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How Firefox Got Fast Again

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Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#691

Post by deong »

Moseman23 wrote: post #334
deong wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we don't want the government arbitrarily censoring people, why are we OK with corporations doing it? Because the "opt-out" process is orders of magnitude easier. You don't have to use Google. Microsoft has online document creation applications, as does Apple, assuming iWork still exists. Or you can just write documents offline using any of several thousand tools. Corporate censorship is entirely under your contr…

I'm sorry but in most areas of online life the system monopolies of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft are crushing our freedom and choice in tons of ways. You DO have to use Google Docs(for your PTA, your kids soccer team, your communication with your accountant or your church), because everyone else does. Most people won't be running their own mail server or Diaspora. There are many many examples of thi…

I'm no libertarian; I'm just pointing out the difference between legal force and social pressure. You do not have to use Google Docs. You may really really need to, but there's no literal threat of imprisonment hanging over your head if you don't.

Again, by all means, protest Google/Amazon/Facebook. I'd love to see the state of affairs change too. Just don't pretend like missing your church bulletin is equivalent to actual imprisonment.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#692

Post by deong »

Santosh83 wrote: post #355
moomin wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider this: imagine the guy sat next to you at work starts yelling at you with a loudhailer all day. Every day. And he never ever shuts up. (Alternatively, imagine that he just whispers "fuck santosh" all day.) Would you expect him to be free to continue doing it? Would you expect the government to stop him? Or would you expect your employer to stop him? The answer is: groups of people (and corporations are groups…

In which case there needs to be easy to employ mechanisms to redress grievances, which tech corps currently don't have. For example, account lockouts and DMCA takedowns (when done by error or if the user thinks is unfair) are pretty much permanent. Your best option is to accept the data loss, move on and create another account. My point is censorship is a huge responsibility and power, especially when it is done at t…

I'm with you for almost all of that journey. Companies should be held accountable for their actions. There are consumer protection laws, and I think it's reasonable for those laws to include protection against things like automated takedowns with no appeal process.

I just can't quite go as far as to say that Google or Facebook should be treated as governmental entities. The bill of rights restricts what government can do. It has never been interpreted as restricting what an individual person can do, even if that person heads a giant corporation.

Solve these problems another way, not by literally nationalizing social media.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#693

Post by [deleted] »

inDigiNeous wrote: post #505
frik wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox 56 is actually pretty good. It's now fast again. I am using a fresh new profile. Please let me increase "content process count" higher than 7. Chrome opens hundreds of child-processes (no problem at all on my PC). And I am still keeping an older Firefox 48 around, as it's the last version that runs Firebug and other good but now unsupported addons. Firebug had this "DOM" panel which showed the non-default DOM…

You will be pleasantaly surprised when you get updated to 57 :) Have been running the beta for 3 weeks now, very stable, fast, snappy. Amazing work.

[deleted]

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#694

Post by sfink »

sushibowl wrote: post #59
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…

> Am I just remembering incorrectly, or haven't they already declared "we're as fast as Chrome now" several times in the past. https://arewefastyet.com/ refers specifically and only to Firefox's javascript engine. It runs js benchmarks only, not whole websites, and doesn't test responsiveness or rendering performance. Javascript performance in firefox has been on par with competing browsers for a while now. The curre…

Not entirely true anymore. If you select eg "Quantum Reference (Windows, browser, x64)" and look at the Breakdown list, you'll see a couple of browser benchmarks that look at responsiveness and rendering. Speedometer and Unity WebGL, for example. But yeah, it's mainly all about JS.

Since the Quantum effort started, the JS team has prioritized perf work higher, so quite a bit of perf-related improvements have been made in Spidermonkey for 57 as well. (And Quantum DOM needed some rearchitecting to re-multithread the engine in a limited way.)

(Source: I work on Spidermonkey.)

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#695

Post by iterati »

DiThi wrote: post #690
iterati wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the mean time, they've lost one of those power users (likely more, going by some of the discussion in issues for various vim-like plugins) and will, in the future, need to do something to entice me back. This experience has left a bad taste in my mouth and I'm not going to be rushing to go back to a browser that breaks functionality on me without prompt.

They lost me once for terrible, terrible performance. For a year or two until I really needed tree style tabs back. They need to prioritize. Deal with it. Also, since you're a power user, why don't you use that proposed API already? It seems you don't even need to compile the browser or anything, just enabling a flag and installing the API as an addon.

> They lost me once for terrible, terrible performance. For a year or two until I really needed tree style tabs back. They need to prioritize. Deal with it.

I am dealing with it. I moved to a different browser.

> Also, since you're a power user, why don't you use that proposed API already? It seems you don't even need to compile the browser or anything, just enabling a flag and installing the API as an addon.

Simply not true.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#696

Post by iterati »

DiThi wrote: post #684
iterati wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less "dire warnings on forums" and more "slow development pace for required pieces to make my workflow even possible again". Here's an issue opened June 9 that hasn't been addressed by the Mozilla team and hasn't had any updates in a month: https://github.com/cmcaine/keyboard-api/issues/1 Here's the request for a better keyboard API (referenced in the above) that's been open for over 2 years with no end in sight: htt…

> with no end in sight Except an already developed patch and proposal that needs some time from the main devs to be reviewed. For a long time they were very busy making FF bearable for 90% of the users. Now that it's released we'll see if this issue is as stuck as you imply.

I guess we will, but with the slow pace that any of this was (not) done over the last number of years, I'm not holding my breath.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#698

Post by beemboy »

cyberjunkie wrote: post #663
beemboy wrote: post #317

I can still remember: * that moment I was overjoyed to use Lynx over dialup in South India back in the mid-90s allowing me to browse the World Wide Web! * ...And then that moment being surpassed when I wet myself running the Netscape "GUI browser" on Windows 95 using a brilliant hack by a pair of brothers I knew that wrote a winsock.dll shim on top of Lynx over dialup (called Blue Laser; those guys went on to become…

Shellshock? Were you using the Rs. students shell account using the bonafide certificate or the Rs. 5,000 standard shell account?

It was the standard account I believe. Shellshock came first followed by BlueLaser IIRC.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#699

Post by mgbmtl »

zeveb wrote: post #682
mgbmtl wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that is a valid issue, but it's still quite a different scale than using Google. If I understand correctly, you're saying that we should be careful about saving passwords in Firefox if we could be the target of a National Security Letter from the US. The attack would be detectable, so it cannot be used very often (and they would need a really good excuse for doing so). By contrast, Google takes all our data a…

Oh, I certainly don't recommend Google over Firefox. But I do not recommend using Firefox's Sync functionality, which is indeed insecure by design. I have no idea why so many downvotes. Can anyone disagree that a system in which Mozilla is able to decrypt user data is insecure? One note: the attack is not necessarily detectable, unless you are in the practice of verifying the JavaScript you receive for each page. If…

We can run our own Firefox Account servers. A privacy-focused hosting co-op could run that as part of their services, or someone could run their own at home (but that's not useful to the general public).

People get annoyed of being told x-y-z is not secure, while not being offered any practical solution, especially if the risk/probability of attack is low.

(I'm assuming Firefox has a good reason for working the way it does, but I guess the first step would be to have more documentation about that.)

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#700

Post by Drdrdrq »

colanderman wrote: post #456
Drdrdrq wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... ... What do you mean?

There are two distinct problems I've noticed with FF scrolling vs. Chrome on Android. First is that certain elements block scrolling. I use FF primarily for Facebook (since FF allows me to use my – shameless plug – idle-time faker extension [1]). If my scrolling thumb lands on the "Like" button of a post, the screen just stays put. So about 1/3 of my "scroll" gestures are in vain. Second is that "flinging" motions do…

Thank you for an in-depth explanation! I guess I use browser quite differently (qnd on simpler pages) so I never noticed any of these things.
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