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

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

#551

Post by detaro »

logicallee wrote: post #548
detaro wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jumped to 950 MB, settled at ~800 MB. Deferred loading seems to do a lot, so I could imagine that different usage patterns make a big difference, but that would need a detailed look into how Firefox and Chrome manage memory for "stale" tabs. If I remember right Mozilla recently added improvements there, getting rid of their memory more aggressively?

So, under actual usage (not ctrl-tabbing around to aggressively force-load things) it is 950 MB vs 5.3 GB. (I imagine for a comparable number of tabs?) ------ EDIT in response to your reply: Please do! I agree that logging would be interesting. Do you know, does Firefox defer/discard tabs again if they do fully load but you don't use them for a long time? Or are the only deferred tabs, ones that you never looked at t…

I don't think you can count a freshly started browser that has only loaded 7 tabs (one per window) as "actual usage". I'd guess tabbing around triggered Maybe I should set up logging for this, might be interesting.

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

#552

Post by bovine3dom »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #524
bovine3dom wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I see where you're coming from. cmcaine started on an extension to the WebExtension API [1] that would fix that, but progress has stalled. It got preliminary approval and was split up into loads of bugs on Bugzilla at which point we all got a bit lost. If you feel very strongly about it, perhaps you could pick up the baton? Part of the reason I haven't done so is because I disagree with you - Tridactyl is prett…

This is sad on so many levels... If I understand this correctly: Firefox sucks now because they want everything asynchronus, to the point that they are even unable to implement something as simple as a reliable key-event-api? And you think it's ok because it's not the worst problem around if users of a keyboard-first-interface are forced to often use the mouse or botherd with regulary hiccups in the workflow? OK, I u…

No, the extension to the API and code is quite simple.

The problem is bureaucratic - the schedules of those involved rarely overlap, and they have very little motivation to work on it.

The meta bug for the API is here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061

Again, I strongly recommend that if you care about this, you look through the issue on the BMO (especially see depends on and blocks), figure out what the next step is, and do it :)

I suspect it would not take very much time at all, although there could be a reasonable amount of waiting for replies from Mozillians.

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

#554

Post by rootlocus »

midasz wrote: post #322
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…

Too bad there is no way to install Safari on Windows.

Safari is heavily optimized for Mac, so porting it doesn't really make sense.

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

#555

Post by matthewmacleod »

paulie_a wrote: post #504
susam wrote: post #76

Firefox was never away, at least for me. Therefore the expression "Firefox is back" sounds a little odd to me. I have been using it since 2006 (Firefox 2.0). Back then, the presence of the Firebug extension for Firefox made me switch to Firefox as my primary browser. Two years later, Chrome arrived but Firefox remained as my primary browser because I wanted to continue using the Vimperator extension for Firefox that…

I personally was never impressed by firebug. I haven't checked it out in a while but it was incredibly clunky.

Isn’t it essentially the prototype for all modern browser dev tools though? As in, they are all substantially similar to what Firebug was like, and Firebug existed before any of the others?

I could be getting my history wrong, but from what I remember Firebug was absolutely mind-blowing.

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

#556

Post by giancarlostoro »

sureaboutthis wrote: post #500
radmuzom wrote: post #467

Most of the comments here are about using or not using Firefox, depending on it's features as compared to primarily Chrome. However, for me, it is not about being better or having more features at all - it is because I like Firefox and want to support Mozilla and believe that Google should not control the web. It is somewhat similar to the free software vs. open source debate - one should use free software not becaus…

A lot of people forget that the only browser used by most everyone was IE and that was stagnant and smelly as they come. Firefox nudged the web forward when it was introduced, and made quite a splash on its own by capturing about a fourth to a third of usage from IE, but a small company can't fend itself from Microsoft. It took Google and Chrome, later, to knock IE and Microsoft into its place with its big push forwa…

Mozilla too gets to write certain bits. WebAssembly is all Mozilla. I guess Google has more resources to invest in Chrome is the bigger difference.

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

#557

Post by juzffoo »

I'm stuck with Chrome for more of my daily browsing because have been using Chrome browser as my password manager as well for non critical application accounts. Now every time I browse those apps/sites using firefox, i do not remember all of those passwords and need to go back to chrome again. And I been too lazy to go through the forgot password song and dance too. Is there any way to move the Chrome saved passwords over to Firefox?

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

#558

Post by ubercow13 »

bollockitis wrote: post #534
radmuzom wrote: post #467

Most of the comments here are about using or not using Firefox, depending on it's features as compared to primarily Chrome. However, for me, it is not about being better or having more features at all - it is because I like Firefox and want to support Mozilla and believe that Google should not control the web. It is somewhat similar to the free software vs. open source debate - one should use free software not becaus…

I switched to Firefox a week or so ago for the same reasons. My issue is that I can't make Firefox usable for me without a bunch of tweaks. For example, scrolling with the mouse wheel feels like scrolling through mud. I like smooth scrolling but the defaults are too slow. Font rendering is also janky unless I disable hardware acceleration, which is a real shame. On Chrome, I do nothing but add a home button to the to…

There are lots of parameters in about:config to tweak scrolling (unlike in Chrome). Try searching for 'wheel'

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

#559

Post by dep_b »

samplesizeme wrote: post #543
retSava wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, performance-wise I can't complain :) I'm a compulsive tab hoarder with about 400 open (admittedly, have to enable the "don't load until focused"-setting) on a 5 yo laptop with lots of other stuff running. No problem at all.

I am a tab hoarder as well and switched to Firefox last year for this reason. I have a 16GB MBP and I had to restart Chrome twice a day due to memory usage. The most I saw was 25GB of RAM used by Chrome (thank you solid state swap!) When Quantum was released, I did a side by side comparison, opening the exact same tabs in each browser, switching browsers each day, manually keeping tabs in sync. Did this for about two…

> A big bonus has been the huge improvement in battery life. I had no idea how much I was losing to Chrome. Safari is supposed to be great for that, but plugins and the fact I'm an Android user means it doesn't offer me much.

Firefox is still bad compared to Safari.

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

#560

Post by Fej »

samplesizeme wrote: post #543
retSava wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, performance-wise I can't complain :) I'm a compulsive tab hoarder with about 400 open (admittedly, have to enable the "don't load until focused"-setting) on a 5 yo laptop with lots of other stuff running. No problem at all.

I am a tab hoarder as well and switched to Firefox last year for this reason. I have a 16GB MBP and I had to restart Chrome twice a day due to memory usage. The most I saw was 25GB of RAM used by Chrome (thank you solid state swap!) When Quantum was released, I did a side by side comparison, opening the exact same tabs in each browser, switching browsers each day, manually keeping tabs in sync. Did this for about two…

For bookmark sync, use, well, Firefox Sync. It's built-in.
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