Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 446 posts

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#121

Post by etatoby »

angrygoat wrote: post #40
spiderfarmer wrote: post #22

Firefox, I love you, but you and my 15" rMBP (with 4k Dell external monitor) simply don't get along: https://i.imgur.com/rByz7zS.png I don't what causes this, but in the last 2 years it's gotten worse and with Quantum the CPU usage is even higher. Chrome and Safari don't have this issue.

I wonder if MacOS just isn't that much of a priority for Firefox? Popular but heavy sites like Facebook perform quite poorly relative to Chrome on my (admittedly quite old) early 2013 MBP, but the difference seems to vanish under Linux or Windows. I'd love to switch to Firefox, I'm not that keen to be running a browser made by a gargantuan advertising agency.

MacOS seems not to be a priority for Apple, sadly.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#122

Post by tapoxi »

driverdan wrote: post #84
DiabloD3 wrote: post #44

As someone that jumped ship from how slow Chrome has gotten and went to Nightly /w Stylo and (CPU threads - 1) e10s processes enabled about 2 monthsish ago... Holy damn Firefox is actually fast. Fair comparison, both having Pocket, uBlock, Evernote, OneNote, Pushbullet, and Bitwarden; neither of them having an extension the other doesn't. Above described Firefox Nightly config vs Chrome Dev. Test machines are a works…

I'd like to see the same comparison on a Mac. The Windows version of Firefox has been close to Chrome performance for a while. The Mac version has been significantly slower.

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.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#123

Post by Eridrus »

Vinnl wrote: post #71
mtgx wrote: post #54

That video in the post seems to show Chrome is still significantly faster in half of the tests shown there. How is that possible? From what Servo was initially promising (even 3-4x the speed of old Firefox), it didn't look like Chrome would come close either. Did they make that many compromises when "porting parts from Servo" to Gecko? What's hurting Firefox's performance so much that even after implementing Electrol…

I guess it mostly comes down to "performance is difficult, and optimisations for one use case might cause regressions for another". Note, though, that there's still more to come [1]. Also, I guess the state of Servo can tell you what a tremendous effort rewriting is, and why that would still take quite a while to finish. [1] "Project Quantum: There’s more to come" at https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/09/firefox-quantum-…

I look forward to seeing the rest land, but that video, while impressively fair, didn't really leave me excited to install Firefox.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#124

Post by baby »

etatoby wrote: post #119
reikonomusha wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tree Style Tab is the killer feature for me and some of my scientist coworkers. If this disappears or doesn’t work, I’ll probably use Chrome.

Plus, there's that recent Webkit-based browser with vertical tabs as it's main feature. It was covered here on HN a few days ago.

What is it????

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#125

Post by mannigfaltig »

virtualwhys wrote: post #117
mannigfaltig wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> set `xpinstall.signatures.required` to false This seems to only work in the Nightly and Developer channel, not with the Beta channel. Is that correct?

On developer edition here, no idea about Beta. Does the `about:config` option to disable signatures exist in your FF? If so, make sure you grab the correct artifact to import[1] [1] http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/xpi/nightly/treestyletab-we.xpi

It works now on Firefox Developer Edition 57.0b3 (64-bit), macOS High Sierra. It took me a while to figure out that one needs to activate it by clicking one of the icons at the top.

Edit: This was a really bad idea because upgrading to 57 destroyed my sessionstore.js. None of the backups were up-to-date for some reason. Be careful and make backups!

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#126

Post by k__ »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #116
k__ wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see, okay. I just had the feeling that Firefox has news to be on-par with Chrome for years now, but I never really "felt" it, hehe.

The current news relates to merging parts of Servo (web engine written in Rust) to Firefox, which started relatively recently.

I know that. And I have high hopes :)

I just wanted to say, that it isn't the first news about Firefox getting faster since Chrome came out.

I tried the new versions every now and then and Chrome always felt faster to me. Maybe it really is, maybe it just uses some perceptional tricks, I don'T know.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#127

Post by baby »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #44

As someone that jumped ship from how slow Chrome has gotten and went to Nightly /w Stylo and (CPU threads - 1) e10s processes enabled about 2 monthsish ago... Holy damn Firefox is actually fast. Fair comparison, both having Pocket, uBlock, Evernote, OneNote, Pushbullet, and Bitwarden; neither of them having an extension the other doesn't. Above described Firefox Nightly config vs Chrome Dev. Test machines are a works…

I run 60 tabs in Firefox atm, takes 2.14GB (obviously I'm using Tree Style Tabs). Runs smoothly.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#128

Post by bradyd »

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…

Thankfully there is a gear icon on the new tab page that opens New Tab Preferences. This has an option to disable "Recommended by Pocket".

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#129

Post by baby »

gepoch wrote: post #49

Lots of comments from people suffering issues and missing their favorite plugins, so I thought I'd jump in as a former Chrome user. Firefox quantum is really very good. This is the first time in a long time that I've been able to entertain switching browsers. It is at least on par with the speed of chrome, and since I'm moving from chrome, I'm not really missing any Firefox plugins too much. I've been able to port my…

I think I'm not the only who wished Tree Style Tabs was integrated as a default feature of Firefox. It's a primordial configuration to your browsing experience but it's been constantly stabbed and fixed at every update of Firefox.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#130

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

superdaniel wrote: post #58

For people who use password managers, beware that lastpass's extension is not compatible with the new release. Found that out the hard way.

That seems more a failure on LastPass's part than Firefox's.

I say this as a LastPass user, they clearly don't give a rat's ass. They've known about the WebExtension requirement for, what, a year now? Somehow they're among the first apps to support Android Oreo's autofill API, yet they can't be bothered to update their Firefox extension.

It's a real pity. I like LastPass. I pay for it. I use their Secure Notes feature ALOT. But I may still have to switch if they can't get their act together.

Post reply on HN