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Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

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Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#141

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.

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

Me too. I'm using FF since 3.6, and before that Camino (a derived version for the mac), and the only thing Google has done is strengthen my resolve to keep using Firefox, but I still prefer to debug on Chrome (well, Chromium). It just feels better, even though it's starting to slip and FF is improving slowly.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#142
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.

>Firefox's Container Tabs is hard for me to imagine losing. Yes, and the lack of a viable vertical tabs solution for Chrome (though some Chrome based browsers have native implementations). I am baffled how anyone could still be using horizontal tabs as it is clearly inferior. I am also annoyed as hell that it is not native in Firefox.

> I am baffled how anyone could still be using horizontal tabs

I don't tend to work with a browser full-screen on my larger monitor (2560×1440) instead often using half the screen (so 1280px wide) or there abouts. My other screen is 1080×1920 (standard 1080 but portrait not landscape). In those cases I have less room for tabs on the side. It might be less of an issue but most of the side-tab options I tried had a minimum width noticeably wider than the minimum width of a tab in the standard layout.

What might work for me is tabs that can be flipped from horizontal to vertical at a keystroke, or perhaps even if they reacted to window size (with the default choice being easily overridden).

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#143
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if I've done anything special but I've got history going back to 2021.

Interesting. That gives me hope that there might indeed be a setting to change the behaviour. Thanks. :)

There's a good chance an about:config setting lets you change it. FF has a ton of detailed settings but most are hidden.

On my setup the "manage history" window goes back a bit over 6 months. Unfortunately the list entries don't show a date, so I can't give more precise numbers.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#144
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pocket is builtin to Firefox, but in my experience, searching something you saved to Pocket (a thing that should be pretty core to the Pocket product) sucks and you really need simonw's https://github.com/dogsheep/pocket-to-sqlite to actually search it.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#145

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.

Same. Recently I tried Brave because of all the praise but turns out the browser can only display around 80 tabs on the tab bar and every further tab simply never shows up even if it's in the foreground. I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better. I'm staying with Firefox, though I think Brave is probably still a good recommendation for users that don't want to go through the effort of installing an ad blocker…

> I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better.

It's my understanding that on mobile, tabs are unloaded from memory nearly instantly. You lose state but they use almost no resources. (I wish this was an option out of the box on Desktop. I've had extensions that do this and it's a godsend)

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which is a fast DNS? 1.1.1.1 ? I thought the OS caches DNS anyway, so shouldn't matter much in day to day browsing.

Anything you can "time nslookup" in or under 0.03 seconds (in "real" terms). From my desk: local one - 0.029 seconds 1.1.1.1 - 0.035 seconds 8.8.8.8 - 0.120 seconds Normally it should be, but Firefox's behavior is very sensitive to DNS response speed. Sounds not intuitive, but I think they're not using glibc's caching, or doing something by themselves.

In the past, at least, firefox has done its own caching since expiring my OS dns cache was insufficient to get it to pick up a change in DNS.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#147

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.

Same. Recently I tried Brave because of all the praise but turns out the browser can only display around 80 tabs on the tab bar and every further tab simply never shows up even if it's in the foreground. I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better. I'm staying with Firefox, though I think Brave is probably still a good recommendation for users that don't want to go through the effort of installing an ad blocker…

I'm old and I code for a living, I have maybe at most a dozen tabs open on any day. I can't imagine needing 80 but now I see why chrome has that new search tabs drop down.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#148
post #107

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).

As a fellow tab hoarder, I recommend using Tab Session Manager plugin. You can easily save all tabs, although from my own experience I've almost never restored them anyway lol

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#149
post #6

That chart suggests massive improvements since the beginning of this year. Can anyone explain how this was achieved? What precisely has changed?

You can expect some blog posts from us on this topic at the end of the year / early next year. In short: Organizational focus on a performance target, significant investment, and some great new tooling. We're also reaping the benefits of foundational work that happened over the last few years.
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