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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.
It wasn't an "outage", it was an "unscheduled hiatus".
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.)
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.
Except you don't really have a choice. Web developers put tons crap with their webpages that make it impossible to use them with a Netscape 3 era browser.
Browsers used to be document viewers, but now, they are essentially OSes.
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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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.
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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
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.