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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Google Maps aren't done until FireFox won't run", then? :D
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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.
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.
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