Anyways, I am in love with the nightly build of ff and everyone should honestly give it atleast a week of their time to try it.
The developer edition and the nightly build have some really interesting features for development out of the box and honestly helps make work easier. You do run in to the occasional error or two but for pre-release versions they are seriously stable.
p.s https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12579163 (Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014))
Just wanted to tell you that a lot of people working on Firefox are here and we really appreciate your word of mouth support and feedback.
This year is going to be huge for us as we're wrapping up the part about reducing technical debt and start gearing toward using our new superpowers to innovate.
We need your help to stay relevant (market share), improve quality (report bugs, write test cases), and improve (lots of code in Firefox is easy to hack on as we move a lot of UI to HTML/JS - like devtools).
Google is where Microsoft was not long ago: engaging in self-destructive user-hostile behavior to protect their profit center. It can't work forever.
Chrome is definitely smoother on mobile but using extensions is worth it for me. Does Firefox Mobile's codebase closely match that of the desktop browser? Are their release schedules similar? Wondering if we should see it speed up with Firefox's latest improvements.
But it's not my experience that Chrome is smoother on mobile; it doesn't work very well and crashes often.
On desktop however (Windows) I still use Chrome, and I don't know why. Every time I launch FF I then come back to Chrome. I'm kind of ashamed of myself for it but can't quite pinpoint the real reason. Maybe FF looks a litle more "fragile", I don't know.
We are aware of the importance of those three things. They're all not-trivial problems to solve, but we're working on all three:
1) Performance is an insanely complex problem. We can't easily measure the "real" performance, in a scientific way. We can measure performance of so called "microbenchmarks" which can tell you that, for example, our JavaScript engine can perform X million regular expression computations per second. The X may be higher or lower than what Chakra or V8 can, but how it translates to real world experience is insanely complicated. What we know by now is that JS engine performance is not the problem. At this point all modern engines are fast. What we need to advance are things like performance of DOM, CSS, layout, painting and prioritization (ability to ensure that UI performance cannot be blocked by website's JS computations). We're working hard on several projects this year, under the umbrella of codename "quantum" that is aiming at making Firefox blazingly fast. We're taking lessons and code from Servo and applying it in Firefox. The end result, if we succeed, is that we'll have ability to perform DOM, layout, CSS and painting orders of magnitude faster (even if it's 2x it's still huge!). The other piece of performance, is what's called perceived performance. That one is even more tricky because it's all about what your brain tells you. In cognitive psychology and HCI there are tons of studies that prove that depending on how we use tricks like animation, colors, shapes and gimmicks like focus, we can trick your eye to think that things are faster or slower. Chrome is really good at that and kudos to them! I love watching their UI painting order in 120fps slow-mo just to see all the things they employed. Together with Quantum we're going to look into ways to improve the perceived performance of Firefox. I hope we'll get it right :)
2) On the privacy front we're working with Tor browser and we're also working on several projects aiming at disrupting the current way of browsing the Internet. Read about Firefox+Tor browser and Activity Streams if you're interested.
3) On the QA front, we've made major progress over the last year. That's a huge part of the technical debt that we had to remodel in 2016. We now have much better fuzzers, tests and APIs that makes it easier to write code that will not break. On top of that, multi-process helps us make sure that painting crash doesn't crash your browser, that plugins can't crash your browser and finally that content can't crash your browser. We also designed a whole new language that is significantly better suited to write security critical code than C++ is. It's called Rust and we just started moving pieces of our engine to it. If we can succeed with this, we should end up with a codebase of the unprecedented stability for a project this size and facing third-party code. If you're interested, read about Mozilla Oxidation project.
It is a major bet. We're betting on JS, we're betting on Rust. We're betting on Gecko and our ability to "change the engine mid-flight". I'm excited about the opportunity, but it's going to be a huge effort to pull it off.
If any of this is interesting for you, help us! We're a small team (compared to all other browser engines), but we have a culture that fosters community participation and I believe that we can compete and shape the Web together: https://whatcanidoformozilla.org/
Performance hasn't really been an issue for me, even on an ancient (6-year-old) laptop. Anything on shadertoy reliably kills it, but other than that it's been fine.
If I had to pick one thing that really needs improvement, it'd be the intersection of extensions and security. FF has always leaned heavily on extensions to avoid feature bloat in the core product, but I've never really been comfortable installing them because pretty much all of them seem to demand full access to page content on all sites, and that's a very uncomfortable ask for things like primary webmail or banking sites.
Now, you could imagine a honking great siteXextension matrix for this, bikeshed refinements until the cows come home and then bikeshed the cows, but I think you could get 95% of the way there with a way to persistently flag domains as "paranoid", and have all extensions disabled on those domains. Maybe something like this already exists, but if so I haven't been able to find it. The best advice seems to be "use a separate profile", but that's pretty inconvenient for heavily-used things like webmail.
Please, track Mozilla progress over the next months if you have the time. We're drafting a workforce to start the UX updates and I hope we'll get voices like yours well represented. I'll make sure to post about it on HN once we begin.
I'm not sure if it makes any difference whether its flash or html5 video.
Graphic driver bugs are nasty :)
Hope we'll be able to address it and remove the one and only reason you can't use Firefox!
Another out there idea would be a protocol handler for the IPFS protocol.
I also have some JS benchmarks from a real world app involving encryption and erasure coding in JS where Chrome significantly outperforms Firefox if you're interested (I'm talking 3.3X faster).
Happens for the map at Google Flights (https://www.google.de/flights/) that is the No 1 search result when googling for Flights (that's of course a clever move by Google to create a top site that only works fine with Chrome, I wonder how long it will take that YouTube or GMail only work "optimal" with Chrome)
Anyway, I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1329141 but this is only P3 priority (that is, marked a "valid" bug but nobody is working on it). Which I found really "strange" because website not working in Firefox and being force to temporally switching to Chrome (and maybe staying) are the worst that can happen. Eventually, when booking a flight I even had to tell other family members that they should use Chrome for it (who were surprised because normally I tell them to use Firefox ;)
P3 is not that bad tbh. I understand that for each one of us the bug that affects us is the most important one, but working with bugzilla is a bit like data mining. We have 1.3 million bugs reported and we track our respective components, cluster similar bugs and solutions and prioritize what is affecting most people in most crucial ways.
The fact that your bug got triaged and [gfx-noted] is a good sign. It's on their triageboard now and may soon get clustered with other Google website related graphics bugs. You'll get an email when it happens.
Thanks for your help!
That really depends how "normal" the user is.
If you have basic HTML/JS/CSS skills, you can try to minimize the testcase - https://css-tricks.com/reduced-test-cases/
If you don't, you can always contact the website author and inform him about performance problems and ask him to get in touch with us. He does have access to the whole website and could help us get a temporary account for us to investigate.
If you have more knowledge and curiosity, you can even use our performance devtools to generate a profile. It's actually fairly easy - just start recording in the performance tab and do what you would normally do that is slow.
Then file a bug and attach the profile.
This will give us an insight into what takes so much time. It may not be enough, but sometimes it is, and in those cases we are able to "peak" into what your Firefox is spending so much CPU cycles on.
It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing :)
You guys clearly care deeply about the web, and while I'm sure Google cares too I feel like their primary motivation is becoming more to do with maintaining their ad revenue sources than advancing the state of the art.
I've been a volunteer for Mozilla since 2000 and got hired in 2010. I've been through thick and thin, and I deeply believe in Mozilla Manifesto and care about the role we serve in making the Internet a public resource.
In the meantime, you can test more tab processes by increasing the "dom.ipc.processCount" pref in about:config. I set my process count limit to 999. :)
The UI said it was due to accessibility features.
Is there a timeline for getting it working with touch screens or has that already happened?
You folks have made a lifelong supporter out of me the hard way, by earning my respect over the years.
besides that, I support the project in general, the developers and the competition.
when I installed Firefox on a friends phone with uBlock Origin added on, he loved it.
p.s. that reminds me, when I was a teenager I installed Firefox for the first time. My mother insisted it was a virus and would yell at me to "remove that mozzerella fox virus IMMEDIATELY and quit installing your mIRC virus!"
It hasn't been smooth. Chrome is faster and has better dev tools. Ads have caused significant lock ups, to the point where I was forced to install uBlock against my wishes.
Nevertheless I've persisted.
But the thing that continually pushes me towards switching back to Chrome is this bug[1]. It affects every single Mac user I've met, is trivially easy to confirm and yet sits there.
On the positive side, the Firefox syncing works well across machines, so that is nice.
I appreciate all you guys have done in the past couple releases, particularly Electrolysis, and I can't wait until it's always on.
(I'm a satisfied customer)
Offer something that can be bought and written down on a proforma.
"According to the change-of-control term, 9.1 in the agreement, Mozilla has the right to leave the partnership if — under its sole discretion and in a certain time period — it did not deem the new partner acceptable. And if it did that, even if it struck another search deal, Yahoo is still obligated to pay out annual revenue guarantees of $375 million."
[0] http://www.recode.net/2016/7/7/12116296/marissa-mayer-deal-m...
I don't use Chrome much so I can't really tell how good it is for developers. If its dev tools are similar to the ones in Opera (same engine) they look closer to Firebug than to FF dev tools.
https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Mozilla/Benchmarking
Specifically, I use those environment variables:
JS_OPTION_USE_UNBOXED_ARRAYS=1
JSGC_DISABLE_POISONING=1
There's at least one other thing (async stack) that I'm aware of that may be tunable:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280819
edit: just figured out that that's "javascript.options.asyncstack", so I set it to disabled on nightly too.
Fwiw, the unboxed objects bug is: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1153266
edit: typedobj performance improvements visible at the bottom of https://arewefastyet.com/#machine=28&view=breakdown&suite=mi...
edit: removed MOZ_QUIET=1, as a source inspection reveals that it is only compiled #ifdef DEBUG.
That said, Mozilla has also made some bone-headed decisions. Integrating Pocket, forcing a chat client, and advertising tiles really turned me off.
Google receives it.
But I gave up after trying repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, to force-enable hardware acceleration and bypass their 'video card blacklist'.
From what I understand they check driver versions in a couple places on Windows, and disable hw acc. if the version is lower than X, or the versions they get, say from registry and dll's, are different, mismatch. Thing is, the matter is quite complicated on dual-gpu laptops (intel+dedicated) since manufacturers give us all kinds of custom drivers. Firefox will try to find a driver version, it won't find anything from Intel or AMD/NVidia, and it will default to software rendering.
As a user I don't have the luxury to simply 'Update my graphics drivers', I have to live with whatever custom software I got from the manufacturer.
Hasn't Safari been doing something like throttling background tabs for a while? I don't really know the details of how Safari and Chrome's new feature compares, but you may be equally unhappy with Safari in that respect.
I'm with you on the other stuff though, I always disable Flash, NaCl and DRM plugins. I also hate the forced Material Design UI. Having a Mac native app look like Android is visually jarring.
I tried switching to Safari, Firefox, and Brave a few months ago because I was unhappy with the direction Chrome was going, but ultimately ended up coming back to Chrome. The big things that brought me back: Safari isn't supported by Privacy Badger. With Brave, it was that if you open a new window and start typing immediately, it would lose the first few keystrokes... though I just downloaded the latest, and that seems to be fixed now. I don't remember off hand what stopped me from using Firefox
I'm considering Chromium too, but if I'm going to migrate, I might as well migrate to something like Safari which has the added benefit of cross device integration (ios-macos). Sticking with chromium likely signals a vote for chrome in browser stats that I would rather not do. Firefox would have been the ideal pick had it not been for multiple very dubious choices in their history like bundling hello and pocket.
Non-profits are usually more pro-user than for-profits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
What made you think Firefox and Mozilla are so anti-user? I didn't get many claims along those lines back when I was evaluating them.
Few examples that come to mind:
- Sync is just terrible. It's insecure, awfully overengineered, poorly documented proprietary mess.
- Mandatory addon signing was understandable, but still didn't felt exactly right. Probably because I'm a luddite don't fancy those walled garden app stores, and that somehow resembled those.
- Moving to WebExtensions-only is going to hurt badly. AFAIK it was announced they'll soon stop signing new non-WE addons for Firefox 53 (which is quite real soon). I don't want a Chromium clone with another rendering engine and Firefox Account instead of Google.
- DRM support. Browser market share, user requests, etc, but still - thanks for helping that cancer spread more freely.
- Test Pilot instead of just publishing an experimental addons on AMO feels weird. Especially the fact that those addons self-uninstall after someone says the experiment's over. Well, it's Mozilla work and it's their decision how they want things to be, but it just doesn't feel right to me. FLOSS used to be somehow... different in days back there.
- Pocket integration was sort of controversial. I've used Pocket's extension, but it surely didn't belong to the browser core.
- Some UIs were dumbed down to the extent of being barely usable. Some comments blame Chrome hiding TLS info here, but Mozilla had pioneered that (although to a lesser extent).
I'm about to self host sync myself so I'm interested in your claim about it being insecure. I won't sync passwords or form fields, because I don't store them in the browser. Only browsing history and maybe tabs, but for sure I don't want to send all my desktop tabs to my phone. Most of them won't make any sense there.
As for the protocol - there is WebDAV. Seriously. It's functionally equivalent to what their blob storage does, except simpler, vendor independent, and doesn't mandate any particular auth schemes. Oh, and their auth protocols are total mess (BrowserID, HAWK _and_ OAuth - three different protocols are necessary to just talk to the damn system!). I get it, three teams were working on different pieces (accounts, tokenserver and the actual sync blob storage), but they could've at least tried to not invent that up, but use something standard. Or, at the very least, settle on a single protocol.
I'm saying this as someone who had spend some time reading docs and reversed engineering the rest, and had implemented almost-working (sans some undocumented oddities and a few lazy omissions leading to glitches, but it mostly works-for-me) standalone sync1.5 server - same functionality could've been done in a much more saner and simpler way.
Does anyone know the rationale for doing so? It's made trying to figure out what the connection is using into a multi-step pain now.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=646465
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=663971
I have no idea about the rationale but here's where SSL details reside now... it's insane what they have done:
>First, get into Developer tools. You can do this via Chrome’s upper-right three vertical dots, then click “More tools” — then “Developer tools” — or on many systems you can just press the F12 button.
>But wait, there’s still more (yeah, Google took a simple click in an intuitive place and replaced it with a bunch of clicks scattered around).
>Once the panel opens, look up at its top. If you don’t see the word “Security” already, click on the “>>” to the right of “Console” — then look down the list that appears and click on “Security” — which will open the Security panel with all of the certificate-related goodies. When you’re done there, click the big “X” in the upper right of the panel to return to normal browser operations.
https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/01/28/heres-where-google-hid-...
>Click on the Secure/Not Secure/(i) page info button.
>Click "Details" to go straight to the Security panel of the Developer Tools
And the punchline is always a soggy: "I'm seriously reconsidering".
Post would be much more effective if you just switched already, and discussed your experience having done so.
That said, I like Canada a lot and have spent a lot of time there. It is quite nice
- forced bundling of pocket/readability,
- forced bundling of hello,
- forced and heavyweight extension signing (I understand them wanting to sign extensions in user profiles; but the extensions installed by root should not need that - this killed the config extension for FreeIPA, for example),
- I understand their desire to change their extension model, but killing many popular extensions is not a way. How it was communicated was a great example of hubris,
- DRM support should not have been the default choice,
- but MSE WebM with VP8 and VP9 still doesn't work,
- the Australis redesign was controversial.
(And from personal interest standpoint: still no Web Components support? still no WebP?)
I think they dropped Hello altogether.
Extension signing is not forced though, can be toggled from about:config.
In my opinion WebExtensions is a last ditch attempt to gain users and devs. If FF abandons XUL, WebExtensions will be the ONLY STANDARD way to write extensions. But in their defense there are active discussions about adding new APIs to enable more powerful integrations.
DRM is off by default on fresh installs, AFAIK and is user toggleable in Preferences unlike being hardcoded in Chrome and Edge.
Extension signing can be disabled in about:config, but I think the pref ("xpinstall.signatures.required") only works in the Firefox Nightly and Developer Edition channels.
EME DRM is enabled by default in Firefox, but it won't work until the DRM blob (Google's Widevine CDM DLL) is automatically downloaded about one minute after Firefox launches. Here are instructions for disabling EME DRM and uninstalling the Widevine CDM:
Unfortunately that is no longer true. Their argument was that users could be tricked to disable it, or run extensions that disable it. So to cater to the lowest common denominator user they completely removed the option for all users of Firefox.
The alternatives are the non-Firefox (unbranded) Firefox builds or using an alpha version of Firefox (developer version).
On the non-beta version? It's not supposed to be toggleable.
On Sierra, you can reenable favicons with MySIMBL [1] and SafariStand [2].
[1] https://github.com/w0lfschild/mySIMBL [2] https://github.com/anakinsk/SafariStand
safari is also incredibly fast compared to chrome and ff. i love ff, but since starting to use safari i honestly don't think i could switch back
It's not perfect, but I've found myself having to open up Chrome as a backup less and less often. At this point I think it's been about a month since I've needed Chrome.
This was my experience...
Hmm, a WebGL application I'm developing isn't receiving my right-click gestures. I guess that's the mouse gesture functionality I remember from Opera. No worries, I'll just change the bindings...
I opened the settings and found the mouse gesture settings easily. Hmm, okay there's this bind to Alt checkbox, I'll enable that.
Back in my WebGL app... Hrm, still not working. On closer inspection I see the Alt binding only works for trackpads. Okay, fair enough... I guess. I'll just change from right-click to middle mouse, or something... Wait, no options for that. Okay, fine I'll just disable the darn thing.
Now my WebGL app works great. Yay!
Hmmm, but I feel like I'm not getting the proper Vivaldi experience without those gestures. I know! Vivaldi is open source, I'll just implement some configuration options myself...
Wait, they only offer tarballs? How the heck do I submit pull requests? Presumably I can't. Alright, I’ll email them asking if they plan to accept pull requests any time in the near future.
Hmm, their contact form keeps failing with cryptic error messages, but never explaining what I did wrong.
Alright, I’ll go to their bug tracker. Okay, I need to sign up. Wait... what? Their bug tracker registration form is also failing but not explaining why.
Okay, to be fair, by this point I'm guessing it's because I'm using an addition (plus) character in my email address. Not supporting that is poor, but not informing me that the email address field is the issue is totally unacceptable.
Alright, I'm far too annoyed at this point. If Vivaldi can't manage an open source project, can't write a working contact form and can't write a working sign-up form then I have very little evidence to suggest they can write a decent browser.
Firefox it is.
it used to barf helpful error messages (including info it should give like internal network details), I reported it and got a thank you email ... and immediately got banned from their forums :)
I'm actually trying Brave now and am quite impressed. It's certainly got some problems (viewing SSL certificate is broken - https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/2611). However, it's pretty slick and the fact it's a real open source browser is quite promising.
Vivaldi's native tab management far surpasses both Chrome and Firefox. Likewise native mouse gestures work in every place including the speed dial (unlike plugins which attempt to do so on other browsers).
The only thing I miss is tab synchronisation across mobile and desktop devices.
If you're using mobile Chrome on Android, you should seriously take a look at Brave.
But it's source code is available.
Have you or someone looked through them to confirm they contain all of Vivaldi? Do they state this somewhere? Can you compile Vivaldi from them?
I'm not that concerned with not being able to distribute modified versions (freedom 3) since I am unlikely to have the time to contribute quality code unlike Benjamin above ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514415#13517798 )
But I do want to be able to compile it myself and tweak & hack it as I like (freedom 1). (We already have freedom 0 and 2).
Of course I would prefer to have freedom 3 too, so that in case I have the time to do more than hacks I could actually contribute.
https://github.com/ograycode/vivaldi-source (not-official mirror)
I'll have to try building it from source.
not the real ublock any way
Given what happened after the previous ublock splitt iam hesitant to use it.
I really haven't experienced this at all. Up until about a month ago when they pushed a big update, Safari has been my problem child browser. IE Edge has been really solid with conformance. Looking at compliance to the html5 spec, edge is neck and neck with firefox: https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html
Disclaimer: I used to work for ms, but not on edge.
Comparing the last version of IE, the latest Edge and, the latest Chrome: https://html5test.com/compare/browser/ie-11/edge-12/edge-15/... it looks like it's catching up and implementing a lot of important APIs.
As far as I know, Edge is a little slow to adopt new stuff, perhaps because they're afraid of implementing something and having everyone scream "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish!" at them.
The specific cases I've had are with how SVG's are rendered and that manipulating them with css does not work in-document like it does in Chrome or Firefox.
The bugs page itself isn't very insightful, but if you look at the issues posted, you'l see that there is significantly less conversation or involvement of people into the problems. By itself, Edge not being open source should make it unfit for usage, but they also don't involve themselves nearly as much in the web community. This is one big factor why chrome gets more vulnerability reports than Edge.
http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1224/...
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-26/p...
Including Widevine, Chrome Extensions, and various other things
Hidden away? They added an entire panel dedicated to security information. It's far more pronounced than it was previously.
This is in addition to the large green "Secure" text to the left of the URL bar.
"I'll be seriously reconsidering IE before the next Firefox/Safari release"?
Browser "choice" has always been more an illusion than anything else. One or another may be a little further ahead than the others but they all appear to be heading down the locked-down, unconfigurable, opaque, user-hostile "consume and don't oppose" path.
If you want to get away from all that, then I suggest looking into the more obscure alternative browsers like Dillo, NetSurf, etc.
Finally people start to understand "Do no evil" for the marketing message it was.
Thinks I like: improved battery life, fast, was able to disable video autoplay in Debug menu, no Flash at all, great integration with iOS, dev tools are actually good (I heard they would be bad, but nope, they're good).
Thinks I don't like: no favicons on tabs, Safari does not have profiles (I used a separate one for Facebook), Chrome has more extensions (but happy with Ghostery and Adguard so far).