5 ms·

They made the same mistake IE made: around Firefox 3, they allowed their browser to become terribly slow, and so Chrome ate their lunch. Because let's be hones

by ktjfi 8y ago

They made the same mistake IE made: around Firefox 3, they allowed their browser to become terribly slow, and so Chrome ate their lunch. Because let's be honest, Chrome was and still is so much faster than Firefox, and that's why they won. You could argue that Chrome has infinite ad budget, and that obviously helps, but I'm a Google hater and I'd gladly use Firefox if it was better or at least on par with Chrome, but it's not. I understand fixing something like that takes a lot of effort, but they lost a lot of time and money in projects that had no chance of working out, such as FirefoxOS (really? making an entire OS using the slowest browser engine that there is on the cheapest ARM hardware they could find?), Hello, Persona, etc. They also abandoned Thunderbird, which I will never forgive, the same way I will never forgive Google for abandoning Reader. Servo is a nice project but the chances it will be abandoned after years in development are over the roof. So now they are focused on their privacy improvements, but they can't stop shooting themselves in the foot (sending your browsing history to the advertisement company Cliqz, remotely installing an addon to advertise the Mr. Robot show, installing Pocket by default...) Then, if it is slower, and they don't seem to be able to take my privacy seriously despite their claims to the contrary, why in hell should I use Firefox?

dgzl 8y ago
I really think Firefox's performance is better than what you're alluding.
- sergiosgc 8y ago
  On Google properties Chrome is noticeably faster. Everywhere else, I'd wager Firefox is faster and less resource hungry.
  - lucasverra 8y ago
    on my rMBP 13 late 2013, im on safari > ff > chr. Safari works pretty OK with G properties, except offline editing of docs
- newsgremlin 8y ago
  I switched about a month ago and I honestly couldn't tell a difference. The only thing people have to get over with Firefox is the browser controls and settings.
ycombinete 8y ago
When was the last time you checked/researched whether or not chrome is faster?
- ktjfi 8y ago
  A few weeks ago. Performance of Chrome is consistent: always snappy. Firefox on the other hand will turn laggy from time to time, especially when opening or closing tabs, when it sometimes freezes noticeably. It is also slower when doing DOM manipulations, and their developer tools are simply crap (MUCH slower, and with fewer features). But if they want to jerk off looking at how they reign in their synthetic benchmarks, who am I to disagree?
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    My 'synthetic benchmark' right now is FF with a few hundred tabs open in front of me. It works like a charm.
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      What do you have, like 32G of RAM, 16 cores, app running from an SSD, Gb network, etc.. :oP
      - detaro 8y ago
        If you run an adblocker, you don't need any of that.
      - jacquesm 8y ago
        ABP, umatrix, 16G, spinning rust, first gen i7. FF does take about 10G right now (Linux), so it is not exactly super efficient but given the amount of windows and tabs open I really can't complain.
  - jerryzh 8y ago
    While actually many versions before, like 58 or some, Firefox has released a impressive update that brought a entirely new way to play many tabs. Their experiment is that they can open over a thousand tabs in several seconds.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
alex_duf 8y ago
I don't think it's fair to point how mozilla didn't succeed on their projects such as Firefox OS, Hello and Persona. Every tech company has failed projects, you can't blame them for trying. Look at Google: google wave, google plus, google buzz, their clusterfuck of IM / phone calls. I mean knock yourself out, there's a whole list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discontinued_products_and_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon... My point being, Mozilla has to try to innovate, and they have to try these projects. They're being reproached that some failed, but no one is questioning Rust now that it's taking off...
- Vinnl 8y ago
  They're also one of the founders of LetsEncrypt, maintain MDN, etc. Furthermore, one time long ago, Mozilla might have thought they didn't need to build a mobile browser, and focus on their main product: Firefox for Desktop. Next thing you know, Firefox is completely irrelevant on what's becoming the dominant computing platform. I don't know whether VR/AR or IoT will be a thing, and I'm sure that they will be criticised for their projects there when they don't, but I'm certainly glad they're at least trying to make those open platforms - just in case they do become mainstream.
ed_balls 8y ago
FF is good on my mobile. I use it as well as Brave. On my laptop I use mostly Chrome and sometimes FF. I'd imagine Apple will team up with Mozilla, so we would have two major browser engines.
pythux 8y ago
Hey, Cliqz employee here. I'd like to clarify a few things since I don't think your comment is accurate. 1. Cliqz is not an advertising company, it's a search company and we push hard for privacy protection in everything we do (private search, antitracking, adblocking, etc.) 2. Privacy policies are legally binding, and in ours we state that no personal data is collected. We designed our features and products to not require collection of any private data (that includes our search engine). 3. I'd like to point out that in Firefox, by default, your queries are sent to advertising company Google. So I don't understand all the heat when Mozilla tries to find more privacy-friendly alternatives to Google. In this case, they replaced Google by Cliqz (again, an independent German search company focusing on privacy, building its own index: no Bing results involved) in Germany, for 1% of the users. That seems to perfectly fit in Mozilla's mission of protecting users' privacy.
- ktjfl 8y ago
  1st, Cliqz is majority-owned by Hubert Burda Media, an advertising and media company. You don't set the fox to guard the henhouse. 2nd, sending the user's complete browsing history to a 3rd party which is owned by an advertising and media company without telling the user was a terrible idea. It's simply mismanagement by the Mozilla Corporation. https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i... >This experiment also includes the data collection tool Cliqz uses to build its recommendation engine. Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit.
  - pythux 8y ago
    Fortunately for our users, the way our technology was communicated by Mozilla is not accurate. Cliqz has never collected the "complete browser history" of any of our users (and it's the last thing we want to do). We have some data collection in place and it is limited to collected anonymous information about search results found on SERP page. If you want to know more about how we do it without putting user privacy at risk, feel free to read this document: https://gist.github.com/solso/423a1104a9e3c1e3b8d7c9ca14e885e5 https://gist.github.com/solso/423a1104a9e3c1e3b8d7c9ca14e885...
jerryzh 8y ago
Actually there is no proof showing Chrome works more efficiently than Firefox, especially provided with same computer resources. BTW, Thunderbird is restarted.
- Nursie 8y ago
  Proof? I don't know, but anecdotally... My late 2013 Macbook Pro Retina is still my work machine, I attach it to two screens, one of which is a 4K screen. Firefox struggles to play embedded video on that screen. Chrome does not. FF also seems to have a lot of weird copy/paste issues with the Slack web client and Jira. I really don't want to use chrome but FF ended up annoying me so much I went back to it. (Safari almost worked... but the outlook webmail we use didn't play well, and with safari I had to refresh and re-login every hour or so, rather than daily on other browsers) If this sort of experience is true for most users, then it's bad.
- tapoxi 8y ago
  If it did I'd still be using it. I've always seen this UI lag with Firefox (on macOS) so while I'd love to support them to prevent a monoculture, I get worse performance and no obvious benefits out of the switch. (Sure, "not Google" but I can also just use Safari.)
gnomewascool 8y ago
> Hello That was an experimental, lightweight Skype alternative, that didn't take too much effort to build beyond introducing WebRTC into Gecko (which they had to do anyway) and which probably helped them iron out bugs in Gecko's WebRTC implementation. Also, for the record, when I used it, it worked mostly fine. > Persona It worked, but almost nobody used it (you could argue that that is "not working out" from a social, if not technical point of view). > They also abandoned Thunderbird, which I will never forgive They didn't abandon it. They transferred it into other people's caring hands. They still provide some support for it under the Mozilla umbrella and they still coordinate (to some extent) with Thunderbird's current developers when modifying the common base Firefox and Thunderbird depend on. > Cliqz Partially true, if rather overblown. It affected a tiny number of people (~ 1 % of new users, in only one country), the data was anonymised and the code running on the server to which the data was sent was FOSS, though obviously there's no definitive proof that Cliqz didn't substitute it with malicious code. It was an order of magnitude less bad than what Google always does and considering that the point was to build an alternative to Google search, if it had worked out, it would have been a massive privacy gain. The most disappointing part was it being opt-out, not opt-in, for the randomly selected users. > remotely installing an addon to advertise the Mr. Robot show That was a very silly (and stupid) gimmick, but it didn't invade your privacy. > installing Pocket by default Having Pocket installed by default is not a privacy violation, even if it is slight bloat-ware.
TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
Good grief. I use Chrome, Firefox, and Safari across Mac, Windows, and Linux. None of them make me think, "Oh wow, this is so 'slow' that I'm going to switch." Is there some objective rating which compares this, and shows Chrome is faster than all competition in every situation? I've just Googled this (ha!) and it would seem that different rendering engines optimize for different things, and there's no clear winner. But plenty of sites want to tell me that Chrome is "the best," so I got that going for me.

by ktjfi 8y ago

dgzl 8y ago

I really think Firefox's performance is better than what you're alluding.

sergiosgc 8y ago
On Google properties Chrome is noticeably faster. Everywhere else, I'd wager Firefox is faster and less resource hungry.
- lucasverra 8y ago
  on my rMBP 13 late 2013, im on safari > ff > chr. Safari works pretty OK with G properties, except offline editing of docs
newsgremlin 8y ago
I switched about a month ago and I honestly couldn't tell a difference. The only thing people have to get over with Firefox is the browser controls and settings.

ycombinete 8y ago

When was the last time you checked/researched whether or not chrome is faster?

ktjfi 8y ago
A few weeks ago. Performance of Chrome is consistent: always snappy. Firefox on the other hand will turn laggy from time to time, especially when opening or closing tabs, when it sometimes freezes noticeably. It is also slower when doing DOM manipulations, and their developer tools are simply crap (MUCH slower, and with fewer features). But if they want to jerk off looking at how they reign in their synthetic benchmarks, who am I to disagree?
- jacquesm 8y ago
  My 'synthetic benchmark' right now is FF with a few hundred tabs open in front of me. It works like a charm.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    What do you have, like 32G of RAM, 16 cores, app running from an SSD, Gb network, etc.. :oP
    - detaro 8y ago
      If you run an adblocker, you don't need any of that.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      ABP, umatrix, 16G, spinning rust, first gen i7. FF does take about 10G right now (Linux), so it is not exactly super efficient but given the amount of windows and tabs open I really can't complain.
- jerryzh 8y ago
  While actually many versions before, like 58 or some, Firefox has released a impressive update that brought a entirely new way to play many tabs. Their experiment is that they can open over a thousand tabs in several seconds.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

alex_duf 8y ago

I don't think it's fair to point how mozilla didn't succeed on their projects such as Firefox OS, Hello and Persona. Every tech company has failed projects, you can't blame them for trying. Look at Google: google wave, google plus, google buzz, their clusterfuck of IM / phone calls. I mean knock yourself out, there's a whole list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discontinued_products_and_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon... My point being, Mozilla has to try to innovate, and they have to try these projects. They're being reproached that some failed, but no one is questioning Rust now that it's taking off...

Vinnl 8y ago
They're also one of the founders of LetsEncrypt, maintain MDN, etc. Furthermore, one time long ago, Mozilla might have thought they didn't need to build a mobile browser, and focus on their main product: Firefox for Desktop. Next thing you know, Firefox is completely irrelevant on what's becoming the dominant computing platform. I don't know whether VR/AR or IoT will be a thing, and I'm sure that they will be criticised for their projects there when they don't, but I'm certainly glad they're at least trying to make those open platforms - just in case they do become mainstream.

ed_balls 8y ago

FF is good on my mobile. I use it as well as Brave. On my laptop I use mostly Chrome and sometimes FF. I'd imagine Apple will team up with Mozilla, so we would have two major browser engines.

pythux 8y ago

Hey, Cliqz employee here. I'd like to clarify a few things since I don't think your comment is accurate. 1. Cliqz is not an advertising company, it's a search company and we push hard for privacy protection in everything we do (private search, antitracking, adblocking, etc.) 2. Privacy policies are legally binding, and in ours we state that no personal data is collected. We designed our features and products to not require collection of any private data (that includes our search engine). 3. I'd like to point out that in Firefox, by default, your queries are sent to advertising company Google. So I don't understand all the heat when Mozilla tries to find more privacy-friendly alternatives to Google. In this case, they replaced Google by Cliqz (again, an independent German search company focusing on privacy, building its own index: no Bing results involved) in Germany, for 1% of the users. That seems to perfectly fit in Mozilla's mission of protecting users' privacy.

ktjfl 8y ago
1st, Cliqz is majority-owned by Hubert Burda Media, an advertising and media company. You don't set the fox to guard the henhouse. 2nd, sending the user's complete browsing history to a 3rd party which is owned by an advertising and media company without telling the user was a terrible idea. It's simply mismanagement by the Mozilla Corporation. https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-i... >This experiment also includes the data collection tool Cliqz uses to build its recommendation engine. Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the URLs of pages they visit.
- pythux 8y ago
  Fortunately for our users, the way our technology was communicated by Mozilla is not accurate. Cliqz has never collected the "complete browser history" of any of our users (and it's the last thing we want to do). We have some data collection in place and it is limited to collected anonymous information about search results found on SERP page. If you want to know more about how we do it without putting user privacy at risk, feel free to read this document: https://gist.github.com/solso/423a1104a9e3c1e3b8d7c9ca14e885e5 https://gist.github.com/solso/423a1104a9e3c1e3b8d7c9ca14e885...

jerryzh 8y ago

Actually there is no proof showing Chrome works more efficiently than Firefox, especially provided with same computer resources. BTW, Thunderbird is restarted.

Nursie 8y ago
Proof? I don't know, but anecdotally... My late 2013 Macbook Pro Retina is still my work machine, I attach it to two screens, one of which is a 4K screen. Firefox struggles to play embedded video on that screen. Chrome does not. FF also seems to have a lot of weird copy/paste issues with the Slack web client and Jira. I really don't want to use chrome but FF ended up annoying me so much I went back to it. (Safari almost worked... but the outlook webmail we use didn't play well, and with safari I had to refresh and re-login every hour or so, rather than daily on other browsers) If this sort of experience is true for most users, then it's bad.
tapoxi 8y ago
If it did I'd still be using it. I've always seen this UI lag with Firefox (on macOS) so while I'd love to support them to prevent a monoculture, I get worse performance and no obvious benefits out of the switch. (Sure, "not Google" but I can also just use Safari.)

gnomewascool 8y ago

> Hello That was an experimental, lightweight Skype alternative, that didn't take too much effort to build beyond introducing WebRTC into Gecko (which they had to do anyway) and which probably helped them iron out bugs in Gecko's WebRTC implementation. Also, for the record, when I used it, it worked mostly fine. > Persona It worked, but almost nobody used it (you could argue that that is "not working out" from a social, if not technical point of view). > They also abandoned Thunderbird, which I will never forgive They didn't abandon it. They transferred it into other people's caring hands. They still provide some support for it under the Mozilla umbrella and they still coordinate (to some extent) with Thunderbird's current developers when modifying the common base Firefox and Thunderbird depend on. > Cliqz Partially true, if rather overblown. It affected a tiny number of people (~ 1 % of new users, in only one country), the data was anonymised and the code running on the server to which the data was sent was FOSS, though obviously there's no definitive proof that Cliqz didn't substitute it with malicious code. It was an order of magnitude less bad than what Google always does and considering that the point was to build an alternative to Google search, if it had worked out, it would have been a massive privacy gain. The most disappointing part was it being opt-out, not opt-in, for the randomly selected users. > remotely installing an addon to advertise the Mr. Robot show That was a very silly (and stupid) gimmick, but it didn't invade your privacy. > installing Pocket by default Having Pocket installed by default is not a privacy violation, even if it is slight bloat-ware.

TheRealDunkirk 8y ago

Good grief. I use Chrome, Firefox, and Safari across Mac, Windows, and Linux. None of them make me think, "Oh wow, this is so 'slow' that I'm going to switch." Is there some objective rating which compares this, and shows Chrome is faster than all competition in every situation? I've just Googled this (ha!) and it would seem that different rendering engines optimize for different things, and there's no clear winner. But plenty of sites want to tell me that Chrome is "the best," so I got that going for me.