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I keep switching between Firefox and Chrome. I want to be using Firefox, except I cannot. Chrome is designed for web apps. If you keep several apps open in Fir

I keep switching between Firefox and Chrome. I want to be using Firefox, except I cannot. Chrome is designed for web apps. If you keep several apps open in Firefox, like say Gmail, FastMail, Slack, Gitter, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp Web and Google Music or YouTube, pretty soon Firefox ends up being really, really sluggish. And I keep these apps pinned, and the startup experience for Firefox gets horrible. Firefox also has problems with many services, where loading a single link can make your whole browser unresponsive for a long time or even crash it. To see what I mean, load this Travis log in Firefox and compare with Chrome: https://travis-ci.org/monixio/monix/builds/148774867 https://travis-ci.org/monixio/monix/builds/148774867 ; and this is just one sample, there are others that bother me, like the OpenTSDB UI. Personally I don't keep 200 tabs open, because I'm focusing on just a few at a time. If I want to go back to something valuable, I use bookmarks (or more recently Pinboard.in). This is because tabs are hard to manage and search, unless you have one of those fancy extensions, but I dislike those as well. On add-ons, I very much appreciate Mozilla having a good review process, but those add-ons have no isolation and everything is allowed to run even in private mode. The fact is, if I can't comfortably run my web apps in Firefox, I'll keep going back to Chrome. And yes I keep trying using native apps, like Thunderbird and Adium/Pidgin. It isn't working out.

the8472 10y ago
> On add-ons, I very much appreciate Mozilla having a good review process, but those add-ons have no isolation and everything is allowed to run even in private mode. To me, that's a good thing. I don't like walled gardens because then you, the commoner, have to beg your benevolent ruler to please allow a particular use-case to be supported in their fiefdom.
ploxiln 10y ago
Notice also that the Raw Log loads instantly and is very responsive, in the same Firefox that struggles so much with the fancy travis log page. I think it is unfortunate that insanely heavy web applications, which can kinda get away with it in Chrome, are forcing everyone to Chrome.
- tracker1 10y ago
  It's hard... though, if you work in a mixed environment where different devs use different browsers, some things are better. Just the same, it's hard to convince people not to bring in the jungle for the banana (appropriated analogy). With today's tooling, it's very easy to use smaller frameworks, and piece together what you need.. but in goes angular, jQuery, lodash and a few other large libraries for good measure. About the only one I'm guilty of bringing in these days is moment... and most of that is because the internals for Date are poorly lacking (maybe it's time to standardize some non-mutating, moment-like ES extensions to Date already).
  - lcarlson 10y ago
    Ugh I just had this debate recently about moment. I opted out of using it as I felt it was just too big for its use case.
- bzbarsky 10y ago
  It's not just insanely heavy web applications that are a problem. It's people writing stuff, then it being slow in all browsers, then them optimizing it in Chrome only (basically changing stupid stuff they did that ended up slow in Chrome but maybe fast in other browsers, but not changing stupid stuff that was fast in Chrome but slow in other browsers) and shipping the results.
s_kilk 10y ago
> To see what I mean, load this Travis log in Firefox and compare with Chrome Wow, that one brought FireFox Dev Edition (OSX El Capitan) to a dead stop over here.
- alex_duf 10y ago
  that did indeed froze my firefox. I had to kill it (on linux)
  - Sylos 10y ago
    Alright, I'm confused. This doesn't do anything for me. I even tried it in a fresh profile to ensure that it wasn't fixed by some add-on or setting that I was using, and tried it with e10s on and off, but it loads perfectly fine in any case. Granted, it's a bit slower than the average site for me, too, but it still loads within about 3 seconds. I'm on Firefox Nightly, Linux, which should be sort of the combination of the two use-cases that you guys have...
    - sharmi 10y ago
      the fun begins when you click on the logs below. It starts loading the log and firefox slows down a lot.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
anonyfox 10y ago
On Safari, this loads instantly for me, butter smooth.
explorigin 10y ago
FWIW, I tried this link in FF 47.0.1 on OS X and it loaded quickly without blocking anything else. Maybe check your plugins or try a fresh profile.
- icebraining 10y ago
  Did you click on the build job on the bottom? The page linked above is fast for me, but the actual log[1] blocks FF for a bit. [1] https://travis-ci.org/monixio/monix/jobs/149097798 https://travis-ci.org/monixio/monix/jobs/149097798
petval 10y ago
I am using Firefox night builds with 33 active addons including GreaseMonkey and some user scripts at the moment as a main browser for about few months already because of multiprocess support. It's perfect - fast, responsive and pretty stable now. What you say about web apps and Chrome you can say about FF with multiprocess on as well. If some page takes too much cpu you can find it in your OS task manager and kill it and you will see which tab crashes (TabData is an usefull addon showing how much memory pages take https://github.com/bobbyrne01/tab-data-firefox https://github.com/bobbyrne01/tab-data-firefox (don't sample too often, it slows FF down if it's active and you have dozens of tabs open and sample every few seconds) I don't know the number of process they will use as default, I configured 128. I regularly use 20-60 tabs with pinned Twitter, Gmail, Reddit, WhatApp and some more ( TabMixPlus with multirow tabs makes it no problem) and it's really nice browsing experience. I had to restart FF every morning, sometimes multiple times a day and when something crashed the whole browser went down. Now you just reload the crashed tab or plugin - was common few months back and is rare nowadays. It has a warning if some addon is slowing FF down - I hope addon authors will update them but right now I just ignore the warnings because I don't see any subjective slowdown.
bzbarsky 10y ago
For what it's worth, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1291707 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1291707 is tracking the travis-ci issue. And if you have concrete examples of other pages where there are performance problems, that would be very much appreciated!

the8472 10y ago

> On add-ons, I very much appreciate Mozilla having a good review process, but those add-ons have no isolation and everything is allowed to run even in private mode. To me, that's a good thing. I don't like walled gardens because then you, the commoner, have to beg your benevolent ruler to please allow a particular use-case to be supported in their fiefdom.

ploxiln 10y ago

Notice also that the Raw Log loads instantly and is very responsive, in the same Firefox that struggles so much with the fancy travis log page. I think it is unfortunate that insanely heavy web applications, which can kinda get away with it in Chrome, are forcing everyone to Chrome.

tracker1 10y ago
It's hard... though, if you work in a mixed environment where different devs use different browsers, some things are better. Just the same, it's hard to convince people not to bring in the jungle for the banana (appropriated analogy). With today's tooling, it's very easy to use smaller frameworks, and piece together what you need.. but in goes angular, jQuery, lodash and a few other large libraries for good measure. About the only one I'm guilty of bringing in these days is moment... and most of that is because the internals for Date are poorly lacking (maybe it's time to standardize some non-mutating, moment-like ES extensions to Date already).
- lcarlson 10y ago
  Ugh I just had this debate recently about moment. I opted out of using it as I felt it was just too big for its use case.
bzbarsky 10y ago
It's not just insanely heavy web applications that are a problem. It's people writing stuff, then it being slow in all browsers, then them optimizing it in Chrome only (basically changing stupid stuff they did that ended up slow in Chrome but maybe fast in other browsers, but not changing stupid stuff that was fast in Chrome but slow in other browsers) and shipping the results.

s_kilk 10y ago

> To see what I mean, load this Travis log in Firefox and compare with Chrome Wow, that one brought FireFox Dev Edition (OSX El Capitan) to a dead stop over here.

alex_duf 10y ago
that did indeed froze my firefox. I had to kill it (on linux)
- Sylos 10y ago
  Alright, I'm confused. This doesn't do anything for me. I even tried it in a fresh profile to ensure that it wasn't fixed by some add-on or setting that I was using, and tried it with e10s on and off, but it loads perfectly fine in any case. Granted, it's a bit slower than the average site for me, too, but it still loads within about 3 seconds. I'm on Firefox Nightly, Linux, which should be sort of the combination of the two use-cases that you guys have...
  - sharmi 10y ago
    the fun begins when you click on the logs below. It starts loading the log and firefox slows down a lot.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

anonyfox 10y ago

On Safari, this loads instantly for me, butter smooth.

explorigin 10y ago

FWIW, I tried this link in FF 47.0.1 on OS X and it loaded quickly without blocking anything else. Maybe check your plugins or try a fresh profile.

icebraining 10y ago
Did you click on the build job on the bottom? The page linked above is fast for me, but the actual log[1] blocks FF for a bit. [1] https://travis-ci.org/monixio/monix/jobs/149097798 https://travis-ci.org/monixio/monix/jobs/149097798

petval 10y ago

I am using Firefox night builds with 33 active addons including GreaseMonkey and some user scripts at the moment as a main browser for about few months already because of multiprocess support. It's perfect - fast, responsive and pretty stable now. What you say about web apps and Chrome you can say about FF with multiprocess on as well. If some page takes too much cpu you can find it in your OS task manager and kill it and you will see which tab crashes (TabData is an usefull addon showing how much memory pages take https://github.com/bobbyrne01/tab-data-firefox https://github.com/bobbyrne01/tab-data-firefox (don't sample too often, it slows FF down if it's active and you have dozens of tabs open and sample every few seconds) I don't know the number of process they will use as default, I configured 128. I regularly use 20-60 tabs with pinned Twitter, Gmail, Reddit, WhatApp and some more ( TabMixPlus with multirow tabs makes it no problem) and it's really nice browsing experience. I had to restart FF every morning, sometimes multiple times a day and when something crashed the whole browser went down. Now you just reload the crashed tab or plugin - was common few months back and is rare nowadays. It has a warning if some addon is slowing FF down - I hope addon authors will update them but right now I just ignore the warnings because I don't see any subjective slowdown.

bzbarsky 10y ago

For what it's worth, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1291707 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1291707 is tracking the travis-ci issue. And if you have concrete examples of other pages where there are performance problems, that would be very much appreciated!