Changes To Look Forward To With Firefox 52

[eydee]

"improved file downloading experience"
I don't know exactly what it is, flat, material, metro design, but it looks like crap. It's too much white, too dull, progress bar is too thin.
It was better before!

The downloading UI hasn't changed a bit for ages. The changes mentioned in the article must be internal ones.

[LinAGKar]

crap!!, many corporate apps still require npapi java :/ I wonder how this will end up.

- They really should have waited until FF 53 to make this change, considering that FF 52 will be the base for the next ESR

It will still be supported in Firefox 52 ESR though.
Edit: Source

[Azrael5]

firefox has to improve hardly providing reliable hardware acceleration as well as to manage effectively both system ram VRam, cpu cache and buffers because it is very slow compared to chrome. It is not able to detect all the system abilities by which to take benefits. On the same hardware chrome is able to feature very well hardware acceleration where firefox fails.

[bug77]

firefox has to improve hardly providing reliable hardware acceleration as well as to manage effectively both system ram VRam, cpu cache and buffers because it is very slow compared to chrome. It is not able to detect all the system abilities by which to take benefits. On the same hardware chrome is able to feature very well hardware acceleration where firefox fails.

https://arewefastyet.com/

I noticed the mobile version exhibits some hiccups on some sites where Chrome doesn't, but other than that I can't say FF looked slow in any way.

[coder111]

Is Firefox still running single-threaded? Damn, they need a new JS/HTML engine by yesterday if that's still the case.

I'm still using Firefox as I trust Mozilla more than I trust Google... Google has a massive conflict of interest between selling ads and protecting user privacy.

[gbcox]

https://arewefastyet.com/

I noticed the mobile version exhibits some hiccups on some sites where Chrome doesn't, but other than that I can't say FF looked slow in any way.

I was using Chrome stable on a Nexus 9 of all things with the latest patches and Chrome would always hang and freeze the entire tablet... I would have to constantly reboot. FF doesn't have this problem. Go figure...

[gbcox]

Is Firefox still running single-threaded? Damn, they need a new JS/HTML engine by yesterday if that's still the case.

I'm still using Firefox as I trust Mozilla more than I trust Google... Google has a massive conflict of interest between selling ads and protecting user privacy.

It's being rolled out - extensions are now the big hangup - but that should change with FF57: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

[JonathanM]

@All of those Elementary OS lovers, don't you think it's weird (as in safety) to have Midori as default?

Midori was still default in Freya (the version based on Ubuntu 14.04), but this has changed in Loki, which was released last year, now gnome-web is the default. (But i just use chromium.)

I understand the need for a well integrated browser, but Midori isn't really a serious option.

[Michael_S]

firefox has to improve hardly providing reliable hardware acceleration as well as to manage effectively both system ram VRam, cpu cache and buffers because it is very slow compared to chrome. It is not able to detect all the system abilities by which to take benefits. On the same hardware chrome is able to feature very well hardware acceleration where firefox fails.

Chrome is faster, but I'm pretty sure your explanation for why is incorrect. The operating system handles using RAM, cache, and buffers efficiently, you don't have to put custom code into your application to do it for you.

You can add custom code, and if you're trying to get absolute maximum performance from a particular piece of hardware you will. Console games typically do, because the game maker knows exactly what hardware the game runs on. But Firefox developers and even Chrome developers can't profile their browser on everything from a Pentium 4 to the latest Atom to the latest i7, the Athlon 64 to the Kabini 5150 to Ryzen, hundreds of different ARM processors, and various RAM limits and optimize for all cases.

The biggest performance advantage Chrome had for a long time was being multi-process while Firefox was single process. Firefox transitioned to partial multi-process in 2016, but a lot of plugins forced it to work in a single process way. But if you're running Firefox 51 or 52 and you have no plugins or all of your plugins are compatible with Firefox multi-process, it's really fast. Anything that Chrome does, Firefox does at the same speed or at most a second slower. I use the Privacy Badger plugin that blocks third party tracking. It transitioned to multi-process in late December, and the difference in Firefox speed for me was instantly noticeable.

Chrome still has more efficient rendering code. The rendering performance gap is large, which is part of the reason the Firefox team is rewriting their rendering engine with Servo. Firefox's Javascript engine has been neck and neck with the one in Chrome for years.

[bug77]

Is Firefox still running single-threaded? Damn, they need a new JS/HTML engine by yesterday if that's still the case.

I'm still using Firefox as I trust Mozilla more than I trust Google... Google has a massive conflict of interest between selling ads and protecting user privacy.

It's not. You can go to about:support to check multi-threading status. Some addons are incompatible with multi-threading (you can check status for many plugins here: https://arewee10syet.com/). If FF detects an incompatible add-on, if will turn off multi-threading rather than letting the browser/add-on misbehave, but there's a way to force multi-threading on, too.
And afaik, there are plans to parallelize additional things in the future.