5 ms·

I keep wanting to give it a good go, but I'm hooked on containers in Firefox (with cookie auto delete) which is a shame because FF just seems to be getting slow

I keep wanting to give it a good go, but I'm hooked on containers in Firefox (with cookie auto delete) which is a shame because FF just seems to be getting slower for me, and the dev tools have fallen behind Chrome IMO But I just feel happier having certain things always open in their own container, and not sharing cookies or anything with other ones - all my news sites are in one, banking in another etc I know they've said it's hard to do, and I don't doubt them, but until someone else implements containers I can't/won't move.

cheph 6y ago
> FF just seems to be getting slower It is a real pity, containers are awesome, one of the best new features in a browser for some time, but damn firefox is frustratingly slow.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  I think the magic word is seems. My experience with Firefox got much faster after I installed a local DNSMasq server. Things got noticeably faster after that point. For details, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21877330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21877330 This comment was when I first installed DNSMasq on a very low powered OrangePi Zero (512MB) on home network. I worked a lot of kinks and this situation holds truer when compared to that time.
  - 2Gkashmiri 6y ago
    where does pihole fit with this dnsmasq? i am running a pihole on a pi zero wh and that has just worked. can a pihole do this?
    - bayindirh 6y ago
      I don't know which DNS server PiHole uses or whether it's configured to cache normal DNS queries too. The aim here is to minimize the DNS query turnaround time and reduce the latencies while opening a connection. When the network is working smoother, Firefox's performance goes up in a disproportional fashion. I didn't notice the same amount of improvement in other network bound stuff but, Firefox went from "meh" to "youjustdidwhat!?" after DNSMasq installation and modem change. Same thing also happened when I changed my modem 7-8 years ago after my venerable Alcatel Speedtouch died. So, in retrospect, modem chipset really plays a central role in your home network performance.
    - rand49an 6y ago
      Pihole is just a web app running over dnsmasq as far as I know.
  - AmVess 6y ago
    It can be a lot slower depending upon the machine and OS it is installed on. For instance, running the Jetstream2 and Speedometer2 tests on https://browserbench.org https://browserbench.org on Mac OS M1 CPU and Windows 10 Ryzen 3700: Mac OS M1: Jetstream2 Firefox score of 115. Safari score of 227. Speedometer 2 Firefox score of 203. Safari score of 218. Windows 10 Ryzen 3700: Jetstream2 Firefox score of 92. MS Edge score of 145. Speedometer 2 Firefox score of 95. MS Edge score of 142. These are bare metal installs running off the same connection method to the same network. I understand what you are saying about DNSMasq, but I wanted to test out the "seems" portion of his comment. If Firefox seems slower on any particular machine, that is because it is.
    - bayindirh 6y ago
      Thanks for the quick benchmarks. Since I mainly use Linux (80%) and Mac (20%), I sometimes think that everyone is using the same OS with me. You're right, I didn't think of OS dependent performance difference.
- rhn_mk1 6y ago
  My Firefox setup blocks JavaScript by default. It has been peachy with NoScript and a bunch of other addons since forever. After Firefox switched to the new "Quantum" verion, my extensions got reshuffled and I'm using uMatrix to block scripts. However, even with scripts blocked, Firefox eats up a whole lot of CPU power, even on static, unchanging pages. What was <1% is now 5% CPU. Given the Quantum promise of a speedup, I'm rather underwelmed.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    I use both chrome and Firefox all the time to separate work and personal, plus dev testing (yes I have a lot of RAM :-D It seems to be that Firefox uses more cpu and better on memory, whereas chrome is the opposite (although by by means is chrome "light" on cpu).
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    My experience with Firefox quantum was the opposite. Ff became immediately faster and more useable. Experience seems to vary by hardware, sites, and add-ons.
  - NikolaeVarius 6y ago
    I have 8 tabs open including a youtube tab, and FF is taking 0.5% CPU. Quantum was a "quantum" leap faster than what FF had become.
  - cheph 6y ago
    I don't use it that often, but last I tried switching to it this was also one of my biggest problems, it was simply using too much resources when it was literally doing nothing, where chrome, doing much more, used much less CPU power. I don't like chrome, firefox is feature wise better IMO, but I am not patient enough for it. Maybe it is just my setup, and the plural of anecdote is not data, so my experience may be an outlier, but I wish it was not my experience.
jansan 6y ago
Firefox is slower with pure Javascript performance (factor 2 in my experience), but Chrome blew it with hardware rasterization. This slows down rendering large SVGs by up to a factor 10, so for our app Firefox is much much faster unless you disable hardware rasterization on Chrome. It obviously depends on the use case.
jakub_g 6y ago
I don't have a good comparison since I don't use Chrome on desktop much apart from development. But for me Firefox + containers + ublock origin is good enough for 98% websites. For the 2% of websites that serve 20 MB of JavaScript, I use Chrome. Works well enough for me.
clarkdave 6y ago
The killer feature of containers for me is keeping Google isolated. I've degoogled my personal life but still have to use it for work (i.e. G-Suite SSO). I can force all those sites to open in my work container which leaves my other containers Google-free. Before Firefox I used Brave with multiple profiles and it was very painful to use in practice; two sets of extensions, two unlocks of 1Password X, no ability to force certain websites to open in Profile X or Y, etc. But yes, Firefox feels like it's getting progressively slower and I'm finding more and more things that don't support it. In particular, many of the recent spatial audio tools just flat out refuse to run in Firefox, and tools like Apple Business Manager don't run even though they typically work fine if you spoof the User Agent. If a Chromium-based browser like Vivaldi or Brave added containers it'd be a very compelling alternative.
- padenot 6y ago
  Firefox audio developer here, would you mind giving me a link to a couple of those "spatial audio tools" that don't work in Firefox?
  - clarkdave 6y ago
    Sorry, I just realised my comment was ambiguous. The apps claim not to support Firefox, and then I'd just close the app without trying with a spoofed UA - so it's not necessarily a technical issue. The only one I have bookmarked is https://getmibo.com https://getmibo.com, which claims to "currently only work in Google Chrome"
    - jeroenhd 6y ago
      Honestly, when I see an application that works with Chrome exclusively, I just conclude that the application is either bad or not finished yet and ignore it. I understand Safari because it's just a massive pain to develop for because you need custom hardware (and because it lags behind in implementing open standards), but Firefox is perfectly fine for any decent JS application, even if its JS engine is a bit slower. User agent filtering is a thing of the past, web developers need to fix their shitty apps instead of forcing Chrome down everyone's throats.
bananaoomarang 6y ago
It's not really an ideal solution but I do find wiping my profile/firefox config directory periodically helps speed it up. It seems to get heavier over time.
chanmad29 6y ago
Is Chrome a RAM hog and therefore faster than FF? I exclusively use FF and find it a bit sluggish, but am fine to give up some speed for the privacy gain.
earthscienceman 6y ago
What are you using to auto delete the cookies? I tried doing this but didn't find an elegant solution for something that seems like an obvious feature.

cheph 6y ago

> FF just seems to be getting slower It is a real pity, containers are awesome, one of the best new features in a browser for some time, but damn firefox is frustratingly slow.

bayindirh 6y ago
I think the magic word is seems. My experience with Firefox got much faster after I installed a local DNSMasq server. Things got noticeably faster after that point. For details, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21877330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21877330 This comment was when I first installed DNSMasq on a very low powered OrangePi Zero (512MB) on home network. I worked a lot of kinks and this situation holds truer when compared to that time.
- 2Gkashmiri 6y ago
  where does pihole fit with this dnsmasq? i am running a pihole on a pi zero wh and that has just worked. can a pihole do this?
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    I don't know which DNS server PiHole uses or whether it's configured to cache normal DNS queries too. The aim here is to minimize the DNS query turnaround time and reduce the latencies while opening a connection. When the network is working smoother, Firefox's performance goes up in a disproportional fashion. I didn't notice the same amount of improvement in other network bound stuff but, Firefox went from "meh" to "youjustdidwhat!?" after DNSMasq installation and modem change. Same thing also happened when I changed my modem 7-8 years ago after my venerable Alcatel Speedtouch died. So, in retrospect, modem chipset really plays a central role in your home network performance.
  - rand49an 6y ago
    Pihole is just a web app running over dnsmasq as far as I know.
- AmVess 6y ago
  It can be a lot slower depending upon the machine and OS it is installed on. For instance, running the Jetstream2 and Speedometer2 tests on https://browserbench.org https://browserbench.org on Mac OS M1 CPU and Windows 10 Ryzen 3700: Mac OS M1: Jetstream2 Firefox score of 115. Safari score of 227. Speedometer 2 Firefox score of 203. Safari score of 218. Windows 10 Ryzen 3700: Jetstream2 Firefox score of 92. MS Edge score of 145. Speedometer 2 Firefox score of 95. MS Edge score of 142. These are bare metal installs running off the same connection method to the same network. I understand what you are saying about DNSMasq, but I wanted to test out the "seems" portion of his comment. If Firefox seems slower on any particular machine, that is because it is.
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    Thanks for the quick benchmarks. Since I mainly use Linux (80%) and Mac (20%), I sometimes think that everyone is using the same OS with me. You're right, I didn't think of OS dependent performance difference.
rhn_mk1 6y ago
My Firefox setup blocks JavaScript by default. It has been peachy with NoScript and a bunch of other addons since forever. After Firefox switched to the new "Quantum" verion, my extensions got reshuffled and I'm using uMatrix to block scripts. However, even with scripts blocked, Firefox eats up a whole lot of CPU power, even on static, unchanging pages. What was <1% is now 5% CPU. Given the Quantum promise of a speedup, I'm rather underwelmed.
- freedomben 6y ago
  I use both chrome and Firefox all the time to separate work and personal, plus dev testing (yes I have a lot of RAM :-D It seems to be that Firefox uses more cpu and better on memory, whereas chrome is the opposite (although by by means is chrome "light" on cpu).
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  My experience with Firefox quantum was the opposite. Ff became immediately faster and more useable. Experience seems to vary by hardware, sites, and add-ons.
- NikolaeVarius 6y ago
  I have 8 tabs open including a youtube tab, and FF is taking 0.5% CPU. Quantum was a "quantum" leap faster than what FF had become.
- cheph 6y ago
  I don't use it that often, but last I tried switching to it this was also one of my biggest problems, it was simply using too much resources when it was literally doing nothing, where chrome, doing much more, used much less CPU power. I don't like chrome, firefox is feature wise better IMO, but I am not patient enough for it. Maybe it is just my setup, and the plural of anecdote is not data, so my experience may be an outlier, but I wish it was not my experience.

jansan 6y ago

Firefox is slower with pure Javascript performance (factor 2 in my experience), but Chrome blew it with hardware rasterization. This slows down rendering large SVGs by up to a factor 10, so for our app Firefox is much much faster unless you disable hardware rasterization on Chrome. It obviously depends on the use case.

jakub_g 6y ago

I don't have a good comparison since I don't use Chrome on desktop much apart from development. But for me Firefox + containers + ublock origin is good enough for 98% websites. For the 2% of websites that serve 20 MB of JavaScript, I use Chrome. Works well enough for me.

clarkdave 6y ago

The killer feature of containers for me is keeping Google isolated. I've degoogled my personal life but still have to use it for work (i.e. G-Suite SSO). I can force all those sites to open in my work container which leaves my other containers Google-free. Before Firefox I used Brave with multiple profiles and it was very painful to use in practice; two sets of extensions, two unlocks of 1Password X, no ability to force certain websites to open in Profile X or Y, etc. But yes, Firefox feels like it's getting progressively slower and I'm finding more and more things that don't support it. In particular, many of the recent spatial audio tools just flat out refuse to run in Firefox, and tools like Apple Business Manager don't run even though they typically work fine if you spoof the User Agent. If a Chromium-based browser like Vivaldi or Brave added containers it'd be a very compelling alternative.

padenot 6y ago
Firefox audio developer here, would you mind giving me a link to a couple of those "spatial audio tools" that don't work in Firefox?
- clarkdave 6y ago
  Sorry, I just realised my comment was ambiguous. The apps claim not to support Firefox, and then I'd just close the app without trying with a spoofed UA - so it's not necessarily a technical issue. The only one I have bookmarked is https://getmibo.com https://getmibo.com, which claims to "currently only work in Google Chrome"
  - jeroenhd 6y ago
    Honestly, when I see an application that works with Chrome exclusively, I just conclude that the application is either bad or not finished yet and ignore it. I understand Safari because it's just a massive pain to develop for because you need custom hardware (and because it lags behind in implementing open standards), but Firefox is perfectly fine for any decent JS application, even if its JS engine is a bit slower. User agent filtering is a thing of the past, web developers need to fix their shitty apps instead of forcing Chrome down everyone's throats.

bananaoomarang 6y ago

It's not really an ideal solution but I do find wiping my profile/firefox config directory periodically helps speed it up. It seems to get heavier over time.

chanmad29 6y ago

Is Chrome a RAM hog and therefore faster than FF? I exclusively use FF and find it a bit sluggish, but am fine to give up some speed for the privacy gain.

earthscienceman 6y ago

What are you using to auto delete the cookies? I tried doing this but didn't find an elegant solution for something that seems like an obvious feature.