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How Firefox Got Fast Again

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Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#211

Post by sp332 »

acqq wrote: post #132
karllager wrote: post #84

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...

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…

Firefox's Webextensions APIs are much more expansive than Chrome's. They still have an active developer community so the ecosystem will recover quickly.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#212

Post by fauigerzigerk »

digi_owl wrote: post #114
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.

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.

Firefox does have some distinct features that are important to me. I want to open links from Gmail or Inbox without being logged in to my Google account. Firefox containers are perfect for that. I also like snoozing tabs and quick tab switching by typing % into the address bar.

Some of these things can be done in other browsers using third party extensions, but I am extremely reluctant when it comes to third party extensions for security reasons.

[Edit] Very important to me as well is built-in reader view.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#213

Post by wtetzner »

fiatjaf wrote: post #202
e40 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The signing into an account in chrome is the killer feature for me. I have work and a couple of personal accounts that I have signed in in different browser windows. That allows me to keep things separate (extensions, mail, browsing, bookmarks, etc). How do FF users do this?

Firefox 58 has "persona" tabs. Coloured tabs that keep their own sessions. You can just configure multiple personas and work on them all simultaneously from the same window (or you can use different windows, if you prefer). It's good even for creating fake accounts, test accounts, testing apps from the perspective of different user sessions etc.

They're available in earlier versions, but I think you have to turn in on in about:config.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#214

Post by tgb »

mtgx wrote: post #87
mapgrep wrote: post #52

I switched back to Firefox 54 from Chrome when multiprocess browsing ("Electrolysis") came out of beta. It's been absolutely great. It's fast and I trust and like the nonprofit behind it. And all the extensions I care about are available. My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account, and just generally wanting less dependence on Google. I also like that Firefox has a built in tracking…

For those who don't know, if you sign in to your Google account in Chrome, Google will automatically save all the searches you've done in the omnibox. I don't remember Google ever warning me specifically that this was happening in the background, and after I checked https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity and noticed it was doing that, I was so furious that I deleted all the data Google kept on me there, and paused…

I hate that it saves it enough that I often perform 'dumb' googles in an incognito window just so it'll never suggest "how do I parallel park" again. But how is this unexpected behavior? It also saves every URL you visit - in your browser history. And those URLs encode the search terms. If you want it to not save what you do, then you use incognito mode.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#215

Post by pcwalton »

fabrice_d wrote: post #186
mastax wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Well, in general, I don't see Quantum as elevating the concerns of desktop over mobile. Moving to parallel implementations of functionality can help even more on mobile than on desktop, since Android phones have tended to embrace multicore faster than desktop has. (Apple phones are a different story, but Gecko obviously can't be relevant there, and even Apple is finally moving to high core counts in the past year.)

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#216

Post by ocdtrekkie »

asdgkknio wrote: post #198
Touche wrote: post #38

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…

I'm confused by it, too. The main reason I've preferred Firefox to Chrome for years has been performance. It's pretty much the same in responsiveness and uses far less memory. Chrome being the fastest browser is ancient history.

The main reason I originally left Firefox (for Edge, mind you, I don't touch Google software anymore) was the single-process issues they fixed with electrolysis which came out in Firefox 48.

Bloated websites (usually Google ones) would actually lock up the entire Firefox UI, and Windows would recognize the browser application as "Not responding" until the page finished loading. In the case of a super bloated site like the old Google+, that could be as much as twelve seconds non-responsive while all the cruft loaded up.

I am back on Firefox release channel now, and pretty satisfied with current performance, but looking forward to Quantum.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#218

Post by sverige »

acqq wrote: post #194
nerdwaller wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on Firefox since I can remember it being out, but the latest versions, 56+, have me using it only intermittently due to battery drain issues on Mac[0] :(. I am really hoping they get this fixed shortly. [0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042

Exactly, Firefox is slower for both me and my girlfriend, I am a kind of "typical non-typical" and she "typical typical" user, and it got annoyingly slower for both. And now I've just lost all the extensions too, including NoScript and the dictionary(?!?)! See my other post here for details.

I've been using firefox since forever too. (Actually, since Mozilla 1.0 (aka Nutscrape) in 1993 or thereabouts.) I'm at that point where I'm about to dump it again, as I have periodically in the past.

They keep making it more and more like Chrome. If I wanted to use Chrome, I would. It's gotten to bloat maximum.

It's slow as hell. It's less flexible and less easy to personalize. They have broken some of my favorite add-ons.

This piece is pure propaganda.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#219

Post by [deleted] »

Thorncorona wrote: post #201
e40 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The signing into an account in chrome is the killer feature for me. I have work and a couple of personal accounts that I have signed in in different browser windows. That allows me to keep things separate (extensions, mail, browsing, bookmarks, etc). How do FF users do this?

FF just came out with multi account containers about a month ago -> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

[deleted]

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#220

Post by remedan »

e40 wrote: post #193
mapgrep wrote: post #52

I switched back to Firefox 54 from Chrome when multiprocess browsing ("Electrolysis") came out of beta. It's been absolutely great. It's fast and I trust and like the nonprofit behind it. And all the extensions I care about are available. My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account, and just generally wanting less dependence on Google. I also like that Firefox has a built in tracking…

The signing into an account in chrome is the killer feature for me. I have work and a couple of personal accounts that I have signed in in different browser windows. That allows me to keep things separate (extensions, mail, browsing, bookmarks, etc). How do FF users do this?

Firefox has supported multiple profiles for ages. Just run it with -P. It allows you to have separate history, extensions, bookmarks, everything.

The new panel containers are also handy. They allow you to have shared history and bookmarks but separate cookies and sessions. You can be logged into the same site on different accounts in two tabs in the same window.

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