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by sp332 3019 days ago
The main feature of the new model is that it has less functionality than the old model. Firefox is betting that it can enable close to 100% of the functionality that users actually want via clean APIs instead of opening up literally every internal aspect of the browser to extensions. There will be bugs, but specifying APIs makes them easier to fix.

The advantages are speed, security, ease of installation, ease of development since more thought was put into the APIs, compatibility with Chrome extensions, and better compatibility across platforms since extensions now use less native code. Those benefits are "observable". The downside is that you have to wait for Firefox devs to think though the security, performance, and usability aspects of every bit of functionality an extension dev wants, and then wait for the new or updated extension to exist.

1 comments

Those benefits are "observable".

Not yet, they aren't. In fact, the exact opposite has been observed here, many times already. This is my point.

As you say, I'm sure we all hope that the situation will improve in the future, and then maybe the sales pitch for Quantum will start to look a bit more realistic. Until then, sad as it makes me, Firefox will remain relegated to primarily a testing tool on my system, because today other browsers are simply better in every way that matters.

There are many reports of unusual CPU usage in some scenarios on Mac OS, you can help Mozilla debug the issue following this: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7knnn4/firefox_qua...