Mozilla Firefox Quantum is released today

[StyM]

http://hexus.net/tech/news/software/...eleased-today/

Mozilla began Firefox Quantum beta tests a couple of months ago. If you are interested in a reinvigorated Firefox but not keen on beta software, the time has come as Firefox Quantum gets its mainstream release today. At the time of writing it's not listed as available but the homepage here will be updated when it is released. Those already running Firefox need only wait for an update to be delivered.

Firefox Quantum comes with two key promises from the Mozilla development staff; it is twice as fast as previous Firefox releases, and it is a third more memory efficient than Google Chrome. However, that is not all, Mozilla thinks you should choose Firefox Quantum for its "beautiful, intelligent design" with new shortcuts and functionality, and powerful privacy features.

To show off its improvements in speed and memory use, Mozilla published a dedicated blog post. There you can have a closer look at the test conditions, figures, and comparisons. For example the speed claims judge Quantum against Firefox 52. The speed comparison ran on a Surface Laptop (Processor: Intel Core i7 / Memory: 8GB / Storage: 256GB), a new Firefox profile, and no other apps or tabs running. Similar performance boosts were observed across PC and Mac platforms.

If you want to read more about the under-the-bonnet tweaks for speed there is an additional Firefox Quantum tech post here by Lin Clark, an engineer on the Mozilla Developer Relations team. One snippet worth mentioning here is that the new CSS engine in Firefox Quantum is written completely in the Rust language which is great for multi-core processing. Interestingly, in 2018, Mozilla plans to use your GPU to render web pages even faster.

[NEOAethyr]

I'm a bit worried about firefox.
The future looks pretty bleak to me.
The newer ver's use cloud baised/online plugins.

Supposedly won't allow the older style plugins.
However, kubuntu 17.10 has ff v56.
And sure enough, my plugins do work it seems.
Alot of them I modded, some of them not even up anymore.
Like my side tabs and so on.
The guy that makes the AIOS (all in one sidebar) straight up quit dev'ing after the news of the new cloud plugin crap.
My fork of it is still working though.
All this stuff I've never up'ed though.
In the dev ver of ff, nightly, you can re-enable offline plugins.
I don't know, it just works for me using the stock ver.
I got so many settings modding it and such..., who knows.

Anyways I'm pretty worried about it.
When things really stop working, I mean i can get around not having mht's and so on...
But..., when it does, I'm either gonna have to insert my stuff into the main src, or I'm going to stop using firefox all together.
Vivaldi is shaping up, but it's not there yet, needs a little more work on the tab code, and the ability to remove/add buttons at the very min.
This is the only browser I can see as an alt in the future.

When opera started the redo on it's code, to go from mozilla base to chrome base.
The dev team split.
Opera became a spyware garbage clone of chrome.
Vivaldi is slow in dev, but it's starting to look like it has potential.
Not ready yet though.

I'm on the lts v52 of firefox.
I'll try to update it in the future when I feel like it.
I have one MAJOR issue though.
The new multi process code is the completely wrong way of going about mt.
I'm not going to have a million ff processes running, hell no.
1 processes, period, that's the way it goes for me, even with flash in it.
I don't put up with out of process moronic bull crap.
It just makes things way worse.

Sorry about my language there...
But I'm pretty perturbed about the direction.
I still have yet to do 2 fixes to the base code, one of them was from a little nsa little heffer...
sigh... eh whatevers though.
I mean, it was only a month ago when i finally got rid of the final bit of spyware callback stuff out of ff.
Now I find out I needed it to do live streams and mic stuff lol, ohwell lol.
I'll figure out a solution to that, even if I need a 2nd browser config just for it.