10 ms·
I tried Firefox again a few days ago, and it was indeed noticeably snappier. In fact, it felt snappier than Chrome on the handful of sites I tried. With all th
by runlevel1 4y ago
I tried Firefox again a few days ago, and it was indeed noticeably snappier. In fact, it felt snappier than Chrome on the handful of sites I tried.
With all the things they've addressed in Firefox recently and with Chrome's manifest v3 nonsense, I'm running out of reasons not to switch.
- Forgeties79 4y agoI’ve been on brave for about 2 years now and all I see people talk about is Firefox. Should I swap? I thought people liked brave but I really don’t see it mentioned anymore.
- james_pm 4y agoSame situation. I switched to Brave a couple of years ago (from Firefox) and I occasionally check in on Firefox to see if I should switch back. I haven't seen a reason yet. Things like full screen support in YouTube sees a bit janky still. I like where Brave is going with getting rid of cookie consent and other annoyances without extensions.
- donatzsky 4y ago> I like where Brave is going with getting rid of cookie consent and other annoyances without extensions. Firefox is supposed to get that too. Believe it's in Nightly already.
- wryun 4y agoDepends what you care about. I think there are two main reasons to use Firefox over Chrome: - better privacy protections - not wanting to leave web standards entirely to Google/Apple (for-profit corps) Brave attempts to address the first, but does little about the second as it uses Blink (i.e. Chrome's engine). Personally, I care a lot more about the second.
- nicoburns 4y agoIMO Firefox with a few extensions is much better than brave for the first.
- mr_toad 4y ago> I’ve been on brave for about 2 years now and all I see people talk about is Firefox. Should I swap? They’re not wives, you can have more than one.
- plonk 4y agoI have news about some people's approach to wives.
- Forgeties79 4y agoIt’s far more conducive for the way I work to stick to one browser for the most part. You do you.
- Melatonic 4y agoI would recommend it. Firefox + uBlock Origin + NextDNS is an awesome experience. I keep NoScript mostly off but occasionally enable.
- Forgeties79 4y agoI have uBlock origin on brave so that’s moot, but I don’t use nextDNS. Is there a reason to use it when I’ve already got brave/uBlock killing most ads and trackers? (I also use proton VPN, not that it’s quite as relevant but figured I’d throw it out there).
- donatzsky 4y agoWe'll see what Brave can do to work around it, but chances are that content blockers are going to be handicapped when Manifest v3 is fully implemented. Firefox will have no such problem, as Mozilla has specifically committed to keeping the necessary features.
- Forgeties79 4y agoAppreciate the insight!
- spartanatreyu 4y agoJust to add to this, even before the upcoming Manifest V3 switchover, Firefox's uBlock Origin implementation is already better than Chrome's.
- synicalx 4y agoPersonally I still use NextDNS to help me kill ads on mobile, and also keep a tighter leash on my various IoT devices. You can block more than just ads with it and it also gives you interesting data, hard to beat for less than the price of a cup of coffee each month.
- Forgeties79 4y agoSo I’m an usual user here - I’m tech savvy compared to most people (film/television background and just a general nerd) but I am a Luddite compared to y’all around here. I imagine it’s not hard to set up, but what does it give me that ad guard + proton + brave (mobile) and proton + brave w/ uBlock origin (Mac) don’t?
- SkyMarshal 4y agoI use Brave and Firefox primarily on my Linux computers (and Safari on MacBook for battery reasons already mentioned). I just switch between them for different purposes. Usually Brave for Gmail or Google Docs, and Firefox if I need some extension not available in Brave (Firefox still seems to have more robust extension capability).
- wintermutestwin 4y agoDo you care about vertical tabs? (if not, you must not have many tabs open at once) If so, your choices are: Opera, Edge or Firefox with one of two extensions (I use Sidebery).
- stevenhubertron 4y agoOr Vivaldi natively.
- gnicholas 4y agoBrave is adding vertical tabs. It's currently available via flag on Nightly and Dev. Hope they add nested tabs also!
- wintermutestwin 4y agoThanks for that info! I think nested tab are lame as it wastes some of the tab title length. I use a browser window for each high level topic, which mimics the advantages of high level nests.
- gnicholas 4y agoThis is a fair point. In recent years (before Brave supported tabs, but after I left Firefox), I had to use a single window because the TST-style tab manager sat beside it in a separate window. This was annoying enough even with a single browser window, and it was unmanageable with multiple windows. But now that I'm using native tabs, it is much easier for me to use multiple windows because the tabs are attached. Thanks for pointing this out!
- wintermutestwin 4y agoJust to add another suggestion to the multiple windows approach: the Titler extension allows you to name each window so that the title shows up before the current tab name of that window. Unfortunately, Sidebery doesn't pick it up, which makes moving tabs between windows a bit of a pain...
- novaRom 4y agoPersonal experience: Battery drain was always my problem with Firefox on MacOs. Why when using Safari it is nice and full day surfing w/o recharge; but doing the same with Firefox would discharge laptops battery much faster.
- kitsunesoba 4y agoBattery life seems like an afterthought for anything other than Safari (and back when it was Trident-based, MS Edge on Windows), which is kinda weird when one considers how laptops have come to dominate computing.
- plonk 4y agoWas Edge based on Trident? I thought they re-wrote an engine from scratch.
- kitsunesoba 4y agoEdge technically used EdgeHTML, but EdgeHTML was a fork of Trident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeHTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeHTML
- cobalt 4y agoold edge was trident (which came from IE) new edge is based on chromium
- jaxrtech 4y agoFrom my understanding, Chromium/WebKit/V8 and Firefox/Gecko/Spidermonkey are the last (major) contenders in the browser engine space. After Opera switched to WebKit in 2013. And Edge in 2020. I'm sure there are numerous lesser known ones...
- KptMarchewa 4y agoGoogle forked from WebKit in 2013, at this point there might be huge differences between WebKit and blink. Someone more knowledgeable might add something to this.
- Melatonic 4y agoIt has been snappier for me for awhile now on Windows at least. I have not used it on OSX enough to really know but I never found it slow
- babypuncher 4y agoI've been shilling for Firefox for years. It is my primary browser for both development and personal use. But I still think it has some catching up to do with Chrome. I have a web app that allows customers to make templates for their standard operating procedures that they pull from our main product. For writing steps and substeps, I use a WYSIWYG HTML editor called TynyMCE. I went with it because I was able to implement it in an afternoon, their licensing was compatible with our use, and I had a tight deadline. We failed to anticipate just how large some of the templates clients would be making, so sometimes when they open a template they end up having a couple hundred of these editors hidden behind drag and drop enabled accordions. Firefox chokes on the initial TinyMCE calls for these large templates, taking quite a long time to fully render the page. Once it's done, everything is nice and snappy, but it's like a 20-30 second wait after the wire even on my beefy 5900x. Chrome seems to handle this just fine. It's possible that the culprit is a bad polyfill or a Firefox-specific bug in TinyMCE, I haven't put much work into diagnosing it yet beyond verifying that TinyMCE is eating up all the CPU time. For now my planned solution is to just write my own WYSIWYG editor, because TinyMCE ultimately offers a lot more than we actually need, and it was only a stopgap solution to get out a polished MVP. But needless to say, for the first time in years, I found myself spending a non-trivial amount of development time in Chrome. Sadly I've never actually had a client use this app with anything other than Chrome or Safari, so this is naturally a low-priority issue.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cpeterso 4y agoIs there a public demo or test page for TinyMCE that reproduces the hangs? If not, you could use Firefox's built-in performance profiler to record a profile and file a Firefox bug. Here are instructions of using the profiler with just a few clicks: https://profiler.firefox.com/ https://profiler.firefox.com/
- gsvelto 4y agoIf you could grab a profile of the problem with the Firefox profiler and file a bug it would be greatly appreciated. From the sounds of it it's probably an edge-case we're not aware of where Firefox performs very poorly. The problem with this kind of things in Mozilla is that we're often blind until someone brings up the issue and notifies us.
- ryall 4y agoFor me, having to log in to multiple AWS accounts, Firefox containers are a killer feature
- synicalx 4y agoDepending how those accounts are set up and related to one another, you may also get some mileage out of this add-on - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aws-extend-switch-roles3/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aws-extend-sw... Basically it just lets you extend how many roles/accounts you can switch between in the AWS console UI.
- soheil 4y agoThere are also a lot of Chrome extensions that do the same: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/multilogin/ijfgglilaeakmoilplpcjcgjaoleopfi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/multilogin/ijfggli... Also keep in mind although Firefox containers is made by Mozilla it's a plugin that you have install, which was very counter intuitive when I first wanted to use it.
- toyg 4y agoThe plugin is technically just a management interface for functionality that is already in the browser. FF just doesn't surface it by default, because devs think it would scare casual users.
- soheil 4y agoHonestly the implementation seems half baked, it's very hard to move sites to new containers, there is no list of sites with containers they belong to, etc. I don't know why you'd add a feature in the first place and then decide to hide it for vast majority of users instead of going the extra mile of making it user friendly and intuitive.
- toyg 4y agoProbably because it's a bit of a difficult thing to explain to users in the first place. Instead, by providing just "primitives", they opened the doors to focused add-ons (like the one that isolates Facebook, effectively the first large-scale deployment that used it) without spending too much time on a feature that folks might have found difficult and might result in increased support issues. The status quo is that power-users can make it work, add-ons can use it if they wish, and the overwhelming majority of users can carry on happily ignoring its existence; not a terrible trade-off. But I agree that the management add-on could be better. I believe Apple is doing something similar with their virtualization API - it's there, some folks can use it, but they don't want to surface it to the masses.
- sneak 4y agoUngoogled Chromium doesn’t serve ads or bundle spyware on by default. Firefox does. Someone should make an automated Unmozilla’d Firefox that rips out all phone-home and advertising. I’d run that.
- themagician 4y agoYou can use more than one browser. I use three. I leave Safari as my default browser, although I actually use it the least. But I like having the same "default" experience on my desktop and phone. If I am opening a link from Mail.app or punching something into Alfred it will open in Safari. I use some light ad-blocking. I use Chrome for work. I use Google Translate a bit and this works extra well in Chrome. Plus, Google apps and whatnot. Limited ad-blocking because I'm often using ads platforms. I use Firefox for all my intentional/casual browsing. Maximum ad blocking.
- maximmillian 4y agoWhat do you use for adblocking on safari macOS?
- bombcar 4y agoI use Adguard for Safari, seems to work.
- themagician 4y agoAdblock Plus, Firefox Focus, Hush, Ghostery and Malwarebytes on iOS. Adblock Plus, Ghostery, and Hush on macOS.
- soheil 4y agoCertainly YouTube isn't snappier than in Chrome at all. Most other sites feel the same or faster, however.
- vladvasiliu 4y agoI wonder whether this could be related to "profile bloat" or something. It's not a direct apples to apples comparison, but my anecdotal evidence, on Linux, is the opposite. I usually use Firefox on my Linux/X11 box, but every now and again I fire up Chromium and always get the feeling that it's much snappier.
- gotenyama 4y agoI'm genuinely curious, have you looked into the lack of good sandboxing with Firefox browsers (https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...) ?
- hashin 4y agoI may be mistaken, but I have found the Microsoft Edge to have done considerable catching up. In my Mac and on PC, it beats Chrome anyday in performance and ease of use. I understand that Microsoft have reasons to invest heavily on a modern, nimble browser. But do we have any other reasons - like trying to conquer a new market etc. Behind this?
- bumblebritches5 4y ago
- a254613e 4y agoI gave it a go: * CPU Usage is extremely higher than in chrome for video call/meeting related websites. * Font rendering is horrible on a lot of websites. I think this is more fault of the website developers, but it doesn't change the fact that I as end user with Firefox have subpar experience. * The native OS integration seems very janky, from swipe to go back, to pinch to zoom, something feels off about them. * I've encountered a lot more websites that didn't quite work smoothly. This is same as one of the points above of web developers being at fault here, but it still doesn't change my experience with FF. I want to use Firefox, but not if it degrades my experience - which it currently very noticeably does.
- barbariangrunge 4y agoHow is firefoxes battery life vs safari in a MacBook?