5 ms·

Perfect timing to switch browsers!

gridlockd 7y ago
Firefox is even worse on DOM microbenchmarks and in many others. It really only shines in WASM performance. [1] It's unlikely that you will notice the difference anyway, few websites manipulate that many DOM elements at interactive rates. Those would be much better off with Canvas, which is also way slower on Firefox. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=chrome-80-benchmarks&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=chrome-8...
- leeoniya 7y ago
  > This round of tests was under an Ubuntu 20.04 snapshot in my experience, both browsers performed very differently under Windows than under Linux (Manjaro). both mozilla and google clearly spend more time optimizing for the overwhelmingly more common user (Windows).
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    In my experience, these differences I mentioned exist on Windows as well, I just don't have any other numbers readily at hand.
azhenley 7y ago
Any suggestions? Brave comes to mind but it seems to have some controversy around it.
- enumjorge 7y ago
  Firefox?
- zelly 7y ago
  Brave is Chromium with a different settings page.
  - BrendanEich 7y ago
    Wrong: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove) https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-... -- and that is just what we strip and stub. We add other value, but in any case, your "... with a different settings page" statement is on its face false.
- eganist 7y ago
  The only controversy around Brave is around Eich and his own personal beliefs. But honestly, if you can get past that, the team backing it is one of the strongest and most pro-user browser teams today. I'm particularly biased in favor of their security engineering. That said, I still prefer Firefox because Firefox isn't Blink.
  - TimTheTinker 7y ago
    Is there still controversy surrounding Eich? I thought (hoped?) that was over years ago.
    - eganist 7y ago
      People dig it up from time to time on Twitter.
      - 101404 7y ago
        Scary times we live in.
    - dave5104 7y ago
      As a gay man, I don't think I'll ever be able to like that guy. He spent money to try and prevent me from getting married.
      - gridlockd 7y ago
        Suppose you believed that California with gay marriage would receive a similar fate to Sodom or Gomorrah, what's morally wrong with spending the money to try and avert that fate? It's nothing personal. You probably believe in curtailing certain personal freedoms for other reasons and you are morally justified to do so. Again, nothing personal.
        driverdan 7y ago
        You'd be an asshole for trying to impose your personal beliefs on others.
- anon73044 7y ago
  Firefox + uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger Works on Windows, Linux and Android. Don't know about Apple products, but I assume it works on those also.
- mwilliaams 7y ago
  Firefox works for me. It’s lighter than chrome ever since the rebuild they did a few years ago.
neltnerb 7y ago
I spent an hour yesterday with two different websites trying to place an order on Firefox (to name and shame, CVS and shutterfly). I eventually gave up and used Chrome to place an order, but sent a note telling CVS that they lost my business because their website is broken on Firefox. Please, more people switch to Firefox. Chrome is breaking the internet.
- Scarbutt 7y ago
  Is likely they know this and the costs of supporting firefox doesn't outweigh the benefits for them.
  - diag 7y ago
    What's the benefit of breaking services for a subset of your customers? I can't think of any.
    - snazz 7y ago
      They’re not intentionally breaking anything, they’re just making it work exclusively with Chromium by not testing under Firefox. It saves them time and money.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Something I realized recently is that all of these sites have analytics. They can see exactly what percentage of their users are on Firefox, and that will directly drive their dev priorities. Using Firefox isn't just a symbolic gesture; it's a direct vote in its favor.
  - dexen 7y ago
    >all of these sites have analytics. The analytics is most likely blocked by common adblock rules. And present-day Firefox users are quite likely to be advanced users, running adblock. Thus Firefox ends up being under-represented in the analytics.
sdegutis 7y ago
I generally use Safari for everything and Chrome+Safari+Firefox when developing. When on Mac, Safari just feels the smoothest and seems lightest on battery.
- spurgu 7y ago
  I actually tried Safari last night (tried it for a day or two a couple of months ago as well). Is it just me or has everything about the extensions changed? They're only available from the App store? I tried to install Bitwarden but got sent to download the desktop app. And overall the extension landscape looks highly bleak. What are the recommended adblockers? I found Ghostery Lite (which according to the reviews seems quite disappointing) and a number of paid adblockers... From my test some while back there at least seemed to be a decent number of extensions out there but now it's different. Why? Edit: The Bitwarden extension seems to have been installed automatically along with the desktop app.
  - spurgu 7y ago
    And re: extensions in the App store, it doesn't seem to have a search function...
  - sdegutis 7y ago
    I don't use any Safari extensions. Regarding ad blockers, my solution has just been to stop using the internet so much. I almost exclusively use it for work now. So I run into almost no websites with ads. I heartily recommend going internet free except during work hours, and using the library for the rest. It's been such an amazing life improvement for us, we wish that on everyone.
    - spurgu 7y ago
      Had you said that 6 months (or even 6 days) ago I would've laughed it off but right now I actually agree. Laughing foremost because I'd certainly be asking the wrong guy as I'd expect most HN guys to be power users. Not laughing because I recognize the huge potential of waste of time the internet brings along, that I hadn't really seriously considered until recently, had just figured it's half necessary to keep myself up to speed with things. We really don't need to be up to speed with things, outside of work at least, and if work is stressing us to the point where it becomes uncomfortable we should simply just change our work. I do however like to be efficient in whatever I do so I would still like a convenient way of browsing the web, but... in the big picture it's not that important, especially if you leave out the time consuming stuff. Then it's mostly looking up stuff, which you can do using whatever tools. In a couple of months I will be cutting off most of those time consuming tasks, whether that's FB, Reddit, HN, following politics, mindlessly looking for entertainment/escape. It's a life choice and I'm really looking forward to it. For work I simply use Chrome and will keep it that way. Simple, easy, compatible, not fighting the mainstream. For private browsing though I would prefer to use something more.. personal. Brave works fine, currently trying out Cliqz. And I've tried out Next and Qutebrowser the last two days. Being a geek/ADHD I guess. There are more important things in life. Meditation helps. So does sailing. And not ranting on HN.

Firefox is even worse on DOM microbenchmarks and in many others. It really only shines in WASM performance. [1] It's unlikely that you will notice the difference anyway, few websites manipulate that many DOM elements at interactive rates. Those would be much better off with Canvas, which is also way slower on Firefox. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=chrome-80-benchmarks&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=chrome-8...

leeoniya 7y ago
> This round of tests was under an Ubuntu 20.04 snapshot in my experience, both browsers performed very differently under Windows than under Linux (Manjaro). both mozilla and google clearly spend more time optimizing for the overwhelmingly more common user (Windows).
- gridlockd 7y ago
  In my experience, these differences I mentioned exist on Windows as well, I just don't have any other numbers readily at hand.

azhenley 7y ago

Any suggestions? Brave comes to mind but it seems to have some controversy around it.

enumjorge 7y ago
Firefox?
zelly 7y ago
Brave is Chromium with a different settings page.
- BrendanEich 7y ago
  Wrong: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove) https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-... -- and that is just what we strip and stub. We add other value, but in any case, your "... with a different settings page" statement is on its face false.
eganist 7y ago
The only controversy around Brave is around Eich and his own personal beliefs. But honestly, if you can get past that, the team backing it is one of the strongest and most pro-user browser teams today. I'm particularly biased in favor of their security engineering. That said, I still prefer Firefox because Firefox isn't Blink.
- TimTheTinker 7y ago
  Is there still controversy surrounding Eich? I thought (hoped?) that was over years ago.
  - eganist 7y ago
    People dig it up from time to time on Twitter.
    - 101404 7y ago
      Scary times we live in.
  - dave5104 7y ago
    As a gay man, I don't think I'll ever be able to like that guy. He spent money to try and prevent me from getting married.
    - gridlockd 7y ago
      Suppose you believed that California with gay marriage would receive a similar fate to Sodom or Gomorrah, what's morally wrong with spending the money to try and avert that fate? It's nothing personal. You probably believe in curtailing certain personal freedoms for other reasons and you are morally justified to do so. Again, nothing personal.
      - driverdan 7y ago
        You'd be an asshole for trying to impose your personal beliefs on others.
anon73044 7y ago
Firefox + uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger Works on Windows, Linux and Android. Don't know about Apple products, but I assume it works on those also.
mwilliaams 7y ago
Firefox works for me. It’s lighter than chrome ever since the rebuild they did a few years ago.

neltnerb 7y ago

I spent an hour yesterday with two different websites trying to place an order on Firefox (to name and shame, CVS and shutterfly). I eventually gave up and used Chrome to place an order, but sent a note telling CVS that they lost my business because their website is broken on Firefox. Please, more people switch to Firefox. Chrome is breaking the internet.

Scarbutt 7y ago
Is likely they know this and the costs of supporting firefox doesn't outweigh the benefits for them.
- diag 7y ago
  What's the benefit of breaking services for a subset of your customers? I can't think of any.
  - snazz 7y ago
    They’re not intentionally breaking anything, they’re just making it work exclusively with Chromium by not testing under Firefox. It saves them time and money.
_bxg1 7y ago
Something I realized recently is that all of these sites have analytics. They can see exactly what percentage of their users are on Firefox, and that will directly drive their dev priorities. Using Firefox isn't just a symbolic gesture; it's a direct vote in its favor.
- dexen 7y ago
  >all of these sites have analytics. The analytics is most likely blocked by common adblock rules. And present-day Firefox users are quite likely to be advanced users, running adblock. Thus Firefox ends up being under-represented in the analytics.

sdegutis 7y ago

I generally use Safari for everything and Chrome+Safari+Firefox when developing. When on Mac, Safari just feels the smoothest and seems lightest on battery.

spurgu 7y ago
I actually tried Safari last night (tried it for a day or two a couple of months ago as well). Is it just me or has everything about the extensions changed? They're only available from the App store? I tried to install Bitwarden but got sent to download the desktop app. And overall the extension landscape looks highly bleak. What are the recommended adblockers? I found Ghostery Lite (which according to the reviews seems quite disappointing) and a number of paid adblockers... From my test some while back there at least seemed to be a decent number of extensions out there but now it's different. Why? Edit: The Bitwarden extension seems to have been installed automatically along with the desktop app.
- spurgu 7y ago
  And re: extensions in the App store, it doesn't seem to have a search function...
- sdegutis 7y ago
  I don't use any Safari extensions. Regarding ad blockers, my solution has just been to stop using the internet so much. I almost exclusively use it for work now. So I run into almost no websites with ads. I heartily recommend going internet free except during work hours, and using the library for the rest. It's been such an amazing life improvement for us, we wish that on everyone.
  - spurgu 7y ago
    Had you said that 6 months (or even 6 days) ago I would've laughed it off but right now I actually agree. Laughing foremost because I'd certainly be asking the wrong guy as I'd expect most HN guys to be power users. Not laughing because I recognize the huge potential of waste of time the internet brings along, that I hadn't really seriously considered until recently, had just figured it's half necessary to keep myself up to speed with things. We really don't need to be up to speed with things, outside of work at least, and if work is stressing us to the point where it becomes uncomfortable we should simply just change our work. I do however like to be efficient in whatever I do so I would still like a convenient way of browsing the web, but... in the big picture it's not that important, especially if you leave out the time consuming stuff. Then it's mostly looking up stuff, which you can do using whatever tools. In a couple of months I will be cutting off most of those time consuming tasks, whether that's FB, Reddit, HN, following politics, mindlessly looking for entertainment/escape. It's a life choice and I'm really looking forward to it. For work I simply use Chrome and will keep it that way. Simple, easy, compatible, not fighting the mainstream. For private browsing though I would prefer to use something more.. personal. Brave works fine, currently trying out Cliqz. And I've tried out Next and Qutebrowser the last two days. Being a geek/ADHD I guess. There are more important things in life. Meditation helps. So does sailing. And not ranting on HN.