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I was a long time Firefox user until the start of this year. I think I started using Pheonix as my main browser around 0.5 or 0.6. However over the years Firefo

by satysin 10y ago

I was a long time Firefox user until the start of this year. I think I started using Pheonix as my main browser around 0.5 or 0.6. However over the years Firefox has got heavier and slower and taken way too long to evolve. It sucked when I realised I hadn't opened Firefox for a whole month. Now I just stay in Chrome as it is, for me, the best browsing experience. It is fast and looks good. It might be a large program in terms of install size but it doesn't feel bloated. The UI is snappy, scrolling is instant, etc. I do miss a few things about Firefox but not enough to slow down my whole browsing experience. I have moved on from the huge UI changing extensions. Now I just keep things minimal with just a content blocker and one or two other things for convenience. What I don't understand about Firefox is that Mozilla have a lot of money but progress seems very slow. Sure they get there in the end (or most of the way) but it just seems to take forever. Why?

sametmax 10y ago
You are not answering his concern at all, just talking about your preferences.
Nexxxeh 10y ago
Assuming we're talking on the desktop, have you tried Firefox multithreaded? It's a relatively new change.
gcp 10y ago
Mozilla have a lot of money but progress seems very slow As opposed to Google, Apple and Microsoft? Consider what happened to Opera. I think you vastly underestimate the complexity of modern browsers. By orders of magnitude.
fbender 10y ago
Firefox slowness is often related to some bad-behaving extension (though that improved over time), some AV software hijacking the process (happens far too often and way harder to detect than it should), or some busted profiles with a lot of cruft that failed to be cleaned up automatically (re: bad behaving extensions). I advise you to try the Firefox DevEdition (which uses a separate profile by default) and check if it works for you. You can also get rid of your old profile or try to reset it (preserving some data). Money isn't necessarily the issue for Mozilla, they managed to create a decent browser with a fraction of the big player's budget. As always, it's the triangle of complexity and time and manpower, they just can't fight on all fronts at once. At the moment, they are trying to get rid of a lot of legacy that prevented them from improving some aspects of the system (see project e10s, WebExtensions, etc.) all while preserving as much of the ecosystem as possible – which is very hard due to the current extension system that was created more than 10 years ago and just doesn't fit the bill anymore. E.g. e10s is already going on for 5 years or so and it just started rolling out a few months ago. Good news is that with these projects completing (improving overall responsiveness), there's a huge new project starting (Project Quantum) that aims to overhaul major parts of the rendering engine. This will integrate a lot of the research and investment poured into Rust and Servo, which will probably outrun current browsers by an order of magnitude (at least in some aspects that has already been shown, see WebRender).

by satysin 10y ago

sametmax 10y ago

You are not answering his concern at all, just talking about your preferences.

Nexxxeh 10y ago

Assuming we're talking on the desktop, have you tried Firefox multithreaded? It's a relatively new change.

gcp 10y ago

Mozilla have a lot of money but progress seems very slow As opposed to Google, Apple and Microsoft? Consider what happened to Opera. I think you vastly underestimate the complexity of modern browsers. By orders of magnitude.

fbender 10y ago

Firefox slowness is often related to some bad-behaving extension (though that improved over time), some AV software hijacking the process (happens far too often and way harder to detect than it should), or some busted profiles with a lot of cruft that failed to be cleaned up automatically (re: bad behaving extensions). I advise you to try the Firefox DevEdition (which uses a separate profile by default) and check if it works for you. You can also get rid of your old profile or try to reset it (preserving some data). Money isn't necessarily the issue for Mozilla, they managed to create a decent browser with a fraction of the big player's budget. As always, it's the triangle of complexity and time and manpower, they just can't fight on all fronts at once. At the moment, they are trying to get rid of a lot of legacy that prevented them from improving some aspects of the system (see project e10s, WebExtensions, etc.) all while preserving as much of the ecosystem as possible – which is very hard due to the current extension system that was created more than 10 years ago and just doesn't fit the bill anymore. E.g. e10s is already going on for 5 years or so and it just started rolling out a few months ago. Good news is that with these projects completing (improving overall responsiveness), there's a huge new project starting (Project Quantum) that aims to overhaul major parts of the rendering engine. This will integrate a lot of the research and investment poured into Rust and Servo, which will probably outrun current browsers by an order of magnitude (at least in some aspects that has already been shown, see WebRender).