Firefox’s faster, slicker, slimmer Quantum edition now out | Hacker News Reader

Firefox’s faster, slicker, slimmer Quantum edition now out

arstechnica.com

138 pointsrbanffy103 comments

My big question is whether people are really noticing such a dramatic speed difference? I've tried it several times, and it seems like there is a negligible difference, if any, between it and Chrome. And I'm a guy that uses Sublime even though I like the feature set on VSCode better because I can't live with the snappiness downgrade.

No. I try FF nightly very often because I really want to dump Chrome. But then it crashes (with devtools open, I should say; it's fine for regular browsing) or grinds to a crawl. Every tab. Total lockup, always within a few minutes of starting work.

OS?

Old profile?

Linux. I will try deleting my profiles.

Perhaps you can install Firefox stable, now that Quantum is available there. Nightly tends to crash more often; it crashes once or twice a week for me, but I already expect that. I'm using it to feel good about helping Mozilla.

I was also trying desperately to dump chrome, and the only thing stopping me was cpu usage. That seems to be fixed in this version.

I'm noticing it, but it was abnormally slow for me before the update. My installation was quite old, which might have something to do with it. The number of addons was reasonable (like 10ish or so), and nothing crazy (most thing shouldn't have to touch webpages, and those that do are well established: uBlock Origin, LastPass, ...).

LastPass may be established, but their old Firefox extension is a resource hog: I eventually just uninstalled it.

very stark difference for me on both my linux laptop and my work imac fwiw.

I've been using Firefox daily for 11 or 12 years. The speed up with 57 is dramatic versus past versions. I'm a very happy Firefox user again.

Is it faster than Chrome? I'm not seeing a meaningful difference between the two, both are very fast.

This jump for 57, keeps me from wanting to abandon Firefox for Chrome as my primary desktop browser however. I don't need Firefox to be faster than Chrome, I just need it to remain very competitive.

This is a great point. A lot of focus seems to be placed on beating Chrome. As long as browsers have about the same performance, then the other differences start to matter a lot, and that's where having an independent (default search contracts aside) browser provider is a big deal.

I don't see this as a competition for speed. To me it's more of an effort to get the performance issue out of the way so the real benefits can shine.

Personally, I can't help but notice a significant improvement in the feel of speed. Not done any hard measurements, but we all know that average users will go by feel. However I would not say the improvement is dramatic, but that may be because my network link is still DSL and hence its latency hogs my perception far more than Firefox's speedups.

It certainly can't be called as "slow" or "bloated" anymore by any reasonable stretch, that's for sure. And that can only help it claw back some market share going forward, but speed alone won't work magic. Firefox needs to once again grab the attention of ordinary computer users the way it did when it first arose from the ashes of Netscape. Fortunately people at that time were fed up of IE and were desperate for an alternative. The big question is, are people desperate for a Chrome alternative now?

Personally, I think the next target should be battery usage, that's where Chrome is vulnerable IMHO. The second target should be robust performance under Android, and the third some gimmickry that can entice iOS users (plus improvements on performance under iOS - I know the webview is what it is, but at the moment it lags even just typing in the search bar).

Enough with the distractions (ffos, iot, buzzword-of-the-day...), FF is getting back to basics and doing great, let's have more of it!

> The second target should be robust performance under Android

That's going to be hard, given Android and Chrome are both Google products.

It doesn't have to be better, it just has to be "not much worse", so that people coupling it with FF on desktop won't feel like they are missing out. You will likely not get new users from Android first, but you should be able to make sure all your desktop users remain so when using Android devices.

Besides, Google is not exactly famous for internal synergies, for years they had two different browsers on Android and they still have multiple chat apps...

firefox's performance gets pretty terrible if you leave a gmail tab open for more than a few minutes. i'm sure there is some data around to support people's gut reactions.

I always leave my gmail tab open and never noticed any issues. Could it be one of your extensions?

I agree I've had my gmail open for nearly 24 hours without issue.

I'm using an oldish HP laptop with Slackware current and I noticed a huge difference. I don't have PulseAudio installed so Quantum won't play sound but otherwise it's a big improvement for me. And it was super easy to install, just download, untar, move to proper path and execute.

Because of that I'm able to keep the old Firefox which works with ALSA for youtube and such and use Quantum for everything else. Gotta love switches like -profile and -no-remote.

Nice work Mozilla!

Maybe you could try out something like https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse for getting around the pulseaudio requirement.

Thank you, I will give it a go. Have been procrastinating for a while on taking care of this so thanks for the nudge!

edit: Figured I'd give it a try. Really easy to set up and after figuring out how to white list /dev/snd in Firefox it works great. Thanks again!

I noticed a huge difference . On my work machine Firefox became as fast as chrome if not even faster .

I don't notice a huge difference between Firefox 57 and Chrome. There's a massive difference between Firefox 56 and 57 on my systems though.

They may not be faster than Chrome but at least it's neck and neck again.

Yea, IMO Firefox 57 is about Firefox finally being able to compete with Chrome in terms of speed. This is easily the main reason Chrome ever took over (that, and Google aggressively advertising it and borderline malware-installing it in bundles of other software). I'd say Chrome and Firefox are identical now in terms of general snappiness and ease of use and it's giving Firefox a chance to actually race ahead with more smart improvements in the future and a believable commitment to protecting its users from aggressive data-leeching and advertising.

Speed feels the same on my top end machine but FF could handle more tabs opened and font rendering looks noticeably better on Windows 10 vs. Chrome.

Chinese characters look like a bad flashback from the 90s when viewed on Chrome, I can't believe they never bothered to fix it.

That's the point. It used to be very slow, clunky, and simply ugly compared to Chrome since the Australis redesign. It's a lot better now, and is about the same in speed plus more memory efficient.

Especially with the dev tools open, I had several sites that could reliably crash Firefox on an i7 which led me to finally switch to Chrome.

Firefox rendering speed and dev tools penalty were pretty bad and I'll take any improvement I can get.

I want to switch back, but for that rendering speed, quality of the development tools and sandboxing need to be at least on par with Chrome.

If you compare it with Chrome it's hard to say. But if you just want to use Firefox (because speed is not everything), the difference between 57 and 56 is huge. I spent 15 minutes just opening sites at random to enjoy the speed :).

On the other hand, the addons took a big hit, most of my addons aren't supported anymore. And it seems that everybody is searching for equivalents, as http://addons.mozilla.org/ seems to throw nginx errors right now.

I did, and I'm tired of Chrome eating my machines alive. I've been running Nightly for a few weeks now and I only open Chrome to use the cast plugin.

I didn't notice a difference between 56 and 57.

I live and work in a Rural area, with terrible Broadband. FireFox is appreciably faster here.

If you want to see how much of a difference the past few months of landing big changes has made, try running Firefox 52 next to 57. On Windows, you can grab both Firefox Portable ESR 52.x and Firefox Portable 57 and compare them without messing with your local installs from PortableApps.com.

its great that they have improved compared to themselves, but i think the question is, is it vastly faster than chrome?

think of it this way, why would i switch to firefox to get back to where i was to begin with (speed wise)? firefox would have to be substantially different from chrome to make people make the effort to switch. right now it seems that it is just catching up to the competition. i look forward to the continued updates and will continue to look into the possibility of switching in the future. right now, the speed is comparable to chrome, and extensions seem to be at a disadvantage. a few more months to go for me, personally before trying again.

Firefox is now comparable to Chrome in actual usage (some sites faster some sites slower) but generally starts up faster, uses less RAM if you're a tab-a-holic, and 'feels' faster in usage. This makes Firefox's other benefits (fully open source, not tied to an advertising company, more customizable, actual competition in the browser space so we don't wind up with an IE-style monoculture again with webkit/blink, etc) more attractive as they do not incur the penalty of using a slower browser to get them.

I have several atom-based 2-in-ones that are now unusable with edge and chrome, and installing FF57 (beta) brought them back to life. This is a great performance improvement.

I've been wanting to get back on Firefox for quite some time now, but the main thing holding me back was that all of my passwords were saved on Chrome. A few months ago, I moved to 1Password, so this is the perfect time to give it a real try!

For folks not using Chrome as their password manager. Firefox has a built in utility to import passwords from Chrome. Personally, I use both. Chrome for the less important things that I want super-quick access to (i.e. autofill) and 1P for everything else.

I've been looking for a way to import passwords from Chrome into Firefox, and was unable to find it. It is the only thing preventing me from using Firefox. Can you point to some place have any link where this is documented? (I'm using Firefox Developer edition.)

It looks like you can do it here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/import-bookmarks-data-a...

The UI is kinda sucky and for some reason every couple years they insist in switching the location of basic things like the refresh button, favorites, etc.

56 was already fast for me, didn't noticed much difference but it's a good thing they woke up and started doing the work instead of all talk and fuzzy feelings about other personal agendas.

If it was fast it was because your machine is single core. Honestly to the average user it was unusable for a very long time.

They didn't woke up. Long term work finally sold off ...

I don't like the new default interface at all, but at least it's mostly customizeable without addons.

I changed to the "light" theme, disabled animations (toolkit.cosmeticAnimations.enabled;false), turned the title bar back on, turned off all of the pocket/highlights junk on the new tab window, and changed the density to "compact".

I like the experience now, except for the square tabs really bug me.

I can't make it to show a dropdown arrow in the URL box like any normal dropdown would, at the far right of the box, always at the same place. They moved the arrow to somewhere randomly in the middle, depending on the icons inside of the URL box. Somehow these icons are more importan to them?

It seems their developers don't use that arrow? Or is it because Chrome doesn't have it? I'm not using Chrome, but it seems the FF developers do, if true.

I miss Tab Mix Plus (pleeeease make a web extension version!) but Firefox is one of the few open software projects which actually puts a ton of effort into interface design and I can appreciate that. I clicked on the wrong side maybe twice but I do get why you'd put the refresh button to the left side, if nothing else, to establish a common interface language with how Chrome and Edge do it. They have smart UI guys and even if they can still fuck up here and there you can really feel they're taking this seriously and the result is a browser experience that doesn't feel like whatever the UI-equivalent of "programmer art" is.

Yeah, you said it. I don't know who is in charge of changing the theme and UI every major release but this time they've out done themselves.

I don't usually like to customize but it's mandatory now.

I'm on 57 since some time now. It is certainly faster, but still not competitive on macOS compared to Chrome. Responsiveness and especially cpu load are quite high as soon as animations are happening. Is it just me?

I'm on a 7 year old macbook air and FF 57 is noticeably faster than 56.

Not just you. I've been using it on and off since Nightly and it drains my battery fairly quickly. I'm back to using Chrome.

Ironically, I read this blog post (https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/entering-the-quantum-era-h...) in Chrome and Firefox, and on Firefox the scrolling was noticeably slow to the point where I found it distracting.

Edit: Turns out scrolling a simple page up and down causes Firefox to use 40% CPU. Is it not using any hardware acceleration?

Not sure if it's using hardware acceleration right now (i.e. in v57), but there's a new rendering component (WebRender) coming in one of the next releases which does everything on the GPU.

Hardware acceleration is a feature in the options. I've not found that it's very useful and had to turn it off for performance reasons.

Maybe it depends on the graphics chip? In some OSX/model combinations, the initial switch from integrated to discrete is terribly expensive and laggy. If the browser is somehow triggering the switch, I can see how it could be stalling.

It is definitely not happening for me on Sierra 10.12.6 on high-spec MBP-tb late 2016, this FF version really flies. CPU is not low, but FF and Chrome have always been hogs in my experience, as long as they are responsive I don't care too much. I guess it also helps that it killed a bunch of extensions...

I just tried Firefox 57 on my Windows machine. One of the first pages it showed me was https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox. Scrolling on that page I immediately noticed that it was dropping frames, a lot. I tried the same page in Chrome and it maintains 60 FPS. I've got high spec machine but with an NVidia NVS 310, which might be the problem. However, Chrome is fine...

I would try turning off hardware acceleration in the settings. I was having a problem with stutter and jitter in previous versions and this helped with my issue.

Battery drain on Mac OS (High Sierra, early-2015 MBP Retina) is definitely more significant than Chrome, especially with video, as measured with the "Energy impact" index in Activity Monitor.

Twitter timeline measured with "Live video" open on right-hand sidebar, then "Live video" collapsed:

FF 57 - 225, 22 Chrome 61 - 60, 3

I've decided to make Firefox my main browser after yesterday's discussion. Migrating from Chrome was relatively painless:

* Firefox could import my bookmarks and, equally important, most passwords without a problem.

* Firefox's syncing capabilities seems to sync everything that's important.

* There's a built-in dark theme, people! It isn't applied to empty tabs, though.

* You can customize the toolbar. Not nearly as powerful as Opera's visual editor but better than Chrome's.

* Many plugins haven't been ported to 57.

* It uses a lot of RAM. I only have two tabs open and 5 plugins active yet Firefox uses 500 MB. Doesn't really bother me because I can sacrifice RAM for performance.

* The unified address/search bar is better than Chrome's because it actually consistently searches your bookmarks and not randomly like Chrome. Also, because you can add metadata to your Firefox bookmarks, you can add synonyms and what not to make searching for bookmarks even more powerful.

* I absolutly love that Firefox makes it possible to create custom search engines via the context menu. Also, you can easily add shortcuts to specific bookmarks? Brilliant.

>It uses a lot of RAM

I think Firefox uses a bit more RAM than Chrome when being just opened with fresh session. The point is - that value doesn't increase so massively when opening more tabs as with Chrome. On my machine with 8 GB RAM, Chrome is just unusable, as it eats the whole RAM and everything starts to swap. If you actually use the browser, Firefox clearly wins regarding RAM usage.

Here, right now, with 136 tabs open and 20 extensions, Firefox Nightly uses 2 GB of RAM, with 0.5 GB being used by 1 one of 8 content processes (so probably mostly by long-running Facebook tab, which is massive resource hog). Chrome would eat the whole 8 GB somewhere around 30-50 tabs already.

I am happy to see a return to the simplified options menu. When I do remote technical support it's much easier to say click on the icon with three horizontal lines then click "Preferences" rather than find the gear icon that may be moved due to screen resolution.

Same.

I still miss Classic Theme Restorer, but the main reason I used it was to bring back the old FF menu button, as I refused to use the weird "bag of squares" menu that seemed to come out of nowhere.

Still feels like it's in the wrong place, and I feel like I should be able to move it, but I'm starting to get used to the new one.

It's supposed to support FIDO U2F devices, but I'm unable to log into my Google or Github accounts like I do in Chrome. I'm not sure if it's on their end or Firefox's.

I get that it's an edge case, though. Has anyone else noticed this or looked into it?

It's available from 58 (so, not current release) and you have to explicitly enable it in `about:config`. Search for "security.webauth" and enable what you would like.

With that method, you can successfully login to GitHub and other services using U2F. Unfortunately, not Google, because Google doesn't check if Firefox has U2F support or not. Instead, it makes the assumption based upon the browser agent.

I pulled in an addon on an earlier version, and it worked perfectly on github. Gmail, however, refused to even let me try on firefox, saying it was unsupported. So blame google.

Being faster is one thing (good thing).

Having most of extensions unusable - not quite.

Till 'UnMHT' or 'Custom Tab Width' and several other extensions are not present for Firefox Quantum, I stick to 'slow' Firefox 56.

Has anyone else noticed really slow performance on Google sites (especially Inbox and Docs) with Quantum? Are there any theories on what’s causing it?

I really want to use Firefox more but I spend a lot of time in GSuite.

Google likely doesn't test/optimize for browsers other than Chrome as much as they do for Chrome. It's similar to how Microsoft used to mainly test/optimize for IE and if anyone complained they just told them to use IE.

should remain quick and responsive even under heavy load with hundreds of tabs.

What is the use case where someone would require hundreds of tabs to be open?

It's not very unlikely for me to have thousands of tabs open in Firefox. It makes the browsing, especially researching, worry free, and with good UI (scrolling tabs, searching in Awesomebar and possible extensions like Tab Center Redux or Tree Style Tabs) it's still easy enough (if not easier) to navigate. I can't stand using Chromium, since after a few hours of browsing you can't navigate the tabs at all, since they are all reduced almost to single pixels.

I've been wondering this for years. I'm glad Firefox can handle it but I can't help but feel that whatever use case people have shouldn't be the concern of a browser and could be better solved by a tool designed specifically for whatever it is they need.

Firefox w/tree style tabs is a research tool for many of us.

For me, whenever I find myself with 100 tabs, I realize that the problem is the bookmark/tab dichotomy, which can probably be solved with better UI - e.g. a bookmark is a frozen tab with a copy of the last content it showed, and be refreshed automatically or on demand.

I never use bookmarks, at all. Tabs in Firefox work that way just great.

They sort-of-do, but on my machine (an i3 with 8GB memory running Ubuntu), there's threshold that - when crossed - causes it to slow down considerably, and e.g. take about 5 minutes to become interactive after quitting and restarting.

Also, they are way too easy to close accidentally; bookmarks stay, but if you accidentally closed one of your thousand tabs 3 months ago, good luck finding it in history.

I had that issue (slow restart) with earlier versions, but it has been fixed with FF56.

This. I use onetab[0] for chrome as an intermediary between bookmarks and tabs. It lets me send all the tabs on the right, left, just the current tab etc to a temporary bookmarks page that I can scroll through and restore from with ease.

[0]https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...

Actually, I'd like to revert the question: why would I close tabs? I generally have a few hundreds of them opened, because it works.

Once in a while, I realize that I'm not going to read all of these things and I remove most of them. But I'm glad my Firefox scales up to these use cases.

> why would I close tabs

Anxiety at the "I must read this" a bunch of open tabs can create. Frustration at being unable to find the tab I actually wanted to pull up out of the hundreds available to me. Forgetting something I actually wanted to do because it's buried in an avalanche of windows.

It's kinda funny to watch a colleague who follows that mantra try and find the right tab, sometimes cycling through the 4-5 copies of the same website to find the one with the proper state.

Then I see them do the same thing with terminal tabs/windows and cringe because they can never remember where they are or where their windows are connected to. Given that they have prod access and are connected out there while also developing locally, I'm sure nothing will ever go wrong...

That anxiety does not exist for everyone. I do a thing I call "immutable browsing" with tree-style tabs. I open EVERY link in a new child tab (and I might try to make my browser [0](shameless plug) support new-tab form submission). When I no longer need the parent, I just close it and other tabs move up.

Navigating a tree of your actions or your current context is actually way easier than re-navigating a website. This is especially true with things like API docs where you might open a bunch of things and constantly re-reference them. Saving off trees and supporting a kind of quick-tab-find approach both help here too. This also helps when navigating things like source repositories on GitHub.

We don't tell people to retrieve files externally because their filesystem makes it hard to find things. And we don't really chide people for too many editor tabs open either because we have a navigation panel. Why is a browser any different here?

0 - https://cretz.github.io/doogie/

> And we don't really chide people for too many editor tabs open either because we have a navigation panel

> Why is a browser any different here?

"navigation panel" In which case the tabs are effectively duplicated, and not of much use.

> Navigating a tree of your actions or your current context is actually way easier than re-navigating a website.

It really depends on the size of the tree, and the speed of page loads. For example, I keep a local copy of the Python, Go, and Boto documentation. This makes navigation fast and simple, even in the slowest of browsers. Click on a link, loaded (virtually) instantly. Hit the back button on my mouse, loaded instantly. One tab, fast as I could ever ask for.

Ultimately, OP was asking why, I answered. No chiding intended, and only a little judgement - but disorder is incredibly ineffective.

They still haven't found the location bar or noticed that it has auto completion.

I regularly have >50 tabs open, so I find not difficult to believe somebody could have hundreds of tabs.

Porn.

Tabs are the only data representation of a tree of threads of research on a topic that I’ve found that works for me on the web. Not just spatially (I use Tree Style Tabs), but also over page history and context. Bookmarks are a snapshot in time of the arrangement of tabs, but then I lose the page history when I close the tabs. Once my thread of research solidifies to a point I’m satisfied with, I transcribe to notes I keep in Emacs Org mode. But until my thoughts coalesce adequately, the tabs let me conveniently re-acquire my mind state at the time I left off.

I should probably disclose that my lines of questioning cover very broad and unrelated areas. So a lot of what I research is along the lines of the direct question itself, then zillions of offshoots as I read to learn how to interpret the results as I’m frequently delving into subjects I am not deeply familiar with.

Mind mapping software is starting to get close to what I really want, but there are some rough edges to work out.

Did 57 fix the profile rot problem? (wherein the user profile will eventually start causing the browser to bog down over weeks and months of continual use).

AFAICT, it's still very common for someone with a "slow firefox" issue to be told to nuke their user profile.

I recently heard of user profile resets being touted as a solution to various issues. I found it interesting because I’ve been using the same set of user profiles for the past 10 years without issue.

Perhaps it’s a solution for problems caused by too many installed add-ons (that may conflict with each other). I’m fairly conservative about what add-ons I install and don’t have more than 10 installed at any one time.

I'm really glad that Firefox is back in the game! But I haven't got a compelling reason to switch from Chrome just yet.

privacy?

Sorry to sound negative, but what exactly?

Both browsers communicate with their owners under various circumstances. Both have it relatively well documented (both with some omissions, as the docs lag behind). Both had screw-ups (probably, non-malicious but just accidental - YMMV) and were caught communicating something (IIRC, non-severe) when they shouldn't have been. Both have their own ecosystem/services (starting with Google and Firefox Accounts respectively) that they actively promote.

This is subjective, but I believe in the large picture neither of browsers has some consistent technological advantage in terms of user privacy (fingerprinting, data leaks, options to block unsafe modern stuff etc). One or another wins over specific cases or introduces some measures before another does, but they feel to be generally on par - at least if we consider available extensions (adblocking, etc) and not just the core features.

The only significant difference I see is that one of the browsers markets itself with heavy use of term "privacy", and other doesn't.

When it comes down to it, Google is a for-profit company that makes money by selling targeted ads. Mozilla is not.

Or, in their own words, Google: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful

Mozilla: ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all

Intentions and goals matter.

Sure, but isn't it a variant of ad hominem? Or, well, ad collegium.

As long as Chrome itself really doesn't do anything particularly wrong, of course. But I think Google (probably because of lots of various rumors) went to great lengths to actually describe what they do and what they don't, and I haven't spotted anything particularly alarming in their privacy whitepapers.

Compared to Chrome, Firefox has the huge advantage that it is Free Software, while Chrome (the whole package) isn't.

Compared to Chromium (the Free Software part of Chrome), Firefox has the advantage that it has no anti-features in the first place, rather than having the Chromium community trying to keep after Google removing each anti-feature as soon as they notice.

Mozilla is an independent advocate for the open web, compared with a for-profit entity. This means the incentives are better. They try to fight the good fights, even if they don't always succeed.

That's a key reason to support them.

There's no Policeman like extension avalaible now :(

You can try umatrix - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/

I dislike it intensely. What I had was working for me.

All my add ons got disabled and many will never get updated

Why do people here feel the need to down-vote personal opinions? So their preference is to not like the new release and they commented as such. Do we really need to down vote someone because they have a differing view?

I didn't downvote but their comment contributes nothing to the conversation. Why don't they like it? What are their issues?

There's not actually anything forcing you to upgrade should you not want to.

Except that the web browser is the single largest attack surface on nearly all computers, and refusing to update it is pretty much explicit consent to your computer being used as raw material for botnets, or worse.

exactly. Web browser, and in second place, the operating system itself

You can always move to a smaller, slower computer.

Try the ESR release. It will keep the changes/updates to a minimum but you'll still get security fixes.

FF 57 feels quite good on my Mac, but it has an impediment to me to use it everyday: Google Hangouts videocalls. I use GSuite on my organization, so I use it practically everyday.

Any news on that? Will the introduction of WebExtensions might help?

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