I switched over the firefox a month ago from chrome. While I had tried doing that a few times over the past few years, i came back to chrome because honestly there was not much difference and chrome just feels like home. This time around I had switched to try out a new tech called 'webrender'. Webrender takes a completely different approach to rendering and compositing, instead of maintainting layers and repainting certain sections it renders and paints content like a game engine.

Chrome can get jerky on a 4k monitor with lots of tabs open, but not firefox . With webrender everything is silky smooth. It's so good that I used hacks to also enable it on my intel laptop ( webrender is currently not supported on integrated graphics by default ) and the result is a browser which feels and works smoother than anything that I have experienced before. Everytime I open chrome now it just feels laggy and slow in comparison.

> [Firefox] ... likely will continue to get better.

But to enable it you turn on gfx.webrender.all in about:config.

Going by this bugzilla thread it seems like it should be in stable. But maybe they changed it back.

Though the hardware requirement is actually NVIDIA desktop hardware on Windows 10, i.e. laptops are currently excluded. Which is implemented by checking if your computer has a battery.

I've been using WebRender as my daily driver on Mac for months now.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers#w_what-are-c... [2] https://www.thechiefmeat.com/guides/containers.html

(Well, that’s not fair, they still support an API for remapping keys that only takes effect after a page tab has loaded.)

"If every addon must be personally signed by Mozilla, why not just shrink-wrap the browser and make me get it from Microsoft at Best Buy?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taGARf8K5J8

Plus, opening facebook? BAM instant new container automagically open for me, to keep facebook in its own walled garden :D

In a world without Windows, something something doors (or Gates, or some other permutations of those).

Though I don't remember the quote, I remember it being a good one.

:)

In fact, I have friends who use CLI or TUI email clients, like mutt. Never really used those for than a little, somehow, despite being a long-time Unix guy. Should try that out as well. Likely be a lot faster than either desktop or webmail.

> Mozilla is still the better browser when it comes to privacy

Tree tabs then makes its super convenient to navigate between these worlds.

unless I am mistaken and -no-remote isnt required anymore.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

[2]: https://github.com/stoically/temporary-containers

[3]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...

[4]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...

These are forgivable in my opinion. At least this steps are somehow understandable.

What I‘m really miffed about is their partnership with Cliqz. If Google is the devil then Cliqz is Beelzebub. I don‘t understand what they were thinking...

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cliqz-recommendations-f...

There must be another cliqz? Or are there some skeletons in the closet I should know about? Beelzebub to Google's devil is pretty strong for the people that own ghostery...

And yes, the difference between this and ads is paper-thin – just like the difference between search and ads is paper-thin – so it's easy to get things wrong.

One of these experiments was through a German start-up called Cliqz, in which Mozilla invested in early stage. For a small fraction of German users, Firefox used the Cliqz engine as an implementation of this recommendation engine: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cliqz-recommendations-f...

For these users, lots of private data was sent to Cliqz (pretty much the data that Chrome sends to Google). Cliqz is open-source and there were contracts between Cliqz and Mozilla to legally guarantee user's privacy, but I do not know/remember the details. Also, I seem to remember that the default Cliqz settings in the experiment were set to minimal privacy, which wasn't very good.

The experiment didn't last long, in part because of privacy concerns, but some people were (understandably) unhappy about this, including most Firefox devs.

(I may be missing some details, I haven't followed this closely)

More details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74yo19/cliqz_and_m...

This. I don't get it why people point out on and on the same three mistakes that Firefox team made in the past. In case of Cliqz, I guess they want to say: "I am not going to use Firefox, because it sends browsing history to Cliqz". Isn't that a bit weird? I agree, that was a mistake and Firefox does not have crystal-clear history, but in case of Google Chrome I am not really sure how Google collect, enrich and manage my data.

Personally, I can only notice two advantages of using Google Chrome over Firefox these days: a developer console and it is "faster" to develop websites targeting only one browser. I think I just got used to dev-console in Chrome, with each release the new developer console in Firefox is way better. About the second, it still doesn't matter much, because we have also mobile browsers, which also takes a lot of our precious time during development. Is there are any other unique selling point of Chrome which I've missed?

Their slogan is „The no-compromise browser. Cliqz gives you relevant search results and does not leak your private data.”

Sounds good on the surface, but what they really mean with „does not leak” is leak to Google. The Cliqz browser sends every keystroke in real-time to some supposedly Cliqz owned AWS instances. I verified that myself with Wireshark. They outright lie about this in their Transparency Cockpit: ”Telemetry data do not contain any information about queries, search results or visited URLs.”

Now Cliqz is owned by Hubert Burda Media one of Germany‘s largest media groups. Honi soit quit mal y pense.

I wrote a comment about this about a year ago[1] and also one about their relationship with Ghostery[2] more recently.

Hubert Burda Media is also one of the primary drivers behind EU link tax and upload filter legislation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15427992#15428104

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17159497#17161135

Is that considered well known enough to drop without a translation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honi_soit_qui_mal_y_pense

Mozilla employees denied for months that Pocket paid for the integration. Eventually it came out that there was a referral deal.

Mozilla acquired Pocket in early 2017 and said they would release the source code. That still hasn't happened.

My understanding is that at the time it was foist in users it was very much just some random extension, tho

In fact, I switched to Firefox because of the pocket integration, not the other way around.

Is it something fundamental to the different design choices, is it just which has had more test/resources thrown at it, and is the closing of the gap practical and/or on a roadmap?

- it would break all old-style extensions and users were unhappy about that;

- it takes looooots of memory and users were unhappy about that, too.

Now that Firefox has dropped all old-style extensions, there's large focus on reducing memory footprint, to allow moving to this model without costing as much memory as Chrome.

There are still a few kinks to fix, but this new isolation model should hopefully land within a few months.

Also, all sorts of security improvements are much easier now that Firefox dropped old-style extensions. Also, switching many developments to Rust makes new code much, much safer.

If FF gets rewritten in Rust, it will be a decades long effort.

So then OCSP comes along and everything will be fine now, right? Nope, Chrome doesn't (or, again, "didn't", they might have fixed this since I last looked, but that doesn't make it any better) let you do any sort strict revocation checking, so if the OCSP response failed and a response wasn't pinned, Chrome would happily let you in without bothering to check revocation (Firefox does this by default too, annoyingly, but it does have a strict mode).

Even if these things have been fixed, Chrome's general attitude towards web standards and security is to run away and not bother when they don't get their way, so even if you're not already skeptical of blanket claims that they're "more secure", which is a meaningless thing to say, there is evidence that their attitude towards web security might make them less so.

Hah, even compiling Chromium takes a huge amount of effort and a workday or so of time. Don't think I'd want to go spelunking through that codebase

But it should and advocates can make it matter to users, just like they did when Phoenix was the cure for the made for IE blues

As an FF user for decades, esp on Linux, the experience was really poor before the Quantum upgrade. Yes, we lost a lot of plugins, but some of those plugins existed because of FF's legacy code and we are better for it being gone. FF now runs very smooth and uses so much less memory. I actually had Chrome use up all the memory on my 16 gig laptop... it was first for me since I use it so little.

The one thing Chrome does really well is profiles. I have one profile for work, that reopens all pages that were last open. And other for personal viewing in which I don't care. FF's multi account is a plugin and... it's okay for managing multiple social media accounts from one domain, but not good for separating work and play.

I've been a 95% happy Containers user since it was a Test Pilot experiment but there are certainly cases where it's not enough. In my case, not being able to use the mobile device emulator in a container tab was a big pain.

The big memory use fix went out a few years before quantum. Extensions like firebug were leaking memory.

and the removal of RSS support. So much for the champions of the Free Web!

- pretty much nobody was using it;

- it's pretty easy to reimplement as an extension.

Championing the Free Web is harder if you also need to champion the dead web.

edit "nobody" => "pretty much nobody"

You'll need a source for that, since most Wordpress sites which constitute a HUGE part of the web have pretty much by default rss feeds. It's not because you are not using it that nobody is.

And even you premise was true (which is debatable), it cost absolutely nothing for Firefox to keep a functional RSS reader without putting much effort into it (or instead, you know, putting efforts in pushing ads to people who never wanted them).

I'm not making it up. I don't remember the exact details – you'll have to look at the archives of the Mozilla dev-platform mailing list if you want them – but I seem to remember the usage was below 0.001% of users.

I personally read RSS with Thunderbird, which is a much better experience anyway.

> And even you premise was true (which is debatable), it cost absolutely nothing for Firefox to keep a functional RSS reader without putting much effort into it (or instead, you know, putting efforts in pushing ads to people who never wanted them).

It actually does. Every piece of software that you need to maintain is a tax. Paying the tax makes sense if the code is useful, not if it isn't.

Also, frankly, this implementation didn't bring anything to users. It wasn't nice to use. There are much better RSS readers than a browser – starting with RSS WebExtensions.

Additional features that the average user does not want to use or care about creates confusion and a feeling of bloat. An official extension would be nice though.

If the answer to both is no, they should have left it. I wish I could tell my parents to subscribe to some news sites and my website to see updates, so they dont' have to join some kind of mailing list... but I can't, because I'm not going to explain how to configure addons to my 70 year old.

Very happy indeed. I discovered Pocket as a result of it being integrated and have been a very happy user ever since.

I'd be surprised. Do you have a source?

Here, just take a look at the first response:

>Literally 99.99% of Firefox users did not use the built in RSS support[1].

>I love RSS! I also never used the built in Firefox RSS support because it was not very good. Mozilla also compiled a helpful list of alternative RSS readers for the 0.01% of users that used this feature and made it easy to export your feed list[2].

>[1] https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod...

>[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacement...

- it actually doesn't hurt;

- market research indicates that most people actually love it.

I love RSS! I also never used the built in Firefox RSS support because it was not very good. Mozilla also compiled a helpful list of alternative RSS readers for the 0.01% of users that used this feature and made it easy to export your feed list[2].

[1] https://www.gijsk.com/blog/2018/10/firefox-removes-core-prod...

[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/feed-reader-replacement...

Mozilla have done all these things, and when called out on it, they don't seem to realise they've done anything wrong. That crosses the line from naive to actively malicious.

Literally everything I liked about Firefox is gone, so I have no reason not to use Chrome instead anymore. They are mostly the same, Firefox is just uglier than Chrome now and I can't change that anymore.

But the big difference is that people actually use it.

Yet, this will change though

https://9to5google.com/2018/09/21/google-chrome-macos-dark-m...

On some of them. I use Mac with non-default resolution and I have no issues.

I can obviously follow Bugzilla, but does Mozilla have anyone working this from more of a support angle and provide high-level updates on the top issues like this?

So did Chrome, to be fair.

I used to be a huge fan of FF... I think with Chromium, at least for me, the browser has never changed.

Every time I try to go back to FF it's different and I have to re-learn it.

It might be better for them to clone the FF menu system so that you can switch to it without having to re-learn everything.

What, why not? Beaker and others did exactly this.

A features-based approach seems iffy. They can't push speed or site compatibility anymore, assuming MS doesn't completely mishandle the build. Even tiny Vivaldi seems to remain coupled closely enough to Chromium releases that it will be hard to say "theirs is so out of date and missing the latest and greatest."

If they try to deliberately hobble ChromiumEdge, it seems like it wouldn't look good to regulators. "We didn't test Gapps on Gecko, oops, it breaks" is one thing, but it's hard to keep a straight face saying "it mysteriously works in our version of Chromium and not Microsoft's"

Many of the differences they'd likely differentiate on (the sticky Google login, telemetry) are not features for the consumer, they're the features that benefit Google and justify the cost of developing a browser.

Which clearly didn't mean anything [1] for increasing market share.

[1] https://ferdychristant.com/the-state-of-web-browsers-f5a83a4...

In the web's short history we've already seen several browsers rise and fall. It's possible Microsoft may in the future repeat what Google achieved with Chrome if it can find a new edge to compete, pun intended.

The Chrome Web Store is full of active, known-about malware Google does not remove.