.. title: Firefox is Cool Again
.. slug: firefox-is-cool-again
.. date: 2018-01-21 18:10:01 UTC+01:00
.. tags: firefox, rust, servo
.. category: 
.. link: 
.. description: 
.. type: text

Even though it is not news anymore, I think it is worth mentioning
that `Mozilla Firefox <https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/>`_
improved by a large margin with the Firefox Quantum (57) release.
Although I have been using Firefox since it started `back in 2004
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Firefox>`_, from time to
time I was jealous of the performance of Chrome and other engines.
Still I never left the platform with the deep conviction that Firefox
will catch up sooner or later.  This time has finally come!

.. image:: /images/Mozilla_Firefox_logo_2013.png
   :alt: Mozilla Firefox Logo
   :align: center
	 
.. TEASER_END

Around the end of September 2017 the Mozilla newsletter announced
significant performance increases to be expected soon.  The impatient
could take a look at whats coming through the `Firefox Beta
<https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/>`_ program.
While sitting at a Hotel bar, it was easy to install that on my
Android phone and sure enough the performance increase was impressive.
As I didn't want to switch to Firefox Beta on all my machines, I kept
an eye open until the new code base became available through the
stable Firefox releases.

Only a few weeks later the 57.0 release gained a lot of attention in
all of the IT media.  Even regular media took notice and commented on
the big speed improvements.  If you want to know more details about
the contributions of the newly developed programming language `Rust
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)>`_ to this
achievement, I found the `Blog of Bobby Holley
<http://bholley.net/blog/2017/stylo.html>`_ to be a good source of
information.  It is interesting how Mozilla is able to gradually
convert a giant code base to this new paradigm and gain significant
advantages already on the way.  It will be interesting to see what
further improvements are coming this way.  A recent Mozilla blog entry
on `Making WebAssembly even faster
<https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/making-webassembly-even-faster-firefoxs-new-streaming-and-tiering-compiler/>`_
is another hint in that direction.

My Ubuntu machines received the Quantum release simply on the next
regular update.  The Debian stretch machines however still have
Firefox-ESR 52, so I installed Firefox manually below below /opt.  As
Firefox has its own update management system, all that is needed to
keep Firefox up-to-date is to restart it regularly to apply the
automatically downloaded updates.

From a practical perspective, the `Changes for add-on developers
<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/57#Changes_for_add-on_and_Mozilla_developers>`_
bemoaned by a lot of technical versed people had near zero impact on
me.  All that I lost was a gestures plugin that I did not use heavily
lately anyway.  What did confuse me for a while was the disappearance
of the bookmarks menu in its known form.  Through a few searches I
learned through a `Support form entry
<https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1184435>`_ that it is
easy to put back a comparable such a menu into the toolbar with a few
mouse clicks and thus also solved that problem.

All in all I'm pretty happy with Firefox and I can recommend it to
anyone without any restriction.  On a fresh install its also a matter
of only a single click to install and activate uBlock Origin
(mentioned in the :doc:`increasingly-user-hostile-web` post) as it is
listed immediately activating the "Add-ons" menu.  The new look needed
a few days to accommodate but from then on it felt home like ever.