Firefox Product Roadmap
wiki.mozilla.org
wiki.mozilla.org
Noticeable visible differences included page-load performance as well as a smaller memory footprint relative to Chrome.
Faster WebAssembly[0] starting from v58.0 made the speed optimization more visible -- it was at this point when I truly fell in love with the browser -- Firefox dethroned Chrome as my default. Add to this the hardened tracking protection, Greasemonkey's super massive stash of user scripts and values of the non-profit organization that supports the browser -- Chrome felt so old-school.
[0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/making-webassembly-even-fa...
How many websites do you visit (and which ones are they) that use WebAssembly?
Wasm is currently considered "around half as fast as native"[0]. The Wasm design, Emscripten compiler, and browser compilers all have a part of responsibility in this, but I suspect that browser compilers have the largest share. Mozilla created The WebAssembly Explorer[1] which shows good-looking ".wat", but bloated "Firefox x86 Assembly" compared to "LLVM x86 Assembly". I hope they intend to use this tool to improve Firefox x86 Assembly.
[0] https://github.com/WebAssembly/binaryen/issues/1070
[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/03/previewing-the-webassembly...
Chrome:
- WebAssembly: didn't load
- Asm.js: 50-60FPS
- JS: 2FPS
Firefox:
- WebAssembly: 30-40FPS
- Asm.js: 20-30FPS
- JS: 2FPS
I have the newest versions of both browsers.
On a Lenovo T450s sitting idle with 14 tabs across 4 windows, FF is now using 25-100% of the CPU and over 4GB of RAM. When I resume from Hibernation (on Windows) it can take up to 10 minutes for FF to settle down and for the system mouse to respond.
If that's an improvement from Chrome, then OMG you poor bastards who use Chrome as your daily.
FF seems to be fine on more powerful systems but on my lower spec'd laptops it's just a battery sucking lap warmer.
People's mental model (Chrome fast, lean; Firefox slow, bloated) seem to really not update quickly. When Chrome hangs it's "That's weird, something must be broken, the website sucks" when it's Firefox "Well further proof the Firefox is terrible".
For the record, my 2012 MBA, which is probably weaker than your Lenovo, has no issues with Firefox at all.
My remarks were not strikes against Firefox's performance, it's stellar, just that since Quantum it has become a resource hog to achieve that high performance.
I am running on a 32nm SandyBridge, which is even older then the 2012 MBA, 22nm Ivy Bridge mentioned in the MBA post below. And due to some thermal issues, It is now capped to running at Max 2.2Ghz.
I am still trying to clean up my tabs, which is on a moderately high level of 299. Slightly lower then last weeks 380. Not all of them are active, may be only 40 tabs or so.
And needless to say, for lots of Heavy Tabs users, Firefox now runs circle around Chrome. And right now, it is using 15 - 40% CPU when "idle", but mostly hover around ~25%. And I have Ad Block and Privacy option turned on. So that helps a lot too.
These days website uses insane amount of Javascript from track everything including your mouse movement to quietly mining Bitcoins. For most people, Firefox is now very fast.
You should try resetting profile and visit the same website to see if problem persist. You should file a bug. But may be you would have try all this and know already, since you have been using it since Phoenix. I can not help.
Have a nice Day User since Netscape era.
I tend to have Azure dashboards open which are quite active and resource intensive so I'm not doing myself any favors however I typically only have 6 of 12 tabs active.
I've never used Chrome as my primary browser so I can't really compare it to Firefox in terms of performance, I just know what Firefox has been like over the years. They've always had a cadence to their releases and I know it'll get better, at the moment however it is a CPU and memory hog compared to past releases.
That being said I am kind of astonished that in it's current state people are saying it's astonishingly better than Chrome. I guess it just speaks to how bad Chrome is presently? I don't think I use Chrome enough to comment but I've not had issues with it. I typically only have Chrome running ~5 tabs with 1 active.
Note that as firefox isn't capable of suspending or resuming a computer I'm going to continue to assume that your OS is partially related to bad resume performance.
I think you misunderstood what I said.
Firefox isn't suspending or resuming the computer. I put the computer into hibernation explicitly and it hibernates which means the computer is consuming no power and is shut down. I can remove the battery and unplug it with no harm.
Upon powering the laptop back up, Firefox starts consuming 100% CPU utilization for 5-10 minutes consuming so much CPU time that the mouse stutters.
If I end task Firefox then the system becomes immediately responsive.
Rubber band scrolling: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1124108
Downloads in Finder: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=909760
Toolbar movement in full screen: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=738335
Pinch to zoom: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688990
Animate back gesture: doesn’t seem to be a bug for this.
Animated checkboxes: can’t find a bug for this either.
Yes, I've seen the same on GitHub. Note sure this is a GitHub or Firefox bug. (I use Nightly). Could you maybe file a bug at bugzilla for this?
In that bug you can see there are several things that can cause this, including website issues and certain extensions.
A bug report with steps to reproduce (even a link to the specific GitHub page involved would help) would be really useful if you are still seeing this. Please cc "bzbarsky". Also worth checking whether the problem persists with extensions disabled, if it's reproducible enough to do that with...
But, of course as stated in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404468#c43 there a sites like http://www.jeuxvideo.com/ which huge (1-2sec) FOUC in Firefox (not noticable in Chrome).
Chrome has started just blocking the HTML parser completely on stylesheets. That means it doesn't end up with FOUC (except insofar as there is renderable content before a sheet that is affected by the sheet), but at the cost of less parallelism and slower pageload...
This is very interesting. If Chrome decide to follow the same path it could give a serious incentive to some website to be more careful about there security.
The whole "display a warning when login are passed via HTTP" already managed to create some reaction. It probably won't be a revolution but it might be a good first step.
Malicious hacking is already illegal with significant penalties.
> not blame the victims
If the victims failed even basic security measures, I'm quite happy to give them their share of blame. There have been plenty of reports of exposed databases with no password protection, places that stored passwords in plain text, folks running unpatched OSs... You can't just ignore security and pretend that you're not at fault.
Yes, more people should end up in jail.
>If the victims failed even basic security measures, I'm quite happy to give them their share of blame.
Please detail how you have established that the victims themselves personally ignored security practices.
>There have been plenty of reports of exposed databases with no password protection, places that stored passwords in plain text, folks running unpatched OSs... You can't just ignore security and pretend that you're not at fault.
You are making broad claims. Remember that the non-technical business owners/managers/CEOs etc need our help, and they don't need people shaming them for using vendors or consultants who might have made made mistakes.
Went back to Firefox Quantum for a few months. Now I'm back on Chrome for exactly the same reasons. After hours of active use, Firefox is eating a ton of RAM and consuming way too much CPU, while also struggling to open any pages (let alone more complex apps) or downright crashing the apps that were already running.
Plus, it does not seem to support web calls at all (Google Meet, BlueJeans, GoToMeeting you name it).
I hate being on Chrome again, and I miss those Firefox features. But I have work to do, and I just can't have my tools grind to a halt all the time.
It is a showstopper. I don't care about new features if it can't handle basic stability.
Oh, and before anyone asks, on the thinkpad the performance issue was still present on a debian stretch install as well.
Just because it works on your system doesn't mean this isn't a bug they need to fix.
If it was broken for everyone it would already have been fixed.
There can be all sorts of reasons that specific sites or specific installations might show performance problems that aren't representative of the typical experience. Your specific environment might have some feature (particular hardware, profile data, addons, etc.) that happen to trigger a bad case in some code and so lead to an overall slowdown. Or you might be regularly using a site that happens to do something that's CPU intensive in Firefox but less so in other browsers. This could be a Firefox problem (maybe we implemented a feature using an algorithm with different tradeoffs compared to other browsers and it so happens that everyone avoids the worst case behaviour in Chrome, but not in Firefox, maybe our implementation just has issues that can be fixed), or it could be a site problem (sometimes sites just send buggy, broken code to specific browsers that causes them to use lots of CPU for no reason).
One of the things that was most valuable during the Quantum project was the work to improve the profiling tools. If you can capture a profile using the super-easy-to-use gecko profiler[1] and create a bug with the profile attached it should be possible to figure out what exactly is causing the problem in your case. Without that data it's really hard to make progress because the kind of problem you experience is just not something that would be allowed to ship if it was known.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance...
I had many issues with Firefox and Webex. In the end just put it down to Linux or Ghostery plugin rather than Firefox specifically, as I couldn't get it to work with Chromium either.
However, in my experience Firefox does work flawlessly with appear.in
You can see a setting "Performance" in the first tab, uncheck the "Use recommended.." and reduce the number of CPUs it suggest. Maybe that'll help?
Have you tried brave browser ? It was created by Brendan Eich, the co-founder of Mozilla and I'm so happy with Brave browser right now, especially in terms of resource consumption, it's just so slick and fast
Mild ? For some reasons, it's like 5X faster then chrome on my laptop, Can't live without it anymore
Also, FireFox for Android runs faster that Chrome (not because FireFox is faster that Chrome on Android, but because the ad-blocker does a nice work avoiding to load garbage), and the RAM usage it's keep at bay. I have like ten tabs on FF for Android and keeps working like if I had one open.
On any case, on Chrome and Firefox you can install a add-on called "Tab suspender". It allows to save ram, literally suspending tabs that has not been accesses on some time. Try it.
*edit : grammar
Reflects my experience. I use Firefox at work, Chrome at home. Chrome RAM usage is much higher than FF. Not that I really mind - I have more than enough RAM to support it. But it often leaves me wondering if some tab/plugin/extension is misbehaving, which in turn forces me to close all my tabs only to find that the memory use stays high and the number of Chrome processes doesn't decrease as expected. I'm considering switching back to Firefox at home now.
EDIT: OK, tested with Firefox now. Number of process doesn't decrease as I close tabs either, but memory use is still considerably higher than Chrome.
Entering about:about in the URL bar gives you a short list of interesting about:* links that you can play around.
I guess it depends per device and use-case. I use Firefox everywhere. Home (PC with Linux OS), work (laptop with Linux OS) and on my phone.
On my pc I have 0 RAM or CPU issues with Firefox. (intel i5, and nvidia GTS 250, ancient I know.)
On my laptop (intel i7 and nvidia NVS 5200M) I have had serious CPU issues though. With version 57 it used to stay above 90% CPU for hours. Since version 58 though it's been a lot better. Sometimes stays at about 40% for a while, then goes back down to like 10%. I suspect it might be due to some of the tabs I have open with zabbix graphs, but I don't know for certain.
I love using firefox on my phone because it's the only mobile browser that can use uBlock Origin. I don't care how fast or smooth chrome is on mobile, I'm not gonna use it if the price you have to pay is being eye-raped by ads.
and its got smooth scrolling. (at least on android)
* https://github.com/brave/browser-android-tabs
I want to do that but can't replace chrome's debugging features, specifically websocket network call analysis and hover variable to get its value. How have you replaced these feature in your workflow?
1. Record a profile with the Gecko Profiler WebExtension (Install it from https://perf-html.io/)
2. Upload the profile to https://perf-html.io/
3. Create a bug on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ with a link to this performance profile.
The Firefox developers are friendly and welcome, and I'd say in about 50-75% of cases the bugs get fixed in a timely manner.
It might also be that being the second fastest guy on the track will not win you a gold medal. As everyone tends to develop and test software on Blink/V8, it will undoubtedly feel slow when ran on a competiting browser.
If the bugreport just reads "it's slow", then of course that's not helpful. However, performance issues as drastic as described above are certainly not normal. I'm using Firefox on Windows, Linux and (up until recently) macOS and never encountered anything remotely like this. So it would certainly be helpful to get detailed traces of that abnormal situation.
If it being slow really is a rule rather than an exception, then perhaps there is something in your configuration making it that way. Or a specific website that you happen to always have open. It's not normally always slow for most people, so again, this would be useful to know about.
It's true that often developers only test on Chrome, and in making sure it runs smoothly there they happen to make something that performs badly on Firefox. If we know about these websites then we can see if it's something we should change on our end, or get in touch with the developers ourselves.
How about making this, Record, Profile, and Submission procedure built in. Button Accessible within 3-4 clicks. The amount of work required to get all these done and submitted is not easy especially for average users. I do a lot in my most enthusiastic days ( Mostly for Memshrink ), but after Memshrink I couldn't be bother much, unless the bug is annoying enough that persist.
but it takes up too much CPU. I kept track of the issue https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
It seems it's just normal that every page render takes 80-90% cpu. I'll take battery life over marginal performance improvements.
Hope they'll make it a priority one day.
I use tree style tabs, so I have lots of tabs open - after a cleanup this morning, I still have 26, but 50 to 100 is far from unusual - and it's just as fast as ever to open new tabs. I don't notice the memory usage at all. Sure, browsers are all the biggest hogs - Chrome, Firefox, Slack - but with 16G in my work laptop there's no noticeable difference than with my home machine with 32G.
I don't use Chrome much beyond development testing, but with some features - anything with smooth animations in particular - I see way more CPU usage from it than FF.
Just to add another data point, this has also been my experience: Firefox since Quantum often pegs CPU cores at 100% when showing pages with even quite simple animations.
The other big trouble area since Quantum seems to be extensions. After various experiments of my own and various discussions online, it seems clear that the machines I use where there are more extensions involved are much less stable and much more vulnerable to problems generally than those with mostly vanilla Firefox installations.
Firefox is doing a good job about analysing extensions startup performance, but I guess they need to do the same thing for page loads and memory usage. Or integrate the extension functionality into core more.
Unfortunately in practice what's happened so far is that lots of useful little things aren't possible any more because the new API doesn't support them, while extensions are evidently still capable of causing problems with performance and stability anyway.
Hopefully both of these aspects will improve in time. In particular, the emphasis on personalisation and improving the extensions ecosystem in this roadmap is welcome and seems very much in keeping with what a lot of us used to like about Firefox. I hope they really do put their focus there and exercise caution on becoming too "opinionated".
[Edit] Why the downvotes? I want Firefox to be successful, it just seems to have lost its charm from when it was originally called Phoenix[/Edit]
Not sure about the downvotes, either, because I think you have a very good point.
However, I suspect that many people want Firefox to be exactly like Chrome, at least subconsciously. This is of course silly, because what do we win if Firefox becomes a second Chrome? Also, it would mean that Firefox will always lose, because every little difference to Chrome would be considered negative.
On the other hand, it might make tactically sense for Firefox to mimic Chrome for now, to win back the lost users.
In the end, I want Firefox to be clearly different from and better than Chrome.
In fact it's painfully obvious that Mozilla isn't at all trying to "clone" Chrome, given that their recent Photon UI design looks less like Chrome than their previous Australis UI, all things considered. Not to mention that even their own Chromium-based products are drastically differently from Chrome, and they've just confirmed in this post that they intend to even move those over to GeckoView.
As such it's a very silly and tiresome argument to hear, and since the rest of the comment didn't seem very interested in having a conversation or adding to the greater discussion, I'm not surprised it would just get downvoted.
Using Firefox at work, often with more than 100 Tabs and multiple windows open without any issues. And my machine only has 6GB RAM...
If anyone has suggestions how I could get all those things fixed it would be really welcome. I'm using an Intel Core 2 6700 with Intel 965Q graphics with 8GB of RAM.
Please record a profile and report this.
If none of that works, you could try going back to about:support and click on Refresh Firefox. You’ll lose settings and extensions but it can clear up problematic issues. [2]
[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drive...
[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...
On another note, the lack of support for sessions is the real killer for me. And the lack of WebSocket debugging is a big strike against the dev in me. I use FF as my primary browser, but gotta give credit where it is due.
And while we are talking about hardware, it would be nice, if both Chrome and Firefox supported hw accelerated decoding on Linux. Currently, they don't support it at all.
I suspect they don't realize how many viewers this costs them, as this has been behind a flag for months already, meanwhile RTC users are being told "We recommend Chrome".
Sorry, I'm currently switching back to Chrome. :(
I believe that should only happen for tabs restored during startup. Unlike Chrome (unless something has changed), Firefox lazy-loads restored tabs on startup. I think that's preferable to the alternative.
I've discovered also that when I switch from tab to tab, sometimes the tab needs to reload the page. That's fine. But sometimes, it takes forever to get past a blank white screen on that tab.
Are you running a lot of extensions?
I've tested while looking at the activity monitor a bit. Loading random sites like HN show Firefox spiking to 80-90% CPU while Chrome spikes to 20-30%.
Though I would prefer if it were a bit harder to accidentally leave a container when opening a new tab.
I don't think it is worse at all. I use both and usually have firefox on my main monitor and chrome on my second monitor
Wow, the browser is giving up on the OS. What madness given that typical W10 PC's with 2GB RAM (with the disk spinning in vain) have only two apps open: the browser and its adversary, the AV. Heck 4GB isn't comfortable anymore with several tabs open.
I dont have any interest in using Lockbox; I already have a self-hosted open-source password management solution (Bitwarden, in my case, but that's just an implementation detail) that works for much more than just my web browser, which means I'm way more interested in hearing how Mozilla plans to make this kind of integration smoother and less error-prone.
I need to sync passwords for apps on my phone, for desktop apps that aren't web browsers (and for multiple browsers on several platforms), and Mozilla's one-off reinvention of existing software and protocols for their singular use cases is just xkcd'ing the problem, sadly.
Take the toolbar, for example: After installation it has all that unused space on the left and right sides of the address bar. This is probably to encourage customizations to it, but Joe doesn't care about that.
And then there are so many things on the toolbar that shouldn't be there. I think they should be hidden behind the sandwich menu, as the power users will know to add to the toolbar the ones that they need, and Joe wouldn't be overwhelmed by them.
Only these things should be present on the toolbar: back button, forward button, reload button (maybe), a home button - only if a home page was set, a clean omnibar, and the sandwich button.
Instead, even after trying to remove as much as I can from the toolbar, I still have: a non clean omnibar (two icons on its left end that seem to come from different universes, and too many things on it's right end - there should only be a dropdown button for the history at this end) and a more tools button. I counted and in total on the omnibar and the toolbar I have 4 buttons for "more stuff", instead of two (one dropdown for the history and the sandwich menu).
But I do think they are on the right track. I personally switched to Firefox from Chrome less than a year ago, and I'm not going back. Thank you, Mozilla, for all the good work that you did on Firefox!
But they need to get all videos working. It feels to me that it's a 50:50 chance to play a video.
On Android the startup is faster than with Chrome too, but the scrolling feels rather sluggish, so I still prefer Chrome here.
Videos generally work for me in Firefox. The only videos that don't work for me are from sites that are still (and only) using Flash because I don't have Flash installed.
What's an example of a video that doesn't work for you?
Some "html5" videos on Facebook and Twitter don't work.
https://github.com/servo/webrender
(Cargo lets you specify Git repos for dependencies.)
Just because it has no release on crates.io doesn't mean it's unreleased or unstable. Crates.io is just one way to get your crates.
I'm puzzled what Lockbox is mean to do. https://mozilla-lockbox.github.io/lockbox-extension/faqs/
What’s the difference between Lockbox and the Firefox password manager?
newer encryption than what is offered with password manager
probably because it wouldn't work with sync on linux/windows/android
> eh, sounds fairly run of the mill?
would you have preferred them to use some cutting edge cipher instead?
"run of the mill" is me taking a lazy jab at their description of advantages of Lockbox - they need to make a whole new product just to use the standard cipher/auth you'd expect them to be using anyway? I assume there might be more to it, but their product page doesn't really explain much.
I think Firefox for Android didn't get mentioned just because most of the desktop improvements apply equally to the Android version and they don't have much mobile-specific stuff planned. Meanwhile Focus/Klar is an entirely different codebase that is getting some new features.
"Firefox Klar is a version of Firefox Focus for Germany, Austria and Switzerland with user activity tracking disabled by default." - https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.klar/
Then of course this January all mainline Firefox development from the Taipei office ceased completely (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16186927), which has led to the situation that since then, the front-end part of the app hasn't had any active Mozilla developers assigned (!). There's some minimal staffing to continue looking at bug reports and identifying any real critical issues that still require fixing ASAP with whatever development resources can be scraped together or contracted in, but other than that everything is on standby.
There are some signs that some sort of rewrite might be on the table (although interestingly the roadmap keeps completely quiet about that), but until more is known about that, I tend to be rather pessimistic and assume lots of opportunities for losing or regressing current functionality and it taking ages until things are sorted out again, if ever.
It's a shame that the situation seems so dire. I guess I can understand it, since Firefox for Android really is not doing well and Focus seems to be doing a lot better, but it's still a really important part of the Firefox ecosystem, so it would be great if they could find a way to make it work well. But ah well. And perhaps they'll try to turn Focus into its replacement later on.
From what public data can be pierced together, Firefox for Android still has more active daily users than Focus's lifetime install count on the Play Store, though.
THANK YOU! I hope this will stop the notification boxes implemented in JS too. Using the web has become a whack-a-mole game with each website requiring me to tell it off ten times unitl I can get to the content.
But camera and microphone? They seem useful for Skype, Hangouts, and other opt-in use cases. Are people seeing those prompts so much they're annoyed by them? What's the mechanism to opt back in for selected sites?
I guess the site can detect the permission denial. But making the website show browser-specific instructions for how to disable the global opt-out seems really suboptimal. The browser is where browser-specific specific UI belongs!
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.platform/t...
First sentence in that thread is "Web Authentication is backward compatible with FIDO U2F second-factor tokens, and also supports more advanced capabilities in future FIDO 2.0 devices."
Ultimately the thing that is going to be shipped is probably webauthn.
The new Firefox mainly caters to simple users. Mozilla has abandoned their feature rich concept to appeal only to Chrome users.
Mozilla's only goal today is becoming number one in marketshare and beat Google no matter what. Even if that means they alienate every single power user.
I do not at all agree with that. That is a pure simple betrayal - exchanging their origin user base against Chrome users. Opera did that too.
The issue is, there is already an over-simplistic browser - Chrome. And only a minority of Chrome users will switch over to Firefox - the hope to absorb the majority of the Chrome user base will not work out for Mozilla.
They should have kept the features for the nerds and geeks inside. You know, there is something which is called honesty and dignity. This is for what we from Anonymous are standing for and what we are valuing.
And it is disgusting to see that an Open Source organization throws all of that over board just to become mainstream compatible.
But what about Servo? As in the parsing and layering part? Last time the test we had 10x speed difference compared to Gecko.
WebRendr is GPU / Nvidia limited? I though PCwalton said it will also be a Software Render too.
I really hope this includes the likes of outbrain, taboola and similar clickbait garbage that pollutes far too many blogs these days
- open about:config.
- type "autoplay" into the search bar at the top of the page.
There should be two options there:
"media.autoplay.enabled" and "media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground"
What these options do should be rather self-explanatory.
EDIT: damn markdown formatting
Why focus on QUIC when the JS APIs to use it aren't available? Numerous of the features of HTTP/2 aren't usable (i.e. trailers, flow control, security sensitive headers, priority, etc.).
I don't understand how the web is supposed to flourish without giving web developers some kind of access to these tools. Meanwhile, app developers are showered with such goodies.
>Phrase not found
Guess I'm still staying on v56...
> More Extension APIs: Firefox extensions will become more capable with additional features for tab management and organization, including a full implementation of Tab Hiding (61)
Once you can hide tabs, you can basically have tab groups.
Eventually I just went with keeping things in their own browser window. With multiple monitors or a screen big enough to have separate windows the dragging and dropping of tabs works fine.
Then the issue becomes that you cant save tab groups :(
You can even use multiple browsers if they do something useful for a type of group. History and bookmarking becomes even more mysterious that way.
The extensions I used to save groups are all broken atm.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view...
Come on, do the right thing for once and put the user first.
The ones everyone (except the ad networks) wants blocked by default are the intrusive ones, like video ads auto-playing loud BS or the ones where you scroll or move the cursor and some <div> or something pops up, darkens the rest of the site and annoys the reader with some pathetic bid to "subscribe to our page" etc.
Nevertheless, pretending Mozilla is not receiving funds from Google (who is already trying to force their standards through Chrome / Coalition for Better Ads) is intellectually dishonest.
Block all ads, let the user white list, that is the pro user approach. Should have been done years ago.
A number of innovative browsers never gained traction, and when mainstream ones try to improve UI it gets considerably worse.
Every new browser has a short runway of new awesome ideas and then it's stagnant for decades.
I totally dislike their experiments with menu bar. I never wanted that. It's Ribbon all over again.
But consistency, visual coherency, discoverability and predictability are apparently all outmoded concepts in UI design, so opinions like mine -- that native applications should look and feel like native applications -- don't seem to be worth much among the cool crowd nowadays.
* https://winaero.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/firefox-...
iTunes is the classic example!
because they weren’t a net improvement
> and when mainstream ones try to improve UI it gets considerably worse.
Examples? Firefox’s recent UI improvements are pretty great.