Firefox 15 arrives, supports compressed textures for impressive 3D gaming | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 15 arrives, supports compressed textures for impressive 3D gaming

arstechnica.com

118 pointsshawndumas52 comments

I had to do some testing and installed latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, IE and Opera. To my surprise, Firefox seems to have improved a lot in the last few versions. It feels much snappier and more responsive than Chrome, which was not the case for a long time. Looking at other stuff, like download page experience, anti-aliased fonts on pages by default and overall look and feel, one can see that Mozilla has put a lot of effort into fixing the problems and trying to get back to #1 spot in terms of being the most advanced browser.

Competition from Chrome has awaken them from sleep and finally we are starting to see a very fast, slick browser. Given all the plugin ecosystem, Firefox could be back on top. The only problem is that they might be a little bit too late with these improvements, and it would be hard to win back the users that switched to Chrome. Most of my friends who switched won't even be bothered to try new Firefox. They just discard it, the same way majority of ex-IE users discards newer versions of IE without even trying once.

I don't think Firefox was ever asleep. They just had different priorities during the time when Chrome was advancing primarily in performance.

I'm a Mozilla employeed, and I think it's fair to say that Chrome's presence caused us to increase the focus on Firefox performance. E.g. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink and https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Snappy.

I switched back from chrome to FF few months ago, well I never left really due to firebug and client certs, but now I really don't use chrome anymore. FF is as fast as chrome to start, ie turning off tabs autoloading. I never lost my history with FF while it happened too many times with Chrome. Extensions integration is a lot better in FF, try LastPass for example. FF can have multiple rows of tabs with an extension, I don't think that's possible in Chrome. chrome text search is light years back from FF. And finally, Chrome way of hiding privacy settings, ie delete cookies, is annoying, obviously Google doesn't have any interests on my privacy. FF has been terrible and slow for at least 4 years, but it's back!

Try the "Tree Style Tab" extension. It puts tabs on the side, so you can fit many more of them, and you can even collapse and expand sub-trees.

I'll have a look, thank you

Yes Tree Style Tab is a must. Chrome and Chromium do not offer vertical tab support on Linux.

  "Chrome way of hiding privacy settings, ie delete cookies, is annoying, obviously Google doesn't have any interests on my privacy."

It's only a shift+ctrl+esc away. I don't see why you equate cookies to privacy, though... if you're talking about third-party cookies, they can be disabled. That will likely break a lot of things, though.

I'm actually excited about the second part: The new version also significantly reduces the memory overhead of leaky add-ons.

I'm going to download a bunch of downloads and see how it feels now.

Don't they say that EVERY firefox release?

Yes, they do.

Whenever the topics of Firefox's memory leaks or performance problems come up, there are always people who claim that it has none. They hold this position even when presented with mountains of evidence to show that there are in fact problems. Then the next version of Firefox is released, and the release notes go on and on about how memory leaks and performance problems have been fixed. Strange, how could they fix these problems that supposedly never existed in the first place?

There isn't one single cause of the memory leaks, it's a very complex piece of software and plugging those leaks is a continuous process. And they are making progress, this version is much lighter.

Well I can usually hold 300-400 tabs with 2GB of memory, so I'm not complaining. Chrome will naturally use more memory because of multiple processes, however.

The MemShrink project has been in progress for over a year now, with measurable results shipping in many updates. The specific bullet point here is a fix to a very common addon problem that has been shown to have real-world benefits.

Nobody here is denying there's a problem, things are getting fixed.

Not really, but here's why it might seem like it: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/08/29/debunking-a-...

i have always stuck with FF for firebug and because of how much i can customize every single aspect to my needs. i think opera fits the bill as well, but something about its UI doesn't work for me. ff is plenty fast and i dont need to deal with untweakable interface decisions as i do in chrome. i have said for a long time that i would give chrome another try when they give me an about:config equivalent and a fully customizable ui, but that's not in the cards.

Does anyone know what the status of the new Australis theme is? I think FF is really in need of an update and the mockups of Australis that I saw looked really nice to me.

No HiDPI support yet. They are slacking!

Most features support HiDPI in the nightly builds since 4 days ago. http://nightly.mozilla.org/ That probably means it will be included in FF 17, in 3 months.

I think it's actually going to be ready for FF 18

Is it really a priority? The vast majority of Firefox users do not own the new MBP.

This is of course true. But it will ensure every Retina MBP owner is not using Firefox.

More of them are being sold every day, and the pace is only set to increase as it's pretty much inevitable that Apple will release more high-resolution devices as time goes on. Might as well get it over with now before Firefox gets labeled as "the ugly one on high-res devices".

Are we ever going to see a high resolution Windows implementation?

Windows 8 will support multiple DPI values, at least for Metro.

This is a priority. The numbers are small today but they're growing and we can expect more HiDPI machines from Apple in the not too far off future.

You can track the progress of HiDPI support here:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674373

Agreed HiDPI would be nice, but seriously if anyone is interested, do yourself a favor and check out Firefox again.

Firefox Aurora, the bleeding edge http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/aurora/

Firefox Beta, pretty stable http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/beta/

Firefox Stable http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

You might be totally surprised just how fast it is nowadays, quicker than Chrome even, on many scripts. Not only test wise, but the GUI feels much snappier too.

I can never seem to switch between profiles very effectively. I wish there was a way to run firefox in a "trial" mode where it just created a new temporary profile that it got rid of on exit.

I'd like to try out firefox nightly from time to time to see if they've fixed a feature yet or if I should go into the bug tracker. However currently I've managed to accidentally trash my profile a couple times. I made a new profile for nightly, but it then seemed to break firefox beta.. blah blah blah.

It's not very well documented, but at least on Linux you can do this:

    $ tar xf firefox-nightly-whatever.tar.bz2
    $ cd firefox
    $ mkdir /tmp/temporary-profile
    $ ./firefox -no-remote -profile /tmp/temporary-profile

No "profile manager" dialog, no interaction with existing profiles, it just creates a new profile in the directory you specify and starts up.

On OSX: (directory will be autocreated)

  $ /Applications/FirefoxAurora.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin
    -no-remote -profile /tmp/temp-profile

This is assuming you want to use Firefox Aurora, without interfering with your main profile. (Recommended :p)

You can get HiDPI text in Firefox 15 and Beta 16 if you set about:config pref layers.acceleration.disabled=true. This obviously has a performance impact, but it's a temporary workaround that let's me keep using Firefox on my Retina MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, this workaround no longer works in Aurora 17 or Nightly 18. :(

I wish the gui interface was more like chrome. The tab management seems clunky.

The way Chrome handles a large number of open tabs is one of the reasons I don't use it. In fact, out of all the things that could possibly bother me about Firefox, the interface isn't one.

The same for me. My wife uses Chrome and when I sometimes have to use it on her laptop it really makes me mad when I have to find a tab when the only thing I see is the favicon.

I tried Chrome on my linux and I much more prefer Firefox (aurora channel)

There are plenty of Firefox add-ons to customize tab management.

And also the built in Tab Groups feature. (Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + e)

Does anyone actually use this feature? I'm always waiting for better tab managment in Firefox, and this just isn't it.

As someone else mentioned further up: Tree Style Tabs

I was really asking about whether anyone actually used Tab Groups that are built into the Firefox core.

Tabs to me are really window manager territory. I'm fed up of the inconsistancy across applications.

Thanks for the suggestion of Tree Style Tabs, I'll see how I get on with it.

Having an issue with the Tree Style Tabs in Nightly, closed pages aren't resulting in closed tabs.

Heh, not me! Just thought it should be mentioned.

But, I never have more than about 7 tabs per window, and rarely more than 3 windows open, so for me, tab management isn't much of an issue.

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

In addition to making the UI resemble Chrome (just don't look too closely), it also replicates Chrome's tab-squeezing behavior. This addon is a godsend on Linux, where Firefox is ugly as sin.

Mozilla is shining these days! Introducing awe techs (Not to mention, servo!!).

Mozilla is shining these days! Not to mention servo!!

can someone just email me when it's faster than chrome? thx

Performance and stability wise based on some use today it's a step forward.

It's still fugly sadly.

Finally, someone who understands! Prettiness really is the most important feature of any browser.

You need to compete on all fronts and decent UI is one of them. Firefox, for me at least, is still behind in this area (though I loved the Australis stuff that was being put forward).

no one will email you. just use chrome instead of trolling.

I think it is faster then Chrome with add-ons or at least just as fast. I had to stop using Chrome once people started making Chrome only websites and pushing it even though other browsers had the same capability. Chrome is a good browser but so is Firefox, IE 9/10 and Opera. Each one is faster at different things so there will never be a clear advantage like 2009.

Likewise, can somone email me when Chrome stops cutting corners? When developing, out off FF, Opera and Chrome, Firefox is the most consistent and asthetically pleasing. Yes, Chrome is usually the fastest when it comes to raw speed, but as long as it is cutting corners (for example, try rescaling an .svg with javascript, or make a gradient that extends over a few thousand pixels, and see how blocky both become), it's really comparing apples and oranges.

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