Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
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.
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 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.
If you want to trace uses of it in the code, here is a reasonable place to start, I imagine: https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/chrome/browser/engageme...
i think it's cool that you can see the actual ranking.
Firefox: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities...
Chrome: https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/search/label/Stable%20...
Hopefully with their sandboxing project done (Also with Rust) will make Firefox much better in the security department, but until then, no.
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.
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.
But this comes at the cost of battery life. I moved back to Chrome because it was constantly chewing CPU.
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..
Absolutely stunning improvement in performance!
Great work by team FFx! :D
Safari TP 11.1 Release 40 - 62.71
Chrome Canary 63.0.3221.0 - 55.45
Firefox Dev Edition 57.0b3 - 44.17
Firefox 55.0.3 - 71.4
Firefox Dev Edition 57.0b3 - 113
Chrome 61.0.3163.100 - 136
These are Browserbench 1 though, I have no idea how to run v2.
I've been sending feedbacks for Nightly for a while now, but they don't seem to read them. The two biggest issues are:
1- High CPU usage (which leads to high temperature and shorter battery life) 2- No "Look Up / Define" in right-click menu.
Fix them and I'll switch from Chrome in a blink.
Last time was a week ago :\
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.
However, I'll try Quantum and see if it improves the situation. I really don't want to be using Chrome.
That said, I'm definitely going to give quantum a try
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.
[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 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.
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.
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 like Firefox Nightly on Android though, it's really good.
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.
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.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
There's also the Tree Tabs extension which I don't like as much.
The new extension API will be much more stable, especially for something so complex like Tree-Style Tabs.
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.
(Previous HN discussion was flagged as a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15338795)
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?
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. :)
"Firefox Quantum: Developer Edition" == "Firefox: Developer Edition" for versions of Firefox >= 57.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
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'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).
> 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) :
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`).
- 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.
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.
Note that they're switching the review system to a fully automated one (initially): https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/09/21/review-wait-times...
It's still supposed to be trustworthy though, but I'm guessing Chrome's similar.
For example there is no way to do a gestures extension that doesn't rely on buggy DOM injection.
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.
To say that they don’t care about extensions doesn’t seem to match the efforts you can see in the browser.
Until there's a stable/signed release you have to allow unsigned extensions; set `xpinstall.signatures.required` to false.
To hide the default tab bar I needed to put the following in ~/.mozilla/firefox/xyz123-profile-here/chrome/userChrome.css
#TabsToolbar > * {
visibility: collapse;
}
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)
The top bar doesn't auto-hide yet, the API for that will be in a future release apparently.
Downgraded to 54.0 as fast as I could.
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.
https://discussion.enpass.io/index.php?/topic/1876-beta-ver-...
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.
Still, this sounds like something to investigate.
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.
That doesn't sound good. What are the reasons for having bloatware bundled in instead releasing them as separate add-on or installation option?
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.
---
[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.
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.
Truly, "bloat" can only be defined as "a feature I personally do not use right now".
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.
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.
I'd love to switch to Firefox, I'm not that keen to be running a browser made by a gargantuan advertising agency.
Hardly, most Mozilla people I've seen use a Mac, if anything, it's Linux that is a bit less of a priority it seems.
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.
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.
Another good feature was styles sync.
(Also appears to feature an updated logo.)
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-en...
https://cl.ly/1b2O1g231m47/Screen%20Shot%202017-09-26%20at%2...
I'm on High Sierra and the UI at the top seems to do something really really weird...
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.
Who knows, the fix might make it in time for the actual release.
I see the improvents coming with this update. I hope that’s the beginning of Firefox catching up again.
Keep up the great work!
I understand the push behind web extensions but I don't think there will ever be a keychain integration addon now.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Na... exists to allow web extensions to talk with programs on the computer, its up to someone to write the extension and executable for that usecase
(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)
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.
(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.
Excellent job Mozilla.
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.
EDIT: I meant from Chrome to Firefox
That said "project quantum" is about improving the browser which applies to all of the code not just the Rust parts.
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?
You can upload the CRX to https://www.extensiontest.com/ to check if it's likely to be compatible.
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).
What about Linux?
But.. that's not what you were getting at, just a tiny rant ;(
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.
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.
Note, though, that there's still more to come [1].
Also, I guess the state of Servo can tell you what a tremendous effort rewriting is, and why that would still take quite a while to finish.
[1] "Project Quantum: There’s more to come" at https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/09/firefox-quantum-developer-...
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzNDA
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).
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.
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
More info about profiles at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
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.)
I use it in nightly via the config flag; it is pretty great but there are still some glitches from time to time.
For reference, ran the test with Firefox Quantum on the same machine and got a 68.
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.
What I get:
35.82 Safari 11.0 (11604.1.38.1.7)
34.89 Firefox 57.0b3
32.01 Chrome 47.0.2526.106
31.44 Firefox 58.0a1
26.77 Firefox 55.0.3
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
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
Interesting that Firefox still scores roughly the same as Safari and Chrome on your machine too. I don't understand why they'd make this big fuss.
And Safari isn't available on Ubuntu or Windows, so it scores a 0 on those platforms ;)
Super interesting that building WebKit for windows from source is still supported though: https://webkit.org/webkit-on-windows/
- Safari Technology Preview: ~80
- Vivaldi Beta: ~72
- Firefox Beta: ~57
- Firefox Nightly: ~54
- Firefox Beta: ~59
- Firefox Nightly: ~57
That said, if you use GNOME Shell, the Pixel Saver extension is great for me: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/723/pixel-saver/
Was using ~cryptic setting in Hide Caption Title Bar Plus to accomplish this, but it not ported yet.
I'll give it to them though it does seem fast.
In the lower right, there should be a toggle for it.
edit: not sure if that's linux friendly
*a JavaScript one
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.
It seems to have features that the standard edition doesn't have. But does the standard edition have feature the dev edition doesen't?
Or are there some different features? Any of them reason not to use the dev edition in daily browsing?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Multiple_profile...
> 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.
> firefox --ProfileManager
Also, just in case, have you tried without extensions? Because that looks like something that a misbehaving WebExtension could easily do.
I sent a feedback but I'll file a bug report right now.
WILD APPLAUSE
Every other browser can, they just don't as of now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It isn't though. There are still some pages in the video where Chrome wins.
So you're right: Really no reason for me to keep using Firefox besides the privacy / morally one.
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...
Try it for a week and see how it feels -- you might be pleasantly surprised. http://firefox.com/developer
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.
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/
browser.tabs.remote.autostart true browser.tabs.remote.force-enable true layout.css.servo.enabled true
This way I get to keep my Tree Style Tab, Lastpass, and a few other add-ons that haven't yet been ported to WebExtensions.
Convenient FTP link, since it seems right now the automated installers are jumping between versions 55 and 57: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/56.0b12/