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Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#351

Post by CrystalGamma »

Brakenshire wrote: post #169
magnat wrote: post #52

> Firefox Quantum enhances Firefox’s integration with Pocket, the read-it-later app that Mozilla acquired last year. When you open a new tab, you’ll see currently trending web pages recommended by Pocket users so you won’t miss out on what’s hot online, as well as your top sites. That doesn't sound good. What are the reasons for having bloatware bundled in instead releasing them as separate add-on or installation opt…

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?

That is news to me, and https://getpocket.com/about doesn't mention Mozilla at all … do you have a link to some official announcement?

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#352

Post by jacobparker »

kosi28 wrote: post #198
foolfoolz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never thought I'd say this but the 2 fastest bowsers on my computer are Firefox and Edge

Well that's because Chrome is busy doing random crap like this in the background - chrome://site-engagement/

Intended use cases are documented here: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/site-en...

If you want to trace uses of it in the code, here is a reasonable place to start, I imagine: https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/chrome/browser/engageme...

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#353

Post by derobert »

kosi28 wrote: post #198
foolfoolz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never thought I'd say this but the 2 fastest bowsers on my computer are Firefox and Edge

Well that's because Chrome is busy doing random crap like this in the background - chrome://site-engagement/

I guess you've never checked ~/.mozilla/firefox/YOUR-PROFILE/places.sqlite which includes a record, including date & referer, for every time you visit a site. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/Places... for documentation (or http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox_3_History_... for unofficial documentation). Several hundred thousand rows here...

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#354

Post by coldtea »

jorvi wrote: post #342
tapoxi wrote: 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.

But Chrome is also guilty of absolutely guzzling battery. I always try other browsers on macOS but in the end keep switching back to Safari because it easily gets me ~2-3h more battery life. This means that on 10h average battery life you'd pay a ~20-33% battery life premium just to run a different browser. At that point, finding replacement Safari extensions is well worth the bother. What I don't understand: why is…

>We live in a portable world after all..

Do we? I'd say most people with laptops use them either at home or at work, both places were they can plug in.

The majority is not "Starbucks laptop users" or road warriors.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#355

Post by SubiculumCode »

k__ wrote: post #147
gue5t wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: touchpad scrolling, make sure you disable "smooth" (animated) scrolling and enable precise scrolling; on Linux this requires setting MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 in the environment.

Nice, thanks! Everything feels 10 times faster without smooth scrolling, while I have to say that the nightly already felt blazing fast _with_ smooth scrolling, haha.

This should be off by default. Feels and looks faster. What is the downside?

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#356

Post by dblohm7 »

JSJunky wrote: post #266

That’s all good. However, my current Firefix Stable: v.55.0.3 crashes on a regular basis. I’d really live to switch back, after all these Chrome years.

Have you sent in the crash reports? Go to about:crashes and post some URLs of crash reports here.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#357

Post by jhasse »

callahad wrote: post #272
jhasse wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ins…

Sounds nice :)

Still I would love if you prioritized getting some WebExtension APIs ready for 57 (or delayed WebExtensions-only to a later version).

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#358

Post by jhasse »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #328
jhasse wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's now also heavily competing for fastest browser It isn't though, as Chrome still wins in some benchmarks.

That doesn't mean they're not competing...

Correct. Still no selling point over Chrome though :/

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#359

Post by Crespyl »

doktrin wrote: post #155
Vinnl wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but in VimFx's case it's more a matter of the developer not feeling like it considering Vimium is available, which for me has been a drop-in replacement of VimFx. I just assumed that as you mentioned Vimperator, you wanted the complete, somewhat more invasive, experience.

It's preferable, but if I'm honest Vimium is Good Enough(tm) for my general use case. I didn't realize they had a FF57 compatible version :)

Vimium is /mostly/ there, but gaps in the WebExtensions API make the experience rough in my experience.

The biggest issue for me, right now, is that there are a lot of places where FF won't allow WebExtensions to intercept key events for shortcuts, like on the new tab page, error pages, any other "system" pages, or certain pinned tabs (this one is particularly inconsistent). This means that if I'm jumping through several tabs with J/K and hit any of those by accident, I'm stuck there until I figure out what happened and either use the mouse or the official hotkeys to switch back out.

Same with focusing the URL bar and the slightly quirky experience of the omnibar that Vimium has to use instead.

It works, but mostly serves to remind me how much I miss VimFX rather than to improve my productivity.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#360

Post by gue5t »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #355
k__ wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, thanks! Everything feels 10 times faster without smooth scrolling, while I have to say that the nightly already felt blazing fast _with_ smooth scrolling, haha.

This should be off by default. Feels and looks faster. What is the downside?

Tracking the thread through https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1207700 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1170342 (and ultimately https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93539 ) it appears that when XI2 is used, focus-out events were not sent in rare cases under old versions of Xorg. If you're running modern software there should be no downside.
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