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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

I switched to Chrome years ago and every time I try Firefox it feels sluggish, so I don't switch back.

Last time was a week ago :\

Did you try current stable firefox or Developer edition or Nightly edition?

If I understand correctly, the photon changes haven't landed on current stable firefox yet. They have just landed in Developer edition. So you might want to give it (or nightly edition) a try.

This has been my experience also.

However, I'll try Quantum and see if it improves the situation. I really don't want to be using Chrome.

57 really is a huge improvement, I can no longer feel any difference in responsiveness between firefox and chrome.

In some ways I think firefox has actually surpassed chrome (e.g. on my xps 13 touchpad scrolling is much more responsive/smoother in firefox)

Re: touchpad scrolling, make sure you disable "smooth" (animated) scrolling and enable precise scrolling; on Linux this requires setting MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 in the environment.

Nice, thanks!

Everything feels 10 times faster without smooth scrolling, while I have to say that the nightly already felt blazing fast _with_ smooth scrolling, haha.

This should be off by default. Feels and looks faster. What is the downside?

Tracking the thread through https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1207700 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1170342 (and ultimately https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93539 ) it appears that when XI2 is used, focus-out events were not sent in rare cases under old versions of Xorg. If you're running modern software there should be no downside.

Thanks. Could the Mozilla installer detect the version of Xorg and set ?

The key is, which version a week ago? Unless it was nightly you wouldn't have seen any of the stuff in the OP.

I see, okay.

I just had the feeling that Firefox has news to be on-par with Chrome for years now, but I never really "felt" it, hehe.

The current news relates to merging parts of Servo (web engine written in Rust) to Firefox, which started relatively recently.

I know that. And I have high hopes :)

I just wanted to say, that it isn't the first news about Firefox getting faster since Chrome came out.

I tried the new versions every now and then and Chrome always felt faster to me. Maybe it really is, maybe it just uses some perceptional tricks, I don'T know.

Firefox really has been slowly getting faster for a while; especially with Firefox 54, I no longer felt as if I was taking a significant performance hit as the price for not using Chrome. Firefox 55 got even a bit faster, but still was not quite as fast as Chrome. However, the recent changes in Nightly (Firefox 57), which now landed in the developer edition, really was a huge leap forward in performance.

I encourage you to try out Nightly now (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/). I’m not promising that it’ll be faster than Chrome, but it just might be fast enough now.

Just try firefox nightly 58.0a1 ! Firefox nightly is my default browser nowadays. I love the modern UI.

I installed that nightly and it really feels fast and modern.

They even got rid of that search bar, haha.

Only fonts and the scroll bars seem a bit old school compared to Chrome.

Also, WhatsApp Web keeps logging me out.

> Also, WhatsApp Web keeps logging me out.

This is an issue on my Arch Linux laptop, but not at work using Ubuntu. Both run Firefox nightly. Been going nuts with this issue!

I have it on my Windows7 machine with Firefox Nightly, but not on Chrome.

Works on my Arch …

> They even got rid of that search bar, haha.

It's actually configurable by the user. I like having it on the side, so I added it back.

Mozilla is experimenting with which default is preferred by fresh install users right now, so users on this thread may have different initial defaults. I don't think that there are plans to change the default for existing users.

How? I was looking for this last week and couldn't find any settings that worked. Nothing relevant in about:config, and the toolbar customization shows the search bar there until I close customization.

Go to customize mode and hover your mouse pointer on the search bar. You'll notice that your mouse pointer turns into a hand, then just drag the search bar and drop it into the center of the screen (blank space).

(Tested on Firefox 55.0.2/Linux)

Cheers. :)

They actually very recently added a preference for this: https://dolske.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/searchprefs.png?w...

> fonts

Chrome has a bunch of bugs related to font-rendering on Windows, e.g. https://crbug.com/414307. I'm not sure why switching to DirectWrite didn't just fix these bugs, but subjectively appearance-wise on Windows, Firefox > Edge > Chrome.

okay.

To me it seemed like the input font here on HN could need a bit more hinting in FF.

Was it nightly? I was in the same boat with the standard release, everytime I tried it it felt sluggish. Then I tried nightly and all I can say is wow, no.other browser is as snappy as FF nightly

Check your addons. They can really slow things down.

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