I rate Firefox pretty highly since Quantum released. It's fast, polished and in my unscientific testing, consumes less resources.

I tried using Firefox Quantum since Safari 12 closed off most extensions. Firefox Quantum is laggy in comparison, particularly the UI (web page rendering is fine). For example, dragging tabs to other windows is jittery. Launching preferences page is a bit delayed.

I don't understand why people keep saying Safari closed some extensions. It simply disabled them and they're ready to be enabled again in the preferences panel, simple as that.

From what I understand, now you cannot install unsigned extensions. You might have some “grandfathered” if they were already installed, but anything new (on new machines etc) won’t get in. So, effectively, if the developer was unable or unwilling to pay the Apple tax, the extension was killed.

@four try Firefox Developer Edition. There's a current known UI tabs issue in Firefox that's fixed in the next version (which Dev Edition runs on).

I switched to FF mobile few weeks ago and I am very pleased. FF desktop however turned me away because it felt quite laggy.

Have you tried it after the quantum engine change? It’s insanely faster than before.

is there some option i'm missing? i'm trying to switch over on tablet, but ff touch detection or 'guessing where they meant to touch' is just horrible. i have to zoom in like crazy to hit the upvote button on hn while on chrome it just works, or i might be trying to click on an article on the front page but end up hitting the comments section.

i usually prefer the desktop version of websites since mobile often times looks more awkward on tablet. but with ff i almost have no choice.

I'm the same way - I love FF mobile, and I love the Send Tab feature, but I can't stand Quantum so I switched to Waterfox.

Except battery, it is a battery destroyer unfortunately.

There's some potential for the new WebRender stack to improve battery life a lot - part of the reason why Edge is so good at saving battery is that it makes good use of modern GPUs to save power, and Firefox's new graphics stack is another modern one that attempts to avoid wasting CPU/GPU to do old-style rendering of web pages

It's really that we should be using the OS compositor more than we are, particularly on macOS. I think I'm probably going to be working on this, or at least finding someone to work on it, soon. WebRender should make this easier, because we should be able to get away with using a smaller subset of the OS composition functionality than other browsers do.

Anyway, for now, if you're on macOS, set gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true in about:config for a large increase in energy efficiency at the cost of some visual effects.

One would think that would be as a direct result of consuming more resources, not less. What is it doing to drain your power, do you know?

I really want to switch from Chrome -> Firefox for dev work but my MBP’s battery already lasts nowhere near “10 hours”...

Last time I played around with comparing, Chrome and Firefox were comparable in terms of battery drain on my MBP. However they were both significantly worse than Safari, which barely ever turns on the discrete GPU while I'm browsing.

Well, if you're looking for battery life, both safari and edge have excellent battery life by virtue of not doing anything useful.

And if you're looking to do dev work, that usually means at minimum an editor, a server, and a browser, which seems like too much to run unplugged.

Unless your editor is actually a webapp itself, I don't see how that's going to tip anything over the edge in terms of practicality...

The resources consumed by any web server I can think of are entirely inconsequential.

Or fortunately for those of us who use desktop computers. Usually battery performance enhancements decrease actual performance. It's a real shame so much good software is gimped just so people can run it on mobile.

This hasn't been true for a long time. The same enhancements that conserve battery also tend to ensure that plenty of processing and thermal capacity is available for whatever does want the CPU. (For instance, your top CPU "turbo" speed depends on how many of the other CPU cores are sleeping.)

I really want to use Firefox on Android, but I need a couple things:

Desperately need the scrolling in Firefox to feel like scrolling in the rest of the apps.

And I would very much like easy tab switching by swiping across the title bar thing, and the new tab/new incognito/back button behaviour.

Pls Moz pls

Given that Chrome on Android doesn’t support extensions and thus no ad/privacy blockers, it might as well not exist and Firefox is for me the only game in town due to supporting uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.

Scrolling is irrelevant for me.

By any chance have you noticed Google serving ads on Firefox? I use ublock origin on firefox and I have been getting ads occasionally on search.

Surprisingly enough, I've been using Stylus on quite a few sites as well

Chrome style scrolling is default now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17032056

Holy shit finally.

Why didn't they do this straight away? It's extremely bothersome having one app scroll differently to the others

Brave browser has been my default browser on Android.

It's as fast as Chrome (if not faster) as it uses the same rendering engine Blink; has all the features you mention; has builtin Ad and privacy controls; is developed by Brendan Eich's company (Mozilla's co-founder); but is fully open source and a fork away, if the company starts pulling odd moves.

Hey it does too.

Now I can't remember why I went back to Chrome

And pull down on page to reload

God no!

Available in Homebrew Cask as "eloston-chromium"

(Though frankly, if you're using a Mac, Safari should be your browser of choice, if only for privacy reasons.)

>(Though frankly, if you're using a Mac, Safari should be your browser of choice, if only for privacy reasons.)

What privacy protections does Safari have that Firefox doesn't? (Keeping in mind the vast extension store - I include extensions like NoScript within the umbrella of "Firefox")

Moreover, does Safari provide something similar to Firefox's tab containers? Blocking Facebook, Amazon et al. from tracking me across the web is a big deal in my book.

Good point. Safari is not a bad browser, but it's all or nothing - I prefer Firefox since I can find add ons if there's a feature I want that isn't included.

Safari is my browser of choice. Until they killed off extensions with Safari 12, just a few days ago.

> Until they killed off extensions with Safari 12, just a few days ago.

At best this is a strong exaggeration, and at worse completely wrong.

I’m not sure what you mean here. I just used safari 12 with extensions installed. Are there new restrictions for extensions?

> Bringing back the "Don't" in "Don't be evil"

What an introduction to the repo of that readme.

Just read the FAQ and it seems that extension installation in this "spin-off" is pain in the ass; which makes protecting one's browsing experience in terms of privacy and ads even more annoying...

I wonder, how much it differs from SRWare Iron or Iridium

Do you not encounter problems with video codecs when using Chromium?

Do you have any sites specifically that were causing you problems? I've not run into any issues myself with flash sites, netflix, amazon, hulu, etc.

That being said, I use the gentoo chromium package that builds chromium from source and rips the codecs out of the binary chrome release.

No, I was asking to figure out if I should switch! When I look up their differences this is what I see, which makes me hesitant, so I'm wondering if it's an actual problem or not.

I also use Gentoo and the packaged Chromium and have zero issues with YouTube and Amazon videos.

Thanks! But have you had issues with any other videos (or anything else besides lack of Google integration/auto-updates for that matter)?

I have used that Gentoo Chromium on a bunch of different video sites.

Here are some examples I can think of:

- to stream live webcast and prerecorded webcasts through a Continuing Legal Ed provider, using their (proprietary?) web app.

- Vimeo.

- NFL.com but not live streamed any games.

- some of the 2018 Winter Olympics, including live stream.

- videos but no live stream on the Premier League and Bundesliga websites.

- Twitch, both live and recorded

However, I have never tried Netflix or Hulu or any other pay provider.

I'm sure I've watched videos on other sites that I'm not thinking of right now, like BBC, etc.

I have never had any other issues, but I only use Chromium for a few things, like expressly watching videos, and using a few specific websites. Otherwise, I use Firefox and FF Nightly as my main browsers, for almost everything except watching videos and streams and also anything with audio. For all that stuff, I have had nothing but great experiences with Chromium.

I should say,

> I have never tried Netflix or Hulu or any other pay provider.

... except YouTube Red/subscription and Amazon Prime Video, which are obviously both pay-fors, but I mentioned those in the previous comment so I neglected to include them in the list above.

Both of those have worked perfectly well in Chromium on my Gentoo install.

Thank you!

NFL streaming has been a pain point, but MLB works. Haven't tried NHL or NBA yet.

Thank you!