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Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

mobile.nytimes.com

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Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#351

Post by Mayzie »

didgeoridoo wrote: post #3

Ironically, the thing that drove me to Firefox was the excellent Account Containers system that I found necessary to manage being logged into multiple Google Apps accounts simultaneously (I have five ). Each tab owns one account — that way, Google Drive files from my work don't randomly refuse to open because I'm also logged into my personal account. (Chrome has no solution for containing accounts across tabs, last I…

> the thing that drove me to Firefox was the excellent Account Containers system

Though unfortunately, history and bookmarks are not isolated to their individual containers, and Firefox's profile management system is a PITA compared to Chrome's easy button in the title bar.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#352

Post by fencepost »

mxvzr wrote: post #152
fencepost wrote: post #85

I haven't seen anyone mention this, but Firefox is my "daily driver" for almost all browsing, and is also locked down with uMatrix, uBlock Origin, DecentralEyes and Ghostery (though I could probably drop Ghostery without missing it). Chrome has uBlock Origin and a few other things but interferes with pages less. I keep a set of pages for some specific web apps (e.g. GMail, Google Calendar, task management, etc.) open…

I'd remove Ghostery. Not only is it useless once you are running uMatrix & uBlock Origin, they also used to sells your data (page visit, blocking, and advertising statistics) if you activated a feature called "GhostRank". Not sure whether it's still true or not.

Ghostery is convenient in that it categorizes what it's blocking - most of the time it's obvious, particularly with uBlock Origin in Advanced mode, but sometimes I'll look at things in uMatrix and say "OK, X is blocked, but why was it on the page and will unblocking it resolve things?" For example, looking at jumpcloud.com Ghostery breaks the 7 blocked items into 2 advertising trackers, 2 "Essential" trackers, 2 analytics trackers and 1 social media tracker.

As for Ghostery having a breach and exposing email, etc. that would require that I actually create an account for Ghostery. It works just fine without.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#353

Post by thecrazyone »

mooman219 wrote: post #319
joeblau wrote: post #172

I just ran both of the speed test benchmarks [1][2] mentioned in the article, plus two other tests [3][4]. | Firefox | Safari | Chrome ----------------|----------------|-----------------|----------------- Speedometer 2.0 | 83.0 ±0.91 | 92.1 ±2.8 | 75.7 ±3.4 JetStream | 219.40 ±8.5563 | 294.79 ±11.138 | 201.81 ±15.171 Motion Mark | 203.71 ±5.41% | 525.77 ±6.56% | 388.85 ±4.79 ARES-6 | 54.06 ±0.95ms | 16.85 ±1.19ms | 2…

To compare: i7 6700k / GTX 1080 / Windows 10 | Edge 42 | Chrome 67 | Firefox 61 ----------------|-------------------|------------------|------------------ Speedometer 2.0 | [3] 76.8 ±1.0 | [1] 118.0 ±1.3 | [2] 85.7 ±2.1 JetStream | [1] 283.0 ±21.4 | [3] 235.1 ±2.4 | [2] 240.8 ±2.7 Motion Mark | [3] 273.2 ±12.9% | [2] 305.4 ±0.9% | [1] 445.7 ±0.8% ARES-6 | [3] 65.4 ±16.5ms | [1] 17.8 ±0.4ms | [2] 51.4 ±1.7ms

Thanks for putting the [1] [2] [3], it becomes easier to understand for someone who doesn't know about these test scores

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#354

Post by black_puppydog »

miqkt wrote: post #168
mxvzr wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd remove Ghostery. Not only is it useless once you are running uMatrix & uBlock Origin, they also used to sells your data (page visit, blocking, and advertising statistics) if you activated a feature called "GhostRank". Not sure whether it's still true or not.

Ghostery also had an incident [1] last month where they exposed e-mail addresses of some users, which I guess adds further doubt to their reliability. [1]: https://www.ghostery.com/blog/ghostery-news/ghostery-email-i...

wait, why do they need users' emails?

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#355

Post by acqq »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #316
joeblau wrote: post #172

I just ran both of the speed test benchmarks [1][2] mentioned in the article, plus two other tests [3][4]. | Firefox | Safari | Chrome ----------------|----------------|-----------------|----------------- Speedometer 2.0 | 83.0 ±0.91 | 92.1 ±2.8 | 75.7 ±3.4 JetStream | 219.40 ±8.5563 | 294.79 ±11.138 | 201.81 ±15.171 Motion Mark | 203.71 ±5.41% | 525.77 ±6.56% | 388.85 ±4.79 ARES-6 | 54.06 ±0.95ms | 16.85 ±1.19ms | 2…

Firefox’s biggest problem is rapacious battery draining. Unplug your charger and Safari feels like a dainty butterfly in a soft summer breeze, while Firefox thrashes around like a drunken Godzilla in mid-90s Tokyo. The energy usage tab on the activity monitor consistently shows Firefox at a ~40 “score” (whatever that unit is), and Safari more around 4. Anecdotally, the difference in battery time is real. This is the…

I also observe the same problem with Firefox on Windows and Linux. I have an impression that their developers don't have any priority on the battery drain, instead they just measure speed, and don't want to investigate too much on reducing actual work done, even when, from the user perspective, we're "doing nothing" (e.g. just keeping the browser open on some pages). I know there are many sites today that have tracking codes etc that "always run" but it seems that it's an excuse not to investigate what the browser "always does" in all the scenarios when it should just do as little as possible. Also, different kind of "movement" on the pages (videos, animated gifs, sounds) all take more battery than the competition.

My measurements are that on some specific pages, even when I "do nothing" Firefox uses up to twice as much CPU. Luckily, it's not always twice as much battery drain, because even idle uses power. But it's definitely visible and measurable: from 3 hours of other browsers you'd probably have only 2 of Firefox.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#356

Post by te0006 »

Teeer wrote: post #212
marban wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I keep coming back to Opera which feels the snappiest on the latest MBP 13". Any real-world numbers?

Strangely, I've also found that Opera's android browser is by far the fastest, very noticeably.

Also Opera is the only major mobile browser left with a decent text reflow implementation. Shame on Chrome for dropping it.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#357

Post by zaarn »

spockz wrote: post #331
maxyme wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, firefox is working on switching to rendering the entire page in opengl which should bring it's motion mark score up substantially. Details on that (and how to enable it in nightly at the bottom of each post) at https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com

They’d better switch to using metal because Apple deprecated OpenGL for MacOS.

That's a problem that Apple fabricated themselves. All MacOS games would also have to switch and I don't see that happening other than through the MoltenVK library if they support Vulkan at all.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#358

Post by Yizahi »

konart wrote: post #323
Yizahi wrote: post #318

> But it became irrelevant after Google in 2008 released Chrome No, it didn't. > Chrome, a faster, more secure and versatile browser. No, it wasn't. Articles like this are perpetrating the myth about "better" Chrome, while it had always been slower and had less features than Firefox.

>it had always been slower Only if at the very beginnning. For a long time now Chrome is much faster than Fx both in rendering (withough Fx WebRender) and general responsiveness.

I know it is anecdotal experience, not a proper test, but personally I tried Chrome for several months as a main browser when FF had been in 3x versions, and Chrome always felt less responsive. It had some weird micropauses in initial page rendering, and since I'm mainly opening/closing new different pages from multiple sites (as opposed to have several pages open constantly from few sites) it had been less pleasant to use compared to FF. And I'm not even mentioning addons and privacy, just from performance standpoint.

PS: at that time I was working for almost full time on Asus Eee PC, with 1Gb memory and early model of Atom CPU, so that was the reason to try Chrome widely marketed as "faster" (as I said above, it wasn't in practice, at least for me).

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#359

Post by [deleted] »

isolli wrote: post #344

I have always used Firefox, ever since they implemented tabbed browsing (an incredible improvement, for those who don't remember the time before that). However, in recent times I have had to switch more and more apps to Chrome because the UI breaks in Firefox: intercom.io, trello.com, notion.so. Probably no fault of Firefox, but if a UI is broken there is no choice but to migrate.

[deleted]

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#360

Post by ar0 »

isolli wrote: post #344

I have always used Firefox, ever since they implemented tabbed browsing (an incredible improvement, for those who don't remember the time before that). However, in recent times I have had to switch more and more apps to Chrome because the UI breaks in Firefox: intercom.io, trello.com, notion.so. Probably no fault of Firefox, but if a UI is broken there is no choice but to migrate.

Are you sure this isn't some Firefox add-on that you are using that is causing this? (E.g. uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger or activating Firefox's built-in anti-tracking protection or maybe just blocking third-party cookies; which could be solved by whitelisting the problematic webpages.)

I am using Firefox exclusively and I rarely find sites that don't work with Firefox after I disable blocking extensions.

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