Personally, it has to a large extent. Somethings that are not yet there:

1. Since Webextensions are new, some extensions that I use in chrome, need to be ported over. Most are not must haves to be fair.

2. Hangouts for work. :(

3. A solution to manage different personas - Chrome has the "user profile" thing linked to google accounts, firefox as container tabs. I think user profile is better than container tabs, although both are kinda bad.

Except hangouts, none are deal breakers - I use firefox as much as I can, and in fact overall it feels more faster and more repsonsive than Chrome starting with Quantum. It also looks and feels better than chrome.

Thank you for choosing Firefox.

1. Are there any specific extensions you need? Happy to add them to our outreach list.

2. Sorry about Hangouts; follows a trend of Chrome-only product launches/re-launches from Google (five this year so far). Wish we could do more, but if Google's OK shipping things that only work on one browser, that's their prerogative.

3. Firefox also has completely separate profiles, in addition to container tabs. The UI isn't as polished as in Chrome, but it works: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

> 1. Are there any specific extensions you need? Happy to add them to our outreach list.

for me, vimperator/pentadactyl and tab groups. i can't use a browser without them so i won't be upgrading :(

Tab Groups is the reason I won't be upgrading :( Hopefully someone will take on the task of upgrading/rewriting it.

> 3. Firefox also has completely separate profiles, in addition to container tabs. The UI isn't as polished as in Chrome, but it works: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

Chrome allows users to simultaneously run multiple profile instances, each with it own profile. Firefox didn't seem to support that.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... (or a similar addon) might bring me back to using Firefox.

With Chrome, one set up a profile shortcut to a given profile, and then all tabs/windows within the instance corresponded to the same profile. This meant hitting Ctrl+T to open new tabs, rather than having to click and dig through a menu to pick the right profile.

I'd like the containers addon to support easy shortcuts. Maybe on hitting ctrl+t, one can then press 1-5 (or some other selector) to determine which profile the new tab opens in. Alternatively, more safely and less confusingly, just having windows sticky to a specific profile, so all new tabs predictably open into the same profile.

Firefox does support multiple isolated instances, just without a prominent UI. You can use the Profile Manager (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...) or command-line flags to launch and manage separate profiles.

The UX around multi-account containers is still being worked on, but the contextualIdentities WebExtension API (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/AP...) allows add-ons to interact with containers, so a third party developer could create exactly the experience you've requested.

In case anyone comes back and sees this thread, instructions for launching different profiles simultaneously can be found here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Opening_a_new_instance_of_Firefox_...

> 3. Firefox also has completely separate profiles, in addition to container tabs.

hey callahad, thanks for shiming in. My biggest pain with profiles is that you cannot use separate profiles at the same time. A Firefox instance can only run one at the same time, making it useless to run e.g. a work and a private profile together. Container tabs also do not help here because they share the same history which I do not want for privacy reasons.

Nonetheless, thanks for a great release!

> A Firefox instance can only run one at the same time, making it useless to run e.g. a work and a private profile together.

I may be misunderstanding what you mean, but I believe you actually can do that. If you navigate to about:profiles, there should be a "launch profile in new browser" button that runs multiple profiles at the same time, each in their own, isolated Firefox process.

To make this a bit easier, you can create desktop shortcuts which launch a specific profile like `firefox --new-instance --profile Work` (on Windows, use --no-remote instead of --new-instance).

> 1. Are there any specific extensions you need? Happy to add them to our outreach list.

LastPass please. I'm sure it's on your list already, and I'm sure they know about it too but every little helps.

I am happy to use pass/keepass (whatever version) but the family says only LastPass is acceptable.

LastPass updated a few days ago -- I'm using it with FF57 now!

> Are there any specific extensions you need?

Keysnail. It requires the ability to override C-n, though.

As for your third point, yes, Firefox does have containers now, but it has the profiles feature as well. `about:profiles` and starting your Firefox with `-p` flag will help you out.

Yeah, without the UI it's 80% useless.

`about:profiles` is the UI. It allows you to create new profiles, restart Firefox with a specific profile, and manage profiles. Starting Firefox with `-p` (and no passed argument) starts a window which allows you to do the same.

Sorry I wasn't clear. Chrome profiles is a usable UI. Easy to find, switch, manage, create, delete, all with just a couple clicks, never very far away.

about:profiles is not discoverable (obviously), easily usable (you have to restart), or easily switchable (you have to open about:profiles or the terminal).

By the technical definition of "UI", the raw filesystem and terminal counts, sure. Opaque and unknown about: pages count, sure. But that doesn't make it good.

For features like this the UI is the feature. about:profiles is not a good UI, so the feature is 80% useless.

Container tabs have a much nicer UI. They're a bit experimental but they're easy to use.

does hangouts.google.com work in FF (too lazy to try it)

No. Hangouts only works on Chrome and Safari (with a plugin). It does not work in Edge or Firefox, as we've phased out support for third-party plugins.

Specifically calls (and video) doesn't work. If you just want to message it works fine.

So far, Chrome has better sandboxing support on most platforms (especially Linux), though Chrome's catching up quickly.

I'm generally optimistic about Rust code having fewer exploitable defects, although it's a reasonable argument to suggest that the previous C++ parts had a lot more public scrutiny.

Also, for me personally: I use a lot of different profiles and using multiple Firefox profiles simultaneously is a mess. The only UX that still works is about:profiles (all of the profile switcher extensions broke since the move to WebExtensions) and I've had Firefox beachball (hang -- I'm on macOS) on me twice while doing that.

Don't get me wrong! I love Firefox and I'm really excited about this change.

Hey lvh. As imron suggested, I've found containers have largely replaced my need for multiple profiles day-to-day, with the main exception of throwaway profiles, which `firefox --profile $(mktemp -d) --new-instance` handles well enough.

I'd love to talk to you more about the ergonomics of containers / profiles for your use case. You know how to reach me. :)

Containers are great, but there needs to be an easier way to open a link in a new container. Right now it's burried in a sub menu of the context menu. Lifting the menu item to the top level of the context menu would be a great improvement. Ideally there should also be a configurable keyboard shortcut.

> firefox --profile $(mktemp -d) --new-instance

Thanks for that, I can now replace `chromium --temp-profile`.

> and using multiple Firefox profiles simultaneously is a mess.

Not sure if it meets your use case, but checkout Firefox containers.

Is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... really broken? That was a test pilot experiment till two month ago, it would be very bad (and a bit ridiculous) if that addon were already broken.

Containers are different from Profiles.

Containers only separate Cookies and login data, to make you look towards the internet like multiple people.

Profiles on the other hand separate everything, as if you had two completely independent Firefox installations. Different browsing history, bookmarks, themes, extensions.

They work very well for allowing multiple people to all have their own Firefox, even though it's the same installation. But also really well for single-person use, for example I have a normal Profile for everyday browsing and then a webdev Profile, where I don't put in content/tracking blockers.

You can manage Profiles by typing "about:profiles" into the URL bar or with this: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

Not broken. Using it on FF57 stable.

Embeddability. I've mentioned it on this site before, but Chrome's embeddability story (Electron, nw.js, CEF, Qt, etc) affects adoption more significantly than Mozilla prioritizers are giving credit for. Sure it's not an effect of Google itself, but that it exists only on one browser is something Mozilla should actively target. Of course there are a few attempts here and there, e.g. positron, but there needs to be a real effort to make the entire browser easily buildable and embeddable w/ an easy C API (doesn't have to conform to CEF like Servo was/is trying). Provide prebuilt libs and the headers and you will see adoption go up.

Faster at what things?

On my 2017 iMac (3.4 GHz Core i5, Radeon Pro 570) I get 60 on Mozilla's Speedometer 2.0 [1] test with Firefox 57.0. I get 90 on Chrome and 93 on Safari.

On my Surface Pro 4 that gap is smaller, but Chrome is still about 15% faster on that test.

[1] https://mozilla.github.io/arewefastyet-speedometer/2.0/

Benchmarks are not comprehensive, nor are they gospel; it's entirely possible for a browser to score lower on a benchmark while also feeling faster in real-world use. For a long time, this was true of Chrome versus Firefox on JavaScript benchmarks: SpiderMonkey is routinely on par with V8, yet Firefox also felt significantly slower.

In the case of Speedometer, it's measuring one specific type of webapp interaction in a single tab; it's not capturing things like perceived speed of opening or closing the browser, switching tabs, loading pages, etc. It doesn't test how the browser performs when many JS-heavy tabs are loaded in the background. It also has lots of corner cases: installing a common password manager halves the score, and a common adblocker nearly does the same again, yet neither show that kind of noticeable degradation in real-world browsing.

Benchmarks are useful for saying "we've improved our browser this much in this area compared to where we were last year," but they're much less useful for making broad generalizations across heterogeneous browsers; there are too many other variables at play.

Whilst benchmarking stylo for example we noticed there were perceptible wins on interaction time on real world sites; but speedometer didn't budge as much because it tends towards small DOM trees which stylo can't parallelize much.

Yeah, they even recently officially posted the speedometer result and it was a few percent behind Chrome. Also some consider Speedometer to be the closest thing to a real user performance benchmark.

Nothing, so far. I have completely switched in the hope that I don't hit a showstopper that makes me switch back.

It is probably sometimes marginally faster and sometimes slower, same with memory use. Its security is still lacking compared to Chrome. Personally I don't see any pressing incentive to switch.

Supporting a browser that actually has your interests in mind, so they have some power at the web standards bodies might be it.

For me, it's missing Chromecast and my MacBook Pro heats up enough that the keys become warm to the touch when using Firefox.

Unless it's reverse engineered I doubt you'll be getting Chromecast. It's kind of in the name.

Yeah, that's an unfortunate reason I'll probably have to keep using chrome fairly regularly.

I have been thinking of switching back from Chrome to Firefox. I haven't been able to find decent profile support though (so I can keep work and private data separate), and all profiles addons are broken at the moment.

The Firefox Multi-Account containers are great: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

Multiple profiles within a single window, visually distinguished by tab highlight color.

It looks like this doesn't allow you to separate history, addons, bookmarks, or move your current tab to a container. I am sticking with google for now.

You can use about:profiles or the profile manager (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...) to handle that. The UX isn't as polished, but for just a handful of uses (work, personal, etc.) it's easy enough to make shortcuts which call `firefox --new-instance --profile <profilename>`.

You can use multiple profiles with Firefox, the UX for doing so just isn't as fleshed out as Chromium.

Create a new profile by going to about:profiles, and thereafter when you start Firefox it should present you with an option to pick which profile to use.

Yep. I love containers.

You can launch Firefox with different profiles (including navigation history, Firefox account, extension, etc) in the same machine. It's a bit cumbersome since you need to select the profile as a launch option (firefox -p) or launch it from "about:profiles", but it works.

What stops you from launching Firefox with the profile manager twice (there's a flag for that), and selecting the two profiles? It takes a couple of seconds to select the profile.

That is a good work-around. Multiple devices, systems, users, locations, and other factors makes selecting the current profile a pain.

@mmphosis: you can always link different profiles to different Firefox account so they all get sync between devices.

firefox -p launches firefox into the profile manager. firefox -p work -new-instance launches your work profile. What are you missing?

More options: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Lin...

Thanks, this seems to work. I found the no-remote option when looking around, but accidentally lauching private_dot_com (nsfw) a couple of times at work instead of my private profile ended my testing with this last time.

Yup,

    c:\apps\firefox\firefox.exe -no-remote -profile "C:\profiles\some-clean-profile"

was my was-to-go method for testing various configurations.

Knowing about

    %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles.ini

is also often helpful, eg. when you want to move certain profile folder.

I still trust Chrome's sandbox - I have less understanding of where Firefox does sandboxing, how it works across platforms, etc. Whereas I have a solid understanding of how Chrome uses seccomp on Linux.

While pieces of Firefox are moving to Rust the majority of attack surface is still in C++, so I want a strong sandbox if I'm going to run that browser.

> I have less understanding of where Firefox does sandboxing, how it works across platforms, etc. Whereas I have a solid understanding of how Chrome uses seccomp on Linux.

It's described in detail here:

* https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox

* http://www.morbo.org/2017/11/linux-sandboxing-improvements-i...

I find the absence of Smart Zoom on Mac Firefox to be very painful indeed. The "double right tap" gesture works in both Safari and Chrome, and zooms in exactly on the div/image you're interested in. I've searched for alternatives in FF, but even the half-working ones I found don't work in Quantum. Sad because I'm rooting for Mozilla, but just can't function in their browser without Smart Zoom.

Yeah, it's a shame that macOS support in Firefox is so bad. I hope Mozilla can start making Firefox feel like a first-grade browser in macOS, like Safari and Chrome, now that it's speedy.

Smart Zoom and Handoff is completely missing and Applescript scripting support is extremely poor.

Chrome has a better security model. That's big for some.

Not really anymore. Mozilla has been doing a lot here in recent months, too. The foundation for most of these performance improvements is the recent introduction of multiprocess, which also allowed them to introduce sandboxing in many more places.

To my knowledge, the only bigger architectural difference now is that Chrome sandboxes each tab individually, unless they're from the same domain as another tab, whereas Firefox by default only uses as many processes as you have CPU cores and then round-robins your tabs among those.

This is for performance reasons: You still get almost the same parallelism, but much less RAM usage especially with lots of tabs, and then that free RAM can again be used to speed things up elsewhere.

You can however configure this. Set dom.ipc.processCount in about:config to as many processes as you want to maximally use. If you set it to a really high number, like 1000, then it will create a new process for each tab (until you open your 1001st tab) and those will then all be individually sandboxed.

Another big security difference were extensions. Firefox previously with the classic Linux approach of "If it's installed, it's trusted".

Now they have the same extension model as Chrome with a number of additional APIs. Those APIs are potential security holes, but also allow the implementation of better security, for example NoScript is being ported to Firefox 57, still can't be ported to Chrome.

Well, and then going away from the model itself, Mozilla enables much better security on the extension side, again with the Linux approach, by reviewing extensions and extension updates before they allow the publication. I'd have no concern with my mum installing whatever extension she wants in her Firefox. With Chrome, I would be concerned.

Lastly, only some of us are security super humans. Chrome always gives an option for security to calm security people, but if it benefits Google, they'll leave this option off by default, even if it should clearly be default on.

For example Sync in Firefox is end-to-end-encrypted by default. Only one password needed. In Chrome, it's not. Because Google wants to evaluate your browsing history, bookmarks etc. You can have E2EE, but you need to separately enable it and use a second password for it.

Again, fine for security super humans, but the fewest of us understand browsers enough to know about all potential security holes and we simply do need to rely on browser vendors for our own security.

Don't think Google has actually fixed that Auto-Fill phishing attack either yet, which comes up around here every half year or so.

Google Hangouts :-/

es6 import

Sounds like an edge case the developers would be interested in. Have you got a reproducable testcase?

Can confirm. Would be very interested in a link that shows a regression of that degree.

Play "Space Station 13" and see for yourself. And that game normally lags and stutters bad enough as-is on any browser. It's worse in FF57.

Developer Tools needs to have better UI

That’s a bit … vague. I mean, Fx Dev Tools has a grid visualisation that’s much better than anyone else’s, so that’s better UI right there.

And they need to work better in general. I use dev edition which has a much better UI (it's pretty much Chrome) but it's much slower and has weird bugs - if you disable sourcemaps, it won't let you inspect sources, because sourcemaps is null.

Chrome Dev Tools. Firefox’s dev tools simply aren’t as good.

There are also many features in Chrome that I’ve come to appreciate, such as right clicking a tab and selecting “duplicate”, which opens a copy of the tab and retains the browser history of the original one.

Have you tried the dev tools in FF 57? As a FF user with Chrome-as-debugger for 3-4 years, I'm honestly impressed.

FF 57 also has "duplicate tab" with duplicate history.

Thanks for pointing out "duplicate tab". I loved that feature and really missed it on Firefox.

Ctrl-Click on Refresh button acts as duplicate tab in FF for a long time. I am not sure why this option is so hidden but it works.

To be fair you can have a duplicate browser tab in almost any browser by clicking the back or forward button with mouse3.

The (apparently) continuing lack of tab duplication is my major reason not to switch back.

FF 57 has it.

Thanks. Right, that's it, I'm probably on my way back.

It's actually had it for years (probably even always, almost certainly since about 1.5) via middle-clicking the refresh button.

Well, Firefox has existed since before tabs were a thing in browsers, so can't have been always, but yeah, wouldn't surprise me, if this was relatively quickly added after the introduction of tabs.

These kind of hidden features don't require a whole lot of designing and forethought, so it's something that usually only really needs one dev thinking that it'd be nifty to have them implement it.

>It's faster

Faster than old fox? Yes. Faster than Chrome? Nope. Still long way to go.

Nothing can beat Chrome in being the fastest to become unusable when opening many tabs ;)

How many? I typically have 2 windows with ~30-50 tabs opened in each of them. No problem at all, never was.

I typically have hundreds, sometimes low thousands of tabs opened in Firefox on 8GB RAM and it works well, while ~30-50 is an upper limit of what Chrome can do without bringing the whole system to swapping hell. Plus, Chrome's tab UI makes more tabs completely unusable, while vanilla Firefox works well and can also offer massive improvements like vertical tabs.

> I typically have hundreds, sometimes low thousands of tabs

They should probably ditch all in-memory stuff, and just use the drive, so they can support those cases when you really want to have a "low millions of tabs open."

Okay. Hands down here. Never could get this kind of use case, never had such an experience either, so may be by the time you have 1000+ tubs Chrome does kill itself.

>Chrome's tab UI makes more tabs completely unusable

True, thankfully we have extensions that deal with this (I've been using Keepin' Tabs for this, until I started using cVim)

Very true. Chrome can never handle my 150+ tabs per window that Firefox can.

What do you do with 150 tabs?

When I have 20 open I already start to get confused about where stuff is...

Not the original poster, but...

I have 9 virtual desktops; I typically have browsers in 6-7 of them for various in-progress tasks. That's somewhere between 6 and 14 browser windows (I can fit two side by side on my screen), with multiple tabs in each.

Finding things is easy. Even ignoring the per-task categorization by desktop, Firefox lets you search all your tab titles/urls: just type "% " in the URL bar followed by your search string. If I'm looking for something specific, this is the simplest way to find it.

With Tree Style Tabs plus the Awesome bar it is not a problem to handle and it's easy to get up to this number over the day.

Came here to say that. Tree Style Tabs makes ut possible to navigate an unhealthy amount of tabs.

But, so I guess you open links in a new tab and don't bother closing them?

I easily reach a hundred tabs with Tree Style Tabs when researching a topic. The tree structure makes it easy to understand how you've navigated the web and to traceback where you came from. When I found what I've what I was looking for I start closing tabs. The ones that remain is my catch and I save the URLs and/or contents.

Gotcha. Interesting. :-)

Just for completeness:

* Firefox's Awesomebar (the address bar) is much more powerful. Whereas Chromes sends you to google mainly: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...

* Tree Style Tab: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

There's also Tab Center Redux, for people who already need a better way to handle tabs, but don't need or want to use trees there: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-re...

Thanks to Firefox's userChrome.css, you can pull pretty nice customized UIs even without any additional extensions :) https://github.com/eoger/tabcenter-redux/wiki/Custom-CSS-Twe...

There is so much FF PR talk here.

Faster in what way? There are multiple subsystems in a browser.