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Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

pulsebrowser.app

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Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#2
I'm not sure what this is offering over normal Firefox other than not having to turn off telemetry, install ublock ( and the other mentioned add-ons), and making use of user.js myself?

Also if you're making an issue of providing software with no telemetry then your website should probably not include cloud insights tech that: "collects web vitals from the actual devices your visitors are using".

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#4

I'm not sure what this is offering over normal Firefox other than not having to turn off telemetry, install ublock ( and the other mentioned add-ons), and making use of user.js myself? Also if you're making an issue of providing software with no telemetry then your website should probably not include cloud insights tech that: "collects web vitals from the actual devices your visitors are using".

"Hyper minimalistic UI"

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#6

I'm not sure what this is offering over normal Firefox other than not having to turn off telemetry, install ublock ( and the other mentioned add-ons), and making use of user.js myself? Also if you're making an issue of providing software with no telemetry then your website should probably not include cloud insights tech that: "collects web vitals from the actual devices your visitors are using".

Hi, I am a dev on Pulse Browser. I want to clarify our current development direction (I haven't significant updated the website recently). We have been moving further away from privacy and towards developing/iterating on features faster than Firefox is willing to, along with providing sane defaults.

For example, we have been experimenting with a opera/vivaldi-like method of accessing Firefox's sidebar. Whilst you could technically achieve this via patching `omni.ja`, you would need to repatch it every update. At that point, it might as well be a custom browser.

Sorry about Vercel's insight stuff, not sure how that got enabled, but it should be disabled now (or whenever Cloudflare invalidates your cache).

If you want further reading into some of the specific parts of our code that we are putting most of our effort into, here are some links: - https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser/blob/alpha/src/brow... - https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser/tree/alpha/src/brow...

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#7
Firefox is already fast in a lot of ways. For example, "Recalculate Style" is dead slow on Chrome compared to firefox. I don't know how but it's night and day (over a second difference for 10k+ nodes). Maybe something to do with https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/performance/bestprac...

A better firefox would be a better Chrome that copies optimization technique from firefox. Because "better" means improving the one that 65% of users are already using .. if it's fixable.

Edit: NVM. the tagline is "enhances focus and increases work productivity"

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#8
post #5

This isn't so much a fork rather than a firefox bundle with some extensions and tweaks or am I wrong? In which it would be quite deceptive in my opinion.

Our website is a touch (read very) out of date. To clarify, we are working on newer features, like the sidebar tabs. Currently, it is a combination of a tech demo and a set of personal preferences (features, extensions, preferences) that I and the other developer would prefer. If you have ideas for new features, I am interested to hear them.

Re: Pulse Browser – An experimental Firefox fork

#10

Firefox is already fast in a lot of ways. For example, "Recalculate Style" is dead slow on Chrome compared to firefox. I don't know how but it's night and day (over a second difference for 10k+ nodes). Maybe something to do with https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/performance/bestprac... A better firefox would be a better Chrome that copies optimization technique from firefox. Because "better" means improving the…

Firefox is also faster at DOM navigation: https://jsbench.github.io/#b39045cacae8d8c4a3ec044e538533dc

You can see from that set of benchmarks (once you run them) that Chrome will top out at around 45 million ops/s in the fastest cases.

In Firefox the top cases are a stress test of memory access speed. My old desktop with DDR3 reports numbers like 850 million ops/s while my newer laptop (4 years old) with DDR4 memory, both otherwise slower, reports something around 1.2 billion ops/s. Years ago when I discovered those benchmarks I remembered other users reporting as high as 5 billion ops/s.

I would be curious what somebody reports now with fast DDR5 memory.

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