Firefox 13 Released - Homepage + Speed Improvements | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 13 Released - Homepage + Speed Improvements

blog.mozilla.org

144 pointsdaleharvey82 comments

Obligatory:

Release Notes: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/13.0/releasenotes/

Complete list of changes: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/13.0/releasenotes/bugli...

This gotta get me some karma!

This is the first release with SPDY enabled by default. Once most Firefox users have updated, about half of all web traffic will be from SPDY-enabled browsers.

Here's a tiny restartless addon that shows if the page you're on is using SPDY: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/spdy-indicato...

Thanks! That's useful.

Note: if you're upgrading Firefox and you didn't have SPDY enabled already you'll have to enable it manually.

(about:config, network.http.spdy.enabled = true)

This isn't true. If you had the pref set to the default value before, it should change to the new default value when you upgrade.

[Note: I am a Firefox developer.]

Maybe I should file a bug report then?

[Note: I literally just downloaded it, upgraded, and had this experience.]

Yes, that would be great!

Worked perfectly fine for me.

Ctrl + F displays number of instances found in a page in Chrome but not in Firefox. Can you please fix it.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=257061

The bug is 8 years old and nobody seems to be working on it. I wouldn't hold my breath that it will be fixed soon.

This is the classic example of FOSS apathy towards users.

Citation needed! What about users of old versions of Chrome, for example?

Chrome has had SPDY enabled for at least a year now -- since around Chrome 10, I think? And according to Statcounter measurements for this month to date [1], 28.75% of all page views currently come from Chrome 19.

From the same Statcounter numbers, 17.27% of all page views are from Firefox 12. So that's over 46% of page views this month using the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox. And another few percent are just one or two versions behind. So a couple of months from now, 50% of page views measured by Statcounter should come from SPDY-enabled browsers, especially if IE marketshare keeps shrinking rapidly.

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-201206...

Also interesting: according to that graph, as of June 2012, Firefox's major stable release at last surpassed IE's major stable release--just a few months shy of the 10-year anniversary of the release of Firefox 0.1.

EDIT: Ha, actually, drilling back further, looks like that's not true at all: Firefox's major release has surpassed IE9 for a while now. I was misled by IE9's slow adoption curve.

Aren't Chrome users almost always using the latest version because of the auto-update by default?

Apparently not. There's an ever growing tail of users who get stuck with an outdated version [1]. It's not as bad as Firefox yet but surprising nonetheless given how much effort Google put into Chrome's update system.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/may-br...

I have personally experienced and seen Chrome get “stuck” and kind of just fail to update itself until a manual re-download of the installer is performed. It does usually work, but sometimes just stops. For example, I recently saw a bug report from someone who thought they were on the most recent version of Chrome — 10. (It’s currently at 19 or so.)

Wow, those charts are fantastic.

Chrome auto-updates, so there are almost no users of old versions of Chrome. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/may-br...

Well, about 12% of Chrome page views are from old versions so "almost no users" is a bit of a myth or exaggeration. But it's definitely a smaller proportion than other browsers.

Firefox also auto-updates, but has a longer tail of users from old versions since it's been around longer and had a more obtrusive update process until recently. Currently about 32% of Firefox page views come from old versions, but this is decreasing steadily now that Firefox 3.6 users are being auto-updated to the current release channel, and now that updates are more "silent."

Stats are based on http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-201206... and http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-201206-201206-...

SPDY has been around since Chrome 10, so only 5% of Chrome users are older than that.

Once SPDYv3 is enabled in a release channel the Chrome installations which only support an outdated SPDY version will rise suddenly if the current update trend is not reversed in a future version.

http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper

Lots of detail about SPDY for those like me who didn't know.

Score one for mediocrity. Microsoft's Speed + Mobility version of Spdy has some good improvements, but I guess Google will just declare their version to be the standard.

Also Spdy only had 23% faster page load times than non-pipelined HTTP (in other words, enabling networking.http.pipelining is just as good).

SPDY is not something that Google just implemented and froze as a standard. Mozilla and others are still working on the SPDY spec in the IETF, and we're happy to see improvements. Mike Belshe continues to work on evolving the SPDY protocol even though he no longer works for Google. The latest development builds of Chrome and Firefox have just been updated to SPDY draft3.

Any idea to where Mike Belshe moved?

Belshe left Google to co-found http://www.twist.com/

Interesting, thanks for the info.

So speaking for Google, if IETF results in changes from Speed + Mobility then Google will commit to implement it?

From what I can see the Spdy draft 3 doesn't include any improvements from Speed + Mobility so I don't see the relvance of your post. It's a shame because Speed + Mobility has real improvements (yes Microsoft does things right sometimes).

I work for Google on Chromium (primarily networking stuff, like SPDY). You can see my comments on this matter here: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/spdy-dev/ipTmn5ty_n0/discu....

"Our plan is to continue what we've been doing: experimenting with new ideas in SPDY and recommending the good ones for standardization in IETF (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-mbelshe-httpbis-spdy-00). In the end, we only want one protocol, so we don't intend to keep a SPDY track alive longer than a successful standards process."

Out of curiosity, what changes from Speed + Mobility would you like to see in SPDY? We'd love to hear your recommendations on spdy-dev@googlegroups.com.

What changes would I like to see? I'd like to see you work with Microsoft (and others) to improve the protocol. Microsoft with S+M has made real improvements.

Ask them. They know their stuff.

For me though, I think Microsoft held back on changes so it would be more accepted as Spdy-like. For instance the whole HTTP format seems pretty lame to me... a 16-bit string length count... amazing, iirc it's 32-bit now but who ever thought that was a good idea?!

Umm, I can't speak for Google, because I work for Mozilla. I can't speak for Mozilla's networking team either, since I'm a UI developer on the mobile team. But I feel safe saying that Mozilla is (a) committed to the standards process and (b) wants whatever final result is best for our users.

If you have questions about Mozilla's SPDY and HTTP plans, or if you want to suggest areas of work (or even contribute yourself!), you should attend the networking team meetings [1], join #networking on irc.mozilla.org, or ask on mozilla.dev.tech.network.

[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Networking

SPDY is in a better position to dictate the development of HTTP 2.0 as there are already two independent implementation in the wild, unlike S+M which so far only exists as a concept paper AFAIK.

That's a shame, since S+M has the potential to become the true next-gen HTTP, an improvement for everyone, while SPDY only is useful for "the elite" websites who has purchased a SSL certificate.

Most small websites with no need for SSL, unless they're hosted on a service like Tumblr or Webly, will be stuck on HTTP 1.1 "forever". It sucks that independently hosted "real" websites will have a technological disadvantage to websites hosted on third-party services unless they're willing to shell out a not insignificant amount of money ($15+ USD per year per site).

Personally, I'm glad that SPDY is providing an incentive for people to use SSL.

Also, just because SSL costs money today (it doesn't if you use startssl.com), doesn't mean it will continue to do so into the future. DANE (once the spec is finalised) will allow people to store fingerprints of their SSL certs in DNS records, signed using DNSSEC. This will remove the existing CAs from the loop.

Cool, I hadn't heard about DANE/DNSSEC. How automated will the process be?

I hope you don't have to apply/renew it manually. Buying a SSL certificate and installing it was a hassle even for me (a geek), it would have been horrible for a normal website owner.

HTTP Pipelining has its own issues, such pipeline requests being processed FIFO and stalling queued requests.

Are you saying that because you heard other people say so, or because you actually believe it yourself?

https://developers.google.com/speed/articles/spdy-for-mobile

Scroll down halfway to the waterfall charts. Out of 35 requests, 31 were for static files, where there is no blocking. These are bandwidth limited so the main difference is whether they complete one at a time somewhat regularly spaced (pipeline) or interleaved (Spdy), but total throughput will be roughly the same.

For the 4 dynamically generated files the HTTP version actually finished these sooner.

"The waterfall diagrams clearly show SPDY's main advantage over HTTP: The use of out-of-order responses. ... [vs HTTP] handling requests in a FIFO fashion".

Oh really? More like the diagram clearly shows they weren't using pipelining. If they had been using pipelining then requests would have been sent immediately instead of blocking. The bars would be blue, with more variety of length but averaging to the same as for Spdy (as clearly this case was bandwidth limited).

To put this into context, they replaced the Android browser that did do pipelining with Chrome and then post a comparison of Spdy vs no pipelining. Seriously ask yourself why they compared Spdy to non-pipelining HTTP to trumpet their +23% claims when they were previously using pipelining. My hunch is they are just lazy and disengenuous... or are they purposely pushing Spdy, or are they incapable of believing Google doesn't produce the best at everything?

I don't know what Google's motivation is with Spdy, but the claims they make are just absurd. The actual real-world problems with pipelining are that some server/proxy software borks it up.

Thanks for the link. I haven't benchmarked pipelining myself, just read others' tests.

Broken servers and proxies should become less of a problem now that iPhone and (non-Chrome) Android browsers enable pipelining by default. And, after many years, Mozilla may enable pipelining by default for desktop Firefox, too:

Bug 264354 - Enable HTTP pipelining by default https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=264354

Opera introduced Speed Dial in 2007. I can't believe that its getting published as a major feature today.

On a side note, I find the Chrome New Tab page much cooler. We can drag and drop favorite sites at the bottom of the new tab page (where it shows "Most Visited" and "Apps") and it creates our own customized group.

Edit: Fixed typo

Well I don't quite follow this behaviour. But thanks, I hadn't clicked there before.

Yes it is quite undocumented, this is the best I could find: http://productforums.google.com/d/msg/chrome/lqlO-zYGki4/zTT...

Discussion on "Why new firefox 13 'load tabs on demand' is bad UX.", some solutions to the problem, plus comments from a chrome developer on why they moved away from this behaviour can be found here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4069535

While I think this is a good submission (and upvoted it, despite being a Mozillite), it's in bad form to post comments on one submission to drive clicks to one of your own, even if it's related to the high-level topic, unless it's a continuation of a dialogue that's going on in a thread.

The one reason why I moved back to Firefox (mostly) after years of Safari and Chrome was the "load tabs on demand" feature. I love it.

BTW despite what the article says this is not from firefox 13 - I've had it at least since 12, and probably even earlier.

The option was disabled by default in Firefox 12 and earlier; it is enabled by default starting with Firefox 13.

Upgraded last night. Using it today it feels slightly lighter to use, it is noticeably faster in general and has some nice UI polish that has been needed for a while. Still my browser of choice. The new tab page got disabled right away though, don't like it in other browsers and don't like it in Fx. Thank god for about:config :)

Yeah, I don't like the New Tab page either.

For those reading, you can disable the interface entirely (click the grid button in the top right corner).

You don't have to go into about:config to disable it all you have to do is click the little 9 boxes in the upper right of the newtab page.

Being able to lock the pseudo class on the inspector is pretty freaking great (though not quite as intuitive to figure out how just yet). Also, a very happy change is that the panels remember what you want to have open.

Next on the list should be further integrating the console.

Also, FF 14b6 out tomorrow (I think).

14 works great, no problems with any of the dozens of extensions I use.

Reminder: If you're like me and don't use FF anymore for anything but testing, this is a good time to open it up and apply the update. This will save you the frustration of having the update applied the next time you're in the middle of working.

If you don't like the homepage/new tab thing (I don't), as there appears to be no options pane thing to disable it, do this:

1. visit about:config

2. Search for browser.newtabpage.enabled

3. Set to false

You can also just click on the icon in the top right corner of the page to disable it.

Thank you - much easier :)

I use Firefox on a 2011 MacBook Pro/Lion and I find that memory usage constantly increases, even when very little is going on (starts at about 200MB, soon reached 500MB). Because of this, I have switched to Chrome, whose memory stays about 200MB.

My fingers have gotten used to doing command-option-shift-click which opens a new tab AND switches to it.

Unless you have a leaking plugin, Firefox is likely doing that for performance. You have a lot more than 500MB RAM, right? Why not take advantage of it?

I noticed they added a "Most Visited Pages" display when you open a new tab, much like Safari's "Top Sites", and like with Safari it's turned on by default.

I wonder how many people accidentally have their porn habit outed the first time they or a family-member/coworker opens the new version? Surprise!! :D

This release finally ends support for Win2000 due to the move to VC2010, BTW.

They still haven't merged the tabs into the titlebar on os x..

FWIW if you switch Firefox to small icon mode, hide the addon bar (previously status bar) and the bookmark bar, then Firefox only has a few vertical pixel less than Chrome for the content area. That's how I use my Firefox at least.

installed on osx; launched; still no lion scrollbars or full screen support

honestly mozilla?

Lion full-screen (http://bugzil.la/639705) is coming in Firefox 14, which will be released six weeks from today (https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar). You can use it now on the Aurora channel (https://mozilla.org/firefox/aurora/) and in a few days it'll also be on the Beta channel (https://mozilla.org/firefox/beta/).

Lion-style scrollbars (http://bugzil.la/636564) are still in progress. You can test them on the UX branch: https://msujaws.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/mozillas-ux-nightly...

I don't get Mozilla. The first OSX Lion developer preview came out in March of 2011. This kind of (very) slow adoption of platform improvements is the worst way to win users, and by extension power, to fulfil their mission of a free and open web.

I honestly can't think of an excuse for not supporting Lion specifics this late in the game.

OSX support requires OSX contributors. So don't ask Mozilla what the excuse is, ask your fellow OSX programmers.

Mozilla take in millions a year from Google. If nobody is contributing to a major platform - pay someone to. I don't even own a mac, but simply can't understand how Mozilla are failing so badly at it.

http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/stable-ch...

Mountain Lion.

Chrome is faster, has great extensions, why would I use Firefox?.

I find the current Firefox to be equal to Chrome in terms of speed, it uses less memory than Chrome, it has much better extensions (including adblock, noscript and vimperator, which are all nicer than their Chrome equivalents), the UI itself is also more configurable (e.g. toolbars, add-on bar; also, we can't even have a bookmarks sidebar in Chrome! In general, if I don't like some aspect of Firefox I can change it, whereas this is not always the case with Chrome), and I like to keep my data to myself as far as possible.

For me, the best thing about Chrome is that it's arrival on the browser scene motivated Mozilla to redouble their efforts, especially in terms of performance and stability, and this has borne fruits with recent iterations of Firefox.

> Chrome is faster, has great extensions, why would I use Firefox?.

Firefox is more open, has new JS language features before anyone else, why would I use Chrome? :P

the awesome bar is still better than the omnibar IMHO, but that's the only thing I can think of. Some extensions may still be better in firefox land too.

But, I too left firefox behind, mostly because of lack of OSX keychain integration, and I have very little hope that mozilla is going to fix an issue 11 years old anytime soon[0]

[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106400

Pentadactyl, Firebug are mostly the reasons I use Firefox. Also I like my privacy.

Chrome dev tools are equal as powerful, and regarding the other comment about speed. I have tried the new firefox and chrome still flows better. The reasons posted here are not sufficient, sounds like the firefox users are just loyal.

No, it has nothing to do with loyalty but with utility and how you weigh the different feature sets of each browser (speed et al. being features as well for the sake of this discussion). I find such claims disingenuous because they assume that Chrome can act as a drop-in replacement for Firefox which can be trivially shown not to be true. You seem to compare the browsers from the point of shared features or features exclusive to Chrome which understandably can lead to wrong conclusions about Firefox users.

Chrome's features don't constitute a superset of Firefox features and vice versa. Examples for features exclusive to Firefox:

1) Tab groups 2) Awesomebar (which works very differently than the Omnibar) 3) History sync 4) Load tabs on demand 5) Bookmark tags 6) Livemarks 7) Better resource usage (especially memory)

And I could easily add several more, both native as well as the ones added by extensions. You may not care about some or all of these features because they don't fit into your browser usage pattern, but others do. Speed is also important to me and I'm glad that Firefox gets improved with each new version currently but it's not the deciding criteria as long as it doesn't inhibit me from using the browser as I wish.

I recently started using Firefox Aurora after years with Chrome, so I'm not a loyal FF user :) What made me switch is vimperator, I really like being able to navigate with the keyboard when my MBP is docked and issuing commands by their name(e.g., I can add a page to pinboard with `:pin`), also it saves some screen space by removing the navigation toolbar. Another nice feature is macro-recording, if you are doing a very repetitive task you can record a macro and run it when needed.

Obviously FF is far from the perfect browser, I hate that it doesn't use native ui elements on web pages(e.g., the `select` html element) and I think it's a bit more resource-hungry than Chrome.

"I think it's a bit more resource-hungry than Chrome"

Depends on what you measure and your usage patterns. Firefox runs circles around Chrome with regards to memory usage and features like "load tabs on demand" can further lower the general resource usage drastically.

The lack of native UI styling of 'select' elements is a disgrace though, especially on Mac. Firefox is the last browser to exhibit this and there are no sign that this will changed in the near future. :-(

As an Emacs fan, I really enjoy the Firemacs extension.

IMO Chrome is great, but Firefox has more features that I like. The minor speed differences are inconsequential and FireFox is faster at some things anyway.

Depending on the site page loading can still badly affect interface responsiveness. There are a number of projects to alleviate this under the umbrella of the Snappy project[1] but for all the work the Mozilla devs have have put into it, Firefox as of now (Fx13) is still nowhere near as smooth as its biggest competitor for regular use cases. I'm hoping that the SuperSnappy research project[2] will produce usable results though.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Snappy [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=718121

> Chrome is faster

Slower for me. Hits the disk more.

> has great extensions

Not nearly enough. Not by half.

Also, there's the issue of respect: Chrome doesn't respect me nearly enough to let me configure my browser to how I want it. I did away with the speed dial 'feature' in Firefox; I can't do that in Chrome. Not possible. That's just one example of many.

Firefox respects me. Therefore, I use it.

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