I switched from Chrome to Firefox when Quantum was released and do not regret it at all. The only thing I really miss from Chrome is the live language/translation tools but other than that Firefox...
I switched from Chrome to Firefox when Quantum was released and do not regret it at all. The only thing I really miss from Chrome is the live language/translation tools but other than that Firefox has been better in almost every way. Even the Web Developer tools for Firefox Quantum are better than Chrome now too, which was the only reason I switched to Chrome in the first place all those years ago.
This is a pretty good synopsis of my experience too. I do miss Chrome's click-to-translate, but I practically live in a browser these days so privacy has to be considered over nice-to-have features.
This is a pretty good synopsis of my experience too. I do miss Chrome's click-to-translate, but I practically live in a browser these days so privacy has to be considered over nice-to-have features.
Same here, I switched from Chrome to Firefox Quantum. But I never really trusted the live translations. What languages do you guys translate when translating entire websites? I have...
Same here, I switched from Chrome to Firefox Quantum.
But I never really trusted the live translations.
What languages do you guys translate when translating entire websites? I have www.translate.google.com and www.deepl.com bookmarked, so I often copy and paste text on both. Sometimes deepL is better (specially for German to English). Google translate is still good if you want a quick check on the meaning of a word.
Honestly, the new look along with being able to use the Normal or Compact sizes for FF were enough to keep me switched over. I always wanted to be a Firefox user just because I respected the...
Honestly, the new look along with being able to use the Normal or Compact sizes for FF were enough to keep me switched over. I always wanted to be a Firefox user just because I respected the project, but they hadn't overcame their (casual) usability and aesthetic problems until Quantum.
You might want to look into the Opener app for (sort of) opening new tabs. If you've tried FF Focus, how about Adguard? FOSS, works just like Ublock Origin except...without counters or script...
You might want to look into the Opener app for (sort of) opening new tabs.
I do live the granular ability to trust sites over others rather than blanket block/allow rules as with Safari+FF.
If you've tried FF Focus, how about Adguard? FOSS, works just like Ublock Origin except...without counters or script management, because Apple.
Firefox has never been irrelevant. Its usage has dropped quite a bit, and Chrome has been dominant as shown here, but for it to be truly irrelevant, web sites would not consider it in their design...
it became irrelevant after Google in 2008 released Chrome, a faster, more secure and versatile browser.
Firefox has never been irrelevant. Its usage has dropped quite a bit, and Chrome has been dominant as shown here, but for it to be truly irrelevant, web sites would not consider it in their design and testing.
When I worked in web dev the Gecko engine wasn't really a "consideration" in that sense. It just worked. There's no real need to design "for Firefox" because it's always been good at getting stuff...
When I worked in web dev the Gecko engine wasn't really a "consideration" in that sense. It just worked. There's no real need to design "for Firefox" because it's always been good at getting stuff right. You ran up Firefox to make sure the hacks you put in for IE didn't break a standards compliant browser but that was usually about it.
Damn, that chart is depressing for Firefox, though. It's such a good, idealistic project. It got a third of the browser market, beat IE and then Google comes along and locks all your internet...
Damn, that chart is depressing for Firefox, though. It's such a good, idealistic project. It got a third of the browser market, beat IE and then Google comes along and locks all your internet activity to one company.
I don't think it's all that depressing, honestly. Notice that the chart shows us percent market share. That can be an incredibly misleading data point as it can appear that Firefox is suddenly...
I don't think it's all that depressing, honestly. Notice that the chart shows us percent market share. That can be an incredibly misleading data point as it can appear that Firefox is suddenly being adopted less, but is actually being adopted more but is simply having those numbers overshadowed. Additionally, notice that the sharp rise in Chrome usage roughly coincides with the increase in smartphone adoption over the years. Also note that Safari usage increases over that same time period. It's then reasonable to speculate that Chrome's prevalence in that chart is largely due to smartphone adoption.
Other factors could include the sales of Chromebook devices, Chrome coming preinstalled on many Android devices, Google's various services being so widely used and thus influential in choosing Chrome due to the Google brand name, Chrome being marketed by Google whereas Firefox typically isn't advertised, among other things. Then you have the fact that people tend to stick with the browser they're first introduced to unless they're introduced to a browser directly that makes their browsing experience better (people don't really like change, after all), so if they use Chrome for mobile and tablet devices then they're far more likely to use it for desktop devices as well. And if someone gets new devices every year, they're going to be downloading their favorite browser again and again, which can inflate numbers if this behavior isn't being accounted for.
So honestly, I would say that it's just the natural result of marketing and a sudden flood of consumer devices into the market. In the end, most open source software simply won't match the market share of closed source software that has a lot of marketing behind it, at least among your average consumer. Even open source software pushed by a popular company as a product or as a part of their own product will have a distinct advantage over other open source software. That's not a hard rule, but a pretty good rule of thumb.
tl;dr - That chart is probably incredibly misleading due to a variety of factors that can cause numbers to be artificially inflated, and natural market forces give Chrome an automatic advantage e.g. the rise of smartphones. Try not to read too much into it :)
Yeah, Tree Style Tab is a must when you have a bajillion tabs open at all times like I usually do. Tabs Outliner for Chrome was pretty good too though.
Yeah, Tree Style Tab is a must when you have a bajillion tabs open at all times like I usually do. Tabs Outliner for Chrome was pretty good too though.
I wanted to, but after using it for a few weeks, I found that tree style tab in quantum isn't very stable. Sometimes it's just loading, sometimes it doesn't list some tabs. So just to keep it...
I wanted to, but after using it for a few weeks, I found that tree style tab in quantum isn't very stable.
Sometimes it's just loading, sometimes it doesn't list some tabs. So just to keep it safe, I keep the ones on top :/
Yeah I don't mess around with UserChrome.css either... but IMO with Compact Density mode it's not so bad having both tabs at the top and Tree Style Tabs.
Yeah I don't mess around with UserChrome.css either... but IMO with Compact Density mode it's not so bad having both tabs at the top and Tree Style Tabs.
For anyone who wants to try it, this is how you do it: Go to this location: C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile> Create chrome\userChrome.css if it doesn't exist...
For anyone who wants to try it, this is how you do it:
The API for that has been worked on since then. In an experimental state it has been available since 59, and in 61 it's on by default. That's how it works. There are many concerns that come with...
The API for that has been worked on since then. In an experimental state it has been available since 59, and in 61 it's on by default. That's how it works. There are many concerns that come with UI mods, that's why development takes so long.
Tree Style Tab is the main reason I never left Firefox for Chrome. With the amount of tabs I often have open, Chrome's top-tabs got way to crowded. Firefox was the "power user's browser" for a...
Tree Style Tab is the main reason I never left Firefox for Chrome. With the amount of tabs I often have open, Chrome's top-tabs got way to crowded. Firefox was the "power user's browser" for a long time as well, and so it had some great plugins in addition to TST that meant I could really make it my own.
Yes to the first, no to the second. Chrome/Chromium is secure, but it likes to “phone home” to Google. Can someone who knows more than me weigh in on this? Which is good for security, but is...
Google said that privacy and security went hand in hand, and that it led the industry on both fronts.
Yes to the first, no to the second. Chrome/Chromium is secure, but it likes to “phone home” to Google.
The search giant said it had the only browser with a method for reliably addressing Spectre, the security flaw that was revealed this year and that cannot be completely fixed.
Can someone who knows more than me weigh in on this?
Chrome also includes a built-in filter that blocks inappropriate, malicious ads from loading.
Which is good for security, but is nothing compared to Firefox’s Tracking Protection. At least it incentivizes advertisers to make better ads, if not more privacy respecting ones.
And only lightweight versions of Firefox are available for Apple’s iOS devices.
Sad but true. No Ublock, can’t be set as default browser, etc. That said, it’s extremely stable compared to the more privacy focused Endless/Brave and the tracking protection blocks most ads.
By the way, I count 8 ad trackers and 35 analytics trackers on the mobile site. I get that they need to collect some data, but is it really necessary to have 35 trackers?
A bit misleading but not entirely untrue. Chromium vs. Firefox Chromium addresses side-channel attacks by using Site Isolation - rendering content for each website in a separate process. It will...
The search giant said it had the only browser with a method for reliably addressing Spectre, the security flaw that was revealed this year and that cannot be completely fixed.
Can someone who knows more than me weigh in on this?
Chromium addresses side-channel attacks by using Site Isolation - rendering content for each website in a separate process. It will be enabled by default in an upcoming version of Chrome but has to be manually enabled for now.
You might not be the best person to answer this question, but are you guys seeing the effect of Quantum on usage statistics? Is market share increasing a little bit?
You might not be the best person to answer this question, but are you guys seeing the effect of Quantum on usage statistics? Is market share increasing a little bit?
It's a complicated subject. Mozilla's NDA is unique in the sense that we consider almost everything to be public by default, instead of the other way around like most tech companies. Sadly, our...
It's a complicated subject.
Mozilla's NDA is unique in the sense that we consider almost everything to be public by default, instead of the other way around like most tech companies. Sadly, our internal usage numbers are one of those exceptions, so I can't discuss that.
I do have some general comments on browser market share numbers, however:
As mentioned by @Emerald_Knight, the total number of people on the web is increasing, so a loss in market share does not necessarily translate to a loss in users.
Mobile is a big deal in terms of growth in web traffic, which is really, really hard for us to penetrate. Most people are perfectly happy with the browsers that were bundled with their devices. We're finally developing a mobile strategy that I think is going to help. Firefox Focus is kind of our toehold. Stay tuned!
StatCounter and NetMarketShare offer an incomplete view of web traffic. When you consider the largest websites in the world, they all run their own analytics, and they tend to consider their analytics to be trade secrets. You never hear market share numbers coming out of Google or Facebook, for example. It is entirely possible for users to stay entirely within the ecosystems of those companies, such that their usage never shows up on StatCounter or NetMarketShare's radar. It's a huge blind spot.
Firefox supports tracking protection; when enabled, it blocks their code. Yes, you could argue that sites could pull user agent information in other ways (such as grabbing user agents from HTTP logs), but our understanding is that in practice, the trackers obtain their UA information via JavaScript.
Our data scientists have some issues with the methodologies of the two popular browser market share reports.
Having said that, there are two things I can assure you of:
Mozilla leadership pays attention to both internal and external metrics;
Even though Mozilla disagrees with some methodologies of external metrics, leadership understands that they influence perception of strength, particularly in the webdev community. Mozilla's goal with respect to market share isn't to win browser wars; it's to have enough influence to be able to shape standards, and to encourage developers to code to those standards instead of to an individual browser or engine. If our market share is too small, it becomes harder for us to do that.
Thanks for the great answer! Just one remark: I agree 100%, but when I see the public market share data, I sure am worried... Hence my question :)
Thanks for the great answer! Just one remark:
Mozilla's goal with respect to market share isn't to win browser wars; it's to have enough influence to be able to shape standards, and to encourage developers to code to those standards instead of to an individual browser or engine. If our market share is too small, it becomes harder for us to do that.
I agree 100%, but when I see the public market share data, I sure am worried... Hence my question :)
Hey! I'll just list some questions I can think of right now. :p Desktop: Why is there still no proper global permission and shortcut management? Even the lackluster attempt with about:permissions...
Hey! I'll just list some questions I can think of right now. :p
Desktop:
Why is there still no proper global permission and shortcut management? Even the lackluster attempt with about:permissions was removed long ago.
Is there at least some hope we'll get a global shortcut API? After all, there are still so many keyboard-driven users,
Why does the font manager not show the fonts how they would be rendered? Especially in order to see how different locales will look like.
What is the status of a global shortcut API support?
Why can't we configure search engines manually?
Similarly, why don't you allow users to select their own block list for tracking?
Why is there no search bar on the default get add-ons page?
Why is the add-on search so bad? At least allow to exclude anything outside the title and the description, that alone would decrease noise immensely.
Why can't we set the application that should open a file by default in Firefox itself?
And why can't we choose whether a save only or open or save window will appear for particular file types?
Can we get a cookie expires on tab close and cookie expires after leaving a domain option in the cookie manager?
Can we get a counter of the number of permission entries for location/camera/etc. so we don't have to click settings for each of them?
Can we get a normal restart function in the menu or as a about:restart URI? Why is there only one disabling add-ons, while the normal one is hidden in about:profiles?
Mobile:
Can we get an integrated invert colors feature similarly to what Lightning+ offers? It's FOSS, just steal it. :p
Why don't you take advantage of the space sliding side bars at the left and right would bring?
Why is the mobile theme support so bad? What about a black AMOLED app (incl. menu) theme?
Firefox should consider adding a floating button at the bottom as a more comfortable access to selected functions.
Are there any plans for navigation via gestures?
We should be able to choose what sharing buttons are accessible directly in the menu.
There should be a way to set how long the switch to tab tool-tip should appear.
The add-ons button in the menu should lead to a sub-menu like 'page' or 'tools', listing all or some add-ons.
With respect, these aren't AMA questions so much as they are complaints and feature requests. I am neither a product manager, nor am I involved with any of these things that you are asking about...
With respect, these aren't AMA questions so much as they are complaints and feature requests.
I am neither a product manager, nor am I involved with any of these things that you are asking about (I work on lower-level stuff), so I would suggest that you consider filing issues in our bug tracker for these things. If Bugzilla suggests an existing bug that already exists, use the vote feature to indicate your interest (but please no "me too" posts in existing bugs, those just add noise).
Why are these complaints rather than questions-? Since I don't know what team you're on, I just listed everything that I thought of at the moment--and AMA means anything anyway. The non-questions...
Why are these complaints rather than questions-? Since I don't know what team you're on, I just listed everything that I thought of at the moment--and AMA means anything anyway. The non-questions are just suggestions you might have had something to comment on if that was your area.
No need to interpret my post as a judgemental commentary. edit: grammar
Blog Bugzilla Account I can add more if necessary. Definitely for Android. iOS is trickier because App Store policies prevent us from using Gecko. Not sure, sorry. You'd have to ask the iOS team....
First of all, please provide proof. Not that I doubt you, but isn’t that how AMA’s work?
Second, are there any plans to port the tracking protection enhancements (canvas+webgl blocking, crypto mining blocking) to mobile?
Definitely for Android. iOS is trickier because App Store policies prevent us from using Gecko.
Third, I understand that you use the iOS content blocking api for tracking protection. To my knowledge, it just provides the browser with a list of stuff to block. How then, is Firefox able to display stats on what’s being blocked?
Not sure, sorry. You'd have to ask the iOS team.
Finally, what “low level” job are you in? Testing fonts and ui? (Sorry if my questions aren’t your pay grade.)
To clarify, when I said "low-level," I was referring to the code that I work on, not my job level. My title is actually "Staff Platform Engineer," which essentially a tech lead who works on the Gecko web engine.
I work on the Platform Integration and Content Isolation team. "Platform Integration" is Mozilla-speak for all of the code that is specific to a particular desktop OS. "Content Isolation" = Sandboxing. I work mostly on the former, but am often consulted on the latter.
Thank you. You might want to ask some help from the Snowhaze devs. FOSS, does the same as Brave at protecting from fingerprinting, but like Firefox, it's WKwebview, so it might be possible for...
I can add more if necessary.
Thank you.
Definitely for Android. iOS is trickier because App Store policies prevent us from using Gecko.
You might want to ask some help from the Snowhaze devs. FOSS, does the same as Brave at protecting from fingerprinting, but like Firefox, it's WKwebview, so it might be possible for Firefox to do the same. I know nothing about iOS development though, so I'm likely wrong.
Not sure, sorry. You'd have to ask the iOS team.
Are they active on reddit?
"Content Isolation" = Sandboxing. I work mostly on the former, but am often consulted on the latter.
So you're one of the people who make sure that visiting a single malicious site doesn't infect the entire browser/computer? Thanks for providing security!
I'm sure that there is some kind of plan there, but since I work on Gecko, and iOS can't use it, I am pretty detached from the technical side of our iOS offerings. You're in luck, our iOS manager...
You might want to ask some help from the Snowhaze devs. FOSS, does the same as Brave at protecting from fingerprinting, but like Firefox, it's WKwebview, so it might be possible for Firefox to do the same. I know nothing about iOS development though, so I'm likely wrong.
I'm sure that there is some kind of plan there, but since I work on Gecko, and iOS can't use it, I am pretty detached from the technical side of our iOS offerings.
Are they active on reddit?
You're in luck, our iOS manager hangs out on /r/Firefox.
So you're one of the people who make sure that visiting a single malicious site doesn't infect the entire browser/computer?
Among other things! In 2016 and 2017, I spent 18 months on the electrolysis project in a race to attain 100% deployment of multiprocess in time for the Quantum 57 release.
A brwoser hitting the news needs to build a little momentum first. If it hit the news right when it dropped it would probably not have been looked at the same .
A brwoser hitting the news needs to build a little momentum first. If it hit the news right when it dropped it would probably not have been looked at the same .
I have a suggestion for a browser setup that i switched to when quantum came out. I currently run a stripped version of firefox called waterfox, It is very quick and supports the old addons,...
I have a suggestion for a browser setup that i switched to when quantum came out. I currently run a stripped version of firefox called waterfox, It is very quick and supports the old addons, including unsigned ones.
If you run Waterfox + this stack of addons (over a VPN, with a pihole dns set up ofc)
Decentraleyes (decentralises dependecies)
HTTPS everywhere (Forces HTTPS if it's available)
NoScript (blocks JS by default)
Privacy Badger (blocks trackers)
self-destructing cookies (automatically delete cookies)
uBlock Origin (blocks ads)
Random Agent Spoofer (Spoofs referers, ip, resolutions, against browser fingerprinting because you are very unique when you use the above)
you are as protected as you can be without going completely TOR.
Every time I try to go back to FF I can't get over how ugly the form widgets are. Straight out of 1998. EDIT: And just to be sure, I gave it another shot: the tab bar has been updated and looks...
Every time I try to go back to FF I can't get over how ugly the form widgets are. Straight out of 1998.
EDIT: And just to be sure, I gave it another shot: the tab bar has been updated and looks real nice, but those form widgets are still hideous.
There have been at least 3 or 4 redesigns since 1998. I must say I like Firefox' look better than Chrome nowadays, but that's a matter of taste anyways.
There have been at least 3 or 4 redesigns since 1998. I must say I like Firefox' look better than Chrome nowadays, but that's a matter of taste anyways.
I don't mean it literally hasn't changed since 1998, I mean despite all the changes, the form widgets still look like they fell out of the 90's. Which is a shame: in terms of responsiveness it...
I don't mean it literally hasn't changed since 1998, I mean despite all the changes, the form widgets still look like they fell out of the 90's.
Which is a shame: in terms of responsiveness it seems to be on par with Chrome and I don't have a problem with any of the other aesthetics. But those form widgets, man. They're gross.
On some level the fact that it's minor makes it more annoying. So they've containerized Facebook and overhauled their JavaScript interpreter to arguably take the lead. These are impressive...
On some level the fact that it's minor makes it more annoying. So they've containerized Facebook and overhauled their JavaScript interpreter to arguably take the lead. These are impressive technical feats. And yet they still can't figure out how to frame a text box?
Firefox Chrome What's with the faux bevel around the form field? Why are the buttons totally flat despite the bevel around the form field? Why is the kerning on the button text so tight?
What's with the faux bevel around the form field? Why are the buttons totally flat despite the bevel around the form field? Why is the kerning on the button text so tight?
As a web developer, I tend to mostly stick with Chrome because it's usually first to add new features that are getting standardized. But Firefox's DevTools are impressive. And I like how Chrome...
As a web developer, I tend to mostly stick with Chrome because it's usually first to add new features that are getting standardized. But Firefox's DevTools are impressive. And I like how Chrome handles bookmarks but but I use both regularly.
Just fired up Firefox for the first time in a while and the first thing I noticed was how it looks pretty much exactly like Microsoft Edge. It's not my favorite browser UI in the world but I can...
Just fired up Firefox for the first time in a while and the first thing I noticed was how it looks pretty much exactly like Microsoft Edge. It's not my favorite browser UI in the world but I can live with it. Next, I tried to fire up Reddit. After about 10 seconds of trying to load the site, I got this error message. A couple refreshes later and the page finally loads, however, Chrome is still the faster browser by a noticeable margin.
In this day and age, I think it's pretty much impossible to have complete privacy on the internet. I don't feel like bottlenecking my enjoyment of the web for slightly more anonymity.
That appears to be an error in the reddit redesign, not related to Firefox: https://www.google.com/search?q=sorry%2C+we+have+failed+you.+try+refreshing!+site%3Areddit.com Maybe try testing on a...
That appears to be an error in the reddit redesign, not related to Firefox:
From my anecdotal experience, Firefox ("Quantum") will freeze other (Firefox) windows when in heavy use in order to prioritize the window you're currently in. This doesn't work for me. I used to...
From my anecdotal experience, Firefox ("Quantum") will freeze other (Firefox) windows when in heavy use in order to prioritize the window you're currently in. This doesn't work for me. I used to solely use Firefox, but I have to multitask a lot, and Firefox isn't great for doing that.
Firefox is the one thing I stuck to in terms of internet idealism. Never switched to Chrome. Ironically, partly for the reason you just brought up, but also because I really like the idea of a...
Firefox is the one thing I stuck to in terms of internet idealism. Never switched to Chrome. Ironically, partly for the reason you just brought up, but also because I really like the idea of a non-profit organization running my internet browser. They're also the best open source project I know and actually care about user-oriented UI design (which is depressingly rare in open source software). If I have a choice between Google owning 100% of my internet use or just 70%, I prefer the latter.
The one thing Chrome had over Firefox that was hard to argue was that Chrome was faster. Since Firefox Quantum (version 57), that's no longer the case.
One of my biggest reasons is that Google is an advertising company, I don’t want my browsing activity anywhere near their browser. From a technical standpoint, Quantam is a bit faster for me, but...
One of my biggest reasons is that Google is an advertising company, I don’t want my browsing activity anywhere near their browser.
From a technical standpoint, Quantam is a bit faster for me, but even more significant is that it can handle hundreds of tabs no problem, while Chrome starts having memory issue with just a few dozen.
Extensions are more powerful (the transition to web extensions made them a bit less powerful, but they’re working hard on adding most of the old APIs back).
As a developer, the dev tools are a lot better.
I also prefer the look and UI (and UI customizability) of Fiefox.
I also switched to Firefox when Quantum came out, and the thing that I miss most is casting to chromecast. I wish there were a way to do this from Firefox, but I guess it is kind of in the name.
I also switched to Firefox when Quantum came out, and the thing that I miss most is casting to chromecast. I wish there were a way to do this from Firefox, but I guess it is kind of in the name.
As a developer I spend a good chunk of my time in Chrome DevTools, maybe it's my unfamiliarity with Firefox's tools but I just don't like them and they are missing some important features (like...
As a developer I spend a good chunk of my time in Chrome DevTools, maybe it's my unfamiliarity with Firefox's tools but I just don't like them and they are missing some important features (like nodejs remote debugging) that I lean on heavily. Also for better or worse I've bought into the Google ecosystem, I have an android phone and I simply like the convenience of all the integrations more than I care about what I pay for them.
Firefox Developer Edition has Remote Debugging enabled by default... in the "normal" edition you just have to enable it in the Dev Tools Settings. Inspect Element - click the Settings Cog (top...
Firefox Developer Edition has Remote Debugging enabled by default... in the "normal" edition you just have to enable it in the Dev Tools Settings.
Inspect Element - click the Settings Cog (top right) - Advanced Settings (bottom right) - check 'Enable remote debugging'
There’s documentation on debugging node on the devtools website (the website talks about installing a standalone version of the devtools, but it should be possible with what’s included in Firefox).
There’s documentation on debugging node on the devtools website (the website talks about installing a standalone version of the devtools, but it should be possible with what’s included in Firefox).
AFAIK the debuggers for both Chrome and Firefox are comparable now. I have never worked with nodejs though so can't say for sure, and I could be wrong that perhaps Chrome does something better...
AFAIK the debuggers for both Chrome and Firefox are comparable now. I have never worked with nodejs though so can't say for sure, and I could be wrong that perhaps Chrome does something better regarding it than Firefox.
I don't know if Debian Testing has the latest, supposedly faster, version yet but Firefox on my machine is still incredibly slow to load stuff compared to Chrome. It's almost like it's using a...
I don't know if Debian Testing has the latest, supposedly faster, version yet but Firefox on my machine is still incredibly slow to load stuff compared to Chrome. It's almost like it's using a different - and much worse - DNS service. Chrome is snappy, Firefox still feels slow and clunky.
I think it should. If you go to "About Firefox" under the help menu it'll tell you the version number. I've found the loading and rendering to be very snappy. I have to agree with you about DNS...
I think it should. If you go to "About Firefox" under the help menu it'll tell you the version number.
I've found the loading and rendering to be very snappy. I have to agree with you about DNS though. On firefox, on linux, I've repeatedly had problems with DNS resolution, where firefox takes an extra second to lookup each third party domain.
I think this is because chrome isn't using system DNS maybe? I think it's phoning everything home to google, where google is using its own internal DNS? I'm not 100% sure on that.
Anyway, in some cases, this is caused by firefox trying to look stuff up over ipv6 when you don't have a valid ipv6 configuration. In some cases I've completely solved the slow DNS problem by going to about:config, searching for network.dns.disableIPv6 and setting it to "true".
Note though, this doesn't always solve it. For whatever reason, I still occasionally get slow DNS problems in firefox on linux. Never on windows, not always, not any specific version, or any specific reason I've managed to nail down. I've got to agree, super annoying, and if I couldn't solve it I'd likely use chrome.
Page rendering is fine. But to be honest, page rendering on a modern computer using a modern rendering engine should be fine! It's pretty basic stuff, and Gecko is a good engine. I think Blink is...
Page rendering is fine. But to be honest, page rendering on a modern computer using a modern rendering engine should be fine! It's pretty basic stuff, and Gecko is a good engine. I think Blink is slightly better but it's so close to make no real-world difference.
I might dig about with the DNS settings. I know Chrome caches DNS and does some Smart prediction/pre-fetching stuff, maybe that's where FF is losing a few fractions of a second. I'm not sure if Chrome phones home to google as part of the initial request, although if it does Google's DNS is pretty damn fast anyway. I can't really tell any difference between Cloudflare and Google for DNS speed.
I mostly stick with Chrome because it works. Opera is arguably a better browser but given I have Chrome running nicely with bookmarks and extensions and so on and there's nothing actually bad about it (personally I consider the privacy/services trade-off Google offer to be reasonable in it's current form), there's not much incentive to change.
You say that, but on the other hand the current trend these days is to have a framework spit out 10mb of javascript and css. If your network connection is fast enough that you don't notice the...
Page rendering is fine. But to be honest, page rendering on a modern computer using a modern rendering engine should be fine! It's pretty basic stuff, and Gecko is a good engine. I think Blink is slightly better but it's so close to make no real-world difference.
You say that, but on the other hand the current trend these days is to have a framework spit out 10mb of javascript and css. If your network connection is fast enough that you don't notice the difference between 1mb and 20mb because they both take less than a second, then rendering time becomes a lot more apparent.
The other performance concern is multiplying the overhead of the javascript and layout engines times the number of tabs you have open. I never really have more than 10 tabs open at the worst of times, but I know some people frequently end up with 100+. If you're one of those people, and say you're on an i3 laptop with 4gb of ram, you're going to notice a huge, night and day difference between different browsers. Chrome has gotten bad with this. Edge is surprisingly good, but it still won't get me to use it.
Anyway, you're right, for most people it's largely "six of one, half a dozen of the other". All browsers these days perform adequately, and render accurately. For 90%+ of people, it doesn't really make a difference.
Oh, I know how to find the version number. It's 52.8. I just don't know when that stops being "Firefox" and becomes "Firefox Quantum" I could look it up but given Firefox's current relatively slow...
Oh, I know how to find the version number. It's 52.8. I just don't know when that stops being "Firefox" and becomes "Firefox Quantum"
I could look it up but given Firefox's current relatively slow performance I'm not that bothered in making it my daily driver anyway.
Firefox 57.0+ is Quantum They completely rehauled a lot key components in Quantum, including the engine, so your old version's slow performance is likely a result of missing out on that.
They completely rehauled a lot key components in Quantum, including the engine, so your old version's slow performance is likely a result of missing out on that.
Lol, not even close then. :D Testing is a bit laggy on some packages, but it always gets there eventually. Debian has historically had a bit of Free-as-in-speech related beef with Mozilla...
Lol, not even close then. :D
Testing is a bit laggy on some packages, but it always gets there eventually. Debian has historically had a bit of Free-as-in-speech related beef with Mozilla projects, I don't know if that's a factor. I could pin v60 out of unstable but I'm not that interested. Pinning packages out of other releases can get messy.
Oh hang on, I might be running the ESR version, which is much slower moving. Maybe I'll investigate that.
It's the most up to date version in the Debian repository, it was updated only today. I assume that the Extended Support Release of Firefox gets timely security updates if not features. Otherwise...
It's the most up to date version in the Debian repository, it was updated only today. I assume that the Extended Support Release of Firefox gets timely security updates if not features. Otherwise what would be the point of it?!
Can't you get only the Firefox from the unstable repository? I don't really use Debian, so I'm not sure. I only know that Debian really cares about security and testing.
Can't you get only the Firefox from the unstable repository?
I don't really use Debian, so I'm not sure. I only know that Debian really cares about security and testing.
You can do something called apt pinning which can be wobbly depending on the, well, dependencies. So if I pinned something major like gnome-shell to unstable then I'd also end up with the unstable...
You can do something called apt pinning which can be wobbly depending on the, well, dependencies. So if I pinned something major like gnome-shell to unstable then I'd also end up with the unstable version of everything which depends on a particular version of gnome-shell, and it can get a bit confusing. You can also end up with conflicts between packages in testing which want particular versions of something that another package has forced an upgrade on.
Apt does it's best to manage and resolve these issues and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
Firefox probably doesn't have too many dependencies outside of it's own libraries that are too version-critical, iirc it's a fairly self-contained project. It's unlikely to need bleeding-edge versions of GTK or whatever.
I stopped using FF when they started dicking around with the UI in ways that reduced usability and were completely non-optional. I don't really like Chrome all that much (there are some things...
I stopped using FF when they started dicking around with the UI in ways that reduced usability and were completely non-optional. I don't really like Chrome all that much (there are some things about it I loathe), but I can't see myself going back to FF and risk having the same thing happen again a year or two from now.
I don't! But I know that they haven't done that recently, and being run by a corporate behemoth is likely to slow any similarly massive changes to the front end down by a lot. Of course it's not...
I don't! But I know that they haven't done that recently, and being run by a corporate behemoth is likely to slow any similarly massive changes to the front end down by a lot. Of course it's not like they've ever done things like this - just look at the recent GMail redesign or when they completely axed Google Reader despite it being widely used. If they were to do similarly negative changes to Chrome, then I would certainly reconsider continuing to use it.
Actually, when I moved away from FF as I mentioned in the previous post, I actually started writing my own browser that would allow for a fully-customizable UI (modelled loosely after foobar2k) with various modules that could be imported, but ended up getting distracted by other projects before I got all that far in.
Are you aware of userChrome.css? I wrote a simple tutorial for it here
Are you aware of userChrome.css? I wrote a simple tutorial for it here
Firefox supports advanced customization of its UI with user-defined CSS. This allows virtually unlimited customization of the style of the browser, as well as some functionality customization.
I've tried twice but I have problems with font rendering (kerning) on linux on some websites. My friend also experiences this. Couldn't fix it, so I switched back.
I've tried twice but I have problems with font rendering (kerning) on linux on some websites. My friend also experiences this. Couldn't fix it, so I switched back.
I tried switching to Firefox from Vivaldi back when they released Quantum, but there are several features Vivaldi offers that I don't want to give up. Firefox tends to slow down as you install...
I tried switching to Firefox from Vivaldi back when they released Quantum, but there are several features Vivaldi offers that I don't want to give up. Firefox tends to slow down as you install various privacy/security addons, especially the startup time noticeably slows down even after installing just a couple of addons.
If you have a lot of tabs open it eats up more RAM, and again startup is further slowed down the more tabs are open.
I still feel a sense of brand loyalty towards Mozilla because their browser was kick ass for a long period of time, but brand loyalty doesn't make my browser behave the way I want it to.
Is it the same list that's used for Firefox Focus on mobile ? Because if so it's pretty often that Focus will break a site and I have to disable tracking protection for this particular website,...
Is it the same list that's used for Firefox Focus on mobile ? Because if so it's pretty often that Focus will break a site and I have to disable tracking protection for this particular website, especially because you can't choose what to allow and not like in uBlock or uMatrix.
Unfortunately, certain sites just plain do not work in Firefox, such as Google Voice, which I nearly always have pinned open so that I don't have to have my phone nearby when I'm on the PC. I'm...
Unfortunately, certain sites just plain do not work in Firefox, such as Google Voice, which I nearly always have pinned open so that I don't have to have my phone nearby when I'm on the PC.
I'm quite sure that there are some workarounds - such as getting all of my messages in Hangouts via my pinned GMail tab - but even there, things are broken in Firefox. No phone calls.
couldn't really care about quantum, i actually hate it for removing the things i loved about firefox. firefox has been fast enough for me for years, if it wasn't i would have switched to chrome.
couldn't really care about quantum, i actually hate it for removing the things i loved about firefox.
firefox has been fast enough for me for years, if it wasn't i would have switched to chrome.
You should look into Waterfox (a Firefox fork) if you haven't already. I haven't kept up with their news lately, but, as far as I know, the main developer is committed to keeping legacy addon support.
You should look into Waterfox (a Firefox fork) if you haven't already. I haven't kept up with their news lately, but, as far as I know, the main developer is committed to keeping legacy addon support.
I switched from Chrome to Firefox when Quantum was released and do not regret it at all. The only thing I really miss from Chrome is the live language/translation tools but other than that Firefox has been better in almost every way. Even the Web Developer tools for Firefox Quantum are better than Chrome now too, which was the only reason I switched to Chrome in the first place all those years ago.
This is a pretty good synopsis of my experience too. I do miss Chrome's click-to-translate, but I practically live in a browser these days so privacy has to be considered over nice-to-have features.
Same here, I switched from Chrome to Firefox Quantum.
But I never really trusted the live translations.
What languages do you guys translate when translating entire websites? I have www.translate.google.com and www.deepl.com bookmarked, so I often copy and paste text on both. Sometimes deepL is better (specially for German to English). Google translate is still good if you want a quick check on the meaning of a word.
Honestly, the new look along with being able to use the Normal or Compact sizes for FF were enough to keep me switched over. I always wanted to be a Firefox user just because I respected the project, but they hadn't overcame their (casual) usability and aesthetic problems until Quantum.
+1 for Snowhaze, though the UI isn't the best.
You might want to look into the Opener app for (sort of) opening new tabs.
If you've tried FF Focus, how about Adguard? FOSS, works just like Ublock Origin except...without counters or script management, because Apple.
This has been my experience as well. I'm upset that they had to change their extensions setup with the update though. It broke a lot of useful addons.
Firefox has never been irrelevant. Its usage has dropped quite a bit, and Chrome has been dominant as shown here, but for it to be truly irrelevant, web sites would not consider it in their design and testing.
When I worked in web dev the Gecko engine wasn't really a "consideration" in that sense. It just worked. There's no real need to design "for Firefox" because it's always been good at getting stuff right. You ran up Firefox to make sure the hacks you put in for IE didn't break a standards compliant browser but that was usually about it.
Damn, that chart is depressing for Firefox, though. It's such a good, idealistic project. It got a third of the browser market, beat IE and then Google comes along and locks all your internet activity to one company.
I don't think it's all that depressing, honestly. Notice that the chart shows us percent market share. That can be an incredibly misleading data point as it can appear that Firefox is suddenly being adopted less, but is actually being adopted more but is simply having those numbers overshadowed. Additionally, notice that the sharp rise in Chrome usage roughly coincides with the increase in smartphone adoption over the years. Also note that Safari usage increases over that same time period. It's then reasonable to speculate that Chrome's prevalence in that chart is largely due to smartphone adoption.
Other factors could include the sales of Chromebook devices, Chrome coming preinstalled on many Android devices, Google's various services being so widely used and thus influential in choosing Chrome due to the Google brand name, Chrome being marketed by Google whereas Firefox typically isn't advertised, among other things. Then you have the fact that people tend to stick with the browser they're first introduced to unless they're introduced to a browser directly that makes their browsing experience better (people don't really like change, after all), so if they use Chrome for mobile and tablet devices then they're far more likely to use it for desktop devices as well. And if someone gets new devices every year, they're going to be downloading their favorite browser again and again, which can inflate numbers if this behavior isn't being accounted for.
So honestly, I would say that it's just the natural result of marketing and a sudden flood of consumer devices into the market. In the end, most open source software simply won't match the market share of closed source software that has a lot of marketing behind it, at least among your average consumer. Even open source software pushed by a popular company as a product or as a part of their own product will have a distinct advantage over other open source software. That's not a hard rule, but a pretty good rule of thumb.
tl;dr - That chart is probably incredibly misleading due to a variety of factors that can cause numbers to be artificially inflated, and natural market forces give Chrome an automatic advantage e.g. the rise of smartphones. Try not to read too much into it :)
Also, the sites gathering the statistics probably had their analytics blocked by tracking protection.
Been using firefox as my main browser again since quantum.
How I've missed using Tree Style Tab...
Yeah, Tree Style Tab is a must when you have a bajillion tabs open at all times like I usually do. Tabs Outliner for Chrome was pretty good too though.
I don't like how in Quantum, you can't simply hide the tabs at the top though, feels like a waste showing the tabs twice.
I wanted to, but after using it for a few weeks, I found that tree style tab in quantum isn't very stable.
Sometimes it's just loading, sometimes it doesn't list some tabs. So just to keep it safe, I keep the ones on top :/
Yeah I don't mess around with UserChrome.css either... but IMO with Compact Density mode it's not so bad having both tabs at the top and Tree Style Tabs.
For anyone who wants to try it, this is how you do it:
I've been using Tree Style Tabs with this userChrome.css trick ever since Firefox Quantum launched. Never had any problems.
The API for that has been worked on since then. In an experimental state it has been available since 59, and in 61 it's on by default. That's how it works. There are many concerns that come with UI mods, that's why development takes so long.
This looks interesting will need to check it out. This might cut down on the number of tabs I open and lost track of.
Tree Style Tab is the main reason I never left Firefox for Chrome. With the amount of tabs I often have open, Chrome's top-tabs got way to crowded. Firefox was the "power user's browser" for a long time as well, and so it had some great plugins in addition to TST that meant I could really make it my own.
Yes to the first, no to the second. Chrome/Chromium is secure, but it likes to “phone home” to Google.
Can someone who knows more than me weigh in on this?
Which is good for security, but is nothing compared to Firefox’s Tracking Protection. At least it incentivizes advertisers to make better ads, if not more privacy respecting ones.
Sad but true. No Ublock, can’t be set as default browser, etc. That said, it’s extremely stable compared to the more privacy focused Endless/Brave and the tracking protection blocks most ads.
By the way, I count 8 ad trackers and 35 analytics trackers on the mobile site. I get that they need to collect some data, but is it really necessary to have 35 trackers?
A bit misleading but not entirely untrue.
Chromium vs. Firefox
Chromium addresses side-channel attacks by using Site Isolation - rendering content for each website in a separate process. It will be enabled by default in an upcoming version of Chrome but has to be manually enabled for now.
Firefox, on the other hand, already implemented several short-term mitigation measures across all live and beta versions of the browser but as yet has no "permanent" solution... they are already experimenting with several techniques though.
Mozilla developer (who just joined the tildes community) here. Feel free to AMA!
You might not be the best person to answer this question, but are you guys seeing the effect of Quantum on usage statistics? Is market share increasing a little bit?
It's a complicated subject.
Mozilla's NDA is unique in the sense that we consider almost everything to be public by default, instead of the other way around like most tech companies. Sadly, our internal usage numbers are one of those exceptions, so I can't discuss that.
I do have some general comments on browser market share numbers, however:
Having said that, there are two things I can assure you of:
EDIT: Added mention
Thanks for the great answer! Just one remark:
I agree 100%, but when I see the public market share data, I sure am worried... Hence my question :)
I completely understand! Unfortunately that's the most I can say on the matter. The best I can do is assure you that we want those numbers to improve.
And I will continue my doing my best to promote Firefox. Keep up the good work!
Hey! I'll just list some questions I can think of right now. :p
Desktop:
And why can't we choose whether a save only or open or save window will appear for particular file types?
Mobile:
With respect, these aren't AMA questions so much as they are complaints and feature requests.
I am neither a product manager, nor am I involved with any of these things that you are asking about (I work on lower-level stuff), so I would suggest that you consider filing issues in our bug tracker for these things. If Bugzilla suggests an existing bug that already exists, use the vote feature to indicate your interest (but please no "me too" posts in existing bugs, those just add noise).
Why are these complaints rather than questions-? Since I don't know what team you're on, I just listed everything that I thought of at the moment--and AMA means anything anyway. The non-questions are just suggestions you might have had something to comment on if that was your area.
No need to interpret my post as a judgemental commentary.
edit: grammar
I can add more if necessary.
Definitely for Android. iOS is trickier because App Store policies prevent us from using Gecko.
Not sure, sorry. You'd have to ask the iOS team.
To clarify, when I said "low-level," I was referring to the code that I work on, not my job level. My title is actually "Staff Platform Engineer," which essentially a tech lead who works on the Gecko web engine.
I work on the Platform Integration and Content Isolation team. "Platform Integration" is Mozilla-speak for all of the code that is specific to a particular desktop OS. "Content Isolation" = Sandboxing. I work mostly on the former, but am often consulted on the latter.
Thank you.
You might want to ask some help from the Snowhaze devs. FOSS, does the same as Brave at protecting from fingerprinting, but like Firefox, it's WKwebview, so it might be possible for Firefox to do the same. I know nothing about iOS development though, so I'm likely wrong.
Are they active on reddit?
So you're one of the people who make sure that visiting a single malicious site doesn't infect the entire browser/computer? Thanks for providing security!
I'm sure that there is some kind of plan there, but since I work on Gecko, and iOS can't use it, I am pretty detached from the technical side of our iOS offerings.
You're in luck, our iOS manager hangs out on /r/Firefox.
Among other things! In 2016 and 2017, I spent 18 months on the electrolysis project in a race to attain 100% deployment of multiprocess in time for the Quantum 57 release.
Note that quantum released a few months ago. This article is a bit old news.
A brwoser hitting the news needs to build a little momentum first. If it hit the news right when it dropped it would probably not have been looked at the same .
I think it's Firefox' philosophy to use OS UI elements wherever possible. For me, the scrollbars look different because, I assume, I'm on a Mac.
I have a suggestion for a browser setup that i switched to when quantum came out. I currently run a stripped version of firefox called waterfox, It is very quick and supports the old addons, including unsigned ones.
If you run Waterfox + this stack of addons (over a VPN, with a pihole dns set up ofc)
you are as protected as you can be without going completely TOR.
edit: wrote origin after uBlock
*uBlock Origin
Every time I try to go back to FF I can't get over how ugly the form widgets are. Straight out of 1998.
EDIT: And just to be sure, I gave it another shot: the tab bar has been updated and looks real nice, but those form widgets are still hideous.
There have been at least 3 or 4 redesigns since 1998. I must say I like Firefox' look better than Chrome nowadays, but that's a matter of taste anyways.
I don't mean it literally hasn't changed since 1998, I mean despite all the changes, the form widgets still look like they fell out of the 90's.
Which is a shame: in terms of responsiveness it seems to be on par with Chrome and I don't have a problem with any of the other aesthetics. But those form widgets, man. They're gross.
Aren't these coming from your system/window manager? Also, do you have a particular website in mind?
I primarily use Win10 and macOS, so yes, I'm sure.
Example here
Thanks, I understand now. I agree the Chrome one looks a bit better. Not a disaster though.
On some level the fact that it's minor makes it more annoying. So they've containerized Facebook and overhauled their JavaScript interpreter to arguably take the lead. These are impressive technical feats. And yet they still can't figure out how to frame a text box?
The form widgets are generated from your OS's native theme.
Firefox
Chrome
What's with the faux bevel around the form field? Why are the buttons totally flat despite the bevel around the form field? Why is the kerning on the button text so tight?
The real problem with firefox' buttons is the vertical text alignment
Aint nobody in the world who thinks that bevel is in good taste. Best case, you don't notice it.
I personally love to max out the bevel.
Firefox uses the OS' styling, where applicable. Date input is an example of where they created their own style.
http://jsfiddle.net/jr7gxf18/
As a web developer, I tend to mostly stick with Chrome because it's usually first to add new features that are getting standardized. But Firefox's DevTools are impressive. And I like how Chrome handles bookmarks but but I use both regularly.
Just fired up Firefox for the first time in a while and the first thing I noticed was how it looks pretty much exactly like Microsoft Edge. It's not my favorite browser UI in the world but I can live with it. Next, I tried to fire up Reddit. After about 10 seconds of trying to load the site, I got this error message. A couple refreshes later and the page finally loads, however, Chrome is still the faster browser by a noticeable margin.
In this day and age, I think it's pretty much impossible to have complete privacy on the internet. I don't feel like bottlenecking my enjoyment of the web for slightly more anonymity.
That appears to be an error in the reddit redesign, not related to Firefox:
https://www.google.com/search?q=sorry%2C+we+have+failed+you.+try+refreshing!+site%3Areddit.com
Maybe try testing on a less shitty site, lol. From my anecdotal experience the new ff is as fast as chrome, but with half the memory and cpu usage.
From my anecdotal experience, Firefox ("Quantum") will freeze other (Firefox) windows when in heavy use in order to prioritize the window you're currently in. This doesn't work for me. I used to solely use Firefox, but I have to multitask a lot, and Firefox isn't great for doing that.
why put effort into switching browsers when most of them behave similarly and good enough?
Firefox is the one thing I stuck to in terms of internet idealism. Never switched to Chrome. Ironically, partly for the reason you just brought up, but also because I really like the idea of a non-profit organization running my internet browser. They're also the best open source project I know and actually care about user-oriented UI design (which is depressingly rare in open source software). If I have a choice between Google owning 100% of my internet use or just 70%, I prefer the latter.
The one thing Chrome had over Firefox that was hard to argue was that Chrome was faster. Since Firefox Quantum (version 57), that's no longer the case.
One of my biggest reasons is that Google is an advertising company, I don’t want my browsing activity anywhere near their browser.
From a technical standpoint, Quantam is a bit faster for me, but even more significant is that it can handle hundreds of tabs no problem, while Chrome starts having memory issue with just a few dozen.
Extensions are more powerful (the transition to web extensions made them a bit less powerful, but they’re working hard on adding most of the old APIs back).
As a developer, the dev tools are a lot better.
I also prefer the look and UI (and UI customizability) of Fiefox.
I also switched to Firefox when Quantum came out, and the thing that I miss most is casting to chromecast. I wish there were a way to do this from Firefox, but I guess it is kind of in the name.
As a developer I spend a good chunk of my time in Chrome DevTools, maybe it's my unfamiliarity with Firefox's tools but I just don't like them and they are missing some important features (like nodejs remote debugging) that I lean on heavily. Also for better or worse I've bought into the Google ecosystem, I have an android phone and I simply like the convenience of all the integrations more than I care about what I pay for them.
Firefox Developer Edition has Remote Debugging enabled by default... in the "normal" edition you just have to enable it in the Dev Tools Settings.
Inspect Element - click the Settings Cog (top right) - Advanced Settings (bottom right) - check 'Enable remote debugging'
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Remote_Debugging/Debugging_Firefox_Desktop
The document seems to be alluding to remote debugging of mobile browsers can you confirm this works with nodejs programs as well?
There’s documentation on debugging node on the devtools website (the website talks about installing a standalone version of the devtools, but it should be possible with what’s included in Firefox).
Nice hopefully it's not too much of a pain to get working when the need arises (chrome it's just navigate to
chrome://inspect#devices)AFAIK the debuggers for both Chrome and Firefox are comparable now. I have never worked with nodejs though so can't say for sure, and I could be wrong that perhaps Chrome does something better regarding it than Firefox.
I thought this said Firefly.
You made me a sad panda OP. I hope you're happy.
I don't know if Debian Testing has the latest, supposedly faster, version yet but Firefox on my machine is still incredibly slow to load stuff compared to Chrome. It's almost like it's using a different - and much worse - DNS service. Chrome is snappy, Firefox still feels slow and clunky.
I think it should. If you go to "About Firefox" under the help menu it'll tell you the version number.
I've found the loading and rendering to be very snappy. I have to agree with you about DNS though. On firefox, on linux, I've repeatedly had problems with DNS resolution, where firefox takes an extra second to lookup each third party domain.
I think this is because chrome isn't using system DNS maybe? I think it's phoning everything home to google, where google is using its own internal DNS? I'm not 100% sure on that.
Anyway, in some cases, this is caused by firefox trying to look stuff up over ipv6 when you don't have a valid ipv6 configuration. In some cases I've completely solved the slow DNS problem by going to
about:config, searching fornetwork.dns.disableIPv6and setting it to "true".Note though, this doesn't always solve it. For whatever reason, I still occasionally get slow DNS problems in firefox on linux. Never on windows, not always, not any specific version, or any specific reason I've managed to nail down. I've got to agree, super annoying, and if I couldn't solve it I'd likely use chrome.
Page rendering is fine. But to be honest, page rendering on a modern computer using a modern rendering engine should be fine! It's pretty basic stuff, and Gecko is a good engine. I think Blink is slightly better but it's so close to make no real-world difference.
I might dig about with the DNS settings. I know Chrome caches DNS and does some Smart prediction/pre-fetching stuff, maybe that's where FF is losing a few fractions of a second. I'm not sure if Chrome phones home to google as part of the initial request, although if it does Google's DNS is pretty damn fast anyway. I can't really tell any difference between Cloudflare and Google for DNS speed.
I mostly stick with Chrome because it works. Opera is arguably a better browser but given I have Chrome running nicely with bookmarks and extensions and so on and there's nothing actually bad about it (personally I consider the privacy/services trade-off Google offer to be reasonable in it's current form), there's not much incentive to change.
You say that, but on the other hand the current trend these days is to have a framework spit out 10mb of javascript and css. If your network connection is fast enough that you don't notice the difference between 1mb and 20mb because they both take less than a second, then rendering time becomes a lot more apparent.
The other performance concern is multiplying the overhead of the javascript and layout engines times the number of tabs you have open. I never really have more than 10 tabs open at the worst of times, but I know some people frequently end up with 100+. If you're one of those people, and say you're on an i3 laptop with 4gb of ram, you're going to notice a huge, night and day difference between different browsers. Chrome has gotten bad with this. Edge is surprisingly good, but it still won't get me to use it.
Anyway, you're right, for most people it's largely "six of one, half a dozen of the other". All browsers these days perform adequately, and render accurately. For 90%+ of people, it doesn't really make a difference.
Search for diagnostics on Firefox to check your Firefox version.
Oh, I know how to find the version number. It's 52.8. I just don't know when that stops being "Firefox" and becomes "Firefox Quantum"
I could look it up but given Firefox's current relatively slow performance I'm not that bothered in making it my daily driver anyway.
Firefox 57.0+ is Quantum
They completely rehauled a lot key components in Quantum, including the engine, so your old version's slow performance is likely a result of missing out on that.
Lol, not even close then. :D
Testing is a bit laggy on some packages, but it always gets there eventually. Debian has historically had a bit of Free-as-in-speech related beef with Mozilla projects, I don't know if that's a factor. I could pin v60 out of unstable but I'm not that interested. Pinning packages out of other releases can get messy.
Oh hang on, I might be running the ESR version, which is much slower moving. Maybe I'll investigate that.
Jesus, that's like 8 full versions behind. Keep your browsers updated!
It's the most up to date version in the Debian repository, it was updated only today. I assume that the Extended Support Release of Firefox gets timely security updates if not features. Otherwise what would be the point of it?!
Either you're on the ESR, or you're hopelessly outdated.
I updated my system this morning so probably the former.
edit: just checked, ESR is the only version available in the testing package tree.
Can't you get only the Firefox from the unstable repository?
I don't really use Debian, so I'm not sure. I only know that Debian really cares about security and testing.
You can do something called apt pinning which can be wobbly depending on the, well, dependencies. So if I pinned something major like gnome-shell to unstable then I'd also end up with the unstable version of everything which depends on a particular version of gnome-shell, and it can get a bit confusing. You can also end up with conflicts between packages in testing which want particular versions of something that another package has forced an upgrade on.
Apt does it's best to manage and resolve these issues and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
Firefox probably doesn't have too many dependencies outside of it's own libraries that are too version-critical, iirc it's a fairly self-contained project. It's unlikely to need bleeding-edge versions of GTK or whatever.
I stopped using FF when they started dicking around with the UI in ways that reduced usability and were completely non-optional. I don't really like Chrome all that much (there are some things about it I loathe), but I can't see myself going back to FF and risk having the same thing happen again a year or two from now.
I don't! But I know that they haven't done that recently, and being run by a corporate behemoth is likely to slow any similarly massive changes to the front end down by a lot. Of course it's not like they've ever done things like this - just look at the recent GMail redesign or when they completely axed Google Reader despite it being widely used. If they were to do similarly negative changes to Chrome, then I would certainly reconsider continuing to use it.
Actually, when I moved away from FF as I mentioned in the previous post, I actually started writing my own browser that would allow for a fully-customizable UI (modelled loosely after foobar2k) with various modules that could be imported, but ended up getting distracted by other projects before I got all that far in.
Are you aware of userChrome.css? I wrote a simple tutorial for it here
Interesting. I'll keep that in mind - it looks like it's something I'd be interested in.
You do know it's possible to change up the UI using CSS right?
I've tried twice but I have problems with font rendering (kerning) on linux on some websites. My friend also experiences this. Couldn't fix it, so I switched back.
I tried switching to Firefox from Vivaldi back when they released Quantum, but there are several features Vivaldi offers that I don't want to give up. Firefox tends to slow down as you install various privacy/security addons, especially the startup time noticeably slows down even after installing just a couple of addons.
If you have a lot of tabs open it eats up more RAM, and again startup is further slowed down the more tabs are open.
I still feel a sense of brand loyalty towards Mozilla because their browser was kick ass for a long period of time, but brand loyalty doesn't make my browser behave the way I want it to.
DAE have the experience that Firefox’s tracker blocking is just too blunt? It broke so many sites that I had to switch to a third party tool.
Which sites? No problems for me.
Can’t recall. I installed quantum a while ago and I didn’t like that the blocking settings weren’t granular.
Is it the same list that's used for Firefox Focus on mobile ? Because if so it's pretty often that Focus will break a site and I have to disable tracking protection for this particular website, especially because you can't choose what to allow and not like in uBlock or uMatrix.
Unfortunately, certain sites just plain do not work in Firefox, such as Google Voice, which I nearly always have pinned open so that I don't have to have my phone nearby when I'm on the PC.
I'm quite sure that there are some workarounds - such as getting all of my messages in Hangouts via my pinned GMail tab - but even there, things are broken in Firefox. No phone calls.
Google Voice works for me on Firefox; is there something special about your configuration?
It never loads for me, and hasn't since I tried Firefox since Quantum was released. (I try Firefox every couple of weeks).
couldn't really care about quantum, i actually hate it for removing the things i loved about firefox.
firefox has been fast enough for me for years, if it wasn't i would have switched to chrome.
You should look into Waterfox (a Firefox fork) if you haven't already. I haven't kept up with their news lately, but, as far as I know, the main developer is committed to keeping legacy addon support.