4 ms·

It was slow, janky unresponsive compared to Chrome. Also security was much weaker. I think they addressed some of the issues now.

by mda 9y ago

3131s 9y ago
I agree with the GP -- I never noticed this in Firefox and years back I was surprised to learn after the fact that Chrome had come to dominate in market share. Was Firefox less performant on Windows or something? I never really got what people were complaining about as a user of Firefox on Linux... However, the new beta is purely awesome. I don't think I've ever been so excited about a new software version release! What a fantastic validation of Rust too in the process.
- amiga-workbench 9y ago
  I've used them side by side before and the default scrolling behaviour felt janky as hell. I'll be very pleased if they have improved performance as much as everybody is saying, I want off the Google botnet.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    have you tried waterfox ? Alternatively have you tried enabling smooth scrolling ?
- mda 9y ago
  My experience is mostly on linux. Chrome was way better on all aspects i mentioned. It was like day and night.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    Seems to me you had a corrupted profile or you installed the wrond extension(s). Have you tried comparing both on a brand new user profile ? A day and night difference on a fresh profile is unheard of, they should be comparable speed.
    - terlisimo 9y ago
      I am surprised at how many people can't see (or mind) the obvious difference in speed. Here's a test: Create a fresh clean profile for both FF56 (or earlier) and chrome without any extensions. Then, create/import a bookmark folder with 20 sites and sync them to both browsers. Fire up each browser and watch the cpu usage with top (or task manager). Choose "open all in tabs" and monitor the cpu usage over time. For me chromium finishes loading 3-5x faster. By "finishes loading" I mean all spinning circles in tabs are gone and the cpu usage drops to nearly 0%. Firefox uses only 2 processes/threads, while chromium makes use of all cores. I am guessing the more cores your CPU has, the more obvious the difference. But you don't need an 8-core cpu to see the difference, the difference is as noticeable for me on my i5-6200U laptop. But page loading speed and JS performance aside, what turned me away from firefox is the sluggish UI. Little things like how fast the dev tools open, or the speed at which right-click menus open. It's like firefox freezes for a millisecond on these operations while chrome feels much more fluid. I don't have a test case for this :) I never really used Firefox, and I give it a go every year or so. I used Opera 12 for as long as I could precisely because of the FF UI responsiveness. Then Chrome came along. I keep looking back but... FF is not there yet for me. I'm no fan of Google and I really hope the new FF is as good as people claim to be. Remains to be seen, having high hopes! EDIT: Obviously if you have a slow internet link then the pipe becomes the bottleneck and both browsers will load sites at same speed. But in that case you could just close all tabs and reopen them and let the browsers load most of the stuff from cache.
    - mda 9y ago
      Of course. My profiles were not corrupt, also tried with empty profiles, tbh firefox performance degraded much faster after profiles got heavier. This was some time ago though. To be honest it was impossible to not see the performance difference, chrome is always more fluid and snappy.
bigbugbag 9y ago
What kind of hardware and OS were you running when you experienced this ? My own experience over a number of different computers, years and settings is the exact opposite: chrome being less responsive or both being about the same. At times firefox was slower but it always turned out to be due to a malware ridden computer or a combination of dubious firefox extensions. srware iron did feel faster than both iunder certain conditions though.

It was slow, janky unresponsive compared to Chrome. Also security was much weaker. I think they addressed some of the issues now.

by mda 9y ago

It was slow, janky unresponsive compared to Chrome. Also security was much weaker. I think they addressed some of the issues now.

3131s 9y ago

I agree with the GP -- I never noticed this in Firefox and years back I was surprised to learn after the fact that Chrome had come to dominate in market share. Was Firefox less performant on Windows or something? I never really got what people were complaining about as a user of Firefox on Linux... However, the new beta is purely awesome. I don't think I've ever been so excited about a new software version release! What a fantastic validation of Rust too in the process.

amiga-workbench 9y ago
I've used them side by side before and the default scrolling behaviour felt janky as hell. I'll be very pleased if they have improved performance as much as everybody is saying, I want off the Google botnet.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  have you tried waterfox ? Alternatively have you tried enabling smooth scrolling ?
mda 9y ago
My experience is mostly on linux. Chrome was way better on all aspects i mentioned. It was like day and night.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  Seems to me you had a corrupted profile or you installed the wrond extension(s). Have you tried comparing both on a brand new user profile ? A day and night difference on a fresh profile is unheard of, they should be comparable speed.
  - terlisimo 9y ago
    I am surprised at how many people can't see (or mind) the obvious difference in speed. Here's a test: Create a fresh clean profile for both FF56 (or earlier) and chrome without any extensions. Then, create/import a bookmark folder with 20 sites and sync them to both browsers. Fire up each browser and watch the cpu usage with top (or task manager). Choose "open all in tabs" and monitor the cpu usage over time. For me chromium finishes loading 3-5x faster. By "finishes loading" I mean all spinning circles in tabs are gone and the cpu usage drops to nearly 0%. Firefox uses only 2 processes/threads, while chromium makes use of all cores. I am guessing the more cores your CPU has, the more obvious the difference. But you don't need an 8-core cpu to see the difference, the difference is as noticeable for me on my i5-6200U laptop. But page loading speed and JS performance aside, what turned me away from firefox is the sluggish UI. Little things like how fast the dev tools open, or the speed at which right-click menus open. It's like firefox freezes for a millisecond on these operations while chrome feels much more fluid. I don't have a test case for this :) I never really used Firefox, and I give it a go every year or so. I used Opera 12 for as long as I could precisely because of the FF UI responsiveness. Then Chrome came along. I keep looking back but... FF is not there yet for me. I'm no fan of Google and I really hope the new FF is as good as people claim to be. Remains to be seen, having high hopes! EDIT: Obviously if you have a slow internet link then the pipe becomes the bottleneck and both browsers will load sites at same speed. But in that case you could just close all tabs and reopen them and let the browsers load most of the stuff from cache.
  - mda 9y ago
    Of course. My profiles were not corrupt, also tried with empty profiles, tbh firefox performance degraded much faster after profiles got heavier. This was some time ago though. To be honest it was impossible to not see the performance difference, chrome is always more fluid and snappy.

bigbugbag 9y ago

What kind of hardware and OS were you running when you experienced this ? My own experience over a number of different computers, years and settings is the exact opposite: chrome being less responsive or both being about the same. At times firefox was slower but it always turned out to be due to a malware ridden computer or a combination of dubious firefox extensions. srware iron did feel faster than both iunder certain conditions though.