Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#161

Post by bscphil » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 10:53 AM UTC

jrugk wrote: post #99

ajdlinux wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has to stop taking 3 times as long to load Slack, or crashing/freezing when I'm using WebEx. Yes, the applications bear a lot of blame here, but they are the applications I am stuck with for business use.

>the applications bear a lot of blame here ...or Firefox simply has some performance problems. Touching the DOM in Firefox is a terrible bottleneck, for example

> Touching the DOM in Firefox is a terrible bottleneck, for example

Yep. Speedometer 2.0 shows this pretty well. It's 25% faster in Chromium for me on desktop, and over 100% faster! in mobile Chrome than Firefox for Android. Mozilla have done a remarkable job of catching up on raw javascript engine performance and the speed of the renderer, but they have a ways to go yet in other areas, probably none more so than bringing recent improvements to mobile.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#162

Post by PunksATawnyFill » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 10:54 AM UTC

brianpgordon wrote: post #57

> While I understand that they have to make money somehow I don't. I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. With that kind of money, Firefox should be absolutely dominating the browser space. They shouldn't be making Firefox worse with advertising in order to subsidize their flailing around trying to find traction in mobile or VR. It actually reminds…

If that's true, then they're at least 50% failing. Thunderbird absolutely blows, to the extent that I've chosen to use Apple Mail instead. That's saying something.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#163

Post by bscphil » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 10:57 AM UTC

JeanMarcS wrote: post #128

feanaro wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. Also a full-time Firefox user. This is fascinating because I quite literally cannot remember a website for which I had to switch browser so it would start working. What kind of websites are these? Have you noticed any pattern about them? Perhaps it's a certain type of site…

Maybe it’s the combination with ad blockers, but there are a lot of times I get stucked in the payment part. And then I have to redo all the ordering process on Chromium. It for long failed on Visa 3D secure (so not website dependant) until I found why with Badger blocking it. But often when the payment system is included in the website it fails (and that’s really annoying)

I solve this problem by having a clean profile with only uBlock that I can open up when I want to make sure a purchase is going to work. uMatrix has a glitch where even when you enable something it sometimes won't work / load even when you refresh the page multiple times, but I don't think I've encountered problems on many pages with just uBlock.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#164

Post by brianpgordon » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 10:58 AM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #152

brianpgordon wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They spent $253 million (45% of revenue) on software development, presumably the bulk going to Firefox. I'm curious if anyone can locate information on how much of that was spent specifically on Firefox, the browser. It seems like Mozilla was working on a bunch of peripheral stuff during that 2016-2017 period. * Work on Firefox OS was still ongoing through 1H 2016. ( https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.de…

>They were building a free subscription service to check HIBP for your info. ( https://monitor.firefox.com/ ) // Wasn't HIBP a single person. So presumably a checking system could have been churned out by, being generous, a team of 6 on a mean-average $100,000 wage. Lets say $1.2M per year (doubled to account for facilities, etc.) as a top end. Realistically surely that's a couple of months work for such a team? Look…

The examples were intended to illustrate the point that Mozilla has a lot of non-Firefox software development going on, not to be an exhaustive accounting of everything they do. But even so, I have to question only allocating $13 million to the items I listed. Particularly Firefox OS and Firefox Reality. Those are big projects. The blog post I linked even has a pull quote emphasizing how much work the latter was:

> We had to rethink everything, including navigation, text-input, environments, search and more. This required years of research, and countless conversations with users, content creators, and hardware partners. The result is a browser that is built for the medium it serves. It makes a big difference, and we think you will love all of the features and details that we’ve created specifically for a MR browser. – Andre Vrignaud, Head of Mixed Reality Platform Strategy at Mozilla

Even something like Firefox Monitor has lots of design work and art assets and backend infrastructure and management overhead that makes it not as trivial as you make it sound.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#165

Post by jillesvangurp » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 11:02 AM UTC

dblohm7 wrote: post #52

techntoke wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the new Firefox for Android will not support extensions.

The story for extensions in Fenix has not been finalized yet.

This is on their roadmap: https://github.com/orgs/mozilla-mobile/projects/28#card-2405...

It looks like there are some other tickets on the road map that have the needs:gv label (Needs Gecko View). So, it seems they are on it or at least aware of it and there is some unfinished work to bring over more of the components they have for Fennec and Desktop.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#166

Post by ddtaylor » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 11:03 AM UTC

csdreamer7 wrote: post #78

brianpgordon wrote: post #57

> While I understand that they have to make money somehow I don't. I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. With that kind of money, Firefox should be absolutely dominating the browser space. They shouldn't be making Firefox worse with advertising in order to subsidize their flailing around trying to find traction in mobile or VR. It actually reminds…

> I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. Mostly agree. > The whole point of Mozilla is supposed to be Firefox and Thunderbird. I can understand your view. With that said, I am quite happy they funded Rust and also gave a grant to the Godot project to develop their webassembly interface.

> I can understand your view. With that said, I am quite happy they funded Rust and also gave a grant to the Godot project to develop their webassembly interface.

I agree, but it seems problematic they aren't monetizing that. They're making money doing the things users don't really like while not making a dime of good things like fostering a legitimate free and open web.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#167

Post by sebazzz » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 11:07 AM UTC

feanaro wrote: post #105

NullInvictus wrote: post #32

I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues. They certainly should be addressed to some degree, but the issues I find people are bothered about in Firefox are something that Mozilla has very little control over: Bugs in sites. As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. It's pretty easy to…

> As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. Also a full-time Firefox user. This is fascinating because I quite literally cannot remember a website for which I had to switch browser so it would start working. What kind of websites are these? Have you noticed any pattern about them? Perhaps it's a certain type of site…

Sounds like tracking protection blocks some elements.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#168

Post by brianpgordon » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 11:09 AM UTC

AsyncAwait wrote: post #149

brianpgordon wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft still makes a browser; they just don't make their own rendering engine anymore. Which makes sense because it's hard and Blink works just fine. I wouldn't mind if Mozilla did the same thing. The Vivaldi folks are using that strategy and managing to make the best web browser out there with what I assume must be a microscopic fraction of $500 million/yr. And I don't share your opinion of how far a $500 million…

> I wouldn't mind if Mozilla did the same thing. Then there would literally be no point to Firefox existing as a counterbalance to Google deciding the web's future.

Theoretically they could still focus on developing a privacy-first browser on top of the core engine, and continue to influence web standards by implementing them as plugins with some glue patches maintained as a running fork on top of the Chromium code. As it is now, the fact that Firefox uses Quantum instead of Blink and SpiderMonkey instead of V8 isn't really a differentiator for the vast majority of users. There's a vague sense that a technology monoculture is unhealthy, but I would argue that the real threat is a browser monoculture, and Mozilla apparently can't stop that from happening with their current strategy because Firefox is losing.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#169

Post by aliceryhl » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 11:09 AM UTC

JeanMarcS wrote: post #128

feanaro wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. Also a full-time Firefox user. This is fascinating because I quite literally cannot remember a website for which I had to switch browser so it would start working. What kind of websites are these? Have you noticed any pattern about them? Perhaps it's a certain type of site…

Maybe it’s the combination with ad blockers, but there are a lot of times I get stucked in the payment part. And then I have to redo all the ordering process on Chromium. It for long failed on Visa 3D secure (so not website dependant) until I found why with Badger blocking it. But often when the payment system is included in the website it fails (and that’s really annoying)

I have never had payment fail in Firefox.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#170

Post by tambre » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 11:13 AM UTC

hazz99 wrote: post #151

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with this is that the web is competing with native apps. Only in the minds of web “devs”.

> "dev" Drop those apostrophes - a web developer is a completely valid, skilled profession. Web apps unequivocally compete with native apps, that is a fact. I prefer the Slack web client to the native version. I use Google Docs instead of Microsoft Word. I use Google Drive, iCloud, Google Photos etc. instead of my own harddrive. To think that web apps don't compete with native apps is simply untrue.

> I prefer the Slack web client to the native version.

Slack doesn't have a native version, does it? They have a desktop client, but that's just the web version wrapped inside Electron.