22 ms·

Browse Against the Machine

190 points by type0 9y ago

poyj 9y ago
Well you have to get Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump to use it, to make any sort of dent. In this pointless attention economy propped up by Youtube, Twitter and Facebook there don't seem to be any other ways.
iamd3vil 9y ago
I know lot of people here say that Chrome is much faster than Firefox. I agree that sometimes chrome feels more responsive, but I want to tell my perspective from someone who owns a very old and slow laptop. Whenever I just start Chrome, it seems superfast until 5 minutes. Just open 5 tabs and some other programs like Terminal and Clementine, my whole system just hangs. So I can't even use Chrome because of the memory it consumes. Firefox actually seems very responsive for me even if I open 10-15 tabs, I can open other programs when it's open. Also I feel that in last two years I have rarely seen the UI hanging in Firefox when a page loads (even with my shitty laptop). So I am really thankful for people who work on Firefox and letting me use it on a shitty laptop. Also it's one of the reasons I am learning Rust now so that I can contribute to it.
- jbmorgado 9y ago
  Well, using Google docs/sheets the difference is really big. I understand that Chrome should be heavily optimised to use other Google products like Google Sheets, but in the end, as a user it really makes a diference. On a Macbook Pro from 2015, entering a simple Google Sheets documents and have the page fully loaded and ready to work takes me ~8 seconds on Chromium, but ~17 seconds on Firefox. It's really a huge diference. Still, I'm trying to use Firefox more and more because of privacy considerations, but Mozilla really should up their game and have more focus in their roadmap.
  - Certhas 9y ago
    I use Firefox as my primary browser. Do you have another example outside of google docs that behaves that way? The difference for google docs on my machine (three year old Laptop) isn't as big as the one you describe and on ownclouds I don't actually see a difference. Obviously google targets Chrome with Docs. You could equally well say that Google needs to up their game there. Where they really have catching up to do is with battery usage. Unfortunately Friefox Mobile simply uses up considerably more battery for me.
    - JD557 9y ago
      I do have another example: Marathon UI. If you access the marathon UI in Firefox, your browser will eventually slow down to a crawl and the job JSON description will be rendered incorrectly (it seems like a memory leak somewhere). It works fine on Chrome.
      - dblohm7 9y ago
        It might be worth reporting this on webcompat.com
- dkarl 9y ago
  I suspect the differences are more about browsing habits, because I have the opposite experience. I use both, and I never have to restart Chrome, but when my computer starts crawling and beach-balling, I know I can fix it by closing Firefox and re-loading the same set of tabs. I tend to open and close a lot more tabs on Firefox, and there are web sites I run exclusively in Firefox instead of in Chrome, so I'm not saying Firefox is any worse, just that if you stress it the right way, it has its own problems. On a historical note, I remember that ten years ago Firefox's memory usage was a topic that generated a lot of heat online. I described my issues in detail once and got flamed by Firefox fanboys saying "you must be lying, because the memory leak was fixed two years ago," and those fanboys got flamed by a wave of truer fanboys saying "stop saying 'memory leak,' because it wasn't technically a memory leak, you're libeling the developers." I can't think of a piece of open source software that has such a rabid following these days, or maybe I'm just too old these days to hang out in such rough internet neighborhoods.
rectang 9y ago
Cue the "Give in to Google" defeatists, spiritual inheritors of the "Give in to Microsoft" defeatists of yesteryear.
PeterStuer 9y ago
Firefox is still set as my default browser, but it feels like every month more and more sites just seem to QA only on Chrome :(.
- karrotwaltz 9y ago
  On the other hand, I've seen a lot of internal websites (mostly HR tools) being "optimized for Internet Explorer 9", and indeed neither Chrome nor Firefox worked for theses.
- nindalf 9y ago
  I see this a lot too, but I figure continuing to use Firefox and complaining when I see broken websites is a good way forward. Far better than slipping into a browser monoculture.
  - dblohm7 9y ago
    Report those broken websites to webcompat.com
rc_bhg 9y ago
I just use it because Mozilla is the only browser I trust with my information and privacy. They are the only ones who I think are genuine about trying to protect me.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 9y ago
  Yet Firefox doesn't sync cookies block/whitelist and permissions [0] Something Chrome has supported since the beginning. I, also, use (only) Firefox on mobile and desktop but sometimes I'm really suprised by the lack of features to control data/privacy. [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=978010 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=978010
DavideNL 9y ago
...meanwhile we still can't use "pinch to zoom" (trackpad) in Firefox, which is available in Safari and Chrome for like 5 years now. Such a basic feature! It's the main reason i personally stopped using Firefox.
- thanksgiving 9y ago
  > ...meanwhile we still can't use "pinch to zoom" (trackpad) in Firefox, which is available in Safari and Chrome for like 5 years now. Such a basic feature! It's the main reason i personally stopped using Firefox. http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110322102812402 http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2011032210281240... I assume you're on a mac since you mention Safari? I don't have a mac. Please give it a try with the latest nightly. It should loom something like https://i.imgur.com/2EgjCIO.png https://i.imgur.com/2EgjCIO.png The article says this feature depends on support from your hardware. Of course, in the typical Mozilla fashion there is a six year old bug that seems related https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=632733 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=632733 I don't know what to say. Sigh.
  - DavideNL 9y ago
    Yea, the pinch to zoom setting those links refer to is equal to hitting "Cmd +" or "Cmd -" on the keyboard (in Windows it would be Ctrl +). However this zoom doesn't really work properly on all websites, for example with both text and images. What i was referring to was the "smooth" pinch to zoom like Safari and Chrome which works on any webpage (text + images). I don't know how to properly describe it, here's the example: http://i.imgur.com/AvLLbuy.gif http://i.imgur.com/AvLLbuy.gif >I assume you're on a mac since you mention Safari? Yea, a Macbook with a touchpad.
- Vinnl 9y ago
  > Such a basic feature! As a programmer, I really dislike remarks like this. There are so, so many features that are just as basic as that. All software will have features of this caliber that are not implemented, disregarding the thousands upon thousands of equivalently "basic" features that are.
fiatjaf 9y ago
Let me state here again that I would love to use Firefox, and I've tried more than once, but Chrome DevTools are much faster.
hartator 9y ago
> I head up Firefox marketing, but I use Chrome every day. This is one thing to use it privately, this is another to say it publicly. I think he should be fired. Not even considering the other contradictions of this article. I think he has no idea how to lead Firefox marketing.
- Vinnl 9y ago
  It's one of the browsers he uses. "Know thy enemy" and such :P
- dsr_ 9y ago
  You would rather he said "I don't know anything about Chrome because I rarely use it"? That would be incompetence. I hope he tries out Opera and PaleMoon fairly often, too.
- kps 9y ago
  I used to be on the Chrome team and still do the occasional bit of development or maintenance on code I wrote, but I use (mostly) Firefox at home. Two main reasons: - Firefox on Linux lets me configure the menu shortcut modifier key to Super, while Chrome is hardcoded to the Windows-style Control. (I use Control-W for word erase in vim and shell all the time, which means that the sequence of Control-W followed Control-Shift-T is a regular occurrence in Chrome.) - Firefox's shift-click to bypass stupid web developer tricks.
rhaps0dy 9y ago
Unfortunately Firefox (Chrome too) use more CPU than Safari when browsing static pages or being unfocused. Which makes them a battery drain. Otherwise I'd use Firefox everywhere. EDIT: numbers on 2013 11-inch Macbook Air Firefox 3-10% vs. Safari 0.2-2% when idling Firefox 10-40% vs. Safari 5-10% when scrolling HN
- otalp 9y ago
  Yup, Safari is far less taxing on the battery than Chrome or Firefox. I'd consider Firefox for desktop, but it has to be Safari on mobile devices.
yeukhon 9y ago
I use Firefox as my main browser at work and at home, but Firefox performance degrades as soon as I have 10 tabs opened. Not FF's entire fault though, a lot of my tabs are JIRA board so there are some stupid Javascript from plugins making the performance more worse. With Chrome, however, I was able to load over 100 tabs easily and I rarely get a crash... So when I need to load lots of tabs, I use Chrome. I still don't understand why. They both use multi-process now, so where is the bottleneck? But I try to stick to Firefox whenever possible because I like the browser. The only issue with Chrome I have been having lately, despite not remembering the error message, is I often can't type search terms on the url field and then get search results from Google. I get an error message with a dinosaur telling me something broke. I tried deleting profiles and even reinstall Chrome, but no. I can reproduce this problem on two Macbooks I own, which makes my experience with Chrome now pretty bad considering I can't search directly from URL bar! Also, while Firefox's devtool has improved a lot over the years, I can't seem to find certain features. For example, it's pretty simple to preserve logs under Network tab in Chrome, but where is it in Firefox? But to be fair, I also use Firefox devtools in cases I can't easily from Chrome like editing request in Firefox is simpler IMO. So it's a bit of pick and choose, depending on what I need to do. I love Firefox (I interned at Mozilla before), I've done some contributions to Firefox, and I think the folks there have been doing a great job. But my honest opinion is we still have some serious battle to fight, especially in performance and plugin. I don't care much about syncing bookmarks myself though so Chrome's integration with Google account doesn't matter to me.
- 3131s 9y ago
  Firefox on Linux performs really well for me, even with 50-100 tabs open. However I have your same problem with not knowing how to preserve the network history between refreshes, that would be useful.
  - yeukhon 9y ago
    Do you use Firefox from Mozilla, or do you use one of the forks?
    - 9y ago
xg15 9y ago
> It’s faster, lags less, hogs much less memory than chrome, and in June we’ll release multi-process Firefox, putting us at performance parity with Chrome in most of the ways we mere humans can actually perceive. I'm rooting for them but I really hope they get this done quickly. On Firefox, I often have ~.5 second UI freezes throughout the use which lead to an impression of sluggishness. Chrome, with the same number of tabs and equivalent extensions doesn't have this. By all means, Mozilla, use tricks if needed - keep stuff loaded in the background, defer script execution, prefetch DNS etc - but perceived responsiveness is really important. Freezing UI of all things is the worst that could happen. Despite this, I'll stay on Firefox and look forward for the future.
- SEMW 9y ago
  > I really hope they get this done quickly You don't have to wait for them to enable it for everyone. Enable it yourself by setting browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true in about:config (on ff48-53 this'll use one one process for ui and one for all tabs, I believe on 54+ it'll use more). (As long as you don't have any addons that don't support it, anyway -- after enabling it, check in about:support under "Multiprocess Windows", and if not, about:addons should show the offending addon. IIRC there's a staged rollout, so it may already be enabled for you even if you don't force it on, unless you have an addon that doesn't support it)
  - Sylos 9y ago
    browser.tabs.remote.autostart should already be default-enabled, unless your extensions aren't compatible with it. It'll tell you "disabled by add-ons" in about:support, if that's the case. And you can enable multiple content processes prior to Firefox 54 by setting dom.ipc.processCount to a number higher than 1. This is the maximum number of content processes that it'll use, as you open more tabs. So, if your number of tabs exceeds that value, it'll currently still distribute them among your content processes round-robin-style. You get the best performance vs. RAM ratio with this value at 4 (or I believe rather just the number of cores your CPU has). This is also what Firefox 54 will ship with. You get the best security and best performance, disregarding RAM, by setting it to something really high, like 500, so that a new process starts up with each tab that you open (which allows each tab to be sandboxed individually).
scandox 9y ago
Why did I move from Netscape to IE? Speed. Why did I move from IE to Firefox? Speed. Why did I move from Firefox to Chrome? Speed. Why did I move from Chrome to Firefox? Negative feelings about Google. So for myself the only things that work, hand on heart, are Speed or Repulsion. You can't really sell repulsion. Therefore, I think their only hope is Speed. Admittedly I may be a crap example.
- roblabla 9y ago
  Why did I move from chrome to firefox? Stability. I don't know if it's just me, but nowadays, chrome just sucks so much firefox manages to be better. Chrome tab crashes occur more often than ever before and it uses a shitcrapton of memory. I remember the days where chrome was lean and small and fast. Those days are long gone. I've been sailing firefox for a year now, and to my great surprise, it has gone from being an absolutely terrible memory hog and crash-o-meter to being fairly efficient and stable. Sure it is still a bit on the heavy side of memory, but in the meantime it doesn't lose my work every few days.
  - soperj 9y ago
    Yeah, on linux Chrome just chews through my battery.
  - flai 9y ago
    I never had a crash, and thus never felt the need to switch.
- astrobe_ 9y ago
  I think features play can play a role. I switched to DuckDuckGo a long time ago more because of their extra features than because of Google. The old Opera was also moderately successful because of their proxy-like feature (it was pre-rendering webpages and compressing the result) that was very appreciated by mobile users. Before their downfall they also integrated peer-to-peer file sharing and chat. I believe that maybe Firefox has a card to play with decentralization. Think something like IPFS or MediaGoblin easy-to-use integration.
guilhas 9y ago
Using Firefox with disk.cache disabled
- cpeterso 9y ago
  Is the Firefox disk cache particularly slow on your computer? Mozilla is developing a new feature called "Racing Cache With Network" (RCWN). Based on feedback from Facebook and user telemetry, it was discovered that the disk cache was very slow for some users, especially with non-SSD hard disks. With RCWN, if the disk cache doesn't return a cached result quickly enough, Firefox will issue a network request and just return whichever content returns first. Firefox will still check the cache first, but can avoid the extreme outlier cases. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=RCWN https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=RCWN
xg15 9y ago
> Firefox for work, Chrome for play If the Marketing head for Firefox opens like this, I'm honestly not optimistic. So even he states that for some reason, using Firefox alone is not sufficient for him. I think unless they find out the reasons for that, they have little chance to become meaningful competition again - even though we really need it. Slightly OT, that being said, my feeling is that Chrome played on an unfair playing field from the very beginning. I remember when Firefox was the newcomer. With enormous effort and help of a phenomenal community-driven grassroots campaign they managed to fight IE and, over 6 years, climb to ~30% market share. It was an enormous success. Then came Chrome and went from completely unknown to beating IE in 2 years. My feeling is that this can't be explained by better technology and features alone but the fact that e.g., Google was in a position to put a Chrome ad below the search field on the Google home page might have played a role.
- SA500 9y ago
  Do you realise Firefox's marketshare was in large part due Google? It's not surprising that when they decided to go their own way they made rapid gains
- cpeterso 9y ago
  > he states that for some reason, using Firefox alone is not sufficient for him. I think unless they find out the reasons for that, they have little chance to become meaningful competition again Competitive analysis and compatibility testing. It's important for Firefox engineers and product people to understand, firsthand, what other browser vendors are doing.
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  There were several things going on. The ad below the search field helped. The agreements with various companies (e.g. Adobe) to stealth-install Chrome when their products were being installed helped. The fact that a lot of the hard work of getting web sites to be created to standards not just to "works in IE" had been done by Firefox helped. The ads on TV all over the place helped. The ads on posters in subways all over the place helped. Better technology and features are nice, but huge marketing spend and sleazy stealth-install agreements are nice too, if your goal is just market share.
GlitchMr 9y ago
I use Firefox myself. It's really fast, until you get into Google websites, like YouTube - those websites work really slow (well, not that slow, just noticeably slower), while there are no issues in Google Chrome - as if that was intentional, even (like, Google detecting Firefox, and providing it slower code).
- intopieces 9y ago
  If this turned out to be true, is there an antitrust case there?
  - lucb1e 9y ago
    There might be, but I doubt it's on purpose. At best it'd be gross negligence or something, but I'm not sure holding a monopoly by not actively supporting the opposition (i.e. negligence) is punishable. I experience the same issue and it's frustrating. Not that I use a lot of Google services, but when I do... yeah the effect is noticeable. So much as I like to point a finger, I expect it's just due to them not putting in as much time to make their stuff run perfect in anything other than Chrome.
    - 5ilv3r 9y ago
      Have you read google's website code guidelines? They actively encourage breaking the standards to save characters as long as it renders ok. It's kinda wrong, and I'm sure they have a little list of tricks they can pull to break one browser but not another. Example: Google search with firefox mobile has unclickable links if I change my user agent to IE8. Literally nothing happens when I tap a link. They are in too deep and starting to break things.
      - therealidiot 9y ago
        Google search on the desktop also has unclickable links if I change my UA to Chrome while running Firefox
- Raphael 9y ago
pandatigox 9y ago
I'm going add a controversial opinion. I've been using Firefox my whole life but recently I'm finding Safari to be a more appealing option than both Firefox or Chrome. Firefox, and Chrome to an extent, are powerhouses. They have a great community with awesome and really creative extensions. Safari only just started adding extensions and it shows: apart from the usual ad blocker stuff, there's not much out there. But Safari is fast and is tied to the OS so well that it's great for just using the browser as a portal to the web. Safari has a menu option that allows me to save quickly to my Downloads folder. I can use the share sheet to send URLs, snippets of info straight to other apps. Also, if I'm crazy into automation, I can set up workflows via Automator for even more efficient text processing. People champion Firefox as the sole defender of the web, but people often forget that Safari is quite unobtrusive too. Sure, it maybe lacking in pushing the frontiers of web standards, but for the most part, it stays out of your hair too (Firefox has this quirky default homepage that likes you to send these "witty" phrases)
- roblabla 9y ago
  Safari being MacOS-only doesn't help its cause very much. It's also so far behind on web standards that some started to call it "the new IE"[0]. Since this, apple started to show some new love to safari in the form of the safari tech preview, but it's still far from where it should be... [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051267
  - eriknstr 9y ago
    Furthermore, Safari is proprietary. Firefox is not and most of Chrome is not (Chromium).
    - masswerk 9y ago
      Ahem, Webkit ...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - 9y ago
brynedwards 9y ago
There are also patches for Chromium that remove Google integration and improve its privacy features: inox-patchset - https://github.com/gcarq/inox-patchset https://github.com/gcarq/inox-patchset ungoogled-chromium - https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium Iridium Browser - https://iridiumbrowser.de/ https://iridiumbrowser.de/
thedonkeycometh 9y ago
This sounds a lot like "Why won't people sleep with the nice guy?" Firefox needs to lead with tech and speed. They seem to be flailing around with this tech and that, but not offering anything truly ground breaking. Ultimately, I think that they'll jump on the net neutrality thing and sell themselves off as a delivery mechanism, not a browser.
Melchizedek 9y ago
I trusted them until they de facto fired a prominent employee for his political opinions - opinions shared by a large portion of the population. If they can do that to an employee, what can't they do to you, an anonymous user? That said, I stick with Firefox for private use. But the trust is gone.
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  so because they didn't want an alt-right bigot as their ceo it somehow means they're going to spy on users?
  - yellowapple 9y ago
    "alt-right bigot" See, that's why Eich's "resignation" is a massive red flag for me. Plenty of perfectly-decent people have misinformed political opinions. Any reasonable person could separate those personal beliefs from professional merits. Instead, though, we have lots of unreasonable people who look at a handful of political beliefs (including past ones that may or may not still be in effect) as some sign that a person is irredeemably and permanently "evil". I have many friends, family members, and coworkers who have political viewpoints that I find to be reprehensible. Some are diehard "Make America Great Again (but only for white people)" Republicans. Some are diehard "If you're not with Hillary and every last one of her political stances, you're a deplorable and evil person" Democrats. I'm able to maintain civil and productive relationships with these people because I'm able to see past political differences and recognize these people as human beings with perfectly valid (albeit horribly misinformed) opinions. If Eich's resignation (forced or not) has no effect on Firefox users or the persecution thereof, then neither would Eich's continued tenure as CEO affect users. Same goes for Mozilla staff; unless there's actual evidence that Eich would have discriminated against non-heterosexual staff in a professional setting, the idea that Eich was somehow unfit to lead the project which he cofounded was a premature and unfounded idea at the very least.
- joecool1029 9y ago
  The last thing we were keeping it around for was the extension support, but they unfortunately killed that so I now recommend Edge over Firefox for resource-constrained systems. It's not there yet, but it's got a brighter future than Firefox. But yeah nothing pissed me off more than them saying they support choice when they kill off well-supported standards they don't like [1], fire employees over their (common) religious beliefs [2], take the longest to roll out critical security features [3], and prioritize shitty UI updates that nearly everyone hates [4]. All I keep hearing is that the new multi-process is so much faster, everything is great now, but every time I run it on fairly decent systems (i7 from late 2013) it takes multiple seconds to switch tabs. It really is a joke that their head of marketing wasn't fired for that post, it only supports the true thing that Mozilla has come to stand for: hypocrisy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich [3] https://community.qualys.com/thread/12421 https://community.qualys.com/thread/12421 [4] https://www.ghacks.net/2013/11/23/80-unhappy-firefoxs-australis-interface-mozilla-report-states/ https://www.ghacks.net/2013/11/23/80-unhappy-firefoxs-austra...
cyborgx7 9y ago
I think teaching people that Google is dangerous and everyone using Chrome makes it worse is important, and probably a good strategy for Firefox. You can reasonably feel like Chrome is better than Firefox but I don't think it's so much better that it is worth the trade-off.
- balladeer 9y ago
  Actually unless it's about playing videos, audio or debuging my angular app Firefox feels snappier and better to use (and I am back on Firefox for the first time after Pocket happened). But then again those three aspects of using a browser are very big ones. But the reason I came to Firefox was because I didn't want Chrome to be a clear monopoly and see a time when it was pretty much too late for any competition.
- culturalzero 9y ago
  It feels weird using Google now and knowing that I'm just training their AI. Frankly, I don't particularly want that to move any faster than it already is. One less user won't make that much difference, no, but I do think that supporting Firefox makes a great antithesis to Google's forces.
stevemk14ebr 9y ago
Ran a comparison just for fun. Ubuntu 16.04, on netflix chrome jumps between ~15%-40% CPU. Firefox was a solid 40%-55%. And i noticed UI lags when loading netflix pages, took me 3 minutes to go back to chrome.
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  ran same comparison on both my macbook air and windows 10 desktop and got the opposite results. just want to point out that what happens on one piece of hardware isn't indicative of everyone's experience.
tyingq 9y ago
The messaging implies a strong stance, which I don't really see. A strong stance would include ad and tracking blocking, on...by default. This is more like "Optionally Browse Against the Machine After Figuring out How".
webwanderings 9y ago
> Chrome wants you to only use Chrome. This is no different than saying Microsoft only wants you to use Hotmail. Firefox did not build Gmail, nor does it have any serious interconnected bookmarks manager. Why would I use Firefox when Gmail does not render well on it and there is no way for me to seamlessly carry bookmarks, history and everything else which is part of daily browser activity? Sure, I use Firefox for work as well. It is fine. I don't need to worry about gmail and personal bookmarks, etc at work.
- hoschicz 9y ago
  > there is no way for me to seamlessly carry bookmarks, history and everything else There is, Firefox Sync. It works pretty well and doesn't use your history to target ads. You can sync bookmarks, open tabs, history, password, add-ons, preferences. When you sign up on a new device, FF also remembers your settings of what you want to sync. Chrome, by default, syncs everything, including history, and uses it to target ads.
  - webwanderings 9y ago
    > There is, Firefox Sync. You didn't follow the real problem. Firefox Sync only wants you to use Firefox Sync. Your data is not liberated to be used where you want it to be used.
    - UnrealIncident 9y ago
      Actually you can run your own FF Sync server.
- pikzen 9y ago
  >Why would I use Firefox when Gmail does not render well I don't know, maybe complain to Google who purposefully fucks up things on Firefox, over and over? >there is no way for me to seamlessly carry bookmarks, history and everything else which is part of daily browser activity? ...except there is? The Mozilla account stuff does just that.
newbear 9y ago
What about Vivaldi? I found it a while ago and Only use it occasionally but when I do it's blazingly fast. Any opinions? Info?
cmurf 9y ago
I don't have many problems with Firefox desktop, but in particular Firefox on Android (and Chrome to some degree as well) is increasingly a nightmare with news pages. As I'm scrolling and reading, the content jumps around as reflows occur when e.g. an embedded ad or video renders and is squeezed into the content. Instead of rendering the complete page with holes for this embedded content to eventually appear, Firefox seems to render a compact page, and then over the course of literally 2 or 3 minutes, it one by one inserts that content, causing reflow, and unprompted scrolling. So I'm reading and then the shit I'm reading vanishes and I have to scroll to go find it, start reading again, and then FUCK it just happened again, rescroll to read it, and FUCK FUCK FUCK it happened again!
- abrowne 9y ago
  Two words: Reader View
  - cmurf 9y ago
    It helps a ton. But you have to cancel the loading of the page to get that icon. And many of the pages I'm arriving at will do their own reload when I click cancel, so it can be a juggling act to cancel, and in a brief window of opportunity click on the reader view icon before the reload is triggered.
    - abrowne 9y ago
      Yes, it's not perfect. The worst is when the reader icon doesn't respond, so you tap again, only to have it enter then exit reader mode in succession.
jbg_ 9y ago
I switched from Chrome to Firefox nightly for most browsing some time ago, and it really seems that Firefox is moving at a furious pace at the moment. Its performance and battery usage is light years ahead of a year ago, and in terms of web standards support, at least in some areas, it's the best browser available. Also (not affiliated): If you've been tinkering with Rust or have thought about doing so, Servo is well worth checking out or helping with - I think helping to prevent Chrome from having an effective monopoly in Web browsing is a noble cause even if you're not worried about Google's motives.
vuldin 9y ago
Thanks you Mozilla. As long as you continue to exist for your stated reasons then I'll never stop using Firefox for what it's good at.
anonu 9y ago
> [Chrome] is an eight-lane highway to the largest advertising company in the world. Google built it to maximize revenue from your searches and deliver display ads on millions of websites. Can someone please explain this statement to me. Does using chrome change which ads are displayed to you? Does Firefox do anything differently? Personally I use ad blockers so my choice of browser is really based on which blocker plugin is easiest to install. Chrome does this pretty well...
RRRA 9y ago
Firefox needs multiprocessor asap and a great sandbox... after that, yeah, fuck Chrome (except for those site who can't code against a standard, for what they're worth)
itaysk 9y ago
Interested why the author uses chrome for "play"...?
itaysk 9y ago
The main reason why I dislike ff is it's GUI. Chrome is beautifully minimal, and ff is the opposite. also - unify search and address bar already.
- SolarNet 9y ago
  They have added search features to the URL bar. And you can remove the search bar if you no longer want it. However many people prefer to use the search bar. For example if I am googling for "System.IO" how does the browser know that's a search and not a URL, hence I put it in the search bar.
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  > unify search and address bar already Do you prefer not having search suggest, or sending all your URLs to your search engine? Because with a unified bar, you have to pick one or the other.
raintrees 9y ago
I periodically get asked by my clients about which browser is "best." I respond that I use FireFox because of: Mozilla's mission/actions versus Google's mission/actions, and NoScript protection on FireFox to stop undesired behavior of websites I do not trust/have not vetted. Personally, I use Chromium for the few websites where NoScript is over-aggressive to their functionality, and that I have already vetted as being acceptable to share all with (privacy, history, etc.). And to make sure a problem I experience is not a FireFox-only problem :)
jwr 9y ago
Sorry, but until Firefox runs JavaScript code at least on par with Safari, it isn't a good option for some of us. I am the author of a reasonably large web app (https://partsbox.io/ https://partsbox.io/), and in real-life performance on a Mac, Chrome is #1, Safari follows right behind it, and Firefox lags far behind. So, Firefox isn't "faster" and doesn't "lag less", quite the opposite.
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  Just out of curiosity, did Chrome get faster since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13752024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13752024 or did Safari get slower? In any case, I'd like to try to figure out what's going on here. Is the problem reproducible with the publicly available demo of partsbox? If so, what are the steps to reproduce? That is, what operations are you measuring?
  - jwr 9y ago
    I don't think either happened. I made a mistake, I intended to say that Safari comes out on top. Sorry about that. Yes, the public demo is just fine for trying things out. As for measuring, Chrome does seem to have a faster JavaScript engine, as operations like search indexing take shorter than in Safari. However, for interactive use, Safari provides the best experience. I do not know why — perhaps due to the way it updates the displayed DOM? In Chrome long computations in JavaScript run fast, but Safari feels more snappy in real use.
    - bzbarsky 9y ago
      > Yes, the public demo is just fine for trying things out. OK. Could you point me to the specific operations on the public demo that are slow in Firefox? I've been trying a few things side by side with Chrome/Safari and not really seeing a perceptible difference, but I don't really know my way around this UI, so it's possible I'm not finding the right things, or not noticing lag that you're noticing... Note that I was using a Firefox nightly; if you're seeing the slowness in a specific Firefox release, which one is it?
newtem0 9y ago
I use firefox for the treestyle tabs. I just cant live without it. I was very excited to read about this overhaul coming in june!
mirimir 9y ago
I've been using Firefox since forever. IE was mostly hopeless. Opera was cool for a while. But once I'd left Windows for good, Firefox was clearly the best option. I love that Chrome sandboxes itself. However, there's just too much Google in it. Sure there's Chromium. But even that contains Google blobs. So yes, Firefox it is.
bocz 9y ago
I've been a long term Firefox user, but recently I have switched to Opera. It needed some tweaking to make the experience better for a power user, but it works like a charm now. The built in VPN is a plus. Haven't had any compatibility issues.
RandyRanderson 9y ago
Can someone explain to me why ppl think that splitting the browser application into separate processes will positively affect performance?
- 1123581321 9y ago
  1. Separate processes for UI and tab rendering/computation. Same reason iOS is always smooth; in addition to allowing faster access to menus, inspector, extensions etc., it simply feels faster to experience an interface at a constant 60fps. 2. Can pass work off to more CPU cores. I'm not sure of the real world performance gain, but theoretically you could render three heavy tabs and the Firefox UI on a 4 processor CPU almost as fast as one heavy tab in single processor mode.
  - RandyRanderson 9y ago
    All browsers use multiple threads internally so single process browsers too can use mutliple cores and, in fact, can more efficiently. Further, most popular modern operating systems handle processes and threads similarly internally. I'm not sure what you mean by 60 fps. 2d apps typically don't have render loops as games do - they only "composit" graphics typically by updating the UI only if a section needs to be re-drawn.
    - 1123581321 9y ago
      I am sure you are right, but Mozilla says FF used one process, currently uses two (one for UI, one for content) and the final version of multiprocess will use more for web content and extensions. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Multiprocess_Firefox https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Multiprocess_Fir... I shouldn't have said 60fps. I just meant low or no interface lag. Regardless of what the system is trying to do internally, Firefox has performance issues in the UI, so hopefully they can address those.
ralphc 9y ago
A big use case for me on Chrome is multiple users with their own passwords, cookies etc. At work it's essential for logging in to multiple Salesforce orgs at the same time, and at home I use it to manage multiple gmail accounts. I can't consider using Firefox as my main browser until it has multiple users as easily as Chrome does.

190 points by type0 9y ago

poyj 9y ago

Well you have to get Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump to use it, to make any sort of dent. In this pointless attention economy propped up by Youtube, Twitter and Facebook there don't seem to be any other ways.

iamd3vil 9y ago

I know lot of people here say that Chrome is much faster than Firefox. I agree that sometimes chrome feels more responsive, but I want to tell my perspective from someone who owns a very old and slow laptop. Whenever I just start Chrome, it seems superfast until 5 minutes. Just open 5 tabs and some other programs like Terminal and Clementine, my whole system just hangs. So I can't even use Chrome because of the memory it consumes. Firefox actually seems very responsive for me even if I open 10-15 tabs, I can open other programs when it's open. Also I feel that in last two years I have rarely seen the UI hanging in Firefox when a page loads (even with my shitty laptop). So I am really thankful for people who work on Firefox and letting me use it on a shitty laptop. Also it's one of the reasons I am learning Rust now so that I can contribute to it.

jbmorgado 9y ago
Well, using Google docs/sheets the difference is really big. I understand that Chrome should be heavily optimised to use other Google products like Google Sheets, but in the end, as a user it really makes a diference. On a Macbook Pro from 2015, entering a simple Google Sheets documents and have the page fully loaded and ready to work takes me ~8 seconds on Chromium, but ~17 seconds on Firefox. It's really a huge diference. Still, I'm trying to use Firefox more and more because of privacy considerations, but Mozilla really should up their game and have more focus in their roadmap.
- Certhas 9y ago
  I use Firefox as my primary browser. Do you have another example outside of google docs that behaves that way? The difference for google docs on my machine (three year old Laptop) isn't as big as the one you describe and on ownclouds I don't actually see a difference. Obviously google targets Chrome with Docs. You could equally well say that Google needs to up their game there. Where they really have catching up to do is with battery usage. Unfortunately Friefox Mobile simply uses up considerably more battery for me.
  - JD557 9y ago
    I do have another example: Marathon UI. If you access the marathon UI in Firefox, your browser will eventually slow down to a crawl and the job JSON description will be rendered incorrectly (it seems like a memory leak somewhere). It works fine on Chrome.
    - dblohm7 9y ago
      It might be worth reporting this on webcompat.com
dkarl 9y ago
I suspect the differences are more about browsing habits, because I have the opposite experience. I use both, and I never have to restart Chrome, but when my computer starts crawling and beach-balling, I know I can fix it by closing Firefox and re-loading the same set of tabs. I tend to open and close a lot more tabs on Firefox, and there are web sites I run exclusively in Firefox instead of in Chrome, so I'm not saying Firefox is any worse, just that if you stress it the right way, it has its own problems. On a historical note, I remember that ten years ago Firefox's memory usage was a topic that generated a lot of heat online. I described my issues in detail once and got flamed by Firefox fanboys saying "you must be lying, because the memory leak was fixed two years ago," and those fanboys got flamed by a wave of truer fanboys saying "stop saying 'memory leak,' because it wasn't technically a memory leak, you're libeling the developers." I can't think of a piece of open source software that has such a rabid following these days, or maybe I'm just too old these days to hang out in such rough internet neighborhoods.

rectang 9y ago

Cue the "Give in to Google" defeatists, spiritual inheritors of the "Give in to Microsoft" defeatists of yesteryear.

PeterStuer 9y ago

Firefox is still set as my default browser, but it feels like every month more and more sites just seem to QA only on Chrome :(.

karrotwaltz 9y ago
On the other hand, I've seen a lot of internal websites (mostly HR tools) being "optimized for Internet Explorer 9", and indeed neither Chrome nor Firefox worked for theses.
nindalf 9y ago
I see this a lot too, but I figure continuing to use Firefox and complaining when I see broken websites is a good way forward. Far better than slipping into a browser monoculture.
- dblohm7 9y ago
  Report those broken websites to webcompat.com

rc_bhg 9y ago

I just use it because Mozilla is the only browser I trust with my information and privacy. They are the only ones who I think are genuine about trying to protect me.

rcMgD2BwE72F 9y ago
Yet Firefox doesn't sync cookies block/whitelist and permissions [0] Something Chrome has supported since the beginning. I, also, use (only) Firefox on mobile and desktop but sometimes I'm really suprised by the lack of features to control data/privacy. [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=978010 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=978010

DavideNL 9y ago

...meanwhile we still can't use "pinch to zoom" (trackpad) in Firefox, which is available in Safari and Chrome for like 5 years now. Such a basic feature! It's the main reason i personally stopped using Firefox.

thanksgiving 9y ago
> ...meanwhile we still can't use "pinch to zoom" (trackpad) in Firefox, which is available in Safari and Chrome for like 5 years now. Such a basic feature! It's the main reason i personally stopped using Firefox. http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110322102812402 http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2011032210281240... I assume you're on a mac since you mention Safari? I don't have a mac. Please give it a try with the latest nightly. It should loom something like https://i.imgur.com/2EgjCIO.png https://i.imgur.com/2EgjCIO.png The article says this feature depends on support from your hardware. Of course, in the typical Mozilla fashion there is a six year old bug that seems related https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=632733 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=632733 I don't know what to say. Sigh.
- DavideNL 9y ago
  Yea, the pinch to zoom setting those links refer to is equal to hitting "Cmd +" or "Cmd -" on the keyboard (in Windows it would be Ctrl +). However this zoom doesn't really work properly on all websites, for example with both text and images. What i was referring to was the "smooth" pinch to zoom like Safari and Chrome which works on any webpage (text + images). I don't know how to properly describe it, here's the example: http://i.imgur.com/AvLLbuy.gif http://i.imgur.com/AvLLbuy.gif >I assume you're on a mac since you mention Safari? Yea, a Macbook with a touchpad.
Vinnl 9y ago
> Such a basic feature! As a programmer, I really dislike remarks like this. There are so, so many features that are just as basic as that. All software will have features of this caliber that are not implemented, disregarding the thousands upon thousands of equivalently "basic" features that are.

fiatjaf 9y ago

Let me state here again that I would love to use Firefox, and I've tried more than once, but Chrome DevTools are much faster.

hartator 9y ago

> I head up Firefox marketing, but I use Chrome every day. This is one thing to use it privately, this is another to say it publicly. I think he should be fired. Not even considering the other contradictions of this article. I think he has no idea how to lead Firefox marketing.

Vinnl 9y ago
It's one of the browsers he uses. "Know thy enemy" and such :P
dsr_ 9y ago
You would rather he said "I don't know anything about Chrome because I rarely use it"? That would be incompetence. I hope he tries out Opera and PaleMoon fairly often, too.
kps 9y ago
I used to be on the Chrome team and still do the occasional bit of development or maintenance on code I wrote, but I use (mostly) Firefox at home. Two main reasons: - Firefox on Linux lets me configure the menu shortcut modifier key to Super, while Chrome is hardcoded to the Windows-style Control. (I use Control-W for word erase in vim and shell all the time, which means that the sequence of Control-W followed Control-Shift-T is a regular occurrence in Chrome.) - Firefox's shift-click to bypass stupid web developer tricks.

rhaps0dy 9y ago

Unfortunately Firefox (Chrome too) use more CPU than Safari when browsing static pages or being unfocused. Which makes them a battery drain. Otherwise I'd use Firefox everywhere. EDIT: numbers on 2013 11-inch Macbook Air Firefox 3-10% vs. Safari 0.2-2% when idling Firefox 10-40% vs. Safari 5-10% when scrolling HN

otalp 9y ago
Yup, Safari is far less taxing on the battery than Chrome or Firefox. I'd consider Firefox for desktop, but it has to be Safari on mobile devices.

yeukhon 9y ago

I use Firefox as my main browser at work and at home, but Firefox performance degrades as soon as I have 10 tabs opened. Not FF's entire fault though, a lot of my tabs are JIRA board so there are some stupid Javascript from plugins making the performance more worse. With Chrome, however, I was able to load over 100 tabs easily and I rarely get a crash... So when I need to load lots of tabs, I use Chrome. I still don't understand why. They both use multi-process now, so where is the bottleneck? But I try to stick to Firefox whenever possible because I like the browser. The only issue with Chrome I have been having lately, despite not remembering the error message, is I often can't type search terms on the url field and then get search results from Google. I get an error message with a dinosaur telling me something broke. I tried deleting profiles and even reinstall Chrome, but no. I can reproduce this problem on two Macbooks I own, which makes my experience with Chrome now pretty bad considering I can't search directly from URL bar! Also, while Firefox's devtool has improved a lot over the years, I can't seem to find certain features. For example, it's pretty simple to preserve logs under Network tab in Chrome, but where is it in Firefox? But to be fair, I also use Firefox devtools in cases I can't easily from Chrome like editing request in Firefox is simpler IMO. So it's a bit of pick and choose, depending on what I need to do. I love Firefox (I interned at Mozilla before), I've done some contributions to Firefox, and I think the folks there have been doing a great job. But my honest opinion is we still have some serious battle to fight, especially in performance and plugin. I don't care much about syncing bookmarks myself though so Chrome's integration with Google account doesn't matter to me.

3131s 9y ago
Firefox on Linux performs really well for me, even with 50-100 tabs open. However I have your same problem with not knowing how to preserve the network history between refreshes, that would be useful.
- yeukhon 9y ago
  Do you use Firefox from Mozilla, or do you use one of the forks?
  - 9y ago

xg15 9y ago

> It’s faster, lags less, hogs much less memory than chrome, and in June we’ll release multi-process Firefox, putting us at performance parity with Chrome in most of the ways we mere humans can actually perceive. I'm rooting for them but I really hope they get this done quickly. On Firefox, I often have ~.5 second UI freezes throughout the use which lead to an impression of sluggishness. Chrome, with the same number of tabs and equivalent extensions doesn't have this. By all means, Mozilla, use tricks if needed - keep stuff loaded in the background, defer script execution, prefetch DNS etc - but perceived responsiveness is really important. Freezing UI of all things is the worst that could happen. Despite this, I'll stay on Firefox and look forward for the future.

SEMW 9y ago
> I really hope they get this done quickly You don't have to wait for them to enable it for everyone. Enable it yourself by setting browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true in about:config (on ff48-53 this'll use one one process for ui and one for all tabs, I believe on 54+ it'll use more). (As long as you don't have any addons that don't support it, anyway -- after enabling it, check in about:support under "Multiprocess Windows", and if not, about:addons should show the offending addon. IIRC there's a staged rollout, so it may already be enabled for you even if you don't force it on, unless you have an addon that doesn't support it)
- Sylos 9y ago
  browser.tabs.remote.autostart should already be default-enabled, unless your extensions aren't compatible with it. It'll tell you "disabled by add-ons" in about:support, if that's the case. And you can enable multiple content processes prior to Firefox 54 by setting dom.ipc.processCount to a number higher than 1. This is the maximum number of content processes that it'll use, as you open more tabs. So, if your number of tabs exceeds that value, it'll currently still distribute them among your content processes round-robin-style. You get the best performance vs. RAM ratio with this value at 4 (or I believe rather just the number of cores your CPU has). This is also what Firefox 54 will ship with. You get the best security and best performance, disregarding RAM, by setting it to something really high, like 500, so that a new process starts up with each tab that you open (which allows each tab to be sandboxed individually).

scandox 9y ago

Why did I move from Netscape to IE? Speed. Why did I move from IE to Firefox? Speed. Why did I move from Firefox to Chrome? Speed. Why did I move from Chrome to Firefox? Negative feelings about Google. So for myself the only things that work, hand on heart, are Speed or Repulsion. You can't really sell repulsion. Therefore, I think their only hope is Speed. Admittedly I may be a crap example.

roblabla 9y ago
Why did I move from chrome to firefox? Stability. I don't know if it's just me, but nowadays, chrome just sucks so much firefox manages to be better. Chrome tab crashes occur more often than ever before and it uses a shitcrapton of memory. I remember the days where chrome was lean and small and fast. Those days are long gone. I've been sailing firefox for a year now, and to my great surprise, it has gone from being an absolutely terrible memory hog and crash-o-meter to being fairly efficient and stable. Sure it is still a bit on the heavy side of memory, but in the meantime it doesn't lose my work every few days.
- soperj 9y ago
  Yeah, on linux Chrome just chews through my battery.
- flai 9y ago
  I never had a crash, and thus never felt the need to switch.
astrobe_ 9y ago
I think features play can play a role. I switched to DuckDuckGo a long time ago more because of their extra features than because of Google. The old Opera was also moderately successful because of their proxy-like feature (it was pre-rendering webpages and compressing the result) that was very appreciated by mobile users. Before their downfall they also integrated peer-to-peer file sharing and chat. I believe that maybe Firefox has a card to play with decentralization. Think something like IPFS or MediaGoblin easy-to-use integration.

guilhas 9y ago

Using Firefox with disk.cache disabled

cpeterso 9y ago
Is the Firefox disk cache particularly slow on your computer? Mozilla is developing a new feature called "Racing Cache With Network" (RCWN). Based on feedback from Facebook and user telemetry, it was discovered that the disk cache was very slow for some users, especially with non-SSD hard disks. With RCWN, if the disk cache doesn't return a cached result quickly enough, Firefox will issue a network request and just return whichever content returns first. Firefox will still check the cache first, but can avoid the extreme outlier cases. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=RCWN https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=RCWN

xg15 9y ago

> Firefox for work, Chrome for play If the Marketing head for Firefox opens like this, I'm honestly not optimistic. So even he states that for some reason, using Firefox alone is not sufficient for him. I think unless they find out the reasons for that, they have little chance to become meaningful competition again - even though we really need it. Slightly OT, that being said, my feeling is that Chrome played on an unfair playing field from the very beginning. I remember when Firefox was the newcomer. With enormous effort and help of a phenomenal community-driven grassroots campaign they managed to fight IE and, over 6 years, climb to ~30% market share. It was an enormous success. Then came Chrome and went from completely unknown to beating IE in 2 years. My feeling is that this can't be explained by better technology and features alone but the fact that e.g., Google was in a position to put a Chrome ad below the search field on the Google home page might have played a role.

SA500 9y ago
Do you realise Firefox's marketshare was in large part due Google? It's not surprising that when they decided to go their own way they made rapid gains
cpeterso 9y ago
> he states that for some reason, using Firefox alone is not sufficient for him. I think unless they find out the reasons for that, they have little chance to become meaningful competition again Competitive analysis and compatibility testing. It's important for Firefox engineers and product people to understand, firsthand, what other browser vendors are doing.
bzbarsky 9y ago
There were several things going on. The ad below the search field helped. The agreements with various companies (e.g. Adobe) to stealth-install Chrome when their products were being installed helped. The fact that a lot of the hard work of getting web sites to be created to standards not just to "works in IE" had been done by Firefox helped. The ads on TV all over the place helped. The ads on posters in subways all over the place helped. Better technology and features are nice, but huge marketing spend and sleazy stealth-install agreements are nice too, if your goal is just market share.

GlitchMr 9y ago

I use Firefox myself. It's really fast, until you get into Google websites, like YouTube - those websites work really slow (well, not that slow, just noticeably slower), while there are no issues in Google Chrome - as if that was intentional, even (like, Google detecting Firefox, and providing it slower code).

intopieces 9y ago
If this turned out to be true, is there an antitrust case there?
- lucb1e 9y ago
  There might be, but I doubt it's on purpose. At best it'd be gross negligence or something, but I'm not sure holding a monopoly by not actively supporting the opposition (i.e. negligence) is punishable. I experience the same issue and it's frustrating. Not that I use a lot of Google services, but when I do... yeah the effect is noticeable. So much as I like to point a finger, I expect it's just due to them not putting in as much time to make their stuff run perfect in anything other than Chrome.
  - 5ilv3r 9y ago
    Have you read google's website code guidelines? They actively encourage breaking the standards to save characters as long as it renders ok. It's kinda wrong, and I'm sure they have a little list of tricks they can pull to break one browser but not another. Example: Google search with firefox mobile has unclickable links if I change my user agent to IE8. Literally nothing happens when I tap a link. They are in too deep and starting to break things.
    - therealidiot 9y ago
      Google search on the desktop also has unclickable links if I change my UA to Chrome while running Firefox
Raphael 9y ago

pandatigox 9y ago

I'm going add a controversial opinion. I've been using Firefox my whole life but recently I'm finding Safari to be a more appealing option than both Firefox or Chrome. Firefox, and Chrome to an extent, are powerhouses. They have a great community with awesome and really creative extensions. Safari only just started adding extensions and it shows: apart from the usual ad blocker stuff, there's not much out there. But Safari is fast and is tied to the OS so well that it's great for just using the browser as a portal to the web. Safari has a menu option that allows me to save quickly to my Downloads folder. I can use the share sheet to send URLs, snippets of info straight to other apps. Also, if I'm crazy into automation, I can set up workflows via Automator for even more efficient text processing. People champion Firefox as the sole defender of the web, but people often forget that Safari is quite unobtrusive too. Sure, it maybe lacking in pushing the frontiers of web standards, but for the most part, it stays out of your hair too (Firefox has this quirky default homepage that likes you to send these "witty" phrases)

roblabla 9y ago
Safari being MacOS-only doesn't help its cause very much. It's also so far behind on web standards that some started to call it "the new IE"[0]. Since this, apple started to show some new love to safari in the form of the safari tech preview, but it's still far from where it should be... [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051267
- eriknstr 9y ago
  Furthermore, Safari is proprietary. Firefox is not and most of Chrome is not (Chromium).
  - masswerk 9y ago
    Ahem, Webkit ...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- 9y ago

brynedwards 9y ago

There are also patches for Chromium that remove Google integration and improve its privacy features: inox-patchset - https://github.com/gcarq/inox-patchset https://github.com/gcarq/inox-patchset ungoogled-chromium - https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium Iridium Browser - https://iridiumbrowser.de/ https://iridiumbrowser.de/

thedonkeycometh 9y ago

This sounds a lot like "Why won't people sleep with the nice guy?" Firefox needs to lead with tech and speed. They seem to be flailing around with this tech and that, but not offering anything truly ground breaking. Ultimately, I think that they'll jump on the net neutrality thing and sell themselves off as a delivery mechanism, not a browser.

Melchizedek 9y ago

I trusted them until they de facto fired a prominent employee for his political opinions - opinions shared by a large portion of the population. If they can do that to an employee, what can't they do to you, an anonymous user? That said, I stick with Firefox for private use. But the trust is gone.

oculusthrift 9y ago
so because they didn't want an alt-right bigot as their ceo it somehow means they're going to spy on users?
- yellowapple 9y ago
  "alt-right bigot" See, that's why Eich's "resignation" is a massive red flag for me. Plenty of perfectly-decent people have misinformed political opinions. Any reasonable person could separate those personal beliefs from professional merits. Instead, though, we have lots of unreasonable people who look at a handful of political beliefs (including past ones that may or may not still be in effect) as some sign that a person is irredeemably and permanently "evil". I have many friends, family members, and coworkers who have political viewpoints that I find to be reprehensible. Some are diehard "Make America Great Again (but only for white people)" Republicans. Some are diehard "If you're not with Hillary and every last one of her political stances, you're a deplorable and evil person" Democrats. I'm able to maintain civil and productive relationships with these people because I'm able to see past political differences and recognize these people as human beings with perfectly valid (albeit horribly misinformed) opinions. If Eich's resignation (forced or not) has no effect on Firefox users or the persecution thereof, then neither would Eich's continued tenure as CEO affect users. Same goes for Mozilla staff; unless there's actual evidence that Eich would have discriminated against non-heterosexual staff in a professional setting, the idea that Eich was somehow unfit to lead the project which he cofounded was a premature and unfounded idea at the very least.
joecool1029 9y ago
The last thing we were keeping it around for was the extension support, but they unfortunately killed that so I now recommend Edge over Firefox for resource-constrained systems. It's not there yet, but it's got a brighter future than Firefox. But yeah nothing pissed me off more than them saying they support choice when they kill off well-supported standards they don't like [1], fire employees over their (common) religious beliefs [2], take the longest to roll out critical security features [3], and prioritize shitty UI updates that nearly everyone hates [4]. All I keep hearing is that the new multi-process is so much faster, everything is great now, but every time I run it on fairly decent systems (i7 from late 2013) it takes multiple seconds to switch tabs. It really is a joke that their head of marketing wasn't fired for that post, it only supports the true thing that Mozilla has come to stand for: hypocrisy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich [3] https://community.qualys.com/thread/12421 https://community.qualys.com/thread/12421 [4] https://www.ghacks.net/2013/11/23/80-unhappy-firefoxs-australis-interface-mozilla-report-states/ https://www.ghacks.net/2013/11/23/80-unhappy-firefoxs-austra...

cyborgx7 9y ago

I think teaching people that Google is dangerous and everyone using Chrome makes it worse is important, and probably a good strategy for Firefox. You can reasonably feel like Chrome is better than Firefox but I don't think it's so much better that it is worth the trade-off.

balladeer 9y ago
Actually unless it's about playing videos, audio or debuging my angular app Firefox feels snappier and better to use (and I am back on Firefox for the first time after Pocket happened). But then again those three aspects of using a browser are very big ones. But the reason I came to Firefox was because I didn't want Chrome to be a clear monopoly and see a time when it was pretty much too late for any competition.
culturalzero 9y ago
It feels weird using Google now and knowing that I'm just training their AI. Frankly, I don't particularly want that to move any faster than it already is. One less user won't make that much difference, no, but I do think that supporting Firefox makes a great antithesis to Google's forces.

stevemk14ebr 9y ago

Ran a comparison just for fun. Ubuntu 16.04, on netflix chrome jumps between ~15%-40% CPU. Firefox was a solid 40%-55%. And i noticed UI lags when loading netflix pages, took me 3 minutes to go back to chrome.

oculusthrift 9y ago
ran same comparison on both my macbook air and windows 10 desktop and got the opposite results. just want to point out that what happens on one piece of hardware isn't indicative of everyone's experience.

tyingq 9y ago

The messaging implies a strong stance, which I don't really see. A strong stance would include ad and tracking blocking, on...by default. This is more like "Optionally Browse Against the Machine After Figuring out How".

webwanderings 9y ago

> Chrome wants you to only use Chrome. This is no different than saying Microsoft only wants you to use Hotmail. Firefox did not build Gmail, nor does it have any serious interconnected bookmarks manager. Why would I use Firefox when Gmail does not render well on it and there is no way for me to seamlessly carry bookmarks, history and everything else which is part of daily browser activity? Sure, I use Firefox for work as well. It is fine. I don't need to worry about gmail and personal bookmarks, etc at work.

hoschicz 9y ago
> there is no way for me to seamlessly carry bookmarks, history and everything else There is, Firefox Sync. It works pretty well and doesn't use your history to target ads. You can sync bookmarks, open tabs, history, password, add-ons, preferences. When you sign up on a new device, FF also remembers your settings of what you want to sync. Chrome, by default, syncs everything, including history, and uses it to target ads.
- webwanderings 9y ago
  > There is, Firefox Sync. You didn't follow the real problem. Firefox Sync only wants you to use Firefox Sync. Your data is not liberated to be used where you want it to be used.
  - UnrealIncident 9y ago
    Actually you can run your own FF Sync server.
pikzen 9y ago
>Why would I use Firefox when Gmail does not render well I don't know, maybe complain to Google who purposefully fucks up things on Firefox, over and over? >there is no way for me to seamlessly carry bookmarks, history and everything else which is part of daily browser activity? ...except there is? The Mozilla account stuff does just that.

newbear 9y ago

What about Vivaldi? I found it a while ago and Only use it occasionally but when I do it's blazingly fast. Any opinions? Info?

cmurf 9y ago

I don't have many problems with Firefox desktop, but in particular Firefox on Android (and Chrome to some degree as well) is increasingly a nightmare with news pages. As I'm scrolling and reading, the content jumps around as reflows occur when e.g. an embedded ad or video renders and is squeezed into the content. Instead of rendering the complete page with holes for this embedded content to eventually appear, Firefox seems to render a compact page, and then over the course of literally 2 or 3 minutes, it one by one inserts that content, causing reflow, and unprompted scrolling. So I'm reading and then the shit I'm reading vanishes and I have to scroll to go find it, start reading again, and then FUCK it just happened again, rescroll to read it, and FUCK FUCK FUCK it happened again!

abrowne 9y ago
Two words: Reader View
- cmurf 9y ago
  It helps a ton. But you have to cancel the loading of the page to get that icon. And many of the pages I'm arriving at will do their own reload when I click cancel, so it can be a juggling act to cancel, and in a brief window of opportunity click on the reader view icon before the reload is triggered.
  - abrowne 9y ago
    Yes, it's not perfect. The worst is when the reader icon doesn't respond, so you tap again, only to have it enter then exit reader mode in succession.

jbg_ 9y ago

I switched from Chrome to Firefox nightly for most browsing some time ago, and it really seems that Firefox is moving at a furious pace at the moment. Its performance and battery usage is light years ahead of a year ago, and in terms of web standards support, at least in some areas, it's the best browser available. Also (not affiliated): If you've been tinkering with Rust or have thought about doing so, Servo is well worth checking out or helping with - I think helping to prevent Chrome from having an effective monopoly in Web browsing is a noble cause even if you're not worried about Google's motives.

vuldin 9y ago

Thanks you Mozilla. As long as you continue to exist for your stated reasons then I'll never stop using Firefox for what it's good at.

anonu 9y ago

> [Chrome] is an eight-lane highway to the largest advertising company in the world. Google built it to maximize revenue from your searches and deliver display ads on millions of websites. Can someone please explain this statement to me. Does using chrome change which ads are displayed to you? Does Firefox do anything differently? Personally I use ad blockers so my choice of browser is really based on which blocker plugin is easiest to install. Chrome does this pretty well...

RRRA 9y ago

Firefox needs multiprocessor asap and a great sandbox... after that, yeah, fuck Chrome (except for those site who can't code against a standard, for what they're worth)

itaysk 9y ago

Interested why the author uses chrome for "play"...?

itaysk 9y ago

The main reason why I dislike ff is it's GUI. Chrome is beautifully minimal, and ff is the opposite. also - unify search and address bar already.

SolarNet 9y ago
They have added search features to the URL bar. And you can remove the search bar if you no longer want it. However many people prefer to use the search bar. For example if I am googling for "System.IO" how does the browser know that's a search and not a URL, hence I put it in the search bar.
bzbarsky 9y ago
> unify search and address bar already Do you prefer not having search suggest, or sending all your URLs to your search engine? Because with a unified bar, you have to pick one or the other.

raintrees 9y ago

I periodically get asked by my clients about which browser is "best." I respond that I use FireFox because of: Mozilla's mission/actions versus Google's mission/actions, and NoScript protection on FireFox to stop undesired behavior of websites I do not trust/have not vetted. Personally, I use Chromium for the few websites where NoScript is over-aggressive to their functionality, and that I have already vetted as being acceptable to share all with (privacy, history, etc.). And to make sure a problem I experience is not a FireFox-only problem :)

jwr 9y ago

Sorry, but until Firefox runs JavaScript code at least on par with Safari, it isn't a good option for some of us. I am the author of a reasonably large web app (https://partsbox.io/ https://partsbox.io/), and in real-life performance on a Mac, Chrome is #1, Safari follows right behind it, and Firefox lags far behind. So, Firefox isn't "faster" and doesn't "lag less", quite the opposite.

bzbarsky 9y ago
Just out of curiosity, did Chrome get faster since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13752024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13752024 or did Safari get slower? In any case, I'd like to try to figure out what's going on here. Is the problem reproducible with the publicly available demo of partsbox? If so, what are the steps to reproduce? That is, what operations are you measuring?
- jwr 9y ago
  I don't think either happened. I made a mistake, I intended to say that Safari comes out on top. Sorry about that. Yes, the public demo is just fine for trying things out. As for measuring, Chrome does seem to have a faster JavaScript engine, as operations like search indexing take shorter than in Safari. However, for interactive use, Safari provides the best experience. I do not know why — perhaps due to the way it updates the displayed DOM? In Chrome long computations in JavaScript run fast, but Safari feels more snappy in real use.
  - bzbarsky 9y ago
    > Yes, the public demo is just fine for trying things out. OK. Could you point me to the specific operations on the public demo that are slow in Firefox? I've been trying a few things side by side with Chrome/Safari and not really seeing a perceptible difference, but I don't really know my way around this UI, so it's possible I'm not finding the right things, or not noticing lag that you're noticing... Note that I was using a Firefox nightly; if you're seeing the slowness in a specific Firefox release, which one is it?

newtem0 9y ago

I use firefox for the treestyle tabs. I just cant live without it. I was very excited to read about this overhaul coming in june!

mirimir 9y ago

I've been using Firefox since forever. IE was mostly hopeless. Opera was cool for a while. But once I'd left Windows for good, Firefox was clearly the best option. I love that Chrome sandboxes itself. However, there's just too much Google in it. Sure there's Chromium. But even that contains Google blobs. So yes, Firefox it is.

bocz 9y ago

I've been a long term Firefox user, but recently I have switched to Opera. It needed some tweaking to make the experience better for a power user, but it works like a charm now. The built in VPN is a plus. Haven't had any compatibility issues.

RandyRanderson 9y ago

Can someone explain to me why ppl think that splitting the browser application into separate processes will positively affect performance?

1123581321 9y ago
1. Separate processes for UI and tab rendering/computation. Same reason iOS is always smooth; in addition to allowing faster access to menus, inspector, extensions etc., it simply feels faster to experience an interface at a constant 60fps. 2. Can pass work off to more CPU cores. I'm not sure of the real world performance gain, but theoretically you could render three heavy tabs and the Firefox UI on a 4 processor CPU almost as fast as one heavy tab in single processor mode.
- RandyRanderson 9y ago
  All browsers use multiple threads internally so single process browsers too can use mutliple cores and, in fact, can more efficiently. Further, most popular modern operating systems handle processes and threads similarly internally. I'm not sure what you mean by 60 fps. 2d apps typically don't have render loops as games do - they only "composit" graphics typically by updating the UI only if a section needs to be re-drawn.
  - 1123581321 9y ago
    I am sure you are right, but Mozilla says FF used one process, currently uses two (one for UI, one for content) and the final version of multiprocess will use more for web content and extensions. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Multiprocess_Firefox https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Multiprocess_Fir... I shouldn't have said 60fps. I just meant low or no interface lag. Regardless of what the system is trying to do internally, Firefox has performance issues in the UI, so hopefully they can address those.

ralphc 9y ago

A big use case for me on Chrome is multiple users with their own passwords, cookies etc. At work it's essential for logging in to multiple Salesforce orgs at the same time, and at home I use it to manage multiple gmail accounts. I can't consider using Firefox as my main browser until it has multiple users as easily as Chrome does.