As a recent Firefox user, I'm super excited about the future evolution of the browser. I switched to Firefox Quantum after using Chrome as mainstay for over 9 years and I was absolutely BLOWN AWAY by the under-the-hood refinements and UX enhancements in v57.0 -- could clearly observe the impact of Gecko's upgraded Servo/Rust components at work.
Noticeable visible differences included page-load performance as well as a smaller memory footprint relative to Chrome.
Faster WebAssembly[0] starting from v58.0 made the speed optimization more visible -- it was at this point when I truly fell in love with the browser -- Firefox dethroned Chrome as my default. Add to this the hardened tracking protection, Greasemonkey's super massive stash of user scripts and values of the non-profit organization that supports the browser -- Chrome felt so old-school.
I am not the op, but (faster) WebAssembly could turn out to be a big thing for browser extensions. For example, we are just in the process of adding WebAssembly powered image search to our Kantu Selenium IDE to allow for visual testing. We tried before with normal Javascript and even WebGL, but both results were not usable for various reasons. The websight page gave us new hope ;-) https://websightjs.com/
Faster WebAssembly isn't listed on the roadmap, so you are disappointed, right?
Wasm is currently considered "around half as fast as native"[0]. The Wasm design, Emscripten compiler, and browser compilers all have a part of responsibility in this, but I suspect that browser compilers have the largest share. Mozilla created The WebAssembly Explorer[1] which shows good-looking ".wat", but bloated "Firefox x86 Assembly" compared to "LLVM x86 Assembly". I hope they intend to use this tool to improve Firefox x86 Assembly.
As someone who has used Firefox as my default browser since it was called Phoenix, I can tell you that Quantum was a big step backward in terms of memory consumption and CPU utilization for Firefox.
On a Lenovo T450s sitting idle with 14 tabs across 4 windows, FF is now using 25-100% of the CPU and over 4GB of RAM. When I resume from Hibernation (on Windows) it can take up to 10 minutes for FF to settle down and for the system mouse to respond.
If that's an improvement from Chrome, then OMG you poor bastards who use Chrome as your daily.
FF seems to be fine on more powerful systems but on my lower spec'd laptops it's just a battery sucking lap warmer.
People's mental model (Chrome fast, lean; Firefox slow, bloated) seem to really not update quickly. When Chrome hangs it's "That's weird, something must be broken, the website sucks" when it's Firefox "Well further proof the Firefox is terrible".
For the record, my 2012 MBA, which is probably weaker than your Lenovo, has no issues with Firefox at all.
I generally do report it and the bugs are generally addressed in followup releases of Firefox.
My remarks were not strikes against Firefox's performance, it's stellar, just that since Quantum it has become a resource hog to achieve that high performance.
The Lenovo here is running on Boardwell, that is the 14nm version of Haswell.
I am running on a 32nm SandyBridge, which is even older then the 2012 MBA, 22nm Ivy Bridge mentioned in the MBA post below. And due to some thermal issues, It is now capped to running at Max 2.2Ghz.
I am still trying to clean up my tabs, which is on a moderately high level of 299. Slightly lower then last weeks 380. Not all of them are active, may be only 40 tabs or so.
And needless to say, for lots of Heavy Tabs users, Firefox now runs circle around Chrome. And right now, it is using 15 - 40% CPU when "idle", but mostly hover around ~25%. And I have Ad Block and Privacy option turned on. So that helps a lot too.
These days website uses insane amount of Javascript from track everything including your mouse movement to quietly mining Bitcoins. For most people, Firefox is now very fast.
You should try resetting profile and visit the same website to see if problem persist. You should file a bug. But may be you would have try all this and know already, since you have been using it since Phoenix. I can not help.
That's impressive. How do you manage hundreds of tabs?
I tend to have Azure dashboards open which are quite active and resource intensive so I'm not doing myself any favors however I typically only have 6 of 12 tabs active.
I've never used Chrome as my primary browser so I can't really compare it to Firefox in terms of performance, I just know what Firefox has been like over the years. They've always had a cadence to their releases and I know it'll get better, at the moment however it is a CPU and memory hog compared to past releases.
That being said I am kind of astonished that in it's current state people are saying it's astonishingly better than Chrome. I guess it just speaks to how bad Chrome is presently? I don't think I use Chrome enough to comment but I've not had issues with it. I typically only have Chrome running ~5 tabs with 1 active.
Ouch, when I have experienced problems like that in FF it tends to have been something I've done to myself, fiddling with prefs in about:config. Do you see the same behavior if you spin up a fresh profile?
That's entirely possible though I would say the profile on my work machine is only a couple months old. Is it possible that Firefox sync brought in settings from another machine that's possibly borking it?
Your resume performance has to do with windows not Firefox and it seems that something might be buggy about your experience I suggest that others are not experiencing the same issues.
The resume performance is directly related to Firefox running. I've closed Firefox prior to hibernation and not experienced the slowness at resume. I've also started the resource monitor and hibernated with Firefox running. The resource monitor reports 100% CPU utilization on all cores with Firefox processes being the primary consumers.
Is this so with a fresh profile and no addons enabled? Is this so without the 2-3 different antivirus a lot of windows people seem to run for no reason?
Note that as firefox isn't capable of suspending or resuming a computer I'm going to continue to assume that your OS is partially related to bad resume performance.
> Note that as firefox isn't capable of suspending or resuming a computer
I think you misunderstood what I said.
Firefox isn't suspending or resuming the computer. I put the computer into hibernation explicitly and it hibernates which means the computer is consuming no power and is shut down. I can remove the battery and unplug it with no harm.
Upon powering the laptop back up, Firefox starts consuming 100% CPU utilization for 5-10 minutes consuming so much CPU time that the mouse stutters.
If I end task Firefox then the system becomes immediately responsive.
I don't know. Firefox 59 needs about a second to load a small local html file with 3 small pictures (100x100 pixel) from SSD. How is this possible? Most windows games load instantly. UI in most games works instantly. Why is it so hard to make the same possible in a browser?
Something like this?
https://imgur.com/Y9CkxEh
I don't know how to do it. I can only start a recording and reload the page. But it is not the same as to open it in a new tab (which much slower).
I really like the goals they picked, but wish "Native Look and feel" was also in there. I use Firefox as my primary browser on Windows, but on the Mac it still feels significantly non-native. For instance, we're still missing rubber-band scrolling, Firefox still doesn't set the file attribute that causes the progress bars to be displayed on the Finder for each file and on the Downloads stack on the dock, on full screen the toolbar doesn't 'move down' along with the menu bar when I move my cursor to the top of the screen, there is still no pinch to zoom, the back/forward trackpad gestures and checkboxes/radio buttons are not animated, etc.
I love Firefox and it is my primary browser for years, on both - Mac and Windows, and it's not going to change anytime soon. Still, I feel Mac version is noticeably slower. Even though I disabled all extensions I can see the difference between Chrome and Firefox on Mac. Sometimes I can even see "naked" plain text page for a moment, before styling is applied (ex: on GitHub pages.)
This is called "Flash of unstyled content", and has been a bug since 57: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404468 . In 57 the delay before initial drawing was removed, which mostly makes things feel faster, but sometimes makes things show up naked for a moment.
In that bug you can see there are several things that can cause this, including website issues and certain extensions.
A bug report with steps to reproduce (even a link to the specific GitHub page involved would help) would be really useful if you are still seeing this. Please cc "bzbarsky". Also worth checking whether the problem persists with extensions disabled, if it's reproducible enough to do that with...
Yes, that one is on my to-investigate list already. Thank you for the reminder!
Chrome has started just blocking the HTML parser completely on stylesheets. That means it doesn't end up with FOUC (except insofar as there is renderable content before a sheet that is affected by the sheet), but at the cost of less parallelism and slower pageload...
I’ve been tracking some of the bugs related to this for years, and there’s been a dispiriting lack of progress in them. Ultimately I’m still a Firefox user because it makes the best trade offs for my particular wants and needs, but I’d love to be able to more enthusiasticallt recommend it to others for whom non-native feeling apps are a non-starter.
I would like to use Firefox but I still use Chrome as my main browser. Edge, in fact, is my secondary browser (I'm on windows) and I use Firefox last. The speed of Firefox is much better than before but it's appearance is very clunky, enough that this is the main reason I don't use it. There are also other ways the browser seems to lack polish. I don't say this as an attack. I see so many fawning comments about Firefox so I want to give my honest opinion.
A clunky appearance is a fairly subjective statement, could you clarify exactly what about the appearance doesn't work for you? I think that would provide somewhat more useful feedback. (I use Firefox on Windows, and personally don't view it as any more or less clunky than Chrome)
> Breach Alerts: Breach alerts will inform a user if a site they've visited has been breached and will ask if the user wants to have their account checked to determine if it was compromised. If it was compromised, some helpful information will be presented to the user. (October)
This is very interesting.
If Chrome decide to follow the same path it could give a serious incentive to some website to be more careful about there security.
The whole "display a warning when login are passed via HTTP" already managed to create some reaction.
It probably won't be a revolution but it might be a good first step.
And of course we should be ready for the slew of sites complaining about how terrible and irresponsible it is to tell users that they've been compromised:)
The last thing a business wants is a browser scaring customers away without cause. But I think they would be OK as long as the list is maintained and is accurate. Certainly, we should do more to penalize hackers, and not blame the victims of cyber attacks (as is sometimes the case).
Malicious hacking is already illegal with significant penalties.
> not blame the victims
If the victims failed even basic security measures, I'm quite happy to give them their share of blame. There have been plenty of reports of exposed databases with no password protection, places that stored passwords in plain text, folks running unpatched OSs... You can't just ignore security and pretend that you're not at fault.
>Malicious hacking is already illegal with significant penalties.
Yes, more people should end up in jail.
>If the victims failed even basic security measures, I'm quite happy to give them their share of blame.
Please detail how you have established that the victims themselves personally ignored security practices.
>There have been plenty of reports of exposed databases with no password protection, places that stored passwords in plain text, folks running unpatched OSs... You can't just ignore security and pretend that you're not at fault.
You are making broad claims. Remember that the non-technical business owners/managers/CEOs etc need our help, and they don't need people shaming them for using vendors or consultants who might have made made mistakes.
I think I remember some password managers that have similar features alerting if a site that you have an account with was breached. There has to be some sort of external accountability or pressure to make these organizations move the needle on their security practices.
I've always loved Firefox. Had to switch to Chrome for stability and resource consumption, but I did not enjoy being all Google and I did miss numerous awesome features of Firefox. The awesomebar and dev tools to just name a few.
Went back to Firefox Quantum for a few months. Now I'm back on Chrome for exactly the same reasons. After hours of active use, Firefox is eating a ton of RAM and consuming way too much CPU, while also struggling to open any pages (let alone more complex apps) or downright crashing the apps that were already running.
Plus, it does not seem to support web calls at all (Google Meet, BlueJeans, GoToMeeting you name it).
I hate being on Chrome again, and I miss those Firefox features. But I have work to do, and I just can't have my tools grind to a halt all the time.
I'm using all day Firefox for front develop, an I have multiple tabs open. I don't have any issue of excessive RAM or CPU usage. Even I noticed that Chrome uses more RAM that FF . The actual instance that I have open to write it, with 16 tabs open, it's using around 300-400MiB and ~5% of CPU.
Also, FireFox for Android runs faster that Chrome (not because FireFox is faster that Chrome on Android, but because the ad-blocker does a nice work avoiding to load garbage), and the RAM usage it's keep at bay. I have like ten tabs on FF for Android and keeps working like if I had one open.
On any case, on Chrome and Firefox you can install a add-on called "Tab suspender". It allows to save ram, literally suspending tabs that has not been accesses on some time. Try it.
> Even I noticed that Chrome uses more RAM that FF
Reflects my experience. I use Firefox at work, Chrome at home. Chrome RAM usage is much higher than FF. Not that I really mind - I have more than enough RAM to support it. But it often leaves me wondering if some tab/plugin/extension is misbehaving, which in turn forces me to close all my tabs only to find that the memory use stays high and the number of Chrome processes doesn't decrease as expected. I'm considering switching back to Firefox at home now.
EDIT: OK, tested with Firefox now. Number of process doesn't decrease as I close tabs either, but memory use is still considerably higher than Chrome.
> I don't have any issue of excessive RAM or CPU usage.
I guess it depends per device and use-case. I use Firefox everywhere. Home (PC with Linux OS), work (laptop with Linux OS) and on my phone.
On my pc I have 0 RAM or CPU issues with Firefox. (intel i5, and nvidia GTS 250, ancient I know.)
On my laptop (intel i7 and nvidia NVS 5200M) I have had serious CPU issues though. With version 57 it used to stay above 90% CPU for hours. Since version 58 though it's been a lot better. Sometimes stays at about 40% for a while, then goes back down to like 10%. I suspect it might be due to some of the tabs I have open with zabbix graphs, but I don't know for certain.
I love using firefox on my phone because it's the only mobile browser that can use uBlock Origin. I don't care how fast or smooth chrome is on mobile, I'm not gonna use it if the price you have to pay is being eye-raped by ads.
I'm also using Firefox on Android because of the Adblocker, but it is not faster than Chrome. The page load time is generally slower than Chrome, even with ads blocked. It sometimes freezes and crashes
I feel firefox on android in many ways far more better than chrome (especially the UX and addons), the only thing preventing me to make it my default browser is the built in page translation of chrome, for me its a must have since i live in a foreign country.
I want to do that but can't replace chrome's debugging features, specifically websocket network call analysis and hover variable to get its value. How have you replaced these feature in your workflow?
Unfortunately being slow & hogging resources tends to more of a rule than an exception. I doubt it would help if everyone started drowning developers in bug reports that basically state the obvious.
It might also be that being the second fastest guy on the track will not win you a gold medal. As everyone tends to develop and test software on Blink/V8, it will undoubtedly feel slow when ran on a competiting browser.
I am a Firefox developer. Bug reports with specific examples of Firefox being slow, e.g. on a certain website, or with a certain hardware configuration, are very useful. Profiles even more so.
If it being slow really is a rule rather than an exception, then perhaps there is something in your configuration making it that way. Or a specific website that you happen to always have open. It's not normally always slow for most people, so again, this would be useful to know about.
It's true that often developers only test on Chrome, and in making sure it runs smoothly there they happen to make something that performs badly on Firefox. If we know about these websites then we can see if it's something we should change on our end, or get in touch with the developers ourselves.
I have been asking for this features for eternity, but now Firefox has changed a little may be there is a chance this might get consider again.
How about making this, Record, Profile, and Submission procedure built in. Button Accessible within 3-4 clicks.
The amount of work required to get all these done and submitted is not easy especially for average users. I do a lot in my most enthusiastic days ( Mostly for Memshrink ), but after Memshrink I couldn't be bother much, unless the bug is annoying enough that persist.
> I doubt it would help if everyone started drowning developers in bug reports that basically state the obvious.
If the bugreport just reads "it's slow", then of course that's not helpful. However, performance issues as drastic as described above are certainly not normal. I'm using Firefox on Windows, Linux and (up until recently) macOS and never encountered anything remotely like this. So it would certainly be helpful to get detailed traces of that abnormal situation.
+1 for Firefox eating CPU. For some reason they can't track down the issue. If there's anyone from Mozilla reading, I'm on a Late 2013 13" rMBP fully loaded. I've made all the recommended changes to improve performance (and undone all of them as well to ensure they weren't the problem.) Firefox consumes most of my CPU and causes my fans to run at the full 6200 RPM while they try to cool my CPU which consistently reaches beyond 80C on any page running any Javascript.
Talking about "the issue" is a misunderstanding of how performance of complex software works. Overall performance is the result of the entire codebase, and there can be a varieety of ways that performance problems can manifest for individual users. One of the most productive approaches to improving performance with Quantum was fixing lots and lots of small and medium sized issues across the product that individually didn't have much impact but overall added up to a significant improvement.
There can be all sorts of reasons that specific sites or specific installations might show performance problems that aren't representative of the typical experience. Your specific environment might have some feature (particular hardware, profile data, addons, etc.) that happen to trigger a bad case in some code and so lead to an overall slowdown. Or you might be regularly using a site that happens to do something that's CPU intensive in Firefox but less so in other browsers. This could be a Firefox problem (maybe we implemented a feature using an algorithm with different tradeoffs compared to other browsers and it so happens that everyone avoids the worst case behaviour in Chrome, but not in Firefox, maybe our implementation just has issues that can be fixed), or it could be a site problem (sometimes sites just send buggy, broken code to specific browsers that causes them to use lots of CPU for no reason).
One of the things that was most valuable during the Quantum project was the work to improve the profiling tools. If you can capture a profile using the super-easy-to-use gecko profiler[1] and create a bug with the profile attached it should be possible to figure out what exactly is causing the problem in your case. Without that data it's really hard to make progress because the kind of problem you experience is just not something that would be allowed to ship if it was known.
Whereas on my i5 thinkpad ('14 t430) I had to switch to chrome as my browser, which was annoying, but even on a clean win10 insstall w/ only FF installed, it would peg the cpu hard. Don't know why, as I still use it as my primary browser for my desktop as well as android phone, but ever since Quantum there just seems to be a significant number of systems that are incompatible with firefox.
Oh, and before anyone asks, on the thinkpad the performance issue was still present on a debian stretch install as well.
Just because it works on your system doesn't mean this isn't a bug they need to fix.
One of the actual Firefox processes doing that? On my MBP the problem seems to be plugin-container, or most probably one of the third-party plugins running inside. Which is to say, either Cisco's H.264 codec or Google's video DRM module. `killall plugin-container` helps but also crashes basically all pages requiring video support, requiring reload.
I don't recognize your experience of Firefox in my own.
I use tree style tabs, so I have lots of tabs open - after a cleanup this morning, I still have 26, but 50 to 100 is far from unusual - and it's just as fast as ever to open new tabs. I don't notice the memory usage at all. Sure, browsers are all the biggest hogs - Chrome, Firefox, Slack - but with 16G in my work laptop there's no noticeable difference than with my home machine with 32G.
I don't use Chrome much beyond development testing, but with some features - anything with smooth animations in particular - I see way more CPU usage from it than FF.
I don't use Chrome much beyond development testing, but with some features - anything with smooth animations in particular - I see way more CPU usage from it than FF.
Just to add another data point, this has also been my experience: Firefox since Quantum often pegs CPU cores at 100% when showing pages with even quite simple animations.
The other big trouble area since Quantum seems to be extensions. After various experiments of my own and various discussions online, it seems clear that the machines I use where there are more extensions involved are much less stable and much more vulnerable to problems generally than those with mostly vanilla Firefox installations.
Yeah, one needs to check those extensions one by one for performance problems. My performance problems with Firefox went away when I uninstalled Ghostery a while back.
Firefox is doing a good job about analysing extensions startup performance, but I guess they need to do the same thing for page loads and memory usage. Or integrate the extension functionality into core more.
It seems to me that extensions used to be more integrated and the goal of the new model is, as much as anything, to separate and encapsulate them more. In theory, that should help with security and stability issues.
Unfortunately in practice what's happened so far is that lots of useful little things aren't possible any more because the new API doesn't support them, while extensions are evidently still capable of causing problems with performance and stability anyway.
Hopefully both of these aspects will improve in time. In particular, the emphasis on personalisation and improving the extensions ecosystem in this roadmap is welcome and seems very much in keeping with what a lot of us used to like about Firefox. I hope they really do put their focus there and exercise caution on becoming too "opinionated".
FWIW Firefox does support WebRTC (which is used for web calling), however sites like Meet sometimes filter for Chrome anyway (IIRC Meet may use Chrome-only proprietary features?). Hangouts is now available on Firefox though, after years of waiting for Google to do it.
It seems like the problem is that Google Meet doesn’t support Firefox. Not the other way around. Google’s unwillingness to make Meet work in all browsers really annoys me.
As much as I love FF, this is not true.
Chrome supports VP9, FF/Safari do not.
VP9 is a huge leap ahead of VP8, and Google is not wrong to use it in Meet.
What's more, FF only supports UDP which requires a much less firewalled environment.
On another note, the lack of support for sessions is the real killer for me. And the lack of WebSocket debugging is a big strike against the dev in me.
I use FF as my primary browser, but gotta give credit where it is due.
It supports VP9, but not in WebRTC.
Or at least, not without enabling a flag on each viewers computer[0]. I am running Nightly, and can verify that it is _still_ behind a flag.
I suspect they don't realize how many viewers this costs them, as this has been behind a flag for months already, meanwhile RTC users are being told "We recommend Chrome".
Google should support H.264 as well. The quality is close to VP9 (i.e. most users won’t notice a difference) and the hardware acceleration makes a huge difference on all but the latest systems. Saving a little bandwidth at the expense of going from 10% to 100+% CPU is a net loss, especially for battery powered devices.
Systems from last few years have VP9 encoding too, only AMD is a laggard in this regard (Raven Ridge is the first GPU to support it).
And while we are talking about hardware, it would be nice, if both Chrome and Firefox supported hw accelerated decoding on Linux. Currently, they don't support it at all.
Yes, it’s appearing but it’s not anywhere near a given, especially on corporate and non-gamer systems — exactly the majority of users who don’t care about bandwidth if it means their CPU fans are on high driving a slideshow.
I've been using Firefox as my main browser for years (typically with 30-50 tabs open at any given time) and I never once saw it use more RAM or CPU than Chrome.
> Plus, it does not seem to support web calls at all (Google Meet, BlueJeans, GoToMeeting you name it)
I had many issues with Firefox and Webex. In the end just put it down to Linux or Ghostery plugin rather than Firefox specifically, as I couldn't get it to work with Chromium either.
However, in my experience Firefox does work flawlessly with appear.in
If it's a plugin or such, it may be helpful to make a profile just for that site (about:profiles or -P on command line). I do this for various sites that need different extensions or just that I want to isolate for privacy/security.
I had the opposite experience, some years ago I switched from chrome to ff because certain recursive calls in javascript would lock up the processor and put my computer into an state where manual reboot was the only option.
I had similar issues, but found it was my TreeStyleTabs extensions consuming all of my CPU. When I disabled the extension the issue went away. Could it be an extension that was causing issues?
>I've always loved Firefox. Had to switch to Chrome for stability and resource consumption
Have you tried brave browser ? It was created by Brendan Eich, the co-founder of Mozilla and I'm so happy with Brave browser right now, especially in terms of resource consumption, it's just so slick and fast
At least it works for you, for me Firefox just starts eating gigabytes of RAM when starting up and then finally it stops and maybe becomes usable, but even then, without proper HW acceleration Youtube, WebGL games and kerning are awful.
If anyone has suggestions how I could get all those things fixed it would be really welcome. I'm using an Intel Core 2 6700 with Intel 965Q graphics with 8GB of RAM.
I can’t see your graphics card in the blocklist[1] so I’m not sure why hardware acceleration would be disabled. If you look in about:support is it definitely not working? If you go to about:config and search for ’acceleration’ is anything disabled there?
If none of that works, you could try going back to about:support and click on Refresh Firefox. You’ll lose settings and extensions but it can clear up problematic issues. [2]
I loved Firefox until it lost the plot. They tried to look like a clone of chrome. They removed the status bar because it was "superfluous" and then they integrated the pocket extension. I hope they regain the joy that it caused when I first used it
[Edit] Why the downvotes? I want Firefox to be successful, it just seems to have lost its charm from when it was originally called Phoenix[/Edit]
> Why the downvotes? I want Firefox to be successful, it just seems to have lost its charm from when it was originally called Phoenix
Not sure about the downvotes, either, because I think you have a very good point.
However, I suspect that many people want Firefox to be exactly like Chrome, at least subconsciously. This is of course silly, because what do we win if Firefox becomes a second Chrome? Also, it would mean that Firefox will always lose, because every little difference to Chrome would be considered negative.
On the other hand, it might make tactically sense for Firefox to mimic Chrome for now, to win back the lost users.
In the end, I want Firefox to be clearly different from and better than Chrome.
It's also fair to say that some people subconsciously go well out of their way to treat every vague similarity as part of some broader conspiratorial case that Firefox is trying to clone some other browser in general. Even when the products still ultimately look, feel and behave so differently that it's clearly not the case.
In fact it's painfully obvious that Mozilla isn't at all trying to "clone" Chrome, given that their recent Photon UI design looks less like Chrome than their previous Australis UI, all things considered. Not to mention that even their own Chromium-based products are drastically differently from Chrome, and they've just confirmed in this post that they intend to even move those over to GeckoView.
As such it's a very silly and tiresome argument to hear, and since the rest of the comment didn't seem very interested in having a conversation or adding to the greater discussion, I'm not surprised it would just get downvoted.
I wanted to love Firefox Quantum. At first, it was great. But for whatever reason (likely CPU and RAM as people are describing in this thread), I've discovered that its performance doesn't scale with many tabs as well as Chrome. I've discovered also that when I switch from tab to tab, sometimes the tab needs to reload the page. That's fine. But sometimes, it takes forever to get past a blank white screen on that tab. Sometimes when I open a new tab and try a Google search from the URL bar, same thing. Tried the same URL or same Google search from the URL bar in a new tab in Chrome, absolutely no problem.
> I've discovered also that when I switch from tab to tab, sometimes the tab needs to reload the page.
I believe that should only happen for tabs restored during startup. Unlike Chrome (unless something has changed), Firefox lazy-loads restored tabs on startup. I think that's preferable to the alternative.
Sure, but I said that's fine. My point is that it doesn't load. I wait for minutes, and it doesn't load. Quoting myself:
I've discovered also that when I switch from tab to tab, sometimes the tab needs to reload the page. That's fine. But sometimes, it takes forever to get past a blank white screen on that tab.
My one issue with Firefox right now is CPU use. On my iMac or on desktop it doesn't truly matter. But on a MBP no matter how many tabs I have or what I'm doing the fans never turn on with Chrome. On Firefox they turn on regularly.
I've tested while looking at the activity monitor a bit. Loading random sites like HN show Firefox spiking to 80-90% CPU while Chrome spikes to 20-30%.
I have the same issue on my Linux laptop. It seems like Firefox always maxes out at least one core when loading pages or rendering pages with certain video codecs. I'm guessing Chrome throttles its performance or maybe it's just more performant.
On my 2012 MBA opening HN spikes very briefly to 25%. As others have pointed out, if you're genuinely hitting performance bugs then record a profile and fill a bug report.
How much worse than chrome is firefox actually? I use firefox beta on a 500$ laptop with ubuntu mate and i'm more than satisfied with the speed and general performance. Privacy has been a very hot topic on HN lately (or has always been) and now i see people complaining over silly little things on firefox than make them go back to Chrome. How can we complain for the monopoly of Google Facebook etc, when we can't stand using a very good, competent and open source product that respects our privacy despite some minor bugs? Is firefox really so bad that you're willing to give everything to Google?
Sadly not many mentions of privacy in their roadmap (outside of grouping controls).
Things like "container tab" could allow them to really differentiate from Chrome ...
Did you skim and miss how they plan on blocking intrusive ads and cross-domain tracking/retargeting by default, and improving the existing tracking protection functionality? There are certainly more mentions of privacy than you cite.
One data point: it is not bad at all. I use Firefox as my primary browser(having used chrome on and off for many years) and it works well for almost everything. There are occasional sites that don't behave with ff and for those I go to chrome. Even the andoid version is not bad (the only problem is that is is harder to avoid chrome due to smaller issues with websites).
This feature already out (v59) caught my eye: "When we detect that disk IO may be slow, we send a network request in parallel, and we use the first response that comes back. For users with slow spinning disks and a low latency network, the result would be faster loads".
Wow, the browser is giving up on the OS. What madness given that typical W10 PC's with 2GB RAM (with the disk spinning in vain) have only two apps open: the browser and its adversary, the AV. Heck 4GB isn't comfortable anymore with several tabs open.
The hoops a password manager has to jump through to get halfway decent integration into a browser is basically begging for security vulnerabilities. Seriously, just look at how much JavaScript is riding behind webextensions like LastPass, KeePassRPC, Bitwarden, etc. It's staggering.
I dont have any interest in using Lockbox; I already have a self-hosted open-source password management solution (Bitwarden, in my case, but that's just an implementation detail) that works for much more than just my web browser, which means I'm way more interested in hearing how Mozilla plans to make this kind of integration smoother and less error-prone.
I need to sync passwords for apps on my phone, for desktop apps that aren't web browsers (and for multiple browsers on several platforms), and Mozilla's one-off reinvention of existing software and protocols for their singular use cases is just xkcd'ing the problem, sadly.
For Firefox to gain market share, it needs to target the average Joe, which I think they are trying. But in order to do that, it's not enough to make it work better than Chrome when you have 40 tabs open (less memory and CPU usage), they should also try to have the clean interface that Chrome has, or even cleaner, right after the installation.
Take the toolbar, for example: After installation it has all that unused space on the left and right sides of the address bar. This is probably to encourage customizations to it, but Joe doesn't care about that.
And then there are so many things on the toolbar that shouldn't be there. I think they should be hidden behind the sandwich menu, as the power users will know to add to the toolbar the ones that they need, and Joe wouldn't be overwhelmed by them.
Only these things should be present on the toolbar: back button, forward button, reload button (maybe), a home button - only if a home page was set, a clean omnibar, and the sandwich button.
Instead, even after trying to remove as much as I can from the toolbar, I still have: a non clean omnibar (two icons on its left end that seem to come from different universes, and too many things on it's right end - there should only be a dropdown button for the history at this end) and a more tools button. I counted and in total on the omnibar and the toolbar I have 4 buttons for "more stuff", instead of two (one dropdown for the history and the sandwich menu).
But I do think they are on the right track. I personally switched to Firefox from Chrome less than a year ago, and I'm not going back. Thank you, Mozilla, for all the good work that you did on Firefox!
> But they need to get all videos working. It feels to me that it's a 50:50 chance to play a video.
Videos generally work for me in Firefox. The only videos that don't work for me are from sites that are still (and only) using Flash because I don't have Flash installed.
What's an example of a video that doesn't work for you?
I rarely look at videos on Facebook but all the Twitter videos (or GIFs which they convert to H.264 video) I've seen have worked in Firefox. Do you have a link to a Twitter video that doesn't work for you in Firefox? If these videos are somehow different from normal then I'd find it a useful test case for an application I wrote which makes use of Twitter video.
Does anyone know if WebRender will become available as a crate for other Rust applications to use? I will be working on a text-heavy GUI application later this year and WebRender looks like a good fit feature-wise.
I can't see why they couldn't sync with linux/windows/android as well as storing the entries in OSX keychain.
"run of the mill" is me taking a lazy jab at their description of advantages of Lockbox - they need to make a whole new product just to use the standard cipher/auth you'd expect them to be using anyway? I assume there might be more to it, but their product page doesn't really explain much.
What's interesting is that the Mobile section doesn't mention Firefox for Android at all? Given that both Firefox Klar and Firefox Focus are mentioned, which I thought were different names for the same product, I'm probably misunderstanding something. Anyone who can clear that up for me?
Recent developments have been rather less than encouraging. First of all, gradually the whole of the original/long-term developers for the front-end either got moved to other projects (the iOS browser, other experimental mobile projects, Focus, ...) or left Mozilla, so by the end of 2016 almost nobody was left and most of the front end development was transferred to the Taipei office. There was some initial enthusiasm and activity, but then the same thing happened again - some developers were shifted over to start yet another browser (Firefox Rocket) and after the UI refresh for the 57 update activity started quietening down again.
Then of course this January all mainline Firefox development from the Taipei office ceased completely (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16186927), which has led to the situation that since then, the front-end part of the app hasn't had any active Mozilla developers assigned (!).
There's some minimal staffing to continue looking at bug reports and identifying any real critical issues that still require fixing ASAP with whatever development resources can be scraped together or contracted in, but other than that everything is on standby.
There are some signs that some sort of rewrite might be on the table (although interestingly the roadmap keeps completely quiet about that), but until more is known about that, I tend to be rather pessimistic and assume lots of opportunities for losing or regressing current functionality and it taking ages until things are sorted out again, if ever.
Thanks for the insights, that was exactly what I was hoping for.
It's a shame that the situation seems so dire. I guess I can understand it, since Firefox for Android really is not doing well and Focus seems to be doing a lot better, but it's still a really important part of the Firefox ecosystem, so it would be great if they could find a way to make it work well. But ah well. And perhaps they'll try to turn Focus into its replacement later on.
> Firefox for Android really is not doing well and Focus seems to be doing a lot better
From what public data can be pierced together, Firefox for Android still has more active daily users than Focus's lifetime install count on the Play Store, though.
Klar and Focus are indeed the same thing, something about a trademark dispute in Germany over the name Focus. Whoever wrote the article seems to have been slightly confused about this.
I think Firefox for Android didn't get mentioned just because most of the desktop improvements apply equally to the Android version and they don't have much mobile-specific stuff planned. Meanwhile Focus/Klar is an entirely different codebase that is getting some new features.
Firefox for Android has been using Quantum for some time. It's just that they haven't switched Focus over to using it (it currently uses an Android WebView).
Firefox for Android seems a bit underplayed in general. I'd have thought all this work on parallel processing with Quantum would make a difference in particular with mobile chips.
> Global permissions management: Permission prompts, especially for notifications, have gotten out of control and users must deny them individually at every site that offers them. Firefox will provide users with a way to disable permission prompts globally for Location, Camera, Microphone, and Notifications. (Firefox 59)
THANK YOU! I hope this will stop the notification boxes implemented in JS too. Using the web has become a whack-a-mole game with each website requiring me to tell it off ten times unitl I can get to the content.
I would gladly disable notification prompts. A number of sites I rarely visit show them. There's a reason I visit them rarely, and it's not because I forget to!
But camera and microphone? They seem useful for Skype, Hangouts, and other opt-in use cases. Are people seeing those prompts so much they're annoyed by them? What's the mechanism to opt back in for selected sites?
Notifications are the most frequent offenders, in my experience, and it's followed by the Location one. It seems to me that they'll provide four individual settings one for each permission in order to optionally globally disable the relative one. I don't think it's going to be one button to kill them all though. I'll disable cam, mic and notifications, but I do share my location to some websites very occasionally.
Yeah. But it looks like the way it works is you say "Don't ask again" on e.g. microphone, then there's no good way to deal with some new site where you actually want to use your mic.
I guess the site can detect the permission denial. But making the website show browser-specific instructions for how to disable the global opt-out seems really suboptimal. The browser is where browser-specific specific UI belongs!
Well I hope they'll add a way to whitelist for that. It's unfortunate that we need whitelists and blacklists for everything. As an irrelevant rant, I can say that I miss xombrero so much. It was so nice being able to have all your browser config in a couple files, in plain text. These days I'm waiting to see if the Next browser will become a viable option.
For those curious about the progress of Pathfinder (WebRender's GPU-based font and vector graphics rasterizer), this month's Bay Area Rust meetup featured a talk and live demo from pcwalton: https://air.mozilla.org/rust-bay-area-meet-up-march-2018/
I'm excited for WebAuthentication. That's probably the only thing that will push me to implement something new and significantly valuable for my apps this year based on web platform improvements.
The problem is that there's a buggy u2f library out in the wild distributed by Google that depends on Chrome-specific impl details. This means that while the pref works for sites like Github, it doesn't work for Duo or Google logins or anything that uses u2f.js. Sometimes it doesn't work to the extent that these sites break in other ways. There's nothing that Firefox can do about this; aside from waiting for it to be fixed.
Ultimately the thing that is going to be shipped is probably webauthn.
First sentence in that thread is "Web Authentication is backward compatible with FIDO U2F second-factor tokens, and also supports more advanced capabilities in future FIDO 2.0 devices."
The new Firefox mainly caters to simple users. Mozilla has abandoned their feature rich concept to appeal only to Chrome users.
Mozilla's only goal today is becoming number one in marketshare and beat Google no matter what. Even if that means they alienate every single power user.
I do not at all agree with that. That is a pure simple betrayal - exchanging their origin user base against Chrome users. Opera did that too.
The issue is, there is already an over-simplistic browser - Chrome. And only a minority of Chrome users will switch over to Firefox - the hope to absorb the majority of the Chrome user base will not work out for Mozilla.
They should have kept the features for the nerds and geeks inside. You know, there is something which is called honesty and dignity. This is for what we from Anonymous are standing for and what we are valuing.
And it is disgusting to see that an Open Source organization throws all of that over board just to become mainstream compatible.
I have tried to use Firefox but I keep ending up back on Chrome. It's because I am lazy and I have been sucked into the convience of Google's password manager. Also because many of the developer extensions I use aren't on Firefox (Apollo Dev tools). I think Firefox is great, I should make the switch.
Biggest issue for me switching to Firefox is the DevTools. "Undo" does not work for CSS changes in DevTools! Tried to submit a bug for this but it was misunderstood and dismissed. Hoping this might be fixed by the 3-Panel Inspector...
Can ff really do much about that? Safari is probably getting a better battery life out of your Mac because Apple have a direct incentive to optimise for their own hardware.
Ya, I just switched back to Chrome, because it was unbearable to use Firefox over Chrome without my laptop plugged in (we're talking ~8hrs life down to ~1.5hrs). I really wanted to like Firefox (given its strong privacy)...such a shame.
AFAIK: Servo is an experimental browser with many components, including a web rendering engine. Some parts of Servo already are migrated to Firefox, mostly in the Quantum release last fall.
I recently moved from Chrome to Firefox 57 on both Mobile and Desktop. The only grip i have with it is that i hope it can get a good with device battery as safari is.
Seems like it. But just compare how vocal the "we intend to support vimperator-like functionality" message used to be before version 57, and how silent everything has been since.
I honestly don't remember the actual message from Mozilla varying much over the past two years when it comes to Vimperator-needed APIs. But then I don't remember anyone doing much to get things figured out on that front, so a lack of progress is hardly surprising to me.
Why focus on QUIC when the JS APIs to use it aren't available? Numerous of the features of HTTP/2 aren't usable (i.e. trailers, flow control, security sensitive headers, priority, etc.).
I don't understand how the web is supposed to flourish without giving web developers some kind of access to these tools. Meanwhile, app developers are showered with such goodies.
I'm not sure how you come to this conclusion, or what you mean? As I understand it, QUIC is a transport layer for the HTTP application-level protocol, so I would guess that pretty much all of the JS-exposed APIs are equally applicable.
No easily switchable, fully isolated profiles a-la Chrome, no default zoom support without installing an add on (handy on 4K displays). Epic fail. Better luck next year, Mozilla.
Given how neutral Firefox is I wish they didn't create new stuff when good open community developed alternatives are available. I'm referring to lockbox. It would be better id this was an extension to keepass or a fork that read the same file format
How are you a sucker if you have a rational basis for making the decision? FWIW I switched from Chrome to FF and haven't noticed any major differences.
Tab Groups isn't in v56 either. What you're looking for is actually there, at least most of it:
> More Extension APIs: Firefox extensions will become more capable with additional features for tab management and organization, including a full implementation of Tab Hiding (61)
Once you can hide tabs, you can basically have tab groups.
You're probably better off with v52ESR, it's at least getting maintained with security patches for another few months. FF61 should enable the Tab Groups addon to return in June (release of the tab hiding API), v52 is maintained until August.
I use to try everything available to group tabs regardless of browser. They all had their issues.
Eventually I just went with keeping things in their own browser window. With multiple monitors or a screen big enough to have separate windows the dragging and dropping of tabs works fine.
Then the issue becomes that you cant save tab groups :(
You can even use multiple browsers if they do something useful for a type of group. History and bookmarking becomes even more mysterious that way.
The extensions I used to save groups are all broken atm.
Thanks, I'm glad somebody's working on it. Now I need to check if the rest of my addons are up to snuff (last time FoxyProxy update for Quantum was completely unusable and forgot my carefully maintained whitelist).
Filter certain types of ads by default: Firefox will offer users a simple ad filtering option. We're in the early stages still, researching types of advertisements that should be blocked by default. (Q3)
Come on, do the right thing for once and put the user first.
There ARE some types of non-intrusive ads (read: unnoticed unless specifically searched for) like little ribbons with text and maybe a link, like on [Troy Hunts blog](https://www.troyhunt.com/) or small non-animated banners like the ones on StackOverflow.
The ones everyone (except the ad networks) wants blocked by default are the intrusive ones, like video ads auto-playing loud BS or the ones where you scroll or move the cursor and some <div> or something pops up, darkens the rest of the site and annoys the reader with some pathetic bid to "subscribe to our page" etc.
I completely disagree, non-intrusive ('acceptable' etc) ads don't exist, no matter how hard this concept is pushed, period.
Nevertheless, pretending Mozilla is not receiving funds from Google (who is already trying to force their standards through Chrome / Coalition for Better Ads) is intellectually dishonest.
Block all ads, let the user white list, that is the pro user approach. Should have been done years ago.
I remember when it used to look like a nice, compact native dialog box* instead of a full-screen, space-wasting abomination that follows no standards for anything.
But consistency, visual coherency, discoverability and predictability are apparently all outmoded concepts in UI design, so opinions like mine -- that native applications should look and feel like native applications -- don't seem to be worth much among the cool crowd nowadays.
I disagree with you on this particular point, but in a wider scope I think you're spot on - it seems so little thought is given to the very basics of UI design.
I've just opened preferences and I don't see much improvement. It's a page now, and there's less stuff, but it's what I had 15 years ago. Anyway, I still have to go to about:preferences all the time.
I totally dislike their experiments with menu bar. I never wanted that. It's Ribbon all over again.
I might have said that Preferences was much the same as ever, for most practical purposes, with only comparatively minor improvements; but one thing particularly stands out as a massive improvement: the search box. Now I don’t need to know where what I want to tweak is, if only I know what to search for, which I pretty much always do.
I didn't find any UI improvements in the roadmap, other than password manager. I also remember that password manager was added to Opera browser around 2000. It wasn't a great sucess since nobody figured out how that's different from regular "remember password".
Noticeable visible differences included page-load performance as well as a smaller memory footprint relative to Chrome.
Faster WebAssembly[0] starting from v58.0 made the speed optimization more visible -- it was at this point when I truly fell in love with the browser -- Firefox dethroned Chrome as my default. Add to this the hardened tracking protection, Greasemonkey's super massive stash of user scripts and values of the non-profit organization that supports the browser -- Chrome felt so old-school.
[0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/making-webassembly-even-fa...