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Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

treeherder.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox gave birth to the first good dev tools as an extension IIRC

A testament to how open its old extension API was.

The Firefox extension API (which wasn't an API really at all when it was first used) was created to support cases like the DOM Inspector and others which abused Mozilla's XPInstall and XUL overlays (both created for other purposes) to invent extensions. The same people that created the APIs were the same people building those extensions (see Joe Hewitt for Firefox and DOMI and later Firebug.)

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#452

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.

> "time nslookup"

Or as a slightly more thorough approach, you can use something like namebench or dnsbench:

https://code.google.com/archive/p/namebench

https://github.com/askmediagroup/dnsbench

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't bypass keyloggers

True, but keyloggers aren't one of the threat vectors I am most concerned about, and as mcpackieh said, it still limits the potential damage quite a lot. We all have to gear our security mechanisms toward our particular threat assessments.

What is your biggest concern? I would think key loggers are a more common threat than attacks on the password manager directly, especially if you're running something niche. What else do you gain from keeping it air gapped?

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> "time nslookup" Or as a slightly more thorough approach, you can use something like namebench or dnsbench: https://code.google.com/archive/p/namebench https://github.com/askmediagroup/dnsbench

Yeah, while it's not as thorough as these tools, the method is at least reproducible and sane, and with ~10 or so samples, you get an interval with a nice confidence.

Another through method will be hyperfine[0], yet I wanted to provide a method which requires no installation and can be done in a whim, without jumps and hoops, with the tools already at hand.

[0]: https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#455

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…

As for sites that don't work in FireFox, here's a huge one: Office365 does not support FireFox on MacOS[0]. Mostly it works, but some things unfortunately don't. For instance, my employer's Teams site just doesn't render at all in FF.

[0]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/which-browsers-wo...

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But I completely trust Firefox on the password issue, to the point that I let it generate them for me. Not that I don't trust them but I always recommend using a dedicated PW manager like KeePassXC which is FOSS and has been security audited, plus it gives you full control over where you get to store your PWs and how they're secured and generated.

I'm even stricter than you. I use a password manager, but on a separate device from where I use passwords and it does not talk over the network. Wen I use a password, I look it up and type it in by hand. No autofill is possible, intentionally.

I do it similarly, except passwords are stored in an offline VM on Qubes OS and copied every time using Qubes' secure copy/paste.

Much more convenient and quick and still reasonably secure.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#457
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 again…

A number of Mozilla's LGBT+ employees spoke out at the time saying that they'd already known about the donation but since he'd been utterly professional at work they still felt quite sufficiently supported by the company and leadership.

The donation getting publicised, going viral and becoming a shitstorm was what forced the end of his tenure as CEO, and I've heard comments since that his being replaced with a more business-y CEO has been a disappointing experience.

(I've no idea what percentage of the relevant subset of employees made such comments and/or held such opinions, and I'm not expressing an opinion on should/shouldn't about any given event, but it does seem to have been a little more complicated than "he got kicked out ... for being a homophobe")

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#458

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.

Those results say nothing. Were you RAM-constrained? When I am not, I have found that Firefox tries to use more memory. If I use Firefox while also having 3 VMs running and compiling stuff it stays down, whereas if I don't it easily starts using over 4gb (i have 64).

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Btw, you can bookmark the entire tree, to re-open the entire tree later. I mostly have the same workflow as you, though, except for a few regularly scheduled things (book clubs, DnD sessions, etc), where I have a bookmarked tree ready to open for necessary context.

Re: Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer

#460
post #374

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 have never doubted the performance of Firefox. There’s a really old computer sitting in my house, never updated it for almost a decade now and my parents occasionally use it. The Chrome on it kept getting slower and laggier, while the Firefox always work fine. At some point, I just removed Chrome and told my parents to use Firefox: “the red fox is the Internet”

Well.

Chrome definitely lit a fire under Firefox, and that’s saying something because, at the time chrome came out, Firefox was “fast”.

I switched to chrome early on for the speed benefits.

At some point, Firefox started getting pretty close. Albeit not on parity with chrome, but chrome started major spying oriented pushes. So the minor loss in speed was worth it.

Now chrome could never win me back anyway. Google is evil.

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