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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.
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.
Debian: ESR here
Not until I can block everything that leaks out, like I do with NoScript today. I don't know when that might be, but if it isn't soon, I'll have to switch to Pale Moon.
Privacy and script blocking are far more important to me than speed or stability.
John
Yes on systems I don't use that much and No on my primary system. I'm waiting for NoScript to finish its WebAssembly port. On the other systems I'm experimenting with uBlock Origin and uMatrix. (I may end up running all three with NoScript and "Allow Scripts Globally" enabled to just take advantage of its ABE, ClearClick and XSS protections, etc... letting uMatrix and uBO do the rest.)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'm a longtime Firefox user, and I've been annoyed as anyone about the bone-headed UI decisions in past years. But there, at least, you could use add-ons to revert back to a sane user interface, restore the status bar, and the like.
But killing your core, essential feature that makes your product actually worth using over any other browser? Did some cruel time traveller come back in time to ruin Firefox from within or something - I can't see a motivation on the part of those who would do this.
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!
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.
Love it. Fast and fixes rendering issues I had in FF 56.
-=Lothsahn=-
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.
I am probably in the minority here (this place loves to complain) but I love the update. The new GUI is great once I got used to it and set the Dark Theme, plus it is noticeably faster. As for extensions, most of the ones I use are supported, and the ones that didn't i discovered i either didnt need or had functionality replacements available in the browser now that I didn't realize since never looked.
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.
I've been using Firefox "since it all began" (and Mozilla before then, and Netscape when that was the thing - yes, that's a long time ago). My primary reason for sticking with Firefox through thick and thin was the wide selection of addons, in particular those designed to guard privacy and clean up my web experience.
With the move to webextensions there was little left to distinguish between Firefox and Chrome. My main reservation wrt. Chrome was presumable lack of ability to programmatically control cookie access list (i.e. allow/session only/deny sites ability to set cookies from an extension). Authors of Firefox cookie manager extensions (such as Cookie Controller) stated that doing so is not possible in Chrome.
Finally, I figured I'd give it a try. Less than 20 minutes of searching helped me find an API to control cookies from a Webextension. I wrote my own (and put it up in Chrome "web store" - "Cookie ACL manager"), and we were in business shortly.
While doing that, found a few bugs (not critical but def. needing some attention) in cookie and site data handling. Reported these through Chrome bug reporting site and was positively surprised by developers actually reading and responding (and, hopefully, fixing them soon). By comparison, never got Firefox developers to fix anything.
So - I am sorry Firefox, it's been a good 20 years, but now we must part. Farewell.
I don't like that they moved the refresh button to the left of the URL. I preferred it on the right.
The Refresh button is now outside the URL bar and you can move it via the Customize screen like some of the other UI buttons.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
For three reasons:
1. The core security/privacy functionality is built tightly into the browser by default: HTTPS upgrades, script control, ad blocking, fingerprint protection, etc. No add-ons and depending on third party developers for these vital functions needed.
2. It is the only browser company really doing serious innovation, and that gives it the best chance to actually challenge Google. Plus, how is Mozilla going to challenge Google when it once again depends on Google for almost ALL of its income?
3. Lighting fast and operates in an intuitive UI. I no longer need to mess with all the configurations I had to in Firefox to get it how I wanted it. Brave makes it super easy to toggle things on and off without sorting through an about:config to harden the browser.
https://brave.com/
Alternatives:
Waterfox portable.
Pale Moon 64-bits
Pale Moon 32-bits
Pale Moon Portable
Ghostery does not install in Pale Moon, so I use the Disconnect extension. Disconnect's interface is not as well-designed.
The Luddites had very good reasons to hate the industrialization that threatened their culture, economy, and way of life. Their opponents were brutal and made inferior textiles with a high human cost. The Luddite rebellion failed, and the horrible treatment of textile workers has continued pretty much unabated to this very day. It's a silly thing to trot out when "progress" has more steps back than forward.
Firefox 57 fixed problems I didn't have and took away things I've used for years. 56 worked well on everything from my i7 gaming rig to my ancient Pentium laptop that shipped with vista and 2 gigs of ram. I kind of wonder if this "57 is fast" stuff is a bunch of benchmark fluff, but it could be I'm just insensitive to browser latency. Stability, now that has been a very real problem in the past. Stability was also flawless on all my machines in 56.
If 57 is delightful for you, cool. Me, I lost extensions that've been part of my daily life, I gained nothing, and I think that's a perfectly damn fine reason to be annoyed with it. Not to mention all the extension developers who got shafted. Feh, Luddite indeed.
In Firefox's favor though, Fakespot on Chrome costs 2 dollars a month for a glorified link opener. What the frak?
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.
The've been doing this since 2011. Mozilla has been quite content to shed any technical merit they had for almost any reason at all. It all started when they saw Chrome beginning to become successful, and immediately decided to emulate Google's development environment. They adopted Google's rapid release and versioning method on a project that was neither technically nor culturally suited for it. They broke extensions by the truck load with that little gem, and instead of slowing down and letting the extension system catch up, their solution was to write a script that automatically scanned their extensions and just disabled the ones which hadn't caught up yet. Then they went all hell bent on adopting major UI changes that were demonstrably unpopular by the majority of its user base. And if alienating the extensions authors wasn't enough, many of the UI changes destroyed themes on back-to-back-to-back releases. It reminds me of one of my country's more famous prime ministers who, when he realized he'd alienated half my country, proceeded to give them the finger from his seat on a train. That's Mozilla. They alienate users, and then the ones who have stayed loyal they give the finger to.
All of this was in an attempt at emulating Chrome's burgeoning success. The problem is, they never figured out... you simply cannot surpass someone else by playing copycat on their methods. All they did was alienate their existing user base in favour of a product that could never be quite as good at being Chrome as Chrome was.
Mozilla had a great browser, and a great community. Someone spooked at Chrome's early success and decided that change for change's sake was necessary, and they have resisted every indication that they have made a mistake.
I recommend PaleMoon for a fantastic experience that is the best of what Firefox was in combination with innovation that makes sense and which takes into account its user base. It was originally a patch on an earlier FF ESR, they have since essentially departed from Firefox, though they still borrow some bits when it makes sense to do so. It's what Firefox should have been if they hadn't taken the detour into crazy six years ago.
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.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
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?
How's about Tab Mix Plus? Which will probably *never* be ready, maybe a far less useful version at best.
GreaseMonkey is so radically changed a lot of scripts are likely to break, and authors may have long disappeared or otherwise won't re-write.
Another user mentioned CTR. Entirely disallowed.
DownThemAll lost a lot of functionality.
And we've just covered major addons. What about the hundreds, even thousands, of smaller ones? Yeah, maybe a lot of them could technically be rewritten, if the developer is still around, and is willing to rewrite it, which would often entail having to work with the Firefox devs to get new functionality added in (assuming it's even allowed functionality, a lot won't be). Since that's such a high burden, let's face it, a lot of those smaller addons are dead and never coming back.
Personally I really like Download Manager Tweak for example, but the feature of it I use will not be allowed in WebExtensions, and the author isn't interested in rewriting one with far less functionality.
Not to mention a lot of users who have upgraded have said quite a large number of advanced configuration options have been removed, because part of Chromification is the inexorable march towards stomping on user choice and dumbing things down, which Firefox has already been doing for some time now.
Bottom line is 57 destroys a lot of plugins and plugin functionality that are gone forever. Given that plugin ability is the primary reason a large part of the userbase is still sticking with FF, there's just no way the benefits are worth this loss. Mozilla thinks being more like Chrome with its hostility towards power users will gain them more users than they'll lose, but what incentive is there for someone to switch away from Chrome to an imitator? My money is still on this ultimately being proven a disastrous decision, because I've seen far more existing users who plan to stick to 56 or the ESR as long as possible then dump FF than users that want 57, and can't fathom a reason to expect any kind of new user influx.
Mark Davis, before you make an asinine claim about Firefox like:
you should read Firefox's privacy policy!
That way you'd see that it contains stuff like (emphasis added):
and
and
So don't give us this bullshit about Firefox not containing "Googleisms and Google tracking". Firefox very clearly does use at least two Google services, and using these services involves sending data to Google. And this "Google advertising ID" is clearly an example of a "Googleism" that has found its way into Firefox.
Anyone who claims that Firefox cares about its users' privacy is full of bullshit.
Given how Firefox uses services provided by Google, I don't consider it any better than Chrome. In fact, it may be worse, because clearly some people like you have been fooled into wrongly thinking that Firefox is free from "Googleisms and Google tracking".