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Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

hacks.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#11

Post by RheingoldRiver »

QuarterReptile wrote: post #4

I was a consistent Firefox user, probably for the past 15 years, but I recently switched to Brave and Edge after too much frustration with power consumption. Firefox makes my laptop shriek, while the other 2 normally don't cause the fan to start at all. Does anyone actually care about loading speeds (apart from the necessary ad blocking)?

> Does anyone actually care about loading speeds (apart from the necessary ad blocking)?

It's kinda like money imo: You think you don't care about it until you don't have it. The only time I've ever cared about loading speeds was when I stayed on LTS Firefox for 2 years to avoid switching to WebExtensions, because I wanted to keep using several addons that were discontinued in Quantum. And near the end...yeah I cared about loading time. Felt amazing when I finally did upgrade (although I'm still pissed af that they never re-added the ability for extensions to access tab-specific history & will never get over this unless they do one day add it).

So I do think it's important to pay attention to even when no one cares, just to make sure that no one starts caring.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#12

Post by rs_rs_rs_rs_rs »

bingemaker wrote: post #9

When more and more parts of FF are written in rust, I thought FF will get a lot faster. But for the past 1 year, I can only see marginal improvements w.r.t speed. And occasionally FF hangs when I have 20 tabs opened.

Why would you think that? Rust is certainly a little bit slower than C/C++

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#13

Post by flanfly »

ta1243 wrote: post #3

Since upgrading to 118 I've had random hangs of firefox every few days. Not clear why, no CPU or swap. All windows just freeze and need a "killall firefox", which works - shutting firefox down cleanly. Of course it's impossible to find anything anywhere about this due to search engine spam Was fine for years until 118 and is rare enough to not be able to reliably reproduce it (and thus do things like disabling extens…

I got these on Brave on two different computers. Disabling hardware acceleration fixed it. Both had Intel graphics.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#14

Post by jszymborski »

I trust the Firefox team knows what they're doing and came to the right conclusion re: performance.

That said, I have a small nit. I would have liked to see how performance changed relative to the same time last year, to control for seasonal effects. Image 1 is showing changes on the scale of 1/100 of a second. I'm not an expert in the field, but when you'r looking at signal of that magnitude controlling for noise is more relevant.

EDIT: I should add, I am a satisfied user of FF.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#15

Post by Centigonal »

I switched to Firefox from Chrome for personal browsing several months ago, after the Manifest v3 debacle. So far, it's been good!

Very few sites only work on chrome. Firefox is fast, and the auto tab discard works better for me than Chrome's equivalent (or the Marvelous Suspender), I really like container tabs, and the whole experience feels pretty snappy. There are some product affordances I don't get with Firefox (ex. being able to run math expressions in the address bar), but it's small potatoes.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#16

Post by qup »

ta1243 wrote: post #3

Since upgrading to 118 I've had random hangs of firefox every few days. Not clear why, no CPU or swap. All windows just freeze and need a "killall firefox", which works - shutting firefox down cleanly. Of course it's impossible to find anything anywhere about this due to search engine spam Was fine for years until 118 and is rare enough to not be able to reliably reproduce it (and thus do things like disabling extens…

I've been getting these but I hadn't figured out what to blame yet. I imagined it was one tab doing something bad.

I'll have to pay attention now to if it's happening on all my machines. it for sure happened on a Windows 10 machine

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#17

Post by [deleted] »

QuarterReptile wrote: post #4

I was a consistent Firefox user, probably for the past 15 years, but I recently switched to Brave and Edge after too much frustration with power consumption. Firefox makes my laptop shriek, while the other 2 normally don't cause the fan to start at all. Does anyone actually care about loading speeds (apart from the necessary ad blocking)?

[deleted]

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#18

Post by mnd999 »

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #12
bingemaker wrote: post #9

When more and more parts of FF are written in rust, I thought FF will get a lot faster. But for the past 1 year, I can only see marginal improvements w.r.t speed. And occasionally FF hangs when I have 20 tabs opened.

Why would you think that? Rust is certainly a little bit slower than C/C++

[flagged]

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#19

Post by smegsicle »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #6
Doches wrote: post #2

> We’ve been motivated by the improvements we’re seeing in our telemetry data, and we’re convinced that our efforts this year are having a positive effect on Firefox users. Mozilla gets a lot of flak (especially around here!) for their sometimes heavy-handed usage analytics, but it's nice to see that used for its stated purpose! Great use of data here.

I'm not a fan of telemetry in any browser (I love Lynx because of this), but Mozilla is definitely more trustworthy than Google or Microsoft. Edit: I'm not saying that Lynx should be a daily driver or that it's more secure, but it's a neat little project that avoids some of the bad patterns in modern browsers.

> Mozilla definitely hold a public perception of being more trustworthy than Google or Microsoft

100% true, definitely

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#20

Post by charcircuit »

xxpor wrote: post #5

Only looking at the 95th percentile is pretty disappointing. Enough page loads happen that higher percentile experiences aren't exactly rare.

It's not like real users aren't hitting loading times in those higher percentiles. They really should be showing p100.
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