Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

treeherder.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 559 posts

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#121

Post by tashoecraft »

dylan604 wrote: post #67
emsixteen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it, but just don't like the devtools. Or moreso miss some things from Chrome/Edge.

I use the FF devtools daily, and for what I'm working on, it has everything I need to help me get the things I need done. Knowing that I'm not everyone and have plenty to learn, what things are missing from the devtools for you?

The only issue I have (which, is happening less and less lately) is my debugger doesn't jump to the source. It hits and everything pauses, but I don't get routed to it and have to start progressing just to get it to work, which can make the debugger useless as you've gone past what you were looking at. This has happened across machines for years for me, and happens much less in chrome. But doesn't happen enough for me to switch.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#122

Post by osmarks »

justinclift wrote: post #58
Avamander wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome automatically prunes history for quite a while now. Which I personally dislike, as I sometimes need to find something I visited a long time ago.

Firefox does the same thing too unfortunately, and it doesn't seem like it can be turned off. It's a real pita for the same reason. Needed to look at browser history older than a few months and discovering it's all been deleted (by Firefox) was a very unpleasant experience. Seems to be a needless data loss "optimisation" (sic), but I have no idea what the real world use case for that would be.

I wrote a script (https://github.com/osmarks/random-stuff/blob/master/histrete...) to dump a Firefox places.sqlite database to a separate SQLite database for long-term storage (I run it nightly). It seems to delete stuff based on some combination of visit frequency and last visit time.

I suspect they need to do this to keep history searches fast, since I also separately hacked a bunch of `about:config` options to retain more history and they run quite slowly now, particularly on my phone.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#123

Post by guillim85 »

terafo wrote: post #107
seba_dos1 wrote: post #17

There was a time when Firefox felt a lot slower than Chromium, but for a few years now it's been close enough (even if still somewhat slower) to not bother me, while Firefox clearly offers superior functionality and much better performance under high load. The last time Chromium has felt attractive compared to Firefox was a really long time ago. Glad to see it moving in the right direction still.

Firefox is slower for me than Chrome, but that's because I have tab hoarding problem(2k tabs in Firefox right now).

Close them all today. It will feel weird for like 1 hour, but you will feel much better after.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#124

Post by frou_dh »

It's kinda interesting that some of the younger amongst us might have only ever known Chrome through the lens of its meme-like reputation for being a big fat hog.

Because when it was originally released like 15 years ago, the pitch/consensus were the exact opposite of that, i.e. ultra clean and efficient.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#125

Post by lolinder »

lillecarl wrote: post #76
flerchin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really cool how you can see Firefox speed enhancements showing up in discrete steps. I am surprised to see Chrome faster than Chromium. What is google doing in their branded flavor?

On windows you can speed chromium up by renaming it to chrome.exe so it gets special treatment by antivirus software.

That's incredibly dumb if true, but can't be the whole story because the difference is still present in the Linux stats.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#126

Post by dspillett »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #28
xd1936 wrote: post #8

I've used Firefox as my primary browser since the "Quantum" in 2017. Chrome still feels snappier, but Firefox's Container Tabs is hard for me to imagine losing.

> Chrome still feels snappier I actually tested this and Firefox is significantly faster in rendering CSS and tables. (Not sure about complex Javascript.) Chrome's snappiness is mostly UI smoke and mirrors, actual sites load faster for me in Firefox.

> Chrome's snappiness is mostly UI smoke and mirrors

This can be very effective, which is why optimising complex pages for first contentful draw (perhaps at the expense of overall load speed) can make a huge difference to how your pages/app are perceived.

Back in the dial-up (and early ADSL) days many were convinced that IE was faster because of progress bar trickery: it would actively lie and could inch up to ~85% before the first byte of data had arrived from the server (I forget if it waited for the HTTP request to be sent or if it started edging up immediately upon TCP connection). It still did it right up to the end, though with local connectivity getting faster these days the amount you'll notice it is greatly reduced.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#127

Post by javajosh »

coldtea wrote: post #69
javajosh wrote: post #50

Firefox is a great browser and Mozilla is a (generally) great organization. It's my daily driver on all my devices (except my TV ha), it's fast and has great plugins that also work in mobile. Philosophically I'm very much a "root for the underdog" type of person so it makes me happy that way, too. Only very rarely (every few months) am I forced to use Chrome for a site - and in my view, that's a huge ding on the site…

> It's strange hearing reports of "scroll lag" in the other comments. It's possible I'm just lucky. Or there's a misconfiguration somewhere in their setup that Chrome somehow avoids. Don't forget the other possibility: someone using Firefox having internalized this lag as "normal behavior".

As an aside, I am very much against this trend of accusing people of "internalizing" a bad thing such that they aren't aware of it. It's using therapy-speak as an ad hominem attack, and in my view reflects poorly on the speaker. Most of the people on HN are software developers and are conversant in a wide variety of tools on many platforms, and certainly I am (one can infer that from my post). So to assert that I simply don't know what scroll lag looks like is not only absurd, but also fundamentally disrespectful and ignorant. The simple fact is that you do not, cannot, know what other people experience on their machines. Each physical system is characterized by roughly 10e10 bits - the number of combinations is (10e10)!. In other words, wild and alien configurations exist that you've never seen, and cannot imagine. Compared to this, the chances that someone has software that behaves slightly differently on their system than on your system is approaching 1.

Have some humility.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#128

Post by rileymat2 »

terafo wrote: post #107
seba_dos1 wrote: post #17

There was a time when Firefox felt a lot slower than Chromium, but for a few years now it's been close enough (even if still somewhat slower) to not bother me, while Firefox clearly offers superior functionality and much better performance under high load. The last time Chromium has felt attractive compared to Firefox was a really long time ago. Glad to see it moving in the right direction still.

Firefox is slower for me than Chrome, but that's because I have tab hoarding problem(2k tabs in Firefox right now).

It seems like we need a better solution, between bookmarking and offline websites on disk, it feels like there is a better way.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#129

Post by penguin_booze »

terafo wrote: post #107
seba_dos1 wrote: post #17

There was a time when Firefox felt a lot slower than Chromium, but for a few years now it's been close enough (even if still somewhat slower) to not bother me, while Firefox clearly offers superior functionality and much better performance under high load. The last time Chromium has felt attractive compared to Firefox was a really long time ago. Glad to see it moving in the right direction still.

Firefox is slower for me than Chrome, but that's because I have tab hoarding problem(2k tabs in Firefox right now).

On each tab, towards the right, you'll seen an X. If you click that, you can close a tab.

Alternatively, you can use Ctrl-W keyboard shortcut.

(Sorry!)

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#130

Post by solarkraft »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #28
xd1936 wrote: post #8

I've used Firefox as my primary browser since the "Quantum" in 2017. Chrome still feels snappier, but Firefox's Container Tabs is hard for me to imagine losing.

> Chrome still feels snappier I actually tested this and Firefox is significantly faster in rendering CSS and tables. (Not sure about complex Javascript.) Chrome's snappiness is mostly UI smoke and mirrors, actual sites load faster for me in Firefox.

Yes, that's important. The funny part about it is that it's probably a lot cheaper than optimizing the engine.
Post reply on HN