theduality 2017-11-13 14:52 UTC link

I have been using 57 in beta, and I have to say, I'm impressed. It is a huge improvement. Whether it keeps me off Chrome in the future remains to be seen though!

m_st 2017-11-13 15:47 UTC link

I switched from Chrome to Firefox 57 beta and couldn't be happier. Only issue so far was the ugly black title bar on the Mac, but switching to the integrated 'Light' theme fixed that. Too bad 'Light' isn't the default on macOS.

Also note their updated Firefox on iOS. It looks and works just fine now and comes with Firefox Sync which gives you access to your tabs, bookmarks and history.

mattmanser 2017-11-13 15:47 UTC link

Serious question, is this too little too late?

Firefox has taken a massive nosedive in the last few years, in the UK at least. My two big clients have them on less than 2% share.

Just checked one, 5 years ago they had 9.55% share, today it's 1.8%. Even taking into account the growth of mobile, that's dire.

Touche 2017-11-13 15:59 UTC link

Am I the only one that is confused by Firefox's "fast again" narrative? I remember that they launched the https://arewefastyet.com/ site a few years ago to fight the idea that FF was slow. It feels like there's a new blog post that essentially says the same thing "we're fast now" every couple of months.

So I find this all confusing. Am I just remembering incorrectly, or haven't they already declared "we're as fast as Chrome now" several times in the past. Were those lies/incorrect? Or again, am I remembering incorrectly. Can someone explain this?

mapgrep 2017-11-13 16:04 UTC link

I switched back to Firefox 54 from Chrome when multiprocess browsing ("Electrolysis") came out of beta. It's been absolutely great. It's fast and I trust and like the nonprofit behind it. And all the extensions I care about are available.

My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account, and just generally wanting less dependence on Google. I also like that Firefox has a built in tracking protection (not just Do Not Track toggle but actual blocking of trackers). That's something that's just not in Google's interest to put in Chrome.

Browsers are becoming more and more aggressive in protecting the interests of users. Becoming true "User Agents," in other words. See also Safari iOS allowing content blockers and now in iOS 11 blocking some popular tracking behaviors by default. It's absolutely great. And it's not surprising to me that Chrome is not a leader here. It's owned by the biggest advertising company on the internet. I predict Chrome will continue to lag on pro-privacy, anti-nag features.

jacek 2017-11-13 16:05 UTC link

Stable Firefox 57.0 is already available on Mozilla's FTP server: https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/57.0/

I am already using it, but had to reinstall uBlock Origin.

shadowtree 2017-11-13 16:11 UTC link

Been using FF consistently on OSX the last years, the improvements are really great - Kudos!

The various channels, like Quantum to stay on Beta, seem to have worked. Easy to understand as a user and hopefully helpful for the devs to gather important info. Plus a native dark theme, yay!

One thing that remains is performance of Youtube. For some reason HD videos start crushing the processor after a while. Chrome, Safari stay calm.

dogprez 2017-11-13 16:33 UTC link

Somewhat tangentially, I really like the cartoons Lin has made. I’ve found I’ve naturally anthropomorphized code. Often when I start working with someone new they get confused when I start talking about constructs like people. I think it’s given me a different perspective on encapsulation and concurrency than most people.

I don’t know if I’ve ever worked with someone that thinks the same way. When I work on code that wasn’t designed that way I force my brain to think like the CPU instead of in terms of little elves with different job... Not sure if anyone else has experienced this 2 modes of thinking about code. It seems like FF engineer’s might be thinking in the same terms as they tackle concurrency refactors.

ArmandGrillet 2017-11-13 17:03 UTC link

I just installed Firefox 57 (thanks jacek for the link) and the first things I noticed are:

- The cross to close a tab and the one to create a tab are aligned in a weird way.

- Opening a tab is laggy (I'm on a MBP with an Intel Iris chip and 16GB of RAM).

- The scrolling still does not feel native (I'm on macOS High Sierra).

I'm very impressed by the work that has been done for this release as a dev but this does not give me a great first impression as a user (I haven't used Firefox these past 5 years). Google Chrome since its Material UI redesign (https://medium.com/google-design/redesigning-chrome-desktop-...) is snappy and has a clean UI, I hope that Firefox will also reach this point.

Anyway, this release is a major achievement. Congrats to the contributors!

balajics 2017-11-13 17:14 UTC link

Using 57 for few days, speed improvements are impressive.

But two things which is going to stop me from complete switch. 1. There is no native websocket inspector. websocket-monitor[0] add-on which supported websocket inspection is not compatible with quantum. Really wish they speed up native support development[1] 2. Double tap zoom really makes it easy to find UI issues. Really wish it get implemented in firefox too.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/websocket-mon... [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885508

have_faith 2017-11-13 17:18 UTC link

I can't remember the last time I thought about how "fast" a browser is except for edge cases like complex WebGL stuff.

I don't think focusing on speed will plug the gap of users leaving for other browsers except for the minority of us on HN. I can't remember the last time a non-technical person I know complained about browser speed beyond a website itself being slow.

millstone 2017-11-13 17:22 UTC link

I tried Firefox 57 hoping to like it, and I found it's still too alien feeling on the Mac. The scroll bar looks, behaves, and animates differently. Text selection looks and behaves differently. Even the cursor blinks differently. It feels out-of-place.

I wish there were a community effort to build a true native Firefox version, instead of trying to recreate standard Mac behaviors.

alkonaut 2017-11-13 17:38 UTC link

Are Google doing anything along the lines of Servo/WebRender etc?

I'm assuming the Chrome code suffers from the same issues the FF did/does: you simply don't shoehorn in shared memory concurrency in some nontrivial piece of C++ code.

Mozilla threw some serious research and time at the problem. Is Google doing that too? Or are they confident enough that Chrome will be fast enough in the future without major architectural refactoring?

beemboy 2017-11-13 19:17 UTC link

I can still remember:

* that moment I was overjoyed to use Lynx over dialup in South India back in the mid-90s allowing me to browse the World Wide Web!

* ...And then that moment being surpassed when I wet myself running the Netscape "GUI browser" on Windows 95 using a brilliant hack by a pair of brothers I knew that wrote a winsock.dll shim on top of Lynx over dialup (called Blue Laser; those guys went on to become CS PhDs doing microprocessor research)

* ...And then that moment being surpassed when IE4 came out in '97 and I couldn't imagine what a faster browser could be or do.

* ...And then that moment when FF 1 came out in '04 and I thought this is incredible, Netscape is alive!! and kicked IE's a55 and me thinking the "browser wars" are over

* ...And then that moment when Google Chrome came out and I went "who needs another browser??" and then switching wholesale to it in short order

* ...Many moments in between thinking "Wow, the browser wars really are over in my lifetime"

* ...And that moment 2 weeks ago when I installed Firefox Quantum beta (Firefox??) and went "Holy crap, this thing is FAST!" and then switched all my browsers everywhere to it. To a beta browser.

It sure is a good time to be a nerd.

Keep up the great work moz://a

PS - edited to reformat

JepZ 2017-11-13 20:07 UTC link

I hope it will not take too long until FF gets hardware acceleration for videos on Linux (VAAPI/VDPAU). A few days ago I installed Arch Linux on a Netbook and was shocked to see that FF still doesn't have hardware acceleration for videos (VDPAU exists since 2008).

Some might say this is not much of an issue as most modern CPUs can handle 1080p, but actually pre-Ryzen AMD CPUs are too slow and power saving Intel CPUs Laptops are too slow too. So the only excuse might be, that nobody uses that open source OS, but especially from Mozilla I would not expect such an attitude towards open source software.

SadWebDeveloper 2017-11-13 20:10 UTC link

> This is the opportunity that the Chrome engineers foresaw. We saw it too, but we had a bumpier path to get there. Since we had an existing code base we needed to plan for how to split up that code base to take advantage of multiple cores

The "bumpier path" is that they removed XUL-based/legacy addons, only chrome-like addons (aka WebExtensions) are now supported on FF57. Personally i still have some extensions that are marked as Legacy, mainly for web development so m going be slightly affected with this release, i hope the performance gains are worth it.

nikisweeting 2017-11-13 20:54 UTC link

There are so many Firefox features that I love, and Mozilla is an awesome company that I want to support, but Safari and even Chrome are both still significantly faster than Quantum on my Mac.

Even with 50+ tabs open in Chrome, it still loads uncached pages 2-3 seconds faster than FF Quantum, with fewer flashes of unstyled content as well.

I had high hopes for this refactor, but it looks like I'll have to wait to switch browsers until the speed really beats Chrome.

esturk 2017-11-13 21:05 UTC link

One thing I particularly like about the Mozilla Devtool is that when I highlight an element, I can see the horizontal and vertical lines that extend beyond the element box model which is great to see if other items are leveled with the one selected. Does anyone know if this is supported in Chrome or might there be an extension that can reproduce this functionality?

Symmetry 2017-11-13 21:38 UTC link

A question as I consider moving to Firefox. On Chrome I've set my search engine keywoards so I can open a new tab and type "w foo" to search Wikipedia for "foo". And similar things for DuckDuckGo, Hoogle, Amazon, etc. On Firefox I can do something similar if i'm willing to click on a small icon rather than hitting enter or move to the search bar with ctrl-k, type my term, then press tab a bunch of times to select the right engine. Is there any good extension to give Firefox Chrome's ergonomics here?

dom96 2017-11-13 22:03 UTC link

For those, like myself, that were thinking "huh, I haven't seen any noticeable differences" when reading the article/comments: FF 57 is the version you want and it is officially releasing tomorrow.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/quantum/

mariusmg 2017-11-13 15:28 UTC link

Why shouldn't it keep you away from Chrome ? It's faster, uses less memory, and the "maker", Mozilla is more trustworthy compared with Google.

What's missing ?

agumonkey 2017-11-13 15:47 UTC link

Similar conclusion here. So far I stopped using Chrome (stable or canary). I do miss it, Firefox Nightly (as I mention in other threads) have responsiveness issues a bit too much even for average websites (no video, no webgl, no audio) and I know that chrome doesn't suffer from that. But so far I'm still using Firefox for a few weeks.

Few things that I do prefer in Firefox:

- bookmarks with tags

- nightly/testmode snooze tabs. Wonderful idea

- reader view (not sure if chrome has that out of the box nowadays)

I don't use containers even though they seem lovely

robin_reala 2017-11-13 15:49 UTC link

I’m using Firefox on iOS fulltime now, as in the last couple of releases ad blockers and 1Password have gained support.

frostwhale 2017-11-13 15:49 UTC link

Firefox is about more than market share. A state of the art free non for profit browser makes the market much more competitive and better for the consumer. They are there to keep chrome/ other browsers honest. If chrome / google does something too corporate you don't like, there's an alternative.

robin_reala 2017-11-13 16:00 UTC link

That wasn’t a marketing site, it was a tracker to measure the increase in performance over time due to the ongoing work the newly-spun-up performance team was doing.

JohnTHaller 2017-11-13 16:01 UTC link

There have been multiple separate initiatives over the years to speed up various aspects of Firefox. The largest one is culminating in the release of Firefox Quantum, which is launching as Firefox 57 tomorrow. You've heard this more lately as the Quantum version of Firefox was released to Nightly and then Beta/Developer channels over the past couple months.

sushibowl 2017-11-13 16:06 UTC link

> Am I just remembering incorrectly, or haven't they already declared "we're as fast as Chrome now" several times in the past.

https://arewefastyet.com/ refers specifically and only to Firefox's javascript engine. It runs js benchmarks only, not whole websites, and doesn't test responsiveness or rendering performance.

Javascript performance in firefox has been on par with competing browsers for a while now. The current initiative, called Quantum, is complementary to this effort. It is supposed to make the rest of the browser components fast, using among other things a new renderer, a CSS styling engine, and multiprocessing support.

eitland 2017-11-13 16:13 UTC link

Depends a bit: if devs switch back I'd say definitely.

If devs are ready to repeat the IE 6 story, this time with Chrome.

Getting companies to do cross browser testing seems hard even if it it should be simpler than ever before.. :-/

nerdwaller 2017-11-13 17:00 UTC link

I've been on Firefox since I can remember it being out, but the latest versions, 56+, have me using it only intermittently due to battery drain issues on Mac[0] :(. I am really hoping they get this fixed shortly.

[0]https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042

weihanglo 2017-11-13 17:01 UTC link

I thought it is a translucent title bar. At least in Firefox Nightly 59 it is.

darrmit 2017-11-13 17:10 UTC link

Thanks for this. Was waiting patiently for the push this week after getting tired of Nightly builds.

Paul-ish 2017-11-13 17:16 UTC link

Percentage of total users is deceptive in some ways. The absolute number of FF users can stay the same, or even rise, and their % share can decline. It is absolute number of users that impacts the deals they can make. That's not to say a larger % wouldn't be good for FF.

konart 2017-11-13 17:23 UTC link

>ugly black title bar

One of the best thins in the new FF to me though (also macos). I still hope apple will to something to their gray ui. I'd love to have dark theme for the ui, not only for menubar and dock.

andrew3726 2017-11-13 17:31 UTC link

Well, for me at least, I always recognize if a button click/UI interaction doesn't force a visible and immediate UI response. That's one of the main reasons why I switched a couple of years to Chromium and now back to Firefox. It really responds fast. I totally agree that there were _very_ few instances where I noticed a rendering time difference.

e40 2017-11-13 17:34 UTC link

The signing into an account in chrome is the killer feature for me. I have work and a couple of personal accounts that I have signed in in different browser windows. That allows me to keep things separate (extensions, mail, browsing, bookmarks, etc).

How do FF users do this?

mxuribe 2017-11-13 17:38 UTC link

You are not alone in your way of thinking!

Also, I had never previously seen the code cartoons produced by @linclark...but now seeing them (and digging a little deeper), count myself a fan!

asdgkknio 2017-11-13 17:39 UTC link

I'm confused by it, too. The main reason I've preferred Firefox to Chrome for years has been performance. It's pretty much the same in responsiveness and uses far less memory.

Chrome being the fastest browser is ancient history.

a_imho 2017-11-13 17:54 UTC link

Are you using a vanilla browser or do you have a content blocker installed perhaps? There is a very noticeable difference in load times and I would definitely consider the former 'slow'.

I agree though, that rendering performance is not the bottleneck of the browsing experience.

catamorphismic 2017-11-13 18:04 UTC link

That's weird, Firefox feels much snappier than Chrome to me. It also uses significantly less memory.

wpietri 2017-11-13 18:08 UTC link

Performance is a Red Queen problem. [1] People keep expecting more from computers. On the web, pages keep getting bigger and more complicated. Firefox's competition isn't going to stop trying to improve performance, and people's baseline for "fast" will mainly be other things they use. If Mozilla isn't always trying to be faster, they're going to be getting slower.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis

bjterry 2017-11-13 18:14 UTC link

It also feels laggy to me. It's weird given the reports of all these other users. I am also using a 16GB Ram, Intel Iris MBP. There is a noticeable pause while switching tabs, and there is a very noticeable lag while typing (for example in this box). Pages do seem to render fast, but it feels very laggy in terms of user interaction.

Edit: The scrolling is also very laggy, which I forgot to mention, much more so than Chrome.

grigory 2017-11-13 18:28 UTC link

When I explain various aspects of concurrency and multi-threaded programming to non-programmers, using analogy of people doing some tasks really helps.

I've picked this up from Feynman's lectures on computing - highly recommend them!

whatever_dude 2017-11-13 18:31 UTC link

I feel I've always done that because I learned programming through Usborne's books, and her work reminds me of that. Usborne books helped me grok difficult things very fast when I was about 10 years old. For a while, when using variables and arrays, I would always think of robots grabbing things from shelves.

Examples and PDF downloads (!): https://boingboing.net/2016/02/07/usborne-releases-free-pdfs...

I wish those were still around when I was learning about pointers. Would have made things so much easier!

bowlich 2017-11-13 18:33 UTC link

Latest one seems like it has a memory leak on linux. Starts off fast, but I've found that I need to close out all of Firefox about once a day. Not sure if that's the vanilla build, or the multi-account containers extension that's causing the issue.

snikeris 2017-11-13 18:48 UTC link

Didn't Djikstra write about this? I wasn't able to pull anything up, but maybe this will jog someone's memory.

callahad 2017-11-13 19:00 UTC link

If you set your screen resolution to "default for display" in System Preferences, does the scrolling feel closer to native?

kristofferR 2017-11-13 19:41 UTC link

Camino used to be exactly that: https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/7548/camino

on_and_off 2017-11-13 19:43 UTC link

>My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account, and just generally wanting less dependence on Google

One thing they have been doing very well is allowing history to sync between multiple devices on different OSes.

Right now I use Chrome everywhere because :

- It feels pretty fast (I still have to try the new FF)

- Any replacement needs to come with an extension covering this feature and working across all my OSes.

_frog 2017-11-13 19:55 UTC link

The scrolling thing is a real shame, and it’s shocking to me that they haven’t implemented bouncy overscrolling when macOS has had it for something like 6 years.

tspike 2017-11-13 20:01 UTC link

Thanks for the reminder. I just downloaded the latest FF beta and exiled Chrome to an "only when needed" role.

All the back-and-forth about speed and features is understandable, but misses the point that Firefox needs our support if we are to have any real non-proprietary options for what is quickly becoming the base system abstraction layer for most computing.

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