Live data from Hacker News

Firefox 28 Release Notes

mozilla.org

21–30 of 164 posts

Re: Firefox 28 Release Notes

#21
post #20

Eagerly waiting to ditch Chrome & its forced notifications. Perhaps with Australis (Firefox 29), the UI would be at par. Edit : Chrome feels subtle, lighter & perceptually faster (specifically : tabs, scrollbars). Although after updating Firefox today, I can notice that there's improvement in Firefox.

One major (okay maybe not that major but an important factor in my decision) issue for me with Australis is the separate boxes for URLs and search. Every other browser merged them and I don't know of any reason to keep them separate - is there one?

Re: Firefox 28 Release Notes

#22
post #6

Well, there's also stuff that you can't see in the "release notes". I found that Firefox 27 had huge speed improvements in canvas 2D compared to Firefox 26, at least in Linux without hardware accelerated canvas. I couldn't find anything related to that in 27's release notes, sooo (still happy though!).

In regards to rendering performance, we have this internal app that's pushing a lot of points into timeline charts rendered with HighCharts. When all the datapoints are rendered, Chrome has a lot of latency but is still usable, whereas Firefox chokes. I see that in Australis it's much improved, but still less usable than Chrome.

This is awkward since in general I find Firefox's performance to be on par with Chrome, sometimes slightly better, but these charts make me open Chrome and it's a pity since I prefer Firefox.

Maybe HighCharts is not optimized properly for Firefox and of course, those charts being a work in progress are not optimized. But I do wonder, what's the difference here? Is it something about hardware acceleration?

Re: Firefox 28 Release Notes

#23
post #20

Eagerly waiting to ditch Chrome & its forced notifications. Perhaps with Australis (Firefox 29), the UI would be at par. Edit : Chrome feels subtle, lighter & perceptually faster (specifically : tabs, scrollbars). Although after updating Firefox today, I can notice that there's improvement in Firefox.

What problems do you have with the current firefox UI?

Re: Firefox 28 Release Notes

#25
post #20

Eagerly waiting to ditch Chrome & its forced notifications. Perhaps with Australis (Firefox 29), the UI would be at par. Edit : Chrome feels subtle, lighter & perceptually faster (specifically : tabs, scrollbars). Although after updating Firefox today, I can notice that there's improvement in Firefox.

One major (okay maybe not that major but an important factor in my decision) issue for me with Australis is the separate boxes for URLs and search. Every other browser merged them and I don't know of any reason to keep them separate - is there one?

It's admittedly a corner case, but I've searched phrases that contain URLs and have had them get treated as a URL rather than search phrase in Chrome. In that case, I just drop to google.com and issue the search from there.

Re: Firefox 28 Release Notes

#26
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea why the "slim" numbers are moving steadily in the wrong direction?

Some of it is the move from single to multi process/thread tab and rendering model. And if I'm remembering correctly a few of the new HTML5 elements added have caused significant (+20-30mb) leaks as they are, as of yet, unoptimized in the rendering code.

There's no multiprocess content code enabled by default yet, so that's not it.

Re: Firefox 28 Release Notes

#28
post #20

Eagerly waiting to ditch Chrome & its forced notifications. Perhaps with Australis (Firefox 29), the UI would be at par. Edit : Chrome feels subtle, lighter & perceptually faster (specifically : tabs, scrollbars). Although after updating Firefox today, I can notice that there's improvement in Firefox.

One major (okay maybe not that major but an important factor in my decision) issue for me with Australis is the separate boxes for URLs and search. Every other browser merged them and I don't know of any reason to keep them separate - is there one?

You know you can remove the search bar, right?

Right click in the tab area, select "Customize" and then drag it to the available icons panel. Searching works from the address bar too.

It is also probably there still because you can select where you want to search, so you can pull down the menu and search in Twitter, or Amazon, eBay, Google translate, Google maps, The Pirate Bay, Wolfram|Alpha, YouTube, ....

Re: Firefox 28 Release Notes

#29
post #20

Eagerly waiting to ditch Chrome & its forced notifications. Perhaps with Australis (Firefox 29), the UI would be at par. Edit : Chrome feels subtle, lighter & perceptually faster (specifically : tabs, scrollbars). Although after updating Firefox today, I can notice that there's improvement in Firefox.

One major (okay maybe not that major but an important factor in my decision) issue for me with Australis is the separate boxes for URLs and search. Every other browser merged them and I don't know of any reason to keep them separate - is there one?

If your search bar is your URL bar, then all your keystrokes (even when typing URLs) go to your search provider to provide autocomplete of search results. In Firefox you can type URLs without having them sent to a third-party. We think this is important. (You can get autocomplete search results by typing in the search bar.)

Re: Firefox 28 Release Notes

#30
post #20

Eagerly waiting to ditch Chrome & its forced notifications. Perhaps with Australis (Firefox 29), the UI would be at par. Edit : Chrome feels subtle, lighter & perceptually faster (specifically : tabs, scrollbars). Although after updating Firefox today, I can notice that there's improvement in Firefox.

One major (okay maybe not that major but an important factor in my decision) issue for me with Australis is the separate boxes for URLs and search. Every other browser merged them and I don't know of any reason to keep them separate - is there one?

There is. Mozilla doesn't want data from users (unknowingly) being sent across networks to a server by default.

The urlbar is already capable of searching though. It just doesn't give you suggestions for the reason above.

Post reply on HN