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Comment by timwaagh | Hacker News Reader

This a most pointless decision. making firefox fast at the expense of the extensions.

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.

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> why would it make people switch back to FF? because it's 1% faster than 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.

> 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.

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.

> So FF might actually be slower. It's definitely not noticeably faster than Chrome.

Yep, on some pages, on some benchmarks, it can go either way. I think this more brings Firefox to a competitive place, and shows the potential for the project Quantum - there's much more to come, webrender in particular.

> Both of those things can be counted in Chrome's favor as well.

Totally. Whether one browser is more secure than another is a complicated topic.

There is always a few of these comments per Firefox 57 post. Always someone lamenting the days of yore, and talking about how no one will ever use Firefox again. It's not making a new point, and the other comments are usually speaking of how great it's been. People get super emotional when things change.

The perf improvements of Quantum have nothing to do with extensions, actually.

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.

Firefox's main selling point for many has always been that it's fighting for a free and open web. And simply "not being Google" (/Facebook, but they don't have a browser yet) still is a selling point as well.

It shouldn't be Firefox's only selling point though.

Well, it's not. It's now also heavily competing for fastest browser and will continue to be the most extensible browser, even if it is sacrificing things there.

> It's now also heavily competing for fastest browser

It isn't though, as Chrome still wins in some benchmarks.

That doesn't mean they're not competing...

Correct. Still no selling point over Chrome though :/

> because it's 1% faster than chrome?

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.

More changes are coming (WebRender, etc.), but raw benchmarks are only part of the story. We focused an enormous amount of effort on improving perceived performance in Firefox 57. More events go into an idle queue, background tabs get throttled, scripts from domains on our tracking protection list get throttled even further, etc.

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

Sounds nice :)

Still I would love if you prioritized getting some WebExtension APIs ready for 57 (or delayed WebExtensions-only to a later version).

The two issues are separate -- they didn't change the extensions system to make Firefox fast, they changed the extensions system because the old extensions system was a security nightmare.

And a code maintenance nightmare. (Not breaking the APIs used by extensions)

It does actually play into performance, too. The new multiprocess architecture requires that extensions get updated to be compatible with it. It is possible to achieve that in the old extension API, but every single extension author would have to do that, which is just not ever going to happen.

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 yet for the last couple of years every new extension released is Chrome only. Even uBlock Origin was originally a Chrome only extension.

When our admins actually care to migrate to java webstart and I can drop java plugin and firefox esr, I'll probably move to chrome, because selenium works better with chromedriver for me.

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/

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