Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?timerange=31536000&series=mozilla-central,3735773,1,13&series=mozilla-central,3412459,1,13

by akyuu • 3 years ago

1282 544 3 years ago

treeherder.mozilla.org

throwaway29303• 3 years ago

Great job, guys!

veave• 3 years ago

Is this one of those synthetic benchmarks that don't mean much?

londons_explore2• 3 years ago

Yes. But being fast, even at a synthetic benchmark, is rarely worse than being slow.

StevePerkins• 3 years ago

They sure do seem to mean a lot when someone recommends Firefox and people shit on them.

akyuu2• 3 years ago

Speedometer is one of the primary benchmarks used by the Chromium team as a proxy for real-world use of popular JavaScript frameworks: https://v8.dev/blog/speedometer-2

bee_rider• 3 years ago

It looks to measure a bunch of little JavaScript-driven interactions. It has been around for a while, so I guess it probably measures what it says it measures.

OTOH, you might feel it doesn’t mean much depending on your priorities. I mean, JavaScript is bad anyway. So I guess anyone they cares about performance/security blocks it as much as possible and/or avoids JavaScript heavy sites.

Or, big picture, Firefox wasn’t built by a spying company, so even if Chrome had much better benchmarks switching to Chrome would be a silly thing to do.

0xcde4c3db• 3 years ago

It's using a fake "app", but it measures UI updates across multiple real JavaScript frameworks. In other words, probably not a good benchmark for things that are compute-bound or I/O-bound, but probably a pretty good benchmark for "snappiness".

hajile• 3 years ago

Speedometer executes a bunch of TodoMVC projects, so it's a mix of JS and DOM work. FF has done a lot of cool work on their DOM and have started to focus some on making JS faster, so they are pretty fast here.

https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/

If you are interested in just JS, JetStream 2 is a good metric IMO, but is perhaps less "real world" as it doesn't really do DOM stuff. FF is slower here, but has made a lot of progress recently. (going from somewhere around 35% slower to around 10% slower).

https://browserbench.org/JetStream2.0/in-depth.html

sanxiyn3• 3 years ago

Safari is like 30% faster than Chrome on JetStream. I have no idea why people think V8 is the fastest engine around.

LargeDiggerNick4• 3 years ago

After this quick switch profile addon was release I have been 100% on firefox and love it.

brunno• 3 years ago

Thanks for mentioning this. Somehow I've searched for something like this before and couldn't find it.

That didn't stop me from using Firefox tough. I just have my first bookmark in the toolbar point to "about: profiles" and use this page to launch new profile instances, create new ones etc.

kristiandupont• 3 years ago

Are you talking about this? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...

LargeDiggerNick4• 3 years ago

I did that too but I encountered fuckery. I forgot what it was though it was a while ago.

MilaM• 3 years ago

I use profiles extensively and would love to know which extension you are using. Containers cover most of my sandboxing needs for private browsing, but I prefer to have a separate Firefox profile for business accounts/apps.

LargeDiggerNick4• 3 years ago

Firefox containers are great but this is better imo:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...

evulhotdog• 3 years ago

The thing that has me stuck on Chrome is that it doesn’t automatically open the profile you last had focus of. For example, if I have last touched my personal profile I don’t want to open a new link from Slack in my work profile.

Having the ability to only default to one really sucks.

loeg• 3 years ago

Does anyone familiar with this work have some pointers to read more about it?

jeroen• 3 years ago

This comment should be helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36771201

p-e-w2• 3 years ago

That chart suggests massive improvements since the beginning of this year. Can anyone explain how this was achieved? What precisely has changed?

akyuu2• 3 years ago

In the Firefox Nightly blog, there is some discussion of the performance improvements they've delivered in each release: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org

For example: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2023/04/14/dropping-the-ban...

The two big jumps are from these two fixes. Great job, Performance Team!

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1444491

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1815069

efreak2• 3 years ago

Starting from Firefox 112, users can now search for text inside the about:addons page (through the usual associated keyboard shortcuts, e.g. Ctrl-F and ‘/’) – Bug 1499500

_Finally_. It's only been _years_ that I haven't been able to search through my (admittedly far too big) list of disabled add-ons to find the one I want and turn it on.

Now we just need the collection limit on Firefox nightly removed. It only fetches the first page of 50 addons in a collection. I add things to my collection any time it seems useful, and keeping a collection in sync with what's being used across _seven_ browsers on two devices is difficult (I use multiple browsers on Android the way I use multiple browser windows on desktop; extensions usually only get installed in the workspace I actually need them for, so each install has a slightly different set of extensions and slightly different settings)

mstange• 3 years ago

You can expect some blog posts from us on this topic at the end of the year / early next year. In short: Organizational focus on a performance target, significant investment, and some great new tooling. We're also reaping the benefits of foundational work that happened over the last few years.

zamadatix• 3 years ago

You can click the dots and get a link to what was changed in that commit. e.g. in the sudden bump after April there is a 4 part cache related patch linking to the issue tracking ID which describes (in human terms) additional jit caching mechanisms.

dt2m• 3 years ago

Anecdotally, Firefox has always been faster than Chrome on MacOS for me. Great to see it’s only getting even better.

londons_explore2• 3 years ago

Try clearing your profile.

Turns out having years of history, extensions, and a multi-gigabyte cache makes any browser slow.

Avamander• 3 years ago

Chrome automatically prunes history for quite a while now. Which I personally dislike, as I sometimes need to find something I visited a long time ago.

p-e-w2• 3 years ago

That's like saying "If your car runs too slow, toss out the back seats."

History and extensions are there for a reason. And managing the cache is the browser's job, not the user's.

steveBK1233• 3 years ago

I found chrome on macOS to be a sloppy implementation

Years ago I remember it was the one app that could reliably kernel panic my MacBook

Strange stuff

itsTyrion2• 3 years ago

how the shit does a browser just casually kernel panic the OS ‽ O_o

xd19363• 3 years ago

I've used Firefox as my primary browser since the "Quantum" in 2017. Chrome still feels snappier, but Firefox's Container Tabs is hard for me to imagine losing.

dsauerbrun• 3 years ago

pretty sure chrome has had tab grouping for over a year now

CrampusDestrus• 3 years ago

container tabs != tab grouping

tab grouping uses the same cookies everywhere, whereas container tabs provide isolated workspaces each with their own set of cookies

post-it• 3 years ago

Are they containerized? I have separate containers for work and personal stuff, with separate sessions for Gmail, GitHub, etc.

allarm• 3 years ago

That's not what container tabs are. Think of it as isolated environments for groups of sites. You can even set it up so that each new link opens in a new environment, without any cookies, etc.

seba_dos112• 3 years ago

How are tab groups relevant here?

haswell• 3 years ago

Container tabs isolate sessions. I don’t think tab grouping is related.

Firefox allows you to create/manage multiple containers, and set up rules to assign specific sites to specific containers if desired.

I think the closest feature in Chrome is the ability to create multiple profiles, but this is less flexible/ergonomic IMO.

otabdeveloper4• 3 years ago

Chrome still feels snappier

I actually tested this and Firefox is significantly faster in rendering CSS and tables. (Not sure about complex Javascript.)

Chrome's snappiness is mostly UI smoke and mirrors, actual sites load faster for me in Firefox.

insanitybit3• 3 years ago

Maybe FF should take some tips on those UI "smoke and mirrors". What feels faster is what users are going to go off of. For example, a page that fully loads in 1 second vs a page that incrementally loads in 1.5 seconds - the latter may feel faster because the time to start loading is faster.

dspillett2• 3 years ago

Chrome's snappiness is mostly UI smoke and mirrors

This can be very effective, which is why optimising complex pages for first contentful draw (perhaps at the expense of overall load speed) can make a huge difference to how your pages/app are perceived.

Back in the dial-up (and early ADSL) days many were convinced that IE was faster because of progress bar trickery: it would actively lie and could inch up to ~85% before the first byte of data had arrived from the server (I forget if it waited for the HTTP request to be sent or if it started edging up immediately upon TCP connection). It still did it right up to the end, though with local connectivity getting faster these days the amount you'll notice it is greatly reduced.

solarkraft2• 3 years ago

Yes, that's important. The funny part about it is that it's probably a lot cheaper than optimizing the engine.

kevincox2• 3 years ago

Yup. I found that Firefox does incredibly well at long text documents and tables. I remember that Google's internal source code browser would warn you if you tried to open a "large" file (I don't remember what the threshold was). However with Firefox the files always opened fine and things like scrolling performed well. I thought the warning was just a relic of an earlier time. However I realized that my colleagues using Chrome would actually respect this warning and download the file to open it in a text editor. Testing showed that the files would truly grind Chrome to a halt. It seems that Chrome still has a performance edge on highly dynamic content but Firefox does appear to be significantly better at large pages of mostly-static content like long HTML and text documents.

rewmie2• 3 years ago

(...) but Firefox's Container Tabs is hard for me to imagine losing.

Are you referring to Firefox's multi-account containers extension?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

happymellon3• 3 years ago

I can't speak for them, but it's what I thought of and agree.

Sandboxed tabs is brilliant.

I just wish they added better overall profile support.

chaxor• 3 years ago

This is indeed fantastic, but paired with container proxies, it's awesome.

You can send a few tabs through one socks proxy, a few through another, all while segmenting that from work, personal, etc. if you have a vpn for one work location and different ones for other work.

xd19363• 3 years ago

That's the one! I thought it was an inbuilt feature of the browser. I guess the Facebook Container[1] extension must bring it down as a dependency or something, because I have never installed that extension knowingly.

1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...

bayindirh7• 3 years ago

Chrome's most of the snappiness is coming from how it handles the DNS queries internally from my experience.

Pair Firefox with a fast DNS, and it's noticably faster than Chrome, for the last 3 years or so.

I discovered it accidentally, after switching to local DNS at the office. We run one of the nation-wide ones in a pretty close proximity in network terms.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK4• 3 years ago

which is a fast DNS? 1.1.1.1 ? I thought the OS caches DNS anyway, so shouldn't matter much in day to day browsing.

zelphirkalt• 3 years ago

I recently noticed something similar, when I had to enable DoH (unfortunately Cloudflare — good that this thing lives in a separate browser profile) to reach atlassian websites. Suddenly the pages loaded faster than without DoH. Still not sure what changed on my system (nothing?) or what my ISP did so that I could no longer resolve those websites, but at least DoH solved the problem for me.

sanxiyn3• 3 years ago

Chrome has better network stack. For most other things Firefox is faster, but of course, network is the most important.

hnav• 3 years ago

one deficiency in the FF network stack is that it doesn't properly detect existing pooled connections being broken by net route changes while Chrome does

wintermutestwin2• 3 years ago

Firefox's Container Tabs is hard for me to imagine losing.

Yes, and the lack of a viable vertical tabs solution for Chrome (though some Chrome based browsers have native implementations).

I am baffled how anyone could still be using horizontal tabs as it is clearly inferior. I am also annoyed as hell that it is not native in Firefox.

seapat2• 3 years ago

What extension do you use for vertical tabs on FF? I tried tree style tabs and sideberry but liked neither.

dspillett2• 3 years ago

I am baffled how anyone could still be using horizontal tabs

I don't tend to work with a browser full-screen on my larger monitor (2560×1440) instead often using half the screen (so 1280px wide) or there abouts. My other screen is 1080×1920 (standard 1080 but portrait not landscape). In those cases I have less room for tabs on the side. It might be less of an issue but most of the side-tab options I tried had a minimum width noticeably wider than the minimum width of a tab in the standard layout.

What might work for me is tabs that can be flipped from horizontal to vertical at a keystroke, or perhaps even if they reacted to window size (with the default choice being easily overridden).

kdklol• 3 years ago

As a person who habitualy closes everything, I often average around 5 tabs open, rarely going above 10. With so few open at a time, the giant column of vertical space for the tab tree would be a waste of screen real estate, which can be better utilized to open another window i a vertical split arangement, or just for the website's content. Having said that, I know one of my friends has always at minimum 100 tabs open at any time, so he jumped at this feature as soon as ut released. It's a matter of preference I'd say.

NelsonMinar• 3 years ago

I switched to Chrome a few months ago and Container Tabs are the one thing I really miss. I can no longer quarantine Facebook. I can no longer easily juggle multiple login profiles for sites like Twitter. There's nothing like it in Chrome. Multiple profiles don't work well, too many UI problems. The SessionBox looks promising but it's such a complex mess and basically requires a paid plan to use effectively.

kstrauser3• 3 years ago

I spend more than my fair share of time in AWS consoles. My company uses multiple accounts to segregate data and services were appropriate, and container tabs let me have several consoles open at once when I need them. That's such a wonderful productivity boost over having to have multiple browsers open.

lattalayta• 3 years ago

I always get suspicious when someone describes performance as "feels snappier"

xd19363• 3 years ago

jklinger410• 3 years ago

Container tabs are unfortunately not very usable for me. I have extensions that are unique to the profile. When they decided to redo the tabs rather than modernize the profile workflow, it basically forced me to use chrome.

fooker• 3 years ago

This is awesome, looking forward to performance improvement efforts from Firefox.

I try Firefox once in a while and it admittedly feels slower and more choppy compared to Chrome, but would definitely consider switching if there's more focus on performance.

seba_dos112• 3 years ago

There was a time when Firefox felt a lot slower than Chromium, but for a few years now it's been close enough (even if still somewhat slower) to not bother me, while Firefox clearly offers superior functionality and much better performance under high load. The last time Chromium has felt attractive compared to Firefox was a really long time ago. Glad to see it moving in the right direction still.

emsixteen• 3 years ago

I use it, but just don't like the devtools. Or moreso miss some things from Chrome/Edge.

wackget3• 3 years ago

For me it's the opposite. Firefox's dev tools feel better. What things are missing?

dylan6045• 3 years ago

I use the FF devtools daily, and for what I'm working on, it has everything I need to help me get the things I need done. Knowing that I'm not everyone and have plenty to learn, what things are missing from the devtools for you?

markandrewj3• 3 years ago

Give Firefox Developer Edition a try, if haven't already, and are looking for more robust development tools.

tgv• 3 years ago

Me too. I'm using FF since 3.6, and before that Camino (a derived version for the mac), and the only thing Google has done is strengthen my resolve to keep using Firefox, but I still prefer to debug on Chrome (well, Chromium). It just feels better, even though it's starting to slip and FF is improving slowly.

systems_glitch2• 3 years ago

I used to keep Chrome installed just for the dev tools, but the Firefox dev tools became good enough in probably 2013 or so.

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

Firefox gave birth to the first good dev tools as an extension IIRC

netule• 3 years ago

I still keep Chrome installed for some sites that are just excruciatingly slow on FF like FoundryVTT and some video sites.

david2ndaccount• 3 years ago

Chrome’s wasm debugging is much better than firefox’s.

Kholin• 3 years ago

For me, Firefox performs better on Linux than on Windows.

nateb20223• 3 years ago

This is true of a lot of things.

pjmlp2• 3 years ago

Until one needs to watch YouTube videos.

toastal3• 3 years ago

Fx provided a decent enough performance boost with its builtin tracking blocker that more than made up for any difference in real world scenarios. …But I never switch away from Gecko since Fx v2.x.

copperx3• 3 years ago

What is Fx? An extension?

alpaca1286• 3 years ago

Same. Recently I tried Brave because of all the praise but turns out the browser can only display around 80 tabs on the tab bar and every further tab simply never shows up even if it's in the foreground. I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better. I'm staying with Firefox, though I think Brave is probably still a good recommendation for users that don't want to go through the effort of installing an ad blocker.

Edit: so I just looked and it turns out you can enable tab bar scrolling on chrome://flags/#scrollable-tabstrip. Why is that even disabled by default?

andybak2• 3 years ago

I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better.

It's my understanding that on mobile, tabs are unloaded from memory nearly instantly. You lose state but they use almost no resources. (I wish this was an option out of the box on Desktop. I've had extensions that do this and it's a godsend)

backendanon2• 3 years ago

I'm old and I code for a living, I have maybe at most a dozen tabs open on any day. I can't imagine needing 80 but now I see why chrome has that new search tabs drop down.

dom96• 3 years ago

though I think Brave is probably still a good recommendation for users that don't want to go through the effort of installing an ad blocker

Is that really the only reason to install Brave?

Starting to wonder if I should just set up a Firefox that bundles uBlock Origin by default with a brand new name.

andai• 3 years ago

Not to do a "you're holding it wrong", but why would you want so many tabs that they go offscreen?

More precisely, why 100 tabs in 1 window instead of 10 tabs times 10 windows?

terafo• 3 years ago

Firefox is slower for me than Chrome, but that's because I have tab hoarding problem(2k tabs in Firefox right now).

guillim85• 3 years ago

Close them all today. It will feel weird for like 1 hour, but you will feel much better after.

rileymat2• 3 years ago

It seems like we need a better solution, between bookmarking and offline websites on disk, it feels like there is a better way.

penguin_booze• 3 years ago

On each tab, towards the right, you'll seen an X. If you click that, you can close a tab.

Alternatively, you can use Ctrl-W keyboard shortcut.

(Sorry!)

stark98• 3 years ago

As a fellow tab hoarder, I recommend using Tab Session Manager plugin. You can easily save all tabs, although from my own experience I've almost never restored them anyway lol

filchermcurr• 3 years ago

As a fellow tab hoarder, I recommend Auto Tab Discard. Tabs are still open but aren't actually loaded until you click on them. With various configurable options for how that works.

I have five windows open with about 1000 tabs in each, no performance problems at all. It's great!

seba_dos112• 3 years ago

Not sure how it works now, but 2k tabs in Chrome used to be outright impossible on any reasonable hardware anyway, while Firefox always handled it pretty well aside of slowdowns ;)

almenon• 3 years ago

Wh....why?

bamfly• 3 years ago

I just mass-bookmark mine into a new bookmark folder periodically. Keeps it from getting anywhere near 2k.

I've been doing this for years and have never, not once, looked at the bookmarks. But it gives me the peace of mind I need to close all tabs and start over.

jesup• 3 years ago

2K? Not bad. My main linux box is running around 7500 tabs in 34 windows right now. Takes about 30s to start, which is fine since that browser gets restarted only every few weeks. My secondary desktop (windows) only has 2750 tabs.

And there are users of Firefox out there with >15000 tabs.

Two reasons for tab hoarding: 1) spatial -- related tabs are close together (frequently open a bunch of related search results; if I come back to them to continue later, they're all together). 2) history -- unlike bookmarks or history entries, tabs retain the forward and back history, so when you return to them you can know how you go there (go back to the search for example).

I do periodically clear out tabs, especially duplicates. The Tab Stats extension by glandium is very handy for tab hoarders

aidenn04• 3 years ago

Firefox's GC seems to be much slower than chromium at least as of 109. Certain Vue websites are rather prolific in their garbage generation and The performance difference between chromium and firefox is easily noticeable, particularly if you leave an SPA open for a while.

tapper• 3 years ago

We are on firefox 115 now mate.

jonco217• 3 years ago

Can you point me at an example of this?

heavyset_go• 3 years ago

If you notice these issues, it can help to file bug reports.

kenniskrag• 3 years ago

TL;DR: Windows Defender had a bug that made certain system calls expensive on CPU cycles when Defender's Real-time Protection feature is enabled. After discovery, Mozilla reported this issue to Microsoft. Microsoft is releasing a patch that should result in lower CPU usage when using Firefox on sites like YouTube (a ~75% CPU usage reduction was noted when browsing YouTube in Firefox with the fixed version of Defender).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35458746

beltsazar5• 3 years ago

I switched to Firefox from Chrome years ago because Chrome was slower. Specially, when there were many tabs opened, switching tabs in Chrome were usually prefaced with a blank white screen for about 2 seconds.

I've been staying with Firefox not for the performance (today Chrome loads Google sites like YouTube faster), but mainly for Tree Style Tab extension. I couldn't imagine opening more than a dozen of tabs without it.

generalizations2• 3 years ago

That's pretty much the reason for me as well. The day some other browser makes tree-style tabs, firefox will probably lose a user.

mortalkastor• 3 years ago

I switched to Orion[0] as a test, discovered the awesomeness of superbly integrated, native, tree style tabs, and now I'm stuck with this browser where sites I need for work are half broken. I tried Firefox with Tree Style Tab extension, but it's not nearly as good :(

[0] https://browser.kagi.com

whynotkeithberg• 3 years ago

I switched about a year ago as well, partially because of performance pains but also because I tried to leave as many google products behind as I could for privacy reasons. I have not been disappointed so far... There are a few plugins I miss on Chrome but nothing I couldn't live without or find an acceptable alternative.

dahfizz• 3 years ago

I couldn't imagine opening more than a dozen of tabs without it.

I can't imagine having more than a dozen tabs open, period. You tab hoarders will never make sense to me...

permo-w• 3 years ago

Brave has tree style tabs now

dhimes• 3 years ago

I've stayed (edit: with Firefox) because of (1) containers and (2) password storage. I have to use Chrome for some things, and every now and then it prompts me for a password and refuses to use the auto-fill. Totally torques me off because my passwords are not easy.

But I completely trust Firefox on the password issue, to the point that I let it generate them for me.

hollander• 3 years ago

I hate the tab reload in Chrome after switching tabs, which often changes form input.

dmix• 3 years ago

but mainly for Tree Style Tab extension.

Same, I like to pretend I use Firefox for other reasons but 99% of it is tree tab.

bigpapikite• 3 years ago

Tree style tabs along with changing the CSS to remove the tabs from the top of the screen has been a game changer for me. Back when I had an M1 macbook air, it was the difference between everything feeling cluttered to feeling like a real laptop screen.

zamalek• 3 years ago

much better performance under high load.

Massive GitHub PRs can refuse to load in chromium-based browsers. Firefox renders them effortlessly.

JshWright• 3 years ago

I’d love for Firefox to be my daily driver, but I just can’t give up the quality of life improvement I get from TouchID based WebAuthn.

shmolf• 3 years ago

clearly offers superior functionality

I think it's worth mentioning the caveat, that it doesn't natively support PWA in the same way WebKit browsers do. It has little to no support (depending on your definition of support).

entropicdrifter5• 3 years ago

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-fire...

Works fine for me on Linux Mint 21.1

I also use Firefox for Android and that does natively support PWAs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...

SomeHacker443• 3 years ago

The thing that I really like in Chrome (which I use for work) is Tab Groups. There is nothing like it for Firefox. Even the "Simple Tab Groups" extension, which is well liked, cannot do the simple "grouping" of tabs in a larger window - it simply hides all the tabs that are not in current use (which defeats the purpose of tab groups, I can just use windows for that). Another thing that Chrome has is the ability to name individual windows for easy Alt-Tabbing. Shame that Firefox doesn't have these things (that I know of).

jzoch• 3 years ago

Honestly you are the first person I’ve ever heard that prefers chromes tab system. Check out tree style tabs it’ll change your life. I hate chrome now solely due to it

mccolin• 3 years ago

I am a longtime and proud Firefox user, but this feature of Chrome is the one thing I want. When I see colleagues using it, it just looks like the right way to tackle that need.

TheRealPomax2• 3 years ago

Firefox had them. In fact, it had them since version 4 [1]. Then Firefox got rid of them again [2]. For no clear reason. And then Chrome copied the idea. And that's just a messed up timeline of events.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-4-beta-updated-w...

[2] https://venturebeat.com/mobile/mozilla-is-removing-tab-group...

beltsazar5• 3 years ago

In Tree Style Tab you can create a tab group (which is basically a custom tab whose title you can rename, e.g. "Docs"), then move all tabs you want to group as one "inside" it. That makes all the tabs the children of the tab group. Now you have the best of both worlds: tab groups and tree-based tab structures.

ddoolin3• 3 years ago

Use Sidebery in Firefox for vertical tabs and it has not only better grouping but also entire "tab spaces" (workspaces) which you can switch between as well, if wanted.

Semaphor• 3 years ago

That is what always irks me when people (usually only on here) say FF should have stayed with xpi and their old architecture. Only after all those changes did FF finally become performant enough for me to use it again, before it was a slow drag to me.

And I know, people with limited resources would have had a different experience, I don't know, I never had RAM issues. With enough RAM, FF was noticably slower than chrome.

tmvnty• 3 years ago

I have never doubted the performance of Firefox. There’s a really old computer sitting in my house, never updated it for almost a decade now and my parents occasionally use it. The Chrome on it kept getting slower and laggier, while the Firefox always work fine. At some point, I just removed Chrome and told my parents to use Firefox: “the red fox is the Internet”

wredue• 3 years ago

Well.

Chrome definitely lit a fire under Firefox, and that’s saying something because, at the time chrome came out, Firefox was “fast”.

I switched to chrome early on for the speed benefits.

At some point, Firefox started getting pretty close. Albeit not on parity with chrome, but chrome started major spying oriented pushes. So the minor loss in speed was worth it.

Now chrome could never win me back anyway. Google is evil.

BizarroLand3• 3 years ago

I also like that Firefox isn't putting artificial limitations on the plugins that we can use in order to appease their infinite hunger for ad revenue.

Chrome's manifest v3's entire purpose for existence is to ultimately snuff out ad blockers so they can make the internet worse for everyone and get more money in the process.

And if you don't believe me then you are wrong.

Of course they won't do it immediately. They won't entirely rug pull their browser's user base.

They'll just keep raising the bar to get approved for Chrome Store, making it harder and harder to comply with their extension requirements while also changing the way they deliver their ads.

This way the ad blockers have to be updated and then go back through the extension store review process until the developers either get tired of jumping through their hoops and gives up or until they can no longer afford to keep the extension alive.

And then they'll rug pull, just like Reddit and Twitter, and all of a sudden ad blocking extensions will require that the users pay Google for the privilege of having fewer ads while still letting some ads through anyway, and that will be that.

Best to jump ship now, things are nice and cozy over here in "user wants are respected within reason" land.

hackinthebochs3• 3 years ago

Edge provides a compelling alternative that is a drop-in replacement for Chrome for most users. I wonder if the competition will keep Google in check. I also wonder if Edge will end up providing its own ad-blocker if Google's restrictions become too onerous. Probably easier than forking the core browser to maintain a parallel build without the extension limitations.

charcircuit2• 3 years ago

Chrome's manifest v3's entire purpose for existence is to ultimately snuff out ad blockers

There is no evidence of that, while there is evidence that manifest v3 provides security, privacy, and performance benefits. Manifest v3 doesn't stop ad blocking from working.

so they can make the internet worse for everyone

Ads make the internet better for everyone since it provides a monetization model for sites to give away valuable services for free instead of everything being behind a paywall.

And if you don't believe me then you are wrong.

This way of arguing doesn't convince people. This kind of stance only appeals to people who are antitech or antigoogle.

They'll just keep raising the bar to get approved for Chrome Store, making it harder and harder to comply with their extension requirements

Adblockers are highly priviledged. They steered have a high bar to make it into a extention store.

theusus• 3 years ago

Yeah, while people here used to complain about it. But whenever I went to Chrome(or derivatives) on desktop. I experienced poor performance.

Firefox has been very smooth since couple of years.

Mobile has to catch-up though.

rat_on_the_run• 3 years ago

I tested Chrome and Firefox about 1 week ago. On about 30 tabs, Firefox uses about 1G more RAM than Chrome. Their speed is difference is unnoticeable. I also tested Edge and Vivaldi for RAM usage. The result is Chrome < Edge < Firefox < Vivaldi.

bjoli• 3 years ago

Those results say nothing. Were you RAM-constrained? When I am not, I have found that Firefox tries to use more memory. If I use Firefox while also having 3 VMs running and compiling stuff it stays down, whereas if I don't it easily starts using over 4gb (i have 64).

throwaway9142• 3 years ago

No other browser has something like container tabs. Temporary Containers is an excellent extension to make each new tab its own isolated browser session too. First Party Isolation is 1 thing, but Chrome cannot do containers.

rpgbr• 3 years ago

Safari will get that feature in iOS 17/macOS Sonoma.

ksec• 3 years ago

Partly because Chrome got a lot slower over time compared to its initial release. When everything was snappy.

jredwards• 3 years ago

I went back to Firefox about 2 years ago. Zero regrets.

dherikb• 3 years ago

I'm just waiting for the vertical tabs support to give a new chance for Firefox.

dan_hawkins• 3 years ago

Something like this?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/

pokeymcsnatch• 3 years ago

Eh? Firefox vertical tab support is much better than Chromium's in my experience. The chrome addons I've seen are hacky and clunky. It doesn't seem like chrome UI has nearly the same modifiability as firefox.

Edit: I use the Tree Style Tabs add on

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

eyegor• 3 years ago

Tree style tabs is a vertical tab extension for ff and the best ui around if you use a lot of tabs. I can't even use chromium vertical tabs anymore because they feel terrible in comparison. You can also fully style tree style tabs via css.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

tapoxi• 3 years ago

But then you get duplicates, since Mozilla made it a pain to disable the main tab bar. I'm using a Chromium offshoot (Arc) but I also like how Vivaldi handles vertical tabs. Firefox doesn't just compete with Chromium itself, but the entire ecosystem.

e4m2• 3 years ago

See also https://arewefastyet.com.

flerchin• 3 years ago

Really cool how you can see Firefox speed enhancements showing up in discrete steps.

I am surprised to see Chrome faster than Chromium. What is google doing in their branded flavor?

kirbyfan64sos• 3 years ago

Chrome tends to be built with a rather slow and stringent set of optimization extras like PGO that people tend to leave off in Chromium builds.

lillecarl• 3 years ago

On windows you can speed chromium up by renaming it to chrome.exe so it gets special treatment by antivirus software.

ttarr• 3 years ago

Probably PGO.

Even prebuilt Firefox tend to be faster than distro provided ones, at least at some point on the past.

toastal3• 3 years ago

I believe this domain started at the big 4.x version drop which was the turn of a new era in the Browser Wars. I remember using Minefield because the new features were too tempting to miss & this was before evergreen versioning became the norm.

dumpster_fire• 3 years ago

I'd prefer if they kept the y-axis starting at zero for a more realistic representation.

austin-cheney4• 3 years ago

As a JavaScript developer my priorities are limited to visual render and DOM access. Going back 5+ years ago Chrome was able to access the DOM at about 45m ops/s on my desktop and Firefox was achieving about 850m ops/s on the same hardware. On my laptop (faster memory) Chrome was getting up to 55m ops/s while Firefox was around 1.4b ops/s.

Now Firefox numbers have remained constant, but Chrome struggles to hit 20m ops/s in my desktop. Chrome has sacrificed front end performance across the board for modest performance improvements to query string access of the DOM. Pretty unfortunate.

kstrauser3• 3 years ago

How many cores was laptop benchmark running on?

magicalist4• 3 years ago

"access the DOM" is not a constant operation, though, it will vary wildly based on what you're doing and what you were doing just before that (think of reading a computed style before vs after writing a style that forces layout).

1.4b ops/s also sounds like it might not be testing what you think it's testing. Access in that case might just be hitting a cache, so possibly not at all representative of real performance of a web app.

Nezteb• 3 years ago

Also https://awsy.netlify.com/!

moffkalast• 3 years ago

Hey they forgot to include the WebGPU speed comparison... oh wait ;)

insanitybit3• 3 years ago

It's great to see Firefox competing on a core metric - performance. It doesn't look like a one time thing, either, I suspect an ongoing initiative to close this gap. I'd be curious to hear more about what that entails.

Something that might be less exciting is finding where Chrome beat Firefox on a benchmark and then tuning Firefox one knob at a time until it didn't, then moving on to the next benchmark - that would mean that there's not much more room to grow since it's basically just "ah, they did that we should do that". It would still be good work just not sustainable.

If it's part of a larger performance initiative I'd really like to learn more.

rednafi• 3 years ago

The biggest reason I stick with Chrome is how easy it is to resume your work on a new machine. You just log into your Google account and boom, all of your data and extensions start syncing in the background. With Firefox, I've to log into a new FF account and then log into my Gmail again anyway. I admit I'm lazy but for me, ergonomics usually comes before ideology.

micromacrofoot• 3 years ago

more like vendor lock

jodrellblank2• 3 years ago

"I prefer the way this vendor does things" is not vendor lockin.

"I hate the way this vendor does things, but I'm locked in and can't leave" is vendor lockin.

lolinder2• 3 years ago

This is only true for your Google account, right? You're not magically logged into HN already on the new machine? Chrome isn't actually syncing your cookies, it's just that logging into the browser logs you into all your Google apps too.

Firefox syncs extensions, preferences, open tabs, etc. The only thing it can't do is automatically log into Google, but having to enter one extra username/password one time per computer seems like a pretty minor reason to pick a browser, unless you're constantly logging in on new computers.

gobip• 3 years ago

Firefox can render pages faster than Chrome, if it still has a laggy scroll on macOS, I won't be using it.

Every six months, I go back to Firefox for a day or two, only to notice this scroll lag. Every time.

Engineering-MD• 3 years ago

I use a macbook and do not notice any scroll lag. Have you got smooth scrolling on? If so, try turning it off.

afavour• 3 years ago

I’d be curious to see how Safari stacks up. I switched to it when I was finding Firefox too slow a long time and have largely stuck with it because of inertia. Very happy with it as a browser though.

sanxiyn3• 3 years ago

Safari has the fastest JavaScript engine by far. It has been #1 on JetStream for years by large margin, JavaScriptCore greatly outperforming both V8 and SpiderMonkey.

agloe_dreams2• 3 years ago

Safari blows the doors off everyone. Nearly 10% faster on same hardware.

magicalist4• 3 years ago

If you switch to Mac you can get Safari numbers, which seem to be about the same or just slower than Chrome, and now Firefox as well:

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...

javajosh5• 3 years ago

Firefox is a great browser and Mozilla is a (generally) great organization. It's my daily driver on all my devices (except my TV ha), it's fast and has great plugins that also work in mobile. Philosophically I'm very much a "root for the underdog" type of person so it makes me happy that way, too. Only very rarely (every few months) am I forced to use Chrome for a site - and in my view, that's a huge ding on the site devs, not on Firefox.

It's strange hearing reports of "scroll lag" in the other comments. It's possible I'm just lucky. Or there's a misconfiguration somewhere in their setup that Chrome somehow avoids.

It's true that I still mostly use Chrome for webdev - I've become more used to it's (excellent) dev tools, even though Firefox and Firebug started that whole trend. It feels very right to separate my "user browser" from my "dev browser" in this way!

systems_glitch2• 3 years ago

Same. Been using it since it was called Camino then Firebird, a confusing namespace collision :P

dylan6045• 3 years ago

Maybe they can use Screaming Chicken for a future name

BearOso• 3 years ago

Camino was actually a separate, but similar slim-down project for Mac. It had Mac OS Cocoa controls, so it fit in better.

Camino was originally named Chimera. It was started by Dave Hyatt, the guy who went to Apple to build Safari and WebKit, which Chrome now uses.

ok123456• 3 years ago

Phoenix for me.

coldtea3• 3 years ago

It's strange hearing reports of "scroll lag" in the other comments. It's possible I'm just lucky. Or there's a misconfiguration somewhere in their setup that Chrome somehow avoids.

Don't forget the other possibility: someone using Firefox having internalized this lag as "normal behavior".

javajosh5• 3 years ago

As an aside, I am very much against this trend of accusing people of "internalizing" a bad thing such that they aren't aware of it. It's using therapy-speak as an ad hominem attack, and in my view reflects poorly on the speaker. Most of the people on HN are software developers and are conversant in a wide variety of tools on many platforms, and certainly I am (one can infer that from my post). So to assert that I simply don't know what scroll lag looks like is not only absurd, but also fundamentally disrespectful and ignorant. The simple fact is that you do not, cannot, know what other people experience on their machines. Each physical system is characterized by roughly 10e10 bits - the number of combinations is (10e10)!. In other words, wild and alien configurations exist that you've never seen, and cannot imagine. Compared to this, the chances that someone has software that behaves slightly differently on their system than on your system is approaching 1.

Have some humility.

hooverd• 3 years ago

They might be talking about "Smooth Scrolling." But personally I don't see any lag on Firefox.

thomastjeffery• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure Firefox defaults to smooth scrolling, which can feel laggy even on reasonably powerful hardware, because animation is its own latency.

wackget3• 3 years ago

What do you find lacking in Firefox dev tools? For me I actually prefer them to Chrome.

swores• 3 years ago

They just said they're more used to the Chrome version, not that the Firefox version is lacking.

(Personally I'm with you in preferring Firefox dev tools - although I'm not someone who needs to use them more than a few times a month - not because I have any specific issues with Chrome dev tools, but because I prefer Firefox, and Mozilla, generally, and I've not found anything that FF can't do.)

javajosh5• 3 years ago

I don't find them lacking - I just don't use them regularly so it feels awkward when I do use them.

hardcopy• 3 years ago

Not who you replied to, but: performance analysis, service worker debugging, indexeddb inspection

(I use firefox devtools primarily)

Scarbutt• 3 years ago

Mozilla fired the dev tools team, so features get in more slowly compared to Chrome.

barrotes• 3 years ago

I took an old laptop and transformed it into an Arch Linux based smart-tv (thanks to a stabilized "air mouse" and AwesomeWM to configure windows positions and shortcuts through LUA). Now I basically do everything through Firefox in kiosk mode: it's fast, you can avoid ads, telemetry et similia through configuration tweaks and extensions. The only problem I have is with Sky/NowTV services, that are not accessible by web browser and don't have Linux apps and are not (yet?) working through wine. All the rest I use (Prime Video, Netflix, Mubi, Discovery+ etc) work great with it, way faster and cleaner than usual smart TV apps. This with a 15W-TDP 4th-gen i3 based old entry level laptop. That's just to say that Firefox can actually be pretty good for TV!

RVRX• 3 years ago

Only very rarely (every few months) am I forced to use Chrome for a site - and in my view, that's a huge ding on the site devs, not on Firefox.

I find this very common with Credit Card and Banking Sites. Very often they either refuse to log me in or log me out sooner than they should on Firefox, or certain pages within the site will just not load. I'm guessing they prioritize security, and only test this stuff in Chrome ;(

ranting-moth• 3 years ago

I've had this happen and businesses have lost my business because of it.

alekratz• 3 years ago

The place I run into this the most is, strangely, chipotle.com. Still can't order online on Firefox.

cozzyd• 3 years ago

except my TV ha

I was sad when they discontinued Firefox for my TV (even though it was mostly an Amazon-funded workaround to get youtube on FireTV which went away when YouTube started working...).

azeirah4• 3 years ago

Firefox dev tools have been letting me down the past few months.

I'm working on a pretty nasty (legacy and poorly optimised) but otherwise still rather "normal" website at work.

Opening the dev tools makes Firefox hang for almost a minute, I suspect this is due to some issue with source maps, thousands of source files and large (several megabytes of) minified code.

The debugger often reports _wrong_ values on hover especially in useEffects whereas console.log shows the right one.

Other than the js debugger I have 0 problems with the Firefox devtools, it often spearheads features that I use on a day-to-day basis like highlighting grid layouts. Super nice!

javajosh5• 3 years ago

Yes! Their grid layout/comprehension tool is first-rate.

aden1ne• 3 years ago

As for sites that don't work in FireFox, here's a huge one: Office365 does not support FireFox on MacOS[0]. Mostly it works, but some things unfortunately don't. For instance, my employer's Teams site just doesn't render at all in FF.

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/which-browsers-wo...

copperx3• 3 years ago

Do you know what features Firefox is missing on MacOS?

agumonkey• 3 years ago

kudos

hank_z• 3 years ago

A off topic question. Has anyone encountered the crash after wake from sleep for the latest Firefox on macOS Sonoma public beta?

_y5hn2• 3 years ago

Firefox or Librewolf would be my preference if it had tab groups.

unsungNovelty2• 3 years ago

Firefox containers are tab groups on steroids. Tab groups are just aesthetic while Firefox containers can not only group and colour code the tabs but isolate cache and stuff. This means you can use two gmail accounts in two separate tabs. It also means you can isolate you personal bank or other websites so that other data harvesting website cant get to that information. :)

Firefox containers have been there long back before tab groupings were available in Chrome as well.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-contain...

_y5hn2• 3 years ago

Last time I checked it didn't allow me to group tabs, so not sure why it would be applicable to my usecase which is an UI thing. Seems to be two separate features to me at least, but maybe you know how to use containers to group tabs in top bar of browser.

fernandotakai• 3 years ago

as a pentadactly widow, i would recommend to anyone that is coming back to firefox tridactyl https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl

is it the same? no.

but is it close? hell yeah. it really helps me with productivity!

dz0ny• 3 years ago

I don't know but inspect tools just irritate me soo much in Firefox that I don't like to use the browser then at all. I started my career in Firefox and still remember you had to have an extension for debugging HTML, the editing style was fun and useful.

My usage changed a lot from then, now I need:

- Tracing graph for network events in Firefox which it does not have.

- Applications tab that would show me the status of workers, cache ... is just plain in Firefox

- And UI seems condensed, I guess I just got used to a more relaxed Chrome.

- The whole debacle we don't want you to install a web app as a shortcut because it's bad for some reason. (They lost me initially with this years ago when I still had Linux).

It's a shame but Firefox is just not what I need and prefer anymore.

trewqasdf• 3 years ago

It's nice to hear that they are not falling behind. I switched to Firefox after Opera started to decline. I rely heavily on multi-account containers, but it is a pity that they can't run their own engine on iOS. I have nothing against the dev tools in Firefox, but it is way easier to google issues for chrome dev tools.

lmizell• 3 years ago

I will always vouch for Firefox, It's been my primary browser since 2018 and there's no turning back. However its worth noting that while my FF windows experience has been painless I cannot say the same for Linux.

alcamech• 3 years ago

On Fedora, I usually have issues with video playback, wayland, and browser/tab crashes.

alexghr• 3 years ago

This is great to hear and I hope it will mean more people give Firefox a decent try! We need more people on alternative browsers in order to keep healthy competition between rendering engines.

Firefox also handles lots of tabs really well and its Tab Containers plugin enables perfect separation of work tabs and personal tabs (I've got 1.4k tabs split across personal/work containers. I've got a problem, I know)

napo• 3 years ago

I'm a bit confused by the UI. Looks like the test is for windows. Did someone manage to test it for Linux and MacOS as well? (not sure what test we are supposed to use)

mgoetzke• 3 years ago

Sadly I cannot update Firefox anymore as any newer release would mean my other monitors would only show a black screen when looking at anything even remotely encoded with copy protection.

frou_dh• 3 years ago

It's kinda interesting that some of the younger amongst us might have only ever known Chrome through the lens of its meme-like reputation for being a big fat hog.

Because when it was originally released like 15 years ago, the pitch/consensus were the exact opposite of that, i.e. ultra clean and efficient.

globular-toast2• 3 years ago

As was Firefox (originally Pheonix, then Firebird), which was the ultra clean and efficient version of Mozilla. It was crazy how much better it was compared to IE6. It just didn't have a monopoly and anti-competitive marketing behind it like Chrome and IE did.

EMM_386• 3 years ago

Yep, I was a Pheonix user from the beginning in 2002 ... where you just unzipped it to a folder and ran it.

I stuck with Firefox for literally 20 years, only caving in last year due to noticeable performance difference (went to Brave).

But this news makes me want to try it again, I'd rather be using Firefox just to have another browser engine thriving.

Competition is good.

pingec• 3 years ago

FF is great, only two things left I go to Chrome for are DevTools and watching Youtube (lower cpu usage, lower battery drain).

dh-g• 3 years ago

Youtube performance/reliability on OSX made me switch to Brave.

nateb20223• 3 years ago

Regarding battery drain, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1716164

TL;DR: Firefox usually uses AV1. Hardware prior to intel 11th gen tiger lake, amd rdna2 (pre rtx 6000 series) and nvidia 3000 series has no hardware AV1 decoding support (and neither does Apple Silicon). This results in higher CPU usage on Firefox, whereas Safari and Chrome usually resort to codecs that have hardware decode support on the machine.

This can easily be fixed by going to `about:config` and setting `media.av1.enabled` to false.

pdanpdan3• 3 years ago

Does this require some special test environment (special OS, special builds of firefox/chrome)?

Because for me chrome vs firefox (both 115)

  - ubuntu desktop: 148(+-2.2) vs 126(+-6.5)
  - android phone: 95.8(+-2.0) vs 78.5(+-4.3)

So it looks like chrome is faster and delivers a more stable performance while firefox is slower and more inconsistent on performance

tekni5• 3 years ago

I get 260 for chrome & 160 for firefox on win 10.

gorhill• 3 years ago

Extensions can have a measurable effect on the benchmark, be sure both browsers have no extension, or the same extensions with the same configuration.

pdanpdan3• 3 years ago

Chrome has ublock and very few others, Firefox only ublock

I suppose it is about nightly 117

mccr8• 3 years ago

The linked graph is for Firefox Nightly (currently 117) running on Windows.

pdanpdan3• 3 years ago

Small update: Firefox 117 on Android phone 75.4(+-6.4) so still there

jeffbee• 3 years ago

Adding my anecdotes: on an M2 mac mini

  - chrome 114: 472 ± 30
  - firefox 115: 390 ± 22
  - firefox 117: 420 ± 12

impoppy• 3 years ago

Chrome and Safari still feel way faster in normal usage though, as they try to predict the most likely page the user will open and start pre-loading it even before the user has pressed Enter. Firefox is my daily driver, but sometimes I use Safari for some specific cases and Safari certainly is stupidly fast compared to Firefox.

throwaway1047822• 3 years ago

You'll pry the Firefox developer tools and container tabs from my cold dead hands. It would have to be significantly slower for me to switch off of it.

adverbly• 3 years ago

Interesting. I actually switch to Chrome specifically if I need to use the developer tools. What do you prefer about the Firefox version?

michaelsalim• 3 years ago

Not OP but I think it's a lot about familiarity. I'm sure chrome has most of the things I use in firefox. But I'm just not familiar with it anymore so I always revert back to firefox if i need to use the dev tools.

Sarkie• 3 years ago

Firefox is faster for our site* so we have suggested customers to use it.

*Our site is shit.

izzydata• 3 years ago

I think it is finally time to de-google my digital footprint.

magicbuzz• 3 years ago

I just wish that Teams would load in a reasonable time on Firefox. It's a corporate enforced need and it takes minutes to load the web Teams version in Firefox. Microsoft seem not to treat Firefox as a legitimate web client.

hooby• 3 years ago

It would be really bad if everyone used Firefox - just as it would be very bad if everyone used Chrome (or even any other browser based on the same rendering engine).

We all absolutely do benefit greatly from having multiple competing browsers and render engines - regardless of which one we individually prefer to use.

Therefore I really don't understand the many, many, many "my-browser-is-better-than-yours-you-should-switch" comments in this thread here. Why's everyone trying to convince everyone else that they should use the one and only "best" browser too? What for?

Are people truly that desperate for confirmation and validation, that they need others to agree on their choice of browser?

51Cards• 3 years ago

The problem is the percentage use is so unbalanced right now (IMO due to Google and Microsoft using their other platforms to drive installing their browsers) that I now run across sites that only function in Chrome properly. A lot of devs feel that "Eh, I've targeted the 90+%, why do the rest matter?" and that is how you hand control of web standards to Google. The usage ratio needs to be more balanced to prevent a browser monopoly, hence people trying to ensure there continues to be a choice.

beej71• 3 years ago

I regret I have but one thumbs-up to give this comment.

It's important to have at least 2 healthy browsers (in market share). They keep each other honest, if I might put it so tersely. We all remember IE6, and were in danger territory again with the current percentages.

For this reason, personally, Chrome would have to be 2x or more better than Firefox for me to consider switching to it. Do what you can to keep the market diverse.

If the percentages were reversed, I'd absolutely be running Chromium or a variant.

LinuxBender• 3 years ago

Browser wars are almost as old as the internet. There was even a time when people would put little rectangle animated gifs at the bottom of their websites saying things like "Best viewed with Netscape!" or "MSIE SUX!" or "Best Viewed with MSIE!" and then after a while those evolved into memes and then they vanished. There would be flamewars on Usenet about which browser is better. It isn't just browsers. There's tabs-vs-spaces. Scripting language vs scripting language. Meat vs plants. I think this would be best answered by a psychologist. I am curious what the personal preference wars will look like in another 20 years. Maybe "Real human skin vs. synthetic skin on my LoveDroid!"

some_random2• 3 years ago

It'll be more browser wars but be between 4 different Chromium browsers.

some_random2• 3 years ago

Don't worry, there's no risk of a 100% Firefox ecosystem[1]. To the point where even suggesting it as a risk is really silly.

[1]https://gs.statcounter.com/

globular-toast2• 3 years ago

It wouldn't be as bad if everyone used Firefox, though.

FalconSensei2• 3 years ago

many "my-browser-is-better-than-yours-you-should-switch" comments in this thread here

Also because they say FF is better but... for what/who? what parts are better?

I try it a couple times a year, and always go back to Chrome, because the UX is so bad (for me). I get more stressed about the browser I'm using, than actually enjoying the browsing

n_time• 3 years ago

I stopped using Firefox because it was killing my battery life. Also because I noticed more and more websites stopped supporting it and I just kind of gave up. I'm using Safari these days and it's fine.

pjmlp2• 3 years ago

Great, however it will take more than that to get out of the 3% adoption.

Everyone pushing Chrome and Electron apps will not suddenly adopt Firefox.

Zamicol• 3 years ago

I had to switch back to Firefox on desktop because Chrome has rendering bugs on Ubuntu. I use it infrequently, and noticed that Firefox has gotten much faster.

isodev• 3 years ago

Kind of a shame they didn't include Safari. But it's good to see Firefox has managed to climb to the second place.

agloe_dreams2• 3 years ago

Heh, yeah I enjoy that this is the missing context. It really does show progress though for Firefox.

It's like "The Cubs beat the Yankees in the World Series! (But the Astros actually won the World Series)"

magicalist4• 3 years ago

Safari is slower, though? From the sibling comment:

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...

cpeterso3• 3 years ago

Here are the Speedometer results for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari on macOS:

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...

seabass-labrax• 3 years ago

I love Firefox, but there's just one thing I miss from Chromium: run-in-background mode. My PinePhone has lots of memory but very slow IO, which means that Firefox can spend nearly twenty seconds loading. Once running, it'll load pages really quickly because local storage isn't involved. If there was a way of keeping a Firefox daemon running to instantly bring back a window, I would be very pleased indeed.

kevinlinxc2• 3 years ago

Does anyone else use Firefox on Android and have the bug where any unassuming tab can become unresponsive when you leave and come back to it, to the point where opening a new tab is the only option?

neycoda• 3 years ago

Uh, I find this hard to believe considering Firefox still consistently runs slower in most ways for me than Chrome.

warabe• 3 years ago

I don't care about performance if differences are negligible enough.

I support Firefox because competition makes market healthier. Current status of Manifest v.3 is a shining example.

jeroenhd• 3 years ago

That's very interesting! Last time I benchmarked Firefox, it performed half as fast as Chrome or Gnome's WebKit. I should run my benchmarks again!

I do wonder though, is this performance improvement Windows specific? It's hard to believe that Mozilla could make up the difference in only three or four months.

Edit: looks like Chromium still beats Firefox on Linux: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...

In fact, all benchmarks browsers seem between a quarter and a third slower on Linux in speedometer. That's strange, I wonder if this has to do with the limited availability of hardware acceleration?

return_to_monke• 3 years ago

I'd think that these improvements were started years ago but only now enabled

542458• 3 years ago

https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6...

Looks like it really depends on the benchmark. In some Firefox gets slaughtered, in some Firefox is the clear winner.

foota• 3 years ago

Some of these are score (higher is better) and some are time (lower is better) in case that wasn't clear.

Jochim4• 3 years ago

Firefox has been my browser of choice since I switched from Internet Explorer as a child.

However, I've found their refusal to implement or offer alternatives to WebSerial and screen-casting utterly depressing. It's made a number of tasks more difficult and inconvenient and makes Firefox a less useful tool overall.

On the WebSerial discussion ticket, an educator articulates how this decision essentially forces what was a Firefox based classroom onto Chrome. I'll be sticking with Firefox but missing functionality drives users away.

It doesn't help that their reasoning for not implementing WebSerial feels extremely paternalistic and runs counter to the ethos of user empowerment at the core of most open source projects.

RunSet2• 3 years ago

"WebSerial" appears to me just another baby step in Chome's quest to become an OS.

What is the justification for making everyone's browser able to "read from and write to serial devices"?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Serial_...

I know it is really for user fingerprinting but what is google's overt justification for pushing it?

Jochim4• 3 years ago

Mozilla's argument isn't that you'll be tracked or fingerprinted. It's that you're too stupid to be permitted control over whether or not you want to allow access to devices you've connected to your machine. Rather than work to mitigate those risks, they've decided to hobble the utility of their browser.

Personally, it would make flashing ESPHome devices much more convenient. Not having to switch browser for a start. The ability to plug a board into whatever PC on my LAN and just flash it, without having to install and maintain the entire toolchain is nice as well.

More broadly, there are web based IDEs for microcontrollers. Arduino has one: https://docs.arduino.cc/learn/starting-guide/the-arduino-web...

A few of these are aimed at the education sector, removing a some of the significant barriers faced by educators that would otherwise have trouble getting the software installed and keeping it updated.

In one of the discussions, someone was using it to help dental offices retrieve data from some specialised hardware. Browser support dealt with similar concerns of how to distribute the software to non-technical clients and keep it up to date. It was also something their clients understood, rather than something new.

panzi• 3 years ago

That's great. But Google Maps Street View (-> GeoGuessr) is still a slideshow under Firefox (Linux) for me. (I tried all the things under about:config) Really hope that gets fixed some day. On that day I will switch back. Really missing browser containers (well, I'm booting Firefox just for that, actually).

FalconSensei2• 3 years ago

Nice, maybe someday I'll give it another chance. My main gripe is the UX for some things, and how some features seem half-baked.

E.g.: to add a keyword for a search engine, it saves a bookmark, but there isn't (or wasn't) any way to filter for those later if you wanted to check what you had already created

nwienert• 3 years ago

I’ve got a landing page I’ve been working on that pushes the limits on things by overlapping all sorts of effects: WebGL, mix-blend-mode, clip-path, SVGs, overlapping animations on custom fonts, etc.

Safari and Chrome run it surprisingly well. Firefox was getting basically 1fps. I had to turn off half the effects before it felt reasonable.

nateb20223• 3 years ago

I just benchmarked both Firefox and Chromium on my desktop using Speedometer 2.1. Each browser was configured as out of the box, with no extensions, and with a blank profile:

FF (114.0.1): 101 +- 1.9 Chromium (114.0.5735.198): 94.5 +- 2.2

FF (115.0.2): 104 +- 2.4 Chromium (115.0.5790.90): 101 +- 2.6

Machine Specs: Intel i5-3470 @ 3.2 GHz, 16 GB DDR3, 128 GB SSD. Linux kernel 6.1.38 (latest longterm branch) on Arch.

kyledrake• 3 years ago

I use Firefox on my phone, it's the only one that allows me to block popups/ads/autoplay videos and disable javascript via add-ons when I need to, and the web is pretty much unusable without being able to do that now. Who cares if it's faster if you can't even load the content without it blocking your view with popups and trying to play videos without your consent before crashing?

rukshn• 3 years ago

My only suggestion is for FireFox to implement the native UI elements of the system (dropdowns, menus) etc. Than using something of their own. Where Chrome uses the system native UI elements.

Is there a way to fix it with some tweeking?

bobbob19212• 3 years ago

Im also a recent to firefox from Chrome convert recently (win 11). My reason is UI latency related, and my used case is a tad unique. As a network engineer, and system administrator, my daily PC is very high end enterprise hardware and running windows 11, and has 8 x 4K monitors.

I always will have 20 to 50 web browser windows open as well as many tabs in each of those windows.

The main issue I was encountering, and my best guess, from a lot of testing over the past three years, is related to the large pixel count of my desktop - I would frequently encounter 1 to 2 seconds of lag/unresponsiveness when switching from chrome to another (chrome) application in the background. As this has been a nearly 3 year long issue, I’ve tried many , MANY fixes/work arounds The two most impactful were upgrading from windows 10 to windows 11. And switching from chrome from primarily using chrome to Firefox. (The issue was actually the same with chrome canary, as well as with GPU rendering enabled or disabled in each browser.)

  while I now run Firefox 24/7, I will occasionally open up chrome or chrome canary in unique use cases, and still notice the performance improvement in firefox during those times.

(to be clear when I say I’ve tried and tested just about everything, I mean it from fresh new iOS installs with no applications, except chrome, two upgrading every piece of hardware a few times over) - the issue persisted.

azeirah4• 3 years ago

8 x 4K monitors, I'm so jealous wow. I wish my work would give me even one, I'm developing on 2 full hd monitors :(

I even do some design work so it's honestly pretty bad.

bobbob19212• 3 years ago

Thanks, to be fully accurate, it’s 6X 4K monitors normal orientation,, and 2x 2560p - 29 inch widescreen type monitors both rotated vertically , and touching each other (via one of those $60 or so floorstanding 40 inch tall dual monitor mounts from Amazon).

I love my set up, I work for myself, and from home, so purchased it myself.

The GPUs I use, used to be 2X Nvidia, P1000 Quadro. But as I was trying to troubleshoot this latency issue I was referring to I’ve upgraded to 2X Quadro, RTX 4000 GPUs. (Which actually made little difference/improvement to the issue).

By the way, set ups like mine aren’t as expensive as you might think, you can get a nvidia Quadro P1000 or P2000 GPU on eBay for very inexpensive, as in around maybe 200 or less, each.

I really don’t play games, the rare times I do it’s exclusively on my Xbox (so none of this is for gaming / gaming optimized)

Edit: also, the 4K monitors are 30 inch in physical size, one might be 32-inch. This is very important I have found over the years (and going through many different monitors and resolutions to finally find the optimal set up for myself.) - 30 or 32 inch I have found is the sweet spot for 4K resolution.

I don’t use any windows OS text size increase (or whatever the 100% 125% 150% thing is called, mine is set to 100%.)

demizer• 3 years ago

Firefox is the best. I wish Mozilla would let me donate funds specifically to fund it's development for my own peace of mind.

collinmanderson• 3 years ago

Firefox has 2.2% usage on US government websites according to https://analytics.usa.gov/

If it falls below 2% it may lose official support on .gov websites according to https://designsystem.digital.gov/documentation/developers/#b...

Soupy• 3 years ago

Been a firefox user since 2020 after switching from Chrome and haven't looked back. The only thing that I find myself missing is native casting support so that's the last piece that sometimes forces me to open up Chrome

tracker12• 3 years ago

Glad to see this, browsers have been mostly Chromium based for a while. Safari seems to be lagging a lot since the split, and I just don't like the Firefox UI as much.

OT: Just curious... does anyone have a good cross-browser extension (chrome and FF browsers) that can sync the bookmarks, in particular the bookmark toolbar. I use a password manager (Bitwarden) that integrates well, wish I could get the same for the bookmarks toolbar.

unilynx• 3 years ago

I’ve tried to find something like this multiple time over the past years, but it seems browsers do their best to protect bookmarks from extensions

It seems the only way are tools that directly edit each respective browsers setting files (ie from the command line) but I’d rather not go down that path.

tracker12• 3 years ago

Yeah... I'd been keeping my "source of truth" to my google account, so it's easy enough to export and import to other browsers... but trying to distance myself from the google account for everything.

Found a couple extensions, so will probably export to be safe, then start playing to see how it goes.

Propelloni• 3 years ago

There used to be xbookmarks.com but it is long gone. There is an open source tool by the name of XBrowserSync [1] which came up when I searched for xbookmarks. What they say on their website sounds promising, but I did not do any further research or try it out. I'm on Firefox on all my devices ;)

[1] https://www.xbrowsersync.org/

bugmen0t• 3 years ago

The link is terrible. Maybe the article should link to https://arewefastyet.com or maybe the Speedometer selection at https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/raptor-desktop-spe...

twism• 3 years ago

I may bee the outlier here since everyone seems to gush about firefox every now and then on here ... but as a webdev firefox still feels second rate to me when it comes to PWA, Push Notifications, CSS animations (glitchy/graphics tearing) and a host of other things I test for browser compatibility

sedatk• 3 years ago

I think that because of the new "efficiency" initiatives at Microsoft, Edge is very bad compared to the others at handling web sites that need low latency and moderate execution speed (such as 3D demos, games, emulators, audio players).

Edge on my 5950X + RTX3080 + 32GB RAM can't play some chiptune without glitching while Firefox can handle it like butter. Firefox's becoming a strong competitor every day.

andrewstuart• 3 years ago

Firefox is my main browser.

No complaints.

jrnichols• 3 years ago

I've been a fan of Firefox for many years. Seems that those friends of mine still using Chrome are doing so because they are firmly trapped in the Googleverse. (gmail, YouTube, Google Docs, etc.)

Firefox & its containers have been fantastic. Fast, stable, and I get the impression that security still matters.

torartc• 3 years ago

Firefox might be fast, but it's majorly lacking in browser APIs these days.

osdril• 3 years ago

I use Safari as my primary browser, only for its tab groups implementation. In my opinion they just nailed it, I think it's much better than the Chrome one. I would really like to switch to Firefox as I prefer it in every other way, but I don't think I will move until they offer a robust native tab group implementation (I've tried Simple Tab Groups but I don't want to rely on a hacky extension for such a core functionality).

Havoc• 3 years ago

I’ll stick to FF for lack of manifest 3 alone. Adblocking is superior of ff as a result…and that affects my experience more than a microsecond diff either way

merdaverse• 3 years ago

I have considered making the switch, but on Ubuntu touch screen is poorly implemented as mouse clicks instead of touch events. Chromium sidesteps this by doing its own touch detection, allowing me to comfortably browse through pages with touch. Firefox does not. Until either Firefox or Linux starts taking touchscreens on desktop seriously I will stick to Chrome, and in desperate times, Windows.

juanefren• 3 years ago

The only thing it prevents me for using Firefox is it's XML viewer, clicking on text collapses nodes, it makes copying text very hard. I haven't found a workaround for this.

tortoise_in• 3 years ago

Now wish they are allowed to have their own webview and Android don't allow to block it

tempaccount420• 3 years ago

Firefox is great, Mozilla on the other hand...

cosmojg• 3 years ago

I find that, in every domain, second place is almost always superior to first place where it counts despite being somewhat rougher around the edges. Firefox is a particularly excellent example of this phenomenon.

Why is that? Just good old-fashioned competitive optimization?

MrBra• 3 years ago

Ok, now take the number of years during which Firefox was slower and calculate an averaged value of its speed. This will account for all the frustration it would have caused switching to it in the past. Being faster for 2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months, and probably even for 2 years wouldn't be enough to cause a big change in that averaged value. And that would also measure how much of a guarateed good choice would be switching to Firefox right now. As soon as it will stay faster for enough time to smooth out the differences then I'll start consider using it.

I've been a Firefox advocate and user for many years, but then about 6 years ago I had to face the hard truth of how bad it performed with lots of tabs open, and how much of a pain I was causing myself for not switching to a Chromium powered browser.

About one month ago, I've checked it out again under the same conditions... and sadly it's still not even close to competitors' memory management.

Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

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