Damn, I am commenting right now from 57.0b4 and it's so, so fast. It properly recovered the 50 or so tabs I had open from the prior version, and even as I rapidly clicked from tab to tab Firefox didn't skip a beat.

I never left Firefox though, it's been my primary browser for ~12 years. Fuck Chrome! I can say without a doubt that 57.0b4 is more performant than any Chrome / Chromium version that I've begrudgingly used to check if my client's sites are cross-browser compatible.

Fuck chrome? Whoa what did Chrome do?

In fairness I (and I suspect many others) refuse to use Chrome on privacy grounds.

Serious question, you think firefox has any quantifiable privacy benefit over chrome?

We'll, there's the obvious argument that any open source software is better for your privacy and security than any closed source software, just because you know what it's doing. Then there's chrome's history of repeatedly discovering "whoops, we weren't supposed to be collecting that"... For me, it was when a researcher noticed that chrome kept his microphone activated all the time, because it was passively recording and sending all your audio to google. That one even made it into chromium! Then there's the abuse of their products to force people into their browser and OS - like Hangouts only working on chrome, or chrome not enabling hardware acceleration for any device but Chromebooks, despite a years old (trivial) patch to do so, and years of testing reports. Arch Linux maintains its own version of chromium just to have that patch included.

But for me, it's the conflict of interest that makes the real difference. Fundamentally, Google as a company makes it's money by selling information about me and my behavior on the internet. That's it's objective. Firefox exists to promote open standards, OSS, and privacy on the Internet. If chrome at the moment doesn't seem to be contributing towards Google's objective, that's by definition only a temporary state of affairs. And I know which objective I would rather support.

It's a benefit that it's not owned by a company that collects your data to sells ads.

Are you sure it sells 'your' data? Or Chrome somehow acts as a tool for this purpose?

Google doesn't officially tell that Chrome tracks you more than other browsers do, but an ex-Google employee has said that "Google definitely uses Chrome user data and can track every click within it". https://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/blog/ex-google-employ...

The article does not give any context and I am not sure what they meant by that sentence. Is it because you can log in to Chrome with your Google account?

I was actually thinking about switching to Chrome because of GMail (or rather Inbox). When I open Inbox in Firefox, it can take 20 to 30 seconds for the cursor to stop spinning and I have a 300 Mbps connection.

Hi! Firefox engineer here. Check out this reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15371068

If you're interested in helping me figure out what's going on here, feel free to send me a performance profile.

on which firefox version? have you tried nightly?

The first Quantum release (57) is now on Beta, so if you want something a little more stable than Nightly it's a solid choice.

It's always a good idea to back up your profile first (where your bookmarks/passwords/etc. live), especially when downgrading:

https://support.mozilla.org/kb/back-and-restore-information-...

I've been running Nightly and experienced the same thing with inbox. If I attempt to interact with it before fully loaded, inbox will freeze up for minutes at a time. Love everything else about nightly, this is my biggest issue.

Hi! Firefox engineer here, and I want to understand why your Firefox is misbehaving.

Would you be willing to provide us a performance profile? Instructions are here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance...

Feel free to email it to me if you don't want to post the link publicly. I'm mconley at mozilla dot com.

I've been noticing that gmail will seem to lose connection with Nightly Firefox on occassion after sitting a while (Win 7 PC).

Other than that Nightly is amaze balls.

Make FireFox work with FaceBook's Live Video feature - as in both viewing and broadcasting. You'll have me switch back from Chrome in a heartbeat.

Seriously, when we talk so much about the Web's portability, why is a major feature from a major website not even working on identically on the two biggest browsers? Since it's Facebook we can't accuse them of browser favouritism as they're browser neutral. I wonder what APIs are missing from Firefox that makes FB Live Video broken?

> Since it's Facebook we can't accuse them of browser favouritism as they're browser neutral

Favoritism isn't the only reason for these things. What often happens is that the website devs all use one browser and nobody tests it.

It's not like Google wants their sites to be broken on other browsers either (I presume), it's just that many teams at Google aren't bothered.

IIRC Firefox has the same WebRTC APIs as Chrome, so this might be reliance on browser-specific nonstandard behavior.

(Or it might not. It's worth looking into, but I can't because it seems like you need to ask for an FB live invite to investigate)

Edit: Figured out how to do it. Seems to work fine in Firefox Nightly.

> Favoritism isn't the only reason for these things. What often happens is that the website devs all use one browser and nobody tests it.

That is exactly the point the GP post makes. These things are supposed to be standardized and the standards well described, so basic things should work everywhere without any testing. But somehow for web, it is acceptable and accepted as status quo, even after years and years of smashing our heads against the wall of nonstandard, browser-specific features.

Yeah. Well, it's not just "features", it's also stuff like minor differences that the spec allows for (the spec doesn't spec everything). For example, assuming the order of elements in the indexed getter of getComputedValues().

There are also cases like where Google's U2F library doesn't work with Firefox's U2F implementation because Firefox's window.u2f is immutable, as a newer (IIRC draft) spec dictates, whereas it isn't in Chrome, and the library does `var u2f=u2f||{}` which errors in Firefox.

Can you try this in an install of Nightly? It's working for me.

Works in Nightly but the video quality is beyond garbage. 1080p webcam should not look like 320p. Chrome properly sees my camera resolution and uses it.

interesting, will file a bug

More interestingly - it will work with a forced-set resolution using ManyCam. Just not with webcam natively.