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Comment by superplussed | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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