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It’s time to give Firefox another chance

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Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#691

Post by terlisimo »

bigbugbag wrote: post #649
mda wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is mostly on linux. Chrome was way better on all aspects i mentioned. It was like day and night.

Seems to me you had a corrupted profile or you installed the wrond extension(s). Have you tried comparing both on a brand new user profile ? A day and night difference on a fresh profile is unheard of, they should be comparable speed.

I am surprised at how many people can't see (or mind) the obvious difference in speed. Here's a test:

Create a fresh clean profile for both FF56 (or earlier) and chrome without any extensions.

Then, create/import a bookmark folder with 20 sites and sync them to both browsers.

Fire up each browser and watch the cpu usage with top (or task manager). Choose "open all in tabs" and monitor the cpu usage over time.

For me chromium finishes loading 3-5x faster. By "finishes loading" I mean all spinning circles in tabs are gone and the cpu usage drops to nearly 0%.

Firefox uses only 2 processes/threads, while chromium makes use of all cores. I am guessing the more cores your CPU has, the more obvious the difference. But you don't need an 8-core cpu to see the difference, the difference is as noticeable for me on my i5-6200U laptop.

But page loading speed and JS performance aside, what turned me away from firefox is the sluggish UI. Little things like how fast the dev tools open, or the speed at which right-click menus open. It's like firefox freezes for a millisecond on these operations while chrome feels much more fluid. I don't have a test case for this :)

I never really used Firefox, and I give it a go every year or so. I used Opera 12 for as long as I could precisely because of the FF UI responsiveness. Then Chrome came along. I keep looking back but... FF is not there yet for me.

I'm no fan of Google and I really hope the new FF is as good as people claim to be. Remains to be seen, having high hopes!

EDIT: Obviously if you have a slow internet link then the pipe becomes the bottleneck and both browsers will load sites at same speed. But in that case you could just close all tabs and reopen them and let the browsers load most of the stuff from cache.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#692

Post by syshum »

ubernostrum wrote: post #675
syshum wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>>Apple introduced a large legal online music store with DRM. Apple got huge... Huge enough that record labels got scared and needed to break Apple's position. They turned to Amazon to start a competing music store, ROFL.... That is ... wow... Nothing about that is factually accurate, to state the Record Labels was the driving force behind DRM free Music... Ummm No... >>>The fact that you keep claiming EME is DRM t…

I'm not saying the labels wanted to go DRM-free. I'm saying that it was the only option they had at that point. They got legitimately scared of Apple's dominance in the market, and the only way to introduce a viable competitor was to do what they did with Amazon and a DRM-free store. And just for the record, responses like "ROFL" and calling things "moronic" (as you did in your other comment) don't really make you lo…

It was not the only option that had, nor did they desire in any way to go DRM free, they had to be forced into it by both Amazon and Apple.

And just for the record, responses like your revisionist history, and Hyperbolic non-sense don't really make you look like you know what your talking about or like you're someone who should be taken seriously

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#693

Post by ubernostrum »

syshum wrote: post #690
ubernostrum wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EME is big binary blob plugins called CDM's The plugin world had big binary blobs that need the ability to absolutely control at least most or all of the browser and possibly other parts of the computer too. The EME world has far smaller binary blobs communicating over a narrow defined API which does not give them control of the browser. So. You don't actually know what you're talking about, and resort to misrepresen…

CDM require total control of the OS and Hardware, far worse than just control over the Browser. So it is you that do not know what you are talking about

Here's the spec: https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/

Please point to the portion which backs your assertion.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#694

Post by ubernostrum »

syshum wrote: post #692
ubernostrum wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying the labels wanted to go DRM-free. I'm saying that it was the only option they had at that point. They got legitimately scared of Apple's dominance in the market, and the only way to introduce a viable competitor was to do what they did with Amazon and a DRM-free store. And just for the record, responses like "ROFL" and calling things "moronic" (as you did in your other comment) don't really make you lo…

It was not the only option that had, nor did they desire in any way to go DRM free, they had to be forced into it by both Amazon and Apple. And just for the record, responses like your revisionist history, and Hyperbolic non-sense don't really make you look like you know what your talking about or like you're someone who should be taken seriously

You keep trying to put words in my mouth. It keeps not working. Consider a different approach.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#695

Post by lugg »

bigbugbag wrote: post #628
lugg wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The above poster is also neglecting to realise Mozilla is not a normal business in it for profit (as far as I understand it - correct me if I'm wrong.) https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_Foundation_Projects The foundation has a crazy long history of funding open source and various pursuits. Comparing their style of execution to google is just rediculously unfair on so many levels.

Are you confusing the not for profit mozilla foundation and the for profit mozilla corporation here ? The foundation had engaged in tax evasion over the money raised through the corporation and ended up settling with the IRS by paying a $1.5 millions fine[1], they had provisioned $15 millions for this fine, suddenly they got a few unexpected millions to spend on whatever. I agree that comparing mozilla to google make…

Is there a difference? Is there a reason we say Google and not ABC?

The seperation is purely legal and financial, no?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#696

Post by mda »

bigbugbag wrote: post #649
mda wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is mostly on linux. Chrome was way better on all aspects i mentioned. It was like day and night.

Seems to me you had a corrupted profile or you installed the wrond extension(s). Have you tried comparing both on a brand new user profile ? A day and night difference on a fresh profile is unheard of, they should be comparable speed.

Of course. My profiles were not corrupt, also tried with empty profiles, tbh firefox performance degraded much faster after profiles got heavier. This was some time ago though. To be honest it was impossible to not see the performance difference, chrome is always more fluid and snappy.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#697

Post by mda »

JoelTheSuperior wrote: post #666
mda wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuck chrome? Whoa what did Chrome do?

In fairness I (and I suspect many others) refuse to use Chrome on privacy grounds.

Serious question, you think firefox has any quantifiable privacy benefit over chrome?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#698

Post by coldtea »

dralley wrote: post #282
ricw wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not representative of either the time frame or the resources available to Mozilla. Mozilla has had Hundreds of millions of annual income through their search associations [1]. It’s surprising how they’ve wasted that amount of money to finally in 2017 build a browser that can compete again. This is 9 years after google chrome was released! They have absolutely no excuse for falling this far behind. They squand…

While Mozilla has had quite a few projects that didn't really pan out, I'm not sure you're giving them enough credit. They developed (well... became the first and most significant major backer of) an entirely new programming language, purely for the purposes of building a better browser. And then devoted tons of resources for years into developing Servo, a massive and complex project that is only being realized now.…

>Also, it's unfair to argue that they have neglected the browser. Firefox is a massive legacy codebase that couldn't be cleaned up without breaking A LOT OF THINGS

They said that for Netscape too (compared to Mozilla/Firefox). At what point do they start writing nice extensible code?

Webkit based browsers don't seem to have the same issues.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#699

Post by coldtea »

eric-hu wrote: post #506
dralley wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Mozilla has had quite a few projects that didn't really pan out, I'm not sure you're giving them enough credit. They developed (well... became the first and most significant major backer of) an entirely new programming language, purely for the purposes of building a better browser. And then devoted tons of resources for years into developing Servo, a massive and complex project that is only being realized now.…

> Firefox is a massive legacy codebase that couldn't be cleaned up without breaking A LOT OF THINGS, and at every step in the process they faced people begging them not to break their things, despite the alternative being the continued rot of Firefox's internals. I've made a couple small contributions to Firefox. Though I'd been a Firefox user for years, this never occurred to me until I looked at the source in 2015…

>I think Firefox hit full ES6 compatibility first among the browsers

Wasn't it Webkit that hit that first? Whereas Firefox at the time was just 93%.

https://twitter.com/webkit/status/728643624464883712?lang=en

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