27 ms·

Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

1282 points by akyuu 3y ago

throwaway104782 3y ago
You'll pry the Firefox developer tools and container tabs from my cold dead hands. It would have to be significantly slower for me to switch off of it.
- adverbly 3y ago
  Interesting. I actually switch to Chrome specifically if I need to use the developer tools. What do you prefer about the Firefox version?
  - michaelsalim 3y ago
    Not OP but I think it's a lot about familiarity. I'm sure chrome has most of the things I use in firefox. But I'm just not familiar with it anymore so I always revert back to firefox if i need to use the dev tools.
throwaway29303 3y ago
Great job, guys!
veave 3y ago
Is this one of those synthetic benchmarks that don't mean much?
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Yes. But being fast, even at a synthetic benchmark, is rarely worse than being slow.
- StevePerkins 3y ago
  They sure do seem to mean a lot when someone recommends Firefox and people shit on them.
- akyuu 3y ago
  Speedometer is one of the primary benchmarks used by the Chromium team as a proxy for real-world use of popular JavaScript frameworks: https://v8.dev/blog/speedometer-2 https://v8.dev/blog/speedometer-2
- bee_rider 3y ago
  It looks to measure a bunch of little JavaScript-driven interactions. It has been around for a while, so I guess it probably measures what it says it measures. OTOH, you might feel it doesn’t mean much depending on your priorities. I mean, JavaScript is bad anyway. So I guess anyone they cares about performance/security blocks it as much as possible and/or avoids JavaScript heavy sites. Or, big picture, Firefox wasn’t built by a spying company, so even if Chrome had much better benchmarks switching to Chrome would be a silly thing to do.
- 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
  It's using a fake "app", but it measures UI updates across multiple real JavaScript frameworks. In other words, probably not a good benchmark for things that are compute-bound or I/O-bound, but probably a pretty good benchmark for "snappiness".
- hajile 3y ago
  Speedometer executes a bunch of TodoMVC projects, so it's a mix of JS and DOM work. FF has done a lot of cool work on their DOM and have started to focus some on making JS faster, so they are pretty fast here. https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ If you are interested in just JS, JetStream 2 is a good metric IMO, but is perhaps less "real world" as it doesn't really do DOM stuff. FF is slower here, but has made a lot of progress recently. (going from somewhere around 35% slower to around 10% slower). https://browserbench.org/JetStream2.0/in-depth.html https://browserbench.org/JetStream2.0/in-depth.html
  - sanxiyn 3y ago
    Safari is like 30% faster than Chrome on JetStream. I have no idea why people think V8 is the fastest engine around.
LargeDiggerNick 3y ago
After this quick switch profile addon was release I have been 100% on firefox and love it.
- brunno 3y ago
  Thanks for mentioning this. Somehow I've searched for something like this before and couldn't find it. That didn't stop me from using Firefox tough. I just have my first bookmark in the toolbar point to "about: profiles" and use this page to launch new profile instances, create new ones etc.
  - kristiandupont 3y ago
    Are you talking about this? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...
    - LargeDiggerNick 3y ago
      Thats the one!!
  - LargeDiggerNick 3y ago
    I did that too but I encountered fuckery. I forgot what it was though it was a while ago.
- MilaM 3y ago
  I use profiles extensively and would love to know which extension you are using. Containers cover most of my sandboxing needs for private browsing, but I prefer to have a separate Firefox profile for business accounts/apps.
  - LargeDiggerNick 3y ago
    Firefox containers are great but this is better imo: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...
loeg 3y ago
Does anyone familiar with this work have some pointers to read more about it?
- jeroen 3y ago
  This comment should be helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36771201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36771201
p-e-w 3y ago
That chart suggests massive improvements since the beginning of this year. Can anyone explain how this was achieved? What precisely has changed?
- akyuu 3y ago
  In the Firefox Nightly blog, there is some discussion of the performance improvements they've delivered in each release: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org For example: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2023/04/14/dropping-the-banner-hammer-and-more-these-weeks-in-firefox-issue-134/ https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2023/04/14/dropping-the-ban... > The two big jumps are from these two fixes. Great job, Performance Team! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1444491 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1444491 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1815069 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1815069
  - efreak 3y ago
    > Starting from Firefox 112, users can now search for text inside the about:addons page (through the usual associated keyboard shortcuts, e.g. Ctrl-F and ‘/’) – Bug 1499500 _Finally_. It's only been _years_ that I haven't been able to search through my (admittedly far too big) list of disabled add-ons to find the one I want and turn it on. Now we just need the collection limit on Firefox nightly removed. It only fetches the first page of 50 addons in a collection. I add things to my collection any time it seems useful, and keeping a collection in sync with what's being used across _seven_ browsers on two devices is difficult (I use multiple browsers on Android the way I use multiple browser windows on desktop; extensions usually only get installed in the workspace I actually need them for, so each install has a slightly different set of extensions and slightly different settings)
- mstange 3y ago
  You can expect some blog posts from us on this topic at the end of the year / early next year. In short: Organizational focus on a performance target, significant investment, and some great new tooling. We're also reaping the benefits of foundational work that happened over the last few years.
dt2m 3y ago
Anecdotally, Firefox has always been faster than Chrome on MacOS for me. Great to see it’s only getting even better.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Try clearing your profile. Turns out having years of history, extensions, and a multi-gigabyte cache makes any browser slow.
  - Avamander 3y ago
    Chrome automatically prunes history for quite a while now. Which I personally dislike, as I sometimes need to find something I visited a long time ago.
    - justinclift 3y ago
      Firefox does the same thing too unfortunately, and it doesn't seem like it can be turned off. It's a real pita for the same reason. Needed to look at browser history older than a few months and discovering it's all been deleted (by Firefox) was a very unpleasant experience. Seems to be a needless data loss "optimisation" (sic), but I have no idea what the real world use case for that would be.
      - wackget 3y ago
        Not sure if I've done anything special but I've got history going back to 2021.
        justinclift 3y ago
        Interesting. That gives me hope that there might indeed be a setting to change the behaviour. Thanks. :)
        alpaca128 3y ago
xd1936 3y ago
I've used Firefox as my primary browser since the "Quantum" in 2017. Chrome still feels snappier, but Firefox's Container Tabs is hard for me to imagine losing.
- dsauerbrun 3y ago
  pretty sure chrome has had tab grouping for over a year now
  - CrampusDestrus 3y ago
    container tabs != tab grouping tab grouping uses the same cookies everywhere, whereas container tabs provide isolated workspaces each with their own set of cookies
  - post-it 3y ago
    Are they containerized? I have separate containers for work and personal stuff, with separate sessions for Gmail, GitHub, etc.
  - allarm 3y ago
    That's not what container tabs are. Think of it as isolated environments for groups of sites. You can even set it up so that each new link opens in a new environment, without any cookies, etc.
  - seba_dos1 3y ago
    How are tab groups relevant here?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - haswell 3y ago
    Container tabs isolate sessions. I don’t think tab grouping is related. Firefox allows you to create/manage multiple containers, and set up rules to assign specific sites to specific containers if desired. I think the closest feature in Chrome is the ability to create multiple profiles, but this is less flexible/ergonomic IMO.
fooker 3y ago
This is awesome, looking forward to performance improvement efforts from Firefox. I try Firefox once in a while and it admittedly feels slower and more choppy compared to Chrome, but would definitely consider switching if there's more focus on performance.
seba_dos1 3y ago
There was a time when Firefox felt a lot slower than Chromium, but for a few years now it's been close enough (even if still somewhat slower) to not bother me, while Firefox clearly offers superior functionality and much better performance under high load. The last time Chromium has felt attractive compared to Firefox was a really long time ago. Glad to see it moving in the right direction still.
- emsixteen 3y ago
  I use it, but just don't like the devtools. Or moreso miss some things from Chrome/Edge.
  - wackget 3y ago
    For me it's the opposite. Firefox's dev tools feel better. What things are missing?
    - nicce 3y ago
      On Chromium touch screen emulation feels much better.
      - KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
        I find them both pretty poor compared to running on emulators/simulators
    - swang 3y ago
      One of the reasons I stopped using Firefox was that the columns in the devtools were unexpandable. I couldn’t see any data past what Firefox decided was enough to show. Did they fix this?
      - tredre3 3y ago
        I'm assuming you're talking about table views like the Network or Storage/Cookies tabs? You can resize columns and each cell has a tooltip that shows the full content if it's hidden.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dherikb 3y ago
I'm just waiting for the vertical tabs support to give a new chance for Firefox.
- dan_hawkins 3y ago
  Something like this? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
- pokeymcsnatch 3y ago
  Eh? Firefox vertical tab support is much better than Chromium's in my experience. The chrome addons I've seen are hacky and clunky. It doesn't seem like chrome UI has nearly the same modifiability as firefox. Edit: I use the Tree Style Tabs add on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- eyegor 3y ago
  Tree style tabs is a vertical tab extension for ff and the best ui around if you use a lot of tabs. I can't even use chromium vertical tabs anymore because they feel terrible in comparison. You can also fully style tree style tabs via css. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
  - tapoxi 3y ago
    But then you get duplicates, since Mozilla made it a pain to disable the main tab bar. I'm using a Chromium offshoot (Arc) but I also like how Vivaldi handles vertical tabs. Firefox doesn't just compete with Chromium itself, but the entire ecosystem.
    - aembleton 3y ago
e4m2 3y ago
See also https://arewefastyet.com https://arewefastyet.com.
- flerchin 3y ago
  Really cool how you can see Firefox speed enhancements showing up in discrete steps. I am surprised to see Chrome faster than Chromium. What is google doing in their branded flavor?
  - kirbyfan64sos 3y ago
    Chrome tends to be built with a rather slow and stringent set of optimization extras like PGO that people tend to leave off in Chromium builds.
  - lillecarl 3y ago
    On windows you can speed chromium up by renaming it to chrome.exe so it gets special treatment by antivirus software.
    - lolinder 3y ago
      That's incredibly dumb if true, but can't be the whole story because the difference is still present in the Linux stats.
    - voxic11 3y ago
      Doesn't windows check the signature or something to decide if an application should be allowed to bypass antivirus? Seems like doing it based on the filename would be a pretty huge security hole.
    - tredre3 3y ago
      Chromium's executable[1][2] is already named chrome.exe unless the builder goes out of their way to rename it. This can't be the reason. 1. https://download-chromium.appspot.com/ https://download-chromium.appspot.com/ 2. https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/releases/windows/ https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-bina...
insanitybit 3y ago
It's great to see Firefox competing on a core metric - performance. It doesn't look like a one time thing, either, I suspect an ongoing initiative to close this gap. I'd be curious to hear more about what that entails. Something that might be less exciting is finding where Chrome beat Firefox on a benchmark and then tuning Firefox one knob at a time until it didn't, then moving on to the next benchmark - that would mean that there's not much more room to grow since it's basically just "ah, they did that we should do that". It would still be good work just not sustainable. If it's part of a larger performance initiative I'd really like to learn more.
rednafi 3y ago
The biggest reason I stick with Chrome is how easy it is to resume your work on a new machine. You just log into your Google account and boom, all of your data and extensions start syncing in the background. With Firefox, I've to log into a new FF account and then log into my Gmail again anyway. I admit I'm lazy but for me, ergonomics usually comes before ideology.
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  more like vendor lock
  - jodrellblank 3y ago
    "I prefer the way this vendor does things" is not vendor lockin. "I hate the way this vendor does things, but I'm locked in and can't leave" is vendor lockin.
    - Sayrus 3y ago
      I'd argue that "I prefer the way this vendor does things and I can't leave" is still vendor lock-in. There may be different reasons as to why you can't leave, even if it is just personal preferences. Google can offer this because you are using a single, fairly unified, ecosystem and they own both your account and browser. However, this ecosystem does not offer interoperability so you are effectively locked-in. Ironically, this feature is exactly why I can't use Chrome or login on accounts on Android applications: this will auto-sync everything and log you into Google, make logging out very hard, enroll your devices on Google Workspace if that's a professional account, ...
      - jodrellblank 3y ago
        I'd argue that that's ridiculous. "The door is closed and locked and I can't leave" is so very very different from "the door is open and I can leave but I prefer it inside" that calling the second "being locked in" is an insult to people who actually are locked in. Vendor lockin is where the vendor does things to lock you in, such as "Google made it so my Chromebook can only run Chrome", or "Google made it so my GMail only works in Chrome". Lockin generally is when people other than the vendor do things to lock you in, "Meta made WhatsApp web only work in Chrome", "My bank website only works in Chrome". "The vendor made a more integrated, better, product and I prefer it" is not lockin of any kind, that's ordinary competition.
gobip 3y ago
Firefox can render pages faster than Chrome, if it still has a laggy scroll on macOS, I won't be using it. Every six months, I go back to Firefox for a day or two, only to notice this scroll lag. Every time.
- Engineering-MD 3y ago
  I use a macbook and do not notice any scroll lag. Have you got smooth scrolling on? If so, try turning it off.
afavour 3y ago
I’d be curious to see how Safari stacks up. I switched to it when I was finding Firefox too slow a long time and have largely stuck with it because of inertia. Very happy with it as a browser though.
- sanxiyn 3y ago
  Safari has the fastest JavaScript engine by far. It has been #1 on JetStream for years by large margin, JavaScriptCore greatly outperforming both V8 and SpiderMonkey.
- agloe_dreams 3y ago
  Safari blows the doors off everyone. Nearly 10% faster on same hardware.
- magicalist 3y ago
  If you switch to Mac you can get Safari numbers, which seem to be about the same or just slower than Chrome, and now Firefox as well: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAlerts=1&highlightChangelogData=1&highlightCommonAlerts=0&series=autoland,3924422,1,13&series=mozilla-central,3736699,1,13&series=mozilla-central,4561128,1,13&timerange=5184000 https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...
javajosh 3y ago
Firefox is a great browser and Mozilla is a (generally) great organization. It's my daily driver on all my devices (except my TV ha), it's fast and has great plugins that also work in mobile. Philosophically I'm very much a "root for the underdog" type of person so it makes me happy that way, too. Only very rarely (every few months) am I forced to use Chrome for a site - and in my view, that's a huge ding on the site devs, not on Firefox. It's strange hearing reports of "scroll lag" in the other comments. It's possible I'm just lucky. Or there's a misconfiguration somewhere in their setup that Chrome somehow avoids. It's true that I still mostly use Chrome for webdev - I've become more used to it's (excellent) dev tools, even though Firefox and Firebug started that whole trend. It feels very right to separate my "user browser" from my "dev browser" in this way!
- systems_glitch 3y ago
  Same. Been using it since it was called Camino then Firebird, a confusing namespace collision :P
  - dylan604 3y ago
    Maybe they can use Screaming Chicken for a future name
    - ragingrobot 3y ago
      That's reserved for use after build 197.3.
  - BearOso 3y ago
    Camino was actually a separate, but similar slim-down project for Mac. It had Mac OS Cocoa controls, so it fit in better. Camino was originally named Chimera. It was started by Dave Hyatt, the guy who went to Apple to build Safari and WebKit, which Chrome now uses.
  - ok123456 3y ago
    Phoenix for me.
natded 3y ago
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agumonkey 3y ago
kudos
hank_z 3y ago
A off topic question. Has anyone encountered the crash after wake from sleep for the latest Firefox on macOS Sonoma public beta?
_y5hn 3y ago
Firefox or Librewolf would be my preference if it had tab groups.
- unsungNovelty 3y ago
  Firefox containers are tab groups on steroids. Tab groups are just aesthetic while Firefox containers can not only group and colour code the tabs but isolate cache and stuff. This means you can use two gmail accounts in two separate tabs. It also means you can isolate you personal bank or other websites so that other data harvesting website cant get to that information. :) Firefox containers have been there long back before tab groupings were available in Chrome as well. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-containers https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-contain...
  - _y5hn 3y ago
    Last time I checked it didn't allow me to group tabs, so not sure why it would be applicable to my usecase which is an UI thing. Seems to be two separate features to me at least, but maybe you know how to use containers to group tabs in top bar of browser.
    - mukti 3y ago
      Yeah - not the OP but I investigated containers and they didn't do what you're asking for. I ultimately ended up installing Simple Tab Groups to get similar behavior to chrome. It would be nice if this functionality was actually built into the browser.
    - unsungNovelty 3y ago
      Please follow the link. You should be able to group it, colour code it and isolate them. For example, I have different colours for different different containers. I can also open only container designated websites in it. For example, if I am in facebook container and I open google websites, it can switch the google tab to google container. There are so many things you can do with it.
fernandotakai 3y ago
as a pentadactly widow, i would recommend to anyone that is coming back to firefox tridactyl https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl is it the same? no. but is it close? hell yeah. it really helps me with productivity!
dz0ny 3y ago
I don't know but inspect tools just irritate me soo much in Firefox that I don't like to use the browser then at all. I started my career in Firefox and still remember you had to have an extension for debugging HTML, the editing style was fun and useful. My usage changed a lot from then, now I need: - Tracing graph for network events in Firefox which it does not have. - Applications tab that would show me the status of workers, cache ... is just plain in Firefox - And UI seems condensed, I guess I just got used to a more relaxed Chrome. - The whole debacle we don't want you to install a web app as a shortcut because it's bad for some reason. (They lost me initially with this years ago when I still had Linux). It's a shame but Firefox is just not what I need and prefer anymore.
trewqasdf 3y ago
It's nice to hear that they are not falling behind. I switched to Firefox after Opera started to decline. I rely heavily on multi-account containers, but it is a pity that they can't run their own engine on iOS. I have nothing against the dev tools in Firefox, but it is way easier to google issues for chrome dev tools.
lmizell 3y ago
I will always vouch for Firefox, It's been my primary browser since 2018 and there's no turning back. However its worth noting that while my FF windows experience has been painless I cannot say the same for Linux.
- alcamech 3y ago
  On Fedora, I usually have issues with video playback, wayland, and browser/tab crashes.
alexghr 3y ago
This is great to hear and I hope it will mean more people give Firefox a decent try! We need more people on alternative browsers in order to keep healthy competition between rendering engines. Firefox also handles lots of tabs really well and its Tab Containers plugin enables perfect separation of work tabs and personal tabs (I've got 1.4k tabs split across personal/work containers. I've got a problem, I know)
napo 3y ago
I'm a bit confused by the UI. Looks like the test is for windows. Did someone manage to test it for Linux and MacOS as well? (not sure what test we are supposed to use)
mgoetzke 3y ago
Sadly I cannot update Firefox anymore as any newer release would mean my other monitors would only show a black screen when looking at anything even remotely encoded with copy protection.
frou_dh 3y ago
It's kinda interesting that some of the younger amongst us might have only ever known Chrome through the lens of its meme-like reputation for being a big fat hog. Because when it was originally released like 15 years ago, the pitch/consensus were the exact opposite of that, i.e. ultra clean and efficient.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  As was Firefox (originally Pheonix, then Firebird), which was the ultra clean and efficient version of Mozilla. It was crazy how much better it was compared to IE6. It just didn't have a monopoly and anti-competitive marketing behind it like Chrome and IE did.
  - EMM_386 3y ago
    Yep, I was a Pheonix user from the beginning in 2002 ... where you just unzipped it to a folder and ran it. I stuck with Firefox for literally 20 years, only caving in last year due to noticeable performance difference (went to Brave). But this news makes me want to try it again, I'd rather be using Firefox just to have another browser engine thriving. Competition is good.
pingec 3y ago
FF is great, only two things left I go to Chrome for are DevTools and watching Youtube (lower cpu usage, lower battery drain).
- dh-g 3y ago
  Youtube performance/reliability on OSX made me switch to Brave.
- nateb2022 3y ago
  Regarding battery drain, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1716164 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1716164 TL;DR: Firefox usually uses AV1. Hardware prior to intel 11th gen tiger lake, amd rdna2 (pre rtx 6000 series) and nvidia 3000 series has no hardware AV1 decoding support (and neither does Apple Silicon). This results in higher CPU usage on Firefox, whereas Safari and Chrome usually resort to codecs that have hardware decode support on the machine. This can easily be fixed by going to `about:config` and setting `media.av1.enabled` to false.
pdanpdan 3y ago
Does this require some special test environment (special OS, special builds of firefox/chrome)? Because for me chrome vs firefox (both 115) - ubuntu desktop: 148(+-2.2) vs 126(+-6.5) - android phone: 95.8(+-2.0) vs 78.5(+-4.3) So it looks like chrome is faster and delivers a more stable performance while firefox is slower and more inconsistent on performance
- tekni5 3y ago
  I get 260 for chrome & 160 for firefox on win 10.
- gorhill 3y ago
  Extensions can have a measurable effect on the benchmark, be sure both browsers have no extension, or the same extensions with the same configuration.
  - pdanpdan 3y ago
    Chrome has ublock and very few others, Firefox only ublock I suppose it is about nightly 117
- mccr8 3y ago
  The linked graph is for Firefox Nightly (currently 117) running on Windows.
- pdanpdan 3y ago
  Small update: Firefox 117 on Android phone 75.4(+-6.4) so still there
- jeffbee 3y ago
  Adding my anecdotes: on an M2 mac mini - chrome 114: 472 ± 30 - firefox 115: 390 ± 22 - firefox 117: 420 ± 12
impoppy 3y ago
Chrome and Safari still feel way faster in normal usage though, as they try to predict the most likely page the user will open and start pre-loading it even before the user has pressed Enter. Firefox is my daily driver, but sometimes I use Safari for some specific cases and Safari certainly is stupidly fast compared to Firefox.
Sarkie 3y ago
Firefox is faster for our site* so we have suggested customers to use it. *Our site is shit.
izzydata 3y ago
I think it is finally time to de-google my digital footprint.
magicbuzz 3y ago
I just wish that Teams would load in a reasonable time on Firefox. It's a corporate enforced need and it takes minutes to load the web Teams version in Firefox. Microsoft seem not to treat Firefox as a legitimate web client.
hooby 3y ago
It would be really bad if everyone used Firefox - just as it would be very bad if everyone used Chrome (or even any other browser based on the same rendering engine). We all absolutely do benefit greatly from having multiple competing browsers and render engines - regardless of which one we individually prefer to use. Therefore I really don't understand the many, many, many "my-browser-is-better-than-yours-you-should-switch" comments in this thread here. Why's everyone trying to convince everyone else that they should use the one and only "best" browser too? What for? Are people truly that desperate for confirmation and validation, that they need others to agree on their choice of browser?
- 51Cards 3y ago
  The problem is the percentage use is so unbalanced right now (IMO due to Google and Microsoft using their other platforms to drive installing their browsers) that I now run across sites that only function in Chrome properly. A lot of devs feel that "Eh, I've targeted the 90+%, why do the rest matter?" and that is how you hand control of web standards to Google. The usage ratio needs to be more balanced to prevent a browser monopoly, hence people trying to ensure there continues to be a choice.
  - beej71 3y ago
    I regret I have but one thumbs-up to give this comment. It's important to have at least 2 healthy browsers (in market share). They keep each other honest, if I might put it so tersely. We all remember IE6, and were in danger territory again with the current percentages. For this reason, personally, Chrome would have to be 2x or more better than Firefox for me to consider switching to it. Do what you can to keep the market diverse. If the percentages were reversed, I'd absolutely be running Chromium or a variant.
- LinuxBender 3y ago
  Browser wars are almost as old as the internet. There was even a time when people would put little rectangle animated gifs at the bottom of their websites saying things like "Best viewed with Netscape!" or "MSIE SUX!" or "Best Viewed with MSIE!" and then after a while those evolved into memes and then they vanished. There would be flamewars on Usenet about which browser is better. It isn't just browsers. There's tabs-vs-spaces. Scripting language vs scripting language. Meat vs plants. I think this would be best answered by a psychologist. I am curious what the personal preference wars will look like in another 20 years. Maybe "Real human skin vs. synthetic skin on my LoveDroid!"
n_time 3y ago
I stopped using Firefox because it was killing my battery life. Also because I noticed more and more websites stopped supporting it and I just kind of gave up. I'm using Safari these days and it's fine.
pjmlp 3y ago
Great, however it will take more than that to get out of the 3% adoption. Everyone pushing Chrome and Electron apps will not suddenly adopt Firefox.
Zamicol 3y ago
I had to switch back to Firefox on desktop because Chrome has rendering bugs on Ubuntu. I use it infrequently, and noticed that Firefox has gotten much faster.
isodev 3y ago
Kind of a shame they didn't include Safari. But it's good to see Firefox has managed to climb to the second place.
- agloe_dreams 3y ago
  Heh, yeah I enjoy that this is the missing context. It really does show progress though for Firefox. It's like "The Cubs beat the Yankees in the World Series! (But the Astros actually won the World Series)"
  - magicalist 3y ago
    Safari is slower, though? From the sibling comment: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAlerts=1&highlightChangelogData=1&highlightCommonAlerts=0&series=autoland,3924422,1,13&series=mozilla-central,4561128,1,13&series=mozilla-central,3736699,1,13&timerange=2592000 https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...
- cpeterso 3y ago
  Here are the Speedometer results for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari on macOS: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAlerts=1&highlightChangelogData=1&highlightCommonAlerts=0&series=autoland,3924422,1,13&series=mozilla-central,4561128,1,13&series=mozilla-central,3736699,1,13&timerange=2592000 https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...
junglistguy 3y ago
[dead]
seabass-labrax 3y ago
I love Firefox, but there's just one thing I miss from Chromium: run-in-background mode. My PinePhone has lots of memory but very slow IO, which means that Firefox can spend nearly twenty seconds loading. Once running, it'll load pages really quickly because local storage isn't involved. If there was a way of keeping a Firefox daemon running to instantly bring back a window, I would be very pleased indeed.
kevinlinxc 3y ago
Does anyone else use Firefox on Android and have the bug where any unassuming tab can become unresponsive when you leave and come back to it, to the point where opening a new tab is the only option?
neycoda 3y ago
Uh, I find this hard to believe considering Firefox still consistently runs slower in most ways for me than Chrome.
warabe 3y ago
I don't care about performance if differences are negligible enough. I support Firefox because competition makes market healthier. Current status of Manifest v.3 is a shining example.
jeroenhd 3y ago
That's very interesting! Last time I benchmarked Firefox, it performed half as fast as Chrome or Gnome's WebKit. I should run my benchmarks again! I do wonder though, is this performance improvement Windows specific? It's hard to believe that Mozilla could make up the difference in only three or four months. Edit: looks like Chromium still beats Firefox on Linux: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAlerts=1&highlightChangelogData=1&highlightCommonAlerts=0&series=autoland,3925511,1,13&series=mozilla-central,3744566,1,13&timerange=5184000 https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl... In fact, all benchmarks browsers seem between a quarter and a third slower on Linux in speedometer. That's strange, I wonder if this has to do with the limited availability of hardware acceleration?
- return_to_monke 3y ago
  I'd think that these improvements were started years ago but only now enabled
- 542458 3y ago
  https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=60 https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6... Looks like it really depends on the benchmark. In some Firefox gets slaughtered, in some Firefox is the clear winner.
  - foota 3y ago
    Some of these are score (higher is better) and some are time (lower is better) in case that wasn't clear.
Jochim 3y ago
Firefox has been my browser of choice since I switched from Internet Explorer as a child. However, I've found their refusal to implement or offer alternatives to WebSerial and screen-casting utterly depressing. It's made a number of tasks more difficult and inconvenient and makes Firefox a less useful tool overall. On the WebSerial discussion ticket, an educator articulates how this decision essentially forces what was a Firefox based classroom onto Chrome. I'll be sticking with Firefox but missing functionality drives users away. It doesn't help that their reasoning for not implementing WebSerial feels extremely paternalistic and runs counter to the ethos of user empowerment at the core of most open source projects.
- RunSet 3y ago
  "WebSerial" appears to me just another baby step in Chome's quest to become an OS. What is the justification for making everyone's browser able to "read from and write to serial devices"? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Serial_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Serial_... I know it is really for user fingerprinting but what is google's overt justification for pushing it?
  - Jochim 3y ago
    Mozilla's argument isn't that you'll be tracked or fingerprinted. It's that you're too stupid to be permitted control over whether or not you want to allow access to devices you've connected to your machine. Rather than work to mitigate those risks, they've decided to hobble the utility of their browser. Personally, it would make flashing ESPHome devices much more convenient. Not having to switch browser for a start. The ability to plug a board into whatever PC on my LAN and just flash it, without having to install and maintain the entire toolchain is nice as well. More broadly, there are web based IDEs for microcontrollers. Arduino has one: https://docs.arduino.cc/learn/starting-guide/the-arduino-web-editor https://docs.arduino.cc/learn/starting-guide/the-arduino-web... A few of these are aimed at the education sector, removing a some of the significant barriers faced by educators that would otherwise have trouble getting the software installed and keeping it updated. In one of the discussions, someone was using it to help dental offices retrieve data from some specialised hardware. Browser support dealt with similar concerns of how to distribute the software to non-technical clients and keep it up to date. It was also something their clients understood, rather than something new.
panzi 3y ago
That's great. But Google Maps Street View (-> GeoGuessr) is still a slideshow under Firefox (Linux) for me. (I tried all the things under about:config) Really hope that gets fixed some day. On that day I will switch back. Really missing browser containers (well, I'm booting Firefox just for that, actually).
FalconSensei 3y ago
Nice, maybe someday I'll give it another chance. My main gripe is the UX for some things, and how some features seem half-baked. E.g.: to add a keyword for a search engine, it saves a bookmark, but there isn't (or wasn't) any way to filter for those later if you wanted to check what you had already created
nwienert 3y ago
I’ve got a landing page I’ve been working on that pushes the limits on things by overlapping all sorts of effects: WebGL, mix-blend-mode, clip-path, SVGs, overlapping animations on custom fonts, etc. Safari and Chrome run it surprisingly well. Firefox was getting basically 1fps. I had to turn off half the effects before it felt reasonable.
nateb2022 3y ago
I just benchmarked both Firefox and Chromium on my desktop using Speedometer 2.1. Each browser was configured as out of the box, with no extensions, and with a blank profile: FF (114.0.1): 101 +- 1.9 Chromium (114.0.5735.198): 94.5 +- 2.2 FF (115.0.2): 104 +- 2.4 Chromium (115.0.5790.90): 101 +- 2.6 Machine Specs: Intel i5-3470 @ 3.2 GHz, 16 GB DDR3, 128 GB SSD. Linux kernel 6.1.38 (latest longterm branch) on Arch.
kyledrake 3y ago
I use Firefox on my phone, it's the only one that allows me to block popups/ads/autoplay videos and disable javascript via add-ons when I need to, and the web is pretty much unusable without being able to do that now. Who cares if it's faster if you can't even load the content without it blocking your view with popups and trying to play videos without your consent before crashing?
rukshn 3y ago
My only suggestion is for FireFox to implement the native UI elements of the system (dropdowns, menus) etc. Than using something of their own. Where Chrome uses the system native UI elements. Is there a way to fix it with some tweeking?
bobbob1921 3y ago
Im also a recent to firefox from Chrome convert recently (win 11). My reason is UI latency related, and my used case is a tad unique. As a network engineer, and system administrator, my daily PC is very high end enterprise hardware and running windows 11, and has 8 x 4K monitors. I always will have 20 to 50 web browser windows open as well as many tabs in each of those windows. The main issue I was encountering, and my best guess, from a lot of testing over the past three years, is related to the large pixel count of my desktop - I would frequently encounter 1 to 2 seconds of lag/unresponsiveness when switching from chrome to another (chrome) application in the background. As this has been a nearly 3 year long issue, I’ve tried many , MANY fixes/work arounds The two most impactful were upgrading from windows 10 to windows 11. And switching from chrome from primarily using chrome to Firefox. (The issue was actually the same with chrome canary, as well as with GPU rendering enabled or disabled in each browser.) while I now run Firefox 24/7, I will occasionally open up chrome or chrome canary in unique use cases, and still notice the performance improvement in firefox during those times. (to be clear when I say I’ve tried and tested just about everything, I mean it from fresh new iOS installs with no applications, except chrome, two upgrading every piece of hardware a few times over) - the issue persisted.
- azeirah 3y ago
  8 x 4K monitors, I'm so jealous wow. I wish my work would give me even one, I'm developing on 2 full hd monitors :( I even do some design work so it's honestly pretty bad.
  - bobbob1921 3y ago
    Thanks, to be fully accurate, it’s 6X 4K monitors normal orientation,, and 2x 2560p - 29 inch widescreen type monitors both rotated vertically , and touching each other (via one of those $60 or so floorstanding 40 inch tall dual monitor mounts from Amazon). I love my set up, I work for myself, and from home, so purchased it myself. The GPUs I use, used to be 2X Nvidia, P1000 Quadro. But as I was trying to troubleshoot this latency issue I was referring to I’ve upgraded to 2X Quadro, RTX 4000 GPUs. (Which actually made little difference/improvement to the issue). By the way, set ups like mine aren’t as expensive as you might think, you can get a nvidia Quadro P1000 or P2000 GPU on eBay for very inexpensive, as in around maybe 200 or less, each. I really don’t play games, the rare times I do it’s exclusively on my Xbox (so none of this is for gaming / gaming optimized) Edit: also, the 4K monitors are 30 inch in physical size, one might be 32-inch. This is very important I have found over the years (and going through many different monitors and resolutions to finally find the optimal set up for myself.) - 30 or 32 inch I have found is the sweet spot for 4K resolution. I don’t use any windows OS text size increase (or whatever the 100% 125% 150% thing is called, mine is set to 100%.)
demizer 3y ago
Firefox is the best. I wish Mozilla would let me donate funds specifically to fund it's development for my own peace of mind.
collinmanderson 3y ago
Firefox has 2.2% usage on US government websites according to https://analytics.usa.gov/ https://analytics.usa.gov/ If it falls below 2% it may lose official support on .gov websites according to https://designsystem.digital.gov/documentation/developers/#browser-support https://designsystem.digital.gov/documentation/developers/#b...
Soupy 3y ago
Been a firefox user since 2020 after switching from Chrome and haven't looked back. The only thing that I find myself missing is native casting support so that's the last piece that sometimes forces me to open up Chrome
tracker1 3y ago
Glad to see this, browsers have been mostly Chromium based for a while. Safari seems to be lagging a lot since the split, and I just don't like the Firefox UI as much. OT: Just curious... does anyone have a good cross-browser extension (chrome and FF browsers) that can sync the bookmarks, in particular the bookmark toolbar. I use a password manager (Bitwarden) that integrates well, wish I could get the same for the bookmarks toolbar.
- unilynx 3y ago
  I’ve tried to find something like this multiple time over the past years, but it seems browsers do their best to protect bookmarks from extensions It seems the only way are tools that directly edit each respective browsers setting files (ie from the command line) but I’d rather not go down that path.
  - tracker1 3y ago
    Yeah... I'd been keeping my "source of truth" to my google account, so it's easy enough to export and import to other browsers... but trying to distance myself from the google account for everything. Found a couple extensions, so will probably export to be safe, then start playing to see how it goes.
  - Propelloni 3y ago
    There used to be xbookmarks.com but it is long gone. There is an open source tool by the name of XBrowserSync [1] which came up when I searched for xbookmarks. What they say on their website sounds promising, but I did not do any further research or try it out. I'm on Firefox on all my devices ;) [1] https://www.xbrowsersync.org/ https://www.xbrowsersync.org/
bugmen0t 3y ago
The link is terrible. Maybe the article should link to https://arewefastyet.com https://arewefastyet.com or maybe the Speedometer selection at https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/raptor-desktop-speedometer?numDays=60 https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/raptor-desktop-spe...
twism 3y ago
I may bee the outlier here since everyone seems to gush about firefox every now and then on here ... but as a webdev firefox still feels second rate to me when it comes to PWA, Push Notifications, CSS animations (glitchy/graphics tearing) and a host of other things I test for browser compatibility
sedatk 3y ago
I think that because of the new "efficiency" initiatives at Microsoft, Edge is very bad compared to the others at handling web sites that need low latency and moderate execution speed (such as 3D demos, games, emulators, audio players). Edge on my 5950X + RTX3080 + 32GB RAM can't play some chiptune without glitching while Firefox can handle it like butter. Firefox's becoming a strong competitor every day.
andrewstuart 3y ago
Firefox is my main browser. No complaints.
jrnichols 3y ago
I've been a fan of Firefox for many years. Seems that those friends of mine still using Chrome are doing so because they are firmly trapped in the Googleverse. (gmail, YouTube, Google Docs, etc.) Firefox & its containers have been fantastic. Fast, stable, and I get the impression that security still matters.
torartc 3y ago
Firefox might be fast, but it's majorly lacking in browser APIs these days.
osdril 3y ago
I use Safari as my primary browser, only for its tab groups implementation. In my opinion they just nailed it, I think it's much better than the Chrome one. I would really like to switch to Firefox as I prefer it in every other way, but I don't think I will move until they offer a robust native tab group implementation (I've tried Simple Tab Groups but I don't want to rely on a hacky extension for such a core functionality).
Havoc 3y ago
I’ll stick to FF for lack of manifest 3 alone. Adblocking is superior of ff as a result…and that affects my experience more than a microsecond diff either way
merdaverse 3y ago
I have considered making the switch, but on Ubuntu touch screen is poorly implemented as mouse clicks instead of touch events. Chromium sidesteps this by doing its own touch detection, allowing me to comfortably browse through pages with touch. Firefox does not. Until either Firefox or Linux starts taking touchscreens on desktop seriously I will stick to Chrome, and in desperate times, Windows.
juanefren 3y ago
The only thing it prevents me for using Firefox is it's XML viewer, clicking on text collapses nodes, it makes copying text very hard. I haven't found a workaround for this.
tortoise_in 3y ago
Now wish they are allowed to have their own webview and Android don't allow to block it
tempaccount420 3y ago
Firefox is great, Mozilla on the other hand...
cosmojg 3y ago
I find that, in every domain, second place is almost always superior to first place where it counts despite being somewhat rougher around the edges. Firefox is a particularly excellent example of this phenomenon. Why is that? Just good old-fashioned competitive optimization?
MrBra 3y ago
Ok, now take the number of years during which Firefox was slower and calculate an averaged value of its speed. This will account for all the frustration it would have caused switching to it in the past. Being faster for 2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months, and probably even for 2 years wouldn't be enough to cause a big change in that averaged value. And that would also measure how much of a guarateed good choice would be switching to Firefox right now. As soon as it will stay faster for enough time to smooth out the differences then I'll start consider using it. I've been a Firefox advocate and user for many years, but then about 6 years ago I had to face the hard truth of how bad it performed with lots of tabs open, and how much of a pain I was causing myself for not switching to a Chromium powered browser. About one month ago, I've checked it out again under the same conditions... and sadly it's still not even close to competitors' memory management.

1282 points by akyuu 3y ago

You'll pry the Firefox developer tools and container tabs from my cold dead hands. It would have to be significantly slower for me to switch off of it.

adverbly 3y ago
Interesting. I actually switch to Chrome specifically if I need to use the developer tools. What do you prefer about the Firefox version?
- michaelsalim 3y ago
  Not OP but I think it's a lot about familiarity. I'm sure chrome has most of the things I use in firefox. But I'm just not familiar with it anymore so I always revert back to firefox if i need to use the dev tools.

throwaway29303 3y ago

Great job, guys!

veave 3y ago

Is this one of those synthetic benchmarks that don't mean much?

londons_explore 3y ago
Yes. But being fast, even at a synthetic benchmark, is rarely worse than being slow.
StevePerkins 3y ago
They sure do seem to mean a lot when someone recommends Firefox and people shit on them.
akyuu 3y ago
Speedometer is one of the primary benchmarks used by the Chromium team as a proxy for real-world use of popular JavaScript frameworks: https://v8.dev/blog/speedometer-2 https://v8.dev/blog/speedometer-2
bee_rider 3y ago
It looks to measure a bunch of little JavaScript-driven interactions. It has been around for a while, so I guess it probably measures what it says it measures. OTOH, you might feel it doesn’t mean much depending on your priorities. I mean, JavaScript is bad anyway. So I guess anyone they cares about performance/security blocks it as much as possible and/or avoids JavaScript heavy sites. Or, big picture, Firefox wasn’t built by a spying company, so even if Chrome had much better benchmarks switching to Chrome would be a silly thing to do.
0xcde4c3db 3y ago
It's using a fake "app", but it measures UI updates across multiple real JavaScript frameworks. In other words, probably not a good benchmark for things that are compute-bound or I/O-bound, but probably a pretty good benchmark for "snappiness".
hajile 3y ago
Speedometer executes a bunch of TodoMVC projects, so it's a mix of JS and DOM work. FF has done a lot of cool work on their DOM and have started to focus some on making JS faster, so they are pretty fast here. https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ If you are interested in just JS, JetStream 2 is a good metric IMO, but is perhaps less "real world" as it doesn't really do DOM stuff. FF is slower here, but has made a lot of progress recently. (going from somewhere around 35% slower to around 10% slower). https://browserbench.org/JetStream2.0/in-depth.html https://browserbench.org/JetStream2.0/in-depth.html
- sanxiyn 3y ago
  Safari is like 30% faster than Chrome on JetStream. I have no idea why people think V8 is the fastest engine around.

LargeDiggerNick 3y ago

After this quick switch profile addon was release I have been 100% on firefox and love it.

brunno 3y ago
Thanks for mentioning this. Somehow I've searched for something like this before and couldn't find it. That didn't stop me from using Firefox tough. I just have my first bookmark in the toolbar point to "about: profiles" and use this page to launch new profile instances, create new ones etc.
- kristiandupont 3y ago
  Are you talking about this? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...
  - LargeDiggerNick 3y ago
    Thats the one!!
- LargeDiggerNick 3y ago
  I did that too but I encountered fuckery. I forgot what it was though it was a while ago.
MilaM 3y ago
I use profiles extensively and would love to know which extension you are using. Containers cover most of my sandboxing needs for private browsing, but I prefer to have a separate Firefox profile for business accounts/apps.
- LargeDiggerNick 3y ago
  Firefox containers are great but this is better imo: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...

loeg 3y ago

Does anyone familiar with this work have some pointers to read more about it?

jeroen 3y ago
This comment should be helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36771201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36771201

p-e-w 3y ago

That chart suggests massive improvements since the beginning of this year. Can anyone explain how this was achieved? What precisely has changed?

akyuu 3y ago
In the Firefox Nightly blog, there is some discussion of the performance improvements they've delivered in each release: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org For example: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2023/04/14/dropping-the-banner-hammer-and-more-these-weeks-in-firefox-issue-134/ https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2023/04/14/dropping-the-ban... > The two big jumps are from these two fixes. Great job, Performance Team! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1444491 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1444491 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1815069 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1815069
- efreak 3y ago
  > Starting from Firefox 112, users can now search for text inside the about:addons page (through the usual associated keyboard shortcuts, e.g. Ctrl-F and ‘/’) – Bug 1499500 _Finally_. It's only been _years_ that I haven't been able to search through my (admittedly far too big) list of disabled add-ons to find the one I want and turn it on. Now we just need the collection limit on Firefox nightly removed. It only fetches the first page of 50 addons in a collection. I add things to my collection any time it seems useful, and keeping a collection in sync with what's being used across _seven_ browsers on two devices is difficult (I use multiple browsers on Android the way I use multiple browser windows on desktop; extensions usually only get installed in the workspace I actually need them for, so each install has a slightly different set of extensions and slightly different settings)
mstange 3y ago
You can expect some blog posts from us on this topic at the end of the year / early next year. In short: Organizational focus on a performance target, significant investment, and some great new tooling. We're also reaping the benefits of foundational work that happened over the last few years.

dt2m 3y ago

Anecdotally, Firefox has always been faster than Chrome on MacOS for me. Great to see it’s only getting even better.

londons_explore 3y ago
Try clearing your profile. Turns out having years of history, extensions, and a multi-gigabyte cache makes any browser slow.
- Avamander 3y ago
  Chrome automatically prunes history for quite a while now. Which I personally dislike, as I sometimes need to find something I visited a long time ago.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Firefox does the same thing too unfortunately, and it doesn't seem like it can be turned off. It's a real pita for the same reason. Needed to look at browser history older than a few months and discovering it's all been deleted (by Firefox) was a very unpleasant experience. Seems to be a needless data loss "optimisation" (sic), but I have no idea what the real world use case for that would be.
    - wackget 3y ago
      Not sure if I've done anything special but I've got history going back to 2021.
      - justinclift 3y ago
        Interesting. That gives me hope that there might indeed be a setting to change the behaviour. Thanks. :)
        alpaca128 3y ago

xd1936 3y ago

I've used Firefox as my primary browser since the "Quantum" in 2017. Chrome still feels snappier, but Firefox's Container Tabs is hard for me to imagine losing.

dsauerbrun 3y ago
pretty sure chrome has had tab grouping for over a year now
- CrampusDestrus 3y ago
  container tabs != tab grouping tab grouping uses the same cookies everywhere, whereas container tabs provide isolated workspaces each with their own set of cookies
- post-it 3y ago
  Are they containerized? I have separate containers for work and personal stuff, with separate sessions for Gmail, GitHub, etc.
- allarm 3y ago
  That's not what container tabs are. Think of it as isolated environments for groups of sites. You can even set it up so that each new link opens in a new environment, without any cookies, etc.
- seba_dos1 3y ago
  How are tab groups relevant here?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- haswell 3y ago
  Container tabs isolate sessions. I don’t think tab grouping is related. Firefox allows you to create/manage multiple containers, and set up rules to assign specific sites to specific containers if desired. I think the closest feature in Chrome is the ability to create multiple profiles, but this is less flexible/ergonomic IMO.

fooker 3y ago

This is awesome, looking forward to performance improvement efforts from Firefox. I try Firefox once in a while and it admittedly feels slower and more choppy compared to Chrome, but would definitely consider switching if there's more focus on performance.

seba_dos1 3y ago

There was a time when Firefox felt a lot slower than Chromium, but for a few years now it's been close enough (even if still somewhat slower) to not bother me, while Firefox clearly offers superior functionality and much better performance under high load. The last time Chromium has felt attractive compared to Firefox was a really long time ago. Glad to see it moving in the right direction still.

emsixteen 3y ago
I use it, but just don't like the devtools. Or moreso miss some things from Chrome/Edge.
- wackget 3y ago
  For me it's the opposite. Firefox's dev tools feel better. What things are missing?
  - nicce 3y ago
    On Chromium touch screen emulation feels much better.
    - KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
      I find them both pretty poor compared to running on emulators/simulators
  - swang 3y ago
    One of the reasons I stopped using Firefox was that the columns in the devtools were unexpandable. I couldn’t see any data past what Firefox decided was enough to show. Did they fix this?
    - tredre3 3y ago
      I'm assuming you're talking about table views like the Network or Storage/Cookies tabs? You can resize columns and each cell has a tooltip that shows the full content if it's hidden.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dherikb 3y ago

I'm just waiting for the vertical tabs support to give a new chance for Firefox.

dan_hawkins 3y ago
Something like this? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
pokeymcsnatch 3y ago
Eh? Firefox vertical tab support is much better than Chromium's in my experience. The chrome addons I've seen are hacky and clunky. It doesn't seem like chrome UI has nearly the same modifiability as firefox. Edit: I use the Tree Style Tabs add on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
eyegor 3y ago
Tree style tabs is a vertical tab extension for ff and the best ui around if you use a lot of tabs. I can't even use chromium vertical tabs anymore because they feel terrible in comparison. You can also fully style tree style tabs via css. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- tapoxi 3y ago
  But then you get duplicates, since Mozilla made it a pain to disable the main tab bar. I'm using a Chromium offshoot (Arc) but I also like how Vivaldi handles vertical tabs. Firefox doesn't just compete with Chromium itself, but the entire ecosystem.
  - aembleton 3y ago

e4m2 3y ago

See also https://arewefastyet.com https://arewefastyet.com.

flerchin 3y ago
Really cool how you can see Firefox speed enhancements showing up in discrete steps. I am surprised to see Chrome faster than Chromium. What is google doing in their branded flavor?
- kirbyfan64sos 3y ago
  Chrome tends to be built with a rather slow and stringent set of optimization extras like PGO that people tend to leave off in Chromium builds.
- lillecarl 3y ago
  On windows you can speed chromium up by renaming it to chrome.exe so it gets special treatment by antivirus software.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    That's incredibly dumb if true, but can't be the whole story because the difference is still present in the Linux stats.
  - voxic11 3y ago
    Doesn't windows check the signature or something to decide if an application should be allowed to bypass antivirus? Seems like doing it based on the filename would be a pretty huge security hole.
  - tredre3 3y ago
    Chromium's executable[1][2] is already named chrome.exe unless the builder goes out of their way to rename it. This can't be the reason. 1. https://download-chromium.appspot.com/ https://download-chromium.appspot.com/ 2. https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-binaries/releases/windows/ https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-bina...

insanitybit 3y ago

It's great to see Firefox competing on a core metric - performance. It doesn't look like a one time thing, either, I suspect an ongoing initiative to close this gap. I'd be curious to hear more about what that entails. Something that might be less exciting is finding where Chrome beat Firefox on a benchmark and then tuning Firefox one knob at a time until it didn't, then moving on to the next benchmark - that would mean that there's not much more room to grow since it's basically just "ah, they did that we should do that". It would still be good work just not sustainable. If it's part of a larger performance initiative I'd really like to learn more.

rednafi 3y ago

The biggest reason I stick with Chrome is how easy it is to resume your work on a new machine. You just log into your Google account and boom, all of your data and extensions start syncing in the background. With Firefox, I've to log into a new FF account and then log into my Gmail again anyway. I admit I'm lazy but for me, ergonomics usually comes before ideology.

micromacrofoot 3y ago
more like vendor lock
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  "I prefer the way this vendor does things" is not vendor lockin. "I hate the way this vendor does things, but I'm locked in and can't leave" is vendor lockin.
  - Sayrus 3y ago
    I'd argue that "I prefer the way this vendor does things and I can't leave" is still vendor lock-in. There may be different reasons as to why you can't leave, even if it is just personal preferences. Google can offer this because you are using a single, fairly unified, ecosystem and they own both your account and browser. However, this ecosystem does not offer interoperability so you are effectively locked-in. Ironically, this feature is exactly why I can't use Chrome or login on accounts on Android applications: this will auto-sync everything and log you into Google, make logging out very hard, enroll your devices on Google Workspace if that's a professional account, ...
    - jodrellblank 3y ago
      I'd argue that that's ridiculous. "The door is closed and locked and I can't leave" is so very very different from "the door is open and I can leave but I prefer it inside" that calling the second "being locked in" is an insult to people who actually are locked in. Vendor lockin is where the vendor does things to lock you in, such as "Google made it so my Chromebook can only run Chrome", or "Google made it so my GMail only works in Chrome". Lockin generally is when people other than the vendor do things to lock you in, "Meta made WhatsApp web only work in Chrome", "My bank website only works in Chrome". "The vendor made a more integrated, better, product and I prefer it" is not lockin of any kind, that's ordinary competition.

gobip 3y ago

Firefox can render pages faster than Chrome, if it still has a laggy scroll on macOS, I won't be using it. Every six months, I go back to Firefox for a day or two, only to notice this scroll lag. Every time.

Engineering-MD 3y ago
I use a macbook and do not notice any scroll lag. Have you got smooth scrolling on? If so, try turning it off.

afavour 3y ago

I’d be curious to see how Safari stacks up. I switched to it when I was finding Firefox too slow a long time and have largely stuck with it because of inertia. Very happy with it as a browser though.

sanxiyn 3y ago
Safari has the fastest JavaScript engine by far. It has been #1 on JetStream for years by large margin, JavaScriptCore greatly outperforming both V8 and SpiderMonkey.
agloe_dreams 3y ago
Safari blows the doors off everyone. Nearly 10% faster on same hardware.
magicalist 3y ago
If you switch to Mac you can get Safari numbers, which seem to be about the same or just slower than Chrome, and now Firefox as well: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAlerts=1&highlightChangelogData=1&highlightCommonAlerts=0&series=autoland,3924422,1,13&series=mozilla-central,3736699,1,13&series=mozilla-central,4561128,1,13&timerange=5184000 https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...

javajosh 3y ago

Firefox is a great browser and Mozilla is a (generally) great organization. It's my daily driver on all my devices (except my TV ha), it's fast and has great plugins that also work in mobile. Philosophically I'm very much a "root for the underdog" type of person so it makes me happy that way, too. Only very rarely (every few months) am I forced to use Chrome for a site - and in my view, that's a huge ding on the site devs, not on Firefox. It's strange hearing reports of "scroll lag" in the other comments. It's possible I'm just lucky. Or there's a misconfiguration somewhere in their setup that Chrome somehow avoids. It's true that I still mostly use Chrome for webdev - I've become more used to it's (excellent) dev tools, even though Firefox and Firebug started that whole trend. It feels very right to separate my "user browser" from my "dev browser" in this way!

systems_glitch 3y ago
Same. Been using it since it was called Camino then Firebird, a confusing namespace collision :P
- dylan604 3y ago
  Maybe they can use Screaming Chicken for a future name
  - ragingrobot 3y ago
    That's reserved for use after build 197.3.
- BearOso 3y ago
  Camino was actually a separate, but similar slim-down project for Mac. It had Mac OS Cocoa controls, so it fit in better. Camino was originally named Chimera. It was started by Dave Hyatt, the guy who went to Apple to build Safari and WebKit, which Chrome now uses.
- ok123456 3y ago
  Phoenix for me.

natded 3y ago

[dead]

agumonkey 3y ago

kudos

hank_z 3y ago

A off topic question. Has anyone encountered the crash after wake from sleep for the latest Firefox on macOS Sonoma public beta?

_y5hn 3y ago

Firefox or Librewolf would be my preference if it had tab groups.

unsungNovelty 3y ago
Firefox containers are tab groups on steroids. Tab groups are just aesthetic while Firefox containers can not only group and colour code the tabs but isolate cache and stuff. This means you can use two gmail accounts in two separate tabs. It also means you can isolate you personal bank or other websites so that other data harvesting website cant get to that information. :) Firefox containers have been there long back before tab groupings were available in Chrome as well. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-containers https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-contain...
- _y5hn 3y ago
  Last time I checked it didn't allow me to group tabs, so not sure why it would be applicable to my usecase which is an UI thing. Seems to be two separate features to me at least, but maybe you know how to use containers to group tabs in top bar of browser.
  - mukti 3y ago
    Yeah - not the OP but I investigated containers and they didn't do what you're asking for. I ultimately ended up installing Simple Tab Groups to get similar behavior to chrome. It would be nice if this functionality was actually built into the browser.
  - unsungNovelty 3y ago
    Please follow the link. You should be able to group it, colour code it and isolate them. For example, I have different colours for different different containers. I can also open only container designated websites in it. For example, if I am in facebook container and I open google websites, it can switch the google tab to google container. There are so many things you can do with it.

fernandotakai 3y ago

as a pentadactly widow, i would recommend to anyone that is coming back to firefox tridactyl https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl is it the same? no. but is it close? hell yeah. it really helps me with productivity!

dz0ny 3y ago

I don't know but inspect tools just irritate me soo much in Firefox that I don't like to use the browser then at all. I started my career in Firefox and still remember you had to have an extension for debugging HTML, the editing style was fun and useful. My usage changed a lot from then, now I need: - Tracing graph for network events in Firefox which it does not have. - Applications tab that would show me the status of workers, cache ... is just plain in Firefox - And UI seems condensed, I guess I just got used to a more relaxed Chrome. - The whole debacle we don't want you to install a web app as a shortcut because it's bad for some reason. (They lost me initially with this years ago when I still had Linux). It's a shame but Firefox is just not what I need and prefer anymore.

trewqasdf 3y ago

It's nice to hear that they are not falling behind. I switched to Firefox after Opera started to decline. I rely heavily on multi-account containers, but it is a pity that they can't run their own engine on iOS. I have nothing against the dev tools in Firefox, but it is way easier to google issues for chrome dev tools.

lmizell 3y ago

I will always vouch for Firefox, It's been my primary browser since 2018 and there's no turning back. However its worth noting that while my FF windows experience has been painless I cannot say the same for Linux.

alcamech 3y ago
On Fedora, I usually have issues with video playback, wayland, and browser/tab crashes.

alexghr 3y ago

This is great to hear and I hope it will mean more people give Firefox a decent try! We need more people on alternative browsers in order to keep healthy competition between rendering engines. Firefox also handles lots of tabs really well and its Tab Containers plugin enables perfect separation of work tabs and personal tabs (I've got 1.4k tabs split across personal/work containers. I've got a problem, I know)

napo 3y ago

I'm a bit confused by the UI. Looks like the test is for windows. Did someone manage to test it for Linux and MacOS as well? (not sure what test we are supposed to use)

mgoetzke 3y ago

Sadly I cannot update Firefox anymore as any newer release would mean my other monitors would only show a black screen when looking at anything even remotely encoded with copy protection.

frou_dh 3y ago

It's kinda interesting that some of the younger amongst us might have only ever known Chrome through the lens of its meme-like reputation for being a big fat hog. Because when it was originally released like 15 years ago, the pitch/consensus were the exact opposite of that, i.e. ultra clean and efficient.

globular-toast 3y ago
As was Firefox (originally Pheonix, then Firebird), which was the ultra clean and efficient version of Mozilla. It was crazy how much better it was compared to IE6. It just didn't have a monopoly and anti-competitive marketing behind it like Chrome and IE did.
- EMM_386 3y ago
  Yep, I was a Pheonix user from the beginning in 2002 ... where you just unzipped it to a folder and ran it. I stuck with Firefox for literally 20 years, only caving in last year due to noticeable performance difference (went to Brave). But this news makes me want to try it again, I'd rather be using Firefox just to have another browser engine thriving. Competition is good.

pingec 3y ago

FF is great, only two things left I go to Chrome for are DevTools and watching Youtube (lower cpu usage, lower battery drain).

dh-g 3y ago
Youtube performance/reliability on OSX made me switch to Brave.
nateb2022 3y ago
Regarding battery drain, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1716164 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1716164 TL;DR: Firefox usually uses AV1. Hardware prior to intel 11th gen tiger lake, amd rdna2 (pre rtx 6000 series) and nvidia 3000 series has no hardware AV1 decoding support (and neither does Apple Silicon). This results in higher CPU usage on Firefox, whereas Safari and Chrome usually resort to codecs that have hardware decode support on the machine. This can easily be fixed by going to `about:config` and setting `media.av1.enabled` to false.

pdanpdan 3y ago

Does this require some special test environment (special OS, special builds of firefox/chrome)? Because for me chrome vs firefox (both 115) - ubuntu desktop: 148(+-2.2) vs 126(+-6.5) - android phone: 95.8(+-2.0) vs 78.5(+-4.3) So it looks like chrome is faster and delivers a more stable performance while firefox is slower and more inconsistent on performance

tekni5 3y ago
I get 260 for chrome & 160 for firefox on win 10.
gorhill 3y ago
Extensions can have a measurable effect on the benchmark, be sure both browsers have no extension, or the same extensions with the same configuration.
- pdanpdan 3y ago
  Chrome has ublock and very few others, Firefox only ublock I suppose it is about nightly 117
mccr8 3y ago
The linked graph is for Firefox Nightly (currently 117) running on Windows.
pdanpdan 3y ago
Small update: Firefox 117 on Android phone 75.4(+-6.4) so still there
jeffbee 3y ago
Adding my anecdotes: on an M2 mac mini - chrome 114: 472 ± 30 - firefox 115: 390 ± 22 - firefox 117: 420 ± 12

impoppy 3y ago

Chrome and Safari still feel way faster in normal usage though, as they try to predict the most likely page the user will open and start pre-loading it even before the user has pressed Enter. Firefox is my daily driver, but sometimes I use Safari for some specific cases and Safari certainly is stupidly fast compared to Firefox.

Sarkie 3y ago

Firefox is faster for our site* so we have suggested customers to use it. *Our site is shit.

izzydata 3y ago

I think it is finally time to de-google my digital footprint.

magicbuzz 3y ago

I just wish that Teams would load in a reasonable time on Firefox. It's a corporate enforced need and it takes minutes to load the web Teams version in Firefox. Microsoft seem not to treat Firefox as a legitimate web client.

hooby 3y ago

It would be really bad if everyone used Firefox - just as it would be very bad if everyone used Chrome (or even any other browser based on the same rendering engine). We all absolutely do benefit greatly from having multiple competing browsers and render engines - regardless of which one we individually prefer to use. Therefore I really don't understand the many, many, many "my-browser-is-better-than-yours-you-should-switch" comments in this thread here. Why's everyone trying to convince everyone else that they should use the one and only "best" browser too? What for? Are people truly that desperate for confirmation and validation, that they need others to agree on their choice of browser?

51Cards 3y ago
The problem is the percentage use is so unbalanced right now (IMO due to Google and Microsoft using their other platforms to drive installing their browsers) that I now run across sites that only function in Chrome properly. A lot of devs feel that "Eh, I've targeted the 90+%, why do the rest matter?" and that is how you hand control of web standards to Google. The usage ratio needs to be more balanced to prevent a browser monopoly, hence people trying to ensure there continues to be a choice.
- beej71 3y ago
  I regret I have but one thumbs-up to give this comment. It's important to have at least 2 healthy browsers (in market share). They keep each other honest, if I might put it so tersely. We all remember IE6, and were in danger territory again with the current percentages. For this reason, personally, Chrome would have to be 2x or more better than Firefox for me to consider switching to it. Do what you can to keep the market diverse. If the percentages were reversed, I'd absolutely be running Chromium or a variant.
LinuxBender 3y ago
Browser wars are almost as old as the internet. There was even a time when people would put little rectangle animated gifs at the bottom of their websites saying things like "Best viewed with Netscape!" or "MSIE SUX!" or "Best Viewed with MSIE!" and then after a while those evolved into memes and then they vanished. There would be flamewars on Usenet about which browser is better. It isn't just browsers. There's tabs-vs-spaces. Scripting language vs scripting language. Meat vs plants. I think this would be best answered by a psychologist. I am curious what the personal preference wars will look like in another 20 years. Maybe "Real human skin vs. synthetic skin on my LoveDroid!"

n_time 3y ago

I stopped using Firefox because it was killing my battery life. Also because I noticed more and more websites stopped supporting it and I just kind of gave up. I'm using Safari these days and it's fine.

pjmlp 3y ago

Great, however it will take more than that to get out of the 3% adoption. Everyone pushing Chrome and Electron apps will not suddenly adopt Firefox.

Zamicol 3y ago

I had to switch back to Firefox on desktop because Chrome has rendering bugs on Ubuntu. I use it infrequently, and noticed that Firefox has gotten much faster.

isodev 3y ago

Kind of a shame they didn't include Safari. But it's good to see Firefox has managed to climb to the second place.

agloe_dreams 3y ago
Heh, yeah I enjoy that this is the missing context. It really does show progress though for Firefox. It's like "The Cubs beat the Yankees in the World Series! (But the Astros actually won the World Series)"
- magicalist 3y ago
  Safari is slower, though? From the sibling comment: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAlerts=1&highlightChangelogData=1&highlightCommonAlerts=0&series=autoland,3924422,1,13&series=mozilla-central,4561128,1,13&series=mozilla-central,3736699,1,13&timerange=2592000 https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...
cpeterso 3y ago
Here are the Speedometer results for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari on macOS: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAlerts=1&highlightChangelogData=1&highlightCommonAlerts=0&series=autoland,3924422,1,13&series=mozilla-central,4561128,1,13&series=mozilla-central,3736699,1,13&timerange=2592000 https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...

junglistguy 3y ago

[dead]

seabass-labrax 3y ago

I love Firefox, but there's just one thing I miss from Chromium: run-in-background mode. My PinePhone has lots of memory but very slow IO, which means that Firefox can spend nearly twenty seconds loading. Once running, it'll load pages really quickly because local storage isn't involved. If there was a way of keeping a Firefox daemon running to instantly bring back a window, I would be very pleased indeed.

kevinlinxc 3y ago

Does anyone else use Firefox on Android and have the bug where any unassuming tab can become unresponsive when you leave and come back to it, to the point where opening a new tab is the only option?

neycoda 3y ago

Uh, I find this hard to believe considering Firefox still consistently runs slower in most ways for me than Chrome.

warabe 3y ago

I don't care about performance if differences are negligible enough. I support Firefox because competition makes market healthier. Current status of Manifest v.3 is a shining example.

jeroenhd 3y ago

That's very interesting! Last time I benchmarked Firefox, it performed half as fast as Chrome or Gnome's WebKit. I should run my benchmarks again! I do wonder though, is this performance improvement Windows specific? It's hard to believe that Mozilla could make up the difference in only three or four months. Edit: looks like Chromium still beats Firefox on Linux: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAlerts=1&highlightChangelogData=1&highlightCommonAlerts=0&series=autoland,3925511,1,13&series=mozilla-central,3744566,1,13&timerange=5184000 https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl... In fact, all benchmarks browsers seem between a quarter and a third slower on Linux in speedometer. That's strange, I wonder if this has to do with the limited availability of hardware acceleration?

return_to_monke 3y ago
I'd think that these improvements were started years ago but only now enabled
542458 3y ago
https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=60 https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6... Looks like it really depends on the benchmark. In some Firefox gets slaughtered, in some Firefox is the clear winner.
- foota 3y ago
  Some of these are score (higher is better) and some are time (lower is better) in case that wasn't clear.

Jochim 3y ago

Firefox has been my browser of choice since I switched from Internet Explorer as a child. However, I've found their refusal to implement or offer alternatives to WebSerial and screen-casting utterly depressing. It's made a number of tasks more difficult and inconvenient and makes Firefox a less useful tool overall. On the WebSerial discussion ticket, an educator articulates how this decision essentially forces what was a Firefox based classroom onto Chrome. I'll be sticking with Firefox but missing functionality drives users away. It doesn't help that their reasoning for not implementing WebSerial feels extremely paternalistic and runs counter to the ethos of user empowerment at the core of most open source projects.

RunSet 3y ago
"WebSerial" appears to me just another baby step in Chome's quest to become an OS. What is the justification for making everyone's browser able to "read from and write to serial devices"? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Serial_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Serial_... I know it is really for user fingerprinting but what is google's overt justification for pushing it?
- Jochim 3y ago
  Mozilla's argument isn't that you'll be tracked or fingerprinted. It's that you're too stupid to be permitted control over whether or not you want to allow access to devices you've connected to your machine. Rather than work to mitigate those risks, they've decided to hobble the utility of their browser. Personally, it would make flashing ESPHome devices much more convenient. Not having to switch browser for a start. The ability to plug a board into whatever PC on my LAN and just flash it, without having to install and maintain the entire toolchain is nice as well. More broadly, there are web based IDEs for microcontrollers. Arduino has one: https://docs.arduino.cc/learn/starting-guide/the-arduino-web-editor https://docs.arduino.cc/learn/starting-guide/the-arduino-web... A few of these are aimed at the education sector, removing a some of the significant barriers faced by educators that would otherwise have trouble getting the software installed and keeping it updated. In one of the discussions, someone was using it to help dental offices retrieve data from some specialised hardware. Browser support dealt with similar concerns of how to distribute the software to non-technical clients and keep it up to date. It was also something their clients understood, rather than something new.

panzi 3y ago

That's great. But Google Maps Street View (-> GeoGuessr) is still a slideshow under Firefox (Linux) for me. (I tried all the things under about:config) Really hope that gets fixed some day. On that day I will switch back. Really missing browser containers (well, I'm booting Firefox just for that, actually).

FalconSensei 3y ago

Nice, maybe someday I'll give it another chance. My main gripe is the UX for some things, and how some features seem half-baked. E.g.: to add a keyword for a search engine, it saves a bookmark, but there isn't (or wasn't) any way to filter for those later if you wanted to check what you had already created

nwienert 3y ago

I’ve got a landing page I’ve been working on that pushes the limits on things by overlapping all sorts of effects: WebGL, mix-blend-mode, clip-path, SVGs, overlapping animations on custom fonts, etc. Safari and Chrome run it surprisingly well. Firefox was getting basically 1fps. I had to turn off half the effects before it felt reasonable.

nateb2022 3y ago

I just benchmarked both Firefox and Chromium on my desktop using Speedometer 2.1. Each browser was configured as out of the box, with no extensions, and with a blank profile: FF (114.0.1): 101 +- 1.9 Chromium (114.0.5735.198): 94.5 +- 2.2 FF (115.0.2): 104 +- 2.4 Chromium (115.0.5790.90): 101 +- 2.6 Machine Specs: Intel i5-3470 @ 3.2 GHz, 16 GB DDR3, 128 GB SSD. Linux kernel 6.1.38 (latest longterm branch) on Arch.

kyledrake 3y ago

I use Firefox on my phone, it's the only one that allows me to block popups/ads/autoplay videos and disable javascript via add-ons when I need to, and the web is pretty much unusable without being able to do that now. Who cares if it's faster if you can't even load the content without it blocking your view with popups and trying to play videos without your consent before crashing?

rukshn 3y ago

My only suggestion is for FireFox to implement the native UI elements of the system (dropdowns, menus) etc. Than using something of their own. Where Chrome uses the system native UI elements. Is there a way to fix it with some tweeking?

bobbob1921 3y ago

Im also a recent to firefox from Chrome convert recently (win 11). My reason is UI latency related, and my used case is a tad unique. As a network engineer, and system administrator, my daily PC is very high end enterprise hardware and running windows 11, and has 8 x 4K monitors. I always will have 20 to 50 web browser windows open as well as many tabs in each of those windows. The main issue I was encountering, and my best guess, from a lot of testing over the past three years, is related to the large pixel count of my desktop - I would frequently encounter 1 to 2 seconds of lag/unresponsiveness when switching from chrome to another (chrome) application in the background. As this has been a nearly 3 year long issue, I’ve tried many , MANY fixes/work arounds The two most impactful were upgrading from windows 10 to windows 11. And switching from chrome from primarily using chrome to Firefox. (The issue was actually the same with chrome canary, as well as with GPU rendering enabled or disabled in each browser.) while I now run Firefox 24/7, I will occasionally open up chrome or chrome canary in unique use cases, and still notice the performance improvement in firefox during those times. (to be clear when I say I’ve tried and tested just about everything, I mean it from fresh new iOS installs with no applications, except chrome, two upgrading every piece of hardware a few times over) - the issue persisted.

azeirah 3y ago
8 x 4K monitors, I'm so jealous wow. I wish my work would give me even one, I'm developing on 2 full hd monitors :( I even do some design work so it's honestly pretty bad.
- bobbob1921 3y ago
  Thanks, to be fully accurate, it’s 6X 4K monitors normal orientation,, and 2x 2560p - 29 inch widescreen type monitors both rotated vertically , and touching each other (via one of those $60 or so floorstanding 40 inch tall dual monitor mounts from Amazon). I love my set up, I work for myself, and from home, so purchased it myself. The GPUs I use, used to be 2X Nvidia, P1000 Quadro. But as I was trying to troubleshoot this latency issue I was referring to I’ve upgraded to 2X Quadro, RTX 4000 GPUs. (Which actually made little difference/improvement to the issue). By the way, set ups like mine aren’t as expensive as you might think, you can get a nvidia Quadro P1000 or P2000 GPU on eBay for very inexpensive, as in around maybe 200 or less, each. I really don’t play games, the rare times I do it’s exclusively on my Xbox (so none of this is for gaming / gaming optimized) Edit: also, the 4K monitors are 30 inch in physical size, one might be 32-inch. This is very important I have found over the years (and going through many different monitors and resolutions to finally find the optimal set up for myself.) - 30 or 32 inch I have found is the sweet spot for 4K resolution. I don’t use any windows OS text size increase (or whatever the 100% 125% 150% thing is called, mine is set to 100%.)

demizer 3y ago

Firefox is the best. I wish Mozilla would let me donate funds specifically to fund it's development for my own peace of mind.

collinmanderson 3y ago

Firefox has 2.2% usage on US government websites according to https://analytics.usa.gov/ https://analytics.usa.gov/ If it falls below 2% it may lose official support on .gov websites according to https://designsystem.digital.gov/documentation/developers/#browser-support https://designsystem.digital.gov/documentation/developers/#b...

Soupy 3y ago

Been a firefox user since 2020 after switching from Chrome and haven't looked back. The only thing that I find myself missing is native casting support so that's the last piece that sometimes forces me to open up Chrome

tracker1 3y ago

Glad to see this, browsers have been mostly Chromium based for a while. Safari seems to be lagging a lot since the split, and I just don't like the Firefox UI as much. OT: Just curious... does anyone have a good cross-browser extension (chrome and FF browsers) that can sync the bookmarks, in particular the bookmark toolbar. I use a password manager (Bitwarden) that integrates well, wish I could get the same for the bookmarks toolbar.

unilynx 3y ago
I’ve tried to find something like this multiple time over the past years, but it seems browsers do their best to protect bookmarks from extensions It seems the only way are tools that directly edit each respective browsers setting files (ie from the command line) but I’d rather not go down that path.
- tracker1 3y ago
  Yeah... I'd been keeping my "source of truth" to my google account, so it's easy enough to export and import to other browsers... but trying to distance myself from the google account for everything. Found a couple extensions, so will probably export to be safe, then start playing to see how it goes.
- Propelloni 3y ago
  There used to be xbookmarks.com but it is long gone. There is an open source tool by the name of XBrowserSync [1] which came up when I searched for xbookmarks. What they say on their website sounds promising, but I did not do any further research or try it out. I'm on Firefox on all my devices ;) [1] https://www.xbrowsersync.org/ https://www.xbrowsersync.org/

bugmen0t 3y ago

The link is terrible. Maybe the article should link to https://arewefastyet.com https://arewefastyet.com or maybe the Speedometer selection at https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/raptor-desktop-speedometer?numDays=60 https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/raptor-desktop-spe...

twism 3y ago

I may bee the outlier here since everyone seems to gush about firefox every now and then on here ... but as a webdev firefox still feels second rate to me when it comes to PWA, Push Notifications, CSS animations (glitchy/graphics tearing) and a host of other things I test for browser compatibility

sedatk 3y ago

I think that because of the new "efficiency" initiatives at Microsoft, Edge is very bad compared to the others at handling web sites that need low latency and moderate execution speed (such as 3D demos, games, emulators, audio players). Edge on my 5950X + RTX3080 + 32GB RAM can't play some chiptune without glitching while Firefox can handle it like butter. Firefox's becoming a strong competitor every day.

andrewstuart 3y ago

Firefox is my main browser. No complaints.

jrnichols 3y ago

I've been a fan of Firefox for many years. Seems that those friends of mine still using Chrome are doing so because they are firmly trapped in the Googleverse. (gmail, YouTube, Google Docs, etc.) Firefox & its containers have been fantastic. Fast, stable, and I get the impression that security still matters.

torartc 3y ago

Firefox might be fast, but it's majorly lacking in browser APIs these days.

osdril 3y ago

I use Safari as my primary browser, only for its tab groups implementation. In my opinion they just nailed it, I think it's much better than the Chrome one. I would really like to switch to Firefox as I prefer it in every other way, but I don't think I will move until they offer a robust native tab group implementation (I've tried Simple Tab Groups but I don't want to rely on a hacky extension for such a core functionality).

Havoc 3y ago

I’ll stick to FF for lack of manifest 3 alone. Adblocking is superior of ff as a result…and that affects my experience more than a microsecond diff either way

merdaverse 3y ago

I have considered making the switch, but on Ubuntu touch screen is poorly implemented as mouse clicks instead of touch events. Chromium sidesteps this by doing its own touch detection, allowing me to comfortably browse through pages with touch. Firefox does not. Until either Firefox or Linux starts taking touchscreens on desktop seriously I will stick to Chrome, and in desperate times, Windows.

juanefren 3y ago

The only thing it prevents me for using Firefox is it's XML viewer, clicking on text collapses nodes, it makes copying text very hard. I haven't found a workaround for this.

tortoise_in 3y ago

Now wish they are allowed to have their own webview and Android don't allow to block it

tempaccount420 3y ago

Firefox is great, Mozilla on the other hand...

cosmojg 3y ago

I find that, in every domain, second place is almost always superior to first place where it counts despite being somewhat rougher around the edges. Firefox is a particularly excellent example of this phenomenon. Why is that? Just good old-fashioned competitive optimization?

MrBra 3y ago

Ok, now take the number of years during which Firefox was slower and calculate an averaged value of its speed. This will account for all the frustration it would have caused switching to it in the past. Being faster for 2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months, and probably even for 2 years wouldn't be enough to cause a big change in that averaged value. And that would also measure how much of a guarateed good choice would be switching to Firefox right now. As soon as it will stay faster for enough time to smooth out the differences then I'll start consider using it. I've been a Firefox advocate and user for many years, but then about 6 years ago I had to face the hard truth of how bad it performed with lots of tabs open, and how much of a pain I was causing myself for not switching to a Chromium powered browser. About one month ago, I've checked it out again under the same conditions... and sadly it's still not even close to competitors' memory management.