Ask HN: How is Firefox Quantum for you?

Long time Firefox user here. Switched to Chrome when FF 53 got released. Chrome, albeit RAM hungry, is fast! Tried Firefox Quantum after all the hype, and was disappointed to see Firefox struggle with Whatsapp Web[1] and MS Exchange webmail. The behaviour is same with beta and nightly channels. IMO, Firefox is not there yet.

[1] https://web.whatsapp.com/

I've heard quite a few anecdotal reports of FFQ being slow on certain websites. I've had no such issues, and in fact really like Quantum. I've used FF for a long, long time. I may be biased.

Edit: Had no slow-downs or hang ups on any of the mentioned sites (including the whatsapp linked below)

I've been trying it out after all I've heard about it, but I'm just not seeing what all the hype is about. Several sites I use will hang while loading, but will work flawlessly on Chrome. Also, their import from Chrome didn't seem to grab passwords which makes using it kind of a chore.

Am I the only one that dislikes the dev tools completely? Compared to Safari it feels like going back 3 years in time.

I tried it. IT IS faster now but I don't see any difference from chrome. Also the dev tools UI is not good IMO. What made me quit was when pressing the ALT key toggles the top menu on ubuntu 17.10 and 5 minutes of googling didn't help me fix this.

One of our writer's opinions:

https://www.howtogeek.com/333393/why-i-switched-from-chrome-...

TL;DR

"I’ve been using Firefox Quantum non-stop for more than a week now, starting from before its official release. For years, every Firefox release has felt slower than Chrome to me. But Firefox is now a real, speedy, modern option again. Enough so that I’m switching from Chrome back to Firefox. ... Overall, Firefox Quantum feels about the same as Chrome (maybe even faster!) and offers nicer text rendering and a few bonus features Chrome doesn’t. It’s an excellent browser, and I’m sticking with it."

Disclaimer: I'm a developer at howtogeek.com

You need to install an addon and a webserver to have your own html file in the new tab. And even these two things won't give you location bar experience of about:newtab. Location bar won't be focused and the url won't be selected. So you can't just start typing. Mouse gestures don't work on about:newtab, nor on any chrome url (nor do they work on mozilla.com). Mouse gesture are just an example. No addon works on a chrome-url. At least some addons don't work in private-mode, which makes private mode useless. I'm really curious how all this pain does improve security (which was not an issue the last ten or so years).

It is faster. It lacks a compelling use case for me. Quantum breaks the productivity tools that make Firefox the best alternative for me. It flat out breaks Firemacs and Menu Wizard.

More importantly Quantum broke my Greasemonkey code. It looked like an ordinary "upgrade bug." I went to fix the upgrade bug. Objects created by Greasemonkey code are no longer accessible from the developer console. That kind of sucks but the fix is not that complex so I open the built in editor. I save. Now more code is broken because dependencies can't be found. I roll the code back and save. dependencies still can't be found.

I installed Firefox Extended Support Release [1] along side Quantum. Reinstalled and reconfigured my addons. Copied my Greasemonkey files to the appropriate location and now I am back up to productivity. One thing I have noticed is that Firefox ESR is much faster than the last version of Firefox before Quantum. I thought Firefox seemed to be getting slower for the past few months. I think it was and that's part of why Quantum feels so much faster.

I hate not being able to trust Mozilla. But after this, I trust it less.

  Faster != more powerful

Quantum is closer to the sort of thing that concerns Stallman. It takes power away from users. It has hard coded non-overridable keys. It impedes users from modifying the Javascript running in their browser. It only reflects industry practice. There's nothing best about it.

[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/

Having used Firefox as my primary personal browser since its inception, Quantum feels like greased lightning to me.

I do use Chrome, but generally only for dev work, or edge cases such as video on mobile.

It was surprising to learn that Firefox's market share had reached single digits in recent years.

It's really nice to see Firefox catch up. Also nice to see Rust flex its muscles.

Faster. Still an insane memory hog. I had 12 tabs open and it was up over 6GB at one point.

I have LastPass, Acrobat, Grammarly, and OneTab extensions.

Certainly nothing that would seem like it'd use that much memory. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm on a i5 Linux System - Seems faster, haven't noticed as long stalling out on long-scrolling infinty pages as previously.

Really miss my favorite plug-in "Tilt 3D" - that, apparently, died of attrition.

The transition from firebug to whatever has left me with stuff that doesn't seem to work as reliably. Whether it is old UI remnants or new bugs it's hard to tell...

I'm using it exclusively as my main browser to give things a try after hearing so many people taking about it. I want it to succeed so we have healthy competition in the browser space.

I cannot understand why modern browsers use so much memory though, it drives me bonkers.

Macbook late 2008, the scrolling feels way too sluggish. Despite having it set to my main browser I find myself opening Chrome manually most of the times and sticking there.

Good.

Although I'm desperately waiting for U2F to actually work.

Anecdotally, some people see it working with GitHub, but I don't.

Really fast for rendering but slows my whole system when watching video.

The biggest drawback for me is that I have taken Chrome's PDF support for granted. I love being able open PDFs inside of the browser and then save them from there to whichever directory I choose. With Firefox I have to save a copy to the Downloads folder and open that in Preview prior to exporting a new copy to where I want to save it.

Also miss the print preview in Chrome.

We'll see how long with experiment lasts for me. I love how much easier Google has made my life over the years but I would like to move away from their browser.

Slack calls aren't supported, which is a big downer for me.

I've switched over, and I'm loving it so far. The dark theme looks great, and it's as quick as Chrome for me.

The only major downsides for me so far are:

* I have a lot of bookbarks on my toolbar that I ported over from Chrome, and they're pretty squashed together on Firefox. A bit of extra spacing would work wonders.

* Downloads being in a separate window near the top of the browser. I miss being able to visually see my downloads on the bottom, and having to deal with them when they were finished.

* The separate bars for address and search, especially when the address bar basically does search for you anyway.

* The dev tools. I was a huge Firebug fan, but when the dev jumped over to Chrome their dev tools became much better, and Firefox's native tools were far worse than before. They've caught up, but Chrome still feels years ahead of them in this regard.

I've been a Firefox user for a long time and so far really enjoy quantum. It feels much faster, and I like the new design a lot. My one complaint is that it doesn't support any of the touch gestures or even TouchPad gestures that Edge does, so I'm only using Firefox when I've got my Surface Book docked with a mouse and keyboard. Any other time I miss the gestures too much and switch to Edge.

To be fair, that's a problem that Firefox has always had, but boy do I wish they'd support gestures sometime soon.