Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
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.
> What else do you need?
Classic theme restorer.
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.
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.
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.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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...
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.
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.