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Inside Mozilla's Fight To Make Firefox Relevant Again (cnet.com)
News outlet CNET has a big profile on Firefox today, for which it has spoken with several Mozilla executives. Mozilla hopes to fight back Chrome, which owns more than half of the desktop market share, with Firefox 57, a massive overhaul due November 14. From the report: "It's going to add up to be a big bang," Mozilla Chief Executive Chris Beard promises, speaking at the company's Mountain View, California, headquarters. "We're going to win back a lot of people." "Some of the stuff they're doing from a technology perspective is amazing," says Andreas Gal, who became CEO of startup Silk Labs after leaving the Mozilla chief technology officer job in 2015. "I just don't think it makes a difference." [...] You may not care which browser you use, but the popularity of Firefox has helped keep browsers competitive and build the web into a foundation for online innovations over the last decade. Are you a fan of Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter or YouTube? That's partly thanks to Firefox. Mozilla's mission is to keep the web vibrant enough for the next big innovation even as companies offer mobile apps instead of websites, dump privacy-invading ads on you or try to confine your activity to their own walled gardens. [...] To Mozilla, each tap or click on a webpage in Firefox is more than you browsing the internet. It's a statement that you'd prefer a more open future where online services can start up on their own. The alternative, as Mozilla sees it, is a future where everyone kowtows to Apple's app store, Google's search results, Facebook's news feed or Amazon's Prime video streaming. That's why Mozilla bought billboard ads saying "Browse against the machine" and "Big browser is watching you," a jab at Google. [...] Improvements within a project called Quantum are responsible for much of the difference. One part, Stylo, accelerates formatting operations. Quantum Flow squashes dozens of small slowdown bugs. Quantum Compositor speeds website display. And Firefox 57 also will lay the groundwork for WebRender, which uses a computing device's graphics chip to draw webpages on the screen faster. "You can do user interface and animation and interactive content that you simply can't do in any other browser," says Firefox chief Mayo, speaking from his office in Toronto -- over video chat technology Firefox helped make possible. It all adds up to a very different engine at the core of Firefox. That kind of speedup can really excite web developers -- an influential community key to Firefox's success in taking on IE back in 2004.
It seems it will support NoScript:
NoScript’s Migration to WebExtensions APIs
You had me worried for a moment... =)
Again, even with Firefox 54, the current stable release, it's still very noticeably slower than Chrome. But if you download the nightly build of Firefox I think the speed improvement is fantastic.
Because Firefox became Chrome Junior with their interface and stopped making the browser better. Every release had some new feature that no one asked for. A paper airplane button for sharing links with friends? Until they make something faster and less bloated I'm staying with Chrome. Apparently no one at Mozilla is old enough to remember the bloat that was IE4.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I agree with pretty much everybody else on here that if Mozilla wants Firefox to succeed, they should stop trying to give us more doodads in the browser.
You want to know why they failed and everyone switched to Chrome? Firefox used to be horrible at memory management. It might still be, I don't know I haven't used it in years. If you had your browser open for a certain period of time it would slow to a crawl and you would find it eating up gobs of memory. When the Mozilla developers had this bug reported to them, they took an elitist position and shrugged their users off as being idiots for having their browsers open too long or with too many tabs or whatever scapegoat excuse they could come up with. Their users gave them the finger and switched to a browser that worked correctly and consistently. That was the mistake. Now they can't get the market share back. If the Mozilla devs hadn't done that, we might be in the reverse situation but no Mozilla devs had to be arrogant and elitist. You reap what you sow!
We'll make great pets
I went to your link and it is some... thing, an actual old 90s website still up, you meant http://palemoon.org/