9 ms·

I attempted to switch to Firefox earlier this year, as part of a personal exodus from Google. I ended up switching back to Chrome because I couldn't tolerate t

by luhn 9y ago

I attempted to switch to Firefox earlier this year, as part of a personal exodus from Google. I ended up switching back to Chrome because I couldn't tolerate the poor performance. I'm giving it another shot now that Electrolysis is there. I've only been using it for half an hour now, but my initial experience has been promising.

starik36 9y ago
I've switched to Firefox full time (unless using F12 tools) - Electrolysis helped a lot. It has gotten very much faster and snappier, while Chrome feels laggy, particularly when closing or switching tabs. I've tried disabling all extensions, but it didn't help.
- namanspace 9y ago
  I've been using e10s for quite a while now. Yes, its great that they have reduced memory consumption by a huge margin. Unfortunately, I still feel page load times, scrolling, overall snappi-ness of chrome (I use ungoogled chromium) or overall browsing experience are way better than Firefox.
- throwanem 9y ago
  What about Chrome's dev tools do you find preferable? I tend to find myself hampered by lack of functionality like easy replay of network requests, and don't spend a lot of time in Chrome's toolset for such reasons - I'd be interested to hear a different perspective.
  - starik36 9y ago
    At least for my case, I found that Firefox debugger would sometime hang for a bit. It was slowing me down. I'll definitely give it a shot on my next JavaScript heavy project.
    - throwanem 9y ago
      I had the same trouble with complex applications in Firefox 45, but haven't encountered it since then - 51 and since have been much more performant in general, and that goes for devtools as well. (I suspect it may have something to do with https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Release_Criteria/Jank#GC_pauses https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Release_Criteria/Jank#... - but that's just a guess.)
- nachtigall 9y ago
  In my case doing a "refresh" did help: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...
callahad 9y ago
Welcome back! Fair warning, legacy add-ons can perform worse under multi-process Firefox, since any synchronous APIs now require cross-process locking. To the greatest extent possible, try to limit yourself to add-ons badged with "Compatible with Firefox 57+" on addons.mozilla.org, which are guaranteed work well under Electrolysis. Also, get ready for Firefox 57. Just one example, in one benchmark, but the last data point on the right is accurate: https://screenshots.firefox.com/1DYGktRBpiIJBc7T/arewefastyet.com https://screenshots.firefox.com/1DYGktRBpiIJBc7T/arewefastye...
- kibwen 9y ago
  What particular change is responsible for the performance improvement seen in that benchmark? Not anything related to Quantum/Servo surely; I expect those benchmarks to reflect Javascript performance exclusively, and I haven't heard anything in a long time from Mozilla regarding Spidermonkey improvements.
  - callahad 9y ago
    The change in that benchmark was from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1369140 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1369140, as part of the Quantum Flow (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum/Flow https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum/Flow) effort.
  - cmrx64 9y ago
    That particular benchmark stresses DOM and layout performance, that test just programatically clicks all the delete buttons in the page under test.
  - bzbarsky 9y ago
    There's been a steady march of performance improvements in Spidermonkey, though they haven't gotten very much press. They've been rearchitecting most of the inline caches so there's more sharing between the baseline and optimizing compiler and less in the way of performance cliffs. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1259927 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1259927 and its dependencies (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=1259927&hide_resolved=0 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=12599... for the dependency view). Things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1328140 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1328140 led to significant improvements to the sort of megamorphic code you commonly see in frameworks (e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1328140#c14 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1328140#c14 shows 25% improvements on Ember benchmarks). This work has been ongoing; a bunch of it landed in 53, more in 54, and more has been landing since. What makes it a bit harder to advertise is that it's aiming at reducing performance cliffs and improving the chance that real-life code lands on fast paths, not on improving the performance of those already-fast paths. WebAssembly is where the "make the fast bits faster" action is, mostly.
mtgx 9y ago
If it still doesn't work for you now you may want to give it another try once Project Quantum is further along the way (a year?): https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/a-quantum-leap-for-the-web-a3b7174b3c12 https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/a-quantum-leap-for-the-web-a... Servo looks super fast, but they don't seem to want to just rip-out Gecko and put Servo in there, just replace bits and pieces over time. I think that's a mistake, despite the hurdles of doing that, and especially if the end result in terms of performance is something like 60-70% of Servo as opposed to 100%. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzNDA https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzNDA https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Google-Servo-Perf-Comparison https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Google-S...
- jvehent 9y ago
  > they don't seem to want to just rip-out Gecko and put Servo in there It's hard enough to change the wheels of a car while driving on the highway, you really don't want to do all four at once.
  - _boardwalk 9y ago
    Car analogies (and generalizations in general) are not so useful. I've seen many cases (and been frustrated) working in a corporation where high levels of caution end up creating much more total work to make changes incremental. And when you do finish, the code is often not is nice as if it had been all done at once (at which point it probably gets left as is as more important things than refactoring, in the eye of business people, come along).
- pcwalton 9y ago
  It would have been hard for us to get the real-world battle testing needed to get Servo's style system into shape without rolling it out in Gecko. https://github.com/servo/servo/pull/16971 https://github.com/servo/servo/pull/16971 is an example of Bobby Holley, a Gecko developer (who's awesome, by the way) landing almost a full rewrite of the multicore scheduler, making tons of sites faster in Servo.
Twirrim 9y ago
To confirm that Electrolysis is being used for you, open a new tab and go to about:support, and double check what "Multiprocess Windows" reports.
toyg 9y ago
Try Vivaldi - it's basically Chrome without the Google-everything, supporting almost all extensions too, and pretty fast.
- hobarrera 9y ago
  Vivaldi is closed source though.
  - toyg 9y ago
    Chrome is too, they only open the chromium core.
    - v3ss0n 9y ago
      No , Chromium is almost 100% chrome , just without Google Service specific features .
      - PatentTroll 9y ago
        How can I run chromium as a daily driver on windows? What about automatic updates?
        temgo 9y ago
        Choco packages chromium nightly builds for Windows.You could automate 'choco upgrade chromium -Y' (Daily snapshot builds). Otherwise: http://chromium.woolyss.com/#windows http://chromium.woolyss.com/#windows Which packages http://www.henrypp.org/product/chrlauncher http://www.henrypp.org/product/chrlauncher in the portable edition
      - toyg 9y ago
        Features like the updater / appmanager, which is borderline malware and one of the reasons I uninstalled Chrome (and boy did it take some effort). Regardless, Chrome is not fully opensource, so there is no way to "calculate" the % you mention. Google might be running a bitcoin miner in Chrome and you would have no way of knowing. The degree of trust required to run Chrome is equivalent to the one you need to run Vivaldi; the only difference is who you trust (Google vs a bunch of ex-Opera developers). If you don't trust anything that is not opensource, you shouldn't run Google Chrome - you should run Chromium or Firefox builds published by trusted parties.
nachtigall 9y ago
> switch to Firefox earlier this year ... I couldn't tolerate the poor performance Everyone still seeing poor performance in Firefox 54, I personally would recommend to do a Refresh: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a... because usually it is an old add-on or wierd setting that causes it. At least it was in my case, and after Refresh firefox was running very fast
- codebolt 9y ago
  I don't understand what you people are seeing who make these performance complaints. I switched to Firefox last year because Chrome was giving me a lot issues (often hanging and crashing when I had many tabs/large pages open). So far Firefox has been working like a dream for me.
  - Semaphor 9y ago
    I've often read FF is faster, HN is one of the few places I see Chrome being called faster. Maybe it depends heavily on the number of tabs and which sites are loaded? For me FF, whenever I tried switching, was always way slower and prone to freezes. But then I have 32GB Ram, 5 tabs always open (pinned), between 3 to 20 extra tabs at the same time and quite the number of extensions.
  - zzalpha 9y ago
    I really wish I could agree. On a core i7 with 16GB and a completely fresh Windows 10 install that has never had Firefox on it (so we can't blame an old profile on the machine), Firefox with a single plugin (Keefox) is noticeably slower than Chrome. Just logging into my Google account I saw surprising amounts of basic UI stuttering. Something like Inbox (which is admittedly a pig) loads slowly and scrolls sluggishly. Chrome, by comparison, is responsive and snappy. I wish it were different. I really want to like Firefox, but on this machine, with some very basic tests it's clear that, for me, it simply does not compare...
    - jovial_galileo 9y ago
agumonkey 9y ago
It's an odd situation. Firefox has many fast parts but the whole is cranky. Chrome is sleek in almost every department. As much as I don't "like" it.. I use Chrome 99% of the time
jovial_galileo 9y ago
Welcome back! There are a lot more things in the pipeline. V57 in November will be crazy fast, even better than the current one.

by luhn 9y ago

starik36 9y ago

I've switched to Firefox full time (unless using F12 tools) - Electrolysis helped a lot. It has gotten very much faster and snappier, while Chrome feels laggy, particularly when closing or switching tabs. I've tried disabling all extensions, but it didn't help.

namanspace 9y ago
I've been using e10s for quite a while now. Yes, its great that they have reduced memory consumption by a huge margin. Unfortunately, I still feel page load times, scrolling, overall snappi-ness of chrome (I use ungoogled chromium) or overall browsing experience are way better than Firefox.
throwanem 9y ago
What about Chrome's dev tools do you find preferable? I tend to find myself hampered by lack of functionality like easy replay of network requests, and don't spend a lot of time in Chrome's toolset for such reasons - I'd be interested to hear a different perspective.
- starik36 9y ago
  At least for my case, I found that Firefox debugger would sometime hang for a bit. It was slowing me down. I'll definitely give it a shot on my next JavaScript heavy project.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    I had the same trouble with complex applications in Firefox 45, but haven't encountered it since then - 51 and since have been much more performant in general, and that goes for devtools as well. (I suspect it may have something to do with https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Release_Criteria/Jank#GC_pauses https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Release_Criteria/Jank#... - but that's just a guess.)
nachtigall 9y ago
In my case doing a "refresh" did help: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...

callahad 9y ago

Welcome back! Fair warning, legacy add-ons can perform worse under multi-process Firefox, since any synchronous APIs now require cross-process locking. To the greatest extent possible, try to limit yourself to add-ons badged with "Compatible with Firefox 57+" on addons.mozilla.org, which are guaranteed work well under Electrolysis. Also, get ready for Firefox 57. Just one example, in one benchmark, but the last data point on the right is accurate: https://screenshots.firefox.com/1DYGktRBpiIJBc7T/arewefastyet.com https://screenshots.firefox.com/1DYGktRBpiIJBc7T/arewefastye...

kibwen 9y ago
What particular change is responsible for the performance improvement seen in that benchmark? Not anything related to Quantum/Servo surely; I expect those benchmarks to reflect Javascript performance exclusively, and I haven't heard anything in a long time from Mozilla regarding Spidermonkey improvements.
- callahad 9y ago
  The change in that benchmark was from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1369140 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1369140, as part of the Quantum Flow (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum/Flow https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum/Flow) effort.
- cmrx64 9y ago
  That particular benchmark stresses DOM and layout performance, that test just programatically clicks all the delete buttons in the page under test.
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  There's been a steady march of performance improvements in Spidermonkey, though they haven't gotten very much press. They've been rearchitecting most of the inline caches so there's more sharing between the baseline and optimizing compiler and less in the way of performance cliffs. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1259927 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1259927 and its dependencies (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=1259927&hide_resolved=0 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=12599... for the dependency view). Things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1328140 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1328140 led to significant improvements to the sort of megamorphic code you commonly see in frameworks (e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1328140#c14 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1328140#c14 shows 25% improvements on Ember benchmarks). This work has been ongoing; a bunch of it landed in 53, more in 54, and more has been landing since. What makes it a bit harder to advertise is that it's aiming at reducing performance cliffs and improving the chance that real-life code lands on fast paths, not on improving the performance of those already-fast paths. WebAssembly is where the "make the fast bits faster" action is, mostly.

mtgx 9y ago

If it still doesn't work for you now you may want to give it another try once Project Quantum is further along the way (a year?): https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/a-quantum-leap-for-the-web-a3b7174b3c12 https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/a-quantum-leap-for-the-web-a... Servo looks super fast, but they don't seem to want to just rip-out Gecko and put Servo in there, just replace bits and pieces over time. I think that's a mistake, despite the hurdles of doing that, and especially if the end result in terms of performance is something like 60-70% of Servo as opposed to 100%. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzNDA https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzNDA https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Google-Servo-Perf-Comparison https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Google-S...

jvehent 9y ago
> they don't seem to want to just rip-out Gecko and put Servo in there It's hard enough to change the wheels of a car while driving on the highway, you really don't want to do all four at once.
- _boardwalk 9y ago
  Car analogies (and generalizations in general) are not so useful. I've seen many cases (and been frustrated) working in a corporation where high levels of caution end up creating much more total work to make changes incremental. And when you do finish, the code is often not is nice as if it had been all done at once (at which point it probably gets left as is as more important things than refactoring, in the eye of business people, come along).
pcwalton 9y ago
It would have been hard for us to get the real-world battle testing needed to get Servo's style system into shape without rolling it out in Gecko. https://github.com/servo/servo/pull/16971 https://github.com/servo/servo/pull/16971 is an example of Bobby Holley, a Gecko developer (who's awesome, by the way) landing almost a full rewrite of the multicore scheduler, making tons of sites faster in Servo.

Twirrim 9y ago

To confirm that Electrolysis is being used for you, open a new tab and go to about:support, and double check what "Multiprocess Windows" reports.

toyg 9y ago

Try Vivaldi - it's basically Chrome without the Google-everything, supporting almost all extensions too, and pretty fast.

hobarrera 9y ago
Vivaldi is closed source though.
- toyg 9y ago
  Chrome is too, they only open the chromium core.
  - v3ss0n 9y ago
    No , Chromium is almost 100% chrome , just without Google Service specific features .
    - PatentTroll 9y ago
      How can I run chromium as a daily driver on windows? What about automatic updates?
      - temgo 9y ago
        Choco packages chromium nightly builds for Windows.You could automate 'choco upgrade chromium -Y' (Daily snapshot builds). Otherwise: http://chromium.woolyss.com/#windows http://chromium.woolyss.com/#windows Which packages http://www.henrypp.org/product/chrlauncher http://www.henrypp.org/product/chrlauncher in the portable edition
    - toyg 9y ago
      Features like the updater / appmanager, which is borderline malware and one of the reasons I uninstalled Chrome (and boy did it take some effort). Regardless, Chrome is not fully opensource, so there is no way to "calculate" the % you mention. Google might be running a bitcoin miner in Chrome and you would have no way of knowing. The degree of trust required to run Chrome is equivalent to the one you need to run Vivaldi; the only difference is who you trust (Google vs a bunch of ex-Opera developers). If you don't trust anything that is not opensource, you shouldn't run Google Chrome - you should run Chromium or Firefox builds published by trusted parties.

nachtigall 9y ago

> switch to Firefox earlier this year ... I couldn't tolerate the poor performance Everyone still seeing poor performance in Firefox 54, I personally would recommend to do a Refresh: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a... because usually it is an old add-on or wierd setting that causes it. At least it was in my case, and after Refresh firefox was running very fast

codebolt 9y ago
I don't understand what you people are seeing who make these performance complaints. I switched to Firefox last year because Chrome was giving me a lot issues (often hanging and crashing when I had many tabs/large pages open). So far Firefox has been working like a dream for me.
- Semaphor 9y ago
  I've often read FF is faster, HN is one of the few places I see Chrome being called faster. Maybe it depends heavily on the number of tabs and which sites are loaded? For me FF, whenever I tried switching, was always way slower and prone to freezes. But then I have 32GB Ram, 5 tabs always open (pinned), between 3 to 20 extra tabs at the same time and quite the number of extensions.
- zzalpha 9y ago
  I really wish I could agree. On a core i7 with 16GB and a completely fresh Windows 10 install that has never had Firefox on it (so we can't blame an old profile on the machine), Firefox with a single plugin (Keefox) is noticeably slower than Chrome. Just logging into my Google account I saw surprising amounts of basic UI stuttering. Something like Inbox (which is admittedly a pig) loads slowly and scrolls sluggishly. Chrome, by comparison, is responsive and snappy. I wish it were different. I really want to like Firefox, but on this machine, with some very basic tests it's clear that, for me, it simply does not compare...
  - jovial_galileo 9y ago

agumonkey 9y ago

It's an odd situation. Firefox has many fast parts but the whole is cranky. Chrome is sleek in almost every department. As much as I don't "like" it.. I use Chrome 99% of the time

jovial_galileo 9y ago

Welcome back! There are a lot more things in the pipeline. V57 in November will be crazy fast, even better than the current one.