. That's the main issue. With addons like ublock origin and other content filters, the cpu usage reaches 50-60% and the page rendering is not that quick as compared to chrome even with addons. Chrome's UI is seriously so liquid smooth that after being with firefox for so many years for my love for privacy, I HAD to switch to chrome sacrificing my privacy. I still use heavy privacy addons but chrome still doesn't get slow noticeably.
I highly appreciate what you doing. Hoping to get back on Firefox as soon as possible.
Once again please take care of those sudden cpu and ram usage with almost necessary addons like ublock, tab suspender etc.
This is one of the things which really slows Firefox down for me. I often found in the past I had to blow away chunks of Sqlite in my profile to get back to a decent speed.
Unfortunately, as long as Firefox security infrastructure does not match Chrome, I can not use it. Note that errors like use-after-free and buffer overflows are marked as Critical (run arbitrary code on computer) for Firefox, but marked as High (execute code in the context of, or otherwise impersonate other origins.) for Chrome because of sandboxing.
Firefox sandboxing does not use Rust. Servo sandboxing (work in progress) does.
It's not accurate to say that Firefox has no sandbox. Sandboxing work has been rolling out for many months now, and later versions have increasingly restrictive sandboxes. You can see the current status per version here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox#Current_Status
Hardening the sandbox is a constant work in progress, but it's not as simple as "compromise of browser engine automatically means arbitrary code execution as running user" any longer.
Sorry I didn't mean Sandboxing used Rust, It was a separate thing (That Rust is less susceptible to such class of errors, so the more code written in Rust the better)
Also didn't mean it has no sandboxing (I knew about efforts), my point was its security is not a match for Chrome yet, as seen from the amount and type of critical errors.
When it is there I would definitely use it along with Chrome.
In case it wasn't clear, it is now the case that content process compromise is no longer critical unless combined with sandbox escape.
Looking at historical vulnerability reports can be misleading in this regard, as the sandboxing features are rather recent (pre-stable-version in some cases).
If I wasn't clear as well, As far as I can see from the link you gave It still does not match the level of security Chrome offers, it is getting there, but not yet.
As Mr. Patrick Walton over there said, Mozilla is still building up the exact, minimal file-system permissions. So, yes, in that way it is still not yet on quite the same level as Chrome.
In terms of security architecture, there is to my knowledge only one bigger difference left and you can change that, if you want.
The difference is that Chrome will spawn a new process for every new tab (unless the webpage in it is from the same domain as another tab). Firefox instead will always round-robin the tabs across a fixed number of processes to achieve lower RAM usage and as result of that also somewhat better performance.
But you can tell Firefox to round-robin across up to 1000 processes or what have you, so that it then does spawn a new process for every new tab (and therefore sandboxes each tab individually).
To do so, go into about:config and set "dom.ipc.processCount" to a high number, like 1000.
I guess as long as it is not default behavior it will stay as a weakness then? I am not sure if it is worth to exchange it for memory or performance gain.
Also is using thread per tab approach more susceptible to memory leaks, resource sharing issues or OS scheduling shenanigans than process per tab approach? You close the tab, the process is dead and resources are mostly guaranteed to returned. My knowledge of modern browsers is limited, maybe this was considered an acceptable compromise though.
Though the Firefox developers aren't going to skimp on sandboxing (or other exploit mitigation techniques) just because of Rust. Defense-in-depth is the name of the game; Rust just provides a layer of language-level defense that C++ previously didn't offer.
I'd like to see the same comparison on a Mac. The Windows version of Firefox has been close to Chrome performance for a while. The Mac version has been significantly slower.
I've been using Firefox Nightly (57) for a while on a 2013 MBP running Sierra. Firefox definitely feels significantly faster than it used to, and the new UI is great.
But this comes at the cost of battery life. I moved back to Chrome because it was constantly chewing CPU.
But Chrome is also guilty of absolutely guzzling battery. I always try other browsers on macOS but in the end keep switching back to Safari because it easily gets me ~2-3h more battery life. This means that on 10h average battery life you'd pay a ~20-33% battery life premium just to run a different browser. At that point, finding replacement Safari extensions is well worth the bother.
What I don't understand: why is it that other browsers don't put battery life before all else? We live in a portable world after all..
I switch to Safari when on battery. But the cost is pretty high - it's the only browser I have on my mac that I find actively unreliable, and the feeble range of available extensions makes it seem crippled compared to Firefox or Chrome
+1 for the significantly improved performance on Firefox on OSX (I'm on a 2015 MBP), not just in the current 57 nightly, but since Firefox 55 came out.
Yep, switched to FF from Chromium since 54/55 when multi-threaded tabs became default. Don't need to restart once in a while when Chromium has eaten up all the RAM. The extension support is just as good, and some of the labs features are very interesting.
Not sure whether this would be borne out on later Macs but this seems to confirm my anecdotal experience on my Mac in the last few days, even since 57 came out.
I had to switch back to Chrome since Firefox has been almost unusable on mainstream site like Netflix.
Can't wait to go back to Firefox as soon as 57 is out!
Did you try current stable firefox or Developer edition or Nightly edition?
If I understand correctly, the photon changes haven't landed on current stable firefox yet. They have just landed in Developer edition. So you might want to give it (or nightly edition) a try.
Re: touchpad scrolling, make sure you disable "smooth" (animated) scrolling and enable precise scrolling; on Linux this requires setting MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 in the environment.
Everything feels 10 times faster without smooth scrolling, while I have to say that the nightly already felt blazing fast _with_ smooth scrolling, haha.
I just wanted to say, that it isn't the first news about Firefox getting faster since Chrome came out.
I tried the new versions every now and then and Chrome always felt faster to me. Maybe it really is, maybe it just uses some perceptional tricks, I don'T know.
Firefox really has been slowly getting faster for a while; especially with Firefox 54, I no longer felt as if I was taking a significant performance hit as the price for not using Chrome. Firefox 55 got even a bit faster, but still was not quite as fast as Chrome. However, the recent changes in Nightly (Firefox 57), which now landed in the developer edition, really was a huge leap forward in performance.
Chrome has a bunch of bugs related to font-rendering on Windows, e.g. https://crbug.com/414307. I'm not sure why switching to DirectWrite didn't just fix these bugs, but subjectively appearance-wise on Windows, Firefox > Edge > Chrome.
Mozilla is experimenting with which default is preferred by fresh install users right now, so users on this thread may have different initial defaults. I don't think that there are plans to change the default for existing users.
How? I was looking for this last week and couldn't find any settings that worked. Nothing relevant in about:config, and the toolbar customization shows the search bar there until I close customization.
Go to customize mode and hover your mouse pointer on the search bar. You'll notice that your mouse pointer turns into a hand, then just drag the search bar and drop it into the center of the screen (blank space).
Was it nightly? I was in the same boat with the standard release, everytime I tried it it felt sluggish. Then I tried nightly and all I can say is wow, no.other browser is as snappy as FF nightly
Switch to Bitwarden, already has a WebExtension extension. Lastpass is basically dead ever since LogMeIn proved they don't care about security of the vault.
Thanks for mentioning Bitwarden. I didn't know about them, but I've had the same concerns about Laspass/Logmein. Yubikey functionality is important to me, which many alternatives don't have, but I see Bitwarden does have that. Their GPL v3 license on all of their software is nice to see too.
Seems 2FA (YubiKey) costs 10 USD/year instead of 24 USD/year which LastPass costs.
I've been looking for a recent feature comparison, the Wikipedia one is rather shallow and incomplete [1] [2].
My (incomplete) take on feature comparison:
Both are relatively cross-platform, widely supported by what I consider status quo platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, Chrome, Firefox).
Advantages of Bitwarden are open source and public development, approx half the price (and approx same as Lastpass before purchased by Logmein), and the ability to self-host.
Advantages of Lastpass are different login for accessing to account and decrypting database. This is important because without this, a MITM attack gets access to the master password.
I also found the announcement of Bitwarden, approx 1 year old now, on HN [3]. It includes some feedback about the software. Bitwarden uses AES256-CBC. How secure is AES256-CBC in this case, and what does Lastpass use? Another criticism is usage of Google Analytics. This can be disabled in the application, but I don't feel it serves a purpose for the user. It should never have been included in the first place. I also don't think either software is audited.
There is no good comparison website I'm aware of, but Bitwarden ticks every box Lastpass does, and is already working on ticking boxes Lastpass doesn't.
Yes, it does. Source: I just switched hours ago and it imported my CCs from LastPass. You can see the stuff they're working on via their Twitter account too.
I'm a quite happy user of KeepPassXC as my password manager. I seriously dislike how LastPass stores the passwords on their servers. And KeepPassXC is open source and actively developed.
Enjoying the Chinese consortium that owns Opera too? I am not even joking here, given China's recent track record with WeChat I would think twice before using Opera to handle all your https (banking..etc.) traffic. Of course Chrome (US) suffers from somewhat similar issues. Firefox really has unique position in the market in that it's fully Open Source and has non-profit driven org behind it.
For historical note: that is Speedometer 2.0-r221659. Somehow missed the last two digits when I wrote this comment originally.
Also, with gfx.webrender.enabled, gfx.webrendest.enabled, gfx.webrender.blob-images, and gfx.webrender.layers-free all enabled, same version of Speedometer and Firefox on the workstation scores 63.47 (or 4% faster), but has render errors on the Speedometer's tach needle (SVG?) and renders fonts with very strong (very fatiguing to read) subpixel rendering.
I've become a big fan of "The Great Suspender" extension since I am always opening new tabs in the background and may not get around to them until hours -- or sometimes days! -- later.
On Chrome I presume? Not available on FF, and afaik FF doesn't even support unloading tabs (actually unloading from memory rather than making it appear that way but still consuming the memory).
Here's mine (fx55): http://i.cubeupload.com/AvH2Cc.png
profile1: 6 windows, ~900 tabs; profile2: 2 windows, ~300 tabs.
cold start takes about 2 minutes (on nvme ssd), next are slightly better.
Startup time improvements were supposed to be in 55, right?
I've found that google maps performs worse in firefox and I get random %100 cpu spikes from websites in firefox that I didn't get in chrome. I'm on a mac using firefox 55.
Firefox 55 doesn't have any of the (massive) improvements from 57 and Project Quantum which are being discussed here. Give Beta, Developer Edition, or Nightly a spin.
I've found out that many google products (web pages) have bad performance outside of Chrome[0]. But I've used Netscape/Mozilla my whole life, and I will not change from it, specially now that its performance is measurably rising (again).
[0] which is of course something google devs should consider and fix the sites, but hey... why do that when you're the market leader?
I used Firefox Focus on my Pixel for a few weeks and was blown away by how fast it was. The mobile web went from borderline unusable to borderline pleasant with it, I imagine largely due to its tracking and limited ad blocking. Sadly, I migrated back to Chrome because anything that needs to work with Google login or opening an app simply doesn't work. This causes issues with a lot of things I use.
I feel like I'm being ActiveX'd into using Chrome now which is very non-Googly. Not sure how feasible it is to use a different mobile browser until Mozilla and Google work together to make sure they're all on the same API page on Android. Ironically enough, Windows is far more open and friendly to competing browsers than Android.
It's not as fast as Focus, but if you want an alternative to Chrome Firefox for Android should work better with Google Apps that are (probably) broken due to Focus's anti-tracking features. It is based on the same rendering engine as desktop and should benefit from many of the future speed improvements of Firefox 57.
On Android Chrome is arguably better if you want Google account integration or raw speed, but Firefox for Android has a more traditional UI, extensions, and is fast enough for most of my browsing.
I was blown away by Firefox Focus as well. I ended up making it the default browser, so its used when I read an article on HackerNews, Reddit, Twitter, etc. But when I need the "logged in" experience - autofill passwords, bookmarks, cookies, etc. - I launch Chrome. Best of both worlds!
Yes! I do this as well after reading about it on some Reddit thread. Fantastic use case for opening random links from email and chat (and Focus is actually very smooth)!
Sorry, but unless you have a Gecko-based version (which - AFAIK - is not what you can get from Google Play or F-Droid), it's system WebView (i.e. Chromium) under the hood.
I haven't had any issues using Firefox for Android... Firefox Focus is not a general purpose browser, so some issues are probably expected. Try Firefox for Android and install uBlock, or any of your other favorite desktop extensions!
Focus is, uh… WebKit/Chromium with no traditional browser session features (history/bookmarks/etc.) and a tracking blocker. Useful, but not "true Firefox" :)
I like Firefox Nightly on Android though, it's really good.
> I feel like I'm being ActiveX'd into using Chrome now which is very non-Googly
Um
Define "googly"
(If you're saying it's atypical of the behavior you'd expect of them: based on what?) Considering there's no trivial way to log into one of their services (gmail) without automatically doing so on others (yt etc) without fucking around with browser sessions - among many other non-customizability gotchas from them - saying google doesn't want to control how their offerings are used is going to be a very tough sell.
Lots of comments from people suffering issues and missing their favorite plugins, so I thought I'd jump in as a former Chrome user.
Firefox quantum is really very good. This is the first time in a long time that I've been able to entertain switching browsers. It is at least on par with the speed of chrome, and since I'm moving from chrome, I'm not really missing any Firefox plugins too much. I've been able to port my most needed plugins from chrome's app store, and I'm using an "open in chrome" plugin to bridge the gap with hangouts so that I can have a reasonable workflow at work. It's been a pleasure to use!
I am currently also experiencing the awesomeness of tab containers. These things are a godsend, and I think they'll be in every browser before too much longer.
I have to say, I do feel that Mozilla has sacrificed some of its existing userbase to make a grab at Chrome's. It's worked in my case, but they've definitely upended the environments of a lot of people. I hope it pays off for them. For the first time in a long time though, Firefox feels really fast and innovative again. I look forward to my next phase of my browser life as an enthusiastic user.
I think I'm not the only who wished Tree Style Tabs was integrated as a default feature of Firefox. It's a primordial configuration to your browsing experience but it's been constantly stabbed and fixed at every update of Firefox.
Seems like Tree Style Tabs got ported to the WebExtensions version now! It still can't hide the tab bar (API will come in later releases) but it works!
Is the Inspector panel improved too? Probably I'm too used to Chrome's, but I find Firefox Inspector quite hard to use (inspect elements, change styles, look in network requests...)
> Mozilla has sacrificed some of its existing userbase to make a grab at Chrome's. It's worked in my case, but they've definitely upended the environments of a lot of people. I hope it pays off for them
Yeah, it always pays off to ditch the core of the user base chasing after the fresh new users, chasing after the main competitor - on their field and by their rules, look at Blackberry.
Congratulations on the new release, it's really amazing!
I'm a web developer and nowadays I'm using a lot of React. I quite often end up switching to Chrome when I debug to get a useful error message/stack trace. Is this because Facebook has targeted Chrome or is it simply because Chrome has better error reporting? If the latter is the case, are you working on improving this?
Email me (my HN username @mozilla.com) and I'll file for you.
I'd also encourage you to look into a password manager (I like https://keepassxc.org/, and I've recently seen folks taking a liking to https://bitwarden.com/) so you don't have to worry about the requirements. :)
I can throw my hat into the ring and attest to just how great 57 is. I can remember the Australis update coming out and receiving a mixed reaction, but I can't see this update receiving anything but praise. If you've been on Chrome for a while I'd definitely encourage you to try it out.
As a developer one small thing that's irked me is the recent removal of the ability for the dev tools to render html responses. There's an bug open here https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1350229 but it seems to have stagnated. It seems like the functionality was removed on a hunch and it's not been added back in, meaning I have to head to Chrome to debug some ajax requests. This, and the lack of LastPass support are the only things holding it back for me.
Yeah, the whole pulling the API rug out from under Firebug really disappointed me. The FF dev tools looked good initially, but I quickly realized I couldn't actually use them. It was death by a thousand papercuts: all of the features seem to have some trivial-seeming problem that ends up hampering productivity past the point where switching to Chrome's dev tools gets the job done. It may lack some things I do like about FF dev tools, but the features it does have actually work in a responsive and glitch-free manner.
Just as an aside, I used LastPass for a long time, and held on in discomfort for a while after their acquisition, but their inability to keep their Firefox plugin updated or even working finally convinced me to switch to 1Password. I couldn't be happier, and their Firefox extension is modern and well-done!
LastPass has announced that they will have their extension updated by the time 57 hits release. I'm not sure it's fair to expect them to have something for Beta even if their competitors do.
I have previously in several HN comments been vocal and adamant about leaving the Mozilla shipwreck before it foundered on the shoals of 57.
And I may have been wrong.
At long last there is meaningful information on addons.mozilla.org about what actually works now, and what doesn't. Looking nowhere near as bleak as it all sounded just a few months ago. I can have my uMatrix, I can have something Flagfoxish, I can open tabs by rightclicking links, I can have meaningful search from context menu. I can have something which doesn't look like Chrome. I may actually give the thing a chance.
I've been wanting to go back to Firefox as my "daily browser" for quite a while but performance was always the thing that made me switch back to Chrome everytime I tried FF.
I'm sitting on the deck with my iPad at the moment but when I go back in I'm gonna install one of these newer FF versions (probably nightly) on my primary workstation (Arch Linux) and give it a fair chance. That box has 16c/32t so I should see a huge improvement over the currently installed FF 55.
Hopefully it will be good enough to keep me on FF for good (extensions are my big concern, although I only use a few).
Wow, it really is blazing fast, and just at a glance I like what they're doing with the dev tools. Unfortunately...
> Vimperator : "This add-on is not compatible with your version of Firefox."
Ouch. Guess I might need to wait a bit to make this my daily driver. All in all, though, I have to say I'm really glad to see Firefox is still solidly in this race - and with a kick ass and quite possibly superior product to boot.
edit :
I didn't realize at the outset that a FF57 version of Vimium was available (link provided by gogoengie) :
Could you be more specific? I don't believe this is a known issue. If you're experiencing this behavior, you may want to report it: https://github.com/philc/vimium/issues
Personally, I'm running Firefox 55.0.3 with `vimium-ff` 1.6.0 (current build on addons.mozilla.org), and the `t` keybinding opens new tabs just like `Ctrl-t`. Command repetition also works (eg, `5t`).
Vimperator, unfortunately, appears to be one of the few extensions that can never be fully ported, as it made use of API's that implied a security risk.
Pentadactyl too is horribly broken. I'm running Firefox's Extended Support Release for this very reason. Will probably have to bite the bullet and switch to Vimium within a year.
Very interesting, that does appear to be the case - likewise for VimFx. From what I gather, the go-to Vim plugin after this year will be Vimium (which I currently use on Chrome), although it hasn't yet been ported to FF 57.
Mozilla is still doing something with the keyboard shortcuts API to make that more capable. I don't know what exactly they're doing, it won't be as powerful as Vimperator, but it should be a good bit more powerful than Vimium.
This (obviously) won't be in Firefox 57, but should be ready relatively soonish after. So, this is something that they have already been actively working on for a few months. I'm guessing 59 or 60 from how I've heard it described.
I’m sad that I’ll have to stop using VimFX, it was the best Vim plugin I could find. It was lightweight and did just what it had to (I absolutely hate the custom search/address bar thing in Vimium). My alternative right now is Saka Key. I hate the default keybindings, but you can customize them all you want. The thing I miss the most right now is being able to focus on the address bar (pressing “o” with VimFX). I’m not sure if it’s possible with the current WebExtensions API.
Yes, but in VimFx's case it's more a matter of the developer not feeling like it considering Vimium is available, which for me has been a drop-in replacement of VimFx. I just assumed that as you mentioned Vimperator, you wanted the complete, somewhat more invasive, experience.
Note: I should correct this. It's not about the developer not feeling like it, but about him only wanting to do it without having to work around API limitations like Vimium had to: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061#c3
Vimium is /mostly/ there, but gaps in the WebExtensions API make the experience rough in my experience.
The biggest issue for me, right now, is that there are a lot of places where FF won't allow WebExtensions to intercept key events for shortcuts, like on the new tab page, error pages, any other "system" pages, or certain pinned tabs (this one is particularly inconsistent). This means that if I'm jumping through several tabs with J/K and hit any of those by accident, I'm stuck there until I figure out what happened and either use the mouse or the official hotkeys to switch back out.
Same with focusing the URL bar and the slightly quirky experience of the omnibar that Vimium has to use instead.
It works, but mostly serves to remind me how much I miss VimFX rather than to improve my productivity.
The lack of dev work on vimperator is actually what drove me back to chrome. I've been using cvim, and it has all the features I liked in vimperator.
Unfortunately, vimium-FF is still not as full featured as I'd like yet.
I didn't try the new Firefox yet, but now the only thing possibly holding it back are its confusing menus and dialogs:
- we have the artificial distinction between the hamburger menu, the traditional menu and several (Chrome-like) settings pages
- yet, obviously, the New Page could function as the entry point to all of Firefox features: history, favorites, settings, customization, extensions. This would remove all clutter from the chrome, would be more discoverable, and would be easily touch compatible.
- dialogs, really, who want out of window dialogs? If you start with the New Page, there is a full page to work with, and this also lets the user use Ctrl+F to search for any hard to spot options. It is also mobile friendly.
And lastly, every single time I download a .exe Firefox asks me what I want to do with it (I save it every time) and every time I click the checkbox that says "Do this every time". But the dialog nevertheless keeps returning, with this useless checkbox enabled, suggesting I didn't click it last time. Very irritating.
So I hope the new UI improves things, there's quite a lot to gain.
Despite these gripes, it is my default browser, and I'm increasingly impressed by the incredible work being done.
Seeing some comments about Firefox vs Chrome on macOS below, here's my experience ...
After several years of using Chrome I've switched to Firefox and I'm not going back. I do occasionally use Chrome, like for Node.js profiling.
In terms of performance, Firefox has been behaving better than Chrome for my usage patterns, using less memory too. Usage patterns matter a lot though. For example Google's own apps (e.g. G Suite) tend to be optimized for Chrome, but I'm not using Google's apps that much.
Stability has been improving, e10s is finally here, we've got multi-processing and it's working. It's not so keen on starting one process per tab as Chrome, but I like that, as memory usage tends to be better.
I've liked the "sandboxing" of Chrome's extensions, having a permissions system that's better than nothing, however I trust Firefox's Add-ons more because Mozilla has a trustworthy review system in place. At the end of the day, when you give permissions to an Add-on for accessing your data across all websites you visit, you can always get screwed with a simple and silent update from that developer and there have been countless of extensions on Chrome's store turned to spyware over night.
Either way, Firefox now has a permissions system in place, they've been introducing it gradually.
In terms of features, I love how natural the Awesome Bar is when trying to go back to a page from history. This is in comparison with Chrome that makes you do more searches on Google. It also has had some great extensions for tab management, some of which are now broken due to the transition, but I'm pretty sure they'll become available again, because hackability is in Firefox's DNA. Consider that Firefox on Android has supported plugins (and ad blockers) from day 1, whereas Chrome still doesn't.
But overall, even if Firefox would be the worst one on the market, I would probably keep using it because it's the only browser whose makers have been looking after my interests as a user, for example being the only major browser that tried opposing DRM or patent encumbered video encoding.
I guess the reasoning is that there's still an Extended Support Release that is supported for quite a while still, which still supports the extension mechanism. If you really still need a specific extension, you can keep using that - and then once there's a new ESR, hopefully the extension will be available.
Yeah, I agree. And it's a shame, because it looks like these features are coming to web extensions (e.g. see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1384515 which tracks the api needed for "tab groups"). It just won't be there for launch.
Yes, it's a real shame that it seems like they don't even care about extensions anymore, and therefore forces me to stay on the older versions and miss out on the new and welcome improvements. I'd be more ok with their switch to web extensions if they had included more powerful API:s, even if they're not available in other browsers.
My developer edition recently got upgraded to 57, and Greasemonkey stopped working. Reading what the developer writes it seems as they are going to rewrite the whole extension from scratch, with a lot of the functionality left out because it's no longer possible to do.
And yet here it is, available and working as a WebExtension more than a month before legacy add-ons go away. The process may look opaque, but as far as results, I'm really not sure what more you want?
We moved to WebExtensions specifically to fix the problem of constant breakage. Sure, it adds a layer of abstraction, but there's finally an explicit interface that we can commit to supporting. The legacy APIs were a monkeypatching free-for-all that prevented us from landing even minor improvements or refactors for fear of potentially breaking some add-on somewhere. Now that we have that interface, we can refactor without breaking add-ons.
Regarding 3, no they couldn't have. You're vastly overestimating how many people use it. I've seen 1 person using it, and I work in IT. Outside of IT the percentage is probably smaller...
If they hadn't deprecated the old extensions yet, the newest version would be pretty much the same as using the old version. This way, some people who don't rely on those extensions (I believe half of the users don't even run an extension at all?) can benefit from those improvements now, and you'll be able to do so later.
That's not true, the legacy extensions kept working w/ the project quantum stuff until mozilla broke completely unrelated stuff. E.g. Greasemonkey only broke because they renamed (not removed) a few things.
It works now on Firefox Developer Edition 57.0b3 (64-bit), macOS High Sierra. It took me a while to figure out that one needs to activate it by clicking one of the icons at the top.
Edit: This was a really bad idea because upgrading to 57 destroyed my sessionstore.js. None of the backups were up-to-date for some reason. Be careful and make backups!
I'm just about to upgrade from 55 to either the Beta or Developer edition and was worried about this so thanks for the heads up! I probably would have anyways but now I'll be extra sure to back up my profiles first.
Are you kidding? It's like "Blackberry is better than iPhone once again, finally losing the keyboard".
The main and only distinctive feature of Firefox was programmability (XUL, XPCOM), and now it's gone. There are forks like PaleMoon and Waterfox though but for how long.
Firefox had to take that app-platform niche (thanks to XUL, XPCOM) that now occupies Electron, but failed on that chasing after Chrome.
No, it’s not like that at all. Firefox’s performance, memory usage, and UI all far outstrip Chrome’s in my browsing now; I don’t see any reason to use Chrome apart from the usual cross-browser testing, and it’s been that way for a year (?) now.
(And Firefox “forks” have always been a very good way to be behind on security patches to no benefit.)
Not sure if parent means this, but Vivaldi can do vertical tabs. But no idea if that is as powerful/flexible as Tree Style Tabs on Firefox. Probably not...
I have switched from Tree Style Tabs to the Test Pilot vertical tab extension (I don't remember the exact name) plus the about:config option that makes them always small, plus a few lines of userChrome.css to make the close button larger, like it was in one of the first versions. I recommend it.
yep. I don't know if it will cleanly update; so it may lose your settings.
(Webextension ports have to spend one release in "hybrid" mode where they'r a webextension wrapped in a legacy extension shell to port settings correctly)
In addition to nightly builds of TST, there's also an alternative called Tab Tree that works with 57 and is available right from the official Add-ons site:
Decided to give this a quick try and WOW! I'm blown away by how fast it is! The speed is incredible!
On the downside, two of the most important extensions I use (uMatrix and Enpass) don't work with this version of Firefox. It looks like they're both being updated to support it though, so it's just a matter of waiting til they get published or installing them by hand.
I like the fact that Mozilla is honest with the comparison test video and actually shows Chrome being faster than Firefox on a few sites (e.g., Instagram and YouTube).
Interesting. I wonder if the Instagram slowness is due to Stylo, we have had troubles on Instagram (specifically wrt data URI parsing) before, but IIRC we fixed most of that.
Of course these troubles were when IG was unreasonably slow, it's quite possible there are further issues to be fixed there that we never noticed because it was "good enough".
Or Chrome's approach is just superior for IG and some other sites. Quite possible.
Love all the new quantum, rust, and servo work. I try to use
Firefox exclusively, for the good of the web, and tell everyone to do likewise.
Only have a few issues with it. Frequently, I find that Firefox Sync doesn't remember that I'm logged in, particularly after updates, which come frequently.
Also, Firefox still requires a polyfill to use Web Components, although I realize that Mozilla has been working to ensure that the standard gets everything right, rather than just rushing right to approval. I don't know the status of all that, but I am hopeful that it will be all sorted out soon.
Also hope the churn with the extensions is coming to an end, but happy that the browser extensions standard is coming together. I prefer that it use an open standard.
I would also like to see gtk done away with, and a variant of browser.html used exclusively.
> Firefox Quantum enhances Firefox’s integration with Pocket, the read-it-later app that Mozilla acquired last year. When you open a new tab, you’ll see currently trending web pages recommended by Pocket users so you won’t miss out on what’s hot online, as well as your top sites.
That doesn't sound good. What are the reasons for having bloatware bundled in instead releasing them as separate add-on or installation option?
Pocket is now owned by Mozilla, and is going to be open sourced. What separates that from any other functionality built into the browser, for instance Firefox Sync or Autocomplete?
1. Firefox Accounts & Sync is a terrible mess. Its security is still broken[1] and it's insanely over-engineered[2].
I really wish it shouldn't have existed, and instead Mozilla would've focused on providing an API to build a synchronization service upon. And then, whatever - their services could've been an pre-bundled extension.
2. I believe all of those SaaSes (i.e. Firefox Screenshots, too) shouldn't belong to the browser's core. Those could be distributed as pre-bundled extensions (which they actually are, but in a special way), but not as a part of the browser itself.
This is highly opinionated, though. I just feel that rather than a browser, Firefox is becoming something like a service platform. I don't like it for the same reasons I tend to value self-hosting over the dependence on others' services, and Free Software over non-free options. I recognize others may feel very differently and possibly even welcome that.
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[1] Authentication pages are still served from network, so if you use it - you trust Mozilla to not steal (or, better say, not be forced to steal) your password and the encryption keys. The protocol is stable for quite a while so I really don't know why they're still not fixing this.
[2] I wrote an alternative self-hosted Accounts & Sync implementation, so while I'm biased I sort of know what I'm talking about here. Four different authentication protocols (BrowserID, Hawk, OAuth2 and JWT), multiple non-standard HTTP headers, and the whole system just reeks of the NIH syndrome.
Yes, of course. Although I can't vouch for its security and stability - while I use it myself and it seems to work OK, I'd rather state that it's risky. In short, the repo is more like a code dump, rather than a properly released project.
Development is very sporadic, though - you can see it in commit history. And some parts of code feel dirty (in particular, I've made a bad design decision when trying to avoid implementing full-fledged OAuth2).
The repo lacks few things:
1) Notes about patched PyBrowserID. It's in the repo, and you can check the Dockerfile, but not in README.
2) Instructions on installing Kinto - another piece that is used to sync WebExtension settings[1]. It became mandatory with 57, without it sync fails and doesn't update "last synced" date (used to work in 56 and below). I'll add some instructions later, when I'll find time to do so.
----
[1] BTW, this means that everyone who runs self-hosted Sync but not Accounts (relying on Mozilla tokens instead) are now storing parts of their data on Mozilla servers. I don't think this was ever announced, I've only learned about Kinto when my Firefoxes started to log errors in the browser console. If you self-host Sync-only and think you may be affected - check `webextensions.storage.sync.serverURL` value.
> I just feel that rather than a browser, Firefox is becoming something like a service platform
Isn't it? Wasn't this the crux of the whole dev team controversy/split years ago?
(This is all sounding like rehashed news to me, but I admit I don't go out of my way to keep up with browser community drama, so someone correct me if I'm wrong.)
Sync, Pocket, Dev tools, Screenshots etc are not required to display and interact with HTML pages. They are useful and it's nice they exist, but I don't see a reason to have them installed if I don't need them - just as I don't install every package available in OS just in case I'll need later it.
Even if they don't use resources when not being actively used (no way to test since there is no way to remove them), they increase attack surface and clutter UI.
There are users who value OSes where things are "just working", out of the box. Even more, there are users who value if OS has lots of stuff pre-installed.
There are users who value OSes for being absolutely minimal, so they can install only the stuff they want.
There are users who build their OSes from scratch, compiling each piece from source, fine-tuning every option they want to touch, manually defining every aspect of their system.
None of those approaches are wrong. And each of users may voice their discontent if things are not the way they prefer them to be (and that's good).
> But your OS does come with lots of packages and features you may not use.
Sure does. And I can remove them if I want to. I can apt-get remove libc6 if I really really want to and I accept the consequences. I can't remove non-essential parts of the Firefox, though.
Delete /usr/lib/firefox/browser/features/firefox@getpocket.com.xpi (or - better - rebuild the .deb package to not include this file) and the Pocket will be gone. Same for screenshots@mozilla.org.xpi.
Sync and DevTools are tightly integrated, though. I'd really really wish it would be realistically possible to remove Sync and replace it with something else.
Firefox, I love you, but you and my 15" rMBP (with 4k Dell external monitor) simply don't get along:
https://i.imgur.com/rByz7zS.png
I don't what causes this, but in the last 2 years it's gotten worse and with Quantum the CPU usage is even higher. Chrome and Safari don't have this issue.
Yeah, it's really weird that you STILL have to force enable it through about:config. Come on Mozilla… Mesa 17 has arguably the best OpenGL implementation ever.
I also have very poor performance with my 2015 rMBP and external Dell 4K display, but it's almost as bad without the display.
Although performance is greatly improved (and, seriously, the developers should be proud of the progress), there's still a lot of work to be done. There's significant lag in even non-network UI (e.g., highlighting the row under the cursor in about:config lags behind the mouse cursor by almost a second).
As much respect as I have for the developers for this progress, I still can't really use software that makes me feel like I'm intoxicated.
If the issue is as bad as it looks like in that screenshot, the performance profiler should be able to spot what's happening easily. Take a look at https://perf-html.io/
I wonder if MacOS just isn't that much of a priority for Firefox? Popular but heavy sites like Facebook perform quite poorly relative to Chrome on my (admittedly quite old) early 2013 MBP, but the difference seems to vanish under Linux or Windows.
I'd love to switch to Firefox, I'm not that keen to be running a browser made by a gargantuan advertising agency.
I had the same problem from time to time when a Google search result page was open. Closing it made everything normal again. It'd be interesting to know if that was only me or if others have the same problem.
I'm convinced it's because of CSS animations / transitions. Firefox seems to be doing just fine loading static sites like HN. Stripe.com however seems to be Firefox worst nightmare.
I would love to hear from others who have this problem too. In fact I have a 15" MBP and a 4k Dell monitor at work so when I get back next week I will test it too.
Just updated my Firefox beta to 57. A few observations:
1. It does feel snappier.
2. Tabs UI looks ugly. Bigger elements than older design, more bulky. Sharp rectangular shapes of each tab UI element are standing out. It looks like a touchscreen UI to me, and it's wasteful on a desktop.
3. It also completely disabled all common add-ons like Adblock Plus and Stylish. That's a BIG problem. Looks like Adblock Plus has a compatible beta version at least.
2: Note you can select a smaller variant of all (default?) themes. Menu > Customise > Bottom left > compact.
3: There's quite a few alternative add-ons I've found thus far - uBlock Origin and Stylus.
Sadly I was using Dark Background Light Text whixh has a webext port only in progress.
Why do you use Adblock Plus over uBlock Origin? uBlock Origin has a better memory footprint and no ties to the advertising industry. It also has a stable WebExtension for use in 57+.
I'm guessing this will be fixed in a few days as people upgrade internally. So far, other than looking ugly, it doesn't seem to be causing any other problems.
I so wanted to use the new Firefox and switch from safari. I searched and was excited to learn there was an extension for integration with keychain on mac only to learn that it was no longer supported :(
I understand the push behind web extensions but I don't think there will ever be a keychain integration addon now.
(The webextension might be in beta? When I installed it a month ago it was in "beta" and had to be installed directly from their site, idk if they've uploaded it to the store yet)
Something like Keychain support seems high-risk to leave to third party addons? In the back of my mind I wonder if they'll also follow the Chrome model of malware takeovers.
It is a lot faster for me... so far, the most noticeable example is when using the back/forward buttons on Reddit (it used to reload the whole page every time) but more than half of the extensions that I use haven't been updated yet to work with Firefox 57. Looks like you can enable legacy extensions, about:config?filter=extensions.legacy.enabled, but it appears to be only for installed extensions (you can't add new ones).
That seems more a failure on LastPass's part than Firefox's.
I say this as a LastPass user, they clearly don't give a rat's ass. They've known about the WebExtension requirement for, what, a year now? Somehow they're among the first apps to support Android Oreo's autofill API, yet they can't be bothered to update their Firefox extension.
It's a real pity. I like LastPass. I pay for it. I use their Secure Notes feature ALOT. But I may still have to switch if they can't get their act together.
Pretty much my thoughts exactly. I would probably have switched to 1password once they raised their prices, but at least my employer pays for lastpass for me.
The lack of LastPass is a pain, however it made me discover BitWarden, which is free, open source, has 2FA, has working firefox & chrome plugins, and iOS/Android apps. It is also trivial to import your LastPass data into bitwarden. It's definitely worth giving it a try.
(The LastPass firefox app also seemed to use a lot of CPU for some reason, I have no idea how that was possible?)
Note: It doesn't support all of LastPass features, like per-website extra data, which may be a problem for some users. There's also no Safari plugin.
Pretty sure we are coordinating with them to make sure it's available for the Firefox Quantum release in November. So this is hopefully only going to be an issue during Nightly and Beta cycles, and not in the main population.
This is good. Too bad it they don't have the new extension available yet. For the few minutes I had the Firefox beta it seemed pretty awesome. It actually was seeming to be competitive with Chrome on macOS.
I made the switch from Chrome to Firefox a couple of months ago primarily because of the open source and privacy aspects.
I have to say I was impressed by the speed improvements, and since I started using Firefox Nightly a couple months ago, it's gotten even faster. Only complaint is that I don't have a working LastPass plugin yet, though they claim they'll have it released by the time v57 is finalized.
I'd recommend anyone give it a try for a week or two and see what you think.
Is the idea here that they'll just keep switching out pieces written in C++ for Rust until all of Firefox is Rust, rather than launching a new product?
Not really. Parts of Firefox like Tracemonkey (or whatever they call the js engine now) aren't going to be rewritten because it would take a decade to do. I expect that Firefox will always be built more like a C++ project with Rust components than the other way.
That said "project quantum" is about improving the browser which applies to all of the code not just the Rust parts.
I see. The page didn't really go into specifics about how they made Firefox Quantum faster, so I had assumed that it was faster because they were rewriting parts in Rust.
In part, it is because of a Rust component. A new CSS engine, Stylo, is shipping with 57 and that brought a noticeable performance improvement. In the foreseeable future there will also be WebRender, which should give an even bigger improvement, but that wasn't ready for 57.
Another big part is that they recently switched Firefox over to a multiprocess architecture (Firefox 48) and these performance improvements are now mostly optimizations that are now possible due to this architecture. Basically offloading all kinds of slower operations into a background thread. The optimizations are all over the place, mostly of smaller nature, but taken together they make a big difference.
And a third point is the new UI. It is partially really just more efficient, partially uses animations and such to trick your brain into thinking that things are faster, and then it also now has "tab warm-up", which basically means that when you hover with your mouse over a tab, it already starts loading in that tab, so that it's instantly there when you click.
> it also now has "tab warm-up", which basically means that when you hover with your mouse over a tab, it already starts loading in that tab, so that it's instantly there when you click.
They actually removed that again for now due to instability, IIRC it's slated to arrive in Firefox 58.
Those who work on Servo/Firefox have stated before that it's not "because they were rewriting parts in Rust", but because they've been re-architected for today's hardware. Rust is still significant, as its safety features allowed them to pull off things like aggressive parallelism without introducing tricky bugs. But people don't generally believe that simply re-writing something in Rust instantly makes it faster.
I am synthesizing previous comments here, so take this with a grain of salt. Maybe ManishEarth or pcwalton will chime in.
The CSS handling system is now in Rust, and is massively parallel (Rust lets us do this easily), which is why that is faster. This leads to significant performance benefits because CSS cascading/"styling" happens pretty often, including on every DOM manipulation, and can slow down interactions.
But also there has been a major push to fix performance issues in other parts of the browser which itself has lead to significant improvements across the board.
Aside from the performance gains that you'd naturally expect from an expert rewrite, lots of the performance gains are due to aggressive concurrency and parallelization, which is a task that Rust is designed to excel at.
> ren't going to be rewritten because it would take a decade to do.
Semi-related question - does anyone know what that would look like? Like if someone were to rewrite v8/Tracemonkey from scratch, what's the cutting edge research on this?
So I kind of rely on Xmarks since I have to run on multiple browsers, and afaik it's still the only cross-platform sync system. Unfortunately it's also pretty much abandonware and highly unlikely to get ported to WebExtensions :/ Is there anything else out there that has similar functionality that would be compatible?
WebExtensions started with Chrome API compatibility as a base, so you may be able to just download the Chrome version's .crx file, unpack it, and run it in Firefox, perhaps with some minor tweaks.
Are there any plans to have Firefox throttle background tabs? This is one feature from Chrome that is currently stopping me from switching. It's very useful for laptops with lots of open tabs. The current rate of progress is definitely impressive though.
Yes. Much of that work began landing in Firefox 55, and there's more to come. We also more aggressively throttle scripts that are sourced from domains on our tracking protection blacklist, so tracking / advertising scripts won't be able to ruin your experience.
Firefox has been throttling background tabs (setTimeout, setInterval, requestAnimationFrame) for years.
Starting in Firefox 55 there are more operations that are being throttled. In both Firefox and Chrome the exact set of things that get throttled, and the throttling conditions, is somewhat in flux at the moment, as browsers try to figure out how much they can throttle without breaking legitimate usecases (e.g. user-desired audio in a background tab).
Been using Developer Edition for a few months now. A few hiccups here and there, but overall running well! It's cool to see performance gains with each update, really speaks to how much work the Firefox team has been putting in lately.
Bit of an issue for anyone with a touchscreen: No smooth zooming [0].
I eventually switched to firefox regardless, but the issue has been unassigned for five years. Chrome, Edge and Firefox Android have had this feature for as long as I can remember.
That video in the post seems to show Chrome is still significantly faster in half of the tests shown there. How is that possible? From what Servo was initially promising (even 3-4x the speed of old Firefox), it didn't look like Chrome would come close either.
Did they make that many compromises when "porting parts from Servo" to Gecko? What's hurting Firefox's performance so much that even after implementing Electrolysis and now Quantum, it still can't be a clear winner over Chrome in performance? Is it simply a matter of Google "being ahead" in performance tuning and having more engineers, etc, or is there something fundamentally wrong with Firefox's codebase compared to Chrome's codebase?
I wish Mozilla was more committed to rewriting Firefox in Rust. Or perhaps it would be better to have it as a completely new project, like they did with Firefox Focus, which by the way to me it seems faster than Firefox + ublock origin on Android, even though it only blocks trackers.
Browser performance is not a single dimension. Nobody said Servo was going to be 3x-4x faster than (insert engine here) on every possible benchmark anyone could ever come up with. Rather, it's fast on the areas it focuses on.
But, as others have said, we may be getting a more drastic increase in performance when the new rendering engine lands, too. I thought this included the new rendering engine, which is why I felt it was quite disappointing compared to those slides we saw before. But if it's only the CSS engine that makes its about twice as fast, that's quite a nice boost. Hopefully the new rendering engine will give it another 2x (at least on quad-core+ machines).
This is very nice. I have always _wanted_ to use Firefox because a web built much for the community is best used on a browser built by the community with no corporate influences such as trying to push their own "web platform". It's just that it has felt far too bulky compared to Chrome.
But yeah, this is quite workable, and Quantum WebRender hasn't even landed yet. By Firefox 60 we should have even more substantial (i.e. noticeable) improvements.
It's scrolling very smoothly, and the browser rendering sites doesn't seem to impact typing into the adress bar much. It elegantly passes my personal little stress test with multiple Periscope tabs running at once, something that near killed Firefox 56. Honestly it doesn't even really flinch, and that's on an aging laptop, but an 8 core at that, so I guess the Quantum components so far in Firefox are happy about this.
I would love switching but the only thing preventing me is the lack of profiles like Chrome has. Containers is not the same as you can't have different extensions for each container like chrome has for each profile.
For example, I have 2 LP accounts one for home and one for work and there's no way to use both of then at the same time in FF
I agree that the UX isn't anywhere as seamless as Chrome's, though I've seen add-ons that attempt to fill that niche. Hopefully we'll revisit it once containers are done.
Personally, I'm on Linux most of the time, so I just bind a hotkey to `firefox --ProfileManager --new-instance` and I'm off to the races. On Windows, I tend to add shortcuts to the taskbar for each profile.
It has MRU tab switch ordering!!! Oh wait, Firefox already had that, I just didn't care because it was.. Firefox. Now that it is faster, I care. If either of those is missing I don't care about the browser. It needs to offer MRU tab switching, and be fast, and be compatible with most websites, or at least with web standards so that the websites will eventually be compatible with it. Wait, that was like 3 or 4 things... Anyway, my point is, JUST ADD MRU TO CHROME ALREADY so I can stop caring about which browser I'm using and just always use Chrome, please. This is the place where you make a wish and it comes true right?
Can someone more in the know explain if this uses webrender or not? I thought that it did...
I have to admit that I'm not super impressed with the results here. Based on the talk that pcwalton did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erfnCaeLxSI I was expected it not to just be a little faster than Chrome, but to, like, double the speed, or more.
Is it that these are just not good candidates for showing how much faster than webrender can be? Or has Firefox slowed it down vs. in Servo maybe?
WR's architecture has changed significantly from that talk, for the better. In particular aggressive use of early Z has made our fragment shading performance go way up since then.
In Nightly you can turn WR on via about:config. But be warned that there are quite a few problems, including performance problems, that still remain. The foundation is solid, but the CSS rendering model is complex, and there's a good amount of engineering work that just has to happen to make every corner case fast. (For instance, parts of Ars Technica were recently found to be slow because the particular interaction between the CSS features it was using was causing Gecko to generate a ton of clipping operations for WR... there's no substitute for engineering polishing work that has to happen in cases like that.)
There are multiple; I forget which one is "real" WebRender and I'm on my phone so I can't check.
Last I was looking at this, the big WebRender flag wasn't expected to be faster due to the specific way it was integrated, you need the more aggressive setting to get pure WebRender.
I get 35.82 on Safari 11 on El Capitan. What is your hardware? I wonder if I'm slower because I'm on older hardware, because I'm on an older version of OS X, or both?
My hardware is a Mac Pro (Early 2009), 2.66 GHz quad core Xeon, 32 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC RAM, GeForce GT 120 512 MB.
I also for comparison gave it a shot on my Surface Pro 4 (Core i7, 2.2 GHz, 16 GB RAM, Intel Iris 540 GPU).
Here are the results for Chrome 60.0.3112.113. Since I was running on battery I tried this at various power mode settings. Here are the results for Chrome 60.0.3112.113 arranged by power mode setting:
70.18 Best performance
69.61 Best performance (2nd time)
68.03 Better performance
50.84 Recommended
41.33 Battery saver
There are two runs of "Best performance" because I did the tests in the order best, better, recommended, battery saver, and so all but the first may have benefited from caching from the previous. I ran best again after finishing battery saver to get a run of best that would have the same caching benefit the other may have received.
For Firefox 57.0b3 I get:
54.34 Best performance
58.91 Best performance (2nd time)
57.91 Better performance
40.51 Recommended
34.28 Battery saver
Firefox 57 is quite impressive in terms of speed and the fancy new animations, but unfortunately downgraded back to 56 because none of the extensions I use have WebExtension variants for some reason? May look for alternatives at some point but its so sad to see extensions like "Strict Popup Blocker" go because of lacking API support. Really hope Firefox can work things out with these extension developers in due time because this extension is a must-have for me.
Any idea how I can get rid of that title bar that sits on top of the tab bar? In the demo I saw it's not present or it may have been cut from it.
Linux
Using a Core2 Duo E7500 (Q1'09) and this is a noticeable improvement; but I still find chrome faster in that the GUI doesn't stall. Firefox locks up when typing into a new tab's address bar. Still using Firefox (55) as the daily driver even though I have to kill it about 8 times a day. FF 57 does fix the need to kill Firefox but then a couple of the plugins I use are not supported anymore.
I downloaded FF Quantum this morning and used it throughout the day, and anecdotally I can say it feels a lot faster than Chrome for casual web surfing.
That said, speed is only one of a number of factors I consider when choosing a browser, and between the horrible UI and lack of compatible extensions, I'm sticking with Chrome for the time being.
Still no live javascript editing, like Chrome scripts tab? This is a major setdown that prevents me from using Firefox. Chrome has that since so many years that I can't believe Firefox still hasn't got it.
I think the latest Firefox releases are fast and good as browsers.. but as a developer, that's a showstopper.
I've always seen this feature, but never used it. How does it work? I'm curious if this works well with nodejs build systems, or if this only works with "workspaces" (does souce maps allow this?).
I've been extremely happy with Firefox's recent transformation. I was using Edge for a while as my primary browser, because it was definitively the fastest and it was worth tolerating a couple of bugs in exchange. But I'd put Firefox now as being more or less as performant, and that's before Quantum.
Couldn't the minor speed differences in the comparison video [1] in the post be attributed to the variable latencies of server responses? Or is that accounted for somehow?
Dev edition is regular Firefox beta with some other defaults (theme, developer options). The only reason you might not want to use it is because the stability guarantees are less strong than for stable, but in practice, it probably runs stable enough.
One thing that stops me switching from Chrome is the multiple profiles and easy profile switching in Chrome. I have work and personal profiles and then other profiles for different roles I use in testing web applications. Last time I checked it wasn't at all convenient to do this in Firefox.
> You cannot change the profile while Firefox is running. Although it is possible in some cases to have multiple instances of Firefox running in different profiles, to avoid confusion, you should first exit/quit/terminate all running instances of Firefox, FirefoxDeveloperEdition or Nightly.
Do you know if it's possible to make ctrl-t (new tab) open a new tab in the same profile? If I'm in profile A, I always want new tabs to have the same profile; I don't want to have to specify it.
I think there's a bugreport where about half of users want it to open in the default container, and half in the same :P Ctrl+. as a shortcut allows you to pick a profile for a new tab, though, that might do for now.
Would you mind expanding on that? I'm on MacOS and neither Cmd-. nor Ctrl-. seem to be bound in Firefox 57.b03. Is there a way to list all keybindings that are in effect? Cmd-click on a link does work for me as a way to open a new tab in the same container, which is a possible workaround. Otherwise this is making containers very hard to use for me.
EDIT: Cmd-click on the "New Tab" + icon does open a new tab in the same container.
Do you have the Containers extension installed as well, and the toolbar button enabled? That's what it's bound to. I don't know of a way to list all keybindings.
So that benchmark video I assume shows loading from local disk (because if network then not a fair benchmark)? If that’s the case, most websites seem to take 8+ seconds and often around 30? Doesn’t this seem insane? It also doesn’t seem to match my daily experience but I’m not using a stopwatch.
I am still with Safari as my main browser for battery life and performance on Mac. Does anyone have insights how Firefox currently compares? I can't touch Chrome without sacrificing at least an hour of battery life from my day
Might switch to Fox, but only with full support for Chrome extensions. Last time I checked - most of them didn't work on Nightly (can install with chrome store foxify, but most of the functionality is dead).
Feel free to reach out to those add-on authors and suggest they port to Firefox. It should be pretty much painless at this point, and we even have an online linter at http://extensiontest.com/ that should give them a good idea of what work needs to happen.
Does anyone know what happened to that new tab groups feature? It allowed you to be logged into a site with different users in different tabs. I was just getting to trying it out when it disappeared.
I don't know about the Beta or Dev editions, but in Nightly I can use tab groups by clicking and holding the "Open a new Tab" button and selecting the tab group. (Personal, Work, Banking, Shopping are predefined and you can add new ones)
I've been using Nightly as much as I can, but with the dev tools open sometimes it likes to take a 30 second break before sending a request. I really tried. FF- see you in another 6 months.
Quantum has been broken for me for at least a month. Everytime I click on the right mouse button it goes to the previous page. It never happened on any browser before including Firefox.
My understanding is that this is only about the desktop, with android coming later. And iOS can't use Gecko, so it doesn't count with this kind of thing.
That’s all good. However, my current Firefix Stable: v.55.0.3 crashes on a regular basis. I’d really live to switch back, after all these Chrome years.
As you're probably well aware, several words in the english language have more than a single authoritative meaning. The version of 'can' they were probably using is: "Used to indicate possession of a specified capability or skill".
If the others do not currently possess that ability, then they cannot.
This a most pointless decision. making firefox fast at the expense of the extensions.
why would it make people switch back to FF? because it's 1% faster than chrome? come on, it's 2k17 and few care about that. Edge might be faster than both and people still would not use it. FF had its selling point to power users which is why i'm currently browsing from ff.
Now there is no reason at all to use it. I guess there is no reason not to use it either however i think people will go with the bigger brand name. Maybe power users will switch to some more niche browser. Maybe everyone will go to chrome.
> why would it make people switch back to FF? because it's 1% faster than chrome?
General responsiveness is definitely something I consider when choosing any tool. 1%? I don't think that's a real number. It can be much faster, especially since this is just one of many-to-come improvements.
When you have lots of tabs open, lots of extensions, etc, pages can actually be quite slow to render. As webpages become more complex (I'm thinking about my company's web-app product) or as we start leveraging renderers for more than just web content, performance is more important.
Beyond that, given mobile devices low memory usage, strong energy requirements, and insane popularity, it makes sense to care about how well we utilize resources in our applications.
> FF had its selling point to power users which is why i'm currently browsing from ff.
"Power users" like to believe this, and they're certainly the loudest, but I don't think it's true. Most people are not power users, and I think it stands to reason that most Firefox users are not "power users". Many are just regular people using their browser to get to Facebook, a site that loads a huge a mount of content. Things like "I visited a website and got hacked, I hate firefox now" or "Ugh firefox hung on facebook" or "ugh instagram is taking forever to load" matter a lot to these users.
> Now there is no reason at all to use it.
Well, performance is one reason. Security could easily be another - as Firefox moves to a memory safe language we can expect to see lower critical bug rates. I know for a lot of the older people whose computers I've set up "I don't want to get viruses" is a huge ask from them. So moving your renderer to a memory safe language is a nice win there.
Most users extensions are likely to continue to work with the new Firefox. Maybe not the 'power users', who almost by definition are a minority, but most.
> 1%? I don't think that's a real number. It can be much faster, especially since this is just one of many-to-come improvements.
I am getting 73 in Speedometer 2 on Chrome Canary vs 66 Mozilla is touting here. Also as shown in their own video, Chrome loads faster on some pages. So FF might actually be slower. It's definitely not noticeably faster than Chrome.
> Well, performance is one reason. Security could easily be another
Both of those things can be counted in Chrome's favor as well.
> So FF might actually be slower. It's definitely not noticeably faster than Chrome.
Yep, on some pages, on some benchmarks, it can go either way. I think this more brings Firefox to a competitive place, and shows the potential for the project Quantum - there's much more to come, webrender in particular.
> Both of those things can be counted in Chrome's favor as well.
Totally. Whether one browser is more secure than another is a complicated topic.
There is always a few of these comments per Firefox 57 post. Always someone lamenting the days of yore, and talking about how no one will ever use Firefox again. It's not making a new point, and the other comments are usually speaking of how great it's been. People get super emotional when things change.
The perf improvements of Quantum have nothing to do with extensions, actually.
Firefox removed the old extensions model because it was literally just "here's our code, hook into it however you want", where everything was a public API. This means addons broke all the time and it was effort to keep things semi-stable.
With the multiprocess stuff most addons had broken anyway, except Firefox took a model where multiprocess would only turn on if you had compatible addons. But it was going to move off it; which it did in a previous release, disabling non-multiprocess compatible addons (I think).
So the addons stuff is at best related to Firefox becoming faster because of multiprocess, which happened a couple releases ago. So the decision to kill the old extension API was related to the timing of the multiprocess stuff and also just because it was a long time coming and let Firefox move to a cleaner architecture.
The new API is growing, though. Firefox can already support many kinds of addons that Chrome doesn't, including stuff like Tree Style Tabs or Tab Center.
Firefox's main selling point for many has always been that it's fighting for a free and open web. And simply "not being Google" (/Facebook, but they don't have a browser yet) still is a selling point as well.
Well, it's not. It's now also heavily competing for fastest browser and will continue to be the most extensible browser, even if it is sacrificing things there.
More changes are coming (WebRender, etc.), but raw benchmarks are only part of the story. We focused an enormous amount of effort on improving perceived performance in Firefox 57. More events go into an idle queue, background tabs get throttled, scripts from domains on our tracking protection list get throttled even further, etc.
And as long as performance is comparable, we can compete on things like our CSS Grid inspector, or per-tab profiles ("Containers"), which I use every day to keep my personal Google account segregated from my work one, and to sandbox Facebook and LinkedIn off into their own little worlds: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/introducing-firefox-multi-a...
The two issues are separate -- they didn't change the extensions system to make Firefox fast, they changed the extensions system because the old extensions system was a security nightmare.
It does actually play into performance, too. The new multiprocess architecture requires that extensions get updated to be compatible with it. It is possible to achieve that in the old extension API, but every single extension author would have to do that, which is just not ever going to happen.
Otherwise, if you install a multiprocess-incompatible extension, Firefox will essentially fall back into single-process whenever that extension does something. So, then a good portion of the extensions on AMO would come with severe, for the user inexplicable performance problems.
Mozilla would have just not rolled that out without knowing that the switch to WebExtensions will clean that all up.
Well, and then besides that there's also the points that 1) the old extension API is quite complex, so it's comparatively hard for extension authors to write an extension, especially also qualitatively good extension, 2) the old extension API was really unstable, basically whenever Mozilla changed something about Firefox, some extensions broke, and 3) with the new extension API being based on Chrome's extension API, it becomes often trivial to port Chrome extensions to Firefox, making it much more likely that Firefox will continue to have extensions even if Chrome continues to eat up market share.
When our admins actually care to migrate to java webstart and I can drop java plugin and firefox esr, I'll probably move to chrome, because selenium works better with chromedriver for me.
And yeah, I don't care much about which one loads page 0.5 secs faster - I used to download porn on a modem:) https://xkcd.com/598/
If you want to try these performance improvements (servo, e10s) but keep legacy add-on compatibility (at least for now) I suggest installing firefox 56, disabling auto-updates, and making the following changes/additions in about:config
Elsewhere in the thread it's stated that Tree Style Tabs has shipped a 57-compatible version, and that LastPass will be ready by the time this all hits stable.
True. I did in fact have to explicitly downgrade TST to the <57-compatible version. The new version apparently doesn't yet support hiding the tab bar across the top of the browser.
I think they should rebrand the browser entirely. I want to try this but imagining the Firefox logo on my computer makes me sick to my stomach - reminding me of a time when my browser crashed constantly and slowed to a crawl if I had 5+ tabs open.
Holy damn Firefox is actually fast.
Fair comparison, both having Pocket, uBlock, Evernote, OneNote, Pushbullet, and Bitwarden; neither of them having an extension the other doesn't. Above described Firefox Nightly config vs Chrome Dev.
Test machines are a workstation with a i7-4771 @ 3.9ghz, 32GB DDR3-2133, Radeon 7970 with a trio of 1080p screens (a very fast modern machine from the Haswell era) and a laptop with a i5-32120M, 8GB of DDR3-1600, Intel HD4000 iGPU feeding a 13" 2560x1600 @ 200% hidpi (an Ivy Bridge era MBPr 13" Late 2012). Both machines run Win10.
Both machines have less real world wait on Firefox than Chrome, and the interface has less latency between when I do something and it even begins processing the request. Also, under a ton of windows and tabs, Firefox seems to use less RAM and the speed gap seems to widen.
I don't care about about artificial benchmarks, btw, they never seem to measure what actually makes browsers slower for humans.
Edit: Even though I just said I don't care about benchmarks, using Speedometer 2.0-r2216: On the workstation: Firefox 58.0a1 2017-09-26 64bit 61.18 vs Chrome 63.0.3217.0 dev 64-bit 51.67; on the laptop, same versions: Firefox 28.58 vs Chrome 26.74
So, arguably, flat out benchmarkable performance is the same, with Firefox just slightly edging ahead (18% and 6% faster). It isn't enough to explain how fast Firefox feels now.
Edit 2: And now with Edge 40.15063.0.0/EdgeHTML 15.15063: Workstation, 46.72; Laptop 21.37. Firefox is 34% and 31% faster, Chrome is 25% and 11% faster.