Live data from Hacker News

Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

treeherder.mozilla.org

341–350 of 559 posts

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#341
post #256
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).

I just mass-bookmark mine into a new bookmark folder periodically. Keeps it from getting anywhere near 2k. I've been doing this for years and have never , not once, looked at the bookmarks. But it gives me the peace of mind I need to close all tabs and start over.

Exactly. You can even name the bookmark folder either with the thing you're researching/interacting with or just by the date if it's a ton of miscellaneous stuff. Then later on you can go thru and delete all the date-named bookmarks older than 6 months. At that point just search your browser history

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#342
I just benchmarked both Firefox and Chromium on my desktop using Speedometer 2.1. Each browser was configured as out of the box, with no extensions, and with a blank profile:

FF (114.0.1): 101 +- 1.9 Chromium (114.0.5735.198): 94.5 +- 2.2

FF (115.0.2): 104 +- 2.4 Chromium (115.0.5790.90): 101 +- 2.6

Machine Specs: Intel i5-3470 @ 3.2 GHz, 16 GB DDR3, 128 GB SSD. Linux kernel 6.1.38 (latest longterm branch) on Arch.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#343

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…

> 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)

Huh. And I actually had to play around in Android settings to exempt Firefox from regular memory management, so it stops unloading tabs so aggressively. Not only this was a huge annoyance when browsing[0][1], it actually prevented me from using the one PWA I cared about[2] - it would literally blank out every time I switched away from and back to it, while having as much as a single trivial other app open, forcing me to kill and relaunch it.

It's not that my phone was memory-constrained, we're talking a recent Samsung Galaxy flagship[3] - it's purely overly aggressive memory management on part of Firefox.

--

[0] - Have 5 tabs open, all something trivial like HN, put away phone, grab it 5 minutes later, switch to other HN tab, ... wait half a minute for it to reload on a spotty connection at my in-laws' countryside home.

[1] - Talking with others about how we experience technology, I'm starting to feel that I'm abnormally annoyed by large or unpredictable UI latency.

[2] - TypingMind.

[3] - I learned to save up and only buy high-end, thanks to the experience with my first smartphone, that turned out to be underspecced for its own functionality. It's probably a case of [1], but one time I deviated from this rule and got my wife a mid-range phone, we both started to regret it in a few months, so it's not only me who has low tolerance for jank.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, yeah thousands seems like a lot. But I'm not sure, maybe there's a workflow where that makes sense.

One thing I've noticed since I started using Sideberry extension (a different/better take on Tree Style Tabs) is that after a day or two, the whole tab panel I separated specifically for HN tends to accumulate 100+ tabs. Having them laid out vertically in tiny font makes this apparent in a way that the regular tab bar doesn't. Fortunately, I also habituated the simple behavior of "If I realize I have a lot of HN tabs…

What makes Sidebery better than TST? I'm consider trying it, but I don't want to lose all of my TST tabs.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On my main Firefox profile I'm rarely below 1000 tabs. I also use them as bookmarks and backlog, and every couple of months I scroll through the entire tab bar and close everything unimportant. The address bar also searches all open tabs and lets me jump to matches.

I have Safari, Anybox, and Alfred, and the three works together in a nice way to save anything interesting quickly. And once in a while, I comb through the inbox and sort them out. If I ever need to explore a subject, I then have a collection of links ready. I feel uncomfortable whenever I have 10+ tabs open. It felt that I’m not focusing enough on my research (taking the proper time to read and reflect in order to find a solution).

The only things I hoard are books. They are more like my antilibrary (things I’d like to have read already) than collecting everything I encounter.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#346
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Except people really do internalize lag as "normal behavior". Back when PC monitors were stuck at 60Hz, people would unironically claim that "the human eye can't see more than 60 fps". Of course they changed their tune after experiencing lower input lag

I agree that the human eye can see higher than 60Hz, especially in the peripheral vision where VR research shows we need at least 90Hz to not get sick and 120Hz works better.

That said, there is something to be said for modern applications just running way below the limits of the refresh rate of our screens: https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1671670996921896960

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dev tools automatically disables caching for that tab, by default. CTRL+SHIFT+R always disables cache for that reload, too.

I didn't know about devtools doing that; C-S R is what I use when I run into it.

On the Dev Tools’ network tab, there should be a checkbox about it on the top left.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#348
post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wh....why?

On my side, a combination of: - I'm likely to return back to some of them. I might not know which ones. Typing in the address bar brings them back fast and the page does not need to be loaded again. Having the tab already open is also a strong signal that this is what I'm looking up. - no noticeable slowdown anyway, Firefox is actually quite efficient. - I don't care for taking the time of closing them progressively.…

Same applies to thousands of them, the "close everything" time just happens later in that case. I usually clean them up once Firefox starts slowing down, which is at tens of thousands.

With a good UI the unused ones just don't bother you anymore anyway until you scroll or filter them. They show me my train of thoughts without having to consciously organize anything. Unused tabs get unloaded from RAM anyway, so the cost of keeping them open is minimal.

A few years ago there was a version of Firefox that didn't slow down and opened quickly even at tens of thousands of tabs, but unfortunately it quickly regressed, so throwing everything out periodically is still inevitable:)

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, yeah thousands seems like a lot. But I'm not sure, maybe there's a workflow where that makes sense.

One thing I've noticed since I started using Sideberry extension (a different/better take on Tree Style Tabs) is that after a day or two, the whole tab panel I separated specifically for HN tends to accumulate 100+ tabs. Having them laid out vertically in tiny font makes this apparent in a way that the regular tab bar doesn't. Fortunately, I also habituated the simple behavior of "If I realize I have a lot of HN tabs…

Sideberry FTW. Sideberry tab panels FTWW.

Except for the annoying interaction (I think) with "open new tabs next to current tab", which causes Sideberry to somehow leave behind lots of stupid empty tabs named after the page the real new tab had. I deal with it, but it's annoying.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#350

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…

> I couldn't imagine opening more than a dozen of tabs without it. I can't imagine having more than a dozen tabs open, period. You tab hoarders will never make sense to me...

In my case, the open tabs are longer reads I mean to come back to read properly, except a new shiny opens and I never seem to get to them.
Post reply on HN