4 ms·

In the beginning, Firefox was ultra fast. Now it is a slow beast and I am forced to use Chrome instead. Are they sure they are focusing on the right things?

r3bl 10y ago
Designers and community managers sure as hell are not going to fix Firefox's speed. Programmers are surely not going to focus on this. Mozilla has more than one team. The speed has nothing to do with the logo. That's like saying: Samsung's new flagship phone is exploding, and they're focusing on making washing machines?
- zyx321 10y ago
  >Samsung's new flagship phone is exploding, and they're focusing on making washing machines? Their washing machines are exploding, too.
- dingaling 10y ago
  > That's like saying: Samsung's new flagship phone is exploding, and they're focusing on making washing machines? The difference being that Samsung's repsective divisions are run as self-funding corporations. The Android development team in their bubble don't have any financial impact on the shipbuilding folks or the washing-machine QA teams. In contrast Mozilla has essentially only one revenue flow, orders of magnitudes greater than the secondary flows. So every dollar that Mozilla spends on 'rebranding' or flailing around with The IoT is one dollar less for paying developers to fix Firefox bugs, or maintain Thunderbird or Persona or whatever.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - rockdoe 10y ago
    Aside from Firefox itself all the things you mentioned got either canned or significantly downsized. Note that Firefox is "owned" by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation which is using it to generate funding for the things it considers important. Given that many of those involve activism, improving branding or messaging seems like a natural investment. It's like whining that Samsung was spending money on their (then-irrelevant) SSD division at a time when their hard drives were starting to get pressured in the market.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
gbog 10y ago
Did you try Firefox recently? I switched back to FF three months ago and it is actually often faster than Chrome (on Linux at least)
ohthehugemanate 10y ago
When was the last time you used Firefox? They've put a ton of work into performance, which involved a serious rewrite. Current versions are now much faster than Chrome (for me). A bit more technical: A big part of why it was so slow, is that the engine was written before tabs ever existed, before CSS and JS (both) became so heavy, and before computers had so much disposable RAM. It kept everything in a single process, on a single CPU. The rewrite makes firefox multi-process and multi-CPU core capable. It makes the browser feel MUCH faster and lighter! The functionality is nicknamed Electrolysis or e10s, and they've been gradually rolling it out since March of this year. The work effected extensions in particular, so they have to roll out slowly. About 30% of the stable-release userbase has multi-process at this point, and they're just starting the follow up rollout enabling multi-core. Give it a try! Try the firefox beta (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/) or better yet, Firefox Developer Edition. If you want to see the full speed improvement of multi-core, go to about:config and set services.sync.numClients to something higher than 1. (they're rolling out with a value of 2, and ultimately ending on 5).

r3bl 10y ago

Designers and community managers sure as hell are not going to fix Firefox's speed. Programmers are surely not going to focus on this. Mozilla has more than one team. The speed has nothing to do with the logo. That's like saying: Samsung's new flagship phone is exploding, and they're focusing on making washing machines?

zyx321 10y ago
>Samsung's new flagship phone is exploding, and they're focusing on making washing machines? Their washing machines are exploding, too.
dingaling 10y ago
> That's like saying: Samsung's new flagship phone is exploding, and they're focusing on making washing machines? The difference being that Samsung's repsective divisions are run as self-funding corporations. The Android development team in their bubble don't have any financial impact on the shipbuilding folks or the washing-machine QA teams. In contrast Mozilla has essentially only one revenue flow, orders of magnitudes greater than the secondary flows. So every dollar that Mozilla spends on 'rebranding' or flailing around with The IoT is one dollar less for paying developers to fix Firefox bugs, or maintain Thunderbird or Persona or whatever.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- rockdoe 10y ago
  Aside from Firefox itself all the things you mentioned got either canned or significantly downsized. Note that Firefox is "owned" by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation which is using it to generate funding for the things it considers important. Given that many of those involve activism, improving branding or messaging seems like a natural investment. It's like whining that Samsung was spending money on their (then-irrelevant) SSD division at a time when their hard drives were starting to get pressured in the market.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

gbog 10y ago

Did you try Firefox recently? I switched back to FF three months ago and it is actually often faster than Chrome (on Linux at least)

ohthehugemanate 10y ago

When was the last time you used Firefox? They've put a ton of work into performance, which involved a serious rewrite. Current versions are now much faster than Chrome (for me). A bit more technical: A big part of why it was so slow, is that the engine was written before tabs ever existed, before CSS and JS (both) became so heavy, and before computers had so much disposable RAM. It kept everything in a single process, on a single CPU. The rewrite makes firefox multi-process and multi-CPU core capable. It makes the browser feel MUCH faster and lighter! The functionality is nicknamed Electrolysis or e10s, and they've been gradually rolling it out since March of this year. The work effected extensions in particular, so they have to roll out slowly. About 30% of the stable-release userbase has multi-process at this point, and they're just starting the follow up rollout enabling multi-core. Give it a try! Try the firefox beta (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/) or better yet, Firefox Developer Edition. If you want to see the full speed improvement of multi-core, go to about:config and set services.sync.numClients to something higher than 1. (they're rolling out with a value of 2, and ultimately ending on 5).