FireFox 57 is QUANTUM

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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Firefox 57 beta is out for you to try. v57 will be known as Firefox Quantum when it releases on November 14th. I have been playing around with it some this morning, and this coming from a "Chrome guy," it is pretty damn fast. A lot faster than it used to be for sure and for the pages I have visited, everything I see is being rendered correctly, and is working right on our forums. w00t!!1


Firefox 57 has been given the release name Quantum, after the Firefox Quantum engineering project that has aimed to rebuild Firefox from the ground up, bringing with it major performance, stability, and visual improvements. This is the first version of Firefox to ship some of these improvements, so we wanted to mark the occasion.

Firefox's new parallel CSS engine — also known as Quantum CSS or Stylo — is enabled by default in Firefox 57 for desktop, with Mobile versions of Firefox to follow later on. Developers shouldn't notice anything significantly different, aside from a whole host of performance improvements. There are however a number of minor functional differences in Stylo, implemented to fix non-standard Gecko behavior that should be eliminated. We will report on such differences on reference pages and in the release notes as appropriate (see Quantum CSS notes).
 
I just switched to chrome about a month ago because of agonizingly slow firefox has become on several of my PCs. No idea why, but it would take 30 seconds plus to load a lot of my favorite websites where chrome would load them instantly. Really throwing me off as its happening at home and at work on multiple PCs. Maybe it's worth a try to see how the new beta is.
 
Time2Kill:
A months ago I went from Chrome to Firefox because Chrome kept on crashing, PLUS was crazily slow.

Two weeks later, I went back to Chrome because Firefox's UI (e.g. opening up new tabs and playing Youtube videos) felt so sluggish.

I just tried 57 and MAN is it quick! It feels MUCH quicker than Chrome! :)

(I'm running a Xeon E5620 with 24GB of RAM)
 
Went from Chrome to Firefox nightly and .... I'm back on chrome. FFN is just too sluggish and too unstable for me.
 
its a morbid hobby of mine that once/month I give all browsers a whirl for about an hour each (barring MS browsers.. lets not be crazy). Vivaldi, Opera, Chrome, FF, Waterfox, etc.

I can say that as somebody who's been doing this on and off for a while, this feels faster than anything I've ever used or been able to tweak a browser into doing. It does sadly clip out most of the "legacy" plugins that dont have a web extension format, but damn. If this is what we get in return, I'm fine with that migration period.
 
Fast it may be, but it dropped support for every single one of my favorite plugins. Perhaps because it is not running plugins as well is making it so fast. I wonder.
Chrome still works with my equivalent plugins so that is where i went. For me Firefox has lost its appeal.
 
Installed ok then promptly crashed. (not a blue or black screen, just a failure to browse.)The end, not now never ever.

Win10, 6950x, 1080t
 
been using Chrome for Youtube, FF for everything else. Installed Brave browser, appeared fast, but has a slight delay when intially loading pages...gets annoying.
 
I may have to try this out.

I tried Vivaldi a few weeks ago and while it worked ok, the weird browser window blanking when switching pages just felt off to me.

I use Chrome exclusively at home, but it has it's own issues such as sometimes pages not rendering properly and links sometimes not doing anything.

Have to use IE at work so I am used to it, but man is it a piece of work as is our proxy/web filter.
 
Of course FF57 is fast, all your extensions are incompatible! ;-)
 
Currently trying it and its running flawless.

The only thing i found that is not working and is not firefox fault, is google earth, since google is forcing everyone to use chrome for that site.
 
Fast it may be, but it dropped support for every single one of my favorite plugins. Perhaps because it is not running plugins as well is making it so fast. I wonder.
Chrome still works with my equivalent plugins so that is where i went. For me Firefox has lost its appeal.
Of course FF57 is fast, all your extensions are incompatible! ;-)

They changed the type of plugins it supports, from being a type where each plugin had direct access to the core of the browser (including possible security risks and performance issues) to using plugins that are basically identical to the type that Chrome uses.

Some legacy plugins did things that they can't do as well or at all anymore with the limitations that come from using chrome-style plugins now. ANY plugin that works on Chrome however, will work on new versions of Firefox just fine with only minimal modifications. Chrome has nothing in terms of plugin support that the new version of Firefox can't also support.

Getting mad at Mozilla for removing legacy plugin support is totally legit. Switching to Chrome due to plugins is silly and stupid however since they basically support the same plugins now.
 
I just tested FF 57 out and yea it is definitely snappier. However my add ons don't work so I switched back. I like things how they are too much.
 
Fast it may be, but it dropped support for every single one of my favorite plugins. Perhaps because it is not running plugins as well is making it so fast. I wonder.
Chrome still works with my equivalent plugins so that is where i went. For me Firefox has lost its appeal.
Firefox 57 Quantum is an adaptation of their Servo engine research.

For those who need XUL/XPCOM and NPAPI support check out Waterfox. The current version is 55.2.2 and it will be interesting to see the roadmap after 56 is out (mini roadmap available here).

Also keep an eye out for Basilisk which will be a Firefox XUL platform development fork.

There's always Firefox ESR 52.5.0 with about:config's plugin.load_flash_only set to false (or ESR 45.9.0 if needed, but not secure).
 
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