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Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

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Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#291

Post by 482794793792894 »

doktrin wrote: post #102
Vinnl wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vimperator, unfortunately, appears to be one of the few extensions that can never be fully ported, as it made use of API's that implied a security risk.

Very interesting, that does appear to be the case - likewise for VimFx. From what I gather, the go-to Vim plugin after this year will be Vimium (which I currently use on Chrome), although it hasn't yet been ported to FF 57.

Mozilla is still doing something with the keyboard shortcuts API to make that more capable. I don't know what exactly they're doing, it won't be as powerful as Vimperator, but it should be a good bit more powerful than Vimium.

This (obviously) won't be in Firefox 57, but should be ready relatively soonish after. So, this is something that they have already been actively working on for a few months. I'm guessing 59 or 60 from how I've heard it described.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#292

Post by Manishearth »

baby wrote: post #16
EasyTiger_ wrote: post #3

I've been trying out the nightly versions of 57 and it's really fast. Would recommend people try out the Beta.

Is Tree Style Tab working on it? I've disabled updates until further notice.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

yep. I don't know if it will cleanly update; so it may lose your settings.

(Webextension ports have to spend one release in "hybrid" mode where they'r a webextension wrapped in a legacy extension shell to port settings correctly)

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#293

Post by ko27 »

staticassertion wrote: post #222
timwaagh wrote: post #165

This a most pointless decision. making firefox fast at the expense of the extensions. why would it make people switch back to FF? because it's 1% faster than chrome? come on, it's 2k17 and few care about that. Edge might be faster than both and people still would not use it. FF had its selling point to power users which is why i'm currently browsing from ff. Now there is no reason at all to use it. I guess there is n…

> why would it make people switch back to FF? because it's 1% faster than chrome? General responsiveness is definitely something I consider when choosing any tool. 1%? I don't think that's a real number. It can be much faster, especially since this is just one of many-to-come improvements. When you have lots of tabs open, lots of extensions, etc, pages can actually be quite slow to render. As webpages become more com…

> 1%? I don't think that's a real number. It can be much faster, especially since this is just one of many-to-come improvements.

I am getting 73 in Speedometer 2 on Chrome Canary vs 66 Mozilla is touting here. Also as shown in their own video, Chrome loads faster on some pages. So FF might actually be slower. It's definitely not noticeably faster than Chrome.

> Well, performance is one reason. Security could easily be another

Both of those things can be counted in Chrome's favor as well.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#294

Post by drdaeman »

staticassertion wrote: post #232
magnat wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sync, Pocket, Dev tools, Screenshots etc are not required to display and interact with HTML pages. They are useful and it's nice they exist, but I don't see a reason to have them installed if I don't need them - just as I don't install every package available in OS just in case I'll need later it. Even if they don't use resources when not being actively used (no way to test since there is no way to remove them), they…

> just as I don't install every package available in OS just in case I'll need later it. But your OS does come with lots of packages and features you may not use.

There are users who value OSes where things are "just working", out of the box. Even more, there are users who value if OS has lots of stuff pre-installed.

There are users who value OSes for being absolutely minimal, so they can install only the stuff they want.

There are users who build their OSes from scratch, compiling each piece from source, fine-tuning every option they want to touch, manually defining every aspect of their system.

None of those approaches are wrong. And each of users may voice their discontent if things are not the way they prefer them to be (and that's good).

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#295

Post by crwll »

baby wrote: post #16
EasyTiger_ wrote: post #3

I've been trying out the nightly versions of 57 and it's really fast. Would recommend people try out the Beta.

Is Tree Style Tab working on it? I've disabled updates until further notice.

In addition to nightly builds of TST, there's also an alternative called Tab Tree that works with 57 and is available right from the official Add-ons site:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-tree/

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#296

Post by 482794793792894 »

mannigfaltig wrote: post #86
virtualwhys wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, thankfully there's a nightly build[1]. Until there's a stable/signed release you have to allow unsigned extensions; set `xpinstall.signatures.required` to false. To hide the default tab bar I needed to put the following in ~/.mozilla/firefox/xyz123-profile-here/chrome/userChrome.css #TabsToolbar > * { visibility: collapse; } Some features, like autohide, aren't available with the new web extensions model, but ot…

> 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?

I think, that is correct, yeah.

DevEdition is nowadays essentially just Beta with slightly different defaults (and that option compiled in), so you could just use that.

If you really do specifically want Beta, then Mozilla also supplies Unbranded Builds with that option compiled in: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#297

Post by Manishearth »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #196
mastax wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Parts of Firefox like Tracemonkey (or whatever they call the js engine now) aren't going to be rewritten because it would take a decade to do. I expect that Firefox will always be built more like a C++ project with Rust components than the other way. That said "project quantum" is about improving the browser which applies to all of the code not just the Rust parts.

I see. The page didn't really go into specifics about how they made Firefox Quantum faster, so I had assumed that it was faster because they were rewriting parts in Rust.

The CSS handling system is now in Rust, and is massively parallel (Rust lets us do this easily), which is why that is faster. This leads to significant performance benefits because CSS cascading/"styling" happens pretty often, including on every DOM manipulation, and can slow down interactions.

But also there has been a major push to fix performance issues in other parts of the browser which itself has lead to significant improvements across the board.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#298

Post by Manishearth »

AndrewCHM wrote: post #28
eklavya wrote: post #11

I so wanted to use the new Firefox and switch from safari. I searched and was excited to learn there was an extension for integration with keychain on mac only to learn that it was no longer supported :( I understand the push behind web extensions but I don't think there will ever be a keychain integration addon now.

fwiw there is nothing that web extensions lack that would prevent that from working https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Na... exists to allow web extensions to talk with programs on the computer, its up to someone to write the extension and executable for that usecase

The OnePassword extension already does this fwiw.

(The webextension might be in beta? When I installed it a month ago it was in "beta" and had to be installed directly from their site, idk if they've uploaded it to the store yet)

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#299

Post by dr_zoidberg »

mahyarm wrote: post #287
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've found that google maps performs worse in firefox and I get random %100 cpu spikes from websites in firefox that I didn't get in chrome. I'm on a mac using firefox 55.

I've found out that many google products (web pages) have bad performance outside of Chrome[0]. But I've used Netscape/Mozilla my whole life, and I will not change from it, specially now that its performance is measurably rising (again).

[0] which is of course something google devs should consider and fix the sites, but hey... why do that when you're the market leader?

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#300

Post by mintplant »

mahyarm wrote: post #287
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've found that google maps performs worse in firefox and I get random %100 cpu spikes from websites in firefox that I didn't get in chrome. I'm on a mac using firefox 55.

Firefox 55 doesn't have any of the (massive) improvements from 57 and Project Quantum which are being discussed here. Give Beta, Developer Edition, or Nightly a spin.
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