My experience with Firefox Quantum [as compared to Chromium] | Hacker News Reader

My experience with Firefox Quantum [as compared to Chromium]

blog.einval.eu

40 pointsvifon16 comments

About the profiles, Firefox supports "Multi-Account Containers" [1], it's like profiles but per-tab. You can also force some websites to open in a tab (like facebook.com in a "Social Media" container). You should definitely give it a try!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15256603

I did give them a try and I use them for a different purpose. I use profiles when I want a separate set of bookmarks, browsing history and/or addons (like a work/home separation). I use containers if I want a different set of cookies, so usually if I need to log into a single service with multiple identities. Maybe I should have mentioned that in the article but I totally forgot about the containers when writing. They are nice but I wouldn't miss them much if they were gone.

How can I force a specific website to always open in a specific container? I cannot find it.

With the website open in a container, click on the Multi-account containers' icon (the 3 squares with a +) and check "Always open xxx in yyy".

I needed to install this addon[1]. Somehow I enabled the containers on Firefox 55 or 56 previously (possibly with about:config) and I didn't have this button. Thanks!

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

EDIT: Yes, it was privacy.userContext.enabled in about:config.

About the profiles, check out the about:profiles site in FF. For sure not as handy as described for chromium, but maybe easier than scripts.

I started to use Firefox Quantum after a 8 years long breakup. I'm impressed, so impressed that Firefox Quantum is the first browser I'm paying for every month, there is a donate link on Mozilla's homepage in the footer.

I have really been enjoying Quantum. It's noticeably faster on almost every page I use daily, or maybe it's just placebo. I have noticed that on pages that are very JS and video heavy (YouTube, KhanAcademy) it is quite a bit slower than Chrome, so I've just been using chrome for those.

I had to switch back because of this. For example Google docs was dog squeeze slow.

It is odd. Web sites load noticeably faster, but web _apps_ take longer to load than Chrome. Only tested on Google SPAs so far, though, so it may be a lack of optimization.

That is easily explained by faster rendering / CSS (Stylo) but a slower JS engine (vs V8)

Google sites load faster in Google Chrome. It makes sense.

Hmm, Google Docs and Gmail are fine for me. Are you using any extensions?

Noticed this as well, granted it may be because I had to lose about 20 legacy extensions...

switched to Firefox because Mozilla was the only company that was against inclusion of DRM into w3c standard.

One area I think Firefox could improve is site-level permissions. For example, when third-party cookie blocking is enabled, Chrome will display an icon in the URL bar when cookies are blocked. Using that icon, you can allow cookies if you need to. In Firefox, there's no way to tell that cookies are being blocked, and the procedure to unblock them (for me) involved finding the origin setting the cookie and manually setting the site permissions to allow cookies.

Another example: clicking the information icon for any site in Chrome allows me to quickly enabled/disable permissions. Have a site that is loading really abusive Javascript? In Firefox, there's no way to disable JS for the page outside of using your adblocker or globally disabling it. In Chrome, just click the site icon, click the Javascript menu, and choose disable.

Might as well plug my update experience as well, although you in particular have already seen it:

https://gist.github.com/FichteFoll/903baad8447ce83e81dee1789...

Regarding multiple tabs, I use this: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/multiple-tab-han... It also cooperates with Tree Style Tab (since it's from the same developer)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com