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Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

mobile.nytimes.com

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Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#311

Post by analogmemory »

azinman2 wrote: post #307

I spent the last 6 months or so in Firefox after having been out of it for years. It generally has caught up, and was generally pleasurable to use. I’m in the Apple ecosystem, so I wish there was a way to better sync with it like using the system keychain and Safari bookmarks, but it was otherwise holding up nicely. I loved the new containers feature, feeling like I had a fundamentally new way to approach web securit…

I'm guessing you didn't signup for a Firefox account to save the sync the bookmarks?

Do you not have any backup services running?

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#312

Post by ddtaylor »

analogmemory wrote: post #311
azinman2 wrote: post #307

I spent the last 6 months or so in Firefox after having been out of it for years. It generally has caught up, and was generally pleasurable to use. I’m in the Apple ecosystem, so I wish there was a way to better sync with it like using the system keychain and Safari bookmarks, but it was otherwise holding up nicely. I loved the new containers feature, feeling like I had a fundamentally new way to approach web securit…

I'm guessing you didn't signup for a Firefox account to save the sync the bookmarks? Do you not have any backup services running?

> Firefox sync somehow was preserved in this blank profile, yet it synced barely anything (a few extensions).

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#313

Post by thespirit »

furgooswft13 wrote: post #78

I find it kind of ironic that Mozilla rewrote Netscape Navigator from scratch with the lofty idea of creating an entire cross-platform application development platform, not just a browser. XUL, XULRunner etc. But it never caught on and they abandoned all that to focus on just the browser. Yet now Electron is everywhere... Before its time and abandoned in the nick of it. And no one cares about native GUI's anymore app…

Skills have centralized too heavily around HTML/CSS/JS for GUI development, that to do otherwise locks out talent, and or oppurtunity, depending on your budget.

Electron enabled cross-platform localized applications where nothing else stayed within the budget, with developers you already had.

It isn't that no one cares about native GUI's, it is that it isn't commerical, except in rare circumstances (games, visualization software, giant applications built by 1000s of developers, probably).

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#314

Post by [deleted] »

culot wrote: post #291
joeblau wrote: post #172

I just ran both of the speed test benchmarks [1][2] mentioned in the article, plus two other tests [3][4]. | Firefox | Safari | Chrome ----------------|----------------|-----------------|----------------- Speedometer 2.0 | 83.0 ±0.91 | 92.1 ±2.8 | 75.7 ±3.4 JetStream | 219.40 ±8.5563 | 294.79 ±11.138 | 201.81 ±15.171 Motion Mark | 203.71 ±5.41% | 525.77 ±6.56% | 388.85 ±4.79 ARES-6 | 54.06 ±0.95ms | 16.85 ±1.19ms | 2…

FWIW: | Firefox | Edge | Chrome ----------------|-----------------|-----------------|----------------- Speedometer 2.0 | 65.70 ±01.100 | 59.10 ±01.300 | 86.92 ±00.600 JetStream | 191.73 ±14.598 | 226.78 ±12.531 | 162.21 ±02.1999 Motion Mark | 173.67 ±04.61% | 432.36 ±13.07% | 279.61 ±13.67% ARES-6 | 63.72 ±01.26ms | 77.97 ±20.19ms | 27.65 ±00.79ms

[deleted]

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#315

Post by ferongr »

bholley wrote: post #278
com2kid wrote: post #79

After running for a few hours, Firefox starts making my entire computer lag, eventually to the point of freezing up for seconds at a time multiple times per minute. Over time Firefox's video playback gets more and more janky, until it drops more frames than it shows. In task manager I can see FF using 50% of my GPU to play a 720p stream from Twitch. Closing FF completely and reopening it fixes the problem, until it h…

Sounds like ghost windows. Try disabling all your add-ons to see if the problem persists? You can also record a profile via perfht.ml and send it to me, I'm happy to have a look.

Admittedly, my own experience was with older versions up to 57, but what it felt like e10s did not really help with responsiveness, especially after very long sessions (24 hours+). Restarting Firefox used to be a daily ritual (with all the lost website state that entailed) as JS pauses started becoming very noticeable. Fx would also keep the CPU in high power states with constant 10-20% CPU usage near the 24 hour mark.

I don't know if it's an architectural limitation of how e10s was implemented, but Firefox still feels like a single-process browser. On the other hand, Chrome remains responsive even after a week of being open.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#316

Post by nothrabannosir »

joeblau wrote: post #172

I just ran both of the speed test benchmarks [1][2] mentioned in the article, plus two other tests [3][4]. | Firefox | Safari | Chrome ----------------|----------------|-----------------|----------------- Speedometer 2.0 | 83.0 ±0.91 | 92.1 ±2.8 | 75.7 ±3.4 JetStream | 219.40 ±8.5563 | 294.79 ±11.138 | 201.81 ±15.171 Motion Mark | 203.71 ±5.41% | 525.77 ±6.56% | 388.85 ±4.79 ARES-6 | 54.06 ±0.95ms | 16.85 ±1.19ms | 2…

Firefox’s biggest problem is rapacious battery draining. Unplug your charger and Safari feels like a dainty butterfly in a soft summer breeze, while Firefox thrashes around like a drunken Godzilla in mid-90s Tokyo.

The energy usage tab on the activity monitor consistently shows Firefox at a ~40 “score” (whatever that unit is), and Safari more around 4. Anecdotally, the difference in battery time is real.

This is the biggest reason to keep using Safari on Mac in battery mode. (Or Always Be Charging :) )

I hope they can ever fix this :( sounds pretty fundamental, but I know little.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#317

Post by oselhn »

fencepost wrote: post #85

I haven't seen anyone mention this, but Firefox is my "daily driver" for almost all browsing, and is also locked down with uMatrix, uBlock Origin, DecentralEyes and Ghostery (though I could probably drop Ghostery without missing it). Chrome has uBlock Origin and a few other things but interferes with pages less. I keep a set of pages for some specific web apps (e.g. GMail, Google Calendar, task management, etc.) open…

Ghostery like filtering is already implemented in firefox (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection).

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#318

Post by Yizahi »

> But it became irrelevant after Google in 2008 released Chrome

No, it didn't.

> Chrome, a faster, more secure and versatile browser.

No, it wasn't.

Articles like this are perpetrating the myth about "better" Chrome, while it had always been slower and had less features than Firefox.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#319

Post by mooman219 »

joeblau wrote: post #172

I just ran both of the speed test benchmarks [1][2] mentioned in the article, plus two other tests [3][4]. | Firefox | Safari | Chrome ----------------|----------------|-----------------|----------------- Speedometer 2.0 | 83.0 ±0.91 | 92.1 ±2.8 | 75.7 ±3.4 JetStream | 219.40 ±8.5563 | 294.79 ±11.138 | 201.81 ±15.171 Motion Mark | 203.71 ±5.41% | 525.77 ±6.56% | 388.85 ±4.79 ARES-6 | 54.06 ±0.95ms | 16.85 ±1.19ms | 2…

To compare: i7 6700k / GTX 1080 / Windows 10

                  |     Edge 42       |    Chrome 67     |     Firefox 61
  ----------------|-------------------|------------------|------------------
  Speedometer 2.0 | [3]  76.8 ±1.0    | [1] 118.0 ±1.3   | [2]  85.7 ±2.1
  JetStream       | [1] 283.0 ±21.4   | [3] 235.1 ±2.4   | [2] 240.8 ±2.7
  Motion Mark     | [3] 273.2 ±12.9%  | [2] 305.4 ±0.9%  | [1] 445.7 ±0.8%
  ARES-6          | [3]  65.4 ±16.5ms | [1]  17.8 ±0.4ms | [2]  51.4 ±1.7ms

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#320

Post by vntok »

exodust wrote: post #207
andrepd wrote: post #83

>The browser, made by the nonprofit Mozilla, emerged in the early 2000s as a faster, better designed vessel to surf the web. But it became irrelevant after Google in 2008 released Chrome, a faster, more secure and versatile browser. Irrelevant? More versatile (even though it didn't even have extensions until v5)? Why?

It's simply an incorrect statement. Firefox did not become irrelevant. I'm not sure where the author is coming from with his remarks, but obviously he lived in a Google Chrome bubble for a long time.

Have a look at the trends[0] and tell me it does not show a descent to darkness.

1. Firefox was at ~30% market share at its apex (it's now half that)

2. It got surpassed by a newcomer with no previous experience in browser making in less than 3 years

3. And the newcomer was so much better at technical stuff and marketing that it not only kept superseding Firefox but it kept growing uninterrupted ever since

3. Meanwhile, instead of stabilizing and reversing the trend, Firefox's usage share just kept tumbling down to the level of Internet Explorer's (Internet Explorer!)

4. It. Never. Recovered. Seriously, it had around 12% market share a month ago[1], below IE's share. That's ridiculous.

Of all those points, I think maybe #4 shows Firefox's irrelevancy best: the most generous estimates now place it around 14% global market share, barely above while Chrome is striving at around 60%. If IE is becoming more and more irrelevant (it is, right?), then surely Firefox is becoming just as irrelevant as well.

Even though the data isn't ideal and there are probably some +/- percent point errors between Netmarketshare, W3counter, Alexa, Google, etc., the trend is identical among all these reporting platforms.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...

1: https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?options...

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