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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

#121

Post by ce4 »

padenot wrote: post #78
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…

Firefox developer here. There are a few ways to diagnose this, depending on your setup. If everything is frozen on Linux, it's probably the parent process that is having an issue. The "parent process" is the process that oversees all the tabs, it's the top process in a Firefox process tree, the one that has lots of children. If our crash reporter is enabled, you can also just kill the parent process with `SIGABRT`, t…

Wow, thanks for the information!

Side question: what can be done on Windows in such a case?

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#122

Post by QuarterReptile »

frandroid wrote: post #21
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)?

Are you serious?

I'm absolutely serious. Apart from using my work laptop to visit an ad-ridden page, doing stupid timed sign-up activities like going to Disney World, or using my older work desktop that was so old and slow that it spent 10 minutes every morning at 100% disk utilization before calming down, I can't think of a time when I've experienced noticeably slow webpage loading in years, maybe a decade.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#123

Post by jakub_g »

magicalhippo wrote: post #64
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.

All browsers already heavily throttle js timers execution in background tabs. You also have specific apis like requestAnimationFrame to decouple UI timers from non-UI timers like setInterval.

Stopping it entirely and then suddenly restarting on foreground would be probably too much of a breaking change for the websites' developers. I mean, I guess it could be possible but would require properly thinking it through. Some browsers aggressively freeze background tabs but AFAIR they do full reload on unfreeze.

The breakage area of shipping that kind of change into the web ecosystem of a major browser is huge.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#124

Post by wizzwizz4 »

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…

I use Debian's Firefox ESR, and for at least five major (ESR) versions there's been a bug where sometimes if multiple tabs try to do a web push notification at once, the entire browser process hangs maxing out a core and nothing I do will recover from that. (I use X11 with PulseAudio.) One of these days, I'll get around to reliably reproducing it. (I haven't tried `pulseaudio -k`, which might fix it if it's an issue playing the sound: videos hang kinda like that, though more recoverably, if the sound isn't working right.)

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#125

Post by aembleton »

orev wrote: post #109
southernplaces7 wrote: post #98

Sounds wonderful, but they've been claiming speed increases for years, causing me to go and check if they're true, and being deeply disappointed. I don't use powerful laptops with fancy hardware for my browsing, but how stupid can a browser be if it only works well even with heavy use if your hardware is great? Not everyone has that luxury even if they'd like a bit of privacy features. As much as I detest and avoid a…

Firefox is definitely on par with Chrome these days, so if you’re seeing issues like this, I would first suspect that it’s the web sites you have loaded in those 50+ open tabs instead of the browser itself. So many sites use bad JavaScript and that’s often what causes the problems.

> So many sites use bad JavaScript and that’s often what causes the problems

Then Firefox needs to handle that better. As an end user, I don't care about the quality of the JS of the sites I want to browse - I just want it to work, and if it works in Chrome but not Firefox then I guess I'll switch to Chrome.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#126

Post by dabedee »

In the last five years, my experience with Firefox has always been far superior in terms of performance than when using Chrome. I just can't bring myself to justify using a Google product for something as important as browsing. I guess it's ideological, but I just want Firefox to succeed.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#127

Post by Osmose »

jacobyoder wrote: post #114
orev wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is definitely on par with Chrome these days, so if you’re seeing issues like this, I would first suspect that it’s the web sites you have loaded in those 50+ open tabs instead of the browser itself. So many sites use bad JavaScript and that’s often what causes the problems.

> Firefox is definitely on par with Chrome these days, The GP is likely going to be triggered by those words, because... I've seen this repeated every X months/years... "Oh... yeah, you had problems in the past, but it's so much better now"... and... it rarely is. GP will just need to try out again at their own schedule and make their own determination. I had this standard issue with desktop/laptop linux for years ..…

This is valid but in both directions: people will say "Firefox is slow" because they don't have the time/interest to say "Firefox is slow on this specific webapp that is very important to me on my specific laptop". Of course the responses to the first statement are going to interpret it generally rather than specifically.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#128

Post by s3p »

tombert wrote: post #79
StableAlkyne wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friend, it is okay to enjoy things. Lynx is just a cool project :)

Well wait, I don't think jeffbee was saying it's bad to enjoy things, but rather that the person they were responding to was implying something, namely "Lynx is (in some way) better than Firefox because it doesn't take telemetry data." Lynx definitely takes less telemetry data than Firefox, but it also gets substantially fewer updates, including security updates. I think text-based browsing is pretty fun but I don't…

The person you are replying to is the same person that they are replying to. you can just say "you".

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#129

Post by noman-land »

footlose_3815 wrote: post #65
noman-land wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree they're not immune whatsoever. In fact I hold them to a higher standard than the others because it's their mission to do it, so their failures sting much harder.

But I hold the others to zero standard. There is less than zero trust there. I expect to be abused by them because their mandate requires them to ignore my wishes. It's not a failure but a success to them.

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