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Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

treeherder.mozilla.org

231–240 of 559 posts

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#231
post #131

FF is great, only two things left I go to Chrome for are DevTools and watching Youtube (lower cpu usage, lower battery drain).

Regarding battery drain, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1716164

TL;DR: Firefox usually uses AV1. Hardware prior to intel 11th gen tiger lake, amd rdna2 (pre rtx 6000 series) and nvidia 3000 series has no hardware AV1 decoding support (and neither does Apple Silicon). This results in higher CPU usage on Firefox, whereas Safari and Chrome usually resort to codecs that have hardware decode support on the machine.

This can easily be fixed by going to `about:config` and setting `media.av1.enabled` to false.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#232
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 Is that really the only reason to install Brave? Starting to wonder if I should just set up a Firefox that bundles uBlock Origin by default with a brand new name.

It also has nice privacy centric and QoL features that strip tracking URLs, removes "Open in App" banners and AMP pages + redirects (e.g. old.reddit) for mobile, fingerprint randomisation and of course, will probably be the best Chromium-based browser adblocker post Manifest V3, but yeah you can also spin these features into a bundled Firefox or use one of those Libre* forks which already does most of this afaik.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#233
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.

I switched to Chrome a few months ago and Container Tabs are the one thing I really miss. I can no longer quarantine Facebook. I can no longer easily juggle multiple login profiles for sites like Twitter. There's nothing like it in Chrome. Multiple profiles don't work well, too many UI problems. The SessionBox looks promising but it's such a complex mess and basically requires a paid plan to use effectively.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#235
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try clearing your profile. Turns out having years of history, extensions, and a multi-gigabyte cache makes any browser slow.

That's like saying "If your car runs too slow, toss out the back seats." History and extensions are there for a reason. And managing the cache is the browser's job, not the user's.

It's more like saying stop carrying around the cassette boombox and corpses of your last 3 dogs in the back seats.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#236

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.

> much better performance under high load.

Massive GitHub PRs can refuse to load in chromium-based browsers. Firefox renders them effortlessly.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#237
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).

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

I prefer Tab Stash. It can be also used as a side bar for your tabs, but can close every currently open one and put them into a group you can optionally name for later reuse.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to Firefox from Chrome years ago because Chrome was slower. Specially, when there were many tabs opened, switching tabs in Chrome were usually prefaced with a blank white screen for about 2 seconds. I've been staying with Firefox not for the performance (today Chrome loads Google sites like YouTube faster), but mainly for Tree Style Tab extension. I couldn't imagine opening more than a dozen of tabs withou…

That's pretty much the reason for me as well. The day some other browser makes tree-style tabs, firefox will probably lose a user.

Edge has had vertical tabs with tab groups natively for a couple years now. It also has a nice Reader mode, good text-to-speech, and a screenshot tool built in. And it supports uBlock Origin as an add on.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#239
I love Firefox, but there's just one thing I miss from Chromium: run-in-background mode. My PinePhone has lots of memory but very slow IO, which means that Firefox can spend nearly twenty seconds loading. Once running, it'll load pages really quickly because local storage isn't involved. If there was a way of keeping a Firefox daemon running to instantly bring back a window, I would be very pleased indeed.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#240
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sim…

Considering this as a possibility is anything than "fundamentally disrespectful and ignorant".

I've known lots of developers who thought that some broken, slow, erratic, or stupid, program or OS behavior is the normal, because that's what they've been used to. They could be great programmers too, they just didn't venture much outside the stuff they used.

As for the diatribe, I don't care for this recent trend of perceiving something somebody said as some kind of abuse of "therapy speak" (before this comment I've seen a few stories about some actor "abusing therapy speak" and such lately, so I assume it's some new fad going on). I don't read about therapy, or had any therapy speak in mind. "Internalized" has been used for decades as a term, and here just means "accepted this lag as the baseline as they don't have a frame of reference". Might not even be the right word, I probably was looking for normalized (is that therapy speak too?). So there's that.

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