Firefox 57 (aka Quantum) out now. Huge performance improvements.

[FoxPro]

5 hours ago, FoxPro said:

Haven't gotten the chance to update yet, still doing some work and can't restart the browser, will also report back on any possible battery life improvements as well.

Just now got the chance to update, the difference in the UI is different, but my theme stayed and from the looks of it, all my addons as well. Also only using a mere 1.5GB with all my usual tabs and some extras, that's streaming music as well. It seems about the same as the previous firefox for me in terms of performance, but that may be the 3rd generation (mobile) i7 showing its age. According to macOS's Activity Monitor, FF is using 25-50% less energy than it's average, just updated and still plugged in, but so far it seems the efficiency is really showing; my CPU is also running less and cooler.

[JoeCoke]

I've been using the beta, and yeah, it's been amazing. Firefox has always been my favorite, and now with these huge upgrades it's even more my favorite.

[Doobeedoo]

It's quite better overall, great update for it. Personally I like Opera/Vivaldi they work awesome but yeah. Nice update and good to see a bigger improvement.

[Ryujin2003]

I really do like the new Firefox. The ONLY thing I dislike is the default clickbait crap that comes up when you open a new tab. Damned Pocket. Disabled. Life is grand now. The logo still looks relatively the same. I thought the Mech-Warrior-esk fox was going to stick around. Maybe next time.

 

Also, the install was even faster than any other browser I've ever installed. CRAZY!

 

Last criticism.... It's 21st century. A night theme/mode should come standard. Don't make people have to install addons...

[ElZamo92]

FINALY! I can stop using Google crap on my PC! I'll instal it when I get back home.

[Guest]

57 minutes ago, Ryujin2003 said:

Last criticism.... It's 21st century. A night theme/mode should come standard. Don't make people have to install addons...

While the night theme is not the default skin (They should make it the default IMO), it is included and is one of the first things in the theme selection. (Granted a regular user might not stumble across this, but I digress.)

Spoiler

 

[pyrojoe34]

55 minutes ago, Ryujin2003 said:

 

Last criticism.... It's 21st century. A night theme/mode should come standard. Don't make people have to install addons...

No addon needed, it’s in the customize settings.

[Argentum]

Does anyone know how to make the top sites icons larger like in 56?

[ScratchCat]

5 hours ago, Ryujin2003 said:

I really do like the new Firefox. The ONLY thing I dislike is the default clickbait crap that comes up when you open a new tab. Damned Pocket. Disabled. Life is grand now. The logo still looks relatively the same. I thought the Mech-Warrior-esk fox was going to stick around. Maybe next time.

 

Also, the install was even faster than any other browser I've ever installed. CRAZY!

 

Last criticism.... It's 21st century. A night theme/mode should come standard. Don't make people have to install addons...

Not MechWarrior-Fox but still a change. FYI this was the nightly logo for a period of time

 

[MyName13]

5 hours ago, Ryujin2003 said:

 

 

Last criticism.... It's 21st century. A night theme/mode should come standard. Don't make people have to install addons...

That, and give users the control to decide if a website can open a new window or tab.

[Ryujin2003]

7 hours ago, tjcater said:

While the night theme is not the default skin (They should make it the default IMO), it is included and is one of the first things in the theme selection. (Granted a regular user might not stumble across this, but I digress.)

  Hide contents

 

Awesome, somehow I had missed that!

[ElZamo92]

It is FAST and it doesn't spy on me all the time! Chrome uninstalled.

[jasonvp]

I've been playing around with it most of yesterday and have gone back to Chrome.  My main gripe is watching watching 1440p/60 vids on YouTube sends my laptop into fits.  It's horrendously inefficient with CPU and/or GPU use (depending on what I let it use).  The laptop instantly warms up to "fry-an-egg" status and the fans kick into top gear.

 

The laptop gets a little warm when using Chrome to watch the same vids, but nothing nearly as bad.

 

They've still got some work to do.

[Wanaknow]

this is quite good. some extensions are missing but this might be a good replacement for the memory hungry chrome.

[NelizMastr]

My colleague managed to trigger a buffer overflow digging through some firewall logging, so there's that. Bug submitted. Other than that, it's working pretty well so far. MUCH faster than the previous version. 

[dizmo]

The new UI is nice but I don't buy the less resources part. It used to run 1 instance in task manager, now when I open it it runs 3-4. It's already caused my system to slow down after having 1/3 of the number of windows open I usually do. Not impressed. 

[xAcid9]

23 minutes ago, dizmo said:

The new UI is nice but I don't buy the less resources part. It used to run 1 instance in task manager, now when I open it it runs 3-4. It's already caused my system to slow down after having 1/3 of the number of windows open I usually do. Not impressed. 

Same here, i tried opening the same tabs on both my daily driver Opera and the new FFox Quantum. FFox actually consume more memory and use slightly higher CPU.

 

The new FFox feel slightly faster but nothing ground breaking and somewhat negligible to me.

[ScratchCat]

1 hour ago, dizmo said:

The new UI is nice but I don't buy the less resources part. It used to run 1 instance in task manager, now when I open it it runs 3-4. It's already caused my system to slow down after having 1/3 of the number of windows open I usually do. Not impressed. 

That is the multiprocessing architecture electrolysis and has been there since 54/55. It opens 3-4 processes to enable better usage of muticore CPUs and isolation of crashed pages, chrome opens a new process for every tab. If you want to reduce the number go to settings , uncheck use reccommended performance settings and set the content process number to a lower value.

 

How much RAM do you have if it is slowing down your computer ? I can use 2 content processes with 1 GB RAM without issues (~4 tabs) and Windows 8.1. If you have an HDD , try increase the sessionstoreinterval in about:config, the default value of 15000 produces too much HDD activity.

[suicidalfranco]

Like the new FF, still going to stay on Vivaldi cause no tab tiling on FF and the one extension that give it that function no longer works

[ScratchCat]

1 hour ago, xAcid9 said:

Same here, i tried opening the same tabs on both my daily driver Opera and the new FFox Quantum. FFox actually consume more memory and use slightly higher CPU.

 

The new FFox feel slightly faster but nothing ground breaking and somewhat negligible to me.

If you have a lot of RAM Firefox will try improve performance by adding more content processes , these have a memory overhead (having more will increase memory usage even if only one tab is open). The fact that you have 7 Firefox processes ( from task manager) suggests that this is the case. ( I cannot remember if more than 4 content processes has been released yet )

 

CPU usage wise Firefox still isn't very efficient regarding video decoding and other tasks.

[porina]

Just updated on a laptop with an old version. They need to work on the updater, why do I need to jump from 46.0.1 to 47.0.2 to 56.0 to 57.0? Anyway, after installing ublock origin to match my chrome install, trying it side by side they seem similar in feel. In itself, that's not enough to get me to switch. I don't want similar, I want better, and so far, I don't see it. I'm also more concerned about Mozilla's lack of consistency as one of the reasons I moved away from FF was they kept messing around with the UI every major version.

[Princess Luna]

15 hours ago, Ryujin2003 said:

. Don't make people have to install addons...

I had no issue setting it to stock night theme, add the fact every website I go now offers night themes all is as dark as night.

[ScratchCat]

1 hour ago, Princess Cadence said:

I had no issue setting it to stock night theme, add the fact every website I go now offers night themes all is as dark as night.

If every website you visit is dark you might want to check your monitor backlight

 

It is rather neat of them to include this per default , sadly there does not seem to be an easy way to change the new tab page background like in Chrome.

[dizmo]

3 hours ago, xAcid9 said:

Same here, i tried opening the same tabs on both my daily driver Opera and the new FFox Quantum. FFox actually consume more memory and use slightly higher CPU.

 

The new FFox feel slightly faster but nothing ground breaking and somewhat negligible to me.

Hmmm Opera eh? I haven't tried that one yet. How is it? Does it import bookmarks nicely? 

2 hours ago, ScratchCat said:

That is the multiprocessing architecture electrolysis and has been there since 54/55. It opens 3-4 processes to enable better usage of muticore CPUs and isolation of crashed pages, chrome opens a new process for every tab. If you want to reduce the number go to settings , uncheck use reccommended performance settings and set the content process number to a lower value.

 

How much RAM do you have if it is slowing down your computer ? I can use 2 content processes with 1 GB RAM without issues (~4 tabs) and Windows 8.1. If you have an HDD , try increase the sessionstoreinterval in about:config, the default value of 15000 produces too much HDD activity.

Even when I was using 56/57 it only had one process, at most 2. Not 4. Interesting though, I'll check that out when I get home. 

 

I have 4GB. I have an SSD. 

[Memories4K]

2 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

Like the new FF, still going to stay on Vivaldi cause no tab tiling on FF and the one extension that give it that function no longer works

Yeah same, still doesn't have much over Vivaldi for me