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The Mozilla tech blogs are always a good read. Informative and easy to digest. I can only think of one other company blogging with similar consistency/quality:

The Mozilla tech blogs are always a good read. Informative and easy to digest. I can only think of one other company blogging with similar consistency/quality: Cloudflare. Firefox performance has seen tremendous gains since their Project Quantum efforts. It mostly feels on par with Chrome for me pretty much everywhere. There is one glaring omission though: a single company where I have problems with FF on multiple apps - Google. Gmail was still dog-slow the last time I tried, Youtube can send my fan into a frenzy and Docs is also regularly problematic. (on Linux)

The_rationalist 7y ago
It is mostly par with Chrome now pretty much everywhere. Well browsing most website should not trigger lag in any browsers. But if we look at benchmarcks: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-68-Chrome-76-Browsers https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-...
- the_duke 7y ago
  Amended to "feels on par".
- pcwalton 7y ago
  Baseline interpreter is a good example of doing things that help most Web pages instead of benchmarks. One of the major things that ARES-6 and other benchmarks test is whether generators are JIT'd, for example. This doesn't really help Web pages, as it's a rarely used feature at present and even rarer in hot loops. SpiderMonkey should get around to jitting generators, but I have a hard time blaming the team for focusing on real-world improvements first.
  - The_rationalist 7y ago
    Pcwalton! While I agree that most synthetic benchmarcks are mostly not representative for the real world, there is a benchmarck suite for real world. That is benchmarcking most used ALEXA websites. It's named TP 5 and TP6, mozilla use it internally (e. G to measure progress on stylo) Why is the real world (TP5/6) not public?? Phoronix has never used it, mozilla has never publicly published benchmarcks. I guess they favor chromium but I've never seen all results only the few mozillians posted on bugzilla. Let the world know, publish the results, even if it favor chromium. Anyway the mainstream will never be affected by that public information (most people have difficulties discerning a search engine from the concept of browser, let alone talking about benchmarcks)
    - fabrice_d 7y ago
      Did you look at the raptor dashboards? Let me help you: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perf.html#/graphs?timerange=2592000&series=mozilla-central,1647786,1,1 https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perf.html#/graphs?timerange=2...
      - The_rationalist 7y ago
        Thank you! But without being able to compare it with chromium the results are meaningless to my brain.
        pcwalton 7y ago
        You're free to port it to Chromium and run it yourself.
  - yusukesuzuki 7y ago
    JSC's async-await is constructed on the generator's mechanism so that high performance generator is critical for all the web code using async functions. Not sure how SpiderMonkey is doing.
    - littlestymaar 7y ago
      As the gp said, async/await is rarely used in hot loops, so it would probably never get jit-ed in a real webpage.
      - yusukesuzuki 7y ago
        I don’t agree given that async iterator can be iterated. But I’m ok if SpiderMonkey folks thinks so ;)
        littlestymaar 7y ago
        Async is mainly useful for asynchronous operations, like network requests if file system access. If used in this context, the loop cannot be "hot"… Maybe there are people (ab)using the async stuf do do something else, but at least it's not really common.
        pcwalton 7y ago
        I'm sure SM will get around to jitting that stuff at some point. All I'm saying is that Baseline Interpreter gives users bigger wins right now.
- bradknowles 7y ago
  Does anyone know if those same phoronix tests have been run against the new Firefox 70 Nightly or Developer Edition apps? I'd be curious to see how 68 versus 69 versus 70 compare.
  - The_rationalist 7y ago
    I don't think it has yet been done. But as you probably noticed he tested with webrender too
    - Caspy7 7y ago
      I mean, WebRender and spidermonkey are two separate things.
zachruss92 7y ago
Yea YouTube performance is nuts! It seems to be exacerbated when playing in full screen or @2x speed as well. Google has been getting better though with supporting FF. They now support Hangouts on FF and Gmail is actually faster for me in FF than it is in Chrome.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  On Edge the slowness increases to the point that loading a ZX Spectrum game from tape feels psychologly faster. A mute point however now with EdgeChrome.
  - semi-extrinsic 7y ago
    Not to nitpick, but it's "a moot point". Fun fact, the word "moot" has the same origin as "meet". A "moot point" was originally "something that has to be discussed and decided at a meeting" (like a town hall or similar). Thus there was no sense in discussing it, since it was up to the meeting to decide. Also, scouts still call their congregations "a moot".
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Thanks for the correction. <small rant mode> Nowadays I have two sources of errors when writing. My own lack of knowledge, or incorrect knowledge, and then the stupid auto corrections that just go down the drain due to me mostly typing across multiple languages. </small rant mode> So whatever caused it, thanks again.
aswanson 7y ago
Do they have a doc detailing the full architectural design? I feel like I'm walking into a movie during the last 15 minutes.
jedberg 7y ago
I solve this by using Firefox for all web browsing, and Chrome for gmail/gapps/anything by google. It sucks that we have to do that, but I can't entirely blame them for making their own products work better on their own browser.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Just like you can't blame Microsoft for making ActiveX work best on Windows.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    If they did it while talking about open standards, then we would.
- smt88 7y ago
  Rambox was a FOSS desktop app based on Electron to house all your Chrome apps in tabs. Rambox went proprietary, but was forked into Hamsket. Might be easier than what you're using now. https://github.com/TheGoddessInari/hamsket https://github.com/TheGoddessInari/hamsket
- josteink 7y ago
  > It sucks that we have to do that, but I can't entirely blame them for making their own products work better on their own browser. You mean like MS for a long time did with MSIE? Are we really back in the 90s, back to “This page works best in $one_specific_browser”? This is not the future I was hoping for... On the flip side I can use Linux for almost anything, so i guess it’s not all bad.
  - hutzlibu 7y ago
    Well .. consider you are back in the 90s ... would you think in general, that this is "the future you was hoping for..."?
    - pjmlp 7y ago
mr_puzzled 7y ago
> Gmail was still dog-slow the last time I tried, Youtube can send my fan into a frenzy and Docs is also regularly problematic. It seems to work fine on my system running Ubuntu 18.04 with ublock origin installed. Which OS are you using?
- shadowfacts 7y ago
  Anecdotally with Firefox on macOS, Gmail is by far the worst offender. Switching inboxes/labels takes several seconds in FF and is near instant in Chrome. Scrolling performance in FF is also much worse.
  - nvrspyx 7y ago
    In my opinion, macOS is definitely FF's weakest desktop platform. I've personally experienced terrible performance, out-of-place UI for the platform (e.g. default dropdowns), and just a generally less polished experience compared to Safari, Chrome, and Chromium derivatives. I still use it as my default browser on macOS though because it does excel in other areas.
    - omnimus 7y ago
      Interesting i never had such problems. I do webdev and Safari seems to be always the worst. But i dont use gmail.
    - duncanawoods 7y ago
      I have zero problems with FF MacOS. Might be something in your setup?
    - 1_player 7y ago
      Same for me, I tried the latest Nightly a couple days ago to test the CoreAnimation work, and after 1 hour of use my Slack tab because so unbearably sluggish each keypress would take 1 second to render. No extensions, no GIFs, no heavy tabs open, perhaps one or two open tabs. No slowdowns at all after 8 hours on Slack w/ Safari or Brave. Firefox is definitely the worst browser on macOS, compared to the Windows version where it's absolutely perfect and always quick.
_hardwaregeek 7y ago
YouTube freezes so damn much. Very annoying. But probably good since I watch too much damn YouTube haha.
patrickmcnamara 7y ago
YouTube is faster on Firefox on my laptop for some reason. I get zero dropped frames on Firefox too, compared to Chrome/Chromium. Still waiting on Firefox to support hardware-accelerated decoding of videos though.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  > Still waiting on Firefox to support hardware-accelerated decoding of videos though. Wait, Firefox doesn't do this already? Didn't know.
  - pitaj 7y ago
    I'm fairly certain it does it already.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      It says its using the GPU but if you look at the cpu time required to play a 1080p video within firefox vs playing the same video with mpv www.mpv.io : a lightweight player that among other things can transparently stream any url understood by youtube-dl It uses 20x as much cpu as mpv. For purposes of comparison this is like Toyota selling a car that goes just as fast as your Ford so long as you are OK with only getting 4MPG. There is an addon if you prefer to right click on a url and open in mpv or in an addon like Tridactyl you can do the same with your keyboard. It also lets you speed up and slow down the playback speed which is nice for speakers who talk too slow and take a while to get to the point.
      - cmcaine 7y ago
        I use mpv on my laptop to get more out of the battery and to stop the fan annoying me.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      It uses the GPU but doesn't use it to actually decode video on linux. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726 Bug opened 4 years ago. Hundreds of millions in revenue and can't task one person for a summer to hook into the support that already exists.
tsbinz 7y ago
I still need to either use chrome on android or explicitly navigate to the mobile page to get the title text on xkcd.com ... android firefox cuts the title text off with no apparent way to read the full one :/
- Kelm 7y ago
  Just use the mobile version, works fine on android ff
chao- 7y ago
I have the opposite experience with YouTube. With an AMD GPU on Linux, Chrome churns, drops frames, and stutters horribly on even 1080p videos at 30fps. Firefox, meanwhile, handles 1440p60 video with no problem. Even two such videos simultaneously, on separate monitors. Chrome became inexplicably better for parts of early 2019 (I did not note which versions), but starting 2 or 3 months ago Chrome returned to being unusable for YouTube beyond 720p videos. Before anyone asks, this is on an AMD RX 580 with Mesa 18.0.
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  have you double checked whether firefox is set to use your gpu or not, for video?
  - vetinari 7y ago
    Neither Firefox nor Chrome under Linux are capable of using GPU for video decoding. Only some distribution-specific Chromium builds do.
    - Yoric 7y ago
      I seem to remember that some GPU acceleration under Linux was disabled voluntarily, on both Firefox and Chrome, because they actually ran much slower than CPU, probably due to bad drivers.
      - ubercow13 7y ago
        That’s certain GPU acceleration of rendering - specifically for Firefox I think compositing is disabled by default. It’s not the same as GPU accelerated video decoding which isn’t implemented in either browser, except via a set of patches for Chromium.
      - vetinari 7y ago
        It is slower not due to drivers, but due to how the browsers[1] compose the final webpage. It does that using CPU, not GPU as on other operating systems, so hardware video decoding would involve moving the compressed video to GPU, waiting for it to decode, moving the decoded video back to RAM, do the composition, and then move the result back to GPU for display. For hw decoding to have sense, GPU composition is needed. Hopefully webrender will bring that in for Linux too. [1] Firefox actually, Chrome does use GPU composition. Chrome for ChromeOS even uses the same driver (libva+intel-vaapi-driver) as desktop linux for video decoding, Google just is not willing to support it on desktop. That's what some distributions enable in their Chromium builds.
nullandvoid 7y ago
My yt experience is both play @ same frames but firefox waits for a couple of seconds before I'm able to click play / when I skip to a part in the video - whereas chrome is instant in both cases which can becoming annoying
TheArcane 7y ago
I wanted to keep using FF despite being a gmail user so much so that I switched to Thunderbird for my emails. I guess Mozilla wins this way.
- omnimus 7y ago
  I did the same and then ditched gmail for payed email service + my domain. Thumderbird is underrated.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Same here. Gmail is only an easy way to aggregate my emails, which I used yahoo for, and eventually might use something else. Back home, Thunderbird, and the occasional donations.
- copperx 7y ago
  I thought Thunderbird was not under development anymore?
  - chucksmash 7y ago
    They released a new version on the 27th of August[1]. It looks like it that was the first release since August 2018[2]. [1]: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/68.0/releasenotes/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/68.0/releaseno... [2]: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/60.0/releasenotes/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/60.0/releaseno...
    - Caspy7 7y ago
      I believe Thunderbird is now ESR. So it gets a major version then security updates for a year until the next one.
      - copperx 7y ago
        What is the meaning of ESR? Because that sounds like life support to the layman.
SomeOldThrow 7y ago
Confluence is also pretty bad on firefox for whatever reason, so I'm pretty sure this is going to be a problem wherever chrome is the dominant browser in the dev culture there.
- fnord123 7y ago
  All the Atlassian suite is somehow dog slow on Firefox on Mac. They're unusable.
Antrikshy 7y ago
Speaking of good tech blogs, Netflix has an excellent one as well.
dgellow 7y ago
Gmail is really crazy slow on Firefox, it’s such a deal breaker. I have regularly 30s to load the web application, it’s closer to 2-5s on Edge with the same setup (same ad blockers, etc).
- u619900 7y ago
  Google should get their shit together and make Gmail usable then. (Works fine for me in FF though).
- lacampbell 7y ago
  I suspect this is because chrome supports WebSQL while Firefox does not.
  - Technetium 7y ago
    I suspect you have suspected incorrectly: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/audits/web-sql https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/audits/we...
    - lacampbell 7y ago
      I realize Mozilla spearheaded an effort to remove webSQL from the standards. But chrome still uses it for fulltext search in gmail. https://caniuse.com/#search=websql https://caniuse.com/#search=websql https://nolanlawson.com/tag/websql/ https://nolanlawson.com/tag/websql/
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  That has to be something wrong with your PC, it only takes a few seconds on even my 6 year old laptop on Firefox to load up from zero. Switching between folders is under a second as is opening an email. Firefox (latest Ubuntu)
sehugg 7y ago
If it's any consolation, Gmail is dog-slow on my Samsung Chromebook 3. I switched to "Basic HTML" mode to make it bearable.
user234683 7y ago
> Gmail was still dog-slow the last time I tried I use the HTML version instead to deal with this issue
phreack 7y ago
I suggest checking out the Dolphin Emulator tech blogs as well, they're also consistently great in quality. https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/ https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/
a1369209993 7y ago
I don't know about Gmail or Docs, but IME (also on linux) Youtube doesn't work in any browser[0]; I'd recommend http://youtube-dl.org/ http://youtube-dl.org/ and a real video player. 0: Even with remote code execution vulnerabilities enabled it shows a corporate spam clip instead of the video I'm trying to watch.

The_rationalist 7y ago

It is mostly par with Chrome now pretty much everywhere. Well browsing most website should not trigger lag in any browsers. But if we look at benchmarcks: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-68-Chrome-76-Browsers https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-...

the_duke 7y ago
Amended to "feels on par".
pcwalton 7y ago
Baseline interpreter is a good example of doing things that help most Web pages instead of benchmarks. One of the major things that ARES-6 and other benchmarks test is whether generators are JIT'd, for example. This doesn't really help Web pages, as it's a rarely used feature at present and even rarer in hot loops. SpiderMonkey should get around to jitting generators, but I have a hard time blaming the team for focusing on real-world improvements first.
- The_rationalist 7y ago
  Pcwalton! While I agree that most synthetic benchmarcks are mostly not representative for the real world, there is a benchmarck suite for real world. That is benchmarcking most used ALEXA websites. It's named TP 5 and TP6, mozilla use it internally (e. G to measure progress on stylo) Why is the real world (TP5/6) not public?? Phoronix has never used it, mozilla has never publicly published benchmarcks. I guess they favor chromium but I've never seen all results only the few mozillians posted on bugzilla. Let the world know, publish the results, even if it favor chromium. Anyway the mainstream will never be affected by that public information (most people have difficulties discerning a search engine from the concept of browser, let alone talking about benchmarcks)
  - fabrice_d 7y ago
    Did you look at the raptor dashboards? Let me help you: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perf.html#/graphs?timerange=2592000&series=mozilla-central,1647786,1,1 https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perf.html#/graphs?timerange=2...
    - The_rationalist 7y ago
      Thank you! But without being able to compare it with chromium the results are meaningless to my brain.
      - pcwalton 7y ago
        You're free to port it to Chromium and run it yourself.
- yusukesuzuki 7y ago
  JSC's async-await is constructed on the generator's mechanism so that high performance generator is critical for all the web code using async functions. Not sure how SpiderMonkey is doing.
  - littlestymaar 7y ago
    As the gp said, async/await is rarely used in hot loops, so it would probably never get jit-ed in a real webpage.
    - yusukesuzuki 7y ago
      I don’t agree given that async iterator can be iterated. But I’m ok if SpiderMonkey folks thinks so ;)
      - littlestymaar 7y ago
        Async is mainly useful for asynchronous operations, like network requests if file system access. If used in this context, the loop cannot be "hot"… Maybe there are people (ab)using the async stuf do do something else, but at least it's not really common.
      - pcwalton 7y ago
        I'm sure SM will get around to jitting that stuff at some point. All I'm saying is that Baseline Interpreter gives users bigger wins right now.
bradknowles 7y ago
Does anyone know if those same phoronix tests have been run against the new Firefox 70 Nightly or Developer Edition apps? I'd be curious to see how 68 versus 69 versus 70 compare.
- The_rationalist 7y ago
  I don't think it has yet been done. But as you probably noticed he tested with webrender too
  - Caspy7 7y ago
    I mean, WebRender and spidermonkey are two separate things.

zachruss92 7y ago

Yea YouTube performance is nuts! It seems to be exacerbated when playing in full screen or @2x speed as well. Google has been getting better though with supporting FF. They now support Hangouts on FF and Gmail is actually faster for me in FF than it is in Chrome.

pjmlp 7y ago
On Edge the slowness increases to the point that loading a ZX Spectrum game from tape feels psychologly faster. A mute point however now with EdgeChrome.
- semi-extrinsic 7y ago
  Not to nitpick, but it's "a moot point". Fun fact, the word "moot" has the same origin as "meet". A "moot point" was originally "something that has to be discussed and decided at a meeting" (like a town hall or similar). Thus there was no sense in discussing it, since it was up to the meeting to decide. Also, scouts still call their congregations "a moot".
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Thanks for the correction. <small rant mode> Nowadays I have two sources of errors when writing. My own lack of knowledge, or incorrect knowledge, and then the stupid auto corrections that just go down the drain due to me mostly typing across multiple languages. </small rant mode> So whatever caused it, thanks again.

aswanson 7y ago

Do they have a doc detailing the full architectural design? I feel like I'm walking into a movie during the last 15 minutes.

jedberg 7y ago

I solve this by using Firefox for all web browsing, and Chrome for gmail/gapps/anything by google. It sucks that we have to do that, but I can't entirely blame them for making their own products work better on their own browser.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
Just like you can't blame Microsoft for making ActiveX work best on Windows.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  If they did it while talking about open standards, then we would.
smt88 7y ago
Rambox was a FOSS desktop app based on Electron to house all your Chrome apps in tabs. Rambox went proprietary, but was forked into Hamsket. Might be easier than what you're using now. https://github.com/TheGoddessInari/hamsket https://github.com/TheGoddessInari/hamsket
josteink 7y ago
> It sucks that we have to do that, but I can't entirely blame them for making their own products work better on their own browser. You mean like MS for a long time did with MSIE? Are we really back in the 90s, back to “This page works best in $one_specific_browser”? This is not the future I was hoping for... On the flip side I can use Linux for almost anything, so i guess it’s not all bad.
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  Well .. consider you are back in the 90s ... would you think in general, that this is "the future you was hoping for..."?
  - pjmlp 7y ago

mr_puzzled 7y ago

> Gmail was still dog-slow the last time I tried, Youtube can send my fan into a frenzy and Docs is also regularly problematic. It seems to work fine on my system running Ubuntu 18.04 with ublock origin installed. Which OS are you using?

shadowfacts 7y ago
Anecdotally with Firefox on macOS, Gmail is by far the worst offender. Switching inboxes/labels takes several seconds in FF and is near instant in Chrome. Scrolling performance in FF is also much worse.
- nvrspyx 7y ago
  In my opinion, macOS is definitely FF's weakest desktop platform. I've personally experienced terrible performance, out-of-place UI for the platform (e.g. default dropdowns), and just a generally less polished experience compared to Safari, Chrome, and Chromium derivatives. I still use it as my default browser on macOS though because it does excel in other areas.
  - omnimus 7y ago
    Interesting i never had such problems. I do webdev and Safari seems to be always the worst. But i dont use gmail.
  - duncanawoods 7y ago
    I have zero problems with FF MacOS. Might be something in your setup?
  - 1_player 7y ago
    Same for me, I tried the latest Nightly a couple days ago to test the CoreAnimation work, and after 1 hour of use my Slack tab because so unbearably sluggish each keypress would take 1 second to render. No extensions, no GIFs, no heavy tabs open, perhaps one or two open tabs. No slowdowns at all after 8 hours on Slack w/ Safari or Brave. Firefox is definitely the worst browser on macOS, compared to the Windows version where it's absolutely perfect and always quick.

_hardwaregeek 7y ago

YouTube freezes so damn much. Very annoying. But probably good since I watch too much damn YouTube haha.

patrickmcnamara 7y ago

YouTube is faster on Firefox on my laptop for some reason. I get zero dropped frames on Firefox too, compared to Chrome/Chromium. Still waiting on Firefox to support hardware-accelerated decoding of videos though.

mehrdadn 7y ago
> Still waiting on Firefox to support hardware-accelerated decoding of videos though. Wait, Firefox doesn't do this already? Didn't know.
- pitaj 7y ago
  I'm fairly certain it does it already.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    It says its using the GPU but if you look at the cpu time required to play a 1080p video within firefox vs playing the same video with mpv www.mpv.io : a lightweight player that among other things can transparently stream any url understood by youtube-dl It uses 20x as much cpu as mpv. For purposes of comparison this is like Toyota selling a car that goes just as fast as your Ford so long as you are OK with only getting 4MPG. There is an addon if you prefer to right click on a url and open in mpv or in an addon like Tridactyl you can do the same with your keyboard. It also lets you speed up and slow down the playback speed which is nice for speakers who talk too slow and take a while to get to the point.
    - cmcaine 7y ago
      I use mpv on my laptop to get more out of the battery and to stop the fan annoying me.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    It uses the GPU but doesn't use it to actually decode video on linux. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726 Bug opened 4 years ago. Hundreds of millions in revenue and can't task one person for a summer to hook into the support that already exists.

tsbinz 7y ago

I still need to either use chrome on android or explicitly navigate to the mobile page to get the title text on xkcd.com ... android firefox cuts the title text off with no apparent way to read the full one :/

Kelm 7y ago
Just use the mobile version, works fine on android ff

chao- 7y ago

I have the opposite experience with YouTube. With an AMD GPU on Linux, Chrome churns, drops frames, and stutters horribly on even 1080p videos at 30fps. Firefox, meanwhile, handles 1440p60 video with no problem. Even two such videos simultaneously, on separate monitors. Chrome became inexplicably better for parts of early 2019 (I did not note which versions), but starting 2 or 3 months ago Chrome returned to being unusable for YouTube beyond 720p videos. Before anyone asks, this is on an AMD RX 580 with Mesa 18.0.

gameswithgo 7y ago
have you double checked whether firefox is set to use your gpu or not, for video?
- vetinari 7y ago
  Neither Firefox nor Chrome under Linux are capable of using GPU for video decoding. Only some distribution-specific Chromium builds do.
  - Yoric 7y ago
    I seem to remember that some GPU acceleration under Linux was disabled voluntarily, on both Firefox and Chrome, because they actually ran much slower than CPU, probably due to bad drivers.
    - ubercow13 7y ago
      That’s certain GPU acceleration of rendering - specifically for Firefox I think compositing is disabled by default. It’s not the same as GPU accelerated video decoding which isn’t implemented in either browser, except via a set of patches for Chromium.
    - vetinari 7y ago
      It is slower not due to drivers, but due to how the browsers[1] compose the final webpage. It does that using CPU, not GPU as on other operating systems, so hardware video decoding would involve moving the compressed video to GPU, waiting for it to decode, moving the decoded video back to RAM, do the composition, and then move the result back to GPU for display. For hw decoding to have sense, GPU composition is needed. Hopefully webrender will bring that in for Linux too. [1] Firefox actually, Chrome does use GPU composition. Chrome for ChromeOS even uses the same driver (libva+intel-vaapi-driver) as desktop linux for video decoding, Google just is not willing to support it on desktop. That's what some distributions enable in their Chromium builds.

nullandvoid 7y ago

My yt experience is both play @ same frames but firefox waits for a couple of seconds before I'm able to click play / when I skip to a part in the video - whereas chrome is instant in both cases which can becoming annoying

TheArcane 7y ago

I wanted to keep using FF despite being a gmail user so much so that I switched to Thunderbird for my emails. I guess Mozilla wins this way.

omnimus 7y ago
I did the same and then ditched gmail for payed email service + my domain. Thumderbird is underrated.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Same here. Gmail is only an easy way to aggregate my emails, which I used yahoo for, and eventually might use something else. Back home, Thunderbird, and the occasional donations.
copperx 7y ago
I thought Thunderbird was not under development anymore?
- chucksmash 7y ago
  They released a new version on the 27th of August[1]. It looks like it that was the first release since August 2018[2]. [1]: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/68.0/releasenotes/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/68.0/releaseno... [2]: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/60.0/releasenotes/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/60.0/releaseno...
  - Caspy7 7y ago
    I believe Thunderbird is now ESR. So it gets a major version then security updates for a year until the next one.
    - copperx 7y ago
      What is the meaning of ESR? Because that sounds like life support to the layman.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago

Confluence is also pretty bad on firefox for whatever reason, so I'm pretty sure this is going to be a problem wherever chrome is the dominant browser in the dev culture there.

fnord123 7y ago
All the Atlassian suite is somehow dog slow on Firefox on Mac. They're unusable.

Antrikshy 7y ago

Speaking of good tech blogs, Netflix has an excellent one as well.

dgellow 7y ago

Gmail is really crazy slow on Firefox, it’s such a deal breaker. I have regularly 30s to load the web application, it’s closer to 2-5s on Edge with the same setup (same ad blockers, etc).

u619900 7y ago
Google should get their shit together and make Gmail usable then. (Works fine for me in FF though).
lacampbell 7y ago
I suspect this is because chrome supports WebSQL while Firefox does not.
- Technetium 7y ago
  I suspect you have suspected incorrectly: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/audits/web-sql https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/audits/we...
  - lacampbell 7y ago
    I realize Mozilla spearheaded an effort to remove webSQL from the standards. But chrome still uses it for fulltext search in gmail. https://caniuse.com/#search=websql https://caniuse.com/#search=websql https://nolanlawson.com/tag/websql/ https://nolanlawson.com/tag/websql/
stjohnswarts 7y ago
That has to be something wrong with your PC, it only takes a few seconds on even my 6 year old laptop on Firefox to load up from zero. Switching between folders is under a second as is opening an email. Firefox (latest Ubuntu)

sehugg 7y ago

If it's any consolation, Gmail is dog-slow on my Samsung Chromebook 3. I switched to "Basic HTML" mode to make it bearable.

user234683 7y ago

> Gmail was still dog-slow the last time I tried I use the HTML version instead to deal with this issue

phreack 7y ago

I suggest checking out the Dolphin Emulator tech blogs as well, they're also consistently great in quality. https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/ https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/

a1369209993 7y ago

I don't know about Gmail or Docs, but IME (also on linux) Youtube doesn't work in any browser[0]; I'd recommend http://youtube-dl.org/ http://youtube-dl.org/ and a real video player. 0: Even with remote code execution vulnerabilities enabled it shows a corporate spam clip instead of the video I'm trying to watch.