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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?
Agreed, however I have had to handle loads of complaints for Quantum and I just can not even sort them out. It's the loss of TabMixPlus as an extension that is causing all these issues with staff now closing FF by mistake, losing tabs by not opening in a new tab and also multirow tabs.
When you have 200 staff all using Tabmix, that's a lot of people Mozilla have destroyed. Sure FF is faster but people are now taking longer to work around the extensions issues so it's not really a win-win situation. Hopefully oneman of Tabmixplus will be rewritting the extension soon
Well its this. We were approaching a monoculture in browsers. Firefox's move to Quantum was years in the making. It is a MAJOR overhaul of the browser that took years to pull off. It now competes head to head in performance and features, and offers an alternative with improved privacy. This is good for the web. It is good for freedom. Quantum is getting the press they deserve, IMO
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
When you have 200 staff all using Tabmix, that's a lot of people Mozilla have destroyed. Sure FF is faster but people are now taking longer to work around the extensions issues so it's not really a win-win situation.
That's the big problem. Speed is nice, but speed by itself, isn't meaningful. The new Firefox design didn't just kill my favorite extensions, the developers of those extensions have given up because the new design makes it impossible to create a new version of certain extensions. There are some things that you simply can't do any more.
So, what good is a "fast" browser if it doesn't so what I want?
That is the lamest shit reason. The move to webextensions is going to expand the ecosystem of maintained extensions
Bullshit.
Many extensions cannot be ported over to the new system -- there are certain things that you simply can't so any more.