4 ms·

It reminds me of Phoenix (to become Firefox), and how much of an improvement it was over the Mozilla browser. It makes me wonder where things went wrong, as I r

by fdej 9y ago

It reminds me of Phoenix (to become Firefox), and how much of an improvement it was over the Mozilla browser. It makes me wonder where things went wrong, as I recall the Firefox of ~2005 being snappier than the one of ~2015. The only discrete drop in performance that I can remember was the addition of the AwesomeBar (which was worth it, but it really annoyed me at the time that just typing in an address became sluggish). Of course, my memory about these things could be completely wrong, and in any case web 2.0 gradually took over and websites accreted JavaScript faster than the hardware could improve, so comparing today with 10-15 years ago isn't really fair... Well, congrats to the Firefox developers, because it really is a pleasure to use again.

DiThi 9y ago
> It makes me wonder where things went wrong, as I recall the Firefox of ~2005 being snappier than the one of ~2015. If you visit any page made in 2005 with any recent browser it will be unbelievably fast. Pages became more bloated in the last decade because they could.
- cat199 9y ago
  this + stuck js + single threading.. chrome's day-one multiprocess support was really the big shift since it allowed js bloat to not kill your session, which in turn allowed more js bloat to exist, which in turn made ff slower..
  - staticassertion 9y ago
    Yeah, when you think about Chrome's being selling points - a browser that won't crash just because one tab does, sandboxing, and responsiveness - it's literally all just from their multiproc architecture. It bought them so much to have that from the state. But, like Firefox, they now have a big codebase to maintain and it's not so easy to get massive perf improvements because changing up architecture is painful.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  first releases of firefox were also pretty bare. in a good way, it didn't do much but did everything I, as a coder, wanted. Now think about devtools and live customization .. and every other bits added.

by fdej 9y ago

DiThi 9y ago

> It makes me wonder where things went wrong, as I recall the Firefox of ~2005 being snappier than the one of ~2015. If you visit any page made in 2005 with any recent browser it will be unbelievably fast. Pages became more bloated in the last decade because they could.

cat199 9y ago
this + stuck js + single threading.. chrome's day-one multiprocess support was really the big shift since it allowed js bloat to not kill your session, which in turn allowed more js bloat to exist, which in turn made ff slower..
- staticassertion 9y ago
  Yeah, when you think about Chrome's being selling points - a browser that won't crash just because one tab does, sandboxing, and responsiveness - it's literally all just from their multiproc architecture. It bought them so much to have that from the state. But, like Firefox, they now have a big codebase to maintain and it's not so easy to get massive perf improvements because changing up architecture is painful.
agumonkey 9y ago
first releases of firefox were also pretty bare. in a good way, it didn't do much but did everything I, as a coder, wanted. Now think about devtools and live customization .. and every other bits added.