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Literally every version for the last 5 years people say "Firefox has really gotten better for real now with version N", and every single time, I try it and imme

by dmd 5y ago

Literally every version for the last 5 years people say "Firefox has really gotten better for real now with version N", and every single time, I try it and immediately find it's still an order of magnitude slower and more power hungry than Chrome.

easton 5y ago
What OS and sites are you talking about? Firefox is as fast (if not maybe a smidge faster every once in a while) as Chrome on macOS.
ashneo76 5y ago
Seriously, genuinely don't know what you're talking about. I have like 500 tabs open any given time. It is blazing fast, always
jonny_eh 5y ago
Maybe every new version converts more people?
mxxx 5y ago
that was my experience a couple of times, but the last time i gave it a shot it was permanent, haven't looked back.
squarefoot 5y ago
That was true several years ago, when Firefox was essentially the only player and optimization seemed a concept unheard of in web browsers. Then came Chrome, which in its earlier versions was really fast compared to Firefox, this paired with pervasive advertising by Google made many users jump ship to Chrome (including myself, for a brief while before caring about privacy became more important than speed). Years passed with Chrome totally deserving the prize for speed, although it was just like today a nightmare privacy-wise, but hey, it comes from the #1 targeted advertising company in the world, what should I expect? Fast forward a few years (iirc it was roughly in 2018) and Mozilla devs show they learned the lessons: the next Firefox release runs on par with Chrome, then following versions get some further improvements in speed too. So yeah, Chrome was indeed faster than Firefox, but that is a thing of the past. Speaking personally here, but I value privacy a lot more than bells and whistles or speed, so Chrome is a no-no here regardless of its performance.
stevekemp 5y ago
I've never used chrome, but have had a linux desktop for the past 20+ years and have run firefox for at least the past five years (whenever that full-page advert about firefox in the new york times came out, that's when I switched. I remember paying for my name to be included). I've never ever thought "Firefox is slow", instead I think sometimes "the network is slow", or "this wifi is terrible". I imagine if people are using heavy web-applications maybe this is visible, but using gmail, slack, and similar sites everything works just fine. Sure it might be nicer if things were even faster, but the speed of my browser is not something I've ever thought about. I often wonder why people have some different opinions of their browsers..
hu3 5y ago
As an exercise, if you open https://github.com https://github.com on anonymous mode. What do you see on Chrome and Firefox? This is what I see on my Windows machine: Chrome ~2.5% CPU https://streamable.com/flb8rh https://streamable.com/flb8rh Firefox ~3.5% CPU https://streamable.com/dkrp0w https://streamable.com/dkrp0w

by dmd 5y ago

easton 5y ago

What OS and sites are you talking about? Firefox is as fast (if not maybe a smidge faster every once in a while) as Chrome on macOS.

ashneo76 5y ago

Seriously, genuinely don't know what you're talking about. I have like 500 tabs open any given time. It is blazing fast, always

jonny_eh 5y ago

Maybe every new version converts more people?

mxxx 5y ago

that was my experience a couple of times, but the last time i gave it a shot it was permanent, haven't looked back.

squarefoot 5y ago

That was true several years ago, when Firefox was essentially the only player and optimization seemed a concept unheard of in web browsers. Then came Chrome, which in its earlier versions was really fast compared to Firefox, this paired with pervasive advertising by Google made many users jump ship to Chrome (including myself, for a brief while before caring about privacy became more important than speed). Years passed with Chrome totally deserving the prize for speed, although it was just like today a nightmare privacy-wise, but hey, it comes from the #1 targeted advertising company in the world, what should I expect? Fast forward a few years (iirc it was roughly in 2018) and Mozilla devs show they learned the lessons: the next Firefox release runs on par with Chrome, then following versions get some further improvements in speed too. So yeah, Chrome was indeed faster than Firefox, but that is a thing of the past. Speaking personally here, but I value privacy a lot more than bells and whistles or speed, so Chrome is a no-no here regardless of its performance.

stevekemp 5y ago

I've never used chrome, but have had a linux desktop for the past 20+ years and have run firefox for at least the past five years (whenever that full-page advert about firefox in the new york times came out, that's when I switched. I remember paying for my name to be included). I've never ever thought "Firefox is slow", instead I think sometimes "the network is slow", or "this wifi is terrible". I imagine if people are using heavy web-applications maybe this is visible, but using gmail, slack, and similar sites everything works just fine. Sure it might be nicer if things were even faster, but the speed of my browser is not something I've ever thought about. I often wonder why people have some different opinions of their browsers..

hu3 5y ago

As an exercise, if you open https://github.com https://github.com on anonymous mode. What do you see on Chrome and Firefox? This is what I see on my Windows machine: Chrome ~2.5% CPU https://streamable.com/flb8rh https://streamable.com/flb8rh Firefox ~3.5% CPU https://streamable.com/dkrp0w https://streamable.com/dkrp0w