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Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

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201–210 of 296 posts

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not need it. This is a really weird attitude. Until like the late '00s "telemetry" was, full stop, spyware (still is, for those of us who didn't shift our attitudes with the prevailing winds). I wouldn't say that responsiveness to user needs and desires has improved since then, in software design.

But what is the problem? That I can know that you press the print button? That you chose the Edit menu? I really don't see the problem. Please, explain, I really want to understand.

You don't see the problem of someone recording the actions you take using your own computer in your own home or office? It's like having a stranger sitting over your shoulder watching you. It's creepy and weird, and it's gross that people try to do it at all.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#202

Has anyone at firefox used the iOS app? I want you to track what the workflow is to access a password in the app. Tap tap tap left side, right side, can't get out of the settings to check the website while doing so. It's maddening. Besides that... it's lovely.

Is it complex in all iOS browsers due to the whole 'you're actually running Safari underneath' thing? Or is it Firefox specific on iOS?

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fake users?

“Firefox got faster for real users…” why include “real”? Are there fake users? Just strange phrasing.

Firefox's analytics allows Mozilla to analyze changes in the real world for Firefox users. Testing things like startup time and load times for actual users as opposed to synthetic benchmarks.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Combine the good performance with great add-ons like Multi Account Containers, and Tree Style Tabs, and you have a great browser.

the user.js file is a very underrated feature as well. i have a few computers and some of them are dual boot which means i have a lot of firefox installs so its great just being able to drop in the user.js file and have everything set up the way i like it

I have a userChrome.css to hide the default tabs. What do you have in your user.js and have you automated the install of it?

Here is a reference for the userChrome.css to hide the default tabs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23268077

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#205
I really could not tell if it is better or not. But I've had 2 problems that seems to never be resolved:

- using hardware accelerated video decoding is bizarre if the video uses VP9 (even disabling it or forcing AV1) it stutters from time to time;

- watching a video in the background and playing game at the same time, with hybrid graphics, freezes/hangs kWin, then, the video that was playing in the browser becomes green and everything that used either iGPU or dGPU starts to struggle and stutters a lot, forcing me to log in and out, i. e. restart my session manually;

The last one may be because of Nvidia (yes, my fault for having this card) prime offload in Wayland, but even so, I did not find any topic related to this, that has not otherwise been solved in bugzilla, and honestly I am kind of afraid to report this and be met with judging questions; I'd like to debug some more, but I don't have the patience.

These are the two ever lasting headaches that I have with Firefox. None of this bothers me enough to leave Firefox though.

Anyway, my congratulations to the team. Today, I have successfully converted 5 people to use Firefox.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what is the problem? That I can know that you press the print button? That you chose the Edit menu? I really don't see the problem. Please, explain, I really want to understand.

You don't see the problem of someone recording the actions you take using your own computer in your own home or office? It's like having a stranger sitting over your shoulder watching you. It's creepy and weird, and it's gross that people try to do it at all.

It's one thing to argue over whether basic user facing software like an image compressor or a text editor should have telemetry, but a web browser is one of the least controversial scenarios for telemetry I can imagine. It is constantly sending and receiving data on your behalf with hundreds or thousands of servers spread across the internet as a user agent. Your usage patterns - i.e. is it crashing, is the feature you're trying to use failing to work for some reason, is it rendering at a good framerate, is it running out of memory, are you having trouble finding the information you're looking for - are going to be incredibly complex and specific to you.

Significant bugs can affect only 1% or 0.1% of a browser's userbase but at Chrome scale or even Firefox scale that's like a million people. If you don't have telemetry it is REALLY hard to hear from those people about their problems and understand them. There simply are not alternative solutions that work half as well as opt-in (or opt-out) telemetry. People who say web browsers don't need telemetry are simply ignorant of what it's like to ship one and try to keep it working in the face of a constantly shifting environment - broken drivers, broken VPNs, malicious websites, malicious extensions, broken hardware, and users who are confused or tired or simply just bad at using software. No one is speaking on their behalf, you have to dig their suffering out of the data by looking at crash reports and performance metrics.

Shipping a web browser used by a million (or a billion) users means that you have a responsibility to do a good job. If your browser is not well engineered and reliable and responsive to users' needs that can result in data breaches or third-party server outages when your browser misbehaves or incorrectly channels user intent.

I'm personally a fan of making usage telemetry opt-in instead of opt-out, but browsers are a case where I don't opt out because I know how important the data is for browser vendors to make informed decisions.

This is of course different from sending your browsing history to Google, Microsoft, or any other company. I encourage people not to opt in to that stuff and not to sync their history/bookmarks/etc to those companies.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#207
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…

I've used an older firefox version from 2020(the why I did is a long story) and only updated after the webp security issue. New version felt immediately faster.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#208

I really could not tell if it is better or not. But I've had 2 problems that seems to never be resolved: - using hardware accelerated video decoding is bizarre if the video uses VP9 (even disabling it or forcing AV1) it stutters from time to time; - watching a video in the background and playing game at the same time, with hybrid graphics, freezes/hangs kWin, then, the video that was playing in the browser becomes gr…

That second point is something that drives me CRAZY. For years I would keep YouTube or Twitch streams open on the second monitor. Now I deal with constant fps loss, video stutters or freezing. Absolutely bizarre regression in performance.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://lynx.invisible-island.net/current/CHANGES.html seems to show it still getting updates; can you point to these known attacks that aren't getting fixed?

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#210

When more and more parts of FF are written in rust, I thought FF will get a lot faster. But for the past 1 year, I can only see marginal improvements w.r.t speed. And occasionally FF hangs when I have 20 tabs opened.

After the CSS parser and Webrender has there been any more new rust components?
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