Firefox Quantum Lands in Beta, Developer Edition - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/09/26/firefox-quantum-beta-developer-edition/ <comment><USER5> As someone that jumped ship from how slow Chrome has gotten and went to Nightly /w Stylo and (CPU threads - 1) e10s processes enabled about 2 monthsish ago...

Holy damn Firefox is actually fast.

Fair comparison, both having Pocket, uBlock, Evernote, OneNote, Pushbullet, and Bitwarden; neither of them having an extension the other doesn't. Above described Firefox Nightly config vs Chrome Dev.

Test machines are a workstation with a i7-4771 @ 3.9ghz, 32GB DDR3-2133, Radeon 7970 with a trio of 1080p screens (a very fast modern machine from the Haswell era) and a laptop with a i5-32120M, 8GB of DDR3-1600, Intel HD4000 iGPU feeding a 13" 2560x1600 @ 200% hidpi (an Ivy Bridge era MBPr 13" Late 2012). Both machines run Win10.

Both machines have less real world wait on Firefox than Chrome, and the interface has less latency between when I do something and it even begins processing the request. Also, under a ton of windows and tabs, Firefox seems to use less RAM and the speed gap seems to widen.

I don't care about about artificial benchmarks, btw, they never seem to measure what actually makes browsers slower for humans.

Edit: Even though I just said I don't care about benchmarks, using Speedometer 2.0-r2216: On the workstation: Firefox 58.0a1 2017-09-26 64bit 61.18 vs Chrome 63.0.3217.0 dev 64-bit 51.67; on the laptop, same versions: Firefox 28.58 vs Chrome 26.74

So, arguably, flat out benchmarkable performance is the same, with Firefox just slightly edging ahead (18% and 6% faster). It isn't enough to explain how fast Firefox feels now.

Edit 2: And now with Edge 40.15063.0.0/EdgeHTML 15.15063: Workstation, 46.72; Laptop 21.37. Firefox is 34% and 31% faster, Chrome is 25% and 11% faster.

<comment><USER6> I switched to Chrome years ago and every time I try Firefox it feels sluggish, so I don't switch back.

Last time was a week ago :\

<comment><USER7> This has been my experience also.

However, I'll try Quantum and see if it improves the situation. I really don't want to be using Chrome.

<comment><USER8> 57 really is a huge improvement, I can no longer feel any difference in responsiveness between firefox and chrome.

In some ways I think firefox has actually surpassed chrome (e.g. on my xps 13 touchpad scrolling is much more responsive/smoother in firefox)

<comment><USER9> Re: touchpad scrolling, make sure you disable "smooth" (animated) scrolling and enable precise scrolling; on Linux this requires setting MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 in the environment.

<comment><USER6> Nice, thanks!

Everything feels 10 times faster without smooth scrolling, while I have to say that the nightly already felt blazing fast _with_ smooth scrolling, haha.

<comment><USER10> This should be off by default. Feels and looks faster. What is the downside?

<comment><USER9> Tracking the thread through [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1207700](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1207700) and [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1170342](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1170342) (and ultimately [https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93539](https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93539) ) it appears that when XI2 is used, focus-out events were not sent in rare cases under old versions of Xorg. If you're running modern software there should be no downside.

<comment><USER10> Thanks. Could the Mozilla installer detect the version of Xorg and set ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Lots of comments from people suffering issues and missing their favorite plugins, so I thought I'd jump in as a former Chrome user.

Firefox quantum is really very good. This is the first time in a long time that I've been able to entertain switching browsers. It is at least on par with the speed of chrome, and since I'm moving from chrome, I'm not really missing any Firefox plugins too much. I've been able to port my most needed plugins from chrome's app store, and I'm using an "open in chrome" plugin to bridge the gap with hangouts so that I can have a reasonable workflow at work. It's been a pleasure to use!

I am currently also experiencing the awesomeness of tab containers. These things are a godsend, and I think they'll be in every browser before too much longer.

I have to say, I do feel that Mozilla has sacrificed some of its existing userbase to make a grab at Chrome's. It's worked in my case, but they've definitely upended the environments of a lot of people. I hope it pays off for them. For the first time in a long time though, Firefox feels really fast and innovative again. I look forward to my next phase of my browser life as an enthusiastic user.

<comment><USER12> I think I'm not the only who wished Tree Style Tabs was integrated as a default feature of Firefox. It's a primordial configuration to your browsing experience but it's been constantly stabbed and fixed at every update of Firefox.

<comment><USER13> Seems like Tree Style Tabs got ported to the WebExtensions version now! It still can't hide the tab bar (API will come in later releases) but it works!

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style- ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

There's also the Tree Tabs extension which I don't like as much.

<comment><USER14> [https://bugzil.la/1332447](https://bugzil.la/1332447) is the bug for adding a WebExtensions API for hiding the tab bar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We have a more developer focused article on the Hacks Blog at [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/09/firefox-quantum- developer-...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/09/firefox-quantum-developer- edition-fastest-firefox-ever/)

(Previous HN discussion was flagged as a dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15338795](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15338795))

<comment><USER16> Congratulations on the new release, it's really amazing!

I'm a web developer and nowadays I'm using a lot of React. I quite often end up switching to Chrome when I debug to get a useful error message/stack trace. Is this because Facebook has targeted Chrome or is it simply because Chrome has better error reporting? If the latter is the case, are you working on improving this?

<comment><USER17> If you notice things that React is doing worse in Firefox than Chrome, let us (React team) know – it's not intentional and we'll want to fix.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can throw my hat into the ring and attest to just how great 57 is. I can remember the Australis update coming out and receiving a mixed reaction, but I can't see this update receiving anything but praise. If you've been on Chrome for a while I'd definitely encourage you to try it out.

As a developer one small thing that's irked me is the recent removal of the ability for the dev tools to render html responses. There's an bug open here [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1350229](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1350229) but it seems to have stagnated. It seems like the functionality was removed on a hunch and it's not been added back in, meaning I have to head to Chrome to debug some ajax requests. This, and the lack of LastPass support are the only things holding it back for me.

<comment><USER19> Just as an aside, I used LastPass for a long time, and held on in discomfort for a while after their acquisition, but their inability to keep their Firefox plugin updated or even working finally convinced me to switch to 1Password. I couldn't be happier, and their Firefox extension is modern and well-done!

<comment><USER20> LastPass has announced that they will have their extension updated by the time 57 hits release. I'm not sure it's fair to expect them to have something for Beta even if their competitors do.

<comment><USER21> If you use firefox beta then it's fair to look for a product that supports your use case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have previously in several HN comments been vocal and adamant about leaving the Mozilla shipwreck before it foundered on the shoals of 57.

And I may have been wrong.

At long last there is meaningful information on addons.mozilla.org about what actually works now, and what doesn't. Looking nowhere near as bleak as it all sounded just a few months ago. I can have my uMatrix, I can have something Flagfoxish, I can open tabs by rightclicking links, I can have meaningful search from context menu. I can have something which doesn't look like Chrome. I may actually give the thing a chance.

<comment><USER23> I've been wanting to go back to Firefox as my "daily browser" for quite a while but performance was always the thing that made me switch back to Chrome everytime I tried FF.

I'm sitting on the deck with my iPad at the moment but when I go back in I'm gonna install one of these newer FF versions (probably nightly) on my primary workstation (Arch Linux) and give it a fair chance. That box has 16c/32t so I should see a huge improvement over the currently installed FF 55.

Hopefully it will be good enough to keep me on FF for good (extensions are my big concern, although I only use a few).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wow, it really is blazing fast, and just at a glance I like what they're doing with the dev tools. Unfortunately...

> Vimperator : "This add-on is not compatible with your version of Firefox."

Ouch. Guess I might need to wait a bit to make this my daily driver. All in all, though, I have to say I'm really glad to see Firefox is still solidly in this race - and with a kick ass and quite possibly superior product to boot.

edit :

I didn't realize at the outset that a FF57 version of Vimium was available (link provided by gogoengie) :

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium- ff/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/)

<comment><USER25> There's also Saka Key [ [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/saka- key/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/saka-key/) ] that has an vim keybindings mode. It looks like currently Vimium-FF cannot open new tabs...

<comment><USER26> Could you be more specific? I don't believe this is a known issue. If you're experiencing this behavior, you may want to report it: [https://github.com/philc/vimium/issues](https://github.com/philc/vimium/issues)

Personally, I'm running Firefox 55.0.3 with `vimium-ff` 1.6.0 (current build on addons.mozilla.org), and the `t` keybinding opens new tabs just like `Ctrl-t`. Command repetition also works (eg, `5t`).

<comment><USER25> Sorry, new tabs from links in background, using 'F'. Or at least with yesterday's version on ff58.0a1

<comment><USER26> Ah, cool. Yes, known bug. Reported fixed yesterday (though I've not tried it myself).

reported: [https://github.com/philc/vimium/issues/2510](https://github.com/philc/vimium/issues/2510)

closed with: [https://github.com/philc/vimium/pull/2602](https://github.com/philc/vimium/pull/2602)

I'm not familiar with their release cycle, so I don't know when it'll hit AMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I didn't try the new Firefox yet, but now the only thing possibly holding it back are its confusing menus and dialogs:

\- we have the artificial distinction between the hamburger menu, the traditional menu and several (Chrome-like) settings pages

\- yet, obviously, the New Page could function as the entry point to all of Firefox features: history, favorites, settings, customization, extensions. This would remove all clutter from the chrome, would be more discoverable, and would be easily touch compatible.

\- dialogs, really, who want out of window dialogs? If you start with the New Page, there is a full page to work with, and this also lets the user use Ctrl+F to search for any hard to spot options. It is also mobile friendly.

And lastly, every single time I download a .exe Firefox asks me what I want to do with it (I save it every time) and every time I click the checkbox that says "Do this every time". But the dialog nevertheless keeps returning, with this useless checkbox enabled, suggesting I didn't click it last time. Very irritating.

So I hope the new UI improves things, there's quite a lot to gain.

Despite these gripes, it is my default browser, and I'm increasingly impressed by the incredible work being done.

</comment><comment><USER28> Seeing some comments about Firefox vs Chrome on macOS below, here's my experience ...

After several years of using Chrome I've switched to Firefox and I'm not going back. I do occasionally use Chrome, like for Node.js profiling.

In terms of performance, Firefox has been behaving better than Chrome for my usage patterns, using less memory too. Usage patterns matter a lot though. For example Google's own apps (e.g. G Suite) tend to be optimized for Chrome, but I'm not using Google's apps that much.

Stability has been improving, e10s is finally here, we've got multi-processing and it's working. It's not so keen on starting one process per tab as Chrome, but I like that, as memory usage tends to be better.

I've liked the "sandboxing" of Chrome's extensions, having a permissions system that's better than nothing, however I trust Firefox's Add-ons more because Mozilla has a trustworthy review system in place. At the end of the day, when you give permissions to an Add-on for accessing your data _across all websites you visit_ , you can always get screwed with a simple and silent update from that developer and there have been countless of extensions on Chrome's store turned to spyware over night.

Either way, Firefox now has a permissions system in place, they've been introducing it gradually.

In terms of features, I love how natural the _Awesome Bar_ is when trying to go back to a page from history. This is in comparison with Chrome that makes you do more searches on Google. It also has had some great extensions for tab management, some of which are now broken due to the transition, but I'm pretty sure they'll become available again, because hackability is in Firefox's DNA. Consider that Firefox on Android has supported plugins (and ad blockers) from day 1, whereas Chrome still doesn't.

But overall, even if Firefox would be the worst one on the market, I would probably keep using it because it's the only browser whose makers have been looking after my interests as a user, for example being the only major browser that tried opposing DRM or patent encumbered video encoding.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Mozilla has a trustworthy review system in place

Note that they're switching the review system to a fully automated one (initially): [https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/09/21/review-wait- times...](https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/09/21/review-wait-times-get- shorter/)

It's still supposed to be trustworthy though, but I'm guessing Chrome's similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I just wish they would have filled in more missing APIs before mandating web extensions.

For example there is no way to do a gestures extension that doesn't rely on buggy DOM injection.

<comment><USER30> Yes, it's a real shame that it seems like they don't even care about extensions anymore, and therefore forces me to stay on the older versions and miss out on the new and welcome improvements. I'd be more ok with their switch to web extensions if they had included more powerful API:s, even if they're not available in other browsers.

My developer edition recently got upgraded to 57, and Greasemonkey stopped working. Reading what the developer writes it seems as they are going to rewrite the whole extension from scratch, with a lot of the functionality left out because it's no longer possible to do.

<comment><USER31> Theyve built a whole development model reliant on extensions (Test Pilot). They've made tremendous progress on enhancing the extensions API.

To say that they don't care about extensions doesn't seem to match the efforts you can see in the browser.

<comment><USER12> They def. don't care about Tree Style Tabs which is the reason number one a lot of people use Firefox.

<comment><USER15> There are functioning development builds of TST as a WebExtension. This is what it looked like last month: [https://i.imgur.com/IBx8F6L.png](https://i.imgur.com/IBx8F6L.png)

Not sure how that translates to "not caring."

Edit: Oh, hey, look, the WebExtension version has been published: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style- ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

<comment><USER12> 1) It's been constantly broken and re-fixed for years versions after versions

2) they do not reply to his requests or bugfiles

3) they could have made it a default in Firefox

<comment><USER15> And yet here it is, available and working as a WebExtension more than a month before legacy add-ons go away. The process may look opaque, but as far as results, I'm really not sure what more you want?

We moved to WebExtensions specifically to fix the problem of constant breakage. Sure, it adds a layer of abstraction, but there's finally an explicit interface that we can commit to supporting. The legacy APIs were a monkeypatching free-for-all that prevented us from landing even minor improvements or refactors for fear of potentially breaking some add-on somewhere. Now that we have that interface, we can refactor without breaking add-ons.

<comment><USER12> And it's broken again :/ this time it just plain doesn't work and I can see the vertical tabs again. This hasn't happened in years...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've been trying out the nightly versions of 57 and it's really fast. Would recommend people try out the Beta.

<comment><USER12> Is Tree Style Tab working on it? I've disabled updates until further notice.

<comment><USER33> Tree Style Tab is the killer feature for me and some of my scientist coworkers. If this disappears or doesn't work, I'll probably use Chrome.

<comment><USER34> Which would be a shame, now that Firefox is (IMHO) better than Chrome, once again :)

<comment><USER35> Are you kidding? It's like "Blackberry is better than iPhone once again, finally losing the keyboard".

The main and only distinctive feature of Firefox was programmability (XUL, XPCOM), and now it's gone. There are forks like PaleMoon and Waterfox though but for how long.

Firefox had to take that app-platform niche (thanks to XUL, XPCOM) that now occupies Electron, but failed on that chasing after Chrome.

<comment><USER36> No, it's not like that at all. Firefox's performance, memory usage, and UI all far outstrip Chrome's in my browsing now; I don't see any reason to use Chrome apart from the usual cross-browser testing, and it's been that way for a year (?) now.

(And Firefox "forks" have always been a very good way to be behind on security patches to no benefit.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Decided to give this a quick try and WOW! I'm blown away by how fast it is! The speed is incredible!

On the downside, two of the most important extensions I use (uMatrix and Enpass) don't work with this version of Firefox. It looks like they're both being updated to support it though, so it's just a matter of waiting til they get published or installing them by hand.

<comment> jean- Starting with 1.0.1b5, uMatrix is compatible with the latest Firefox: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/umatrix/versi...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/umatrix/versions/beta)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I like the fact that Mozilla is honest with the comparison test video and actually shows Chrome being faster than Firefox on a few sites (e.g., Instagram and YouTube).

<comment><USER39> It's interesting that, even in some cases where Chrome wins, Firefox starts rendering useful parts of the page sooner. Watch the rendering carefully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Love all the new quantum, rust, and servo work. I try to use Firefox exclusively, for the good of the web, and tell everyone to do likewise.

Only have a few issues with it. Frequently, I find that Firefox Sync doesn't remember that I'm logged in, particularly after updates, which come frequently.

Also, Firefox still requires a polyfill to use Web Components, although I realize that Mozilla has been working to ensure that the standard gets everything right, rather than just rushing right to approval. I don't know the status of all that, but I am hopeful that it will be all sorted out soon.

Also hope the churn with the extensions is coming to an end, but happy that the browser extensions standard is coming together. I prefer that it use an open standard.

I would also like to see gtk done away with, and a variant of browser.html used exclusively.

</comment><comment><USER41> > Firefox Quantum enhances Firefox's integration with Pocket, the read-it- > later app that Mozilla acquired last year. When you open a new tab, you'll > see currently trending web pages recommended by Pocket users so you won't > miss out on what's hot online, as well as your top sites.

That doesn't sound good. What are the reasons for having bloatware bundled in instead releasing them as separate add-on or installation option?

<comment><USER42> Pocket is now owned by Mozilla, and is going to be open sourced. What separates that from any other functionality built into the browser, for instance Firefox Sync or Autocomplete?

<comment><USER43> 1\. Firefox Accounts & Sync is a terrible mess. Its security is still broken[1] and it's insanely over-engineered[2].

I really wish it shouldn't have existed, and instead Mozilla would've focused on providing an API to build a synchronization service upon. And then, whatever - their services could've been an pre-bundled extension.

2\. I believe all of those SaaSes (i.e. Firefox Screenshots, too) shouldn't belong to the browser's _core_. Those could be distributed as pre-bundled extensions (which they actually are, but in a special way), but not as a part of the browser itself.

This is highly opinionated, though. I just feel that rather than a browser, Firefox is becoming something like a service platform. I don't like it for the same reasons I tend to value self-hosting over the dependence on others' services, and Free Software over non-free options. I recognize others may feel very differently and possibly even welcome that.

\---

[1] Authentication pages are still served from network, so if you use it - <USER2> trust Mozilla to not steal (or, better say, not be forced to steal) your password and the encryption keys. The protocol is stable for quite a while so I really don't know why they're still not fixing this.

[2] I wrote an alternative self-hosted Accounts & Sync implementation, so while I'm biased I sort of know what I'm talking about here. Four different authentication protocols (BrowserID, Hawk, OAuth2 and JWT), multiple non- standard HTTP headers, and the whole system just reeks of the NIH syndrome.

<comment><USER35> Add to this things like [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=812348](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=812348) and [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=814801](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=814801) to make the whole picture even worse.

Did you open-sourced your alternative self-hosted Accounts & Sync implementation?

<comment><USER43> Yes, of course. Although I can't vouch for its security and stability - <USER3> I use it myself and it seems to work OK, I'd rather state that it's risky. In short, the repo is more like a code dump, rather than a properly released project.

Still, here it is: [https://gitlab.com/drdaeman/firesync](https://gitlab.com/drdaeman/firesync)

Development is very sporadic, though - you can see it in commit history. And some parts of code feel dirty (in particular, I've made a bad design decision when trying to avoid implementing full-fledged OAuth2).

The repo lacks few things:

1) Notes about patched PyBrowserID. It's in the repo, and you can check the Dockerfile, but not in README.

2) Instructions on installing Kinto - another piece that is used to sync WebExtension settings[1]. It became mandatory with 57, without it sync fails and doesn't update "last synced" date (used to work in 56 and below). I'll add some instructions later, when I'll find time to do so.

\----

[1] BTW, this means that everyone who runs self-hosted Sync but not Accounts (relying on Mozilla tokens instead) are now storing parts of their data on Mozilla servers. I don't think this was ever announced, I've only learned about Kinto when my Firefoxes started to log errors in the browser console. If you self-host Sync-only and think you may be affected - <USER4> `webextensions.storage.sync.serverURL` value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Firefox, I love you, but you and my 15" rMBP (with 4k Dell external monitor) simply don't get along: [https://i.imgur.com/rByz7zS.png](https://i.imgur.com/rByz7zS.png)

I don't what causes this, but in the last 2 years it's gotten worse and with Quantum the CPU usage is even higher. Chrome and Safari don't have this issue.

<comment><USER45> I wonder if MacOS just isn't that much of a priority for Firefox? Popular but heavy sites like Facebook perform quite poorly relative to Chrome on my (admittedly quite old) early 2013 MBP, but the difference seems to vanish under Linux or Windows.

I'd love to switch to Firefox, I'm not that keen to be running a browser made by a gargantuan advertising agency.

<comment><USER46> > I wonder if MacOS just isn't that much of a priority for Firefox?

Hardly, most Mozilla people I've seen use a Mac, if anything, it's Linux that is a bit less of a priority it seems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Just updated my Firefox beta to 57. A few observations:

1\. It does feel snappier.

2\. Tabs UI looks ugly. Bigger elements than older design, more bulky. Sharp rectangular shapes of each tab UI element are standing out. It looks like a touchscreen UI to me, and it's wasteful on a desktop.

3\. It also completely disabled all common add-ons like Adblock Plus and Stylish. That's a BIG problem. Looks like Adblock Plus has a compatible beta version at least.

<comment><USER48> 2: Note you can select a smaller variant of all (default?) themes. Menu > Customise > Bottom left > compact.

3: There's quite a few alternative add-ons I've found thus far - uBlock Origin and Stylus. Sadly I was using Dark Background Light Text whixh has a webext port only in progress.

<comment><USER47> Thanks! Compact made it better, similar to how it was before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> More info about Firefox Quantum (aka Firefox 57) here: [https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/quantum/](https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/quantum/)

(Also appears to feature an updated logo.)

<comment><USER49> Is this a known issue?

[https://cl.ly/1b2O1g231m47/Screen%20Shot%202017-09-26%20at%2...](https://cl.ly/1b2O1g231m47/Screen%20Shot%202017-09-26%20at%2016.08.31.png)

I'm on High Sierra and the UI at the top seems to do something really really weird...

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't encountered this, but it'd be great if you could report it: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/)

Who knows, the fix might make it in time for the actual release.

<comment><USER49> Looks like it was already reported! [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1401957](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1401957)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> As a web developer, I use my browser all day. Speed, stability and feature support are crucial for me. Firefox hasn't been so great, lately.

I see the improvents coming with this update. I hope that's the beginning of Firefox catching up again.

Keep up the great work!

</comment><comment><USER51> I so wanted to use the new Firefox and switch from safari. I searched and was excited to learn there was an extension for integration with keychain on mac only to learn that it was no longer supported :(

I understand the push behind web extensions but I don't think there will ever be a keychain integration addon now.

<comment><USER52> fwiw there is nothing that web extensions lack that would prevent that from working

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/WebExtensions/Na...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/WebExtensions/Native_messaging) exists to allow web extensions to talk with programs on the computer, its up to someone to write the extension and executable for that usecase

<comment><USER13> The OnePassword extension already does this fwiw.

(The webextension might be in beta? When I installed it a month ago it was in "beta" and had to be installed directly from their site, idk if they've uploaded it to the store yet)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> It is a lot faster for me... so far, the most noticeable example is when using the back/forward buttons on Reddit (it used to reload the whole page every time) but more than half of the extensions that I use haven't been updated yet to work with Firefox 57. Looks like you can enable legacy extensions, about:config?filter=extensions.legacy.enabled, but it appears to be only for installed extensions (you can't add new ones).

<comment><USER54> does extensions.legacy.enabled actually work for you? I set it to true but lastpass is still disabled

<comment><USER53> No it didnt... but I started from a fresh profile and I thought that it was why

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Looks amazing. I hope I will finally be able to ditch Chrome!

<comment><AUTHOR> Try out the beta and let us know!

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> For people who use password managers, beware that lastpass's extension is not compatible with the new release. Found that out the hard way.

<comment><USER57> That seems more a failure on LastPass's part than Firefox's.

I say this as a LastPass user, they clearly don't give a rat's ass. They've known about the WebExtension requirement for, what, a year now? Somehow they're among the first apps to support Android Oreo's autofill API, yet they can't be bothered to update their Firefox extension.

It's a real pity. I like LastPass. I pay for it. I use their Secure Notes feature ALOT. But I may still have to switch if they can't get their act together.

<comment><USER56> Pretty much my thoughts exactly. I would probably have switched to 1password once they raised their prices, but at least my employer pays for lastpass for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> It is so fast. The last time i was this amazed was my first ride in a Tesla P85.

Excellent job Mozilla.

</comment><comment><USER59> I made the switch from Chrome to Firefox a couple of months ago primarily because of the open source and privacy aspects.

I have to say I was impressed by the speed improvements, and since I started using Firefox Nightly a couple months ago, it's gotten even faster. Only complaint is that I don't have a working LastPass plugin yet, though they claim they'll have it released by the time v57 is finalized.

I'd recommend anyone give it a try for a week or two and see what you think.

EDIT: I meant from Chrome to Firefox

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, it sounds like you meant "from Chrome to Firefox" :)

<comment><USER59> Oops, yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Is the idea here that they'll just keep switching out pieces written in C++ for Rust until all of Firefox is Rust, rather than launching a new product?

<comment><USER60> Not really. Parts of Firefox like Tracemonkey (or whatever they call the js engine now) aren't going to be rewritten because it would take a decade to do. I expect that Firefox will always be built more like a C++ project with Rust components than the other way.

That said "project quantum" is about improving the browser which applies to all of the code not just the Rust parts.

<comment><USER57> I see. The page didn't really go into specifics about _how_ they made Firefox Quantum faster, so I had assumed that it was faster because they were rewriting parts in Rust.

<comment><USER61> In part, it is because of a Rust component. A new CSS engine, Stylo, is shipping with 57 and that brought a noticeable performance improvement. In the foreseeable future there will also be WebRender, which should give an even bigger improvement, but that wasn't ready for 57.

Another big part is that they recently switched Firefox over to a multiprocess architecture (Firefox 48) and these performance improvements are now mostly optimizations that are now possible due to this architecture. Basically offloading all kinds of slower operations into a background thread. The optimizations are all over the place, mostly of smaller nature, but taken together they make a big difference.

And a third point is the new UI. It is partially really just more efficient, partially uses animations and such to trick your brain into thinking that things are faster, and then it also now has "tab warm-up", which basically means that when you hover with your mouse over a tab, it already starts loading in that tab, so that it's instantly there when you click.

<comment><AUTHOR> > it also now has "tab warm-up", which basically means that when you hover > with your mouse over a tab, it already starts loading in that tab, so that > it's instantly there when you click.

They actually removed that again for now due to instability, IIRC it's slated to arrive in Firefox 58.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> So I kind of rely on Xmarks since I have to run on multiple browsers, and afaik it's still the only cross-platform sync system. Unfortunately it's also pretty much abandonware and highly unlikely to get ported to WebExtensions :/ Is there anything else out there that has similar functionality that would be compatible?

<comment><USER15> WebExtensions started with Chrome API compatibility as a base, so you may be able to just download the Chrome version's .crx file, unpack it, and run it in Firefox, perhaps with some minor tweaks.

You can upload the CRX to [https://www.extensiontest.com/](https://www.extensiontest.com/) to check if it's likely to be compatible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I didn't believe the metrics, I downloaded it, I feel like Im browsing the web in the fast lane.

</comment><comment><USER64> Are there any plans to have Firefox throttle background tabs? This is one feature from Chrome that is currently stopping me from switching. It's very useful for laptops with lots of open tabs. The current rate of progress is definitely impressive though.

<comment><USER15> Yes. Much of that work began landing in Firefox 55, and there's more to come. We also more aggressively throttle scripts that are sourced from domains on our tracking protection blacklist, so tracking / advertising scripts won't be able to ruin your experience.

<comment><USER64> Thank you and keep up the excellent work! I look forward to trying it out (and at some point switching).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Been using Developer Edition for a few months now. A few hiccups here and there, but overall running well! It's cool to see performance gains with each update, really speaks to how much work the Firefox team has been putting in lately.

</comment><comment><USER66> >Firefox Quantum feels right at home with today's mouse and touch-driven operating systems: Windows 10, macOS High Sierra, Android Oreo, and iOS 11.

What about Linux?

<comment><USER67> Linux is not a touch-driven operating system as far as I know. There are so many issues with touch in Linux that I don't even know where to start.

But.. that's not what you were getting at, just a tiny rant ;(

<comment> yoz-y macOS does not support touch at all though

<comment><USER60> macOS supports touch really well, you're just expected to touch a pad not a screen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Bit of an issue for anyone with a touchscreen: No smooth zooming [0].

I eventually switched to firefox regardless, but the issue has been unassigned for five years. Chrome, Edge and Firefox Android have had this feature for as long as I can remember.

[0] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=789906](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=789906)

</comment><comment><USER69> That video in the post seems to show Chrome is still significantly faster in half of the tests shown there. How is that possible? From what Servo was initially promising (even 3-4x the speed of old Firefox), it didn't look like Chrome would come close either.

Did they make that many compromises when "porting parts from Servo" to Gecko? What's hurting Firefox's performance so much that even after implementing Electrolysis and now Quantum, it still can't be a clear winner over Chrome in performance? Is it simply a matter of Google "being ahead" in performance tuning and having more engineers, etc, or is there something fundamentally wrong with Firefox's codebase compared to Chrome's codebase?

I wish Mozilla was more committed to rewriting Firefox in Rust. Or perhaps it would be better to have it as a completely new project, like they did with Firefox Focus, which by the way to me it seems faster than Firefox + ublock origin on Android, even though it only blocks trackers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess it mostly comes down to "performance is difficult, and optimisations for one use case might cause regressions for another".

Note, though, that there's still more to come [1].

Also, I guess the state of Servo can tell you what a tremendous effort rewriting is, and why that would still take quite a while to finish.

[1] "Project Quantum: There's more to come" at [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/09/firefox-quantum- developer-...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/09/firefox-quantum-developer- edition-fastest-firefox-ever/)

<comment><USER70> I look forward to seeing the rest land, but that video, while impressively fair, didn't really leave me excited to install Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> This is very nice. I have always _wanted_ to use Firefox because a web built much for the community is best used on a browser built by the community with no corporate influences such as trying to push their own "web platform". It's just that it has felt far too bulky compared to Chrome.

But yeah, this is quite workable, and Quantum WebRender hasn't even landed yet. By Firefox 60 we should have even more substantial (i.e. noticeable) improvements.

It's scrolling very smoothly, and the browser rendering sites doesn't seem to impact typing into the adress bar much. It elegantly passes my personal little stress test with multiple Periscope tabs running at once, something that near killed Firefox 56. Honestly it doesn't even really flinch, and that's on an aging laptop, but an 8 core at that, so I guess the Quantum components so far in Firefox are happy about this.

</comment><comment><USER72> I would love switching but the only thing preventing me is the lack of profiles like Chrome has. Containers is not the same as you can't have different extensions for each container like chrome has for each profile.

For example, I have 2 LP accounts one for home and one for work and there's no way to use both of then at the same time in FF

<comment><USER15> about:profiles -> launch in new browser

More info about profiles at [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile- manager-create-...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager- create-and-remove-firefox-profiles)

<comment><USER72> Didn't know about this. It's still not nearly as convenient as Chrome. Hard to switch profiles, hard to distinguish which window is which profile.

<comment><USER15> I agree that the UX isn't anywhere as seamless as Chrome's, though I've seen add-ons that attempt to fill that niche. Hopefully we'll revisit it once containers are done.

Personally, I'm on Linux most of the time, so I just bind a hotkey to `firefox --ProfileManager --new-instance` and I'm off to the races. On Windows, I tend to add shortcuts to the taskbar for each profile.

Nevertheless, the capability _is_ there. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> It has MRU tab switch ordering!!! Oh wait, Firefox already had that, I just didn't care because it was.. Firefox. Now that it is faster, I care. If either of those is missing I don't care about the browser. It needs to offer MRU tab switching, and be fast, and be compatible with most websites, or at least with web standards so that the websites will eventually be compatible with it. Wait, that was like 3 or 4 things... Anyway, my point is, JUST ADD MRU TO CHROME ALREADY so I can stop caring about which browser I'm using and just always use Chrome, please. This is the place where you make a wish and it comes true right?

</comment><comment><USER74> Can someone more in the know explain if this uses webrender or not? I thought that it did...

I have to admit that I'm not super impressed with the results here. Based on the talk that pcwalton did: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erfnCaeLxSI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erfnCaeLxSI) I was expected it not to just be a little faster than Chrome, but to, like, double the speed, or more.

Is it that these are just not good candidates for showing how much faster than webrender can be? Or has Firefox slowed it down vs. in Servo maybe?

<comment><USER75> WebRender, last I heard, is targeting 58. It's certainly not in this release.

I use it in nightly via the config flag; it is pretty great but there are still some glitches from time to time.

<comment><USER74> Actually Nightly is what I'm using. Is there a page where I can see the types of speed advantages that pcwalton showed off in his talk?

<comment><USER74> Oh sorry, you said config flag, I haven't tried this yet.

<comment><USER75> There are multiple; I forget which one is "real" WebRender and I'm on my phone so I can't check.

Last I was looking at this, the big WebRender flag wasn't expected to be faster due to the specific way it was integrated, you need the more aggressive setting to get pure WebRender.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Running Safari 11 on High Sierra and got a 90 on the speedometer 2.0 test referenced. Why are they bragging about a 66?

For reference, ran the test with Firefox Quantum on the same machine and got a 68.

<comment><USER77> I get 35.82 on Safari 11 on El Capitan. What is your hardware? I wonder if I'm slower because I'm on older hardware, because I'm on an older version of OS X, or both?

My hardware is a Mac Pro (Early 2009), 2.66 GHz quad core Xeon, 32 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC RAM, GeForce GT 120 512 MB.

What I get:

      35.82  Safari 11.0 (11604.1.38.1.7)
      34.89  Firefox 57.0b3
      32.01  Chrome 47.0.2526.106
      31.44  Firefox 58.0a1
      26.77  Firefox 55.0.3

I also for comparison gave it a shot on my Surface Pro 4 (Core i7, 2.2 GHz, 16 GB RAM, Intel Iris 540 GPU).

Here are the results for Chrome 60.0.3112.113. Since I was running on battery I tried this at various power mode settings. Here are the results for Chrome 60.0.3112.113 arranged by power mode setting:

      70.18  Best performance
      69.61  Best performance (2nd time)
      68.03  Better performance
      50.84  Recommended
      41.33  Battery saver

There are two runs of "Best performance" because I did the tests in the order best, better, recommended, battery saver, and so all but the first may have benefited from caching from the previous. I ran best again after finishing battery saver to get a run of best that would have the same caching benefit the other may have received.

For Firefox 57.0b3 I get:

      54.34  Best performance
      58.91  Best performance (2nd time)
      57.91  Better performance
      40.51  Recommended
      34.28  Battery saver

Edge on best performance gave 34.69.

<comment><USER76> I'm on a iMac 2017 with a 3.8ghz i5, so yeah it might due to the newer hardware.

Interesting that Firefox still scores roughly the same as Safari and Chrome on your machine too. I don't understand why they'd make this big fuss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Firefox 57 is quite impressive in terms of speed and the fancy new animations, but unfortunately downgraded back to 56 because none of the extensions I use have WebExtension variants for some reason? May look for alternatives at some point but its so sad to see extensions like "Strict Popup Blocker" go because of lacking API support. Really hope Firefox can work things out with these extension developers in due time because this extension is a must-have for me.

</comment><comment><USER79> Any idea how I can get rid of that title bar that sits on top of the tab bar? In the demo I saw it's not present or it may have been cut from it. Linux

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's not possible yet (but soon): [https://twitter.com/Sesivany/status/908628645299748865](https://twitter.com/Sesivany/status/908628645299748865)

That said, if you use GNOME Shell, the Pixel Saver extension is great for me: [https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/723/pixel- saver/](https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/723/pixel-saver/)

<comment><USER80> Yay! This was my current rabbit hole trying out the new dev edition. That and trying to hide the tab strip after installing tab-center redux.

Was using ~cryptic setting in Hide Caption Title Bar Plus to accomplish this, but it not ported yet.

I'll give it to them though it does seem fast.

<comment><AUTHOR> People seem to report a modification of userChrome.css to hide the tab bar: [https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/issues/1224#issuecomm...](https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/issues/1224#issuecomment-333048630)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Using a Core2 Duo E7500 (Q1'09) and this is a noticeable improvement; but I still find chrome faster in that the GUI doesn't stall. Firefox locks up when typing into a new tab's address bar. Still using Firefox (55) as the daily driver even though I have to kill it about 8 times a day. FF 57 does fix the need to kill Firefox but then a couple of the plugins I use are not supported anymore.

</comment><comment><USER82> Hopefully this will also trickle on down to the qbrt project and we'll have an electron alternative* that's faster and uses less RAM

*a JavaScript one

<comment><USER67> I'm kind of curious to see about an electron alternative using Servo in a year or two

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> I downloaded FF Quantum this morning and used it throughout the day, and anecdotally I can say it feels a lot faster than Chrome for casual web surfing.

That said, speed is only one of a number of factors I consider when choosing a browser, and between the horrible UI and lack of compatible extensions, I'm sticking with Chrome for the time being.

</comment><comment><USER84> Still no live javascript editing, like Chrome scripts tab? This is a major setdown that prevents me from using Firefox. Chrome has that since so many years that I can't believe Firefox still hasn't got it. I think the latest Firefox releases are fast and good as browsers.. but as a developer, that's a showstopper.

<comment><USER85> I've always seen this feature, but never used it. How does it work? I'm curious if this works well with nodejs build systems, or if this only works with "workspaces" (does souce maps allow this?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> I've been extremely happy with Firefox's recent transformation. I was using Edge for a while as my primary browser, because it was definitively the fastest and it was worth tolerating a couple of bugs in exchange. But I'd put Firefox now as being more or less as performant, and that's before Quantum.

</comment><comment><USER87> Couldn't the minor speed differences in the comparison video [1] in the post be attributed to the variable latencies of server responses? Or is that accounted for somehow?

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIywpvHewc0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIywpvHewc0)

<comment><USER87> FWIW, this is the tool they used: [https://github.com/WPO- Foundation/webpagetest](https://github.com/WPO-Foundation/webpagetest)

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Can you enlighten me what's the thing with the developer edition?

It seems to have features that the standard edition doesn't have. But does the standard edition have feature the dev edition doesen't?

Or are there some different features? Any of them reason not to use the dev edition in daily browsing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Dev edition is regular Firefox beta with some other defaults (theme, developer options). The only reason you might not want to use it is because the stability guarantees are less strong than for stable, but in practice, it probably runs stable enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> One thing that stops me switching from Chrome is the multiple profiles and easy profile switching in Chrome. I have work and personal profiles and then other profiles for different roles I use in testing web applications. Last time I checked it wasn't at all convenient to do this in Firefox.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi- account...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account- containers/)

<comment><USER89> Thanks, not compatible with the new firefox beta, but thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> It says at the top:

> Note: Firefox 57+58 users should Install from our latest GitHub Release [1]

[1] [https://outgoing.prod.mozaws.net/v1/dc0c83a8fa9601d8fa71a456...](https://outgoing.prod.mozaws.net/v1/dc0c83a8fa9601d8fa71a4560a1055ad954f070fc607b05d7db2f36474856676/https%3A//github.com/mozilla/multi- account-containers/releases/latest)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> So that benchmark video I assume shows loading from local disk (because if network then not a fair benchmark)? If that's the case, most websites seem to take 8+ seconds and often around 30? Doesn't this seem insane? It also doesn't seem to match my daily experience but I'm not using a stopwatch.

</comment><comment><USER91> And I'm just sitting here wondering if they'll ever share some love with the Android version.

</comment><comment><USER92> I am still with Safari as my main browser for battery life and performance on Mac. Does anyone have insights how Firefox currently compares? I can't touch Chrome without sacrificing at least an hour of battery life from my day

</comment><comment><USER93> Might switch to Fox, but only with full support for Chrome extensions. Last time I checked - most of them didn't work on Nightly (can install with chrome store foxify, but most of the functionality is dead).

<comment><USER15> Feel free to reach out to those add-on authors and suggest they port to Firefox. It should be pretty much painless at this point, and we even have an online linter at [http://extensiontest.com/](http://extensiontest.com/) that should give them a good idea of what work needs to happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> Does anyone know what happened to that new tab groups feature? It allowed you to be logged into a site with different users in different tabs. I was just getting to trying it out when it disappeared.

<comment><USER95> It can be enabled with extension.

[https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers](https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> I've been using Nightly as much as I can, but with the dev tools open sometimes it likes to take a 30 second break before sending a request. I really tried. FF- see you in another 6 months.

</comment><comment><USER97> Quantum has been broken for me for at least a month. Everytime I click on the right mouse button it goes to the previous page. It never happened on any browser before including Firefox.

<comment><USER34> That looks weird. Have you filed a bug?

Also, just in case, have you tried without extensions? Because that looks like something that a misbehaving WebExtension could easily do.

<comment><USER97> I have no WebExtensions installed.

I sent a feedback but I'll file a bug report right now.

edit: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1403187](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1403187)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> Is there a way to disable screenshot feature all together windows provide winkey+shift+s so i don't some javascript keep taking screenshot and upload.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just not clicking the screenshot button is probably the least amount of effort ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> Edge is still the most responsive browser for me when I'm connected to a remote Windows desktop through a shaky 3g cellular connection.

</comment><comment><USER47> Dark theme of the developers tools became too dark (almost black). Is the older gray/steel color theme still available?

</comment><comment><USER100> NOTE: This update is going to be incompatible with all the legacy add-ons. Happened with me. Though, the update's nice.

</comment><comment><USER101> I heard that the mobile and desktop versions of firefox are different. Is 57 going to be the same engine on both?

<comment><USER75> My understanding is that this is only about the desktop, with android coming later. And iOS can't use Gecko, so it doesn't count with this kind of thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> That's neat. However, my Firefox v55.0.3 crashes on a regular basis. I'd really love to switch back but...

</comment><comment><USER103> Since we're on the subject, can anyone recommend a good hacker news formatted that works with quantum?

</comment><comment><USER104> This is all awesome but... Does it run natively on Wayland yet? If not, how does it perform on Xwayland?

</comment><comment><USER105> Cool does it have support for Shadow DOM?

</comment><comment><USER106> How does it compare with Safari on Macs?

</comment><comment><USER102> That's all good. However, my current Firefix Stable: v.55.0.3 crashes on a regular basis. I'd really live to switch back, after all these Chrome years.

<comment><USER107> Have you sent in the crash reports? Go to about:crashes and post some URLs of crash reports here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> > The new, minimalist design introduces square tabs

 __WILD APPLAUSE __

</comment><comment><USER109> > No other browser can do this.

Every other browser can, they just don't as of now.

<comment><USER110> Oh boy, I'll bite.

As you're probably well aware, several words in the english language have more than a single authoritative meaning. The version of 'can' they were probably using is: "Used to indicate possession of a specified capability or skill".

If the others do not currently possess that ability, then they cannot.

<comment><USER109> well I hope so, because I strongly dislike the notion that only some software "can".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER111> This a most pointless decision. making firefox fast at the expense of the extensions.

why would it make people switch back to FF? because it's 1% faster than chrome? come on, it's 2k17 and few care about that. Edge might be faster than both and people still would not use it. FF had its selling point to power users which is why i'm currently browsing from ff.

Now there is no reason at all to use it. I guess there is no reason not to use it either however i think people will go with the bigger brand name. Maybe power users will switch to some more niche browser. Maybe everyone will go to chrome.

<comment><USER112> The two issues are separate -- they didn't change the extensions system to make Firefox fast, they changed the extensions system because the old extensions system was a security nightmare.

<comment><USER61> It does actually play into performance, too. The new multiprocess architecture requires that extensions get updated to be compatible with it. It is possible to achieve that in the old extension API, but every single extension author would have to do that, which is just not ever going to happen.

Otherwise, if you install a multiprocess-incompatible extension, Firefox will essentially fall back into single-process whenever that extension does something. So, then a good portion of the extensions on AMO would come with severe, for the user inexplicable performance problems. Mozilla would have just not rolled that out without knowing that the switch to WebExtensions will clean that all up.

Well, and then besides that there's also the points that 1) the old extension API is quite complex, so it's comparatively hard for extension authors to write an extension, especially also qualitatively good extension, 2) the old extension API was really unstable, basically whenever Mozilla changed something about Firefox, some extensions broke, and 3) with the new extension API being based on Chrome's extension API, it becomes often trivial to port Chrome extensions to Firefox, making it much more likely that Firefox will continue to have extensions even if Chrome continues to eat up market share.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER113> If you want to try these performance improvements (servo, e10s) but keep legacy add-on compatibility (at least for now) I suggest installing firefox 56, disabling auto-updates, and making the following changes/additions in about:config

browser.tabs.remote.autostart true browser.tabs.remote.force-enable true layout.css.servo.enabled true

This way I get to keep my Tree Style Tab, Lastpass, and a few other add-ons that haven't yet been ported to WebExtensions.

Convenient FTP link, since it seems right now the automated installers are jumping between versions 55 and 57: [https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/56.0b12/](https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/56.0b12/)

<comment><USER75> Elsewhere in the thread it's stated that Tree Style Tabs has shipped a 57-compatible version, and that LastPass will be ready by the time this all hits stable.

<comment><USER113> True. I did in fact have to explicitly downgrade TST to the <57-compatible version. The new version apparently doesn't yet support hiding the tab bar across the top of the browser.

<comment><USER114> I think the API for hiding the tab bar hasn't landed yet. You can do that with userChrome.css for now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER115> I think they should rebrand the browser entirely. I want to try this but imagining the Firefox logo on my computer makes me sick to my stomach - reminding me of a time when my browser crashed constantly and slowed to a crawl if I had 5+ tabs open.</comment>


Memex Aims to Create a New Paradigm for Domain-Specific Search - <AUTHOR> http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2014/02/09.aspx

<comment><USER2> Not a single picture other than some imaginary desk from the 40's. !?

</comment><comment><USER3> LoAaaS

Library-of-Alexandria-as-a-Service</comment>


My father, the philosopher - <AUTHOR> http://thehairpin.com/2015/03/my-father-the-philosopher/

<comment><USER2> Is it considered "ok" now to refresh a page after a few minutes just to get fresh ads? I was in the middle of a sentence and the entire page reloaded and scrolled to the top. I lost my place.</comment>


Show HN: Dynamic Charts library built upon D3 - <AUTHOR>

I made a little library to make it easier having dinamically filled charts. The goal of the library is making your life easier; it is not too elaborate from a graphic point of view, but every chart Object can be easily extended trough inheritance. There are four kind of charts at the moment: 3 histogram charts and a wheel shaped one.
All the charts objects support multidimensional data, have plenty of built-in methods to change style-related details, such as colors, as well as modifying preferences about labels. legend, title, and deciding whether each subcomponent of a multidimensional dataset should be scaled according to global or local maximum.
For 3 out of 4 charts requires that the maximum amount of values that can be represented at the same time is fixed on construction; it is therefore possible to set how much of the oldest data should be discarded when the chart is full, in order to draw new data (or, by default, the chart will discard all of the new data passed)
Finally, the function used to validate data can be set at run time, allowing to make the chart able to accept JSON data or any other format.
Please feel free to take a look at the showcase
http://bl.ocks.org/4340039 http://bl.ocks.org/4339162
and possibly to fork it on github:
https://github.com/mlarocca/Dynamic-Graphs
JSDocs coming right away. <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for correcting the link.

Documentation is now ready (thanks to YUIDoc <http://yui.github.com/yuidoc/>)

You can find it here: <http://mlarocca.github.com/Dynamic-Charts>

<comment><AUTHOR> Version 0.2 released: check for improvements <https://github.com/mlarocca/Dynamic-Graphs> <http://bl.ocks.org/4340039> <http://bl.ocks.org/4339162>

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> correct link: <https://github.com/mlarocca/Dynamic-Charts></comment>


Show HN: FUSE filesystems in Emacs Lisp - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vkazanov/elfuse <comment><USER3> I've thought about FUSE filesystems before, as a way to express a data container based language (such as APL, SmallTalk, MUMPS, etc.) as a Unix/Linux filesystem. Basically as a tool to expose the internal data and allow external tools the ability to process the data. Is there anything written that might talk about PROs and CONs in the design process for these?

<comment><USER4> Only tangentially related, but my favourite example of exposing (albeit simple) internal data as a filesystem is FrexxEd. FrexxEd is an AmigaOS editor co-written (in C) by the creator of curl back in the 90's that makes all open buffers accessible as a filesystem.

It was particularly compelling back then when saving a buffer to a temporary file in worst case could involve swapping floppies, but I've always liked the elegance of being able to call external tools and let them read the buffer directly.

I'd imagine the major con in general is that if you want to use it to actually operate on the data, lots of files is slow (open, read/write/seek, close cycle involves many context switches), but making _structured_ data accessible as few files means structured files and potentially complicated locking - <USER2> FrexxEd example above is close to the ideal case in terms of simplicity of exporting the data in an efficient way.

<comment><USER5> I was also about to mention the Amiga, but I remember something else: filesystem drivers for ZIP and LHA-files.

You would just cd into the file and the rest was magic. I've always missed that feature since moving to the PC.

In lots of ways, AmigaOS was way ahead of its time.

<comment><USER6> This resonated with me somehow, despite never using AmigaOS... And then I realized TotalCommander can also treat archives as folders (aside from solid RARs, I suppose).

<comment><USER5> While that is true, that was an _application-level_ implementation.

With an OS-level file-system implementation, I could in any application just double-click a ZIP file, open a GIF or JPG inside it, make my changes and save back and the ZIP was now updated.

It was one of those small things which made a huge difference in the user- experience.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Biggest of Puzzles Brought Down to Size - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/science/31angi.html <comment><USER2> Interesting if not slightly fluffy article. Unfortunately, the author decided to use calories as a unit of energy in one of the examples to compare gasoline energy content and human energy consumption. While the numbers are correct, the use of the 'calorie' for a non-dietary energy unit actually equivalent to a kcal, is disappointing.

America may learn numerical literacy but it seems unlikely they'll be able to apply it to many problems without a system of units that doesn't require knowledge of arbitrary conversion ratios or ambiguous magnitudes.</comment>


Nokia, Siemens and Iran: When technology gets bloody - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/basheerakhan/100000089/nokia-siemens-and-iran-when-technology-gets-bloody/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure NSN did anything wrong here.

[http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com/global/Press/Press%20rel...](http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com/global/Press/Press%20releases/news- archive/Provision%20of%20Lawful%20Intercept%20capability%20in%20Iran.htm)

<comment><USER3> Legally, they did nothing wrong. But ethically and morally? They probably didn't expect the blowback they are receiving now. But I do think it is warranted. When companies do business with oppressive regimes then they reap what they sow. Sure the deal was done probably years before the election took place. But did it not occur to anyone involved that these people, "the Ahmidenijad government", aren't good guys.

20 years ago, Nike got dragged over the nails because the companies they contracted with were using child labor and using inhuman working conditions. Legally, they did nothing wrong but the bad press made them take note that their involvement wasn't 100% guilt free. They paid a moral cost and now go out of their way to remind people that they don't use sweatshop labor.

Hopefully, this will remind Nokia, Siemens, and NSS that there is a human cost in every business transaction.

<comment><USER4> Siemens should already know this: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2233890.stm>

It's particularly disappointing for a company with that kind of history to continue unethical behavior.

<comment><USER2> Godwin!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I never fully understood how citizens of such countries expect to remain anonymous on the internet.

The explanation "if you build the network for somebody, you also give them monitoring tools" sounds plausible to me.

</comment><comment><USER6> All I get is "Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.". The Telegraph seems to have retracted the post ... It's in Google's history, but doesn't seem to be cached.

<comment><AUTHOR> UPDATE: It's back up now.

<http://twitter.com/Bash/status/2342437314>

"Yes, my latest Telegraph post about Nokia and Siemens' involvement in Iran has been pulled. Updates as I have them."

Wonder what's going on there... Do you have a link to the cache for others to read?</comment></comment>


Meet the new AdSense user interface - <AUTHOR> https://adsense.googleblog.com/2016/10/meet-new-adsense-user-interface.html <comment><USER2> Certainly wish I could explore it, but unfortunately, when I was first learning as a web developer, I had installed Adsense and unfortunately, had it in some areas that it probably didn't need to be. Lifetime banned. Fortunately, it forces you to figure out other ways to be creative in advertising. While you may not be getting money from Google.. Google isn't exactly getting money from you, either, so it works both ways I suppose, or doesn't work.. they don't really care.</comment>


I had a geek friend - <AUTHOR> http://ilostmyego.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/geek-friend/

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have any remarks, im here. What do you think about it, tell me.</comment>


Observations on Technology Use by Dementia / Alzheimer's Patients - <AUTHOR>

A recent personal experience has proven to me that there is an underserved market for people who develop dementia, Alzheimer's, and other related neurological disorders.  These diseases can strike people in a broad range of ages and seemingly wipe out the ability to use more modern technologies.  Someone who previously had the ability to use cell phones, computers, etc. can rapidly degrade to the point where extraneous buttons and touchscreens (for example) make a device overwhelming and completely useless.  As we struggled with my mother-in-law this afternoon because she was overwhelmed by too many buttons on her cordless phone and TV remote, it seems to me that there is still room for simple devices that can assist a struggling user.<p>Does anyone have any similar experiences or thoughts on this subject? <comment><USER2> I agree with your observation. I will add that habits formed before Dementia struck are more or less intact (for instance, the patient can log into their hotmail with the password already stored). The inability to learn new things just means that no new passwords can be learned, and no new environments can be learned. It would be great to develop habits before the dementia gets full blown. Like the habit of going to a particular location each day and updating one's life every morning (like 50 first dates).

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting. I wonder if that is a difference between the disease processes of dementia and Alzheimer's. I am noticing a marked regression in my mother-in-law's ability to function with normal tasks, whereas my grandmother who had dementia was able to perform certain activities well (although she didn't know why).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does a founder judge quality if they can't code? - <AUTHOR>

I am the founder of a small Canadian based startup which is currently in development.  My background is business/economics and the project I am developing is a social network.  I'm doing this startup by myself and with my own investment 30K.  I'm not a techie so I shopped around for a company which I could hire to do the development. I eventually settled on an Indian company with a good track record of developing social networks.
So far I've been very pleased with the company's work and they have done an awesome job in the design phase. But during the design phase I have been managing the Indian team, to ensure quality, that they are meeting the project requirements, and make sure they understand what it is I'm trying to create.  But in about a month, starting in January we are going to be finished with designs and move into programming.
Here is my problem: Once we get into programming, I no longer have the ability to judge quality and make sure they are meeting the project requirements. I pretty much know zero about coding so if I looked at some amazing code and some awful code side-by-side, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.  This is a really dangerous position for me to be in because I'll be making decisions that I have no qualification to be making. I'm not going to sit back let the company do whatever they want and I'm also not going to try and manage the technical side either. I've been talking to other startup guys and they all recommend getting either a CTO, consultant or a tech cofounder.  The issue of course is money/equity. I don't like the idea of giving a huge portion of my company to a cofounder or CTO. Plus I don't know any. I'm favoring bringing on a consultant who I can pay an hourly or flat fee to do some project management for me. My project isn't huge, only 30K fixed price (10k design, 20K coding). And all I really need is a tech guy to come in and look at the code make sure it's good and make sure the company I hired is doing things properly.
Everyone I've talked to says I need to bring in a tech cofounder who is a rockstar to do the coding for me.  But I just don't get it. I already have development team, and I shouldn't assume they write shitty code just because it's outsourced. But I do need someone to check it for me.  I agree I eventually need a rockstar development team but if I bring in cofounders after beta instead of before they will be taking a much lower equity stake. Right now I don't need a developer capable of programing artificial intelligence. I just need good quality programing so I can launch the beta, test it in market and then develop the amazing technology behind it if its accepted by consumers.Because you can have the most amazing technology in the world but if people don't like the product, then there is no point.<p>Am I wrong? Any suggestions how I can fix this without giving away a huge portion of my company to a stranger, or going broke paying a consultant? Any advice is welcome. Thanks. <comment><USER2> I am also a not a techie who is founding a startup. Fortunately, I was in the position to be able to hire 2 developers locally to bring on my team from the get-go. I didn't give up any equity but if things go well, they will be rewarded. If I was not in the financial position to pay them well, I would have definitely given up equity for the right developers to come in.

If you are starting a web-based company, then code is what makes your tick. It's not like you're selling widgets in a brick and mortar store and you throw a website up to sell more widgets. In that case a website is an add-on to your business. If you are developing a web based application like a social network then that website IS your business. You need to have that core competency of the design and development in-house and not outsource it.

If you're having trouble finding the right local developer, try looking for local freelancers. I would suggest seeing if there is a local coworking office where freelance designers/developers work. Ask if any of them are willing to work on a project at a reduced rate with some equity that vests after a certain amount of time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thxs for the feedback. It sounds like you were in the same position as me, your a non-techie and you hired developers. The only difference was geography, your developers were local whereas mine are overseas. So how did you address the quality issue? How did you know what the developers were giving you was actually good stuff? I can't assume that just because I outsourced to India that the code they write is going to be worse then what a US developer would do. In fact if I stayed with a US developer I would have the exact same problem. Whether the developer I hire is in the US, India, Canada etc, problem is still sorting the good from the bad. I'm just saying local does not equal good programming. With any developer you aways go through the same stages, checking experience, references, past projects etc but in the end it comes down to trust (which I have in my team) and verification (which I don't have). How should I get the verification? How did you verify your developer's work?

<comment><USER2> True, local doesn't equal quality. I guess the difference was that by going local, I was able to verify the quality of my developer's work by people I trusted rather than from people I didn't know. What's more important, the endorsement of a respected businesses person, designer, or developer that you personally know and respect their work, or the endorsement of a random person that someone lists as a reference? The back end developer that I hired was a speaker at a regional conference, seemed to have the respect of the web community that I was looking to enter (Rails development and MailChimp-esque design and UI,) and had glowing references from web designers and developers that I knew at least as acquaintances. These designers and developers were actually clamoring to use him for freelance stuff before I hired him. If this is the route you want to take, I would suggest networking within your local web design community and go to events.

If you want to go the other route, listen to/watch the podcast on Mixergy.com from Nov. 24 on Beanstalk. That guy used a distributed team across the world to do development for his company. The big difference is that he was already a developer.

<comment><AUTHOR> cool thanks a lot for the info

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Totally agree with znt after starting a co without learning to code (now working on Zed Shaw's Python guide, which is awesome).

Learn to code. IF you don't, and even if you successfully find a tech cofounder/lead engineer, you'll know so little about dev that you'll be wasting everyone's time during project management meetings and/or have no idea what's going on at your startup.

I looked for a tech cofounder for 9 mos. I could have/should have been learning to code at that time. It establishes basic cred you'll need.

And if you're not willing to learn to do that, ask yourself if you're really ready to do a startup, where you'll have to learn painful new skills on a near-daily basis.

</comment><comment><USER4> You can start learning how to code, not for this startup but the one after this one. Also having a cofounder helps a lot, it validates your idea first of all.

Maybe, instead of asking us "How do I keep my company / money to myself", you should ask yourself "Do I want all of something that is unvaluable or a part of something invaluable?"</comment>


Android 11 - <AUTHOR> https://www.android.com/android-11/ <comment><USER2> Wow, the bubbles feature is really interesting. They standardized Facebook Messenger's chat bubbles (the best part of Messenger imo). Pretty awesome to be able to have chats from many different apps accessible in the bubbles.

<comment><AUTHOR> They were a little buggy in Beta 3, we'll see if they ironed them out before release!</comment></comment>


Keeping People - <AUTHOR> http://zachholman.com/talk/keeping-people <comment><USER2> This slide set didn't touch on the most important factor for me: Your Manager.

Having a micromanaging || incompetent || tyrannical || condescending || squeezing (as in trying to get the last drop out of you) manager is the quickest way to show me the door.

(Now GitHub from what I understand is a flat structure with no "managers" so I see why this wouldn't be in their slide deck, but it's a huge part of the equation for most organizations)

And now for some other points

 _> "Not being forced to make poor product decisions"_

IMO, this happens often when you're placed under a manager who (a) is way too optimistic about development time/resources needed, or (b) knows that he's squeezing, but wants to get more done with little headcount in order to help his way up the foodchain (a friend was victim to this and it was terrible to see).

Dear managers: please give us enough people and time to execute properly. We really don't want to ship a half baked product either.

<comment><USER3> I am facing this situation right now. How do you deal with a manager like that?

Do you confront them directly and tell them how you feel? Do you "report" them? Do you realize life is too short and likely they won't change and just quit?

Any other suggestion?

<comment><USER2> I have done all of the following at various points in the past:

1\. Report to HR.

2\. Switch teams (new manager).

3\. Quit.

IMHO (1) doesn't accomplish anything. Human nature is such that even the most empathetic, self-aware, fair people have a tough time changing their day to day habits and standards. The likelihood of a tyrannical manager somehow finding the light because some underling told them how they felt is infinitesimally unlikely.

Switch teams or quit, imo. (switching teams is kind of like quitting anyways) And start looking asap, since job searches tend to take a while.

Also,

4\. Tell them how you feel.

My former coworker did this. Did not accomplish anything. However, when another team member left for a very prominent company which at this point had developed a track record of recruiting from our company, he did get a decent raise. (this doesn't help the root cause of the frustration at all, but letting your boss know that you're unhappy does make him realize that you might quit at any moment)

edit: I'm happy to be a sounding board in private if you think that'd help. Ping me on twitter and we can exchange contact details. (same ID as my HN ID)

<comment><USER4> How about:

5\. Do nothing and adopt a "it will be done when it's done" attitude bordering on passive aggressiveness, leave work at 5:01pm every day, etc. while preparing (mentally and/or practically) for switching team or company. At least that's my natural tendency.

<comment><USER5> This would make me unhappy and I believe it is also true for most people. This positions oneself as helpless and feeling helpless is feeling unhappy.

If you choose aggressiveness then at least make it active (advice to be taken with a grain of salt :-) )

<comment><USER6> Not necessarily. I did that for a while at a job I hated. It was the only thing that kept me sane. Lots of hackers (like me) _hate_ confrontation. Even small amounts of interpersonal conflict cause intense discomfort. So, when under a toxic boss, I think adopting a clockwatcher attitude is an entirely valid strategy.

I analogize it to the strict shift rotations employed by nuclear reactor workers, chemical plant workers, and others who have to deal with dangerous and toxic materials in their day-to-day jobs. You set hard limits on exposure and stick to them. The act of setting and sticking to those boundaries can give you a modicum of control over a situation where you feel like you have no control at all. It can make a huge difference.

And, of course, as a side benefit, setting hard limits on the hours you work also allows you to have time to conduct a search for a less terrible job. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How about: raises. When your engineers can realistically get a 20, 30 or 50% raise switching jobs, go ahead and match that. Does your entry level person now have two years of experience? Boost their pay. A lot. Give people raises based on market rates, not based on their current pay.

Also, performance review processes at companies are generally horrid. I think it more often de-motivates people, lowers morale, and makes people want to go to other jobs if they feel under-appreciated or feel the process is bogus. Employees shouldn't have to write a 3 page essay justifying their growth and goals. It should be evident from their work. And peer reviews are all the worse. If a manager can't competently review performance of engineers, the manager isn't doing his/her job.

<comment><USER8> So very, very true. Hell, half the time your employees don't actually know how much their job sucks until they start looking because they feel underpaid.

I felt into that category - spent two years right out of college at a company where my technical skills were atrophying and middle management reigned supreme. Younger me didn't know any better - but knew that I was being grossly underpaid.

I'm still a little bit thankful that they shafted me two compensation reviews in a row, otherwise I may still be working that job.

> _"Also, performance review processes at companies are generally horrid."_

I have never, ever met a review process that wasn't a complete waste of time.

There was always a huge disconnect between compensation and reviews. I'd get reviews where my coworkers vouch for my abilities and sometimes sing my praises, and then my total compensation adjustment would come in sub-1%.

We just spent the last week and half wasting everyone's time writing up these review forms so that the conclusion is "is very good at his job, well liked by everyone, demonstrates initiative and judgment, is worth a 0.8% raise".

Compensation is a big deal, and should have been mentioned in the slide deck IMO. I don't care _how_ perfect my job is, if I feel like there's a 30-40% gap between my comp and market comp, I'm going to up and leave.

<comment><USER9> I agree about the uselessness of performance reviews. I've seen several attempts at introducing a performance review process, and the results are always the same: everybody finds out what they already knew intuitively, nobody gets a meaningful raise that they wouldn't have gotten without the review anyway, and bottom performers who haven't already been weeded out will not be weeded out as a result of the review.

I would say that there's no reason for a business to have performance reviews, but i've seen them used as an instrument to postpone raises with the argument "we're setting a baseline now to adjust compensation next year". So, they are useful as a cost reduction instrument, provided your people don't walk out in disgust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I quit my last job because:

* I was hired as a commodity, not a person, and treated as one.

* Management beyond my immediate supervisor had a fantasy about our working situation that colored their every decision, and no effort by front-line personnel could lead them to reality.

* My company had a failing business model, and thought they could squeeze the difference between expectation and reality out of the people doing the actual work that supported that model.

* Immediate supervisors thought loyalty meant not questioning.

* Evaluations were based on arbitrary criteria that had little to do with actual job success.

* My manager's response to pointing any of this out was "You should be grateful you have a job at all."

In a week I will be starting a new job at a small, but successful startup that appears to be the exact opposite of my previous job. I feel really sorry for the (quite talented) people who are still there, and I am grateful to that company for teaching me what kind of job _not_ to take.

</comment><comment><USER11> Related to "Hire open source hackers", I'd like to work for a company that respects, and dare I say encourages, open source contributions.

I recently went through the approval process to contribute to a project on my own time. Due to its nature, the project obviously would not conflict with my business unit or any business unit within the company. Approval should have been a 5 minute conversation with my manager.

Instead, I had to write up a proposal for the open source review board. After a week or so, they agreed it was acceptable. The next step was to fill out a form and get a VP to manually sign it. This took a bit of time since the VP is 4 levels up and was, unsurprisingly, out of the country.

That experience will affect my next job search.

<comment><USER12> I would take that further: I want to work for a company where you need a form from the VP to allow any work in the company to go _un-open-sourced_. Everything is MIT-licensed and posted to Github by default. Only the secret- est of secret sauce gets redacted.

<comment><USER13> Why not GPLv3?

<comment><USER14> If I had to guess, it might be because, while philosophically more "pure", I believe GPL is a less pragmatic license if the goal is getting your software more widely used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some of this just doesn't ring true. "Hire slowly": while Github was small for the first 2.5 years, the second 2.5 years have had insane growth.

I don't think Github has been around long enough to see if they can really retain people. They've gotten a lot of people in the last year because of money and because the work is good, to be sure. Someone else great will come along eventually, and the real test of Github's retention will happen when those people have a new offer.

As a purely technical company, Github has a lot of advantages to offer to technical people. I'm not slagging on them: personally, I'd love to work there. I just think they haven't been through a real test of retention yet.

</comment><comment><USER16> Pretty early on it calls code & design reviews "overhead", with "The Man" underneath.

Maybe I'm missing some context/voiceover here, but every decent coder/designer I've worked with embraces feedback & reviews. Not sure how I'd survive without them.

<comment><USER17> I've never worked anywhere that code reviews were more effective than communication (ideally pairing). The process feels like a kludge to try and solve code quality. Rather than fix the problem (code quality going in and communication about changes) you place a barrier to entry for submitting code. Anything that prevents me from doing my job (shipping code) is going to cost the company money.

Good quality staff, pairing and making sure test automating is in place are way better practices than code reviews.

<comment><USER18> Well, in the places where I've seen it done right, the code reviews happen _before_ the code is committed.

Fixing existing code after it's already in the code base is a losing battle (particularly since it usually has to be re-tested), and you'll get pulled off onto "more important work".

And it's not a kludge, it's a very good way of improving code quality (possibly up to the union of your better programmers' skills) and preventing dodgy crap from seeing the light of day.

 _> Anything that prevents me from doing my job (shipping code) is going to cost the company money._

I think you meant "working code" there - where "working" means "solves business problems" as wells as "not buggy" ;)

<comment><USER19> _Well, in the places where I've seen it done right, the code reviews happen before the code is committed._

Do you mean before the code is _merged_? Either programmers at these places worked directly together (eg. pairing), or they weren't using a DVCS like Git or HG.

We use GitHub at work, with code-reviewed Pull Requests. You do you work (pairing as you want), then ask for it to be merged. It gets reviewed by at least one peer, and you get feedback, discuss and make changes, and then merge those into trunk.

You get the benefit of code review, while also being allowed to carry on with something else in the same codebase without sitting on your butt waiting for a code review.

(Has anyone else tried this and had good or bad results?)

<comment><USER18> Committed into master / dev branches, was what I meant to type. And yes, essentially pull requests, but in person rather than over the internet :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't get how "the music" and "the chat" are good reasons to stick around while ping-pong table and xbox aren't.

<comment><USER21> It's really about the character of those things rather than the things themselves. Any company can just buy an Xbox or a ping-pong table, whereas the particular selection of music or friendly banter in the chat helps define the unique culture of GitHub.

<comment><USER20> Sure. But you can call xbox or ping-pong "the game" if you want and it has as much impact on keeping people as "the music". I don't want to listen to any music when I'm coding or thinking and I despise being judged for my taste (or lack thereof) in music. I'd rather play a friendly game of ping-pong which does not bring my personal choices/tastes into question. Of course, neither has any effect on me long-term.

It would have been interesting had the author elaborated on what "the chat" meant. Is it friendly banter between knowledgable folks about their personal takes on interesting problems? Or is it high-school drama or bro-code hijinks?

<comment><USER22> I think the point is you can buy a ping pong table and a pair of speakers, but you can't buy "the chat" or "the music" - you have to grow and evolve it organically, through active example. It's culture, not "stuff". It can't be bought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Generally itchy feet" Is why I'm moving away right now (slowly; I still have bills n' stuff). There are a lot of reasons for this for most people, but it's hard to pinpoint common aspects for all. For some it may be burnout as mentioned, but the solution there is fairly simple: fire the drama queens.

There's a give and take tradeoff for hiring people with an ego as big as their skill-set (often, they're not proportional) and if you insist on keeping people who act like asses because they're skilled, you kill productivity regardless. And for avoiding tedium, let the devs choose their own tools if possible. Unless there's heavy collaborative editing or strongly connected analytics, there's no need to force people to use identical tools.

That doesn't mean let them do whatever they please willy-nilly, just keep things consistent up to a sane degree.

"Most users are idiots": A less mean way to say that would be, "most users don't perceive what you perceive" and that's for the very simple reason that you look at your product through the filter of a creator. Sometimes you really do need to step outside of yourself to get the perspective of someone who wasn't involved in its creation.

Features should be only those that make sense, obviously, or you'll never bloody get done.

Interesting reasons for sticking around should be the people, and by extension, the chat. The End. Everything else is fluff easily blown away at the first sign of friction.

Don't hire A-Players... whatever that means. Hire people who know how to learn and don't have an ego that will make a newt look like Godzilla. Hire hackers; you can ask for samples of their work or just talk to them about how they see certain problems.

There's an old trick carpenters/model-builders use to see if someone's a qualified candidate. They ask the person to drill a hole in a piece of wood. Most people fail it on the first try.

+1 For "Hire Slowly". They don't fail as fast.

(Correct answer is a question: "Where on the piece do you want me to drill?")

<comment><USER24> I don't understand the carpenters' trick. Why is asking where to drill the correct answer?

<comment><USER25> I think the wrong answer would be to drill a hole in the piece of wood.

Personally, I think trick questions like that are kind of a waste of everyone's time.

<comment><USER26> I'd hate the guy who spent 20 minutes asking about where, how deep, what bit size, how fast etc to drill his hole. Sometimes you just want to tell someone to go do something and trust them to muddle through the details without burdening you with all of them. The kind of worker that needs every detail specified is powered by servos and trained with a pendant.

<comment><USER27> The point is, though, that you never just want a piece of wood with a hole in it. You want a piece of wood that has a hole in the middle so you can put a rope through the hole, tie a knot, and make a swing.

Or you want a piece of wood that has a hole at the end so you can drive a post through it and have some sort of horizontal-piece-of-wood-sticking-out-from-a- post deal. I don't know. I'm not a wood expert. The point is that you have to think about what you're really doing, and that carpentry is about way more than the manual skill of working with wood. The parallel with software engineering is pretty clear when phrased this way, yes?

Maybe it's part of a table. The piece of wood, not software engineering. The hole is where the table's leg will attach. If you just up and drill where you please, you'll probably not end up with a useful table.

<comment><USER24> In that case, I think a better question to ask would be along the lines of "What function does this piece of wood serve?". Once you know what it'll be used for, you can demonstrate that you know where to drill the hole without having to ask where.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Point #1 really resonates with me, because my previous employer got it completely wrong. Sure, they paid lip service to the idea of internal movement and reducing unnecessary process. Their execution was terrible, though.

The first point was highly dependent on management. Not just your direct manager, but also those around and above. There were many in management who saw people wanting to frequently change tasks, roles, or jobs as flaky, unreliable, and even disloyal. These managers wanted people who would knuckle down and perform their niche role on a program for years, or even decades in some cases. It was infuriating at times, and I think being in that environment for the first 9.5 years of my career hurt my current position and direction. Why I stayed there for so long is a long, off-topic story.

The rest are good points as well, though a cringe a bit every time I see something to the effect of, "Only hire A players". From the reverse perspective, its pretty close to what I look for in a company when deciding who I would like to work for.

</comment><comment><USER29> "Dogfooding: Building stuff you use means recursive happiness"

This is the best and most succinct explanation of why dogfooding is awesome that I have ever read.

</comment><comment><USER30> Here is another recent article on building company culture: [http://firstround.com/article/How-Dave-Goldberg-of- SurveyMon...](http://firstround.com/article/How-Dave-Goldberg-of-SurveyMonkey- Built-a-Billion-Dollar-Business-and-Still-Gets-Home-By-5-30)

A few things that stand out: "attitude matters", "meetings bad", and "leaving at 5:30".

</comment><comment><USER31> Kind of disappointed there wasn't a 72 point FUCK within the first 5 slides.

Slippin', dude.

</comment><comment><USER32> @Zach "Hire People who Frustrate Easily?"

That seems counter intuitive to me, what does it mean with example?

<comment><USER33> <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris>

<comment><USER32> Well, I don't know if those 3 points made are to be taken seriously. I despise laziness and I don't think you can justify it in any form.

<comment><USER34> There are two kinds of laziness. Rank laziness (aka "goldbricking", to use an outdated term) doesn't really have much use. But there's also virtuous laziness, which is the desire to do work in the most efficient way possible. People who work like that often tend to be assets because they invent all of the stuff that leads to everything running smoothly and with a minimal amount of effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm glad "there are a lot of A players" was included in this slideshow given how often we hear that there are not nearly enough good people out there to hire.

</comment><comment><USER36> First Break all the Rules is relevant to this discussion. It also has the virtue of being very data focused (they did thousands of surveys to come to their conclusions).

here's a summary of the key conclusions.

<http://www.refresher.com/!breakalltherules.html>

</comment><comment><USER37> I left my earlier job mostly because I was bored. All the other reasons are just seasoning on that huge reason. I'm not sure if HR could've done anything, short of promoting me to upper management.

</comment><comment><USER38> I love that presentation theme. Does anyone know where i can get a good template like that?

</comment><comment><USER39> Great slides Zach!

Also, is there any audio of the presentation?

</comment><comment><USER40> Great set of slides.</comment>