Mozilla Prepares to Fight Back against Google's Chrome Browser

Megalith

Megalith

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Firefox is planning to fend off Chrome with the release of Firefox 57, which debuts in November: this version is supposed to be a massive overhaul, offering new features such as Quantum, which squashes slowdown bugs and speeds up website display. WebRender will also allow a computing device’s graphics chip to draw webpages on the screen faster. Unfortunately, Mozilla may have already killed the goodwill of many of its remaining users by deprecating many beloved add-ons.

Will it be enough? Some are skeptical. Even if a browser is twice as fast as Chrome, uses half the memory and suffers half the security holes, it may not be enough to get you to switch, says Silk Labs’ Gal. Especially when Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Docs and other major sites tell you things will work better if you switch to Chrome. Mozilla executives are more optimistic, though they’re candid about the problems that led to today’s difficulties. “Firefox didn’t keep up with the market and what people really want. A lot of hardcore Firefox fans are now happy Chrome users,” Beard says.
 
I'm happy with it so far, went back to it from chrome and chrome based browsers. but I've never liked chrome itself. It's got too many idiosyncrasies I just don't like. And the add on issue is quickly resolving itself, and I can still use the old ones while that does so, so meh.
 
Emission said:
But does it still have memory leaks?
Click to expand...
Nope. I only close mine when i have to reboot and so far, nothing.

You know which one screwed me over the other day by using 1.5 GB of ram? Edge.

Only had 5 tabs open, but it was open for a week or so.
 
I haven't run into any memory leaks besides those caused by a few faulty addons on non-beta Firefox's since beta Firefox 4. It's always used less memory than Chrome whenever I used that.
 
grtitan said:
Nope. I only close mine when i have to reboot and so far, nothing.

You know which one screwed me over the other day by using 1.5 GB of ram? Edge.

Only had 5 tabs open, but it was open for a week or so.
Click to expand...

I actually watched Edge climb to 1.7 GB once, over the course of a minute, with one tab open.
 
Are there particular add-ons I should be concerned about?
 
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I want to believe, but until then I'll stick with my heavily modified ragamuffin no name ff fork.
 
I use Firefox. It's fine. Just never felt at home with Chrome and I'm a Chromebook user quite often.
 
I'll give it a try. But it needs to have a top notch popup blocker either built in or by add on extension.
 
yeah chrome is the one thing i will never use to browse anything even local files.

it's the first app i disable on my phone.

FireFox 4L
 
I'm watching this space. I used FF for years then switched to Chrome as it was better. Now, things are getting interesting....the new FF is pretty nice so far.
 
I've been using Firefox for years as my primary browser for a number of reasons, from its extensions to it being developed in both an open source manner and by a company that makes privacy/security/openness their motto, as opposed to one of the greatest data mining endeavors on the planet. I really want to see Firefox and in general, all Mozilla projects thrive because of this. Now maybe its just my experience but even loaded down with some pretty intense addons, I never found Firefox to be slow or leaking memory the way some did. I know that they're moving towards reshaping the browser with 57, such as implementing multiprocess , sandboxing, and redefining the way extensions work (which overall is a good thing, save for the growing pains of old extension API stuff needing a rewrite etc)., but frankly the thing that I am worried about the most - and one thing that Mozilla really needs to focus on with respect to competition - is the amount of things that currently "only work on Chrome".

There are far too many things that for one reason or another, are best or only work on Chrome. For instance a classic example has been PPAPI plugins and whatnot - like how Flash on Linux was only being kept up to date in a Chrome specific manner. Chrome WebApps are another - which really frustrate me when some people say "Oh yeah, we have a PC version of X" ; No you do not, you have a bloody entrenched Chrome browser spawned around your page/app! THings like how certain streaming video sites Amazon most notably play FullHD / 4K HTML5 video on Chrome, but default to some lower resolution plugin stuff on Firefox even when Firefox includes EME engines enabled, and has plenty of HTML5 video. Here's a prime example I just touched on today while looking for ways to play an offline/couch Co-Op game with someone over the Internet (any suggestions on tools for this by the way?) - http://moonlight-stream.com/ - The PC version is a deprecated Java client, with the main development being in Chrome! These days there are many reasons that people choose Chrome and overall Firefox has many good ways to counter/answer them (ie performance, features among both browsers are closer than ever and I think Firefox has the lead in many cases), but when it comes to "X pretty much only works for Chrome users, or works dramatically better for them", that's a problem. THAT is a major place Mozilla needs to focus, ensuring that they support just about every (reasonably open) standard and feature so that it never seems like "X won't work with Firefox".

I want to support Mozilla and they are working on a lot of good stuff, though there's still a ways to go (ie Thunderbird needs some love. For instance, full compliance with Gmail mailbox sorting without a labeling explosion and plugins that give Better-Than-IMAP experience with ProtonMail / Tutanota and other fully encrypted mail sites), but its good to see they're not out of the fight the way some thought they would be. Their presence is a key point in making the Web a place more respectful of people's privacy, data, standards etc.. and to me that's worth supporting, but its even better when their products have an equal or better experience to competitors as well.
 
I think Chrome is over rated but

1) it syncs bookmarks better than Firefox (Firefox mobile does not sync bookmarks to the desktop version using the same account)
2) When you find bookmarks, I want to see ticks in the scrollbar like Chrome

This is why I use Opera, which is built off the same engine as Chrome. As good as Chrome but I have someone else potentially spying on me, not google.
 
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I'll believe it when I see it.

Firefox has spent way WAY too much time aping Chrome, when it wasn't off on some silly SJW kick...

Consequently, the browser's suffered mightily.

What they REALLY need to do before the release a version is go through and fuzz the crap out of it and see where it blows up.

Because right now, it's entirely too easy to blow the browser up with "out of bounds" data.
 
A process for every tab in Firefox right now rocks! I already have the new features in Firefox 54.0.1!

No more slow YouTube tabs!
 
Never liked Chrome and I was a very unhappy camper when Opera moved over to Chrome as the basis for their browser. In many ways Chrome reminds me of Netscape Navigator. Ugh.

After IE became somewhat better in the late 1990s was a big user of IE for many years, switched to Opera for a long time, then moved to Firefox when Opera stopped developing Presto.
 
I'm a simple man. Chrome does everything I need. My PC sits at 16GB used RAM consistently, in fact, I'm more on the lookout for browsers that DON'T cache data to a scratch file while in use. Keep all my tabs in RAM, so I don't have to re-render my tabs when I let them sit for a few days.
 
Why does Mr. Firefox look like Adam West's Batman dreaming of being Superman?
 
Seventyfive said:
I swapped to chrome but Firefox still has a few extensions I really really like. If those are gone, I'm not sure I'll ever be back. If anyone wants to guinnea pig it:
Click to expand...

Maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't FF57 kill NoScript and Greasemonkey?
 
Seventyfive said:
I swapped to chrome but Firefox still has a few extensions I really really like. If those are gone, I'm not sure I'll ever be back. If anyone wants to guinnea pig it:


Firefox 57 is downloadable in alpha right now:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/57.0a1/releasenotes/
Click to expand...

The Lamb said:
Maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't FF57 kill NoScript and Greasemonkey?
Click to expand...

Not sure, I can try with the nightly when I get home. I use Tampermonkey in Chrome so I'm not sure. For Firefox I just really like one of the video download extensions.

I did install the nightly alpha I linked above last night. Man, I have to admit, it does FEEL faster. I went to my favorite webpage that serves a lot of videos and I opened like 10 tabs, everything worked very smooth, definitely better old Firefox and a bit more responsive than chrome.

If anyone installs the nightly, there is an option in preferences where you can set max threads to 7 instead of 4.
 
when will they learn....NO CAPES!

1501791338pxl48w567l_1_1.jpg
 
I was using Firefox before it was called Firefox... I switched to Chrome about 3 or 4 years for a number of reasons and watched as Firefox became less and less relevant...

Now I would use either Edge or Chrome. I don't have much use for Firefox these days.

Making statements about security us hearsay until someone proves a true improvement has been made compared to what Chrome and Edge are doing...
 
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