31 ms·

It also had an advantage of being a friggin' fast browser. I switched in 2009 and never looked back beside occasionally trying out FF and nope'ing back to Chrom

by tdkl 10y ago

It also had an advantage of being a friggin' fast browser. I switched in 2009 and never looked back beside occasionally trying out FF and nope'ing back to Chrome.

shmerl 10y ago
Firefox became faster than Chrome quite a while ago already. Not sure what you were measuring.
- Aldo_MX 10y ago
  UI Responsiveness probably, any perception of speed is lost if loading a website freezes the entire browser for several msecs.
  - Drdrdrq 10y ago
    This. I love FF and use it wherever I can, but there are small tricks in Chrome that make it seem much faster in normal use. No matter what you do, action feedback is instant. Firefox should really imitate this.
  - delecti 10y ago
    Yep. A bit part of the perception of speed isn't "always be fast", it's "never be slow".
- acdha 10y ago
  When talking about a piece of software as complicated as a modern browser, “became faster” is too broad to have any meaning at all — you can find specific features where almost any browser is faster. In the case of Chrome and Firefox, they're competitive enough that you really need to say both what you're measuring and how you measured it. People tend to say one is faster than the other when they most commonly mean “the set of extensions I installed in A slowed it down more than B”.
  - Aldo_MX 10y ago
    No, we are talking about the architecture of the browsers in areas where there is significant impact (ie. UI Responsiveness), this has nothing to do with extensions. In Chrome when you load a JS-intensive website (ex. Facebook) you can switch to a different tab while the website finishes doing that JS-intensive task (ex. loading), but in Firefox the opposite happens, the entire browser freezes so you are forced to wait until the browser becomes responsive again. We are talking in the order of magnitude of milliseconds, but unfortunately it is enough to be perceptible (and annoying). Fortunately for FF, e10s[1] is almost baked, it still doesn't feel as responsive as Chrome BUT it feels significantly better so you can easily neglect the difference until it matures or something better (Servo[2]) gets baked. [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis [2] https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/
    - acdha 10y ago
      That may be what you thought we're talking about but the comment I replied to was simply “Firefox became faster than Chrome quite a while ago already”. My point was simply that without providing more detail, those comments are so vague to be useless.
- yomly 10y ago
  I have a policy of keeping personal browsing on chrome and work based browsing on FF. Every now and then FF will inexplicably hang for over 5 seconds on a page that is probably already cached. I never notice this on chrome, and my connection speed is over 100MBps.. Other times, FF is lightning quick - near instantaneous loads - only other thing I can think of is that I'm running FF on Fedora?
  - shmerl 10y ago
    On Linux until full Wayland switch will happen, performance won't be optimal. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1038800 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1038800
  - shmerl 10y ago
    See also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=740200 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=740200
- tracker1 10y ago
  Honestly I just like Chrome's UI better... I have to use IE/Edge, Chrome, Safari and Firefox regularly to test things... I keep coming back. I had higher hopes for FF android, as it allows plugins (adblock), but the browser is so horrible on the platform, I wound up switching back... I also tried dolphin for a while. Neither was satisfactory. I just like chrome better...
  - Aldo_MX 10y ago
    My experience in Android is a different one, I'm using a FF fork (Adblock Browser) and my mobile life has never been better. Unfortunately outside America the mobile web is a malvertising minefield, and the malvertisers target the carriers directly, so there is no way to expect ad networks (ex. AdSense) to proactively hunt for them. A browser with integrated AdBlock is the most sensible option you can have in a non-rooted device, and the easiest one you can recommend to friends and colleagues.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      Do you happen to use lastpass? Is there an integration there either with the android app, or with the browser itself that works? I'm just curious as the chrome app can tell what url is in the browser, and peak into the page... This detail doesn't work in ff, dolphin and others I've tried so far. I know that is a separate issue... would really like my password manager & adblock & the app window/tabs where each "tab" is a separate window instead of integrated tab-bar, which isn't very nice at all on a phone.

by tdkl 10y ago

It also had an advantage of being a friggin' fast browser. I switched in 2009 and never looked back beside occasionally trying out FF and nope'ing back to Chrome.

shmerl 10y ago

Firefox became faster than Chrome quite a while ago already. Not sure what you were measuring.

Aldo_MX 10y ago
UI Responsiveness probably, any perception of speed is lost if loading a website freezes the entire browser for several msecs.
- Drdrdrq 10y ago
  This. I love FF and use it wherever I can, but there are small tricks in Chrome that make it seem much faster in normal use. No matter what you do, action feedback is instant. Firefox should really imitate this.
- delecti 10y ago
  Yep. A bit part of the perception of speed isn't "always be fast", it's "never be slow".
acdha 10y ago
When talking about a piece of software as complicated as a modern browser, “became faster” is too broad to have any meaning at all — you can find specific features where almost any browser is faster. In the case of Chrome and Firefox, they're competitive enough that you really need to say both what you're measuring and how you measured it. People tend to say one is faster than the other when they most commonly mean “the set of extensions I installed in A slowed it down more than B”.
- Aldo_MX 10y ago
  No, we are talking about the architecture of the browsers in areas where there is significant impact (ie. UI Responsiveness), this has nothing to do with extensions. In Chrome when you load a JS-intensive website (ex. Facebook) you can switch to a different tab while the website finishes doing that JS-intensive task (ex. loading), but in Firefox the opposite happens, the entire browser freezes so you are forced to wait until the browser becomes responsive again. We are talking in the order of magnitude of milliseconds, but unfortunately it is enough to be perceptible (and annoying). Fortunately for FF, e10s[1] is almost baked, it still doesn't feel as responsive as Chrome BUT it feels significantly better so you can easily neglect the difference until it matures or something better (Servo[2]) gets baked. [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis [2] https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/
  - acdha 10y ago
    That may be what you thought we're talking about but the comment I replied to was simply “Firefox became faster than Chrome quite a while ago already”. My point was simply that without providing more detail, those comments are so vague to be useless.
yomly 10y ago
I have a policy of keeping personal browsing on chrome and work based browsing on FF. Every now and then FF will inexplicably hang for over 5 seconds on a page that is probably already cached. I never notice this on chrome, and my connection speed is over 100MBps.. Other times, FF is lightning quick - near instantaneous loads - only other thing I can think of is that I'm running FF on Fedora?
- shmerl 10y ago
  On Linux until full Wayland switch will happen, performance won't be optimal. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1038800 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1038800
- shmerl 10y ago
  See also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=740200 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=740200
tracker1 10y ago
Honestly I just like Chrome's UI better... I have to use IE/Edge, Chrome, Safari and Firefox regularly to test things... I keep coming back. I had higher hopes for FF android, as it allows plugins (adblock), but the browser is so horrible on the platform, I wound up switching back... I also tried dolphin for a while. Neither was satisfactory. I just like chrome better...
- Aldo_MX 10y ago
  My experience in Android is a different one, I'm using a FF fork (Adblock Browser) and my mobile life has never been better. Unfortunately outside America the mobile web is a malvertising minefield, and the malvertisers target the carriers directly, so there is no way to expect ad networks (ex. AdSense) to proactively hunt for them. A browser with integrated AdBlock is the most sensible option you can have in a non-rooted device, and the easiest one you can recommend to friends and colleagues.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    Do you happen to use lastpass? Is there an integration there either with the android app, or with the browser itself that works? I'm just curious as the chrome app can tell what url is in the browser, and peak into the page... This detail doesn't work in ff, dolphin and others I've tried so far. I know that is a separate issue... would really like my password manager & adblock & the app window/tabs where each "tab" is a separate window instead of integrated tab-bar, which isn't very nice at all on a phone.