Firefox got faster for real users in 2023 • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#31

Post by dinosaurdynasty » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #26

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…

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 t…

Debian uses Firefox ESR. It's rare for Linux distros to use ESR (Ubuntu and derivatives notably don't, I don't think flatpak does either).

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#32

Post by fooker » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

I must be a virtual user or something.

I have Firefox installed for testing WASM targets, and everything seems slower than usual.

If you open 20+ tabs, the UI seems to be laggy. At some point, I had to kill a tab, the whole browser froze for a while.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#33

Post by xedrac » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

I like seeing Mozilla actually improving Firefox instead of just shuffling UI components around. I've been a longtime user, and am happy to support the underdog here to try and keep some balance of power on the web. Having Mozilla focus more on their tech, and less on politics is a good thing. Regardless, Firefox is a good piece of software and I have no major qualms with it.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#34

Post by OfSanguineFire » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

jwells89 wrote: post #22

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)?

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 significa…

A lot of laptops don’t even have fans, and as a Firefox user who has owned ultrabooks for the last several years, I can’t say that this choice of browser has had any noticeable detrimental impact; I still get the many hours of battery life that ultrabooks are known for. I suspect that the devs, faced with limited resources and the need to prioritize, would consider this a matter for the hardware and OS to deal with.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#35

Post by lxgr » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

qup wrote: post #24

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn’t be surprised if rewrites in any language (including the original one!) would have a tendency to outperform.

A rewrite (by people familiar with the original and its pain points) is an excellent opportunity to optimize.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#36

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

smegsicle wrote: post #19

StableAlkyne wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#37

Post by mcpherrinm » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #29

nfriedly wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fake users?

“Firefox got faster for real users…” why include “real”? Are there fake users? Just strange phrasing.

I think they're distinguishing from synthetic benchmarks

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#38

Post by jeffbee » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

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.

> I love Lynx because of this

Pseudonymous user so concerned about privacy that they use the browser with by far the greatest density of exploitable flaws.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#39

Post by ramesh31 » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

I've made the switch. The difference is so minimal at this point it's unnoticeable. And regardless of telemetry and who sees what, I simply cannot stomach touching anything even remotely related to Google anymore.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#40

Post by sojsurf » Tue, Oct 31, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #29

nfriedly wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fake users?

“Firefox got faster for real users…” why include “real”? Are there fake users? Just strange phrasing.

Perhaps as opposed to "Firefox got faster in the benchmarks", which do not always correlate to how normal users use the web.