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Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

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Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#61

Post by zanellato19 »

Centigonal wrote: post #15

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

This works here for me just fine, at least for simple ones

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#62

Post by JadeNB »

jeffbee wrote: post #38
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.

> 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.

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

"I love Lynx" is different from "I use Lynx for security-sensitive browsing," and "greatest density of publicly documented exploitable flaws" is, even if true (I don't know), not the same as "greatest density of exploitable flaws."

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#63

Post by temp0826 »

jszymborski wrote: post #14

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…

I think that's what arewefastyet is?

https://arewefastyet.com/

Edit- also see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Areweyet

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#64

Post by magicalhippo »

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)?

I'm mostly working on a desktop computer so I don't care that much about energy consumption, however I do notice that a lot of websites have some timer going off at very high frequency, as part of some framework or whatnot.

Personally I don't see why Firefox can't just stop JavaScript execution on tabs that aren't visible after say 5 seconds, unless the user has enabled background execution.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#65

Post by footlose_3815 »

noman-land wrote: post #57
smegsicle wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mozilla definitely hold a public perception of being more trustworthy than Google or Microsoft 100% true, definitely

Mozilla, the legally registered non-profit foundation with a mission statement[0], for sure is more trustworthy than a for-profit data behemoth whose sole revenue comes from collecting as much data a possible, or a for-profit tech company with a history of corporate abuse and user hostile behavior. [0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

I'm not trying to be a contrarian, but Google paid Firefox lots of money to force Google as the default search. Likely an offer they would refuse at their own peril, but I really liked how my search engine settings persisted when I reinstalled. Now it defaults to google.

There's also a ton of promoted garbage on your homepage and privacy switches that need to be toggled off by default. Those settings don't carry-over when you sync your account settings.

I still prefer Firefox, but they are not immune to the encroaching enshittification.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#66

Post by diggan »

fooker wrote: post #32

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.

I regularly have 100+ tabs open depending on what I'm doing, and killing tabs in groups of 10+ sometimes without any lag. But then I'm on a 5950x CPU + Linux so maybe that plays some role. What hardware are you using?

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#67

Post by sfortis »

In the Speedometer 2, Firefox is much slower than Chrome, which is a bit slower than Edge. But who cares! In real life, this makes no real difference. I respect and trust the privacy of Mozilla. Features like containers and the ability to run Ublock and Tampermonkey on mobile are priceless!

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#68

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

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…

And I on the other hand use Mozilla's latest & greatest all the time on Debian, and "simply have never encountered the bugginess that gets described on these HN threads" either.

So there's that ...

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#69

Post by throitallaway »

fooker wrote: post #32

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.

> the whole browser froze for a while.

Are you swapping out? I think a lot of people don't realize how heavy web pages are, often taking up hundreds of MB of RAM (at least) for each tab. I highly recommend the Auto Tab Discard plugin. I'm terrible with leaving tabs around, and tab suspension plugins let me continue that bad habit.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#70

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

jeffbee wrote: post #38
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.

> 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.

If it doesn't run JavaScript it immediately loses most attack surface relative to other browsers.
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