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How Firefox Got Fast Again

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Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#391

Post by Santosh83 »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #31
frostwhale wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is about more than market share. A state of the art free non for profit browser makes the market much more competitive and better for the consumer. They are there to keep chrome/ other browsers honest. If chrome / google does something too corporate you don't like, there's an alternative.

That seems a dangerous line of thinking, like arguing that startups are about more than growth. Firefox is looking like Apple circa 1997. They can still recover, but they have to focus on what people want.

They're doing well now, especially since Electrolysis. But they can't beat Chrome being bundled in literally everywhere. Most average Joes will never switch from the bundled browser. Firefox needs to cut some deals to get bundled in as well. Sadly I doubt they have resources for this...

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#392

Post by callahad »

nachtigall wrote: post #370
callahad wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for choosing Firefox. 1. Are there any specific extensions you need? Happy to add them to our outreach list. 2. Sorry about Hangouts; follows a trend of Chrome-only product launches/re-launches from Google (five this year so far). Wish we could do more, but if Google's OK shipping things that only work on one browser, that's their prerogative. 3. Firefox also has completely separate profiles, in addition to…

> 3. Firefox also has completely separate profiles, in addition to container tabs. hey callahad, thanks for shiming in. My biggest pain with profiles is that you cannot use separate profiles at the same time. A Firefox instance can only run one at the same time, making it useless to run e.g. a work and a private profile together. Container tabs also do not help here because they share the same history which I do not…

> A Firefox instance can only run one at the same time, making it useless to run e.g. a work and a private profile together.

I may be misunderstanding what you mean, but I believe you actually can do that. If you navigate to about:profiles, there should be a "launch profile in new browser" button that runs multiple profiles at the same time, each in their own, isolated Firefox process.

To make this a bit easier, you can create desktop shortcuts which launch a specific profile like `firefox --new-instance --profile Work` (on Windows, use --no-remote instead of --new-instance).

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#393

Post by PuffinBlue »

callahad wrote: post #122
nullspace wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, it has to a large extent. Somethings that are not yet there: 1. Since Webextensions are new, some extensions that I use in chrome, need to be ported over. Most are not must haves to be fair. 2. Hangouts for work. :( 3. A solution to manage different personas - Chrome has the "user profile" thing linked to google accounts, firefox as container tabs. I think user profile is better than container tabs, altho…

Thank you for choosing Firefox. 1. Are there any specific extensions you need? Happy to add them to our outreach list. 2. Sorry about Hangouts; follows a trend of Chrome-only product launches/re-launches from Google (five this year so far). Wish we could do more, but if Google's OK shipping things that only work on one browser, that's their prerogative. 3. Firefox also has completely separate profiles, in addition to…

> 1. Are there any specific extensions you need? Happy to add them to our outreach list.

LastPass please. I'm sure it's on your list already, and I'm sure they know about it too but every little helps.

I am happy to use pass/keepass (whatever version) but the family says only LastPass is acceptable.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#394

Post by Sylos »

clairity wrote: post #360
mtgx wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who don't know, if you sign in to your Google account in Chrome, Google will automatically save all the searches you've done in the omnibox. I don't remember Google ever warning me specifically that this was happening in the background, and after I checked https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity and noticed it was doing that, I was so furious that I deleted all the data Google kept on me there, and paused…

thanks for the direct ftp link, and congrats to the firefox team! i've been using 57 (and 58) via the developer edition and really like the improvements. but i think i'll stick with 56 as my default browser for a little longer since quantum breaks some great legacy add-ons: * NoScript -- control script execution * RequestPolicy (and its variants) -- control content requests * Blend In -- use the most common user agen…

NoScript should be released either today/tomorrow or soon. The dev was planning to have it ready for 57, but I don't know how far exactly he got.

It won't be quite full-featured yet, though. He's planning that for Firefox 59, which will be the next Extended Support Release and what Tor Browser will be based on (which needs NoScript).

There's a handful of compatible user-agent switchers already...

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#395

Post by woolvalley »

zachwood wrote: post #349
woolvalley wrote: post #341

Has anyone tried firefox 57 or 56 on macOS and still found it to be slower on a bunch of sites? Like facebook is unusably slow on firefox compared to chrome still. Google maps has slow downs too.

you should try to refresh your FF profile. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...

This happened with a fresh install with nothing else installed, I don't know how much that would help.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#396

Post by unethical_ban »

digi_owl wrote: post #114
mattmanser wrote: post #18

Serious question, is this too little too late? Firefox has taken a massive nosedive in the last few years, in the UK at least. My two big clients have them on less than 2% share. Just checked one, 5 years ago they had 9.55% share, today it's 1.8%. Even taking into account the growth of mobile, that's dire.

It may even be worse than that. They have effectively thrown out all that made Firefox distinct in any user facing sense to achieve this.

I understand the concern about the extensions/addons changes, but FF is still a distinct browser.

Several things immediately come to mind:

* Mozilla is a more trustworthy company than Google, so all things being equal, I'll take their product.

* Container tabs (or multi-account tabs now) are a killer feature for privacy and greatly improve the "multi profile" use case

* Firefox Mobile allows extensions, where Chrome doesn't support it.

The only negative for me with FF is that in the enterprise, FF Kerberos/SSO function seems inferior to Chrome, which "just works".

But for it being closed source, I think Vivaldi is a better experience than Chrome. Sure it's "just" a reskin, but point is, Chrome is in 3rd place in my opinion.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#397

Post by Sylos »

_greim_ wrote: post #327
m_st wrote: post #16

I switched from Chrome to Firefox 57 beta and couldn't be happier. Only issue so far was the ugly black title bar on the Mac, but switching to the integrated 'Light' theme fixed that. Too bad 'Light' isn't the default on macOS. Also note their updated Firefox on iOS. It looks and works just fine now and comes with Firefox Sync which gives you access to your tabs, bookmarks and history.

> Also note their updated Firefox on iOS I was under the impression Apple didn't allow any web rendering engines on iOS except the one mobile Safari uses, thus Chrome, Firefox, etc, on iOS are just wrappers around the Safari engine. Is that not the case anymore? It would be nice to see these speedups on iOS.

That is still the case. Firefox for iOS is also just a WebKit wrapper. Mozilla mainly released it for the people that use Firefox on the desktop and want to sync their stuff.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#398

Post by CaptSpify »

mattmanser wrote: post #324
eitland wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posting from Firefox monile now. It's my main browser. If I use Chrome only it is for my sockpuppet accounts. I far prefer FF even on mobile.

I found it ate all my memory and crashed frequent. Nexus 5X.

One of the things I found was that I had to use their Beta. Their main build wouldn't even start for me.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#399

Post by inanutshellus »

on_and_off wrote: post #387
ared38 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has had syncing built in for a while: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/sync/ Haven't tried it on iOS yet, but it worked great on my Android.

and this is where Chrome has a good hook on me. In order to switch, both FF desktop and mobile need to be better than Chrome. Does FF support a version of Chrome tabs too ? Damn, they have built themselves a good moat just with features I will miss.

I don't know about iOS but the Firefox Android app is great and works with Firefox Sync, of course.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#400

Post by oconnor663 »

Splines wrote: post #381
k__ wrote: post #376

How long will it take to forget about this again? The whole story reminds me of something a project manager, who worked at the Google homepage, once said. They worked their asses off to get the page smaller and smaller so the UX was unbeatable. Then, after they got enough users, they focused on different things, and more and more stuff was included. Somehow Firefox went the same way, right? First they created it so i…

Performance is usually death by a thousand cuts, and (imo) the best way of mitigating this is by standardizing some measurements and making that automated. Block changes that move performance past this bar, make sure the organization buys off on this approach. Any changes to a critical area that impact performance need to be zero-sum - if you add something, you need to take something away.

The cost of doing this in a large organization seem high though. Are there good ways to solve problems like this:

- A newbie developer adds small feature, triggering some performance test that was already close to failing. Now newbie has to learn all about the performance of this large project before they can land their first change.

- The performance test has a reasonable amount of noise. At first, 10% of test runs fail it, and people just rerun them. Eventually 90% of test runs fail, and people need to start dealing with it, but the effort required to get it all the way back down to 10% is unrealistic for any one person.

- The product is something like Microsoft Excel, that has a strong guarantee of backwards compatibility across a wide variety of hardware and OS versions that are difficult to test. Asking developers to delete code from parts of the product they're not experts in, is likely to break stuff.

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