201–210 of 336 posts
I use Firefox because of 2 things: 1) vimperator 2) single process handling multiple tabs (I typically have upwards of 40 tabs open at a time) Firefox is in the process of removing plugins like 1) so that it makes it possible to remove 2). Wonderful.
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FWIW, though I'm an avid supporter of Firefox and use it, my very consistent observation is that security experts believe, * Chrome/Chromium is more secure against attacks by governments or criminals (i.e., attacks against the integrity of the system; I can't think of the right word). * Firefox may be more secure against advertising and corporate confidentiality attacks. * Firefox with certain add-ons, too technical…
The fundamental difference is that Google is a gigantic engineering organization that dedicates enormous resources to security, benefiting Chrome directly and indirectly. Over the years, lots of work has been done to ensure and improve its security at a design and architectural level. Firefox, as this announcement shows, is just getting around to freeing itself from design decisions which may have made sense over a d…
Ouch, the comments over there are extremely negative. As mozilla is our last bastion of hope between advertising giants it pains me to see mozilla having an increasingly hard time to sustain a positive brand image. It is crazy if you think about it, because Mozilla is the last giant that respects its users. It has a very good proposition with regards to privacy and user-interest alignment. There are still tons of les…
A car analogy is perfect here. Google Chrome is kind of like a sedan, something convenient for most people. Firefox is kind of like a pickup truck, less convenient for a lot of people but more powerful and useful for the people who need them. This move is kind of like a pickup truck manufacturer realizing that sedans are more common than pickup trucks, then thinking sedans don't have beds in the back, and removing th…
According to NetMarketShare stats [0], Firefox is now at under 12% of desktop marketshare... and falling. I've switched over to Chromium (and Safari on OSX) because I just couldn't justify slower speeds and much poorer performance overall anymore. I've also noticed it used a lot more CPU than alternative browsers... which is an issue if you're using a laptop. Once Mozilla kills off XPCOM and XUL-based addons [1], the…
Well now you don't have to, Firefox is now faster than Chrome by a huge margin with the 51.0.1 Electrolysis update.
Proof: https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0
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Because Chromium runs far better in my experience, especially on Linux, and especially where graphics and WebGL are concerned. If all I can use are WebExtensions, I may as well use Chromium for the speed.
You really should use Firefox if you are a heavy WebGL user, Firefox is 3 times as fast as Chrome now on Unity3D, an it's the complete opposite, Chrome is more snappy with Java and Firefox with animations/Graphics. Here is my latest benchmark as solid proof: https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0
Firefox WebGL works much better on Windows for me; never tried it on OS X. It's probably a Linux-specific issue, but I rarely use Firefox on anything else.
If you don't run an ad-blocker, and you go to a typical commercial web site (say, nytimes.com), Firefox can be incredibly slow and laggy. Scrolling is janky and the whole experience is just bad. The whole browser can lock up.
This is because Firefox's UI uses the same single-threaded JavaScript engine that web pages do. Ads tend not to be good web citizens, so they cause that single-threaded engine to run poorly, which causes the whole browser, even UI elements like scrolling, to run poorly.
To fix this, Firefox has moved to a multi-process model. I believe it's called Electrolysis (e10s). The UI uses a different JavaScript process than web pages.
Electrolysis is enabled today.
And yet, if you read the comments in this thread, you'll see a lot of people complaining about Firefox being slow and janky. What's up with that? Electrolysis was supposed to fix it!
Well, legacy extensions dig into the internals of Firefox. If you've built multi-process code, you know that it's very sensitive to race conditions. Third-party extensions running arbitrary code make it impossible, or at least prohibitively difficult, for Firefox to run e10s.
So e10s is disabled if you have a legacy extension. This causes Firefox to be slow and janky.
To fix this problem, Firefox is removing support for legacy extensions.
To be clear, the engineering tradeoff being made here is this:
A) Allow legacy extensions to run arbitrary code. See performance get steadily worse in comparison to other browsers.
B) Have a fast, smooth, multi-process browser. Hope that the new extension mechanism is "good enough" and that important extensions are migrated.
You can't have both. Mozilla has chosen B). You may disagree with this choice. Personally, I think it was the right one.
(You might say that the correct answer is C) run single-threaded when legacy extensions exist, and e10s otherwise. This is the situation that exists today. Look at all the people complaining about Firefox's performance. I don't think this is a viable solution, as people blame Firefox even when it's their extensions that are to blame. Also, option B) gives extension developers a reason to migrate and help Mozilla identify needed APIs.)
Apologies if I got some of these details wrong. I've been following Firefox's migration to a multiprocess model with interest, but I'm hardly an expert.
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Web extensions are vetted by amo reviewers if they come from that channel. Is it going to catch every single malicious extension? Doubtful. Is it better than nothing? Yes.
> Web extensions are vetted by amo reviewers [...] But so is every other type of add-on. You even need to upload source code for binary components. (A XUL extension can include DLLs or their cross-platform equivalents.)
My first reaction was to disable automatic updates of Firefox. I'm not against change, but the whole controversy around this issue makes me a bit wary of blindly trusting Mozilla. I want to make sure my browser experience doesn't get ruined because of this shift. I don't have the time or patience to clean up a messy first release with webextensions only, breaking my trusted browser add-ons. First seeing, then believi…
Ouch, the comments over there are extremely negative. As mozilla is our last bastion of hope between advertising giants it pains me to see mozilla having an increasingly hard time to sustain a positive brand image. It is crazy if you think about it, because Mozilla is the last giant that respects its users. It has a very good proposition with regards to privacy and user-interest alignment. There are still tons of les…
Your comment is insulting, people are not "less than smart" because have different priorities or different view than you. I am using mostly Chrome because I had a lot of performance/memory usage issues with Firefox and because of security. You forget how someone got access to internal not disclosed list of vulnerabilities in Firefox? Compare amount of code execution CVEs[0][1] Chrome = 80 Firefox = 700! And I don't c…
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I've read it is about twice that. How does one know what numbers to believe?
Compare [1] and [2] and see if you can figure out why they are so different. [1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr... [2] https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr...