Congratulations, and to all your colleagues, too! Quantum has just landed on my phone, and the speed improvement is remarkable. (I thought at first it might be a placebo effect, but it turns out all these Rust components are in the Android build, too. I never knew, I thought all this joy was just for desktop. That’s something Mozilla might want to trumpet more loudly?)
By the bye, if you or a colleague are thinking of writing about the social side of project Quantum, I for one would be well interested. AFAIK projects this successful generally involve some rather successful teambuilding and vision-sharing and project-managing, too, and I always enjoy reading about that sort of thing.
Brace yourself for an all-new Firefox. It’s fast. Really fast. It’s over twice as fast as Firefox from 6 months ago
As a Firefox Nightly user, I have to vouch for this. A good friend of mine, intern at Mozilla during the summer, told me to try and I could not believe it. Not only the speed was better than I recalled, battery life was also increased, and they had included several sweet features in the browser. I would recommend you to at least download it and give it a shot.
I have tested today, its incredibly fast. Both with SPA Js applications, standard sites as well etc. The memory usage is much lower than chrome (as promised) so all round I’m a very happy camper. The default style out of the box is also very clean. A big improvement from previous versions.
It will be interesting to see the Servo adoption from smaller browser projects.
I’m really excited to see that Chrome finally has some serious competition. We’ve already lived through the IE dominance era, and the dangers of one company having a dominant browser are quite clear at this point. This alone is a great reason to start using Firefox in my opinion.
Firefox is now (and since some nightly versions ago) faster and a lot more resource friendly than chrome for me. But, I am surprised that neither Firefox nor Chrome support hardware accelerated video decoding under Linux and it’s quite surprising to me that nobody mentioned it because this is the number one battery killer for me.
Are there any plans to support VAAPI in upcomming Firefox versions?
cmcaine has gotten an extended keyboard api for WebEx approved but it not slated to be implemented until the next release. They are also https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl working on a replacement for Vimperator called Tridactyl.
That said, Vimium is said to be the best among WebEx-compatible, Vimperator-like extensions. I think I’ll probably wait until 52 is EOL and decide what to do then.
I’ve been using Vimium with Quantum (Firefox Developer Edition) for a few days and haven’t noticed any problems. (I am a long-time user of Vimium in Chrome.) I don’t know if it’s at 100% feature parity, but all of the features I use work.
One thing that really miffs me about Firefox (that I’m being reminded of right now) is that Ctrl-q closes the entire browser. Seems great, until you remember that Ctrl-w closes tabs and if you accidentally fat-finger (or just miss) the key, you lose your entire session.
I’ve looked at some “disable ctrl-q behavior” and “remap keys” extensions but none of them seem to work with this newest version (even though they’re supported). Has anyone found a workaround?
I know the flexibility of extensions to change key bindings according to user preferences is greatly diminished with webextensions; I’ve had to route around this problem at the OS layer instead of inside FF: https://technomancy.us/184
I was concerned that the new extension API would break my extensions, but HTTPS Everywhere, uBlock Origin, and Privacy Badger are already compatible with the new version of Firefox. NoScript has announced that it will have support “definitely by the end of this week”.
Unfortunately, Random Agent Spoofer will not support the new version. Does anybody know any alternatives?
Agent spoofing is something that Firefox (as of version 56) supports natively, but what I like about Random Agent Spoofer was that it could be set to send a randomized user-agent string with every request. uMatrix doesn’t appear to do that, from what I can see.
I started re-using FF when I saw an article on Hacker News about Quantum hitting Developer edition, and try it out. It was so nice that I switch back to FF. The error I made was setuping the release instance, so it was not easy to transfer the profile to the Developer edition. Now that it’s released wow it’s fast. I really like what the team is doing and I have great hope for FF in the future. I still need to use Chrome a little, but FF is now my main browser at work and at home!
I am seriously impressed. Around year ago I dropped firefox for chromium because sites like 500px were visibly slow. I just tried Quantum and I see great improvement. Awesome job!
Everybody says it’s fast, and pages certain do appear the get rendered faster, but CSS variables and JS events run so slowly now that things I have built that used to be silky smooth animations in older FF (and every other browser) are now showing up as slideshows in FF Quantum. What a total piece of garbage!
Here’s a video I recorded a few moments ago of the same page in the new FF and in regular Safari - for the record, it used to look like Safari’s example in pre-Quantum Firefox: http://staticresource.com/new-ff.mp4
It’s running so slowly, I’m probably going to get bug reports for my software because of how bad the new FF sucks, and what can I tell them? Downgrading would fix performance, but is never recommended for security.
Looks great here on macOS, I can’t reproduce your issue either. As @skade said, any information on the machine itself would be appreciated, happy to try and help diagnose.
Regardless of performance pre-quantum, you can help us investigate if you swing by on IRC at irc.mozilla.org #developers and ask for help in profiling a specifically slow website. Folks will show you around if you’re a bit patient with uss
N.B.: most Devs are in Pacific Time (utc-8 O think)
For those wondering if anything good ever came out of this thread.. innovati dropped by and we ended up with at least a couple useful bug reports & test cases, and devs are looking into it :-) So thanks a lot.
Thanks for your help DuClare! Hopefully (if they have time, and if they find the bugs) they can fix these and be on par with previous releases of their own browser, and also join other browsers in their performance ^_^
It ran as smooth as could be previously, none of the demos I’m talking about are particularly computationally expensive and run just fine on low end hardware, but it feels like new FF is throttled or something, it’s not just jumpy it’s a downright slideshow
Should this little amount of JS turn a modern browser into an absolute slideshow?
function update(e){
var x = e.clientX || e.touches[0].clientX
var y = e.clientY || e.touches[0].clientY
document.documentElement.style.setProperty('--cursorX', x + 'px')
document.documentElement.style.setProperty('--cursorY', y + 'px')
}
document.addEventListener('mousemove',update)
document.addEventListener('touchmove',update)
It updates 2 variables on mousemove and touchmove - that’s it! There’s literally nothing else going on in this demo :/ It worked fine in FF until this new version.
What version did you run previously? 56 or something older?
I’m being told there’s event throttling in nightly which should reduce excess updates and thus improve performance. This doesn’t explain why performance should have regressed in 57. I honestly can’t see much of a difference between 56, 57, and nightly.
I can see a similarish slowdown of the animation on my version of FF (58.0b1 (64-bit) dev edition on Windows 8.1). Granted, I’m running on an older bit of hardware. (a 4-core i5-2400 running up to 3.1GHz, 8GB of memory). Chrome on the same machine runs the animation smoothly
Overall, on older hardware (2010-12 era CPUs), FF 57+ seems to have issues where a heavy page seems to be able to contest rendering on other pages, at least that’s my guess. However, I don’t have a stable repro at the moment.
It definitely feels a lot faster than previous Firefox releases so I decided to compare it to the latest Chrome on both my 2015 Macbook Air and my HP Z440 Linux workstation. I ran all 4 of the benchmarks at browserbench.org to see how each browser did on both machines. Chrome bested Firefox significantly across all 4 benchmarks on both machines. In particular, JetStream seemed to identify some serious memory leaks in Firefox.
Seems much-improved so far, but does anyone know if it’s possible to make it so zooming gestures work the way they do on mobile devices (i.e. by zooming in on one part of the rendered page, rather than reflowing the page)? It’s been an open bug for five years (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=789906) and it seems that there are no WebExtensions compatible add-ons to enable it.
I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser since I ditched Navigator back who knows when. v57 really is so much faster I couldn’t believe. Clear win for most of its users and congrats to everyone involved.
Still, I am seriously thinking of going back to v56 or maybe ESR. I tried to use Tree Style Tab instead of Tab Groups, but it is simply not similar. Neither are other tab organizers suggested by Mozilla as they don’t provide real groups (trees require “leading” page) none of them hides “groups” I am not using. I’ll give it a few more days to see if I can get used to discomfort.
It is fast :)
(Note the imaginary Mozilla Hat I’m wearing though :-). Actual hat yet to be approved)
Congratulations, and to all your colleagues, too! Quantum has just landed on my phone, and the speed improvement is remarkable. (I thought at first it might be a placebo effect, but it turns out all these Rust components are in the Android build, too. I never knew, I thought all this joy was just for desktop. That’s something Mozilla might want to trumpet more loudly?)
By the bye, if you or a colleague are thinking of writing about the social side of project Quantum, I for one would be well interested. AFAIK projects this successful generally involve some rather successful teambuilding and vision-sharing and project-managing, too, and I always enjoy reading about that sort of thing.
Much of the android stuff doesn’t land until 58; I bet we’ll make more noise about it then.
As a Firefox Nightly user, I have to vouch for this. A good friend of mine, intern at Mozilla during the summer, told me to try and I could not believe it. Not only the speed was better than I recalled, battery life was also increased, and they had included several sweet features in the browser. I would recommend you to at least download it and give it a shot.
I have tested today, its incredibly fast. Both with SPA Js applications, standard sites as well etc. The memory usage is much lower than chrome (as promised) so all round I’m a very happy camper. The default style out of the box is also very clean. A big improvement from previous versions.
It will be interesting to see the Servo adoption from smaller browser projects.
Seconding the lower memory usage! I’ve been thrilled since I switched over to the nightly and now rarely reach for chrome.
I’m really excited to see that Chrome finally has some serious competition. We’ve already lived through the IE dominance era, and the dangers of one company having a dominant browser are quite clear at this point. This alone is a great reason to start using Firefox in my opinion.
Firefox is now (and since some nightly versions ago) faster and a lot more resource friendly than chrome for me. But, I am surprised that neither Firefox nor Chrome support hardware accelerated video decoding under Linux and it’s quite surprising to me that nobody mentioned it because this is the number one battery killer for me. Are there any plans to support VAAPI in upcomming Firefox versions?
edit: typos fixed.
Meanwhile, I’m still waiting on ESR for Vimperator or Vimium to catch up :)
Vimperator is EOL sadly.
cmcaine has gotten an extended keyboard api for WebEx approved but it not slated to be implemented until the next release. They are also https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl working on a replacement for Vimperator called Tridactyl.
Yeah, I know.
That said, Vimium is said to be the best among WebEx-compatible, Vimperator-like extensions. I think I’ll probably wait until 52 is EOL and decide what to do then.
Someone on the orange website mentioned this one: https://github.com/ueokande/vim-vixen apparently the only one supporting ex commands
I’ve been using Vimium with Quantum (Firefox Developer Edition) for a few days and haven’t noticed any problems. (I am a long-time user of Vimium in Chrome.) I don’t know if it’s at 100% feature parity, but all of the features I use work.
One thing that really miffs me about Firefox (that I’m being reminded of right now) is that Ctrl-q closes the entire browser. Seems great, until you remember that Ctrl-w closes tabs and if you accidentally fat-finger (or just miss) the key, you lose your entire session.
I’ve looked at some “disable ctrl-q behavior” and “remap keys” extensions but none of them seem to work with this newest version (even though they’re supported). Has anyone found a workaround?
Just type Dvorak, and then Q and W are on opposite sides of the keyboard! Problem solved! /s
Set
browser.tabs.warnOnClose = true,browser.showQuitWarning = trueand DO NOT SET “Show my windows and tabs from last time”. There is a WebExtension for this but it only works on Mac (o_0)Fat-fingering Ctrl-W? meh. I have Ctrl-Q set as my tmux shortcut key! Imagine how many times I press it into the wrong window :D
unacceptable
It’s not going to, like, actually lose your tabs.
Ctrl-Q shows a popup with “Save and Quit”. Crash/kill -9/power plug pulling/… – the “do you want to restore session” screen.
I know the flexibility of extensions to change key bindings according to user preferences is greatly diminished with webextensions; I’ve had to route around this problem at the OS layer instead of inside FF: https://technomancy.us/184
If you’re running Gnome you can create a custom keyboard shortcut for Ctrl+Q with an empty action to disable it (in all applications).
The “Disable Ctrl-Q and Cmd-Q” add-on works for me. I’m sitting here mashing Ctrl-Q and nothing is happening.
edit: ah, https://bugzil.la/1325692 may be related if you’re on Linux. Sorry :/
I was concerned that the new extension API would break my extensions, but HTTPS Everywhere, uBlock Origin, and Privacy Badger are already compatible with the new version of Firefox. NoScript has announced that it will have support “definitely by the end of this week”.
Unfortunately, Random Agent Spoofer will not support the new version. Does anybody know any alternatives?
uMatrix has user agent spoofing.
Agent spoofing is something that Firefox (as of version 56) supports natively, but what I like about Random Agent Spoofer was that it could be set to send a randomized user-agent string with every request. uMatrix doesn’t appear to do that, from what I can see.
I’ve been using uBlock Origin as a Noscript replacement with no complaints.
I started re-using FF when I saw an article on Hacker News about Quantum hitting Developer edition, and try it out. It was so nice that I switch back to FF. The error I made was setuping the release instance, so it was not easy to transfer the profile to the Developer edition. Now that it’s released wow it’s fast. I really like what the team is doing and I have great hope for FF in the future. I still need to use Chrome a little, but FF is now my main browser at work and at home!
Thanks for the hard work :)
I am seriously impressed. Around year ago I dropped firefox for chromium because sites like 500px were visibly slow. I just tried Quantum and I see great improvement. Awesome job!
I already used firefox but quantum is great. I’m really happy with it, so thanks to all the folks who made it happen!
Everybody says it’s fast, and pages certain do appear the get rendered faster, but CSS variables and JS events run so slowly now that things I have built that used to be silky smooth animations in older FF (and every other browser) are now showing up as slideshows in FF Quantum. What a total piece of garbage!
Here’s a video I recorded a few moments ago of the same page in the new FF and in regular Safari - for the record, it used to look like Safari’s example in pre-Quantum Firefox: http://staticresource.com/new-ff.mp4
It’s running so slowly, I’m probably going to get bug reports for my software because of how bad the new FF sucks, and what can I tell them? Downgrading would fix performance, but is never recommended for security.
Interesting. What machine is this running on? I tried it on mine and couldn’t replicate the effect. Runs smoothly.
Looks great here on macOS, I can’t reproduce your issue either. As @skade said, any information on the machine itself would be appreciated, happy to try and help diagnose.
I get the same thing on a 3Ghz i7 Macmini7,1. Not sure how that particular demo performed in pre-quantum firefox, though.
Regardless of performance pre-quantum, you can help us investigate if you swing by on IRC at irc.mozilla.org #developers and ask for help in profiling a specifically slow website. Folks will show you around if you’re a bit patient with uss
N.B.: most Devs are in Pacific Time (utc-8 O think)
Also, couldn’t find anybody in #developers on irc.mozilla.org - are you sure that’s where you meant to send me?
image of IRC channel list
The channel does not show up on that list, probably due to a channel mode (+s).
It’s #developers, it’s there and there’s around 600 people in right now.
For those wondering if anything good ever came out of this thread.. innovati dropped by and we ended up with at least a couple useful bug reports & test cases, and devs are looking into it :-) So thanks a lot.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1417970
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1417991
Thanks for your help DuClare! Hopefully (if they have time, and if they find the bugs) they can fix these and be on par with previous releases of their own browser, and also join other browsers in their performance ^_^
It ran as smooth as could be previously, none of the demos I’m talking about are particularly computationally expensive and run just fine on low end hardware, but it feels like new FF is throttled or something, it’s not just jumpy it’s a downright slideshow
Compare this page in new FF to any other browser: https://s.codepen.io/tomhodgins/debug/egWjBb
Should this little amount of JS turn a modern browser into an absolute slideshow?
It updates 2 variables on
mousemoveandtouchmove- that’s it! There’s literally nothing else going on in this demo :/ It worked fine in FF until this new version.This is working very smoothly for me. Running firefox 57 on arch linux.
Thanks for having a peek :3
What version did you run previously? 56 or something older?
I’m being told there’s event throttling in nightly which should reduce excess updates and thus improve performance. This doesn’t explain why performance should have regressed in 57. I honestly can’t see much of a difference between 56, 57, and nightly.
I can see a similarish slowdown of the animation on my version of FF (58.0b1 (64-bit) dev edition on Windows 8.1). Granted, I’m running on an older bit of hardware. (a 4-core i5-2400 running up to 3.1GHz, 8GB of memory). Chrome on the same machine runs the animation smoothly
Overall, on older hardware (2010-12 era CPUs), FF 57+ seems to have issues where a heavy page seems to be able to contest rendering on other pages, at least that’s my guess. However, I don’t have a stable repro at the moment.
I’ve been running beta for the last month. As a Chrome migrant I’m a big fan already!
It definitely feels a lot faster than previous Firefox releases so I decided to compare it to the latest Chrome on both my 2015 Macbook Air and my HP Z440 Linux workstation. I ran all 4 of the benchmarks at browserbench.org to see how each browser did on both machines. Chrome bested Firefox significantly across all 4 benchmarks on both machines. In particular, JetStream seemed to identify some serious memory leaks in Firefox.
Seems much-improved so far, but does anyone know if it’s possible to make it so zooming gestures work the way they do on mobile devices (i.e. by zooming in on one part of the rendered page, rather than reflowing the page)? It’s been an open bug for five years (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=789906) and it seems that there are no WebExtensions compatible add-ons to enable it.
I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser since I ditched Navigator back who knows when. v57 really is so much faster I couldn’t believe. Clear win for most of its users and congrats to everyone involved.
Still, I am seriously thinking of going back to v56 or maybe ESR. I tried to use Tree Style Tab instead of Tab Groups, but it is simply not similar. Neither are other tab organizers suggested by Mozilla as they don’t provide real groups (trees require “leading” page) none of them hides “groups” I am not using. I’ll give it a few more days to see if I can get used to discomfort.