Comment by forgotpwtomain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by forgotpwtomain | Hacker News Reader

This probably isn't a direct response - but I've been thinking about it for a while. In my mind there are a few major reasons that Firefox is loosing market share to Google Chrome.

1) Performance

These might be select regressions (Google Maps, Slack - so I'll skip the bugzilla references), but every-time a user has to open Slack or Google Maps or Google Docs in Chrome, they are that much more likely to switch from Firefox (ultimately due to Sync issues: bookmarks, history) it just makes so much sense to use a single browser.

2) Developer Tools

I don't know how it is now, but half a year ago when I tried to switch to Firefox Developer tools (again for the Nth time) it would take 2-4 seconds for the console to open. Comparatively Chrome Dev tools opened < .5. As a result even trying to use Firefox for everything else, I still end up in Chromium almost daily.

3) Sync/Mobile

Using Google Chrome has distinct advantages when syncing with an Android device and other Google services (performance issues aside) - most of the things that I considered to be an advantage in Firefox mobile (the top button with <number-of-tabs> for tab switching) Chrome has actually copied.

Minor point - I'm almost sure there is some somewhat underhanded user-memory choice (it's just too smart and annoying to be a bug) - because as someone that is often in foreign countries my Firefox (where I am signed into Gmail btw) always tends to give search results in the native language search, while Chromium (where I'm not signed into anything displays English ones).

Over all I really think Mozilla should focus on getting an advantage on 3) -- I don't think Google and definitely not pocket (which I wish they would unbundle from Firefox) provide a good service for syncing information / personal links / knowledge. There was a browser concept that floated by HN some-time ago allowing users to organize their tabs into sessions / subjects - that could be great! (e.g. check a button to sync only my places/people/events window to my phone and leave my work stuff out).

Stubborn FF user her:

I recently

1.) Refreshed my Windows install and got rid off Lenovo crap (auto, just make backup, just make sure you have bckups of settings, incl. gpg keys etc. Documents were totally fine.)

2. Reintroduced a hosts file that redirects a few thousand domains to 0.0.0.0

3. Started using NoScript liberally. IIRC both google front page and search results would poke my processor every few seconds even when left alone. Now Firefox CPU usage is more sane. When you do have a number of search results open at most of the time this can tax even a modern CPU.

It took me quite a while to discover this as I don't know a good way to get pr domain processor usage and I honestly did not belive that Google would let such major performance problems pass QA.

Now I just use Firefox search box (ctrl-k) to get autocomplete.

> It took me quite a while to discover this as I don't know a good way to get per domain processor usage and I honestly did not believe that Google would let such major performance problems pass QA.

If you type "about:performance" into the URL-bar and hit enter, that should give you at least a rough overview of how individual tabs are eating up resources...

Wow, thanks!

Has this been available fo a long time or is it a recent improvement?

It is somewhat more recent. From what the internet tells me, this was introduced with Firefox 40.

Your missing a few important factors like:

1) Advertising/promotions budget

Microsoft and Google can both easily outspend Mozilla in TV and online advertising as well as pay companies to bundle and promote their software.

2) Network effects of related protects

Microsoft and Google are able to leverage their control over their own products (Windows, Google Search) to promote their software. All Mozilla has is a browser.

> Performance

I use Firefox about 80% of the time. I use Chrome for a few sites I need for work that still use Flash.

I really don't notice this performance issue. I don't use Slack, but do use Google Maps, Google Drive/Docs/Sheets and Gmail and it's all just fine in Firefox from my perspective.

I tend to not keep large numbers of tabs open (just habit more than anything) so that may be part of it. E.g. 10 tabs would be a lot for me.

I also don't sync settings. In fact I have no settings: I have firefox set to basically dump everything (cache, history) upon exit.

https://github.com/i-rinat/freshplayerplugin deals with the Flash on Firefox problem.

It's been my experience over the past couple of years dealing with ugly web-apps that abuse JS, have huge DOMs, thousands of tiny images etc., that such abominations (hacks) will run reasonably well on Chrome while verging on unusable in Firefox. This is from someone who was ideologically wedded to Mozilla for years, and more or less refused to use IE regardless of how good it got; I switch to Chrome basically solely on the basis of performance; secondarily the strength of dev tools and the impressive security model.

It's freaking sad that Firefox is stumbling out multi-process in 2016. This has plainly been the way to go for years. Multithreading is a disaster, it's just not a workable model for browser-scale applications.

But hey, if they could recover Firefox from the ashes of the bloated disaster that Mozilla Suite became, I have hope that the community can catch up eventually. Maybe.

> Multithreading is a disaster, it's just not a workable model for browser-scale applications.

All browsers, Chrome as much as any other, are heavily multithreaded, so this is clearly untrue.

Ok, you got me. What I said was nonsense, taken literally, I was being lazy; you're right, Chrome's heavily multithreaded too. But, there is process-level separation both between tabs/browser contexts with information of differing security sensitivity, and between nasty stuff like parsing and rendering versus basic UI etc. All the good defense-in-depth sandboxing that others have alluded to, that is the stuff of many papers.

FF performance seems to vary greatly per platform. It's nearly on-par with Chrome on Windows and good video drivers, but on Linux with crap drivers, or on an OSX laptop, it's pretty slow.

> Developer Tools

Give it another go, especially Firefox Developer Edition: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

It's tools are fast and amazing, arguably better than Chrome's.

Except that it doesn't handle source maps in JS stack traces, which is a major pain...

Regarding language, I'm going to guess that you downloaded a localized build that set that locale as the preferred language, or that it is coming from your OS: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/949545

Chrome has this also: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/173424?hl=en

Suggesting an "underhanded user-memory choice" is a serious claim. It might be worth comparing your browsers' language settings.

To clarify the minor point, I'm talking about the primary language of Google search results, on Chromium the front-page of search results is always English. On Firefox it's entirely Spanish or whatever other local language of my location. Yes my locale / OS defaults are set correctly and unrelated.

> Suggesting an "underhanded user-memory choice" is a serious claim. It might be worth comparing your browsers' language settings.

I'm saying two things: a) Chromium / Chrome prioritizes recognizing the same-user. b) Maybe they are (accidentally?) very bad are remembering non-chrome users. As I said if it's an accident I'd be surprised, try it next you visit a foreign country.

Is it redirecting you to a local site, or using a different language on Google.com? Maybe you've done https://www.google.com/ncr (No Country Redirect) on Chrome, but not on Firefox?

No (not for /ncr) I am saying the default search (think mobile-phone home-screen search-bar) if directed to Chrome almost always tends to work (and if I tell it to switch once to English it will remember across Wifi networks) where as Firefox is more iffy. I'm not sure it's as serious as OP conveys, I mean are you really going to complain about Google failing to track you? But I've been quite annoyed to search for something and get all of my results repetitively in a foreign language.

anecodatal: Have seen and paid a large price differences on airline tickets (google flights referrer? ) with and without /ncr ($500++)

FF and Chrome both gave me Japanese in Japan until I did the ncr trick. I think both browsers sniff your locale in various ways.

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