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by danjoc 3129 days ago
As a counter anecdote, I'm removing FF from all my workstations today. I've been using FF for years. I gave quantum a chance until NoScript shipped. Now it's clear that this is not going to work for me anymore. Moving to Brave. Bye FF.

>I also like the redesign but the killer feature was the noticeable speed up.

FYI, it was faster when NoScript worked. Tabs didn't crash constantly either.

3 comments

Not having slowdowns like you, nor tabs crashing. Reminds me of when Chrome first came out, I ditched Firefox, till I realized Chrome didn't have proper adblocking, and when they did it was awful compared to Firefox's adblocker. It's improved since, but I'm not interested in Chrome since. Firefox has only gotten better and better for me. I guess everyone will experience the new versions differently.
I've been a long time user of Firefox, and after v55, I've been incredibly pleased with the improvements in tab handling (I'm one of those imbeciles who often has hundreds and hundreds of tabs open) and browser performance overall. Like you, I haven't had any stability issues, and the overall resource use is still far lower than Chrome/Chromium/derivatives (like Brave). I'm somewhat disappointed with the removal of the old XUL API and the death of many extensions, but expecting this, I trimmed what I had installed to an absolute minimum. So far so good; can't say I'm really missing anything except maybe Session Manager.

I do have some empathy for your parent comment: I'm not particularly fond of NoScript v10's UI either, if that's their chief complaint. It's different and somewhat cartoonish, but I don't know if my reaction is because of the stylistic changes or the fact that it just changed.

Regardless, Raymond Hill released a version of uMatrix for Firefox 57 which I feel has somewhat more power than NoScript in certain areas (selectively blocking cookies is a nice addition), and I like the UI better. It's not as intuitive, arguably, as the original NoScript, but it's information-dense and provides a fantastic picture of what's going on--better than NoScript ever did.

Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. Getting huge slow downs with tree style tabs. Firefox is unusable for me now :/
FYI, noscript is working again since today.
It launched with a new UI that I am still in the process of figuring out. If the parent lost their patience, I can't blame them asbut there is definitely a learning curve to NoScript 10 and zero documentation to help people figure it out.

NoScript 10 caught me on a good week, if I had been busier this week I wouldn't have had the patience either because it's definitely not doing things in a way I would expect.

Any references for figuring it out?

Can I ask do you run it with ublock or other ad blockers?

I do in fact run it with uBlock.

So here are my notes for the previous version, I literally went to type this up only to find NoScript updated itself in the past day or two.

You have Default, Trusted, Untrusted and Custom.

Double-Clicking on either of those will give you more granular control ranging from scripts to media to fonts and webgl, which is nice. Untrusted has everything unchecked by default, Default seems to have scripting and most other things turned off by default, and Trusted and Custom you have to set yourself, with Trusted I think having Scripting on by default.

Now if you change the settings for any of these, at least on the previous version, your changes will apply to all domains under that category, so if you have scripting on for Custom, you'll have Scripting on for all domains you've set to Custom. Now whether this is still the case for the latest version, I couldn't tell you at this exact moment, but hopefully that's enough to get you started.

"Temporarily allow" also seems to have been replaced with a clock icon which you can find next to the Trusted and Custom category markers, which I only knew about from reading the blog updates. The latest update added three icons to the top right which are fairly self explanatory, one is options, one is for temporarily allowing all of the page and one is for revoking temporary permissions.

All in all I wouldn't say it is the most intuitive UI, particularly after having used NoScript for about 10 or 11 years. That said, if you're willing to allow yourself a bit of time to get used to it, most of the core functionality is retained, and is in fact a little bit more granular than before. When I have a little bit more free time, I intend to test out Custom a little bit and see if I can use it to allow some websites to render custom typography without having to run JavaScript. Theoretically that should be done completely in CSS, but I haven't kept on top of web standards since deciding not to be a web developer about 10 years ago so I'm not sure to what extent websites still depend on JavaScript for typography.

Thanks so much for this. They sound like some improvements, especially the timed/clock feature. Useful for not wanting to whitelist a website you need to view. I never find temporarily allow all too work that great - sometimes required several cycles.