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Goodbye, EdgeHTML

blog.mozilla.org

641–650 of 679 posts

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#641
post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad it completely kills your CPU on a Mac. I tried switching completely a month ago for the third time. Sadly absolutely nothing has happened in a 5 year time-span. The performance on my high-spec i7 Macbook Pro is abysmal. ( same across several company Macbooks ) The fans speed up constantly like they have done it for years. It's completely unusable for "professional" work or just regular multi tab browsing and…

I know about ~100 Firefox developers with Macbooks and none of them experiences the issue, so that's probably harder to reproduce. Would you be interested in help to profile the issue and file a detailed bug? This would help fix it.

Off course. I would really like to ditch Chrome once and for all.

What i don't get is that it's an unknown problem, many people have already filed bug reports on the tracker:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626325

(also see several blog posts like: https://www.kamshin.com/2018/07/firefox-on-macos-insane-batt...)

I think it has to do with running the Macbook Pro at scaled resolution which is pretty much standard among devs on MB pro no? (otherwise you will have very little screen real estate).

I just created i Profile through the Gecko profiler once again but i don't know if that captures the CPU data? What external profiler do you use?

Profile here from Firefox nightly, 1 minute of scrolling around https://fs8.transfernow.net/download/5c0a9b99f98e/master/Fir...

----

Very non scientific test below that i need to external profiler to confirm:

Symptoms:

I get a hot computer when browsing / working normally

high CPU usage leading to

fans constantly running and battery drain

Doesn't happen in other browsers

Comparative methodology:

Open 20 tabs and scroll a bit up and down for 1 minute.

Check CPU usage in Activity monitor.

Check fan speed an temp.

Repeat in all major browsers.

Result:

Safari, Chrome and Opera the fans stays silent and i get moderate CPU usage.

Firefox the fans kick in quickly (also ran first to have a fair baseline temperature).

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the exception of your personal stats.

It makes perfect sense if you're less worried about your internet usage privacy than about browser exploits installing malware onto your computer.

Then “security” is too vague and needs to be qualified.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#643
post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will admit I was secretly hoping that Servo would become a new, minimalistic, privacy-focused browser that would also blow Chrome out the water with performance. Its a shame they just plugged some parts into Firefox and called it a day. Instead of getting us a new shiny browser that could compete with Chrome, Mozilla focuses efforts on dubious Pocket/Cliqz/VPN integrations and a bunch of progressive outreach progra…

We haven't called it a day. The servo team still exists, we still work on Servo. Working on a production ready project is hard and takes forever, the integration work was a pit stop where we had an opportunity to get our work out to users. We'll take these opportunities as we get them.

> we had an opportunity to get our work out to users. We'll take these opportunities as we get them.

Compared to the number of people who browse the web on desktop, the number of VR/AR users is statistically insignificant.

Moving Servo's focus away from desktop and towards niche VR/AR experiments will only accelerate the decline of Firefox. Or rather, fail to slow it down.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#644
post #73

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> They plainly admit that Firefox can just hold it’s own and it is still NOT the fastest and best browser experience out there. The reason why is that those are complex judgements rather than easily measured objective facts. Browsers are extremely complex and what “fastest” means depends on what you're measuring and where it's running. Chrome's memory usage is a great example — if you have tons of RAM and nothing els…

How much of what you say is due to the “extremely complex” rendering engine and how much to just “simple” app design?

I’m not sure what you’re asking. My point was just that you can’t distill the performance of a complex system down to a single number and each browser is going to have areas where they’re ahead on something which some group of people cares about.

As an extreme example, this is far from true but assume that the next version Chrome was faster on every part of the browser from networking to JavaScript, CSS, etc. Firefox might still be faster for most users on the metric they care about the most because its default tracking protection blocks 90% of the page weight on most sites and so every single one of those people would say it’s faster because that’s what they actually experience.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're quite practical even if you don't care about tracking. I have different containers for my work and personal Google accounts and they make things much easier than relying on Google's support for multiple accounts. They're also great for development. I have different containers for each user I use while working on logged-in flows. I can just go from tab to tab to test different user experiences or switch betwee…

the only thing i miss from containers is a shortcut to open a new tab using current container[0]. it would make usage a lot easier. [0] https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/4...

That would be nice. I'd also like the to be able to automatically revert to default container when leaving a site (like the FB container plugin does), to view/manage cookies by container, and to specify more than one container that I like to open sites in so it doesn't bug me about using my default Google container when I open gmail in my work container.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're quite practical even if you don't care about tracking. I have different containers for my work and personal Google accounts and they make things much easier than relying on Google's support for multiple accounts. They're also great for development. I have different containers for each user I use while working on logged-in flows. I can just go from tab to tab to test different user experiences or switch betwee…

This is one of the things I used to like IE for - perhaps the only thing it got better than the competition: File | New Session ... and then you have a fresh session context that doesn't share cookies with the others so you can log into services as different users. As a developer this is very handy for testing multi-user workflows, and had numerous uses as a more general user too, and it was easy to do ad-hoc without…

That does sound useful. I often end up creating several temporary containers while doing testing and development. The overhead of creating and deleting these is annoying.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#647
post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're quite practical even if you don't care about tracking. I have different containers for my work and personal Google accounts and they make things much easier than relying on Google's support for multiple accounts. They're also great for development. I have different containers for each user I use while working on logged-in flows. I can just go from tab to tab to test different user experiences or switch betwee…

Absolutely! I use them so I can be logged in to multiple AWS accounts at the same time - works like a charm!

That's one of my use cases too. It works pretty well when you're actively using multiple accounts. Amazon doesn't preserve the session very long, so I find that most of the time I open one of my AWS containers they're logged out.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#648
post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried and simply couldn't do it. Although I know in my case it's a very specific issue with multiple profiles. I have a work and personal profile for Chrome and even tho I could make that work on Firefox, one very simple thing makes it completely unusable to me: clicking a link always opens on one particular window/profile. On Chrome whatever window you last used will be the one opening the url, which is extremely…

If understand your scenario, you can do that with FF, if you don't force a url to be always opened in one profile. For instance you can have sites hard-linked to specific profiles (e.g. social networks) and others that are not, so they stay in the current session (e.g. paypal, which otherwise is broken by the multi account feature).

Oh I don't force anything. Chrome obeys the "last window" rule while Firefox always opens things on the first profile (or last? can't recall).

If you use multiple accounts on the same service (eg. Gmail for work/personal use) you're screwed.

The whole point is that it shouldn't need configuration, it should be smart like Chrome is.

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#649
post #438
post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used to support it, but it was killed to prioritize firefox development (and couple of years later they stopped developing mozilla suite). https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.embeddin... otoh Webkit was originally developed as part of iOS, so embedding was required

WebKit was a fork from KDE and was used to build Safari before iOS existed.

right, KHTML is still a valid option under linux to build apps. But that's getting so much less (no?) attention from web developers

I bet the ipad prototype from early 2000s actually ran some version of osx&safari

Re: Goodbye, EdgeHTML

#650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is still very imperfect in their prioritising of privacy, but when we're looking at the question of "use Chrome or Firefox", that's hardly significant in comparison. I'm curious what you're using currently if Firefox's privacy imperfections are of concern? Safari?

I use Chrome, because security is my top concern. (Firefox has a good security team, but Chrome's is unmatched.)

What exactly is your threat model?

In terms of technical implementations, Chrome naturally surpasses everything else in a naïve myopic comparison (and always will), but holistically a secure algorithm isn't going to protect you if you've voluntarily handed the keys to the kingdom to umpteen untrusted parties. Chrome gets all the technical details right in a context where doing so seems redundant.

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