Firefox Announces New 'Quantum' Browser With 2X Faster Speeds, Coming November 14

[sbailey4]

FF 56 which was in beta until today (actually not released until tomorrow) was an improvement. But ver 57 is really nice! Looks great and loads super fast. Finally multi-process is enabled without having to jack with it. So far its looking to be a great browser. I actually made it default! Like the new starting screen look as well. There was a PC mag or CNET article some weeks back talking about ver 57 and the speed was off the charts in their testing against other browsers.

 

[fairuz]

I don’t know why one would run any browser other than Safari on a Mac, especially a laptop or other mobile device. I’m certain that 90+% of users’ needs would be met by Safari, and Safari sips energy and contributes to increased battery life. Furthermore, the small percentage of users who run Chrome or Firefox out of necessity aren’t likely to change their habits for relatively small speed bumps and/or efficiency gains.

Superior speed, efficiency, cloud integration, and aesthetics are my reasons for running Safari and I don’t anticipate that changing any time soon. Even if a browser surpasses Safari in any one of those categories, no other browser is as good at all of them.

I don't get it either. Chrome uses like 5-10X the energy while idle, and it uses such a ridiculous amount of RAM that, with enough tabs open, your memory compression and/or disk paging will kick in and destroy your battery even more. I wonder if people don't even try Safari.

 

[neliason]

Firefox is a good secondary because it doesn't use native proxy settings or the Keychain, so I can have an isolated browser, but that of course makes it suck as a primary browser. And FF used to be fast and light; IDK what happened to it.

I used to use Firefox because I had used it for Firebug for years. I still like it as a development browser.

I don't get it either. Chrome uses like 5-10X the energy while idle, and it uses such a ridiculous amount of RAM that, with enough tabs open, your memory compression and/or disk paging will kick in and destroy your battery even more. I wonder if people don't even try Safari.

Absolutely true. My wife who insists on using a Chrome has a MacBook Air. Battery life was terrible and it was getting super hot. It was Chrome that was the problem.

 

[tmoney468]

I don't get it either. Chrome uses like 5-10X the energy while idle, and it uses such a ridiculous amount of RAM that, with enough tabs open, your memory compression and/or disk paging will kick in and destroy your battery even more. I wonder if people don't even try Safari.

Web developers would disagree with both of you. Many more plugins for chrome and FF

 

[mazz0]

Only tested on Windows, but I can confirm: Firefox is snappier!

 

[neliason]

Web developers would disagree with both of you. Many more plugins for chrome and FF

True, but my wife, my mother in law, and brother in law aren’t web developers. I nowadays run Opera for any plugins I need as I despise Google. For general browsing I use Safari.

 

[fairuz]

Web developers would disagree with both of you. Many more plugins for chrome and FF

Web devs can and should use separate browsers for development and daily usage, as I did when I did my (small amounts of) web dev. You don't need dev plugins to browse YouTube, Stackoverflow, and Reddit.

 

[yesjam]

Big fan of this. Although based on that video, Chrome still loads all the important things faster (lol). I have always liked Firefox better than Chrome, but my decision to stick with Chrome for so long has been due to the sure dominance in performance Chrome has had. I doubt this will change anytime soon, but wish Firefox well.
[doublepost=1506441911][/doublepost]

I can guarantee you chrome users (even on Mac) is not a "smaller percentage". Lots of people buy a Mac and immediately install Chrome.

You misread my comment. I said the small percentage of users who use Chrome or Firefox out of necessity (e.g. web developers etc.)
[doublepost=1506448465][/doublepost]

Web developers would disagree with both of you. Many more plugins for chrome and FF

Hence why I mentioned the small percentage of users who use either browser out of necessity, which I guarantee you does not represent the needs of the average user.

 

[tmoney468]

Web devs can and should use separate browsers for development and daily usage, as I did when I did my (small amounts of) web dev. You don't need dev plugins to browse YouTube, Stackoverflow, and Reddit.

Cool, thanks for telling me how I should work!

I was just responding the statements like "Firefox sucks just use Safari crowd." There's a population where having alternative browsers is a necessity. And personally, I'm happy that there's competition in the browser realm and FF is still innovating and becoming better. It makes the web better in the long run

 

[KazKam]

I don’t know why one would run any browser other than Safari on a Mac, especially a laptop or other mobile device. I’m certain that 90+% of users’ needs would be met by Safari, and Safari sips energy and contributes to increased battery life. Furthermore, the small percentage of users who run Chrome or Firefox out of necessity aren’t likely to change their habits for relatively small speed bumps and/or efficiency gains.

Superior speed, efficiency, cloud integration, and aesthetics are my reasons for running Safari and I don’t anticipate that changing any time soon. Even if a browser surpasses Safari in any one of those categories, no other browser is as good at all of them.

I agree with most of what you said about Safari being the obvious choice, except for one thing.

A few weeks ago John Gruber made the same point. Since Safari is so much more efficient on Mac, why do so many Mac users use Chrome, myself among them? The answer was startlingly simple and for some reason never occurred to me... favicons.

I'm a web developer and I consistently have 7+ windows with 10+ tabs open in each. The simple reason I get frustrated using Safari is that I can't identify what's in each tab at a glance by the favicon!

If Apple caved on that one thing, I could easily be a Safari convert. However, until that day, Chrome it is. OK, there's one more reason. Chrome's inspector is superior IMO.

 

[garirry]

I don’t know why one would run any browser other than Safari on a Mac, especially a laptop or other mobile device. I’m certain that 90+% of users’ needs would be met by Safari, and Safari sips energy and contributes to increased battery life. Furthermore, the small percentage of users who run Chrome or Firefox out of necessity aren’t likely to change their habits for relatively small speed bumps and/or efficiency gains.

Superior speed, efficiency, cloud integration, and aesthetics are my reasons for running Safari and I don’t anticipate that changing any time soon. Even if a browser surpasses Safari in any one of those categories, no other browser is as good at all of them.

Wow. It's almost as if not all people are hardcore Mac users.

 

[Michaelgtrusa]

FF 56 which was in beta until today (actually not released until tomorrow) was an improvement. But ver 57 is really nice! Looks great and loads super fast. Finally multi-process is enabled without having to jack with it. So far its looking to be a great browser. I actually made it default! Like the new starting screen look as well. There was a PC mag or CNET article some weeks back talking about ver 57 and the speed was off the charts in their testing against other browsers.

FF 56 is out on Wensday?

 

[Mike MA]

Nice to see development is continuing here. Firefox is my alternative if Safari is not the first choice.

 

[Mizhou]

I just tried the beta and run the speedometer thing from the article. Firefox Quantum was slowest, Safari fastest, and Chrome came in between.

Safari come out on top here too, in comparison with Chrome. For both browsers I ran the test in full screen, to minimise the impact that other open windows may have. I didn't even test Firefox ot FF Quantum.

With Chrome I got about 56.88 at best in that Speedometer test. I had only one window with one tab open in Chrome during the test, but I also had Safari running in the background.

In Safari I got 62.82 as my worst result and over 65 as my best, despite the fact that i have 9 windows open and another 30-40 windows minimised to the dock, with probably more than 100 tabs in total.

 

[Erdbeertorte]

Looks like my Firefox Nightly 58.a01. I already wondered about the many bugs and build updates.

 

[mkeeley]

I had high hopes of this but it's dreadfully slow on the mac. Many sites take a good 50% longer to load compared to Opera and Vivaldi. If it had been within a second I would have been fine with it but yet again ff is really poor on the mac.
[doublepost=1506455101][/doublepost]

Funny on my machine it’s chrome which is slow as crap, îm running the dev edition.

I don't believe for a second that ff beats chrome on your machine unless you're running Windows.
[doublepost=1506455191][/doublepost]

I don’t know why one would run any browser other than Safari on a Mac, especially a laptop or other mobile device. I’m certain that 90+% of users’ needs would be met by Safari, and Safari sips energy and contributes to increased battery life. Furthermore, the small percentage of users who run Chrome or Firefox out of necessity aren’t likely to change their habits for relatively small speed bumps and/or efficiency gains.

Superior speed, efficiency, cloud integration, and aesthetics are my reasons for running Safari and I don’t anticipate that changing any time soon. Even if a browser surpasses Safari in any one of those categories, no other browser is as good at all of them.

Lack of extensions for one, like privacy badger, https everywhere, decentraleyes...

[doublepost=1506455417][/doublepost]

Both Chrome and Firefox are slow as crap on my machine, so I use Safari. Firefox is a good secondary because it doesn't use native proxy settings or the Keychain and doesn't have any Google login junk, so I can have an isolated browser for dev stuff, but that of course makes it suck as a primary browser. And FF used to be fast and light; IDK what happened to it.

I agree with most of what you said about Safari being the obvious choice, except for one thing.

A few weeks ago John Gruber made the same point. Since Safari is so much more efficient on Mac, why do so many Mac users use Chrome, myself among them? The answer was startlingly simple and for some reason never occurred to me... favicons.

I'm a web developer and I consistently have 7+ windows with 10+ tabs open in each. The simple reason I get frustrated using Safari is that I can't identify what's in each tab at a glance by the favicon!

If Apple caved on that one thing, I could easily be a Safari convert. However, until that day, Chrome it is. OK, there's one more reason. Chrome's inspector is superior IMO.

Have you seen Faviconographer, it's a hack but works pretty well.

 

[mrzz]

I don’t know why one would run any browser other than Safari on a Mac, especially a laptop or other mobile device. I’m certain that 90+% of users’ needs would be met by Safari, and Safari sips energy and contributes to increased battery life. Furthermore, the small percentage of users who run Chrome or Firefox out of necessity aren’t likely to change their habits for relatively small speed bumps and/or efficiency gains.

Superior speed, efficiency, cloud integration, and aesthetics are my reasons for running Safari and I don’t anticipate that changing any time soon. Even if a browser surpasses Safari in any one of those categories, no other browser is as good at all of them.

90+% of Mac users I know use a different browser than Safari.. and majority of them are pretty advanced users.. I have tried Safari couple of times, but I simply don't like it, so I don't share the same opinion. But use what you find the best for you, it's great that we all can choose a browser we like.

 

[KazKam]

Have you seen Faviconographer, it's a hack but works pretty well.

I did try it (still have it installed). But I was disappointed with it for a few reasons. As you stated, it is a hack.

The favicons don't drag when you move the window, they just stay where they were until you release the drag. Also, the favicons are positioned so that they cover-up the tab's close icon, which is a little confusing at times. There were a few other quirks, just can't remember them off the top of my head.

 

[MadeTheSwitch]

I don’t know why one would run any browser other than Safari on a Mac

One simple reason: On both the Macs I have had, Safari ran like crap. Chrome isn't much better. So Firefox it is. I do however only use Safari on the ipad. Because it works. And that is the bottom line to me over anything else.

 

[boast]

Did they have to bully fire any CEOs to release this one?

 

[harriska2]

FF has worked very poorly on my win 7 machine for the last 6 months. It uses memory like nobody’s business.

 

[fairuz]

Cool, thanks for telling me how I should work!

I was just responding the statements like "Firefox sucks just use Safari crowd." There's a population where having alternative browsers is a necessity. And personally, I'm happy that there's competition in the browser realm and FF is still innovating and becoming better. It makes the web better in the long run

They're talking about which one you use as your main browser, not the secondary one you keep around for dev and misc tasks, and saying that FF and Chrome are problematic to use primarily. Lack of dev plugins has nothing to do with that. Look, I've got 3 on my Dock: Safari as main, FF for dev, and Opera for Slack (purely so I can cmd-tab to it, lol).

 

[dampfnudel]

I still like using Firefox, it works for me most of the time. I just use Chrome when it doesn't.

 

[curmudgeonette]

I don’t know why one would run any browser other than Safari on a Mac, especially a laptop or other mobile device. I’m certain that 90+% of users’ needs would be met by Safari, and Safari sips energy and contributes to increased battery life.

Configurability. Here's a partial list of my "user set" Firefox about:config settings:

browser.display.use_document_fonts 0
browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll false
font.minimum-size.x-western 12
font.name.sans-serif.x-western Lucida Grande
font.name.serif.x-western Lucida Grande
font.size.fixed.x-western 12
font.size.variable.x-western 12
image.animation_mode once
toolkit.zoomManager.zoomValues .3,.5,.67,.8,.9,1,1.125,1.25,1.33,1.5,1.7,2,2.4,3
ui.click_hold_context_menus true

 

[johannnn]

I'd like a speed comparison with Safari 11 before I jump to download it. Safari has been working great for me and I have no real complaint about it.