This all seems a bit sensationalist. Mozilla tried a few other things, mostly didn't work out, maybe a bit distracted from Firefox. The decline from 2010 was about Chrome, not neglect (& maybe mobile, where they lacked a device).
I wouldn't say Firefox was leading the way or the biggest innovator in the last few years, but for me it's kept up-to-date enough not to feel at all neglected.
I've been using Firefox for years without any problems and find it much better (just as fast, more privacy-minded) than chrome.
I honestly don't understand (from a consumer standpoint) why people complain about Firefox. I can understand devs having browser preferences, but to say that "time forgot" firefox is ridiculous as a general user.
I keep Chrome on Linux only for its developer tools, which are clearly more performant, and for its updated and sandboxed Flash.
But I only bring it up for those two features. Otherwise Firefox with a ton of extensions, including Tab Center, is my default choice. I don't see in what way it would be inferior to Chrome.
In fact, it has several user-level features that I miss in other browsers, such as column / rectangular selection of tables, automatic saving of form input, Ctrl+I dialog with a list of pictures in the current page, and so on. Don't tell me these are "power user" or developer features!
Firefox for Android is also very good, IMHO better than Chrome, and it supports uBlock, Stylish, and so on.
I migrated back to Firefox from Chrome recently after hearing this news. Though Flash is becoming less and less relevant, but it was bit annoying before.
As a dedicated FF user: It feels significantly slower than chrome, it's hard to figure out what tab is killing things, and they keep making choices that I consider highly questionable.
I do love FF, and it is the browser I use everyday. But it's not without it's own warts, which Chrome is much better at hiding.
I've found that in recent times Chrome has started to feel bloated and slow and firefox (with minimal addons) feels much more zippy. However Firefox does seem to be a bit more temperamental when something else is using significant CPU.
After version 50.0 I switched back from Opera. The deal is to get the e10s multiprocess windows on. It might be disabled because some of the addons. You can try to enforce it or like in my case with only uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger installed, it was on by default.
This browser is seriously fast now on Linux. I couldn't be happier with it. I've used it for weeks already, browsing a lot and it's still as snappy as when I installed it.
Good job. And soon we'll start getting the Servo stuff...
If you have any other suggestions for getting it going, I'd appreciate it.
One additional complaint I have about FF: It's hard to find out where to change the setting that I want. I constantly have to ddg for "How do I change $x" and I end up with 3 different answers for 3 different revisions. If anyone knows of a good resource for me to find this out, I would appreciate it.
Elsewhere in the comments section there were tips about an addon that tells if one of your addons is blocking e10s. Another useful tip was the dom.ipc.processCount setting. Before I cancelled my LastPass account I was using the 3.x version from them, which doesn't support e10s and crashed the browser when I forced it on. But still I was able to turn it on even though the browser was unusable.
I run this on Arch and Wayland, which might also add to the snappyness. What I kind of observed from all the comments was, that the OSX users were complaining the most about the slowness. Might be that the Linux version is faster then.
Exactly that, it feels slow. On my laptop I have chrome and nightly firefox which typically is faster than stable branch. I have tons of addons in chrome and only ublock in ff, and yet chrome feels much more responsive compared to ff.
Agreed. I prefer Firefox, but I recognise there's really not that much difference between Firefox and Chrome in terms of usability and features, they both seem about on par to me (some areas Firefox is slightly ahead, some areas Chrome is slightly ahead). The suggestion that Firefox is something "time forgot" is basically just trolling, someone looking for a reaction rather than something substantial.
The numbers don't back either of your claims, though - significantly more people use Safari and Chrome than use Firefox. I for one appreciate chrome for the fact that it syncs with my google everything, across all devices, google accounts, etc.
I'm probably going to hate myself for my blase attitude towards security when I inevitably end up on some massive dump of hacked accounts, but I've kind of given up on privacy/security. It's just so convenient to be able to pull up on my phone the tab I had open on my browser when I'm in the kitchen cooking, or whatever.
>"The numbers don't back either of your claims, though - significantly more people use Safari and Chrome than use Firefox."
The reason we're in disagreement is we're picking different forms of comparison. You're looking at popularity, I'm looking at technology. I don't dispute more people use Chrome, but that doesn't make it automatically better from a technical point of view. As I said before, technically Firefox and Chrome are fairly equal, and there are benchmarks and feature comparisons that back this up.
> significantly more people use Safari and Chrome than use Firefox
This is true. Significantly more people use "Safari and Chrome" than "Firefox". However, significantly less people use "Safari" than "Firefox". Chrome is the gorilla, Safari is waaaaaaay back in the pack.
> I've been using Firefox for years without any problems and find it much better (just as fast, more privacy-minded) than chrome.
Then you must not value security at all.
Firefox is by far the worst of the modern browsers in how easy it's to exploit. Don't listen to me, listen to the experts [1] [2] [3]
I would go as far as to say that if Firefox is your main browser, odds are you're owned by multiple parties, and I don't mean nation states. This can not be fixed by iterative improvements, Firefox needs to die. By far the best thing you can do for your online peace of mind is to switch to Chromium/Chrome or (on Windows only) Edge.
Your statement may be valid, but the two links you provided don't seem to have much to say on that topic. The first refers to a bug currently fixed in current GA Firefox, the second is a rant about Tor bundle. If reblogging snark is the standard of proof here, anyone could justify any "modern browser" as "worst".
My counterargument is that Firefox has always and continues to support tools such as NoScript and uBlock that prevent whole classes of attack. And Chrome, for example, is pwned like clockwork at every contest for exploitation. Behavior and not platform is the biggest determinant of security online.
If you're talking about Pwn2own, they've dropped Firefox
from the competition __because it was too easy to exploit__ [1].
I quote:
"For the last decade, the Pwn2own hacking competition has pitted the world's best hackers against web browsers to try and find zero-day vulnerabilities in a live event. The contest, which is sponsored by HPE and TrendMicro this year, is offering over half a million dollars in prize money, but for the first time, not a penny of that will directed to Mozilla Firefox. While Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and Apple Safari are targets, Firefox isn't because it's apparently too easy and not keeping up with modern security: "'We wanted to focus on the browsers that have made serious security improvements in the last year,' Brian Gorenc, manager of Vulnerability Research at HPE said."
How is that for a slap in the face?
Selectively reading what you like and ignoring the rest
[an entire section in the second link is devoted to Firefox issues that have nothing to do with TBB, including the conclusion] won't change the basic facts. Another point those not in the security domain miss, is that there are plenty of exploitable bugs that are deliberately kept private. Those who have visibility in these circles (such as thegrugq) are obviously in a much better position to appraise how secure a software system really is. Trying to determine how secure Firefox is just from CVEs and bugs that are made public will only lead you to a piece of the entire puzzle. In Firefox case, even that alone should be enough to trigger RED ALERT in somebody's mind.
The best
we can all hope for is for people to stop using Firefox and flock to alternatives that raise the bar significantly.
And yet according to these sources[0][1], Firefox is back this year in Pwn2own. A quote from [1]:
> "Mozilla improved their security enough for us to warrant their re-inclusion in the contest," Gorenc said.
Firefox is fine. Like in every other browser, when security problems are found, they are fixed. There's a lot of work going into making Firefox a great and secure browser, and to call for abandoning it en masse is unwarranted IMO.
Edit: Heck, isn't it your own link[2] that claims that one of the security problems with Tor is their homogeny, that they all use the same browser and version? By that logic, abandoning Firefox is a bad move for overall security.
Look at the prize money for Firefox, lowest of them all.
I think this proves my original point.
TBB is routinely attacked by nation states and other government groups. In that context, homogeneity is an important factor since they only have one target to focus on and considerable resources to use. By the way this is also another point against someone using Firefox. By choosing Firefox, you are choosing a browser that __you know__ is actively targeted by nation states and government groups, because it's used in TBB. You can safely assume said groups have multiple Firefox 0days.
My original point however is not that Firefox is insecure vs nation-grade attackers. __Every browser is__
There are plenty of criminal groups (ever increasing) and actors with limited resources that will focus on Firefox because it's easy to exploit. The fricking FBI was owning people with a Firefox 0day. The same groups would find Chrome or Edge too hard. This is of course a personal evaluation, given what I know from conversations with people in the security domain.
Let me leave you with this piece of (anecdotal) information: In my last job, we used to have new hires for exploit development pick a browser to work on for the first few months. Expectation being remote exploits, lots of them.
Firefox had no process isolation or web content sandboxing for years. It still doesn't in a lot of places even today. That meant that every little bug became a serious bug.
In contrast, RCE's for Chrome and Safari require chaining together a number of exploits - the most valuable of which is the sandbox escape.
Firefox are years behind on security - and in the meantime large number of people have abandoned it and you have an entire security community openly advocating against using or deploying it.
Yes, the security model is improving now (thanks in large part to code from Chromium) - but it's improved in the same way Adobe Flash security has improved, or Java security has improved - it will always have that huge weight of a bad reputation to carry, and it is still a far way from catching up to the norm in browsers today (check the incomplete features, bugs and open issues of e10s)
Firefox missed a huge opportunity in becoming the defacto secure and private browser - I know I don't love running Chrome/Chromium but I kinda have to
This is false and misleading. The only bits Firefox plans to nick from Chromium are things like the C++ PDF reader which is a regression compared to pdf.js running in a nominally memory-safe runtime. The browser itself doesn't use code lifted from Chromium.
Something ruffled your feathers. Why do you want Firefox to be abandoned rather than improve it's security? For my and most other's mundane browsing needs Firefox _is_ secure enough. Mozilla is the only browser vendor actually innovating with Rust, Servo/Quantum and WebRender as examples, the first two give me hope that Mozilla really can tighten the ship and make a more secure browser than Chromium would be.
Nothing ruffled my feathers, I'm simply laying out facts. Feel free to ignore them.
There is no improvement for Firefox, it will never amount to anything given how rotten the codebase is. Unless they plan to scrap it and rewrite everything from scratch, with an actual focus on security from the beginning, which of course they don't. Slowly rewriting small parts of Firefox in Rust will do nothing for security, it's just more smoke and mirrors from Mozilla.
On the other hand, we have Google who were really the pioneers when it comes to securing the browser since they spent millions of dollars doing just that. Mozilla didn't even bother. Even their current attempts are laughable really in terms of scope and actual impact, it's just shitty PR aimed at people without security experience.
That's not to say that Chrome is a secure browser, but it has raised the bar significantly and it deserves wider adoption. Finally, we also have Microsoft who have probably spent even more than Google on improving security on Windows and are doing a lot of innovative security-related work with Edge [1].
It's not "small parts." Quantum has big ambitions. For example, Stylo, a sub-project of quantum, replaces the CSS layout code with Rust. That's a large, key component.
Same here, I personally don't understand people who can use a browser that does not support Tree Style Tab. Serious browsing requires nested tabs on the side.
If there's any way you can provide a link that can be used to reproduce the problem (either here or in private mail), I would be very much interested in investigating this performance problem.
Thank you for the link! I have some more questions that I sent in email to you. Don't know whether those ended up in spam or something; could you check?
Open say 5 to 10 tabs with various twitter profiles loaded in them, does your Firefox still perform reasonably well? 3 twitter tabs open is enough to kill my performance.
So, because of one poorly designed shitty website you're moaning about FF being bad? You should be moaning about Twitter with its bliveted 8 tons of javascript in a 5 pount sack.
You can add espn.com, washingtonpost.com and nytimes.com to that list as well.
I'd rather a browser that can handle shitty websites than hoping every website will somehow magically be written efficiently. Especially since FF is the only browser I know of that can't handle multiple active javascript sessions. It's completely absurd if you think about it, I mean it's a browser, for browsing websites, which use javascript.
If I open 5 to 10 tabs with various twitter profiles loaded in them, and I won't notice much because of the icepick that I'll very shortly embed in through my ear.
However, I routinely run with tens of tabs open - usually 40-50 - and love the 'tab groups' extension so I can semantically group them (I have more tabs overall, but they're not all actively loaded). It can get a little slow with 50 active tabs, yes, but what doesn't? Modern webpages suck CPU and RAM dry.
Hmmm, this sounds like an interesting extension. Does it ACTUALLY unload them (and release the memory)? Well, even if it quit executing javascript, I'd be sold.
Ah, I've misled. I mean that I have a lot of tabs in groups, and FF doesn't load them when you start it up, just when you visit them. So while I have a 'map' of perhaps a couple of hundred tabs in those tab groups, only the ones I've visited in that session are loaded.
Sure. But if three instances of a website can bring a fairly new machine to its knees, then there's nothing any browser could reasonably do to fix Twitter's massive JS bloat.
I do miss loving Firefox, which hasn't been the case since the 1.x days.
Then again, I think these days what I dislike is the Web itself. You can't have a lean, responsive browser like that and support enough of the "advances" of modern CSS and Javascript to render 99.9+% of the Web more or less correctly.
If you look at the cutting edge of browser tech lately, and you read between the lines as to why the browser makers are doing this, you can see that there's a pretty significant trend now towards browsers actually fighting the web itself, because once multiprocess is done and modulo a 2 or 3x rendering speedup that Servo may be able to bring (which will probably be the last advance of that size), the only way for a browser to feel "less klunky" or "speedier" than its competition will be for it to render less of the web. That is, the classic optimization of doing less work.
Which in this case means trashing all the shitty ads and plugins from 15 different sites and synchronous JS trackers, since that happens to be what's klunking up the web. Which, fortunately for the browsers, gives them cover to do this under the guise of working for the user, because there's a lot of truth there, but in some sense it's still just cover, too.
It is in some sense a change of an era; browsers are moving out of a phase of enabling and empowering content creators and slowly moving into active conflict with them. As slowly as possible in some sense, because it's scary for them, but it's something they're being forced to do. It's the same effect where computer users will blame "Microsoft" or "Dell" for the computer being slow, when the problem is actually a slow hard drive or something; eventually it stops mattering that it isn't "your" fault and you have to do something about it.
Big changes in the browser space in the next five years here, I think. Content producers so far have only tepidly fired back at ad blockers and stuff because they're still very niche, but they are getting less niche very fast now.
> once multiprocess is done and modulo a 2 or 3x rendering speedup that Servo may be able to bring (which will probably be the last advance of that size)
That's what we said for years about computing power and the Moor law's : "transistor can't get tynier than xxx nm". It happened anyway because there used to be that much economic incensitive to improve computer. Now research in micro processor is so expensive that the gain in computationnal power are found elsewhere. But there is always ways to improve things. The question is : "is there people eager to fund research". As long as the answer is yes, we'll find ways to improve web browser.
In the web there is so much money involved that the answer will still be yes long after servo shipped.
There is no ability to eternally speed up the browers without doing less work (in the sense in my comment), and while it may never technically limit to zero, it will plateau at some point. Just as Javascript performance pretty much has.
"I wouldn't say Firefox was leading the way or the biggest innovator in the last few years"
That's the thing for me. Before Chrome, Firefox was the big innovator (trailing only behind Opera, and even then).
Then Chrome happened, Firefox took a bit of a backseat (not as bad as IE or Safari, but enough of one to let Chrome become the big innovator), and Opera became a reskinned Chrome.
It'll be interesting to see how Mozilla approaches the next few years. Firefox still offers features that the other major browsers do not (for example, and critically to my own use case, it's the only major browser that supports any semblance of an equivalent to Tree Style Tabs), and the emphasis on an open and standards-compliant web could reinforce the historical reason why practically every user agent under the sun includes the word "Mozilla".
I love this word, enumeronym, though. It seems you may have coined it, as the only Google search result is your comment. The second may well be this comment. I hope it catches on!
Google suggests that the correct term is "numeronym" [1].
> According to Tex Texin, the first numeronym of this kind was "S12n", the electronic mail account name given to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Jan Scherpenhuizen by a system administrator because his surname was too long to be an account name. By 1985, colleagues who found Jan's name unpronounceable often referred to him verbally as "S12n" (ess-twelve-en). The use of such numeronyms became part of DEC corporate culture.
I assume the problem is just that it seems to be moving towards completion at a snail's pace. It certainly feels like I have been hearing about it for a LONG time without a stable release.
Yeah, but it's a massive reworking of the FF internals, so it took a long time to complete. But I'm using it now, and it works pretty well.
My only hitch was needing to turn off some older add-ons. While Mozilla is still doing a slow roll-out, it disables E10s if it can't ensure your plugins will work. (One of mine was a HN add-on, amusingly.)
The e10s project actually stated back in 2009. The project was put on hold in 2011 because the architectural changes and add-on compatibility breakage was deemed insurmountable. In 2013, the project resumed and has been chugging away since.
You can see 2011-2013 pause in the revision history of Mozilla's Electrolysis wiki page:
I made a burndown chart of the e10s bugs in Bugzilla that shows the development progress. The bug high water mark was in 2016 and today at least 2,495 bugs (specifically tagged as e10s related) have been fixed:
This is kinda confusing, but that button only exists in Nightly and Developer builds. Here's how to check, enable, and force-enable it for regular builds: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis#Testing
I did have to force enable it as a few plugins didn't official support it yet. So far it's been amazingly stable though and had sped up my browser considerably.
> It's not process-per-tab like Chrome, it's just 2 or 3 processes.
Chrome is not process-per-tab - it's process per domain. (Even that's not true - sometimes tabs from multiple domains will still share the same process).
Firefox currently uses two processes (one for the UI, and one for rendering pages), but from a technical standpoint, that's the hard part, and that's what took so many years to develop. Once you have separated UI and rendering processes, going from 1 rendering process to multiple is relatively easy - you can already configure Nightly to do this, and Mozilla is basically just waiting for (a) e10s itself to rolled out more broadly, and (b) empirical evidence on what the right number of processes is, as (a) happens.
There are some downsides to doing true process-per-tab (the main one is that it's absurdly inefficient with memory), so ultimately Firefox will probably land on something in between (like Chrome and IE do).
I wouldn't say Firefox was leading the way or the biggest innovator in the last few years, but for me it's kept up-to-date enough not to feel at all neglected.