The Quantum of Firefox: Why is this one unlike any other Firefox?

Re: 30 per cent faster

And once limited connection speeds is accounted for, the lack of noscript negates most of the benefits of the improved rendering engine. I'm no fan of "modern" look either. Luckily there's the ESR version and the Palemoon.

Re: 30 per cent faster

I've been using it all day so far, and 30% seems conservative. For me it feels more like a 'shitload' faster.

Re: 30 per cent faster

What the average Joe wont know is that his Talk Talk mibbuts are not included in that stat and in fact make up 95% of the "speed of the internet"

Perhaps surprisingly, raw bandwidth is no longer all that relevant unless you're hanging off the end of a dog slow link.

As far as normal web browsing goes, whether you've got 10/30/70Mbps is going to be entirely irrelevant to your experience compared with how the site is technically laid out and configured.

Have the devs dumped their JS includes up in the header or right at the bottom of the page? Is the loading of CSS or image elements being delayed by premature JS execution? The perception of speed relies far more on load-ordering than outright speed.

Likewise, is your server configured to use HTTP/2? If not, you're shooting yourself in the face. No amount of bandwidth is going to make up for the latency of repeated round-trips and connections compared with pipelining your requests. Especially if users are remote - the greater the latency, the more obvious round-trips become. Are you using a CDN to deliver static content, or a regionalised server to prevent European traffic having to cross the Atlantic to a US DC (or vice versa)?

Now, a fair amount of that comes down to the service provider, but the browser must also play it's part. Obviously it needs to support things like HTTP/2 out the box, and then if you're pipelining requests and getting a bunch of assets landing simultaneously (instead of sequentially), then being "built-for-multi-threading" and GPU acceleration become a necessity and bolting them onto a legacy code base runs out of steam. The speed at which JS is executed once it downloads lies with the browser, and if the site devs have done something silly like blocking a bunch of requests with a heavy bit of JS, then notionally the browser's use of pipelining and multi-threading could bypass that error. Not that poor coding practices should be encouraged, but a forgiving environment often benefits the end user.

Re: 30 per cent faster

My tests of FF 56 and FF 57 using Mozilla Speedometer show a 16% speed increase for 57.

If it's not just made up, the 30% figure probably includes improvements made prior to the release of FF 57 (and it is definitely true that 56 and 55 were both noticeably quicker than the version prior), which also helped boost the performance of FF 56 with the full addon API. It demonstrates that significant improvement in speed was possible without cutting off the "legacy" addons, and there are probably some additional gains to be found.

I'm all for optimization, but I am not in favor of cutting out important features to get there. If there were alternate APIs that allowed the kind of customization that used to be possible with the old addons, or if the options those addons I use were built into the base FF product, that would be different. As it stands, the legacy addons are indispensable to me. Greater speed isn't... it's nice to have, but not necessary.

Re: 30 per cent faster

of course the ithings version doesn't use any of this, Apple force them (and everyone else that isn't Apple) to use the older, slower unaccelerated webkit engine...

Re: 30 per cent faster

Stopping all the video ad's, content slurping analytics from Google, Google Ad's and all manner of other crap than needs rendered in real time is the shit that slows down your browser. You can see it all in the bottom left when it is building the page.... slowly and in bursts.

Thankfully Ad Block Plus has not been nuked by the Quantum Rewrite.