Live data from Hacker News

Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

blog.mozilla.org

271–280 of 446 posts

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#272
post #223

This 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.

More changes are coming (WebRender, etc.), but raw benchmarks are only part of the story. We focused an enormous amount of effort on improving perceived performance in Firefox 57. More events go into an idle queue, background tabs get throttled, scripts from domains on our tracking protection list get throttled even further, etc.

And as long as performance is comparable, we can compete on things like our CSS Grid inspector, or per-tab profiles ("Containers"), which I use every day to keep my personal Google account segregated from my work one, and to sandbox Facebook and LinkedIn off into their own little worlds: https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/introducing-firefox-multi-a...

Try it for a week and see how it feels -- you might be pleasantly surprised. http://firefox.com/developer

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#274

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…

> It isn't enough to explain how fast Firefox feels now.

That's because we've been making a dedicated effort to find and stamp out sources of UI lag! It's called Quantum Flow; see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum/Flow for more.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#275
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Firefox Nightly (57) for a while on a 2013 MBP running Sierra. Firefox definitely feels significantly faster than it used to, and the new UI is great. But this comes at the cost of battery life. I moved back to Chrome because it was constantly chewing CPU.

+1 for the significantly improved performance on Firefox on OSX (I'm on a 2015 MBP), not just in the current 57 nightly, but since Firefox 55 came out. Absolutely stunning improvement in performance! Great work by team FFx! :D

Yep, switched to FF from Chromium since 54/55 when multi-threaded tabs became default. Don't need to restart once in a while when Chromium has eaten up all the RAM. The extension support is just as good, and some of the labs features are very interesting.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#276

We 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 )

I wanted to file a bug, but password policy in Bugzilla is pretty crazy. 12 characters is little over the top.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#277
post #143
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which would be a shame, now that Firefox is (IMHO) better than Chrome, once again :)

Are you kidding? It's like "Blackberry is better than iPhone once again, finally losing the keyboard". The main and only distinctive feature of Firefox was programmability (XUL, XPCOM), and now it's gone. There are forks like PaleMoon and Waterfox though but for how long. Firefox had to take that app-platform niche (thanks to XUL, XPCOM) that now occupies Electron, but failed on that chasing after Chrome.

No, it’s not like that at all. Firefox’s performance, memory usage, and UI all far outstrip Chrome’s in my browsing now; I don’t see any reason to use Chrome apart from the usual cross-browser testing, and it’s been that way for a year (?) now.

(And Firefox “forks” have always been a very good way to be behind on security patches to no benefit.)

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#278
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current news relates to merging parts of Servo (web engine written in Rust) to Firefox, which started relatively recently.

I know that. And I have high hopes :) I just wanted to say, that it isn't the first news about Firefox getting faster since Chrome came out. I tried the new versions every now and then and Chrome always felt faster to me. Maybe it really is, maybe it just uses some perceptional tricks, I don'T know.

Firefox really has been slowly getting faster for a while; especially with Firefox 54, I no longer felt as if I was taking a significant performance hit as the price for not using Chrome. Firefox 55 got even a bit faster, but still was not quite as fast as Chrome. However, the recent changes in Nightly (Firefox 57), which now landed in the developer edition, really was a huge leap forward in performance.

I encourage you to try out Nightly now (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/). I’m not promising that it’ll be faster than Chrome, but it just might be fast enough now.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#279
post #68

Wow, it really is blazing fast, and just at a glance I like what they're doing with the dev tools. Unfortunately... > Vimperator : "This add-on is not compatible with your version of Firefox." Ouch. Guess I might need to wait a bit to make this my daily driver. All in all, though, I have to say I'm really glad to see Firefox is still solidly in this race - and with a kick ass and quite possibly superior product to bo…

The lack of dev work on vimperator is actually what drove me back to chrome. I've been using cvim, and it has all the features I liked in vimperator. Unfortunately, vimium-FF is still not as full featured as I'd like yet.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#280

We 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 )

I wanted to file a bug, but password policy in Bugzilla is pretty crazy. 12 characters is little over the top.

Email me (my HN username @mozilla.com) and I'll file for you.

I'd also encourage you to look into a password manager (I like https://keepassxc.org/, and I've recently seen folks taking a liking to https://bitwarden.com/) so you don't have to worry about the requirements. :)

Post reply on HN