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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

#231

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

Seems like the easiest path to increased speed is to hold software constant whilst processing and networking continue to improve.

Historically, software has continued to behave like a gas, expanding to fill space and consume resources. The resources generally do not belong to the software authors.

Software isn't eating the world, it's eating your computer's resources and the bandwidth you pay for every month.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#232

Post by kiwijamo »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #124
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using anything other than a Linux distro’s stable, extended-support release? Most of the complaints on HN about Firefox instability seem to be either Windows users, or Linux users upgrading to the latest and greatest, often outside of their distro’s packaging. Meanwhile, I have been running Debian stable’s Firefox for many years and simply have never encountered the bugginess that gets described on these HN t…

I use Debian's Firefox ESR, and for at least five major (ESR) versions there's been a bug where sometimes if multiple tabs try to do a web push notification at once, the entire browser process hangs maxing out a core and nothing I do will recover from that. (I use X11 with PulseAudio.) One of these days, I'll get around to reliably reproducing it. (I haven't tried `pulseaudio -k`, which might fix it if it's an issue…

Same here, I also use Firefox ESR from Debian packages and I've observed Firefox to lock up hard a few times. Often to the point it affects the entire desktop so not quite sure if it's a bug in Firefox itself or possibly elsewhere e.g., Wayland.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#233

Post by post_break »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #202
post_break wrote: post #130

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?

It’s terrible UI

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#235

Post by kiwijamo »

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…

Pro Tip: There is a Firefox extension that forces YouTube to use H.264. Even though my machine does hardware accelerated VP9 I've found it to be unreliable. Switching to H.264 makes YouTube videos play smoothly. All other videos sites use H.264 by default so this only really needs to be done for YouTube.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#236

Post by g-b-r »

g-b-r wrote: post #46
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.

Sure it really led to great things on Firefox Android :facepalm:

I invite people who downvoted to try it, I can't believe you have

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#237

Post by sexy_seedbox »

alberth wrote: post #222

Why use Chrome? I'm curious, for those of you who use Chrome ... why do you (vs. another browser)?

Using Vivaldi on desktop so I can zoom to exactly 85% on some websites. Their history features and search is much better than Chrome.

Using Kiwi Browser on mobile so I can install any extensions.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#238

Post by LoganDark »

mort96 wrote: post #223
LoganDark wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ove…

> simply because ta1243 is reporting a Firefox bug and you're reporting user error

Don't tell me Firefox needs 40GB of virtual memory to keep a tab open for longer than a couple weeks. Or that it's the JavaScript engine when closing all tabs or windows didn't free the memory, only restarting the entire browser did. It wasn't the extensions, either.

If Chromium works properly without leaking memory, and Firefox leaks memory and calls it "user error" to not have overcommit enabled, I'm going to use Chromium, simply because it actually respects my computer's resources.

Also, you're citing ways in which Chromium's V8 uses virtual memory, when V8 does not suffer from this problem. Clearly you can use virtual memory in that way without having a memory leak.

Also remember that Windows does not have unlimited overcommit like Linux does, because it has no OOM killer. So if Firefox were to use 400GiB of virtual memory, that would require the page file to take up the remainder of that.

I did have issues with my page file "automatically" growing to 64GiB with Firefox running, so maybe it literally does do this and it actually uses up hundreds of gigabytes of space on Windows machines. But that is not acceptable behavior from Firefox and it is definitely not user error to not want to give up that much space.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#239

Post by LoganDark »

ColonelPhantom wrote: post #216
LoganDark wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Overcommit != Swap. Overcommit is allocating virtual memory without any backing. Swap is allocating physical memory backed by disk. Overcommit is useful in some cases, for example to preallocate a large heap without immediately making it all resident. Or to allocate 'guard' pages to fight buffer overflows. On Linux, overcommit is commonly assumed and as such disabling it tends to break some programs, as it's not out…

Read up on Windows. Windows does not do overcommit whatsoever, unless swap is enabled, in which case it only allows overcommit up to the size of the swap file.

Overcommit cannot be enabled without a swap file, whatsoever. This differs from Linux that can tend to have overcommit enabled without swap.

Re: Firefox got faster for real users in 2023

#240

Post by LoganDark »

mort96 wrote: post #229
LoganDark wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the memory is never released back to the OS after it is done being used (or when it is not going to be used), then the browser has failed to release it back to the OS.
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