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Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

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21–30 of 296 posts

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#21

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)?

Are you serious?

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#22

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)?

With laptops having taken over computing aside from a small sliver of professionals and enthusiasts and browsers being one of the most consistently used categories of software, one would think that energy efficiency would be a bigger priority for browser devs… I mean who likes their laptop’s fans screaming and finite battery cycles being torn through?

It’s rarely ever mentioned though and not something that significant gains are regularly made in, which is a bit strange to me. Browsers across the board have crossed the threshold of diminishing returns when it comes to speed, I’d personally rather they shift focus towards battery friendliness.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#24

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++

Everything I've read says that you're right in theory, but in practice, rust rewrites tend to outperform.

At Mozilla's level, though, I wouldn't necessarily expect that to hold water. They should be able to write great code in either language.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#26
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…

Are you using anything other than a Linux distro’s stable, extended-support release? Most of the complaints on HN about Firefox instability seem to be either Windows users, or Linux users upgrading to the latest and greatest, often outside of their distro’s packaging. Meanwhile, I have been running Debian stable’s Firefox for many years and simply have never encountered the bugginess that gets described on these HN threads.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#27
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.

Happy to see the top comment on a Mozilla/Firefox article not being somebody grinding their axe with Mozilla (and I say that as somebody definitely having a few) :)

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#28
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.

p100 would include those where the uplink is so slow that the page takes minutes to render completely. Those users are useful to see, but the browser is much less of a bottleneck for them, and the data should be broken out into a separate bin.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#30

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…

I started using Firefox as a main driver a year ago due to me interfacing with Linux distros a lot more often. It's the browser that is usually always installed from the get and offers the best experience after logging into my Firefox account.

They also have some other really good tools they support such as firefox relay which is basically a proxy email address for your main email so you can post your an address on the airwaves w/o compromising your main email.

Pocket for saving articles you read on the internet.

Mozilla Thunderbird?

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