Firefox Quantum Isn’t Just “Copying” Chrome: It’s Much More Powerful | Hacker News Reader

Firefox Quantum Isn’t Just “Copying” Chrome: It’s Much More Powerful

howtogeek.com

26 pointsdoener21 comments

> You can even toggle the media.autoplay.enabled option in about:config to stop HTML5 videos from automatically playing on web pages. Chrome doesn’t allow you to do this without an extension, and that just doesn’t work as well as the integrated option in Firefox.

chrome://flags/, search for "autoplay", set to "Document user activation is required"

Nah, both Firefox and Chrome are battery sucking vampires while Chrome is a slightly better looking battery sucking vampire with more superpowers (extensions). Ever since browser engines started to actually work (remember when Webkit and Gecko were like from different worlds at rendering web sites?) I've not really cared for that as a developer and find that whatever code I write also happens to work most everywhere. So, to conclude, Safari is pretty good.

I don't agree. On Windows, Firefox is much better with RAM and battery than Chrome — and on both Windows and macOS, looks much better too.

Firefox has always been my browser of choice, but I will concede that Safari is vastly superior when it comes to resource usage, especially when you take content blockers vs traditional JS-based ad-blocking into account.

Anyone know of plans for Firefox and/or Chrome to implement a similar 1st-party content-blocking solutions for their respective browsers?

Firefox is still cutting my MacBook battery by 1.5 and often munching through 30% of cpu on many websites, with or without extensions and adblocker. It’s a shame because I love the browser in every way than the rest of the browser gang.

Apparently there's a bug related to scaled resolutions on macOS. It's being investigated: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042

I use a few browsers:

Opera for when running my laptop on battery Vivaldi when in the office.

Now, I've ditched Vivaldi and sticking with Opera & Firefox.

I suspect someone will create a Firefox Addon to auto-detect we running on batteries and throttle back on the performance settings.

You're probably hitting a Firefox bug that we're looking into. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042

Good to know it's a wide spread issue. It's hardly usable when scrolling hackernews causes cpu to spike to 60%

I love that the very first picture is of Tree Style Tab (add-on). I have been using it for years and absolutely can't live without it. I wish they would find a way to disable the now-superfluous top-tabs in quantum, but I'm sure it can be done in time. Everything does seem faster and more stable since the update, I'm happy they got through the transition without pissing off a huge amount of their die-hard users that were tied to old extensions, by giving enough time for crucial things to be ported.

If you use Linux and know how to edit your userChrome.css file, you can get rid of the superfluous tab bar by adding this line:

#tabbrowser-tabs { visibility: collapse !important; }

Be warned that on Windows this kills the hidden "alt" menu bar and hides the close, expand, and minimize buttons. Works perfectly on linux though :P, I haven't tried on OSX.

That space just becomes empty, and can't be reclaimed. Thus useless.

There's an ongoing experiment that would allow extensions to hide the tabstrip: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/TabHiding

I was a bit surprised yesterday to see Chrome using 7GB of RAM. Ouch. A total of 60 Chrome.exe processes, ranging from 30MB to 1.2GB.

Process view: https://imgur.com/a/bum5b

FWIW, my only extensions are uBlock Origin and Tabs Outliner.

I hope Firefox goal isn't archiving speed at the cost of cpu usage. I've been experiencing high cpu usage from Firefox ever since they turned on their multiprocess. Thus I'm still on Chrome as it is the best compromise for my mobile setup.

Also, Firefox start page is basically a glorified ads sponsored articles from their Pocket recommendation. Are people letting Mozilla getting away with this because it's owned by Mozilla? I honestly hate this practice. I don't want more ads.

WebRender at least expects to consume _less_ energy by using the GPU efficiently

And Firefox 56 is even more powerful! It can even support add-ons like Tab Groups and Pentadactyl. There's even an addon to disable Ctrl-Q shortcut on Linux so that you can't accidentally close the entire browser.

But sadly slower, less secure, and less stable. That's the trade off. Feel free to use Firefox 52 ESR (which is secure except for extension security, of course) as it will allow you to use legacy extensions and receive security updates through June 26, 2018. By then, the WebExtensions API will be even more powerful and enable additional extensions.

Side Note: According to Mozilla's add-on site, Pentadactyl is only used by 289 users and appears to have been abandoned years ago, so it's doubtful that it's being worked on from either the extension side by an extension author or the WebExtensions side within Mozilla for features. Perhaps finding another extension (or commissioning one once keybindings are available in WebExtensions) would be in order.

They should've released ESR just before the first Quantum release. Who's going to downgrade their browser 4 versions back? I'd rather switch to Waterfox or Pale Moon or whatever.

I don't use Pentadactyl myself, I probably had in mind another extension (Vimperator).

>By then, the WebExtensions API will be even more powerful and enable additional extensions. >once keybindings are available in WebExtensions

They shouldn't have released anything until this extremely basic functionality is available to extensions. Otherwise it's just farce. Knowing Mozilla they will never implement this functionality because "nobody uses these extensions anymore" (because it's plain impossible to).

How am I supposed to use Firefox if I press Ctrl-W thousands of times per day? Even if I had an incredible accuracy of 99.99%, I'd still accidentally hit Ctrl-Q several times per day. Shouldn't the most basic functionality of a browser be "don't spontaneously close several times per day"?

> They should've released ESR just before the first Quantum release. Who's going to downgrade their browser 4 versions back?

They did. ESR was branched on schedule, the extension changes were well publicized, extensions were marked within the UI as having upcoming incompatibilities. And the breaking changes started before v57.

> I'd rather switch to Waterfox or Pale Moon or whatever.

Pale Moon is based on an even older and slower Firefox engine than Firefox ESR 52.x. Waterfox is planning on supporting legacy extensions, but whether they will set up the extensive manual review process that Mozilla has remains to be seen.

> I don't use Pentadactyl myself, I probably had in mind another extension (Vimperator).

Vimperator had I think 15,000 users at its peak, so it was likely that you were thinking of.

> They shouldn't have released anything until this extremely basic functionality is available to extensions. Otherwise it's just farce. Knowing Mozilla they will never implement this functionality because "nobody uses these extensions anymore" (because it's plain impossible to).

Firefox was bleeding users due to being slower and was having extreme difficulty implementing new features due to the ton of extra time to check if each feature altered existing extensions in any way sometimes adding months of implementation time.

> How am I supposed to use Firefox if I press Ctrl-W thousands of times per day? Even if I had an incredible accuracy of 99.99%, I'd still accidentally hit Ctrl-Q several times per day. Shouldn't the most basic functionality of a browser be "don't spontaneously close several times per day"?

Use Firefox ESR 52.x. It's stable and the same speed you're already accustomed to. By the time ESR is ready to move up to a later release in June, you can evaluate if Firefox 60/61 will suit your needs and support the types of extensions you want or going with an alternative implementation is a better idea.

Until then, you could also do some keybind changes at the OS level if you are so inclined and can find a suitable alternative that doesn't mess with your dev environment. You could also use ALT-HOME and use the standard built-in Firefox homepage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com