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Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

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Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#91

Post by pja »

numbsafari wrote: post #58

He gives a bunch of "ways" in which FireFox is (in his opinion) behind Google Chrome. The only "reason" (why) he gives is mentioned very briefly: > With so many former Firefox developers now working on Chrome at Google, perhaps it makes sense that the innovation has been happening in Chrome, not Firefox. The real question we should be asking is what happened to investment in FireFox? Why has mozilla had a hard time r…

Non-profits find it culturally difficult to pay Google-level salaries to developers perhaps?

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#92

Post by doktrin »

And yet, despite all that, the following two concerns will probably keep me returning to FF :

1. Vimperator (neither of the Chrome equivalents comes close, IMHO)

2. My slowly declining trust in Google

I do wish FF would support multiple tabs a little better, though.

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#93

Post by vy8vWJlco »

randallu wrote: post #52
vy8vWJlco wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there is a simple solution to that (poor multi-core utilization): go back to a one-window, one process model (go back, as in delete a lot of unnecessary code); forget the browser tabs - let the OS handle multitasking and let the window manager handle the windows.

The hard stuff isn't the window system/widget integration, it's having multiple processes open for the same domain (or iframes in different processes) and mediating access to local storage/IDB/cookie jar/network cache/etc. It was only very recently that WebKit2 handled most of this stuff -- up until then they just had a single WebProcess (I think Safari on Mavericks is the first multi-WebProcess browser Apple have sh…

I can't accept your complicated worldview. Iframes, for example, don't need to be new processes. One process - one window - one DOM. The only new process should be the rendering canvas/window. An iframe, or any nested resources can re-use cookies associated with a window/process, including caching. In order to persist tokens/cookies/cache between processes you hand them their own copy when you spin them up and write them out to a common, re-usable place when you close, but for the most part I consider browser statefulness to be more like a flaw than a feature (I constantly clear my cookies, form data, and history). how about a "save session" button, rather than the default being to cache objects and cookies in some common blocking profile that only allows one session and that, when it crashes, it all comes down... If you really want to share, you wrap those services up in a library - which is closer to the present model - but you have to know that in doing so you are making it harder to isolate things when they fail... And isn't that what's wrong with most browsers?

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#94

Post by gnosis »

I've been a long-time user of Opera, who switched back to Firefox and then back to Opera a couple of times.

Opera has been consistently much faster and better designed than Firefox. But it has one major, glaring fault: it's closed-source. I just don't trust closed-source software anymore. I also had concerns about privacy-invading directions Opera was taking (such as sending all of one's keystrokes to a search engine as you typed them in an address bar search -- your typing rate could be used to aid the search engines in uniquely identifying you). So I switched back to Firefox and have been using it steadily for a few years now.

With Pentadactyl, Firefox is much more usable in many ways than Opera was. Though even Pentadactyl can't make up for some of Firefox's ingrained faults, such as it's atrocious bookmark manager, or Firefox's incredible slowness.

I refuse to use Chrome on principle, because it spies on its users by default. This behavior can supposedly be disabled, but I have serious ethical objections to any browser that starts out in that state, and is associated with a spyware company like Google. Chromium is better in that at least it doesn't start out by spying on you, but it still lacks addons that are as capable as Firefox's Pentadactyl and NoScript.

Most recently I've started migrating as much as possible away from all of these bloated browsers. On 99% of the websites I visit, I now use w3m embedded in emacs. This integration gives me far more power than even Pentadactyl in Firefox, and it's far faster than any of the popular browsers.

w3m's main weakness is that it can't handle Javascript, but that's a strength too -- as I don't have to worry about Javascript exploits.. and 99% of the websites I care about don't require Javascript to function.

I am happy to get what I care about most: the content -- usually in plain-text format. And for the few sites I care about which annoyingly insist on using Javascript for full functionality, I can always use the other browsers as a backup. This approach might be a bit extreme for most people, but it works well for me.

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#95

Post by shadowmint »

Swapped to firefox when chrome went crazy and completely stopped working on OSX a while ago (https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=175341 I believe; became completely unusable I suppose is a better description) I swapped back to firefox for the first time in like 2 years.

Still there. Loving it. shrug

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#96

Post by mccr8 »

leviathant wrote: post #75
artmageddon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just switched back to Chrome again from Waterfox. It's crazy how even with only a few tabs open(Facebook, a few HN threads, some reddit and YouTube), Waterfox alone will bring my Core i7 with 8GB of RAM to a crawl. Even before I switched to Chrome, I was using IE 10 in tandem with Waterfox so that it wouldn't bog down my system so much. Edit: Maybe it's just me? I'll have a look at my settings. Thanks!!

Browse to about:memory in that bogged down Firefox and find out exactly what's bogging it down. As a web developer, Firefox is my main browser on an i7 8gb Win 8 machine and I can't remember any single time I've seen the browser bogged down.

On an 8gb machine, the browsing being bogged down probably doesn't have anything to do with memory usage. To figure out what is making everything slow, you need to use the built-in profiler with Nightly. I was able to use it to track down browser slowness I very occasionally see to a particular line of code on Facebook.

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#97

Post by Supermighty »

nathanb wrote: post #44
kaoD wrote: post #5

I began using Firefox a long time ago (when it was called Phoenix) but switched to Chrome. A couple months ago I switched back to Firefox because Chrome lost my open tab session in some cases (hard crashes when loading the old session), due to privacy issues and because it often triggered long swaps (locking the process) when dealing with lots of tabs (I usually have like 50-60 tabs open in several windows). Also bec…

History > Recently closed windows?

Ctrl-Shift-n

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#98

Post by artmageddon »

pessimizer wrote: post #69
artmageddon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're for or against Firefox using a multi-processor architecture? For me, FF becomes unbearably slow when I have about 15-20 tabs open.

That's got to be an addon problem. I can't remember the last time I had less than 15-20 tabs open. I have to get to 80-100 before I start feeling any misery.

I'll have to look into that. I run Ghostery, Adblock and Reddit enhancement suite, but that's it.

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#99

Post by jervisfm »

nathanb wrote: post #67

This article is, in my opinion, not very good. It documents areas where Firefox differs from Chrome, yes, but it fails to make the case why I should care. * I don't want a multi-process architecture, I want it so one tab can't kill my entire browser. If Firefox can get there in a different way than Chrome, so much the better. * I don't care whether or not my browser utilizes certain Windows features, since I run Linu…

> There are extensions I like which have no equivalent (that I know of) in Chrome

Can you give an some examples of useful extensions you use that are available in Firefox but not yet in Chrome ?

Re: Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome

#100

Post by jevinskie »

mtgx wrote: post #82
nathanb wrote: post #67

This article is, in my opinion, not very good. It documents areas where Firefox differs from Chrome, yes, but it fails to make the case why I should care. * I don't want a multi-process architecture, I want it so one tab can't kill my entire browser. If Firefox can get there in a different way than Chrome, so much the better. * I don't care whether or not my browser utilizes certain Windows features, since I run Linu…

Why wouldn't you want a multi-process architecture? It's bad enough that so many apps can utilize the quad core CPU's we have in our PC's. At least the browser is one app that can fully take advantage of multiple cores, unlike most apps out there.

You can take advantage of multiple cores using a single process with threads.
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