Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition

[Megalith]

Mozilla has released the first beta versions of Firefox 57 that come with a new user interface (“Photon”) and a new core engine (“Quantum”): they claim that it is twice as fast as Firefox 52, the version released a year ago. A video demonstrates how Firefox Quantum is often “perceivably faster” than Chrome.

Firefox has historically run mostly on just one CPU core, but Firefox Quantum takes advantage of multiple CPU cores in today’s desktop and mobile devices much more effectively. This improved utilization of your computer’s hardware makes Firefox Quantum dramatically faster. One example: we’ve developed a breakthrough approach to laying out pages: a super-fast CSS engine written in Rust, a systems programming language that Mozilla pioneered. Firefox’s new CSS engine runs quickly, in parallel across multiple CPU cores, instead of running in one slower sequence on a single core. No other browser can do this.

 

[cyclone3d]

So it will allow pages to be even more bloated before bringing even the fastest computer to it's knees?

 

[Jim Kim]

Ya gotta respect a comparison that shows wins and losses on an equal footing.
I'm all for anything that loosens googles grip on the intarweb.

 

[niconx]

The problems I've had with Firefox aren't anything related to rendering speed. The real problem with Firefox is its desire to seize up the entire UI and all tabs and plugins when any page is loading anywhere in the browser. That's been the whole problem with Firefox for years now. The devs are too obsessed with inane details of the rendering engine and not thinking practically. All the optimization in the world isn't going to matter if they can't stop the browser from seizing up on page loads.

 

[SixFootDuo]

I love Firefox been my daily driver for years.

I'm not against Chrome but Chrome doesn't have the massive and easy to use Bookmarks layout Firefox does. After researching why this is, I found the answer, apperently Chrome wants you doing searches and not using bookmarks for everything.

Chrome does have the ability to bookmark but it's a shell of what Firefox provides.

I haven't looked for an addon that brings this functionality to Chrome lately so there might be something out there althought I have my doubts.

 

[grtitan]

Need to check it out.

Love Firefox since it was Firebird!

Edit. Installed it and all my extensions seems to work great and the speed is noticeable.

 

[LMT MFA]

Aaaaand there went all my plugins. Autofox, Rollback. No update for me.

 

[Deleted member 245375]

In their own words (with some highlighting of the relevant bullshit):

We encourage you to make your own comparisons, but here’s a short video that captures our observations when comparing Firefox Quantum and Chrome on various websites. Firefox Quantum is often perceivably faster.

It's all about making it look like it's faster nowadays, not actually making it faster, which means they spend an awful lot of developer time and resources making the browser appear as though it's faster when technically the background non-visual aspects ends up being basically the same in terms of actual performance when loading the raw code to create the page or content to display.

EDIT:
Ok, did some impromptu testing of this Firefox 57b3 build released earlier against my current primary browser, Firefox ESR 52.3.0. Did clean installs of each (portable), started them up 5 times for about a min each then shut 'em down (to get all that startup BS out of the way so it doesn't interfere with the benchmarks) and ran that Speedometer benchmark - which for the record is a Mozilla project, of course - and this is what I got:

Firefox ESR 52.3.0: 24.21
Firefox 57b3: 46.10

So, ok, in that benchmark they did get a rather substantial boost in performance, almost matching the claim of 2x the performance (it's within the margins I'd say). I was going to do several runs of each browser and average the scores but, no, this time just one single run and I did the same for all the others as well.

But just one benchmark is not enough of an indicator so, let's do others.

Octane 2.0 (a Google created Javascript benchmark):

Firefox ESR 52.3.0: 24000
Firefox 57b3: 24345

Ok, another win for Firefox 57b3 but literally a marginal improvement that cannot be absolutely considered a boost.

Now, the old standard Sunspider 1.02 which is basically not even really used anymore but still fun to take a peek at on occasion:

Firefox ESR 52.3.0: 280.33 ms
Firefox 57b3: 245.60 ms

So, again, a marginal improvement, yes it's an improvement that even I can say is there in the single run but not a big huge boost and hardly any human being would be able to notice the difference in day to day use. Next up, the successor to Sunspider known as JetStream which is is described at the website as "JetStream is a JavaScript benchmark suite focused on the most advanced web applications." Sounds good to me, on to the results:

Firefox ESR 52.3.0: 131.11
Firefox 57b3: 144.80

So again a marginal boost. I'm happy that Mozilla is making some improvements in Firefox, really, but the crap they're doing to most every other aspect of it - removing features, changing the extension support system breaking a lot of time tested and useful addons where a lot of developers have simply decided to kill them off permanently, and generally turning Firefox in Chrome from the visual aspect which no serious Firefox fan or long-time user wants - is starting to become a pretty frustrating thing.

I'll keep using Firefox ESR 52 because once ESR 59 is out (they release a new ESR version with every 9th vanilla public version) I'll have to do some serious consideration about whether or not I'll be moving to that or just keep using ESR 52 for as long as the code will run.

I got nothing against change for good reasons, it's change for the sake of change - which is what's driving them to make Firefox look and work like Chrome, sadly - is never ever a good thing.

 

[OutOfPhase]

So yes, a massive improvement to the interactive feel/performance and minor improvements to other things is EXACTLY what they are saying is new in this release.

Changing the good old single threaded beast to be a multi-threaded renderer with multiple content processes is a huge change. No, it is not going to execute computations faster. That's not what it is for. But it does work much smoother, gets stuck less often, and honestly does feel like a modern browser again.

 

[sadsteve]

Doesn't Firefox 57 break all the 'legacy' addons? I just checked my current addons and they're all legacy!! I guess I'll have to stick with ESR edition.

 

[Galvin]

The problems I've had with Firefox aren't anything related to rendering speed. The real problem with Firefox is its desire to seize up the entire UI and all tabs and plugins when any page is loading anywhere in the browser. That's been the whole problem with Firefox for years now. The devs are too obsessed with inane details of the rendering engine and not thinking practically. All the optimization in the world isn't going to matter if they can't stop the browser from seizing up on page loads.

That dont happen anymore if you have firefox using multicore

 

[ChadD]

I got nothing against change for good reasons, it's change for the sake of change - which is what's driving them to make Firefox look and work like Chrome, sadly - is never ever a good thing.

I don't believe it is change for the sake of change. They have completely retooled their engine and modernized it. (adding multi cpu support, and rebuilding their CSS engine). Performance improvements are going to depend on how many cores your throwing at it and how intense the workload is your throwing at it. As someone who does a small bit of web design and deals with some crudde CSS now and then I'll take a boost there even if its small.

Honestly Mozilla has dropped a long way from where they where when they looked like the best alternative to MS. Going and rebuilding from the ground up I believe is going to put them in a good place to compete down the road. If there brand new engine can show even small gains across the board that is fantastic... we are comparing an old reliable engine that has had optimization patches for years against a fresh out of the gate rebuild that is using a better more modern approach to hardware usage. A year from now those small gains are going to turn into medium size ones... and 2 years from now when more people are running on 8+ core CPUs I believe Mozilla may be able to show some real good bench wins vs chrome and edge, it may help them at the least remain a solid 3rd place in usage and not drop to a distant 3rd or worse.

 

[0ptional]

I was able to install almost all of my regular add ons with ff57, it did take a minute to search them in the firefox extensions site, but they were there. Most importantly, RES

 

[Deleted member 245375]

Protip: if you want to test the Firefox 57 "Quantum" beta and want to continue using the older XUL-based addons you can alter one config option that will allow it. Go to about:config in Firefox 57 (assuming you have it running or installed) and then in the search box type the word "legacy" without quotes. After a moment or two you should see a few configuration variables appear like this:

Double-click the extensions.legacy.enabled variable which will change it to true and you're good to go. What irks me is that during the beta phases of testing this built-in support of the older XUL-based addons and extensions is right there in the code, but at some point when 57 is finalized they'll literally just delete those sections entirely and yank it out leaving Firefox 57 only capable of supporting the newer WebExtensions way of doing things.

 

[TwistedAegis]

I'm not against Chrome but Chrome doesn't have the massive and easy to use Bookmarks layout Firefox does. After researching why this is, I found the answer, apperently Chrome wants you doing searches and not using bookmarks for everything..

OMG is that why bookmarks in Chrome are so shitty? Wow, that makes a lot of sense, and is also deviously fucked up.

 

[Staples]

Does bookmark sync from mobile Firefox sync with the desktop versions?

I mean for God sakes, you'd bookmark crap in their mobile app and it would not sync to desktop versions. It was this way by design.

When they fix this worst decision in history, maybe, I will give Firefox another shot.

The MOST important feature to me and should be to anyone is bookmark syncing.