Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#231

Post by bhnmmhmd » Tue, Sep 26, 2017, 5:07 PM UTC

driverdan wrote: post #84

DiabloD3 wrote: post #44

As someone that jumped ship from how slow Chrome has gotten and went to Nightly /w Stylo and (CPU threads - 1) e10s processes enabled about 2 monthsish ago... Holy damn Firefox is actually fast. Fair comparison, both having Pocket, uBlock, Evernote, OneNote, Pushbullet, and Bitwarden; neither of them having an extension the other doesn't. Above described Firefox Nightly config vs Chrome Dev. Test machines are a works…

I'd like to see the same comparison on a Mac. The Windows version of Firefox has been close to Chrome performance for a while. The Mac version has been significantly slower.

+1 for mentioning huge CPU usage by Nightly on Mac.

I've been sending feedbacks for Nightly for a while now, but they don't seem to read them. The two biggest issues are:

1- High CPU usage (which leads to high temperature and shorter battery life) 2- No "Look Up / Define" in right-click menu.

Fix them and I'll switch from Chrome in a blink.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#232

Post by staticassertion » Tue, Sep 26, 2017, 5:07 PM UTC

magnat wrote: post #215

Brakenshire wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pocket is now owned by Mozilla, and is going to be open sourced. What separates that from any other functionality built into the browser, for instance Firefox Sync or Autocomplete?

Sync, Pocket, Dev tools, Screenshots etc are not required to display and interact with HTML pages. They are useful and it's nice they exist, but I don't see a reason to have them installed if I don't need them - just as I don't install every package available in OS just in case I'll need later it. Even if they don't use resources when not being actively used (no way to test since there is no way to remove them), they…

> just as I don't install every package available in OS just in case I'll need later it.

But your OS does come with lots of packages and features you may not use.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#233

Post by jhasse » Tue, Sep 26, 2017, 5:08 PM UTC

hafta wrote: post #166

spiderfarmer wrote: post #22

Firefox, I love you, but you and my 15" rMBP (with 4k Dell external monitor) simply don't get along: https://i.imgur.com/rByz7zS.png I don't what causes this, but in the last 2 years it's gotten worse and with Quantum the CPU usage is even higher. Chrome and Safari don't have this issue.

If you have the time, please file a bug at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ it's pretty painless. We definitely care about Firefox on Mac. Thanks.

Would be great if you could start to care about Firefox on Linux, too. (It's the only platform where hardware acceleration is disabled for example https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280523)

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#234

Post by eklavya » Tue, Sep 26, 2017, 5:08 PM UTC

mkj wrote: post #46

eklavya wrote: post #11

I so wanted to use the new Firefox and switch from safari. I searched and was excited to learn there was an extension for integration with keychain on mac only to learn that it was no longer supported :( I understand the push behind web extensions but I don't think there will ever be a keychain integration addon now.

Something like Keychain support seems high-risk to leave to third party addons? In the back of my mind I wonder if they'll also follow the Chrome model of malware takeovers.

Yeah, but asking Mozilla to include that maybe too much? I don’t know.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#235

Post by sumobob » Tue, Sep 26, 2017, 5:09 PM UTC

I didn't believe the metrics, I downloaded it, I feel like Im browsing the web in the fast lane.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#236

Post by eklavya » Tue, Sep 26, 2017, 5:10 PM UTC

AndrewCHM wrote: post #28

eklavya wrote: post #11

I so wanted to use the new Firefox and switch from safari. I searched and was excited to learn there was an extension for integration with keychain on mac only to learn that it was no longer supported :( I understand the push behind web extensions but I don't think there will ever be a keychain integration addon now.

fwiw there is nothing that web extensions lack that would prevent that from working https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Na... exists to allow web extensions to talk with programs on the computer, its up to someone to write the extension and executable for that usecase

Issue thread: https://github.com/jfitzell/mozilla-keychain/issues/88

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#237

Post by Sylos » Tue, Sep 26, 2017, 5:10 PM UTC

low_battery wrote: post #154

DiabloD3 wrote: post #44

As someone that jumped ship from how slow Chrome has gotten and went to Nightly /w Stylo and (CPU threads - 1) e10s processes enabled about 2 monthsish ago... Holy damn Firefox is actually fast. Fair comparison, both having Pocket, uBlock, Evernote, OneNote, Pushbullet, and Bitwarden; neither of them having an extension the other doesn't. Above described Firefox Nightly config vs Chrome Dev. Test machines are a works…

Unfortunately, as long as Firefox security infrastructure does not match Chrome, I can not use it. Note that errors like use-after-free and buffer overflows are marked as Critical (run arbitrary code on computer) for Firefox, but marked as High (execute code in the context of, or otherwise impersonate other origins.) for Chrome because of sandboxing. Firefox: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabiliti…

As Mr. Patrick Walton over there said, Mozilla is still building up the exact, minimal file-system permissions. So, yes, in that way it is still not yet on quite the same level as Chrome.

In terms of security architecture, there is to my knowledge only one bigger difference left and you can change that, if you want.

The difference is that Chrome will spawn a new process for every new tab (unless the webpage in it is from the same domain as another tab). Firefox instead will always round-robin the tabs across a fixed number of processes to achieve lower RAM usage and as result of that also somewhat better performance.

But you can tell Firefox to round-robin across up to 1000 processes or what have you, so that it then does spawn a new process for every new tab (and therefore sandboxes each tab individually).

To do so, go into about:config and set "dom.ipc.processCount" to a high number, like 1000.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#238

Post by steveklabnik » Tue, Sep 26, 2017, 5:11 PM UTC

mdek wrote: post #229

If 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…

Elsewhere in the thread it's stated that Tree Style Tabs has shipped a 57-compatible version, and that LastPass will be ready by the time this all hits stable.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#239

Post by magnat » Tue, Sep 26, 2017, 5:12 PM UTC

staticassertion wrote: post #232

magnat wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sync, Pocket, Dev tools, Screenshots etc are not required to display and interact with HTML pages. They are useful and it's nice they exist, but I don't see a reason to have them installed if I don't need them - just as I don't install every package available in OS just in case I'll need later it. Even if they don't use resources when not being actively used (no way to test since there is no way to remove them), they…

> just as I don't install every package available in OS just in case I'll need later it. But your OS does come with lots of packages and features you may not use.

> But your OS does come with lots of packages and features you may not use.

Sure does. And I can remove them if I want to. I can apt-get remove libc6 if I really really want to and I accept the consequences. I can't remove non-essential parts of the Firefox, though.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#240

Post by mdek » Tue, Sep 26, 2017, 5:13 PM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #238

mdek wrote: post #229

If 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…

Elsewhere in the thread it's stated that Tree Style Tabs has shipped a 57-compatible version, and that LastPass will be ready by the time this all hits stable.

True. I did in fact have to explicitly downgrade TST to the <57-compatible version. The new version apparently doesn't yet support hiding the tab bar across the top of the browser.