Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017 | Hacker News Reader

Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017

wired.com

454 pointsbpierre328 comments

On my end, I never actually stopped using Firefox after Chrome came out. I had Chrome installed and used it mostly for testing and validation of web code, but my day-to-day was Firefox. I had my extensions configured and setup in it and my large collection of bookmarks was there (I guess I was just too lazy to import them into Chrome). I think the main reason I stuck with Firefox was because I used Android and the Firefox browser on Android supported my extensions -- the most important being uBlock Origin, so the browsing experience was better even though the overall performance wasn't great -- and since my bookmarks were synced, it just worked out better for me that way.

I ran Developer edition, so I received the updated that killed most of my extensions earlier than most and I realized that the main reason I used Firefox was because of my collection of extensions -- many of which now didn't work. So I abandoned Firefox on all but mobile earlier this year and switched to Vivaldi (chromium based)[0].

Now that my most important extensions are available (though still haven't found uBlock Protector), I've started using Quantum again. I'm really enjoying the fact that HTML5/Flask autoplay can be disabled in "about:config" (and that it works, unlike the myriad of extensions I installed for Vivaldi claiming to do the same but which mostly broke things like gifv playback and random non-YouTube video sites that would still autoplay or would simply refuse to play). Firefox Quantum is faster and I'm back to being a (mostly) happy Firefox user, again. Last night I removed the icons for Opera and Vivaldi from my task bar to keep me from accidentally starting them due to muscle memory (and therefore adding bookmarks in a place where I will lose them).

[0] No, I don't have a thing against Google, I just preferred the high-degree of customization that Firefox/Vivaldi gave me over Chrome. I don't like Chrome's opinionated configuration panel -- I'm a developer and I like knobs to turn. Though Vivaldi lacked the conveniences of syncing things between my various machine so I ended up on Opera rather regularly.

As an avid Vivaldi user, I was impressed with what Firefox Quantum had to offer. I hadn't used Firefox since Chrome became dominant, it was interesting to see what Firefox had to offer compared to the Chromium-based ecosystem.

Personally, I would consider Firefox Quantum to be a step up over Chrome, but it's still missing much of the customization that I grew to love under Vivaldi. Simply being unable to change keybindings or the speed dial selection were enough to draw me back to Vivaldi, but I'll be keeping a keen eye on Firefox development from now on.

I do agree however, the lack of syncing is a major drawback to Vivaldi, and one I hope they will add in the near future.

You can customize what pages are displayed in the quick dial screen (and pin them, so that they stay there), but you cannot change the images and reorder sites by dragging (you need to re-enter the URL in some further tile).

I'm surprised at the success of Mozilla's PR push for this. It seems the time is right for this. Probably helps that tech sites seem to compete to have an article on every "current" topic.

Mozilla is running Firefox adverts in my city. I don't remember seeing browser adverts since the initial chrome push.

Does Chrome spam on the google home page count?

I've heard that is one of the most valuable ad spots in the world and I've seen a lot of Chrome ads there.

> I've heard that is one of the most valuable ad spots in the world

Yeah since they literally won't sell that spot, I'd say it's worth billions of dollars.

It would be fascinating to know if Mozilla's financing model makes advertising a no-brainer, i.e. the cost of switching 1,000 users is more/less than the search bar revenue from 1,000 users.

For starters, Google Translate has had a Chrome advert for as long as I remember.

Just to make it clear, I was talking about physical billboard adverts.

It helps if your claims on the product are legit. My Facebook feed (the tech related people) exploded when the new version came out.

'DOM' panel in FF DevTools unfortunately still doesn't distinguished between inbuilt native DOM nodes and custom DOM nodes from JS code - making the DOM panel still completely useless. Firebug grouped non-native DOM nodes (the interesting ones for devs) and sorted them on top, and marked them in bold font - non of these is in the new FF. Until DOM panel still a work-in-progress, I cannot switch.

I still keep a Firebug 48 with old Firebug addon around, because of the awesome DOM panel (that also Chrome doesn't have).

> inbuilt native DOM nodes and custom DOM nodes from JS code

What does that mean? What are "inbuilt native" DOM nodes, or "custom DOM nodes"?

DOM nodes not declared in the static HTML? Not that that makes any more sense as plenty of these are implicit.

I believe frik means what's described in the "Love your own" section: https://getfirebug.com/dom#content

Yes, thanks! It's hard to describe, but this page nails it including the screenshots!

  Love your own

  There are two kinds of objects and functions - those that 
  are part of the standard DOM, and those that are from your 
  own JavaScript code. Firebug can tell the difference, and 
  shows you your own script-created objects and functions in 
  bold at the top of the list.

  To be even more discriminating, use the options menu to 
  completely hide different kinds of objects. For instance: 
  Show Own Properties Only hides derived properties from the 
  prototype chain, Show Enumerable Properties Only hides non-
  enumerable properties and Show Inline Event Handler shows 
  inline event handlers that are not associated with functions.

With "your own JS code" it means the JS libraries, the JS code of your website. Also any changes to DOM made by JS code is also highlighted in bold and different colors like green and red. Try it out yourself, you will see it's very useful undo you will ask yourself, why haven't I used it in the past.

I fear as it's now hard to impossible to try out Firebug with current Firefox, and the WebDevTools have long forgotten the past functionality of Firebug, we may never again get this valuable features back. :(

But to try it out yourself, either download FF48 portable and install an older Firebug revision (the last two Firebug revisions are "fake" meaning the basically remove Firebug, so use an older Firebug from 2015, you have to install it manually, or downgrade it)

Despite the downvotes by people who don't got it, it's a very valuable feature that made a Firebug so special and useful.

Please Mozilla devs, try it out, and you will get it in 1min how useful it is, and please add it to DevTools. (@Chrome devs: please also add it)

The DOM "proper" (created by markup or user agent) and the global JavaScript scope.

Using the new Firefox, I find myself wishing the phone OS project had succeeded. I want something to Android what Quantum is to Chrome. Timing is everything, I wonder if it could have succeeded now.

Ah yes. The fight for smartphone OS dominance is unfortunately over, but I do hope a company like Mozilla could secure a leading spot in the next big consumer technology platform (my bet would be AR), so we can have the option to choose an open platform that respects user freedom, backed by a team that truly has the users' best interests in mind.

>an open platform that respects user freedom, backed by a team that truly has the users' best interests in mind.

Until they begin introducing useless features no one has asked for, redesigning the interface - I'm sorry - "user experience" to be more "modern" (cough... chrome-like... cough) and then change the API without full backward compatibility rendering about a decade of extensions - cough... addons - cough... I think they back to calling them extensions - useless.

Not to mention the users, who had about a decade worth of muscle memory and their extensions configured just the way they like, who now have to start over.

We'd finally have been free from the shit Google and Apple keep pulling. I'm afraid the mobile train is so long gone that it's impossible to get on board now. Even Microsoft, armed with a solid polished product could not make a dent.

> it's impossible to get on board now

To be fair people said the same thing thing to Apple when they decided to enter the phone market

The "smartphone" was still in its infancy back then.

Today the technology is mature enough, so it's more about the (small) gimmicks like fingerprint scanners.

Fingerprint scanners changed the game again for me. Saves countless times of typing the pin code over and over.

All the innovations the iPhone had were also called gimmicks by industry leaders at the time.

Solid base product. Terrible browser and poor store management were are problem for too long.

I don't think you necessarily need a large market share. You just need your alternative to be viable for individuals to choose to use. Then if it's better, you'll gain users.

Firefox itself needs large market share, as a bulkhead against sites that work only in {IE6|Chrome}.

Mobile OSes need large enough market share because you have to persuade the proprietors of important services to make their services available on the OS — if those services aren't available, your OS won't have enough utility for most users.

But it is possible to get a large number of services working on an unpopular mobile OS — if there's a common standard that unpopular platforms can make use of, which is good enough for most users — such as web apps.

(For example, DuckDuckGo can succeed or fail on merit, because it's a viable alternative. In the Linux bubble, most apps don't specifically target unpopular distros, but they can make use of the same source code or the same packaging formats.)

So if we want better mobile OSes, we should support interoperability of apps.

It's good to see Mozilla's ramped up PR, but given how deeply entrenched Chrome is, I doubt it will be enough. That is why we developers, if we support Firefox's/Mozilla's mission, must make it our goal to spread the word. I'm setting a personal goal to let 5 (non-tech) people (mostly in my family) know about this.

I've only seen tech articles/blog posts for Mozilla's PR, so while that is great, they may need to expand their efforts to include the general public. Chrome did speed-test television ads [0] like, Is Chrome faster than a potato cannon? that were appealing to a general audience. Not suggesting Mozilla do this. Perhaps reaching out to universities and school districts to adopt Firefox as their default browser? At my university if you went on a public computer all it had on the desktop was Chrome, so guess what people are going to use, not only on school computers but on their personal devices? The same is true for my high school.

I commend Mozilla for their giant task at hand, taking on such a technological behemoth that has uncountable benefits when it comes to advertising their browser.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0

And right at the time of year when techies are going home for the holidays to do tech support. Brilliant!

It helps they have a very, very good product this time around.

I bet it was 2009 since I last used firefox, other than testing for reported bugs in it. I've been using it exclusively since the Quantum launch, and I really enjoy it.

I liked the idea of having real browser diversity before, but it wasn't practical for me. Now it's practical and awesome.

Same for me. I tried to switch back to Firefox a couple of times in the past and couldn't do it. Performance wasn't there and the UI would often hang without response.

But Quantum changed everything. I've been using Nightly since this summer and it's wonderful. I now use it as my default browser.

The speed increase in Firefox has been something I haven't seen in a browser update for years.

It reminds me of Phoenix (to become Firefox), and how much of an improvement it was over the Mozilla browser. It makes me wonder where things went wrong, as I recall the Firefox of ~2005 being snappier than the one of ~2015. The only discrete drop in performance that I can remember was the addition of the AwesomeBar (which was worth it, but it really annoyed me at the time that just typing in an address became sluggish). Of course, my memory about these things could be completely wrong, and in any case web 2.0 gradually took over and websites accreted JavaScript faster than the hardware could improve, so comparing today with 10-15 years ago isn't really fair... Well, congrats to the Firefox developers, because it really is a pleasure to use again.

> It makes me wonder where things went wrong, as I recall the Firefox of ~2005 being snappier than the one of ~2015.

If you visit any page made in 2005 with any recent browser it will be unbelievably fast. Pages became more bloated in the last decade because they could.

this + stuck js + single threading..

chrome's day-one multiprocess support was really the big shift since it allowed js bloat to not kill your session, which in turn allowed more js bloat to exist, which in turn made ff slower..

Yeah, when you think about Chrome's being selling points - a browser that won't crash just because one tab does, sandboxing, and responsiveness - it's literally all just from their multiproc architecture. It bought them so much to have that from the state.

But, like Firefox, they now have a big codebase to maintain and it's not so easy to get massive perf improvements because changing up architecture is painful.

first releases of firefox were also pretty bare. in a good way, it didn't do much but did everything I, as a coder, wanted. Now think about devtools and live customization .. and every other bits added.

> I can't use the Conde Nast CMS in anything other than Chrome, so I can't switch completely.

Highlight of the article tucked in at the end there.

Chrome is IE6 all over again.

It shares a fraction of one property with IE6. It's nothing like IE6 in all other respects.

A quick refresher for those that perhaps was not around in those heady days: to build even moderately advanced (dynamic) web pages that were cross browser compatible was not merely a question of remembering to test in both, it was a significant engineering commitment. To add to the badness, Netscape in those years was frankly just not a very good browser, so it was not a particularly easy sell. Thus a lot of apps built in those years only (and quite rationally, too) targeted IE4, 5 and finally 6, Microsoft being very focused on backwards compatibility. IE7 was the first browser standards compliant enough to make cross browser development reasonably easy, also being the first browser in the line to have to compete with Firefox. It broke backwards compatibility, which is why IE6 ended up hanging around for so long and being so hated, even if was the DHTML API of IE4 that was the original culprit.

Today, there is no good excuse to build web apps that does not work in all the major browsers, it's just so (relatively) easy. But that was emphatically not the case 15-20 years ago.

You'd think that a technology-oriented magazine like wired would at least try to aim for cross-browser compatibility in their infrastructure. But why bother, make your CMS Chrome-only a policy and free yourself of extra testing.

And it's not only wired. I've come across a lot of internal sites and intranets that are poorly tested on anything but Chrome. I know, it's not exactly the same thing as the old IE/ActiveX but it still grinds my gears when it happens.

If Firefox had a larger market share, it would be easy to make the argument for cross-browser compatibility. But when Firefox is not even 12% of Chrome's usage globally http://gs.statcounter.com/ and likely much less for your customers it's difficult to appeal to ideals

Oh come on.

We've been pushing this since IE6 ruled. :-)

Cross browser compability should be easier than ever so it should just be a matter of being a professional developer.

There are a different and arguably smaller set of warts in 2017 compared to 1999 but that doesn't mean that it's easy to reproduce the exact layout, pixel for pixel, across Firefox, Edge, Opera, UC Browser, Safari, Chrome and other browsers in use.

That's true and to be honest I don’t care too much about pixel perfect.

But I think this thread started with a CMS that didn't even work except in Chrome.

There is a difference between "it works" and pixel-identical results. Those are probably impossible due to font rendering differences anyway.

Nobody cares about pixel for pixel perfection. But as a professional developer you should make sure that functionally it works in all major browsers.

Why is pixel-for-pixel similarity even desired? Is it even true across versions of the same browser, or different user settings (like window size or font size)?

Maybe, but those 12% (didn't check the numbers, I take your word for it) are much more sensitive about such discrimination. That's IE all over again...

I'd be more sympathetic if there weren't examples of Mozilla explicitly fighting against features supported by the other vendors. The classic example is Web SQL, an immensely useful API that Mozilla fought hard against and successfully lobbied to kill off. Chrome and Safari still support it. So for a wide swath of problems, you can either use WebSQL and drop FF support or hack around with a slurry of third party libraries and inferior APIs. Should all web developers be restricted because a vendor with relatively small usage insisted on not supporting features?

> This document was on the W3C Recommendation track but specification work has stopped. The specification reached an impasse: all interested implementors have used the same SQL backend (Sqlite), but we need multiple independent implementations to proceed along a standardisation path. [1]

The w3c requires a standard to have 2 or more independent implementations of a spec. Why should Mozilla or Microsoft be responsible for writing an independent implementation of SQLite just so webSQL can be a standard.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/

And on the flip-side, we have MathML which the Chromium team decided to drop, fighting against an incredibly useful and performant (in comparison to other Javascript-based implementations) feature supported by Firefox and Safari which made mathematics a first-class citizen on the web.

Is WebSQL the "classic" example, or the only example? Can you give another?

WebSQL does seem a little nutty to me. You’d perennially be in a state of wondering which SQL features it supported and which it didn’t. It would just introduce a whole other layer of browser incompatibilities as the browser vendors prioritized different features and performance optimizations.

Or, if you committed to keeping it simple and not chasing Postgres and MySQL, then there’s kinda no point. Just write a little SQL wrapper around LocalStorage.

In the end, that’s why we have LocalStorage—it’s simple. Like a file system. It means that you can have a clear sense of what browsers do and do not support.

I guess here’s a direct question: why do you prefer WebSQL over a tiny JS library that does the same thing?

How many millions of users is that 12% again?

Hundreds of millions to be in the right ballpark. Even if the web has a billion users, 12% is 120 million users on Firefox.

It’s the parent company’s CMS, not Wired’s. I’d bet that the people at Wired are more annoyed by it than anyone.

Well, they also own Ars Technica, which I suppose has its own CMS, but still...

>You'd think that a technology-oriented magazine like wired would at least try to aim for cross-browser compatibility in their infrastructure. But why bother, make your CMS Chrome-only a policy and free yourself of extra testing.

Makes total sense as an engineering tradeoff if you're not in the business of saving the web but publishing a magazine.

At least it's Chrome.

How is this better than those ie-only solutions?

I always wondered why they branded Chromecast with Chrome, it has almost nothing to do with a browser besides the funny gimmick where you could show a web page through it. Maybe an implementation detail.

I suppose I get it now. It was originally just branding to promote a Chrome monopoly, and now it's an artificial exclusive feature. I love the idea of Chromecast but it's sad that it's still so closed off.

Closed off how if I may ask? Is it not free for anyone to implement in their applications?

To implement Cast support in an application, you have to link a closed source binary to your project. Google only provides binaries for iOS and Android (via Play Services), and has a closed source implementation in Chrome.

doesn't cast implement the dial protocol, which is open?

http://www.dial-multiscreen.org/

Where are the open source Chromecast receivers?

Also Google is just sort of terrible at consistent branding.

What does the Condé Nast CMS have to do with Chromecast (or other bits of Chrome branding strategy)?

Nothing specifically. I was expanding the specific comment on an instance of Chrome-only compatibility into a general comment on other things Google has been doing to expand it's Chrome monopoly. Maybe the topic deserves a top level comment, sorry if it's placement offended your sensibilities.

Oh, please don't let my fragile sensibilities get in the way of your entirely off-topic disquisition. I just wondered if I had missed some nuance.

On Android its part of Google Home, and it seems to be just called Cast these days.

Chromecast isn't an open protocol; Miracast seems to be [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracast

Websites and -apps that run in just one browser are worse than ones that haven't yet switched to HTTPS. It is 2017. This has been going on for 20 years. Browsers are more like each other than ever before. There is no reason for this in a new app.

Couldn't you just fake a user-agent, or does the website require components only available in Chrome?

Offtopic: 'ciao' doesn't mean only 'goodbye' as the author seems to imply given the title. It means both 'hello' or 'goodbye'. It is similar to the Hawaiian 'aloha' when used as a greeting.

I'm Italian and agree with you. This said, I'm reasonably sure that in countries like Brazil ciao is only used as good bye, so maybe this explains the confusion. FWIW, I've also saw it written as "chao", which made me rofl.

"Chao" is used in some spanish-speaking countries for bye. So technically it is not misspelled :-)

Brazilians spell it "tchau" (due to ch representing /ʃ/ rather than /tʃ/ in Portuguese -- like German sch for /ʃ/ and tsch for /tʃ/).

Funnily enough, in German we do sometimes spell it "Tschau".

Like any other Portuguese speaking country, it is not Brazilian specific. :)

The word has been incorporated into other European languages with spellings that make sense for that language. Other commentators have mentioned the Portuguese, Spanish and German forms. To add to those, I've come across "Čau" in a number of Slavic languages.

"chao" / "chau" exclusively means "bye" in most of Eastern Europe.

I find something is off with Firefox Quantum, possibly the font rendering and it hurts my eyes.

Running Chrome 62 on OSX 10.11.6 and it is fine.

I had similar problems with Chrome on Windows after they implemented DirectWrite with anti aliasing.

I feel the same too!

I switched from chrome to Firefox because of the font rendering on Windows. It seemed to do a better job particularly on those effete sites with thin fonts and weak contrast. Haven't noticed any disimprovement in quantum but I'll watch out for it.

I had the same problem, try the Font Rendering Enhancer extension for Chrome.

The welcome resurgence of Firefox makes Apple’s ban on third party browser engines on iOS even less justifiable. This is about control, not security.

It does give them enviable control, but the security is a valid point. A browser engine has a wide surface area for attack vectors as it features multiple parsers and a JS engine.

It's taken from the same playbook as their refusal to support open video codecs in WebRTC. Apple is the new IBM, using money and market share to keep out challengers. If Steve Jobs were getting started today we'd have a picture of him standing in front of the Apple logo giving it the finger.

Right, but does a monoculture actually help that in any way? It's not like Apple is always at the forefront of innovation with WebKit.

Honestly, I don’t really care to see any other browsers on iOS. Safari works perfectly fine and I’d rather download an app than use a mobile experience of a website. Most companies suck at mobile web apps whereas the native experience is much better.

Safari has 2 basic problems;

- The Interface is obtuse and inefficient in practice.

- All major updates only happen once a year for so that the OS announcement can have more bullet points

Which, I guess is the problem with iOS as a whole. Marketing is the primary driver of all innovation on that platform and it works for them. Except the iPad.

If you’re happy with the Safari rendering engine, there’s nothing to stop you building a competing browser with a different UI. That’s what Firefox and Chrome on iOS are.

Firefox is a great browser, but what bothers me:

- Design: On Windows it integrates better but on MacOS the header is just somehow ugly. Chrome just feels more stable in this point. Also the scrolling to top when Chrome goes over the 0px line and bounces back - that's just a nicer behaviour.

- Clearing history and cookies: I yet didn't manage to find a fast solution to do this in Firefox.

Please, dear Firefox team, if you read this, improve it and you got me back!

why is the header ugly on MacOS? it actually has the same color and looks like it's part of the menu bar.

The tabs don't hang in the top left corner but there's some space. I don't get this design decision. Also I dislike the hard dark outlines on some icons (e.g. for folders).

> The tabs don't hang in the top left corner but there's some space.

Which is configurable.

It is? I've been trying to figure out how to get rid of this, but Googling various combinations of "remove space to left of tabs Firefox 57" has not yielded anything helpful.

I think, it should be Configurable under Customize and then one of the checkboxes at the bottom.

May not be exactly what you're looking for, but under the Customize menu, you can toggle the Title Bar.

This adds a macOS-style title bar and flushes the tabs to the left of the window.

Menu -> Customize has a few customization options at the bottom, the one you want is called "drag space".

I totally get your point, but please, Mozilla, make the default configuration great or people will stick with a browser who is owned by an evil company. :)

Btw: What I mean is the space left from the first tab, not the "drag space" on top.

> Btw: What I mean is the space left from the first tab, not the "drag space" on top.

The drag space should enable/disable both, the space left of the first tab, and above the tabs.

There is a “forget” toolbar item (which you probably need to add from the customise menu) which makes it very easy to clear history and cookies

Thanks!

Ctrl+Shift+Del

Or Cmd + Shift + Del on macOS. It can't get any faster than this.

Anyone have thoughts on the opt-out telemetry default?

I had to read the privacy notice they open on start to find out that telemetry was enabled by default.

My gut reaction was to be suspicious of Mozilla, but then I remembered that they're Mozilla. They're probably just trying to figure out which features are confusing for users.

It's strange because we do this type of tracking in all facets of webapps, but desktop apps trigger our suspicion meter.

Desktop apps are much more intrusive then web apps.

Yeah definitely. I think the scope of desktop apps is often wider though.

With web apps any telemetry data is pretty much limited to things on that domain. Browsers have access to more in principle.

I guess if the data transmitted is not personally-identifying or profile-building then it's fine. E.g. number of sites only, not urls. On second glance at the new FF page https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ it seems like the stuff they collect is pretty innocuous. Paranoia ftw.

Firefox is actually the only software where I've reviewed the privacy settings when asked and allowed it to send more information than the default setting to the vendor.

Because Mozilla.

How about sending the URLs you visit? This could actually happen to you, since you likely live in Germany based on your comments: http://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whic...

1. Chances are 1 in a 100 by default.

2. Chances are significantly lower considering that this collaboration started only recently on the new installs from the website. Judging by his comment, I don't think he's a new Firefox user.

Of course, the chance is still there, but I would argue that it's low enough to be negligible, at least for him.

It's strange because we do this type of tracking in all facets of webapps

It's natural because in some sense, a webapp is more like regular visiting a site; and just like the fact that my requests to websites will show up in their server logs is, for the most part, not really a concern. To use an analogy, "if you want to have a conversation, both sides need to be able to contact each other." But when software is monitoring what I'm doing with it, and reporting to one central site, when I'm visiting other sites? That just evokes "do not want". I don't care if it's Mozilla or Google or whoever else. Just. Stop. Watching. Me.

Mozilla's pretty careful about what goes into the default telemetry, too. Most of it is info that isn't very identifying (stuff like "how many cores do you have" or "how many times did this specific kind of jank occur for you")

FWIW in Firefox nightly (maybe also beta?) if you flip the privacy.firstparty.isolate then the fact that websites can talk to each other is severely reduced; basically third party iframes get their own set of cookies for each domain they're embedded in, so tracking iframes know about each other less. Flipping this pref will log you out of everything though (only the one time), and some sites don't work with it (nothing major so far, and you can file a bug. In many cases it's the site relying on iframes in a weird way).

Any comments on the cliqz experiment? Sending visited URLs doesn't sound very careful.

I don't know much about that. I'm talking about Firefox in particular.

Edit: Ah, this is a part of Firefox. It looks like they're using some crypto/privacy features such that "aggregation is not technically feasible".

Strongly blinding stuff that way isn't new; e.g. the safe browsing stuff uses differential privacy.

Cliqz isn't (pure) telemetry, it's more like the suggestions at the top of the page on Google. It reads what you're typing in the address bar and tries to give you clever info based on what it thinks you're looking for.

Sending data by itself isn't commonly seen as an attack vector with things like TLS in place and working, as far as we know. At least, Google has been sending browsing history with no additional encryption as part of Chrome Sync since its inception and there we don't know of data leaks during send so far either.

And at the server where it's sent to, it gets disconnected from the IP address and intermixed with other people's browsing history. So, it's not stored in personally identifiable form and therefore not vulnerable there either.

Mozilla has also made an official statement that neither they nor Cliqz store personally identifiable information as part of this, so doing it anyways would be misleading of consumers, i.e. breaking the law.

Not to mention that it would violate German privacy laws (which is where it's currently being tested), if they collected personally identifiable information without clearly notifying the user and at least some checkbox that the user has to tick.

It's easy to spin this, so that it sounds like Mozilla is doing pure evil here, but it's just not the case.

Mozilla ain't what it used to be: http://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whic...

Agreed this is an ill effort which should be shot down but even though Mozilla isn't perfect, they're still miles ahead of Google, Apple, and Microsoft. My point being, what you linked isn't a reason to not go for Firefox 57 or to not be enthusiastic about Firefox 57.

> My gut reaction was to be suspicious of Mozilla, but then I remembered that they're Mozilla.

Mozilla's track record of software that aligns with FLOSS principles makes me trust them when they release new software which they claim aligns with FLOSS principles.

But if Mozilla engages in what you call "suspicious behavior," it seems like a bad idea to assume that it's ok because of Mozilla's track record. In fact, I'd go in the other direction and say that suspicious behavior from Mozilla is enough of an anomaly that you should pay more attention to it, not less.

Unfortunately telemetry is everywhere now, and it disgusts me greatly. Personally, I find the idea that software should continuously phone home about its use, and this silent data collection/monitoring, extremely abhorrent. Some apps that really do not need to interact with the network at all do it, and those can be easily firewalled, but not so with a browser.

Edit: Wow, downvotes for opposing pervasive telemetry. Now that is scary...

Every app and app developer could use crash/bug reports. I can understand your paranoia that something else is being sent but I would hardly call the idea of asking to send back bug reports abhorrent.

Decent gaslighting attempt, but no.

This is not paranoia, scummy software developers have actually sent much more than crash reports. And crash reports may contain private information anyway.

Before anyone says Mozilla is different: http://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whic...

That's not what gaslighting is.

isn't cliqz basically the same as duckduckgo? i understand if you do not trust them specifically, but what i read there is that mozilla was intentionally reducing the information it could collect.

i have seen this article already 5 times on this post, what is the point?

I'm a developer myself and I absolutely oppose this practice. I don't do it and I don't want others to either. The possibility of exposing sensitive information is just not worth it. If you discover a bug you can always make a bug report and provide any details there. In that case, the consent and scope of disclosure is made very explicit. Chances are you don't know what information a machine-generated bug report contains, but you do know what you wrote when you reported it.

Most browser user will NEVER report a bug, maybe they will ask on a forum, giving very limited and misleading context.

As far as i remember you can read the whole automated bug report or even modify it. did i miss something?

The comment that you were replying to didn't mention anything about "asking to send back bug reports."

I'm with you and would go a step further, if anything ad/tracking blocking should be opt-out for any pro consumer browser.

It's really so great to see Firefox actually competing with Chrome on performance. I had to stop using Firefox a few years ago, when visiting most websites would spin up my fans, use all my battery and still be slow.

I've been using Firefox now for about a month, and it's become my main browser. I'm really loving Firefox again, and hope they keep this up.

Maybe time for a donations? https://donate.mozilla.org/

I tried Quantum and it crushed the battery of my MacBook Air. Activity Monitor showed much more energy usage than chrome. Anyone experience the same?

There seem to be a bug with MP4 video processing it eats CPU and battery like crazy (for me both on macOS and Win7), but otherwise, the new FF is great.

You can use [1] to force YouTube videos being streamed as H.264 instead of VP8/9. This helps with the battery issue (at least on YouTube).

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/

I think browser makers (or whoever it needs to be) should offer an option to save battery over a little bit of extra bandwidth. Maybe even make it the default.

youtube's logic selects the codec, not the browser

No, it’s a negotiation wherein the client submits its list of supported protocols and the server chooses between them.

And since FF supports both, it's YouTube which is choosing the codec, as the8472 wrote.

And what vim_coder and ConputerGuru meant was that Firefox would present a spoofed list of supported codecs to YouTube to force selection of the higher bandwidth, lower-powered codec.

Just because Firefox technically supports a format doesn't mean it has to disclose that format to external servers for selection.

Having custom behaviors for specific sites is a terrible practice. Browsers are complex enough as they are without an extra layer of hacks.

Who said anything about custom behavior for custom sites? A simple “on battery? X264/265 only” is what’s being discussed here.

That does not work because the browser that does not know how much it can reduce the presented feature-set without actually breaking the site. Some content is vpx-only.

It seems just about the same as having custom behaviors for specific user agents. Sadly, that's how things work these days.

Not if the browser only advertises support for the one it wants YouTube to pick.

Good to know, but at least for me actually occurs with MP4 files. I tried it on my own video MP4/H.264 files - loading the video with the video tag with plain HTML5. I am sure the FF devs know about the FF57 video bug and have fixed it already in nightly build or are working on it.

I never left Firefox, and started when it was Phoenix (beta). I've always been a Firefox and/or native browser guy. On my desktop (Windows10) it's FF with Edge backup. On my laptop (macOS), it's FF and Safari backup. I see each browser as having certain natural incentives and they run this way:

Native browsers (Safari/Edge)- tend to try their best to grant a good user experience all around for the device you bought, so they should never be discarded. Pretty safe for people to just stick to these as a result.

Firefox- user focused on customization, privacy, features (Send to Device, RSS toolbar feeds, etc).

Chrome- focused on Google's best interests. No real privacy guarantee since that's in their profit incentive. Mostly a marketing backed browser, shiny Google adverts on Google services insisting Chrome is what you want.

I tend to recommend native browsers or Firefox, if the user has the inclination towards being a power user. I really can't see a purpose to Chrome, and it's hard to separate truth from fiction because there's a massive boatload of corporate Google fanboys out there that promote everything they create.

I'm more of the anti-profit incentive type, and prefer people simply do what they want to. It's worth considering if no one would build Google Chrome without a for-profit incentive (and it's highly unlikely it would exist without Google existing), then how could it possibly improve things for the better? It doesn't, it serves Google's best interests. Everything that does, are temporarily mutually aligned interests.

Most people don't see this for what it is, and think Google is their friend.

Kudos to Mozilla for the new Firefox. I really like it!

Though I'm quite sure I won't switch from Safari, since I don't want to exercise my fans anymore. Tried Firefox Quantum and it really feels fast, but it's still on top of my "significant energy" battery list. When I think about it it would be really hard to beat a native GUI browser with something made for cross-platform, so I feel a bit desperate.

I think it is more that many of the safari folks work at a hardware company where people will file bugs and show up at their offices if need be when battery life is affected for said hardware.

I think, there's still some bug that's draining abnormal amounts of battery on macOS for some people, so maybe do check back in a few months or so.

"built for 2017" but doesn't support pinch to zoom on a mac

I really miss the back/forward arrows on the swipe gestures too - the gesture works but it feels wrong not to have that visual feedback.

Am I the only one on HN that dosen't see any significant difference in performance vs Chrome 62 ? and developer tools in Chrome are still superior. I am using both browsers on my ultrabook with mobile low power processor and on my desktop with flagship intel i7 and I don't see any reason to switch to firefox completely.

It seems that Mozilla just uncovered how to make PR/marketing successfully after years of failures in this department. Good because competition is good for end-users.

It's shame that Mozilla is doing things like this though:

"I stopped using firefox since they are delivering cliqz with every 100th download which will analyze and store your browsing history" [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15771719

>significant difference in performance vs Chrome 62

Firefox without WebRender is still slower than Chrome. The difference is noticable if you compare it with the old versions.

I really want to switch back to FF, especially because of the containers extension, but on macOS (i7 + 16gb ram) the fan spins like crazy and the overall feeling is that it is definitely slower than Chrome. Does anyone else have this experience?

Happened to me once, but definitely not a constant occurrence

Used Nightly for a few weeks before and after Quantum.

Definitely a huge improvement. The web response showed it. But I went back to chrome for the last few days. For 2 windows / 20 tabs it's definitely faster in just enough places to make a difference.

I really like Quantum's UI, but for some things (esp Google Inbox) it's significantly slower than Chrome.

I wasn't even asking for fancy + perf. Even average website would take a second to show their tab.

I don't have a recent machine, but chrome (even stable) has no issue at all flying with my x200.

I wonder how firefox perf will evolve with more and more rewrites (rust modules etc)

I wish there was a way to import passwords in to Firefox Quantum.

I think it imported my passwords from Chrome (but then again, memory is a fickle thing).

If you use keepass the you can export your passwords from Chrome in there and then use that for both Firefox and Chrome

I did! for me it was hidden in the bookmarks menu. When I imported bookmarks from Chrome, it grabbed passwords and history as well. This would have been a blocker for me as I don't really know any password.

It doesn't have password option in Firefox 57

It looks like import password is only available on Windows.

I did on firefox 56 (from chrome together with everything i could have thought), not sure about quantum.

Unfortunately, at this point I am just too comfortable with Chrome's inspector. It might seem like a small thing, but I have a dozen other 'small things' to familiarise myself with every day, so reacquainting myself with Firebug is likely to never become a priority. At this stage it'll take something stupid on Chrome's behalf to encourage me to make a move.

Having said that, I might start using FF as my non-work browser again.

Took me a bit to switch from Firebug to Chrome's inspector when Chrome became better a number of years ago.

Took me not as much to switch back.

You can do it. It just takes some getting used to and perhaps a few compromises until the next updates are released, but it'll encourage Google to actually play nice with the web again.

I thought the same thing regarding the inspector in previous versions of Firefox, but the dev tools in Quantum feel right.

Think it's time I tried switching back to Firefox it sounds like. Adblock on my mobile browser is probably what's going to do it for me.

I'm all into the "switch firefox on again" and removed my chrome from my quicklaunch. It's fast as a browser should be, and I trust mozilla a lot more than google.

Yet, webkit/blink powers today a lot more than google chrome. I think headless mode & nodejs(v8) integration (e.g. nwjs/electron) is still a major missing feature to call it "a browser build for 2017"

Firefox has headless mode.

I'm not sure why "use the JS engine from Chrome" is a good requirement for a non-Chrome browser, or what do you mean by "nodejs(v8) integration"?

probably a backend or binding or whatever they call it for node in the same way ChakraCore from Microsoft can be.

https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore

So many articles praising the new Firefox. Feels good but I am wondering now, or let's say 2018 when ff will for sure be faster than chrome, will Google change the annoyng notification they show you when you open Google that says browse Internet faster try Chrome? Will they change that to Firefox?

Except for video playback.

Makes my mac catch fire and still stutters.

edit: downvotes? you guys using some build I'm not? Because I'm on nightly.

On Windows too, MP4 videos spins up fan - only with new Firefox (neither with Chrome nor IE)

just realized this today as well. The video player is a complete disaster, even with forced h264 extension.

EDIT : this is really really weird. I'm pretty sure youtube played perfectly fine yesterday on firefox (mac os x here too). Call me paranoid, but could it be possible that they altered something to have the video stutter on firefox in the meantime ??

Can someone help me understand why this browser will improve my day to day life as a developer?

I like Chrome Dev Tools, they fulfill the vast majority of my needs and Postman covers the rest. I just don’t exactly understand the gains for a developer to switch when the contextual switch is high.

And yet 95% of the time I try to watch YouTube in Firefox, it just hangs, never actually playing. Yet Chrome works flawlessly every time.

I'm not saying Google is doing anything malicious here, I think it's more of a "we put a lot more effort into making YouTube work" kinda thing.

It doesn't hang for me, but it is slow and even lags in Quantum on an underpowered machine on Ubuntu. Works fine in Chrome though.

Just as a counter anecdote, I'm a heavy youtube watcher and I haven't had any issues with high res video playback on osx 10.12.

I've seen something similar — because I turned off auto playing videos. Manually scrubbing the video forward and back seems to fix it for me.

It's also not that surprising that Google has less of an incentive to test interoperability with their competitor's product…

I've just been clicking the small play button.

YouTube is now written in Polymer, a library made by Google that uses the Web Components specifications, which currently only Chrome supports natively[1], so they have to rely on polyfills on the rest of the browsers, so it's understandable that YouTube can perform bad on browsers other than Chrome.

[1]: https://caniuse.com/#search=web%20components

> which currently only Chrome supports natively

Firefox Nightly supports it, too, but Google still uses the polyfill there, and not even their normal polyfill, but a significantly slower one.

I'm still extremely sad that Firefox OS was sidelined and Mozilla appears to be permanently stuck on "faster browser tech" instead of innovating on open standards where it actually matters (like mobile phones, social data standardization, etc).

To counter this, Firefox is the only desktop browser that supports VR out of the box.

In fact, Mozilla has an entire team dedicated to emerging technologies[0] and you can see what that team is focusing on on their website.

[0] https://research.mozilla.org/

Disclaimer: Associated with Mozilla (Foundation), not Firefox (Mozilla Corporation).

On my machine (nMP with dual FirePro D700’s) there’s a noticeable “stall” when Quantum navigates to a page.

This isn’t there on Blink or WebKit.

I’m not sure how to go about trying to get it looked at.

I had the same problem; I tracked it down to a problem with my particular macOS user account most likely caused by me changing the home directory name post-facto. (https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT201548) I made the change because I didn't want my full name as the account name. The problem didn't present itself prior to (IIRC) updating to macOS Sierra.

To determine whether this is the cause for your particular problem, create a fresh new macOS user account, log into it and see if you can replicate the slow-down there. If there's no slowdown, it's probably this bug.

To work around the problem, I created a temporary admin account and logged into it. I then renamed my current account, created a new one with the correct details, then transferred most of my stuff from the old account to the new one, including the full contents of Library. Last step, chown the new profile directory:

  sudo chown -R youruser /Users/youruser

I’ve always had the same 4 letter username and homedir so I’m not sure this is it.

It’s a really annoying issue because the “stall” is like 0.75-1 second every time I navigate anywhere.

I was only able to hypothesise the cause, as that happened to correlate well in my minuscule sample size; your data point appears to have invalidated that. I regret not being able to isolate the cause properly.

I would still run the user account experiment — your described symptom matches exactly what I experienced. It should only take a few minutes to make an account, log into it and run Firefox.

What I do know:

* The problem started after a major macOS version upgrade, almost certainly Sierra.

* The problem occurred on my desktop and my laptop, but not my wife's computers that saw largely similar install history but more plain-vanilla usage patterns.

* The contents of the Firefox profile directory do not matter; the problem occurs with a completely fresh profile.

* The contents of the ~/Library directory do not seem to matter; creating a new user account and moving the entire contents of ~/Library back fixed it.

* The problem could not be replicated within any other user accounts on the same machine where the problem occurred.

* I was unable to create a faulty user account.

Apparently they still didn't fix the issue with edit boxes and dark themes on linux.

There are two things that keep me on Chromium - that, and the ability to appify a website.

The dark text boxes can be fixed by doing a bit of configuration editing[0], not ideal I'll admit but it goes a long way to making it usable on linux.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/firefox#Unreadable_inpu...

Or they could just fix the bug, and show they give a damn.

there is talk on the bug... and options in about:config

see https://bug635044.bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11580...

Opened 3 years ago. And I would argue forcing a light FF theme while using a dark GTK theme is not a "fix". Oh, and, why doesn't it "just work"?

With all this push for Quantum, I wonder what the extension landscape is like. I’ve heard people complain about FF dropping support for old extension APIs (absolutely no idea if this is true - just murmurs). As a Dev, would now technically be a good time to consider building an extension for Firefox?

From what I understand the Webextension API is somewhat standardized, and intended for the long haul. So, now would seem like the time.

I switched to quantum and the only complaint is that I can't use Video Speed Controller on it. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

That application is so useful, everyone I know who has tried it gets used to it and can't live without it.

Video Speed Controller is MIT licensed: https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed

So you could have a go at porting it to Firefox: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Po...

I correct myself. There's no need to port it because it has already been ported:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/videospeed/

Doesn't work with quantum

Works for me. Tested on YouTube and Vimeo.

whoa you're right, yahoo

I use a fair number of add-ons but there are now compatible versions for just about everything. Exceptions are things like Video Download Helper that's moved some functionality into the external format converter program it already had, but since I was rarely actually using it anyway it's not impacted me yet.

Yes, Firefox has transitioned to the new WebExtensions API for add-ons. They first announced the transition over two years ago and Firefox 57 is the first release to disable the old add-ons API:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...

Before Firefox Quantum's release there were around 21,000 add-ons available on https://addons.mozilla.org/ and as of right now there are 7,002 add-ons compatible with Firefox Quantum. Almost all of the top 20 add-ons have made the switch to the new API.

So I'd say now is a good time to build an extension for Firefox. The transition to the new API model is complete, there's lots of room for new add-ons compatible with the new API, and more APIs will be added with each new Firefox release to enable more features for WebExtensions:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/11/20/extensions-in-fir...

The extensions API is pretty stable. I've built my own add-on for it a few weeks ago [1].

If you want to get into add-ons, now is the perfect time. The tutorials are a bit sparse atm, but I found this treasure trove of examples straight from MDNs repo [2]

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

[2] https://github.com/mdn/webextensions-examples

Personally, I don't think there's ever been a better time to start building an extension for Firefox. Some might disagree with me here.

So, Mozilla did drop old extension APIs, but I think you're misunderstanding things here. They didn't just drop, I don't know, the tab renaming API or something like that, instead they dropped the entire extension API. So, the entirety of how you used to write extensions for Firefox does not work anymore.

And they had two of those entire extension APIs (XUL/XPCOM extensions and Jetpack extensions), so yeah, they did drop extension APIs in the plural.

But there's now a new way to write extensions for Firefox, a new entire extension API, called WebExtensions. It's based on Chrome's extension API, so most Chrome extensions can now be ported to Firefox without much hassle. This also means that offering your extension for both Chrome and Firefox is now essentially half the work as before.

The new extension API is also just a lot simpler to work with and your extension will not anymore break with new Firefox releases, like they often used to in the past.

The new extension API is more limited than the old one, which basically is necessary to achieve the two previously mentioned points, so that's why some people might think that it's worse and that it's now not anymore worth to write an extension for Firefox at all and whatnot. They're sometimes a tad overly dramatic there...

Also, the new extension API isn't yet quite stable. The core of it, which was taken from Chrome, obviously is, but Mozilla is still working on more APIs to add to WebExtensions, so depending on what you're wanting to build, it might be a better to do that in a few months from now. But if you're just starting out with writing extensions, it's unlikely that you'll hit your head there right away.

Lastly, because of this deprecation of old extensions, there is a demand now for new extensions. There's gonna be a good number of niches that one can build extensions for and have people actually use them. It's not like we're starting out from zero, many extensions have already been ported (either rewritten or from Chrome), but yeah, still plenty of room, too.

I don't know what's up with the memory usage claims, but on OS X it eats 2x as much as Chrome :o

Maybe see what memory usage is like in a new Firefox profile. That'll be essentially like a factory-reset Firefox, but you can always switch back to your old profile, if it does not change anything.

Type "about:profiles" into the URL-bar and from there it should be mostly self-explanatory.

I wiped out Firefox and observed this memory hungriness with a completely clean install with no add-ons whatsoever versus a Fully configured Chrome.

Anyone use LastPass? It seems like a deal breaker when it comes to Firefox. On my phone, where I really don't want to be typing 16 digit passwords, I can't get it to play nicely with Firefox mobile. If I can get it working, I can really try switching back.

Personally I replaced it by bitwarden.

Free and open source alternative to last pass.

Work flawlessly as a Firefox Android/desktop extension or as it's own app in Android.

Working flawlessly would be a nice upgrade from LastPass. Thanks for the suggestion!

Why don't you use LastPass mobile app, it seems to work for me.

That's an option. I've grown used to having LastPass mobile open automatically for password fields using Chrome, and it won't for Firefox. If there's a setting to enable that, I haven't found it. It's several more steps to switch between apps and copy/paste username and password individually, so it's probably a non-starter.

I tried the extension, but it hangs on the LastPass login screen.

I always used all four major browsers, as I do need to do web development occasionally.

However Firefox has always been the default browser since the days it was Netscape Navigator.

Mozilla is the only organization whose agenda is done in the name of the consumers.

wish i could zoom the page with pinch on the trackpad like i did with chrome..

I really want to love the new Firefox, it's really great... Except I can't debug promises in JavaScript, and JavaScript debugging seems very subpar compared to chrome.

Does it still kill the battery on the Mac or has that been fixed?

One thing holding me back : No websocket monitor in dev tools. And the extension that was offering this in the previous version no longer works.

> Conde Nast CMS

> they are partnering with political activists to block sites that they deem to be "fake news."

> I'm a pretty heavy user of Chrome profiles .. definitely doesn't feel as well thought out in Firefox.

... and any extension incompatibility complaints

These are kind of secondary, or have little to do with the new browser itself. They are not really an argument against an everyday tool that is faster, more customizable and more practical out of the box.

I'm a pretty heavy user of Chrome profiles .. definitely doesn't feel as well thought out in Firefox.

As someone who's not really used Chrome aside from browser testing (which used to involve a lot of cursing because flexbox min sizing was broken), can you explain what Chrome profiles offer over e.g. container tabs? Are you using them as separate cookie jars, to install different extensions or something else?

they allow different sets of extensions (and cookie jar and so on) and they are basically segregated by window (no tabs with different profile in the same window).

In the end they are different from containers in the general purpose (they are geared towards having a multi user experience more than firefox's multi identity/privacy) but chrome's take is much less frustrating to manage in my experience because you can't open the wrong type of tab involuntarly.

That said I switched to firefox and this (and lack of U2F 2nd factor auth) is the only pain point so far

What you're looking for is called Firefox profiles. Just launch firefox -P.

I'd love a combination of the two maybe, but profiles are probably good enough, thanks

> That said I switched to firefox and this (and lack of U2F 2nd factor auth) is the only pain point so far

You should be able to flip "security.webauth.u2f" depending on your release channel. If not available yet, I think it will be soon in any case.

None of the sites where I've been using U2F works.

Some/many sites are sniffing the user agent.

And as far as I have googled, there may be a bug in Mozilla's implementation (or maybe a different interpretation of the standard) that they are currently fixing.

It's not a bug in Mozilla's implementation.

Google has a JS u2f library that relies on an implementation specific detail of Chrome's U2F impl. Lots of folks use this library.

Hm, that's not good. Is that implementation detail something Mozilla might replicate?

Not easily IIRC. Google is aware of that bug so I think we're going to just wait.

I wouldn't do that right now.

It's available, and it works for some sites (Github), but not Duo or Google or most sites.

The reason behind this isn't Firefox's fault, Google has a js u2f library that they've written that relies on implementation specific details. It's not easy for Firefox to switch over to that particular unspecced behavior, nor should it, really, so you need to wait for Google to fix it and consumers to pull it in.

Usually the effect of this is that yubikey login doesn't work on some sites, however a couple weeks ago it went to the level that GMail login didn't work at all; it would log you in and show the progress bar and get stuck there (without even throwing up a JS error)

You want Profiles then.

Run `firefox -P` to get a functional GUI. Create some profiles and named them. Create links that run `firefox -P Work`, `firefox -P Personal`, `firefox -P Furries`, whatever. If you have other firefox instances opened, add `--no-remote` to the command line. They are completely separate instances of Firefox, they share only the executable.

Try Firefox Containers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

I agree. Here's my setup for standalone/isolated profiles if it's any help:

    "firefox.exe" -no-remote -fullscreen -P "spotify-profile" -url "https://open.spotify.com"

and user_pref("taskbar.grouping.useprofile", true) so that I get separate icons in my taskbar for each profile

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Lin...

> and user_pref("taskbar.grouping.useprofile", true) so that I get separate icons in my taskbar for each profile

Thanks for bringing this up. It was bothering me.

Here are specific instructions on how to do this, for the curious: https://superuser.com/a/1050664

And in case anyone's curious about changing the icons of the different profiles in the taskbar, there's this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/24398229

Firefox has about:profiles; they work much the same but don't have as good a UI.

I prefer Container Tabs, which basically let you have profiles on a per-tab basis. So you can have some green tabs, some yellow tabs, and some pink tabs, and each is effectively a separate profile cookie-wise. This is a built in feature but I recommend using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... since it enhances it.

They really need to imorove usability of this feature though. At the very least you should be able to move the existing tabs to a given container and add sites to some list to be opened in a given container by default.

Right now workflow is too inconvenient.

I believe the original test feature had something like this (maybe I'm misremembering) and the final release didn't. Maybe it's something they plan on polishing up and adding.

Probably irrelevant but I found default Bengali font rendering is broken on FF Quantum.

FF always had issues with rendering fonts. It generally over-sizes them. It's not a huge deal most of the time, though.

It needs Websocket inspector. Is it there? Couldn't find it.

Night Mode!!!

Ugh, the journalist jumped the gun, there is no native night mode.

Firefox, hear my plea, help my night browsing eyes, I have too large a screen in my VR dome, and your browser, alongside all others, is still blinding, and I do not trust your add ons with all of my data.

2017 ? :/

After years of being a Chrome user, I've been trying to work myself off of Google's infrastructure as much as possible. Firefox is great, but I was very disappointed to learn that they are partnering with political activists to block sites that they deem to be "fake news."

Edit:

makeee below posted a good source describing what Mozilla is currently doing, which appears to be limited to "researching" the problem of fake news.

I would love to support Firefox so I hope they come up with something more innovative than blocking (which they do not appear to be doing now - I stand corrected) or labeling (which has its own problems).

As I mentioned below, browsers, search engines, or social networks should not be, IMO, attempting to block or de-rank websites based on political activism, regardless of the source.

Oh, that's great news. Blocking fake news sources would get me to try to switch some relatives back over to Firefox.

I simply don't want the technology I use to be the arbiter of information. Teaching people to discern quality sources for themselves is far better IMO.

That seems to be exactly what Mozilla is doing no? Research and investing in tools that help people learn to navigate information online and judge for them self. Haven’t found anything that suggests they plan on blocking websites.

Thanks, the link you posted clarifies that what they are doing at this point is "researching" ways to combat fake news. In practice, the solutions I could imagine them coming up with would be either outright blocking / de-ranking, or preemptively labeling certain sites / articles as fake news. I hope to be wrong on both of those counts.

Where does it say that Mozilla is going to do this?

As it stands you're spreading FUD.

Source? Can’t find anything online that indicates they are partnering with political activists to block websites.

I assume OP is talking about this http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42065644

Edit: Misread, thought OP was talking about Google not Mozilla.

their use of "but" would suggest OP is definitely talking about Mozilla

Ah yes, apologies, I have edited my post to clarify my mistake.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/08/08/mozilla-information...

Thanks, although link doesn’t support anything in parent commenter’s claim.

definite [citation needed] on that one

The confusion seems to be an AFP story conflating two separate programs. The AFP story mentions Mozilla at the same time as an organization called Full Fact, that has a product that does automated live fact checking. It was initially designed for use during televised political debates, where it could show "correct" and "incorrect" warning popups on screen in real time according to what was said:

https://phys.org/news/2017-08-mozilla-fact-checker-fake-news...

(Apologies for the awful link source, I can't find a primary AFP link. Several other sites that have published the same identical story.)

Full Fact does appear to be a real organization, they claim to already work with the BBC, Guardian & other media partners, as well as Google. Some of the controversy seems to be over their grant funding from Omidyar Network and an organization founded by George Soros. (Whether that's a reason for concern, I have no idea.)

https://fullfact.org/blog/2017/jun/automated-fact-checking-f...

https://fullfact.org/blog/2017/jun/awarded-500000-omidyar-ne...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/08/fake-news...

Same here, but I guess getting out of gmail and calendar will be tricky.

Plenty of great email, contacts and calendar services out there, you just need to pay for them. I went with FastMail and it’s been absolutely painless.

Any recommendations for a Google Drive replacement?

I have been using Microsoft OneDrive without issue for the past couple of months. The new Files On Demand feature works well. Of course this is only really helpful to Windows users which is a shame.

It isn't for everyone, but I host my own NextCloud instance on a personal server. Works fine after a bit of tweaking, but it can be a pain to set up.

I wonder what it would cost to run a fallback instance on Google or Amazon cloud, like if my ISP/cable modem craps out for whatever reason.

Dropbox/boxcryptor + MS Office. It’s of course necessary to use google drive for collaborative editing from time to time because it is so ubiquitous, but excel is still miles ahead of google sheets in terms of usability. Pages and Numbers are also pretty good for light use on the Mac and have free web versions for collaboration. The Dropbox desktop client is so much better than Drive in terms of CPU usage and straightforward sharing.

I use [https://syncthing.net/](Syncthing) because it's serverless, works on various Linuxes and Android, pretty easy to set up, and I trust it.

I trust it because I can get it from 3rd-party repos — Debian, Fedora, F-Droid — and I trust that they wouldn't all allow malicious software that claims all communication is encrypted.

Syncthing's forum uses Discourse. The whole thing just smells of competence.

Of course, it may not suit you.

I fear the actual migration, not the alternatives

Fastmail does the email migration in the cloud. It’s relatively quick and painless, and you can trial things for a period by setting up your gmail account as an alias (send from the fastmail web interface through gmail’s smtp servers etc) so you can always switch back if you don’t like it. When satisfied, set up an auto-responder and forwarding to let people know to stop emailing your @gmail account.

Fastmail has a decent calendar, but you may prefer to use iCloud or something else for that. Calendar clients on desktops and phones tend to be pretty good at supporting multiple providers so that is a lot easier to migrate.

I suggest email migration in 3 steps:

1. Set up an email client and get into the habit of checking your mail from it instead of the web interface (at least, on your normal devices). 2. Create and start using your new email account, which you can add as a second email address in your client of choice, alongside your gmail. Share the new address with friends and family; people who you want to recieve mail from. 3. Gradually switch over logins and the rare newsletter you care about to the new address.

Eventually, you'll find that you no longer get any mail you care about on gmail. That's when you download an archive (which you think you will look at but actually never will) and delete your account. As a side benefit, you'll likely get to cut down the amount of junk mail you get :)

I've never used Google calendar, but I presume there's a way to export as ical? That should make it easy to migrate to any provider you like.

Problem with the calendar is, that it is linked with those of the people I care about

The only difficulty with other services and contact syncing is 1) getting them to sync across both Android and iPhone bi-directionally and 2) syncing custom fields.

1 can largely be solved with effort (just about) but last I checked Fastmail doesnt use the same vcard formats as Google/Apple and doesnt support custom fields in contacts. That might have changed recently and I'd be very interested to look again if it has.

I even went as far as a fairly engaged back and forth with Fastmail support (reference to which is in my comment history somewhere here) to work out how they could get bi-directional syncing of custom fields to both platforms working. But they had no plans to implement it.

I appreciate mine is perhaps a niche use case but I've got a lot of contacts with multiple addresses and numbers in multiple countries and short of saving maybe 5 or 6 replica contact entries per individual (which is a mess over) the workable solution was to stay within a walled garden.

That's great new unless your party is the one thats generating most of the fake news, A.K.A GOP/Trump.

I personally don't think partisan propaganda is the big problem. The problem is the content farms that will write completely fabricated news articles designed to outrage/reinforce certain political views for eyeballs. The former is a problem to but it would be more difficult to pass off as factual in an environment without the latter. Also, there is plenty of the latter targeting left wing voters. I see it all the time on some of my less discerning friends' facebook feeds.

I'm aware of a research project to see if reliable identification of "fake news" websites is possible, but there's no "blocking" coming to Firefox. That would violate point 5 of the Mozilla Manifesto.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

That would violate point 5 of the Mozilla Manifesto.

They can interpret that however they want. For example, you can always "shape the Internet and [your] own experiences on it", including removing any blocking, adding things they remove, etc... just get the source code for Firefox and make all the changes you want.

It's all a bunch of vague marketing doublespeak anyway, with around as much power over what Mozilla does as the US constitution has on the US government.

I don't think Mozilla has ever said we're blocking fake news in Firefox.

Mozilla is doing research into this, and may eventually release some tooling for this (an addon or something). But we don't even help block ads in the browser, I doubt this will be built in.

As I mentioned below, browsers, search engines, or social networks should not be, IMO, attempting to block or de-rank websites based on political activism, regardless of the source.

Indeed, whatever happened to "don't take sides". Couldn't an organisation stay completely neutral and only focus its efforts on the technology of accessing websites?

Keyword searches have become unreliable in Quantum for me; it often goes to the homepage of the search site instead. If this affects you too please file a bug report, thanks!

Why don't you file a bug report?

This is bullshit.

Could you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN? We ban accounts that do that, and you've posted good things in the past so I don't want to have to.

Great pr, but Quantum sounds like they finally ported some of chrome 1's tech over. It's great that they're multiprocess now, but it seems more like they've caught up after 9 years, not like they're ahead much. And the UI is still off on macOS.

No, there is seriously new and innovative tech in the case engine with parallel layouts as well as safety improvements with Rust.

In a lot of ways, yes, Firefox had a lot of technical cruft that they got rid of with this release and in those respects have now mainly just caught up with Chrome.

But Mozilla has been optimizing around this technical cruft for so long now that not having this technical cruft anymore leaves them with the architecture of Chrome plus those optimizations.

And they are innovating on top of it as well. They packed in a written-from-scratch CSS engine into this release, which utilizes parallelism. That's something we haven't yet seen in other browsers.

In a few releases from now, we should also get WebRender, which essentially makes it so that Firefox renders webpages in the way that video games render things. So, if you've ever wondered why your graphics card can pump out cinematic space battles at 60 FPS, but your browsers stutters when playing a flimsy CSS animation, this will mostly fix that.

I'll stop using Chrome for work (UX Engineer) and personal use when safari mobile, chrome for iOS, and chrome for Android will each become Firefox.

A browser I'm the only one using, has no use for me.

I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean that you want Firefox mobile to be the default browser?

Firefox mobile is available on Android and also on iOS, though the iOS variant is only a wrap around Safari because of Apple's walked garden.

I mean that I work with my browser and I write web applications.

Chrome is more than dominant, so I'll use Chrome because my users use - for the most part - Chrome.

Someone has deleted my comment. Why? I will say it again. Firefox 57 is faster, with better UI design, i love dark theme option and it works under old Os X Mavericks perfectly. Waiting for High Sierra optimization (is very heavy on cpu) and will use it exclusively.

Now if they only did respect user privacy!

Still every Firefox user gets a never-expiring google cookie by default, a practice that is going on now for many years! Also cookies are accepted from everywhere and last forever by default without user consent, overriding the freedom of internet users in a brutal and privacy destroying way.

It is a great bigbrotheristic marketing lie by mozilla to obscure this anti-privacy behaviour with glorious blabla about how they respect privacy, when in fact they help the trackers to track you even better, doing so since many years.

Cookie privacy must be handled more restrictive by default, e.g. there is no reason to save any cookie after the browser has been closed if user did not explicitely set that for a site.

Hopefully some journous finally check the facts before mindless re-babbling of mozilla propaganda.

This is disingenuous. I assume you’re referring to the safe browsing service, which is run by Google and protects users from phishing and malware sites. In Firefox the requests made to Google's safe browsing are sent using a completely separate cookie jar that is isolated from the rest of the browser, so that even if Google is tracking the requests to its safe browsing service it wouldn't be able to identify you on the basis of the unique cookie alone. Of course if you’re still uncomfortable with this you can always turn it off.

I don’t know where the claims for permanent cookies comes from. Cookies have expiration dates like all other browsers and can be cleared by the user. I in fact use an add on that clears cookies on tab close except for a set of whitelisted sites.

I'm a big weirdo and have all my cookies set to delete every time I close the browser, but, importantly, I recognize that I'm weird.

I think the vast majority of people want their cookies to stay around, especially so they can close and open the browser again and still be logged into whatever services they use. Yes, they could explicatively set it for each site, but why do so when they'd want to stay logged in?

A super-restrictive cookie policy would suit me just fine, but I think it would annoy a ton of users.

I wish they had some better UX designers. Hit the download button and I get a .bz2 file with no install scripts whatsoever.

    $ tar jxvf firefox-57.0.tar.bz2
    $ cd firefox
    $ mkdir /usr/local/firefox
    mkdir: cannot create directory '/usr/local/firefox': Permission denied
    $ sudo su
    Password:
    # mkdir /usr/local/firefox
    # cp -rv * /usr/local/firefox/
    ...
    # ln -s /usr/local/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox 
    ln: failed to create symbolic link '/usr/bin/firefox': File exists
    # mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox.bac
    # ln -s /usr/local/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

Why couldn't they go the extra mile and give me a .deb file I can just click and install or dpkg -i, like Chrome does? Make it absolutely frictionless -- lubricate the whole process -- if you want people to use it instead of Chrome.

Why not use your package manager?

Interesting! Didn't realize Ubuntu had included it already. I almost always assumed Ubuntu package manager is always behind by a few versions (like it is for everything else).

Ubuntu tends to keep Firefox up to date, although I haven't used Ubuntu for a few months already.

But regardless, this is the "official PPA" for the Beta channel: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/firefox-n...

for firefox there is really not any other way, because security updates are not backported. So either you have (ubuntu, ...) to pick latest or ancient ESR.

A .deb file would only work on certain distributions. Why wouldn't you use your distro's package manager to download Firefox? I guess it might be helpful to have a note on their site telling Linux users just that.

This is kind of a strange complaint. You’re using Linux but you don’t want to use the version packaged by your distro, yet you’re uncomfortable opening a standard tarball and following the intructions within? Yet you’re complaining that Mozilla didn’t go the extra mile for your obscure situation.

I'm used to the assumption that my package manager is out of date. It usually is (e.g. it still has only OpenCV 2.4). I have a huge pile of PPAs to solve that ...

I on Fedora and the latest version is available via dnf. But still I use nightly, and all I had to do to j install it was untar it into my opt directory and symlink the binary.

> I on Fedora and the latest version is available via dnf. But still I use nightly, and all I had to do to j install it was untar it into my opt directory and symlink the binary.

What is your strategy with updates? Do you give yourself permission to write to opt or do you run Firefox Nightly as root once a day so it can update iself? I tried the latter for a few weeks and grew tired. I can't wait for containers to come to Firefox stable (which is the feature I am looking forward to the most in nightly).

I mean, it doesn't have to be in your /opt/ folder, you can put it anywhere and add it to your $PATH. I did however give myself permissions to /opt/nightly/, where my binary and the rest of its files are.

I think official deb and rpm repositories would still be nice.

On Ubuntu 17.10 I got the update to Quantum only a few days after the official release, works quite well, no need to look for a PPA.

Ubuntu ships Firefox updates independent of its normal release schedule, so you should always have the latest version there, shortly after the official Firefox release.

But you might want to consider a different distro with more up-to-date packages anyways.

It'll be consistently tested with those more up-to-date packages, so would most likely be more stable than your attempt to rejuvenate Ubuntu LTS or whatever distro you're using exactly.

Well, you're using linux, you should know how to go around this (the tar.bz2 used to have a run-firefox script though) or try the distro package manager

In Mac and Windows it's frictionless

Just add a PPA :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa

sudo apt update

sudo apt install firefox

sudo apt install firefox-locale-[your language]

What I really want is for them to support Flatpak. A 3rd party is doing this work for Nightly and Developer, but I'd like to see Mozilla get on this train, and then the whole distro specific packaging thing is no longer a thing. They're already doing the heavy lifting with their own tarball.

https://flatpak.org/apps

What does this have anything to do with UX?

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