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Mozilla's 'Firefox Quantum' Browser Challenges Chrome In Speed (cnet.com)
The next version of Firefox, aptly named Firefox Quantum, is getting a big speed boost. "The idea, of course, is that the upcoming version 57 is a quantum leap over predecessors -- or, in the words of Mozilla CEO Chris Beard, a 'big bang,'" reports CNET. While Mozilla stopped short of declaring victory over Chrome, Nick Nguyen, vice president of Firefox product, said Firefox Quantum's page-load speed "is often perceivably faster" while using 30 percent less memory. From the report: The new Firefox revamp includes lots of under-the-covers improvements, like Quantum Flow, which stamps out dozens of performance bugs, and Quantum CSS, aka Stylo, which speeds up website formatting. More obvious from the outside is a new interface called Photon that wipes out Firefox's rounded tabs and adds a "page action" menu into the address bar. It also builds in the Pocket bookmarking service Mozilla acquired and uses it to recommend sites you might be interested in. A screenshot tool generates a website link so you can easily share what you see by email or Twitter. Mozilla even simplified the Firefox logo, a fox wrapping itself around the globe. More improvements are in the pipeline for later Firefox versions, too, including Quantum Render, which should speed up Firefox's ability to paint web pages onto your screen.
... but until observed it both wins and loses.
...THAT'S why Mozilla decided to ditch XUL (and a lot of legacy add-ons that relied on it). And it is a very important goal -- a faster and more stable Firefox was needed for a long time.
But I also hope that we soon get back most of the extensions that Firefox lost in this change. Without its previous top-notch configurability, I'm afraid it can't really compete with Google developers working on Chrome.
I know this is just going to be a Firefox hate fest, but give the browser a try.
The important extensions will come along. Ublock origin is here and Noscript will be at the part shortly.
Come on, guys... give us the goods on why the upper crust of the tech world was out of service for so long. I'm sure it'll be a hoot.
Here's what I think when I hear "Firefox Quantum":
(To be clear, I do like the interface better than Chrome's, although I'll reserve judgement until I see how it handles large numbers of tabs -- my key criterion: don't shrink them to slits. I hear that there's an ad blocker around, but I hope that something like RequestPolicy will also exist in the new addon system.)
And yet the only supported audio backend on Linux continues to be PulseAudio. Hard pass.
I've been using 57 for a while now and as a 8 GB RAM user, Firefox is for me way more RAM-friendly than any Chromium based browser.
If one were to run Netscape 3 on today's laptop, it would load in a fraction of a second - and it did essentially the same thing. I would gladly give back whatever extra functionality we are getting for a sub-second application load - and that applies to every application, not just a browser.
Yes, being highly extensible can come with some risk, but it's also the only thing that made Firefox still worth using. It could be made to do things that other browsers, including Chrome and Safari, couldn't be made to do, giving it a leg up over those browsers.
But now Firefox has gotten rid of the only reason to use it, by castrating its extension system.
In many respects Firefox had already mostly been a cheap, shitty imitation of Chrome for a while now. These extension changes now get rid of the "mostly".
Let's recap the situation:
- Firefox's UI imitates that of Chrome (or with Photon, now other Chromium-derived browsers like Vivaldi and Brave).
- Firefox's extension system imitates that of Chrome.
- Firefox's alleged "privacy" is anything but, with Firefox sending user information all over the place, including to Google in some cases!
- Firefox's performance is worse than that of Chrome's. (Yes, I'm using the Firefox 57 beta right now and can confirm this is still the case!)
- Firefox's memory usage is worse than that of Chrome's. (Again, I'm using the Firefox 57 beta right now to confirm this.)
- Firefox is harder for developers to work with, because parts of it are written in the horrid Rust programming language that Moz://a came up with.
- Firefox's market share is in the low single digits already, and will probably be even less after Firefox 57 breaks extensions for normal users, who will just move to some other browser instead of trying to fix up their extensions. Many web developers don't even bother to test with it any longer, so more and more sites don't work well with Firefox.
So from what I can see, there are no benefits to using Firefox, and actually quite a few drawbacks. You're better off using Chrome or some other Chromium-derived browser. There's really no reason at all to use Firefox these days. Its extension system used to be the main reason to use it, but now that reason has been eliminated.
I find your ideas both intriguing and boring and would like to both subscribe and unsubscribe from your quantum newsletter.
I vaguely remember ditching Firefox a decade or more ago as it had become an unwieldy, slow, decrepit, etc... pile of bloatware garbage. I never expected I would be using it again. Over the last few years, for my own reasons, I have sought to de-google my life here and there within practical limits. On my Windows 10 machine, I have been using Edge for about a year and have found it to be surprisingly nice. I think it may have been over another Firefox related story here on Slashdot last week that prompted me to install the current Firefox on a whim. I have not looked back. I am not going to hammer out a review in this comment, but I haven't been so happy with the performance, functionality, and UI of a web browser since the last time Firefox was good. I was quite surprised. I am glad to hear they are continuing to make improvements. Here's to a Firefox renaissance.
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It's called consolidation. Strengthen browser vendors, weaken individuals. With Rust, this can be done imperceptibly over time.
. . . so if it really is "imperceptible" . . . maybe it's already been done, and we just haven't noticed it yet . . . ?
If you can see it, and it's there . . . it's real.
If you can see it, and it's not there . . . it's virtual.
If you can't see it, and not there . . . it's gone.
. . . now when the film star and assassin James Earl Ray Jones shot John F. Kennedy, which led to our "Operation Paperclip" German scientists at Area 51 combining his DNA with the DNA of Martin Luther King to create Barack Obama (which explains why he has no birth certificate; he was grown in a very large test tube), Stanley Kubrick, who was filming the fake Apollo Moon landings in Area 51 filmed the process, which was used as the birth of the "Star Child" scene in "2001: A Space Odyssey" (Obama is not list in the credits), Jones further went on to star in the film with Australian body builder Lou Ferrigno, "Conan, The Librarian"), which led to Ferrigno's failed transgendered Vice-Presidential campaign as "Geraldine Ferrigno" . . .
. . . and then the conspiracy got super suspicious when . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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I use a scriptblocking extension which has to be able to interact with every "tab" to be able to actually work.
And script blocking is probably the number 1 feature of Firefox-based browsers (this is technically impossible to achieve on Chrome according to professionnal developers).
That's why NoScript is currently in the process of being ported to webextensions.
Or, more precisely, Mozilla is in the process of adapting WebExtensions so that things that formely required XUL like NoScript could be ported.
So, unlike Google Chrome, it's very likely that either your favorite script blocking extension will eventually work on Mozilla, or you'll find a nice alternative to your taste.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The problem is that once all major browsers support EME, website operators will feel more justified in requiring EME on grounds that users can choose to just switch on DRM as part of the economic bargain associated with visiting the site. The one thing that had been keeping website operators honest is the existence of at least one widely used browser that doesn't support EME at all.
UI: Much improved. Or, put another way, they removed a ton of the Australis crap that people have been griping about for years. That says quite a bit about their UX team.
- Caveat: They still manage to make a few small stupid errors, like removing the color from bookmark folders (change applied in FF58), and a 'default' theme that mixes light and dark in a way that's annoying no matter which you'd prefer. Just change to either light or dark and be done with it.
Performance: *Vastly* improved, across the board. This is both in chrome and on web pages. These are all the speed improvements that should have been done 5 years ago, but they were too busy pretending desktop didn't matter (Firefox OS is the future!) or pretending user complaints weren't valid, and not putting in any effort to really measure the problem.
- Caveat: That said, this basically just brings them up to on par with Chrome. We'll see if WebRender actually pushes them ahead.
Security: Presumably better. Rust still only covers limited modules, though, so it's not a suddenly perfect system. They have a huge amount of replacement work still to do.
Memory: Each individual process has improved a great deal, but all the processes together still add up to quite a bit. Right now (on my system as I write this), the largest content process is only 170MB. However all processes together add up to over 1.1GB. On the other hand, a few years ago 1.1GB total memory used would have meant the program was starting to melt down. Now, it's completely unnoticeable, and doesn't build up problems over time.
Extensions: On life support. 75% of my extensions are unusable, mostly because the APIs necessary either have not been or will never be built. The ones that *do* run are examples of unpolished, alpha-quality software. Yeah, there's a replacement, but even ignoring what's been crippled, what it does do, it doesn't do as well as the old mature extension did.
- Caveat: This changeover did need to be done. None of the above changes could have been done without ripping out the old ecosystem entirely. Extensions had become the kudzu that kept healthy growth from happening.
Summary: This is the sort of work that Mozilla should have done ~5-7 years ago, back when Chrome was just starting to take off. Chrome ate Firefox's lunch because Firefox couldn't be arsed to look at the problems that people were complaining about. But Mozilla will still claim that Chrome's rise to prominence was solely due to Google leveraging it's ubiquitous presence on the web, and not because Mozilla got sloppy and lazy.
Just for fun, I downloaded the beta and installed it on my Mac OS desktop (core i7-4770k, 32GB).
Two initial impressions:
1) SHIT it's fast.
2) The UI is neither ugly as sin nor weirdly laggy any longer.
Okay, I have been using Chrome for many years now, but this is tempting. I've always kept Firefox installed but rarely use it. But I have just added it to the dock. I can see myself starting it instead of Chrome just because it's so damned fast.
I don't track Firefox development at all, so I have/had no idea this was in the works. I'd never have believed it, I thought FF was effectively doomed. Call me at least initially convinced. Using it now to post this.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
After many years sticking with Firefox, I figured since they seem hell bent on emulating Chrome, I might as well just use Chrome. And let's face it. For better or worse, Chrome is a much better Chrome then Firefox.. So it is going to take a lot to switch me back again at this stage.
Missed a lot on this, so fill me in.
I wasn't a fan of the old UI code (I'm grokking that it's been replaced?) because it made the UI elements slow and choppy to render and react to clicks. It felt like using Linux+X in 1999, even on modern hardware.
This UI feels fast and native, and it's also much cleaner and doesn't do half-assed things like stretch images and icons in the UI out of aspect ratio or scale them without anti-aliasing, which always made me snicker about the old default UI.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I tried the beta, and I have to say... it's not as terrible as I feared.
Personally, I honestly couldn't care less about the performance increases (I'm sure they're there, but I didn't notice them). I was concerned about two things:
1) That there wouldn't be NoScript. There currently isn't -- and that's why I'm not yet going to use the Beta as anything but a curiosity -- but apparently there will be. Assuming that no features will be lost in the port, that will be a showstopper removed.
2) That the UI was going to be unfixably horrible. I absolutely detest the current UI of Firefox (and Chrome), but I could fix the problem with Firefox by using Classic Theme Restorer -- an extension that can't be ported to the new plugin scheme.
My fear was that Firefox would keep a similar UI as it had been using, but without any way of fixing it. That would be a showstopper. But, as it turns out, the Beta UI is much improved, and I can fix the things that I still find irritating using the built-in options. So I'm happy.
I may be able to stay with Firefox after all! And that makes me even happier.