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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,

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.
  - everybodyknows 3y ago
    What cripples FF DevTools for me is being unable to find the setting for timeout on HTTP GET, during full-stack development. If I've set a breakpoint in a debugger on my server and proceed to single-step there, FF aborts the GET request with an error. So client-side JS doesn't see the eventual result of the GET, it has to recover from the error to proceed, e.g. by a full page-reload. Chromium, last I tried it, by default sets the necessary HTTP timeout(s) to infinity if its DevTools is open. My searches of Firefox docs/wiki, StackExchange, HN Algolia for a fix have come up empty. Navigating to "about:config" and searching for "timeout" finds 27 different settings prefixed with the substring "network". Some are obviously in units of milliseconds, others perhaps whole seconds. Anyone know which one (or what combination) might incant the necessary black magic?
  - square_usual 3y ago
    I really like that the Chrome profiler shows you the profile right there. Firefox insists on opening the profile in a browser tab. This is fine, but is an unnecessary context switch for me.
- dylan604 3y ago
  I use the FF devtools daily, and for what I'm working on, it has everything I need to help me get the things I need done. Knowing that I'm not everyone and have plenty to learn, what things are missing from the devtools for you?
  - tashoecraft 3y ago
    The only issue I have (which, is happening less and less lately) is my debugger doesn't jump to the source. It hits and everything pauses, but I don't get routed to it and have to start progressing just to get it to work, which can make the debugger useless as you've gone past what you were looking at. This has happened across machines for years for me, and happens much less in chrome. But doesn't happen enough for me to switch.
  - Jochim 3y ago
    I use FF and prefer the devtools. Chrome's ability to temporarily edit and save changes to JS sources through the debugger editor is fantastic though. Other than that it's mostly just improvements to what FF already has. Search could be made much more useful, especially network requests. Searching all request bodies/responses for a particular string/json/regex would be a huge step up. You can search the response of individual requests but there's a UI bug that makes it look like your filter is no longer applied when you select the next one in the list.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      >Chrome's ability to temporarily edit and save changes to JS sources through the debugger editor is fantastic though. Does this affect the live code so the change is available immediately? I once had a thought about wondering if this was possible to have the change available without refreshing
      - Jochim 3y ago
        As far as I know, you have to reload the page sadly.
- markandrewj 3y ago
  Give Firefox Developer Edition a try, if haven't already, and are looking for more robust development tools.
  - dns_snek 3y ago
    What are the differences compared to regular Firefox?
    - markandrewj 3y ago
      Firefox Developer Edition is targeted towards developers, and contains the latest development tools available. New features also land quicker, as it is built against Firefox beta.
  - frabcus 3y ago
    Looking at https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/developer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/developer/ I'm a bit confused... Which features are just new features which will soon be in the main Firefox DevTools, and which are specific to installing the Developer Edition?
    - cpeterso 3y ago
      AFAIK, Firefox Developer Edition is currently just a repackaging of Firefox Beta and doesn’t have different devtools. It used to be a rebranding of Firefox Aurora (an alpha release channel between Firefox Nightly and Beta, now retired) with a different theme and a few different devtool setting changes.
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    Maybe I was just unlucky, but the one time I tried it, it refused to launch. I'd rather not have my professional work tools be built against a beta channel when there are better alternatives.
    - markandrewj 3y ago
- tgv 3y ago
  Me too. I'm using FF since 3.6, and before that Camino (a derived version for the mac), and the only thing Google has done is strengthen my resolve to keep using Firefox, but I still prefer to debug on Chrome (well, Chromium). It just feels better, even though it's starting to slip and FF is improving slowly.
systems_glitch 3y ago
I used to keep Chrome installed just for the dev tools, but the Firefox dev tools became good enough in probably 2013 or so.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Firefox gave birth to the first good dev tools as an extension IIRC
  - ttfkam 3y ago
    Yep, Firebug
  - HeckFeck 3y ago
    A testament to how open its old extension API was.
    - asadotzler 3y ago
      The Firefox extension API (which wasn't an API really at all when it was first used) was created to support cases like the DOM Inspector and others which abused Mozilla's XPInstall and XUL overlays (both created for other purposes) to invent extensions. The same people that created the APIs were the same people building those extensions (see Joe Hewitt for Firefox and DOMI and later Firebug.)
  - i_am_jl 3y ago
    You're definitely right. I'll go even further; As I remember it Chrome Dev Tools pretty much copied Firebug's homework in terms of UI and feature set.
  - LunaSea 3y ago
    And then completely lost the plot and has been behind Chrome for the last ten years.
- netule 3y ago
  I still keep Chrome installed for some sites that are just excruciatingly slow on FF like FoundryVTT and some video sites.
Kholin 3y ago
For me, Firefox performs better on Linux than on Windows.
- nateb2022 3y ago
  This is true of a lot of things.
  - cpeterso 3y ago
    For example, Mozilla compiles Firefox’s official macOS and Windows builds on Linux because cross-compilation is faster and cheaper than compiling on macOS or Windows in the cloud.
  - chasil 3y ago
    Windows does not fork processes as fast as Linux, although this is improved somewhat in the in the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Here is a somewhat foolish test with a shell script, that forks "/bin/true" 10 million times. C:\>busybox sh ~ $ echo 'x=10000000; while [ $x -gt 0 ]; do true; x=$((x-1)); done' > timetest ~ $ time sh timetest real 0m 46.86s user 0m 46.76s sys 0m 0.04s Here is the same test with Debian's dash shell, one of the fastest: $ cat timetest x=10000000; while [ $x -gt 0 ]; do true; x=$((x-1)); done $ time dash timetest 0m33.79s real 0m33.50s user 0m0.05s system Not a great test, but there is quite a difference there.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Until one needs to watch YouTube videos.
toastal 3y ago
Fx provided a decent enough performance boost with its builtin tracking blocker that more than made up for any difference in real world scenarios. …But I never switch away from Gecko since Fx v2.x.
- copperx 3y ago
  What is Fx? An extension?
  - toastal 3y ago
    “Fx” is and basically has always been (v1.5) the official abbreviation for “Firefox”. This abbreviation is basically the only one used inside Mozilla & you can see it reflected in their project names to this day. > How do I capitalize Firefox? How do I abbreviate it? > Only the first letter is capitalized (so it's Firefox, not FireFox.) The preferred abbreviation is "Fx" or "fx". – Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Release Notes, https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_releasenotes/en-us/firefox/releases/1.5#FAQ https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...
alpaca128 3y ago
Same. Recently I tried Brave because of all the praise but turns out the browser can only display around 80 tabs on the tab bar and every further tab simply never shows up even if it's in the foreground. I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better. I'm staying with Firefox, though I think Brave is probably still a good recommendation for users that don't want to go through the effort of installing an ad blocker. Edit: so I just looked and it turns out you can enable tab bar scrolling on chrome://flags/#scrollable-tabstrip. Why is that even disabled by default?
- andybak 3y ago
  > I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better. It's my understanding that on mobile, tabs are unloaded from memory nearly instantly. You lose state but they use almost no resources. (I wish this was an option out of the box on Desktop. I've had extensions that do this and it's a godsend)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - NavinF 3y ago
    Chrome already does that by default: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/chrome-110-will-automatically-discard-background-tabs-heres-how-to-stop-it/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/chrome-110-will-auto...
    - seba_dos1 3y ago
      Firefox did for about two years now: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/unload-inactive-tabs-save-system-memory-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/unload-inactive-tabs-sa...
    - andybak 3y ago
      That seems like a good way to lose work if you're not careful. Although I would also argue that any well-designed web app should be able to handle this gracefully so maybe it will lead to better web apps. Infinite scroll is an especially bad offender here. If I'm 50 screens down on an infinite scroll that is work and a page refresh losing my place should be treated as a data-loss bug. (an even better idea is not to use infinite scroll at all)
terafo 3y ago
Firefox is slower for me than Chrome, but that's because I have tab hoarding problem(2k tabs in Firefox right now).
- guillim85 3y ago
  Close them all today. It will feel weird for like 1 hour, but you will feel much better after.
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    >It will feel weird for like 1 hour, but you will feel much better after. Yeah, because he'll be back to up hundreds of tabs again.
    - entropicdrifter 3y ago
      An order of magnitude reduction in unnecessary bloat is fantastic
- rileymat2 3y ago
  It seems like we need a better solution, between bookmarking and offline websites on disk, it feels like there is a better way.
  - ElectricalUnion 3y ago
    Pocket is builtin to Firefox, but in my experience, searching something you saved to Pocket (a thing that should be pretty core to the Pocket product) sucks and you really need simonw's https://github.com/dogsheep/pocket-to-sqlite https://github.com/dogsheep/pocket-to-sqlite to actually search it.
- penguin_booze 3y ago
  On each tab, towards the right, you'll seen an X. If you click that, you can close a tab. Alternatively, you can use Ctrl-W keyboard shortcut. (Sorry!)
aidenn0 3y ago
Firefox's GC seems to be much slower than chromium at least as of 109. Certain Vue websites are rather prolific in their garbage generation and The performance difference between chromium and firefox is easily noticeable, particularly if you leave an SPA open for a while.
- tapper 3y ago
  We are on firefox 115 now mate.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    That's why I qualified the version.
- jonco217 3y ago
  Can you point me at an example of this?
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  If you notice these issues, it can help to file bug reports.
kenniskrag 3y ago
TL;DR: Windows Defender had a bug that made certain system calls expensive on CPU cycles when Defender's Real-time Protection feature is enabled. After discovery, Mozilla reported this issue to Microsoft. Microsoft is releasing a patch that should result in lower CPU usage when using Firefox on sites like YouTube (a ~75% CPU usage reduction was noted when browsing YouTube in Firefox with the fixed version of Defender). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35458746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35458746
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
beltsazar 3y ago
I switched to Firefox from Chrome years ago because Chrome was slower. Specially, when there were many tabs opened, switching tabs in Chrome were usually prefaced with a blank white screen for about 2 seconds. I've been staying with Firefox not for the performance (today Chrome loads Google sites like YouTube faster), but mainly for Tree Style Tab extension. I couldn't imagine opening more than a dozen of tabs without it.
- generalizations 3y ago
  That's pretty much the reason for me as well. The day some other browser makes tree-style tabs, firefox will probably lose a user.
  - sp332 3y ago
    Edge has had vertical tabs with tab groups natively for a couple years now. It also has a nice Reader mode, good text-to-speech, and a screenshot tool built in. And it supports uBlock Origin as an add on.
    - generalizations 3y ago
      Yeah, that's not the same, or even functionally close. Just a superficial resemblance. The value of tree style tabs is that you don't manually organize anything, and the tabs are nested arbitrarily deep so that you literally end up with a hierarchical tree of tabs that shows you the logical view of your browsing history with no manual input on your part. (Note the comparison to edge has been made before, which is why I specifically said tree-style tabs, not vertical tabs.)
  - kevinlinxc 3y ago
    Longtime ff user, I use "Tab Groups Extension" for Chrome at work where ff is not allowed
    - purerandomness 3y ago
      What kind of work allows Chrome, but not Firefox? Google?
zamalek 3y ago
> much better performance under high load. Massive GitHub PRs can refuse to load in chromium-based browsers. Firefox renders them effortlessly.
JshWright 3y ago
I’d love for Firefox to be my daily driver, but I just can’t give up the quality of life improvement I get from TouchID based WebAuthn.
shmolf 3y ago
> clearly offers superior functionality I think it's worth mentioning the caveat, that it doesn't natively support PWA in the same way WebKit browsers do. It has little to no support (depending on your definition of support).
- entropicdrifter 3y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-firefox/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-fire... Works fine for me on Linux Mint 21.1 I also use Firefox for Android and that does natively support PWAs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps/Guides/Making_PWAs_installable#browser_support https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
SomeHacker44 3y ago
The thing that I really like in Chrome (which I use for work) is Tab Groups. There is nothing like it for Firefox. Even the "Simple Tab Groups" extension, which is well liked, cannot do the simple "grouping" of tabs in a larger window - it simply hides all the tabs that are not in current use (which defeats the purpose of tab groups, I can just use windows for that). Another thing that Chrome has is the ability to name individual windows for easy Alt-Tabbing. Shame that Firefox doesn't have these things (that I know of).
- jzoch 3y ago
  Honestly you are the first person I’ve ever heard that prefers chromes tab system. Check out tree style tabs it’ll change your life. I hate chrome now solely due to it
  - paranoidxprod 3y ago
    I recently started using Sidebery over TST and found it much more customizable for how I use tabs. It's worth taking a look at if you haven't already.
    - beltsazar 3y ago
      Is there any kind of migration process from TST if I move to Sidebery? I don't want to lose my current tree structures in TST.
    - SomeHacker44 3y ago
      I installed it to see. I don't want something on the "side" - I want the tab organization to be on the top where the tabs ordinarily live anyway. That's what the Chrome tab groups does well. I can just visually see which tabs are grouped together, and collapse all of them.
  - unaindz 3y ago
    This! But also check out sidebery, in my opinion is much better in every way to tree style
Semaphor 3y ago
That is what always irks me when people (usually only on here) say FF should have stayed with xpi and their old architecture. Only after all those changes did FF finally become performant enough for me to use it again, before it was a slow drag to me. And I know, people with limited resources would have had a different experience, I don't know, I never had RAM issues. With enough RAM, FF was noticably slower than chrome.
tmvnty 3y ago
I have never doubted the performance of Firefox. There’s a really old computer sitting in my house, never updated it for almost a decade now and my parents occasionally use it. The Chrome on it kept getting slower and laggier, while the Firefox always work fine. At some point, I just removed Chrome and told my parents to use Firefox: “the red fox is the Internet”
- wredue 3y ago
  Well. Chrome definitely lit a fire under Firefox, and that’s saying something because, at the time chrome came out, Firefox was “fast”. I switched to chrome early on for the speed benefits. At some point, Firefox started getting pretty close. Albeit not on parity with chrome, but chrome started major spying oriented pushes. So the minor loss in speed was worth it. Now chrome could never win me back anyway. Google is evil.
BizarroLand 3y ago
I also like that Firefox isn't putting artificial limitations on the plugins that we can use in order to appease their infinite hunger for ad revenue. Chrome's manifest v3's entire purpose for existence is to ultimately snuff out ad blockers so they can make the internet worse for everyone and get more money in the process. And if you don't believe me then you are wrong. Of course they won't do it immediately. They won't entirely rug pull their browser's user base. They'll just keep raising the bar to get approved for Chrome Store, making it harder and harder to comply with their extension requirements while also changing the way they deliver their ads. This way the ad blockers have to be updated and then go back through the extension store review process until the developers either get tired of jumping through their hoops and gives up or until they can no longer afford to keep the extension alive. And then they'll rug pull, just like Reddit and Twitter, and all of a sudden ad blocking extensions will require that the users pay Google for the privilege of having fewer ads while still letting some ads through anyway, and that will be that. Best to jump ship now, things are nice and cozy over here in "user wants are respected within reason" land.
- hackinthebochs 3y ago
  Edge provides a compelling alternative that is a drop-in replacement for Chrome for most users. I wonder if the competition will keep Google in check. I also wonder if Edge will end up providing its own ad-blocker if Google's restrictions become too onerous. Probably easier than forking the core browser to maintain a parallel build without the extension limitations.
  - BizarroLand 3y ago
    AFAIK all chromium based browsers will follow Manifest V3. Edge will also as otherwise adblockers and the like would impact M$ revenue. Manifest v3 is just everyone's get out of jail free card for not being responsible for the destruction of ad blocking and privacy extensions. Blame it on Google, who says they "had to do it" for some reason that ultimately profits them and their ilk to the detriment of humanity.
- charcircuit 3y ago
theusus 3y ago
Yeah, while people here used to complain about it. But whenever I went to Chrome(or derivatives) on desktop. I experienced poor performance. Firefox has been very smooth since couple of years. Mobile has to catch-up though.
rat_on_the_run 3y ago
I tested Chrome and Firefox about 1 week ago. On about 30 tabs, Firefox uses about 1G more RAM than Chrome. Their speed is difference is unnoticeable. I also tested Edge and Vivaldi for RAM usage. The result is Chrome < Edge < Firefox < Vivaldi.
- bjoli 3y ago
  Those results say nothing. Were you RAM-constrained? When I am not, I have found that Firefox tries to use more memory. If I use Firefox while also having 3 VMs running and compiling stuff it stays down, whereas if I don't it easily starts using over 4gb (i have 64).
throwaway914 3y ago
No other browser has something like container tabs. Temporary Containers is an excellent extension to make each new tab its own isolated browser session too. First Party Isolation is 1 thing, but Chrome cannot do containers.
- rpgbr 3y ago
  Safari will get that feature in iOS 17/macOS Sonoma.
  - throwaway914 3y ago
    I am not in the Mac ecosystem, but that is good to hear :-)
ksec 3y ago
Partly because Chrome got a lot slower over time compared to its initial release. When everything was snappy.
jredwards 3y ago
I went back to Firefox about 2 years ago. Zero regrets.

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.
- everybodyknows 3y ago
  What cripples FF DevTools for me is being unable to find the setting for timeout on HTTP GET, during full-stack development. If I've set a breakpoint in a debugger on my server and proceed to single-step there, FF aborts the GET request with an error. So client-side JS doesn't see the eventual result of the GET, it has to recover from the error to proceed, e.g. by a full page-reload. Chromium, last I tried it, by default sets the necessary HTTP timeout(s) to infinity if its DevTools is open. My searches of Firefox docs/wiki, StackExchange, HN Algolia for a fix have come up empty. Navigating to "about:config" and searching for "timeout" finds 27 different settings prefixed with the substring "network". Some are obviously in units of milliseconds, others perhaps whole seconds. Anyone know which one (or what combination) might incant the necessary black magic?
- square_usual 3y ago
  I really like that the Chrome profiler shows you the profile right there. Firefox insists on opening the profile in a browser tab. This is fine, but is an unnecessary context switch for me.
dylan604 3y ago
I use the FF devtools daily, and for what I'm working on, it has everything I need to help me get the things I need done. Knowing that I'm not everyone and have plenty to learn, what things are missing from the devtools for you?
- tashoecraft 3y ago
  The only issue I have (which, is happening less and less lately) is my debugger doesn't jump to the source. It hits and everything pauses, but I don't get routed to it and have to start progressing just to get it to work, which can make the debugger useless as you've gone past what you were looking at. This has happened across machines for years for me, and happens much less in chrome. But doesn't happen enough for me to switch.
- Jochim 3y ago
  I use FF and prefer the devtools. Chrome's ability to temporarily edit and save changes to JS sources through the debugger editor is fantastic though. Other than that it's mostly just improvements to what FF already has. Search could be made much more useful, especially network requests. Searching all request bodies/responses for a particular string/json/regex would be a huge step up. You can search the response of individual requests but there's a UI bug that makes it look like your filter is no longer applied when you select the next one in the list.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    >Chrome's ability to temporarily edit and save changes to JS sources through the debugger editor is fantastic though. Does this affect the live code so the change is available immediately? I once had a thought about wondering if this was possible to have the change available without refreshing
    - Jochim 3y ago
      As far as I know, you have to reload the page sadly.
markandrewj 3y ago
Give Firefox Developer Edition a try, if haven't already, and are looking for more robust development tools.
- dns_snek 3y ago
  What are the differences compared to regular Firefox?
  - markandrewj 3y ago
    Firefox Developer Edition is targeted towards developers, and contains the latest development tools available. New features also land quicker, as it is built against Firefox beta.
- frabcus 3y ago
  Looking at https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/developer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/developer/ I'm a bit confused... Which features are just new features which will soon be in the main Firefox DevTools, and which are specific to installing the Developer Edition?
  - cpeterso 3y ago
    AFAIK, Firefox Developer Edition is currently just a repackaging of Firefox Beta and doesn’t have different devtools. It used to be a rebranding of Firefox Aurora (an alpha release channel between Firefox Nightly and Beta, now retired) with a different theme and a few different devtool setting changes.
- zdragnar 3y ago
  Maybe I was just unlucky, but the one time I tried it, it refused to launch. I'd rather not have my professional work tools be built against a beta channel when there are better alternatives.
  - markandrewj 3y ago
tgv 3y ago
Me too. I'm using FF since 3.6, and before that Camino (a derived version for the mac), and the only thing Google has done is strengthen my resolve to keep using Firefox, but I still prefer to debug on Chrome (well, Chromium). It just feels better, even though it's starting to slip and FF is improving slowly.

systems_glitch 3y ago

I used to keep Chrome installed just for the dev tools, but the Firefox dev tools became good enough in probably 2013 or so.

quickthrower2 3y ago
Firefox gave birth to the first good dev tools as an extension IIRC
- ttfkam 3y ago
  Yep, Firebug
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  A testament to how open its old extension API was.
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    The Firefox extension API (which wasn't an API really at all when it was first used) was created to support cases like the DOM Inspector and others which abused Mozilla's XPInstall and XUL overlays (both created for other purposes) to invent extensions. The same people that created the APIs were the same people building those extensions (see Joe Hewitt for Firefox and DOMI and later Firebug.)
- i_am_jl 3y ago
  You're definitely right. I'll go even further; As I remember it Chrome Dev Tools pretty much copied Firebug's homework in terms of UI and feature set.
- LunaSea 3y ago
  And then completely lost the plot and has been behind Chrome for the last ten years.
netule 3y ago
I still keep Chrome installed for some sites that are just excruciatingly slow on FF like FoundryVTT and some video sites.

Kholin 3y ago

For me, Firefox performs better on Linux than on Windows.

nateb2022 3y ago
This is true of a lot of things.
- cpeterso 3y ago
  For example, Mozilla compiles Firefox’s official macOS and Windows builds on Linux because cross-compilation is faster and cheaper than compiling on macOS or Windows in the cloud.
- chasil 3y ago
  Windows does not fork processes as fast as Linux, although this is improved somewhat in the in the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Here is a somewhat foolish test with a shell script, that forks "/bin/true" 10 million times. C:\>busybox sh ~ $ echo 'x=10000000; while [ $x -gt 0 ]; do true; x=$((x-1)); done' > timetest ~ $ time sh timetest real 0m 46.86s user 0m 46.76s sys 0m 0.04s Here is the same test with Debian's dash shell, one of the fastest: $ cat timetest x=10000000; while [ $x -gt 0 ]; do true; x=$((x-1)); done $ time dash timetest 0m33.79s real 0m33.50s user 0m0.05s system Not a great test, but there is quite a difference there.
pjmlp 3y ago
Until one needs to watch YouTube videos.

toastal 3y ago

Fx provided a decent enough performance boost with its builtin tracking blocker that more than made up for any difference in real world scenarios. …But I never switch away from Gecko since Fx v2.x.

copperx 3y ago
What is Fx? An extension?
- toastal 3y ago
  “Fx” is and basically has always been (v1.5) the official abbreviation for “Firefox”. This abbreviation is basically the only one used inside Mozilla & you can see it reflected in their project names to this day. > How do I capitalize Firefox? How do I abbreviate it? > Only the first letter is capitalized (so it's Firefox, not FireFox.) The preferred abbreviation is "Fx" or "fx". – Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Release Notes, https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_releasenotes/en-us/firefox/releases/1.5#FAQ https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...

alpaca128 3y ago

Same. Recently I tried Brave because of all the praise but turns out the browser can only display around 80 tabs on the tab bar and every further tab simply never shows up even if it's in the foreground. I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better. I'm staying with Firefox, though I think Brave is probably still a good recommendation for users that don't want to go through the effort of installing an ad blocker. Edit: so I just looked and it turns out you can enable tab bar scrolling on chrome://flags/#scrollable-tabstrip. Why is that even disabled by default?

andybak 3y ago
> I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better. It's my understanding that on mobile, tabs are unloaded from memory nearly instantly. You lose state but they use almost no resources. (I wish this was an option out of the box on Desktop. I've had extensions that do this and it's a godsend)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- NavinF 3y ago
  Chrome already does that by default: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/chrome-110-will-automatically-discard-background-tabs-heres-how-to-stop-it/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/chrome-110-will-auto...
  - seba_dos1 3y ago
    Firefox did for about two years now: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/unload-inactive-tabs-save-system-memory-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/unload-inactive-tabs-sa...
  - andybak 3y ago
    That seems like a good way to lose work if you're not careful. Although I would also argue that any well-designed web app should be able to handle this gracefully so maybe it will lead to better web apps. Infinite scroll is an especially bad offender here. If I'm 50 screens down on an infinite scroll that is work and a page refresh losing my place should be treated as a data-loss bug. (an even better idea is not to use infinite scroll at all)

terafo 3y ago

Firefox is slower for me than Chrome, but that's because I have tab hoarding problem(2k tabs in Firefox right now).

guillim85 3y ago
Close them all today. It will feel weird for like 1 hour, but you will feel much better after.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  >It will feel weird for like 1 hour, but you will feel much better after. Yeah, because he'll be back to up hundreds of tabs again.
  - entropicdrifter 3y ago
    An order of magnitude reduction in unnecessary bloat is fantastic
rileymat2 3y ago
It seems like we need a better solution, between bookmarking and offline websites on disk, it feels like there is a better way.
- ElectricalUnion 3y ago
  Pocket is builtin to Firefox, but in my experience, searching something you saved to Pocket (a thing that should be pretty core to the Pocket product) sucks and you really need simonw's https://github.com/dogsheep/pocket-to-sqlite https://github.com/dogsheep/pocket-to-sqlite to actually search it.
penguin_booze 3y ago
On each tab, towards the right, you'll seen an X. If you click that, you can close a tab. Alternatively, you can use Ctrl-W keyboard shortcut. (Sorry!)

aidenn0 3y ago

Firefox's GC seems to be much slower than chromium at least as of 109. Certain Vue websites are rather prolific in their garbage generation and The performance difference between chromium and firefox is easily noticeable, particularly if you leave an SPA open for a while.

tapper 3y ago
We are on firefox 115 now mate.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  That's why I qualified the version.
jonco217 3y ago
Can you point me at an example of this?
heavyset_go 3y ago
If you notice these issues, it can help to file bug reports.

kenniskrag 3y ago

TL;DR: Windows Defender had a bug that made certain system calls expensive on CPU cycles when Defender's Real-time Protection feature is enabled. After discovery, Mozilla reported this issue to Microsoft. Microsoft is releasing a patch that should result in lower CPU usage when using Firefox on sites like YouTube (a ~75% CPU usage reduction was noted when browsing YouTube in Firefox with the fixed version of Defender). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35458746 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35458746

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

beltsazar 3y ago

I switched to Firefox from Chrome years ago because Chrome was slower. Specially, when there were many tabs opened, switching tabs in Chrome were usually prefaced with a blank white screen for about 2 seconds. I've been staying with Firefox not for the performance (today Chrome loads Google sites like YouTube faster), but mainly for Tree Style Tab extension. I couldn't imagine opening more than a dozen of tabs without it.

generalizations 3y ago
That's pretty much the reason for me as well. The day some other browser makes tree-style tabs, firefox will probably lose a user.
- sp332 3y ago
  Edge has had vertical tabs with tab groups natively for a couple years now. It also has a nice Reader mode, good text-to-speech, and a screenshot tool built in. And it supports uBlock Origin as an add on.
  - generalizations 3y ago
    Yeah, that's not the same, or even functionally close. Just a superficial resemblance. The value of tree style tabs is that you don't manually organize anything, and the tabs are nested arbitrarily deep so that you literally end up with a hierarchical tree of tabs that shows you the logical view of your browsing history with no manual input on your part. (Note the comparison to edge has been made before, which is why I specifically said tree-style tabs, not vertical tabs.)
- kevinlinxc 3y ago
  Longtime ff user, I use "Tab Groups Extension" for Chrome at work where ff is not allowed
  - purerandomness 3y ago
    What kind of work allows Chrome, but not Firefox? Google?

zamalek 3y ago

> much better performance under high load. Massive GitHub PRs can refuse to load in chromium-based browsers. Firefox renders them effortlessly.

JshWright 3y ago

I’d love for Firefox to be my daily driver, but I just can’t give up the quality of life improvement I get from TouchID based WebAuthn.

shmolf 3y ago

> clearly offers superior functionality I think it's worth mentioning the caveat, that it doesn't natively support PWA in the same way WebKit browsers do. It has little to no support (depending on your definition of support).

entropicdrifter 3y ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-firefox/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-fire... Works fine for me on Linux Mint 21.1 I also use Firefox for Android and that does natively support PWAs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps/Guides/Making_PWAs_installable#browser_support https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...

SomeHacker44 3y ago

The thing that I really like in Chrome (which I use for work) is Tab Groups. There is nothing like it for Firefox. Even the "Simple Tab Groups" extension, which is well liked, cannot do the simple "grouping" of tabs in a larger window - it simply hides all the tabs that are not in current use (which defeats the purpose of tab groups, I can just use windows for that). Another thing that Chrome has is the ability to name individual windows for easy Alt-Tabbing. Shame that Firefox doesn't have these things (that I know of).

jzoch 3y ago
Honestly you are the first person I’ve ever heard that prefers chromes tab system. Check out tree style tabs it’ll change your life. I hate chrome now solely due to it
- paranoidxprod 3y ago
  I recently started using Sidebery over TST and found it much more customizable for how I use tabs. It's worth taking a look at if you haven't already.
  - beltsazar 3y ago
    Is there any kind of migration process from TST if I move to Sidebery? I don't want to lose my current tree structures in TST.
  - SomeHacker44 3y ago
    I installed it to see. I don't want something on the "side" - I want the tab organization to be on the top where the tabs ordinarily live anyway. That's what the Chrome tab groups does well. I can just visually see which tabs are grouped together, and collapse all of them.
- unaindz 3y ago
  This! But also check out sidebery, in my opinion is much better in every way to tree style

Semaphor 3y ago

That is what always irks me when people (usually only on here) say FF should have stayed with xpi and their old architecture. Only after all those changes did FF finally become performant enough for me to use it again, before it was a slow drag to me. And I know, people with limited resources would have had a different experience, I don't know, I never had RAM issues. With enough RAM, FF was noticably slower than chrome.

tmvnty 3y ago

I have never doubted the performance of Firefox. There’s a really old computer sitting in my house, never updated it for almost a decade now and my parents occasionally use it. The Chrome on it kept getting slower and laggier, while the Firefox always work fine. At some point, I just removed Chrome and told my parents to use Firefox: “the red fox is the Internet”

wredue 3y ago
Well. Chrome definitely lit a fire under Firefox, and that’s saying something because, at the time chrome came out, Firefox was “fast”. I switched to chrome early on for the speed benefits. At some point, Firefox started getting pretty close. Albeit not on parity with chrome, but chrome started major spying oriented pushes. So the minor loss in speed was worth it. Now chrome could never win me back anyway. Google is evil.

BizarroLand 3y ago

I also like that Firefox isn't putting artificial limitations on the plugins that we can use in order to appease their infinite hunger for ad revenue. Chrome's manifest v3's entire purpose for existence is to ultimately snuff out ad blockers so they can make the internet worse for everyone and get more money in the process. And if you don't believe me then you are wrong. Of course they won't do it immediately. They won't entirely rug pull their browser's user base. They'll just keep raising the bar to get approved for Chrome Store, making it harder and harder to comply with their extension requirements while also changing the way they deliver their ads. This way the ad blockers have to be updated and then go back through the extension store review process until the developers either get tired of jumping through their hoops and gives up or until they can no longer afford to keep the extension alive. And then they'll rug pull, just like Reddit and Twitter, and all of a sudden ad blocking extensions will require that the users pay Google for the privilege of having fewer ads while still letting some ads through anyway, and that will be that. Best to jump ship now, things are nice and cozy over here in "user wants are respected within reason" land.

hackinthebochs 3y ago
Edge provides a compelling alternative that is a drop-in replacement for Chrome for most users. I wonder if the competition will keep Google in check. I also wonder if Edge will end up providing its own ad-blocker if Google's restrictions become too onerous. Probably easier than forking the core browser to maintain a parallel build without the extension limitations.
- BizarroLand 3y ago
  AFAIK all chromium based browsers will follow Manifest V3. Edge will also as otherwise adblockers and the like would impact M$ revenue. Manifest v3 is just everyone's get out of jail free card for not being responsible for the destruction of ad blocking and privacy extensions. Blame it on Google, who says they "had to do it" for some reason that ultimately profits them and their ilk to the detriment of humanity.
charcircuit 3y ago

theusus 3y ago

Yeah, while people here used to complain about it. But whenever I went to Chrome(or derivatives) on desktop. I experienced poor performance. Firefox has been very smooth since couple of years. Mobile has to catch-up though.

rat_on_the_run 3y ago

I tested Chrome and Firefox about 1 week ago. On about 30 tabs, Firefox uses about 1G more RAM than Chrome. Their speed is difference is unnoticeable. I also tested Edge and Vivaldi for RAM usage. The result is Chrome < Edge < Firefox < Vivaldi.

bjoli 3y ago
Those results say nothing. Were you RAM-constrained? When I am not, I have found that Firefox tries to use more memory. If I use Firefox while also having 3 VMs running and compiling stuff it stays down, whereas if I don't it easily starts using over 4gb (i have 64).

throwaway914 3y ago

No other browser has something like container tabs. Temporary Containers is an excellent extension to make each new tab its own isolated browser session too. First Party Isolation is 1 thing, but Chrome cannot do containers.

rpgbr 3y ago
Safari will get that feature in iOS 17/macOS Sonoma.
- throwaway914 3y ago
  I am not in the Mac ecosystem, but that is good to hear :-)

ksec 3y ago

Partly because Chrome got a lot slower over time compared to its initial release. When everything was snappy.

jredwards 3y ago

I went back to Firefox about 2 years ago. Zero regrets.