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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?
I wonder how much they got paid.
So, all this "it's blazing fast" hype is a barebones Firefox with no extensions. The *whole idea* of Firefox is that you add extensions to it to make it usable. Without them, Firefox is weak and useless. So, once you've installed the necessary 10-15 extensions that make the browser worth using, how's that performance then?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I looked at the code and behavior, and Google Maps deliberately uses massive amounts of requests in Firefox but much fewer requests in Chrome. Even though the exact same thing would have worked in Firefix too. Which leaves only deliberate behavior as an option.
Not surprising, coming from Data Kraken "do more evil" Google.
The whole idea of Firefox is *PRIVACY*. Chrome has access to the Google 'Advertiser ID', which in turn is linked to Google play, and google accounts, your credit card, name, address, phone number, linked to the location service (i.e. GPS track), the Wifi near you (i.e. who you are with) and if Google Assistant is onboard then recordings of everything you every said to it, and every website you ever visited that has a Google advert, Google metrics, Google content service, Google Tag Service etc etc etc etc. i.e. every website you ever visited.
So, anyone who's understands what Google is actually doing, switches to DuckDuckGo and Firefox to reduce the amount of data we voluntarily hand over to Google.
Firefox's main selling point is privacy.
Bullshit. The constantly updating plugins made it nigh on impossible to maintain in a professional environment. Any given week our entire studio would explode into a morass of "I can't work" complaints with FF suddenly updating and rendering custom plugins unusable. We'd lose half a day. Once we switched to Chrome we might occasionally run into problems with major security updates, but we were warned months ahead of time. We've never looked back, and we won't. On a personal level I'm far to wired into Google to work around FF hassles.
It's fine to say you might not find something a problem, but don't dismiss legit complaints as "lame".
That's a 32-bit, 1GB, Windows 7 based mini-laptop that I use when I travel. Previous versions of Firefox ran so slowly that I was about to replace the laptop by something more capable (think '20s delay when switching tabs'), but Firefox 57 runs well enough on it that this won't be necessary.
Oh, and why I like that laptop: unlike a tablet, it has a large enough disk that I can make backups of my photos during the trip. And it's light, small, and so cheap that it isn't worth stealing, so I don't feel worried leaving it in the hotel.