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Firefox 60 released

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Re: Firefox 60 released

#151
Firefox overall performance starts to be pretty good and it's pretty pleasant to use. It feels smoother than Chrome on 2015 Macbook Pro.

But I guess there's a long tail of issues that keep some people from (still) switching to Firefox.

Mine is lack of smooth pinch-zoom on macOS. Once that is fixed, I think I'll be using Firefox most of the time.

On 2018 Android flagship phone, scrolling speed seems to be maybe 58/59 fps. Occasional jerky motion sticks out like a sore thumb. I think it might feel smoother steady 30 fps, because at least then all frames take equally long to render.

Re: Firefox 60 released

#152

Unfortunately, looks like the CPU spikes are still a problem on OS X for me. I check this every time a new version is released as I'd love to make the switch from Chrome, but Firefox with one blank tab and no extensions uses more CPU than Chrome with 15 actual tabs. When I actually throw activity at Firefox it hogs the CPU even more. Here's hoping v61 addresses it.

I have the same issue on my MBP Late 2013, but on my MBP 2017 everything works smooth. Not as smooth as chrome, but nothing really noticeable. I always have 40+ tabs open.

Re: Firefox 60 released

#153

Unfortunately, looks like the CPU spikes are still a problem on OS X for me. I check this every time a new version is released as I'd love to make the switch from Chrome, but Firefox with one blank tab and no extensions uses more CPU than Chrome with 15 actual tabs. When I actually throw activity at Firefox it hogs the CPU even more. Here's hoping v61 addresses it.

It feels like they just traded RAM usage for CPU usage.

Re: Firefox 60 released

#154
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox for Android will be copying Chrome's scrolling physics for faster scrolling, since that's what Android users are used to. Chrome doesn't use Android's standard scrolling physics, so custom scrolling code is needed to emulate its behavior. You can test this in Firefox 61 Beta by setting the "apz.android.chrome_fling_physics.enabled" pref to true in about:config. The new behavior will hopefully be enabled by de…

Ah, I was wondering why my scrolling was getting "fling"ed so much on Nightly. It's kinda unusable because 2/3 of the time, when I lift my thumb off the screen, it gets interpreted as a fling. Maybe I'll get used to being very careful, but for now I'm glad to know there's a toggle.

There are still fling bugs to be fixed. :) Feel free to file a bug in Bugzilla that blocks bug 1448439. Perhaps you are seeing one of these known bugs:

* Weirdness at end of Fennec fling. Don't send duplicate DOM 'scroll' event for sub-pixel scrolling: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1230176

* Scrolling in Android has a distinct hitch when releasing finger: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1425739

You can also tweak the fling physics parameters with these about:config prefs:

  apz.android.chrome_fling_physics.friction
  apz.android.chrome_fling_physics.inflexion
  apz.android.chrome_fling_physics.stop_threshold

Re: Firefox 60 released

#155
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish someone with the time would start producing a "De-Mozilla'ed" fork a la Chromium. I think Firefox has gotten to that point, things like this and the Mr. Robot fiasco indicate the project needs to be saved from itself.

Isn't it called Iceweasel?

Iceweasel was Debian's version necessary due to some trademark issue that was resolved last year. GNU Icecat is the fork with only free software.

Re: Firefox 60 released

#156
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use FF on OpenBSD as my daily browser. I have at least three different profiles running simultaneously with multiple tabs open in each (though I don't go nuts with tabs like some do -- I never tend to have more than 10 or so open). It does occasionally seem to get stuck in a state where it just starts chewing CPU cycles and RAM. I've seen this mostly with Google sites like gmail or docs, so I assume it's JS-related…

Did you try container tabs instead of profiles? Could save you a few coh cycles. The gmail/gdocs slowdowns are being tracked and worked on. It's a problem when websites actively optimize for competitive products though.

The other problem with container tabs, which isn't really a Mozilla problem as much as a Google problem, is that if you have enough segregated google profiles going you seem to hit some google anti-abuse codepaths or aomething. I have 3 separate Google accounts separated with container tabs (on purpose, I know Google supports multiple accounts), and a separate regular browsing container, and occassionally just following a link from Gmail or hangouts where Google bounces you through their redirect hangs for 30 seconds or so. When it's doing that it generally does it consistently though.

Re: Firefox 60 released

#157

The enterprise part is great to see (though it was something that seemed long overdue). I recently noticed on a Firefox mailing list that Mike Kaply (of Kaply Consulting, a company that helped with enterprise deployment and configuration of Firefox) had officially joined the Firefox team. Mike's presence is going to make Firefox in the enterprise much better. On Firefox 60, I'm still not on board with the newest vers…

I'm not sure whether it fulfils what you're looking for, but Mozilla just ran an extensions challenge, and one of the winners was Session Sync.

[0] https://extensionschallenge.com/ [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-sync/

Re: Firefox 60 released

#158
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really want to switch to Firefox, so every once in a while I force myself to use it 'properly' for a week or two at least. Such a two week period has just ended, and while FF does feel snappier than before, I'm running into exactly the issues you describe. When using Firefox, my four-year old MacBook Air pretty regularly slows down to the point where my music starts stuttering and even force-closing FF takes a whil…

I wonder what's causing that on your computer, because I'm running Firefox on a late-2011 MacBook Pro without any issues, and that's with a ton of tabs opened (including a bunch of pinned tabs running multiple instances of Office 365 in separate containers, Slack, and so forth) and the usual crowd of extensions (UBO et al). It's bouncing between 0 and 5% CPU utilization.

I've tried figuring it out, but haven't been able to pin it down. Is it even possible to check tab resource usage the way I can in Chrome? If not, that's another reason I'd probably keep coming back to the latter.

Thing is, it's not even that I have so many tabs open. It's always been fewer than Chrome, and with fewer active extensions to boot. Furthermore, it also happens on my other computer. The other one has 16 Gb of RAM, so it can handle quite a bit more, but the problem happens often enough that I also switched back to Chrome there.

Re: Firefox 60 released

#159

One killer feature from Safari missing still is 'Show tab overview' with thumbnails of all your tabs ... anyone know of a well maintained plugin that does something like this? I think it should be built into the browser.

browser.ctrlTab.previews in about:conifg though the feature may be in various states of broken as it is not exposed anywhere

Re: Firefox 60 released

#160

I haven't tried Firefox since version 47 and haven't used it as my main since 37. I gave 61 (dev edition) a spin yesterday. All the extensions that make the browser usable for me were like 1990s geocities pages: "Under Construction" if they existed at all. They were just placeholders that lacked most features with links to bugzilla pages to vote for features to be added back into Firefox. Garbage collection was prett…

That ram usage seems suspicious. I never left firefox, have hundreds of tabs open and never really go over 1,5GB Ram usage. I think you should investigate that further. Maybe one of the pages you open really leaks memory or an extension is at fault here?
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