Firefox Quantum is live, what are your guys impressions

I have been looking to this release and since it is now live what are your guyses impressions of it so far, I put a link to an article that goes somewhat in depth looking at quantum if any of you are interested before checking it out yourselves :smiley:

In depth article on the new firefox

Link to downlaod the new firefox:

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Itā€™s not yet landed in my distros repos, so Iā€™m not there yet.

For those Solus Master Race folk, hereā€™s the phabricator tracking it: https://dev.solus-project.com/D1369

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Just updated. Watching a youtube video pins all four cores to 80%, the UI is sluggish and plugins no longer work.

So, ehm, not great.

EDIT: Itā€™s really fast when not playing a video, so something is going wrong with the decoding. Just noticed some of my addons have been removed without asking, despite being compatible though.

It works great for me, I like it.

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Am I the only one who canā€™t seem to relocate the ā€˜Open a new tabā€™ buttonā€™ to the right of my tabs? Itā€™s not something I canā€™t get used to just a bit odd.
Otherwise it ticked all my expectation boxes (for my craptop at least). Seems to work more efficiently (maybe placebo effect?), I donā€™t know about battery life since I basically started using it only like 2 hours ago. Overall iā€™m happy. May even replace it on my workstation instead of using it exclusively on my craptop. Also the fact that you canā€™t rearange the ā€˜Top Sitesā€™ section in a new tab is a small annoyance, but maybe thatā€™s just me.

i7-2600k here, watching a video (1080p, 60fps) in ā€œtheater modeā€ puts one thread at about 80%. Whatā€™s your GPU setup? Iā€™ve got iGPU and Nvidia. It sounds like youā€™re not getting hardware acceleration on the decode.

The addon binaries may not be compatible.

Screenshot from 2017-11-15 11-37-21

I donā€™t know what youā€™re trying to do. Looks just fine, using the AppImage.

Itā€™s definitely faster. Firefox was a buggy, slow piece of shit prior to this release. Iā€™m not sure that itā€™s faster than chrome, but itā€™s definitely my preference.

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I saw a guy wearing a Firefox superhero outfit on the way to work today.

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Iā€™m running archlinux on an i5-3570k + GTX 1060. Video decode worked fine before so this is definitely a regression

Just reinstalled one of the add-ons (Kee, new version of KeeFox) and it works fine.


Also found some more problems

  • A website of my university doesnā€™t display correctly
  • Dragging around icons in the ā€œcustomizeā€ menu sometimes makes the icons disapper
  • @SgtAwesomesauce Firefox decided to use your profile picture for previewing this thread :laughing:
  • some of my settings have been reset

On the plus side, I used to have a tab open that wouldnā€™t show up in the tab bar. That is gone now.


Iā€™m wondering whether my firefox profile is screwed, as Iā€™ve also had problems logging into twitch a couple days before. Iā€™ll do a complete wipe and reset all settings when Iā€™ve got time.

Iā€™ll update on my laptop now, letā€™s see what happens :crossed_fingers:

Canā€™t say why it wouldnā€™t work. When I get a chance, Iā€™ll try it on my Arch box (has an AMD GPU, but it should tell us if itā€™s an Nvidia issue or if itā€™s Firefox)

In the mean time, this may help: https://askubuntu.com/questions/491750/force-enable-hardware-acceleration-in-firefox#540382

Is it a publicly available site? If so, please link if you donā€™t mind.

Iā€™ve accepted this as a reality of life.

I donā€™t see how this is a problem.


Iā€™d create a new user, log in and try using Firefox. See if your profile got corrupt.

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Thanks for the help. Iā€™m not trying to debug this right now though, just wanted to share my experience. Firefox has always had a tendency to self destruct so no point in fixing things without wiping my profile. Iā€™ll make a new thread if any problems persist and I need help.


After opening that site as well as about:support the UI turned sluggish again and the CPU usage went up. Itā€™s not reproducible though and youtube works fine now too. So the CPU usage wasnā€™t because of the video after all but just a random bug.

Itā€™s my personal lecture schedule. Iā€™d have linked if I could

Just strikes me as odd, especially because it uses the L1T logo for other pages. Itā€™s not like you are the OP either. This only happens on the new tab page, which I never use anyway.

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Yeah, I was just amused at the fact that Harold is getting some prime real estate on your browser. I did it to be funny a while back and it just kinda stuck. :smiley:

CPU usage spiked again just now while reading this thread.

image

It first shoots up to about 80% and drops by about 5% each second. Really, really weird.

(Donā€™t mind the odd Memory usage. My top must be on drugs or something)

Whatā€™s up with your memory?

Sounds like there are a bunch of batch tasks being kicked off, but what for, I havenā€™t the foggiest.

No clue. free -h reports everything correctly and so does GNOMEā€™s system monitor. Must be a bug in top or something, I donā€™t care tbh.

I went looking for my old add-on and found something about future add-onā€™s have to use an API?
Application Programming Interface, but I donā€™t really know what that means to plug-in programmers.

Does that mean they have to use the Firefox API language as opposed to HTML or something?


I find Quantum to be a little faster, snappier comes to mind, but I donā€™t care enough to run speed tests.
And I like the graphic design changes.

The API is how add-ons communicate with firefox. You can think of it as a language the two use to exchange information. The new firefox has dropped support for the old API and thus requires all add-ons to switch to the new one.

The odd thing in my case is that even add-ons which did support the new API were removed. Also they werenā€™t just disabled, but silently uninstalled.

Thatā€™s not gonna happen with my add-on even though the general consensus is it should be part of Firefox.
Some guy on reddit figured out how to do it in CSS, but I donā€™t want to mess with that.
I made some CSS changes once and after hours of work I couldnā€™t figure out how to save it.

image

All Roomy Bookmarks Toolbar did was hide the description for items in the bookmark toolbar until you hover over it. I used to have 50 bookmark icons, but without the add-on I can only see 12 icons+description with Quantum.

Iā€™ve wiped my profile and havenā€™t had any hitches so far. Runs noticeable faster than before :+1:

The only thing I really donā€™t like is that there seems to be no way to get rid of the titlebar. I used to use an add-on for this, but itā€™s no longer compatible because of the API break.

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i didnā€™t have any problems with this release it runs faster and can handle more tabs than before or less memory and even when under heavy load it doesnā€™t get sluggish as much as it used to be, my legacy addons kept working just fine too. All in all, pretty good release

go to Customize and on the bottom left part uncheck the boxnext to Title bar

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The font rendering on some Windows 10 boxes on Intel HD 2000 graphics card (sandybridge) with MS Edge installed is magically really broken in Firefox 57.

Iā€™m still looking at the issue, and Iā€™m no longer sure if itā€™s Microsoft shenanigans or something is just broken.

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