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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

#171

Post by RheingoldRiver »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #47
RheingoldRiver wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does anyone actually care about loading speeds (apart from the necessary ad blocking)? It's kinda like money imo: You think you don't care about it until you don't have it. The only time I've ever cared about loading speeds was when I stayed on LTS Firefox for 2 years to avoid switching to WebExtensions, because I wanted to keep using several addons that were discontinued in Quantum. And near the end...yeah I cared…

they never re-added the ability for extensions to access tab-specific history Curious, what was the use case for this?

In MouseGestures extension, you can bind right-click scroll-up & right-click scroll-down to whatever you want. I bound this to back & forward (within this tab), respectively. So you'd get a little context menu at your cursor to be able to navigate however many ticks you wanted. Insanely useful, especially when websites bullshit autoredirected you once, so navigating away from them requires either super quick reflexes to go back twice with hotkey or mouse gesture, or actually moving your cursor all the way to the back button @@

I still actively get mad that I can't use this shortcut every single time I have to go to the physical buttons.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#172

Post by NTARelix »

dinkleberg wrote: post #80

Gotta say I’ve been using Firefox for years as my daily driver and it has been great. Maybe it is because I’m running on higher end machines for the most part, but I’ve had no complaints with it across Linux, windows, and Mac.

I've also been using it for several years and almost completely agree with your sentiment. The only areas that have given me trouble are in the dev tools. On my machines the debugger is significantly slowed down when opening very large JS files, source maps compound the debugger slow down, and I can't always inspect variables' values when using source maps (possibly a build tool config problem).

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#173

Post by kwanbix »

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.

How do you expect companies to understand how their products are used for improvement purposes without telemetry? Honest question.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#174

Post by wongarsu »

bombledmonk wrote: post #76

The killer app for Firefox is it still allows some flexibility in tab management. Sidebery and TreeStyleTab have been my anchors in the FF ecosystem. The experience is so vastly superior for tab hoarders and tab-todo methodology that I really can't imagine using something else. I also use FF on android because it has ublock origin and dark reader addons. This make browsing the web on mobile far better. I actually hol…

> I just haven't found any Chromium based browser that works as well for me.

The native vertical tabs in Edge are also pretty good. Not nearly as feature-rich, basically just vertical tabs with automatic unloading and tab groups; but in return it's incredibly stable and bug-free.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#175

Post by karmakaze »

sillyalbatross wrote: post #166

Unfortunately Firefox still has a lot of issues when it comes to font rendering on macOS. For example, it's been two years and it still renders San Francisco incorrectly: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1721612 Not to mention all fonts appearing bolder than they should compared to Chrome and Safari. It might seem like a small thing but I'm a stickler for typography and it really stands out on a Mac. I ho…

I confirmed the letter spacing is still an issue by comparing the "How I digitize books" paragraph on Chrome and FF. I had to override the CSS as the site has switched to "Newsreader, serif".

I don't see the fonts appearing bolder difference (on my 4k screen). Actually that's not true, I have seen differences on lower DPI displays. I get around that using BetterDisplay to enable HiDPI on the external. I've also never noticed San Francisco font rendering improperly which I only would if it didn't fit in a clipped box.

Now that performance is largely improved, maybe they'll get around to fixing this one.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#176

Post by Night_Thastus »

Been using Firefox back since version 2 way back when.

After all these years, it still does what I need, how I need it done. That's the best recommendation of a product I think I can give.

Just about my only complaint is I wish there was a way to more quickly cancel saving a duplicate file. When the prompt appears with "this file already exists, do you want to overwrite?" it's much faster to just click "yes" than to click "no" and then drag the mouse down to "cancel" to close the window. Do this once it's no biggy. Do it hundreds or thousands of times and it gets obnoxious. Waste of bandwidth and disk writes, or waste of time.

I know that sounds dumb, but it's one of the only pain points I have.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#177

Post by mftrhu »

kwanbix wrote: post #173
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.

How do you expect companies to understand how their products are used for improvement purposes without telemetry? Honest question.

They could ask their users.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#178

Post by mo_42 »

mftrhu wrote: post #177
kwanbix wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you expect companies to understand how their products are used for improvement purposes without telemetry? Honest question.

They could ask their users.

Or observe people how they interact with the browser. If they would observe my parents, they could learn a lot that cannot be captured by telemetry.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#179

Post by Fnoord »

StressedDev wrote: post #118
user3939382 wrote: post #89

Earlier 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…

> My main complaint about people who dislike telemetry is they never acknowledge its good uses and they never state what telemetry is objectionable.

There's a good reason for that: it is an asymmetric relationship.

The person who enabled telemetry isn't necessarily the user of the software. Ie. it can be mandated or put on by a sysadmin (even by mistake), without user's say. On top of that, the user of the software and/or sysadmin are unable to assess whether they want to share the data because they cannot analyze the data beforehand. They lack the expertise in doing so.

Meanwhile I have to disable telemetry every friggin' time I use Mozilla Firefox. It gets old, having to say 'no' all the time, ya know? I now realize how it feels being a young woman on the market. Geez, I feel sorry for my daughter. The shit she'll have to endure, sayin' 'no' all the time.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#180

Post by JohnFen »

kwanbix wrote: post #173
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.

How do you expect companies to understand how their products are used for improvement purposes without telemetry? Honest question.

Others have answered this, but I just wanted to point out the software devs have been managing to understand how their products are used for improvement purposes from long before telemetry was a realistic possibility.

Telemetry doesn't make it possible, it makes it less expensive.

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