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

[dalekphalm]

9 hours ago, titan384 said:

Edit: I cant say how it compares to chrome because i never have used a browser other than firefox for my personal use in around 10 years. (except netscape maybe)

You know that Firefox is the Netscape successor, right? Mozilla was founded by Netscape employees who were unhappy with the commercial nature of that browser, and they forked it into an open source project.

8 hours ago, Dabombinable said:

I get less performance than versions of Firefox which run just fine on Pentium 4...so yeah it needs a lot of bloat removed.

I mean, just because it runs like shit on a Pentium 4 really doesn't mean much. If it has more features and an engine that needs horsepower to take advantage of all the improvements, then of course an ancient CPU platform will not perform well. Hard to draw any conclusions from that, unless you specifically need a barebones browser to run on such an old platform.

4 minutes ago, titan384 said:

i read somewhere (probably in Mozilla's documents somewhere) that firefox will now use less ram and cpu compared to previous versions.

Can you post a link? I haven't heard anyone make that claim about Firefox 57. Let's try and evaluate it objectively, based on claims they actually made.

 

The fact that it uses more CPU and RAM isn't inherently a bad thing, if you get better performance and features out of that utilization.

[titan384]

6 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

You know that Firefox is the Netscape successor, right? Mozilla was founded by Netscape employees who were unhappy with the commercial nature of that browser, and they forked it into an open source project.

I mean, just because it runs like shit on a Pentium 4 really doesn't mean much. If it has more features and an engine that needs horsepower to take advantage of all the improvements, then of course an ancient CPU platform will not perform well. Hard to draw any conclusions from that, unless you specifically need a barebones browser to run on such an old platform.

Can you post a link? I haven't heard anyone make that claim about Firefox 57. Let's try and evaluate it objectively, based on claims they actually made.

 

The fact that it uses more CPU and RAM isn't inherently a bad thing, if you get better performance and features out of that utilization.

2

I did not know that firefox is a netscape successor.

 

and heres the  thing about performance i read.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/29/its-time-to-give-firefox-another-chance/

[titan384]

https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/29/its-time-to-give-firefox-another-chance/

[captain_to_fire]

17 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Can you post a link? I haven't heard anyone make that claim about Firefox 57. Let's try and evaluate it objectively, based on claims they actually made.

 

The fact that it uses more CPU and RAM isn't inherently a bad thing, if you get better performance and features out of that utilization.

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/quantum-performance-test/

That's Mozilla's claim

[titan384]

1 hour ago, hey_yo_ said:

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/quantum-performance-test/

That's Mozilla's claim

alright. my bad. i did not do proper research before posting things. i read the tech crunch article when i was already sleepy.. 

[Gullerback]

Firefox still crashing my Video drivers 3 years later. How thats not fixed is mind blowing, Especially since this is a totally new system from then

[Dabombinable]

5 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

You know that Firefox is the Netscape successor, right? Mozilla was founded by Netscape employees who were unhappy with the commercial nature of that browser, and they forked it into an open source project.

I mean, just because it runs like shit on a Pentium 4 really doesn't mean much. If it has more features and an engine that needs horsepower to take advantage of all the improvements, then of course an ancient CPU platform will not perform well. Hard to draw any conclusions from that, unless you specifically need a barebones browser to run on such an old platform.

Can you post a link? I haven't heard anyone make that claim about Firefox 57. Let's try and evaluate it objectively, based on claims they actually made.

 

The fact that it uses more CPU and RAM isn't inherently a bad thing, if you get better performance and features out of that utilization.

Older versions run perfectly fine on a Pentium 4. Newer versions struggle to run well on a faster Pentium M (primarily significantly longer page loading times).

Edit: Its a similar story with Pentium III as well, but they lack SSE2 instructions so issues are expected.

[dalekphalm]

2 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

Older versions run perfectly fine on a Pentium 4. Newer versions struggle to run well on a faster Pentium M (primarily significantly longer page loading times).

Edit: Its a similar story with Pentium III as well, but they lack SSE2 instructions so issues are expected.

I'd be curious to see how that trend plays out. Perhaps you're experiencing a bug in this version. Or perhaps their claims were inflated. I think, more likely, is that their claims were simply conditional. Only under specific environments would one see the lower resources, etc.

[Dabombinable]

12 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

I'd be curious to see how that trend plays out. Perhaps you're experiencing a bug in this version. Or perhaps their claims were inflated. I think, more likely, is that their claims were simply conditional. Only under specific environments would one see the lower resources, etc.

If its a bug its a long term one, with the trend being for lower load times+increased memory usage.

Memory usage has definitely gone down this time round by a small amount, however when older versions on IDE HDD with P4 can load web pages faster than newer FF on a mid range SSD with a from 2014/2015 and a 4790K, something isn't right as the exact opposite should be the case.

[Red Hardware]

So is there anything that makes a hardcore google user switch ?

I use a lot of google (Google everything) and i really like the sync between chrome android and desktop and chrome works really well with google products. So what can it offer that others can't ?

[Crunchy Dragon]

I like it as well, but it reminds me a lot of Internet Explorer.......

[ScratchCat]

1 hour ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

I like it as well, but it reminds me a lot of Internet Explorer.......

Firefox is quite different to a legacy browser with about 4 add-ons, a HTML 5 test score of about 250/512 and more security issues and bugs than anyone could count . The UI is now much more similar to Edge, if that is what you mean.

 

3 hours ago, Dabombinable said:

Older versions run perfectly fine on a Pentium 4. Newer versions struggle to run well on a faster Pentium M (primarily significantly longer page loading times).

Edit: Its a similar story with Pentium III as well, but they lack SSE2 instructions so issues are expected.

The new design with more content processes may be the cause of performance issues in the newer versions. My hypothesis would be that due to a greater number of processes being actively used a greater amount of data has to be transferred from memory and any post-conroe architecture had a much better memory subsystem, alleviating this issue.

 

3 hours ago, Dabombinable said:

If its a bug its a long term one, with the trend being for lower load times+increased memory usage.

Memory usage has definitely gone down this time round by a small amount, however when older versions on IDE HDD with P4 can load web pages faster than newer FF on a mid range SSD with a from 2014/2015 and a 4790K, something isn't right as the exact opposite should be the case.

From my testing a Core 2 Duo with FF56 is annihilated by any more modern processor with FF 56 or 57. It wouls be strange if a release which is designed around being so much faster could actually be slower than the previous. What are your FF57 page load times like vs FF56 or earlier on the i7?

[Crunchy Dragon]

1 minute ago, ScratchCat said:

Firefox is quite different to a legacy browser with about 4 add-ons, a HTML 5 test score of about 250/512 and more security issues and bugs than anyone could count . The UI is now much more similar to Edge, if that is what you mean.

That was what I meant lol. I forgot they replaced IE, I only ever use it to install Firefox and I haven't had to do a clean OS install in a while...

[Zodiark1593]

Firefox Quantum for Android is also available. While improved, it still cannot at all touch the smoothness or responsiveness of Chrome. Don't know if Firefox is just slow, or if Chrome is just that far ahead.

 

Oddly, Firefox now works faster on my Bay Trail laptop than it does on my SD821 phone. So yet again, Firefox on the Windows/x86 machines, Chrome for everything else.

[Marine_Boy]

I've installed the update and I have to say I didn't notice anything. It was slower than Vivaldi and it also used more RAM than Vivaldi, but maybe I did something wrong while testing it out... Oh well, I think Vivaldi will remain my main browser and I will use Firefox from time to time as I did until now. 

[asus killer]

it's a lot better, i stopped using firefox long ago because of how a system resource intensive browser it became. Still prefer Opera, less resources used and more speed, but the gap closed. Makes all the difference for those using it on a older machine.

[ScratchCat]

1 hour ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Firefox Quantum for Android is also available. While improved, it still cannot at all touch the smoothness or responsiveness of Chrome. Don't know if Firefox is just slow, or if Chrome is just that far ahead.

 

Oddly, Firefox now works faster on my Bay Trail laptop than it does on my SD821 phone. So yet again, Firefox on the Windows/x86 machines, Chrome for everything else.

Firefox 57 for android is not the same as Firefox 57 for desktop, the mobile version lags behind by around 1-2 versions. The quantum CSS render is supposedly not active in the mobile version yet which would mean the speed and fluidity lags behind most chromium based browsers.

[MyName13]

7 minutes ago, ScratchCat said:

Firefox 57 for android is not the same as Firefox 57 for desktop, the mobile version lags behind by around 1-2 versions. The quantum CSS render is supposedly not active in the mobile version yet which would mean the speed and fluidity lags behind most chromium based browsers.

It seems that Firefox uses 2x more ram than chrome on my android.

[man_named_corn]

I would switch but I use Youtube TV and Firefox is not supported with it

[Zodiark1593]

On 11/20/2017 at 12:30 AM, ScratchCat said:

Firefox 57 for android is not the same as Firefox 57 for desktop, the mobile version lags behind by around 1-2 versions. The quantum CSS render is supposedly not active in the mobile version yet which would mean the speed and fluidity lags behind most chromium based browsers.

Wish they would get a move on with that. I'd love to be able to use it without the frame drops.

[ScratchCat]

5 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Wish they would get a move on with that. I'd love to be able to use it without the frame drops.

Even on iOS they had issues with frame drops , in version 9 moving any part of the UI (navigation bar , closing a tab) causes a ~0.5 second freeze. Given that they don't even need to develop the WebKit engine one could have expected more.

At least they are trying...

[Zodiark1593]

12 hours ago, ScratchCat said:

Even on iOS they had issues with frame drops , in version 9 moving any part of the UI (navigation bar , closing a tab) causes a ~0.5 second freeze. Given that they don't even need to develop the WebKit engine one could have expected more.

At least they are trying...

Yeah, I am aware they're trying. I'm impatient because I would like to ditch Chrome asap, but Firefox still isn't where I want it to be as far as performance goes. Nowhere close. Firefox hits the marks everywhere but fluidity and smoothness, and it has been at this point for some time (much too long).

[Arika]

the one thing that firefox would need to implement to make me swear off chrome forever is better touch support. i miss not being able to swipe to go back and the pinch zoom is terrible. much smoother on chrome, so i still have it installed for some contents where is this more convenient

[vanished]

I switched like a month ago and I've been enjoying it, but I did notice one issue the other day.  In chrome, watching a 4k60 youtube video uses ~80% of my CPU and ~14% of my GPU, and doesn't stutter at all, but on firefox, it uses about 40% CPU, basically no GPU, but stutters slightly every second or few.

[Drak3]

10 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I switched like a month ago and I've been enjoying it, but I did notice one issue the other day.  In chrome, watching a 4k60 youtube video uses ~80% of my CPU and ~14% of my GPU, and doesn't stutter at all, but on firefox, it uses about 40% CPU, basically no GPU, but stutters slightly every second or few.

Tell your install of FF Q to git gud.

 

At least it doesn't become unresponsive after about an hour of just being on LTT.