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by Silhouette 3026 days ago
Not really. I gave up Firefox (as my main browser; I'm a web dev so use all of the major ones regularly anyway) because the main thing keeping me there was its extensibility, and that advantage went away. Firefox was and remains slower, less reliable, and less capable than Chrome, and IME has actually become worse in those respects as well since Quantum.
1 comments
jerheinze 3026 days ago
> Firefox was and remains slower

Did you try out the Firefox Nightly with WebRender enabled?

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Silhouette 3026 days ago
No, but somehow I get the feeling we're talking about entirely different levels of "slower" here.

You're talking about GPU-accelerating complicated page renders.

I'm talking about things like regularly seeing flashes of unstyled content on page load, which I thought we'd left behind somewhere in the last millennium.

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sp332 3026 days ago
I had a look around for other people with this problem, and all the examples I found were caused by extentions. Ghostery just fixed theirs a few days ago, for example. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404468#c36
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Silhouette 3025 days ago
Based on the differences among different machines I use with Firefox installed, it is certainly possible that extensions are causing a lot of the degradation since Quantum, but I'm not sure assigning blame is interesting or useful here. The fact is that my experience as a Firefox user is now much worse than it was before. The new extension model was supposed to make things faster, more secure, more reliable, but sadly the result seems to have been very much the opposite.
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sp332 3025 days ago
The new extension model makes better extensions possible, but it isn't going to make good extensions appear out of thin air. It's not going to stop a buggy extension from causing FOUCs or slowing down the rendering of a page.

I don't want to make excuses if you're having a bad experience though. But I'm hopeful about the future of Firefox.

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Silhouette 3025 days ago
The new extension model makes better extensions possible, but it isn't going to make good extensions appear out of thin air. It's not going to stop a buggy extension from causing FOUCs or slowing down the rendering of a page.

OK, but surely it should at least isolate buggy extensions so they can't compromise the browser itself? Wasn't better security and stability in the presence of bad extensions a key selling point of the new extension model? In practice, Firefox was failing to shut down and restart cleanly for me perhaps one time in three since Quantum, having been solid as a rock until that point. (I say "was" because I haven't yet seen this problem since updating to 59 the other day, so it's possible that that particular bug has now been fixed.)

Likewise, if it makes better extensions possible, how come the only observable difference so far seems to be that various things that extensions used to be able to do are no longer possible? It's looking like a classic case of going all-in on a big software rewrite, but finding that a lot of little details have been overlooked and useful functionality has been lost as a result.

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jerheinze 3026 days ago
> I'm talking about things like regularly seeing flashes of unstyled content on page load

Never seen on my end for quiet some time, maybe worth a bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org

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