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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?
Yes Firefox has improved an amazing amount with the Quantum update. Yes- I moved off of Chrome.
But seriously... it's not like the messiah has returned. The hype surrounding this is unbelievable...
My experience is that Quantum is acceptably fast. Not impressively fast. It's only impressively fast when compared to previous versions of Firefox.
Why did I switch? Because Chrome causes problems with my audio subsystem which gets heavy use. I'd like to use my browser while the computer is routing audio streams. Chrome made that impossible (and was the only program which caused that kind of problem).
After 16 months of trying to solve the problem Firefox eeked out Chrome simply because it was no longer a "dog".
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
once you've installed the necessary 10-15 extensions
What are the necessary 10-15 extensions?
how's that performance then?
Benchmark it and report back.
This may be frustrating, but this is really just a temporary problem. The new extension platform will eventually increase the number of maintained extensions by easing development, increase security.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
I've read this sentence about 50 times and I still don't know what would possess someone to write something like this
Isn't it obvious? Ten. Thousand. Dollars. This is an ad, pure and simple. Just read it: This is rhetoric written by a Mozilla marketing person.
What is the point of writing this?
Increasing market share. Mozilla have been looking at their metrics and have discovered that they've lost a huge number of users since 57 came out. So they've bought an article in wired to try to lure some unsuspecting people back from chrome. It's all right there in the text, talking about how firefox is now more chrome than chrome.
If these things are true and manifestly evident, there's no need to write this at all
The people this is written for switched to chrome years ago and are happy with it. They haven't seen the new firefox, and they don't care. This ad is trying to lure them back.
what's the end game for this idea?
They're hoping they can get more people to switch from chrome to firefox than the number of people who switched to pale moon or waterfox last week.
Who would buy into this idea that hasn't already?
Nobody. What they fail to understand is that the people who use chrome like it. They just don't get that becoming a crappier version of chrome isn't a sensible business plan. They've been told this over and over again but they have their fingers in their ears and they're going "lalalalalala". And now they're in panic mode because the things their users have been saying for the past year turned out to be true.
This smacks of "hey fellow kids, I'm cool too" type rhetoric.
It's a paid ad.
I switched to Pale Moon long ago and regret nothing.
Waterfox here, pale moon and firefox 52 (locked at that version, never to be upgraded) on my last remaining 32 bit system. Both are faster than firefox and don't have a terrible UI. I was particularly impressed by the way waterfox imported everything from firefox: addons, the tabs I had open, everything. Was probably the most painless migration I've ever done.
You browse without extensions?
No.
I feel it's fundamentally dishonest to brag about browser speed
So provide the benchmarks with all your particular extensions installed that show the performance difference with and without extensions. Comments with no evidence provided to back the claims are tedious.
FTFY.
I've learned that there are three major classes of extensions.
First, those that improve security and privacy. These break nothing, other that badly or obnoxiously coded websites (which in the majority of cases are easily replaced by a different website, less badly or obnoxiously coded).
Second, minor tweaks to the UX. These also break nothing, other than totalitarian design fantasies of desktop + tablet supreme codebase unification. My most important UX tweak is the addition of a right click menu that enhances cut and paste behaviours (Make Link) by auto-formatting URLs in a variety of online formats along with various page metadata elements. I use it 100 times a day.
Third, major and intrusive tweaks to the UX. Into this category falls most of the tab bar tweaks. These extensions did consistently break, or become deprecated, or change their behaviour to cope with shifting ground under their feet.
Apparently you should curate your reading more carefully, because you've mainlined a biased sample. You've also fallen for the squeaky wheel fallacy, because this power user—who does know the difference between one type of extension and another—has never complained about technical developments to make Firefox more stable, and never abandoned FF in the first place.
I have complained about Mozilla's degenerating principles and priorities. Just on the communications front alone, they've treated their extension developers like shit. And why is that? Because Mozilla's decisions have been less and less technical, and more and more political.
I don't even know what values Mozilla truly holds anymore. I do know that it's not Chrome, and that Chrome is already too big for its britches, so I use Chrome as little as possible, because I value autonomy and self determination.
Self determination. You should try it some day. Sure beats posting as an AC fuckwad.
Excuse me? "Already baked into Chrome"? The web works on open, clearly defined standards. If Chrome is doing something that's not a standard, then it's the problem not the other browsers.
Chrome quickly became the newest version of Internet Explorer with all the "standards" Google is deciding to make up and change without any consensus from anyone outside Mountain View.
And I make that comparison without regret, because Google is using the same creative dissonance Microsoft did to try to force Internet Explorer's dominance back in the day, but everyone using Chrome probably doesn't remember that, either too young, too ignorant or too gullible.