8 ms·
Ah yes, so Firefox is faster than chrome, allows you more latitude for adblockers, and isn't pushing garbage hostile web standards, but clearly, mozilla just is
by mrguyorama 3y ago
Ah yes, so Firefox is faster than chrome, allows you more latitude for adblockers, and isn't pushing garbage hostile web standards, but clearly, mozilla just isn't doing enough
Can we stop pretending that this is mozilla's fault that the GIANT corp sitting in front of the internet, being the homepage of 90% of computers, that nags users to install chrome "for a better experience" on every single web site it can, is able to get onto more systems than firefox?
How many average users even KNOW about firefox anymore?
- n0tinventedhere 3y ago> so Firefox is faster than chrome Faster on sunspider. In practice, on real web pages, as someone who occasionally browses the web using a low end tablet PC (Surface Go 2 with linux. The CPU is downright anemic but good enough for treating it like a reading device/video stream platform), I experienced many more stutters on Firefox that I did not on Chrome and it has become one of the reasons I stopped using it (the syncing is also way worse and often breaks. "Read latest tab from other device" is almost useless if you don't manually trigger a sync because it sure won't do it by itself in any reasonable time frame). The performance difference is much less visible on my main computer though. But yall really need to try firefox on low end devices before you make generic statements about its performance. Or the android version.. lord, firefox on android is just unpleasant.
- seanw444 3y agoFunny, I use Mull on my Android, which is basically Firefox on Android but even more heavily restricted. Have for at least a year. Didn't know people considered it unpleasant.
- vtee44 3y agoI use Firefox fork as main because anything else is worse on QubesOS. Both WebKit and Chromium have scroll lags, while Librewolf is smooth almost as on bare metal. I don’t know what’s the difference on normal websites, but I can use it and there are almost no lags on it when running few VMs on 8GB RAM. Android variant is actually shit, but it’s getting only better. It’s much faster now than 5 years ago. Hopefully they will improve it further.
- caskstrength 3y agoI have very similar experience - subjectively I experience more stuttering in FF than Chrome both on Android and Linux laptop.
- Dah00n 3y agoI have the exact opposite experience. Streaming video is stuttering and buffering so bad that I can't use Chrome at all on those sites (Brave isn't any better). It was the reason I switched to Firefox and the performance was so much better.
- caskstrength 3y agoYour experience is not "exact opposite" since for me video in FF with VAAPI-based hardware decoding also works better than in Chrome. However, FF can stutter while scrolling animation-heavy sites or when open/closing tabs.
- garciansmith 3y agoFirefox still runs great on my ThinkPad T420s running Linux, which is 12 years old at this point. And while I never use Firefox on Android without uBlock Origin, I don't get how it can be described as unpleasant after the rewrite a few years ago. The combo makes browsing bearable compared to Chrome. The sync tabs thing used to be flaky, I agree, but now sending tabs to and from Linux and Android always works for me.
- sundarurfriend 3y agoBy stuttering, if you mean video stuttering, I used to experience those a lot; I installed Brave for that very reason, because Netflix, Twitch, etc. were performing pretty poorly on Firefox (on a 4GB RAM low end laptop). But I very rarely experience that these days, to the point I've switched back to Firefox for those sites too. But general performance-wise, Firefox is so easily better than Chromium in my experience, it's not even a competition. Firefox with hundreds of tabs open performs better than Chromium with 10-20 tabs. It's more responsive to interactions, uses less memory, and is much less likely to freeze up. With Chromium, I have to constantly keep a watch over open tabs, and close them mercilessly, or suffer from overall system slowdown and a browser that's almost a slideshow.
- drawfloat 3y agoIt's about 12 months ago now, but I worked on a GL project where Firefox was significantly slower than Chrome – and, agreed, it was often on lower end devices. This was to the point it was easier to just drop features wholesale from Firefox, in order to ensure a steady 30 FPS (with Chrome solidly performing 60). I believe a large amount of it related to WebAudio APIs.
- Kuinox 3y agoNot shipping WebReplay in firefox (instead it's a startup called replay.io), Killing the servo project. Running metaverse projects instead. Yes, mozilla could do better.
- mrguyorama 3y agoThese are all things that the average user doesn't even know exist "Power users" aren't most of anyone's user base. The vast majority of people use chrome because google told them to, because google IS the internet
- Kuinox 3y agoWebsites arent made with firefox, so they are not optimized for firefox. They also can be buggy, firefox is my daily browser, yet, multiple times per year, a website is simply bugged on firefox. Google Chrome was recommended by power user, and that how they took the market lead, not because they are the internet, but because power users told regular users to use chrome.
- mrguyorama 3y agoI have never found a website that is broken on firefox that isn't also non-functional on chrome. What does firefox break?
- Reubachi 3y agoFolks mistakenly associate "breaking" with "not being completely compatible with an illegal streaming website with improper TLS/cyphers." That's just an example but you know what I mean. Those are the types of websites that have issues with firefox, because mozilla maintains it's own root trust store held to various standards/compliances, and many..less savory web addresses use not HTTPS content on their HTTPS pages. This is a feature/value added bonus, but because it "breaks" sites for people....back to chrome.
- Kuinox 3y ago
- tapoxi 3y agoFaster on one benchmark, but they don't have a consistent history of performance wins. The bigger issue is that nobody is embedding Gecko. Every Electron app is another developer targeting Chrome. Applications that embed a webview? Chrome. Any new web browser that wants to deliver a new experience (like Arc, or even Brave) is built atop Chromium. The problem is that "not pushing hostile web standards" and "more flexible ad blocking" clearly isn't stopping the insane bleeding of the userbase. These are people actively migrating away from Firefox in droves.
- ComputerGuru 3y agoI would argue that Electron webapps shouldn’t really count towards the browser marketshare. If would be nice to have a Firefox version, but it doesn’t matter precisely because the end user is not choosing the browser - the company pushing the product is. And let’s be honest: nerdy HN users aside, Joe Schmoe has no clue Teams is a web app running in an emasculated browser at all.
- dataangel 3y agoevery time someone uses electron they buy into the chrome ecosystem -- when they run into problems they write mailing list posts or stack overflow questions that other people can read to help them when they have the same problem, and if they actually want to contribute bugfixes or features upstream they go into chrome not firefox. also if they have a webapp version the webapp version that's running in chrome works exactly the same as the same code running in electron without really having to do any separate testing so which browser are they going to push to be used internally?
- lkbm 3y ago> I would argue that Electron webapps shouldn’t really count towards the browser marketshare. Perhaps not, but if you're writing your desktop app in Electron, you'll be benchmarking your performance optimizations against the Chrome engine. If that same code is used for your web app, you're optimizing your website for Chrome. Mozilla can pour resources into making Firefox more performance, but the real-world ecosystem will change behavior to improve Chrome's performance on their webapp with little concern as to whether it hurts Firefox's performance. (I assume people use largely the same code between Electron and their webapps, and that optimizations for Electron translate reasonably well to optimizations for Chrome.)
- wslh 3y ago> Can we stop pretending that this is mozilla's fault Clearly it is Mozilla fault: the world is not fair, if they are where they are they should crunch their resources and win. Google haven't started being the home of most computers. It is the nature of competition. Is it hard? Sure.
- tristan957 3y agoIf you use anti-trust practices to get your foothold, it isn't fair.
- mrguyorama 3y ago"The world is not fair" in part because we refuse to punish Google for their blatantly anti-consumer practice of purposely making their websites work worse on non-chrome browsers and advertising chrome on every google property. How the fuck is mozilla supposed to compete with a GIANT that is nearly everyone's homepage? Even if they had comparable budgets (Which they don't) mozilla still wouldn't get the free advertising that google gives chrome
- wslh 3y agoI think the Mozilla foundation has enough money to lobby about monopolistic practices. Did they? If your argument would be 100% true there will be no innovation or market dynamics. Business history has proven that one day you are at the top and another you aren't anymore.
- pessimizer 3y agoIf firefox sued google over monopolistic practices, that lawsuit would have to be funded completely by google. Google is 80% of firefox's revenue and 0% of its expenditure.
- pessimizer 3y ago> purposely making their websites work worse on non-chrome browsers This is wild exaggeration that I never hear about except from people defending the mismanagement of Firefox. I've used Firefox since forever, and I don't have much trouble anywhere that I can remember. The browser works. This is an article showing that it's outperforming Chrome on some metrics. It's Firefox's business and design decisions that wreck their browser. It went from being awesome to being janky Chrome that calls you abusive when you complain that they put an ad for a tv show in your browser.
- solardev 3y agoThat never stopped Phoenix in the early days, or Chrome itself in its early days. Firefox just offers nothing substantial over Chrome and breaks a lot of sites. And over the last decade it kept pushing crapware and spam on you, right in the browser. Mozilla mismanaged it to hell. They don't even really care about the browser anymore.
- lost_tourist 3y agobetter extension environment much better privacy practically the same experience while surfing keeps competition going ublock origin actually works as it was meant to mozilla didn't forget what "do no evil" and "open internet" means
- radicaldreamer 3y agoWhich sites don’t work with Firefox? Safari is a huge simply due to iOS but it’s a shame that Apple stopped maintaining the windows port.
- solardev 3y agoSadly I don't remember anymore. I ran into plenty of them 3 or 4 years ago (every week or so), then I stopped using Firefox altogether because of that. At work, some coworkers were using Firefox last year and it broke various third party libraries (especially graphics heavy ones). Rather than trying to fix the bugs, we just decided to deprecate Firefox support altogether because its usage was down to like 2 or 3 percent. Those resources were better spent on, say, improving mobile usability and performance for everyone. Edit: I wish Mozilla would just fork Chromium and add/delete whatever privacy things they want, like Brave. There's no reason to maintain Gecko anymore.
- n0tinventedhere 3y agoI didn't have websites outright breaking on FF like solardev, but I had other issues with it, like cloudflare getting me into an infinite loop of asking me if I'm human and not letting me browse the website. This happened even if I deleted my firefox profile and started fresh with no extension. Note that this behavior of Cloudflare is highly dependent on the settings of their anti-ddos stuff, some websites have it set on a higher level of defensive behavior than others, I didn't have this issue everywhere. This wasn't due to my computer's IP, the problem went away the moment I browsed the same website with Chrome, and this time I wasn't even asked to click the checkbox to prove that I'm human.
- mda 3y agoNote that in the Phoronix post it also mentions in the modern and demanding Jetstream benchmark, Firefox is still way behind. While seeing improvements is good, Sunspider is a very old microbenchmark not sure how relevant it is.
- TX81Z 3y agoUh, clearly you don’t know anybody who actually worked there? Management is very very very unpopular and they’ve been facing a massive brain drain for years. Because they do have a great browser, but have a horrible strategy and have wasted money in any number of ways, and made themselves wholly dependent on Google for handouts.
- leviathant 3y ago>Ah yes, so Firefox is faster than chrome, allows you more latitude for adblockers, and isn't pushing garbage hostile web standards, but clearly, mozilla just isn't doing enough >How many average users even KNOW about firefox anymore? A hard lesson I learned at my last company was that it's not enough to have the better product. Better marketing and better relationships will, more often than not, trump a better fitting solution to a problem. It sucks, but it's real.
- mrguyorama 3y agoYeah! In fact, I would say a large portion of this is every android phone coming with Chrome pre-installed, and you know, that entire decade google spent with literal super bowl advertisements and THE GOOGLE DOT COM WEBSITE URGING YOU TO INSTALL CHROME with a mountain of dark patterns that plenty of smarter people than I have written about. Can you imagine the fucking fit HN would throw if mozilla dared to buy a super bowl ad?
- ido 3y agoIt’s not about speed, compatibility with Firefox is actually getting worse. I switched (back) to FF and DDG a few months ago and FF is having trouble with multiple websites I use on occasion (for an example off the top of my head, if I want to log-in to Haaretz.co.il to get past pay walls I have to use safari as FF doesn’t manage to log in). This is still the small minority of sites but I keep safari and chrome around as it still happens often enough.
- darklycan51 3y agoI am a tab hoarder, and on multiple different operating systems, with different installs, etc. Firefox ALWAYS seems to have random leaks after weeks that other browsers don't have, once I saw Firefox taking 24GBs of RAM, while Edge and Brave on the same or more tabs and time were taking only ~2-3gb of RAM. This has been going on since at least 2019-2020 or so, when I started dropping Firefox because of this behavior. It is just random websites that seem to cause leaks but this has never happened with Edge or Brave and no website should really be breaking a browser like this, the system becomes unusable after a while. They are seemingly unable to fix the issue or pretend it doesn't exist even when its reported so I basically had to stop using FF as my main browser.