One thing I learned several years ago when I decided to jump on the bandwagon and try Chrome was that Chrome was unable to safely block javascript the way NoScript does because the plugin framework doesn't allow a plugin to block Javascript before it's loaded.
So all the noscript equivalent for Chrome could offer was to block Javascript after it had loaded. Which seemed unreal and pointless.
So I stayed on Firefox. Because I've been convinced for many years now that Javascript plays a major role in malware delivery through the browser.
And along with email the browser is the major delivery platform for malware.
Chrome can block JavaScript before it's loaded, its what uBlock Origin does and others as well (using the WebRequest API available to Chrome extensions)
It's important to know that NoScript does far more than block JavaScript; just look up its ABE component, for example.
For technical users, uMatrix' interface is an amazing achievement in, effectively, managing application firewall rules. It's breathtakingly efficient in both communicating active settings to the user and in configuring new rules. I wish my actual firewalls used that interface.
The advantage of Firefox's NoScript plugin is that it can be selective.
Say you randomly visit a site and want to temporarily allow the javascript it uses to do its thing, but you don't want to allow any other javascript on the page such as facebook's and google's. The built-in chrome javascript blocker doesn't let you pick and choose temporary permissions at that moment.
I think I qualify as a poweruser by some standards, I tend to have 100's of tabs open and I've never left Firefox for speed reasons or others because it has held up extremely well over the years. My machine has a lot of RAM so maybe that's one reason things have been quick, and the main drive is an SSD. Is there anything specific about the 57 release that makes you feel caused the speed bottle-neck to disappear?
57 is lightning fast. Like, almost uncomfortably so on my machine.
Broay this is because quantum is much further along in nightly than on the other channels. Specifically, they're more aggressive with multithreaded settings, multiprocess is enabled, and the quantum css component is turned on, too.
Is also helps that we compare to chrome. On Linux chrome doesn't even do GPU rendering. So the HN crowd probably has a disproportionately bad experience with it
> 57 is lightning fast. Like, almost uncomfortably so on my machine
As others have said here, I just installed Firefox Nightly after reading this, and you're 100% correct. I think it might even be faster than Chromium for me.
Wait, what? I know that hw accelerated video decoding is generally not available on linux chrome, but I'm pretty sure that lots of other things are. From my chrome://gpu
Firefox has always been unbearably slow on Linux for me. It's the main reason I swapped to Chrome in the first place. I tried switching back to Firefox about 6 months ago, same problem of extremely slow and laggy UI. Interesting to hear 57 is faster now, it may be worth trying again.
Have you tried using a fresh profile, just to narrow the possible variables?
If you've checked both of those things, and you can characterize the slowness in the context of specific operations (e.g. what "laggy" means, precisely), then I'd recommend filing a bug and working with the developers to track down the problem. Because that is not normal.
Firefox 57 should be a much, much improved experience. e10s with multiple processes started rolling out to users in Firefox 54 and tons of small performance issues have been fixed in 55-57.
On Linux, manually enabling GPU acceleration as user ac29 describes below can a big difference. Unfortunately, a lot of Linux GPU drivers have issues that prevent acceleration from being enabled by default for some users.
Same here, it's why I switched to Vivaldi. I had to restart Firefox every day or so and it still lagged. I've read the other recent post on here that shows 100+ tabs has almost no startup burden in FF57 compared to previous builds. I should try it again.
For those who don't notice the speed, multiprocess may be disabled due to certain addons. Go to about:support to check if it enabled. The addon compatibility checker addon can tell you which are the offending addons. For me 1password was the big blocker, but they recently released a beta that works with the new API. Sorry for the lack of links, I'm on mobile.
Oh interesting. Firefox still seems slow and a bit of a memory hog compared to Chrome on my machine. Sure enough I checked and three add-ons are marked as legacy (and presumably disabled the multiprocess stuff): uBlock Origin, Websocket Disabler, and NoScript.
I may have to try Firefox again once 57 is in portage. A few months back I switched to Vivaldi, begrudgingly. I really liked Firefox, but the speed issues were becoming unbearable.
Vivaldi has been a lot faster and mostly an alright experience, and I've watched many of the issues I've found for it get addresses in recent builds. Still there are many things I miss about Firefox, not to mention supporting that community and the browser I've used for well over a decade (including back when it was Phoenix, the original Mozilla and the old Netscape 6 that proceeded them).
How has the nightly been for you in terms of stability? Been thinking of switching to it from beta. The memory issues on MacOS are killing me, and I believe there are fixes in nightly now.
IME, desktop nightly hasn't ever outright crashed (less lucky with mobile nightly). Sometimes I notice minor rendering glitches on various sites, but I also have Servo's CSS engine enabled which might be doing it (it's not yet the default).
Well, it used to crash a lot at some point : when e10s was first activated by default in Nightly (in 2013 IIRC) it crashed several times a day. I stopped using nightly for a year afterwards.
So all the noscript equivalent for Chrome could offer was to block Javascript after it had loaded. Which seemed unreal and pointless.
So I stayed on Firefox. Because I've been convinced for many years now that Javascript plays a major role in malware delivery through the browser.
And along with email the browser is the major delivery platform for malware.