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How Firefox Got Fast Again

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Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#511

Post by cookiecaper »

wpietri wrote: post #239
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…

Performance is a Red Queen problem. [1] People keep expecting more from computers. On the web, pages keep getting bigger and more complicated. Firefox's competition isn't going to stop trying to improve performance, and people's baseline for "fast" will mainly be other things they use. If Mozilla isn't always trying to be faster, they're going to be getting slower. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothes…

Jevon's Paradox [0] is probably more appropriate.

As resources become more plentiful (available performance-units, whether delivered through faster software or faster hardware), demand counter-intuitively increase, in part because the cheaper per-unit price makes people feel they can use the resource more freely.

This phenomenon describes why no matter how fast our computers get, it's unlikely that they will ever be "fast enough".

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

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#512

Post by callahad »

greggman wrote: post #471
nullspace wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, it has to a large extent. Somethings that are not yet there: 1. Since Webextensions are new, some extensions that I use in chrome, need to be ported over. Most are not must haves to be fair. 2. Hangouts for work. :( 3. A solution to manage different personas - Chrome has the "user profile" thing linked to google accounts, firefox as container tabs. I think user profile is better than container tabs, altho…

does hangouts.google.com work in FF (too lazy to try it)

No. Hangouts only works on Chrome and Safari (with a plugin). It does not work in Edge or Firefox, as we've phased out support for third-party plugins.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#513

Post by AsyncAwait »

mda wrote: post #45
mariusmg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn't it keep you away from Chrome ? It's faster, uses less memory, and the "maker", Mozilla is more trustworthy compared with Google. What's missing ?

It is probably sometimes marginally faster and sometimes slower, same with memory use. Its security is still lacking compared to Chrome. Personally I don't see any pressing incentive to switch.

Supporting a browser that actually has your interests in mind, so they have some power at the web standards bodies might be it.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#514

Post by on_and_off »

Spivak wrote: post #425
on_and_off wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and this is where Chrome has a good hook on me. In order to switch, both FF desktop and mobile need to be better than Chrome. Does FF support a version of Chrome tabs too ? Damn, they have built themselves a good moat just with features I will miss.

Yes it does. The feature is called Custom Tabs in FF but it's there.

Will it sync with another browser though.

That's asking a lot (chrome does not do that AFAIK) but that's the only way to allow me to use multiple browsers on different devices fluidly (and also to continue using chrome where it has an edge, like on mobile with chrome tabs)

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#515

Post by icc97 »

type0 wrote: post #462
icc97 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can find pretty much all the data that Google has on you - they allow you to examine the history of it. As far as I know they don't track your entire web browsing history but they do record all uses of their sites with your account. But personally I certainly don't need to be logged in using any of Googles services except for GMail so I'd rather just not build up the history rather than having to go about deletin…

> don't track your entire web browsing history Entire or not, does Google analytics apply here?

Yeah, I think this is where things start to get fairly pointless with avoiding being tracked. I'm imagining that even at a basic level they can match up any Google searches / GMail you use to your IP address and then follow that via Google Analytics.

I'm happily using DDG as a replacemet for most Google searches. But I guess I need to stop using GMail.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#516

Post by rehemiau »

codexon wrote: post #422
acqq wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think most people don't know this, but you need to download the nightly, NOT the regular version of Firefox (56 as of now) to see the speed increase. The regular Firefox is much slower than Chrome still. The nightly is now noticeably faster than Chrome.

This all mozilla's bragging about speed is premature. They should've published this article after firefox 57 reaches stable.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#518

Post by kronos29296 »

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...

Thanks to you I found something really useful. With this I can finally have the convenient replacement for the good old private window which gets overused for logging in to multiple accounts simultaneously.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#519

Post by inferiorhuman »

Manishearth wrote: post #316
icc97 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox containers are awesome. Once you've got a GMail account it's really easy to fall into the trap of letting Google track your everything. GMail, Google searches, Google Maps, You Tube. Containers splits them out beautifully, with minimal tracking. With Chrome / Chromium, Google wants you to log-in using a Google account, so you fall into the trap again.

Does Google actually track web activity when logged out whilst logged in to Chrome? By this I mean connecting e.g. searches done on google maps with your account, not just storing the history. Google of course has all the information server-side to do this; I'm unsure if they actually use it. There's usually a line on tracking that (you think) a company won't cross; e.g. I wouldn't expect Google to use browser finger…

Why wouldn't they? Judging from the RLZ related files I had to clean off of my Mac, Google is bundling RLZ (Google's tracking library) with Chrome on all OSes. I'd be shocked if they're deploying but not using something like that.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#520

Post by codexon »

rehemiau wrote: post #516
codexon wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most people don't know this, but you need to download the nightly, NOT the regular version of Firefox (56 as of now) to see the speed increase. The regular Firefox is much slower than Chrome still. The nightly is now noticeably faster than Chrome.

This all mozilla's bragging about speed is premature. They should've published this article after firefox 57 reaches stable.

Yup this article confused me as well.

The current stable release 56 just can't compare to chrome.

Apparently they have decided 57 is stable already but plan to make it official tomorrow.

From my unscientific testing, 57 is only as fast as chrome, while the nightly (59) seems to be faster than chrome. They should have waited until 59 was stable.

I would be using the nightly as my main browser if I didn't have experience with crashes and bugs with nightly versions before.

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