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How Firefox Got Fast Again

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Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#31

Post by sillysaurus3 »

frostwhale wrote: post #21
mattmanser wrote: post #18

Serious question, is this too little too late? Firefox has taken a massive nosedive in the last few years, in the UK at least. My two big clients have them on less than 2% share. Just checked one, 5 years ago they had 9.55% share, today it's 1.8%. Even taking into account the growth of mobile, that's dire.

Firefox is about more than market share. A state of the art free non for profit browser makes the market much more competitive and better for the consumer. They are there to keep chrome/ other browsers honest. If chrome / google does something too corporate you don't like, there's an alternative.

That seems a dangerous line of thinking, like arguing that startups are about more than growth.

Firefox is looking like Apple circa 1997. They can still recover, but they have to focus on what people want.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#32

Post by icebraining »

frostwhale wrote: post #21
mattmanser wrote: post #18

Serious question, is this too little too late? Firefox has taken a massive nosedive in the last few years, in the UK at least. My two big clients have them on less than 2% share. Just checked one, 5 years ago they had 9.55% share, today it's 1.8%. Even taking into account the growth of mobile, that's dire.

Firefox is about more than market share. A state of the art free non for profit browser makes the market much more competitive and better for the consumer. They are there to keep chrome/ other browsers honest. If chrome / google does something too corporate you don't like, there's an alternative.

As a dedicated FF user since Phoenix, I fully agree, but if few people actually use the alternative, it probably gets harder to get any kind of revenue deals :|

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#33

Post by wbkang »

m_st wrote: post #16

I switched from Chrome to Firefox 57 beta and couldn't be happier. Only issue so far was the ugly black title bar on the Mac, but switching to the integrated 'Light' theme fixed that. Too bad 'Light' isn't the default on macOS. Also note their updated Firefox on iOS. It looks and works just fine now and comes with Firefox Sync which gives you access to your tabs, bookmarks and history.

Same on Windows, I wish the light theme was the default.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#34

Post by TylerE »

frostwhale wrote: post #21
mattmanser wrote: post #18

Serious question, is this too little too late? Firefox has taken a massive nosedive in the last few years, in the UK at least. My two big clients have them on less than 2% share. Just checked one, 5 years ago they had 9.55% share, today it's 1.8%. Even taking into account the growth of mobile, that's dire.

Firefox is about more than market share. A state of the art free non for profit browser makes the market much more competitive and better for the consumer. They are there to keep chrome/ other browsers honest. If chrome / google does something too corporate you don't like, there's an alternative.

Mozilla is NOT a non-profit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#35

Post by okneil »

robin_reala wrote: post #20
m_st wrote: post #16

I switched from Chrome to Firefox 57 beta and couldn't be happier. Only issue so far was the ugly black title bar on the Mac, but switching to the integrated 'Light' theme fixed that. Too bad 'Light' isn't the default on macOS. Also note their updated Firefox on iOS. It looks and works just fine now and comes with Firefox Sync which gives you access to your tabs, bookmarks and history.

I’m using Firefox on iOS fulltime now, as in the last couple of releases ad blockers and 1Password have gained support.

Firefox on iOS supports content blockers? I thought that was Safari only.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#36

Post by methochris »

tried out the 57 beta on macOS (10.13) this weekend and watching in the activity monitor, the main firefox process grabbed a whopping ~800mb of my 8gb of ram + spawned sub-processes needing 20-100mb per website tab. compare this to safari and chrome that have a minimal main-process (~40mb) and then the per-tab amount. i like mozilla and firefox but it just always seems to be something with firefox that pushes me away and now that they have the speed fixed, it's eating up my finite resources.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#37

Post by mywittyname »

I love Firefox and I'm glad to see they are doing what it takes to stay relevant.

That being said, the "quantum" branding here is completely ridiculous. Quantum already had a definite meaning in computing and Firefox's "quantum era" has absolutely nothing to do with it. It's like Ford making a "hybrid" Mustang, that has zero electrification, it's just faster than all previous Mustangs.

I was honestly expecting a Firefox build for quantum computers.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#38

Post by Touche »

Am I the only one that is confused by Firefox's "fast again" narrative? I remember that they launched the https://arewefastyet.com/ site a few years ago to fight the idea that FF was slow. It feels like there's a new blog post that essentially says the same thing "we're fast now" every couple of months.

So I find this all confusing. Am I just remembering incorrectly, or haven't they already declared "we're as fast as Chrome now" several times in the past. Were those lies/incorrect? Or again, am I remembering incorrectly. Can someone explain this?

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#39

Post by milankragujevic »

r3bl wrote: post #27
agumonkey wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar conclusion here. So far I stopped using Chrome (stable or canary). I do miss it, Firefox Nightly (as I mention in other threads) have responsiveness issues a bit too much even for average websites (no video, no webgl, no audio) and I know that chrome doesn't suffer from that. But so far I'm still using Firefox for a few weeks. Few things that I do prefer in Firefox: - bookmarks with tags - nightly/testmode sn…

> reader view (not sure if chrome has that out of the box nowadays) As far as I can tell, Firefox, Safari and Edge all seem to have it, and Chrome does not. Not on mobile, and not on desktop. There are some extensions that accomplish the same. I've had some good (but very limited) experience using Mercury Viewer some time ago: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mercury-reader/okn...

I think Chrome does have it on mobile, because it prompts me to "reader view" a page when it isn't properly formatted for reading, on Android 7.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#40

Post by r3bl »

TylerE wrote: post #34
frostwhale wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is about more than market share. A state of the art free non for profit browser makes the market much more competitive and better for the consumer. They are there to keep chrome/ other browsers honest. If chrome / google does something too corporate you don't like, there's an alternative.

Mozilla is NOT a non-profit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

Mozilla Corporation is, as you can see on the first sentence of that page, a subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation[0], which is itself a non-profit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation

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