I'm guessing this will be fixed in a few days as people upgrade internally. So far, other than looking ugly, it doesn't seem to be causing any other problems.
Are you kidding? It's like "Blackberry is better than iPhone once again, finally losing the keyboard".
The main and only distinctive feature of Firefox was programmability (XUL, XPCOM), and now it's gone. There are forks like PaleMoon and Waterfox though but for how long.
Firefox had to take that app-platform niche (thanks to XUL, XPCOM) that now occupies Electron, but failed on that chasing after Chrome.
No, it’s not like that at all. Firefox’s performance, memory usage, and UI all far outstrip Chrome’s in my browsing now; I don’t see any reason to use Chrome apart from the usual cross-browser testing, and it’s been that way for a year (?) now.
(And Firefox “forks” have always been a very good way to be behind on security patches to no benefit.)
I have switched from Tree Style Tabs to the Test Pilot vertical tab extension (I don't remember the exact name) plus the about:config option that makes them always small, plus a few lines of userChrome.css to make the close button larger, like it was in one of the first versions. I recommend it.
Not sure if parent means this, but Vivaldi can do vertical tabs. But no idea if that is as powerful/flexible as Tree Style Tabs on Firefox. Probably not...
It works now on Firefox Developer Edition 57.0b3 (64-bit), macOS High Sierra. It took me a while to figure out that one needs to activate it by clicking one of the icons at the top.
Edit: This was a really bad idea because upgrading to 57 destroyed my sessionstore.js. None of the backups were up-to-date for some reason. Be careful and make backups!
I'm just about to upgrade from 55 to either the Beta or Developer edition and was worried about this so thanks for the heads up! I probably would have anyways but now I'll be extra sure to back up my profiles first.
yep. I don't know if it will cleanly update; so it may lose your settings.
(Webextension ports have to spend one release in "hybrid" mode where they'r a webextension wrapped in a legacy extension shell to port settings correctly)
In addition to nightly builds of TST, there's also an alternative called Tab Tree that works with 57 and is available right from the official Add-ons site:
Yeah, I agree. And it's a shame, because it looks like these features are coming to web extensions (e.g. see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1384515 which tracks the api needed for "tab groups"). It just won't be there for launch.
Yes, it's a real shame that it seems like they don't even care about extensions anymore, and therefore forces me to stay on the older versions and miss out on the new and welcome improvements. I'd be more ok with their switch to web extensions if they had included more powerful API:s, even if they're not available in other browsers.
My developer edition recently got upgraded to 57, and Greasemonkey stopped working. Reading what the developer writes it seems as they are going to rewrite the whole extension from scratch, with a lot of the functionality left out because it's no longer possible to do.
If they hadn't deprecated the old extensions yet, the newest version would be pretty much the same as using the old version. This way, some people who don't rely on those extensions (I believe half of the users don't even run an extension at all?) can benefit from those improvements now, and you'll be able to do so later.
That's not true, the legacy extensions kept working w/ the project quantum stuff until mozilla broke completely unrelated stuff. E.g. Greasemonkey only broke because they renamed (not removed) a few things.
And yet here it is, available and working as a WebExtension more than a month before legacy add-ons go away. The process may look opaque, but as far as results, I'm really not sure what more you want?
We moved to WebExtensions specifically to fix the problem of constant breakage. Sure, it adds a layer of abstraction, but there's finally an explicit interface that we can commit to supporting. The legacy APIs were a monkeypatching free-for-all that prevented us from landing even minor improvements or refactors for fear of potentially breaking some add-on somewhere. Now that we have that interface, we can refactor without breaking add-ons.
Regarding 3, no they couldn't have. You're vastly overestimating how many people use it. I've seen 1 person using it, and I work in IT. Outside of IT the percentage is probably smaller...
I guess the reasoning is that there's still an Extended Support Release that is supported for quite a while still, which still supports the extension mechanism. If you really still need a specific extension, you can keep using that - and then once there's a new ESR, hopefully the extension will be available.
I get 35.82 on Safari 11 on El Capitan. What is your hardware? I wonder if I'm slower because I'm on older hardware, because I'm on an older version of OS X, or both?
My hardware is a Mac Pro (Early 2009), 2.66 GHz quad core Xeon, 32 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC RAM, GeForce GT 120 512 MB.
I also for comparison gave it a shot on my Surface Pro 4 (Core i7, 2.2 GHz, 16 GB RAM, Intel Iris 540 GPU).
Here are the results for Chrome 60.0.3112.113. Since I was running on battery I tried this at various power mode settings. Here are the results for Chrome 60.0.3112.113 arranged by power mode setting:
70.18 Best performance
69.61 Best performance (2nd time)
68.03 Better performance
50.84 Recommended
41.33 Battery saver
There are two runs of "Best performance" because I did the tests in the order best, better, recommended, battery saver, and so all but the first may have benefited from caching from the previous. I ran best again after finishing battery saver to get a run of best that would have the same caching benefit the other may have received.
For Firefox 57.0b3 I get:
54.34 Best performance
58.91 Best performance (2nd time)
57.91 Better performance
40.51 Recommended
34.28 Battery saver
Couldn't the minor speed differences in the comparison video [1] in the post be attributed to the variable latencies of server responses? Or is that accounted for somehow?
I so wanted to use the new Firefox and switch from safari. I searched and was excited to learn there was an extension for integration with keychain on mac only to learn that it was no longer supported :(
I understand the push behind web extensions but I don't think there will ever be a keychain integration addon now.
(The webextension might be in beta? When I installed it a month ago it was in "beta" and had to be installed directly from their site, idk if they've uploaded it to the store yet)
Something like Keychain support seems high-risk to leave to third party addons? In the back of my mind I wonder if they'll also follow the Chrome model of malware takeovers.
Firefox, I love you, but you and my 15" rMBP (with 4k Dell external monitor) simply don't get along:
https://i.imgur.com/rByz7zS.png
I don't what causes this, but in the last 2 years it's gotten worse and with Quantum the CPU usage is even higher. Chrome and Safari don't have this issue.
I had the same problem from time to time when a Google search result page was open. Closing it made everything normal again. It'd be interesting to know if that was only me or if others have the same problem.
I wonder if MacOS just isn't that much of a priority for Firefox? Popular but heavy sites like Facebook perform quite poorly relative to Chrome on my (admittedly quite old) early 2013 MBP, but the difference seems to vanish under Linux or Windows.
I'd love to switch to Firefox, I'm not that keen to be running a browser made by a gargantuan advertising agency.
I would love to hear from others who have this problem too. In fact I have a 15" MBP and a 4k Dell monitor at work so when I get back next week I will test it too.
If the issue is as bad as it looks like in that screenshot, the performance profiler should be able to spot what's happening easily. Take a look at https://perf-html.io/
I'm convinced it's because of CSS animations / transitions. Firefox seems to be doing just fine loading static sites like HN. Stripe.com however seems to be Firefox worst nightmare.
Yeah, it's really weird that you STILL have to force enable it through about:config. Come on Mozilla… Mesa 17 has arguably the best OpenGL implementation ever.
I also have very poor performance with my 2015 rMBP and external Dell 4K display, but it's almost as bad without the display.
Although performance is greatly improved (and, seriously, the developers should be proud of the progress), there's still a lot of work to be done. There's significant lag in even non-network UI (e.g., highlighting the row under the cursor in about:config lags behind the mouse cursor by almost a second).
As much respect as I have for the developers for this progress, I still can't really use software that makes me feel like I'm intoxicated.
Quantum has been broken for me for at least a month. Everytime I click on the right mouse button it goes to the previous page. It never happened on any browser before including Firefox.
As someone that jumped ship from how slow Chrome has gotten and went to Nightly /w Stylo and (CPU threads - 1) e10s processes enabled about 2 monthsish ago...
Holy damn Firefox is actually fast.
Fair comparison, both having Pocket, uBlock, Evernote, OneNote, Pushbullet, and Bitwarden; neither of them having an extension the other doesn't. Above described Firefox Nightly config vs Chrome Dev.
Test machines are a workstation with a i7-4771 @ 3.9ghz, 32GB DDR3-2133, Radeon 7970 with a trio of 1080p screens (a very fast modern machine from the Haswell era) and a laptop with a i5-32120M, 8GB of DDR3-1600, Intel HD4000 iGPU feeding a 13" 2560x1600 @ 200% hidpi (an Ivy Bridge era MBPr 13" Late 2012). Both machines run Win10.
Both machines have less real world wait on Firefox than Chrome, and the interface has less latency between when I do something and it even begins processing the request. Also, under a ton of windows and tabs, Firefox seems to use less RAM and the speed gap seems to widen.
I don't care about about artificial benchmarks, btw, they never seem to measure what actually makes browsers slower for humans.
Edit: Even though I just said I don't care about benchmarks, using Speedometer 2.0-r2216: On the workstation: Firefox 58.0a1 2017-09-26 64bit 61.18 vs Chrome 63.0.3217.0 dev 64-bit 51.67; on the laptop, same versions: Firefox 28.58 vs Chrome 26.74
So, arguably, flat out benchmarkable performance is the same, with Firefox just slightly edging ahead (18% and 6% faster). It isn't enough to explain how fast Firefox feels now.
Edit 2: And now with Edge 40.15063.0.0/EdgeHTML 15.15063: Workstation, 46.72; Laptop 21.37. Firefox is 34% and 31% faster, Chrome is 25% and 11% faster.
This is one of the things which really slows Firefox down for me. I often found in the past I had to blow away chunks of Sqlite in my profile to get back to a decent speed.
Re: touchpad scrolling, make sure you disable "smooth" (animated) scrolling and enable precise scrolling; on Linux this requires setting MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 in the environment.
Everything feels 10 times faster without smooth scrolling, while I have to say that the nightly already felt blazing fast _with_ smooth scrolling, haha.
I just wanted to say, that it isn't the first news about Firefox getting faster since Chrome came out.
I tried the new versions every now and then and Chrome always felt faster to me. Maybe it really is, maybe it just uses some perceptional tricks, I don'T know.
Firefox really has been slowly getting faster for a while; especially with Firefox 54, I no longer felt as if I was taking a significant performance hit as the price for not using Chrome. Firefox 55 got even a bit faster, but still was not quite as fast as Chrome. However, the recent changes in Nightly (Firefox 57), which now landed in the developer edition, really was a huge leap forward in performance.
Did you try current stable firefox or Developer edition or Nightly edition?
If I understand correctly, the photon changes haven't landed on current stable firefox yet. They have just landed in Developer edition. So you might want to give it (or nightly edition) a try.
Mozilla is experimenting with which default is preferred by fresh install users right now, so users on this thread may have different initial defaults. I don't think that there are plans to change the default for existing users.
How? I was looking for this last week and couldn't find any settings that worked. Nothing relevant in about:config, and the toolbar customization shows the search bar there until I close customization.
Go to customize mode and hover your mouse pointer on the search bar. You'll notice that your mouse pointer turns into a hand, then just drag the search bar and drop it into the center of the screen (blank space).
Chrome has a bunch of bugs related to font-rendering on Windows, e.g. https://crbug.com/414307. I'm not sure why switching to DirectWrite didn't just fix these bugs, but subjectively appearance-wise on Windows, Firefox > Edge > Chrome.
Was it nightly? I was in the same boat with the standard release, everytime I tried it it felt sluggish. Then I tried nightly and all I can say is wow, no.other browser is as snappy as FF nightly
I'd like to see the same comparison on a Mac. The Windows version of Firefox has been close to Chrome performance for a while. The Mac version has been significantly slower.
I've been using Firefox Nightly (57) for a while on a 2013 MBP running Sierra. Firefox definitely feels significantly faster than it used to, and the new UI is great.
But this comes at the cost of battery life. I moved back to Chrome because it was constantly chewing CPU.
+1 for the significantly improved performance on Firefox on OSX (I'm on a 2015 MBP), not just in the current 57 nightly, but since Firefox 55 came out.
Yep, switched to FF from Chromium since 54/55 when multi-threaded tabs became default. Don't need to restart once in a while when Chromium has eaten up all the RAM. The extension support is just as good, and some of the labs features are very interesting.
But Chrome is also guilty of absolutely guzzling battery. I always try other browsers on macOS but in the end keep switching back to Safari because it easily gets me ~2-3h more battery life. This means that on 10h average battery life you'd pay a ~20-33% battery life premium just to run a different browser. At that point, finding replacement Safari extensions is well worth the bother.
What I don't understand: why is it that other browsers don't put battery life before all else? We live in a portable world after all..
I switch to Safari when on battery. But the cost is pretty high - it's the only browser I have on my mac that I find actively unreliable, and the feeble range of available extensions makes it seem crippled compared to Firefox or Chrome
Not sure whether this would be borne out on later Macs but this seems to confirm my anecdotal experience on my Mac in the last few days, even since 57 came out.
I had to switch back to Chrome since Firefox has been almost unusable on mainstream site like Netflix.
Can't wait to go back to Firefox as soon as 57 is out!
Switch to Bitwarden, already has a WebExtension extension. Lastpass is basically dead ever since LogMeIn proved they don't care about security of the vault.
There is no good comparison website I'm aware of, but Bitwarden ticks every box Lastpass does, and is already working on ticking boxes Lastpass doesn't.
Yes, it does. Source: I just switched hours ago and it imported my CCs from LastPass. You can see the stuff they're working on via their Twitter account too.
Thanks for mentioning Bitwarden. I didn't know about them, but I've had the same concerns about Laspass/Logmein. Yubikey functionality is important to me, which many alternatives don't have, but I see Bitwarden does have that. Their GPL v3 license on all of their software is nice to see too.
Seems 2FA (YubiKey) costs 10 USD/year instead of 24 USD/year which LastPass costs.
I've been looking for a recent feature comparison, the Wikipedia one is rather shallow and incomplete [1] [2].
My (incomplete) take on feature comparison:
Both are relatively cross-platform, widely supported by what I consider status quo platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, Chrome, Firefox).
Advantages of Bitwarden are open source and public development, approx half the price (and approx same as Lastpass before purchased by Logmein), and the ability to self-host.
Advantages of Lastpass are different login for accessing to account and decrypting database. This is important because without this, a MITM attack gets access to the master password.
I also found the announcement of Bitwarden, approx 1 year old now, on HN [3]. It includes some feedback about the software. Bitwarden uses AES256-CBC. How secure is AES256-CBC in this case, and what does Lastpass use? Another criticism is usage of Google Analytics. This can be disabled in the application, but I don't feel it serves a purpose for the user. It should never have been included in the first place. I also don't think either software is audited.
I'm a quite happy user of KeepPassXC as my password manager. I seriously dislike how LastPass stores the passwords on their servers. And KeepPassXC is open source and actively developed.
I've become a big fan of "The Great Suspender" extension since I am always opening new tabs in the background and may not get around to them until hours -- or sometimes days! -- later.
On Chrome I presume? Not available on FF, and afaik FF doesn't even support unloading tabs (actually unloading from memory rather than making it appear that way but still consuming the memory).
Here's mine (fx55): http://i.cubeupload.com/AvH2Cc.png
profile1: 6 windows, ~900 tabs; profile2: 2 windows, ~300 tabs.
cold start takes about 2 minutes (on nvme ssd), next are slightly better.
Startup time improvements were supposed to be in 55, right?
I used Firefox Focus on my Pixel for a few weeks and was blown away by how fast it was. The mobile web went from borderline unusable to borderline pleasant with it, I imagine largely due to its tracking and limited ad blocking. Sadly, I migrated back to Chrome because anything that needs to work with Google login or opening an app simply doesn't work. This causes issues with a lot of things I use.
I feel like I'm being ActiveX'd into using Chrome now which is very non-Googly. Not sure how feasible it is to use a different mobile browser until Mozilla and Google work together to make sure they're all on the same API page on Android. Ironically enough, Windows is far more open and friendly to competing browsers than Android.
It's not as fast as Focus, but if you want an alternative to Chrome Firefox for Android should work better with Google Apps that are (probably) broken due to Focus's anti-tracking features. It is based on the same rendering engine as desktop and should benefit from many of the future speed improvements of Firefox 57.
On Android Chrome is arguably better if you want Google account integration or raw speed, but Firefox for Android has a more traditional UI, extensions, and is fast enough for most of my browsing.
I haven't had any issues using Firefox for Android... Firefox Focus is not a general purpose browser, so some issues are probably expected. Try Firefox for Android and install uBlock, or any of your other favorite desktop extensions!
I was blown away by Firefox Focus as well. I ended up making it the default browser, so its used when I read an article on HackerNews, Reddit, Twitter, etc. But when I need the "logged in" experience - autofill passwords, bookmarks, cookies, etc. - I launch Chrome. Best of both worlds!
Yes! I do this as well after reading about it on some Reddit thread. Fantastic use case for opening random links from email and chat (and Focus is actually very smooth)!
Focus is, uh… WebKit/Chromium with no traditional browser session features (history/bookmarks/etc.) and a tracking blocker. Useful, but not "true Firefox" :)
I like Firefox Nightly on Android though, it's really good.
Sorry, but unless you have a Gecko-based version (which - AFAIK - is not what you can get from Google Play or F-Droid), it's system WebView (i.e. Chromium) under the hood.
> I feel like I'm being ActiveX'd into using Chrome now which is very non-Googly
Um
Define "googly"
(If you're saying it's atypical of the behavior you'd expect of them: based on what?) Considering there's no trivial way to log into one of their services (gmail) without automatically doing so on others (yt etc) without fucking around with browser sessions - among many other non-customizability gotchas from them - saying google doesn't want to control how their offerings are used is going to be a very tough sell.
Unfortunately, as long as Firefox security infrastructure does not match Chrome, I can not use it. Note that errors like use-after-free and buffer overflows are marked as Critical (run arbitrary code on computer) for Firefox, but marked as High (execute code in the context of, or otherwise impersonate other origins.) for Chrome because of sandboxing.
Firefox sandboxing does not use Rust. Servo sandboxing (work in progress) does.
It's not accurate to say that Firefox has no sandbox. Sandboxing work has been rolling out for many months now, and later versions have increasingly restrictive sandboxes. You can see the current status per version here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox#Current_Status
Hardening the sandbox is a constant work in progress, but it's not as simple as "compromise of browser engine automatically means arbitrary code execution as running user" any longer.
Sorry I didn't mean Sandboxing used Rust, It was a separate thing (That Rust is less susceptible to such class of errors, so the more code written in Rust the better)
Also didn't mean it has no sandboxing (I knew about efforts), my point was its security is not a match for Chrome yet, as seen from the amount and type of critical errors.
When it is there I would definitely use it along with Chrome.
In case it wasn't clear, it is now the case that content process compromise is no longer critical unless combined with sandbox escape.
Looking at historical vulnerability reports can be misleading in this regard, as the sandboxing features are rather recent (pre-stable-version in some cases).
If I wasn't clear as well, As far as I can see from the link you gave It still does not match the level of security Chrome offers, it is getting there, but not yet.
As Mr. Patrick Walton over there said, Mozilla is still building up the exact, minimal file-system permissions. So, yes, in that way it is still not yet on quite the same level as Chrome.
In terms of security architecture, there is to my knowledge only one bigger difference left and you can change that, if you want.
The difference is that Chrome will spawn a new process for every new tab (unless the webpage in it is from the same domain as another tab). Firefox instead will always round-robin the tabs across a fixed number of processes to achieve lower RAM usage and as result of that also somewhat better performance.
But you can tell Firefox to round-robin across up to 1000 processes or what have you, so that it then does spawn a new process for every new tab (and therefore sandboxes each tab individually).
To do so, go into about:config and set "dom.ipc.processCount" to a high number, like 1000.
I guess as long as it is not default behavior it will stay as a weakness then? I am not sure if it is worth to exchange it for memory or performance gain.
Also is using thread per tab approach more susceptible to memory leaks, resource sharing issues or OS scheduling shenanigans than process per tab approach? You close the tab, the process is dead and resources are mostly guaranteed to returned. My knowledge of modern browsers is limited, maybe this was considered an acceptable compromise though.
Though the Firefox developers aren't going to skimp on sandboxing (or other exploit mitigation techniques) just because of Rust. Defense-in-depth is the name of the game; Rust just provides a layer of language-level defense that C++ previously didn't offer.
Enjoying the Chinese consortium that owns Opera too? I am not even joking here, given China's recent track record with WeChat I would think twice before using Opera to handle all your https (banking..etc.) traffic. Of course Chrome (US) suffers from somewhat similar issues. Firefox really has unique position in the market in that it's fully Open Source and has non-profit driven org behind it.
> It isn't enough to explain how fast Firefox feels now.
That's because we've been making a dedicated effort to find and stamp out sources of UI lag! It's called Quantum Flow; see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum/Flow for more.
I beg you to boost performance at least upto the level of chrome even WITH addons. That's the main issue. With addons like ublock origin and other content filters, the cpu usage reaches 50-60% and the page rendering is not that quick as compared to chrome even with addons. Chrome's UI is seriously so liquid smooth that after being with firefox for so many years for my love for privacy, I HAD to switch to chrome sacrificing my privacy. I still use heavy privacy addons but chrome still doesn't get slow noticeably.
I highly appreciate what you doing. Hoping to get back on Firefox as soon as possible.
Once again please take care of those sudden cpu and ram usage with almost necessary addons like ublock, tab suspender etc.
I've found that google maps performs worse in firefox and I get random %100 cpu spikes from websites in firefox that I didn't get in chrome. I'm on a mac using firefox 55.
I've found out that many google products (web pages) have bad performance outside of Chrome[0]. But I've used Netscape/Mozilla my whole life, and I will not change from it, specially now that its performance is measurably rising (again).
[0] which is of course something google devs should consider and fix the sites, but hey... why do that when you're the market leader?
Firefox 55 doesn't have any of the (massive) improvements from 57 and Project Quantum which are being discussed here. Give Beta, Developer Edition, or Nightly a spin.
For historical note: that is Speedometer 2.0-r221659. Somehow missed the last two digits when I wrote this comment originally.
Also, with gfx.webrender.enabled, gfx.webrendest.enabled, gfx.webrender.blob-images, and gfx.webrender.layers-free all enabled, same version of Speedometer and Firefox on the workstation scores 63.47 (or 4% faster), but has render errors on the Speedometer's tach needle (SVG?) and renders fonts with very strong (very fatiguing to read) subpixel rendering.
Lots of comments from people suffering issues and missing their favorite plugins, so I thought I'd jump in as a former Chrome user.
Firefox quantum is really very good. This is the first time in a long time that I've been able to entertain switching browsers. It is at least on par with the speed of chrome, and since I'm moving from chrome, I'm not really missing any Firefox plugins too much. I've been able to port my most needed plugins from chrome's app store, and I'm using an "open in chrome" plugin to bridge the gap with hangouts so that I can have a reasonable workflow at work. It's been a pleasure to use!
I am currently also experiencing the awesomeness of tab containers. These things are a godsend, and I think they'll be in every browser before too much longer.
I have to say, I do feel that Mozilla has sacrificed some of its existing userbase to make a grab at Chrome's. It's worked in my case, but they've definitely upended the environments of a lot of people. I hope it pays off for them. For the first time in a long time though, Firefox feels really fast and innovative again. I look forward to my next phase of my browser life as an enthusiastic user.
Is the Inspector panel improved too? Probably I'm too used to Chrome's, but I find Firefox Inspector quite hard to use (inspect elements, change styles, look in network requests...)
I think I'm not the only who wished Tree Style Tabs was integrated as a default feature of Firefox. It's a primordial configuration to your browsing experience but it's been constantly stabbed and fixed at every update of Firefox.
Seems like Tree Style Tabs got ported to the WebExtensions version now! It still can't hide the tab bar (API will come in later releases) but it works!
> Mozilla has sacrificed some of its existing userbase to make a grab at Chrome's. It's worked in my case, but they've definitely upended the environments of a lot of people. I hope it pays off for them
Yeah, it always pays off to ditch the core of the user base chasing after the fresh new users, chasing after the main competitor - on their field and by their rules, look at Blackberry.
> Firefox Quantum enhances Firefox’s integration with Pocket, the read-it-later app that Mozilla acquired last year. When you open a new tab, you’ll see currently trending web pages recommended by Pocket users so you won’t miss out on what’s hot online, as well as your top sites.
That doesn't sound good. What are the reasons for having bloatware bundled in instead releasing them as separate add-on or installation option?
Pocket is now owned by Mozilla, and is going to be open sourced. What separates that from any other functionality built into the browser, for instance Firefox Sync or Autocomplete?
Sync, Pocket, Dev tools, Screenshots etc are not required to display and interact with HTML pages. They are useful and it's nice they exist, but I don't see a reason to have them installed if I don't need them - just as I don't install every package available in OS just in case I'll need later it.
Even if they don't use resources when not being actively used (no way to test since there is no way to remove them), they increase attack surface and clutter UI.
> But your OS does come with lots of packages and features you may not use.
Sure does. And I can remove them if I want to. I can apt-get remove libc6 if I really really want to and I accept the consequences. I can't remove non-essential parts of the Firefox, though.
Delete /usr/lib/firefox/browser/features/firefox@getpocket.com.xpi (or - better - rebuild the .deb package to not include this file) and the Pocket will be gone. Same for screenshots@mozilla.org.xpi.
Sync and DevTools are tightly integrated, though. I'd really really wish it would be realistically possible to remove Sync and replace it with something else.
There are users who value OSes where things are "just working", out of the box. Even more, there are users who value if OS has lots of stuff pre-installed.
There are users who value OSes for being absolutely minimal, so they can install only the stuff they want.
There are users who build their OSes from scratch, compiling each piece from source, fine-tuning every option they want to touch, manually defining every aspect of their system.
None of those approaches are wrong. And each of users may voice their discontent if things are not the way they prefer them to be (and that's good).
1. Firefox Accounts & Sync is a terrible mess. Its security is still broken[1] and it's insanely over-engineered[2].
I really wish it shouldn't have existed, and instead Mozilla would've focused on providing an API to build a synchronization service upon. And then, whatever - their services could've been an pre-bundled extension.
2. I believe all of those SaaSes (i.e. Firefox Screenshots, too) shouldn't belong to the browser's core. Those could be distributed as pre-bundled extensions (which they actually are, but in a special way), but not as a part of the browser itself.
This is highly opinionated, though. I just feel that rather than a browser, Firefox is becoming something like a service platform. I don't like it for the same reasons I tend to value self-hosting over the dependence on others' services, and Free Software over non-free options. I recognize others may feel very differently and possibly even welcome that.
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[1] Authentication pages are still served from network, so if you use it - you trust Mozilla to not steal (or, better say, not be forced to steal) your password and the encryption keys. The protocol is stable for quite a while so I really don't know why they're still not fixing this.
[2] I wrote an alternative self-hosted Accounts & Sync implementation, so while I'm biased I sort of know what I'm talking about here. Four different authentication protocols (BrowserID, Hawk, OAuth2 and JWT), multiple non-standard HTTP headers, and the whole system just reeks of the NIH syndrome.
> I just feel that rather than a browser, Firefox is becoming something like a service platform
Isn't it? Wasn't this the crux of the whole dev team controversy/split years ago?
(This is all sounding like rehashed news to me, but I admit I don't go out of my way to keep up with browser community drama, so someone correct me if I'm wrong.)
Yes, of course. Although I can't vouch for its security and stability - while I use it myself and it seems to work OK, I'd rather state that it's risky. In short, the repo is more like a code dump, rather than a properly released project.
Development is very sporadic, though - you can see it in commit history. And some parts of code feel dirty (in particular, I've made a bad design decision when trying to avoid implementing full-fledged OAuth2).
The repo lacks few things:
1) Notes about patched PyBrowserID. It's in the repo, and you can check the Dockerfile, but not in README.
2) Instructions on installing Kinto - another piece that is used to sync WebExtension settings[1]. It became mandatory with 57, without it sync fails and doesn't update "last synced" date (used to work in 56 and below). I'll add some instructions later, when I'll find time to do so.
----
[1] BTW, this means that everyone who runs self-hosted Sync but not Accounts (relying on Mozilla tokens instead) are now storing parts of their data on Mozilla servers. I don't think this was ever announced, I've only learned about Kinto when my Firefoxes started to log errors in the browser console. If you self-host Sync-only and think you may be affected - check `webextensions.storage.sync.serverURL` value.
That video in the post seems to show Chrome is still significantly faster in half of the tests shown there. How is that possible? From what Servo was initially promising (even 3-4x the speed of old Firefox), it didn't look like Chrome would come close either.
Did they make that many compromises when "porting parts from Servo" to Gecko? What's hurting Firefox's performance so much that even after implementing Electrolysis and now Quantum, it still can't be a clear winner over Chrome in performance? Is it simply a matter of Google "being ahead" in performance tuning and having more engineers, etc, or is there something fundamentally wrong with Firefox's codebase compared to Chrome's codebase?
I wish Mozilla was more committed to rewriting Firefox in Rust. Or perhaps it would be better to have it as a completely new project, like they did with Firefox Focus, which by the way to me it seems faster than Firefox + ublock origin on Android, even though it only blocks trackers.
Browser performance is not a single dimension. Nobody said Servo was going to be 3x-4x faster than (insert engine here) on every possible benchmark anyone could ever come up with. Rather, it's fast on the areas it focuses on.
But, as others have said, we may be getting a more drastic increase in performance when the new rendering engine lands, too. I thought this included the new rendering engine, which is why I felt it was quite disappointing compared to those slides we saw before. But if it's only the CSS engine that makes its about twice as fast, that's quite a nice boost. Hopefully the new rendering engine will give it another 2x (at least on quad-core+ machines).
I think they should rebrand the browser entirely. I want to try this but imagining the Firefox logo on my computer makes me sick to my stomach - reminding me of a time when my browser crashed constantly and slowed to a crawl if I had 5+ tabs open.
As you're probably well aware, several words in the english language have more than a single authoritative meaning. The version of 'can' they were probably using is: "Used to indicate possession of a specified capability or skill".
If the others do not currently possess that ability, then they cannot.
Pretty sure we are coordinating with them to make sure it's available for the Firefox Quantum release in November. So this is hopefully only going to be an issue during Nightly and Beta cycles, and not in the main population.
This is good. Too bad it they don't have the new extension available yet. For the few minutes I had the Firefox beta it seemed pretty awesome. It actually was seeming to be competitive with Chrome on macOS.
The lack of LastPass is a pain, however it made me discover BitWarden, which is free, open source, has 2FA, has working firefox & chrome plugins, and iOS/Android apps. It is also trivial to import your LastPass data into bitwarden. It's definitely worth giving it a try.
(The LastPass firefox app also seemed to use a lot of CPU for some reason, I have no idea how that was possible?)
Note: It doesn't support all of LastPass features, like per-website extra data, which may be a problem for some users. There's also no Safari plugin.
That seems more a failure on LastPass's part than Firefox's.
I say this as a LastPass user, they clearly don't give a rat's ass. They've known about the WebExtension requirement for, what, a year now? Somehow they're among the first apps to support Android Oreo's autofill API, yet they can't be bothered to update their Firefox extension.
It's a real pity. I like LastPass. I pay for it. I use their Secure Notes feature ALOT. But I may still have to switch if they can't get their act together.
Pretty much my thoughts exactly. I would probably have switched to 1password once they raised their prices, but at least my employer pays for lastpass for me.
Decided to give this a quick try and WOW! I'm blown away by how fast it is! The speed is incredible!
On the downside, two of the most important extensions I use (uMatrix and Enpass) don't work with this version of Firefox. It looks like they're both being updated to support it though, so it's just a matter of waiting til they get published or installing them by hand.
It is a lot faster for me... so far, the most noticeable example is when using the back/forward buttons on Reddit (it used to reload the whole page every time) but more than half of the extensions that I use haven't been updated yet to work with Firefox 57. Looks like you can enable legacy extensions, about:config?filter=extensions.legacy.enabled, but it appears to be only for installed extensions (you can't add new ones).
Can someone more in the know explain if this uses webrender or not? I thought that it did...
I have to admit that I'm not super impressed with the results here. Based on the talk that pcwalton did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erfnCaeLxSI I was expected it not to just be a little faster than Chrome, but to, like, double the speed, or more.
Is it that these are just not good candidates for showing how much faster than webrender can be? Or has Firefox slowed it down vs. in Servo maybe?
There are multiple; I forget which one is "real" WebRender and I'm on my phone so I can't check.
Last I was looking at this, the big WebRender flag wasn't expected to be faster due to the specific way it was integrated, you need the more aggressive setting to get pure WebRender.
WR's architecture has changed significantly from that talk, for the better. In particular aggressive use of early Z has made our fragment shading performance go way up since then.
In Nightly you can turn WR on via about:config. But be warned that there are quite a few problems, including performance problems, that still remain. The foundation is solid, but the CSS rendering model is complex, and there's a good amount of engineering work that just has to happen to make every corner case fast. (For instance, parts of Ars Technica were recently found to be slow because the particular interaction between the CSS features it was using was causing Gecko to generate a ton of clipping operations for WR... there's no substitute for engineering polishing work that has to happen in cases like that.)
Wow, it really is blazing fast, and just at a glance I like what they're doing with the dev tools. Unfortunately...
> Vimperator : "This add-on is not compatible with your version of Firefox."
Ouch. Guess I might need to wait a bit to make this my daily driver. All in all, though, I have to say I'm really glad to see Firefox is still solidly in this race - and with a kick ass and quite possibly superior product to boot.
edit :
I didn't realize at the outset that a FF57 version of Vimium was available (link provided by gogoengie) :
Vimperator, unfortunately, appears to be one of the few extensions that can never be fully ported, as it made use of API's that implied a security risk.
Very interesting, that does appear to be the case - likewise for VimFx. From what I gather, the go-to Vim plugin after this year will be Vimium (which I currently use on Chrome), although it hasn't yet been ported to FF 57.
Yes, but in VimFx's case it's more a matter of the developer not feeling like it considering Vimium is available, which for me has been a drop-in replacement of VimFx. I just assumed that as you mentioned Vimperator, you wanted the complete, somewhat more invasive, experience.
Vimium is /mostly/ there, but gaps in the WebExtensions API make the experience rough in my experience.
The biggest issue for me, right now, is that there are a lot of places where FF won't allow WebExtensions to intercept key events for shortcuts, like on the new tab page, error pages, any other "system" pages, or certain pinned tabs (this one is particularly inconsistent). This means that if I'm jumping through several tabs with J/K and hit any of those by accident, I'm stuck there until I figure out what happened and either use the mouse or the official hotkeys to switch back out.
Same with focusing the URL bar and the slightly quirky experience of the omnibar that Vimium has to use instead.
It works, but mostly serves to remind me how much I miss VimFX rather than to improve my productivity.
Note: I should correct this. It's not about the developer not feeling like it, but about him only wanting to do it without having to work around API limitations like Vimium had to: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061#c3
Mozilla is still doing something with the keyboard shortcuts API to make that more capable. I don't know what exactly they're doing, it won't be as powerful as Vimperator, but it should be a good bit more powerful than Vimium.
This (obviously) won't be in Firefox 57, but should be ready relatively soonish after. So, this is something that they have already been actively working on for a few months. I'm guessing 59 or 60 from how I've heard it described.
I’m sad that I’ll have to stop using VimFX, it was the best Vim plugin I could find. It was lightweight and did just what it had to (I absolutely hate the custom search/address bar thing in Vimium). My alternative right now is Saka Key. I hate the default keybindings, but you can customize them all you want. The thing I miss the most right now is being able to focus on the address bar (pressing “o” with VimFX). I’m not sure if it’s possible with the current WebExtensions API.
Pentadactyl too is horribly broken. I'm running Firefox's Extended Support Release for this very reason. Will probably have to bite the bullet and switch to Vimium within a year.
Could you be more specific? I don't believe this is a known issue. If you're experiencing this behavior, you may want to report it: https://github.com/philc/vimium/issues
Personally, I'm running Firefox 55.0.3 with `vimium-ff` 1.6.0 (current build on addons.mozilla.org), and the `t` keybinding opens new tabs just like `Ctrl-t`. Command repetition also works (eg, `5t`).
The lack of dev work on vimperator is actually what drove me back to chrome. I've been using cvim, and it has all the features I liked in vimperator.
Unfortunately, vimium-FF is still not as full featured as I'd like yet.
Any idea how I can get rid of that title bar that sits on top of the tab bar? In the demo I saw it's not present or it may have been cut from it.
Linux
I can throw my hat into the ring and attest to just how great 57 is. I can remember the Australis update coming out and receiving a mixed reaction, but I can't see this update receiving anything but praise. If you've been on Chrome for a while I'd definitely encourage you to try it out.
As a developer one small thing that's irked me is the recent removal of the ability for the dev tools to render html responses. There's an bug open here https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1350229 but it seems to have stagnated. It seems like the functionality was removed on a hunch and it's not been added back in, meaning I have to head to Chrome to debug some ajax requests. This, and the lack of LastPass support are the only things holding it back for me.
Just as an aside, I used LastPass for a long time, and held on in discomfort for a while after their acquisition, but their inability to keep their Firefox plugin updated or even working finally convinced me to switch to 1Password. I couldn't be happier, and their Firefox extension is modern and well-done!
LastPass has announced that they will have their extension updated by the time 57 hits release. I'm not sure it's fair to expect them to have something for Beta even if their competitors do.
Yeah, the whole pulling the API rug out from under Firebug really disappointed me. The FF dev tools looked good initially, but I quickly realized I couldn't actually use them. It was death by a thousand papercuts: all of the features seem to have some trivial-seeming problem that ends up hampering productivity past the point where switching to Chrome's dev tools gets the job done. It may lack some things I do like about FF dev tools, but the features it does have actually work in a responsive and glitch-free manner.
That took long enough. I used Firefox primarily for a year or so starting in 2015 but chrome won me back real quick. Let's be honest, Chrome was to only good browser. Hopefully quantum changes this.
444 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] thread(Also appears to feature an updated logo.)
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-en...
https://cl.ly/1b2O1g231m47/Screen%20Shot%202017-09-26%20at%2...
I'm on High Sierra and the UI at the top seems to do something really really weird...
Who knows, the fix might make it in time for the actual release.
I'm guessing this will be fixed in a few days as people upgrade internally. So far, other than looking ugly, it doesn't seem to be causing any other problems.
[1] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/issues/1224
The main and only distinctive feature of Firefox was programmability (XUL, XPCOM), and now it's gone. There are forks like PaleMoon and Waterfox though but for how long.
Firefox had to take that app-platform niche (thanks to XUL, XPCOM) that now occupies Electron, but failed on that chasing after Chrome.
(And Firefox “forks” have always been a very good way to be behind on security patches to no benefit.)
https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center
Edit: Actually, not a preview versions. TST just published an update and now it works on Firefox 57: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Until there's a stable/signed release you have to allow unsigned extensions; set `xpinstall.signatures.required` to false.
To hide the default tab bar I needed to put the following in ~/.mozilla/firefox/xyz123-profile-here/chrome/userChrome.css
Some features, like autohide, aren't available with the new web extensions model, but otherwise works the same as pre-57 versions of TST.[1] http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/xpi/nightly/
This seems to only work in the Nightly and Developer channel, not with the Beta channel. Is that correct?
If so, make sure you grab the correct artifact to import[1]
[1] http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/xpi/nightly/treestyletab-we.xpi
Edit: This was a really bad idea because upgrading to 57 destroyed my sessionstore.js. None of the backups were up-to-date for some reason. Be careful and make backups!
DevEdition is nowadays essentially just Beta with slightly different defaults (and that option compiled in), so you could just use that.
If you really do specifically want Beta, then Mozilla also supplies Unbranded Builds with that option compiled in: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...
Downgraded to 54.0 as fast as I could.
yep. I don't know if it will cleanly update; so it may lose your settings.
(Webextension ports have to spend one release in "hybrid" mode where they'r a webextension wrapped in a legacy extension shell to port settings correctly)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-tree/
The top bar doesn't auto-hide yet, the API for that will be in a future release apparently.
For example there is no way to do a gestures extension that doesn't rely on buggy DOM injection.
My developer edition recently got upgraded to 57, and Greasemonkey stopped working. Reading what the developer writes it seems as they are going to rewrite the whole extension from scratch, with a lot of the functionality left out because it's no longer possible to do.
To say that they don’t care about extensions doesn’t seem to match the efforts you can see in the browser.
Not sure how that translates to "not caring."
Edit: Oh, hey, look, the WebExtension version has been published: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
2) they do not reply to his requests or bugfiles
3) they could have made it a default in Firefox
We moved to WebExtensions specifically to fix the problem of constant breakage. Sure, it adds a layer of abstraction, but there's finally an explicit interface that we can commit to supporting. The legacy APIs were a monkeypatching free-for-all that prevented us from landing even minor improvements or refactors for fear of potentially breaking some add-on somewhere. Now that we have that interface, we can refactor without breaking add-ons.
For reference, ran the test with Firefox Quantum on the same machine and got a 68.
- Safari Technology Preview: ~80
- Vivaldi Beta: ~72
- Firefox Beta: ~57
- Firefox Nightly: ~54
- Firefox Beta: ~59
- Firefox Nightly: ~57
And Safari isn't available on Ubuntu or Windows, so it scores a 0 on those platforms ;)
https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/quantum-performance-test/
Super interesting that building WebKit for windows from source is still supported though: https://webkit.org/webkit-on-windows/
My hardware is a Mac Pro (Early 2009), 2.66 GHz quad core Xeon, 32 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC RAM, GeForce GT 120 512 MB.
What I get:
I also for comparison gave it a shot on my Surface Pro 4 (Core i7, 2.2 GHz, 16 GB RAM, Intel Iris 540 GPU).Here are the results for Chrome 60.0.3112.113. Since I was running on battery I tried this at various power mode settings. Here are the results for Chrome 60.0.3112.113 arranged by power mode setting:
There are two runs of "Best performance" because I did the tests in the order best, better, recommended, battery saver, and so all but the first may have benefited from caching from the previous. I ran best again after finishing battery saver to get a run of best that would have the same caching benefit the other may have received.For Firefox 57.0b3 I get:
Edge on best performance gave 34.69.Interesting that Firefox still scores roughly the same as Safari and Chrome on your machine too. I don't understand why they'd make this big fuss.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIywpvHewc0
I understand the push behind web extensions but I don't think there will ever be a keychain integration addon now.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Na... exists to allow web extensions to talk with programs on the computer, its up to someone to write the extension and executable for that usecase
(The webextension might be in beta? When I installed it a month ago it was in "beta" and had to be installed directly from their site, idk if they've uploaded it to the store yet)
I don't what causes this, but in the last 2 years it's gotten worse and with Quantum the CPU usage is even higher. Chrome and Safari don't have this issue.
I'd love to switch to Firefox, I'm not that keen to be running a browser made by a gargantuan advertising agency.
Hardly, most Mozilla people I've seen use a Mac, if anything, it's Linux that is a bit less of a priority it seems.
HW_COMPOSITING blocked by default: Acceleration blocked by platform
for me with Nightly (57) on Linux.
Although performance is greatly improved (and, seriously, the developers should be proud of the progress), there's still a lot of work to be done. There's significant lag in even non-network UI (e.g., highlighting the row under the cursor in about:config lags behind the mouse cursor by almost a second).
As much respect as I have for the developers for this progress, I still can't really use software that makes me feel like I'm intoxicated.
Also, just in case, have you tried without extensions? Because that looks like something that a misbehaving WebExtension could easily do.
I sent a feedback but I'll file a bug report right now.
edit: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1403187
Holy damn Firefox is actually fast.
Fair comparison, both having Pocket, uBlock, Evernote, OneNote, Pushbullet, and Bitwarden; neither of them having an extension the other doesn't. Above described Firefox Nightly config vs Chrome Dev.
Test machines are a workstation with a i7-4771 @ 3.9ghz, 32GB DDR3-2133, Radeon 7970 with a trio of 1080p screens (a very fast modern machine from the Haswell era) and a laptop with a i5-32120M, 8GB of DDR3-1600, Intel HD4000 iGPU feeding a 13" 2560x1600 @ 200% hidpi (an Ivy Bridge era MBPr 13" Late 2012). Both machines run Win10.
Both machines have less real world wait on Firefox than Chrome, and the interface has less latency between when I do something and it even begins processing the request. Also, under a ton of windows and tabs, Firefox seems to use less RAM and the speed gap seems to widen.
I don't care about about artificial benchmarks, btw, they never seem to measure what actually makes browsers slower for humans.
Edit: Even though I just said I don't care about benchmarks, using Speedometer 2.0-r2216: On the workstation: Firefox 58.0a1 2017-09-26 64bit 61.18 vs Chrome 63.0.3217.0 dev 64-bit 51.67; on the laptop, same versions: Firefox 28.58 vs Chrome 26.74
So, arguably, flat out benchmarkable performance is the same, with Firefox just slightly edging ahead (18% and 6% faster). It isn't enough to explain how fast Firefox feels now.
Edit 2: And now with Edge 40.15063.0.0/EdgeHTML 15.15063: Workstation, 46.72; Laptop 21.37. Firefox is 34% and 31% faster, Chrome is 25% and 11% faster.
i think it's cool that you can see the actual ranking.
If you want to trace uses of it in the code, here is a reasonable place to start, I imagine: https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/chrome/browser/engageme...
Last time was a week ago :\",
However, I'll try Quantum and see if it improves the situation. I really don't want to be using Chrome.
In some ways I think firefox has actually surpassed chrome (e.g. on my xps 13 touchpad scrolling is much more responsive/smoother in firefox)
Everything feels 10 times faster without smooth scrolling, while I have to say that the nightly already felt blazing fast _with_ smooth scrolling, haha.
I just had the feeling that Firefox has news to be on-par with Chrome for years now, but I never really "felt" it, hehe.
I just wanted to say, that it isn't the first news about Firefox getting faster since Chrome came out.
I tried the new versions every now and then and Chrome always felt faster to me. Maybe it really is, maybe it just uses some perceptional tricks, I don'T know.
I encourage you to try out Nightly now (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/). I’m not promising that it’ll be faster than Chrome, but it just might be fast enough now.
If I understand correctly, the photon changes haven't landed on current stable firefox yet. They have just landed in Developer edition. So you might want to give it (or nightly edition) a try.
They even got rid of that search bar, haha.
Only fonts and the scroll bars seem a bit old school compared to Chrome.
Also, WhatsApp Web keeps logging me out.
This is an issue on my Arch Linux laptop, but not at work using Ubuntu. Both run Firefox nightly. Been going nuts with this issue!
It's actually configurable by the user. I like having it on the side, so I added it back.
(Tested on Firefox 55.0.2/Linux)
Cheers. :)
Chrome has a bunch of bugs related to font-rendering on Windows, e.g. https://crbug.com/414307. I'm not sure why switching to DirectWrite didn't just fix these bugs, but subjectively appearance-wise on Windows, Firefox > Edge > Chrome.
To me it seemed like the input font here on HN could need a bit more hinting in FF.
But this comes at the cost of battery life. I moved back to Chrome because it was constantly chewing CPU.
Absolutely stunning improvement in performance!
Great work by team FFx! :D
What I don't understand: why is it that other browsers don't put battery life before all else? We live in a portable world after all..
Do we? I'd say most people with laptops use them either at home or at work, both places were they can plug in.
The majority is not "Starbucks laptop users" or road warriors.
Mozilla will also want to target their engine at tablets and phones at some point. This is presumably why Samsung committed funding to Servo (IIRC).
Personally I can't use Safari, as I want my bookmarks/history synced between devices and don't use an iPhone.
These are Browserbench 1 though, I have no idea how to run v2.
I've been sending feedbacks for Nightly for a while now, but they don't seem to read them. The two biggest issues are:
1- High CPU usage (which leads to high temperature and shorter battery life) 2- No "Look Up / Define" in right-click menu.
Fix them and I'll switch from Chrome in a blink.
Is there a comparison of these tools that you’d recommend?
Is there an easy way to convert your current Lastpass database to Bitwarden?
Seems 2FA (YubiKey) costs 10 USD/year instead of 24 USD/year which LastPass costs.
I've been looking for a recent feature comparison, the Wikipedia one is rather shallow and incomplete [1] [2].
My (incomplete) take on feature comparison:
Both are relatively cross-platform, widely supported by what I consider status quo platforms (Windows, Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, Chrome, Firefox).
Advantages of Bitwarden are open source and public development, approx half the price (and approx same as Lastpass before purchased by Logmein), and the ability to self-host.
Advantages of Lastpass are different login for accessing to account and decrypting database. This is important because without this, a MITM attack gets access to the master password.
I also found the announcement of Bitwarden, approx 1 year old now, on HN [3]. It includes some feedback about the software. Bitwarden uses AES256-CBC. How secure is AES256-CBC in this case, and what does Lastpass use? Another criticism is usage of Google Analytics. This can be disabled in the application, but I don't feel it serves a purpose for the user. It should never have been included in the first place. I also don't think either software is audited.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_password_managers
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_password_manager...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12676979
https://keepassxc.org/
I feel like I'm being ActiveX'd into using Chrome now which is very non-Googly. Not sure how feasible it is to use a different mobile browser until Mozilla and Google work together to make sure they're all on the same API page on Android. Ironically enough, Windows is far more open and friendly to competing browsers than Android.
On Android Chrome is arguably better if you want Google account integration or raw speed, but Firefox for Android has a more traditional UI, extensions, and is fast enough for most of my browsing.
I like Firefox Nightly on Android though, it's really good.
Sorry, but unless you have a Gecko-based version (which - AFAIK - is not what you can get from Google Play or F-Droid), it's system WebView (i.e. Chromium) under the hood.
Um
Define "googly"
(If you're saying it's atypical of the behavior you'd expect of them: based on what?) Considering there's no trivial way to log into one of their services (gmail) without automatically doing so on others (yt etc) without fucking around with browser sessions - among many other non-customizability gotchas from them - saying google doesn't want to control how their offerings are used is going to be a very tough sell.
Firefox: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities...
Chrome: https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/search/label/Stable%20...
Hopefully with their sandboxing project done (Also with Rust) will make Firefox much better in the security department, but until then, no.
It's not accurate to say that Firefox has no sandbox. Sandboxing work has been rolling out for many months now, and later versions have increasingly restrictive sandboxes. You can see the current status per version here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox#Current_Status
Hardening the sandbox is a constant work in progress, but it's not as simple as "compromise of browser engine automatically means arbitrary code execution as running user" any longer.
When it is there I would definitely use it along with Chrome.
Looking at historical vulnerability reports can be misleading in this regard, as the sandboxing features are rather recent (pre-stable-version in some cases).
In terms of security architecture, there is to my knowledge only one bigger difference left and you can change that, if you want.
The difference is that Chrome will spawn a new process for every new tab (unless the webpage in it is from the same domain as another tab). Firefox instead will always round-robin the tabs across a fixed number of processes to achieve lower RAM usage and as result of that also somewhat better performance.
But you can tell Firefox to round-robin across up to 1000 processes or what have you, so that it then does spawn a new process for every new tab (and therefore sandboxes each tab individually).
To do so, go into about:config and set "dom.ipc.processCount" to a high number, like 1000.
Also is using thread per tab approach more susceptible to memory leaks, resource sharing issues or OS scheduling shenanigans than process per tab approach? You close the tab, the process is dead and resources are mostly guaranteed to returned. My knowledge of modern browsers is limited, maybe this was considered an acceptable compromise though.
https://v8project.blogspot.ro/2016/10/fall-cleaning-optimizi...
That said, I'm definitely going to give quantum a try
That's because we've been making a dedicated effort to find and stamp out sources of UI lag! It's called Quantum Flow; see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum/Flow for more.
I highly appreciate what you doing. Hoping to get back on Firefox as soon as possible.
Once again please take care of those sudden cpu and ram usage with almost necessary addons like ublock, tab suspender etc.
[0] which is of course something google devs should consider and fix the sites, but hey... why do that when you're the market leader?
Also, with gfx.webrender.enabled, gfx.webrendest.enabled, gfx.webrender.blob-images, and gfx.webrender.layers-free all enabled, same version of Speedometer and Firefox on the workstation scores 63.47 (or 4% faster), but has render errors on the Speedometer's tach needle (SVG?) and renders fonts with very strong (very fatiguing to read) subpixel rendering.
Firefox quantum is really very good. This is the first time in a long time that I've been able to entertain switching browsers. It is at least on par with the speed of chrome, and since I'm moving from chrome, I'm not really missing any Firefox plugins too much. I've been able to port my most needed plugins from chrome's app store, and I'm using an "open in chrome" plugin to bridge the gap with hangouts so that I can have a reasonable workflow at work. It's been a pleasure to use!
I am currently also experiencing the awesomeness of tab containers. These things are a godsend, and I think they'll be in every browser before too much longer.
I have to say, I do feel that Mozilla has sacrificed some of its existing userbase to make a grab at Chrome's. It's worked in my case, but they've definitely upended the environments of a lot of people. I hope it pays off for them. For the first time in a long time though, Firefox feels really fast and innovative again. I look forward to my next phase of my browser life as an enthusiastic user.
The new extension API will be much more stable, especially for something so complex like Tree-Style Tabs.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
There's also the Tree Tabs extension which I don't like as much.
Yeah, it always pays off to ditch the core of the user base chasing after the fresh new users, chasing after the main competitor - on their field and by their rules, look at Blackberry.
That doesn't sound good. What are the reasons for having bloatware bundled in instead releasing them as separate add-on or installation option?
Truly, "bloat" can only be defined as "a feature I personally do not use right now".
Even if they don't use resources when not being actively used (no way to test since there is no way to remove them), they increase attack surface and clutter UI.
But your OS does come with lots of packages and features you may not use.
Sure does. And I can remove them if I want to. I can apt-get remove libc6 if I really really want to and I accept the consequences. I can't remove non-essential parts of the Firefox, though.
Delete /usr/lib/firefox/browser/features/firefox@getpocket.com.xpi (or - better - rebuild the .deb package to not include this file) and the Pocket will be gone. Same for screenshots@mozilla.org.xpi.
Sync and DevTools are tightly integrated, though. I'd really really wish it would be realistically possible to remove Sync and replace it with something else.
There are users who value OSes for being absolutely minimal, so they can install only the stuff they want.
There are users who build their OSes from scratch, compiling each piece from source, fine-tuning every option they want to touch, manually defining every aspect of their system.
None of those approaches are wrong. And each of users may voice their discontent if things are not the way they prefer them to be (and that's good).
I really wish it shouldn't have existed, and instead Mozilla would've focused on providing an API to build a synchronization service upon. And then, whatever - their services could've been an pre-bundled extension.
2. I believe all of those SaaSes (i.e. Firefox Screenshots, too) shouldn't belong to the browser's core. Those could be distributed as pre-bundled extensions (which they actually are, but in a special way), but not as a part of the browser itself.
This is highly opinionated, though. I just feel that rather than a browser, Firefox is becoming something like a service platform. I don't like it for the same reasons I tend to value self-hosting over the dependence on others' services, and Free Software over non-free options. I recognize others may feel very differently and possibly even welcome that.
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[1] Authentication pages are still served from network, so if you use it - you trust Mozilla to not steal (or, better say, not be forced to steal) your password and the encryption keys. The protocol is stable for quite a while so I really don't know why they're still not fixing this.
[2] I wrote an alternative self-hosted Accounts & Sync implementation, so while I'm biased I sort of know what I'm talking about here. Four different authentication protocols (BrowserID, Hawk, OAuth2 and JWT), multiple non-standard HTTP headers, and the whole system just reeks of the NIH syndrome.
Isn't it? Wasn't this the crux of the whole dev team controversy/split years ago?
(This is all sounding like rehashed news to me, but I admit I don't go out of my way to keep up with browser community drama, so someone correct me if I'm wrong.)
Did you open-sourced your alternative self-hosted Accounts & Sync implementation?
Still, here it is: https://gitlab.com/drdaeman/firesync
Development is very sporadic, though - you can see it in commit history. And some parts of code feel dirty (in particular, I've made a bad design decision when trying to avoid implementing full-fledged OAuth2).
The repo lacks few things:
1) Notes about patched PyBrowserID. It's in the repo, and you can check the Dockerfile, but not in README.
2) Instructions on installing Kinto - another piece that is used to sync WebExtension settings[1]. It became mandatory with 57, without it sync fails and doesn't update "last synced" date (used to work in 56 and below). I'll add some instructions later, when I'll find time to do so.
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[1] BTW, this means that everyone who runs self-hosted Sync but not Accounts (relying on Mozilla tokens instead) are now storing parts of their data on Mozilla servers. I don't think this was ever announced, I've only learned about Kinto when my Firefoxes started to log errors in the browser console. If you self-host Sync-only and think you may be affected - check `webextensions.storage.sync.serverURL` value.
Did they make that many compromises when "porting parts from Servo" to Gecko? What's hurting Firefox's performance so much that even after implementing Electrolysis and now Quantum, it still can't be a clear winner over Chrome in performance? Is it simply a matter of Google "being ahead" in performance tuning and having more engineers, etc, or is there something fundamentally wrong with Firefox's codebase compared to Chrome's codebase?
I wish Mozilla was more committed to rewriting Firefox in Rust. Or perhaps it would be better to have it as a completely new project, like they did with Firefox Focus, which by the way to me it seems faster than Firefox + ublock origin on Android, even though it only blocks trackers.
Note, though, that there's still more to come [1].
Also, I guess the state of Servo can tell you what a tremendous effort rewriting is, and why that would still take quite a while to finish.
[1] "Project Quantum: There’s more to come" at https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/09/firefox-quantum-developer-...
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzNDA
But, as others have said, we may be getting a more drastic increase in performance when the new rendering engine lands, too. I thought this included the new rendering engine, which is why I felt it was quite disappointing compared to those slides we saw before. But if it's only the CSS engine that makes its about twice as fast, that's quite a nice boost. Hopefully the new rendering engine will give it another 2x (at least on quad-core+ machines).
Every other browser can, they just don't as of now.
As you're probably well aware, several words in the english language have more than a single authoritative meaning. The version of 'can' they were probably using is: "Used to indicate possession of a specified capability or skill".
If the others do not currently possess that ability, then they cannot.
(The LastPass firefox app also seemed to use a lot of CPU for some reason, I have no idea how that was possible?)
Note: It doesn't support all of LastPass features, like per-website extra data, which may be a problem for some users. There's also no Safari plugin.
Or do you mean something like 'you must re-enter your master password for particular sites'?
I say this as a LastPass user, they clearly don't give a rat's ass. They've known about the WebExtension requirement for, what, a year now? Somehow they're among the first apps to support Android Oreo's autofill API, yet they can't be bothered to update their Firefox extension.
It's a real pity. I like LastPass. I pay for it. I use their Secure Notes feature ALOT. But I may still have to switch if they can't get their act together.
On the downside, two of the most important extensions I use (uMatrix and Enpass) don't work with this version of Firefox. It looks like they're both being updated to support it though, so it's just a matter of waiting til they get published or installing them by hand.
https://discussion.enpass.io/index.php?/topic/1876-beta-ver-...
I have to admit that I'm not super impressed with the results here. Based on the talk that pcwalton did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erfnCaeLxSI I was expected it not to just be a little faster than Chrome, but to, like, double the speed, or more.
Is it that these are just not good candidates for showing how much faster than webrender can be? Or has Firefox slowed it down vs. in Servo maybe?
I use it in nightly via the config flag; it is pretty great but there are still some glitches from time to time.
Last I was looking at this, the big WebRender flag wasn't expected to be faster due to the specific way it was integrated, you need the more aggressive setting to get pure WebRender.
https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2017/09/25/webrender-newsle...
WR's architecture has changed significantly from that talk, for the better. In particular aggressive use of early Z has made our fragment shading performance go way up since then.
In Nightly you can turn WR on via about:config. But be warned that there are quite a few problems, including performance problems, that still remain. The foundation is solid, but the CSS rendering model is complex, and there's a good amount of engineering work that just has to happen to make every corner case fast. (For instance, parts of Ars Technica were recently found to be slow because the particular interaction between the CSS features it was using was causing Gecko to generate a ton of clipping operations for WR... there's no substitute for engineering polishing work that has to happen in cases like that.)
> Vimperator : "This add-on is not compatible with your version of Firefox."
Ouch. Guess I might need to wait a bit to make this my daily driver. All in all, though, I have to say I'm really glad to see Firefox is still solidly in this race - and with a kick ass and quite possibly superior product to boot.
edit :
I didn't realize at the outset that a FF57 version of Vimium was available (link provided by gogoengie) :
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/
The biggest issue for me, right now, is that there are a lot of places where FF won't allow WebExtensions to intercept key events for shortcuts, like on the new tab page, error pages, any other "system" pages, or certain pinned tabs (this one is particularly inconsistent). This means that if I'm jumping through several tabs with J/K and hit any of those by accident, I'm stuck there until I figure out what happened and either use the mouse or the official hotkeys to switch back out.
Same with focusing the URL bar and the slightly quirky experience of the omnibar that Vimium has to use instead.
It works, but mostly serves to remind me how much I miss VimFX rather than to improve my productivity.
This (obviously) won't be in Firefox 57, but should be ready relatively soonish after. So, this is something that they have already been actively working on for a few months. I'm guessing 59 or 60 from how I've heard it described.
There was a meeting today and the contributors participated in it.
Personally, I'm running Firefox 55.0.3 with `vimium-ff` 1.6.0 (current build on addons.mozilla.org), and the `t` keybinding opens new tabs just like `Ctrl-t`. Command repetition also works (eg, `5t`).
reported: https://github.com/philc/vimium/issues/2510
closed with: https://github.com/philc/vimium/pull/2602
I'm not familiar with their release cycle, so I don't know when it'll hit AMO.
That said, if you use GNOME Shell, the Pixel Saver extension is great for me: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/723/pixel-saver/
Was using ~cryptic setting in Hide Caption Title Bar Plus to accomplish this, but it not ported yet.
I'll give it to them though it does seem fast.
In the lower right, there should be a toggle for it.
edit: not sure if that's linux friendly
What about Linux?
But.. that's not what you were getting at, just a tiny rant ;(
As a developer one small thing that's irked me is the recent removal of the ability for the dev tools to render html responses. There's an bug open here https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1350229 but it seems to have stagnated. It seems like the functionality was removed on a hunch and it's not been added back in, meaning I have to head to Chrome to debug some ajax requests. This, and the lack of LastPass support are the only things holding it back for me.