Mozilla seems to have fixed Firefox

[Woofage]

I don't know about you lot but I had been finding Firefox to be even more of a memory hog than ever and starting to get really really laggy. Anyway, yesterday I updated my 'pooter and lo and behold I now have Firefox "Quantum" (v57.0).

Pretty good so far. Slightly annoying that the page refresh icon has moved though .

[Plug1n]

Pretty good so far. Slightly annoying that the page refresh icon has moved though .

You can right click on the menu bar and use "Customise" to move it back to where you like, though.

It is fast!

[dave r]

I've put Quantum on my Lubuntu box but cant open it as it gives a parsing error, XML Parsing Error: Undefined Entity location: Chrome:// Browser/content/Browser.xul line number 1165, column 7:
Sorted it, uninstalled it, removed the PPA, then installed the normal firefox and upgraded it. Its running OK now, its quick but looks a bit tonka toyish.
I've now got it running on my tablet and phone as well as my PC. I've had it running for a few days now and its been OK, its quick and I've not had any problems with it, the only thing I've noticed is a bit of flickering when scrolling.

[T42]

Either it or the development team have been given a dose of salts. Nice, too, that (so far) it doesn't seem to have thrown any stored data out.

[Woofage]

Pretty good so far. Slightly annoying that the page refresh icon has moved though .

You can right click on the menu bar and use "Customise" to move it back to where you like, though.

Thanks. Moved it

[Ian H]

You can right click on the menu bar and use "Customise" to move it back to where you like, though.

Yes.  I had to find and reinstate Bookmarks to replace the useless Library.

[Wobbly John]

You can right click on the menu bar and use "Customise" to move it back to where you like, though.

Yes.  I had to find and reinstate Bookmarks to replace the useless Library.

Thanks - just done that.

[Morat]

I like it - and it IS really fast.

[freeflow]

Rust and parallelism is why.  The render specific stuff starts at 1:01:30


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO1z-7cuRYI

[dave r]

I've been running Quantum for a few weeks now, and whilst it works well on my desktop on the phone and tablet it doesn't run as well, its OK once its up and running but sometimes it wont load my home page when I first start it.

[orienteer]

Having similar trouble when returning to an idle PC, won't refresh an open page. Usually give up, close and restart it.

[hubner]

Firefox seems to get slower and slower with each new version, and the layout's changed a lot. And some of the add ons now don't work!

I use either Pale Moon or an older version of Firefox (31, which is only about 2 years old). They are much more responsive. This is on several netbooks; 1.6GHz/2GB RAM, single and dual core, Linux 32 and 64 bit, or XP.

[pcolbeck]

Firefox seems to get slower and slower with each new version, and the layout's changed a lot. And some of the add ons now don't work!

I use either Pale Moon or an older version of Firefox (31, which is only about 2 years old). They are much more responsive. This is on several netbooks; 1.6GHz/2GB RAM, single and dual core, Linux 32 and 64 bit, or XP.

Err this new version is wicked fast, that's the whole point. You are right in general it has been getting slower but then again it's been running off the same rendering engine forever until now.

[Greenbank]

Massive rewrites aside, newer versions tend to run slower on older hardware as they generally look to improve performance by using more memory (prefetching pages, caching more, etc), once you start to bump up against the memory limits of the machine it'll crawl along.

If you've only got 2GB of RAM then later versions of FF will run like a dog. My FF (v51 or so) is at 2.3GB right now (although I do have 3 windows with >100 tabs) but on a machine with 8GB of RAM that's fine.

I use either Pale Moon or an older version of Firefox (31, which is only about 2 years old). They are much more responsive. This is on several netbooks; 1.6GHz/2GB RAM, single and dual core, Linux 32 and 64 bit, or XP.

Using older versions of browsers is just too risky. You're opening yourself up to all manner of malware by running such an old version.

[hubner]

I was using Firefox 57 just now but had too many other programs opened at the same time, so yes it was grinding to a halt. Now that I closed some programs and it's now running at its "normal" speed for this netbook, it's about the same speed or slower than the other browsers I use. The version before this update to 57 was definitely slow.

But the No Script add on has completely changed, it was better before.

[hubner]

I've done a simple test.

To open an image on imgur.com

Firefox 57:
8 seconds - image appears, but only the top half that is viewable in the browser, cannot scroll down the page.
18 seconds - page finished loading and can scroll down to the rest of the image.

Pale Moon 27.5.1 (newest is 27.6.1):
6 seconds - image appears and can scroll down for the rest of the image.
As soon as the image appears, the page has finished loading.


A different but similar image
Firefox 57:
18 seconds - image appears, page finished loading and can scroll down for the rest of the image.
Pale Moon:
6 seconds - image appears and can scroll down for the rest of the image.
As soon as the image appears, the page has finished loading.

[freeflow]

The improved speed of Firefox 57 comes from better utilisation of concurrency across multiple cores and from the use of hours resources. If you don't have either of those the Firefox may not perform as fast for you as it does for others.




Measuring the speed of an internet browser by its ability to display an image is folly unless you can separate out download time from rendering time.

[hubner]

The improved speed of Firefox 57 comes from better utilisation of concurrency across multiple cores and from the use of hours resources. If you don't have either of those the Firefox may not perform as fast for you as it does for others.

Measuring the speed of an internet browser by its ability to display an image is folly unless you can separate out download time from rendering time.

OK I gather Firefox 57 is faster on computers which are faster than my computer, but the point is it's still slower than Pale Moon on my computer. Computer is 1.6GHz dual core, 2GB RAM running 64 bit Ubuntu.

I know my computer is old and low powered but what's important for me is the relative speed of different browsers on this computer.

"Hours resources"?

I did the test on the same broadband connection at the same time, opening several images, so I would guess download time would be roughly the same. It's only to get a rough idea of relative speed, it's not a scientific test.

``

[freeflow]

Have you tried it the other way around.  Use palemoon to load an image followed by firefox 57.  Your example has Firefox first both times so for PaleMoon there might be a cached image sitting around somewhere.

[hubner]

I just wrote it like that, I'm sure I used Pale Moon first for some of the images.

I just tried it again, Pale Moon first, using new images, same result.

[freeflow]

OK.  Sounds like the revamped engine isn't as efficient with your specific equipment.


This looks like fun and might give you a appropriate boost in speed.


https://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/blog/2017/06/15/wee-archlet-our-homemade-raspberry-pi-cluster

[pcolbeck]

18 seconds to render an image sounds like download speed is your main issue.

[Greenbank]

18 seconds to render an image sounds like download speed is your main issue.

If it appears in 6 seconds with the other browser (and not getting a cached image) then no, it's not download speed since it's spending at least 12 of the 18 seconds on something other than downloading.

My guess is that it's something to do with imgur pages involving a whole load of javascript (and subsequent downloads); the browser is chugging its way through these due to insufficient memory.

Try it with a URL that has no Javascript at all and is just the image. Here's a relatively small one of a broken bottom bracket: http://www.greenbank.org/misc/bbfail.jpg

(This loads in under a second on FF 52.5.0 on my laptop with no caching involved.)

[hubner]

http://www.greenbank.org/misc/bbfail.jpg
loads in about 1-2 seconds in FF57 but Pale Moon is still faster, less than 1 second.

I tried loading the images themselves from Imgur, ie https://i.imgur.com/123abc.jpg
Result is similar.

Both browser set not to accept cookies or scripts.

Both browsers have about the same add-ons: Noscript, adblocker, 2 privacy add-ons. PaleMoon also has Cookie Controller, which has stopped working in FF57.

[Kim]

Browsers can load files directly from local disk.  That would eliminate the network speed...