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Firefox Quantum (haxx.se)
201 points by pgl on Nov 8, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 201 comments



Firefox has definitely been getting better over the past year or two.

I've always used Firefox, since Chrome doesn't have the ability to scroll through tabs, they just get smaller and smaller on the tab bar. I've never understood why the feature hasn't been added, it seems pretty minor. Firefox also lazy loads existing tabs on startup.

Anyway, for a while, around 2011-2012, Firefox had terrible memory and stability issues. It's good that they've largely been fixed. Firefox is the most extensible and free browser, I'm surprised more tech people don't use it, considering the tech communities love for power and the ability to customise things.


> I'm surprised more tech people don't use it, considering the tech communities love for power and the ability to customise things.

I used to be pretty fanatical about Firefox. But when it got so slow that simple scrolling started dropping frames, I had to switch.


When was the last time you used firefox? There's been a ton of improvements in this area in the past few years (off the main thread compositing, async pan/zoom, e10s etc...). Scrolling is now smooth even when pages are loading, or there's activity in other tabs etc...

I actually use Firefox over Chrome on my xps 13, mainly because firefox's scrolling is considerably smoother than chrome (only beaten out by Edge)


Consider giving it a try again with the Firefox Beta (or wait for 57 final next week). I switched back from Chrome.


Already switched to quantum nightly about a month ago :)


Thankfully Quantum is silky smooth (been using it on the Nightlies and now the web developer edition).


That is because of smooth scrolling. I had to reduce the time for smooth scrolling to complete. I forget the key I modified in about:config.


Some people do perceive smooth scrolling as annoying, but for the most part what he's referring to was because of JavaScript ScrollEventHandlers being run in between the user moving their mouse wheel and the page actually scrolling.

This was fixed with Asynchronous Panning and Zooming (APZ) which moves the webpage and runs the ScrollEvents in parallel on different processes.


> I've never understood why the feature hasn't been added, it seems pretty minor.

I don't want it. I don't like Firefox's approach, I much prefer the shrinking tabs paradigm.


Firefox tabs do shrink. Then, once they get to a width where shrinking any more would start negatively impacting the ability to use the UI, they start to scroll. Until you reach this point, the tab scrolling UI is hidden, so there's no concern for anyone who doesn't use tabs heavily.


> Until you reach this point, the tab scrolling UI is hidden, so there's no concern for anyone who doesn't use tabs heavily.

Which is me. :-)


We're also experimenting with making it configurable. You can ratchet down `browser.tabs.tabMinWidth` in `about:config` to pack more tabs in per window.


This has been added back? That'd be awesome news.

It existed once, but was removed because of "complexity" and since then the recommended solution was editing userChrome.css manually (or using an extension that did so, but that of course doesn't work in 57+). Still haven't quite tied down what the CSS has to be in recent versions.

Here's the bug from back then https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=574654 (yes, I'm still salty about the attitude in there)


>Firefox is the most extensible

Not after quantum.


I think it still is, aside of older versions of itself.


Only if you consider Pale Moon as "an older version of itself".


I would love it if Chrome could enable hiding the tab bar and real panel support for extensions so I could have tree style tabs. I use both browsers in tandem for different things, although primarily Chrome at work.


> since Chrome doesn't have the ability to scroll through tabs

How can you scroll through tabs? What do you mean by this?


In Chrome, the more tabs you open, the smaller they get (infinitely). They all remain on the screen. Once they get tiny enough, you can no longer tell what any given tab is.

In FF, after a certain point the tabs stop getting smaller, and instead you scroll through them left to right, either using little arrow buttons on each side of the tab bar, or using your scroll wheel.


ah, thanks.

If you have that many tabs, one should use tab tree style anyway, i guess: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15652124


I used to have tab trees and they are amazing. The extension I used had some stability / slowness issues and I also like having nothing on the sides of the webpage.

I would still appreciate a tree view that shows when clicking a button when I need it, maybe something like the Netsurf History that shows when long clicking on its previous button (by the way, this next/previous tree feature of Netsurf is awesome, it would be great to have this as is in other browsers).

But I usually have many tabs and Firefox is usable without tree tabs.

I use CTRL+tab to cycle through most recently used tabs. If you enable the browser.ctrlTab.previews about:config setting, you get a nice alt+tab-like window.

The order of tabs in ctrl+tab is changed when using browser.ctrlTab.previews (from simple in order tab circle to circle through most recently used tabs, lastly used first). I have become dependent on this to the point that Chrome or Firefox without it feel like they get in my way when I browse.

I also from time to time used the list of tabs provided by the ctrl+tab previous window, but it seems to have just disappeared in a recent Firefox update?

Anyway, I find that the most efficient way to go to a not so recently-used tab is to just search for something in its title or its URL in the URL bar (CTRL+L) and use the "go to tab" feature (and I disable search engine suggestions in the URL bar). And if you closed the tab, the page will be proposed because it is in the history. Chrome's URL tab just feels useless in comparison.

The URL bar of Firefox and its CTRL+TAB tab preview feature / cycle order are two killer features for me. Losing them would be painful.


Scrolling the mousewheel while hovering the mouse over the tab bar to switch between tabs I guess?


I have always just used ctrl + pgup/pgdown in Chromium for tab switching (same in Sublime). I am guessing OP is referencing the fixed min-width of the tabs though?

I know it is completely insane, but I have a strong compulsion to keep my tab count low. Once it starts approaching 7 or so, it is time to evaluated which 3 or 4 have to go.

Meanwhile I go look at someone else's monitor and they have 25 open all the time, and I can recognize some haven't been touched in weeks. I just think to myself "Clean up after yourself. How can you live like this?"


I use ctrl+tab and ctrl+shift+tab to cycle tabs. Good to know that there are other options.

I also don't see how people have the RAM to have 50 tabs open. If I can't read part of the title of my tab, it's being moved to a new window or closed.


Actually having 50 tabs should not be an issue RAM-wise. The problem is that chrome (and firefox quantum) open many many processes and therefore consume a lot of ram. Quantum is expected to be much better than current Chrome in Ram consumption. Because chromium allegedly opens seperate processes for each tab(?), quantum uses the same process for a couple of tabs and thus allows resource sharing.

In a single processed browser, ram is not an issue. I've been using 25+ tabs for many years, only recently in Chrome I experienced a low ram warning (i have 8GB). I switched back to firefox 56.


With light pages + efficient ad blocking, 50 tabs seem actually light on memory. This may be less true with video pages or many heavy online newspaper websites.

Since I got a 32 GiB RAM computer, I don't know what is the memory usage of Firefox anymore.


tab groups! that is the way to live. Grouping tabs based on theme keeps the bar clean and makes it easy for theme based workflow


I love them at times. Do you know if a Firefox 57+ compatible extension exists for that?


This. This was the feature I missed most when I moved away from Firefox.


I have been on Firefox Quantum for the past couple of months. Previously, when I used Chrome on my Dell XPS 13, core i7, 16gb Linux laptop, it used to hang and kill everything almost every week. And suck battery power like no tomorrow.

I've not rebooted my laptop in 2 months now and battery life is much much better.

Firefox Quantum is pure win.


That's the complete opposite of the way Chrome was designed. I've rarely seen Chrome do a complete lock-up and close everything. The point of Chrome spinning up a new process per tab is that when one Tab crashed it doesn't take out the whole browser.

Firefox on the other hand did this constantly. In fact the only thing that has prevented me going back, and I have regularly given it a try as I support their overall approach and support of web. So I am excited to see how Quantum feels.

But if Chrome was constantly locking up and crashing completely I have to imagine its something wrong with your computer/OS.


Chrome hang on Linux is extremely common. Check this out https://www.google.co.in/search?q=chrome+hang+linux&oq=chrom...

From what I understand, it has something to do with the way it does memory management along with cache. I don't know - but I have pretty much a flagship laptop and am running Fedora 26 which IMHO is the best OS out there right now.

Chrome blows. Quantum rules.


Currently using both Chrome and Firefox, for me it's quite common that Chrome completely dies no freezing just completely and instantly dying. Maybe at most once every other week but it never really happens with Firefox (maybe once or twice per year).


I switched to the beta a couple of months ago, and it's just better than Chrome in every way. It's both faster and seems to have better memory usage.


The Nighty version will always be the best version ;)


> The Nighty version will always be the best version

Is that the version I put on just before I'm about to go to bed?


Depends on what time zone you're in; I'm a recent nightly convert, and am currently in a very different TZ than usual. I had gotten used to around when updates would come through, but now I'm all screwed up :)


You missed the fact that GP was making a joke about a typo ("Nighty" vs Nightly) :-)


Gah! You're 100% right.


Maybe these are silly things to complain about with fellow techies, but the things that prevent me from switching to Firefox:

The menu bars are enormous even on a compact theme. Bigger than on Chrome. I only have so much vertical space to spare.

When opening a new window, the address bar isn't the first thing to receive focus, unlike on Chrome. With Chrome, I just bang out WINKEY + C + H + R + ENTER + part of query + ENTER and I'm pretty much there


https://i.imgur.com/hWl9YR8.png

A screenshot from my screen just now, running FF58 and Chrome side by side. Firefox's menu bar is smaller.


This is a bit misleading. When you maximize Chrome's window the space above the tabs disappears, making Chrome's footprint smaller than that of Firefox.

Though I still wonder why Chrome's menu bar enlarges when the window is not maximized.

Edit: A screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/yabXSEz.png


You're not on the most compact density though. That circle around the back button only appears on the "Normal" and "Touch" densities.

Right click the menu bar, hit "Customize", and you can change the density to "Compact" under the density dropdown at the bottom.


Hey, I didn't know about that. That's great actually! Thanks.

Though this doesn't help with the 'feeling' for new users, as the normal setting is a default.


I wondered the same thing a while ago and I would think this is to ease dragging the window with the mouse, which you may want to do easily when the window is not maximized.

I'd really like Firefox on Linux to hide the window title bar (at least when maximized) and put the close / maximize / reduce buttons in the tab bar (or make it an option). The tab bar does already allow one to move the window, at least on KDE. Then, Firefox could adopt the same kind of behavior as Chrome for this.


I still think Safari has the best implementation of any browser. Coincidentally this (maximizing) is also why bottom tabs is a much saner choice.

Normal window: https://i.imgur.com/WMfJMPC.png

Fullscreen: https://i.imgur.com/4iVPNzQ.png

Fullscreen with mouse at top of screen: https://i.imgur.com/hjC7Qgk.png


There is a Firefox legacy extension that does just this. Hide Caption Bar Plus. It might not work with this new Firefox as he APIs to control the UI are not exposed as they once were. I use it all the time on my laptops


Last mont Fedora had a release in which you could use CSD to merge the title and the tab bars. You only had to set a variable(maybe widget.allow-client-side-decoration?) in about:config to true. They took that option away because some bugs but it may arrive for the next firefox release.

Here is how it looks like https://twitter.com/Sesivany/status/908628645299748865


This is great. I didn't expect this to happen so soon.

When we will have this and pixel-perfect scrolling enabled by default, the Firefox UI will be close to ideal for me.

To get pixel scrolling now, the solution is easy:

  #!/usr/bin/env sh
  MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 exec /usr/bin/firefox "$@"


On debian with gnome, installing "maximus" package should hide title bar when maximized, works well here !


Thanks for the tip. I didn't know maximus. Actually, kwin does allow writing rules that do exactly that. However, this removes window management buttons, which I don't use often but do like to have. Extensions did that but are not compatible anymore ans never really had an integrated look. I recognize this is mostly feelings though


Amusingly, it seems neither you nor the grandparent comment have the interface set to `compact`.


True. I didn't know that that setting exists. That could be part of the problem, ofcourse.


Ah, well, when you Google for "smaller firefox [interface/menus]" you just get results like:

"How to make the menus in Firefox larger" (no thanks)

"How to install a compact theme in Firefox" (which doesn't really help)

Thanks though! Between your response and notes on how much more responsive the new FF is, I'll give it yet another shot. :)


> When you maximize Chrome's window the space above the tabs disappears, making Chrome's footprint smaller than that of Firefox.

Firefox does the same thing. You can also choose whether you want "drag space" or not on non-maximized windows, or even an old-fashioned title bar. It's all in the customize option (where you can also switch to the compact theme).

FF takes up less UI space than Chrome, when the compact theme is used.


As sibling said: Change the tab 'density' in Firefox from 'normal' to 'compact' under Customize > Density (at bottom).


Maximized browsers on wide screen monitors aren't very usable though, you end up with loads of pointless whitespace. The browser works best with a roughly square viewport on 1080p, or tending towards portrait on 1440p.


Good reason to use Firefox then, and its ability to have side tabs:

https://imgur.com/a/L9plD


Oh, absolutely. It seemed that I would have to say goodbye to Tab Center with 57 and was very unhappy with it, but thankfully it turned out that I was able to make it even better than before. userChrome.css rocks :)

https://dosowisko.net/Screenshot_20171030_203716.png https://dosowisko.net/Screenshot_20171030_203804.png


how did you get there? I installed treestyle on ff57 and top tabs are still there, in addition to vertical tabs


1. Navigate to your profile folder [1].

2. cd chrome or create the directory if it isn't there

3. Inside chrome, open userChrome.css or create it if it isn't there

4. Paste the following:

  @namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");
  
  /* to hide the native tabs */
  #TabsToolbar {
      visibility: collapse;
  }
  
  /* to hide the sidebar header */
  #sidebar-header {
      visibility: collapse;
  }
5. Restart Firefox

---

1. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox#Navigatin...


I've been running the side-bar version of tab center with this userChrome.css fix but the best I can say about it is that it's "alright". The window close/max/min buttons are just not positioned very well on macOS.

Also, if you hide the sidebar header I think you run the risk of accidentally opening the bookmarks sidebar and being unable to get back to your tabs.


It's probably a subjective proportion thing. Pure metrics aren't necessary what people "measure", maybe the border above tabs is not seen as wasted space. Same for perf, Firefox might be faster in tests, but chrome has an overall feel of speed is "better".


Certainly not the case as far as opening new tabs goes on my machine, an 1.9Ghz with 4Gb RAM. Firefox opens the new tab instantly while Chrome has a noticeable delay. The same with closing tabs, especially heavy ones. Also Chrome takes just a little bit longer to start than the latest Firefox, although I didn't actually measure this.

I think the general perception that Chrome is fast is more a group-think at this point, fostered by a few years of sub-par Firefox performance combined with aggressive Google marketing. There's no real difference since the last few versions of Firefox vs. Chrome.


Trust me, I use "old" core 2 machines, right now on a 1st gen i5 and I regularly cringe at firefox, whenever I run chrome, something lifts off my mind.

I don't charge firefox, it was resetted non long ago, ublock origin and containers (I removed youtube extensions and the likes). Still twitter hungs enough for me to feel annoyed.

I'm not a speed addict, I even love slowness when done right [1], but I rate firefox nightly a little below chrome (stable or canary) at that point.

[1] I use an HP48 calculator, the thing was slower in terms of UI than all its competition but it was such a nice ux design you rarely care about it.


Did you try firefox quantum? I am also using an "old" machine, first gen i7 mobile processor. Firefox (pre-quantum) was slow for me on windows so I switched to Chrome. But firefox quantum was equally fast if not faster.

Now, I am using firefox 56 on OpenBSD, and it is really really smooth.


I assumed Quantum was in Nightly (58) isn't it ?


> Nightly (58)

It depends on when you ran nightly; Quantum is the name for 57+. Sounds like you were using it.


That was my understanding too. And as other reported that maybe it was use case dependant, loading imgur front page is harsh, no need for video, webgl or anything too fancy. And of course it's much less the case if at all under chrome.

I wish I had tools and knowledge to analyse the perf/stack locally, really.


Thanks! Hadn't tried on Windows.


This is from pre-57 versions, right? I'm on 58 and it is much smaller than that.


> running FF58


Re: vertical space Oh you sweet sweet summer child (i kid)

Vertical tabs are the way to go. I use Tree Style Tabs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...) and there is also Tab center, but the experiment has ended (https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center/). You gain a whole tab height in space and only lose a constant amount of horizontal space.

I manage a world where you can read the title of your tab as you open more. Long gone is the world your curiosity is punished! And the in the tree case, you can track where your tabs came from!


But I also need the horizontal space! I very often tile windows side by side to allow developing while seeing the results, or while reading documentation.

Maybe I'm just picky. I don't know. Chrome does the job pretty well though, even with the bookmarks bar turned on.

A vertical tabs bar would make it impossible to use many sites, like GitHub.


> A vertical tabs bar would make it impossible to use many sites, like GitHub.

I use vertical tabs exclusively (for many, many years), and GitHub constantly. No problems whatsoever.


GitHub already deals with a window of half screenwidth poorly, as in requiring horizontal scrolling to see things. That's what I meant.


Win tree style tabs you can autohide. Indo that to reduce distractions


Looks like in Firefox v56 you need to change the start page to "blank" in the preferences (edit: to get the address bar focused after opening a window).

However in current Nightly (which is on v58) the input focus goes straight to the address bar, even in the default settings, so looks like more users complained ;)

I'm just using Ctrl-L to focus the address bar, works on all operating systems and browsers.


Alt +D. Left hand friendly :)


Opens the File (german: Datei) menu with German Firefox.


Didn't know that. It's handy. Thank you :)


F6 works as well in all OS's I've used (Linux Mint and Windows).


On Firefox 57 that is indeed solved.


Are you running Linux by any chance? For some reason, huge paddings are now very popular in GTK applications with... the result you mention. All GTK3 applications seem to have huge widgets for me, even with compact themes. Frankly, I stopped trying to solve this.


Manjaro Cinnamon. I love everything else about it.


> When opening a new window, the address bar isn't the first thing to receive focus, unlike on Chrome.

Do you have a non-default home page? I can reproduce the problem with Firefox 58 on Windows 10 in my regular user profile but not a brand new profile. My regular user profile had a non-default home page URL.

I'm not sure what the focus behavior should be in that case. If you set your home page to a website, would you still want the address bar to have focus?


Ah, well, the default that comes on the distro was the culprit there. Fixed now. Thanks!


I don't know if it will work in the new version, but you might be able to customize that with CSS:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/959205


> The menu bars are enormous even on a compact theme. Bigger than on Chrome. I only have so much vertical space to spare.

This is what I get on OSX, latest Chrome v FDE Compact: https://i.imgur.com/TA62OAN.png


Can you provide a link to that Firefox theme? I searched "FDE Compact" in mozilla themes and couldn't find what you appear to be using.


FDE is presumably Firefox Developer Edition. What you get by downloading from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

"Compact" is the built-in compact styling. Right-click (or otherwise context-click) on the toolbar, select "Customize.." and near the bottom there is a "Density" selector that you can set to "Compact". Note that this is somewhat independent of the color scheme used.

I'm pretty sure that the "Compact" layout is available in beta 57 as well, not just developer edition. It's not in release 56, though; it was added for 57.


> FDE is presumably Firefox Developer Edition.

> "Compact" is the built-in compact styling.

Yes and yes


> When opening a new window, the address bar isn't the first thing to receive focus, unlike on Chrome. With Chrome, I just bang out WINKEY + C + H + R + ENTER + part of query + ENTER and I'm pretty much there

This works for me with firefox 58/windows 10


I just tested Windows and OSX, when opening new tabs and windows the address bar gets focus


I guess it's just Linux then. Ah well, I hope you enjoy it anyway. I'm still going to donate to Mozilla at the end of the year. If nothing else, competition is great and their documentation is amazing.


What is Win + C + H + R? Is that just Win + R?


It's for searching by app name. Chrome will show up as the best match


Pressing and releasing the Windows-Key will open up the menu and then he types in "Chr" to search for Chrome.

Took me a moment, too...


I'm very impressed by Firefox 57 (have been on the beta for a while now). I never used Firefox really, but Quantum really made me move over.

I still do my dev in Opera simply because I'm used to the dev tools, but if you haven't checked out Firefox Quantum yet, I really urge you to. It's just faster.


Updated my develper edition FF today, and the first 58 beta came along! I'm impressed it consumes about 300MB of memory only. It's not that much more than when my Emacs has been running for some weeks.


> I’m sure Firefox 57 will also get a fair share of sour feedback and comments written in uppercase.

I might be part of that crowd (though in lowercase) because none of the WebExtensions mouse gesture addons work on macOS/Linux anymore due to this outstanding bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1360278

No official dev seems to look into it, and the community patches from the tracker only fix the Linux case.


Yep. I'm not excited about this release at all. Firefox should support gestures natively. Mouse gestures is the only legacy addon I really can't live without so I have turned off automatic updates. Really, it doesn't matter how much faster the new version is if it had to take away so many of the features I've come to rely on over the years. (I have 3 other legacy addons still activated that I really like but that I can live without: classic theme restorer, status 4 evar, and stylish [to control the url bar display, unsupported in the "stylus replacement"].) I have tried Vivaldi but it's not fantastic and it's not open source (but the gestures are more responsive than even the old firegestures).

It seems like the new firefox is just racing to be just like Chrome.


I still use the Firefox ESR for the dev tools, the new dev tools are missing things like the network response preview, the debugger is not working right for me, and the Chrome look does not appeal to me, I prefer the old dev tools. Other then this as a user I like the fact the Firefox is moving again and in a right direction most of the time. I hope they respect the user privacy more and the new privacy invading feature should be opt in.


> the new dev tools are missing things like the network response preview

Do you mean the content of the response or something else? Because I'm on FDE and they're definitely there ("Response" tab when selecting a network entry)


I can see the response as plain text but before there was a PReview tab too that showed the response as rendered html, there is a ticket opened for this issue https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1353319


Is there a way to opt out of the data collection? I haven't used Firefox in a long time but always liked it for its privacy progress. I'm enjoying Aurora so far, but that's not cool.

edit: Found it, very bottom of Privacy


> the new privacy invading feature should be opt in.

I agree. The new features, however, are not. They even ("temporarily") collect IP addresses by default when FF calls home.( https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ )

And, naturally, they also intend comply with the law. In other words, they hand over data to governments. ( https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/ )

What Mozilla are doing here is despicable.


The users that used Firefox despite the lower performance had good reaspons to use Ff like privacy and the extensions, now this new performance updates are cool but the updates that affect privacy and extensions hit the loyal users, I think this is a huge, mistake and I understand that extensions need to be updated but privacy should be the first reason someone would use Ff over chrome, if Mozilla needs statistics then they can prompt the user and ask permissions.


The old devtools were amazingly slow and heavy. The new ones are much much better. Almost as fast as Chrome's.


For me the tools worked fine, I prefer the Firefox ESR layout, I prefer FF ESR Network tab, Chrome network tab is too much for my usual tasks, 99% of the time I want to see the response code and the exact response and I do not care about profiling, so Ff way worked fine for me. The JS debugger layout makes more sense for me how it was in Ff, call stack on left side, variables on right side, Chrome call stack view is weird. So I use ESR for dev, hopefully the bugs that affect me will be fixed and the UI changes I could get used to. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1353319


Firefox 57 will also allow users to enable Always-on Tracking Protection by default (you could sort of do it before, too, but you had to enable the Private Mode by default, which also deletes cookies and other stuff).

This should make it easier for people to enable. It's what Do Not Track should have been all along. We asked advertisers nicely to stop tracking us with DNT, and they didn't care. Now we're going to just block their trackers and there's nothing they can do about it (I'm talking about more mainstream users in general. Of course some of us have already been using ublock origin or similar extensions).

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/firefox-57-to...


DNT will become legally enforced in the EU soon enough.


... and almost all my extensions will cease to work.

16 legacy, 4 ready for 57. a few of them i use very often: automatic save folder, save file to, video downloadhelper, downthemall!, search by image for google, image zoom, copy links


You can switch to Firefox ESR to keep using your extensions and give the extension authors more time. ESR 52 will be supported with fixes until June.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/


And in June 2018...then what?

Sorry - just very tired of people tossing out ESR as a solution to this problem. It isn’t - at best, it just kicks the can down the road. At worst, it’s continuing to support a company that’s shown utter disregard for a huge portion of its user base by the way they’ve handled XUL deprecation. No one’s saying XUL didn’t need to go - it did. What’s frustrating is the complete removal of it without before providing a viable replacement and the accompanying big shrug / middle finger to anyone who relies on XUL-based extensions and can’t switch to the neutered WE version (see Tile Tabs and Tree Style Tab).

As a long-time Firefox user, I’m extremely disappointed by the way Mozilla has handled this. I’ll use 57 for dev tools and bookmark sync, but Waterfox or Vivaldi will be my daily driver.


> You can switch to Firefox ESR to keep using your extensions and give the extension authors more time.

The problem is that certain valuable extensions are impossible to update, because the new plugin API doesn't expose the necessary functionality. E.g. Keysnail, which will break because Mozilla won't expose the ability to override C-n.

Mozilla should have taken the time to release a fully-baked extension API before deleting the old API; then it really would have been on the extension authors. Between this and the utter destruction of Sync's security guarantees a few years back, the Cliqz keylogger fiasco & the Pocket fiasco, as well as the WebRTC fiasco (as well as the defenstration of Brendan Eich), I'm very disappointed in Mozilla these days.


If that's the solution, Quantum should have been released just after an ESR. 57 is in between which is just stupid.

This has been pointed out to Mozilla multiple times.


Set extensions.legacy.enabled to true and enjoy. Do not know how long that will work though, but all mine seem to be working.


That setting will not work in the final release.

See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Firefox57#Compat._Table


I've been on Firefox Nightly for a while now and the difference to my FF56 vanilla install, it behaves much more like chrome and has become my daily driver.

It can and has fully replaced Chrome (after the KeepassHTTP Connector was ported) in all matters (development, daily usage, hackernews).


I used nightly regularly, then stopped. With quantum I used it again. It has shown strong improvements, massive ones, I spent two weeks in nightly. But at point it has perf issues that I don't have with chrome. I'll stay on it for a while to see if it goes away.


I've found that nightly has some issues with video acceleration (my laptop doesn't like playing anything over 1080p resolution), FF release doesn't seem to have that.


I wouldn't rant if it was for intensive usage. But even twitter or the main UI can slow down.


> But at point it has perf issues that I don't have with chrome.

Would you be willing to either file a bug report (and cc "bzbarsky") or just describe steps to reproduce here?


I'd be happy, but beside a context and a list of tabs I have no precise info to give. Would it still be useful ?


Possibly, yes. Even just some idea of which urls are involved and of which operations are being slow would be useful.


Okay, then. Could you give me a few pointers on how to submit (a bugzilla ticket I suppose) ?

Found out the troubleshooting and health report menus in the mean time.


https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi if you're willing to create a bugzilla account. Though I guess we also have sign-in with a github account now...


I was heavy FF user back in the day, then switched to Chrome and now I'm back to FF. I've been using beta version for a few months and improvements are massive!


While it's going to be a great release (have been trying the Quantum beta on side), I'm very sad to see many of the extremely useful extensions that will just stop working as soon as I switch.


Can anyone comment.on whether tree style tabs has been ported, or commented on if it will be?


It practically has, although they're still working on an API to hide the tab bar - until then, you'll have to hide it by editing a local CSS file.


There's also this annoying and useless header bar that's added to the top of the tab tree as well.


...which you can also remove with userContent.css file.


A port is available, it's a regression though. For example no native context menus.


Looks like it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

I'm using Firefox Nightly and it let's me install it.


Tree style tab has been ported, it's a version that's a bit rushed but it does the job.


I switched to Beta 3 weeks ago just to run version 57 and I couldn't be happier on my Windows 10 machine. Firefox starts much faster, is more responsive and I haven't seen a single crash. However, on my Mac, I really don't like the default black chrome. It just looks as out of place as Firefox always did on the Mac, which is just sad :-(

And, I miss Self-Destructing Cookies (SDC). Cookie-AutoDelete (CAD) is fine, but the white list of SDC was automatically shared with Firefox Sync, while CAD settings aren't.


Anyway, congratulations Mozilla already for this great work. I'll try to convert friends and family back from Chrome ASAP.


The compact light theme looks native enough for me (at least it's so minimal that there's little to offend there ;)


Thank you so much! I tried it just now and that's what I'm looking for. Why isn't this the default on Mac? That black bar looks so out of place :-(


I only wish Firefox would give some love to Mesa. GPU acceleration is still off by default on open source graphic stack on Linux (RadeonSI/Intel).


I have been using it for 1 month now and have to say Quantum is the first time i have been actually impressed with the speed of a browser. Great job Mozilla, hopefully some Chrome only users will at least try Firefox now.


I've recently jumped on the Quantum beta from years of using Chrome, and so far, the experience has been really enjoyable.

But please, for the love of everything that is holy, let developers customize scrollbar styles. Thank you.


> But please, for the love of everything that is holy, let developers customize scrollbar styles. Thank you.

Developers, for the love of god, please leave my scrollbars alone. Thank you.


Go Rust!

Sorry, had to say that. Incredible architecture changes were made, but without the language to support them it simply wouldn't have been possible.


This release is amazing, I was slowly moving everything to Chrome from Firefox over the last year-ish.

This really changes Firefox. Everything is incredibly snappy, at times more responsive that chrome.

The small amount of addons I use are now available.

Can't wait to get this by default in Ubuntu.


So the "fast" nightly features are now in "regular" Firefox?

I tried the nightly a few weeks ago and it would always forget my logins so it was essentially unusable.

But the performance was much much better than with Chrome, so I would like to switch to Firefox :)


Firefox stable is v56, Beta v57, Nightly v58+. Next week, Stable will be v57, Beta v58 and Nightly v59.

v57 is a vast improvement over v56. Can't really say about Chrome because I haven't used it for a while. Main difference between v57 and v58 (performance-wise) is that WebRender (the "Quantum Renderer") didn't make it to v57, so you may want to wait for Beta v58.

I've been using the beta channel for years now, it was better than Stable for my browsing habits -- never had an issue.


Will the canvas mouse input lag also go down? I tried to program some small games once and noticed this was horrible on all my (Windows 7) desktop browsers. Just tried again using this demo [1] (not mine!), and now on Chrome it was OK.

Edit: I just took the plunge and tested the beta (57.0b14). Unfortunately, the input lag did not go down. I think subtle lags like this cause web-apps to feel so uncomfortable for me.

[1] http://jsfiddle.net/Donk/5gXX8/2/embedded/result/


I won't be able to continue to use my favorite extension, tab groups, so I don't think I'll be updating in the near-term.


I was a long time Firefox user (since 2005) and I switched to Chrome 6 months back, because I have a 32 GB laptop and the first thing I noticed was my browser was FAST! But giving openness a thought, the thing that prevents me from going back to Firefox is "Dark Reader" extension[1]. It is just fantastic on Chrome.

It would be interesting to see if Firefox gains it's lost trust from the Addon developers like Downthemall.

Also Firefox's default black theme doesn't even come close to FT DeepDark addon[2].

[1] https://github.com/alexanderby/darkreader

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ft-deepdark/


Have a look at the Phoronix benchamrk of Firefox 57. Not really impressive. Still a lot of catching up to chrome.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=firefox-...


The problem with benchmarks is that they don't always represent real world performance.

Where I work sometimes we have really big PRs (+-5000 lines of code). In GitHub diff pages, the scrolling in Chrome is really jerky, while the scrolling in Firefox Quantum is smooth. And for me this is much more important than some random Javascript benchmark.


One thing that these benchmarks don't capture is user perceived latency. A lot of work went into this for 57, making it feel faster, regardless of what a microbenchmark may pick up.

Of course, work is going into making those numbers better too, but I don't think that this kind of benchmarking tells the whole story.

(Also, these mostly seem to be benching JavaScript performance? That's certainly not the whole story of 57.)


I've been running the beta, and it feels so much faster than 56. I also quite like the UI changes they made, quite minimal with everything I need still available. I think this is a great moment for people that stopped using Firefox because of performance issues to give Firefox another go.


I've recently switched from Chrome to Firefox Developer Edition and apart from a few UI niggles, I'm really happy with it and I can't wait to start recommending Firefox to people again.

Congrats to Mozilla and the folks who contributed to this! The web needs Firefox and this is a massive improvement.


sigh I just spend an hour trying to figure out why my emscripten code no longer works. Browsing hacker-news and seeing this post about Firefox. Remembering my Firefox developer edition earlier today mentioned some update on start (FF 58.01b now). And yeah, for some reason it broke some emscripten code (edit: seems now it rather broke WebGL canvas).


Do you have a link to a test page that demonstrates the bug? If so, I can file a bug in Bugzilla and identify the code change that caused the regression.


Sorry, didn't see I got an answer here a few days ago already. Someone else located the bug faster than me and made a bug-report (WebGL being broken - lot of people notice that one ^^). It seems to be fixed already again in nightly, so now it's just waiting for a new developer version to come out.


For anyone (like me) who was surprised by FF Beta upgrading from a point release to 57.0:

> Note that the merge from beta to release happens ahead of time (usually on the Mon/Tue a week before the release date).

https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar


Mine is 57.0 as well. If you go to preferences there is a "restart to update firefox" button. Whack that after installing the beta and you get the release version.

I really like this. I've dumped Chrome and Safari entirely from daily use.


>and you get the release version

Apparently that's not the final release version. Despite not having a beta/RC version is not the final version, that one will come next week.


Thanks for the heads up - appreciated!


Post about why I'm not switching to Firefox for those who care to read it. https://davityle.github.io/post/why-im-not-switching-to-fire...

tldr; the devtools are so slow and buggy they are unusable


I've been using it (beta) for a while on a win10 desktop. No perf issues to report. Launch time is now on par with others.

I'll consider going back from chromium to FF on macOS after the mainstream release.

Happy to see some love going on for ff, which I used to love back then, BC (before chrome) era.


I use v56 and I've disabled even checking for updates. I'd like to have the performance of v57 but it will break or severely downgrade most of the extensions I use on a daily basis. That's a dealbreaker.


Before you comment on that blog post: Any controversial comment will get deleted.


What's the security story these days re: Firefox v. Chrome? I switched to Chrome a few years ago (for the most part) because, at the time, Chrome was considered more secure. Has this changed?


Firefox is way (waaaaay) ahead in the privacy stakes.


You mean the security story is better in Firefox? Can you share some context/details?


Privacy != security.

Chrome is probably more secure, but Firefox does a lot more to help block/prevent fingerprinting and tracking and to enable addons to do it further.


Yep. Misread that comment completely.


It'd be great if I could remove this ugly bar at the bottom of url suggestions input field (the one with "Search XXX in..." and search engine icons if any).


Visit "about:preferences#search" and then uncheck every search engine under "One-Click Search Engines" list.


Okay, I'm stupid. For some reason I never even tried to uncked _all_ of them. Always been keeping Google, thinking it should be there for search in the url bar to work.

Thanks!


Use DuckDuckGo as the default search engine, then you can use the "Bang"[0] notation to search using other services.

[0]https://duckduckgo.com/bang


You can also go into the Customization Menu and remove the Search Bar there while keeping the search engines.


> I’m sure Firefox 57 will also get a fair share of sour feedback and comments written in uppercase. That’s inevitable.

[citation needed]


I started using it about a month ago, because I was getting annoyed with some bugs on Safari [1]. That was on El Capitan, as my Mac was old enough to not support Sierra. I have since gotten a new Mac and am on High Sierra. Firefox has been working well enough that I have not checked to see if those Safari bugs are gone.

There are only two things I've found that annoy me on an ongoing basis with Quantum, and two things I wish they handled better.

• The English spelling dictionary that comes with it is terrible. You can add a better spell check dictionary from the add-ons page, and that helps. Even with that there are weird gaps, though. Consider these words: millisecond, microsecond, nanosecond, picosecond, femtosecond, attosecond. It knows them except for picosecond and attosecond. It seems odd to me to have femtosecond but not picosecond.

Chrome knows them all except attosecond. Safari knows them all.

Although it does not know picosecond, it DOES know picoseconds. Huh?

• I miss the "look up" command on the right-click menus from Chrome and Safari to look up a word in the MacOS dictionary and present the results in a pop-up. I can use the system keyboard shortcut cmd-option-d to open a selected word in Dictionary, but I like the pop-up better. I've got an add-on that adds a lookup to the right-click menu, but that just opens a web-based dictionary in a separate tab.

The two things I wished they handled better were certificates and containers/profiles.

• Safari and Chrome use Apple's keychain for certificates. If I want to add a non-standard certificate authority's root certificate, or trust a self-signed certificate, all I have to do is import it via Keychain Access and set the trust level and it then works in Safari and Chrome (and Mail and Messages...). Firefox uses its own certificate management, requiring that I add everything to it separately.

• Using more than one profile is awkward compared to Chrome. If all you care about is keeping cookies separate [2], Firefox container tabs look like a good alternative, but I also want to keep bookmarks, caches, and history separate, which seems to be beyond what container tabs can handle.

[1] There were two that were particularly annoying. (1) When returning to a page via the back button (or corresponding gesture) it would sometimes freeze for a few seconds after it displayed the page. (2) Occasionally it would get in a state where during a back gesture it would freeze in the middle of the animation of the previous page sliding in. I never saw it recover from that.

[2] Keeping cookies separate is probably good enough for a large fraction of the things that would drive people to multiple profiles. It suffices for things like checking a work account from home or a home account from work on a service where you have accounts for both home and work.


Are you aware of about:profiles? Type that into Firefox's URL-bar and it'll give you a somewhat less awkward profile manager. You can also bookmark that to make it easily accessible...


Tried Firefox recently. Works fine on Linux and macOS, but hangs my Windows 10 cold after a while, requiring a hard reset. Apparently I’m not the only one, and the fix is to disable hardware acceleration.

Leaving aside the fact that Windows is garbage, browsers that hope to increase “user happiness” should not do that. Chrome does not.


Is this the one that makes you launch Chrome for Hangouts/GoToMeeting/etc?

Because why won't you then use Chrome in the first place?


This is a problem with Google only making things work with Chrome. http://www.otsukare.info/2014/10/28/google-webcompatibility-...


Hangouts used to work and I guess they still do on ESR.


For me no incentive to switch from Chrome. I am a bit lazy and if not broken why increase hassle in switching. Plus when did a while back just switched back to chrome when FF became sluggish.


so why not stick to ie/safari?


Probably because they were broken at some point.


like everyone are saying chrome is now? doesn't seem very logical.


Haven't noticed that everyone is saying that about Chrome and it definitely isn't broken for me.


I'm not looking forward to this, I realize they've made speed improvements, but the entire reason I'm on FF at all is Tab Groups, which seems to be dead. I know it's not heavily used, but it's going to be painful for me to get used to browsing without it.

I'm aware that there's a proposal to add an API to make it possible under the new system, but last time I checked the ticket, recent activity was someone from the team arguing that they'd already agreed it was a bad idea at a meeting, and it simply should not be added.

Honestly, I'm going to hang on a legacy version for as long as feasible and then just switch back to Chrome.


I feel your pain on the tab groups extension. I find that extension really helpful too. I'm pretty optimistic that this will be a temporary pain though. My reading of that issue (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1384515) is that there are a lot of people interested in working on it, and they even have working code.

It does seem that a relatively senior Mozilla employee who has joined the discussion late is against the idea. But others have already chimed in with why their objections don't apply to this new approach.

I'd be pretty surprised if it wasn't fixed by FF59.


Ah last I looked was a couple weeks ago, right after the comment basically saying "we tried this before and decided against it", it does look slightly more optimistic.

But even the new comments mention that there isn't a consensus on if they actually want to implement it.

There have been bugzilla issues that seem simple that have been ignored for a literal decade, so I won't celebrate until this actually lands.

If it does I'll probably roll the extension myself if no one beats me to it.


> then just switch back to Chrome.

I understand your want for tab groups, but what does switching to chrome matter? You cant do tab groups in chrome either. What does chrome have that ff57 doesnt?


I used Chrome(ium) for years before tab groups got me to switch to FF, if you take away tab groups, I'd rather just go back to it, if for no other reason that principle. Mozilla won me over by having the more flexible browser, that flexibility is going away, I have no loyalty to them beyond that, honestly.

May not make much sense but that's how I feel.


It's still going to be the more flexible browser. It already supports webextension APIs that Chrome doesn't, with more on the roadmap.

Of course it still pales in comparison to what you could do with XUL, but the point remains. Firefox addons will still be more capable than Chrome ones.


But the only add-ons I actually use are ad block, tab groups, and lastpass.

A half measure doesn't win me anything.

I still use Chrome on my phone, so I get tab sync back by switching, which I gave up to gain tab groups.

I buy in to Google's ecosystem with a personal account and 2 business accounts. The slight integration is nice.

I also generally prefer Chromes UI.

Again, I appreciate my use case is niche, I'm not saying Mozilla have made a mistake and should bow to my whims, I'm just saying I was on Chrome for more than half a decade, I switched to Firefox specifically for tab groups. With them seemingly going away, all things being equal I prefer Chrome.


Painful? Nah.

Use a combination of windows and tabs to achieve the same grouping. Use the awesome bar to search and switch between tabs, if you need the search functionality. Stop having 100+ tabs open, that's what bookmarks are for.

I'm sorry to say that your usage pattern is extremely non-standard and based on the whims of an unpaid extension developer. So you can learn the intended usage pattern for the browser, donate to the extension developer to make him port the extension or create a new extension yourself.

Jumping ship to a browser known for privacy issues seems like a really bad choice in this context.


I'm not at the whims of an add-on developer, I'm at the whims of Mozilla. The new extension API doesn't currently have the control required to make Tab Groups, if it did I would port it myself.

I won't go in to my usage specifically but windows tabs and bookmarks doesn't work nearly as well as tab groups for me personally. That's how I did it for years before switching to Firefox, and its painful for my workflow.

I used Chrome(ium) for years before tab groups got me to switch to FF, if you take away tab groups, I'd rather just go back to it, if for no other reason that principle. Mozilla won me over by having the more flexible browser, that flexibility is going away, I have no loyalty to them beyond that, honestly.


"That's how we've always done it".

AKA the most dangerous phrase in the language.


I posted this in another reply chain but:

I still use Chrome on my phone, so I get tab sync back by switching, which I gave up to gain tab groups.

I buy in to Google's ecosystem with a personal account and 2 business accounts. The slight integration is nice.

I also generally prefer Chromes UI.

So Chrome has at least 3 points in its favor, Firefox has Tab Groups, which are going away, and the idea that Mozilla is sort of more benevolent than Google, which doesn't really move me.

I know Firefox has more to offer others but thats how it shakes out for me.




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