
What You Need to Know About Mozilla's New Firefox Browser Coming Soon - sds111
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-mozillas-new-firefox-browser-coming-next-week/
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superkuh
Don't forget other relatively new features like only being able to install
add-ons approved and cryptographically signed by Mozilla unless you use the
beta, the non-firefox branded version, or your distro has negotiated a deal
with Mozilla to provide non-freedom infringing full versions in their repos
(ie, debian, arch).

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Sylos
> Mozilla will flip the switch on a completely new browser with the release of
> Firefox 57

It's not a completely new browser. It's still Firefox with some components
swapped out, a lot of cruft taken out (due to cutting support for legacy
extensions) and lots of individually small performance fixes (which were
mainly made possible thanks to the recent rollout of multiprocess).

These new components have been taken from Servo, which is an actually new,
written-from-scratch browser engine, but which is still far away from being
production ready (might never be), so they can only retrofit finished
components for now.

> Firefox 57 is the end of the road of a few Mozilla internal projects that
> aimed to fix most of Firefox's previous problems

Not the end of the road. Just a major milestone with PR drumrolls. More is
very much already scheduled for the next few releases, the biggest of which
will be WebRender.

> meaning developers of some Chrome extensions may soon port their add-ons to
> work on Firefox.

As is written directly below that, this API has been shipped in Firefox for a
while already, so lots of Chrome extensions have already been ported.

> These users will be put in the unfortunate situation of having to choose
> between running Firefox without their favorite add-ons or finding a new
> browser where similar add-ons exist.

Or switching to Firefox 52 ESR, which will receive security updates until June
26, 2018 and continue to support these legacy extensions until then. Not a
final solution, but it might bridge the gap until viable alternatives have
been created.

Also, switching to a different browser will rarely make sense, as Firefox
still is the most extensible browser by a long shot.

> Firefox 57 will also be the first Firefox version to support the new Quantum
> engine. Announced last year, the Quantum engine replaces some parts of the
> old Gecko engine with new components written in a mixture of Rust and C++.

"Quantum" is marketing kerfuffle from Mozilla. The engine is still called
Gecko, it's just getting some components swapped out. Again, the components
came from Servo, which is written in Rust. I am not aware of major components
being included that have C++ code.

> Firefox 57 will include more Project Quantum code, such as Quantum Render, a
> brand new, GPU-optimized rendering pipeline based on Servo’s WebRender
> project

As I already mentioned above, WebRender is not in 57, but should hopefully
land in the next few versions.

> Mozilla claims that all these changes have resulted in considerable speed
> boosts to Firefox's boot-up and browsing behavior, although this claims
> should be taken with a grain of salt, as all browser makers say the same
> thing when they launch a new version.

Or you could look at the fucking thing and notice that, oh hey, it is actually
massively faster than previous Firefox versions. You don't even need
benchmarks for that, it's clearly visible.

Some of the changes that are kind of counted into Quantum have been happening
since Firefox 48 already, which is also why Mozilla's claim was that 57 is
twice as fast as _52_ , so yeah, it won't be as significant of a difference
going from 56 to 57, but it should still be relatively obvious.

I won't blame the author for misunderstandings or not being aware of every
little detail, but to write something like that and not even test the two
versions against each other is just lazy and bad journalism in every way.

> Also starting with Firefox 57, new Firefox installations will disable the
> search widget that used to appear in the top right corner of the old Firefox
> UI, an iconic part of the browser's old interface.

They did plan this, but apparently lots of people do actually use the search
bar, so they've decided to put it back in by default.

> The planned UI changes are most likely to annoy some Firefox users because
> the Classic Theme Restorer Firefox add-on will also stop working, meaning
> users won't be able to control how their browser UI looks.

Or to 1) increase performance, the new UI is more efficient, 2) reduce
maintenance cost, the new UI uses vector graphics for most things allowing it
to be reused across OSs, 3) be more flexible, the vector graphics also allow
for Mozilla to ship a Compact-mode and a Touch-mode out of the box, 4) _look_
faster, the animations keep your brain busy and make it feel like things are
faster, 5) help with marketing, a new UI is a far more visible change than a
higher score on some obscure benchmark and will attract press coverage.

Besides that, Classic Theme Restorer is already broken anyways due to legacy
extensions being removed.

And the new UI is actually more "classic" than Australis (square tabs,
back/forward/refresh not glued to the URL-bar, dropdown-menu-like Hamburger-
menu as opposed to the touch-optimized Hamburger menu in Australis etc.), so
while Classic Theme Restorer did do lots more than that, the new UI should
make a lot of users of CTR happy just by not being as unconventional as
Australis.

