6 ms·

Agree. Not sure what else needs to happen to encourage Chromium users to finally give Firefox a try.

tygrak 6y ago
I still don't understand why everyone moved away from Firefox back in the day. Is it really just the fact that Google put up so many ads everywhere?
- waheoo 6y ago
  Chrome had v8, it was fast. Forefox sort of got left behind performance wise. You could still have a million tabs open, something chrome struggled with, so it kept some users. But it took quantum to get users back.
  - meerita 6y ago
    Yes, my experience resumes like this: breakthrough browser, adoption, bloating experience, adopt next fast breakthrough browser.
- dmantis 6y ago
  First, old firefox (pre-quantum) really started to be slow and non-competitive. Second, Google actually were caught on making their resources work worse on firefox and other competitors with some hacks. E.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has... Assuming that literally everyone use gmail, youtube, etc - it had looked that mozilla doesn't work reliably for end users.
  - moooo99 6y ago
    I switched for that exact reason - Firefox was starting to become really slow. After a few years of exclusively using Chrome, Firefox (thanks to Quantum) became my default browser again. It still sometime feels slower than Chrome, especially on Google sites (YouTube and GMail are incredibly slow). But that could just be my current pc starting to show its age.
    - recursive 6y ago
      I've heard this a lot. I use youtube fairly regularly with firefox, and have never noticed any performance problem.
  - TurningCanadian 6y ago
    Chrome was also much more secure and didn't lock up as much thanks to process isolation.
- meerita 6y ago
  I moved because Chrome shown a nice promise in speed, standard support and features, it seemed a good move. Same move I did back in the day when Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4, it was so good in comparison with Netscape 3-4 than it was too late when i got tired of it.
- wolco 6y ago
  The devtools really were ahead of any browser. For the average person it was so much faster than ie 6,7,8,9 and google pushed it everywhere. It comes default on android helps.
- cmdshiftf4 6y ago
  I can’t speak for the users of other OS, but for a long time Firefox was essentially unusable for me on OSX. I have always liked Mozilla though so kept trying builds over time, eventually leading up to Quantum the nightlies became better and better and it was easy to switch back at that point. What a shame it happened in the first place though.
- Ayesh 6y ago
  Other than the performance, I think Mozilla changed their focus to browser based mobile operating systems and starved Firefox from developer talent.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  Chrome was waaaaaay faster. It made Firefox look like a student project. I held out a lot longer than all of my laymen friends, but the gap eventually was hard to ignore. There were also a ton of innovations that caused real quality of life improvements that it took firefox an incredibly long time to catch up to, like process isolation preventing a single misbehaving tab from crashing your entire session.
- Marsymars 6y ago
  I've never used a Chromium-variant as a primary browser. Used Opera until they switched to Chromium and their Presto-based brower became untenable, then switched to Firefox.
milankragujevic 6y ago
I gave it a try tens of times, and continue trying to switch every major release, but keep going back. Too many things are just not right, and can't be fixed for me because I am not ALL of the users + not even the most vocal part of the user base + some things are just meant to be like that in Firefox and that's their "thing" that I don't like. It's pointless to list it here, but I really do continuously try it in good faith and hope to switch someday.
- andai 6y ago
  Have you written about your experience with Firefox somewhere else? I'm curious to hear your thoughts. I just wrote another comment here about its performance, about how I want it to succeed, how I donate to Mozilla, and yet still use a Chromium-based browser due to the performance issues. At this point (I mean, they've literally invented a new programming language to make it faster, and it's still slow) I think the only thing left to do is to learn C++ and Rust and fix it myself...
- Ayesh 6y ago
  I have the feeling that Firefox development is a bit distanced from the real users. It's bugzilla is quite unfriendly, and pretty much everything users wish for is already there, in a ticket that is several years old with no action taken. An then, the next Firefox version comes with some crappy UX decision made, and it is not configurable. /r/Firefox comes up with _yet another_ userChrome.css tweak to revert it. And the cycle continues as the user base grows thin. I wonder why.
dsissitka 6y ago
I try it regularly but it just doesn't work for me. Here are just a few of the reasons why: 1. Chromium based browsers give me control over extensions that require access to everything. https://imgur.com/a/ENZkQyc https://imgur.com/a/ENZkQyc 2. Firefox doesn't support media keys. Edit: Turns out it does if you enable them in about:config. See bad_user's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442732 3. There are still some areas in which Firefox's performance isn't competitive. Try using it with something like Rainway and it will completely fall over. #3 isn't that big of a deal to me. #2 I could probably adapt to. #1 makes Firefox a non starter for me.
- bad_user 6y ago
  Firefox does support media keys, but it's experimental and you have to enable them in about:config: - media.hardwaremediakeys.enabled - dom.media.mediasession.enabled #1 seems nice. Note however that Firefox was safer even before they introduced their permissions system simply by having a review system that works. The review system of Chrome Web Store is broken, there's a lot of malware on it, extensions bought and turned malware and then you've got completely legitimate extensions being banned due to some automatic process flagging them. And then it's really hard to get in touch with humans. All the while reported malware take months to be taken down. Of course, it's also true that Chrome is simply the bigger target. And what Mozilla is doing now probably doesn't scale. But for now Firefox's ecosystem of add-ons is much, much safer (and arguably more useful). Has been that way for some time. I used to complain that it doesn't have a permissions system, I then complained that you can't disable add-ons in private mode. But it keeps evolving and I'm sure it will implement your favorite too, if useful.
  - dsissitka 6y ago
    > Firefox does support media keys, but it's experimental and you have to enable them in about:config: Nice! Thank you. :)
andai 6y ago
Latency. Just tested with a "hello world" page (18ms ping). Chrome takes 102-200ms to render the page, Firefox takes 150-400ms. 1.5 to 2x slower -- and that's after all the performance upgrades they've done with Rust and Quantum. Network inspector says Firefox is spending 150-270ms "blocked" before it even initiates the connection. On Chrome the block is 3-18ms (15-50x (!!) faster). There's also UI lag. When I press Ctrl+N, I expect a new window to open immediately. Chrome and Chromium based browsers do that. I cannot even perceive the delay between pressing Ctrl+N and a new window appearing. With Firefox it takes about 0.5-1 seconds before anything happens at all. This seems to be another 10-20x difference (though I'd have to record my screen and measure the difference). Curiously, Re: UI lag, I think the actual time until the navbar is usable is about the same. But Firefox waits until the whole window is built before it displays it, while Chrome opens the window immediately and fills it in. From a user experience (I do command, I expect feedback) this makes a huge difference. I switch back to Firefox roughly once a year after reading how fast it's gotten. But I have been disappointed on this front every single time. I want Firefox to succeed, I really do. I am donating to Mozilla every month. But as it is right now, I can't tolerate such lag, for a trivial action I perform thousands of times a day.
- wolco 6y ago
  This is useful feedback for building non browser uis. Instant feedback followed by a progressive loading rather than build it all then render.
- DangerousPie 6y ago
  > Chrome takes 102-200ms to render the page, Firefox takes 150-400ms. 1.5 to 2x slower -- and that's after all the performance upgrades they've done with Rust and Quantum. How did you actually measure this? I wonder whether these small timing differences may just be differences in how the respective dev tools report the timing info. FWIW I also don't think the relative difference will be this large for bigger sites - I'd be very surprised if a site that takes 1s to load in Chrome would take 1.5-2s in Firefox.
  - andai 6y ago
app4soft 6y ago
Not sure what else needs to happen to encourage Chromium & Firefox users to finally give Pale Moon a try.

I still don't understand why everyone moved away from Firefox back in the day. Is it really just the fact that Google put up so many ads everywhere?

waheoo 6y ago
Chrome had v8, it was fast. Forefox sort of got left behind performance wise. You could still have a million tabs open, something chrome struggled with, so it kept some users. But it took quantum to get users back.
- meerita 6y ago
  Yes, my experience resumes like this: breakthrough browser, adoption, bloating experience, adopt next fast breakthrough browser.
dmantis 6y ago
First, old firefox (pre-quantum) really started to be slow and non-competitive. Second, Google actually were caught on making their resources work worse on firefox and other competitors with some hacks. E.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has... Assuming that literally everyone use gmail, youtube, etc - it had looked that mozilla doesn't work reliably for end users.
- moooo99 6y ago
  I switched for that exact reason - Firefox was starting to become really slow. After a few years of exclusively using Chrome, Firefox (thanks to Quantum) became my default browser again. It still sometime feels slower than Chrome, especially on Google sites (YouTube and GMail are incredibly slow). But that could just be my current pc starting to show its age.
  - recursive 6y ago
    I've heard this a lot. I use youtube fairly regularly with firefox, and have never noticed any performance problem.
- TurningCanadian 6y ago
  Chrome was also much more secure and didn't lock up as much thanks to process isolation.
meerita 6y ago
I moved because Chrome shown a nice promise in speed, standard support and features, it seemed a good move. Same move I did back in the day when Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4, it was so good in comparison with Netscape 3-4 than it was too late when i got tired of it.
wolco 6y ago
The devtools really were ahead of any browser. For the average person it was so much faster than ie 6,7,8,9 and google pushed it everywhere. It comes default on android helps.
cmdshiftf4 6y ago
I can’t speak for the users of other OS, but for a long time Firefox was essentially unusable for me on OSX. I have always liked Mozilla though so kept trying builds over time, eventually leading up to Quantum the nightlies became better and better and it was easy to switch back at that point. What a shame it happened in the first place though.
Ayesh 6y ago
Other than the performance, I think Mozilla changed their focus to browser based mobile operating systems and starved Firefox from developer talent.
wutbrodo 6y ago
Chrome was waaaaaay faster. It made Firefox look like a student project. I held out a lot longer than all of my laymen friends, but the gap eventually was hard to ignore. There were also a ton of innovations that caused real quality of life improvements that it took firefox an incredibly long time to catch up to, like process isolation preventing a single misbehaving tab from crashing your entire session.
Marsymars 6y ago
I've never used a Chromium-variant as a primary browser. Used Opera until they switched to Chromium and their Presto-based brower became untenable, then switched to Firefox.

milankragujevic 6y ago

I gave it a try tens of times, and continue trying to switch every major release, but keep going back. Too many things are just not right, and can't be fixed for me because I am not ALL of the users + not even the most vocal part of the user base + some things are just meant to be like that in Firefox and that's their "thing" that I don't like. It's pointless to list it here, but I really do continuously try it in good faith and hope to switch someday.

andai 6y ago
Have you written about your experience with Firefox somewhere else? I'm curious to hear your thoughts. I just wrote another comment here about its performance, about how I want it to succeed, how I donate to Mozilla, and yet still use a Chromium-based browser due to the performance issues. At this point (I mean, they've literally invented a new programming language to make it faster, and it's still slow) I think the only thing left to do is to learn C++ and Rust and fix it myself...
Ayesh 6y ago
I have the feeling that Firefox development is a bit distanced from the real users. It's bugzilla is quite unfriendly, and pretty much everything users wish for is already there, in a ticket that is several years old with no action taken. An then, the next Firefox version comes with some crappy UX decision made, and it is not configurable. /r/Firefox comes up with _yet another_ userChrome.css tweak to revert it. And the cycle continues as the user base grows thin. I wonder why.

dsissitka 6y ago

I try it regularly but it just doesn't work for me. Here are just a few of the reasons why: 1. Chromium based browsers give me control over extensions that require access to everything. https://imgur.com/a/ENZkQyc https://imgur.com/a/ENZkQyc 2. Firefox doesn't support media keys. Edit: Turns out it does if you enable them in about:config. See bad_user's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442732 3. There are still some areas in which Firefox's performance isn't competitive. Try using it with something like Rainway and it will completely fall over. #3 isn't that big of a deal to me. #2 I could probably adapt to. #1 makes Firefox a non starter for me.

bad_user 6y ago
Firefox does support media keys, but it's experimental and you have to enable them in about:config: - media.hardwaremediakeys.enabled - dom.media.mediasession.enabled #1 seems nice. Note however that Firefox was safer even before they introduced their permissions system simply by having a review system that works. The review system of Chrome Web Store is broken, there's a lot of malware on it, extensions bought and turned malware and then you've got completely legitimate extensions being banned due to some automatic process flagging them. And then it's really hard to get in touch with humans. All the while reported malware take months to be taken down. Of course, it's also true that Chrome is simply the bigger target. And what Mozilla is doing now probably doesn't scale. But for now Firefox's ecosystem of add-ons is much, much safer (and arguably more useful). Has been that way for some time. I used to complain that it doesn't have a permissions system, I then complained that you can't disable add-ons in private mode. But it keeps evolving and I'm sure it will implement your favorite too, if useful.
- dsissitka 6y ago
  > Firefox does support media keys, but it's experimental and you have to enable them in about:config: Nice! Thank you. :)

andai 6y ago

Latency. Just tested with a "hello world" page (18ms ping). Chrome takes 102-200ms to render the page, Firefox takes 150-400ms. 1.5 to 2x slower -- and that's after all the performance upgrades they've done with Rust and Quantum. Network inspector says Firefox is spending 150-270ms "blocked" before it even initiates the connection. On Chrome the block is 3-18ms (15-50x (!!) faster). There's also UI lag. When I press Ctrl+N, I expect a new window to open immediately. Chrome and Chromium based browsers do that. I cannot even perceive the delay between pressing Ctrl+N and a new window appearing. With Firefox it takes about 0.5-1 seconds before anything happens at all. This seems to be another 10-20x difference (though I'd have to record my screen and measure the difference). Curiously, Re: UI lag, I think the actual time until the navbar is usable is about the same. But Firefox waits until the whole window is built before it displays it, while Chrome opens the window immediately and fills it in. From a user experience (I do command, I expect feedback) this makes a huge difference. I switch back to Firefox roughly once a year after reading how fast it's gotten. But I have been disappointed on this front every single time. I want Firefox to succeed, I really do. I am donating to Mozilla every month. But as it is right now, I can't tolerate such lag, for a trivial action I perform thousands of times a day.

wolco 6y ago
This is useful feedback for building non browser uis. Instant feedback followed by a progressive loading rather than build it all then render.
DangerousPie 6y ago
> Chrome takes 102-200ms to render the page, Firefox takes 150-400ms. 1.5 to 2x slower -- and that's after all the performance upgrades they've done with Rust and Quantum. How did you actually measure this? I wonder whether these small timing differences may just be differences in how the respective dev tools report the timing info. FWIW I also don't think the relative difference will be this large for bigger sites - I'd be very surprised if a site that takes 1s to load in Chrome would take 1.5-2s in Firefox.
- andai 6y ago

app4soft 6y ago

Not sure what else needs to happen to encourage Chromium & Firefox users to finally give Pale Moon a try.