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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

#151

Post by nathanb »

korethr wrote: post #111
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…

- Tab groups suck. They're useless and there's no way to disable them once you activate it by mistake. You have to mess up with about:config (see above). Talk about a great UI. I disagree. I find tab groups to be very useful. I tend to keep multiple tabs open at once, and for multiple tasks. The tab groups lets me easily organize those tabs around a single thought or task. I can keep my music streams in one tab group…

Yeah, I really like tab groups. I can understand that they're not for everybody, but please accept that some of us really like them and have integrated them into our browsing workflow.

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

#152

Post by asadotzler »

mrweasel wrote: post #86
SeanDav wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To this list you can add the deal breaker - Firefox is not mining your data and then passing it on to the NSA.

I would really wish that Firefox provided a way of disabling all external services, including Googles. If you go to the about:config and search for "Google", I would like the ability to disable all these services.

Firefox button > Options > Options (or Tools > Options) > Security, un-check both "Block reported attack sites" and "Block reported web forgeries"

That will turn off the Firefox Safe Browsing features that come from Google.

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

#153

Post by zetafunction »

nathanb wrote: post #150
zetafunction wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A privileged user has nothing to do with it. Running as a non privileged user will not stop keyloggers, cookie theft, privilege escalation exploits, etc.

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

#154

Post by marizcombinator »

Firefox is an excellent browser, but falls behind chrome because (in addition) insists with some poor design decisions.

Three layers on top (buttons, tabs, url-bar), imagine if I enable bookmarks :P

Darker than others... forget the hacker look, come to the light

Simple tasks easy to do with Chrome web inspector are way more complicated in Firefox

Too many buttons, too many options (people like simplicity)

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

#155

Post by wutbrodo »

gcr wrote: post #132
AJ007 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which Google has made intentionally hard to find. Could your mom or grandmother figure this one out? http://build.chromium.org/f/chromium/layout_test_results/

On the systems I work with, it's easy to walk your grandmother through "click on the black square, now type apt-get install chromium, now hit enter."

Yea, my dad still hasn't _quite_ figured out copy and paste but was clicking around the Ubuntu Software Center one day and managed to install Chromium (he heard me talk about how I was planning to install Chrome on his computer and I guess the names were similar enough).

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

#156

Post by malandrew »

pcwalton wrote: post #136
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…

> Most importantly, what happened to Mozilla that it stopped being an innovator and became an imitator? Is it something inherent in it's status as a "not for profit"? Is there something wrong with it's values and goals that prevents it from being truly innovative? pdf.js, sweet.js, Persona, asm.js, Rust, and Servo aren't innovative?

Exactly. Mozilla has been working on a lot of stuff that really matters in a long game and for the internet in general. A lot of the OS foundation level features coming to the browser aren't coming from Chrome/Google, but from Mozilla/Firefox and Samsung/Tizen. Check out all the WebAPIs. How many of them are being pioneered by Google? How many by Mozilla?

My personal opinion is that both are doing a lot to innovate and a lot for the web, but that they are complementing each other. Google is pushing forward the front-end and how the browser works with current content. Firefox is working to get browsers to the point where they can do many of the same things that operating systems can do today. A lot of that work is not as straight forward as reimplementing what operating systems do, since they often require entirely new trust paradigms because sensitive things are being exposed to the open Internet. It's not a trivial task.

Lastly, Rust and Servo matter a lot. You will only be able to get so far with WebKit/WebKit2/Blink/Gecko/Trident, etc. before you start hitting the limit of the architecture of each is capable of. Rust and Servo are being architected from the ground up with the future of computing architecture in mind. This means that they will be behind now, but will jump ahead once Servo is production ready.

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

#157

Post by BitMastro »

jzwinck wrote: post #83
BitMastro wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first comment on the issue is "It fails in Firefox 3 for me, working in Safari 3 though.", so the feature was copied from Safari?

Back then, you had to enable a preference in Firefox to enable full color management. For people who cared about it a lot, this was more or less OK. The commenter there probably didn't know, and you see people further down mention that. I'm not sure which browser was first to have good color management on Windows, but in any case Firefox had it within a year or so of when wider-gamut monitors started to become popula…

I see, I was just confused by the comment

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

#158

Post by samspenc »

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.

He's mtgx, not mtgox (the Bitcoin company).

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

#159

Post by atesti »

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.

It's actually hard for a browser to utilize multiple cores, because Javascript and DOM designed for one thread: While javascript runs the layout shall not be recalculated. When you click and an onclick handler fires and JS runs, the browser cannot run other JS of the same tab in parallel. While HTML is parsed any time a inline script could come and block processing the rest of the document.

Chrome and other browsers of course work hard against that: There is a second fast parser which heuristically finds ressources to preload and Chrome just switched to blink in order to do the parsing and something else in parallel and now they want to do CSS calculations in threads, too, which is hard. There was a story here about it recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5895729

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

#160

Post by numbsafari »

pja wrote: post #142
numbsafari wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Okay, so if it isn't about the money, then what is the reason for losing so many developers to Google?

Or is the idea that Mozilla has been losing key people to Google (as mentioned in the OP) not legitimate?

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