[kwlug-disc] Firefox 57?

Sat Nov 18 14:40:00 EST 2017

The difference that Firefox 57 "Quantum" makes for me is huge. A large
part of this is that Mozilla went through a list of longstanding issues
that affect *responsiveness* (not just pure performance) and optimized
them. For this reason, not all of the performance improvements are
easily measured with traditional benchmarks, but you will still feel the
difference. Also, there is an ongoing effort to add/replace more
components written in Rust. One of these efforts that made it into the
57 release is Stylo, a complete rewrite of the CSS system in Rust that
is much more parallel.

I experienced most of these improvements testing out Nightly for a
while. I haven't actually updated my stable release to 57 yet because of
NoScript (same as a few other people here), but an update for that
should be released within the week, according to the developer. However,
anyone who needs to wait on more extensions to update should strongly
consider switching to Firefox ESR (52) for the time being, as 56 is not
receiving security updates. There are already security advisories about
this: https://security.archlinux.org/ASA-201711-23 (Arch Linux advisory,
but applies to every other distro as well). The only reason I'm still
using 56 right now is because NoScript should be updating very shortly
and I run several WebExtensions that won't work on 52 due to lack of the
required APIs. I disable JavaScript by default, which reduces my attack
surface, but even then, it's still a slight risk.

Also, another thing that greatly improved the "fluidness" of Firefox, at
least on my system, was enabling OpenGL compositing. You can do this by
setting "layers.acceleration.force-enabled" to true in about:config. The
results may vary by driver and GPU (it may even be unstable on some
systems), but for me, it changed scrolling on websites from being
visibly janky (<60 FPS) to rendering at almost the full 144 Hz of my
main monitor. Huge improvement. I use an AMD R9 290 with the latest Mesa
drivers, for reference, but it should help even with less powerful GPUs.

Khalid Baheyeldin:
> I was on the ESR release for some time.
> 
> It is good for stability and no surprises ...
> 
> But the annoying thing is that the releases are in .tar.bz2 format,
> and have to be installed manually when security releases come out.
> 
> Time consuming and error prone, because one forgets how to do it for
> months, then a security release comes out and I have to dig the script
> that does it (which is not totally automated since the download file
> name changes because it has the version in it).
> 
> I wish there was a .deb that can be installed using gdebi, but I don't
> know of one that exists.
> 
> 
> Back to 57.
> 
> I am considering backing up my Firefix profile, then upgrading to 57
> and see how it works. If things go haywire, I can revert the profile
> back. But will wait a bit more to see if the extensions in question
> get released.
> 
> On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 12:37 PM, Ron Singh <ronsingh149 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I moved to Firefix ESR about 6-7 months ago, both in W7/W10 and
>> Linux(Mint(despite the fact that Mint does not have it in their repo)), just
>> to be able to use my fav add-ons. I have not experienced any shortcomings of
>> FF ESR. All my "legacy" add-ons run well.
>>
>> That said, I do have a playtime Thinkpad X220 i7 laptop with 8G running Mint
>> Cinnamon 18.2 and when I reload some 72 tabs on the new FF57, it is some 30%
>> faster on finishing all them reloads. Tabs snap into view a wee faster,
>> advert content load visibly faster too when I have Ublock Origin turned off.
>>
>> Since NoScript 5.x is supported till June 2018, I think I will stick with FF
>> ESR. I am on FF ESR 52.4, even though 52.5 just popped into view a couple of
>> days ago. I will give it another 6 weeks to see how FF ESR 52.5 is received
>> before upgrading.
>>
>> I would think upgrading from FF 56 to FF 57 in newer hardware will show very
>> little "felt" performance increase, but on my older(6-7 yo) laptop, FF57 was
>> visibly faster. For daily driving, I am sticking with FF ESR and will only
>> bust a move to FF 57 after a point release and when NoScript is up to
>> speed.. My 2 cents.
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Ron Singh
>> "in transit, via mobile comm device"
>>
>> On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 12:21 PM, CrankyOldBugger
>> <crankyoldbugger at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> They're saying that it's much faster, but not all independent tests
>>> agree...
>>>
>>>
>>> Firefox Vice President for Product Nick Nguyen. "We use 30 percent less
>>> memory, and the reason for that is we can allocate the number of processes
>>> Firefox uses on your computer based on the hardware that you have," he told
>>> TechNewsWorld
>>>
>>> as per
>>> https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/11/18/0328256/is-firefox-57-faster-than-chrome?utm_source=feedly1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, 18 Nov 2017 at 12:01 Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 11:51 AM, Darcy Casselman <dscassel at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> I'm giving it a go, switching off Chrome for a while, having been
>>>>> assured
>>>>> that my previous Firefox performance issues are a thing of the past. I
>>>>> haven't used Firefox in years because it would become unresponsive
>>>>> after
>>>>> leaving it open for a day or two. I'm hoping it's better.
>>>>
>>>> Several extensions make this a non-issue.
>>>>
>>>> Auto Unload Tab frees memory and stops any Javascript CPU hogging after a
>>>> set
>>>> time (I use 2 hours).
>>>>
>>>> NoScript prevents JS and Flash from sites not in the whitelist from
>>>> running. This
>>>> takes care of all the CPU hogging adware, malware, mineware, ....etc.
>>>>
>>>> uBlock Origin also stops ads on sites that are on the whitelist.
>>>>
>>>> This is why the absence of the first two extensions is a show stopper
>>>> for my move
>>>> to 57.
>>>>
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>>>
>>>
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>>
> 
> 
> 

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