chrome used to be good. Emphasis on the past tense.
Firefox was always good. Chrome was very briefly better. Firefox has not suffered enshittification like chrome did.
I mean, I clearly remember firefox being terrible back when Chrome was just beginning to take off.
It was a lumbering monolith that ate all your ram and loaded pages at a glacial pace. Chrome was a multi-process revolution from that.
Then, firefox got it’s shit together and chrome got overloaded with corpo bullshit.
It used to take firefox ages to open. I switched back after the big update in the mid 2010s that made it good again.
This. Firefox has always been just good. It wasn’t great or anything, it was just a good browser. Then chrome came around and it had more, better features. It was a bit more memory usage, but those were for the additional features Firefox didn’t have.
Firefox didn’t really change a whole lot, it added synching features across accounts, and didn’t get worse. It just stayed the same.
The people made Firefox better, because now they’re creating add-ons for Firefox, where chrome had more.
I feel like once chrome got the majority of browser users, it immediately started going to shit. I have no proof of this, just a memory of it being better until it was announced that chrome was the most used browser, and the near immediate heavier memory usage.
It’s all telemetry so the advertising company that made Chrome can harvest your data for resale at bargain bin prices
I don’t know what rock you’ve been living under where you think base Firefox wasn’t ever improved
Honestly, I’m less worried about the speed and moreso I just don’t like supporting Google’s de facto monopoly of the Web’s infrastructure.
and ads.
ads are awful.
They have ads in Chrome now? Yikes, it’s worse than I thought.
Im’ma be honest. I’ve been using FF for so long that if that’s the case I didn’t even know.
i was talking more about how mobile chrome can’t adblock, so it has ads just not on the app itself, and desktop chrome will soon not be able to effectively
…ew.
Firefox has ads. Very many ads. Out of the box, Firefox sends everything you type into the URL bar to a ‘search provider’. They also place traditional ads in the New Tab page, in the URL area chrome, and in your bookmarks. And probably other places I’m forgetting right now.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-your-default-search-settings-firefox
FF is doing great. All the have to do now is the Steam strategy. Do nothing and wait for the competition to fuck themselves over.
You mean hope that they too don’t become subject to enshittification? I don’t have a lot of faith in that.
Besides that, Google is controlling as fuck. They might keep fucking themselves over but there’s no way they won’t start attempting to ruin things for the rest of us.
It seems Mozilla is not immune to the AI hype. I just hope their AI endeavour won’t kill them when the AI hype finally ends.
to be fair they are the only ones i know of putting it to actual good use.
ai itself is not the problem.
Thankfully the AI use is very tame so far, used for stuff like offline alt text generation and offline translation. I’m personally still concerned about copyrights and ethics of the models used, but at least it’s directed towards providing specific features, not a magic cure-all.
I’m more concerned with Mozilla spending its meager resources to chase some fads instead of focusing on improving firefox.
Thats the problem tho, the new mozilla leadership is on the “do anything but nothing” ship. I really hope they either dont do anything too horrible or someone forks it if they do.
there are already forks in place if you’re dissatisfied with firefox like librewolf, floorp or the new one from mullvad
Steam’s strategy was to be first to market and essentially the only player in the game for a decade, making themselves the default.
People saying FF is slower: like how much slower? are we taking like 14 millisecond slower? Cause everything seems pretty instantaneous here. Maybe its because i’m old enough to remember DSL and 56k internet, but I think FF os crazy fast and even if Chrome would be 25% faster I wouldn’t switch to evil google for that.
61 Firefox windows and 427 tabs (don’t judge, I know I have a problem) and I have no performance complaints - admittedly, not all of them are active/rendering simultaniously, but still…
Firefox (and its forks) have been my go-to for 15 years.
I’m actually interested what you have open with this many windows.
indeed! had I not posted this, I would be asking the same question!
so, its quite a bit more mundane than you might have hoped for.
a mix of…
- ~40% locally served internal pages (mostly zabbix, mail/web server monitoring, some development pages, etc).
- ~60% non-local pages - currently lots of retro computing stuff, debian stuff, github (sigh)
the most recent page I opened was an
archive.orgpage on TI-84 firmware disassembly.I make heavy use of Firefox containers for separation. honestly, Firefox is an absolute workhorse for me. if the Firefox ecosystem were to fall into the void, I would be dead in the water.
It used to be a lot slower, which is why when Chrome showed up with its shiny new V8 engine (and other features) people switched from Firefox en masse. Now the performance difference is no longer noticeable.
Ye a few months ago I remember that the benchmarks showed firefox was just as fast as chrome again or minimally faster/slower in certain benchmarks
Last time I tried it? Like freeze and be unresponsive on my phone for seconds at a time slow. (My phone doesn’t lock up though, I can still go to the home screen, swipe to see notifications so it’s not the phone locking up completely)
Yes, this. Many pages have a 5-15 second blank delay for reasons I can’t figure out when using Firefox. I still use Firefox, but that delay is rough on my blood pressure some days.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks
I wish firefox was faster but benchmarks are pretty common, it’s not hard to test. It’s kind of an unfair fight at this point honestly, large swaths of the web are just built for chrome. There are other benchmark options out there, but even using Mozilla’s own kraken benchmarking solution, it loses tremendously more than it wins. I honestly really respect them for not building their benchmarking system to make their solutions come out on top.
In some benchmarks the lag from firefox is very significant and then on the other hand, when firefox does win, chrome is usually right behind it. It’s not ideal.
It’s clear, slower is relative. FF is slower in the startup and rendering some heavy loading webs, but the difference certainly isn’t sooo dramatic. It’s not a reason to avoid it, the only reason depends of the use of a browser, if it fits your needs or not.
I have been on the firefox train since it was new. I witnessed the rise of Chrome and Chromium, and never really felt the pull, and worried about everyone targeting the same platform. Figured I’d stay on FF until I had no choice. Don’t see myself leaving.
Figured I’d stay on FF until I had no choice. Don’t see myself leaving.
i’m in a similar boat and given the overwhelming majority popular use of chrome, it feels clear to me that firefox will eventually stop working and i wonder what surfing will like like for me in the future.
i suspect i’ll have to go back to use chrome again.
I love Firefox, but I can’t shake the feeling that it is slower on YouTube. My tinfoil hat theory is that Google somehow throttles YouTube on Firefox.
I’m pretty sure someone discovered that is true recently, but can’t be assed to try to find it right now.
It’s not tinfoil, they have been caught doing it and they continue to do it. It’s a scumbag company.
How the fuck they haven’t been slapped with an anticompetitive is beyon - oohh right. End stage capitalism
One thing you can test is to apply a Chrome user-agent on Firefox when visiting YouTube. In my personal experience that actually noticeably improves the situation.
That’s super interesting! I’m not versed enough though, do you have like a tutorial you recommend or should I just Google it?
Google does that a lot with their own web properties. I remember Google Meet didn’t support background replacement on Firefox, but switching Firefox’s user agent to Chrome suddenly fixed it.
For YouTube on IOS, I use Brave. It does a decent (but not perfect) job of hiding ads on YT.
Google definitely did extend video loading times on FF a while ago, not sure if they still do it.
Well, Google will probably optimize their shit for their own
privacy invasion sniffing toolbrowser twice as hard as for Firefox and suchFirefox is good for webpages not web apps
That’s a really weird take. Like… what even is the difference supposed to be?
This sounds more like “everything should be as it was back when <insert arbitrary point in time here>! When there were still Webpages, and we were frolicking about the internet! Until
the fire nation attackedWeb apps took over!”What an oddly aggressive take on someone’s opinion
I’ve switched to Firefox but there’s definitely a few things that irritate me about it.
First thing is when I boot up my computer, launch Firefox, it launches long enough for me to click a bookmark then closes to perform an update. And then doesn’t automatically reopen…
I also have it set to not “remember” my tabs after closing. Yet when I launch Firefox for the first time after rebooting or closing ally tabs, it gives me a “hmm… we’re having a hard time finding your previous session” message. Uh, yeah, I told you not to look for it… can I just have the regular “new tab” page?
It also might just be because I’m used to chrome, but I feel the mobile app is severely lacking. I hate that I can’t access my bookmarks directly from the new tab page, and that the tablet version doesn’t show you your bookmark bar. The synchronization between mobile and desktop isn’t great either, I’ll have a very long specific search query that I’ve used multiple times on my phone, yet it doesn’t offer it for auto-complete on desktop, I have to search the entire term again or go digging through my history. When you’re searching long model numbers and the like, this is incredibly frustrating.
Finally, and I don’t know if this is a Firefox issue, but there’s some memory leak that occurs when viewing a webcam stream from my raspberry pi that only has happened in Firefox. The first time I noticed it happening my PC slowed to a crawl, when task manager finally opened Firefox was taking 23GB of RAM. So I have to use chrome to keep that steam open for more than a few minutes at a time.
I’m curious as to why Firefox is checking for updates, have you configured it to do so? I’ve never seen Firefox do that (and it feels weird to have a program sidestep the update mechanism of the package manager)
Firefox auto updates itself by default I’ve found
They’re probably on windows
That has a background update service. It’ll only immediately kick you out for serious security updates. Unless you f’ed with the configuration.
This might be fixed on Firefox nightly
Lol the webcam thing hanned to me too.
I never really cared that a browser could load a page in 1.5 seconds instead of 1.9… I mean who cares?
I didn’t care until it consistently loaded faster.
That’s now my new baseline, and anything slower than ‘instant’ is annoying.
I would care if that was no longer the case, because I don’t like being constantly annoyed.That said, I don’t think the page loading speed is noticeably different between major browsers.
The addons, customisation, privacy and resource usage are where it’s at.I’m just hoping that some competition to chromium stays afloat.
Firefox is slower, not because it’s worse, but Gecko is a minority engine in the web (~3-4%) and because of this the most webs are optimized for Blink. That is the only reason and because most current Browsers are using it, a devils circle. The result of leaving Google hands-free for too long and that for 20 years the number of available engines has remained stagnant (3 and some testimonial exotic forks) because it is the most complicated part of a browser. Little can be done now.
Well, Apples WebKit is even worse than Gecko, as a small consolation for FF users.
I remember when Chrome was released, all marketing was on how much faster it rendered webpages, I never saw that as an issue, Firefox was fast enough, I tried Chrome for a bit, and hated the UI, I remember being confused as to why everyone loved Chrome suddenly, and frankly, I still am a bit confused by both the sudden shift, and the absolute market dominance by Chrome…
Chrome is very good at running Google’s pages. Even before Google owned YouTube chrome was better at YouTube.
Google bought YouTube in 2006, Chrome was publicly released in 2008, so I believe you are misremembering the events…
Entirely possible, I was pretty busy in my early career back then
The interesting thing is that I was quite certain that I tested it in 2006, but there is zero evidence that that could have happened.
Over the years my customized Firefox looks like chrome ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I switched from FFX to Chrome back in the day because Chrome tabs were all independent processes in task manager, and one crappy website wouldn’t kill my whole browser.
When Google started their war on addons, I switched back to Firefox.
Pretty much my same progression except I’ve come back to LibreWolf instead.
Greetings, fellow LibreWolf user! Hurrah!
I remember being confused as to why everyone loved Chrome suddenly
Because they were still using Explorer before that
Fair, I can see that, I guess my question was more for the people who already had switched to Firefox
People ignore how Firefox can take upwards of 8GB of memory because it wants to.
I haven’t experienced that. What is the use-case that makes this happen? I have one machine with only 8 gig and firefox is fine, and a 16 and 32 gig machine, firefox has never eaten 8 gigs
What they mean is “I use woefully malformed websites loaded up with all sorts of weird shit that eats ram on the regular, and somehow that’s my browser’s fault”
I have a VPS with 1 GB of RAM and Firefox with up to 3 tabs is fine. OK, it’s running Linux maybe FF on Windows is worse.
If you’re switching a couple extensions are uBlock origin and no script with Firefox, prevents most ads and lets you choose which hosts to accept JavaScript from temporarily or permanently.
noscript is your web condom. I will not touch a page without it.
Mouse gestures is the killer-app for me on Firefox. Hate surfing without it.
P.S. Do wish Firefox had tab groups tho.
Surely there is an add on for that
Firefox add-on for Tab Groups? I looked and couldn’t find one. At some point they appeared to try to support tab groups, but gave up? I dunno. I’ve only used Chrome a little. I don’t personally care for Chrome, but I found the tab groups useful.
I just searched “tab groups Firefox” and found results saying it has them. No idea as I wasn’t able to find relevant settings last time I tried on a PC. Mobile just now I tried adding tabs to a collection, but it doesn’t look like it did anything
Thanks, but I tried a few weeks back to get tab groups working for Firefox on MacOS. No joy.
Hope someone else chimes in on how to do this. I typically have hundreds of tabs open, groups were a godsend
On mobile chrome I have “:D” tabs open which I occasionally go through and cull
Do you need noscript if you have ublock?
You can use the advanced mode of ublock to replace noscript too
I use ghostery to remove the obnoxious cookie popups here in the EU.
Vivaldi has in its inbuild ad/trackerblocker also filters to block cookie popups, no problem with this
That kid is superior
Always gonna note too that Google Chrome (and chromium + derivatives to a lesser extent) kneecaps adblock plugins so that up to 50% fewer ad domains are blocked, blocklists are out of date, many in-page ads can’t be caught, it’s slower, and invisible trackers can bypass it.
One thing I’ve been annoyed with after switching to Firefox is the iffy password manager performance. It’s so common for it not to remember a password that it should, or, weirdly, for it to only remember the password once I’ve typed the whole username in and hit tab.
