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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

#221

Post by CuriousCosmic »

diroussel wrote: post #101
EMM_386 wrote: post #48

This is good news, and makes me want to start using it again. Was a user from the Phoenix/Firebird days with the "unzip it somewhere" fancy installation process, used it for almost 20 years, and then switched to a Chromium-based browser due to perceivable speed differences. I wasn't running benchmarks to confirm my suspicions or that performing some action was x milliseconds slower in Firefox or anything. But when yo…

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

Or instead of Tree Style Tabs, using Simple Tab Groups which I find has far better UX:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#223

Post by mort96 »

LoganDark wrote: post #152
padenot wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Running without overcommit is a recipe for disaster! Modern JITs make good use of virtual memory for both security and performance reasons.

Firefox on my laptop currently consumes almost 400GiB of virtual address space, while consuming "only" 458GiB of RSS. And that's not a bug, that's simply the browser making good use of the virtual memory system to provide significant advantages to all users on systems without overcommit disabled (which I'm guessing is 99.99% of people).

The difference in response you're seeing is simply because ta1243 is reporting a Firefox bug and you're reporting user error.

EDIT: Here's some further reading on some of the ways which Chrome's JavaScript engine (V8) uses virtual memory for security: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HSap8-J3HcrZvT7-5NsbYWcj...

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#224

Post by mort96 »

rickstanley wrote: post #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 gr…

Hardware decoding is sadly somewhat of a mess in Linux... I'm guessing that with most of those issues, Firefox is interfacing with the various video coding APIs correctly, and some driver or something is just buggy. If you're on a desktop, turning off hardware video decoding altogether might be worth it.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#225

Post by fooker »

diggan wrote: post #66
fooker wrote: post #32

I must be a virtual user or something. I have Firefox installed for testing WASM targets, and everything seems slower than usual. If you open 20+ tabs, the UI seems to be laggy. At some point, I had to kill a tab, the whole browser froze for a while.

I regularly have 100+ tabs open depending on what I'm doing, and killing tabs in groups of 10+ sometimes without any lag. But then I'm on a 5950x CPU + Linux so maybe that plays some role. What hardware are you using?

Two generations old 8 core i7, 64 gigs of ram, various GPUs interchangeably.

Doesn't seem to be a resource issue unless Linux is doing something odd.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#226

Post by fooker »

throitallaway wrote: post #69
fooker wrote: post #32

I must be a virtual user or something. I have Firefox installed for testing WASM targets, and everything seems slower than usual. If you open 20+ tabs, the UI seems to be laggy. At some point, I had to kill a tab, the whole browser froze for a while.

> the whole browser froze for a while. Are you swapping out? I think a lot of people don't realize how heavy web pages are, often taking up hundreds of MB of RAM (at least) for each tab. I highly recommend the Auto Tab Discard plugin. I'm terrible with leaving tabs around, and tab suspension plugins let me continue that bad habit.

Possible, but unlikely.

I just tweaked vm.swappiness, and there's no obvious change.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#227

Post by zmmmmm »

Please anybody still clinging on to Chromium based browsers on perception of speed being an issue, at least give FireFox a try. I haven't looked back and really enjoy it these days, and it's really important to the future of the web that browser diversity remains strong.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#228

Post by purerandomness »

diroussel wrote: post #101
EMM_386 wrote: post #48

This is good news, and makes me want to start using it again. Was a user from the Phoenix/Firebird days with the "unzip it somewhere" fancy installation process, used it for almost 20 years, and then switched to a Chromium-based browser due to perceivable speed differences. I wasn't running benchmarks to confirm my suspicions or that performing some action was x milliseconds slower in Firefox or anything. But when yo…

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

Nowadays it seems that everybody switched to Sidebery, the tree-style tabs add-on that Tree Style Tabs always wanted to be.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#229

Post by mort96 »

LoganDark wrote: post #198
jraph wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> running without overcommit is a recipe for disaster (but yes, it probably is, even with 40GB of memory. I bet many things are designed on Linux with overcommit as an assumption)

Well, that was just the wrong answer, since their software is supposed to be releasing memory back to the OS properly. Overcommit is just a coping mechanism, you should be addressing the root cause. I have since enabled the page file for other reasons - LLMs demand up to 50GB of memory sometimes, and my new desktop only has 16. The change of machine is why I should probably try Firefox again to see if it behaves.

The reasons browsers rely on overcommit has nothing to do with them failing to release memory back to the OS properly.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#230

Post by kbelder »

tapoxi wrote: post #72
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/

That's the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is the for-profit developer of Firefox that's owned by the Foundation. If Mozilla never established the Corporation I'd give them more slack, but from a "it's nonprofit" perspective it's on the same level as IKEA, which is also owned by a nonprofit foundation.

Funny that I trust the Mozilla Corporation more than I trust the Mozilla Foundation.
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