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Firefox 57.0 Released

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Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#641

Post by tooltalk »

rcarmo wrote: post #599
daniel_iversen wrote: post #565

It’s great that FF is now faster but how’s battery life in this new engine? The reason I stuck with safari and only a year ago moved to chrome was that google finally was able to drastically improve battery life on chrome for Mac... where is FF here (their release page doesn’t mention “battery” at all), does anyone know?

Well, I'm running it on a 7-year-old Mac mini (yeah, no battery, I know, but hold on...), and _idle_ Firefox, without focus, is ticking along at 0.7-1.5% CPU time. Safari is zero . Dead still. I type this and it moves to 0.3%. No idea what Firefox is doing... edit: Also, even without focus, Firefox climbs to 8.9% CPU just by hovering my mouse over it. Safari goes to 0.2%.

Well, I guess that depends on the content of whatever you are viewing. I tried the same on my 5-year old rMacBook Pro:

youtube.com: Firefox ~6%, Safari ~0%

news.ycombinator.com: 0%, ~0%

amazon.com: ~2%, ~2%

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#642

Post by aquadrop »

benlower wrote: post #509
manojlds wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it as just as good as chrome, why should I switch? Especially given how good Chrome Dev tools are.

because Google has the worst biz model in the tech industry and is doing harm to the world.

I think Chrome and its DevTools has positive overall effect on the world.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#643

Post by Avernar »

callahad wrote: post #475
manojlds wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it as just as good as chrome, why should I switch? Especially given how good Chrome Dev tools are.

Aside from the privacy / philosophy / openness / counterweight-to-monopolization-of-the-Web angles which Yoric mentioned, you might find we're actually better than Chrome in some areas. Often small things, but I find I prefer the feel of Firefox to Chrome. - If you do frontend work, our CSS grid inspector is unparalleled https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Page_Inspecto... - Firefox has built-in tracking p…

> If you want to contribute to the DevTools themselves

I wish I had the time. So I'll have to wait for someone else to add the element DOM properties tab in thr panel that has the style rules and layout. Firebug had it, Chrome has it.

The right click and then Show DOM Properties with the results in the console pane is just painful to use.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#644

Post by aquadrop »

callahad wrote: post #475
manojlds wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it as just as good as chrome, why should I switch? Especially given how good Chrome Dev tools are.

Aside from the privacy / philosophy / openness / counterweight-to-monopolization-of-the-Web angles which Yoric mentioned, you might find we're actually better than Chrome in some areas. Often small things, but I find I prefer the feel of Firefox to Chrome. - If you do frontend work, our CSS grid inspector is unparalleled https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Page_Inspecto... - Firefox has built-in tracking p…

You've switched to multiple processes model, but you don't have "task manager" as Chrome. Do you plan to implement it in the future?

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#645

Post by MadWombat »

e12e wrote: post #572
MadWombat wrote: post #530

So... is there an official guide for downgrading back to an older version? For those of us who lost functionality?

You probably want extended support release, not an old(ish) unsupported version: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/

It seems that the extended support is only going to last until mid 2018, so that is not what I want either. Wonder how long Waterfox is going to last.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#646

Post by throwanem »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #212
eoger wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look here [0] for legacy extensions replacements. [0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECIVyBU...

There's no replacement for ScrapBook, a plugin where I have a decade of stored annotated documents (no hyperbole, my oldest files date from 2007). Ever since I discovered that FF57 was going to kill ScrapBook I had to disable Firefox updates so I don't lose access to ~6GB of stored data. It's a mix of past, present, and future writing research. I know I have access to clumsy workarounds such as copying FF56 to a VM w…

Scrapbook, that takes me back. Haven't used it in a dog's age. But I would be enormously surprised if it did no longer store saved content under your Firefox profile directory, and back when I used it, it just saved the files there and maybe did some link rewriting. Not really a lot of importing necessary to view the content outside the extension - you'd just need to point a browser at its file:// URL.

Not sure how much that helps in terms of retaining the actual functionality, which unless I'm badly mistaken would only be feasible in the WebExtensions API via the external application messaging interface - and you'd need a separate program that would receive those messages and do the mirroring for you, and maybe expose a local HTTP server or some other such horrible hack to let you fetch the content tree for rendering in the browser as a table of contents/tree of bookmark-style links. But at least you might not have to lose what you've got.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#647

Post by tolger »

Having Reader View available out of the box is huge for me. This is one of the reasons I prefer Safari when I'm on MacOS. But I use Ubuntu most of the time, so I'm switching back to Firefox as my default browser. So far, it's been great.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#648

Post by xtraeme »

Yoric wrote: post #238
doodpants wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Note that the webextension APIs are still under active development. In which case, switching to webextension support exclusively is premature at this point, don't you think? It would have been better to wait until the API was robust enough to allow 99.99% of legacy extensions to be ported.

Unfortunately, this would have meant no Firefox Quantum. As a Firefox dev (I'm still working at Mozilla, although not much on Firefox atm), I have seen many, many occurrences in which I couldn't optimize codepaths, or even in some case fix bugs, because the old extension mechanism made it impossible. Consider the necessary steps: 1. realize that an internal API is broken; 2. come up with a new non-broken API; 3. port…

I hate to be the person to say this, but perhaps a better approach would have been to simply create a build pipeline that iterated over the addons on AMO to find the ones that use functions from the changed API and bulk send out an email about the changes to the authors (this eliminates steps 5 through 8). The addon developers then get the chance to change it or not. If it's broken oh well (eliminating steps 8 through 15). Making it the responsibility of the FF core team to sit on changes while waiting for a reply is a procedural problem not a problem with XUL/XPCOM. Moving to Web Extensions, which fundamentally make it impossible to access the full file system, permanently breaking many useful addons with no functional way to migrate to FF57 and calling that better is frankly dishonest.

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#649

Post by richdougherty »

daniel_iversen wrote: post #565

It’s great that FF is now faster but how’s battery life in this new engine? The reason I stuck with safari and only a year ago moved to chrome was that google finally was able to drastically improve battery life on chrome for Mac... where is FF here (their release page doesn’t mention “battery” at all), does anyone know?

Kind of a related question... if I'm a developer and I want my software to be mobile friendly, what should I do and how should I test it?

Are there any reasonable proxies for battery usage that I can run during continuous integration? E.g. measure CPU usage while running tests, measure CPU wakes (somehow?), measure memory bandwidth or IO used? How would I do this?

Re: Firefox 57.0 Released

#650

Post by richardboegli »

For those who still need older plugin system, use Firefox ESR for as long as possible or switch now to Pale Moon.

I gave FF57 (Quantum) a try during Beta and it was FAST. I am still using Pale Moon, but installed FF57 to see the improvements, to keep an alternate browser installed and also because Mozilla "Container Tabs" looks very interesting. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Projec...

Using Tree Style Tabs and Container Tabs looks to be AWESOME, once they do a little bit more polish to switching between containers.

At the moment, they haven't implemented hiding of the horizontal tabs as Mozilla haven't officially implemented the feature. It is a work in progress though.

See this workaround to remove tabs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15343940

Now that FF57 is out of beta, I'll give it another go.

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