How Firefox Got Fast Again • Hacker News Board

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#361

Post by lucb1e » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 7:49 PM UTC

51Cards wrote: post #282

mikeytown2 wrote: post #259

I'll be looking to downgrade to Firefox Extended Support Release 52.4.1 [1] and using the hidden settings to enable Electrolysis [2]. Currently on 56 and it's very fast but with 57 tabs mix plus is gone [3]. [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/#en-... [2] https://fossbytes.com/how-to-make-firefox-faster-by-enabling... [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/

I will be doing the same. The enhancements in 57 don't out-weight the productivity loss from my critical extensions. I'll be waiting until more of them are ported forward. For the record I don't actually find Firefox 56 slow at the moment either.

I have two critical extensions and a few others that would all break with 56 or 57. No thanks, I'll stick with what works.

Shoving webextensions down everyone's throat, and only afterwards starting to work on implementing APIs and giving anyone a chance to start working on porting stuff. No thanks.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#362

Post by ared38 » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 7:49 PM UTC

on_and_off wrote: post #354

mapgrep wrote: post #52

I switched back to Firefox 54 from Chrome when multiprocess browsing ("Electrolysis") came out of beta. It's been absolutely great. It's fast and I trust and like the nonprofit behind it. And all the extensions I care about are available. My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account, and just generally wanting less dependence on Google. I also like that Firefox has a built in tracking…

>My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account, and just generally wanting less dependence on Google One thing they have been doing very well is allowing history to sync between multiple devices on different OSes. Right now I use Chrome everywhere because : - It feels pretty fast (I still have to try the new FF) - Any replacement needs to come with an extension covering this feature an…

Firefox has had syncing built in for a while: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/sync/

Haven't tried it on iOS yet, but it worked great on my Android.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#363

Post by lucb1e » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 7:51 PM UTC

s_chaudhary wrote: post #343

Just use the Firefox Android nightly and beta build. The new UI is super clean and the performance is very good. Up until this point I always felt that there was no good Google free alternatives for chrome mobile browser, but this perception has definitely change now with the new Firefox Beta build. I am switching to Firefox nightly for my default Android browser now.

On my phone it often uses 100% CPU for extended periods of time, and does lots of writes to storage. And it has never been fast to begin with.

I mean, a five year old phone isn't top of the line anymore, but if other browsers work just fine, I'm reasonably sure where the blame lies...

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#364

Post by lucb1e » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 7:55 PM UTC

hendersoon wrote: post #302

Mouse gestures in Linux and MacOS are completely broken due to a known bug. They have a Linux patch likely slated for version 58 (in 6 weeks) but no MacOS patch yet. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1360278 Mouse gestures are critically important to me, so I'm sticking with Vivaldi until this is fixed.

Same here. I'm just not updating...

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#365

Post by _frog » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 7:55 PM UTC

ArmandGrillet wrote: post #144

I just installed Firefox 57 (thanks jacek for the link) and the first things I noticed are: - The cross to close a tab and the one to create a tab are aligned in a weird way. - Opening a tab is laggy (I'm on a MBP with an Intel Iris chip and 16GB of RAM). - The scrolling still does not feel native (I'm on macOS High Sierra). I'm very impressed by the work that has been done for this release as a dev but this does not…

The scrolling thing is a real shame, and it’s shocking to me that they haven’t implemented bouncy overscrolling when macOS has had it for something like 6 years.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#366

Post by nachtigall » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 7:56 PM UTC

eli wrote: post #276

Thorncorona wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FF just came out with multi account containers about a month ago -> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

And prior to that you could run multiple Firefox instances with different profiles. Not super hard.

> you could run multiple Firefox instances with different profiles

But not at the same time, which is a showstopper to me (still using Firefox Nightly as main browser).

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#367

Post by Manishearth » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 7:58 PM UTC

callahad wrote: post #321

tzs wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faster at what things? On my 2017 iMac (3.4 GHz Core i5, Radeon Pro 570) I get 60 on Mozilla's Speedometer 2.0 [1] test with Firefox 57.0. I get 90 on Chrome and 93 on Safari. On my Surface Pro 4 that gap is smaller, but Chrome is still about 15% faster on that test. [1] https://mozilla.github.io/arewefastyet-speedometer/2.0/

Benchmarks are not comprehensive, nor are they gospel; it's entirely possible for a browser to score lower on a benchmark while also feeling faster in real-world use. For a long time, this was true of Chrome versus Firefox on JavaScript benchmarks: SpiderMonkey is routinely on par with V8, yet Firefox also felt significantly slower. In the case of Speedometer, it's measuring one specific type of webapp interaction in…

Whilst benchmarking stylo for example we noticed there were perceptible wins on interaction time on real world sites; but speedometer didn't budge as much because it tends towards small DOM trees which stylo can't parallelize much.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#368

Post by tspike » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 8:01 PM UTC

mapgrep wrote: post #52

I switched back to Firefox 54 from Chrome when multiprocess browsing ("Electrolysis") came out of beta. It's been absolutely great. It's fast and I trust and like the nonprofit behind it. And all the extensions I care about are available. My main issue with Chrome was the endless nags to sign in to a Google account, and just generally wanting less dependence on Google. I also like that Firefox has a built in tracking…

Thanks for the reminder. I just downloaded the latest FF beta and exiled Chrome to an "only when needed" role.

All the back-and-forth about speed and features is understandable, but misses the point that Firefox needs our support if we are to have any real non-proprietary options for what is quickly becoming the base system abstraction layer for most computing.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#369

Post by Endy » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 8:02 PM UTC

I'm going to guess that the answer is: by not being Firefox anymore. Since that seems to be Mozilla's answer to just about anything. Then again, I never had a problem with Firefox, it's Chrome taking up so much proces time that kills me. I need a single-process browser that doesn't gum up the rest of my machine the way Chrome and multiprocess Firefox do.

Then again, I remain on a 32-bit processor & OS, and I don't expect to update in the next century.

Re: How Firefox Got Fast Again

#370

Post by nachtigall » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 8:02 PM UTC

callahad wrote: post #122

nullspace wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, it has to a large extent. Somethings that are not yet there: 1. Since Webextensions are new, some extensions that I use in chrome, need to be ported over. Most are not must haves to be fair. 2. Hangouts for work. :( 3. A solution to manage different personas - Chrome has the "user profile" thing linked to google accounts, firefox as container tabs. I think user profile is better than container tabs, altho…

Thank you for choosing Firefox. 1. Are there any specific extensions you need? Happy to add them to our outreach list. 2. Sorry about Hangouts; follows a trend of Chrome-only product launches/re-launches from Google (five this year so far). Wish we could do more, but if Google's OK shipping things that only work on one browser, that's their prerogative. 3. Firefox also has completely separate profiles, in addition to…

> 3. Firefox also has completely separate profiles, in addition to container tabs.

hey callahad, thanks for shiming in. My biggest pain with profiles is that you cannot use separate profiles at the same time. A Firefox instance can only run one at the same time, making it useless to run e.g. a work and a private profile together. Container tabs also do not help here because they share the same history which I do not want for privacy reasons.

Nonetheless, thanks for a great release!