I have been thinking of switching back from Chrome to Firefox. I haven&#x27;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.

Nothing, so far. I have completely switched in the hope that I don&#x27;t hit a showstopper that makes me switch back.

&gt;It&#x27;s fasterFaster than old fox? Yes. Faster than Chrome? Nope. Still long way to go.

I find the absence of Smart Zoom on Mac Firefox to be very painful indeed.  The &quot;double right tap&quot; gesture works in both Safari and Chrome, and zooms in exactly on the div&#x2F;image you&#x27;re interested in.  I&#x27;ve searched for alternatives in FF, but even the half-working ones I found don&#x27;t work in Quantum.  Sad because I&#x27;m rooting for Mozilla, but just can&#x27;t function in their browser without Smart Zoom.

It is probably sometimes marginally faster and sometimes slower, same with memory use. Its security is still lacking compared to Chrome. Personally I don&#x27;t see any pressing incentive to switch.

For me, it&#x27;s missing Chromecast and my MacBook Pro heats up enough that the keys become warm to the touch when using Firefox.

So far, Chrome has better sandboxing support on most platforms (especially Linux), though Chrome&#x27;s catching up quickly.I&#x27;m generally optimistic about Rust code having fewer exploitable defects, although it&#x27;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&#x27;ve had Firefox beachball (hang -- I&#x27;m on macOS) on me twice while doing that.Don&#x27;t get me wrong! I love Firefox and I&#x27;m really excited about this change.

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 &quot;user profile&quot; 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.

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.

Faster at what things?On my 2017 iMac (3.4 GHz Core i5, Radeon Pro 570) I get 60 on Mozilla&#x27;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] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mozilla.github.io&#x2F;arewefastyet-speedometer&#x2F;2.0&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mozilla.github.io&#x2F;arewefastyet-speedometer&#x2F;2.0&#x2F;</a>

I still trust Chrome&#x27;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&#x27;m going to run that browser.

Embeddability. I&#x27;ve mentioned it on this site before, but Chrome&#x27;s embeddability story (Electron, nw.js, CEF, Qt, etc) affects adoption more significantly than Mozilla prioritizers are giving credit for. Sure it&#x27;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&#x2F; an easy C API (doesn&#x27;t have to conform to CEF like Servo was&#x2F;is trying). Provide prebuilt libs and the headers and you will see adoption go up.

Chrome has a better security model. That&#x27;s big for some.

Why shouldn&#x27;t it keep you away from Chrome ? It&#x27;s faster, uses less memory, and the &quot;maker&quot;, Mozilla is more trustworthy compared with Google.What&#x27;s missing ?

&gt; reader view (not sure if chrome has that out of the box nowadays)As far as I can tell, Firefox, Safari and Edge all seem to have it, and Chrome does not. Not on mobile, and not on desktop.There are some extensions that accomplish the same. I&#x27;ve had some good (but very limited) experience using Mercury Viewer some time ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;mercury-reader&#x2F;oknpjjbmpnndlpmnhmekjpocelpnlfdi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;mercury-reader&#x2F;okn...</a>

Similar conclusion here. So far I stopped using Chrome (stable or canary). I do miss it, Firefox Nightly (as I mention in other threads) have responsiveness issues a bit too much even for average websites (no video, no webgl, no audio) and I know that chrome doesn&#x27;t suffer from that. But so far I&#x27;m still using Firefox for a few weeks.Few things that I do prefer in Firefox:- bookmarks with tags- nightly&#x2F;testmode snooze tabs. Wonderful idea- reader view (not sure if chrome has that out of the box nowadays)I don&#x27;t use containers even though they seem lovely

I have been using 57 in beta, and I have to say, I&#x27;m impressed. It is a huge improvement. Whether it keeps me off Chrome in the future remains to be seen though!

No. Now that they have multi-process in good shape they can start getting there though.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.morbo.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;linux-sandboxing-improvements-in.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.morbo.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;linux-sandboxing-improvements-i...</a>

Does this mean Firefox is comparable to Chrome wrt&#x2F; sandboxing?

Firefox on iOS supports content blockers? I thought that was Safari only.

How do you use 1Password with Firefox on iOS?  It&#x27;s not an option for me in the Share modal, so I&#x27;ve been having to switch to Safari.

I’m using Firefox on iOS fulltime now, as in the last couple of releases ad blockers and 1Password have gained support.

I think light is the default for the release version, but devs seem to like dark UIs for some reason.

I prefer the default theme on Windows 10 as there the title bars of the other windows like Settings and Explorer use the same style, which is the color defined in &#x27;Colors&#x27; in the settings. Using the &#x27;Light&#x27; theme makes Firefox looking different which isn&#x27;t nice.Haven&#x27;t seen any other black title bar on my Mac though...

Same on Windows, I wish the light theme was the default.

Well how about that?! I always run &quot;reduce transparency&quot; and &quot;increase contrast&quot; as I never really like the translucent items (System Preferences &gt; Accessibility &gt; Display), and I too thought the new UI was a black bar with a light colored window. I have been enjoying the dark theme in both the developer edition (work) and nightly (home).

I think it just got pushed for the fresh 59.0a release (memories of changelog)

Grey bar for me on OS X, 59.0a1 (2017-11-13)

I thought it is a translucent title bar. At least in Firefox Nightly 59 it is.

&gt;ugly black title barOne of the best thins in the new FF to me though (also macos). I still hope apple will to something to their gray ui. I&#x27;d love to have dark theme for the ui, not only for menubar and dock.

That is still the case. Firefox for iOS is also just a WebKit wrapper. Mozilla mainly released it for the people that use Firefox on the desktop and want to sync their stuff.

&gt; Also note their updated Firefox on iOSI was under the impression Apple didn&#x27;t allow any web rendering engines on iOS except the one mobile Safari uses, thus Chrome, Firefox, etc, on iOS are just wrappers around the Safari engine. Is that not the case anymore? It would be nice to see these speedups on iOS.

&quot;Light&quot; themes hurt my eyes and look horrible, dark all the way for me.  To each their own :)

Looks like some work done, but not complete:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=688990" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=688990</a>

Speaking of firefox and macOS integration, does anyone know why they don&#x27;t support pinch to zoom like chrome and safari do? I tried looking this up, but can&#x27;t find any specific answers.

I switched from Chrome to Firefox 57 beta and couldn&#x27;t be happier. 
Only issue so far was the ugly black title bar on the Mac, but switching to the integrated &#x27;Light&#x27; theme fixed that. Too bad &#x27;Light&#x27; isn&#x27;t the default on macOS.Also note their updated Firefox on iOS. It looks and works just fine now and comes with Firefox Sync which gives you access to your tabs, bookmarks and history.

That seems a dangerous line of thinking, like arguing that startups are about more than growth.Firefox is looking like Apple circa 1997. They can still recover, but they have to focus on what people want.

As a dedicated FF user since Phoenix, I fully agree, but if few people actually use the alternative, it probably gets harder to get any kind of revenue deals :|

Mozilla is NOT a non-profit.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mozilla_Corporation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mozilla_Corporation</a>

That is all so very true. But it is also utterly irrelevant if market share drops too much. That will unavoidably lead to incompatibilities which will without doubt ensure that only die hard enthusiasts will use it.Which means it won&#x27;t be an alternative anymore and it will die.

Firefox is about more than market share. A state of the art free non for profit browser makes the market much more competitive and better for the consumer. They are there to keep chrome&#x2F; other browsers honest. If chrome &#x2F; google does something too corporate you don&#x27;t like, there&#x27;s an alternative.

&gt; but man, Google has just eaten their lunch the past 10 years.Maybe because Google actively pays people to install Chrome without the users knowledge, and force it as default. That’s pretty much the definition of malware already.It’s hard to win against someone that does such hostile behaviour.

I personally think so. I also think their latest work on replacing Firebug and PhantomJS are way way late as well. I commend them on improving their tools, but man, Google has just eaten their lunch the past 10 years.

Until they figure out a way to address their irrelevance on Mobile, devs will never fully switch since they have to do testing on mobile devices.It is really sad that Gecko is becoming so good, but is mainly used to power a product in what is becoming a niche market (yes, desktop is becoming a niche in terms of users relative to mobile).

I switched to Quantum as my daily driver a few weeks ago, I love it as a user. It has made me hate the Chrome dev tools with white hot passion. Firebug might be gone, but the new dev tools are a masterpiece of usability. I emphatically recommend developer edition as a development browser.

Depends a bit: if devs switch back I&#x27;d say definitely.If devs are ready to repeat the IE 6 story, this time with Chrome.Getting companies to do cross browser testing seems hard even if it it should be simpler than ever before.. :-&#x2F;

Considering where Firefox started and the dominant browser at the time, it&#x27;s in a much better position than the first time around.Remember, Firefox was never the dominant browser, and where it is now is where it has almost always been.

This is sadly true. I switched off Chrome 5+ years ago due to the &quot;vim-like&quot; plugins being much better on FF than Chrome (specifically, my keybindings not working on built-in pages) and since FF56, vimperator and pentadactly no longer function. There have been months of back-and-forth between some developers and the FF team, but the functionality required for these plugins has never been prioritized and I had to disable automatic updating and download FF54 so that everything would function. Today I just gave up caring and installed cVim on Vivaldi (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vivaldi.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vivaldi.com&#x2F;</a>) which is Good Enough for now.

Which means that they have to compete on marketing against Google.

Firefox does have some distinct features that are important to me. I want to open links from Gmail or Inbox without being logged in to my Google account. Firefox containers are perfect for that. I also like snoozing tabs and quick tab switching by typing % into the address bar.Some of these things can be done in other browsers using third party extensions, but I am extremely reluctant when it comes to third party extensions for security reasons.[Edit] Very important to me as well is built-in reader view.

I understand the concern about the extensions&#x2F;addons changes, but FF is still a distinct browser.Several things immediately come to mind:* Mozilla is a more trustworthy company than Google, so all things being equal, I&#x27;ll take their product.* Container tabs (or multi-account tabs now) are a killer feature for privacy and greatly improve the &quot;multi profile&quot; use case* Firefox Mobile allows extensions, where Chrome doesn&#x27;t support it.The only negative for me with FF is that in the enterprise, FF Kerberos&#x2F;SSO function seems inferior to Chrome, which &quot;just works&quot;.But for it being closed source, I think Vivaldi is a better experience than Chrome. Sure it&#x27;s &quot;just&quot; a reskin, but point is, Chrome is in 3rd place in my opinion.

It may even be worse than that. They have effectively thrown out all that made Firefox distinct in any user facing sense to achieve this.

Firefox needs a serious presence in mobile. If the browser is competitive with Chrome, and also supports webextensions, it stands a fairly good chance, at least boosting up a few percentage points.

Percentage of total users is deceptive in some ways. The absolute number of FF users can stay the same, or even rise, and their % share can decline. It is absolute number of users that impacts the deals they can make. That&#x27;s not to say a larger % wouldn&#x27;t be good for FF.

FWIW, Firefox is still number one in Germany (desktop only) which is not an to be underrated economy.

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s too late, always room for a better browser, I&#x27;ve swapped to Quantum and I think it&#x27;s better than chrome, especially as a dev. I swapped to chrome when it came out, and it&#x27;s been the better browser for a long time, but I think that&#x27;s changed. I&#x27;m certainly recommending it. Even Edge feels better than chrome at the moment.The other thing I&#x27;m trialing is using duckduckgo as a search engine which is quite good, but google is still mostly better, but since you can google from ddg, I&#x27;m sticking with it for the moment.

Serious question, is this too little too late?Firefox has taken a massive nosedive in the last few years, in the UK at least. My two big clients have them on less than 2% share.Just checked one, 5 years ago they had 9.55% share, today it&#x27;s 1.8%. Even taking into account the growth of mobile, that&#x27;s dire.

Linux too. Chrome was eating all my ram to the point where my laptop was dogging down horribly, sometime even swapping (excruciating).FF is fast and much lighter on RAM. My laptop is fast again. Thanks, Mozilla!

On the other hand Chrome eats RAM like there&#x27;s no tomorrow on my system, while the Firefox&#x27; footprint is pretty much contained. Different systems, different experiences.(Two different machines, both Windows 10)

tried out the 57 beta on macOS (10.13) this weekend and watching in the activity monitor, the main firefox process grabbed a whopping ~800mb of my 8gb of ram + spawned sub-processes needing 20-100mb per website tab. compare this to safari and chrome that have a minimal main-process (~40mb) and then the per-tab amount. i like mozilla and firefox but it just always seems to be something with firefox that pushes me away and now that they have the speed fixed, it&#x27;s eating up my finite resources.

You were downvoted, but I rather agree. I saw the picture of the turbofan diagram, with pointers to arbitrary parts of the engine and naming them as parts of the &quot;Quantum Engine&quot;, DOM, CSS, etc.Tufte referred to chartjunk - that was graphicjunk.However... I love the browser again.

I love Firefox and I&#x27;m glad to see they are doing what it takes to stay relevant.That being said, the &quot;quantum&quot; branding here is completely ridiculous. Quantum already had a definite meaning in computing and Firefox&#x27;s &quot;quantum era&quot; has absolutely nothing to do with it. It&#x27;s like Ford making a &quot;hybrid&quot; Mustang, that has zero electrification, it&#x27;s just faster than all previous Mustangs.I was honestly expecting a Firefox build for quantum computers.

Yeah, sorry, I didn&#x27;t mean to imply it was a marketing site. But there was marketing surrounded it, and I distinctly remember it being used to show that they were, indeed, as fast as the other browsers. I remember a narrative being that the problem wasn&#x27;t Firefox being slow, but FF being slow in certain perceived-speed areas (like new tab speed).That&#x27;s why I find these sorts of announcements confusing, I can remember them saying that there are already as fast as Chrome several times in the past. But maybe my mind is playing tricks on me.

That wasn’t a marketing site, it was a tracker to measure the increase in performance over time due to the ongoing work the newly-spun-up performance team was doing.

There have been multiple separate initiatives over the years to speed up various aspects of Firefox.  The largest one is culminating in the release of Firefox Quantum, which is launching as Firefox 57 tomorrow. You&#x27;ve heard this more lately as the Quantum version of Firefox was released to Nightly and then Beta&#x2F;Developer channels over the past couple months.

Not entirely true anymore. If you select eg &quot;Quantum Reference (Windows, browser, x64)&quot; and look at the Breakdown list, you&#x27;ll see a couple of browser benchmarks that look at responsiveness and rendering. Speedometer and Unity WebGL, for example. But yeah, it&#x27;s mainly all about JS.Since the Quantum effort started, the JS team has prioritized perf work higher, so quite a bit of perf-related improvements have been made in Spidermonkey for 57 as well. (And Quantum DOM needed some rearchitecting to re-multithread the engine in a limited way.)(Source: I work on Spidermonkey.)

&gt; Am I just remembering incorrectly, or haven&#x27;t they already declared &quot;we&#x27;re as fast as Chrome now&quot; several times in the past.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arewefastyet.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arewefastyet.com&#x2F;</a> refers specifically and only to Firefox&#x27;s javascript engine. It runs js benchmarks only, not whole websites, and doesn&#x27;t test responsiveness or rendering performance.Javascript performance in firefox has been on par with competing browsers for a while now. The current initiative, called Quantum, is complementary to this effort. It is supposed to make the rest of the browser components fast, using among other things a new renderer, a CSS styling engine, and multiprocessing support.

The main reason I originally left Firefox (for Edge, mind you, I don&#x27;t touch Google software anymore) was the single-process issues they fixed with electrolysis which came out in Firefox 48.Bloated websites (usually Google ones) would actually lock up the entire Firefox UI, and Windows would recognize the browser application as &quot;Not responding&quot; until the page finished loading. In the case of a super bloated site like the old Google+, that could be as much as twelve seconds non-responsive while all the cruft loaded up.I am back on Firefox release channel now, and pretty satisfied with current performance, but looking forward to Quantum.

I had major problems using LiveReload and BrowserSync during development (two tools that automatically refresh a local website when you make changes to your code). After a few saves, it was too slow to use. Chrome and Safari would refresh about twice as quickly, and remain fast.57, once it got closer to Beta, was the first version I could develop with.

I&#x27;m confused by it, too. The main reason I&#x27;ve preferred Firefox to Chrome for years has been performance. It&#x27;s pretty much the same in responsiveness and uses far less memory.Chrome being the fastest browser is ancient history.

Jevon&#x27;s Paradox [0] is probably more appropriate.As resources become more plentiful (available performance-units, whether delivered through faster software or faster hardware), demand counter-intuitively increase, in part because the cheaper per-unit price makes people feel they can use the resource more freely.This phenomenon describes why no matter how fast our computers get, it&#x27;s unlikely that they will ever be &quot;fast enough&quot;.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jevons_paradox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jevons_paradox</a>

Performance is a Red Queen problem. [1] People keep expecting more from computers. On the web, pages keep getting bigger and more complicated. Firefox&#x27;s competition isn&#x27;t going to stop trying to improve performance, and people&#x27;s baseline for &quot;fast&quot; will mainly be other things they use. If Mozilla isn&#x27;t always trying to be faster, they&#x27;re going to be getting slower.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Red_Queen_hypothesis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Red_Queen_hypothesis</a>

Did you try the nightly or Beta version? If not, you weren&#x27;t experiencing the new changes. These will drop on the stable channel within the next day or so.

All the stuff they are talking about is being released with 57 tomorrow.So maybe give it another spin :)

I recently (a couple of weeks ago) finished giving Firefox another try for about two weeks.  Sorry to say, but it just felt laggy compared with Chrome.  I&#x27;ll give it another shot when the new rendering engine is fully integrated into the release channel.

Am I the only one that is confused by Firefox&#x27;s &quot;fast again&quot; narrative? I remember that they launched the <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arewefastyet.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arewefastyet.com&#x2F;</a> site a few years ago to fight the idea that FF was slow. It feels like there&#x27;s a new blog post that essentially says the same thing &quot;we&#x27;re fast now&quot; every couple of months.So I find this all confusing. Am I just remembering incorrectly, or haven&#x27;t they already declared &quot;we&#x27;re as fast as Chrome now&quot; several times in the past. Were those lies&#x2F;incorrect? Or again, am I remembering incorrectly. Can someone explain this?

Maybe the complacency came from having too much money from the first rounds of Google search deals in like 2004-2008?They had already fulfilled their primary goals (openness, transparency etc.)...I worked at Opera Software between 2004-2015. We also got loads of Google search placement money in that period, but for all of their other faults, our exec team(s) were able to keep us hungry for more.

I think Mozilla wasted some effort on some questionable initiatives, like Firefox OS. They became a little complacent and didn&#x27;t put money(?) where their mouth is.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Mozilla_products" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Mozilla_products</a>In particular, check out the list of their abandoned projects. But some experimentation is necessary. You&#x27;re never completely sure when you strike gold.

At a high level my main question is:Why has Mozilla generally been so slow to react to market trends and taken so insanely long to deliver products that are competitive in other ways than fuzzy aspects like openness, freedom etc?This goes back back all the way to like 1998. My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I remember it feeling like they were in rebuilding mode until like 2005-2006. And then Chrome launched in 2008...The first time around I guess it was massive amounts of technical debt and some questionable architectural choices (e.g. XPCOM), but how about the past decade?

That data is never truly deleted, not for a while at least.I suppose it has benefit now with Android, and multiple devices, but Google, and Youtube both started saving searches long before the release of Chrome.Quite terrible.

It&#x27;s pretty easy to accidentally enable uploading all your cleartext passwords to Google&#x27;s cloud service too (the dialog to do so is a dark pattern).  I similarly was furious when I discovered that.  Firefox is now my go-to, and what I recommend to friends and family.

It&#x27;s a Google box... did you not assume that this went to Google?

I am so vexed by your complaint that I had to create an account just to ask what you thought signing in to Chrome does. What did you think it was going to do? The fact that it syncs your history to your account is front and center in the description, not buried in some legal document:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;chrome&#x2F;answer&#x2F;185277" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;chrome&#x2F;answer&#x2F;185277</a>&quot;When you sign in to Chrome, your info is saved to your Google Account so you can get it whenever you need it.&quot;It is literally the first sentence. I also support some of the various EU privacy initiatives but I don&#x27;t support them because I think users should be militantly ignorant about what they&#x27;re doing.

I hate that it saves it enough that I often perform &#x27;dumb&#x27; googles in an incognito window just so it&#x27;ll never suggest &quot;how do I parallel park&quot; again. But how is this unexpected behavior? It also saves every URL you visit - in your browser history. And those URLs encode the search terms. If you want it to not save what you do, then you use incognito mode.

Isn&#x27;t it the same thing no matter the browser?If you are logged in you Google account, every Google search will end up in your Google history. It doesn&#x27;t matter if you search from Chrome&#x27;s omnibox, google.com or Firefox&#x27;s search bar.Does Chrome also uploads search made with other search engines? That would be a bit more worrisome. Though considering that Firefox saves your history in your &quot;Firefox Sync&quot; account, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if Google did the same.

thanks for the direct ftp link, and congrats to the firefox team! i&#x27;ve been using 57 (and 58) via the developer edition and really like the improvements.but i think i&#x27;ll stick with 56 as my default browser for a little longer since quantum breaks some great legacy add-ons:<pre><code> * NoScript -- control script execution
 * RequestPolicy (and its variants) -- control content requests
 * Blend In -- use the most common user agent string
</code></pre>
ublock origin can somewhat replace the first two (although i think its UI could use some improvement) but the latter one and a few more that i use don&#x27;t have direct equivalents (yet).

I just grabbed FF57 from the ftp link :), couldn&#x27;t wait!

For those who don&#x27;t know, if you sign in to your Google account in Chrome, Google will automatically save all the searches you&#x27;ve done in the omnibox.I don&#x27;t remember Google ever warning me specifically that this was happening in the background, and after I checked <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;myactivity.google.com&#x2F;myactivity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;myactivity.google.com&#x2F;myactivity</a> and noticed it was doing that, I was so furious that I deleted all the data Google kept on me there, and paused all tracking in the Activity Controls page. I also stopped signing in to the Google account in Chrome.This is why I&#x27;m a big supporter of EU&#x27;s &quot;explicit consent&quot; idea. I should be knowing stuff like that without having to read a 5-page privacy policy that&#x27;s often hidden somewhere on the Help page.Speaking of Firefox, version 57 also makes it easier to enable Tracking Protection in settings now (before you had to switch to the private windows to benefit from it, although you could make it so that FF always opened private windows by default).<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ghacks.net&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;07&#x2F;firefox-57-full-tracking-protection-functionality-included&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ghacks.net&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;07&#x2F;firefox-57-full-tracking-p...</a>You can download FF57 from their FTP servers (they published it today), if you can&#x27;t wait for the auto-update tomorrow:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ftp.mozilla.org&#x2F;pub&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;releases&#x2F;57.0&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ftp.mozilla.org&#x2F;pub&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;releases&#x2F;57.0&#x2F;</a>

Browser vendors influence upcoming web standards. If you use ungoogled-chromium then your vote still goes to Google.

Unless Chrome has features you can&#x27;t survive without (and I admit its dev tools are pretty good), then I don&#x27;t see the purpose of this.If staying free of Google becomes a goal, then by using Chrome you&#x27;re still helping them, even if your Chrome is un-googlified.This is because you help Chrome become a monopoly in the marketplace, I view it as the new Internet Explorer already. Many people here probably don&#x27;t remember, but IExplorer also won on technical merits, version 5 being an excellent browser compared with its competition. Market dominance that allowed Microsoft to screw the web for a decade at least. And no, in this context its open source nature does not matter much for as long as Google controls its implementation and distribution.Firefox is right now truly the best browser, at least for my usage patterns and needs, but even if it weren&#x27;t, I would still use it, because when web standards are endangered due to a monopoly, then I consider it my duty to support the underdog.Now don&#x27;t get me wrong, it is true that Google and Chrome have helped the open web. But that doesn&#x27;t matter that much, because they can always turn and you can see how lately Chrome is making bold changes without waiting confirmation from W3C or the other browser vendors — like disabling forms auto-complete or deprecating certificating pining.They are at a point where Chrome has enough market share to implement whatever the heck they want. DRM? H.264? Lost battles after they ended up in Chrome.

They are a good ways behind stable: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Eloston&#x2F;ungoogled-chromium&#x2F;issues&#x2F;262" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Eloston&#x2F;ungoogled-chromium&#x2F;issues&#x2F;262</a>. You might be opening yourself to security issues being this far behind.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Eloston&#x2F;ungoogled-chromium" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Eloston&#x2F;ungoogled-chromium</a> removes many of the nagging and background features related to Google services.

Exactly, Firefox is slower for both me and my girlfriend, I am a kind of &quot;typical non-typical&quot; and she &quot;typical typical&quot; user, and it got annoyingly slower for both. And now I&#x27;ve just lost all the extensions too, including NoScript and the dictionary(?!?)! See my other post here for details.

Honestly, if you are on macOS, just use Safari. Most extension you want&#x2F;need are there (or the are suitable replacements. cVim and sVim are pretty close if you don&#x27;t dive to deep, for example). Adblocking is actually faster than on any other browser because the blockers use the same Content Blocking API as on iOS Safari. And then the battery life... you easily get 2-4h more just by using Safari.Which brings me to my other point (which I always keep hammering on in browser threads): why don&#x27;t 3rd-party browser focus more on battery? If you&#x27;re on Windows, Edge is king in battery use. On macOS, its Safari. On Linux, none (but then Linux doesn&#x27;t have good power management in general). We live in a mobile-first world these days, why not focus browser development there?Edit: I&#x27;m not dissing the Firefox or Chrome team their efforts, but almost all the news articles or blogs I see speak about Chrome or Firefox getting faster. And they do, by significant jumps. But when there are battery improvements, they are usually pretty middling (say 10-20m more battery life). So all I&#x27;m saying: why not flip the focus?

I&#x27;ve been on Firefox since I can remember it being out, but the latest versions, 56+, have me using it only intermittently due to battery drain issues on Mac[0] :(. I am really hoping they get this fixed shortly.[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1404042" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1404042</a>

FF just came out with multi account containers about a month ago -&gt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;multi-account-containers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;multi-account...</a>

Firefox 58 has &quot;persona&quot; tabs. Coloured tabs that keep their own sessions. You can just configure multiple personas and work on them all simultaneously from the same window (or you can use different windows, if you prefer).It&#x27;s good even for creating fake accounts, test accounts, testing apps from the perspective of different user sessions etc.

But now that Google has fundamentally broken users&#x27; trust by locking people out of their own Google Docs through automated machine learning algorithm, can&#x27;t you see why people are wanting to protect themselves from a corporate culture that allows those kinds of zealous and intrusive policies?It was locking out journalists drafting stories!How can you trust Google anymore? There&#x27;s something rotten festering in Mountain View.

Firefox has supported multiple profiles for ages. Just run it with -P. It allows you to have separate history, extensions, bookmarks, everything.The new panel containers are also handy. They allow you to have shared history and bookmarks but separate cookies and sessions. You can be logged into the same site on different accounts in two tabs in the same window.

&gt; I have work and a couple of personal accounts that I have signed in in different browser windows.Don&#x27;t do that. On one hand you mix work and personal related issues (not recommended) on the other hand it makes it easier to track you (as your accounts can be correlated). As a dev I have my own (personal, work, ...) users&#x2F;accounts even at home (if I do remote) to separate the stuff - maybe that&#x27;s paranoid, but for me it was great to improve work-life balance.

I use separate Firefox profiles.  Try &#x27;firefox --ProfileManager&#x27; to create one.

That&#x27;s got nothing to do with &#x27;signing into an account in Chrome&#x27;.Chrome supports multiple profiles, which may optionally be associated with a Google account. Firefox has the same thing, minus the Google account.

I&#x27;ve been using Pinboard for bookmarks since before browsers started offering sync. I can create and search those bookmarks in any browser, and since I use multiple browsers on multile machines, that&#x27;s handy. My webmail is also accessible from any browser.Syncing extensions and browsing history is not something I feel I need.

The signing into an account in Chrome almost got someone fired at a small customer of mine a few weeks ago. Fortunately they called me first to look into it, I pointed out that the porn bookmarks in question were years old and that since Chrome was signed into a personal account it was pretty likely that the same account had been used by other family members at home.I also wrote this up for the owners to send to their staff, feel free to reuse if appropriate for you:We’ve seen at least one situation recently where a user “signed in” to Chrome when prompted, which brought that user’s personal bookmarks and website logins onto their work computer. While Chrome offers this as an option, there are no situations where your personal account should be linked to a browser at work – if you need to be using personal email, etc. please do so from your own phone or other device on your own time. This is for your own privacy and security as well as for the practice – we want to not have your personal data on our systems, and you don’t want your private email, bookmarks, etc. accessible to anyone else who happens to be at your desk while you’ve stepped away.If you have linked your browser to a personal account, please remove that connection using the instructions below.You can check whether Chrome is linked to an online account by clicking on the small person icon at the top right corner of the window – just to the left of the “X” to close the window. 
•	If you click on that and it asks you to sign in, you’re not linked to an account.
•	If you click on that and it lists a personal account, click on “Manage People” to open a new window listing connected accounts. On each account there are 3 dots in the top right corner – click those and “Remove this person”
•	If you see a name rather than a generic person icon, click on that and use “Manage People” to remove that connected account.Firefox offers a similar but less-used version of this that would have required creating a Firefox account to use Firefox Sync. If you have done this with Firefox please disconnect it; if you’re not sure then you almost certainly haven’t done this in Firefox and don’t need to worry about it.

Container tabs in Firefox lets you do this within a single window.about:profiles gives you the same functionality as Chrome&#x27;s profiles; it&#x27;s just a bit harder to discover.

For most Google SPAs I use an appify tool, that contains the site in a single app webview with no shared cookie store. Then in my main FF browser I have cookie crushing on, so that when I navigate away from a domain, all cookies that were created are destroyed.Ok, I spend my life filling in captchas, but to me that’s a signal that it is working and Google aren’t overly sure who I am.

Yes, as other people have said containers does this magically. I even have Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp sign-ins in their own container. Everything is separate and I honestly feel safer on the net because of it.

Firefox containers[1] are new, but you could always do this with Firefox profiles. If you&#x27;re on Linux or Mac, open a terminal and type:<pre><code> firefox -ProfileManager -no-remote &amp;
</code></pre>
(I alias it to `ff`.)Create different profiles[2] for each separate browser you need, and then make shortcuts to launch them.[3] Each Firefox profile will work like a completely separate browser.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;multi-account-containers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;multi-account...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;profile-manager-create-...</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Mozilla&#x2F;Command_Line_Options" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;docs&#x2F;Mozilla&#x2F;Command_Lin...</a>

QubesOS. Makes fucking up accounts even harder to do.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.qubes-os.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.qubes-os.org&#x2F;</a>

The signing into an account in chrome is the killer feature for me. I have work and a couple of personal accounts that I have signed in in different browser windows. That allows me to keep things separate (extensions, mail, browsing, bookmarks, etc).How do FF users do this?

&gt; How am I able to reconcile these two?It&#x27;s like reviews on Amazon. You skim the highs and the lows and you read the rest. People who say Apple is killing the open web are at the extreme. Skim what they say just to be familiar with their argument, but be careful not to get sucked in.

Perhaps because Mozilla doesn&#x27;t have a News platform?  So it is easier to believe that they are doing it for you.  I don&#x27;t mean to imply that Apple have any other motives, I know nothing about them except that there appears to be a greater likelihood of a conflict of interest.

Because more then one person has opinions on the Internet, so sometimes you hear inconsistent opinions.

In my mind, the distinction is simple: Apple is a for-profit corporation, while Mozilla is a charity operating in the public interest.  I sometimes agree with Apple&#x27;s actions while simultaneously distrusting their motives, and I sometimes disagree with Mozilla&#x27;s actions while simultaneously _trusting_ their motives.

&gt; I also like that Firefox has a built in tracking protection (not just Do Not Track toggle but actual blocking of trackersHere&#x27;s something I find curious.When Apple does it, it&#x27;s because they want to kill the open web and drive more people to their closed Apple News platform. When Mozilla does it, it&#x27;s because they&#x27;re saints.How am I able to reconcile these two?

You will be pleasantaly surprised when you get updated to 57 :) Have been running the beta for 3 weeks now, very stable, fast, snappy. Amazing work.

Firefox 56 is actually pretty good. It&#x27;s now fast again. I am using a fresh new profile.Please let me increase &quot;content process count&quot; higher than 7. Chrome opens hundreds of child-processes (no problem at all on my PC).And I am still keeping an older Firefox 48 around, as it&#x27;s the last version that runs Firebug and other good but now unsupported addons. Firebug had this &quot;DOM&quot; panel which showed the non-default DOM attributes in a different color and showed them as first few entries, and the rest below. The DevTools in new Firefox has a less useful DOM panel (it shows all attributes not grouped or colored differently, makes the DOM panel useless and chaotic) - please improve the DOM panel to be feature-equalent to the old Firebug DOM panel!!

Firefox has had syncing built in for a while: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;features&#x2F;sync&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;features&#x2F;sync&#x2F;</a>Haven&#x27;t tried it on iOS yet, but it worked great on my Android.

I&#x27;ve been using FF sync for at least 3 years now, probably more. And FF 57 is definitely on par with Chrome in browsing speed. Still not quite there with WebGL, though. The debugger is much better now, too, and surprisingly more responsive than Chrome&#x27;s.

Funny how you are replying to a comment about privacy and less reliance on google and you are saying chrome is good becuase you can send all your browser history to google.

&gt;My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account, and just generally wanting less dependence on GoogleOne thing they have been doing very well is allowing history to sync between multiple devices on different OSes.Right now I use Chrome everywhere because :- It feels pretty fast (I still have to try the new FF)- Any replacement needs to come with an extension covering this feature and working across all my OSes.

BTW: if using Android, if FF is not for you, try Brave instead of Chrome.It feels exactly like Chrome (it&#x27;s Chromium-based), but has a built-in adblocker, tracker blocking, HTTPS everywhere, no nagging to sign in, and does not throw &quot;suggested news&quot; (with no opt-out) upon you. Brave&#x27;s founder is ex-Mozilla&#x27;s CEO (Brendan Eich).However latest FF on Android is actually not bad, at least if you have a modern phone (the UI feels slowish though on pre-2016 phones).

Indeed this is the main point, and the reason I&#x27;ve stuck with Firefox ever since it launched, despite being rather slow a few years back. This is the only browser engine that is not shaped by major corporate interests. And frankly it has no major downsides as compared to Chrome. The latter only enjoys the market share it does (in my opinion) because of being aggressively pushed on Google.com and being bundled everywhere.

FF57 stable is arriving tomorrow. But you can get it from the FTP server today:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ftp.mozilla.org&#x2F;pub&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;releases&#x2F;57.0&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ftp.mozilla.org&#x2F;pub&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;releases&#x2F;57.0&#x2F;</a>

&gt; exiled Chrome to an &quot;only when needed&quot; roleIt&#x27;s been my second browser for Twitch and Netflix only for a while now. I&#x27;m bit even sure how useful that is anymore if I&#x27;m honest as I&#x27;ve not tried them in firefox for a while - but they used to be unusable and I&#x27;ve become accustomed to having another browser for them

Yeah but for our support we need to start getting in depth with Firefox devtools again.They have features not in chrome and Visa versa. But to blindly switch means taking a productivity penalty, at least temporarily.

Thanks for the reminder. I just downloaded the latest FF beta and exiled Chrome to an &quot;only when needed&quot; role.All the back-and-forth about speed and features is understandable, but misses the point that Firefox needs our support if we are to have any real non-proprietary options for what is quickly becoming the base system abstraction layer for most computing.

you need to use the dev edition.
this is fast...I found Electrolysis still quite slow. but the new engine (&quot;Quantum&quot;), is ridiculous fast. The last ~5 versions were such big improvements, that I even switched from Chrome. It&#x27;s so good know that there is no need to keep Chrome.
Firefox isn&#x27;t good enough again, Firefox is the browser again.

How would you propose &quot;splitting&quot; a modern web app between two programs, one to retrieve its content and another to render it, without the sort of tight integration between these two programs that would be needed to again lead to the kind of &quot;kitchen sink&quot; situation that we have today??IMO the problem is not the kitchen sink nature of web browsers, the problem is the kitchen sink nature of the web itself. It needs to be split into functionally separate parts that can be interfaced with different programs and workflows, instead of being a huge, integrated &#x27;web&#x27; that is in turn parsed by a similarly huge, integrated program, the browser.

&quot;Becoming true &quot;User Agents,&quot; in other words&quot;I remember the early browsers as smaller programs that were oriented around retrieving content for further viewing&#x2F;interaction using other applications. As I understood it, this was one of the ways that MIME was useful.The problems with &quot;modern&quot; web browsing that annoy users probably have less to do with what, back then, would have been separate programs. They have more to do with the retrieval step. User have little control over 1. the content the browser requests and retrieves and 2. whether and how that content is processed (i.e. the &quot;default settings&quot; of the browser decide and to my knowledge few users today manually adjust MIME settings or whatever today&#x27;s equivalent is). Because users today expect the browser to do everything. It is more than a user agent i.e. http client, it is an &quot;all-in-one&quot; program that can seemingly do anything. No auxiliary programs are needed. This comes at a cost. I would argue that cost includes many hassles that users experience, including &quot;speed&quot;.The point is that this blog post is talking about #2, the processing of retrieved content. But is that really what causes most of the user annoyances? Is that what ultimately affects &quot;speed&quot;?Or could it be, at least in part, that some web page is controlling the web browser to have it make dozens upon dozens of DNS and HTTP requests, not only for tracking, but in some cases for &quot;content&quot; the user does not want.The first task of the user agent, #1, to retrieve content, is not nearly as complex as the second, #2. It probably has not changed much since the early days of the www. (I still use original netcat from 1996 as well as other 1990&#x27;s tcp clients to great effect.) Retrieval of content can be user controlled. The complexity is manageable. The &quot;user agent&quot; can be small, open source and easily compiled by the user. And with todays memory and networking retrieval can be very fast.When I think of a &quot;user agent&quot; I think of a tcp or http client, a small program that can make TCP connections and HTTP requests, not one that is also a graphics rendering engine, a video player, a programming language interpreter or a PDF viewer, etc.It is the disappearance of the MIME idea in favor of a highly complex, all-in-one application called a &quot;modern web browser&quot; that is at the source of every known problem I can think of that is associated with &quot;modern web browsers&quot; today, whether it is browser &quot;speed&quot; or privacy or security or whatever. It is the price one must pay for not having separate programs with separate privileges to accomplish separate tasks.

I believe if you type &quot;badidea&quot; at the error page it will let you through unconditionally.

FWIW blocking sites with bogus certs and not allowing a user bypass is exactly what the HSTS RFC requires. If you were testing the HSTS feature of your website, Chrome is doing the right thing. It&#x27;s possible to clear Chrome&#x27;s cache of HSTS-enabled sites btw: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thesslstore.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;clear-hsts-settings-chrome-firefox&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thesslstore.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;clear-hsts-settings-chrome-...</a>

The most anti-user &quot;User Agent&quot; thing of Chrome, in my experience, is their refusal to let me open my myriad dev sites with bogus certificates claiming some bullshit HSTS problem, without giving me a &quot;do it anyway, you stupid browser&quot; button.So, literally, I still use Chrome (because I&#x27;m too used to it), but I do all my dev work on Firefox, which has a dev-friendly user policy.

I use bookmark keywords [1] to register new search engines.[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kb.mozillazine.org&#x2F;Using_keyword_searches" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kb.mozillazine.org&#x2F;Using_keyword_searches</a>

&gt; I like new Firefox but if Firefox is removing search bar than address bar should take over all functionality from search bar and it doesn&#x27;t.In search bar there is easy way to add new search engine with + sign and in address bar there isn&#x27;t.Where do you see the search bar being removed? I can&#x27;t see any announcements, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s going away. Also, I don&#x27;t think the combined bar is missing functionalities, at least not the one you&#x27;re describing.On Firefox Developer Edition 58, in the menu you can choose between :Use the address bar for search and navigationorAdd search bar in toolbarThis decides between combining the address bar and search bar into one, or having a separate address bar and search bar. You can also pick a keyword for each search engine.Even if you decide to use the combined bar, I just tried adding &quot;+ddg&quot; keyword[1] on Duck Duck Go and type &quot;+ddg test&quot; and it searched for &quot;test&quot; on Duck Duck Go instead of my default search engine.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;add-or-remove-search-engine-firefox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;add-or-remove-search-en...</a>

I like new Firefox but if Firefox is removing search bar than address bar should take over all functionality from search bar and it doesn&#x27;t.In search bar there is easy way to add new search engine with + sign and in address bar there isn&#x27;t.

Are you using Firefox nightlies? As I read the article, the Quantum improvements they&#x27;re talking about are nightly-only today; they get released tomorrow. So I think when you say &quot;now&quot; you&#x27;re still talking about pre-Quantum.That said, I don&#x27;t know if Quantum fixes the specific memory leaks you have, adds (back?) the extension hooks you miss, or adds the reporting you&#x27;re looking for.

This sounds genuinely odd, could you be using a add-on that is causing a problem ?I leave Firefox open for months on end without problem and with several hundred of tabs open, multiple windows too. I do use a tab unloader, that unloads an inactive tab after a while. Its precisely because of this that other browsers are not suitable for me

The about:memory display is pretty easy to read and can force memory collections across the app. Should be fairly easy to track down the cause. I run the developer edition and tend to restart weekly or so to pick up new updates but I don&#x27;t notice excessive RAM consumption.

Counterpoint: as a longtime Firefox user, I have to restart it every couple day. It still hemmorhages memory and just gets unusable after a while.Even if it&#x27;s the extension fault, why they aren&#x27;t sandboxed properly, or even why there eisn&#x27;t basic reporting about the offenders boggles my mind. Maybe it&#x27;s because of the API... I find it hard to believe it isn&#x27;t possible to retrofit some of that on the current design to be honest.And now, because they couldn&#x27;t handle it, we&#x27;re getting extensions with crippled power, that are very (very) far away from feature parity with the old ones.I wasn&#x27;t happy before, and I&#x27;m not happy now, albeit for different reason.The fact that I&#x27;m using Firefox of course means I&#x27;m not thinking too much of other browsers. The fact an extension in chrome can&#x27;t add a frigging sidebar is a personal pet peeve of mine.I remember when Firefox was the lightweight alternative to Internet Explorer 6...

54 is not even fast compared to 57 (&quot;Quantum&quot;, launching tomorrow 11&#x2F;14). Seriously if you think 54 is fast, 57 blows it out of the water.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;quantum&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;quantum&#x2F;</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;quantum-performance-test&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mozilla.org&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;quantum-performance-test&#x2F;</a>

This only means that Opera have all your data and can aggregate it in one place.

&gt; Browsers are becoming more and more aggressive in protecting the interests of users. Becoming true &quot;User Agents,&quot;I really like the built in free VPN that Opera provides.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opera.com&#x2F;computer&#x2F;features&#x2F;free-vpn" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opera.com&#x2F;computer&#x2F;features&#x2F;free-vpn</a>

On the verge of switching back to Firefox. Then Pocket. I don&#x27;t want to give my private data to any cloud service out there. Full stop. The only way the cloud gets my data is encrypted with a key I solely own.

I switched back to Firefox 54 from Chrome when multiprocess browsing (&quot;Electrolysis&quot;) came out of beta. It&#x27;s been absolutely great. It&#x27;s fast and I trust and like the nonprofit behind it. And all the extensions I care about are available.My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account, and just generally wanting less dependence on Google. I also like that Firefox has a built in tracking protection (not just Do Not Track toggle but actual blocking of trackers). That&#x27;s something that&#x27;s just not in Google&#x27;s interest to put in Chrome.Browsers are becoming more and more aggressive in protecting the interests of users. Becoming true &quot;User Agents,&quot; in other words. See also Safari iOS allowing content blockers and now in iOS 11 blocking some popular tracking behaviors by default. It&#x27;s absolutely great. And it&#x27;s not surprising to me that Chrome is not a leader here. It&#x27;s owned by the biggest advertising company on the internet. I predict Chrome will continue to lag on pro-privacy, anti-nag features.

Sadly, GUI tweaks is very limited on new extensions api

userChrome.css is still present on Quantum. I haven&#x27;t played around with it a lot, but if you feel like getting your hands dirty, this should be a relevant resource to you: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Aris-t2&#x2F;CustomCSSforFx&#x2F;issues&#x2F;1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Aris-t2&#x2F;CustomCSSforFx&#x2F;issues&#x2F;1</a>

This is my favourite extension also. When using a laptop or other small screen, being able to remove the title bar is essential. I&#x27;m not upgrading to 57 until I can find a good workaround.Apparently, one used to be able to manually modify Firefox&#x27;s userchrome.css to do something similar, but I&#x27;ve yet to find descriptions on what to do with this new version of Firefox.A different broken family of extensions that is impacted is mouse gestures, even for things like moving along tabs when hovering over them using the mouse wheel (default Chrome experience). I don&#x27;t think this behaviour is possible with the new version of FF, sadly.

Apparently client side decorations might appear in Firefox 59 at the earliest. For me having that negates the need to hide the title bar while maximized.Under X11 there are various tools to hide the titlebar (entire chrome basically), see devilspie.

One extension I don&#x27;t find a replacement for is Hide caption titlebar plus. It makes it so there&#x27;s a permanent title bar even when Firefox is maximized. I had to change an xfce setting to hide the title bar when a window is maximized, meaning I lose the title bar for every application... Not ideal. Does anyone know if there is an argument to launch firefox without a title bar? Or set it in xfce for only one application?

Thanks for this. Was waiting patiently for the push this week after getting tired of Nightly builds.

Note that that build isn&#x27;t technically guaranteed to be the 57.0 release, and there have been 11th hour updates pushed out before.

Stable Firefox 57.0 is already available on Mozilla&#x27;s FTP server: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.mozilla.org&#x2F;pub&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;releases&#x2F;57.0&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.mozilla.org&#x2F;pub&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;releases&#x2F;57.0&#x2F;</a>I am already using it, but had to reinstall uBlock Origin.

I&#x27;m waiting for full switch to Webrender and as result GPU accelerated video decoding on Linux and switch to Wayland at last.

There&#x27;s a non-profit Mozilla Foundation and a for-profit Mozilla Corporation. Presumably MoCo bought the ad.

&quot;Mozilla makes money from having users&quot;Wait, how does that work again? Last I checked you couldn&#x27;t deposit users at the bank or pay your rent with them.

Mozilla makes money from having users — it may be open-source but the developers still need to be paid. They don&#x27;t have a captive audience like Windows or Google.com users to advertise on, so public ads seem necessary.

Wasn&#x27;t really aware about MoCo and their deals with all major  search engines.

One thing that troubles me is why does a non profit open source browser buy premium offline ad space to promote itself? There&#x27;s a huge &quot;The new Firefox&quot; ad in down-town Berlin.

Been using FF consistently on OSX the last years, the improvements are really great - Kudos!The various channels, like Quantum to stay on Beta, seem to have worked. Easy to understand as a user and hopefully helpful for the devs to gather important info. Plus a native dark theme, yay!One thing that remains is performance of Youtube. For some reason HD videos start crushing the processor after a while. Chrome, Safari stay calm.

I&#x27;ve started switching back last week. I&#x27;m only using Chrome for any Google Services (drive, gmail, hangouts) and development (for now, but only since I&#x27;m used to it and have deadlines). I am very hopeful at this point.

night mode turn background to the black for all website. It’s good if you reading things on browser.

Could you please elaborate on the &quot;night mode&quot;?

It’s great progress with `rust` and people behind it. I loved night mode on iOS. But on Linux still first launch is slow. _ubuntu17.04_

Did any of you try FF 57? I also used a lot of extensions, but basically all the ones that mattered to me work again. (For tree style tabs I have to add a bit of CSS in a file to make it not awkward, though)

Firefox&#x27;s Webextensions APIs are much more expansive than Chrome&#x27;s. They still have an active developer community so the ecosystem will recover quickly.

&gt; So what&#x27;s going on here? It&#x27;s just the propaganda machine claiming the opposite of what is actually happening at the moment. They maybe have good goals but at the moment it&#x27;s worse than, for example, a year ago.It sounds like you are hitting some kind of bug. Feel free to file issues about it if it&#x27;s reproducible; the telemetry should also be automatically reporting the issues you&#x27;re seeing.I would like to respectfully suggest that you hitting a bug is not evidence of a &quot;propaganda machine&quot;.

Yes, for my girlfriend, during some last few months Firefox is much slower than before: she uses it mostly for Facebook and Youtube, she doesn&#x27;t have any extensions installed by herself (not counting the stuff that is in Firefox because Firefox marketing initiatives, like Pocket) and no adbockers, but Firefox uses so much CPU that it gets completely unusable.And she is not any extreme Facebook user: she has less than 500 &quot;friends.&quot; And she doesn&#x27;t have big &quot;subscriptions&quot; list in Youtube.So it&#x27;s completely opposite of the propaganda: the average user, using the most common sites, is hit to the that much CPU more use that the most common sites are unusable.So what&#x27;s going on here? It&#x27;s just the propaganda machine claiming the opposite of what is actually happening at the moment. They maybe have good goals but at the moment it&#x27;s worse than, for example, a year ago.Maybe it&#x27;s because she doesn&#x27;t have a newly bought computer, which are the ones used by those who test? And I guess those who test don&#x27;t use Facebook and Youtube?I also use Firefox but spend zero time in Facebook and minimal time on Youtube and block Javascript wherever I can, so I don&#x27;t see the same. But I saw the CPU on her computer staying completely blocked by something Firefox is doing. The only thing I was able to figure out: around 40 percent is spent in kernel according to the task manager. Both cores are used more than 90 percent, and the Firefox is not responsive. She doesn&#x27;t do anything more than scrolling down her Facebook to see that effect. It&#x27;s not always that bad, obviously depends on the content on the Facebook, but it&#x27;s bad often enough for her to see the slowness regularly, and when it really gets stuck to complain to me.What I personally observe is the pages embedding more linked Youtube videos got to be very slow to even display them. Those are the pages I stumble on occasionally, so I didn&#x27;t investigate. The second effect I&#x27;ve observed is writing a longer post for HN on Firefox getting much slower (less responsive) the longer the post is. Like writing these words now.So, dear Firefox people, your product is really SLOWER for me too in the last versions, and not faster. And it is extremely slower for a &quot;normal&quot; user using the &quot;normal&quot; Facebook and Youtube.(Additionally, I use a number of extensions, and only one will remain available soon when they turn off the support for what they mark as &quot;legacy&quot; extensions. That is really strange decision, deciding to remove the major difference between them and Chrome, becoming just as limited as Chrome is for extensions and wasting the work of most of the extension developers.)

The thing I can&#x27;t stand about it is closing a window causes a multi-second beachball on latest Firefox &#x2F; macOS.  Really annoying.  This is with a cleaned out profile and no extensions.

Firefox 56 had some kind of performance regression[1], but FF Quantum is a joy to use.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;comments&#x2F;74irm5&#x2F;is_ff_super_slow_after_this_last_update&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;comments&#x2F;74irm5&#x2F;is_ff_super...</a>

It&#x27;s not like someone would buy an exploit and only use it on one person.

It depends, are you worth between $30k and $80k to someone? If yes, I would switch to Chrome.

I&#x27;m not sufficiently familiar with Chrome&#x27;s architecture to speak comparatively, but Firefox Quantum (57) has a significantly improved sandbox thanks to finally going fully multi-process (full status at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&#x2F;Security&#x2F;Sandbox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.mozilla.org&#x2F;Security&#x2F;Sandbox</a>), and replacing C++ components with Rust prevents certain classes of potentially exploitable issues at compile time.

I&#x27;d be more worried about chrome tracking and selling my data than I would about Firefox being p0wned.

I&#x27;m still worried about how secure Firefox is in relation to Chrome. From what I understand, Firefox exploits only go for $30k at Pwn2Own, while Chrome exploits go for $80k. Should I be worried?

If I had to guess why, I&#x27;d say that I am mostly self taught and more of an extrovert.  It&#x27;s probably the only way my brain could trick me into sitting in front of a computer all day instead of talking with other people.  I also played with action figures late, until I was 12... around the same time I started programming... I think I&#x27;m having a psychological breakthrough, haha.

You are not alone in your way of thinking!Also, I had never previously seen the code cartoons produced by @linclark...but now seeing them (and digging a little deeper), count myself a fan!

When I explain various aspects of concurrency and multi-threaded programming to non-programmers, using analogy of people doing some tasks really helps.I&#x27;ve picked this up from Feynman&#x27;s lectures on computing - highly recommend them!

I feel I&#x27;ve always done that because I learned programming through Usborne&#x27;s books, and her work reminds me of that. Usborne books helped me grok difficult things very fast when I was about 10 years old. For a while, when using variables and arrays, I would always think of robots grabbing things from shelves.Examples and PDF downloads (!): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boingboing.net&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;07&#x2F;usborne-releases-free-pdfs-of.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boingboing.net&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;07&#x2F;usborne-releases-free-pdfs...</a>I wish those were still around when I was learning about pointers. Would have made things so much easier!

Found it:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.utexas.edu&#x2F;users&#x2F;EWD&#x2F;transcriptions&#x2F;EWD10xx&#x2F;EWD1036.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.utexas.edu&#x2F;users&#x2F;EWD&#x2F;transcriptions&#x2F;EWD10xx&#x2F;EW...</a>Section beginning, &quot;My next linguistical suggestion is more rigorous&quot;...

Didn&#x27;t Djikstra write about this? I wasn&#x27;t able to pull anything up, but maybe this will jog someone&#x27;s memory.

Me, too.I think about a lot of concepts in terms of real-world objects. When I&#x27;m in the shower looking at the tiles, that&#x27;s an array -- how do I store my data there efficiently, and minimize the need to move blocks of tiles around? When I&#x27;m stuck in traffic, I&#x27;m the data in a network packet -- how do traffic engineers solve this problem? What&#x27;s the software equivalent of a carpool lane, or a double-decker bus, or a side street? How is a stop sign different from a street light (latency versus throughput)? Layout constraints seem exactly like theatrical stage positions to me -- maybe that&#x27;s why I find the Cassowary system perfectly intuitive, and CSS layout not at all.I liken this to Einstein&#x27;s thought experiments: what is the experience of riding on a photon at the speed of light? I find it tremendously useful, and I&#x27;m not sure why it seems to be more popular in physics than in computer science. Perhaps it&#x27;s as simple (and arbitrary) as &quot;Einstein was a fan, and Dijkstra was not.&quot;

Somewhat tangentially, I really like the cartoons Lin has made. I’ve found I’ve naturally anthropomorphized code. Often when I start working with someone new they get confused when I start talking about constructs like people. I think it’s given me a different perspective on encapsulation and concurrency than most people.I don’t know if I’ve ever worked with someone that thinks the same way. When I work on code that wasn’t designed that way I force my brain to think like the CPU instead of in terms of little elves with different job... Not sure if anyone else has experienced this 2 modes of thinking about code. It seems like FF engineer’s might be thinking in the same terms as they tackle concurrency refactors.

Haha, crazy to see a core dev on here.  Great work on the game, been my favorite for years now.

When the new Pixi version is dropped into place (I finished coding that recently) it performs much better on Firefox. I agree that with the current version it&#x27;s definitely not great.Edit: Just to be clear, when I say much better, I don&#x27;t mean much better than chrome, just better than it performs now. When I drop RAF and just run the rendering loop as fast as possible, they get roughly the same FPS on my cheapo laptop.

The one major benchmark I use for browser speed is how fast Tagpro runs, and it&#x27;s definitely gotten much slower on Firefox recently, to the extent that I need to generally play it on Chrome, even though I normally much prefer Firefox to Chrome.

Firefox mobile has extensions, specifically an ad-blocker extension.

Chrome remote desktop is just too good for me to ditch chrome entirely. Can anyone suggest a good (free) alternative?

I appreciate that Firefox is doing great work getting it faster, but at the same time they&#x27;re doing awful work by baking in shitty cloud features and turning their add-on ecosystem into a walled garden. One step forward, two steps back.

I noticed that last week as well, but got 59.0a1 (2017-11-13) this morning and so far have not seen it again. Hopefully just a minor issue that was fixed...

Has anyone else noticed significant CPU usage in the new Firefox Nightly? My computer fan goes full blast when I use the new browser. I like the speed but that level of heat is just not generated by Chrome.

That&#x27;s weird, Firefox feels much snappier than Chrome to me. It also uses significantly less memory.

Check about:support and look for a number higher than 0 in the &quot;Multiprocess Windows&quot; entry. Old extensions or something may be keeping you from running multi-process.

&gt; Edit: The scrolling is also very laggy, which I forgot to mention, much more so than Chrome.Firefox uses smooth scrolling, while Chrome always uses very jerky, jumping scrolling.Have you tried disabling that?

I haven’t had any lag in text entry, but I ran the Windows version for a while (making sure I gave it plenty of time to build up a cache) and my general perception is that Chrome is still faster.I like the idea of switching to Firefox a lot, but from a performance perspective I’m not seeing quite what everyone else is.

The typing lag put me off immediately.I&#x27;ve measured the input latency and its ~3x slower than chrome.Filed a bug around a month ago <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1408699" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1408699</a>

It also feels laggy to me. It&#x27;s weird given the reports of all these other users. I am also using a 16GB Ram, Intel Iris MBP. There is a noticeable pause while switching tabs, and there is a very noticeable lag while typing (for example in this box). Pages do seem to render fast, but it feels very laggy in terms of user interaction.Edit: The scrolling is also very laggy, which I forgot to mention, much more so than Chrome.

Latest one seems like it has a memory leak on linux. Starts off fast, but I&#x27;ve found that I need to close out all of Firefox about once a day. Not sure if that&#x27;s the vanilla build, or the multi-account containers extension that&#x27;s causing the issue.

This seems to have fixed it for me! Not that I could actually live with this fix, but now I could report it to them or something. When I turned it to default scaling it was snappy again. And when I move the window over to one of my 4K monitors it is also fast, so it&#x27;s something unique to the laptop monitor with scaling.

If you set your screen resolution to &quot;default for display&quot; in System Preferences, does the scrolling feel closer to native?

I just installed Firefox 57 (thanks jacek for the link) and the first things I noticed are:- The cross to close a tab and the one to create a tab are aligned in a weird way.- Opening a tab is laggy (I&#x27;m on a MBP with an Intel Iris chip and 16GB of RAM).- The scrolling still does not feel native (I&#x27;m on macOS High Sierra).I&#x27;m very impressed by the work that has been done for this release as a dev but this does not give me a great first impression as a user (I haven&#x27;t used Firefox these past 5 years). Google Chrome since its Material UI redesign (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;google-design&#x2F;redesigning-chrome-desktop-769aeb5ab987" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;google-design&#x2F;redesigning-chrome-desktop-...</a>) is snappy and has a clean UI, I hope that Firefox will also reach this point.Anyway, this release is a major achievement. Congrats to the contributors!

How Firefox Got Fast Again