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Firefox 58

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I wrote up a more detailed look at some of what's in Firefox 58: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/firefox-58-the-quantum-era...

How does one end up in a position to do this work at Mozilla? I'm currently looking for a new SWE role, would absolutely love to work on Firefox.

Current openings are posted at https://careers.mozilla.org/. There should be a steady trickle of opportunities as 2018 budgeting wraps up and requests for headcount get approved over the coming weeks and months.

We do most of our work in the open, so there's a wealth of information you can gather before applying for a role or interviewing. Lurking on mailing lists, reading Bugzilla, following GitHub repos, etc. are all great ways to become familiar with how Mozilla works, the challenges we face, and where you'd best be able to have an impact.

Working at Moz is usually nice, until it's not anymore for reasons that have nothing to do with how well you perform.

Examples: working from the wrong office (go tell the 70 people fired in Taipei that there will be a steady trickle of opportunities) or under the wrong VP. MoCo is in many aspects a company like any other, with its fair share of Dilbert worthy moments.

Thanks! I was browsing a few days ago and applied to work on Telemetry in Firefox and ML Engineering at Pocket. A lot of the work being done with respect to the Quantam initiatives seems interesting, but I didn't really see anything related to the core browser. Anyway, thanks a lot for the info.

I came to it from the web development world, and after getting into speaking transferred internally onto our DevRel team. We're a small team- we encourage any Mozilla employee to speak about their own work if they want, so there's only a few of us for whom it's a full-time job.

Since we're a small team, it's pretty uncommon for a specifically devrel role to open up, but the sibling reply from my teammate callahad is spot-on for how to get involved with Mozilla and Firefox!

Not in any notes: they removed the Android widget. Coincidentally, so did DuckDuckGo today. :(

What is the "android widget"?

A widget that users could place on the homescreen of their launcher.

It had a shortcut to open Firefox itself, one to open a new tab and one to a lightweight search interface.

Switched back to Firefox a few months ago and I'm blown away by the speed.

Last time I had this feeling after switching to Chrome from Firefox years ago, haha.

Besides videos everything works like a charm. Somehow some videos won't start and sometimes I get a message that the video format could not be read, never had this issue in Chrome.

Likewise, but I've found the performance on a few key websites to be awful. Namely Facebook, and often Google Inbox.

Another consequence of switching has been difficulty in using things like my Apple TV or Chromecast (e.g. casting a video to my TV), or using my Mac's media keys to control Google Play Music.

Agree: I have similar performance issues with Google Inbox. E.g. I'm unable to attach files sometimes, and the interface is terrible. Still, I've switched to the new FF as my browser of choice and with the exception of those few sites it's great

Google inbox is terrible on ff, this is vendor lock-in by google, the new MS

Any proof of that claim? (that it is intentional from google and not just a ff issue?)

Google didn't even make Inbox available on Firefox for months because they didn't care, and when they did, they ended up serving entirely different HTML and JS to FF.

This is the same Google that is still keeping Allo Web and Google Earth a Chrome exclusive, the same one that has paid adware vendors to sneakily install Chrome, etc.

Sure, you can believe that this is jist a coincidence. But that's one unlucky streak of coincidences. In fact, you'd be more likely to win the Powerball ten times in a row than for all this to happen by coincidence.

Allo web has been available on browsers other than Chrome for a while - http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/03/allo-web-adds-suppor...

This gives a good reason why Google Earth is only on Chrome - https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/66ao68/new_version_o...

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not any of the related teams. I was curious myself about these so I Googled and came across the above two articles so these opinions are of my own.

Any chance you could poke the Hangouts team to get that working in Firefox? At this point they’ve have 28 months public notice that Mozilla would be deprecating NPAPI.

Hangouts works in Firefox Nightly now.

Oh! Great news, it didn’t when I last tested a couple of weeks ago so I’d assumed there was no progress.

Not really, it works fine on Safari.

Which shared a lot of roots with Chrome. It's probably that they are optimizing for things that are fast in Chrome's JavaScript engine, which isn't necessarily what's fast in Firefox's Javascript engine.

Safari's JS engine is different than Chrome's though, no?

Yes, although I'm not sure (and can't find god info on) whether they started from a similar lineage, or even if they just happen to just share some similarities that Mozilla's doesn't. If SquirrelFish (which became Nitro) happened to start with a similar architectural base, that could predispose them to make similar choices over time (e.g. if arrays are extremely efficient because the underlying types are well implemented, that could have survived and influenced later decisions. Array performance regressions might be seen as bugs that stop progress, and would possible cut of possible avenues of advancement).

There's a decade of history in these engines with a lot of man hours put into them, and they were actively competing with each other very loudly for a while. There's little you could tell me I couldn't find some possible narrative justification for if I consider the PR, bureaucracy, talent and design decisions that might stem from those over a decade.

V8 and JavaScriptCore were written entirely independently; there was little influence between the two. V8 started as an empty codebase, not a fork of JSC.

Google Inbox is also pretty terrible on chrome for me, i'm not sure i'd blame vendor lock-in.

I went from GMail -> Inbox -> GMail -> Thunderbird

It was never that slow as some people declare it to be.

Yeah, it positively was, and it would lock the browser up with misbehaving tabs. I managed to use Fx50 (or so, I forget the exact release) for about a day before going "nope, back to Chrome, it might chew batteries like crazy but at least it's fast."

Firefox has significantly improved and deserves praise for it. Rewriting history to always be at war with Eastchromea is unnecessary.

"It doesn't work on my machine" is a new one.

The benchmarks have always been respectable. I'm sure there are some configurations that made it work poorly, and that's a problem. That isn't true in general.

Benchmarks aren't user experience and never have been. It doesn't matter how fast you render if you feel slow. And, for me, Firefox has felt slow on any hardware I've tried it on for more of its existence than it has not. And it is the only browser I have used in the last decade that hard-locked when a tab got crunchy.

The person above said "slow," you assume they meant artificial JavaScript benchmarks but I'm pretty sure that wasn't the intent.

I too found Firefox pre-57 slow and switched to Chrome. That was because the user experience was slow, slow to open, slow in UI responsiveness, slow to make websites actually usable. Everything had this UI lag feel.

I'm sure it benchmarked fine, but I am a human, not a JavaScript benchmark.

That's a fair point. I've always found Firefox pretty speedy, but I can't judge other people's experiences and I don't think it's possible to objectively measure subjective user experience. Every piece of software has people who have unusually bad experiences and I don't know how to judge which are reliable and representative. The best you could do is polls, which are not reliable.

I don't know how to tell the difference between "Firefox is slow" and "Firefox has an undeserved reputation for being slow."

This seems to be a weird thing:

I've been om FF the while time and I'm impatient.

In the other hand I've no reason not to believe it when so many people report performance issues.

My best guess is a combination of different browsing habits and/or different hardware/os.

(My browsing habits are mostly hn, local news and pages I work on and I've had decent hardware running various versions of Linux and Windows.)

I've found some stuff to be a bit slower on new FF since I made the switch when Quantum came out, but I chalk that up to heavy use of some Google webapps in which the chrome optimizations might have the opposite effect on a different JavaScript engine, and heavy use of containers, which are awesome.[1]

1: At first I didn't know how to get sites to default to a container, so kept having to close and reopen tabs to get the right contianer, but once I figured that out, it's smooth.

I too experience surprisingly bad performance with google webapps in Firefox.

I've had FF become extremely slow on two machines while it worked fine everywhere else. After a few months, back to normal. Profile refreshes etc didn't seem to make any difference and I still have no idea why it happens.

I have had the opposite experience. While individual page loads were a bit quicker in Chrome after a number of tabs were open it bogged down so badly (coupled with the lack of customization) I ran back to Firefox every time. A few months later I would try again with similar results.

I agree that when a tab would crash FF would die in spectacular ways but this was perhaps a once a month experience? Tab restore brought everything back each time. As a result I usually only opened Chrome for site testing.

This. I tried Chrome two or three times for several months a few years ago. Yes, it was fast but had issues with loading pages I usually used, e.g. I click on a link and shows me white page for some time, long enough to be annoying. On the other hand FF since pre 1.x versions is always about the same. I don't see big improvements in speed and I don't see big degradation too. The only problem I had is with Atlassian web pages that tend to memory leak when left open for days. At home where I never open them FF is very stable.

I don't really know.

I just installed Chrome besides Firefox back in the days and it was much snappier. This became my new baseline.

It was for me. On both Win10 and Ubuntu. Fx 57 was a game changer.

Yeah, the browser has gotten snappier. But then I pop open the dev tools and they're unbearably slow - like I simply can't do real dev work in FF anymore, have to use Chrome. It may be that I tend to do a lot of development with Web Components, which FF still doesn't have natively (though Custom Elements are live in 59/nightly, right?!), but either way it seems like a failing of the tooling that it beachballs for 5-10s at a time when inspecting normal valid html.

This! If I have at least one tab with Dev Tools open, then FF becomes unbearably slow. Will check if it is fixed in FF58 though.

When FF 57 came out I was surprised at the new debugger, much better than the old one. But turns out it's still useless. I can't put a breakpoint in the middle of a WebGL game and expect it to work like in Chrome.

The last dev version is even more useless, the "break on exception" button is missing.

Yep, true that.

The browser itself is very snappy an enjoyable now (apart from high res videos, which drive up CPU load a lot).

But the devtools are unbearably slow. They hog down performance to a crawl.

I use FF as my main browser now, but when I need to do some web debugging I switch over to chrome.

> But then I pop open the dev tools and they're unbearably slow - like I simply can't do real dev work in FF anymore, have to use Chrome.

I've had to sit patiently waiting for sourcemaps to load or finally hit breakpoints in FF, I usually try to test changes in Chrome and hope that they work well in FF. Minor inspector usage for CSS styling and what not.

(It's still my primary browser at work, though.)

This is strange. FF dev tools are a lot quicker for our apps then the Chrome dev tools. In fact, the Chrome dev tools are snail speed compared to the FF ones. Again, this might be related to the type of app you are developing.

Try this: From the "Inspector" tab, click on any CSS file in order to open the Style Editor. Loading the file and then scrolling to the relevant part is much slower than Chrome if you do this on a page with several stylesheets.

Have you tried the developer edition? https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

The "break on exception" button is missing in that one.

I experienced the same trying to switch recently. The devtools are the only blocker from me switching to firefox - they're much worse than they used to be performance-wise

same here. Am considering switching over to firefox for main browsing, but development is def in chrome for now. Last time I checked FF console warnings still brought me to the compiled JS file instead of the actual source file through sourcemaps. Did that change yet? (very limited internet atm so cant check)

I wonder how Firefox compares to Edge on a tablet like a Surface Pro. I really like the gestures and general touch and touchpad support in Edge and Edge should be quite efficient on battery life as long as you stay away from monsters like Facebook.

I have Firefox, Chrome and Edge on my Surface Pro 4. I prefer using Edge there because it's touch gestures seem to work better.

Firefox works just fine, but I feel it is more difficult than it should be to hit the tab close buttons with my finger.

Does anyone else get videos that show as like a pink or green screen and can still hear audio? I've experienced this on multiple machines with both Linux and Windows.

Edit: Experienced this under FF57, unknown under 58 because I just updated it.

This also usually happens with things like Facebook videos, but would less often happen with Youtube.

Hey @godelski, I had that issue in Firefox 57, but it seemed to have gone away with 58. Just FYI - I tried altering a bunch of `about:config` non-default settings, but none of them helped. Thanks.

Thanks for the reply. I edited my comment to note that I was experiencing this under 57. I don't know if it will continue under 58 because it seemed more like a random issue, but it is good to know I'm not the only one.

I guess this is bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1417442 ? If so that looks like it’ll be fixed in 59.

We've seen this on select AMD (https://bugzil.la/1417442) and Nvidia (https://bugzil.la/1422850) video cards. What GPU and driver version are you running?

I am using Intel, but Nvidia. On my current machine (Windows) I have a GeForce GTS 450 and the driver version is 23.21.13.8813. The linux one is Arch and has a 1060 Max Q, but I'm not at that computer and don't know the driver. Maybe selection bias, but I think it happens much less on the linux computer.

Too late to make an edit, but I am still experiencing the issue on the Windows version and FF58

https://screenshots.firefox.com/5GyCe8xjvqM7XVYj/www.faceboo...

Doh! Missed your followup. Looks like the exact same card and driver version are mentioned in Bug 1422850 (https://bugzil.la/1422850), and that disabling hardware acceleration should temporarily fix it.

I'd suggest signing into Bugzilla and following that bug so you get email updates when it changes status.

I also switched back to firefox a few weeks ago and I'm not impressed.

* Performance is really not that good. I especially have issue on Google sites (Docs and Drive).

* Scroll-wheel to switch between tabs is gone.

* No multi-tab management (shift/ctrl+click to select and move multiple tabs) like Chrome has

* Firefox's UI on Android is utter garbage, so I haven't been able to switch there which defeats the point of having browser sync. [it leaves zero space for the url bar, all taken by useless buttons which Chrome cleverly hides under the menu button]

I had no idea you could select multiple tabs in Chrome. That's awesome--thank you!!

> I especially have issue on Google sites (Docs and Drive)

And YouTube. And Search. Hangouts, Gmail, Maps, Calendar, Groups, everything else? I don't buy it for a second that it isn't on purpose, even with the polyfill justification.

You only make it easier for people like me to continue ignoring Chrome (if I even needed more reasons).

I don’t think Google is trying to slow it down or does any work to hamper FF or Safari or IE.

I just don’t think they care. If it works, more or less, ship it.

Not lightning fast in Chrome? Put a couple of engineers on it.

Welcome back to 1998 and ‘Best Viewed With’ badges.

Let's hope they don't decide to serve Firefox users JSON output and call it a day

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7oxiae/i_had_to_us...

> Scroll-wheel to switch between tabs is gone.

But I can scroll through list of clickable and readable tabs if they don't fit the screen all at once, unlike in Chrome where you get lots of unusable hair-thin controls instead.

What's wrong with the Firefox on Android? Recent version is minimalistic in terms of design, while works the same way as desktop FF in terms of UX. I've never had any issues, plus "Firefox Sync", "Send Tab to Device..." and Pocket Reader integration—are really great features.

As for desktop version, multiselect/moving tabs is convenient on Chrome, but vertical tabs/bookmarks/history/synced devices available in Firefox is much, much better.

And not to forget the most important feature: you can install uBlock Origin

« Besides videos » is a great problem imho. The video player is complete garbage. Everytime my video is starting to stutter, i go to chrome to see if it’s a network issue, and so far 100% of the time chrome played it just fine.

Simply linking to the download page isn't particularly useful, IMO. Release notes are here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/58.0/releasenotes/

Agreed. From the release notes link you provided:

    *Performance improvements, including:

    Rendering graphics for Windows users by using Off-Main-Thread Painting (OMTP)

    Loading pages faster by changing how Firefox caches and retrieves JavaScript*

These performance enhancements were both featured on HN. It's good news.

> Rendering graphics for Windows users by using Off-Main-Thread Painting (OMTP)

Does this mean OSX and Linux users are not using this method?

Not yet.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1432531

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1430793

Is Linux in this case short for generic *nix + X?

Thanks! We've updated the link.

And since this is HN, the download people here are most likely to want is the Developer Edition: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

Not necessarily. Developer is the beta channel, after all, so many of us use Firefox stable as our primary. I use my various PortableApps.com packages to run separate channels without impacting each other for testing sites.

I use Developer as my only browser. Never had any issues. It's not a buggy alpha version or something.

Even FF Nightly works perfectly well as a day to day browser for me. And I use it all day every day.

Nightly is surprisingly stable. In my past few years of using it, there have only been a few days when it has been unusable. On those days I just used Chrome. The e10s transition was pretty rough. It was common for every tab to crash at once, and sometimes there were long delays for tabs to paint when switching.

You can't disable telemetry in the Developer Edition for some reason, so I've gone back to Stable.

The official response — I asked — isthat by downloading dev or nightly you "automatically opt-in" into telemetry, because no one would download these "if they didn't want to help developing Firefox".

I've simply replaced all URLs in abou:config with https://example.invalid/, that makes sure telemetry is off.

Interesting. Too bad Tracking Protection doesn't apply to Mozilla as well. ;)

Do you remember when you asked that, roughly?

The DevEdition used to just be a dub for Aurora, a.k.a. the Alpha channel. And from that viewpoint it does sort of makes sense to enforce telemetry, as that's the whole point of providing Beta/Alpha/Nightly builds. (Not sure, if it really needs to be enforced, but it does cost them money to provide the download infrastructure for all the people using those builds and if they don't get usage data back, that's costing them money.)

With the Alpha channel gone (the DevEdition is now based on the Beta channel) and the DevEdition really being specifically built for webdevs, it does not make sense to enforce telemetry there, and it might very well just be an oversight that they haven't changed that in the DevEdition build.

I've gotten into a habit of checking into all the performance boosts on Firefox release, but I almost missed the best feature of the release: Tracking Protection!

It's buried under Preferences -> Privacy & Security -> Tracking Protection

I've been using Privacy Badger for a while and today installed DDG's new Privacy Essentials. Does anyone know how the new Firefox feature compares to these other 2 options regarding 3rd party tracking across sites?

How is "tracking protection", as nice as it may be, a "performance boost"?

This is not the "Do Not Track", this is a block list from disconnect.me.

If someone used a single pixel beacon, only mined referrers, that wouldn't be the case, but the additional javascript does cause performance issues.

By not loading trackers, the browser is freed to spend all its resources loading actual content of the page. This speeds up page load by as much as 40%.

Sorry for the confusion; I didn't mean to group those together. I meant that I'd lost sight of other nice features with all the excitement of Firefox performance lately.

Tracking Protection blocks network requests to domains that are identified as trackers. This means that tracking scripts don’t load (faster page load) and run (more responsive web page).

Paper detailling the "as much as 40%" figure that Asa Dotzler mentioned: http://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SPW2015/W2SP/papers/W2SP_201...

This was actually released already in Firefox 57 as mentioned in the "in case you missed it" section at the bottom of the new features list.

Tracking Protection uses the blocklist provided by disconnect.me.

I haven't yet had time to look into DDG's Privacy Essentials, so can't comment on that. But Privacy Badger functions by having a more limited list out of the box and then while you're browsing, it's observing the behaviour of loaded scripts and such, and then dynamically blocks them, if they seem to be tracking you. So, in the long run, it catches more obscure tracking scripts, though there is also something to be said about it needing this time to understand that a script is tracking you.

Then in addition, Privacy Badger also eats up cookies from trackers and blocks social media buttons (or rather replaces them with a non-tracking version). Tracking Protection is just a dumb blocklist, so if you are looking for an all-in-one solution, Privacy Badger is the better choice.

Don't know else to shout this from the roof tops, but it's a biiiig deal in terms of browsing happiness: https://www.peterbe.com/plog/another-win-for-tracking-protec...

^ That blog post was written when my Firefox Nightly was what is v58 today.

The tracking protection is even better with the newly released Duck Duck Go addon

That speed comes at the cost of delaying or breaking existing sites, fwiw

Such as?

IMHO, if the broken sites are broken because of their "need" to download trackers, intrusive ads, and any number of other dark-pattern based tools... we're better of with those sites broken.

Do these trackers actually add direct value for users? 99% don't, things like the Facebook like button and so forth shouldn't require I hit Facebook's server when loading the page initially.

Still on Firefox 56. My crucial addons still don't work. Still wishing Mozilla made FF56 into an ESR.

Just wanted to say you're not alone, I'm on 56 for the same reasons.

55 here because 56 breaks Mozilla's own Tab Center add-on. I see no mention of new APIs for add-ons in the release notes...

IIUC the API needed for this addon[1] will be available in FF 59[2].

Mozilla dropped support for Tab Center a while before Quantum IIRC. Another addon took its place, but then was dropped by its developer with Quantum. Supposedly [1] will allow transition from the older addons. I'm looking forward to finding out once 59 is out.

[1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/ [2]https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1423725

That bugzilla link is purple, so I guess that's the right one. But there's just so many APIs that were missing when they forced 57 on everyone, I honestly don't actively keep track because it's going to take a while. They were nowhere near ready, but a fixed release schedule is a fixed release schedule...

Edit: Looking at the status:

> Status: NEW → RESOLVED 4 days ago

That could have made it into 58. Or they can still add it: why wait? They started this quick major-release cycle to release features sooner, but I don't see why they can't just release them when they're, y'know, ready.

The feature landed in the nightly trunk, it has to go through the alpha/beta release channels.

I'm on 54, probably forever as there's no response from the developer of the RSS addon I use. (I tried 15 of the most popular alternatives, and didn't like a single one, so Firefox 54 it is.)

Tab Center was reimplemented using WebExtension APIs and released as Tab Center Redux: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-re...

That extension is missing several features the old extension had.

Story of my life.

I was happy to find it, only to notice the top tab bar would always still be there. And I've seen with classmates (who saw my tab list and wanted to try it) that it sometimes bugs as well. No such issues with the good ol' Tab Center. (Good ol', yeah, the thing is what, less than two years old now?)

We're actively working on APIs to hide individual tabs, and the entire tab bar, which will bring that functionality back to Firefox.

Individual tab hiding is already implemented in Firefox 59 (Beta / Developer Edition), but currently behind the "extensions.webextensions.tabhide.enabled" pref as we iron out final UX / security / privacy concerns. Still, tangible progress is happening.

> tangible progress is happening.

It's just too bad that it's afterwards. I don't see why it was necessary to toss an old system before the new one is finished. It's not as if they can't coexist.

Sorry if this is a little harsh. The hard work is appreciated and as a developer myself, I know about technical debt and stuff. This is a huge project with loads of people to please. I just hope in the future we can build the new house before tearing down the old.

56 here too on my main machine due to add-on issues. 57 on my secondary machine beside me. Can't wait until I can drop 56.

It's the only browser I've used that gets less useful over time instead of more useful. Losing half my extensions makes it a dealbreaker.

I was on FF 56 because of addons until Meltdown/Spectre happened. Just be aware FF 56 is missing the mitigations for those. Yeah, it would be great if Mozilla made FF 56 into an ESR.

At this point, I have basically given up on the extensions I care about working correctly in the future.

These addons (tree style tabs, tab open/close control) already have webextension versions, but are extremely buggy for me, and I believe that is unfixable because the asynchronous nature of webextensions is fundamentally incompatible with changing browser behavior on that level.

It's now up to a point where I dread opening a new page, and it takes a couple of tries before a tab is in the right position in the tree, if it works at all. Sometimes they just land wherever, not even forming a correct tree anymore, old tabs reappear, and on an extension restart the whole tree is jumbled up.

So, to me, the whole Quantum era has been kind of a big disappointment.

Since release 57 I have almost exclusively started using Firefox on Android. I know most quantum enhancements aren't yet in the Android version but something improved leaps and bounds at 57.

The ability to use sync and various privacy enhancing extensions mean FF has a great appeal on Android. Now only if they can fix the remaining URL load delays and improve video playback compatibility it'll be a great experience.

Run ublock on FF android and it'll more than make up for the slower browser by avoiding downloading all the ads. When the quantum enhancements land Chrome will be way behind.

Yep, already run uBlock Origin and Cookie AutoDelete. The problem has always been there with or without the extensions. But on faster devices it's not that much of an annoyance anymore.

I did try Firefox 57 on my Android phone and found the scrolling to be unpleasant with lots of artifacts and stuttering. It's still a much better experience with the mobile version of Chrome.

That's right but it's not so bothersome anymore esp on faster devices.

I think and early version of the enhancements on Android are available in 58, and can be enabled by using the search bar to enter `layout.css.servo.enabled` and then switching it on.

Nope doesn't look like that setting is present in 58 on Android. It seems to be still disabled at build time.

Long time Firefox user and since Firefox 57, everything has gotten worse for me. A lot of my extensions no longer work. This includes session management extensions which just don't work properly anymore. And of course I just upgraded Firefox and lost all my tabs. The browser completely freezes every 10 seconds for a few seconds (I'm typing this and my cursor gets stuck, then 5 characters show up all at once). I'm glad others suddenly think the browser is great. I guess they don't know what they've been missing with previous versions.

That's a known problem with the sessionstore.js file(s), http://kb.mozillazine.org/Sessionstore.js Try deleting them? Also if your places.sqlite file is damaged it will cause similar behavior, but removing that will delete your history so maybe make sure it's synced first. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_hangs#Other_causes_of_hang...

I've been happily using Firefox since 57 shipped. Loving the overall experience.

I feel a bit petty for bringing this up, but what is up with Firefox's spellchecker? I came from Chrome so the spellcheck had a web-service which kept the word list current (slang and technical terms), but even ignoring that the Firefox spellcheck doesn't do a good job with the "basics."

For example "That" misspelt as "Taht" (a & h transposed) and the solutions Firefox suggests are Tait, Baht, Taft, Ta ht, Ta-ht.

Its out of the box spell checking is just terrible, at least on OS X compared to Chrome and Safari.

Your example doesn't bother me too much, because at least it is right that the word is not spelled correctly. It is just not being great at suggesting replacements (although on my Mac it omits "Tait" and does suggest "That" at the end of the list, and if the misspelled word was "taht" rather than "Taht" then "that" is the first suggestion).

What bothers me is that it frequently flags word as misspelled that are in fact correctly spelled.

I'm using whatever dictionary is configured out of the box. There is an "add dictionary" option in the Languages sub-menu on the right-click pop-up in text areas, but I haven't yet gotten around to exploring that.

The good news is that this is really the only beef I have with Firefox for ordinary use.

Chrome still wins for a lot of development work, though, because of its multiple people feature. I can set up one person for each project, and easily switch between them, with each person having their own set of bookmarks, history, cache, cookies, and so on.

Firefox can do that with multiple profiles, but if you want to use two profiles at once you have to launch two copies of the browser. That can then lead to confusion when other programs try to open a URL, either failing to open or opening in the wrong instance of Firefox.

Grab Mozilla's "Multi-Account Containers"[0] add-on. Each container has its own self-contained session, session data, and cookies. Plus only a single window, different containers are just regular tabs, whereas in Chrome it is one window per profile.

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

Those are good, but it doesn't look like you can have per-container bookmarks. With Chrome persons or Firefox profiles each identity has its own bookmarks.

I wonder if one could write a bookmark manager extension for Firefox that would allow having named collections of bookmarks that could be saved and restored? And if so, would it be possible to make it so that a named set could be associated with a container account and automatically switch in that set whenever you are in a container for that account?

Also, hoping works someday happens on a Multiple language friendly spellchecker [1]. That design -which is the one used in Chrome- is much more pleasant to use when frequently switching between languages (at the occasional cost of a bit of leniency, but to m(an)y eyes it's a very desirable tradeoff).

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69687

Did canvas fingerprinting blocking make it to this release? There were many articles saying it might or will happen and I can't find anything backing this up in the release notes. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=firefox+58+canvas+fingerprinting&t...

According to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=967895 it's in 58 but wasn't added to release notes because it's disabled by default via the privacy.resistFingerprinting about:config setting.

It also breaks the built-in screenshots: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1412961

Well, you'll notice soon enough, if it does get shipped. So many webpages cause that prompt to pop up, it's kind of ridiculous. Frankly might be a reason for them to hold off on shipping it, it's not user-friendly at all to get that smacked into the face, seemingly at random, with no conception of what will break or what's to gain when blocking it.

One of the most prominent pages that makes that prompt pop up is GitHub.

I love Firefox and switched back from Chrome with FF 57, but I really wish they had a Task Manager like Chrome does, so I can spot and kill misbehaving tabs rather than have all my tabs seem to steadily slow down. It's the only feature I miss from Chrome, and hope it appears in FF soon.

Until they provide a decent UI/UX to do that, you can use about:performance for now.

I agree, this might be "good enough" for now; thanks for the tip

about:performance

That's useful, didn't know about that; but it doesn't show per-tab usage like Chrome's does (I think).

Adding the addon 'The Great Suspender' helped me out in this area. Also disabling HTML5 autoplay.

HTML auto-play is absolutely infuriating. On desktop, I landed on some CNET article the other day and suddenly a video start playing (super loud, too). Why does CNET assume I want to watch this?

I don't know if there's an option somewhere in FF or Chrome to block this nonsense but I really hope that feature is implemented some day.

I see no updates on APIs for missing add-ons. Looks like I'm going to have to stay with Firefox 55 a little longer to even be able to use Mozilla's own Tab Center add-on.

FF 57 was much snappier on my Mac than on Chrome, but it occasionally turned into a CPU hog and got the fans spinning full blast. Did anyone else experience that?

Yes, I simply couldn't use it because it drained my macbook battery too quickly. I just updated to 58, but it seems to still be a problem.

Same here - first thing I did when v58 came out was check to see if CPU usage was lowered, which it unfortunately wasn't.

I see no reason why CPU activity should spike to 20% every few seconds with one blank tab open and no extensions enabled.

To save battery life I'm trying to switch to Safari (from Chrome -> Firefox) but container tabs in Firefox are amazing - the ability to automatically open a domain in a container is perfect.

Is it possible to whitelist cookies per domain in Safari?

Only time when I noticed my fans revving up was when I went to a site that tried to mine some bitcoins.

Closing the tab reduced the cpu usage to normal levels.

FF should put up a "red flaming" icon on the tab with high CPU usage - similar to audio icon on the tab with audio output.

I've occasionally seen something named "FirefoxCP Web Content" taking 90+% of a core, mostly on Reddit.

Most of the time when it happens on Reddit it stops if I turn on uBlock Origin and refresh the page. Sometimes, though, it still happens even after that.

> it stops if I turn on uBlock Origin and refresh the page

Why do you turn it off in the first place?

Reddit ads are at fixed positions on the page and don't have sound or motion. They generally provide no distraction, unless the content actually catches my attention because it is something I'm actually interested in. Their ad targeting is good enough that I actually am interested in a fair number of them.

Unless it turns out that the high CPU usage is the fault of the ads (which I've not been able to prove), Reddit's ad system is the kind of ad system we should be encouraging, so I don't block them.

I was looking for this part of the thread. I'm on Windows 10 on an i7-6600U laptop with 16GB RAM and a SSD.

FF57 spiked my cpu to 100% most of the time and Netflix was really laggy. I went back to Chrome because it only uses 10-20% CPU with regular usage.

In FF57, I was using default performance and browser settings.

Add to Home screen button on mobile is great!

Easy way to spot progressive web apps.

Move URL bar to bottom and we have almost perfect browser.

About Updates

Anyone appreciates how Firefox gives us choice? Unlike Chrome where I have to resort to hacks to stop the damned thing from downloading a fresh version whenever it feels like?

BTW: Does chrome keep to the promise of patch or diff updates instead of 100MB+ downloads for every release?

Automatic updates are essential to the timely rollout of new web standards.

> On Firefox for Android, we’ve added support for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) so you can add websites to your home screen and use them like native apps.

Very cool, that was the largest issue for me lately. So maybe my phone doesn't even need Chrome anymore :-)

Any updates on U2F support with major sites? Google, FB etc.?

I haven't tested on FB, but it works with Github.

IIRC you have to enable it, as it was experimental also, didn't work with Google Accounts.

Unfortunately, doesn't work with Google yet... It does work with Dropbox and Github though.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1065729 may be of interest.

The Android version also has several important improvements, a major one being better bookmark management (finally!).

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/android/58.0/releaseno...

I hope they address the issue with battery drainage on macOS.

Dang! Looks like Tab Hiding API didn't make it for 58.

Looks like it's slated for 59 though: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1423725

Didn't read much, but hopefully it allows hiding without unloading.

Patiently waiting..

I switched over to Firefox at work because large diff pages in VSTS (Microsoft's "github") scrolled unbearably slow and choppy in Chrome, but scroll perfectly in Firefox. It's been great.

While I really enjoy Firefox' comeback and regained snappiness, the performance of css transforms and animation is still subpar.

With larger and more complex elements that are affected by CSS transform events it becomes very noticeable that the animation is far from smooth, unlike in other browser like Chrome or Safari. I saw this behavior in every recent Firefox version on macOS - from stable to nightly. However there's so little discussion that I feel I might be the only one experiencing this.

So what is the ETA for release of Webrender in Firefox now?

I don't know the ETA for WebRender in Firefox. The team is focusing on Windows first. You can follow WebRender development on the Mozilla Graphics team's blog:

https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2018/01/16/webrender-newsle...

There's no ETA as far as I'm aware—it's mostly in the blocker bug burn-down phase and I don't want to try to predict when that will conclude. Progress is coming along quite nicely, and it's easier than ever to try it out in Nightly (just toggle gfx.webrender.all in about config). Lots of people on the team, including me, use it quite regularly.

There's a newsletter you can check out too: https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/

Thanks, I'll give nightly a try to see how it works on Mesa / amdgpu+radeonsi.

Firefox has improved dramatically since 57 and I'm using it more now, but the one reason why it's still not my main browser is that new windows open too slowly.

The extra lag can't be much more than 100 ms or so (if that), but opening new windows is the worst possible moment to be a little bit slower than other browsers (on macOS).

Still a lot of 'must have' extensions do not work with Firefox Quantum (57+) like UnMHT for example ...

Anyone running Quantum on Linux with a 4k monitor? I switched from Chrome for a couple months but the lag/jank/choppiness (especially when scrolling) finally drove me back to Chrome. Still loving the new FF on my HD screens though.

I've been running it on a 4K screen for a bit, since I've been using the beta channel, and it's seems to work very smoothly. At least, I have noticed the lag or choppiness you've mentioned. One caveat is that my screen runs at 60 hz, so if you have a higher frame rate, then you might see things I won't catch.

If you aren't setting layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true in about:config, Linux GFX performance is pretty bad. Its a night and day difference for me, and I haven't personally had any issues with it (I use relatively up to date kernels and Mesa on a variety of Intel GPUs, YMMV).

I was going to say that my Firefox on Fedora 27 works really well, but now I realize I did set that force-enabled setting. I have no idea how it works without acceleration.

Font rendering any better in 58?

I was trying Firefox 57 after release on OS X 10.11.6 and it seems like it was giving me eye strain which I strongly presume is the fort rendering. Firefox 52 and Chrome 63 seem to be unaffected.

The dev tools are still way to slow. Especially when debugging javascript. Sometimes there is a 40+ second wait when your trying to go from an error in the console to the line of js in debugger.

I hope the developer tools request tabs in console got fixed. They showed nothing in 57. I'm using FF dev edition now, until it's fixed in the stable FF.

I'm getting some unbearably slow startup times on a new window. Even a fresh uncustomized profile is moderately slow to start.

Does FF 58 have anything like the Request Policy extension (which broke as of FF 57, last I heard)?

I've been using uMatrix for this job for a while now. I find it much better than I ever found RequestPolicy, but of course YMMV.

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

Please make pinch to zoom like webkit/blink browsers

Hoping for PWA support on desktop in upcoming versions.

What do you mean by PWA support? Service Workers etc already are there, and have been for quite some time.

I think he means 'Add to Menu/Desktop' and the visual part without the address bar, etc. I am missing that too for the desktop version, but actually I think the mobile version was the bigger issue and I have to say it works great with FF 58 :-)

Still no status bar :(

One of my 'must have' plugins for firefox stopped working. Luckily they have a desktop version... which runs in chromium (Electron).

Don't know why people are saying Firefox is fast, Speedometer 2.0 shows a score of 47 where Chrome is 67 on my MBP. And on my PC, Chrome gets 76 whereas Firefox gets 64.

User experience is what we are all excited about. A speedy benchmark means absolutely nothing if it FEELS slow when I'm using it.

Besides, there are some things benchmarks don't check. Examples:

Chrome startup takes at least 3 on my machine. It's does heavy disk activity during this period. Firefox on the other hand takes at most 30 seconds.

Ram usage is also way higher on chrome than Firefox.

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