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Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

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Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#441

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 switched to Orion[0] as a test, discovered the awesomeness of superbly integrated, native, tree style tabs, and now I'm stuck with this browser where sites I need for work are half broken. I tried Firefox with Tree Style Tab extension, but it's not nearly as good :( [0] https://browser.kagi.com

I've been looking into Orion. Are the broken sites you're referring to very niche or common ones? Do they work in Safari but not Orion?

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#442

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 tested Chrome and Firefox about 1 week ago. On about 30 tabs, Firefox uses about 1G more RAM than Chrome. Their speed is difference is unnoticeable. I also tested Edge and Vivaldi for RAM usage. The result is Chrome < Edge < Firefox < Vivaldi.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#443

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 also like that Firefox isn't putting artificial limitations on the plugins that we can use in order to appease their infinite hunger for ad revenue. Chrome's manifest v3's entire purpose for existence is to ultimately snuff out ad blockers so they can make the internet worse for everyone and get more money in the process. And if you don't believe me then you are wrong. Of course they won't do it immediately. They w…

>Chrome's manifest v3's entire purpose for existence is to ultimately snuff out ad blockers

There is no evidence of that, while there is evidence that manifest v3 provides security, privacy, and performance benefits. Manifest v3 doesn't stop ad blocking from working.

>so they can make the internet worse for everyone

Ads make the internet better for everyone since it provides a monetization model for sites to give away valuable services for free instead of everything being behind a paywall.

>And if you don't believe me then you are wrong.

This way of arguing doesn't convince people. This kind of stance only appeals to people who are antitech or antigoogle.

>They'll just keep raising the bar to get approved for Chrome Store, making it harder and harder to comply with their extension requirements

Adblockers are highly priviledged. They steered have a high bar to make it into a extention store.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#444
I think that because of the new "efficiency" initiatives at Microsoft, Edge is very bad compared to the others at handling web sites that need low latency and moderate execution speed (such as 3D demos, games, emulators, audio players).

Edge on my 5950X + RTX3080 + 32GB RAM can't play some chiptune without glitching while Firefox can handle it like butter. Firefox's becoming a strong competitor every day.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#445
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.

https://www.tumblr.com/foone/721395638537961472/i-see-people... remains the best take on Brave that I've seen.

"I see people talking about the Brave browser in the whole Firefox vs chrome debate, and while people rightly point out that it's just chromium and that they do shady cryptocurrency shit, I never see anyone point out that Brave's founder and CEO is Brandan Eich.

"He founded Brave after massive protests against him becoming CEO of Mozilla, resigning after 11 days. And the reason for those protests? He donated a lot of money to the Prop 8 campaign to ban gay marriage.

"So just remember: it's not just another chromium fork, it's not just a browser with cryptocurrency bullshit, it's also the browser founded by a homophobe because he got kicked out of his former organization for being a homophobe.

"Also, he invented Javascript. I'm willing to believe that maybe he has grown on the gay marriage issue, and made amends for his former mistakes. But Javascript cannot be forgiven."

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#446

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…

Firefox dev tools have been letting me down the past few months. I'm working on a pretty nasty (legacy and poorly optimised) but otherwise still rather "normal" website at work. Opening the dev tools makes Firefox hang for almost a minute, I suspect this is due to some issue with source maps, thousands of source files and large (several megabytes of) minified code. The debugger often reports _wrong_ values on hover e…

Yes! Their grid layout/comprehension tool is first-rate.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#447
post #54
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 has better network stack. For most other things Firefox is faster, but of course, network is the most important.

one deficiency in the FF network stack is that it doesn't properly detect existing pooled connections being broken by net route changes while Chrome does

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is blowing my mind right now, how do you operate with so many tabs? For me, as soon as I can’t tell which site is in which tab it means I need to close some. And I don’t see the utility of having so many tabs open, since you can obviously only use one at a time. So if you have 100 or 1000 open, most are not being used most of the time, so why not close them? What do you lose from closing tabs versus what do you…

If you can't tell which site is open, that's likely due to Chrome's poor tab UX. Constantly shrinking the click target makes tabs harder to work with. Not being able to read the tab title doesn't help either. Thus, Chrome incentivizes people to close tabs.

With vertical tabs, you don't have this problem. Every tab is the same width, making them easier to interact with. You'll need to vertically scroll the list if it gets too large, but that's a natural enough action. In this situation, you now close tabs because you want to, not because the browser is strong-arming you into it.

Where things really get fun is with vertical tabs that track ancestry, like Tree Style Tabs or Firefox or what's built into Orion. These tabs will nest as you follow links from one page to another, capturing context.

HN is a perfect example of where this works well. I can go to the home page, see a few stories that look interesting, open each comment page as a child tab. Then on each child I can open the associated article. And, as I read the comments, I can open new links that look interesting and that page is now associated with the root story.

I could bookmark all of these pages, but short of creating folders for each story there's no good way to capture that context. Naturally, that makes it harder to restore the same state when opening bookmarks. Instead, I leave the tabs open and when I'm ready to take an action on them (read an article, make notes in Obsidian, bookmark into a topic of interest) I do so and then I close them out. It makes context switching much easier when I know I'm not going to lose the context I just left. As an added benefit, I find if I leave tabs open I get better use of the browser cache than I do if I close an open later from a bookmark.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#449
post #253

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…

Not to do a "you're holding it wrong", but why would you want so many tabs that they go offscreen? More precisely, why 100 tabs in 1 window instead of 10 tabs times 10 windows?

> More precisely, why 100 tabs in 1 window instead of 10 tabs times 10 windows?

I still don't understand why some people believe that the correct answer is anything other than 100 windows.

My platform has 40 years of well refined tools for managing windows, all of which work nicely and consistently across all applications. By comparison, all of the tab management systems are crude amatuerish knockoffs trying to reinvent the same tools from first principles, and isolated to a single application that's then inconsistent with everything else.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#450

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…

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 perc…

One other possibility is that I know what scroll lag is, don't see it in Firefox on my devices, and you really don't want to accept that for some reason. So much so you double-down on your out-of-the-blue speculation about my mental state. People also have petit mal seizures, and that could also explain not seeing lag. Or perhaps an eye problem. Or maybe I'm a paid shill for Mozilla. Why not propose these as well? It would make just as much sense, and reflect just as poorly on you.
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