It’s time to give Firefox another chance
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
But here I am, running Nightly because holy shit this thing flies. Their work has paid off and they're not even done yet. Webrender is coming, it's not quite stable enough for daily use yet (mostly just graphics glitching and integration performance issues as far as I could see), but there's a lot of work being done and it's only getting better.
Their whole "Project Quantum" eliminated the UI performance issues that used to plague the browser and they're improving security sandboxing all the time.
To those who loved the power and control like myself, they still offer a ridiculous level of configuration flexibility and extension APIs - while no longer as powerful as they were - are still better than other browsers on the market today.
Disabled Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)
Disabled Web Runtime (deprecated as of 2015)
Removed Pocket
Removed Telemetry
Removed data collection
Removed startup profiling
Allow running of all 64-Bit NPAPI plugins
Allow running of unsigned extensions
Removal of Sponsored Tiles on New Tab Page
Addition of Duplicate Tab option
Locale selector in about:preferences > General
The truth is that they were in a dilemma situation where they had to choose between not killing all extensions or fixing performance by introducing a multiprocess architecture (which required breaking all extensions).
So, the first thing they did was to simply wait. The performance issues were not that bad yet, so it just didn't yet weigh up to kill all extensions.
Eventually they started work on the multiprocess architecture. That was around 2012, if I remember correctly. They've been doing that in the background without visible results for the public for a long time. It's considered the biggest architectural change that Firefox ever went through, so yeah, that just takes time. Cleaning up technical debt that Chrome never had.
And then they also figured, if they already break all extensions, they should also switch to a new extension API in the same breath (because the old one has had big problems for as long as its existed). So, then they implemented that, too, in the background, in parallel, just to be able to throw it all on the table one day, so that extension authors would only have to rewrite their stuff once.
Indeed, I'm one of the people who has suffered from losing legacy Firefox extensions (find me a substitute for LeechBlock, please!), but I can see how much of a burden it was for the developers to compete on performance and security, which I value more. I'm hopeful that Firefox will continue to add sane extension APIs to help close the gap with what was previously possible without regressing to the old quagmire. Fingers crossed, but they've done well delivering so far with 57.
I never said I agreed with it.
Having to break legacy extensions due to internal changes is understandable. It would have reduced stress for the users if the new API was shipped first, then the changes made and the old one broken, though. Heck, they even thought of it first and did that - you may remember Jetpack. It never picked up steam because the APIs were too limited and too many people ended up resorting to the old APIs, though. Even now with WebExtensions they're shipping lots of new API extensions want in the same release that drops support for the old ones…
Oh, and they had multiple breakages as more and more things went out of process, not one giant one. That's life, really; things take time to build. I believe part of the pushback is that people just finished porting to e10s only to find that their new code will need to be rewritten again for WebExtensions.
The reason that Firefox switched to webextensions was in order to switch to a formal extension API that could be supported long term, instead of the old open integration API which made it difficult to readable without breaking all sorts of extensions.
There reason they adapted the web extension API that chrome uses, was because it largely made sense, was already pretty fleshed out and would allow extension writers that were already familiar with that to also target Firefox.
I don't think they've been "waiting" to solve the UI issues: it's been years of slowly deprecating old systems like XUL, and implementing new systems like e10s. That's been years of anger or at least angst for extension developers, as much backwards compatibility was broken one piece at a time.
The fruit after all that hard work is the new UI.
> And since it's Chromium based I don't see the sluggishness I do in Firefox for Android.
The point of the article is that you'll be able to have a quick experience with Android, without using that one tracker called Google.
Note that none of the Quantum work has been turned on for mobile Firefox yet. I hear it will be coming online in nightly this cycle, targeting Firefox 58.
The thing that is not on mobile Firefox is Stylo.
I do have to find the webextension equivalent of half my add-ons though.
Trying the beta now though, fingers crossed!
For instance, it takes me exactly one click to open a link from the HN app I'm using in Firefox.
Interesting because for me it's the exact opposite: Firefox is fast but when I need to open Chrome (webview or full) it's a slow and painful process (tested on two phones, one 3 year old). Maybe it's because Firefox has everything cached and Chrome needs to load from network... Not to mention full screen, aggressive ads :)
Firefox also supports https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/android/customtabs .
It also has a very nifty feature (IIRC off by default) where if you click on a link instead of switching to Firefox it shows a "Tab opened in Firefox" toast which you can tap on to switch to. This means I can for example click on the links in an email whilst still reading it, and then switch to the browser later to read them all. This does make opening links two taps by default (tap on the link, and then tap on the toast), but there's no tap-hold so it's fast and nice. Plus my workflow prefers opening tabs that i look at later, not immediately.
Notice that they could not support Android 4.4 because they would require using geckoview.
Also, there is no way a browser of only 4MB can contain a whole web engine. The only Android browsers that get so small depend on webview.
Consider this, even the old Presto based Opera Mobile clocked in at 15MB on Android.
And ublock origin must have saved me hundreds of euros and days of time already. (God the internet with ads and trackers is terrible. Gizmodo has a dozen trackers, one of them is called summerhamster. True story).
(1) Though I'm sure it's better than that.
Also chrome has had privacy oriented counterpart since the early days such as srware iron[1].
Since then they got Rust off ground, servo yielding good fruits, firefox cool n quiet.
Once again kudos.
That said my dev edition self-updated last night and... holy shit, the new Firefox flies!
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/
So if it's in Firefox, it's Vimium-FF. (And I'm using Firefox, in case that wasn't clear.)
- Yanking does not work at all.
- "Follow in new tab" (F) does not work. (EDIT: Working now, so maybe I did something weird yesterday.)
- "Open" (o) does not respect search keywords. "wikipedia Test" gives me a search for "wikipedia test" instead of the Wikipedia page for "test".
- Most of the shortcuts don't work on a blank page, or on "about:" pages. For example, when I open a new tab with "t", then change my mind and press "[Esc]x", it doesn't work. Nor does any other letter command.
I filed a bug for the first one, and it seems to be related to shortcomings in FF's clipboard API for WebExtensions, so I suppose that at least the last issue in my list is also related to what the browser allows WebExtensions to do. But at this point, I don't really care about filing more bug reports. I'm looking for alternatives instead. (Any suggestions?)
They have absolutely no excuse for falling this far behind. They squandered a lot of money, while neglecting their core business (their web browser).
I still hope they’ll keep it up. I have been a Firefox fan ever since beta 1. Hopefully they can recover their market share loss.
And a lot of technologies and standards that were developed as part of Firefox OS still are very much around today.
In terms of standards, they did a lot of work for camera and microphone integration, which they now needed again anyways with Google having pushed WebRTC to a web standard.
In terms of technology, the biggest thing is probably Asynchronous Panning and Zooming (APZ). Basically offloading scrolling, zooming and window resizing on the desktop to a separate thread.
If you remember how horribly laggy scrolling on Android Firefox was prior to Firefox 46, APZ is what fixed that.
And it's one of the main-reasons why desktop Firefox with multiprocess immediately felt so much better. (Released in Firefox 48, but extensions needed to be updated to be compatible with multiprocess, so most people here probably didn't experience multiprocess and APZ on the desktop until around Firefox 51.)
I remember one reason Chrome gobbled up a lot of marketshare - it was the browser to install because it had Flash built in. Google definitely leveraged that, and then slowly roped people into the Googlesphere from there once they had the browser as your new default.
We collectively need to factor this into our product choices and stop encouraging the sneakiest of them all.
But how exactly is bundling Flash player sneaky?
Or are you alluding to some sort of bait and switch that was executed to suck people into the Google sphere? If so, please explain! Chrome was never marketed as a privacy-minded browser, was it?
For example, there is apparently a $40B rural Internet access bill that Dems are pushing. I love greater access to the internet but I'm more than a little skeptical.
The side reason is firefox made counterproductive and unnecessary changes: removing the status bar, australis UI, removing the ability to disable script, dropping alsa support and many other useful features removed proving that user have no freedom of choice and no say. While adding unwanted things (DRM, pocket, hello, etc.) and not fixing broken things.
Some power users and long supporter would have sticked with firefox despite google's marketing, had it not piled bad move after bad move and not listening to its users.
And no, these UI changes were not made at the expense of fixing memory and performance issues.
The reason why they didn't fix those memory and performance issues, is because it would have required introducing the (now introduced) multiprocess architecture.
That would have required breaking all extensions (which is now being done with Firefox 57, along with breaking them to switch to a new extension API). So, that would have pissed off power users even more.
And also just in general, you have to understand that power users are not that important for market share. They make up maybe 1%. If they bring their friends and family all along, then maybe 15%.
There's a big number of users that are able to choose their own browser, but are not power users by any means. For example, around 40% of Firefox users don't have any extensions installed [1].
[1] The figure is from Sep 2015, but I don't think things have changed much since then. And if anything, the trend has so far been for this number to increase. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1229949
Which I might say, it has been the only Android browser supporting extensions and quite a nice browser overall ;-)
Does Microsoft make a browser for Android? Does Apple?
They developed (well... became the first and most significant major backer of) an entirely new programming language, purely for the purposes of building a better browser. And then devoted tons of resources for years into developing Servo, a massive and complex project that is only being realized now. I'd rather they think big and be ambitious like this, than be yet another stagnating tech company kept alive by former glory.
Also, it's unfair to argue that they have neglected the browser. Firefox is a massive legacy codebase that couldn't be cleaned up without breaking A LOT OF THINGS, and at every step in the process they faced people begging them not to break their things, despite the alternative being the continued rot of Firefox's internals. But they did try, for years, to move forward without breaking everything - it just came at the cost of glacially slow and cautious progress.
And without grave mistakes ?
Seriously get a reality check.
- Theodore Roosevelt
There isn't, of course. But that wasn't why it failed. It failed because it didn't answer any questions that weren't already answered, except for some (like "more privacy") that too few people wanted an answer to, to have a market. And that part, unfortunately, was utterly predictable.
Think low end android phone (of the time!) running software that was 10x slower than android's.
It's really hard to describe how slow it was if you didn't personally use a firefox os phone. There were times when it felt significantly slower than a 386 running windows 3.11.
2. I thought they were bloody stupid ideas.
I'm not convinced that investing in ideas I think are stupid because things I have previously thought were stupid did well is a sound strategy. All it shows is I'm bad at predicting what will do well, so it makes more sense for me to invest broadly across as many markets as possible.
Maybe it was unrealistic to expect it to work out - one relatively small company fighting with Google and Apple - but I guess some people are optimists and want to believe that the world can be made into something else than corporate dystopia or whatever.
Wanting to believe in something is a thing, neglecting your core product and users to bet on a personal belief is something else.
Considering this is HN, and not Slashdot, probably several readers...
But at least they tried. Everyone else just gave up and either accepted Apple's overpriced walled garden or handed over their deepest secrets to Google.
It was never going to work, and didn’t. Should never had a cent spent on it.
First off their goals, effectively OLPC the phone. A cheap "smartphone" built on web tech that allowed the owner to modify the software as he saw fit.
This then clashed with the partners they found, carriers that had zero interest in owner-modifiable phones.
It was doomed from the start, but it allowed some execs to pat themselves on the back and tell their fellow gallery dwellers that they had done something for the third world...
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_Foundation_Projects
The foundation has a crazy long history of funding open source and various pursuits. Comparing their style of execution to google is just rediculously unfair on so many levels.
The foundation had engaged in tax evasion over the money raised through the corporation and ended up settling with the IRS by paying a $1.5 millions fine[1], they had provisioned $15 millions for this fine, suddenly they got a few unexpected millions to spend on whatever.
I agree that comparing mozilla to google makes little sense as mozilla was working for google in exchange for 85-95% of their revenue. Without google paying mozilla for their users privacy, mozilla would have had to find an actual business model and would not have had the option to wander away from their core product.
On the other hand, without mozilla google would have been mostly the same though would have probably missed some data about millions of users .
[1]: https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-gets-lucky-settles-irs-aud...
The seperation is purely legal and financial, no?
I've made a couple small contributions to Firefox. Though I'd been a Firefox user for years, this never occurred to me until I looked at the source in 2015 and saw TODO comments to upgrade a C++ operation to something available in C++11 (that's C++ released in 2011) when Firefox dropped Windows XP support.
I was surprised at the time that so much of the code was ES6. My mentor pointed out that web app companies might need to wait a few years for users to mass-adopt ES6 browsers. On the other hand, Firefox can use ES6 everywhere in its own code where JS makes sense, since it's only going to be running on latest Firefox JS engine.
I think Firefox hit full ES6 compatibility first among the browsers because there was this extra incentive to modernize the codebase.
Chrome didn't have to build off of the Netscape source, so it didn't have the same legacy problems in 2008 that Firefox did. I think Mozilla has done a remarkable job keeping pace with Google, taking this into account.
A number of ES6 additions were initially Firefox extensions (though some standard-track features like comprehensions also got removed).
Nit: The standard was finalized in 2011 - August 2011 to be more specific, so quite late in the year. Full compliance in various compilers was not achieved for quite some time after that - MSVC being quite problematic in that regard.
Major projects - esp. those compiled on multiple systems across several compilers, like Firefox - absolutely could not just go ahead and start using C++11 in 2011.
I was really into native development around that time, and C++11 was the first time I was exposed to the complexities and gotchas around standardization vs. implementation. I've stopped paying as much attention since, but I believe C++14 fared much better.
FWIW internal firefox code has had ES6-like concepts before ES6 itself; and many of these made it into the final spec in some form.
Wasn't it Webkit that hit that first? Whereas Firefox at the time was just 93%.
https://twitter.com/webkit/status/728643624464883712?lang=en
https://www.contentful.com/blog/2017/04/04/es6-modules-suppo...
They've also been criticized for years for their business model being too dependent on a single income source contrary to their values. They did nothing about it until it became clear that they were losing the game. IMHO this is bad management for years.
First, OS manufacturers who have unlimited power to steer users toward their own browsers. This was true in the Windows days, and it's an order of magnitude more true in the mobile world where one of the leading platforms, iOS, won't even allow "real" versions of competitors' browsers onto their devices.
Second, they're at the mercy of purveyors of web content. How screwed would Firefox be if a couple of major sites like Facebook and Youtube started treating FF like a second-class citizen? FF already kind of feels like a second-class citizen sometimes; as far as I know Google Hangouts still doesn't work on FF: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/google-hangouts-tempora...
So, in the long run, Mozilla is going to have to do something about their tenuous position.
Realistically, they can't blow the doors off of incumbent browsers (Edge, Safari, Chrome) like they did back in the IE6 days. That was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Microsoft, having achieved dominance, had literally disbanded their browser team despite the fact that IE6 was atrocious. But that will never happen again. MS, Apple, and Google each have gobs of engineering talent allocated to their browser efforts and the only way Mozilla can excel its way to the front of the pack is if the other three major browser vendors simultaneously slack off at once and give FF an IE6-like opening.
Also, the importance of the browser is decreasing. Watch kids on phones. It's all apps. They don't do jack shit in a web browser. A web browser is something they use, at most, to look up homework answers.
The world is a better place for Mozilla's presence and I hope that, while keeping FF strong, they manage to figure out an Apple-like second act at some point.
They said that for Netscape too (compared to Mozilla/Firefox). At what point do they start writing nice extensible code?
Webkit based browsers don't seem to have the same issues.
Nobody is perfect, and making a good and desirable product is hard.
Edit: Although, thinking about it, it's really ironic how the Google project inspired by Firefly got canceled way too early.
If I launched an app that got over a hundred million downloads and had many millions of monthly users I certainly wouldn't call that a failure!
Mozilla has revenue of $420M p.a - I don't know what they spent on Firefox OS but it would have been a big bet (hundreds of millions?). At the same time their Firefox marketshare was reduced.
Plus, I think that view - that FF marketshare was reduced, therefore they weren't investing in it enough - is shortsighted. The improvements that have been landing on FF lately are the result of work being done for a long time. And you can't just dump more money into a project and expect it to be finished sooner - see The Mythical Man-Month.
2011 to 2014, that's 4 years. Enough for firefox OS to gobble hundred millions of dollars.
They are not a business, they are a non-profit organization. And their aim is not to simply build a better browser, but to preserve the open web, and put control in the hands of the users. Granted, phoneOS was a failure, but given their mission, they had to try.
Notably this non-profit organization had provisioned $15 millions anticipating that the IRS might get into how a non-profit was actually for profit, it eventually happened and the foundation ended up getting a $1.5 million fine for their google income before setting up the for profit corporation scheme[1].
[1]: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/18/google_still_mozill...
The non-profit organization foundation
I belive, that some tasks cannot be accelerated by additional money. There are tasks that needs time. Money may allow to deal with subtasks in parallel by many developer teams, but in complex system it leads to a lot of conflicts between parts of system, and only time can allow to settle them.
Browser is such a complex system. Old browser with massive amount of legacy is more so. Moreover if you develop the hole new language for upgrading, it becomes surprizing that mozilla have done it in less than 10 years.
After decades of FF I will soon abandon it when it no longer runs vertical tree tabs.
I can't hate them for some of the projects they tried. FirefoxOS was actually something the world really fucking needed. We need an open mobile OS.
They've used their $100-160 million (it has grown over time) budget for a lot of things in the last several years. Off the top of my head:
* Legal battles * Advocacy for open standards like HTML5 * Web literacy projects like webmaker and MDN * LetsEncrypt * Bugzilla * Thunderbird * NSS * Spidermonkey * Rust * PDF.js * Firefox OS * Development and support for open VR web standards * Supporting other, non-Mozilla open source projects like Tor and NTP
Remember that the goal isn't the success of any particular software product. It's pushing the debate and forcing other vendors to adopt and stick with OSS and open standards.
In short: yes, Firefox has lagged behind chrome in the last few years in terms of speed. But remember when IOS didn't support HTML5, or any competing apps? Remember when no one was serving the global south with mobile web capable devices? Remember when HTTPS adoption was at 3% and going nowhere? Remember when CSS meant days of per-browser testing and tweaks? You're welcome.
Mozilla Corp. is taxable and had revenues of $329.5 million in 2014 per Wikipedia. Most of that money came from Google in exchange for making Google the default search engine in Firefox. Open internet and goodwill aside, Firefox is very much their core business.
If Apple hadn't open-sourced WebKit, it's unlikely Chrome would have happened.
Edit: Actually, KHTML is licensed LGPL, and that's a viral license if you make a derivative work. So I suppose Apple was forced to open source their changes when it finally went to market.
When LGPL code is linked with non-free code and the resulting work is distributed LGPL only requires that the changes to the LGPL code be open and that the object files for the non-free code are provided so that users can exercise their LGPL rights with regard to the LGPL portion of the work.
Apple could have separated out much of their work into separate files that contained no non-Apple code and that dynamically linked with the KHTML LGPL code and they could have kept those files closed. They would only have had to open the changes to the LGPL code.
If we accept the terminology that GPL is a viral license then LGPL is more of an immune system than a virus.
First, they didn't publish anything for years. Then only obfuscated source dumps with all comments removed for many years.
It took ages until they published some source code, even longer until they opened their repository.
By that time KHTML was long dead, and development had centered on WebKit.
No, Apple is no saint in this story.
> No, Apple is no saint in this story.
Nowhere did I say or imply that Apple was a saint. All I said was that LGPL allows linking with closed code and distributing the resulting work without having to make the closed code open, and that Apple could have structured WebKit in such a way as to keep most of their code from having to be made open.
This is the main difference between GPL and LGPL, and a big reason why the FSF now discourages the use of LGPL.
> The reason webkit is known today, and not KHTML, is because Apple ignored their LGPL requirements.
> First, they didn't publish anything for years.
They published their KJS changes in June 2002, shortly before they released products using it. They published their KHTML changes shortly after Safari was announced.
> Then only obfuscated source dumps with all comments removed for many years.
Citation needed. My recollection is that they published their code in the form that they used it internally. The difficulty for the KHTML developers in incorporating Apple's code was (1) WebKit was designed to do what Apple needed, which was not necessarily what KDE needed, and so the two were diverging, and (2) Apple was making a lot of changes that touched a lot of code making it hard to break it down to individual improvements that could be incorporated independently.
This made integration impossible.
If it were just as easy (or even comparably easy) to carry on (and maintain) development via external linkage, LGPL would have been long useless.
Nope, they started with webkit and wininet for networking which together might be make a good browser demo.
One of the worst Chrome bugs was a short sighted attempt to remain compatible with a bad decision by netscape.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/DpOXzA...
Chrome didn’t start from scratch (they used WebKit to start) and they didn’t overtake them overnight. Mozilla couldn’t decide what their focus should be for many years, and in that time Chrome grew thanks to Google’s infinite wallet. They made worthwhile risks that didn’t work out in the end, and during this period their core product stopped improving and they eventually needed an extensive and expensive rewrite.
I think the lesson here is this: if you’re going to invest in experimental products, don’t forget about keeping your core technology up to date.
A rich set of lessons in what tends to happen with corporate uptake of a "common good".
Then they should have focused on XML and giving the world an XML based web-browser, trying to drive XML further. XML would have had a much better chance on the web, if web-servers could have responded to URL encoded XPaths (or even XQueries in POST/GET), serving back XML Fragments which could have been XMLIncluded by the browser. They could have lobbied that.
Now we've got HTML5...
With computers having become faster, together with development thrown at it, that's not really an issue anymore, but developers have also realized these days that XML is far from human readable, and for the majority of applications it has been used for, simply a bad idea.
(Mind you, Chrome/Webkit did a similar thing 5-10 years ago wrt. JS performance. Basically, this is the good kind of back-and-forth competition we're seeing.)
I may actually make the switch.
It's always a good idea to back up your profile first (where your bookmarks/passwords/etc. live), especially when downgrading:
https://support.mozilla.org/kb/back-and-restore-information-...
Would you be willing to provide us a performance profile? Instructions are here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance...
Feel free to email it to me if you don't want to post the link publicly. I'm mconley at mozilla dot com.
Favoritism isn't the only reason for these things. What often happens is that the website devs all use one browser and nobody tests it.
It's not like Google wants their sites to be broken on other browsers either (I presume), it's just that many teams at Google aren't bothered.
IIRC Firefox has the same WebRTC APIs as Chrome, so this might be reliance on browser-specific nonstandard behavior.
(Or it might not. It's worth looking into, but I can't because it seems like you need to ask for an FB live invite to investigate)
Edit: Figured out how to do it. Seems to work fine in Firefox Nightly.
That is exactly the point the GP post makes. These things are supposed to be standardized and the standards well described, so basic things should work everywhere without any testing. But somehow for web, it is acceptable and accepted as status quo, even after years and years of smashing our heads against the wall of nonstandard, browser-specific features.
There are also cases like where Google's U2F library doesn't work with Firefox's U2F implementation because Firefox's window.u2f is immutable, as a newer (IIRC draft) spec dictates, whereas it isn't in Chrome, and the library does `var u2f=u2f||{}` which errors in Firefox.
Other than that Nightly is amaze balls.
If you're interested in helping me figure out what's going on here, feel free to send me a performance profile.
I never left Firefox though, it's been my primary browser for ~12 years. Fuck Chrome! I can say without a doubt that 57.0b4 is more performant than any Chrome / Chromium version that I've begrudgingly used to check if my client's sites are cross-browser compatible.
But for me, it's the conflict of interest that makes the real difference. Fundamentally, Google as a company makes it's money by selling information about me and my behavior on the internet. That's it's objective. Firefox exists to promote open standards, OSS, and privacy on the Internet. If chrome at the moment doesn't seem to be contributing towards Google's objective, that's by definition only a temporary state of affairs. And I know which objective I would rather support.
I've moved to waterfox which offers support for the legacy addons and this move actually fixed a few of the annoying bugs I had with firefox. Among which speed was not one.
BTW, also using DDG for search, Outlook for email.
But as some point, too much was too much. Unable to bear vanilla, Google-owned Chrome, I ended up in (closed-source!) Vivaldi. It was...alright.
About two months ago, I tried out FF Nightly. And by god, it's the best browser I've ever used. And the Nightly builds are (typically) _more_ stable than production-issue from other vendors.
So very happy to be back! Mozilla may have their issues, but I'll gladly take imperfect and pro-user over differently imperfect and profit-driven any day.
I actually managed to crash nightly yesterday! Maybe this seems like it ought to be banal, but I think it says something admirable when users are surprised to remember that your pre-beta software is pre-beta. :P
Yeah, I switched to Nightly a couple releases ago (I'd use Dev edition before that because in the past Nightly used to be really unstable) and it's been great. The only time I've been getting crashes are when I flipped stylo on early (which was to be expected), and a couple of random crashes here and there.
In fact, I've had more problems in Chrome (Stable) these last two weeks, where their devtools hanged everything in multiple cases and Netflix wasn't working at all. And Chrome isn't my primary browser -- I only use it for Hangouts and Netflix (Netflix is force of habit, it works great in Firefox now). (I used the devtools because I'm using the new rewritten devtools in Firefox Nightly and they don't have a prettyprint button right now)
Netflix doesn't work great in either Firefox or Chrome, but that's not the browser's fault. Netflix only streams 720p video to Firefox, Opera, and Chrome whereas it will stream 1080p or better to Safari, IE 11, and Edge:
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742
You can see the playback details (formats, resolution, bit rate, etc.) of the video you're currently watching on Netflix by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Alt+D.
I use Safari to view Netflix though I'd prefer to use Firefox. I'm paying Netflix for access to 1080p video, but I only actually get 1080p video with Safari.
Also in the past Firefox's media stack used to be a bit more RAM-hog-y, but that's no longer the case IME either. I still stick media stuff in a different browser so that if I'm doing a build or something expensive I can just close the browser.
Yeah, that's due to DRM.
The simple solution is to disable the EME plugin, and just pirate everything (while still paying for Netflix). You pay for it, and have a moral right to it, and you can watch it in 1080p or 4K easily.
So this is a question that very much depends on ideology and jurisdiction. (I, personally, think that if I pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime, I have a moral right to any older content, and if I pay for a movie ticket for newer content that’s twice as expensive as a DVD of which the cinema gets less than 10%, I have a moral right to rewatch it)
-an extension to allow to treat chrome + firefox history and open tabs as one on all devices (basically what I already have with chrome on desktop + mobile)
-a password manager that integrates with both (this one should be easy enough .. just buy lastpass or an alternative).
I was so harsh with them only because I strongly believe that Firefox is my only hope for a free web.
But then I tried 57, and I must admit, boy was I wrong. This thing is fast! I haven't stopped recommending it to friends and colleagues!
Good job folks!
Glad to see they got it to work.
It seems at some point they became aware of how unsuited C++ is for parallel processing, and how important it would be for browsers in the future. Even compartmentalization or running tabs in their own process is a form of parallelization. This requires an efficient way of sharing memory and preventing race conditions and errant writes, as well as a way to protect these processes from cross-site scripting attacks, buffer over- and underruns, etc.
Computing hardware has also moved on from the CPU-centric world and the gains in battery life from dedicated GPU hardware being used even for rendering tasks, and now for font processing and other things were too good to pass up.
I'm a long time follower of Mozilla's development, and extremely excited about what's happening with Firefox.
(I'm also currently a Chrome user, leaving in large part due to profile corruption issues and inferior built-in development tools. I hope to be able to run Firefox and WebRender on both Ubuntu and Windows.)
are you referring to microsoft's com (component object model)?
Rust actually has a similar mechanism in its standard lib, the Result enum whuch resembles Maybe from Haskell, but has either a returned value if successful (which can be the empty object ()) or an Error.
XPCOM was modeled on the Microsoft version using the same vtable tricks that it used to enable dynamic dispatch through interfaces.
Edit: if there is any, can someone give me a link to the part of the source tree that has it?
otherwise here's the list: http://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=&path=*.rs%24
And many of the Rust things that make FF56+ fast can be found here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum
Do they also have any write-up on how did they find Rust during these changes? Was the back count lower than usual? Did the see an increase on productivity?
There is https://blog.servo.org/, but it's mostly gradual updates on things, not a general overview.
- The URL parser (rust-url). This is not shipping, because it's incomplete and there are some mismatches to deal with. But it exists.
- Stylo: Servo's CSS engine in Firefox. By far the biggest one, this is shipping in beta and nightly, and should be there in the 57 release for everything but Android
- webrender: Servo's GPU-focused renderer. Not shipping, can be flipped on in nightly. Still has work to be done
- encoding-rs: All encoding operations go through this now. Shipping
- The U2F stuff: A lot of the U2F code is in Rust. Shipping in nightly though I think it's still off by default (but that will change soon?)
As far as the location of the code:
The root rust crate is at https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/toolkit/libr... . Everything can be reached from it, and the cargo file that has all these links is https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/toolkit/libr...
- All of Servo is vendored in tree in https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/servo . Not all of Servo is used, the majority of the used code is from https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/servo/compon...
- Webrender is vendored in tree in https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/gfx/webrende...
- The U2F HID stuff is vendored at https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/dom/webauthn...
- There's a bunch of stuff in libcubeb ; I don't even know what it's there for (https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/media/libcub...)
- You can find "c api" rust crates scattered throughout, like mp4parse_capi, rust-url-capi, encoding_glue . These depend on the actual crate (usually, a crate that's published to crates.io) but expose an API that C can call into
- Finally, any dependency from crates.io is vendored in https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/third_party/... . Note that this includes build time dependencies (so you'll find crates that deal with CLI parsing and terminal color info that aren't actually used by firefox). Despite the folder being labeled "third_party", a lot of that code is maintained by us, but in separate repos and published to crates.io. In particular, large chunks of Servo are reusable published crates.
Perhaps if they focused on making web apps as capable as native apps first, it would have been a viable platform.
Gamepad API spec efforts began as part of this, for example. Then another vendor kicked their own inferior spec out the door without talking to anyone and that ended up being the de-facto standard (not the first time). Other APIs like exposing battery status, network connectivity status, and the ability to notify with vibration were in the works, just to name a few I remember.
I just believe that if Firefox dies then for sure "Open Web" will die.
But, yeah, of course I am not happy with Pocket. But it still better than using Chrome.
2. Mozilla Inc acquired it as a Commercial Proprietary Venture, not as a Open Source project under the Mozilla Foundation the non-profit
3. While it is Owned by Mozilla Inc, it of operated as a Separate Commercial Company separate from the Non-Profit so no it is "shares with it self"
4. The integration occurred long before the acquisition
There was some discussion of doing things this way back when it was still called Phoenix. The Seamonkey suite was bloated and slow, Phoenix was the stripped-down browser that just did web browsing but had an extension system to add in extra features. But instead of adding features through the extension system the Mozilla team decided to add them into the base.
Mozilla is now an enemy of the Open Web, the EFF is one of the last organizations left actually standing up for the Open Web. Mozilla is just another Commercial Browser with anti-user features
To be clear I am not laying all the blame at the feet of Mozilla, clearly the Open Web is not an important issue, as even in Linux circles there are countless people that have chosen Google over freedom, making endless excuses and justifications about why choosing chrome was just pragmatic but in making that "pragmatic" choice they sent a clear market signal that performance and netflix was more important the Open web, privacy, and user freedom.
They sent a clear market signal to Mozilla that principles do not matter, and Mozilla took that market signal to heart and turned its back on the Principles of the Open web and privacy to focus more on Performance and Usability to appease those users
This is not hyperbole, by the way: when you adopt the sort of you-agree-with-me-completely-or-you're-my-enemy rhetoric you're using here, well, people's lives are what you're saying you're willing to sacrifice. Mozilla could have taken a suicidal stand on principle, and I guarantee it would have hurt a significant number of people, and possibly led to lives lost (through joblessness, through emboldened powerful interests flush with victory over an all-in opposition, through any number of mechanisms).
So. How many human lives would it be worth to you to get EME out of browsers?
Meanwhile, the rhetoric I was responding to was very much of the "people who only 99.99999% agree with me will be first against the wall when the revolution comes" school of thinking.
Exactly so there was not need to include it in the Standard
>and web-based distribution of major popular media will use that DRM in whatever form it takes.
Lost of popular media does not use DRM at all
>and I've argued at length that killing DRM cannot be done via "principled stands"
No it can only be done by principled stands
>it has to be done via market forces, as it was with online distribution of music.
That was killed by a principled stand not by market forces, the record labels wanted DRM, consumer did not give a shit, a few companies made a principled stand to say no...
That said, even if you want to claim it should be market forces that dictate DRM, then let the market decide by not ham fisting it into a Standard for HTML5.
That distorts the market and is the exact reason MS, Google and Netflix wanted to ensure it was in the Standard so they would not have to explain to the market why the DRM was there, why X device did not work with their products or have to compete in the market place on DRM or no DRM. DRM is "standard" now so there is no market competition for it.
I love all the DRM supporters (which you clearly are despite your claims to not be) that say "DRM was inevitable and putting in the standard would not change anything" Well then why put it in the standard? If it does not change anything, if it does not change the market, if having it in the standard is pointless why did MS/Google/Netflix/MPAA fight so hard to get it in?
because it does in fact matter. It does in fact change the market, and the conversation. Something being a "Standard" normalizes it in the market, allowing it to deployed faster, easier and with less consumer backlash. That was the entire point of the EME Spec, to normalize DRM to the consumer to make it less controversial, and more palatable
Apple introduced a large legal online music store with DRM. Apple got huge. Huge enough that record labels got scared and needed to break Apple's position. They turned to Amazon to start a competing music store, but had a problem: they needed to have the music from Amazon play on devices from Apple, or else people wouldn't shop at Amazon's music store. Since Apple probably wouldn't license Apple's DRM (since, after all, it would be for someone to break Apple's market position), the only option left was DRM-free. And lo and behold, Amazon became the first big music store with major-label music available DRM-free. And once there was one DRM-free store, it became hard to argue, from a market perspective, that there should be any that weren't. So Apple's ended up DRM-free too!
Market forces. Not people taking stands on principle.
That said, even if you want to claim it should be market forces that dictate DRM, then let the market decide by not ham fisting it into a Standard for HTML5.
The fact that you keep claiming EME is DRM tells me that you either don't actually know how EME works or what it does, or that you are willfully lying about it. Which is it, please?
I love all the DRM supporters (which you clearly are despite your claims to not be)
And here we are, back at the assertion that anyone who differs from your position by even a tiny amount must actually be 100% your enemy in every way. This is the kind of thinking that the twentieth century taught us to be very careful around, because it tends to lead to lots and lots and lots of dead bodies, all of them people who were "guilty" of being insufficiently perfectly compliant with the stated ideal.
ROFL.... That is ... wow... Nothing about that is factually accurate, to state the Record Labels was the driving force behind DRM free Music...
Ummm No...
>>>The fact that you keep claiming EME is DRM tells me that you either don't actually know how EME works or what it does, or that you are willfully lying about it. Which is it, please?
The fact you believe EME has any other purpose except DRM tell me you do not actually know the purpose of EME, or what is does.
And just for the record, responses like "ROFL" and calling things "moronic" (as you did in your other comment) don't really make you look like you know what you're talking about or like you're someone who should be taken seriously.
And just for the record, responses like your revisionist history, and Hyperbolic non-sense don't really make you look like you know what your talking about or like you're someone who should be taken seriously
yes, yes it is
The idea the opposing EME and keeping EME out of the HTML5 Standard would have some how "cost lives" is moronic and hyperbolic to such a degree I will not even waste my time responding to it.
So imagine a world in which you get your way. Every browser is forced to un-implement EME, the standard is force-amended to not include it anymore, etc.
Now what? Well, what happens now is popular media stays popular, and continues to be delivered via big binary-blob plugins with horrible security properties.
What's the human cost of hacks? What's the human cost of the security issues those plugins open up? How many people end up financially ruined due to personal information being stolen? How many people end up on the street because their credit gets trashed? How many in prison because a plugin vulnerability turned their computer into a node for serving kiddie porn and murder markets over Tor?
It is nowhere near unreasonable to ask how many lives you'd consider an acceptable cost for defeating EME, because there absolutely would be a human cost to it. It's a human cost we're already paying right now, and the major argument in favor of EME is that it helps us reduce or eliminate that human cost.
And this is where single-issue "you are 100% with me or 100% my enemy" stances are proven to be utterly morally bankrupt. It's not just that you implicitly accept that human cost as a means to serving your end. It's that you won't even acknowledge that the cost exists. That puts you in the company of some very evil people, and should perhaps get you to re-think your position.
EME is big binary blob plugins called CDM's, EME is just a different API to access the binary plugins that will have (and have already had) all kinds of security issues
>What's the human cost of hacks? What's the human cost of the security issues those plugins open up? How many people end up financially ruined due to personal information being stolen? How many people end up on the street because their credit gets trashed? How many in prison because a plugin vulnerability turned their computer into a node for serving kiddie porn and murder markets over Tor?
Hyperbolic Much, Everyone Info is already out there now and it was not Flash or Java or any browser vunerablity at all that caused it. The idea that the source of people having their Credit Card data and other personal info stolen is the browser shows your ignorance in the field of InfoSec.
Browser are a source for Fraud and Ransomware. Databases of Ruin are targets for ID Theft, that is the database of Large Corporations like Equifax, Target, Yahoo, Anthem, Sony, Adobe, Ebay, etc etc etc
Companies that collect and store PII, they are not hacking individual computers to obtain PII, they are dumping databases
>>It is nowhere near unreasonable to ask how many lives you'd consider an acceptable cost for defeating EME, because there absolutely would be a human cost to it. It's a human cost we're already paying right now, and the major argument in favor of EME is that it helps us reduce or eliminate that human cost.
So you assume in this moronic equation of your that there are zero lives lost in the implementation of EME, The sharing of knowledge via the open web is a huge driver of getting people out of poverty, and improving the lives of billions world wide. In change political regimes that abuse, and torture their population.
How many lives will be lost because all knowledge is locked into wall gardens and accessible only via "approved" platforms, and only for "approved" purposes.
The plugin world had big binary blobs that need the ability to absolutely control at least most or all of the browser and possibly other parts of the computer too.
The EME world has far smaller binary blobs communicating over a narrow defined API which does not give them control of the browser.
So. You don't actually know what you're talking about, and resort to misrepresentations and insults to try to cover up for it. Real great "principled" stand you're taking there.
So it is you that do not know what you are talking about
Please point to the portion which backs your assertion.
And staying true to their mission, Mozilla bought Pocket and is now releasing it as open source [1].
You're speaking of "betraying the foundation of the Open Web", but Mozilla is the only one out of the big players that isn't guilty of betrayal, the only big player that tried opposing patent encumbered video codecs or DRM, that have been promoted by Google, Microsoft and Apple, the W3C being basically a charade.
If you're upset of W3C EME, your anger should be directed at the parties responsible for it, which are Google, Microsoft and Netflix and which now control the industry, with a majority market share I might add, which would make all resistance moot.
So I hope you're boycotting Google, Microsoft and Netflix, because otherwise it's unfair to expect that from Mozilla, an organization with a responsibility towards its employees, users and customers.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po...
I will believe that when I see the code. 7 months now still no code, and outside of the single blog post no other comments from Pocket, Read It later, or Mozilla has given any indication they will Open Source it. In fact Read It Later is still a for profit corporations operating as a subsidiary of the For Profit Mozilla Corporation, not the Mozilla Foundation the non-profit organizations
>Mozilla is the only one out of the big players that isn't guilty of betrayal, the only big player that tried opposing patent encumbered video codecs or DRM
They did... When???
>If you're upset of W3C EME, your anger should be directed at the parties responsible for it, which are Google, Microsoft and Netflix
I can be upset with W3c, Netflix, Google, Microsoft and at the same time be upset with Mozilla.
I am more upset with Mozilla because they are a Non-Profit organization that had (and I stress Had) a mission to promoting Open Standards, Open Web, and User Privacy. They have turned their back on that when those issues became less popular than performance. They turned their back on those principles because market share.
They have stopped attempting to education the public on why they should care about EME, about privacy, about anything really.
I find it sad that Mozilla is no longer a leader creating conversations about why the Open Web is needed for Society, about way Standing up for Privacy and User Freedom is important. Instead they have choosen to play follow the Leader to MS and Google.
Where is the 1990's Mozilla when Microsoft wanted to maket Active X a Standard and they stood up and said NO
Where is the 2000's Mozilla when w3c wanted to drop HTML in favor of XHTML and they formed WHATWG to force the W3C in to adopting HTML5 we have today.
Where did the Leader in the open Web go? Where did Mozilla go and what is this abomination that replace it?
I always felt that Mozilla was just forced in a role it never really wanted.
If you remember Mozilla was a child of the browser wars and my guesss is that if Netscape wasn’t cornered by MS it would still be closed source today.
Even today you can see that business is still in their DNA, the for-profit subsidiary.
However although Mozilla is far from perfect, they are our only hope.
It was the internal codename and user-agent for netscape and became the name of mozilla a reminder that their objective is to be the number 1 browser and the new target to replace had been IE.
It was killed by moving focus from users and long term to quarterly profits and short term, around the time Jonvon Tetzchner was pushed to leave the company.
wait are you talking about the leader in the open web or about mozilla here ?
It's arguably not so smart to spend millions of dollars to buy the company behind pocket to release it opensource when an opensource alternative already exists.
Turns out mozilla did not buy pocket as much as the 10 millions user base and 1 billion saved link to get a foot on the mobile platform and helps with their upcoming recommendation engine. Not exactly putting the user first.
Besides there's no integration of pocket into shaarli whereas wallabag has one. Also where is the option to self host a pocket service ?
Not sorry, but pocket sucks on many counts compared to open source alternative.
I've been boycotting microsoft (because microsoft), google (because privacy), apple (because vendor lock-in), netflix (because pollution and bandwidth saturation and killing p2p) was before mozilla made its betrayal to their own words for their own profit. Yup I tend to boycott all opponent to net neutrality and open web. Neither google, microsoft, apple, nor netflix bear responsibility for mozilla deciding to bake support for DRM for fear of becoming irrelevant. To me they showed that they do not put their money where their mouth is and as such are not worthy of trust, also their priorities are not aligned with an open web based on their actions.
Had mozilla been serious about opposing they would not have implemented it in their browser to be netflix compatible out of fear of losing market share. I've had a difficult time reconciliating myself with mozilla "let's do one evil here so we can try to do one good there" approach to things.
To set the records straight, Free Software has nothing to do with choice, as can be seen by how GCC and other projects were developed.
I did try wallabag. I appreciate the effort of its developers, I wish the project succeeds, but the mobile apps are pieces of shit compared with Pocket. So arguably, that open source alternative you're speaking of does not exist.
I really don't understand how Mozilla is not putting the users first, because by their actions, it seems to me like they are.
The really interesting phenomenon however is that I'm not seeing the same vitriol whenever Google's Chrome is being discussed on HN. It's like there's this really vocal minority that really wants Firefox to die, this comment included. No worries, if the current trends holds, Firefox will end up being dead and then you'll be able to have a choice between Chrome, Edge or Safari.
Or you'll be able to fork Firefox, invest in whatever projects you want to invest, build whatever features you want to build and in general put your money where your mouth is.
Can't wait to see that happening. Good luck.
For these reasons I switched to waterfox.
I remember reading that comic that Google made to describe how Chrome worked back in 2009 or so, and thinking process-based tabs were a cool idea, but the experience I was having with Firefox was not bad enough to merit the switch, especially with all of the privacy invasion that switching to Chrome would have entailed. I also reckoned that Google would eventually start to block or make it harder to install add-ons like ad blockers - they are, after all, fundamentally an advertising company.
I'm glad I stuck it out with Mozilla. They're one of the few web companies worth trusting.
However, the new beta is purely awesome. I don't think I've ever been so excited about a new software version release! What a fantastic validation of Rust too in the process.
I'll be very pleased if they have improved performance as much as everybody is saying, I want off the Google botnet.
Alternatively have you tried enabling smooth scrolling ?
Create a fresh clean profile for both FF56 (or earlier) and chrome without any extensions.
Then, create/import a bookmark folder with 20 sites and sync them to both browsers.
Fire up each browser and watch the cpu usage with top (or task manager). Choose "open all in tabs" and monitor the cpu usage over time.
For me chromium finishes loading 3-5x faster. By "finishes loading" I mean all spinning circles in tabs are gone and the cpu usage drops to nearly 0%.
Firefox uses only 2 processes/threads, while chromium makes use of all cores. I am guessing the more cores your CPU has, the more obvious the difference. But you don't need an 8-core cpu to see the difference, the difference is as noticeable for me on my i5-6200U laptop.
But page loading speed and JS performance aside, what turned me away from firefox is the sluggish UI. Little things like how fast the dev tools open, or the speed at which right-click menus open. It's like firefox freezes for a millisecond on these operations while chrome feels much more fluid. I don't have a test case for this :)
I never really used Firefox, and I give it a go every year or so. I used Opera 12 for as long as I could precisely because of the FF UI responsiveness. Then Chrome came along. I keep looking back but... FF is not there yet for me.
I'm no fan of Google and I really hope the new FF is as good as people claim to be. Remains to be seen, having high hopes!
EDIT: Obviously if you have a slow internet link then the pipe becomes the bottleneck and both browsers will load sites at same speed. But in that case you could just close all tabs and reopen them and let the browsers load most of the stuff from cache.
At times firefox was slower but it always turned out to be due to a malware ridden computer or a combination of dubious firefox extensions. srware iron did feel faster than both iunder certain conditions though.
Maybe it's different under windows ?
When a client calls me because his browsing is slow, it was usually caused by a malware ridden computer not by firefox.
On the other hand, running chrome often felt slower for some reason and the rest of the time both were comparable speed.
The "built-in video chat service" is a webstandard. Called WebRTC, got mainly pushed by Google. Every modern browser implements this. Mozilla just decided to build a service which implements the server-side of this protocol. Which they needed anyways to test their client-side implementation.
So, the only squandered time and energy is that of the UX people that polished that server-side implementation up for public use.
And in return for that, Mozilla got excellent testing of their client-side implementation and direct feedback, if maybe people would want the Foundation to allocate some money to run such a service.
I also previously had problems with single tabs causing stuff to lock up or at least respond slowly. This happened with SoundCloud a couple times. Seems good now!
Nightly always helped a bit, but I had trouble with that too. This nightly has yet to crash once across the 4 computers and 2 Android devices I've installed it to, so I'm very impressed. I previously used LastPass which broke several times on Nightly builds in the past. Since then I've migrated to 1password, an unrelated but definitely pleasant change for using Firefox.
But mostly, boy those perf improvements are real. Side by side, it's hard to believe how fast performance changed between versions.
Have you considered addressing this bug?
Of course, the app is being improved too, but apples to apples, Quantum makes it better.
It's expensive, but it's good software. Especially the Mac OS version. It also supports the new Android 8 autofill API, which is already kind of useful.
And please, donate to Mozilla, if you can. They really do deserve some help. Fighting against giants like Google, MS and Apple... They have products running on all kinds of possible platforms, also on old Android phones! And they have some of the best extensions.
What is the basis for these statements? Mozilla's budget is far less than its competitors, Google, Apple, and Microsoft; I expect they could find good uses for a little more.
edit: in response to fabrice's comment about other orgs, checkout http://www.givewell.org/
I don't follow that argument; the evidence seems inconclusive. That's not a lot of people for a software company developing multiple products (and in 2015 they still were developing FirefoxOS), including one as complex and fast-moving as a major web browser, as well as furthering other missions.
Do you know how many work on Firefox, compared with Chrome, IE, and Safari? What are the budgets for the other browsers and for Firefox? That would be evidence that would be applicable.
Now, I don't think they are poor, but being a company that doesn't sell your data, doesn't show ads, etc...
I mean, frankly, I think that such products are really hard to find nowadays. Their revenues come primarily by Google competitors (Yahoo, etc., which try to appear as default search engine).
That's not true at all. The 2015 report was published at the end of 2016. Likewise, the 2016 report should be out by the end of the year.
The best way to help them out is to help get the marketshare back up, so that the next time they sign a contract for the default search provider, they have more negotiating power.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/
The Corporation (which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Foundation i.e. only has a single shareholder, the Foundation) brings in revenue mostly through search engine deals, which is how it's able to pay staff to work on Firefox.
Unsurprisingly, it's a bit confusing... I think having the ultimate owner of the Corporation and the trademarks etc. be the Foundation is a good thing, even though it makes actually funding everything appropriately a bit complex.
Don't forget that Firefox is an open-source project, so contributions of time are always welcome! https://whatcanidoformozilla.org
Sadly 11 of the 14 extensions i use do not work on Firefox 57 (i just tried it). The browser is indeed faster - it feels faster than Chrome and Edge - but i never really had an issue with its performance. On the other hand i have a very big issue with the functionality that is lost. Stylish, FireFTP, Greasemonkey (with its own extensions), Better Reader, DownThemAll and a bunch of other addons are things i rely on almost daily (e.g. the internet became way brighter the moment Stylish stopped working :-P) and there are either no plans to update, no alternatives or the alternatives are simply way inferior (e.g. FireFTP is my favorite (S)FTP client for years now, i use DownThemAll for pretty much every download, i use Stylish themes in many sites to tone the sunburns down, i use Better Reader to make Reader mode actually usable, etc.
Firefox is sadly solving a problem i never had and in the process it introduces a problem that for me is a showstopper.
it's a big dealbreaker for me.
Mozilla overplay the “not for profit” card but with Google you can be sure they are collecting and archiving absolutely everything that passes through their servers.
Sure, Firefox's private browsing does offer tracking protection. But most "normal" users don't seem to use that. And some would argue there's little value in blocking tracking in a session that will be wiped anyway.
Firefox users who pick Google as the search engine are still giving a lot of info to Google, but less info than Google would have had if the user was using Chrome.
It's still giving search information to Google, but that's much more preferable to sending literally everything you type in the box.
I will happily give up some information in exchange for a service that I like. I'll happily give Google my search history, including typos in the search bar, in exchange for them tailoring my responses.
Why? The difference in results is huge. I don't need to specific that I'm looking for Linux answers, math functions, or scientific results. Google knows this, it has learned it from the many years of data that I have given them. Searching anonymously makes my search much less productive and less efficient.
At the same time, I don't want Google watching me poop. I'm okay with then knowing some things, but not others. I've been pretty open with Google, knowingly so, just to get these tailored responses and, to me, they are worth it.
There's still lots of things I don't tell Google. There are still lots of companies that don't give me anything I value, so I don't willingly give them information. It's a sliding scale and needs recipricocity from the business entity, I expect a return from my giving up information.
It's also a very individual choice and best decided at the individual level. I give Google info, but I'd never say someone else should have to. I think it possible to optimize for just that.
FYI, I've been using an anonymized front-end (startpage.com) to Google for the last year and I'm not noticing any degradation in the quality of the search results. Startpage doesn't even set a cookie, so I doubt it is tracking me and learning what interests me.
I also have a media box (well, a series of them over the years) that uses an entirely separate profile. That profile does a lot of YouTube and music. It had learned that I prefer documentaries - though not much more than that. It has also seemed to learn that I prefer isolated guitar tracks and classical guitar. It will now preferentially offer me the isolated guitar track in the top few links, even without including it in my search query. It used to offer different versions, covers, and live versions of the track. I can't get it to offer the isolated track as the primary result, at least not at this time.
I've been monitoring this for quite a while and have watched the improvements. I've even set up the second account, the one mentioned for media, just because I'd observed the effect.
To see the effect, you need to be logged in AND tell them to personalize your results. I'm not sure if that is enabled by default.
I admit this is just anecdotal, but I've made it a point to monitor this since about 2010, which is when I first noticed the option in the settings. I've checked it against being logged out, with different IP addresses, with alternative browsers, and on computers that do not belong to me. The results are remarkably different, though they are pretty generic after the first 20 listed results.
So, in this case, I've given information (privacy) in exchange for results that are more suitable for my personal needs.
I do wish I could select profiles. I'd like to be able to search with my 'generic' profile, my 'tech' profile, my 'music' profile, and my 'entertainment' profile. I think it'd give me more precision and would help me weed out my more generic searches.
Unless you have it blocked, Google also uses a tracking URL on their results. It will say, even if you mouse over it, example.com. But, when you click on it, it actually uses a URL like google.com/tracking/some numbers/example.com. So, they know what links you clicked. I suspect they also log which one you clicked last, so they have an indicator as to which result you found the most helpful.
I should note that links open in a new tab automatically, so they can also track browser session and see when I've completed my searching and can infer more from that information.
I used to also have a developer profile but I haven't really done any development for a few years. That was pretty refined and seemed to learn the languages that I was most interested in.
In each case, the profiles were made by using different email addresses. I have a different email address for the different accounts. I try to avoid cross-pollination between them but I haven't been as good with that as I'd like to have been. I can only speculate that the results would be even more precise if I had done so. As I mentioned above, I did use a third email account but I've not logged into that one in quite a while. It seemed to pick up that I was into PHP, JavaScript, HTML, and was using Wordpress or SMF. I don't know how effective it would be with other languages.
Your mileage might vary, but that sums up my observations and experiences. In my case, I made a clear choice to give up some privacy in exchange for something I value - namely more efficient search results that are more effective and personal.
Again, all an anecdote but I have made it a point to test the results against non-personalized results and the difference is very noticeable and very good. I am much, much happier with the personalized results.
I slam on Google, a lot. I complain about Google - to the point where people may think I hate them and am obsessed with telling people. However, I do try to always make it clear that I'm okay with them asking for my information and that they do have some products and services that I think are done exceptionally well.
Google Analytcs and ads are so widely that most of your browsing will be tracked regardless of browser, even regardless of your search engine (but the search engine is also quite major since they can track what you were trying to search for before jumping into the web).
But there's also a privacy policy explaining what chrome actually sends: https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/privacy/
A company known for tracking the ever-loving shit out of everyone across the Internet distributes a best-in-class web browser absolutely for free. If that's not enough, I really hope you're able to hold on to that innocence as you start using the Internet more and more in the future.
This isn't difficult to test: sandbox default chrome in a VM and see what happens.
But they don't need to because of your point. uMatrix makes it plenty clear all your bits are belong to Google.
Prove to me that Google is tracking me through Chrome. Link me to an article with proof of collection.
Most of us our developers here, surely we can apply some more rigor to this conversation then “we know Google is doing this because it’s Google”.
you'll see your browsing history, which unless you have a preference turned off deep within settings, Google may then use to target advertising.
It's not unique to Chrome. There are additional sync options that are available to Chrome, but those are all opt in.
Maybe that's just me though.
Chrome did a lot of things right and for a while, it was the browser I installed on friends and family PCs because it was trouble free and I knew they would always have the latest version installed automatically.
Google is not a charity, so they used their sites to advertise their own product. Microsoft is doing the same thing with Edge, even on Windows 10.
The other thing that I've been waiting for is better multi-profile support. You can get a (pre-release) version of that now by opting into the Containers experiment: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers
What's it changing to, moving forward?
What does Containers add? If the only answer is "a more convenient UI", then that's good enough for me!
It's more similar to a private browsing session, except things aren't forgotten, and you can have as many as you like. And they're tab level so you can treat them they same way you would a tab.
Other way around. Profiles retain configuration and extensions between sessions.
Containers: Use the same configuration and extensions across different containers in one running Firefox instance.
Both retain configuration and extensions between traditional browser sessions (start/stop). Containers additionally "retain" configuration and extensions across contextual sessions/identities.
Sometimes that's what you want, and profiles certainly aren't going anywhere. But the idea behind Containers is just that you can be logged in to separate accounts simultaneously in multiple containers.
In practice, that means a better and more convenient UI. Containers work on a per-tab basis, so you can have multiple tabs logged in to the same account right next to each other, instead of in different Firefox processes. Plus, you can right click on a link and select "Open in New Container Tab".
So while Containers are more than a UI on top of Profiles, it practice one of the main advantages is the convenience of the UI.
And it's definitely a reason to switch to Firefox. Keeping personal and work Google and AWS accounts open and separate simultaneously is really nice.
Unfortunately the UI has always been sort of hidden.
You can launch with `-P` or `-ProfileManager` to get a profile selection menu. Or nav to `about:profiles` for a slightly more convenient (but less attractive) version.
Firefox profiles are great. Better than Chrome profiles, though less convenient, for now. Interested to see how Containers fits in.
Firefox's new Containers aren't perfect, but I'm giving them a go and since they're in testing still I can submit feedback to influence their direction.
macOS (and OS X before it) is more work. The Finder will switch to the running instance if there is one, instead of launching a new one each time you click. I worked around that with an AppleScript (for the icon and double-clickability) that calls a shell script with the proper args.
It sounds sketchy when I describe it, and is clearly not an obvious option for most people, but it has worked perfectly and invisibly for years.
My solution on macOS is an AppleScript with the usual Firefox name and icon, installed in the usual location, which runs a shell script with the proper args to pop the profile manager in a new session (`-ProfileManager -no-remote`).
The real Firefox binary is buried in a nondiscoverable location (`$HOME/Applications/.Firefox`) so that it doesn't get launched directly.
...but after getting around to making that work seamlessly, many forgotten years ago...Firefox profiles really have been great. :)
I have one Chrome profile for my personal apps, and one for work -- creating a new tab in one of the windows will automatically open it with the same context as the rest of the window. My experience with Firefox was that I'd have to manually choose which profile to open the tab in.
1. This required me to use my mouse (geh, maybe I could use keybindings to change this though? not quite sure how difficult that would be) 2. I'm not sure if this is just a me thing, but if I create a tab stemming from my 'personal' gmail account there's a pretty strong chance that it should also be a 'personal' tab. Maybe this is just a difference in how me and the Firefox team use tabs though?
Once I figure out how to get around those issues, (and when Streak's gmail extension works on Firefox...) that's when I'd be able to move over.
edit: apparently Firefox has had true instance profiles for ages! awesome. now I'm just waiting on Streak lol.
* It's way too easy to open new pages in the wrong container, and you can't convert an existing tab into another container. By the time you've opened a tab it's too late. Solution is to copy URL, create new tab, paste URL, which is a lot to do.
* There's no "New tab in same container" keyboard shortcut or button.
* If you click on a URL in a different app, or from the shell, you get a new tab in the default container.
* There's no way to designate an entire window or macOS space to a container. I have all my work stuff in a separate space, and no personal stuff should interfere. Similarly, if I'm already in a window full of, say, Google Cloud-related tabs, I don't want to clutter that window with containers.
The idea is great, but the implementation is nowhere close to being practical.
Chrome's profiles are too heavy-weight, but it has the right idea about the ability to couple window with profiles, because windows are "collections of tabs", and the most natural-feeling container of pages.
The current container extension uses the default container for new tabs and windows, which is a bit cumbersome, because you have to remember to open new tabs and windows in the current container. If it were associated with a space, it's just inherit the container from the current space.
I had more trouble finding this setting than I should have. Appears to be hamburger menu -> customize -> (bottom of page) density drop-down -> select compact. Still not sure if I like it. The tabs alone are still way too big for my liking.
Coupled with Ubuntu 17.10 and the Gnome that brings, the top of screen is going to be eaten up by way more UI than I would like. Is there any way to get Gnome to have a unified Ubuntu/application menubar like Unity?
Assuming it's the same as every Firefox since they started copying Chrome, the alt key should bring up the old-fashioned (and much more usable) menu bar.
It probably won't land in time for 57, but hopefully soon!
Putting this into there should shrink it down a bit further:
@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");
#TabsToolbar {
height: 24px !important;
--tab-min-height: 24px !important;
}
You can load the URL "chrome://browser/content/browser.xul" to get the browser UI displayed like a webpage, allowing you to easily use the devtools to inspect the different CSS identifiers, so that you can mess around a bit by yourself.
[1] http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=UserChrome.css
Tangentially, this is a rare moment when I want a service to charge me money to assure myself that they are adequately incentivized to take my service/business seriously.
Additionally, it's probably not helping that their historical pricing model makes no sense for users who interact with many platforms on a daily basis. I didn't even know it had changed until I re-checked it after reading your comment.
Just my 2¢ as someone who previously considered 1Password once upon a time, and dismissed them. They may deserve a fresh look these days, but now they're competing against much more robust competitors than they were back in 2010(?).
If you like it, offer it.
That turned a lot of people off from 1Password.
Since my primary workstation and primary laptop now both run Arch Linux -- which 1Password has no desire to support (and don't even mention how shitty the Windows version runs under Wine) -- I'm back to where I was years ago, running KeePass/variants. I don't expect to switch to anything else for a long time -- my "secrets" are mine and only mine, once again.
But maybe I'll explore this.
I just have to remember like two or three substrings from an URL or page title and bam! the page is there.
For comparison, Chrome's omnibox generally only searches for whole words, while the Google search suggestions take up much precious space, while it is known that most web browsing is directed to pages already visited. Firefox's decision to keep the URL bar and the search bar separate seems sensible.
https://portableapps.com/news/2017-09-28--try-firefox-quantu...
I'm still missing one extension (Join for Android), but I can live without it for now and might actually just help joaoapps in developing it.
One thing that annoyed me was the large min tab size as I didn't like scrolling tabs. Someone on Reddit pointed me to the right userChrome.css tweak though [1]
Overall I'm pretty happy being back on Firefox after many, many years.
[0]: https://github.com/smorks/keepasshttp-connector/releases
[1]: https://github.com/Timvde/UserChrome-Tweaks/blob/master/tabs...
AFAIK Firefox extension is pending addition of push API support in extensions. Joao has filed a bug report[0] for that, but there hasn't been much activity on it for some time.
I'm not using the beta or nightly builds because I'm lazy. However, Firefox with containers has sold me and I've switched to it for everything except development. I'm too used to Chrome Dev tools it's been hard to switch :|
I absolutely love Firefox+Containers though. I just wish I could make it auto-open-in-container with wildcards. For example, open all *.mywork.com pages in my Work profile.
Of course, now it's up to the developers to allow U2F support via Firefox (instead of hard-coding it to Chrome/Chromium). I've successfully verified that it works on three different services that don't hard-code the support to Chrome/Chromium.
...except for Google.com, which still hardcodes it to Chrome (doesn’t even seem to work in Chromium there for me).
Chrome FFNightly Safari Safari
OSX OSX OSX iOS
---------------------------------------------------
MotionMark(↑) 348.82 190.23 474.55 295.12
JetStream (↑) 166.84 173.96 239.03 171.27
Sunspider (↓) 225.2ms 178.4ms 115.2ms 198.5ms
What I really care about was that with previous versions of Firefox, my MacbookPro would start getting hot as soon as I would fire it up, and every page load would feel like a drag.
With 57, my Macbook is cool and everything feels snappy.
Actually, extremely impressed. I normally do dev with Chrome for heavy JS (even compared to new devel edition ff) and even though Brave's devtools seem to match up to an older version compared to Chrome, page updates etc are just so much faster in Brave than in Chrome. Fast renders matters a LOT when you're developing. (Btw, there's a bug in the install script if you're using Brave on Debian[2].)
It's still early days and doesn't have as many features as FF and Chrome (in particular for me, Stylish is missing, but the privacy and ad blockers that I prefer are there), but, wow... rendering is faster than Chrome in the common case, or at least strongly feels that way.
I also like how they're focused first and foremost on privacy and ad blocking, but also make it easy to donate to your favorite sites in place of ad revenue. It seems like a balanced approach. Brave seems to be very similar to Mozilla with its strong focus on user privacy.
It's nice to see competition heating up in the browser space again.
1. https://brave.com 2. https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/6902
Maybe Brave is more heavily customized than I thought?
Always take non-indie benchmarks with a grain of salt, of course, but given that their CEO is the developer of JS, it's probably not too much of a stretch to imagine that this is a true or mostly-true claim from their main website page[1]: "Brave loads major news sites 2 to 8 times faster than Chrome and Safari on mobile. And Brave is 2 times faster than Chrome on desktop."
I haven't tried installing chrome extensions in it yet, but if that works, then Brave is definitely my new browser. It seems simple and clean; a worthy successor to both FF and Chrome.
Add-on developer are still catching up, but I think that the majority will be ready for the 57 release in November. I tried switching maybe two weeks ago, and I couldn't, simply because of one extension that wasn't ported.
Looking around, and I was able to find out that they've been working on it and two days ago I've installed the testing version of the add-on and made a complete switch to Nightly.
And just as well, most of these performance improvements would not have been realistically doable, if Mozilla were still forced to not break compatibility.
What you can do, is to move to Firefox 52 ESR. It won't have the performance, but it has the legacy extensions and will continue to get security updates until June 26, 2018.
There's also some forks, namely Pale Moon and Waterfox, which seem motivated to try to keep this legacy extension system alive for longer, so maybe that works for you, too. Personally, I doubt they're able to. The old extension system was a major maintenance burden for Mozilla, so I can't imagine the far smaller teams behind Pale Moon and Waterfox taking that on.
Lastly it should be noted that Tab-Tree-like extensions will be possible with the new extension API and some implementations are already underway:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/
(Not a tree, but tabs in a sidebar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-re...)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/27/tree-style-tab-is-a-webext...
I've always been a Firefox user and one of my favourite addons is Tab Groups. Unfortunately it will stop working with 57.
I'm really keen to update to 57 but until Tab Groups gets updated I'm going to be sticking to 56.
Please someone take over the dev!
For me, privacy was always a large advantage of Firefox but now I also trust Apple, Safari, and Apple’s privacy stance.
Honest question: what privacy advantages does Firefox have over Safari?
However after a lot of searching I found Yomichan, which seems to be better in every way when compared to Rikaisama, but its fairly difficult to find. I highly recommend it to any Japanese learners looking for a replacement.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=firefox-...
Just one study among many, but, worth keeping in mind. Firefox is making strides, but Mozilla still has work to do if they want to stop losing market share. I say this as a Firefox user.
That's a comparison on real websites rather than browser benchmarks.
But yeah, while the technical crowd sees Mozilla as favorable at roughly equal performance, the vast majority of unknowing users are probably more influenced by the world's most popular webpage, video portal, e-mail service, operating system etc. all nudging them to use Chrome.
It'll be interesting to see, if Firefox 57 can generate another major bump in that user graph like it happened with Firefox 48, or if 48 was at sort of the sweet spot where Firefox became acceptable again for most of the tech crowd and now we'd be digging into the non-tech crowd, which is much harder to pull away from what they're habitually using.
The old Firefox UI always felt old fashioned and made the adjustment that much harder.
This new version of firefox has been great - as others have mentioned it's really fast and the UI is simplistic with a side panel for bookmarks to boot.
Definitely kudos where kudos is due, looking forward to using firefox for the foreseeable future.
But often it's the small things that make or break it. For me it was that HTML5 videos don't fullscreen to a new workspace on macOS like they do in Chrome or Safari.
If you've tried the stable version, the stable version is still one version behind the changes that are coming.
I honestly recommend giving it a go again in two months.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...
If it still happens and you want to dig into it a little further the profiler at http://perf-html.io/ allows you to gather and dig into + share details that can help fix.
Edit: typo
https://github.com/Koushien/keyboard-shortcut-api
This is one of the last requirements for having a viable product. cmcaine's working on replacement successor:
https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl
It still a long ways off, but its possible.
Extremely disappointed that Mozilla has basically given a big middle finger to the SeaMonkey/Thunderbird (comm-central) communities with the removal of XUL/XPCOM add-ons, necessity of multi-process, introduction of webextensions, removal of support for complete themes (show me a single Persona that doesn't look like shit), etc. in FF 57.
The reverberations of this decision are so stark that the SeaMonkey council has announced that it can no longer build off of the nightly mozilla-central tree; they're in the process of building RELEASES from the Firefox ESR branch. It's an absolute mess.
Hmm... August, 2015.
And then they needed to follow up with the switch to WebExtensions relatively quickly, so that extension authors wouldn't start porting their extensions to multiprocess and then after that effort have to rewrite their extensions to be WebExtensions-compatible. They wanted extension authors to be able to just directly port to WebExtensions.
And I do think that a lot more extension authors would have probably abandoned their projects, if they had just ported to multiprocess and then had to port to WebExtensions.
Also, a lot of extensions sort of just continue to function without active maintenance. Those are why it would have just as well been really disruptive to space out multiprocess and WebExtensions by a few years. Then we'd have to start over at 0 extensions twice.
[1] Multiprocess was rolled out in Firefox 48, on the 2nd August 2016: http://netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=1&qpaf=&qpcustom...
Mozilla kept pushing developers to make their XUL extensions multiprocess-compatible even after WebExtensions was announced. At one point, they were going to keep the multiprocess compatibility shims until the WebExtensions deadline, but then they decided to start removing them sooner.[1] SDK extensions were mostly multiprocess-compatible already.
Developers are currently maintaining multiple branches of their extensions because 52 ESR is missing APIs and 57+ won't support hybrid extensions. Aligning the WebExtensions transition with the ESR cycle would have made things a lot easier for them.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/02/16/the-road-to-firef...
Perhaps normal users don't care (or just haven't noticed yet), but most of the features which make the Mozilla platform so enticing to power users (what ever happened to XULRunner?) are being decimated because Mozilla is losing market-share and needs free advertising.
Let's not beat around the bush; Mozilla is losing market-share because people get flustered into downloading chrome due to that Microsoft-tier advert that gets plastered onto the google search page in any non-Chrome browser. Yes, Firefox had been feeling chuggier and bloated for awhile, but the core feature-set that made the platform a dream to use for power users never waned. Speeding up the browser while retaining its core feature-set are not mutually exclusive conditions.
I think that if these "normal" users understood how powerful complete themes and the XUL/XPCOM apis are, they would be up in arms. It's not that people don't want complete themes, for example. Were it not for Mozilla's incompetence (there's a bug somewhere that tracks how the total reported download count for complete themes was inexplicably reduced to just 10% of what it previously was, never recovering; there used to be hundreds of thousands of users of complete themes around ~2007-2009), such as the time wasted making incessant changes to the core browser theme that nobody asked for (nothing has ever looked as good as the Suite/SeaMonkey), is what has truly been the cause of these 'modernizations.'
XUL and the add-on SDK are so powerful that I basically re-created two old unix programs ('picons newscheck-faces' and 'xfaces' [0]) over the past couple of weeks. This simple XUL/XPCOM project of mine now brings an incredibly fast & powerful cross-platform solution to two of my favorite old mail visualization programs that have suffered extreme bit rot (I swear more people used Plan 9's vismon than the verious picons/faces programs).
When the legacy add-on api removal finally hits SeaMonkey, my whole extension will cease to function. In fact, it doesn't even work in the current SeaMonkey 2.54a1 nightly. Can you explain to me a similar cross-platform browser/mail client that provides similar APIs for me to rebuild my extension? The answer is no, because in a couple of months the one that did will no longer exist.
Anyway, my point is that I'm not exactly sure who Mozilla is targeting with the Firefox 57 release — perhaps their jet-setting upper management; perhaps nobody.
[0]: http://kinzler.com/picons/ftp/demo/
https://i.imgur.com/EnDMKuO.png
https://i.imgur.com/k40BISq.png
https://i.imgur.com/lvv9REm.jpg
(features not even pictured above: Face header decoding, X-Face header decoding, X-Image-URL header, and Contact Card Image support)
edit: also, as the one guy that has been updating the internal chrome:// url page in recent years, show me a browser that gives this amount of access to its internal tools: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Chrome_URLs#early_Mozilla_Suite_an...
The same marketing that insisted that Mozilla shift their major version on every release, and that keep producing sugar coated videos for the most vapid of reasons.
Face it, the FOSS world has become a bastion of champagne pimping social climbers that just want to add to their score card that they have worked on something with a "humanitarian" angle.
On that note, i guess there is always the option of helping out with Palemoon before they go through with their planned rebase on a more recent Firefox release...
I agree with your point about the shift in major version releases — this was another marketing ploy to 'catch up' to Chrome (who, for whatever reason, popularized the ridiculous practice of tagging releases with huge numbers).
When it comes to add-ons, this bigger-is-better mindset/fallacy is one of the things that Mozilla touts about the ~2000 new web-extensions on AMO. What they fail to mention is how many of these are just utterly useless (or whose core functionality is bested by something like youtube-dl, mpv, using the dev tools, etc.). People don't want the highly limited feature-set provided by web-extensions, they want add-ons that integrate themselves deep into the browser internals (noscript), leverage the add-on sdk, or modify the browser chrome:// in some way.
Edit: I cannot speak about the FOSS community as a whole (I only have experience in academia/government work), but from what I have read online about Mozilla's internal leadership, it currently seems like a difficult place to work if you legitimately care about these kinds of issues.
As for Palemoon, (I have made this clear in previous posts on HN and reddit), but I generally consider that project to be less than a joke. It would take an absolutely herculean amount of time and energy to keep their feature-set even with Firefox while retaining all of the stuff that is being decimated from mozilla-central. It's never going to work. They should focus their attention on SeaMonkey (comm-central) instead of wasting their time.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/herbal-guitar... — especially with the new Photon UI (57)
https://i.imgur.com/b5ZpLaO.jpg
Firefox has always been my main browser, with Chrome only used if required, although I generally have them both open. I am a heavy user of tabs and multiple windows, and Firefox eats Chrome's lunch in this area, while using far less memory.
Still, very good to see Mozilla back on track again and producing great browser software. Keep it up Mozilla!
Why should I take browser advice from someone who doesn't pay attention? Especially someone who lauds the "simplicity" of Chrome...
I do love how fast Firefox 57 is though.
Speed improvements are good, but the lack of basic features is what kills Firefox. It is not ready for heavy duty web app.
Thanks for the info.
Additionally, mouse gestures are completely broken on both linux and MacOS due to Firefox's implementation of right-clicking and that is not slated to be fixed before v57 releases.
Oh-- and there's no functional LastPass addon yet either. And 57 is in beta 4 and will be released very soon.
It is pretty fast, though. Good for benchmarks if not for actually using. Personally, I switched to Vivaldi.
It also is not the end of all Firefox development. Just because it's not necessarily done for 57, doesn't mean that it won't get fixed or that it will "NEVER" work well.
It's also nonsense to make assumptions about what will work in Firefox in the future based on what works in Chrome, as Mozilla is introducing additional APIs that Chrome does not have.
If you're happy with Vivaldi, your thing. But there also is Firefox 52 ESR, which will continue to get security updates until the 26th June 2018.
Sounds like FF Is making a comeback, I'll definitely try it out once it becomes stable.
Others have mentioned pocket's integration, but I can't wait to see the open-source code, I've already set-up my own Shaarli and Wallabag instances.
I'm still evaluating Brave and Vivaldi after being a long time (2+ years) user of Chomium. The only thing that's hardest to find is the separate identity management and Sync that comes so easily in Chrome/Chromium.
Is there any way I can easily objectively measure the impact from moving to FF? Like taking average memory footprints for a few days with each browser?
I have tried switching away at points before this, and something would bring me back to Chrome/Chromium, but not this time.
From first impressions though, I'm very impressed by how snappy it feels.
One downside is a personal site I host uses client side certs for auth, and that stopped working in Firefox (whereas it was fine in Chrome), turns out the Javascript fetch API needs you to structure the request like
`fetch(someUrl, { credentials: 'include' })`
So I had to go through the code to fix that.
Presumably this is a web standard that Firefox is adhering to, whereas Chrome is a bit more relaxed on this?
We need to give Firefox as many chances as it needs because it’s one of the most important projects on the Internet today.
And has Firefox on Linux always been more performant? Because over the years, as everyone else migrated away to Chrome, I never really noticed all of the things that were supposed to be so horrible about Firefox.
But after that bad first impression, launching Firefox 57 is very snappy.
https://www.waterfoxproject.org/blog/waterfox-55.0-release-d...
I'm on 56 atm in Windows 10 / 16 GB RAM / Core i5-3570K and for whatever reason when I press F12 to open up the console it is really sluggish and takes a good whole second to draw itself.
Does 57 solve that?
That said I could see myself just using Chrome for development and FIrefox as main browser. I did the opposite for a while until Firebug was phased out and Chrome Dev Tools became better.
Both browsers use threads extensively within each process as well.
It starts to be fully multicore, CSS engine was re-written in Rust, there's a new design (that they've named Photon), Pocket integration is now slightly tighter, WebExtensions become the default, and they've redesigned the developer tools.
Another big factor is the new UI. It's partially just more efficient, partially uses animations to make it look faster / more responsive, partially enables new performance features, such as "tab warmup", which starts loading in a tab as you hover your mouse over it, so that it's instantly there when you actually click.
Then they're still benefitting from the new multiprocess architecture. A lot of performance problems can be solved by just throwing a lengthy task into a background thread.
Then the deprecation of the old extension API is also significant. The old extension API had essentially no abstraction from Firefox's source code, so Mozilla couldn't even really refactor code without breaking extensions. Now that that's deprecated, they were able to throw out big chunks of code [1] and refactor what's left.
I presume that made it a lot easier to work with the code and find performance problems, but also just in general, they put a lot of effort into fixing hundreds of smaller performance issues that taken together did make a big difference, too.
Not to mention that lots of those old extensions had performance problems themselves as well.
And lastly, they also just made sure that the right things have the right priorities. Your background tab is not as important as the tab that you're looking at and so on. Again benefitting from the multiprocess architecture.
"Is Firefox Quantum significantly better than Chrome? No. But they are on par again"
Well this ringing endorsement sure sold me. Anyone else? Bonus: you can mix your own Firefox Quantum using two regular Firefox Colas, some Jet and Nuclear Materials at any crafting bench.
Looks like some interesting ideas on the user interface in the new Firefox.
Anyone worked out how to hide the tab bar with a single tab in 57 yet? (I'm odd, and I like to use my window manager to manage Web sites in windows.)
https://pasteboard.co/GMJ4vn9.jpg
Still some problems to fix in rendering, u could notice upvote button rendered in chrome and Firefox above
Never forgive never forget.
Never forgive, never forget.
Most of my monitors are high Hz (144 or higher), and the scrolling is definitely smoother than Chrome when there's plenty of images to be loaded. Like butter.
Immediately upon loaded CNN, my fan starts spinning up loudly (2016 macbook pro). When I loaded USAToday in another tab, I had to just quit FF because CPU was maxed out and laptop was overheating.
So...?
Has anyone else seen this problem?
Also I would encourage you to try Firefox Beta, currently on version 57, to see if the issue is present there (also that is the version of Firefox the article is talking about).
EDIT: And is it possible to block third party cookies?
No idea, though, how well it works, I don't have a touchscreen...
This is a great slogan, but actions speak louder than words. Why hasn't FF implemented basic privacy protections and block trackers like Safari does? If Firefox is really "for people," this seems like an area they should be leading in. A cynic (like me) might suggest that it is because Mozilla has become utterly dependent on ad revenue for their survival.
Long gone are the days when Mozilla was funded by donations and t-shirt sales. There was a time when it was more than just a browser maker, it was the spearhead of an internet movement for open source. I miss those days.
Google Allo Web, Hangouts, the Inbox Beta, Google Earth, etc all don’t work, or for a long time didn’t work in Firefox.
What's more, with Google at 60% market share and growing, and not offering such protections for their users, it becomes increasingly more likely for webpage owners to just drop Firefox completely. It's not worth the effort compared to the money they make off of oblivious Chrome users.
You also seem to not be aware of Tracking Protection. Firefox blocks trackers by default in Private Browsing. There's more examples where Firefox goes the extra mile to protect user privacy, but Tracking Protection really is just exactly what you said. You should've seen the outcry from webpage owners when that was pushed out to users.
What's the best way to visualize the relative $BAR usage of browser tabs in real time in the browser UI?
Could each tab have an instantaneous or averaging resource demand indicator shown? ...by a font modification, performance dial, color scheme, or animation...?
What's the best way to sort or select from all tabs, or a selection of tabs, by $BAR usage or a query on $BAR usage?
If you have passwords Xmarks isn't a webextension but you can use it on Firefox 56 and then upgrade.
https://forums.lastpass.com/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=266745&star...
This was a big relief for me, as it was the one extension I was really sweating on.
That said, I would love if there was a Chrome sync for Firefox, or Firefox sync for Chrome capability to sync bookmarks across them both.
But there are builds of Chromium that support Firefox Sync – Samsung’s Android browser even uses Firefox Sync by default
Chromecast is a closed protocol. There are SDKs for it, but you only have three options: Android, iOS, and Chrome.
It's a different story if you are just browsing, like the 95% or more of the internet consumers.
One thing I like about firefox is that its debugger is a just a React webapp : https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html. So it's fairly easy to add to it !
I don't know the stack, but I do remember there is a way to open dev tools FOR the dev tools window.
I did not know that.
If you go to the devtools settings you can add a lot of cool tools to the main pane including a canvas debugger and some other useful stuff.
One essential feature for me is being able to pause the debugger and use the mouse selector on DOM elements, which doesn't work in Firefox right now. This is pretty much the only way I know how to inspect and debug popups.
While FF 57 is usable on my Thinkpad 42p I can not say it is twice as fast as the previous version. Maybe the speedup depends on having a multi-core CPU, something which is notably absent in this 2004-vintage machine. Be that as it may, I think FF 57 is about as fast as its predecessor in general: faster in some tasks, slower in others, notably slower in scrolling.
I think their specific claim was twice as fast as Firefox 52 on one benchmark:
"is unstable" isn't a good reason to avoid it. I've been using Nightly as my daily (heh) driver for a long time. It's been awesome.
BTW, approval is really fast now: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/09/21/review-wait-times...
I strongly disagree. Browser functionality for everyone shouldn't be gimped to protect a small subset of users from themselves.
>"is unstable" isn't a good reason to avoid it.
I'm not holding a controversial opinion in thinking that alphas are generally buggy for significant subset of the userbase. I get that it might work fine for you but there's a reason aurora isn't release.
Developer Edition is not alpha.
>Firefox Developer Edition replaces the Aurora channel in the Firefox Release Process. Like Aurora, features will land in the Developer Edition every six weeks, after they have stabilized in Nightly builds.
the point is, they're so confident in the stability of the "alpha" they're offering it as something to be used by, well, all developers. And they should be confident. In the last year or so, Nightly only broke for me once.
Back to Chrome it is.
I can use Hangouts for simple messaging from Firefox, but as soon as we need to hop on a call I need to boot up Chrome. Often I forget and try to answer in Firefox just to get the error message. Then I have to start Chrome, login to gmail if it's logged out, wait for everything to load, and then answer the call. Ends up taking a fairly long time to answer an incoming call sometimes.
There is no need to point any fingers, but I find it interesting that for years now we've had key players in major browsers sit around at conferences and talk up how much they're working together on standards yet this is where we end up.
It was faster and had a smaller memory footprint than I remember, which was great. It also started stuttering on my macs every ~5 seconds or so. The page would just lock up. Couldn't find a solution. The only hints were to disable graphics acceleration, but those were years old.
On my windows machines it crashed, and crashed hard. Single tab has an issue, the entire browser crashed. Lost work.
No thanks FF, I'll try again in another decade.
You should hope that you'll have the option to do so in a decade, or maybe by then we'll all be getting extorted by Google after they've strangled the open web to death.
But good news, Firefox 57 will probably actually fix that. By 1) breaking unmaintained extensions for good and 2) switching to an extension API which makes it much harder for extension developers to make such mistakes.
Also, I don't know if this will be in 57, but extensions will probably eventually run in individual processes as well. And then you could just shoot down the process of the offending extension.
Something else is wrong. For years, I've regularly had >100 tabs open for weeks at a time.
Surely one would only offer Mozilla another chance once they have extended an olive branch, rather than a closed-circuit television camera?
Honestly, (unpopular opinion probably but) I'm really tired of this privacy-mania…
You can make Chrome more private and secure then Firefox with few command line options. Or use ungoogled-chromium.
do shell script "open -n -a 'Google Chrome' --args --incognito --disable-sync --disable-reading-from-canvas --disable-voice-input --disable-system-timezone-automatic-detection --connectivity-check-url=" & quoted form of url204 & " --disable-remote-fonts --no-referrers --disable-physical-keyboard-autocorrect --no-pings --enable-fast-unload --enable-media-suspend --enable-offline-auto-reload-visible-only --use-simple-cache-backend --aggressive-cache-discard --disk-cache-size=100663296 --proxy-server=" & quoted form of proxy_url
Checked Firefox 57/58 but can't confirm any visible performance gain. Documentation is lacking. And Firefox 57 has at the moment 58 extensions compatible. And it still has Pocket buil-in.