I don't know what their definition of a "real user" is. But everyone I've met who uses Fiercefox does so for philanthropic or political reasons. I have a hard time believing some non techie in Minnesota has noticed performance improvements. Idk, the data looks very pseudo sciencey, just feels like another marketing ploy from the blue haired people.
Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
141–150 of 296 posts
Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
#142I 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.
>Having Mozilla focus more on their tech, and less on politics is a good thing.
And not just a focus on Tech but also focus on product. i.e Firefox.
You could have them focus on Tech and they spend all their resources on Firefox OS.
Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
#143> 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 don't think that data gave them anything more than what testing on a few consumer computers in different price ranges would have.
(Edited, original comment read: "What more information does that give them than just buying a few computers at different price points?")
Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just don't like being bullshitted. Constant marketing about privacy while they're phoning home a bunch of data when you start and stop the browser. I did at some point find a doc page with a zillion steps to disable all of it but that doesn't remediate the hypocrisy IMHO.
What telemetry are you objecting to? Telemetry has good and bad uses. For example, sending in automatic crash reports helps companies find bugs. It can also expose sensitive information which was in ram at the time of the crash. Another example is usage telemetry tells developers what part of the app is being used and can help them focus popular features or on working to let people know about useful but under used po…
If “being useful” is your argument for it, I don’t think you’re ever going to see eye to eye with people who don’t want it.
It’s like you’re arguing about the good things the church does when it’s a discussion on separation of church and state.
Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
#145> 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 don't think that data gave them anything more than what testing on a few consumer computers in different price ranges would have. (Edited, original comment read: "What more information does that give them than just buying a few computers at different price points?")
A vastly larger variety of different computers and computer setups than they could have come up with on their own.
Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
#146Only looking at the 95th percentile is pretty disappointing. Enough page loads happen that higher percentile experiences aren't exactly rare.
You mean only displaying and discussing the 95th percentile in a blog post? There's no reason to assume that what is brought up in a blog post is going to match what engineers are looking at. In this case, I'm a developer at Mozilla, and I would say that I agree that it's worthwhile to look at the 99th percentile as well. And the median (50th percentile). And other platforms. And segregate it by website, but we don't…
I'm sure internally folks are looking at more stuff, but blog post wise, it makes it look like you're intentionally omitting it (see https://youtu.be/lJ8ydIuPFeU?t=1239)
Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that data gave them anything more than what testing on a few consumer computers in different price ranges would have. (Edited, original comment read: "What more information does that give them than just buying a few computers at different price points?")
A vastly larger variety of different computers and computer setups than they could have come up with on their own.
(Sorry I edited my comment before I saw your reply.)
That doesn't seem very useful for the metrics shown in that article. For hard to find bugs sure, for 95th percentile calculations and so on you can just buy a few computers at a retail store and get the same information.
Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
#148What about memory usage? For some reason Chrome gets a lot of flak for this but Firefox is significantly worse in my experience. I'm considering switching just because of that. :/
Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
#149> In order to measure the user experience, Firefox collects a wide range of anonymized timing metrics related to page load, responsiveness, startup and other aspects of browser performance.
So, they collect lots and lots of telemetry and what do they do with it?
> Let’s start with page load. First Contentful Paint (FCP) is a better metric for felt performance than the `onload` event.
Misinterpret and misuse it. Better, my a**.
I can't describe how much I HATE pages that are rendered before they are completely loaded.
I type an adress, I hit enter, and promptly I see the page content. I try to click a link or a button on the page, but guess what? Just before I click it, an image just loaded above the link. The link moved down from under the cursor, and now I click the image instead of the link. And the image IS AN AD!!!
It's like FF devs are actually TRYING to make me click ads!
Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Attack surface matters for unknown attacks. If the browser just never gets security updates, it's got more than enough known attacks.