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How Firefox Got Fast Again

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Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#181

Firefox 56 had some kind of performance regression[1], but FF Quantum is a joy to use. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74irm5/is_ff_super...

The thing I can't stand about it is closing a window causes a multi-second beachball on latest Firefox / macOS. Really annoying. This is with a cleaned out profile and no extensions.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may even be worse than that. They have effectively thrown out all that made Firefox distinct in any user facing sense to achieve this.

This is sadly true. I switched off Chrome 5+ years ago due to the "vim-like" plugins being much better on FF than Chrome (specifically, my keybindings not working on built-in pages) and since FF56, vimperator and pentadactly no longer function. There have been months of back-and-forth between some developers and the FF team, but the functionality required for these plugins has never been prioritized and I had to disa…

Give it some time. I was expecting not to switch because of lack of Tree Style Tabs until around end of year. But I switched some weeks ago. Some addon authors use this opportunity to make a better addon. A few days ago GreaseMonkey has been released with a new API. And of course there will be new addons made by other people to replace lost functionality. It's happening, just not overnight.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may even be worse than that. They have effectively thrown out all that made Firefox distinct in any user facing sense to achieve this.

This is sadly true. I switched off Chrome 5+ years ago due to the "vim-like" plugins being much better on FF than Chrome (specifically, my keybindings not working on built-in pages) and since FF56, vimperator and pentadactly no longer function. There have been months of back-and-forth between some developers and the FF team, but the functionality required for these plugins has never been prioritized and I had to disa…

>specifically, my keybindings not working on built-in pages

This is a restriction for chrome-store extensions. You can install one manually without with "feature"

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#184
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium removes many of the nagging and background features related to Google services.

Unless Chrome has features you can't survive without (and I admit its dev tools are pretty good), then I don't see the purpose of this. If staying free of Google becomes a goal, then by using Chrome you're still helping them, even if your Chrome is un-googlified. This is because you help Chrome become a monopoly in the marketplace, I view it as the new Internet Explorer already. Many people here probably don't rememb…

> Firefox is right now truly the best browser, at least for my usage patterns and needs, but even if it weren't, I would still use it, because when web standards are endangered due to a monopoly, then I consider it my duty to support the underdog.

I just love that the web community actually thinks about this, and actively works to avoid monopolization and nonstandard behavior on the different browsers.

Recently, I have moved into desktop development (using Qt and GTK+), and it is atrocious just how difficult it is to deploy a non-trivially sized native application on the three common operating systems. I really wish that the desktop development community could have unified around a similar set of standards for all the OSes when it comes to desktop applications too.

The web application platform is painful in several ways too, but I think they have nailed it with attention to standards compliance and weeding-out monopolistic behavior

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#185

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.

It may even be worse than that. They have effectively thrown out all that made Firefox distinct in any user facing sense to achieve this.

Which means that they have to compete on marketing against Google.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#186
post #145
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but man, Google has just eaten their lunch the past 10 years. Maybe because Google actively pays people to install Chrome without the users knowledge, and force it as default. That’s pretty much the definition of malware already. It’s hard to win against someone that does such hostile behaviour.

Also because Mozilla wasted a lot of effort on FirefoxOS. That's when the browser really stagnated.

You are totally wrong on the wasted effort. FirefoxOS actually pushed a lot of the performance improvements that are seen as wonderful in this release. I kind of LOLed when people re-discovered things like how sync layout was bad. So much knowledge was lost in Moz when they killed FxOS that it's a showcase of bad leadership.

The desktop browser was stagnating because the browser owners had no idea where to drive it, and some people with the castle keys were change adverse (some finally "left"). They took as an excuse that they could not get support from the platform team, so the platform team killed FxOS support and ended up being absorbed by the Firefox organization to become just the fx backend team (great strategy!). I guess the platform VP was so frightened by the Tofino experiment and Fx Desktop moving away from Gecko that he didn't understand that was betting on the wrong horse long term.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#187

I know this is just one data point, but I just downloaded Firefox 56, and it is still as slow as I remember. Loading YouTube seems to lag behind Chrome, and viewing .gifv videos causes a noticeable stutter. I'll give it another shot next version.

57 is the big improvement with a huge jump in performance. Definitely give it a try.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#188
post #173
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, for my girlfriend, during some last few months Firefox is much slower than before: she uses it mostly for Facebook and Youtube, she doesn't have any extensions installed by herself (not counting the stuff that is in Firefox because Firefox marketing initiatives, like Pocket) and no adbockers, but Firefox uses so much CPU that it gets completely unusable. And she is not any extreme Facebook user: she has less tha…

Did any of you try FF 57? I also used a lot of extensions, but basically all the ones that mattered to me work again. (For tree style tabs I have to add a bit of CSS in a file to make it not awkward, though)

I've just installed 57 for me. The English Dictionary is gone -- now all the words I type here are with wiggly lines, I see "add dictionaries" but I had the darned dictionary already and what's the use trying to add the same? I don't know what to do next. The extensions are all gone, including the NoScript for which the developer claimed that he's adding support for new Firefox -- I checked noscript.net -- I have had the very last version. The mozilla site writes "Not compatible with Firefox Quantum". Noscript was the most used extension from a dozen I have had.

From the less used ones, as an example I've used "Copy Plain Text 2." Now I see there's a new similar and compatible extension by somebody else I guess, but it's obviously more limited: "Note: WebExtension API does not allow setting Copy PlainText as the default copy function of the browser at the moment, neither does it allow user defined keyboard shorts. Once there are such an APIs, I will add the feature."

Others have no replacements at all, not surprising seeing the limitations even for the simple "Copy Plain Text."

(Edit: regarding performance details see my other posts here.)

It's really as bad as it can be.

It's really bad.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#189
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless Chrome has features you can't survive without (and I admit its dev tools are pretty good), then I don't see the purpose of this. If staying free of Google becomes a goal, then by using Chrome you're still helping them, even if your Chrome is un-googlified. This is because you help Chrome become a monopoly in the marketplace, I view it as the new Internet Explorer already. Many people here probably don't rememb…

> Firefox is right now truly the best browser, at least for my usage patterns and needs, but even if it weren't, I would still use it, because when web standards are endangered due to a monopoly, then I consider it my duty to support the underdog. I just love that the web community actually thinks about this, and actively works to avoid monopolization and nonstandard behavior on the different browsers. Recently, I ha…

As someone that has been doing desktop development since the MS-DOS/Amiga days, and is quite happy to only touch Web development when obliged to do so, I wonder what those problems are.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#190

I can't remember the last time I thought about how "fast" a browser is except for edge cases like complex WebGL stuff. I don't think focusing on speed will plug the gap of users leaving for other browsers except for the minority of us on HN. I can't remember the last time a non-technical person I know complained about browser speed beyond a website itself being slow.

Well, for me at least, I always recognize if a button click/UI interaction doesn't force a visible and immediate UI response. That's one of the main reasons why I switched a couple of years to Chromium and now back to Firefox. It really responds fast. I totally agree that there were _very_ few instances where I noticed a rendering time difference.
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