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Comment by penpapersw | Hacker News Reader

Huh. These actually sound like good arguments to switch to Firefox, arguments I've never heard before until now.

One thing I learned several years ago when I decided to jump on the bandwagon and try Chrome was that Chrome was unable to safely block javascript the way NoScript does because the plugin framework doesn't allow a plugin to block Javascript before it's loaded.

So all the noscript equivalent for Chrome could offer was to block Javascript after it had loaded. Which seemed unreal and pointless.

So I stayed on Firefox. Because I've been convinced for many years now that Javascript plays a major role in malware delivery through the browser.

And along with email the browser is the major delivery platform for malware.

NoScript block all three: javascript, java and flash.

Javascript can be used to deliver/encode/decode exploit payload. Usually the exploit itself is java or flash.

At least, that's what I noticed for the zero day RCE that made it up to the first page of Google.

chrome has a setting to block scripts and it lets you add exceptions for sites

it's also easy to access: http://cdn2.ubergizmo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/site-in...

i wish firefox came with something similar

The advantage of Firefox's NoScript plugin is that it can be selective.

Say you randomly visit a site and want to temporarily allow the javascript it uses to do its thing, but you don't want to allow any other javascript on the page such as facebook's and google's. The built-in chrome javascript blocker doesn't let you pick and choose temporary permissions at that moment.

I didn't know the firefox version could do that, it's something I've wanted for sometime.

Chrome can block JavaScript before it's loaded, its what uBlock Origin does and others as well (using the WebRequest API available to Chrome extensions)

I found uMatrix to be an adequate substitute once figured out (http://adamantine.me/index.php/2015/11/18/umatrix-desperatel...)

It's important to know that NoScript does far more than block JavaScript; just look up its ABE component, for example.

For technical users, uMatrix' interface is an amazing achievement in, effectively, managing application firewall rules. It's breathtakingly efficient in both communicating active settings to the user and in configuring new rules. I wish my actual firewalls used that interface.

I moved to firefox once 57 was released on nightly. Firefox is finally usable (in terms of speed) again and I can use it for day to day tasks.

I think I qualify as a poweruser by some standards, I tend to have 100's of tabs open and I've never left Firefox for speed reasons or others because it has held up extremely well over the years. My machine has a lot of RAM so maybe that's one reason things have been quick, and the main drive is an SSD. Is there anything specific about the 57 release that makes you feel caused the speed bottle-neck to disappear?

57 is lightning fast. Like, almost uncomfortably so on my machine.

Broay this is because quantum is much further along in nightly than on the other channels. Specifically, they're more aggressive with multithreaded settings, multiprocess is enabled, and the quantum css component is turned on, too.

Is also helps that we compare to chrome. On Linux chrome doesn't even do GPU rendering. So the HN crowd probably has a disproportionately bad experience with it

Wait, what? I know that hw accelerated video decoding is generally not available on linux chrome, but I'm pretty sure that lots of other things are. From my chrome://gpu

    Canvas: Hardware accelerated
    CheckerImaging: Disabled
    Flash: Hardware accelerated
    Flash Stage3D: Hardware accelerated
    Flash Stage3D Baseline profile: Hardware accelerated
    Compositing: Hardware accelerated
    Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
    Native GpuMemoryBuffers: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
    Rasterization: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
    Video Decode: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
    Video Encode: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
    WebGL: Hardware accelerated
    WebGL2: Hardware accelerated

But this is with an integrated GPU, so maybe things are different for discrete cards.

Firefox has always been unbearably slow on Linux for me. It's the main reason I swapped to Chrome in the first place. I tried switching back to Firefox about 6 months ago, same problem of extremely slow and laggy UI. Interesting to hear 57 is faster now, it may be worth trying again.

Same here, it's why I switched to Vivaldi. I had to restart Firefox every day or so and it still lagged. I've read the other recent post on here that shows 100+ tabs has almost no startup burden in FF57 compared to previous builds. I should try it again.

Go to about:config and set layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true. Made a dramatic difference for me in Linux using a Intel iGPU.

You can check the acceleration status in about:support, look at HW_COMPOSITING and OPENGL_COMPOSITING.

Do you have any extensions installed?

Have you tried using a fresh profile, just to narrow the possible variables?

If you've checked both of those things, and you can characterize the slowness in the context of specific operations (e.g. what "laggy" means, precisely), then I'd recommend filing a bug and working with the developers to track down the problem. Because that is not normal.

Also, current Firefox has `about:performance`, where you can diagnose what addons and tabs can be slowing down the browser. It's quite neat.

I just refreshed my profile and performance improved immensely.

Firefox 57 should be a much, much improved experience. e10s with multiple processes started rolling out to users in Firefox 54 and tons of small performance issues have been fixed in 55-57.

On Linux, manually enabling GPU acceleration as user ac29 describes below can a big difference. Unfortunately, a lot of Linux GPU drivers have issues that prevent acceleration from being enabled by default for some users.

> 57 is lightning fast. Like, almost uncomfortably so on my machine.

I thought you were overstating it but I just tried it out and you're right, it's crazy fast.

> 57 is lightning fast. Like, almost uncomfortably so on my machine

As others have said here, I just installed Firefox Nightly after reading this, and you're 100% correct. I think it might even be faster than Chromium for me.

Here's an in-depth article on Firefox 57 and all the big changes:

https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/mozilla-firefox-fights-...

This article is good but the annoying div that covers your mobile browser when you are in landscape, is not!

OMG. Why do they do that?

has cnet always been this bad? I mean you need JS to read the thing

and the whole article is on a floating div?

How has the nightly been for you in terms of stability? Been thinking of switching to it from beta. The memory issues on MacOS are killing me, and I believe there are fixes in nightly now.

IME, desktop nightly hasn't ever outright crashed (less lucky with mobile nightly). Sometimes I notice minor rendering glitches on various sites, but I also have Servo's CSS engine enabled which might be doing it (it's not yet the default).

Yeh it doesn't crash for me, it just chews up memory until it's unusable. SO far so go though. We'll see how it last through the night.

Well, it used to crash a lot at some point : when e10s was first activated by default in Nightly (in 2013 IIRC) it crashed several times a day. I stopped using nightly for a year afterwards.

I may have to try Firefox again once 57 is in portage. A few months back I switched to Vivaldi, begrudgingly. I really liked Firefox, but the speed issues were becoming unbearable.

Vivaldi has been a lot faster and mostly an alright experience, and I've watched many of the issues I've found for it get addresses in recent builds. Still there are many things I miss about Firefox, not to mention supporting that community and the browser I've used for well over a decade (including back when it was Phoenix, the original Mozilla and the old Netscape 6 that proceeded them).

For those who don't notice the speed, multiprocess may be disabled due to certain addons. Go to about:support to check if it enabled. The addon compatibility checker addon can tell you which are the offending addons. For me 1password was the big blocker, but they recently released a beta that works with the new API. Sorry for the lack of links, I'm on mobile.

Oh interesting. Firefox still seems slow and a bit of a memory hog compared to Chrome on my machine. Sure enough I checked and three add-ons are marked as legacy (and presumably disabled the multiprocess stuff): uBlock Origin, Websocket Disabler, and NoScript.

At least uBlock Origin is compatible with multi-processes. I'm using it right now.

Firefox 55 marks classic extensions as legacy, this has nothing to do with multi-process comparability.

Yep, not legacy, but "not compatible with multiprocess" is what it should show for offending addons.

Well, how can one determine which addons are multi-process compatible?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...

Then Ctrl+Shift+A.

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