It's interesting how we all are focusing on tiny non-noticeable performance gains when privacy is what matters in browsers.
Almost as if Google wants us to focus on performance where they can compete.
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Performance absolutely matters. I've dropped firefox like 5 times in the past 10 years because either it's stability with extensions was bad, or it handled tabs so poorly it felt like memory leaks dragging my entire PC down. At the end of the day you have to actually be able to use the browser.
Performance absolutely matters.
And I am trying firefox again and have experienced two crashes. i'm still giving it a chance but I need to stress that the most important thing is that it fulfills it's main purpose, browsing . If my #1 concern was privacy I wouldn't bother with the browsers altogether.
edit: It is worth mentioning I don't think performance has anything to do with privacy, and firefox could absolutely have both. It just hasn't in my experience.
Two crashes after you just installed it? That's not normal at all. What system do you have?
The same people will have chrome eat ram or crash and just shrug and restart. It's not about the browser. It's the same "I use chrome because everyone else is insecure" "a zero day was reported for chrome last week" "yeah, everyone has bugs sometimes". They have a narrative they want to believe and they self select to support it.
Windows 11, listed all installed extensions in response to other user.
I've literally never had ff crash on me. are u running really old hardware?
2 years at best , still able to run new games on highest settings.
twice in past 2 weeks. Completely random.
If you were interested extensions are:
Libredirect
Improve youtube (for youtube & videos)
LiveTL
Auto Tab discard (added after finding firefox devouring memory for some reason to the point youtube was lagging)
BetterTTV
Panorama tab groups
600% Sound Volume
Currnetly 52 tabs open, which I did both on Chrome and Opera as well.
Again this is still not to the point that I feel like I can't deal with it. The crashes were completely random and not to the point of becoming a trend.
do u have those extensions in chrome as well? meybe its an extension
An extension shouldn't be able to crash the browser, though.
The crash details would be useful to know. The "windows reliability history" menu (how its called) of the control panel shows some of the useful things
Similar. In Opera I used
ublock (forgot to include in firefox list)
Libredirect
Improve youtube
LiveTL
And a different sound volume extension
Prior to that in Chrome, I used
ublock
improve youtube
livetl
and yet ANOTHER volume extension (for some reason volume extensions get flagged a lot)
I've got a five year old low end gaming laptop and I've never had issues. tbf I have 5 tabs usually open, 10 at most. s
I will say as an aside from our discussion, just to stress
I'm not trying to say Firefox is doing bad at performance (I know going through this explaining my setup it may sound that way)
What i'm trying to say is that in response to the original comment
It’s interesting how we all are focusing on tiny non-noticeable performance gains when privacy is what matters in browsers.
To basically say "Nono, performance is important! Please don't stop"
And yes, privacy is also important, Firefox can have both, and I really want to encourage that. Not one or the other.
Imagine giving away a nice browser for a 10% performance increase but now your new browser forces you to watch their ads or it won't load the pages you need to visit.
all the time you saved using "performant Browser" in the past couple of years, the mere minutes or hours, will be overshadowed by a single year of forcefully watching ads on every single website there is.
It's not 10%. If you actually read the things I said you should realize it's not 10%. I'm dealing with crashes and that's still not making me immediately switch back.
The first time I switched (this was years ago) was because firefox was taking closer to 50-80% of memory and making my other software unusable. This was many years back when 32-bit applications were still a thing, but that's more meant to be an example of the kind of instability that i've dealt with in the past. Looking back I think it was a memory leak regarding extensions. It's since been fixed i'm almost certain.
I don't stop using firefox when it makes me drop 2 FPS. I drop it when it makes it impossible to actually do the things I need the browser to do, or it prevents me from doing everything else. And i'm screaming for them to care about performance because I want them to make it better, not just so I have no reason to move, but so that any others who have switched for similar reasons either don't go or come back to firefox.
There is absolutely no reason to make people feel complacent and say that the people are the problem. Firefox can and should improve, and shouldn't have to survive purely on it's principles. Please. Care more about performance.
it's very frustrating to act like what you've dealt with is something far less significant than what actually happened....
edit: just to make sure I wasn't crazy, I did check the windows logs and found there was an application hang from firefox for me around 1 week ago.
Firefox can be as slow as it wants. I will not betray little orange baby.
There are some things in Firefox that I don't agree with, but it's sure as hell I won't ever install chrome on any of my devices
Fennekin all the way
"Meanwhile for the newer and more demanding JetStream 2.0 benchmark, Google Chrome continues to win easily over Firefox"
Lol
And weirdly, Safari of all things kicks Firefox’s and Chromes ass at SunSpider and JetStream, and by a very wide margin.
I wouldn't say that's weird on the contrary it is really expected. Safari is only available on Mac machines. So it is optimized better.
Probably because it's much smaller with less "bloat". No addon support, much smaller, proprietary, no advanced settings (or any at all). Just Webkit with a search bar. (So basically just bullshit).
I need a benchmark for how fast a browser allows me to mindlessly reopen the same bookmark(s) even though I just closed the tab(s). That’s my most common task in Firefox.
In case that helps in any way, ctrl+shift+t is the shortcut for undo close tab. It's one of the most helpful browser shortcuts I know.
Phoronix has always had a strong editorial bias. No mention that Firefox has recently caught up on Speedometer 3 or the other benchmarks Firefox is faster than Chrome in.
That's crazy and all 👍, but it won't make me do the switch from Netscape Navigator
You're just running a really really old version of firefox
Who tf cares when one is proven to not only seamlessly surveil its users but threatens the very option to block ads
Is speed for you nowaday that important (i guess no because we probably all use firefox). I mean sure a browser needs to work on it's performance, but i don't think the browser performance influence my choice that much because all of them do a decent job in almost all cases.
Agreed. I don't get this obsession with marginal speed differences. Stability and privacy and ethics are together 1000 times as important as a 10ms speed boost. I have used Firefox continuously since it was in beta (except for about 6 months of Chrome 15 years ago, when Chrome was still harmless). Today there is literally no choice any more for anyone who understands the internet and cares about their own freedom. It's Firefox or bust. Any speed edge Firefox has is an anecdotal bonus, all but irrelevant.
In the past years I had heard a lot the argument that people are using chrome because it's way faster.
It's the classic tech argument
"I use this because I care about y" "but it's worse at y?" "Y isnt really that important to me"
Especially if the difference is 10 ms
i like firefox because cute fox
that's cool and all but I must have déjà vu because I swear I've seen this exact post like several times in the past week
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Mozilla developers are celebrating that they are now faster than Google Chrome with the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, although that test has been superseded by the JetStream benchmark.
Last week a new Firefox Nightly News was published that outlines that "We’re now apparently beating Chrome on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark!"
The provided numbers now show Firefox easily beating Chrome in this decade-old JavaScript benchmark.
Meanwhile for the newer and more demanding JetStream 2.0 benchmark, Google Chrome continues to win easily over Firefox:
Besides Firefox running the JavaScript SunSpider benchmark much faster over the roughly past month, there's been work on the HTTP/2 upload speed improvements, and various other enhancements.
Learn about the latest Firefox Nightly build advancements via the Firefox Nightly News.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Firefox on android has genuinely become decent af and quite quick. I've been reporting a view bugs i've had on android and it seemed the GPU on some phones was causing stuter. They've solved all of that .
Still some basic features I wish they had though (Tab stacking plz)
I kinda killed chrome from my phone using adb and ff is really decent on android !!
@jungekatz @giant_smeeg Firefox is really great on android, but I've come to find that some apps don't quite function correctly if it's set as the default browser....
On my phone the new firefox for android is much, much slower than the old one, even though it rarely has any tabs open (because I barely use it). Old firefox with a few dozen tabs is much more performant for me.
Old Firefox - are you talking about version >79, with no security updates and designed for popular phones of 2019 like the Galxy A10 with 2GB RAM?
8 tabs on the latest FF android uses like 900MB RAM which isn't a problem for most 2023 devices with 6+GB
Yes, that one.
My phone has 3 GB of RAM. Though I think there might be other issues too, because it's UI is lagging even after just opening it.
Don't worry Google is clearly outperforming in one thing: DRM
The Perfect Storm.
Google is going off the rails, forcing users to watch ads, forcing browsers to comply with invasive drm.
This is likely going to end the Chrome Regime.
Please drink verification can
It still isn't THAT fast on my okayish laptop, but on my friend's beast of a PC (I made him switch to Firefox last year lol), this browser runs amazing. It gives chromium browser a run for their money, really. So I guess it all depends on hardware.
God I wish I had a good system and not just a laptop with a 6th generation processor :( Because Firefox since v113 has been improving drastically.
Nice, it seems like the only browser worth using due to privacy and its stance on adblockers. It's a welcome bonus that it performs comparably as well.
Firefox on Android is a battery drainer. Edit: Even on Windows.
I hope they do more optimisation to improve battery backup.