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How Firefox Got Fast Again

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Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#261

Post by fencepost »

e40 wrote: post #193
mapgrep wrote: post #52

I switched back to Firefox 54 from Chrome when multiprocess browsing ("Electrolysis") came out of beta. It's been absolutely great. It's fast and I trust and like the nonprofit behind it. And all the extensions I care about are available. My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account, and just generally wanting less dependence on Google. I also like that Firefox has a built in tracking…

The signing into an account in chrome is the killer feature for me. I have work and a couple of personal accounts that I have signed in in different browser windows. That allows me to keep things separate (extensions, mail, browsing, bookmarks, etc). How do FF users do this?

The signing into an account in Chrome almost got someone fired at a small customer of mine a few weeks ago. Fortunately they called me first to look into it, I pointed out that the porn bookmarks in question were years old and that since Chrome was signed into a personal account it was pretty likely that the same account had been used by other family members at home.

I also wrote this up for the owners to send to their staff, feel free to reuse if appropriate for you:

We’ve seen at least one situation recently where a user “signed in” to Chrome when prompted, which brought that user’s personal bookmarks and website logins onto their work computer. While Chrome offers this as an option, there are no situations where your personal account should be linked to a browser at work – if you need to be using personal email, etc. please do so from your own phone or other device on your own time. This is for your own privacy and security as well as for the practice – we want to not have your personal data on our systems, and you don’t want your private email, bookmarks, etc. accessible to anyone else who happens to be at your desk while you’ve stepped away.

If you have linked your browser to a personal account, please remove that connection using the instructions below.

You can check whether Chrome is linked to an online account by clicking on the small person icon at the top right corner of the window – just to the left of the “X” to close the window. • If you click on that and it asks you to sign in, you’re not linked to an account. • If you click on that and it lists a personal account, click on “Manage People” to open a new window listing connected accounts. On each account there are 3 dots in the top right corner – click those and “Remove this person” • If you see a name rather than a generic person icon, click on that and use “Manage People” to remove that connected account.

Firefox offers a similar but less-used version of this that would have required creating a Firefox account to use Firefox Sync. If you have done this with Firefox please disconnect it; if you’re not sure then you almost certainly haven’t done this in Firefox and don’t need to worry about it.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#262

Post by davesque »

Touche wrote: post #38

Am I the only one that is confused by Firefox's "fast again" narrative? I remember that they launched the https://arewefastyet.com/ site a few years ago to fight the idea that FF was slow. It feels like there's a new blog post that essentially says the same thing "we're fast now" every couple of months. So I find this all confusing. Am I just remembering incorrectly, or haven't they already declared "we're as fast as…

I recently (a couple of weeks ago) finished giving Firefox another try for about two weeks. Sorry to say, but it just felt laggy compared with Chrome. I'll give it another shot when the new rendering engine is fully integrated into the release channel.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#263

Post by kwhitefoot »

madeofpalk wrote: post #245
mapgrep wrote: post #52

I switched back to Firefox 54 from Chrome when multiprocess browsing ("Electrolysis") came out of beta. It's been absolutely great. It's fast and I trust and like the nonprofit behind it. And all the extensions I care about are available. My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account, and just generally wanting less dependence on Google. I also like that Firefox has a built in tracking…

> I also like that Firefox has a built in tracking protection (not just Do Not Track toggle but actual blocking of trackers Here's something I find curious. When Apple does it, it's because they want to kill the open web and drive more people to their closed Apple News platform. When Mozilla does it, it's because they're saints. How am I able to reconcile these two?

Perhaps because Mozilla doesn't have a News platform? So it is easier to believe that they are doing it for you. I don't mean to imply that Apple have any other motives, I know nothing about them except that there appears to be a greater likelihood of a conflict of interest.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#264

Post by mgbmtl »

zeveb wrote: post #237
colanderman wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty easy to accidentally enable uploading all your cleartext passwords to Google's cloud service too (the dialog to do so is a dark pattern). I similarly was furious when I discovered that. Firefox is now my go-to, and what I recommend to friends and family.

Do note that if you enable Firefox's sync functionality, all of your passwords will be encrypted with a function of your Mozilla Account password, and that Mozilla can target your browser instance with JavaScript to steal your account password at will (their protocol specifies that they never see your plaintext password, but they serve JavaScript to hash the password — which means they could serve JavaScript to send…

I agree that is a valid issue, but it's still quite a different scale than using Google.

If I understand correctly, you're saying that we should be careful about saving passwords in Firefox if we could be the target of a National Security Letter from the US. The attack would be detectable, so it cannot be used very often (and they would need a really good excuse for doing so).

By contrast, Google takes all our data and can do whatever they want with it, without a warrant/NSL?

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#265

Post by n72 »

bjterry wrote: post #243
ArmandGrillet wrote: post #144

I just installed Firefox 57 (thanks jacek for the link) and the first things I noticed are: - The cross to close a tab and the one to create a tab are aligned in a weird way. - Opening a tab is laggy (I'm on a MBP with an Intel Iris chip and 16GB of RAM). - The scrolling still does not feel native (I'm on macOS High Sierra). I'm very impressed by the work that has been done for this release as a dev but this does not…

It also feels laggy to me. It's weird given the reports of all these other users. I am also using a 16GB Ram, Intel Iris MBP. There is a noticeable pause while switching tabs, and there is a very noticeable lag while typing (for example in this box). Pages do seem to render fast, but it feels very laggy in terms of user interaction. Edit: The scrolling is also very laggy, which I forgot to mention, much more so than…

Check about:support and look for a number higher than 0 in the "Multiprocess Windows" entry. Old extensions or something may be keeping you from running multi-process.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#266

Post by Myrmornis »

fiatjaf wrote: post #202
e40 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The signing into an account in chrome is the killer feature for me. I have work and a couple of personal accounts that I have signed in in different browser windows. That allows me to keep things separate (extensions, mail, browsing, bookmarks, etc). How do FF users do this?

Firefox 58 has "persona" tabs. Coloured tabs that keep their own sessions. You can just configure multiple personas and work on them all simultaneously from the same window (or you can use different windows, if you prefer). It's good even for creating fake accounts, test accounts, testing apps from the perspective of different user sessions etc.

Can I check I understand: Firefox has

- Profiles

- Containers

- Persona tabs

?

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#267

Post by grigory »

dogprez wrote: post #100

Somewhat tangentially, I really like the cartoons Lin has made. I’ve found I’ve naturally anthropomorphized code. Often when I start working with someone new they get confused when I start talking about constructs like people. I think it’s given me a different perspective on encapsulation and concurrency than most people. I don’t know if I’ve ever worked with someone that thinks the same way. When I work on code that…

When I explain various aspects of concurrency and multi-threaded programming to non-programmers, using analogy of people doing some tasks really helps.

I've picked this up from Feynman's lectures on computing - highly recommend them!

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#268

Post by acqq »

pcwalton wrote: post #256
acqq wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, for my girlfriend, during some last few months Firefox is much slower than before: she uses it mostly for Facebook and Youtube, she doesn't have any extensions installed by herself (not counting the stuff that is in Firefox because Firefox marketing initiatives, like Pocket) and no adbockers, but Firefox uses so much CPU that it gets completely unusable. And she is not any extreme Facebook user: she has less tha…

> So what's going on here? It's just the propaganda machine claiming the opposite of what is actually happening at the moment. They maybe have good goals but at the moment it's worse than, for example, a year ago. It sounds like you are hitting some kind of bug. Feel free to file issues about it if it's reproducible; the telemetry should also be automatically reporting the issues you're seeing. I would like to respec…

Slowdown on Facebook and Youtube up to getting stuck (exactly what I talk about) was reported in some form at least since February this year, e.g. this Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/5sikxt/firefox_unb...

I've found that link after my GF complained many times, and I've seen the CPU at more than 90% (40% in Kernel) and Firefox stuck after only her visiting Facebook and scrolling down. It was hard even to kill the Firefox. I saw bugzilla entries too. Some quadratic loops for every element, triggering recalculating "everything" even if the result shouldn't change were mentioned if I remember.

What I claim is that on 56.0.2 (the most recent version until tomorrow) is still not better, FF getting stuck and CPU being fully stressed, and that the "subscriptions" can't be the only issue (which is the only scenario that the developers accused if I remember correctly the bugzilla conversations). The computer seeing this at almost 100% CPU and Firefox remaining unresponsive has only two cores, AMD CPU. If it's accidentally "better" on 16-core machine of some developer who doesn't use the mentioned sites anyway, my girlfriend can't change it.

Of course nobody is going to give FF developers her own Facebook access for them to reproduce it.

As for my GF the most of the internet are Facebook and Youtube, I suspect she'll really have to switch to Chrome if it continues. She already did "refresh Firefox" or however it is called now more than once. No change. And she is certainly not an outlier (and regarding the slowdown I see, I type these words on Firefox 57 (I downloaded it after reading other comments about the FTP availability, I see "Stylo true (enabled by default)") on 4 core / HT Intel and typing these last lines is also quite unresponsive and my notebook fan started at maximum even if unsurprisingly for 8 virtual cores I don't see much CPU use on the indicator -- something is still obviously wrong even on the very light site like HN and on the more powerful machine -- I guarantee you I see this only in Firefox and when I use native programming editors everything flies all the time).

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#269

Post by robin_reala »

luhn wrote: post #125
robin_reala wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m using Firefox on iOS fulltime now, as in the last couple of releases ad blockers and 1Password have gained support.

How do you use 1Password with Firefox on iOS? It's not an option for me in the Share modal, so I've been having to switch to Safari.

It was only added in the last couple of weeks I think. Clicking the menu button in the address bar then “Share page with” shows it for me.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#270

Post by wheresmyusern »

remedan wrote: post #230
freeone3000 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no easy way of switching between them, starting a new firefox instance requires running from a command interpreter with -P specified, even the selection window isn't great. The containers feature is the alternative you want to propose here.

Well, you could add about:profiles to your bookmarks. But I agree that the UX around profiles in FF is a bit clunky. But containers don't have separate extensions, bookmarks and history so they can't completely replace profiles.

exactly. i cant believe nobody here seems to know about profiles or about:profiles. its the perfect solution. my setup is tree-style tabs (recently made to work with 57) and a different profile for each task (one profile for each language im learning, one for music, and one for each research topic i might be pursuing). whats your setup like?
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