Firefox 56.0 Is Ready Ahead Of The Big Quantum Update

[davidbepo]

all photon changes are to worse yes EVERY change that i noticed is to worse IMO. the worst is the new "new tab" tab, the websites are ridiculously small and all the space is wasted

[TomPollok]

all photon changes are to worse yes EVERY change that i noticed is to worse IMO. the worst is the new "new tab" tab, the websites are ridiculously small and all the space is wasted

When i first saw the new UI i thought "why again changing it, it already looks good. and i didnt like the photon ui". Now after i have used the nightlies for about a month, i like the new interface much more than the previous. Give yourself some time to adapt to the change. If sth went miserably then give mozilla your feedback

[ssokolow]

I wonder why they move the loading/stop/reload icon from right side of url-bar to the left side? Quite annoying where you look where things were but they aren't there any more.

Ugh. I hadn't noticed that. I wonder if Photon allows one to pin page actions in a deterministic order. Maybe I could hide the reload/stop button and write a page action which does the same thing.

[RelaxTrolls]

I use nightly on android (firefox 58.0a), when 57.0a first dropped, I was blown away by the performance improvements. It took a week for web extensions to catch up, but every plugin I use is now supported...

I also like that TCP fast open is supported now in firefox. Really speeds things up loading subsequent web pages... I'd still really like to see seccomp / sandboxing added on android builds... hopefully, they implement it. It was implemented in Firefox OS, but never on android versions.

[dstaubsauger]

What's the significance behind a "Rust-written" CSS engine?

The new engine leverages multithreading for better performance. They wrote it in Rust because implementing it correctly (i.e. no memory errors aka security issues) in C++ would probably have been really hard. There's a great writeup on how the new engine works on the Mozilla Hacks blog: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/in...css-aka-stylo/

[Anvil]

still no official RPM of it in Fedora which is depressing

[Delgarde]

Multithreaded styling. They say it is much faster.

Although the speed isn't directly attributable to Rust, as such - it's that Rust makes it easier to rewrite their CSS engine in a way that can exploit parallelism without making a mess of it. You *could* do the same in C... but you'd still be finding obscure concurrency bugs and buffer overflow issues ten years from now.

[timofonic]

i will keep firefox on 56 till i can. 57 has awesome performance but the photon ui is trash
long live australis

I consider Australis to be trash. How can I define Photon?

[timofonic]

There are a few reasons of significance behind it. It is a huge announcement because the Servo project was created to eventually be integrated into Firefox, and it is a major success story for their Rust programming language as a whole, which was created alongside Servo. Being written in Rust is actually why it was so easy for them to create this multi-threaded CSS processor, which hadn't been done before. The entire massively parallel nature of Servo is the result of creating Rust for that purpose. Additionally, it is noteworthy because Rust implementations typically consume less memory, require less CPU cycles, and outperform C/C++ implementations, while also being free of an entire class of memory-related vulnerabilities that are rampant throughout web browser code bases. That is a major incentive for a web browser to advertise.

I wonder if it will be possible to reasonably use OpenCL and such to make it get use of the GPU for more stuff too...

[timofonic]

Was it ever removed? You can select Alsa in FF port to FreeBSD, I doubt porting team added Alsa back in..

FreeBSD doesn't ise ALSA at all, but their own derivation of OSS. I'm not sure about the other BSD ones, maybe it's similar.