Slashdot Mirror
Firefox Quantum Is 'Better, Faster, Smarter than Chrome', Says Wired (wired.com)
Wired's senior staff writer David Pierce says Firefox Quantum "feels like a bunch of power users got together and built a browser that fixed all the little things that annoyed them about other browsers."
The new Firefox actually manages to evolve the entire browser experience, recognizing the multi-device, ultra-mobile lives we all lead and building a browser that plays along. It's a browser built with privacy in mind, automatically stopping invisible trackers and making your history available to you and no one else. It's better than Chrome, faster than Chrome, smarter than Chrome. It's my new go-to browser.
The speed thing is real, by the way. Mozilla did a lot of engineering work to allow its browser to take advantage of all the multi-core processing power on modern devices, and it shows... I routinely find myself with 30 or 40 tabs open while I'm researching a story, and at that point Chrome effectively drags my computer into quicksand. So far, I haven't been able to slow Firefox Quantum down at all, no matter how many tabs I use... [But] it's the little things, the things you do with and around the web pages themselves, that make Firefox really work. For instance: If you're looking at a page on your phone and want to load that same page on your laptop, you just tap "Send to Device," pick your laptop, and it opens and loads in the background as if it had always been there. You can save pages to a reading list, or to the great read-it-later service Pocket (which Mozilla owns), both with a single tap...
Mozilla has a huge library of add-ons, and if you use the Foxified extension, you can even run Chrome extensions in Firefox. Best I can tell, there's nothing you can do in Chrome that you can't in Firefox. And Firefox does them all faster.
I've noticed that when you open a new tab in Chrome's mobile version, it forces you to also see news headlines that Google picked out for you. But how about Slashdot's readers? Chrome, Firefox -- or undecided?
The speed thing is real, by the way. Mozilla did a lot of engineering work to allow its browser to take advantage of all the multi-core processing power on modern devices, and it shows... I routinely find myself with 30 or 40 tabs open while I'm researching a story, and at that point Chrome effectively drags my computer into quicksand. So far, I haven't been able to slow Firefox Quantum down at all, no matter how many tabs I use... [But] it's the little things, the things you do with and around the web pages themselves, that make Firefox really work. For instance: If you're looking at a page on your phone and want to load that same page on your laptop, you just tap "Send to Device," pick your laptop, and it opens and loads in the background as if it had always been there. You can save pages to a reading list, or to the great read-it-later service Pocket (which Mozilla owns), both with a single tap...
Mozilla has a huge library of add-ons, and if you use the Foxified extension, you can even run Chrome extensions in Firefox. Best I can tell, there's nothing you can do in Chrome that you can't in Firefox. And Firefox does them all faster.
I've noticed that when you open a new tab in Chrome's mobile version, it forces you to also see news headlines that Google picked out for you. But how about Slashdot's readers? Chrome, Firefox -- or undecided?
Quantum completely broke noscript
NoScript is available for Firefox Quantum. Read the developer's blog to get the latest NoScript status.
Personally I use uBlock Origin and I've also set Firefox's built-in tracking protection to "always".
Gone are pretty much all the extensions that separated Firefox from Chrome.
The developers of NoScript and uBlock Origin say Firefox's WebExtensions API is the best of any browser. The API isn't standing still. New features are getting added. Firefox's implementation of WebExtensions does more than Chrome's does.
That is the lamest shit reason. The move to webextensions is going to expand the ecosystem of maintained extensions, as it will allow developers to more easily develop for multiple platforms/browsers.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
My experience is that they progressively crippled Firefox with useless upgrades so that it became unbearably slow and very fragile (crashing several times a day for me). Then "Quantum" came out... and it runs faster than the utterly crippled versions.
Yeah. we removed your heart but the space left will allow us to bring in a new improved one "in the future". In the meantime, don't blame us,
Firefox without extensions/addons is about as useful as Windows 3.0
so I had to waste half a day finding installing and configuring he long term support version.
It now competes head to head in performance and features, and offers an alternative with improved privacy.
The improved privacy is bullshit. WebExtensions breaks a large number of privacy plugins that blocked fingerprinting (Stop Fingerprinting), stopped redirects (NoRedirect), provided control over cross-site requests (RequestPolicy Continued), self-destructed cookies, super-cookie safeguards (BetterPrivacy), and these won't be ported. David Teller of the Mozilla Foundation has stated "some of our priorities with WebExtensions are - improving privacy. ..." Want to guess how he responded when he was asked how these privacy enhancing addons will be reintroduced to FF57? He went silent.
Then there is the Mozilla Cliqz partnership and the October experiment. "In August 2016, Mozilla ... made a strategic investment in Cliqz. Cliqz plans to eventually monetize the software through a program known as Cliqz Offers, which will deliver sponsored offers to users based on their interests and browsing history." "Mozilla is experimenting with including the Cliqz plug-in by default in its open source Firefox browser." Decide for yourself whether or not any of this is in the interest of privacy. Mozilla is drowning in its own bullshit.
What do you get when you cross a mountain-climber with a mosquito? Nothing! You can't cross a scaler with a vector.
That's not a counterargument - that's just changing the subject by bringing up an entirely different argument. The old extensions could stop working any time the browser updated. With WebExtensions extensions are not only much easier to make (in my experience), but they are future-compatible because they rely on defined APIs rather then just hooking into the browser's code du jour. So GP is correct: the move to webextensions is going to expand the ecosystem of maintained extensions, and that is "the lamest shit reason" to complain about FF 57 since in actual fact 57 fixes the problem you're complaining about.
A completely different issue is that now, instead of an extension being able to do anything that the browser could conceivably do, the functionality of an extension is limited to what APIs have been defined and implemented for WebExtensions. Many of the addons that worked for previous versions of Firefox don't work on Firefox 57 and can't be ported because there are no APIs. There are some addons that I'm not too keen on doing without, so instead of upgrading to 57 I personally am moving back to 52ESR until the extension functionality I want is possible.
> I wish I knew a way to assign and send browser audio streams explicitly to one audio device output, say a set of headphones while keeping any other audio output attached to the primary playback device (speakers).
On Linux there are many ways to do that. This page lists three (plus another one just for Flash):
http://jackaudio.org/faq/routi...
Although the title of the page says Flash, three of the four methods are for the browser.
In Linux you can use patch bays to go crazy with arbitrarily complex connections between audio sources, effects, and outputs:
https://qjackctl.sourceforge.i...
uBlock Origin has completely replaced RequestPolicy for me. Just enable advanced user mode, make "3rd-party" red, hit the save icon... Then whitelist just like with RequestPolicy, only faster and easier. It works as NoScript/YesScript on steroids as well.
Cookie AutoDelete has replaced Self Destructing Cookies.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Why did you allow your users to upgrade then?
Because Mozilla pushed the update as part of the normal daily updates, without even so much as a pop-up warning that it was going to happen.
The same thing happened to me. One afternoon last week, one of my kids comes to me telling me his computer is acting strange. After much digging I discover two things: First, the computer has some kind of malware on it that is doing some naughty shit. Luckily, I have the kids computers segmented from the rest of the network and each other, so the damage is contained. The second thing I discover is that Firefox on the kids computers automatically updated to version 57. My kids cannot have done it because they do not have permissions to install or run unauthorized software. I checked my own machine and sure enough, it had automatically updated to 57 as well. Any other time, I might not have cared so much, but this time it was criitical because Firefox 57 is not compatible with NoScript yet, and so the #^@&ing idiots at Mozilla thought the ideal solution to that problem was to just do the upgrade anyway and ignore the fact that NoScript did not work, by simply removing the Add-on altogether. Worst of all, all of this happened silently. Those imbeciles caused my sons computer to get owned by taking down an important layer of defense I had constructed to keep those computers safe.
The important lesson here is that NoScript is more valuable to me than Firefox, and having been so burned once, I will never again touch another Mozilla product as long as I live. NoScript was the only thing keeping our computers on Firefox. Since I obviously cant trust Mozilla to do the right thing, I have no choice but to move to an alternative. I don't like ScriptSafe as much as I liked NoScript, but Firefox is forever off the table, and that leaves microsoft or google.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted