Been using Developer Edition for a few months now. A few hiccups here and there, but overall running well! It's cool to see performance gains with each update, really speaks to how much work the Firefox team has been putting in lately.
Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
221–230 of 446 posts
Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
#222This a most pointless decision. making firefox fast at the expense of the extensions. why would it make people switch back to FF? because it's 1% faster than chrome? come on, it's 2k17 and few care about that. Edge might be faster than both and people still would not use it. FF had its selling point to power users which is why i'm currently browsing from ff. Now there is no reason at all to use it. I guess there is n…
> why would it make people switch back to FF? because it's 1% faster than chrome?
General responsiveness is definitely something I consider when choosing any tool. 1%? I don't think that's a real number. It can be much faster, especially since this is just one of many-to-come improvements.
When you have lots of tabs open, lots of extensions, etc, pages can actually be quite slow to render. As webpages become more complex (I'm thinking about my company's web-app product) or as we start leveraging renderers for more than just web content, performance is more important.
Beyond that, given mobile devices low memory usage, strong energy requirements, and insane popularity, it makes sense to care about how well we utilize resources in our applications.
> FF had its selling point to power users which is why i'm currently browsing from ff.
"Power users" like to believe this, and they're certainly the loudest, but I don't think it's true. Most people are not power users, and I think it stands to reason that most Firefox users are not "power users". Many are just regular people using their browser to get to Facebook, a site that loads a huge a mount of content. Things like "I visited a website and got hacked, I hate firefox now" or "Ugh firefox hung on facebook" or "ugh instagram is taking forever to load" matter a lot to these users.
> Now there is no reason at all to use it.
Well, performance is one reason. Security could easily be another - as Firefox moves to a memory safe language we can expect to see lower critical bug rates. I know for a lot of the older people whose computers I've set up "I don't want to get viruses" is a huge ask from them. So moving your renderer to a memory safe language is a nice win there.
Most users extensions are likely to continue to work with the new Firefox. Maybe not the 'power users', who almost by definition are a minority, but most.
Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
#223This a most pointless decision. making firefox fast at the expense of the extensions. why would it make people switch back to FF? because it's 1% faster than chrome? come on, it's 2k17 and few care about that. Edge might be faster than both and people still would not use it. FF had its selling point to power users which is why i'm currently browsing from ff. Now there is no reason at all to use it. I guess there is n…
> because it's 1% faster than chrome?
It isn't though. There are still some pages in the video where Chrome wins.
So you're right: Really no reason for me to keep using Firefox besides the privacy / morally one.
Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plus, there's that recent Webkit-based browser with vertical tabs as it's main feature. It was covered here on HN a few days ago.
What is it????
Not sure if parent means this, but Vivaldi can do vertical tabs. But no idea if that is as powerful/flexible as Tree Style Tabs on Firefox. Probably not...
Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
#225This a most pointless decision. making firefox fast at the expense of the extensions. why would it make people switch back to FF? because it's 1% faster than chrome? come on, it's 2k17 and few care about that. Edge might be faster than both and people still would not use it. FF had its selling point to power users which is why i'm currently browsing from ff. Now there is no reason at all to use it. I guess there is n…
Firefox's main selling point for many has always been that it's fighting for a free and open web. And simply "not being Google" (/Facebook, but they don't have a browser yet) still is a selling point as well.
It shouldn't be Firefox's only selling point though.
Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
#226One thing that stops me switching from Chrome is the multiple profiles and easy profile switching in Chrome. I have work and personal profiles and then other profiles for different roles I use in testing web applications. Last time I checked it wasn't at all convenient to do this in Firefox.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
Thanks, not compatible with the new firefox beta, but thanks.
Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
#227One thing that stops me switching from Chrome is the multiple profiles and easy profile switching in Chrome. I have work and personal profiles and then other profiles for different roles I use in testing web applications. Last time I checked it wasn't at all convenient to do this in Firefox.
Actually, you can on Firefox even use different profiles per tab since a few releases ago.
This documentation still makes it sound very clunky and inconvenient compared to chrome:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Multiple_profile...
> You cannot change the profile while Firefox is running. Although it is possible in some cases to have multiple instances of Firefox running in different profiles, to avoid confusion, you should first exit/quit/terminate all running instances of Firefox, FirefoxDeveloperEdition or Nightly.
> firefox --ProfileManager
Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
#228Is the idea here that they'll just keep switching out pieces written in C++ for Rust until all of Firefox is Rust, rather than launching a new product?
Not really. Parts of Firefox like Tracemonkey (or whatever they call the js engine now) aren't going to be rewritten because it would take a decade to do. I expect that Firefox will always be built more like a C++ project with Rust components than the other way. That said "project quantum" is about improving the browser which applies to all of the code not just the Rust parts.
> ren't going to be rewritten because it would take a decade to do.
Semi-related question - does anyone know what that would look like? Like if someone were to rewrite v8/Tracemonkey from scratch, what's the cutting edge research on this?
Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
#229If you want to try these performance improvements (servo, e10s) but keep legacy add-on compatibility (at least for now) I suggest installing firefox 56, disabling auto-updates, and making the following changes/additions in about:config
browser.tabs.remote.autostart true browser.tabs.remote.force-enable true layout.css.servo.enabled true
This way I get to keep my Tree Style Tab, Lastpass, and a few other add-ons that haven't yet been ported to WebExtensions.
Convenient FTP link, since it seems right now the automated installers are jumping between versions 55 and 57: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/56.0b12/
Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
#230We have a more developer focused article on the Hacks Blog at https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/09/firefox-quantum-developer-... (Previous HN discussion was flagged as a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15338795 )
Congratulations on the new release, it's really amazing!
I'm a web developer and nowadays I'm using a lot of React. I quite often end up switching to Chrome when I debug to get a useful error message/stack trace. Is this because Facebook has targeted Chrome or is it simply because Chrome has better error reporting? If the latter is the case, are you working on improving this?