Are there any plans to have Firefox throttle background tabs? This is one feature from Chrome that is currently stopping me from switching. It's very useful for laptops with lots of open tabs. The current rate of progress is definitely impressive though.
Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
311–320 of 446 posts
Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. :)
Thank you. I think I'll just submit it tomorrow. I just need to come up with very long password which I don't forget :)
Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I see. The page didn't really go into specifics about how they made Firefox Quantum faster, so I had assumed that it was faster because they were rewriting parts in Rust.
In part, it is because of a Rust component. A new CSS engine, Stylo, is shipping with 57 and that brought a noticeable performance improvement. In the foreseeable future there will also be WebRender, which should give an even bigger improvement, but that wasn't ready for 57.
Another big part is that they recently switched Firefox over to a multiprocess architecture (Firefox 48) and these performance improvements are now mostly optimizations that are now possible due to this architecture. Basically offloading all kinds of slower operations into a background thread. The optimizations are all over the place, mostly of smaller nature, but taken together they make a big difference.
And a third point is the new UI. It is partially really just more efficient, partially uses animations and such to trick your brain into thinking that things are faster, and then it also now has "tab warm-up", which basically means that when you hover with your mouse over a tab, it already starts loading in that tab, so that it's instantly there when you click.
Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I'm not the only who wished Tree Style Tabs was integrated as a default feature of Firefox. It's a primordial configuration to your browsing experience but it's been constantly stabbed and fixed at every update of Firefox.
Seems like Tree Style Tabs got ported to the WebExtensions version now! It still can't hide the tab bar (API will come in later releases) but it works! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... There's also the Tree Tabs extension which I don't like as much.
https://bugzil.la/1332447 is the bug for adding a WebExtensions API for hiding the tab bar.
Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
#315I like the fact that Mozilla is honest with the comparison test video and actually shows Chrome being faster than Firefox on a few sites (e.g., Instagram and YouTube).
It's interesting that, even in some cases where Chrome wins, Firefox starts rendering useful parts of the page sooner. Watch the rendering carefully.
Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
It shouldn't be Firefox's only selling point though.
Well, it's not. It's now also heavily competing for fastest browser and will continue to be the most extensible browser, even if it is sacrificing things there.
> It's now also heavily competing for fastest browser
It isn't though, as Chrome still wins in some benchmarks.
Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very interesting, that does appear to be the case - likewise for VimFx. From what I gather, the go-to Vim plugin after this year will be Vimium (which I currently use on Chrome), although it hasn't yet been ported to FF 57.
Mozilla is still doing something with the keyboard shortcuts API to make that more capable. I don't know what exactly they're doing, it won't be as powerful as Vimperator, but it should be a good bit more powerful than Vimium. This (obviously) won't be in Firefox 57, but should be ready relatively soonish after. So, this is something that they have already been actively working on for a few months. I'm guessing 59 or…
Yes, Mozilla + volunteer contributors. Check the last comments in this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061
There was a meeting today and the contributors participated in it.
Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
#318Are there any plans to have Firefox throttle background tabs? This is one feature from Chrome that is currently stopping me from switching. It's very useful for laptops with lots of open tabs. The current rate of progress is definitely impressive though.
Yes. Much of that work began landing in Firefox 55, and there's more to come. We also more aggressively throttle scripts that are sourced from domains on our tracking protection blacklist, so tracking / advertising scripts won't be able to ruin your experience.
Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
#319I would love switching but the only thing preventing me is the lack of profiles like Chrome has. Containers is not the same as you can't have different extensions for each container like chrome has for each profile. For example, I have 2 LP accounts one for home and one for work and there's no way to use both of then at the same time in FF
about:profiles -> launch in new browser
More info about profiles at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition
#320Earlier 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????
I wrote https://cretz.github.io/doogie/ and did a show hn a few days ago. It's chromium based though, not webkit.