14 ms·

"Firefox is slower than all the other browsers" Wow, absolutely not my experience. I use both Chrome and FF regularly on Mac and PC desktops and laptops with

"Firefox is slower than all the other browsers" Wow, absolutely not my experience. I use both Chrome and FF regularly on Mac and PC desktops and laptops with vintages ranging from 2011-2023. There is no perceptible difference to me. Admittedly all of my machines are relatively comfortably specced. Desktop-class CPUs, 16GB+ of RAM, SSDs. Perhaps the difference is more pronounced when the computing environment is more constrained. Moving from my subjective opinion to hard benchmarks, Firefox wins some and loses others. Overall they're close. I don't use Android so I don't know the FF situation there. It certainly sounds like a mess. I will take your word for it.

eimrine 4y ago
Don't you have an experience that Chrome works better on old-end hardware? I have in an active use some 2005-2013 hardware and I describe Firefox as significant worse (freezes and consumes more memory per tab), I do not like Chrome but I use it because I use that hardware sometimes. Another story is if computer has at least Haswell/8GB. Than Firefox unleashes its ability to work just fine even with a lot of extensions.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  Another story is if computer has at least Haswell/8GB My oldest in-use machine is an i7-3770 (3.4hgz, 4 core) with 16GB of RAM and an SSD running Windows 10. That's an Ivy Bridge from ~2011 which is a generation older than your Haswell but, honestly, it's still pretty modern... performs at about 50% of a 2023 i5 in CPU benchmarks. FF absolutely smooth on there. Typical usage on that machine is usual recreational web crap. It's my game/relaxing machine. Running 1-2 windows with some mix of Twitter, YouTube, Gmail, Amazon, whatever. Zooming out, I have been running a mix of FF and Chrome for dev work ever since their respective debuts. We're talking easily 2000+ hours a year of browser usage for 20+ years. I have never seen the FF performance issues others get into a fuss about. I honestly have no explanation for this. I'm sure that other people are telling the truth but I find it mystifying. I've never had monster high-end CPUs but I've always run AdBlock/uBlock, I generally have as much RAM as feasible, and was an early SSD adopter. Maybe I dodged some FF issues that way. I also never have massive numbers of tabs/windows... usually a max of 10-15 tabs over 1-3 windows. I'm also not running "big" browser-native apps like Figma or whatever in FF. It's not that I'm insensitive to performance. I run 144hz monitors for gaming and that's a big difference to my eyes. There are also some UI things that are noticeably faster in Chrome like dragging a tab to a new window but that's not a big part of my browsing experience. (FWIW, Safari has always felt significantly faster to me during my infrequent usage. IIRC they do some latency reduction tricks on MacOS. So even though typical web benchmarks show it as slower, it "feels" faster to me)
  - zgk7iqea 4y ago
    IIRC apple significantly improved safari performance in the last year or so. It’s even faster than chrome in a lot of cases
sgc 4y ago
The only reason I use FF on android is for the extensions (especially ad / tracking blockers). Whatever mess it might be, it still is far better than the alternatives and not really noticeable to me during daily use.
jeroenhd 4y ago
Firefox is fine on all platforms. Smooth even! But in terms of loading time and raw JS performance, Chrome wins hands down every time in my experience. Using https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ this is quantified not only by some arbitrary number but also through the visibly slower update speed during the DOM tests. I use Firefox on every device, but Chrome is just faster. I can live with the impact on speed for all the privacy features, but if Mozilla ever wants to get their market share above 5% again they'll need to provide the common user a reason to switch and that'll be hard when the browser is noticeably slower.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  In the discussion above I'm referring to folks saying that FF "bogs down" or becomes unresponsive in real world usage, something I've never experienced. But benchmarks are fun too... this is quantified not only by some arbitrary number but also through the visibly slower update speed during the DOM tests. I ran that and Chrome was 50% faster than FF on my 2018 MBP. Safari was even faster than Chrome by a few %. I would also agree that there was a visible difference in those benchmarks. My opinion is that while benchmarks are vital, I don't believe that a benchmark such as that necessarily correlates with user experience. There are benchmarks where FF is faster and certainly they can't all be right. (At first glance, the one you linked appears to be a mix of modern UI frameworks, which seems pretty reasonable to me) A look at a browser's dev tools during my "normal" usage certainly aligns with what I'm saying -- network bandwidth/latency really dominates perceived performance in nearly every use case; blasting out DOM updates as fast as possible via a synthetic benchmark does not resemble my browsing sessions. That is of course just my subjective opinion. You may have other use cases in which your browser is truly the bottleneck. Or you can just have another set of preferences.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    I think it really depends on what you do and where you live. I have access to high-speed internet, have (way too) many tabs open at all times and use various web applications. Someone who's just reading the news and social media behind a DSL line will have a completely different experience. I rarely encounter loading times that are caused by network traffic. Some servers are slow to reach, but most pages load almost instantaneously. Perhaps that's why things that I see Firefox lose to Chrome at are noticeable to me but not to many others. The benchmark itself is not an indicator of what the average user will do in their browser, but it does show that Firefox is objectively slower in certain areas. Whether those areas bother you is another question, of course. Firefox becoming completely unresponsive happens to me more than I like. This is due to a difference in architecture; Firefox spawns a process for every CPU thread and divides the work whereas Chrome spawns a new thread for every page. When a badly written page slows down to a crawl (i.e. leaving Reddit open for more than two minutes), the tabs sharing that process become unresponsive. On multiple occasions I've had to kill tabs that were shown as "loading" because other tabs stopped functioning if they lost the render process lottery. It's not as extreme as people claim and it's certainly not as bad as it was five years ago, but Firefox does have weird freezes and bugs that Chrome seemingly just doesn't have. On the other hand, I'm convinced part of the reason for slowdowns and problems is that Firefox tries to strip away a lot of the privacy invasions that have become the norm on the modern web. I'll gladly keep taking those slowdowns, but even outside those there's still a lot of work that can be done to bring Firefox on par with Chrome.

eimrine 4y ago

Don't you have an experience that Chrome works better on old-end hardware? I have in an active use some 2005-2013 hardware and I describe Firefox as significant worse (freezes and consumes more memory per tab), I do not like Chrome but I use it because I use that hardware sometimes. Another story is if computer has at least Haswell/8GB. Than Firefox unleashes its ability to work just fine even with a lot of extensions.

JohnBooty 4y ago
Another story is if computer has at least Haswell/8GB My oldest in-use machine is an i7-3770 (3.4hgz, 4 core) with 16GB of RAM and an SSD running Windows 10. That's an Ivy Bridge from ~2011 which is a generation older than your Haswell but, honestly, it's still pretty modern... performs at about 50% of a 2023 i5 in CPU benchmarks. FF absolutely smooth on there. Typical usage on that machine is usual recreational web crap. It's my game/relaxing machine. Running 1-2 windows with some mix of Twitter, YouTube, Gmail, Amazon, whatever. Zooming out, I have been running a mix of FF and Chrome for dev work ever since their respective debuts. We're talking easily 2000+ hours a year of browser usage for 20+ years. I have never seen the FF performance issues others get into a fuss about. I honestly have no explanation for this. I'm sure that other people are telling the truth but I find it mystifying. I've never had monster high-end CPUs but I've always run AdBlock/uBlock, I generally have as much RAM as feasible, and was an early SSD adopter. Maybe I dodged some FF issues that way. I also never have massive numbers of tabs/windows... usually a max of 10-15 tabs over 1-3 windows. I'm also not running "big" browser-native apps like Figma or whatever in FF. It's not that I'm insensitive to performance. I run 144hz monitors for gaming and that's a big difference to my eyes. There are also some UI things that are noticeably faster in Chrome like dragging a tab to a new window but that's not a big part of my browsing experience. (FWIW, Safari has always felt significantly faster to me during my infrequent usage. IIRC they do some latency reduction tricks on MacOS. So even though typical web benchmarks show it as slower, it "feels" faster to me)
- zgk7iqea 4y ago
  IIRC apple significantly improved safari performance in the last year or so. It’s even faster than chrome in a lot of cases

sgc 4y ago

The only reason I use FF on android is for the extensions (especially ad / tracking blockers). Whatever mess it might be, it still is far better than the alternatives and not really noticeable to me during daily use.

jeroenhd 4y ago

Firefox is fine on all platforms. Smooth even! But in terms of loading time and raw JS performance, Chrome wins hands down every time in my experience. Using https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ this is quantified not only by some arbitrary number but also through the visibly slower update speed during the DOM tests. I use Firefox on every device, but Chrome is just faster. I can live with the impact on speed for all the privacy features, but if Mozilla ever wants to get their market share above 5% again they'll need to provide the common user a reason to switch and that'll be hard when the browser is noticeably slower.

JohnBooty 4y ago
In the discussion above I'm referring to folks saying that FF "bogs down" or becomes unresponsive in real world usage, something I've never experienced. But benchmarks are fun too... this is quantified not only by some arbitrary number but also through the visibly slower update speed during the DOM tests. I ran that and Chrome was 50% faster than FF on my 2018 MBP. Safari was even faster than Chrome by a few %. I would also agree that there was a visible difference in those benchmarks. My opinion is that while benchmarks are vital, I don't believe that a benchmark such as that necessarily correlates with user experience. There are benchmarks where FF is faster and certainly they can't all be right. (At first glance, the one you linked appears to be a mix of modern UI frameworks, which seems pretty reasonable to me) A look at a browser's dev tools during my "normal" usage certainly aligns with what I'm saying -- network bandwidth/latency really dominates perceived performance in nearly every use case; blasting out DOM updates as fast as possible via a synthetic benchmark does not resemble my browsing sessions. That is of course just my subjective opinion. You may have other use cases in which your browser is truly the bottleneck. Or you can just have another set of preferences.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  I think it really depends on what you do and where you live. I have access to high-speed internet, have (way too) many tabs open at all times and use various web applications. Someone who's just reading the news and social media behind a DSL line will have a completely different experience. I rarely encounter loading times that are caused by network traffic. Some servers are slow to reach, but most pages load almost instantaneously. Perhaps that's why things that I see Firefox lose to Chrome at are noticeable to me but not to many others. The benchmark itself is not an indicator of what the average user will do in their browser, but it does show that Firefox is objectively slower in certain areas. Whether those areas bother you is another question, of course. Firefox becoming completely unresponsive happens to me more than I like. This is due to a difference in architecture; Firefox spawns a process for every CPU thread and divides the work whereas Chrome spawns a new thread for every page. When a badly written page slows down to a crawl (i.e. leaving Reddit open for more than two minutes), the tabs sharing that process become unresponsive. On multiple occasions I've had to kill tabs that were shown as "loading" because other tabs stopped functioning if they lost the render process lottery. It's not as extreme as people claim and it's certainly not as bad as it was five years ago, but Firefox does have weird freezes and bugs that Chrome seemingly just doesn't have. On the other hand, I'm convinced part of the reason for slowdowns and problems is that Firefox tries to strip away a lot of the privacy invasions that have become the norm on the modern web. I'll gladly keep taking those slowdowns, but even outside those there's still a lot of work that can be done to bring Firefox on par with Chrome.