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Browse Against the Machine

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11–20 of 142 posts

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#11
Unfortunately Firefox (Chrome too) use more CPU than Safari when browsing static pages or being unfocused. Which makes them a battery drain.

Otherwise I'd use Firefox everywhere.

EDIT: numbers on 2013 11-inch Macbook Air

Firefox 3-10% vs. Safari 0.2-2% when idling

Firefox 10-40% vs. Safari 5-10% when scrolling HN

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#12
post #8

...meanwhile we still can't use "pinch to zoom" (trackpad) in Firefox, which is available in Safari and Chrome for like 5 years now. Such a basic feature! It's the main reason i personally stopped using Firefox.

> ...meanwhile we still can't use "pinch to zoom" (trackpad) in Firefox, which is available in Safari and Chrome for like 5 years now. Such a basic feature! It's the main reason i personally stopped using Firefox.

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2011032210281240...

I assume you're on a mac since you mention Safari? I don't have a mac. Please give it a try with the latest nightly. It should loom something like https://i.imgur.com/2EgjCIO.png

The article says this feature depends on support from your hardware.

Of course, in the typical Mozilla fashion there is a six year old bug that seems related https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=632733

I don't know what to say. Sigh.

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#13
post #3

I know lot of people here say that Chrome is much faster than Firefox. I agree that sometimes chrome feels more responsive, but I want to tell my perspective from someone who owns a very old and slow laptop. Whenever I just start Chrome, it seems superfast until 5 minutes. Just open 5 tabs and some other programs like Terminal and Clementine, my whole system just hangs. So I can't even use Chrome because of the memor…

Well, using Google docs/sheets the difference is really big. I understand that Chrome should be heavily optimised to use other Google products like Google Sheets, but in the end, as a user it really makes a diference. On a Macbook Pro from 2015, entering a simple Google Sheets documents and have the page fully loaded and ready to work takes me ~8 seconds on Chromium, but ~17 seconds on Firefox. It's really a huge dif…

I use Firefox as my primary browser. Do you have another example outside of google docs that behaves that way?

The difference for google docs on my machine (three year old Laptop) isn't as big as the one you describe and on ownclouds I don't actually see a difference. Obviously google targets Chrome with Docs. You could equally well say that Google needs to up their game there.

Where they really have catching up to do is with battery usage. Unfortunately Friefox Mobile simply uses up considerably more battery for me.

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#14
I use Firefox as my main browser at work and at home, but Firefox performance degrades as soon as I have 10 tabs opened. Not FF's entire fault though, a lot of my tabs are JIRA board so there are some stupid Javascript from plugins making the performance more worse. With Chrome, however, I was able to load over 100 tabs easily and I rarely get a crash... So when I need to load lots of tabs, I use Chrome. I still don't understand why. They both use multi-process now, so where is the bottleneck? But I try to stick to Firefox whenever possible because I like the browser.

The only issue with Chrome I have been having lately, despite not remembering the error message, is I often can't type search terms on the url field and then get search results from Google. I get an error message with a dinosaur telling me something broke. I tried deleting profiles and even reinstall Chrome, but no. I can reproduce this problem on two Macbooks I own, which makes my experience with Chrome now pretty bad considering I can't search directly from URL bar!

Also, while Firefox's devtool has improved a lot over the years, I can't seem to find certain features. For example, it's pretty simple to preserve logs under Network tab in Chrome, but where is it in Firefox? But to be fair, I also use Firefox devtools in cases I can't easily from Chrome like editing request in Firefox is simpler IMO. So it's a bit of pick and choose, depending on what I need to do.

I love Firefox (I interned at Mozilla before), I've done some contributions to Firefox, and I think the folks there have been doing a great job. But my honest opinion is we still have some serious battle to fight, especially in performance and plugin. I don't care much about syncing bookmarks myself though so Chrome's integration with Google account doesn't matter to me.

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#15
> It’s faster, lags less, hogs much less memory than chrome, and in June we’ll release multi-process Firefox, putting us at performance parity with Chrome in most of the ways we mere humans can actually perceive.

I'm rooting for them but I really​ hope they get this done quickly. On Firefox, I often have ~.5 second UI freezes throughout the use which lead to an impression of sluggishness. Chrome, with the same number of tabs and equivalent extensions doesn't have this. By all means, Mozilla, use tricks if needed - keep stuff loaded in the background, defer script execution, prefetch DNS etc - but perceived responsiveness​ is really important. Freezing UI of all things is the worst that could happen.

Despite this, I'll stay on Firefox and look forward for the future.

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#16
post #8

...meanwhile we still can't use "pinch to zoom" (trackpad) in Firefox, which is available in Safari and Chrome for like 5 years now. Such a basic feature! It's the main reason i personally stopped using Firefox.

> Such a basic feature!

As a programmer, I really dislike remarks like this. There are so, so many features that are just as basic as that. All software will have features of this caliber that are not implemented, disregarding the thousands upon thousands of equivalently "basic" features that are.

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#17
post #3

I know lot of people here say that Chrome is much faster than Firefox. I agree that sometimes chrome feels more responsive, but I want to tell my perspective from someone who owns a very old and slow laptop. Whenever I just start Chrome, it seems superfast until 5 minutes. Just open 5 tabs and some other programs like Terminal and Clementine, my whole system just hangs. So I can't even use Chrome because of the memor…

I suspect the differences are more about browsing habits, because I have the opposite experience. I use both, and I never have to restart Chrome, but when my computer starts crawling and beach-balling, I know I can fix it by closing Firefox and re-loading the same set of tabs. I tend to open and close a lot more tabs on Firefox, and there are web sites I run exclusively in Firefox instead of in Chrome, so I'm not saying Firefox is any worse, just that if you stress it the right way, it has its own problems.

On a historical note, I remember that ten years ago Firefox's memory usage was a topic that generated a lot of heat online. I described my issues in detail once and got flamed by Firefox fanboys saying "you must be lying, because the memory leak was fixed two years ago," and those fanboys got flamed by a wave of truer fanboys saying "stop saying 'memory leak,' because it wasn't technically a memory leak, you're libeling the developers." I can't think of a piece of open source software that has such a rabid following these days, or maybe I'm just too old these days to hang out in such rough internet neighborhoods.

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#18

> I head up Firefox marketing, but I use Chrome every day. This is one thing to use it privately, this is another to say it publicly. I think he should be fired. Not even considering the other contradictions of this article. I think he has no idea how to lead Firefox marketing.

It's one of the browsers he uses. "Know thy enemy" and such :P

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#19
post #16
post #8

...meanwhile we still can't use "pinch to zoom" (trackpad) in Firefox, which is available in Safari and Chrome for like 5 years now. Such a basic feature! It's the main reason i personally stopped using Firefox.

> Such a basic feature! As a programmer, I really dislike remarks like this. There are so, so many features that are just as basic as that. All software will have features of this caliber that are not implemented, disregarding the thousands upon thousands of equivalently "basic" features that are.

It actually shows the tragedy at Mozilla because our* hard-working programmers have implemented this feature but Mozilla gets slammed either way.

Remember how people got in arms because Mozilla Firefox had some preference that allowed people to disable loading images and javascript whole scale across the browser? Well, I imagine Mozilla wouldn't be too excited to see blog posts like this: https://blog.codinghorror.com/this-is-what-happens-when-you-...

So what do we get? We get bugs that sit in Bugzilla for five years and nobody wants to do anything about it.

* I am not a Mozilla employee and I can't speak for Mozilla

Re: Browse Against the Machine

#20
Why did I move from Netscape to IE? Speed.

Why did I move from IE to Firefox? Speed.

Why did I move from Firefox to Chrome? Speed.

Why did I move from Chrome to Firefox? Negative feelings about Google.

So for myself the only things that work, hand on heart, are Speed or Repulsion. You can't really sell repulsion. Therefore, I think their only hope is Speed.

Admittedly I may be a crap example.

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