The fastest Firefox ever with Photon UI and better tooling | Hacker News Reader

The fastest Firefox ever with Photon UI and better tooling

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110 pointsbpierre27 comments

I've been using this on the nightly channel since 57 became available there and it has been an amazing improvement. Excellent work by the fine folks at Mozilla!

I starting using nightly expecting to have stability problems and then just drop it, but can't remember it crashing or having any issues at all.

The speed improvement has been nicer than expected, but it's particularly impressive that they've done it while also keeping things so stable and working all this into such a large complex piece of existing software.

This kind of work and their freedom focused goals will probably make a donor out of me.

Same here, using it for a month both in desktop and mobile, not a single crash. On the desktop the performance improvement is really noticeable

I recall reading about the mobile version of 57 not yet having the changes that made the desktop version so much faster. I think they're coming in mobile 58.

I love the built-in widgets for date/time. It would be great if every browser had built-in widgets like this for all form fields (including complex ones) and styling became options vs mandatory.

I use it already since a few days and it's a huge improvement. It's just way faster than before. The new slimmer UI is also great IMO, because it goes out of the way better than before.

Be aware that some extensions might not work yet. E.g. refind is one of those which need to be updated.

> The fastest Firefox ever

I dunno, 0.x and 1.x Firefoxes (Firefoxen?) were pretty fast.

At rendering the content available at the time.

I just loaded up Netscape 9 (the oldest one I could get to run without too much digging) and while it is quite quick for average pages, a stress test like jsfiddle.net/4dpGz froze it up for several minutes. (It also doesn't render correctly, but I think that's a separate issue.) FF57beta finished in 10 seconds. Firefox 0.6 just says "connection refused" to most sites, so that's pretty fast :p

It's really fast, although for some reason it keeps consuming CPU steadily in the background. This makes my MBP temp go to 70ºC and the fan becomes audible.

Still no live javascript editing, like Chrome scripts tab? This is a major setdown that prevents me from using Firefox. Chrome has that since so many years that I can't believe Firefox still hasn't got it. I think the latest Firefox releases are fast and good as browsers.. but as a developer, that's a showstopper.

Looks awesome. This might convince me to switch back to FF as my default browser.

Is this going to find its way into Firefox mobile as well?

Not for the mobile 57 release, but I think it is supposed to be mobile 58.

Nice. When will it come to Firefox beta?

Beta for 57 rolls out today I believe.

57 Release will roll out on Nov 14. https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar

But will it include these updates, or they are limited to developer edition only?

Firefox 57 includes these updates so yes Quantum is included in the Beta branch right now.

Great, thanks!

UPDATE: Just updated my beta, and tabs UI looks rather ugly IMHO. Bigger elements than older design, more bulky. Sharp rectangular shapes of each tab UI element are also very standing out. It looks like a touchscreen UI to me.

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.

It does feel much snapper though.

It's already been in Nightly for a while, which I was using specifically so I could take advantage of the things in this article.

I've been using Nightly as my daily driver for months now and I haven't really hit any problems. I would just recommend switching to nightly if you're really excited about the new features.

Nightly breaks more often. Even beta can have some glitches on Linux.

It's faster and nicer looking but still, doesn't highlight the URL box when you click on it like in chrome.

So still a pass for me, might seem stupid but its a major thing for easy of use.

Use Ctrl+L or F6, you'll need to touch the keyboard anyway for typing the URL.

Otherwise, you might want to set "browser.urlbar.doubleClickSelectsAll" to "true", so you can at least get it with double-clicks.

Alt-D is another shortcut.

I don't know if this is a difference between Beta and Developer or what, but I'm running Developer Edition and clicking once in the URL bar selects all the text.

I'm pretty sure there is a setting for that

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