Is anyone else getting tired of Mozilla shilling how fast their new version of Firefox is? If it's really that good, let the product speak for itself.
I remained a loyal FF user myself and actually wanted to take this opportunity to promote Firefox Focus which makes it real easy to browse sensitive things like porn on a tablet shared by the family or SO.
It's oriented around privacy so it saves nothing and provides easy to access shortcuts for clearing browser history when you're done.
And all that wasn't enough since they also shadily (based on user agent for no good reason) blocked features for other browsers in their products.
For what it's worth, "millions of dollars" is probably understating things by 2-3 orders of magnitude. The ad budget for Chrome was likely comparable to Mozilla's entire budget for a few years there, even if you ignore the free product placement on google.com...
b) if they didn't make noise about this no one would try to switch to this fairly big release. It's a bit like the hype around Firefox 3.
One thing I've learned in life is, you can do great work, but if people don't know about it or appreciate it, it simply won't help you.
More info at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Fingerprinting
Is there a reason that setting does so many different things?
I've been trying it for a few days but it's a real problem when I want some of those settings but not others. For example the protection against canvas image extraction needs work. It's stuck on 'ask' with constant popups, and once you pick yes/no on a domain it's impossible to see the permission or change it ever again. Until it forgets on browser restart and starts bugging you all over again.
Step 1 is "Get people to (re)try the product".
Unless there's a magic wand waved that gets people unaware of a milestone release to (re)install and (re)launch FF57, Mozilla needs to put out some marketing just to even seed the basis for word-of-mouth of the product's merits.
Every percent we make the browser faster makes it more usable for people (and libraries!) with older, slower computers. A lot of the world can’t afford to upgrade. When we make it faster for everyone, we make it faster for them too.
If we save 0.3 seconds per page view, how many millions of hours do we save humanity from waiting for their browser to do something it could do faster if we just worked hard enough? That’s why faster is good, to me, and so this campaign aligns well with my personal reasons for working here.
Can you explain in a just a bit more details how Firefox "save humanity" 3 seconds if I and nine more people around shave off 0.3 seconds from some web page load and what exactly that mean?
Practically, I'm not sure how I feel about this metric on the 0.3 second level, but I sure do understand it at the 5 second level. I've stared at useless pages that are stuck on some tracking JS so many times I can't count, so if those stop making me stuck, that's invaluable once and multiply that win by a million.
But that's just time. If you also consider the resources that are needed to execute the page JavaScript, we're probably saving megawatts of power per interval (totaled across all Firefox users) with each small efficiency gain. The changes that are "parallelize all the work" may cost more, less, or same amount of power; the ones that are "use fewer CPU cycles" will definitely cost less power. And so there's a very real theory that we could probably measure how many gigawatt^-hours Quantum has saved the world to date, which appeals to me greatly :)
^ I arbitrarily picked "a million" and "gigawatts". This does not offer any guidance whatsoever on specific or approximate user counts.
EDIT: My UPS says that my entire desk has a load of ~75 watts @ 120V, times a million^ users = 75 megawatts. I haven't the faintest idea how much power it takes to evaluate Javascript inefficiently, but saving 0.3 seconds of any amount of power times a million^ users per page view quickly balloons into reality-impacting figures.
Personally it got me to start running Firefox again. I probably wouldn't have bothered if they hadn't been making such a hubbub about it.