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

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

#301

Post by GeekyBear »

torben-friis wrote: post #215

Everyone's talking about what Firefox should do to beat chrome, and meanwhile here I am still suffering the bug that makes it unusable for many MacBooks with retina screens set to "more space". Start Firefox and fans are blaring in seconds, hundreds of reports, years of waiting and no solution... Maybe making it usable in one of the most common devices for devs would be a start, I've got a full building of coworkers…

The solution is to rebuild Firefox to use Core Animation to draw the window contents and then send only changes to that content to the graphics compositor after that instead of using the long deprecated OpenGL implementation it currently uses that repaints the whole screen over and over, so it's hardly surprising to see such a massive change take quite a while to implement.

The earliest changes in this process have finally made it into beta and there are already substantial improvements in power usage/heat generated by an overworked GPU even before all the changes in progress have been enabled.

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

#302

Post by isostatic »

JadoJodo wrote: post #248
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For instance, my bank (Lloyds) has a login screen where you have to select letters from three long drop down lists containing all letters and numbers. With Safari or Chrome, I can select the dropdown (by clicking it or navigating there using the keyboard) and then enter the letter or number on the keyboard. With Firefox, I have to click on the dropdown, scroll down looking for the right letter/number and then select…

As inconvenient as powering through this bug might be, switching to Chrome to use this site just reinforces their choice. Perhaps emailing them to report the issue might also be beneficial for all?

As it’s a bank I suspect their devs have to use IE6 and have recently upgraded to IE8 and thus change in behaviour.

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

#303

Post by dymk »

manojlds wrote: post #75
klingonopera wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those 500 million are easily eclipsed if you compare it to what Google's revenue is... EDIT: It was 136 billion in 2018: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...

And Google builds only a browser? What's the budget of the Google Chrome team?

If you’re wondering who spends more on their browser team, Google does

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

#304

Post by d18g »

tfigment wrote: post #191
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…

Also full time Firefox user. Most of my issues are either blocking related so that is on me or apparently sites bugs. At work I use chrome for beyondtrust because I cannot get ff to automatically download and launch rdp sessions. Apparently the content type is wrong in downloaded file so ff will not associate an application with the file so adds several steps to launching rdp sessions. Easier to keep chrome off to th…

>The other issue is that it does not use Windows ca store for certificates

By default. But can be configured to use the cert store [0].

> Apparently the content type is wrong in downloaded file so ff will not associate an application with the file

If it is consistent that shouldn't be a real problem.

[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/AddRootToFirefox

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

#305

Post by isostatic »

JadoJodo wrote: post #248
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For instance, my bank (Lloyds) has a login screen where you have to select letters from three long drop down lists containing all letters and numbers. With Safari or Chrome, I can select the dropdown (by clicking it or navigating there using the keyboard) and then enter the letter or number on the keyboard. With Firefox, I have to click on the dropdown, scroll down looking for the right letter/number and then select…

As inconvenient as powering through this bug might be, switching to Chrome to use this site just reinforces their choice. Perhaps emailing them to report the issue might also be beneficial for all?

I changed bank - I had an account with a bank (RBS?) in the late 90s / early 00s, couldn't access it from linux, yet I could access HSBC, so RBS lost my custom.

My current bank (Smile) works in Firefox on linux, so that's fine. If it didn't, they'll be losing my custom.

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

#306

Post by aibara »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #178
bad_user wrote: post #124

Firefox has plenty of room for improvement, but this article doesn't touch on it. 1. People don't install their own browser, unless they're on a new computer and want the browser they've always used — people are conservative when making technological choices and when they switch browsers, it's often because they get a friend to install it for them, or they buy a new computer, or install some app that tricks them into…

> I've never had issues with Firefox's fonts. Maybe on Linux you have, but font problems on Linux are to be expected. Not really. On Linux for a decade, fonts have been fine. It's just some distros perhaps don't ship with the best defaults.

I've used Firefox with Ubuntu for over a decade and have never had any issues with the fonts the OP mentions. Maybe it's a problem with some other distros, but I thought Firefox followed your system's settings regardless.

Chromium, on the other hand, has never fully obeyed the default font settings. Even messing with the flags there are plenty of times the font hinting would be different on certain sites than what I've set it too (e.g. grayscale instead of RGB). Never got into troubleshooting it too much though, since I don't use it as my default.

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

#307

Post by hu3 »

dfrankow wrote: post #190

Firefox is way slower than chrome to just open a web page on my pixel 3a. Do others not have this experience?

That's my experience too. Both on mobile and mac.

The only reason I (and many I know) use Firefox mobile is because it can run uBlock Origin.

It is uncertain if the new mobile Firefox will support uBlock Origin so even there I might stop using it.

Which is sad since I'm all for diversity.

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

#308

Post by torben-friis »

grosswait wrote: post #295
Medicalidiot wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is a dumpster fire on Mac. No pinch to zoom? Whatever. Scrolling issues? Whatever. Lighting up my CPU to the point it's noticeably warm on idle? Not cool. Having 60% of the battery life as Chrome and 50% of Safari? Unacceptable. Simply idling Firefox on my Mac would use almost the same amount of battery as actively browsing Safari. I love Firefox on my home Linux desktop, but that's as far as my love goes at…

Wierd. I've been using Firefox Quantum Dev Edition on MBP for a few years now and it consistently uses less CPU and RAM than Chrome, with way too many tabs, and consequently better battery life by far. Power usage still lags behind Safari, but at least it doesn't give me the spinning beachball for 30 seconds on every other new tab after 3 hours of browsing with tons of tabs.

Do you have a retina mbp? And if so, do you have the screen resolution set up to the"more space" configuration in your macos system settings?

Those two factors seem to make the problem worse for most users, since the power drain increases with your display resolution.

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

#309

Post by GeekyBear »

ledauphin wrote: post #239
torben-friis wrote: post #215

Everyone's talking about what Firefox should do to beat chrome, and meanwhile here I am still suffering the bug that makes it unusable for many MacBooks with retina screens set to "more space". Start Firefox and fans are blaring in seconds, hundreds of reports, years of waiting and no solution... Maybe making it usable in one of the most common devices for devs would be a start, I've got a full building of coworkers…

Firefox got most of its early momentum from tech-savvy users recommending it to their friends and family. Many of us use retina MacBooks, and none of us can honestly recommend it since we can't use it ourselves. I understand from the bug report that it's not a trivial solution, but then again the new JS engine wasn't trivial either. Mozilla is going to have to step it up and realize that its own version of advertisin…

For now, on a retina Mac, you can pick up significant power savings by having Firefox opt out of the OS wide window scaling when on a retina display.

Get info on the Firefox app and then check ”Open in Low Resolution” on the get info panel, then restart the app.

You can pick up more energy savings by telling Firefox to stop using transparent pixels.

Go to about:config, and set gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true.

Firefox has just been overloading the GPU by painting the entire window over and over and sending the output to the window compositor where it is slowed down even more by scaling and dealing with transparency.

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

#310

Post by pcwalton »

Dragory wrote: post #122
LoSboccacc wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not entirely true. firefox has solved a lot of startup and other performance issues, but the core rendering engine still lags when confronted with heavy loads, just a scrollable div of a couple dozen large images is enough to make it stutter seconds at time while they load and render, sure it's partly a developer issue for not using thumbnail in the listing, but chrome shows them all with zero lag. stating that the o…

just a scrollable div of a couple dozen large images is enough to make it stutter seconds at time while they load and render I might be wrong, but with WebRender, isn't scrolling now done asynchronously so it doesn't stutter while things are loading? I certainly haven't experienced any scroll stutter since I turned it on.

Scrolling has been async for many years, both with WebRender and without it.
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