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Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#201

Post by rndgermandude »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #112
blub wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is good. It has support for modern standards, is performant, has tracking protection built in and plenty of extensions. Google is winning because it's bundling its browser just like Microsoft used to and is aggressively advertising it on all of its web properties, which might have a reach of close to 100% of the web-using population. Firefox also has a reputation for being slow, gotten probably from people do…

> Firefox also has a reputation for being slow, gotten probably from people doing ridiculous things as keeping tens of tabs open and not restarting it for dayes Do you mean it has the reputation from people doing this 5 or 10 years ago and it's stuck? Or is this still a problem for Firefox?

Firefox developers did a lot of work in the recent years to reduce memory use and leaks (MemShrink) and visual stutter (jank), and e10s will improve the latter even further (while regressing memory use a bit).

However, Firefox will not magically better itself; developers - paid and volunteer - will need to fix issues as they are discovered, and that means that if you run into performance problems, you should file a good bug.

I use both Chrome and Firefox on my Windows 7 box, simultaneously for various reasons.

The Chrome (vanilla install except for uBlock Origin) performance is... not great for me, at least once I get more than 10-15 tabs open, mostly when switching and/or opening tabs. A lot of it seems to be swap-thrashing.

Firefox performance on the other hand is OK to great, even tho it being my main browser with usually 50+ tabs open (with tons of overlap with those Chrome tabs) and rather add-on laden. I am using Nightly since forever, with e10s off at the moment because of one or two add-ons that would fail otherwise; tho I also have Firefox Stable installed and when I use that it behaves the same.

Sure, webgl and/or js benchmarks might be a little behind on Firefox (tho not by a large margin). So that nifty html5/webgl 3D ego shooter might perform a little worse, but that is nothing I personally really care about. Firefox excels for me for regular browsing performance, and that is what I want.

Chrome on OSX always performed abysmal for some reason, so I am using Firefox (Nightly) exclusively on a recent MacBook Pro, which runs fine (sans the occasional memory swap/uncompress stutter when switching back to really old tab that got paged out).

I cannot comment much about startup performance as I usually have long-running sessions in the order of days or weeks, but it seems OK for both browsers.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#202

Post by Libermentix »

sangnoir wrote: post #184
pitay wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did cause you to switch? What follows here are my observations on what are the advantages/disadvantages of the two browsers: The biggest advantage to Chrome that I can think of is it has its own implementation of Flash in it, rather than using the Flash plugin. This allows Chrome to not have another container process, unlike in Firefox which does spawn a container process for Flash, which uses a ton more CPU cyc…

> What did cause you to switch? I'm not GP, but I switched because Chrome had better dev tools. For a while, I was using Firefox for browsing and Chrome for dev, but I ended up using just Chrome. It also didn't help that Firefox dropped its 1st party browser sync (Weave) and Chrome had bookmark & history syncing natively

In my opinion, that is exactly what made Chrome popular. Focussing on Dev-Tools, but that's a very expensive undertaking (it took firefox an extension to make this possible -> Firebug ftw). However, market success from other companies e.g. Stripe have shown that optimizing for developers today is by far the most effective way to get into market.

MS did the same thing, although back then they used ActiveX extensions or certain proprietary IE implementations that simplified the transition from old fat-client development to web-development.

Now that this is gone, focussing on debugging and open-sourcing is a better choice for a web-browser to win dominance. Chrome did just that: Opensourcing the core - attacking one of Mozilla's core promises - and adding proprietary google eco-sytem add-ons on top of that.

So imho what made you change to Chrome is similar to what made everyone of us developers back then adopt IE (i.e. simplifying development). And when Chrome started gaining traction, the google-lead team started implementing proprietary APIs that we now struggle with when we consider an open non-proprietary web.

I use firefox everyday, for dev and regular, and I'm happy to be a user. But I also see a lot of sites that just start breaking because they have been implemented with Chrome in mind. For where I am standing, I try to encourage our team to develop for FF first, test in Chrome and then EDGE/IE, that way it's most likely that anyone can access the site without breakage. And yes, this also means that sometimes it takes some overhead, but I'm willing to take that for the sake of an open web ;-)

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#203

Post by dogma1138 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #198
verroq wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but that is just not true, Firefox has miserable DOM performance that results in laggyness, freezes on pages that work fine with Chrome. Until the Firefox people accept that their browser sucks can they finally try to make it better. There is no sandboxing (in the works for how many years now?), their pdfjs is not as fast as the chrome native plugin, they force me to use the insecure and terribe flash plugin th…

If pages lag or freeze it might be the developers fault. I realize some are providing complex app like experiences but most web sites are just text and images artfully arranged. Making this simple thing slow requires dedicated stupidity.

Users can't fix websites, they can fix their experience by switching to a browser that works.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#204

Post by dogma1138 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #199
rubber_duck wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually GMail and YouTube are the only tolerable experiences using FF. Try watching random FB video, Twitch streams, etc. on a Linux FF and you'll get greeted with a nice "please download Adobe Flash" or some such nonsense. With Chrome it just works , it bundles Flash, I don't have to care which version it is, how to get it for my system, etc. I would like to use FF because the theme makes it match my Gnome theme (s…

Many distros manage to actually bundle flash which then just works out of the box. This isn't a Firefox issue its your distro.

Again blaming the "user" would get you no where.

You have something that works out of the box, and something that doesn't.

Doesn't matter why it's your fault, you are using it wrong, it's your operating system, you aren't holding it properly these are the excuses of poorly designed products.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#205

Post by fixermark »

pitay wrote: post #168
moxie wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Google has market leverage. However, when IE was Firefox's competitor, MS was in just as powerful of a position, and Firefox was a success. They were a success because they clearly had the better browser. These days, that's no longer the case. I know that I certainly did not switch from Firefox because of Google's marketing efforts or underhanded tactics. But what if you're right? In a world where, I agree, it t…

What did cause you to switch? What follows here are my observations on what are the advantages/disadvantages of the two browsers: The biggest advantage to Chrome that I can think of is it has its own implementation of Flash in it, rather than using the Flash plugin. This allows Chrome to not have another container process, unlike in Firefox which does spawn a container process for Flash, which uses a ton more CPU cyc…

Also not the GP, but at the time: process isolation. The process sandboxing Chrome did that allowed only a subset of it to crash was novel and compensated for their relatively young browser engine gagging and dying from time-to-time. Once I could develop and use plugins without bringing down the entire browser session, I never looked back.

Nowadays: inertia and familiarity. Firefox is sometimes faster and sometimes slower, but there's not enough of a difference to tip my hand, and I already have Chrome configured the way I want (including extensions, multiple sessions, and the keyboard accelerators and widget positions that have burned themselves into my brain). And the cross-platform sync works great; I don't know if Firefox's is better or worse, but it would take more than 0 time to set it up, so I don't care yet.

It's also completely integrated with Chromecast, which I use and enjoy.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#206

Post by dogma1138 »

Libermentix wrote: post #202
sangnoir wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What did cause you to switch? I'm not GP, but I switched because Chrome had better dev tools. For a while, I was using Firefox for browsing and Chrome for dev, but I ended up using just Chrome. It also didn't help that Firefox dropped its 1st party browser sync (Weave) and Chrome had bookmark & history syncing natively

In my opinion, that is exactly what made Chrome popular. Focussing on Dev-Tools, but that's a very expensive undertaking (it took firefox an extension to make this possible -> Firebug ftw). However, market success from other companies e.g. Stripe have shown that optimizing for developers today is by far the most effective way to get into market. MS did the same thing, although back then they used ActiveX extensions o…

Firebug is better than chrome dev tools mostly.

The problem is stability especially for development, a rogue JS script can still kill a browser, chrome loses a page, Firefox loses its mind.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#207

Post by fixermark »

mpol wrote: post #176
justinlardinois wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's conjecture. Going by Occam's razor, Microsoft just had no need to innovate because it had no competition.

And they had no competition because they had it destroyed with illegal practices. And all they got fined with was a slap on the wrist while earning billions. More ontopic... IE6 was slightly better than Netscape 4, so almost everyone switched to IE6. Just as now Chrome is only slightly better than Firefox to a lot of people (not to me though). And a lot of people are switching to Chrome. If you trust Google (an adver…

Stagnation like Chromecast?

Google has market incentive to improve on the browser's capabilities that Microsoft did not.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#208

Post by fixermark »

gcb0 wrote: post #37
warcode wrote: post #25

Did Firefox fix their performance degradation over time yet? Every time I try to switch back its fine for 2 weeks and then starts to get slower, like the internal database breaks or something. This is two weeks with 2-3 windows, with 5-20 tabs each, without restarts. So far Vivaldi has been the best chrome replacement for me.

did you report it? for regular users i don't give this kind of assine reply, but here on hacker news, i expect everyone used Firefox for a good decade before switching to chrome now, so i expect you did the minimum to the project and have at least abugzilla account to say "me too" on some bug.

For Firefox, that's really not sufficient. I've reported FF bugs in the past that sit unfixed in the queue for 13 years. It has disincentivized me from bothering to continue reporting them.

Yes, it's open-source and I could in theory pop it out and fix it myself (ha, because I have a spare weekend to burn on setting up a Mozilla dev environment and dependency stack). No, there's no incentive to do so when Chrome simply doesn't have the bug.

Chrome has bugs that languish too, but so far I can't name any that I've tripped over. I'm sure when I do, it'll be incentive to consider switching to Firefox.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#209

Post by esprehn »

rvern wrote: post #39
AgentME wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome has a process for each tab that's sandboxed so that most exploits would be trapped and unable to escalate out of the sandbox. Firefox has nothing like that yet, but it's coming eventually with the new multiprocess architecture that they're ramping up.

Firefox has sandboxing for tabs as well, and has had it before e10s.

What sandbox are you referring to?

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#210

Post by Jaruzel »

mikekchar wrote: post #64
llukas wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have missed recent HN news about google stripped build of Chromium - one that doesnt use binary blobs from Google.

I certainly did. Searching for it doesn't seem to bring anything up. Care to post a link? I even did a duckduckgo search for binary blobs in Chromium and only found the 18 month old discussion of Chromium installing hotwords (which has been resolved now). You're not, by any chance, thinking of the Chromium OS are you?

You can't miss it - it's riding #1 on HN right, and has been for a few hours now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12577787

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