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
370 points (98.2% liked)
Firefox
17903 readers
87 users here now
A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
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
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.
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
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
"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.
Is speed for you nowaday that important (i guess now 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.
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
Who tf cares when one is proven to not only seamlessly surveil its users but threatens the very option to block ads
i like firefox because cute fox
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 !!
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!
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
Don't worry Google is clearly outperforming in one thing: DRM
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.
And Safari of all things kicks Firefox’s and Chromes ass at SunSpider, and by a very wide margin.
I've developed a strong liking for Brave and accumulated a substantial amount of BAT using it over two years. However, I recently decided to switch back to Firefox. The reason is Firefox's profile instances feature, enabling distinct bookmark, pinned tabs, and history sets across different Firefox copies and releases. Now, I'm running two Firefox browsers—one for Media and one for Workstation, each on its own screen. For Brave users, it's wise to back up your BAT folder, especially if you lack a wallet (which I never set up). But with the BAT folder backup, reinstalling Brave and moving the folder can restore your old BAT balance. Who knows, perhaps the BAT price will rise again someday!
Good. I haven't used Brave before, but I do basically the same with my Minecoins.
Firefox on Android is a battery drainer. Edit: Even on Windows.
I hope they do more optimisation to improve battery backup.