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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

#151

Post by astrange »

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/

"Non-profits" are still just as motivated to increase revenue as "for-profits".

Most US hospitals are non-profits but you still see people complaining about them.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#152

Post by LoganDark »

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…

Holy crap, this is the most helpful answer I've ever seen from a Firefox developer on HN. When I was having a memory exhaustion issue, I was just told "enable the page file, running without overcommit is a recipe for disaster" (looks at my 40GB of memory). I should figure out if that issue still occurs.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#153

Post by astrange »

ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote: post #147
lolinder wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

New computers don't behave like old computers, and it's not worth trying to guess why that might be. Could be anything running in the background, old NAND, old battery, low disk space, satellite internet…

Once you do have a model of badness I agree it's better to try to set that up yourself.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#154

Post by astrange »

criddell wrote: post #74
sfortis wrote: post #67

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!

All of the major browsers are probably fast enough for now. It would be nice to see the emphasis shift to decreasing power consumption.

Those are mostly the same thing. You save power by being faster so that you can go idle faster.

Of course, there's a difference between going faster by using more resources and by just taking less time.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#155

Post by ro-ka »

myfonj wrote: post #95

I can subjectively confirm that Firefox feels snappier recently and deeply appreciate and enjoy all improvements. But I have some itching concerns about that methodology with heavy anonymisation and stuff there: Couldn't it be that the web itself got faster, and folks have better hardware? I mean, yes, generally these sloppy script kiddies with bloated frameworks produce less and less effective code … but I can imagi…

As older Firefox versions are still in use, too, it’s possible to check whether the improvements come from updates in Firefox itself or the web in general.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#156

Post by astrange »

sfink wrote: post #99
persnickety wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would also include users who happened to close their laptop lids and suspend for an hour, right during pageload.

That's if it's measured by wallclock time, but they should be using a monotonic timer that ignores sleep and clock changes.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#157

Post by MBCook »

myfonj wrote: post #95

I can subjectively confirm that Firefox feels snappier recently and deeply appreciate and enjoy all improvements. But I have some itching concerns about that methodology with heavy anonymisation and stuff there: Couldn't it be that the web itself got faster, and folks have better hardware? I mean, yes, generally these sloppy script kiddies with bloated frameworks produce less and less effective code … but I can imagi…

It would’ve been nice to see this normalized by CPU cycles or javascript tokens executed or something like that.

Something so that more megahertz/cores doesn’t throw off the number.

Whatever the reason, it is nice to see it improving. I think it would be interesting to also see a median figure in addition to a 95% figure.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#158

Post by downWidOutaFite »

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.

I just went through Lynx's the <20 CVEs over the last 20 years and couldn't find any that haven't been fixed. Same cannot be said for Chrome or Firefox which have dozens every year.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#160

Post by MBCook »

rg111 wrote: post #75
sfortis wrote: post #67

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!

With a 75 MBPS connection, FF loads everything I need instantaneously. Who cares about benchmarks?

See the sibling comment about the person using a very low spec PC.
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