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Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#411
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Chrome is also guilty of absolutely guzzling battery. I always try other browsers on macOS but in the end keep switching back to Safari because it easily gets me ~2-3h more battery life. This means that on 10h average battery life you'd pay a ~20-33% battery life premium just to run a different browser. At that point, finding replacement Safari extensions is well worth the bother. What I don't understand: why is…

> We live in a portable world after all.. Do we? I'd say most people with laptops use them either at home or at work, both places were they can plug in. The majority is not "Starbucks laptop users" or road warriors.

I mostly use mine on the train during the commute. I'm one of many. At home and work I use desktops.

Mozilla will also want to target their engine at tablets and phones at some point. This is presumably why Samsung committed funding to Servo (IIRC).

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#412

Can you enlighten me what's the thing with the developer edition? It seems to have features that the standard edition doesn't have. But does the standard edition have feature the dev edition doesen't? Or are there some different features? Any of them reason not to use the dev edition in daily browsing?

Dev edition is regular Firefox beta with some other defaults (theme, developer options). The only reason you might not want to use it is because the stability guarantees are less strong than for stable, but in practice, it probably runs stable enough.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In part, it is because of a Rust component. A new CSS engine, Stylo, is shipping with 57 and that brought a noticeable performance improvement. In the foreseeable future there will also be WebRender, which should give an even bigger improvement, but that wasn't ready for 57. Another big part is that they recently switched Firefox over to a multiprocess architecture (Firefox 48) and these performance improvements are…

> it also now has "tab warm-up", which basically means that when you hover with your mouse over a tab, it already starts loading in that tab, so that it's instantly there when you click.

They actually removed that again for now due to instability, IIRC it's slated to arrive in Firefox 58.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#415
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

Thanks, not compatible with the new firefox beta, but thanks.

It says at the top:

> Note: Firefox 57+58 users should Install from our latest GitHub Release [1]

[1] https://outgoing.prod.mozaws.net/v1/dc0c83a8fa9601d8fa71a456...

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a different thing than I’m describing. Try out the new ContainerTabs ;)

Cool! I think. For the record: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers-experiment Do you know if it's possible to make ctrl-t (new tab) open a new tab in the same profile? If I'm in profile A, I always want new tabs to have the same profile; I don't want to have to specify it.

I think there's a bugreport where about half of users want it to open in the default container, and half in the same :P Ctrl+. as a shortcut allows you to pick a profile for a new tab, though, that might do for now.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've become a big fan of "The Great Suspender" extension since I am always opening new tabs in the background and may not get around to them until hours -- or sometimes days! -- later.

On Chrome I presume? Not available on FF, and afaik FF doesn't even support unloading tabs (actually unloading from memory rather than making it appear that way but still consuming the memory).

Ahhh, yes, on Chrome, sorry. I didn't realize it wasn't also available for FF.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#418
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's because Chrome is busy doing random crap like this in the background - chrome://site-engagement/

I guess you've never checked ~/.mozilla/firefox/YOUR-PROFILE/places.sqlite which includes a record, including date & referer, for every time you visit a site. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/Places... for documentation (or http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox_3_History_... for unofficial documentation). Several hundred thousand rows here...

This is one of the things which really slows Firefox down for me. I often found in the past I had to blow away chunks of Sqlite in my profile to get back to a decent speed.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#419

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…

> It isn't enough to explain how fast Firefox feels now. That's because we've been making a dedicated effort to find and stamp out sources of UI lag! It's called Quantum Flow; see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum/Flow for more.

I beg you to boost performance at least upto the level of chrome even WITH addons. That's the main issue. With addons like ublock origin and other content filters, the cpu usage reaches 50-60% and the page rendering is not that quick as compared to chrome even with addons. Chrome's UI is seriously so liquid smooth that after being with firefox for so many years for my love for privacy, I HAD to switch to chrome sacrificing my privacy. I still use heavy privacy addons but chrome still doesn't get slow noticeably.

I highly appreciate what you doing. Hoping to get back on Firefox as soon as possible.

Once again please take care of those sudden cpu and ram usage with almost necessary addons like ublock, tab suspender etc.

Re: Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

#420
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…

Is the Inspector panel improved too? Probably I'm too used to Chrome's, but I find Firefox Inspector quite hard to use (inspect elements, change styles, look in network requests...)

hard to use? Perhaps I'm too used to FF, but I find Chrome Inspector hard to use.
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