Firefox 55 Is Ready To Shine With Performance Improvements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Firefox 55 Is Ready To Shine With Performance Improvements

Mozilla's Firefox 55 web browser is now deemed stable while Firefox 56 enters beta and Firefox 57 is the new nightly build...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-55-Released

[shmerl]

Are you getting this bug with electrolysis enabled? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1377950

[flubba86]

FYI, Firefox 57 became the new nightly 3 days ago.
Also F57 has the stylo (from servo) CSS renderer enabled by default, and force-disables all non-web-extension plugins.

[gbcox]

Fx 54 was pretty good also. The big event of course will be when Fx 57 arrives and webextensions only are allowed. Right now, people may be having issues still with incompatible extensions which block e10s and affect performance. I've just ditched all non-compatible extensions.

[Michael_S]

Fx 54 was pretty good also. The big event of course will be when Fx 57 arrives and webextensions only are allowed. Right now, people may be having issues still with incompatible extensions which block e10s and affect performance. I've just ditched all non-compatible extensions.

I have been alternating between 54 and 57 nightly on my machine, and 57 nightly feels worlds faster. The difference is impressive.

browserbench.org
Ares 6 (low is good) 221 FF54, 165 FF57, 69 Chrome 60
MotionMark (high is good) ?? FF54 (it completed but misreported the display resolution), 80.6 FF57, 49.0 Chrome 60
Speedometer (high is good) 27.2 FF54, 41.9 FF57, 76.7 Chrome 60
JetStream (high is good) 83.4 FF54, 85.1 FF57, 85.6 Chrome 60

So Chrome still leads big in ARES 6 and Speedometer, but Firefox cut the difference significantly. The difference in JetStream is rounding error. Firefox wins in MotionMark. I'm not feeling ambitious enough to dig up Firefox 44 or similar for this hardware, but I suspect the numbers are pathetic.

[useless]

Are you getting this bug with electrolysis enabled? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1377950

Same here.

[bemerk]

I find it hard to believe that Pulse Audio still is that bad. People have been complaining for years but i haven't noticed any issue so far.
Could that be already fixed and nobody of the usual suspects noticed?

[Adarion]

Strange. Once they said Mozilla Suite is bloated and the world rather needs the uncoupled browser. And it will be nimble and awesome. Well, partially FF3 was that. But it kinda went downhill often in terms of performance. They added so much stuff, made it a jack-of-all-trades, though several thing you already had within your OS distribution, mirrored functionality (e.g. see that screenshot tool they want to make), I'm not sure how this will work out.
And loading many tabs never was fast in FF. And iirc. there is an option to load them only when you switch to that tab wich can be okay but is basically just spreading the loading times.

On the other hand, webpages these days suck. It's maybe 5 KiB of sheer ASCII coded information that you are looking for. Then you have maybe a few pictures that are helpful, but a majority of unrelated non-sense or ads (adblocking solutions and premium accounts, I know). A lot of "code" then is CSS and HTML formatting, and then moving backgrounds hit (probably HTML5 video elements) and finally the big kahoona follows with JavaScript. The most unperformant script language ever, probably. And these scripts are sometimes megabytes, often from external sources (trustworthy? slow?). And this is something that slows down browsers like hell.
Really, use a non high-end computer, install prefbar or something like that, and switch on/off JS and compare.


And not everyone has or wants PulseAudio. Some people just use ALSA, others maybe use JACK and don't need PA then. It's okay to support PA, but there should be fallback solutions.

[nanonyme]

I find it hard to believe that Pulse Audio still is that bad. People have been complaining for years but i haven't noticed any issue so far.
Could that be already fixed and nobody of the usual suspects noticed?

I don't think so but the several percent CPU usage is a niche problem. Normally you don't care unless something else hogs 100% of CPU time but then that other thing needs fixing

[curfew]

Strange. Once they said Mozilla Suite is bloated and the world rather needs the uncoupled browser. And it will be nimble and awesome. Well, partially FF3 was that. But it kinda went downhill often in terms of performance. They added so much stuff, made it a jack-of-all-trades, though several thing you already had within your OS distribution, mirrored functionality (e.g. see that screenshot tool they want to make), I'm not sure how this will work out.
And loading many tabs never was fast in FF. And iirc. there is an option to load them only when you switch to that tab wich can be okay but is basically just spreading the loading times.

Actually they made the "load tabs on demand" a forced default setting and removed options to change it. It can be hacked from the about:settings page, though.

I agree with that most tools should be bundled at the OS level and built into a web browser. Same goes for these useless chat mini apps that Firefox used to push, I guess it died off too. Epiphany on Gnome supports exporting web pages as web apps but unfortunately didn't work with Hangouts when I tried it. There was no way to login in the web app mode...