
How Firefox Got Fast Again - bpierre
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/entering-the-quantum-era-how-firefox-got-fast-again-and-where-its-going-to-get-faster/
======
mapgrep
I switched back to Firefox 54 from Chrome when multiprocess browsing
("Electrolysis") came out of beta. It's been absolutely great. It's fast and I
trust and like the nonprofit behind it. And all the extensions I care about
are available.

My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account,
and just generally wanting less dependence on Google. I also like that Firefox
has a built in tracking protection (not just Do Not Track toggle but actual
blocking of trackers). That's something that's just not in Google's interest
to put in Chrome.

Browsers are becoming more and more aggressive in protecting the interests of
users. Becoming true "User Agents," in other words. See also Safari iOS
allowing content blockers and now in iOS 11 blocking some popular tracking
behaviors by default. It's absolutely great. And it's not surprising to me
that Chrome is not a leader here. It's owned by the biggest advertising
company on the internet. I predict Chrome will continue to lag on pro-privacy,
anti-nag features.

~~~
e40
The signing into an account in chrome is the killer feature for me. I have
work and a couple of personal accounts that I have signed in in different
browser windows. That allows me to keep things separate (extensions, mail,
browsing, bookmarks, etc).

How do FF users do this?

~~~
fencepost
The signing into an account in Chrome almost got someone fired at a small
customer of mine a few weeks ago. Fortunately they called me first to look
into it, I pointed out that the porn bookmarks in question were years old and
that since Chrome was signed into a personal account it was pretty likely that
the same account had been used by other family members at home.

I also wrote this up for the owners to send to their staff, feel free to reuse
if appropriate for you:

We’ve seen at least one situation recently where a user “signed in” to Chrome
when prompted, which brought that user’s personal bookmarks and website logins
onto their work computer. While Chrome offers this as an option, there are no
situations where your personal account should be linked to a browser at work –
if you need to be using personal email, etc. please do so from your own phone
or other device on your own time. This is for your own privacy and security as
well as for the practice – we want to not have your personal data on our
systems, and you don’t want your private email, bookmarks, etc. accessible to
anyone else who happens to be at your desk while you’ve stepped away.

If you have linked your browser to a personal account, please remove that
connection using the instructions below.

You can check whether Chrome is linked to an online account by clicking on the
small person icon at the top right corner of the window – just to the left of
the “X” to close the window. • If you click on that and it asks you to sign
in, you’re not linked to an account. • If you click on that and it lists a
personal account, click on “Manage People” to open a new window listing
connected accounts. On each account there are 3 dots in the top right corner –
click those and “Remove this person” • If you see a name rather than a generic
person icon, click on that and use “Manage People” to remove that connected
account.

Firefox offers a similar but less-used version of this that would have
required creating a Firefox account to use Firefox Sync. If you have done this
with Firefox please disconnect it; if you’re not sure then you almost
certainly haven’t done this in Firefox and don’t need to worry about it.

~~~
sangnoir
> I pointed out that the porn bookmarks in question were years old and that
> since Chrome was signed into a personal account it was pretty likely that
> the same account had been used by other family members at home.

So the offence was merely _having_ porn bookmarks in their browser - not
visiting porn sites at work? Wow.

~~~
fencepost
This is in an environment with multiple people at a long open desk with
patients on the other side of the counter. Someone sat down to check
something, or check someone in or out, I don't know the details. They hit the
Bookmarks button, and right there on the list was a PornHub link to something
about a teen and anal sex. This caused a bit of an uproar about inappropriate
use of the computer systems, though it may have stayed behind closed doors.

It wouldn't surprise me a bit if the person whose account it was didn't even
know that bookmarks exist in Chrome - it's not like Google makes it obvious
these days. I suspect there were some awkward discussions at home that
evening, or possibly on the phone with college-age children.

------
beemboy
I can still remember:

* that moment I was overjoyed to use Lynx over dialup in South India back in the mid-90s allowing me to browse the World Wide Web!

* ...And then that moment being surpassed when I wet myself running the Netscape "GUI browser" on Windows 95 using a brilliant hack by a pair of brothers I knew that wrote a winsock.dll shim on top of Lynx over dialup (called Blue Laser; those guys went on to become CS PhDs doing microprocessor research)

* ...And then that moment being surpassed when IE4 came out in '97 and I couldn't imagine what a faster browser could be or do.

* ...And then that moment when FF 1 came out in '04 and I thought this is incredible, Netscape is alive!! and kicked IE's a55 and me thinking the "browser wars" are over

* ...And then that moment when Google Chrome came out and I went "who needs _another_ browser??" and then switching wholesale to it in short order

* ...Many moments in between thinking "Wow, the browser wars really _are_ over in my lifetime"

* ...And that moment 2 weeks ago when I installed Firefox Quantum beta ( _Firefox_??) and went "Holy crap, this thing is FAST!" and then switched all my browsers everywhere to it. To a _beta_ browser.

It sure is a good time to be a nerd.

Keep up the great work moz://a

PS - edited to reformat

~~~
abraae
I still remember seeing Netscape for the first time. Seeing web pages was
astonishing enough, then I suddenly realised you could browse the web in
multiple windows, at the same time. Blew my mind.

~~~
vim_wannabe
Then subsequently lost my focus. And as they say, the rest is history.

------
dogprez
Somewhat tangentially, I really like the cartoons Lin has made. I’ve found
I’ve naturally anthropomorphized code. Often when I start working with someone
new they get confused when I start talking about constructs like people. I
think it’s given me a different perspective on encapsulation and concurrency
than most people.

I don’t know if I’ve ever worked with someone that thinks the same way. When I
work on code that wasn’t designed that way I force my brain to think like the
CPU instead of in terms of little elves with different job... Not sure if
anyone else has experienced this 2 modes of thinking about code. It seems like
FF engineer’s might be thinking in the same terms as they tackle concurrency
refactors.

~~~
mxuribe
You are not alone in your way of thinking!

Also, I had never previously seen the code cartoons produced by
@linclark...but now seeing them (and digging a little deeper), count myself a
fan!

~~~
dogprez
If I had to guess why, I'd say that I am mostly self taught and more of an
extrovert. It's probably the only way my brain could trick me into sitting in
front of a computer all day instead of talking with other people. I also
played with action figures late, until I was 12... around the same time I
started programming... I think I'm having a psychological breakthrough, haha.

------
m_st
I switched from Chrome to Firefox 57 beta and couldn't be happier. Only issue
so far was the ugly black title bar on the Mac, but switching to the
integrated 'Light' theme fixed that. Too bad 'Light' isn't the default on
macOS.

Also note their updated Firefox on iOS. It looks and works just fine now and
comes with Firefox Sync which gives you access to your tabs, bookmarks and
history.

~~~
weihanglo
I thought it is a translucent title bar. At least in Firefox Nightly 59 it is.

~~~
adregan
Well how about that?! I always run "reduce transparency" and "increase
contrast" as I never really like the translucent items (System Preferences >
Accessibility > Display), and I too thought the new UI was a black bar with a
light colored window. I have been enjoying the dark theme in both the
developer edition (work) and nightly (home).

------
JepZ
I hope it will not take too long until FF gets hardware acceleration for
videos on Linux (VAAPI/VDPAU). A few days ago I installed Arch Linux on a
Netbook and was shocked to see that FF still doesn't have hardware
acceleration for videos (VDPAU exists since 2008).

Some might say this is not much of an issue as most modern CPUs can handle
1080p, but actually pre-Ryzen AMD CPUs are too slow and power saving Intel
CPUs Laptops are too slow too. So the only excuse might be, that nobody uses
that open source OS, but especially from Mozilla I would not expect such an
attitude towards open source software.

~~~
kosinus
I keep trying Firefox versions every now and then, including 57, but always
run into obstacles.

After installing 57, I went to Twitch and saw my cpu spike and MacBook
drastically heat up. So it’s not just Linux.

I hope more Quantum/Servo stuff will solve all these issues soon.

I just want to ditch Google as much as I can. Now trying Safari for casual
browsing, and using Chrome just for dev stuff.

~~~
XzetaU8
High CPU on twitch TV stream

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1403823](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1403823)

Poor battery life on OSX

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042)

------
Touche
Am I the only one that is confused by Firefox's "fast again" narrative? I
remember that they launched the
[https://arewefastyet.com/](https://arewefastyet.com/) site a few years ago to
fight the idea that FF was slow. It feels like there's a new blog post that
essentially says the same thing "we're fast now" every couple of months.

So I find this all confusing. Am I just remembering incorrectly, or haven't
they already declared "we're as fast as Chrome now" several times in the past.
Were those lies/incorrect? Or again, am I remembering incorrectly. Can someone
explain this?

~~~
asdgkknio
I'm confused by it, too. The main reason I've preferred Firefox to Chrome for
years has been performance. It's pretty much the same in responsiveness and
uses far less memory.

Chrome being the fastest browser is ancient history.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The main reason I originally left Firefox (for Edge, mind you, I don't touch
Google software anymore) was the single-process issues they fixed with
electrolysis which came out in Firefox 48.

Bloated websites (usually Google ones) would actually lock up the entire
Firefox UI, and Windows would recognize the browser application as "Not
responding" until the page finished loading. In the case of a super bloated
site like the old Google+, that could be as much as twelve seconds non-
responsive while all the cruft loaded up.

I am back on Firefox release channel now, and pretty satisfied with current
performance, but looking forward to Quantum.

~~~
BuckRogers
I'm a Firefox or native-platform browser guy. Some sites are laggy on anything
except Chrome. Browsing around Groupon causes periodic freezes for me in
Firefox. I haven't noticed this particular case in Edge but it does lag over
time on other sites.

The whole issue of sites freezing and lagging without using Chrome is
concerning, and it's not pushing me to use Chrome. I think that's Google's aim
by creating that situation but I'm not budging.

It's pushing me to more native apps in both the iOS AppStore and Microsoft
Store.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Of course, the sad state here is that a lot of apps are now Electron-based, so
you end up with Chrome anyways. >.<

~~~
BuckRogers
I've been wondering about that, and how for the "app" side of the webstack if
wasm will wipe out the traditional webstack "apps" and put things back in a
more orderly fashion. Webstack for web documents, wasm for applications. If
wasm becomes the univeral app platform for many appstores and the browser, I'd
welcome that over Electron.

It's probably inevitable that shoving Node based apps into the market falls
flat in favor of more efficient native code solutions due to mobile. I've been
viewing Electron as a temporary stopgap with that in mind at least.

------
ArmandGrillet
I just installed Firefox 57 (thanks jacek for the link) and the first things I
noticed are:

\- The cross to close a tab and the one to create a tab are aligned in a weird
way.

\- Opening a tab is laggy (I'm on a MBP with an Intel Iris chip and 16GB of
RAM).

\- The scrolling still does not feel native (I'm on macOS High Sierra).

I'm very impressed by the work that has been done for this release as a dev
but this does not give me a great first impression as a user (I haven't used
Firefox these past 5 years). Google Chrome since its Material UI redesign
([https://medium.com/google-design/redesigning-chrome-
desktop-...](https://medium.com/google-design/redesigning-chrome-
desktop-769aeb5ab987)) is snappy and has a clean UI, I hope that Firefox will
also reach this point.

Anyway, this release is a major achievement. Congrats to the contributors!

~~~
bjterry
It also feels laggy to me. It's weird given the reports of all these other
users. I am also using a 16GB Ram, Intel Iris MBP. There is a noticeable pause
while switching tabs, and there is a very noticeable lag while typing (for
example in this box). Pages do seem to render fast, but it feels very laggy in
terms of user interaction.

Edit: The scrolling is also very laggy, which I forgot to mention, much more
so than Chrome.

~~~
kuschku
> Edit: The scrolling is also very laggy, which I forgot to mention, much more
> so than Chrome.

Firefox uses smooth scrolling, while Chrome always uses very jerky, jumping
scrolling.

Have you tried disabling that?

~~~
piotrkaminski
FYI, Chrome has had smooth scrolling since v49.
[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/02/smooth-
scr...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/02/smooth-scrolling-in-
chrome-49)

------
theduality
I have been using 57 in beta, and I have to say, I'm impressed. It is a huge
improvement. Whether it keeps me off Chrome in the future remains to be seen
though!

~~~
mariusmg
Why shouldn't it keep you away from Chrome ? It's faster, uses less memory,
and the "maker", Mozilla is more trustworthy compared with Google.

What's missing ?

~~~
enraged_camel
Chrome Dev Tools. Firefox’s dev tools simply aren’t as good.

There are also many features in Chrome that I’ve come to appreciate, such as
right clicking a tab and selecting “duplicate”, which opens a copy of the tab
and retains the browser history of the original one.

~~~
DiThi
Have you tried the dev tools in FF 57? As a FF user with Chrome-as-debugger
for 3-4 years, I'm honestly impressed.

FF 57 also has "duplicate tab" with duplicate history.

~~~
nindalf
Thanks for pointing out "duplicate tab". I loved that feature and really
missed it on Firefox.

------
mattmanser
Serious question, is this too little too late?

Firefox has taken a massive nosedive in the last few years, in the UK at
least. My two big clients have them on less than 2% share.

Just checked one, 5 years ago they had 9.55% share, today it's 1.8%. Even
taking into account the growth of mobile, that's dire.

~~~
frostwhale
Firefox is about more than market share. A state of the art free non for
profit browser makes the market much more competitive and better for the
consumer. They are there to keep chrome/ other browsers honest. If chrome /
google does something too corporate you don't like, there's an alternative.

~~~
sillysaurus3
That seems a dangerous line of thinking, like arguing that startups are about
more than growth.

Firefox is looking like Apple circa 1997. They can still recover, but they
have to focus on what people want.

~~~
jasonkostempski
I think most users don't care how fast the browser is at the level they're
boasting about. They've been fast enough for many years for most use cases.
They should do a commercial showing they can run uBlock Origin on Android, how
fast sites load compared to without it, and jump on the "annoying ad" train
Apple and Google seem to be bragging about fixing latley by "solving" a few
problems uO had solved, the right way, for years.

~~~
jonnytran
I completely disagree. I care a lot about privacy, but I've been unable to use
Firefox for a long time now because of speed. Up until now, Chrome has just
been significantly faster, to the point where I couldn't justify Firefox for
everyday usage. I think a lot of people feel the same, especially those who
know less about privacy. I hope the situation changes. If they were in the
same ballpark in terms of speed, then my choice would be clear, but they
haven't been.

It would be like using Tor all the time. You know it's better, but the
difference in speed is so great, that you have to make a conscious choice. I
think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I want the benefits
_without_ compromising speed.

~~~
addicted
I agree. Browser speed does not affect consumer choice directly. Very few
people chose Chrome over Firefox because it was slightly faster or slightly
more stable. The vast majority of users chose Chrome because it felt better.

Also, Google's pushing it helped. Otherwise consider how Chrome has occupied
an IE like market share despite the quality Delta between Chrome and IE/Edge,
Firefox or Safari is significantly lesser than the Delta between Firefox and
IE was a decade ago, yet Firefox peaked at a much lower marketshare than
Chrome's today.

------
SadWebDeveloper
> This is the opportunity that the Chrome engineers foresaw. We saw it too,
> but we had a bumpier path to get there. Since we had an existing code base
> we needed to plan for how to split up that code base to take advantage of
> multiple cores

The "bumpier path" is that they removed XUL-based/legacy addons, only chrome-
like addons (aka WebExtensions) are now supported on FF57. Personally i still
have some extensions that are marked as Legacy, mainly for web development so
m going be slightly affected with this release, i hope the performance gains
are worth it.

~~~
ripdog
They're talking about Electrolysis there, which happened several versions ago.
XUL addons did indeed work with Electrolysis, but required some modifications
to work well. Most unmodified addons continues to work through some magic
cross-process API wrappers. They didn't implement everything, had some bugs,
and were quite slow, but the fact that mozilla managed to keep most legacy
addons functional through the biggest architectural shakeup in Firefox history
shows their dedication and skill. It also illustrates how much engineering
effort went into keeping XUL addons functional as firefox was re-architected,
and thus why the decision was made to abandon them and move to webextensions.

What addons are you missing for webdev?

~~~
cesnja
All that work only to drop the addons anyway with the migration to
WebExtensions.

Personally, the extension I miss the most is vimperator. Mainly the fact it
worked everywhere. Now you land on new tab page (or about:*) and the extension
just won't load. The highlight features would be macros (automating some
signin and signup workflows) and quickmarks - opens a predefined page in
precisely 3 keypresses. With the way WebExtensions are right now in Firefox, a
quickmarks feature just won't work sometimes, which is very irritating.

------
alkonaut
Are Google doing anything along the lines of Servo/WebRender etc?

I'm assuming the Chrome code suffers from the same issues the FF did/does: you
simply don't shoehorn in shared memory concurrency in some nontrivial piece of
C++ code.

Mozilla threw some serious research and time at the problem. Is Google doing
that too? Or are they confident enough that Chrome will be fast enough in the
future without major architectural refactoring?

------
jacek
Stable Firefox 57.0 is already available on Mozilla's FTP server:
[https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/57.0/](https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/57.0/)

I am already using it, but had to reinstall uBlock Origin.

~~~
gsnedders
Note that that build isn't technically guaranteed to be the 57.0 release, and
there have been 11th hour updates pushed out before.

------
have_faith
I can't remember the last time I thought about how "fast" a browser is except
for edge cases like complex WebGL stuff.

I don't think focusing on speed will plug the gap of users leaving for other
browsers except for the minority of us on HN. I can't remember the last time a
non-technical person I know complained about browser speed beyond a website
itself being slow.

~~~
andrew3726
Well, for me at least, I always recognize if a button click/UI interaction
doesn't force a visible and immediate UI response. That's one of the main
reasons why I switched a couple of years to Chromium and now back to Firefox.
It really responds fast. I totally agree that there were _very_ few instances
where I noticed a rendering time difference.

~~~
elliotec
Are you talking about the UI of the browser itself or websites you're viewing?
If it's the latter, it's probably the website being slow.

~~~
andrew3726
UI of the browser.

------
nikisweeting
There are so many Firefox features that I love, and Mozilla is an awesome
company that I want to support, but Safari and even Chrome are both still
significantly faster than Quantum on my Mac.

Even with 50+ tabs open in Chrome, it still loads uncached pages 2-3 seconds
faster than FF Quantum, with fewer flashes of unstyled content as well.

I had high hopes for this refactor, but it looks like I'll have to wait to
switch browsers until the speed really beats Chrome.

~~~
eref
You can maybe find a alternatives here:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECI...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECIVyBU0GPoSmRqZ7A0VBvqeKYVSww/edit?usp=sheets_home&ths=true)

~~~
nikisweeting
I think you replied to the wrong comment, mine isn't about extensions/add-ons.

------
balajics
Using 57 for few days, speed improvements are impressive.

But two things which is going to stop me from complete switch. 1\. There is no
native websocket inspector. websocket-monitor[0] add-on which supported
websocket inspection is not compatible with quantum. Really wish they speed up
native support development[1] 2\. Double tap zoom really makes it easy to find
UI issues. Really wish it get implemented in firefox too.

[0] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/websocket-
mon...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/websocket-monitor/) [1]
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508)

------
dom96
For those, like myself, that were thinking "huh, I haven't seen any noticeable
differences" when reading the article/comments: FF 57 is the version you want
and it is officially releasing tomorrow.

[https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/quantum/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/quantum/)

------
Symmetry
A question as I consider moving to Firefox. On Chrome I've set my search
engine keywoards so I can open a new tab and type "w foo" to search Wikipedia
for "foo". And similar things for DuckDuckGo, Hoogle, Amazon, etc. On Firefox
I can do something similar if i'm willing to click on a small icon rather than
hitting enter or move to the search bar with ctrl-k, type my term, then press
tab a bunch of times to select the right engine. Is there any good extension
to give Firefox Chrome's ergonomics here?

~~~
cadecairos
In Firefox, you can right click on any search box and there's an option to
"add a keyword search"

For a Wikipedia search, you'd set the keyword to "w" and then you'd get the
identical behaviour you have in Chrome when typing "w foo" in your Awesome
Bar.

~~~
Symmetry
Ah, there we go. I don't get the same visual cues which confused me a bit but
those aren't actually important at all. Thank you very much.

------
shadowtree
Been using FF consistently on OSX the last years, the improvements are really
great - Kudos!

The various channels, like Quantum to stay on Beta, seem to have worked. Easy
to understand as a user and hopefully helpful for the devs to gather important
info. Plus a native dark theme, yay!

One thing that remains is performance of Youtube. For some reason HD videos
start crushing the processor after a while. Chrome, Safari stay calm.

------
millstone
I tried Firefox 57 hoping to like it, and I found it's still too alien feeling
on the Mac. The scroll bar looks, behaves, and animates differently. Text
selection looks and behaves differently. Even the cursor blinks differently.
It feels out-of-place.

I wish there were a community effort to build a true native Firefox version,
instead of trying to recreate standard Mac behaviors.

~~~
kristofferR
Camino used to be exactly that:
[https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/7548/camino](https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/7548/camino)

------
esturk
One thing I particularly like about the Mozilla Devtool is that when I
highlight an element, I can see the horizontal and vertical lines that extend
beyond the element box model which is great to see if other items are leveled
with the one selected. Does anyone know if this is supported in Chrome or
might there be an extension that can reproduce this functionality?

~~~
steveadoo
"Show Rulers" in the chrome dev console settings.

~~~
esturk
Oh awesome! Thanks for the quick response.

------
mikeytown2
I'll be looking to downgrade to Firefox Extended Support Release 52.4.1 [1]
and using the hidden settings to enable Electrolysis [2]. Currently on 56 and
it's very fast but with 57 tabs mix plus is gone [3].

[1] [https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/organizations/all/#en-...](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/organizations/all/#en-US)

[2] [https://fossbytes.com/how-to-make-firefox-faster-by-
enabling...](https://fossbytes.com/how-to-make-firefox-faster-by-enabling-
multi-process-e10s-manually/)

[3] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-
plus/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/)

~~~
51Cards
I will be doing the same. The enhancements in 57 don't out-weight the
productivity loss from my critical extensions. I'll be waiting until more of
them are ported forward. For the record I don't actually find Firefox 56 slow
at the moment either.

~~~
lucb1e
I have two critical extensions and a few others that would all break with 56
or 57. No thanks, I'll stick with what works.

Shoving webextensions down everyone's throat, and only afterwards starting to
work on implementing APIs and giving anyone a chance to _start_ working on
porting stuff. No thanks.

------
serveboy
I tried making the switch from Chrome but ran into three issues :

1) Firefox does not import Chrome logins and passwords. Major pain.

2) Firefox freezes when importing Chrome history and bookmarks. I get a
"script is taking too long" message. If I force close and reopen, then try to
delete the partially imported content, it freezes as well with the same
message. Tried deleting profile and restarting restarting to no avail.

3) (more of a nuisance than a real issue) I need to use the same browser on
all devices so that everything is in sync. Google Search in Firefox Android
looks like a page from the 90s and is missing Search Tools. Maybe Google isn't
playing nice?

Did people migrating from Chrome experience issues 1) and 2)? Tried the
initial import on Linux and macOS, same issue.

------
k__
How long will it take to forget about this again?

The whole story reminds me of something a project manager, who worked at the
Google homepage, once said.

They worked their asses off to get the page smaller and smaller so the UX was
unbeatable. Then, after they got enough users, they focused on different
things, and more and more stuff was included.

Somehow Firefox went the same way, right?

First they created it so it would be small, fast and modular, then it got
bloated to the max and now they set it on a diet again.

Don't get me wrong, I prefer Mozilla to Google, and I like that they even
explored experimental stuff like Rust and Servo to get on the right track
again.

But for how long?

~~~
Splines
Performance is usually death by a thousand cuts, and (imo) the best way of
mitigating this is by standardizing some measurements and making that
automated. Block changes that move performance past this bar, make sure the
organization buys off on this approach. Any changes to a critical area that
impact performance need to be zero-sum - if you add something, you need to
take something away.

~~~
oconnor663
The cost of doing this in a large organization seem high though. Are there
good ways to solve problems like this:

\- A newbie developer adds small feature, triggering some performance test
that was already close to failing. Now newbie has to learn all about the
performance of this large project before they can land their first change.

\- The performance test has a reasonable amount of noise. At first, 10% of
test runs fail it, and people just rerun them. Eventually 90% of test runs
fail, and people need to start dealing with it, but the effort required to get
it all the way back down to 10% is unrealistic for any one person.

\- The product is something like Microsoft Excel, that has a strong guarantee
of backwards compatibility across a wide variety of hardware and OS versions
that are difficult to test. Asking developers to delete code from parts of the
product they're not experts in, is likely to break stuff.

~~~
Splines
> _The performance test has a reasonable amount of noise. At first, 10% of
> test runs fail it, and people just rerun them. Eventually 90% of test runs
> fail, and people need to start dealing with it, but the effort required to
> get it all the way back down to 10% is unrealistic for any one person._

This is a tricky thing to deal with - (imo, again) how you deal with this is
twofold:

1.) The automated test that measures performance needs to be rock solid -
whatever you measure needs to be deterministic. Wall-clock time isn't always
the way to go (although it's the easiest), maybe you profile and measure cpu
cycles consumed by your application.

2.) If you capture performance over time then hopefully you can capture a
trend-line that shows performance degrading from other changes that push the
app past the performance bar. If your dev loop is fast enough you can isolate
performance degradations to a small set of changes. Ideally if you handle #1
above this won't be much of an issue. In my experience changes that tank
performance usually do so beyond the threshold of noise.

Regarding "newbie developer needs to learn all about performance" and "asking
developers to delete code", that's why you need organizational buy-off. If
your changes are regressing performance in a core area that is complex with a
lot of legacy, maybe you shouldn't be making changes there, _or_ the org needs
to be aware of and sign off on letting your change go through. It doesn't
always need to be a hard and fast "reject all changes", but there needs to be
a discussion.

------
woolvalley
Has anyone tried firefox 57 or 56 on macOS and still found it to be slower on
a bunch of sites? Like facebook is unusably slow on firefox compared to chrome
still. Google maps has slow downs too.

~~~
zachwood
you should try to refresh your FF profile. [https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-
US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings)

~~~
woolvalley
This happened with a fresh install with nothing else installed, I don't know
how much that would help.

------
nkkollaw
IMHO, there is even too much focusing on speed. Firefox got _cool_ again. It
looks great, the logo looks great, animations are great.

I look at the thing most of the day, looks are important just as much as
speed.

------
tempestn
I was really excited for Quantum, but it appears the switch to WebExtensions
is going to gut most of my favourite addons, and completely kill the rest.
About half of the addons I use have been updated to be compatible with Firefox
57, so the rest will stop working as soon as I update.

Of the ones that have updated, most are missing significant features. The most
significant example is Lastpass, which can no longer fill in http
authentication boxes, and can't even copy usernames and passwords to the
clipboard anymore. (The Chrome version has never been able to do the former,
but can at least do the latter.) Lastpass fills many auth modals for me every
day, so losing that feature is going to be a huge annoyance.

NzbFox is gone. Hilarious webcomic manager gone. Foxyproxy missing features.
This just sucks. I understand the logic behind this move, but addons were one
of Firefox's strengths. Now it appears they will be a sort of poor cousin to
their Chrome counterparts. I would happily sacrifice speed to not completely
hamstring the capabilities of addons.

Obviously it's too late for this, but the _could_ have added the WebExtension
system to provide greater stability, security, and developer ease for new
addons (and those that wished to migrate), while maintaining the more powerful
system for major things that required those capabilities. Yes, in theory it
means a bad addon could compromise security, but that's true of any program I
choose to install on my computer. I certainly wouldn't trade my general
purpose PC for some locked down app store box regardless!

~~~
stesch
You don't know before the update if an extension is supported or not. Firefox
56 doesn't support all of the new features of web extensions so some add-ons
(and versions) are only available for Firefox 57.

Too bad Mozilla changed the Add-On website a few days ago. You don't see any
indication of supported Firefox version anymore. You only see the extensions
that work in your current browser, not the extensions for the next version.
(Unless you switch to the old layout in an link hidden in the footer.)

Some extensions will be delayed because the deadline (2 years?) wasn't long
enough. Some extensions need additional features and may only be available
with Firefox 58 or later. Some never.

And you need to invest some time to research this. One starting point is
[https://arewewebextensionsyet.com/](https://arewewebextensionsyet.com/)

~~~
tempestn
Actually every addon indicates on the addon site whether it is compatible with
quantum or not. In some cases, there are indeed addons that are only
compatible with 57+ (also indicated there), but the ones I described were
accurate; I'm already using the updated versions, but they are seriously
hamstrung. I agree that things are likely to slowly improve as the
WebExtension APIs are extended and addons go through more updates. Still very
difficult to lose so much functionality overnight. I may switch to v52 (ESR)
for now, then decide next year whether to stick with Firefox.

~~~
stesch
> _Actually every addon indicates on the addon site whether it is compatible
> with quantum or not._

Not on the new site and not if you are using Firefox 56. You need to click on
"View classic desktop site" in the footer. Then you see a "Compatible with
Firefox 57+" tag/badge right from the version number of the extension.

~~~
stesch
Oops. They added the feature that indicates that an extension isn't ready for
quantum.

My bad.

------
voidmain
I wonder if better use of multiple cores by a single webpage (what they are
calling "fine grained parallelism") is actually a good idea. It seems like web
developers can and probably will eat up any improvement in performance by
building slower sites. So in the long run equilibrium, your computer's
performance and energy consumption suffer, while the web remains just barely
fast enough to tolerate.

------
hendersoon
Mouse gestures in Linux and MacOS are completely broken due to a known bug.
They have a Linux patch likely slated for version 58 (in 6 weeks) but no MacOS
patch yet.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1360278](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1360278)

Mouse gestures are critically important to me, so I'm sticking with Vivaldi
until this is fixed.

~~~
lucb1e
Same here. I'm just not updating...

------
shmerl
I'm waiting for full switch to Webrender and as result GPU accelerated video
decoding on Linux and switch to Wayland at last.

------
darrmit
I'm patiently waiting for improved profile support and better Chrome add-on
support before I can abandon Chrome entirely.

Been running Firefox for my personal browsing almost exclusively for years
(with the occasional Chrome use) but I still can't ditch Chrome for work
because of a few add-ons that don't work in Firefox - mainly Mixmax.

------
s_chaudhary
Just use the Firefox Android nightly and beta build. The new UI is super clean
and the performance is very good.

Up until this point I always felt that there was no good Google free
alternatives for chrome mobile browser, but this perception has definitely
change now with the new Firefox Beta build.

I am switching to Firefox nightly for my default Android browser now.

~~~
lucb1e
On my phone it often uses 100% CPU for extended periods of time, and does lots
of writes to storage. And it has never been fast to begin with.

I mean, a five year old phone isn't top of the line anymore, but if other
browsers work just fine, I'm reasonably sure where the blame lies...

------
karllager
Firefox 56 had some kind of performance regression[1], but FF Quantum is a joy
to use.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74irm5/is_ff_super...](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74irm5/is_ff_super_slow_after_this_last_update/)

~~~
acqq
Yes, for my girlfriend, during some last few months Firefox is much _slower_
than before: she uses it mostly for Facebook and Youtube, she doesn't have any
extensions installed by herself (not counting the stuff that is in Firefox
because Firefox marketing initiatives, like Pocket) and no adbockers, but
Firefox uses so much CPU that it gets completely unusable.

And she is not any extreme Facebook user: she has less than 500 "friends." And
she doesn't have big "subscriptions" list in Youtube.

So it's completely opposite of the propaganda: the average user, using the
most common sites, is hit to the that much CPU more use that the most common
sites are unusable.

So what's going on here? It's just the propaganda machine claiming the
opposite of what is actually happening at the moment. They maybe have good
goals but at the moment it's worse than, for example, a year ago.

Maybe it's because she doesn't have a newly bought computer, which are the
ones used by those who test? And I guess those who test don't use Facebook and
Youtube?

I also use Firefox but spend zero time in Facebook and minimal time on Youtube
and block Javascript wherever I can, so I don't see the same. But I saw the
CPU on her computer staying completely blocked by something Firefox is doing.
The only thing I was able to figure out: around 40 percent is spent in kernel
according to the task manager. Both cores are used more than 90 percent, and
the Firefox is not responsive. She doesn't do anything more than scrolling
down her Facebook to see that effect. It's not always that bad, obviously
depends on the content on the Facebook, but it's bad often enough for her to
see the slowness regularly, and when it really gets stuck to complain to me.

What I personally observe is the pages embedding more linked Youtube videos
got to be very slow to even display them. Those are the pages I stumble on
occasionally, so I didn't investigate. The second effect I've observed is
writing a longer post for HN on Firefox getting much slower (less responsive)
the longer the post is. Like writing these words now.

So, dear Firefox people, your product is really SLOWER for me too in the last
versions, and not faster. And it is extremely slower for a "normal" user using
the "normal" Facebook and Youtube.

(Additionally, I use a number of extensions, and only one will remain
available soon when they turn off the support for what they mark as "legacy"
extensions. That is really strange decision, deciding to remove the major
difference between them and Chrome, becoming just as limited as Chrome is for
extensions and wasting the work of most of the extension developers.)

~~~
pcwalton
> So what's going on here? It's just the propaganda machine claiming the
> opposite of what is actually happening at the moment. They maybe have good
> goals but at the moment it's worse than, for example, a year ago.

It sounds like you are hitting some kind of bug. Feel free to file issues
about it if it's reproducible; the telemetry should also be automatically
reporting the issues you're seeing.

I would like to respectfully suggest that you hitting a bug is not evidence of
a "propaganda machine".

~~~
acqq
Slowdown on Facebook and Youtube up to getting stuck (exactly what I talk
about) was reported in some form at least since February this year, e.g. this
Reddit:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/5sikxt/firefox_unb...](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/5sikxt/firefox_unbearably_slow_on_facebook_and_youtube/)

I've found that link after my GF complained many times, and I've seen the CPU
at more than 90% (40% in Kernel) and Firefox stuck after only her visiting
Facebook and scrolling down. It was hard even to kill the Firefox. I saw
bugzilla entries too. Some quadratic loops for every element, triggering
recalculating "everything" even if the result shouldn't change were mentioned
if I remember.

What I claim is that on 56.0.2 (the most recent version until tomorrow) is
still _not better_ , FF getting _stuck_ and CPU being fully stressed, and that
the "subscriptions" can't be the only issue (which is the only scenario that
the developers accused if I remember correctly the bugzilla conversations).
The computer seeing this at almost 100% CPU and Firefox remaining unresponsive
has only two cores, AMD CPU. If it's accidentally "better" on 16-core machine
of some developer who doesn't use the mentioned sites anyway, my girlfriend
can't change it.

Of course nobody is going to give FF developers her own Facebook access for
them to reproduce it.

As for my GF the most of the internet are Facebook and Youtube, I suspect
she'll really have to switch to Chrome if it continues. She already did
"refresh Firefox" or however it is called now more than once. No change. And
she is certainly not an outlier (and regarding the slowdown I see, I type
these words on Firefox 57 (I downloaded it after reading other comments about
the FTP availability, I see "Stylo true (enabled by default)") on 4 core / HT
Intel and typing these last lines is also quite unresponsive and my notebook
fan started at maximum even if unsurprisingly for 8 virtual cores I don't see
much CPU use on the indicator -- something is still obviously wrong even on
the very light site like HN and on the more powerful machine -- I guarantee
you I see this only in Firefox and when I use native programming editors
everything flies all the time).

~~~
pcwalton
If it is indeed style recalculation that is causing the problem, then Quantum
(57) may well solve the issue, as Stylo both improves the dynamic restyling
behavior (the style sharing optimization is more flexible) and accelerates the
slow case in which restyling needs to occur from scratch (via parallelism). I
can't promise anything without being able to reproduce, of course.

Naturally, like all browser engines, Gecko takes performance on popular sites
such as Facebook very seriously.

------
beaconfield
I've been using Firefox 57 since beta and it's fantastic. Chrome users should
definitely give this a shot. It's super fast, nimble, and easy on your RAM. I
also love that it's made by Mozilla and that they're all about user privacy
and security. #FirefoxFTW Thank you moz://a

------
graphememes
To everyone using "54" and "57" use the Nightly build, it is actually a lot
better.

I was going to comment about the slow scrolling, laggy input, and horrific
experience that I have normally using Firefox. Then, I decided to try out the
Nightly build.

It removes all of that.

However, it still has a horrible developer tools experience.

~~~
oatmealsnap
Even better than 57? I moved from Nightly to the Beta channel along with 57.

------
n72
Multiprocessing did nothing for me, since I apparently hadn't configured it to
use more than one process. Some extensions I had were keeping it from doing
so. Once I got all that sorted out, it flew. If you're still on a slowish FF,
make sure you're actually multiprocess.

------
balajics
Using 57 for few days, speed improvements are impressive.

But two things which is going to stop me from complete switch.

1\. There is no native websocket inspector. websocket-monitor[0] add-on which
supported websocket inspection is not compatible with quantum. Really wish
they speed up native support development[1]

2\. Double tap zoom really makes it easy to find UI issues. Really wish it get
implemented in firefox too.

[0] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/websocket-
mon...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/websocket-monitor/)

[1]
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508)

[edit] corrected link

------
tnsengimana
I just installed the beta version, and my impression is mostly page load and
new tab. They are incredibly fast. I also like that FF has made some
noticeable improvements on the UI. It looks a bit cleaner now.

I think this might be the turning point to ditch Chrome & its parent.

------
ameshkov
FF has indeed become faster now, but man, how bad is it's dev tools. I
remember this time when I kept FF for development purposes solely due to
firebug. Things might reverse this time as Chrome's dev tools are Superior to
FF's counterpart.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
I appreciate that Firefox is doing great work getting it faster, but at the
same time they're doing awful work by baking in shitty cloud features and
turning their add-on ecosystem into a walled garden. One step forward, two
steps back.

------
hateful
I've started switching back last week. I'm only using Chrome for any Google
Services (drive, gmail, hangouts) and development (for now, but only since I'm
used to it and have deadlines). I am very hopeful at this point.

------
hathawsh
I'm primarily a Firefox user, but I've been using Chromium for certain sites
due to rendering performance. This page in particular was rendering slowly
enough in Firefox that switching browsers was worth the trouble:

[http://reprap.org/wiki/G-code](http://reprap.org/wiki/G-code)

I'm happy to report that Firefox 57 renders that page much more smoothly than
before. Thanks! FF 57 does blank the page temporarily when I scroll quickly,
though. Chromium seems to render it with no gaps at all.

Anyone else have a favorite page that Firefox doesn't like?

~~~
degenerate
Adwords used to run really, really, really, really slow in Firefox.

It now runs pretty good in FF 57. About as good as Chrome.

------
PascLeRasc
I decided to give FirefoxNightly a chance as a longtime Chrome user/apologist.
It's impressive and I like the design changes, but it's still keeping my MBP
very warm and listed as "Using Significant Energy" in the battery info while
I've been using it for ~3 hours. Not to mention it feels kinda laggy,
especially in text input. Still, I like the changes like seeing zoom percent
in the omnibar and the preferences menu design. I won't be switching over
fully, but I'll keep it around and continue to check out changes.

------
Endy
I'm going to guess that the answer is: by not being Firefox anymore. Since
that seems to be Mozilla's answer to just about anything. Then again, I never
had a problem with Firefox, it's Chrome taking up so much proces time that
kills me. I need a single-process browser that doesn't gum up the rest of my
machine the way Chrome and multiprocess Firefox do.

Then again, I remain on a 32-bit processor & OS, and I don't expect to update
in the next century.

------
srathi
I've moved completely to Firefox from Chrome about a month back, but haven't
found a way to use my Chromecast from Firefox. Does Anyone have a possible
solution?

------
Matterrr
One extension I don't find a replacement for is Hide caption titlebar plus. It
makes it so there's a permanent title bar even when Firefox is maximized. I
had to change an xfce setting to hide the title bar when a window is
maximized, meaning I lose the title bar for every application... Not ideal.
Does anyone know if there is an argument to launch firefox without a title
bar? Or set it in xfce for only one application?

~~~
chippy
This is my favourite extension also. When using a laptop or other small
screen, being able to remove the title bar is essential. I'm not upgrading to
57 until I can find a good workaround.

Apparently, one used to be able to manually modify Firefox's userchrome.css to
do something similar, but I've yet to find descriptions on what to do with
this new version of Firefox.

A different broken family of extensions that is impacted is mouse gestures,
even for things like moving along tabs when hovering over them using the mouse
wheel (default Chrome experience). I don't think this behaviour is possible
with the new version of FF, sadly.

~~~
r3bl
userChrome.css is still present on Quantum. I haven't played around with it a
lot, but if you feel like getting your hands dirty, this should be a relevant
resource to you:
[https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx/issues/1](https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx/issues/1)

------
bpanon
I have been using chrome for years. I would regularly use other browsers for
testing or other reasons but always came back to chrome because it was the
fastest for me. After hearing someone here mention how fast the new Firefox
was, I downloaded Nightly and I never went back to Chrome.

Before firefox was ugly and slow, now it's fast and slick. So glad that I'm
not giving google _all_ of my browser data anymore.

------
metmirr
It’s great progress with `rust` and people behind it. I loved _night mode_ on
iOS. But on Linux still first launch is slow. _ubuntu17.04_

~~~
heavenlyblue
Could you please elaborate on the "night mode"?

~~~
metmirr
_night mode_ turn background to the black for all website. It’s good if you
reading things on browser.

------
Teerees
Firefox Developer Edition 57 Facing SSL error with various https sites.

[https://mail.google.com/mail/](https://mail.google.com/mail/) Secure
Connection Failed An error occurred during a connection to mail.google.com.
Peer received a valid certificate, but access was denied. Error code:
SSL_ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED_ALERT

------
huntie
I've been pretty happy with FF57. One thing I've noticed is that opening a new
tab seems to block the browser. I have my new tab page set to a personal web
page, which takes 150ms to fetch. If I open a new tab and press F6 before the
page is loaded, it doesn't read the input.

Other than that the only thing I really want is tab groups.

------
ainiriand
If only my corporate network would implement this solution... :
[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-
SEC_ERROR_...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-
SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER?as=u#w_the-error-occurs-on-multiple-secure-sites)

------
CmdrKrool
I'm hoping these developments might eventually clear the way to a somewhat
supported Firefox browser core sans UI to embed in our own applications (ala
WebKit and Chromium via QtWebEngine), and then I might switch back. I'm tired
of being pushed around by UI churn in the applications I use.

~~~
callahad
There's been some renewed interest in this direction, at least on Android, in
the form of GeckoView:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322573](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322573)

Servo, Mozilla Research's next-generation parallel browser engine, also has
embedding as an explicit top-level goal:
[https://servo.org/](https://servo.org/)

------
sj4nz
I've been using the developer edition of Firefox and have been finding it to
be a joy. It is very odd how Chrome stopped having the "knack" of being
extremely fast.

Edge on Windows 10 claimed to be fast, but I think that it was doing more
"cheating" with the UX than actually being fast.

------
jaux
I have tried to switch back to ff from chrome several times now (first try was
when developer edition came out, second try was when multi-tasking came out)
but failed, because ff has been too slow in comparison.

Downloading the new developer edition now... Hope it can stay on my dock this
time!

------
EugeneOZ
As a Rust programmer, I’ll be happy to use something what has Rust code
inside. In Rust I trust.

------
baby
Does anyone else use Tree Style Tabs and is having huge lag issues in Nightly?
Since Firefox 57 browsing on Firefox has become a real pain :/ unfortunately
it's the only browser with something like tree style tab so I'm sticking with
the pain.

------
nmca
(honestly not a joke comment) I couldn't find a VIM extension that's
compatible with firefox quantum! Will extensions become compatible when it's
generally released? Bit of a deal-breaker for me, as much as I'd like to
support mozilla.

~~~
K0nserv
I feel you and I was scared when I updated to the FF 57 beta and VimFx stopped
working. However luckily since there’s now support for WebExtensions vimium is
gaining more and more features in the Firefox version everyday

------
pimeys
Now already on Nightly and enabling the WebRender on my Linux laptop. It
hasn't crashed anymore, but there are still some low-hanging fruits to be
gained to make it faster. 2018 will be big for Firefox, even bigger than the
Stylo.

Long live Rust! :)

------
eliben
Did it? With FF 56 on Ubuntu lately I have to restart Firefox once in a day or
two because its memory usage balloons out of proportions (> 1 GB for 4 open
tabs) and it starts getting sluggish. It felt speedier a few months ago

~~~
r3bl
The entire premise of that article is that it applies to v57, which is going
to be released tomorrow.

------
TeeWEE
Wow this is super, Rust based browser with true concurrency support. Chromes
processes where a nice idea, but lots of memory required, and slow heavy on
the hardware.

I just switched to Firefox. +1 for the "do not track" feature.

------
rorykoehler
I use 4 different browsers all day everyday. I'm sure that there is a memory
leak or something similar in Firefoz. It performs fine for a while and then
gets slower and slower until it hangs and I have to restart.

------
stcredzero
One common theme I've read in threads here, is that there is a general problem
with ads, add-ons, and extensions having malware or taking up too much memory
or CPU. Shouldn't those all be sandboxed?

------
peterhadlaw
Has anyone else noticed significant CPU usage in the new Firefox Nightly? My
computer fan goes full blast when I use the new browser. I like the speed but
that level of heat is just not generated by Chrome.

~~~
cdubzzz
I noticed that last week as well, but got 59.0a1 (2017-11-13) this morning and
so far have not seen it again. Hopefully just a minor issue that was fixed...

------
fiatjaf
Ok. It is indeed great. I've switched to Firefox completely since 57. But it
is not as fast as Chrome yet.

There was a page with performance charts comparing it with Chrome from the FF
dev team somewhere. Where is it?

------
maephisto
One thing that troubles me is why does a non profit open source browser buy
premium offline ad space to promote itself? There's a huge "The new Firefox"
ad in down-town Berlin.

~~~
acdha
Mozilla makes money from having users — it may be open-source but the
developers still need to be paid. They don't have a captive audience like
Windows or Google.com users to advertise on, so public ads seem necessary.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" Mozilla makes money from having users"_

Wait, how does that work again? Last I checked you couldn't deposit users at
the bank or pay your rent with them.

~~~
addicted
When a user searches Google from the Firefox toolbar (or Yahoo, or Bing) the
relevant search engine pays them a little bit of money.

~~~
fabrice_d
Not really "per search"... the deals are negotiated for N years. If that was
per search Mozilla's finances would not be in such good shape, which could
actually help them focus on chasing the right targets.

------
bastijn
I want to put a comment on how awesome the drawings are. Just skimming the
drawings is sufficient to get the concepts. Style is awesome too. Whoever drew
them deserves a moment of attention.

------
jonstewart
Does this mean Firefox is comparable to Chrome wrt/ sandboxing?

~~~
sp332
No. Now that they have multi-process in good shape they can start getting
there though.

------
aryehof
Can one run the new version alongside a previous version?

I need to access occasionally extensions unsupported in the new version:
namely Scrapbook and the extension that provides maff file support.

------
dvcrn
And here I am, still using Safari as my main browser on Mac for battery
performance.

I’m wishing the safari team would be a bit more aggressive with pushing
features and performance

------
tasty_freeze
On html5test.com, FF56 scores 478 (on my windows 7 machine). Does FF57
increase compliance at all, or is this purely a performance boost?

~~~
oatmealsnap
You can see here:
[http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html](http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html)

FF57 gives me 483

~~~
tasty_freeze
That chart only shows up to FF55.

------
SubiculumCode
Firefox Nightly user, and I honestly love it.

------
skizm
Chrome remote desktop is just too good for me to ditch chrome entirely. Can
anyone suggest a good (free) alternative?

------
Cyclone_
I can't in good conscience ever use Firefox after how they treated Brendan
Eich. What a bunch of pigs.

------
known
I just installed. Wow I am impressed :)

------
Abishek_Muthian
Guys, did any one switch to proprietary GPU drivers on Linux to take (better)
advantage of GPU Renderer?

------
jernejzen
It's pretty fun. I put FF in a high privacy mode, now Pocket login doesn't
work anymore ;)

------
euske
Browsers I have been using...

2002: phoenix-0.1 (former name of Firebird) and Lynx

2003: Firebird-0.6 (former name of Firefox) and Lynx

2004: Firefox-1.0 and Lynx

...

2017: Firefox-57.0

and Lynx, yes.

------
pers0n
I never switched to chrome, even when it was faster, I just never trusted
google even back in the Web 2.0 days. I installed the first nightly at work
and the beta at home as I have to have quantum now, it’s just fast and
lightweight. Finally it’s taken time but hope Mozilla ends up back at the top,
better for privacy, security and speed

------
Rauchg
I've been extremely happy with Firefox Nightly. Highly recommend it to
everyone here

------
et416
Let's not forget that FF is also introducing support for U2F devices!

------
KaoruAoiShiho
She's so famous for her react stuff that I thought she worked for FB.

------
dzaragozar
Cute drawings in the page, but a distinct lack of benchmarks.

------
DrHow
I would use it but facebook doesn't work on it for me

------
philippeback
Dev edition is fast. The other ones not so much indeed.

------
symlinkk
I'm still worried about how secure Firefox is in relation to Chrome. From what
I understand, Firefox exploits only go for $30k at Pwn2Own, while Chrome
exploits go for $80k. Should I be worried?

~~~
StavrosK
It depends, are you worth between $30k and $80k to someone? If yes, I would
switch to Chrome.

~~~
symlinkk
It's not like someone would buy an exploit and only use it on one person.

------
methochris
tried out the 57 beta on macOS (10.13) this weekend and watching in the
activity monitor, the main firefox process grabbed a whopping ~800mb of my 8gb
of ram + spawned sub-processes needing 20-100mb per website tab. compare this
to safari and chrome that have a minimal main-process (~40mb) and then the
per-tab amount. i like mozilla and firefox but it just always seems to be
something with firefox that pushes me away and now that they have the speed
fixed, it's eating up my finite resources.

~~~
sgift
On the other hand Chrome eats RAM like there's no tomorrow on my system, while
the Firefox' footprint is pretty much contained. Different systems, different
experiences.

(Two different machines, both Windows 10)

~~~
gvb
Linux too. Chrome was eating all my ram to the point where my laptop was
dogging down horribly, sometime even swapping (excruciating).

FF is fast and much lighter on RAM. My laptop is fast again. Thanks, Mozilla!

------
pydox
Where can I get update to my existing Firefox 56?

------
gressquel
if they modernise their developer tools I would jump back to FF. Chrome has
got too much power is not abusing it.

------
aszantu
damn, I just switched to pale moon for speed, cuz ff was hogging my ram :|

------
tardo99
Does it still default to Yahoo search?

------
rayascott
Long live Rust.

------
5ourpu55
Firefox mobile has extensions, specifically an ad-blocker extension.

------
Danihan
The one major benchmark I use for browser speed is how fast Tagpro runs, and
it's definitely gotten much slower on Firefox recently, to the extent that I
need to generally play it on Chrome, even though I normally much prefer
Firefox to Chrome.

~~~
AnkhMorporkian
When the new Pixi version is dropped into place (I finished coding that
recently) it performs much better on Firefox. I agree that with the current
version it's definitely not great.

Edit: Just to be clear, when I say much better, I don't mean much better than
chrome, just better than it performs now. When I drop RAF and just run the
rendering loop as fast as possible, they get roughly the same FPS on my cheapo
laptop.

~~~
Danihan
Haha, crazy to see a core dev on here. Great work on the game, been my
favorite for years now.

------
johansch
At a high level my main question is:

Why has Mozilla generally been so slow to react to market trends and taken so
insanely long to deliver products that are competitive in other ways than
fuzzy aspects like openness, freedom etc?

This goes back back all the way to like 1998. My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I
remember it feeling like they were in rebuilding mode until like 2005-2006.
And then Chrome launched in 2008...

The first time around I guess it was massive amounts of technical debt and
some questionable architectural choices (e.g. XPCOM), but how about the past
decade?

~~~
b0rsuk
I think Mozilla wasted some effort on some questionable initiatives, like
Firefox OS. They became a little complacent and didn't put money(?) where
their mouth is.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mozilla_products](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mozilla_products)

In particular, check out the list of their abandoned projects. But _some_
experimentation is necessary. You're never completely sure when you strike
gold.

~~~
johansch
Maybe the complacency came from having too much money from the first rounds of
Google search deals in like 2004-2008?

They had already fulfilled their primary goals (openness, transparency
etc.)...

I worked at Opera Software between 2004-2015. We also got loads of Google
search placement money in that period, but for all of their other faults, our
exec team(s) were able to keep us hungry for more.

~~~
digi_owl
Possibly. FOSS projects are notorious for going with rewrites rather than
throttle back and maintain what is already there.

------
HaoZeke
Firefox lost its biggest use case.. The extensions. Besides, the new version
is similar to Chrome in memory usage for multiple tabs which is HUGE
disappointment.

~~~
eref
It is a great opportunity to shake up the sphere of extension development a
bit. New alternatives pop up every day and eventually the best will stick.
Here is a list:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECI...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECIVyBU0GPoSmRqZ7A0VBvqeKYVSww/edit?usp=sheets_home&ths=true)

------
heydonovan
I know this is just one data point, but I just downloaded Firefox 56, and it
is still as slow as I remember. Loading YouTube seems to lag behind Chrome,
and viewing .gifv videos causes a noticeable stutter. I'll give it another
shot next version.

~~~
Barrin92
57 is the big improvement with a huge jump in performance. Definitely give it
a try.

------
campuscodi
Buuuuut.... if you delete more than 5 older passwords at a time, it will
crash. #truestorybroh

------
mnm1
Nice work. Now all they have to do is work out the bugs with their dev tools
and convince thousands of programmers to update their old FF addons and it
might be a browser worth using as a primary browser again someday. One step
forward, two steps back seems to be Mozilla's motto these last few years.

------
mywittyname
I love Firefox and I'm glad to see they are doing what it takes to stay
relevant.

That being said, the "quantum" branding here is completely ridiculous. Quantum
already had a definite meaning in computing and Firefox's "quantum era" has
absolutely nothing to do with it. It's like Ford making a "hybrid" Mustang,
that has zero electrification, it's just faster than all previous Mustangs.

I was honestly expecting a Firefox build for quantum computers.

~~~
FireBeyond
You were downvoted, but I rather agree. I saw the picture of the turbofan
diagram, with pointers to arbitrary parts of the engine and naming them as
parts of the "Quantum Engine", DOM, CSS, etc.

Tufte referred to chartjunk - that was graphicjunk.

However... I love the browser again.

