4 ms·

I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster. Really the parent commenter is right: Chrome is dominant only because of i

I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster. Really the parent commenter is right: Chrome is dominant only because of its huge marketing budget. P.S. Chrome is also buggy as hell and crashes pages all the time, which Firefox doesn't do.

jefftk 6y ago
> I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster Are you comparing current Chrome to current Firefox? Relatively recently, compared to the overall trend we're seeing here, Firefox got much faster than it had been: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-firefox-quantum/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-firefox... The discussion above, however, is about how Chrome came to grow so much while Firefox shrank so much, and for that the question is how did Firefox and Chrome compare historically. There was ~10y from Chrome's release until Quantum came out. (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
- mirthflat83 6y ago
  Yes. I remember when I first tried Chrome. It launched within 10 seconds while Firefox 3? 4?, my default browser back then, took almost half a minute to launch. It was fast.
  - jefftk 6y ago
    It sounds like you're describing how long it takes the browser to launch, when earlier you were describing how long it took to load pages? Browser launch time isn't nearly as important to most people as speed once running, because mostly you open the browser once, and then load many pages.
  - rubber_duck 6y ago
    That's relatively irrelevant - Chrome was much faster at the most important sites - which are coincidentally mostly google owned - but still faster - GMail, Youtube, Google itself felt faster on Chrome back then. Then there's the flash handling which was important back then. Also FF was shitty at stability, it didn't have multi process architecture for the longest time and I've had a page crash my entire browser (especially in the flash days) regularly. And then chrome started pushing excellent dev tools (even in FF nightly I get dev tools hanging on complex sites because of how slow they are) Chrome was the better browser back then and it won the power users and developers, then it took over the casuals as it was advertised on google and it was recommended as the best by everyone - it took FF too long to catch up and now a lot of sites don't even test compatibility - I've been trying to switch back to FF before this fiasco for a month and it wasn't a smooth experience compatibility wise.
- atesti 6y ago
  Going fullscreen in youtube is always instant in Chrome. In Firefox however, it is very slow (like 5s) when you have 1000 tabs open. Even opening a select box is slow, if you have several 1000 tabs. Funny enough, opening a new window (and keeping all the other tabs open) makes it fast again, if you are in that window. Seems like Firefox has some slow code paths, like notifying every tab about going fullscreen?
  - krzyk 6y ago
    > Going fullscreen in youtube is always instant in Chrome. In Firefox however, it is very slow (like 5s) when you have 1000 tabs open. Is it possible to have 1000 tabs open in Chrome? When I had like 50, it ate my whole 8GB last time I tried it. In Firefox I frequently have 1000 tabs with no issues. (almost none, recently I noticed that there is some memory leak and the ram slowly disappears). This is the reason why I went back to Firefox after using Chrome for like 2 weeks, it is great for 1-10 tabs.
    - atesti 6y ago
      I don't know if anybody REALLY can have more than 1000 tabs open as in completely loaded into RAM. When my computer is slow I pray that I don't have any unsent edit windows or unfinished youtube/twitch videos and just kill all the render processes. Chrome kills them regularly on it's own, which means they simply crash with out of memory. For me, Chrome generally handles killed renderers better, e.g. it shows a popup about crashed extensions and just reloads them. Firefox requires me to quickly disable and enable adblock and I lose the build in screenshot extension permanently (except disabling and renabling it with about:config). But for chrome a renderer often just freezes and only a day later there is a popup about it which offers to kill it. Firefox seems to handle the tabs better overall, but at some point session resume fails with javascript errors in the shell. Chrome seems to handle session restore a bit better.
ekianjo 6y ago
> I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster. WHo cares? A Ferrari and a Lamborghini in 2020 provide about the same speed experience. What matters is that for the past 10 years Mozilla had the speed of an old Volvo versus the Ferrari that was Chrome/Chromium in comparison. The fact that Mozilla merely caught up in the end is rather a proof that they lost technical leadership a long time ago.
- kwanbix 6y ago
  Bs. The speed difference in real life was never that much.
- sanitycheck 6y ago
  I used Firefox and Chrome simultaneously every day for many years on everything from a low-end laptop to pretty quick desktop. Firefox for personal stuff, Chrome for work. Speed's always been similar for me, Firefox has generally been more reliable (partly due to being able to block so much crap, probably). Chrome used to break with alarming regularity and need a total reinstall. Sometimes there was a site which wasn't compatible with Firefox, and if I needed it I'd open it in a Chrome incognito window. These days I've switched to Vivaldi for the work stuff (vertical tabs, "hibernate background tabs", tiling!), though I still debug JS in Chrome.
quicklime 6y ago
It's not just page load speed, although that is important. After the page load, some sites still feel slower (e.g. the new Facebook). It's also the speed of UI interactions, in particular detaching a tab is slower in Firefox than Chrome. All up, Chrome still feels faster to me.
mdoms 6y ago
I find Firefox much, much, much less reliable than chrome.

jefftk 6y ago

> I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster Are you comparing current Chrome to current Firefox? Relatively recently, compared to the overall trend we're seeing here, Firefox got much faster than it had been: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-firefox-quantum/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-firefox... The discussion above, however, is about how Chrome came to grow so much while Firefox shrank so much, and for that the question is how did Firefox and Chrome compare historically. There was ~10y from Chrome's release until Quantum came out. (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

mirthflat83 6y ago
Yes. I remember when I first tried Chrome. It launched within 10 seconds while Firefox 3? 4?, my default browser back then, took almost half a minute to launch. It was fast.
- jefftk 6y ago
  It sounds like you're describing how long it takes the browser to launch, when earlier you were describing how long it took to load pages? Browser launch time isn't nearly as important to most people as speed once running, because mostly you open the browser once, and then load many pages.
- rubber_duck 6y ago
  That's relatively irrelevant - Chrome was much faster at the most important sites - which are coincidentally mostly google owned - but still faster - GMail, Youtube, Google itself felt faster on Chrome back then. Then there's the flash handling which was important back then. Also FF was shitty at stability, it didn't have multi process architecture for the longest time and I've had a page crash my entire browser (especially in the flash days) regularly. And then chrome started pushing excellent dev tools (even in FF nightly I get dev tools hanging on complex sites because of how slow they are) Chrome was the better browser back then and it won the power users and developers, then it took over the casuals as it was advertised on google and it was recommended as the best by everyone - it took FF too long to catch up and now a lot of sites don't even test compatibility - I've been trying to switch back to FF before this fiasco for a month and it wasn't a smooth experience compatibility wise.
atesti 6y ago
Going fullscreen in youtube is always instant in Chrome. In Firefox however, it is very slow (like 5s) when you have 1000 tabs open. Even opening a select box is slow, if you have several 1000 tabs. Funny enough, opening a new window (and keeping all the other tabs open) makes it fast again, if you are in that window. Seems like Firefox has some slow code paths, like notifying every tab about going fullscreen?
- krzyk 6y ago
  > Going fullscreen in youtube is always instant in Chrome. In Firefox however, it is very slow (like 5s) when you have 1000 tabs open. Is it possible to have 1000 tabs open in Chrome? When I had like 50, it ate my whole 8GB last time I tried it. In Firefox I frequently have 1000 tabs with no issues. (almost none, recently I noticed that there is some memory leak and the ram slowly disappears). This is the reason why I went back to Firefox after using Chrome for like 2 weeks, it is great for 1-10 tabs.
  - atesti 6y ago
    I don't know if anybody REALLY can have more than 1000 tabs open as in completely loaded into RAM. When my computer is slow I pray that I don't have any unsent edit windows or unfinished youtube/twitch videos and just kill all the render processes. Chrome kills them regularly on it's own, which means they simply crash with out of memory. For me, Chrome generally handles killed renderers better, e.g. it shows a popup about crashed extensions and just reloads them. Firefox requires me to quickly disable and enable adblock and I lose the build in screenshot extension permanently (except disabling and renabling it with about:config). But for chrome a renderer often just freezes and only a day later there is a popup about it which offers to kill it. Firefox seems to handle the tabs better overall, but at some point session resume fails with javascript errors in the shell. Chrome seems to handle session restore a bit better.

ekianjo 6y ago

> I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster. WHo cares? A Ferrari and a Lamborghini in 2020 provide about the same speed experience. What matters is that for the past 10 years Mozilla had the speed of an old Volvo versus the Ferrari that was Chrome/Chromium in comparison. The fact that Mozilla merely caught up in the end is rather a proof that they lost technical leadership a long time ago.

kwanbix 6y ago
Bs. The speed difference in real life was never that much.
sanitycheck 6y ago
I used Firefox and Chrome simultaneously every day for many years on everything from a low-end laptop to pretty quick desktop. Firefox for personal stuff, Chrome for work. Speed's always been similar for me, Firefox has generally been more reliable (partly due to being able to block so much crap, probably). Chrome used to break with alarming regularity and need a total reinstall. Sometimes there was a site which wasn't compatible with Firefox, and if I needed it I'd open it in a Chrome incognito window. These days I've switched to Vivaldi for the work stuff (vertical tabs, "hibernate background tabs", tiling!), though I still debug JS in Chrome.

quicklime 6y ago

It's not just page load speed, although that is important. After the page load, some sites still feel slower (e.g. the new Facebook). It's also the speed of UI interactions, in particular detaching a tab is slower in Firefox than Chrome. All up, Chrome still feels faster to me.

mdoms 6y ago

I find Firefox much, much, much less reliable than chrome.