Just wanted to tell you that a lot of people working on Firefox are here and we really appreciate your word of mouth support and feedback.
This year is going to be huge for us as we're wrapping up the part about reducing technical debt and start gearing toward using our new superpowers to innovate.
We need your help to stay relevant (market share), improve quality (report bugs, write test cases), and improve (lots of code in Firefox is easy to hack on as we move a lot of UI to HTML/JS - like devtools).
This is great to read/hear. I'll put my vote in for two things. 1) Performance, performance, performance; this is what originally caused me to use Chrome a lot more, the perception of quick-to-open tabs and snappy responsiveness. 2) Privacy; this is something Google almost by definition can't compete on, because their business model depends on providing something free in exchange for user data (the opposite of privacy). A third important consideration of course is "not crashing" or at least if there is a crash, containing it to the offending tab - this is why I'm very happy to read about the progress of multi-process Firefox! Keep up the great work guys.
I finally switched to Firefox when it dawned on me why Chrome for Android has no plugins, and why they went silent about the reading mode. With Firefox, I can install uBlock Origin, and it's had a reading mode for a while. Google wants to force me to look at ads that make the page slow to load, bouncy, and hard to scroll through.
Google is where Microsoft was not long ago: engaging in self-destructive user-hostile behavior to protect their profit center. It can't work forever.
I also switched to Firefox Mobile on Android over a year ago. Couldn't be happier with the extension support. I've got uBlock Origin and my password manager installed.
Chrome is definitely smoother on mobile but using extensions is worth it for me. Does Firefox Mobile's codebase closely match that of the desktop browser? Are their release schedules similar? Wondering if we should see it speed up with Firefox's latest improvements.
Yes. Firefox for Android uses the same Gecko engine and release schedule as Firefox for Windows, Mac, and Linux desktop. They all share most of the same code in the same source code repository [1]. Most of Mozilla's "Quantum" project to start importing Servo code into Gecko will also run on Android. Firefox for iOS has its own release schedule and shares only a little code (e.g. Firefox Accounts sync for browser history/bookmarks) with the other Firefoxes.
Firefox for Android is the exact same codebase as desktop Firefox. Many Gecko features are turned on for Firefox for Android at the same time as desktop. In other cases either Firefox for Android or desktop will have features before the other. For example Firefox for Android had HTML date/time picker support years before desktop because the OS provided widgets. In the other direction EME has been on desktop for a while and is in the works for Firefox for Android.
But it's not my experience that Chrome is smoother on mobile; it doesn't work very well and crashes often.
On desktop however (Windows) I still use Chrome, and I don't know why. Every time I launch FF I then come back to Chrome. I'm kind of ashamed of myself for it but can't quite pinpoint the real reason. Maybe FF looks a litle more "fragile", I don't know.
why not use AdAway or NetGuard if you are not rooted? only reason i don't use chrome on Android is bad performance (Firefox has even worse), other chromium browsers like Yu or Tuga run much faster, you can see difference with naked eye when loading pages, no need any benchmark
chrome or Firefox are both extremely slow on Android compared to Tuga or Yubrowser, not talking about some synthetic benchmarks but noticeable difference when loading (nonAMP) pages
While I'm sure this may be true, the browser sees everything privacy related. I trust Mozilla and even though Google harvests data, I trust them to keep it safe.
We are aware of the importance of those three things. They're all not-trivial problems to solve, but we're working on all three:
1) Performance is an insanely complex problem. We can't easily measure the "real" performance, in a scientific way. We can measure performance of so called "microbenchmarks" which can tell you that, for example, our JavaScript engine can perform X million regular expression computations per second. The X may be higher or lower than what Chakra or V8 can, but how it translates to real world experience is insanely complicated.
What we know by now is that JS engine performance is not the problem. At this point all modern engines are fast.
What we need to advance are things like performance of DOM, CSS, layout, painting and prioritization (ability to ensure that UI performance cannot be blocked by website's JS computations).
We're working hard on several projects this year, under the umbrella of codename "quantum" that is aiming at making Firefox blazingly fast. We're taking lessons and code from Servo and applying it in Firefox.
The end result, if we succeed, is that we'll have ability to perform DOM, layout, CSS and painting orders of magnitude faster (even if it's 2x it's still huge!).
The other piece of performance, is what's called perceived performance. That one is even more tricky because it's all about what your brain tells you. In cognitive psychology and HCI there are tons of studies that prove that depending on how we use tricks like animation, colors, shapes and gimmicks like focus, we can trick your eye to think that things are faster or slower.
Chrome is really good at that and kudos to them! I love watching their UI painting order in 120fps slow-mo just to see all the things they employed.
Together with Quantum we're going to look into ways to improve the perceived performance of Firefox. I hope we'll get it right :)
2) On the privacy front we're working with Tor browser and we're also working on several projects aiming at disrupting the current way of browsing the Internet. Read about Firefox+Tor browser and Activity Streams if you're interested.
3) On the QA front, we've made major progress over the last year. That's a huge part of the technical debt that we had to remodel in 2016. We now have much better fuzzers, tests and APIs that makes it easier to write code that will not break. On top of that, multi-process helps us make sure that painting crash doesn't crash your browser, that plugins can't crash your browser and finally that content can't crash your browser.
We also designed a whole new language that is significantly better suited to write security critical code than C++ is. It's called Rust and we just started moving pieces of our engine to it. If we can succeed with this, we should end up with a codebase of the unprecedented stability for a project this size and facing third-party code. If you're interested, read about Mozilla Oxidation project.
It is a major bet. We're betting on JS, we're betting on Rust. We're betting on Gecko and our ability to "change the engine mid-flight".
I'm excited about the opportunity, but it's going to be a huge effort to pull it off.
If any of this is interesting for you, help us! We're a small team (compared to all other browser engines), but we have a culture that fosters community participation and I believe that we can compete and shape the Web together: https://whatcanidoformozilla.org/
All of these things have been working fine for me, and unlike many people, my experience is consistently that Chrome has significantly worse performance than Firefox. That said, I cannot remotely condone the removal of Xul without a firm commitment to either replicate functionality or a firm commitment that it will never happen, publicly. I love pentadactyl and Vimperator, and the idea that they may get killed permanently is infuriating, but not as much as the fact that the wiki page on that functionality has gone dormant.
I've been a happy Netscape/MAS/Seamonkey/Firefox user since forever, and am delighted that it still has a healthy development pulse.
Performance hasn't really been an issue for me, even on an ancient (6-year-old) laptop. Anything on shadertoy reliably kills it, but other than that it's been fine.
If I had to pick one thing that really needs improvement, it'd be the intersection of extensions and security. FF has always leaned heavily on extensions to avoid feature bloat in the core product, but I've never really been comfortable installing them because pretty much all of them seem to demand full access to page content on all sites, and that's a very uncomfortable ask for things like primary webmail or banking sites.
Now, you could imagine a honking great siteXextension matrix for this, bikeshed refinements until the cows come home and then bikeshed the cows, but I think you could get 95% of the way there with a way to persistently flag domains as "paranoid", and have all extensions disabled on those domains. Maybe something like this already exists, but if so I haven't been able to find it. The best advice seems to be "use a separate profile", but that's pretty inconvenient for heavily-used things like webmail.
This all sounds really encouraging. I've become a vocal supporter of Firefox again since switching back a year ago. On that note, it may seem trivial to the average user, however it would be great if the powers that be could consider not forcing UI animation on the user without any possibility to disable it. IMHO one of Firefox's greatest assets is it's rich legacy in user choice and customization. Many users (myself included) reluctantly switched away for performance and security reasons back in the day. With that said and while sensitive people are a minority group, we do exist and UI animation can cause elevated stress and fatigue.
great point. I haven't read about this experience, but I believe you.
I know that there are different kind of animations that trigger different reactions (like, fade in text is different from things shifting on the screen).
Please, track Mozilla progress over the next months if you have the time. We're drafting a workforce to start the UX updates and I hope we'll get voices like yours well represented. I'll make sure to post about it on HN once we begin.
On desktop firefox for linux I notice that chrome makes vastly better use of gpu acceleration given nvidia card + official nvidia drivers are there plans for improvements on this front. This is literally the only reason to run anything but firefox on any device I have and would love to see improvements on that front. Without tweaking in about config my wifes computer which is anything but blazing fast with a dual core 3 ghz full screen 1080p video was like a slide show. Even after its noticably laggy to the point where I've had to install chrome.
I'm not sure if it makes any difference whether its flash or html5 video.
This all sounds AWESOME. I can't wait to try it all out.
Another out there idea would be a protocol handler for the IPFS protocol.
I also have some JS benchmarks from a real world app involving encryption and erasure coding in JS where Chrome significantly outperforms Firefox if you're interested (I'm talking 3.3X faster).
What do I do if as a normal user I find what appear to be Javascript issues? e.g. the Deluge and SabNZBd interfaces can cause massive slowdown in Firefox where Chrome seems unaffected. Often these pages are behind logins and contain sensitive information.
Filing bugs on bugzilla.mozilla.org in the "Core::JavaScript Engine" component for performance problems should get the problems in front of the right Firefox developers. However, many site performance problems are related to DOM or animations and not necessarily JavaScript. For slow sites behind logins, there's not much that can be done other than someone creating a standalone test case or working with the site owner to get a temporary test account.
Worst thing is that a site does not work with Firefox, so that one is forced to use Chrome.
Happens for the map at Google Flights (https://www.google.de/flights/) that is the No 1 search result when googling for Flights (that's of course a clever move by Google to create a top site that only works fine with Chrome, I wonder how long it will take that YouTube or GMail only work "optimal" with Chrome)
Anyway, I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1329141 but this is only P3 priority (that is, marked a "valid" bug but nobody is working on it). Which I found really "strange" because website not working in Firefox and being force to temporally switching to Chrome (and maybe staying) are the worst that can happen. Eventually, when booking a flight I even had to tell other family members that they should use Chrome for it (who were surprised because normally I tell them to use Firefox ;)
P3 is not that bad tbh. I understand that for each one of us the bug that affects us is the most important one, but working with bugzilla is a bit like data mining. We have 1.3 million bugs reported and we track our respective components, cluster similar bugs and solutions and prioritize what is affecting most people in most crucial ways.
The fact that your bug got triaged and [gfx-noted] is a good sign. It's on their triageboard now and may soon get clustered with other Google website related graphics bugs.
You'll get an email when it happens.
If you don't, you can always contact the website author and inform him about performance problems and ask him to get in touch with us. He does have access to the whole website and could help us get a temporary account for us to investigate.
If you have more knowledge and curiosity, you can even use our performance devtools to generate a profile. It's actually fairly easy - just start recording in the performance tab and do what you would normally do that is slow.
Then file a bug and attach the profile.
This will give us an insight into what takes so much time. It may not be enough, but sometimes it is, and in those cases we are able to "peak" into what your Firefox is spending so much CPU cycles on.
You know, I haven't used Firefox in many years - I switched to Chrome because I liked the Google account integration and preferred the UI - but reading your comment made me realise how foolish I've been not to at least check it out once in a while.
You guys clearly care deeply about the web, and while I'm sure Google cares too I feel like their primary motivation is becoming more to do with maintaining their ad revenue sources than advancing the state of the art.
Thank you so much! It means a lot to me to read so many positive comments.
I've been a volunteer for Mozilla since 2000 and got hired in 2010. I've been through thick and thin, and I deeply believe in Mozilla Manifesto and care about the role we serve in making the Internet a public resource.
My only serious problem with firefox is that a single tab can lock up the entire application. Otherwise, the performance _and_ memory usage is fantastic. But that one issue is enough to keep me away from it most of the time.
Multiple tab processes (aka "e10s-multi") should be shipping in Firefox 54 (now in the Firefox Nightly channel). The initial rollout of multi-process Firefox ("e10s") had one process for the browser UI and one process for all tabs (and a separate process for sandboxing Flash), so one bad tab could lock up all your tabs but your browser UI would still be responsive so you could close the bad tab. e10s-multi will increase the number of shared tab processes to two or more, balancing tab isolation vs memory overhead.
In the meantime, you can test more tab processes by increasing the "dom.ipc.processCount" pref in about:config. I set my process count limit to 999. :)
I've heard a lot of people say that, but I'm still having problems with a single tab locking up the whole browser for 5-40 seconds on FF 53.0a2 Dev Edition with e10 and process count at 999.
While that's theoretically true, I've never switched from Firefox as my daily driver and crashes are very rare in my experience (more common on mobile, but I leave a bunch of stuff open there as well). Furthermore, when it does crash the session restore does a pretty solid job of restoring and letting me easily exclude tabs from being restored.
If I could cast my vote it would be 1) perception of quick-to-open tabs and snappy responsiveness, 2) everything else. I just could not stand how unresponsive Firefox used to be.
I'll never be switching back to Chrome. I've gone back and forth over the years and have made Firefox my home base.
You folks have made a lifelong supporter out of me the hard way, by earning my respect over the years.
besides that, I support the project in general, the developers and the competition.
when I installed Firefox on a friends phone with uBlock Origin added on, he loved it.
p.s. that reminds me, when I was a teenager I installed Firefox for the first time. My mother insisted it was a virus and would yell at me to "remove that mozzerella fox virus IMMEDIATELY and quit installing your mIRC virus!"
You should make Firefox feel native to each platform and follow its conventions, instead of trying to have a sort of unifying 'Firefox look' that feels out of place everywhere. Using platform-specific enhancements (like VideoToolBox on macOS for example) also would go a long way.
Edit: most important of all is battery life though. Your browser can be super smooth, have all the nice extensions in the world and be FOSS, but if it cuts battery life in half everyone will hate it.
Thanks for working in Firefox. It is so much better than where it was whe Chrome first shipped and I switched to Firefox (and also to DDG thanks to AMP). There are two issue that bug me a lot and I use FF on Mac. The back swipe behavior is not so great and enabling browser.snapshots.limit is buggy. I feel it is also slower rendering and scrolling.
i switched to firefox about two years ago after having been on chrome since 2008 (The very first release). At first i was really impressed with chrome and its speed and stability and UI. But firefox has much improved and is now the privacy candidate. I've also switched to duckduckgo. I'm jumping right off the google hype train because i feel that their business is to mine mine.
Thank you for your great work. For me, security is by far the most important selling point. Firefox is a bit late to the party but not that far behind Chrome, as we can see on the competitions and bug bounties (a Chrome 0day is worth more than a Firefox 0day). Please continue to improve the sandboxing, the website permission model for APIs, the security of extensions (auto reviews, permission model), the binary hardening via compilation options, etc. etc.
Privacy is good but if any website/ISP/government can compromise your browser, what good is it to not send the URLs you visit to Google? Performance for sure is important but that's not a criteria for me. Again, different user profile I guess!
It hasn't been smooth. Chrome is faster and has better dev tools. Ads have caused significant lock ups, to the point where I was forced to install uBlock against my wishes.
Nevertheless I've persisted.
But the thing that continually pushes me towards switching back to Chrome is this bug[1]. It affects every single Mac user I've met, is trivially easy to confirm and yet sits there.
On the positive side, the Firefox syncing works well across machines, so that is nice.
I recently switched from Firefox to Vivaldi due to the upcoming dependency on PulseAudio. Depending on what happens, I may end up switching back; but if I do, I expect support for ALSA either by default, a run-time option or a compile-time switch.
I still prefer Firefox over Chrome or Safari, and push it to everyone I can. Thanks for all the good work! Sometimes it looks like Chrome takes over the web like IE did ten years ago. I hope you can withstand this trend.
Can you make a paid version of Firefox (identical to the free one)? I'd buy if it were for $25, or even give you $50/year subscription to keep you afloat.
Someone on the Firefox subreddit mentioned that one of the ideas which is being considered is offering a privacy-centric VPN service for people who donate. I think that would be a great benefit for subscribers, and a neat way for Mozilla to set Firefox apart from other browsers.
Donations don't replace paying options, that's a grave error. Companies can't "donate" (or it's super difficult) because their accountant will yell at them.
Offer something that can be bought and written down on a proforma.
That's interesting because I've seen plenty of articles over the years stating that they get a ton of money via the search agreements - not to mention the people who donate code. Shouldn't they be self sustaining?
Yahoo! is going belly up so not sure they can rely on search agreements for much longer. It's better if they have some direct small individual customers I think.
"According to the change-of-control term, 9.1 in the agreement, Mozilla has the right to leave the partnership if — under its sole discretion and in a certain time period — it did not deem the new partner acceptable. And if it did that, even if it struck another search deal, Yahoo is still obligated to pay out annual revenue guarantees of $375 million."
That's correct. When you say "self-sustaining", do you mean from direct user donations or paid services (like the built-in VPN example), instead of "selling eyeballs" to Google or Yahoo? There is discussion about creating a Mozilla membership program and what benefits could be offered.
Every time I try to use Firefox, I feel driven away by the web developer tools. I can't exactly pinpoint what makes me unease, I don't think that's only about habits, it feels like the FF dark background makes them harder to read or the font is too big. I'm talking about quite simple usecases: Browsing the DOM and CSS, reading warnings in the JS console, reading Ajax requests. Have you ever tried to compare the ergonomics of the dev tools between Chrome and FF? Do most people like FF's current dev tools?
I like Firebug much more than the native dev tools, I think it has a better UI/UX. They are merging now. Firebug was one of the reasons I was using Firefox so I hope they keep the best parts of the two tools.
I don't use Chrome much so I can't really tell how good it is for developers. If its dev tools are similar to the ones in Opera (same engine) they look closer to Firebug than to FF dev tools.
Just wanted to tell you that a lot of people working on Firefox are here and we really appreciate your word of mouth support and feedback.
This year is going to be huge for us as we're wrapping up the part about reducing technical debt and start gearing toward using our new superpowers to innovate.
We need your help to stay relevant (market share), improve quality (report bugs, write test cases), and improve (lots of code in Firefox is easy to hack on as we move a lot of UI to HTML/JS - like devtools).