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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

#141

Post by dragonwriter »

pcwalton wrote: post #127
dragonwriter wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I think asm.js is so much of a better idea that there's no reason to support NaCl - asm.js does everything it's supposed to do but better. A key focus of NaCl and asm.js is performance, and IIRC most benchmarks are showing NaCl with somewhere between a 25%-33% additional overhead over native C, and asm.js with somewhere in the neighborhood of 100% additional overhead, so I don't think I can quite agree that asm…

Those statistics are misleading. The asm.js numbers count compilation time, while the PNaCl numbers don't.

If you've got statistics that show asm.js is equal or better including compilation time, I'm sure lots of people would like to see them.

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

#142

Post by pja »

numbsafari wrote: post #129
pja wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's certainly part of it. Non-profits generally cannot compete with Google in terms of cash. But are there other ways for them to try and attract or otherwise develop talent? Perhaps their current model is insufficient. It's interesting to see that Mozilla has become more involved with Samsung as a technology development partner. Perhaps that is one model.

The Mozilla Foundation gets $300 million annually from Google: They can certainly afford to pay some developers Google level salaries if they choose to.

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

#143

Post by dragonwriter »

pja wrote: post #91
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?

I think its more that non-profits find it financially difficult to pay Google-level salaries to developers.

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

#144

Post by Svip »

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…

He also mentions that there is no web suite anymore from Mozilla, but there is; it's called SeaMonkey and it's actively maintained. Although, a lot of it is upstream features from Thunderbird and Firefox.

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

#145

Post by pja »

dragonwriter wrote: post #143
pja wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think its more that non-profits find it financially difficult to pay Google-level salaries to developers.

Sorry, I thought it was common knowledge that the Mozilla Foundation gets a huge income stream from Google. $300million / year until 2014 according to Wikipedia.

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

#146

Post by takluyver »

olog-hai wrote: post #117
bengillies wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the really small things that annoy me about Firefox. For example, in gmail, when writing an email, I can't hit cmd+right arrow to go to the end of a line. And because links are set to open in a new window, I can't cmd+click them to open them in the background.

Agreed about the small things. I'll never understand why they decided to put the ctrl+F find dialog at the very bottom of the window. It trips me up almost every time I use Firefox, which isn't often. The vast majority of computer users are not conditioned to look down immediately after invoking find.

Out of interest, where are you conditioned to look? I prefer an in-window find bar to a dialog getting in my way, and I use programs with the find bar at the bottom (Firefox, Libreoffice) more often than ones with it at the top (Chrome, gedit). For me, the position isn't an issue, as I notice the movement wherever it occurs on my screen.

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

#147

Post by glhaynes »

wolfgke wrote: post #118
antihero wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But don't threads generally share memory? So therefore if a thread crashes, it can totally screw up all the other tabs still.

mtgox was talking about scalability, not stability.

Scalability just makes me want stability all the more because the stakes are that much higher.

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

#148

Post by nathanb »

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.

I didn't say I definitely don't want a multiprocess architecture.

Just that a multiprocess architecture may not be the only way to solve the problem, and if Firefox devs believe they can provide equivalent stability without switching to a multiprocess architecture, I won't ding them just because they can't tick a checkbox that Chrome ticks.

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

#149

Post by dragonwriter »

pja wrote: post #145
dragonwriter wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its more that non-profits find it financially difficult to pay Google-level salaries to developers.

Sorry, I thought it was common knowledge that the Mozilla Foundation gets a huge income stream from Google. $300million / year until 2014 according to Wikipedia.

I'm not sure where the $300 million number comes from (yes, I know you said "Wikipedia", but there are lots of pages on Wikipedia, and neither the Mozilla page nor the Firefox page supports anything close to that number, nor does Mozilla's most recent annual report -- in fact, Mozilla's total annual revenue is only around $160 million.)

And the whole point of Google paying Mozilla is that that money is less than the search revenue Google derives from people using Mozilla's browser, which also suggests that its less per user than Google would derive from people using Google's browser -- or, IOW, that the the Google has more to gain by spending additional money on development, assuming they acheive as much in terms of attracting users.

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

#150

Post by nathanb »

zetafunction wrote: post #128
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…

Multiprocess is also important for security. It means that simply finding a renderer exploit isn't enough to pwn your system if the renderer processes have no privileges to write/execute arbitrary files.

If you're running your browser as a privileged user then you deserve to have your system pwned.
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