Slashdot Asks: Have You Switched To Firefox 57?

Yesterday, Mozilla launched Firefox 57 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. It brings massive performance improvements as it incorporates the company's next-generation browser engine called Project Quantum; it also features a visual redesign and support for extensions built using the WebExtension API. Have you used Firefox's new browser? Does it offer enough to make you switch from your tried-and-true browser of choice? We'd love to hear your thoughts.

Comments

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

It updated itself. All my webpages now have more adverts, more pop-up windows, and is probably mining bitcoins in the background. My thought is: It should have been delayed until the more popular addons were ready.

Re:Yes

[luvirini]

> What else do you need?

Classic theme restorer.

Re:Yes

[Khyber]

The need to not need any of that shit in the first place.

Re:Yes

[0100010001010011]

Below someone complained about the placement of the reload button.

What button do you use on the UI that doesn't have a keyboard shortcut to do the same thing faster?

I took everything out of the toolbar, turned on menus and now you can get to anything from the keyboard.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

a legit 'video downloader' would be nice to have back, too. and not those shams that use a web server to pull the video from youtube or vimeo, etc either, but one that directly downloads the resolution you want and, if a separate file or stream, the audio quality you want and pieces the bits back together if necessary.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy shit, it's unbelievable how you Firefox fanatics treat Firefox's users and extension authors so terribly.

The Firefox devs go out of their way to intentionally break Firefox's extension system for no good reason, and then force this release on the world prematurely, yet you somehow blame the extension authors when their extensions that worked perfectly fine with Firefox 56 don't work with Firefox 57?!

On one hand, I can't believe you're actually being serious. But on the other hand, you are a Firefox fanatic, and this isn't the first time that Firefox fanatics have legitimately and honestly behaved in such an atrocious manner.

It's no wonder users and extension authors are fleeing Firefox at such a rapid pace. You Firefox fanatics subject these victims to insane levels of abuse, and these victims really don't deserve any of it.

Nope, switched to chrome

[robocord]

I've stuck with firefox for a long time, but they've finally removed the last few things that were better than chrome, so it's time to give in and switch to the path of least resistance.

Congrats Firefox dev team! You've made it so much like chrome that there's no longer any reason to use it!

Re:Nope, switched to chrome

[markdavis]

>"Congrats Firefox dev team! You've made it so much like chrome that there's no longer any reason to use it!"

1) Is not a binary blob
2) Is community developed (although sometimes hard to tell)
3) Contains no Googleisms and Google tracking
4) Far less likely to contain back doors
5) Still has more UI control options
6) Promotes browser diversity and choice

Had you said "Chromium" instead of "Chrome", that would have helped with a few of the above, but still not really deal with all of it.

No Upgrade Here

[xbytor]

This is all about the add-ons and customization. They can make it the fastest browser by an order of magnitude but if they break things that I consider vital then I won't upgrade.

Yes

[89cents]

Well I've always been a Firefox user and felt it was getting slow and bloated, but I am loving this update. I did a speed test this morning from www.speed-battle.com and peacekeeper.futuremark.com and Firefox 57 beat out Chrome 62 by quite a margin in most tests. Now, if Slashdot would change its favicon to use transparent corners instead of white corners, that one tab of mine wont look so funny.

Loaded question

[slack_justyb]

Apparently the answer according to Slashdot is Mozilla can suck balls no matter what they do. They fix the slowness and now everyone bitches about broken extensions. I get it, everyone is butt hurt about Firefox 3.5 not lasting one hundred millions years. Seriously, FF 57 is faster, extensions, no wait let me correct that, NoScript is coming and it'll be even faster. It doesn't use the abomination that is XUL. But no, the massive tectonic changes that everyone wanted back in 3.5 days, those *finally* get done and (right now) everyone just bitches about NoScript. Color me unsurprised that the comment section over at Slashdot just becomes a "Why I hate _____" section. Because that's all Slashdot is now, a forum for people to tell other people why they hate whatever free technology they've been giving with zero effort on their part. How whatever this new shiny thing will never compare to whatever thing it was meant to replace that was invented oh so many moons ago. It's clearly a violation of whatever made up principals our Luddite collective deemed to be the gospel so many years ago.

I mean, dang. It's damned if you do and damned if you don't on Slashdot. Mods, I await your flamebait scores, but its like everyday this place descends further into old tech guys yelling at each other about the good old days.

Re:Loaded question

[hyades1]

Thank you for responding to that idiot better than I could have. Most Firefox users didn't go in that direction for raw speed and a new GUI every frickin' week. In the early days (and yes, I was an early adopter) it worked reasonably well and featured a consistently-increasing number of add-ons that let you turn it into a browser that did exactly what you wanted. At the time, it was really the only choice for people who wanted to customize their web-surfing experience.

Fast forward to now...The only thing that has kept me from dumping Firefox completely (I use Pale Moon mostly, but there's some sites it just won't render properly) is Classic Theme Restorer. Now, apparently, the developer is being given the cold shoulder by Firefox.

So screw 'em. I'll keep my current version for those rare occasions when I need it and use an alternative for everything else. Mostly that will continue to be Pale Moon. When I really care about privacy/security, I don't bother with "Private Browsing" on either of them. I just use Epic.

Re:No

[unrtst]

Isn't performance pretty much the *only* thing the average user will notice?

No. They won't notice it in this case, because the performance margins between browsers are now so small that you can't notice without something timing things for you, or loading a very intensive (very complex dom or javascript or combo) side by side in FF and some other browser. You're not going to notice if it's faster than chrome if you're not even sure what browser you use.

IMO, this is why MS Edge failed to take off. Who cares about its performance, if it breaks on many sites and, when broken, even offers to show that site in IE instead. If a browser kept telling me to use a different browser, then whatever benefit it may have had to begin with, isn't really worth it cause of that rigmarole.

Re:Unfortunately yes and then back.

[Zontar The Mindless]

Firefox updated itself to 57 and made tabs impossible to see again.

They broke that quite a while back, but before 57 you could use "classic theme restorer" to make them visible again. But 57 stopped it from working and there is apparently no fix.

So had to switch back to 56.

And then they also brag about a lie on their website "Set up Firefox your way. " when you cannot even set tab borders anymore.

Ever since they inexplicably moved the tab bar away from the pane of the viewer and tried to make it impossible to put it back where it belongs, I've known this to be a lie.

Re:Nope

[somenickname]

I keep hearing this mantra about "OMG no NoScript!". Apparently people don't realize that the script blocker in uBlock Origin is *far* superior to NoScript. It was updated for the new Firefox months ago so, it's had plenty of time to brew. You can thank me later: https://github.com/gorhill/uBl...

Re:Firefox 57 finally pushed me over to Chrome

[ugen]

While you are trolling, I will respond because I think it makes a good point :)

I suspect that Firefox may support the same API (thought existing addon authors adamantly state it does not). However, if I am to use the same API, I'd rather use it in a faster, more efficient and (due to its popularity) better supported browser. That is to say - whether Firefox supports such an API is irrelevant at this point.

Firefox had a distinctive advantage of a unique flexible design and API access to all aspects of browser implementation. They chose to remove this advantage in favor of standardization. Now there is no longer anything about Firefox that makes it a better choice.

perversely impressive

[JackSpratts]

browsers are now basically scaffolds for my extensions. 57 borked them all. every single one - it was actually impressive in a perverse way. i rolled back to 56.

- js.

Re:Unfortunately yes and then back.

[luvirini]

So having to tweak a number of CSS files to fix something that the developers broke on purpose in version 29 and still have not fixed to this day. UGH. Really user friendly. No wonder Firefox is losing market share.

If the browser is supposed to be so customizable why is there no UI setting or a direct fix even now more than 3 years after they broke it?

At least with the classic theme restorer you could just install the extension and forget for more than three years that the developers hate the users.

No

[trawg]

Five of the five addons I have installed are marked as Legacy so will not work :( One of them is NoScript, which I know is coming in the next few days, but it's actually the one I care about the least.

The others are:

FireGestures (for gesture controlling - amazing how you get used to this & how much difference it makes to your browsing experience). No update news but from comments it seems it's unlikely to be updated to its former glory due to deficiencies in the new API. There are partial replacements so not too bad.

GreaseMonkey (for modifying webpages on the fly). I mostly use this for minor work enhancements so not critical but it's a really useful tool. I think it's easily replaceable though.

QuickJava. A super useful tool that simply puts icons in the status bar allowing you to toggle on/off JS, WebGL, RTC, Images, CSS, Proxy, etc. Staggeringly handy.

Classic Theme Restorer. I will miss the UI flexibility the most.

I have maybe 12 other addons that I mostly leave disabled; only two of these have been updated, the others are legacy.

I am really torn; I want to stay up-to-date with Firefox but the reason I use Firefox is that I've customised it to my preferences. If I lose that ability and it's not replaced with something better - the speed is nice but I don't really care about it - then why would I update?