13 ms·

Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

• Doches 3y ago
  > We’ve been motivated by the improvements we’re seeing in our telemetry data, and we’re convinced that our efforts this year are having a positive effect on Firefox users. Mozilla gets a lot of flak (especially around here!) for their sometimes heavy-handed usage analytics, but it's nice to see that used for its stated purpose! Great use of data here.
  • StableAlkyne 3y ago
    I'm not a fan of telemetry in any browser (I love Lynx because of this), but Mozilla is definitely more trustworthy than Google or Microsoft. Edit: I'm not saying that Lynx should be a daily driver or that it's more secure, but it's a neat little project that avoids some of the bad patterns in modern browsers.
    • smegsicle 3y ago
      > Mozilla definitely hold a public perception of being more trustworthy than Google or Microsoft 100% true, definitely
      • deleted 3y ago
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      • noman-land 3y ago
        Mozilla, the legally registered non-profit foundation with a mission statement[0], for sure is more trustworthy than a for-profit data behemoth whose sole revenue comes from collecting as much data a possible, or a for-profit tech company with a history of corporate abuse and user hostile behavior. [0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
        • footlose_3815 3y ago
          I'm not trying to be a contrarian, but Google paid Firefox lots of money to force Google as the default search. Likely an offer they would refuse at their own peril, but I really liked how my search engine settings persisted when I reinstalled. Now it defaults to google. There's also a ton of promoted garbage on your homepage and privacy switches that need to be toggled off by default. Those settings don't carry-over when you sync your account settings. I still prefer Firefox, but they are not immune to the encroaching enshittification.
          • PaulHoule 3y ago
            There was the “thoroughly pizzled” pocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofac https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofac on the other hand Microsoft and Facebook are doing this all the time.
          • deleted 3y ago
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          • noman-land 3y ago
            I agree they're not immune whatsoever. In fact I hold them to a higher standard than the others because it's their mission to do it, so their failures sting much harder. But I hold the others to zero standard. There is less than zero trust there. I expect to be abused by them because their mandate requires them to ignore my wishes. It's not a failure but a success to them.
        • tapoxi 3y ago
          That's the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is the for-profit developer of Firefox that's owned by the Foundation. If Mozilla never established the Corporation I'd give them more slack, but from a "it's nonprofit" perspective it's on the same level as IKEA, which is also owned by a nonprofit foundation.
          • kbelder 3y ago
            Funny that I trust the Mozilla Corporation more than I trust the Mozilla Foundation.
      • pseudalopex 3y ago
        Did they remove public perception or did you quote something they didn't say?
    • jeffbee 3y ago
      > I love Lynx because of this Pseudonymous user so concerned about privacy that they use the browser with by far the greatest density of exploitable flaws.
      • StableAlkyne 3y ago
        Friend, it is okay to enjoy things. Lynx is just a cool project :)
        • tombert 3y ago
          Well wait, I don't think jeffbee was saying it's bad to enjoy things, but rather that the person they were responding to was implying something, namely "Lynx is (in some way) better than Firefox because it doesn't take telemetry data." Lynx definitely takes less telemetry data than Firefox, but it also gets substantially fewer updates, including security updates. I think text-based browsing is pretty fun but I don't really use it in no small part because of the infrequency of updates.
          • StableAlkyne 3y ago
            I can see how the post could be interpreted that way. I've added an edit at the bottom to clarify that I'm not suggesting people actually use it as they main one.
          • s3p 3y ago
            The person you are replying to is the same person that they are replying to. you can just say "you".
            • tombert 3y ago
              I didn't see that! Silly me!
      • JadeNB 3y ago
        > Pseudonymous user so concerned about privacy that they use the browser with by far the greatest density of exploitable flaws. "I love Lynx" is different from "I use Lynx for security-sensitive browsing," and "greatest density of publicly documented exploitable flaws" is, even if true (I don't know), not the same as "greatest density of exploitable flaws."
    • kwanbix 3y ago
      How do you expect companies to understand how their products are used for improvement purposes without telemetry? Honest question.
      • mftrhu 3y ago
        They could ask their users.
        • mo_42 3y ago
          Or observe people how they interact with the browser. If they would observe my parents, they could learn a lot that cannot be captured by telemetry.
        • kwanbix 3y ago
          So how many users do you have to ask for it to be statistically relevant for a user base of 360 million users?
          • eviks 3y ago
            Hundreds? Increasing user base doesn't matter much for sample size
      • JohnFen 3y ago
        Others have answered this, but I just wanted to point out the software devs have been managing to understand how their products are used for improvement purposes from long before telemetry was a realistic possibility. Telemetry doesn't make it possible, it makes it less expensive.
        • kwanbix 3y ago
          Do you think it is the same asking a small subset of users than having info on all the users? I work as a Product Manager, and trust me, it is not the same.
          • 3y ago
  • Zekio 3y ago
    Especially considering that google and microsoft probably collects 10x the data
    • chrisjc 3y ago
      While you're probably right and we should be concerned, I'd say what is more concerning that than the quantity is the content. Whenever I hear that an app is collecting telemetry I feel conflicted between leaving it on for maintainers to gain a better understanding of performance and potential issues, or off so that it's not used to profile me. It would be nice if telemetry was somehow simply differentiated through some app options.
    • kccqzy 3y ago
      Chromium is open source. And unsurprisingly all the data collection bits are open source too. (They call it UMA metrics in the codebase.) Search in the codebase for things like UMA_HISTOGRAM_ENUMERATION or SCOPED_UMA_HISTOGRAM_TIMER and with a free afternoon you'll have a pretty good idea what kind of telemetry Google really collects. Example: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:base/metrics/histogram_macros.h;l=297?q=SCOPED_UMA_H&sq=&ss=chromium https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:bas...
      • pornel 3y ago
        Chrome is closed-source though. There’s no way to make a reproducible build of Chrome (the Google binary adds DRM and could be adding more). I’m mentioning this, because this open-closed ambiguity is a typical Google strategy. Similarly, Android in the AOSP flavor is open, but the OS that actually ships on phones is different.
  • lxgr 3y ago
    Happy to see the top comment on a Mozilla/Firefox article not being somebody grinding their axe with Mozilla (and I say that as somebody definitely having a few) :)
    • deleted 3y ago
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      • deleted 3y ago
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  • g-b-r 3y ago
    Sure it really led to great things on Firefox Android :facepalm:
    • g-b-r 3y ago
      I invite people who downvoted to try it, I can't believe you have
  • user3939382 3y ago
    I just don't like being bullshitted. Constant marketing about privacy while they're phoning home a bunch of data when you start and stop the browser. I did at some point find a doc page with a zillion steps to disable all of it but that doesn't remediate the hypocrisy IMHO.
    • ceejayoz 3y ago
      A zillion? Preferences > Privacy > Firefox Data Collection and Use. Uncheck a couple boxes.
      • user3939382 3y ago
        That's some of it but not all of it. If you uncheck those and proxy FF when it's starting you'll see the chatter. I have the doc page I'm talking about somewhere but I have no idea where it is. Fully disabling it is a long complex process involving about:config. * Found this: https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-Telemetry-and-Data-Collection https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-Telemetry-and-Dat... I haven't compared their list to the one I've used before but it's along the same lines and explains the discrepancy between the config settings and Firefox's actual behavior.
        • ceejayoz 3y ago
          Those largely appear to affect local collection of telemetry. https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7k3r9u/mozilla_is_collecting_your_data_even_you_disabled/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7k3r9u/mozilla_is_... > Telemetry data is stored locally by default. As long as the relevant options in the settings' UI are unchecked, or datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled is set to false in about:config, this data won't be sent. <https://medium.com/georg-fritzsche/data-preference-changes-in-firefox-58-2d5df9c428b5 https://medium.com/georg-fritzsche/data-preference-changes-i...> There's likely to still be some non-telemetry chatter, like checking for available Firefox/plugin updates etc.
          • A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  • ad404b8a372f2b9 3y ago
    I don't think that data gave them anything more than what testing on a few consumer computers in different price ranges would have. (Edited, original comment read: "What more information does that give them than just buying a few computers at different price points?")
    • lolinder 3y ago
      A vastly larger variety of different computers and computer setups than they could have come up with on their own.
      • ad404b8a372f2b9 3y ago
        (Sorry I edited my comment before I saw your reply.) That doesn't seem very useful for the metrics shown in that article. For hard to find bugs sure, for 95th percentile calculations and so on you can just buy a few computers at a retail store and get the same information.
        • astrange 3y ago
          New computers don't behave like old computers, and it's not worth trying to guess why that might be. Could be anything running in the background, old NAND, old battery, low disk space, satellite internet… Once you do have a model of badness I agree it's better to try to set that up yourself.
        • lolinder 3y ago
          That can get you 95th percentile calculations for brand new computers that you bought from the store in 2023 that are running Firefox alone, but that doesn't help you understand what your performance will look like when you're running on a 10-year-old machine running Windows 7 while the user is also running Microsoft Word, Excel, and Outlook at the same time. Your P95 numbers aren't especially meaningful if you've only tested ~10 different PC configurations.
    • sefeng 3y ago
      Maybe you get the same result, but with the real user data, you can confidently say the performance has been improved without an disclaimer saying the data was collected in-house.
  • eviks 3y ago
    What's great about it? They can't tie to a specific website, the data is dirty with other factors (as they acknowledge themselves), so what's the benefit vs just testing in on an sample of actual websites to see what is slow?
• ta1243 3y ago
  Since upgrading to 118 I've had random hangs of firefox every few days. Not clear why, no CPU or swap. All windows just freeze and need a "killall firefox", which works - shutting firefox down cleanly. Of course it's impossible to find anything anywhere about this due to search engine spam Was fine for years until 118 and is rare enough to not be able to reliably reproduce it (and thus do things like disabling extensions, running the pain of a new profile, etc), so I guess I have to live with it, as life's too short.
  • krona 3y ago
    Same for me. It happened twice yesterday.
  • qup 3y ago
    I've been getting these but I hadn't figured out what to blame yet. I imagined it was one tab doing something bad. I'll have to pay attention now to if it's happening on all my machines. it for sure happened on a Windows 10 machine
  • flanfly 3y ago
    I got these on Brave on two different computers. Disabling hardware acceleration fixed it. Both had Intel graphics.
  • OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    Are you using anything other than a Linux distro’s stable, extended-support release? Most of the complaints on HN about Firefox instability seem to be either Windows users, or Linux users upgrading to the latest and greatest, often outside of their distro’s packaging. Meanwhile, I have been running Debian stable’s Firefox for many years and simply have never encountered the bugginess that gets described on these HN threads.
    • dinosaurdynasty 3y ago
      Debian uses Firefox ESR. It's rare for Linux distros to use ESR (Ubuntu and derivatives notably don't, I don't think flatpak does either).
• QuarterReptile 3y ago
  I was a consistent Firefox user, probably for the past 15 years, but I recently switched to Brave and Edge after too much frustration with power consumption. Firefox makes my laptop shriek, while the other 2 normally don't cause the fan to start at all. Does anyone actually care about loading speeds (apart from the necessary ad blocking)?
  • RheingoldRiver 3y ago
    > Does anyone actually care about loading speeds (apart from the necessary ad blocking)? It's kinda like money imo: You think you don't care about it until you don't have it. The only time I've ever cared about loading speeds was when I stayed on LTS Firefox for 2 years to avoid switching to WebExtensions, because I wanted to keep using several addons that were discontinued in Quantum. And near the end...yeah I cared about loading time. Felt amazing when I finally did upgrade (although I'm still pissed af that they never re-added the ability for extensions to access tab-specific history & will never get over this unless they do one day add it). So I do think it's important to pay attention to even when no one cares, just to make sure that no one starts caring.
    • WillPostForFood 3y ago
      they never re-added the ability for extensions to access tab-specific history Curious, what was the use case for this?
      • RheingoldRiver 3y ago
        In MouseGestures extension, you can bind right-click scroll-up & right-click scroll-down to whatever you want. I bound this to back & forward (within this tab), respectively. So you'd get a little context menu at your cursor to be able to navigate however many ticks you wanted. Insanely useful, especially when websites bullshit autoredirected you once, so navigating away from them requires either super quick reflexes to go back twice with hotkey or mouse gesture, or actually moving your cursor all the way to the back button @@ I still actively get mad that I can't use this shortcut every single time I have to go to the physical buttons.
• xxpor 3y ago
  Only looking at the 95th percentile is pretty disappointing. Enough page loads happen that higher percentile experiences aren't exactly rare.
  • charcircuit 3y ago
    It's not like real users aren't hitting loading times in those higher percentiles. They really should be showing p100.
    • persnickety 3y ago
      p100 would include those where the uplink is so slow that the page takes minutes to render completely. Those users are useful to see, but the browser is much less of a bottleneck for them, and the data should be broken out into a separate bin.
      • sfink 3y ago
        It would also include users who happened to close their laptop lids and suspend for an hour, right during pageload.
        • astrange 3y ago
          That's if it's measured by wallclock time, but they should be using a monotonic timer that ignores sleep and clock changes.
  • sfink 3y ago
    You mean only displaying and discussing the 95th percentile in a blog post? There's no reason to assume that what is brought up in a blog post is going to match what engineers are looking at. In this case, I'm a developer at Mozilla, and I would say that I agree that it's worthwhile to look at the 99th percentile as well. And the median (50th percentile). And other platforms. And segregate it by website, but we don't collect that, or by country, but although I think we might be collecting that we avoid correlating too many things before discarding the non-aggregate data. There are too many German users to worry about identifying one by knowing they're German, but there's aren't that many German users with >100 tabs running on Windows 7 on slower hardware, etc. I wouldn't want to pile up any more data than necessary in a blog post, though. The point would get buried. Man Bites Dog Whose Litter Mate Once Skipped A Veterinary Visit Because Owner Was Out Of Town At A Wedding Between Two People Whose Names Start With D (Yes, we do consider many different percentiles when making decisions. We kind of have to come up with arguments for what matters, given a change we made or are contemplating. Some things improve the 50th and regress the 95th, for example, and that's a useful clue. Telemetry tracks half a dozen different percentiles.)
• bingemaker 3y ago
  When more and more parts of FF are written in rust, I thought FF will get a lot faster. But for the past 1 year, I can only see marginal improvements w.r.t speed. And occasionally FF hangs when I have 20 tabs opened.
  • rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago
    Why would you think that? Rust is certainly a little bit slower than C/C++
    • mnd999 3y ago
      [flagged]
    • qup 3y ago
      Everything I've read says that you're right in theory, but in practice, rust rewrites tend to outperform. At Mozilla's level, though, I wouldn't necessarily expect that to hold water. They should be able to write great code in either language.
      • lxgr 3y ago
        I wouldn’t be surprised if rewrites in any language (including the original one!) would have a tendency to outperform. A rewrite (by people familiar with the original and its pain points) is an excellent opportunity to optimize.
      • lrem 3y ago
        Eh, no. A rewrite is pretty much always better. You now know the problem you’re actually facing. Drop all the little wrong assumptions. And in general are better equipped than the last time. I vaguely remember reading here about a company that slapped a backend together in Python. When they took off, the compute costs stung, so they rewrote in Go. Saved most of the bill. Some time later that started creaking, so they rewrote again. In Python, but managed to save most of the bill again.
    • pcwalton 3y ago
• Timber-6539 3y ago
  Only because fake users didn't receive the update.
  • nfriedly 3y ago
    fake users?
    • halfmatthalfcat 3y ago
      “Firefox got faster for real users…” why include “real”? Are there fake users? Just strange phrasing.
      • mcpherrinm 3y ago
        I think they're distinguishing from synthetic benchmarks
      • sojsurf 3y ago
        Perhaps as opposed to "Firefox got faster in the benchmarks", which do not always correlate to how normal users use the web.
      • unethical_ban 3y ago
        I assume it implies "we base our claims on data from real users, not artificial metrics"
      • JohnTHaller 3y ago
        Firefox's analytics allows Mozilla to analyze changes in the real world for Firefox users. Testing things like startup time and load times for actual users as opposed to synthetic benchmarks.
• Centigonal 3y ago
  I switched to Firefox from Chrome for personal browsing several months ago, after the Manifest v3 debacle. So far, it's been good! Very few sites only work on chrome. Firefox is fast, and the auto tab discard works better for me than Chrome's equivalent (or the Marvelous Suspender), I really like container tabs, and the whole experience feels pretty snappy. There are some product affordances I don't get with Firefox (ex. being able to run math expressions in the address bar), but it's small potatoes.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • tempusr 3y ago
    I started using Firefox as a main driver a year ago due to me interfacing with Linux distros a lot more often. It's the browser that is usually always installed from the get and offers the best experience after logging into my Firefox account. They also have some other really good tools they support such as firefox relay which is basically a proxy email address for your main email so you can post your an address on the airwaves w/o compromising your main email. Pocket for saving articles you read on the internet. Mozilla Thunderbird?
  • zanellato19 3y ago
    > ex. being able to run math expressions in the address bar This works here for me just fine, at least for simple ones
    • Centigonal 3y ago
      division breaks it, because FF doesn't want to send a potential URL to google (which evaluates math expressions). details here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1318813 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1318813 Thanks to your comment, I did some more research and discovered an about:config flag (browser.urlbar.suggest.calculator) that fixes this for me!
• jszymborski 3y ago
  I trust the Firefox team knows what they're doing and came to the right conclusion re: performance. That said, I have a small nit. I would have liked to see how performance changed relative to the same time last year, to control for seasonal effects. Image 1 is showing changes on the scale of 1/100 of a second. I'm not an expert in the field, but when you'r looking at signal of that magnitude controlling for noise is more relevant. EDIT: I should add, I am a satisfied user of FF.
  • temp0826 3y ago
    I think that's what arewefastyet is? https://arewefastyet.com/ https://arewefastyet.com/ Edit- also see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Areweyet https://wiki.mozilla.org/Areweyet
    • Alifatisk 3y ago
      If I read the graphs correctly, FF performs worse than both Chrome and Safari on all measurements!?
      • crashmat 3y ago
        for me there seems to be a clear winner in every category but it is not always a particular browser. Seems they perform better in different areas. However chrome seems to be better in more areas.
  • alwa 3y ago
    I’m curious what seasonal effects you hypothesize might be in play here. I don’t know enough about the browser performance space to understand what might change: do people really consume a different mix of web technologies through their browsers seasonally? It looks to my naive eyes like the trajectories here are consistent and that the “signal” looks bigger than the variance. The measurements seen consistent with a bunch of smart engineers working to optimize for them during the time period they were measured. At the same time you’re right: that big August improvement might well have something to do with Northern-hemisphere people switching to lighter vacation reading rather than just the Firefox 116 release happening to drop August 1. I’d share your interest in the longer timescale.
• agumonkey 3y ago
  I applaud firefox devs, and wish they can keep on improving everything they want or can.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• fooker 3y ago
  I must be a virtual user or something. I have Firefox installed for testing WASM targets, and everything seems slower than usual. If you open 20+ tabs, the UI seems to be laggy. At some point, I had to kill a tab, the whole browser froze for a while.
  • diggan 3y ago
    I regularly have 100+ tabs open depending on what I'm doing, and killing tabs in groups of 10+ sometimes without any lag. But then I'm on a 5950x CPU + Linux so maybe that plays some role. What hardware are you using?
    • fooker 3y ago
      Two generations old 8 core i7, 64 gigs of ram, various GPUs interchangeably. Doesn't seem to be a resource issue unless Linux is doing something odd.
  • throitallaway 3y ago
    > the whole browser froze for a while. Are you swapping out? I think a lot of people don't realize how heavy web pages are, often taking up hundreds of MB of RAM (at least) for each tab. I highly recommend the Auto Tab Discard plugin. I'm terrible with leaving tabs around, and tab suspension plugins let me continue that bad habit.
    • fooker 3y ago
      Possible, but unlikely. I just tweaked vm.swappiness, and there's no obvious change.
• xedrac 3y ago
  I like seeing Mozilla actually improving Firefox instead of just shuffling UI components around. I've been a longtime user, and am happy to support the underdog here to try and keep some balance of power on the web. Having Mozilla focus more on their tech, and less on politics is a good thing. Regardless, Firefox is a good piece of software and I have no major qualms with it.
  • ksec 3y ago
    >Having Mozilla focus more on their tech, and less on politics is a good thing. And not just a focus on Tech but also focus on product. i.e Firefox. You could have them focus on Tech and they spend all their resources on Firefox OS.
    • CuriousCosmic 3y ago
      Spending time on Firefox OS honestly would have been a productive use case and it'd probably also be a decent revenue source for Mozilla rather than abandoning it and letting KaiOS pick it up. Especially given that it's now become the third largest mobile OS with over 100 million active users worldwide.
  • Qwertious 3y ago
    I'm happy for Mozilla to keep shuffling UI components around - if it gets them more users then that's good, and it's vital that Mozilla be willing and permitted to take risks, instead of always being a step behind in every aspect. For instance, FirefoxOS seems to have been a failure, but most longshots are a failure, and if you scrimp on long shots then you end up like Microsoft, realizing that some kids these days don't even have a laptop and their phone sure as hell isn't running Windows. So I'm fine with more FirefoxOS-like projects.
    • account42 3y ago
      > I'm happy for Mozilla to keep shuffling UI components around - if it gets them more users then that's good https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/StatCounter-browser-ww-yearly-2009-2020_%28updated_until_November%29.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/StatCoun... Firefox is continues to bleed users despite of (or because of) UI reshuffling.
• ramesh31 3y ago
  I've made the switch. The difference is so minimal at this point it's unnoticeable. And regardless of telemetry and who sees what, I simply cannot stomach touching anything even remotely related to Google anymore.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• hipadev23 3y ago
  I stopped using Firefox because every single time I opened the application it would pause while it forced a new update on me.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • southernplaces7 3y ago
    I dont understand why this was downvoted. Why should a person be forced to allow updates with no opt-out or pause option? Everyone complains about it with Windows and its bullshit but FF gets a free pass?
• darklycan51 3y ago
  [flagged]
• EMM_386 3y ago
  This is good news, and makes me want to start using it again. Was a user from the Phoenix/Firebird days with the "unzip it somewhere" fancy installation process, used it for almost 20 years, and then switched to a Chromium-based browser due to perceivable speed differences. I wasn't running benchmarks to confirm my suspicions or that performing some action was x milliseconds slower in Firefox or anything. But when you're using something all day, every day including as part of your job, it is easy to get a feel for. With these multiple reports recently of performance work, along with real-world metrics ... I'm thinking of sticking with it for a few days again. If I don't notice the difference, or it actually seems faster, I'll switch back. I want to switch back, because we need to ensure there are alternate browser engines, and I don't want standards committees to turn into "this year, Google deems we shall be doing the following" sort of events.
  • diroussel 3y ago
    Combine the good performance with great add-ons like Multi Account Containers, and Tree Style Tabs, and you have a great browser.
    • mackrevinack 3y ago
      the user.js file is a very underrated feature as well. i have a few computers and some of them are dual boot which means i have a lot of firefox installs so its great just being able to drop in the user.js file and have everything set up the way i like it
      • diroussel 3y ago
        I have a userChrome.css to hide the default tabs. What do you have in your user.js and have you automated the install of it? Here is a reference for the userChrome.css to hide the default tabs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23268077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23268077
        • mackrevinack 3y ago
• sfortis 3y ago
  In the Speedometer 2, Firefox is much slower than Chrome, which is a bit slower than Edge. But who cares! In real life, this makes no real difference. I respect and trust the privacy of Mozilla. Features like containers and the ability to run Ublock and Tampermonkey on mobile are priceless!
  • criddell 3y ago
    All of the major browsers are probably fast enough for now. It would be nice to see the emphasis shift to decreasing power consumption.
    • astrange 3y ago
      Those are mostly the same thing. You save power by being faster so that you can go idle faster. Of course, there's a difference between going faster by using more resources and by just taking less time.
  • rg111 3y ago
    With a 75 MBPS connection, FF loads everything I need instantaneously. Who cares about benchmarks?
    • MBCook 3y ago
      See the sibling comment about the person using a very low spec PC.
  • windowsrookie 3y ago
    It does still matter for people using low-end computers. My MacBook's screen cracked while on vacation recently and I had to buy an emergency laptop. I picked up a device with a Celeron 6305 and 4GB of RAM. I loaded up Firefox like I normally do, and it was so slow and laggy to the point it was unusable. I then switched over to Edge and it performed significantly faster, and was using less of the 4GB of RAM. I was surprised at how significant the difference was, but there was no denying it. Edge performs much better than other browsers on low-end PC's.
• inparen 3y ago
  Yay! Happily using Firefox since 3.5 release. Keep going guys.
  • chungy 3y ago
    Been using it since it was called Mozilla Firebird. :)
    • brnt 3y ago
      0.5 or 0.6 iirc. I even remember the ad for the 1.0 release ;)
• bombledmonk 3y ago
  The killer app for Firefox is it still allows some flexibility in tab management. Sidebery and TreeStyleTab have been my anchors in the FF ecosystem. The experience is so vastly superior for tab hoarders and tab-todo methodology that I really can't imagine using something else. I also use FF on android because it has ublock origin and dark reader addons. This make browsing the web on mobile far better. I actually hold little allegiance to FF as whole, I just haven't found any Chromium based browser that works as well for me.
  • worthless-trash 3y ago
    In regards to treestyletab did you get rid of the top tabs or do you have both on your screen. I feel like i lost quite a lot of real estate on smaller screens with both.
    • abdullahkhalids 3y ago
      You can remove the top tab bar with some CSS. https://superuser.com/questions/1424478/can-i-hide-native-tabs-at-the-top-of-firefox https://superuser.com/questions/1424478/can-i-hide-native-ta...
      • worthless-trash 3y ago
        Thank you ! that makes things much nicer !
    • bombledmonk 3y ago
      I got rid of the top row.
  • andreashaerter 3y ago
    As a tab hoarder, I also a) need "Auto Tab Discard" which sends unused tabs in the background to sleep, not consuming resources. b) enjoy I can still use CSS to hack the tab bar for e.g. three scrollable rows
  • clumsysmurf 3y ago
• milliams 3y ago
  Graphs like https://hacks.mozilla.org/files/2023/10/FCPRUM.png https://hacks.mozilla.org/files/2023/10/FCPRUM.png which don't start at zero on the y-axis are very misleading.
• dinkleberg 3y ago
  Gotta say I’ve been using Firefox for years as my daily driver and it has been great. Maybe it is because I’m running on higher end machines for the most part, but I’ve had no complaints with it across Linux, windows, and Mac.
  • SoftTalker 3y ago
    Same. And I'm not using high-end machines, all of my daily drivers are 5 years old or more. I've been completely happy with Firefox + uBlock Origin.
  • NTARelix 3y ago
    I've also been using it for several years and almost completely agree with your sentiment. The only areas that have given me trouble are in the dev tools. On my machines the debugger is significantly slowed down when opening very large JS files, source maps compound the debugger slow down, and I can't always inspect variables' values when using source maps (possibly a build tool config problem).
• brianbreslin 3y ago
  So firefox was ahead of the pack on the add-ons/extensions game, but then didn't push it or support it after a while. Now after years of chrome having a few integrations or add-ons that make my life easier, i have a hard time switching back to firefox even though chrome is such a giant memory hog. These aggregator moats are real that stratechery talks about. Maybe I'll give firefox another shot.
• xbmcuser 3y ago
  I have been trying firefox for last 1-2 months it was running great but last week or so it suddenly freezes my whole computer. This happens both on windows and a different linux pc.
• mike_hock 3y ago
  > Collecting data while holding ourselves to the highest standards of privacy can be challenging. Yes, explaining away a blatant self-contradiction can be challenging. You're not holding yourselves to the highest standards of privacy, you've explicitly prioritized data collection over privacy.
  • autoexec 3y ago
    There not much harm as long they're making sure users are aware of the telemetry and can disable it if they choose to. Opt-in is best, but collecting data with consent isn't a problem
    • eviks 3y ago
      So how many users in your estimate are aware? (Opt-in is a method of verifying consent)
• abound 3y ago
  While I'm glad the data is trending in the right direction, isn't this what you'd expect to see from these metrics as people adopt faster hardware and better internet connectivity? I know it's hard to control for those things while maintaining anonymity and doing aggregate analysis, but this would be a much stronger argument controlling for at least some level of available compute. (I exclusively use Firefox on all the platforms)
• myfonj 3y ago
  I can subjectively confirm that Firefox feels snappier recently and deeply appreciate and enjoy all improvements. But I have some itching concerns about that methodology with heavy anonymisation and stuff there: Couldn't it be that the web itself got faster, and folks have better hardware? I mean, yes, generally these sloppy script kiddies with bloated frameworks produce less and less effective code … but I can imagine, that when some heavily visited page deploys a new better optimized and leaner version (I assume such things happen in reality, don't they?), there is no way to tell it apart from telemetry data telling that everything got slightly faster on average. Or with people getting better hardware, or with OS and driver updates, etc.
  • wldlyinaccurate 3y ago
    The web is getting faster, yes. This manifests as a constant (albeit slow) downward trend in global aggregate metrics. We think this trend is mostly due to Google pushing performance metrics being linked to search rankings. However the data presented in this post shows obvious step changes in performance that correlate with browser version rollout. It would be disingenuous not to attribute this to a concerted effort on performance improvements from the Firefox team.
  • ro-ka 3y ago
    As older Firefox versions are still in use, too, it’s possible to check whether the improvements come from updates in Firefox itself or the web in general.
    • MiddleEndian 3y ago
      >the web in general That would certainly be overly optimistic.
    • KeplerBoy 3y ago
      The data will be biased though. Few people will buy new hardware and install old firefox versions.
  • MBCook 3y ago
    It would’ve been nice to see this normalized by CPU cycles or javascript tokens executed or something like that. Something so that more megahertz/cores doesn’t throw off the number. Whatever the reason, it is nice to see it improving. I think it would be interesting to also see a median figure in addition to a 95% figure.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• secondcoming 3y ago
  I don't know if it's the fault of Firefox or Cloudflare WARP but I've been getting a lot of "PR_END_OF_FILE" errors (something like that) when browsing.
• southernplaces7 3y ago
  Sounds wonderful, but they've been claiming speed increases for years, causing me to go and check if they're true, and being deeply disappointed. I don't use powerful laptops with fancy hardware for my browsing, but how stupid can a browser be if it only works well even with heavy use if your hardware is great? Not everyone has that luxury even if they'd like a bit of privacy features. As much as I detest and avoid all things Google in so many ways, Chrome remains preferable because at least it can deliver 50+ open tabs on a completely ordinary laptop without completely freezing everything to shit. You've had so many years to get this basic thing right Mozilla, yet you keep failing, and for a company that claims to track less than the others, then what the fuck is your browser doing to keep being so goddam slow?
  • orev 3y ago
    Firefox is definitely on par with Chrome these days, so if you’re seeing issues like this, I would first suspect that it’s the web sites you have loaded in those 50+ open tabs instead of the browser itself. So many sites use bad JavaScript and that’s often what causes the problems.
    • jacobyoder 3y ago
      > Firefox is definitely on par with Chrome these days, The GP is likely going to be triggered by those words, because... I've seen this repeated every X months/years... "Oh... yeah, you had problems in the past, but it's so much better now"... and... it rarely is. GP will just need to try out again at their own schedule and make their own determination. I had this standard issue with desktop/laptop linux for years... "xyx doesn't work well"... "Oh yeah, it's so much better now - no problems now". Try the new recommendation - still broken. I had a f2f with someone at a local meetup, and we got in to "xyz is subpar/broken on linux" (some gnome thing possibly). This happened to be a linux user group, and someone challenged me with "no, you're wrong, it's fine now". So... I pulled out the laptop and fired it up and showed the irritation/bug. The response - after showing that what I was saying was a bug - was a shrug and "Oh, I don't care about that - doesn't affect me". The verbal equivalent of "WONTFIX". In person. tldr: telling people who've been burned - often for years - that things are "better now" is generally not all the productive. Most of the time, people who have specific/legit issues will figure out if/when they're fixed or tolerable enough.
• knodi 3y ago
  Been a user of Firefox from when he launch the renderer, loving it and never looked back at chrome or safari.
• insanitybit 3y ago
  Really cool to see the real world performance as well as a new Speedometer. I think anyone who's against the telemetry collected is really nuts, as long as it's done responsibly - the idea that Firefox could compete without that data is just a fantasy.
• joduplessis 3y ago
  Love headlines like these. As opposed to what, fake users?
  • rhdunn 3y ago
    Synthetic benchmarks or tests. For example, improving performance of an empty loop is useful for starting somewhere [1], but does not show how fast the browser is on a real page with complex JavaScript such as a vue/react component used to render a tree-based select control with searchable items. [1] E.g. creating the new jitter for Ladybird.
• dabedee 3y ago
  In the last five years, my experience with Firefox has always been far superior in terms of performance than when using Chrome. I just can't bring myself to justify using a Google product for something as important as browsing. I guess it's ideological, but I just want Firefox to succeed.
• post_break 3y ago
  Has anyone at firefox used the iOS app? I want you to track what the workflow is to access a password in the app. Tap tap tap left side, right side, can't get out of the settings to check the website while doing so. It's maddening. Besides that... it's lovely.
  • JohnTHaller 3y ago
    Is it complex in all iOS browsers due to the whole 'you're actually running Safari underneath' thing? Or is it Firefox specific on iOS?
    • saagarjha 3y ago
      This sounds like a UI issue?
    • post_break 3y ago
      It’s terrible UI
  • snailmailman 3y ago
    In iOS you can add Firefox as a password manager auto fill option. Then when you tap in a password field, the relevant passwords should prompt to auto fill. I haven’t tested this with Firefox’s password manager, but I did test in firefox and Bitwarden is auto filling correctly, and in iOS settings I see Firefox is listed as a password manager. It’s settings->passwords->password options. I don’t think apps can automatically enable auto fill, you might have to manually enable this.
    • post_break 3y ago
      That's not when this is an issue, it's when Firefox doesn't auto fill because it's confused.
  • kevincox 3y ago
    Yeah, it is hidden away on Android too. They tried to mitigate this by adding an awkwardly named "Passwords shortcut" app action (long press the app or add it to your home screen) but this just opens the password settings, still another click to actually get to the passwords list.
• sharno 3y ago
  My battery with FF on a Macbook Pro with M2 still lasts less than the same device with Chrome. Hope this improves soon. Ofc, Safari beats them both but I hate Safari's plugins system so I need a browser that doesn't need an AppleID to install plugins.
• pipeline_peak 3y ago
  I don't know what their definition of a "real user" is. But everyone I've met who uses Fiercefox does so for philanthropic or political reasons. I have a hard time believing some non techie in Minnesota has noticed performance improvements. Idk, the data looks very pseudo sciencey, just feels like another marketing ploy from the blue haired people.
  • IainIreland 3y ago
    Generally we say "real users" internally as a comparison to benchmarks, as in "this improves JetStream by 5%, but I don't think it will make any difference to real users".
• IshKebab 3y ago
  What about memory usage? For some reason Chrome gets a lot of flak for this but Firefox is significantly worse in my experience. I'm considering switching just because of that. :/
  • crashmat 3y ago
    I think it's meant to be that due to the differing ways tabs are handled firefox uses more memory with only a couple of tabs but once you increase the number it uses less than chromium.
• M95D 3y ago
  > In order to measure the user experience, Firefox collects a wide range of anonymized timing metrics related to page load, responsiveness, startup and other aspects of browser performance. So, they collect lots and lots of telemetry and what do they do with it? > Let’s start with page load. First Contentful Paint (FCP) is a better metric for felt performance than the `onload` event. Misinterpret and misuse it. Better, my a**. I can't describe how much I HATE pages that are rendered before they are completely loaded. I type an adress, I hit enter, and promptly I see the page content. I try to click a link or a button on the page, but guess what? Just before I click it, an image just loaded above the link. The link moved down from under the cursor, and now I click the image instead of the link. And the image IS AN AD!!! It's like FF devs are actually TRYING to make me click ads!
• someNameIG 3y ago
  For normal use it does feel the same speed as Safari. But the font rendering seems a little of on macOS compared to Safari/Chrome, anyone else notice this?
• sillyalbatross 3y ago
  Unfortunately Firefox still has a lot of issues when it comes to font rendering on macOS. For example, it's been two years and it still renders San Francisco incorrectly: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1721612 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1721612 Not to mention all fonts appearing bolder than they should compared to Chrome and Safari. It might seem like a small thing but I'm a stickler for typography and it really stands out on a Mac. I hope they get around to fixing these issues but two years is a long time for such an obvious bug. What confuses me is how few people have noticed given that it seems to affect all Apple silicon devices.
  • wodenokoto 3y ago
    > Not to mention all fonts appearing bolder than they should compared to Chrome and Safari. No they don't. https://imgur.com/a/p9V4GdN https://imgur.com/a/p9V4GdN
    • sillyalbatross 3y ago
      Interesting, must be only happening on some native MBP displays. I'm on an M1 MBP and haven't tested it on an external display but it's definitely noticeable on mine, although not as big of a deal as the letter spacing thing
  • karmakaze 3y ago
    I confirmed the letter spacing is still an issue by comparing the "How I digitize books" paragraph on Chrome and FF. I had to override the CSS as the site has switched to "Newsreader, serif". I don't see the fonts appearing bolder difference (on my 4k screen). Actually that's not true, I have seen differences on lower DPI displays. I get around that using BetterDisplay to enable HiDPI on the external. I've also never noticed San Francisco font rendering improperly which I only would if it didn't fit in a clipped box. Now that performance is largely improved, maybe they'll get around to fixing this one.
• ksec 3y ago
  So after e10s, Quantum, Azure. Are there any upcoming major changes to Firefox or Gecko?
• Night_Thastus 3y ago
  Been using Firefox back since version 2 way back when. After all these years, it still does what I need, how I need it done. That's the best recommendation of a product I think I can give. Just about my only complaint is I wish there was a way to more quickly cancel saving a duplicate file. When the prompt appears with "this file already exists, do you want to overwrite?" it's much faster to just click "yes" than to click "no" and then drag the mouse down to "cancel" to close the window. Do this once it's no biggy. Do it hundreds or thousands of times and it gets obnoxious. Waste of bandwidth and disk writes, or waste of time. I know that sounds dumb, but it's one of the only pain points I have.
• sputr 3y ago
  Great for them. The mobile app, at least for me, is getting unusuble. I have a crappy phone and reopening a page takes 3x the time opening a new tab and writing the url does. Even then it's still significantly slower than chrome, even with ads. I think it's time I find a different mobile browser with adblocking.
  • crashmat 3y ago
    are you talking about android or iOS? Because all iOS browsers are reskinned safari as per apple mandate.
• rickstanley 3y ago
  I really could not tell if it is better or not. But I've had 2 problems that seems to never be resolved: - using hardware accelerated video decoding is bizarre if the video uses VP9 (even disabling it or forcing AV1) it stutters from time to time; - watching a video in the background and playing game at the same time, with hybrid graphics, freezes/hangs kWin, then, the video that was playing in the browser becomes green and everything that used either iGPU or dGPU starts to struggle and stutters a lot, forcing me to log in and out, i. e. restart my session manually; The last one may be because of Nvidia (yes, my fault for having this card) prime offload in Wayland, but even so, I did not find any topic related to this, that has not otherwise been solved in bugzilla, and honestly I am kind of afraid to report this and be met with judging questions; I'd like to debug some more, but I don't have the patience. These are the two ever lasting headaches that I have with Firefox. None of this bothers me enough to leave Firefox though. Anyway, my congratulations to the team. Today, I have successfully converted 5 people to use Firefox.
  • cmplxconjugate 3y ago
    That second point is something that drives me CRAZY. For years I would keep YouTube or Twitch streams open on the second monitor. Now I deal with constant fps loss, video stutters or freezing. Absolutely bizarre regression in performance.
  • mort96 3y ago
    Hardware decoding is sadly somewhat of a mess in Linux... I'm guessing that with most of those issues, Firefox is interfacing with the various video coding APIs correctly, and some driver or something is just buggy. If you're on a desktop, turning off hardware video decoding altogether might be worth it.
  • kiwijamo 3y ago
    Pro Tip: There is a Firefox extension that forces YouTube to use H.264. Even though my machine does hardware accelerated VP9 I've found it to be unreliable. Switching to H.264 makes YouTube videos play smoothly. All other videos sites use H.264 by default so this only really needs to be done for YouTube.
• LightBug1 3y ago
  Yup, I'll co-sign this. I'm using FF right now on inferior hardware and have done for quite a few years. Feels pretty new and snappy.
• alberth 3y ago
  Why use Chrome? I'm curious, for those of you who use Chrome ... why do you (vs. another browser)?
  • sexy_seedbox 3y ago
    Using Vivaldi on desktop so I can zoom to exactly 85% on some websites. Their history features and search is much better than Chrome. Using Kiwi Browser on mobile so I can install any extensions.
  • Horpostiated 3y ago
    Personally I just find it the least aggravating browser. It doesn't suffer from the performance issues and site incompatibilities of Firefox, the bugs of Brave, nor the incessant nagging of Edge. It just gets out of my way and let's me browse.
• zmmmmm 3y ago
  Please anybody still clinging on to Chromium based browsers on perception of speed being an issue, at least give FireFox a try. I haven't looked back and really enjoy it these days, and it's really important to the future of the web that browser diversity remains strong.
  • th3_nsa 3y ago
    I'm using Brave with rewards, vpn, wallet disabled and around 20 flags modified. It works faster, better extension support for me with fewer bugs, less memory usage when fewer tabs are opened. I chose brave because it can sync. I'm impressed with Firefox and tried a fork called floorp. It has some useful additions and find it better than regular Firefox while still supporting sync and was using ungoogled chromium before. https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp/releases https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp/releases Unfortunately some websites still work better with chromium browsers in my experience. This is anecdotal but I also feel some negative fingerprinting from Google owned websites on Firefox, more memory leaks as well. It's only a matter of time before I change to Firefox (forced manifest V3) but I will stick with brave for now.
    • lionkor 3y ago
      What's wrong with firefox's sync?
• Ikatza 3y ago
  It's a real pity that speed keeps being the golden metric by which browsers measure themselves. I'd much rather have Mozilla focus on making Firefox usable on many popular webs (including HN) than on shaving another millisecond.
• mazugrin2 3y ago
  I just found out today that Firefox does not yet support the css has() selector, while Chrome has supported it for over a year now. I get that there are a lot of reasons for this, but it surprised me, I guess. I use Firefox because its fullscreen mode is far better than all the other browsers I've tried on Linux, but it does seem like it's clearly slower to perform and slower to be able to adopt new web 'quasi'-standards.
  • kevincox 3y ago
    :has() is Chromium-only right now. Firefox and Safari both have it in preview builds and it is scheduled to be released soon on both. This is why having more browser diversity is important. We can't have people thinking that "the web" has a feature once Chrome releases it.
• godelmachine 3y ago
  Among all the web browsers I feel Opera is the fastest. However, I don’t login to sensitive sites such as my bank account or Gmail for fear of data being passed on to the Chinese Communist Party.