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Comment by blub | Hacker News Reader

Firefox is good. It has support for modern standards, is performant, has tracking protection built in and plenty of extensions.

Google is winning because it's bundling its browser just like Microsoft used to and is aggressively advertising it on all of its web properties, which might have a reach of close to 100% of the web-using population. Firefox also has a reputation for being slow, gotten probably from people doing ridiculous things as keeping tens of tabs open and not restarting it for days - learn to use bookmarks!

Silly Mozilla thought they were fighting hand in hand with Google for web standards when Google was fighing for ad money all along.

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Firefox can cope with hundreds of tabs just fine. Way better than Chrome can cope with a similar workload, both in terms of memory usage and UI (Chrome winds up with tabs only a few pixels wide, with no information visible!).

Firefox’s reputation is because of its history: when Chrome was new it did perform really well and Firefox did have serious performance issues. Chrome has been marvellous for Firefox. The sad thing about it is that these past several years Firefox has been better than Chrome in those departments than Chrome, but people aren’t aware of it.

Hundreds? No way. It runs like crap with a few dozen tabs and I always have to restart it so it doesn't start slowing down and behaving badly.

I am a chronic tabber. Chrome can barely handle 20 tabs at a time on my machine (A T410 - nearly 5 years old). Firefox can chug along fine with more than a hundred tabs may be a 200. it starts to show problems only when the session restore file reaches 300mb or more. (Yes that is as far as I have pushed firefox.)

Firefox is much much better than Chrome. Only chrome can put it's foot in the door and sneak in anywhere due to Google peddling it on all its webapps as the best browser for optimal performance for google apps. Just the search and gmail page is enough to convert the unsuspecting population to think Chrome is better than Firefox.

How many of the common masses are actually aware that Firefox exists? How many of them would actually try out both browsers on their systems and evaluate and decide which is best?

There are still people who are swayed by endorsements by huge corporations as signals of quality. In their eyes, Google, which is their window/gateway to the internet, saying Chrome is good would just seal the deal.

I've pushed Firefox over to 650+ tabs before, and it has performed well enough (It has been a while since I've actually had that many tabs actually open.)

Yes way. Now I'm using Tab Center experiment from Test Pilot, which makes it easier for me to clean up unused tabs, so now I'm keeping it around 100, but earlier it was very common for me to have around 600-700 tabs open.

Once I got to 1200. It started to feel a bit sluggish during the usage and I had to restart it daily. Restarting took about 3-4 minutes, but it was fine for some time after restart. Eventually got tired of it and reseted the whole session.

On the other hand, Chromium becomes almost unusable with around 50 tabs. I cannot imagine having more than 200 tabs open in it, both from UI and CPU/RAM perspective.

I have 34 tabs open in a tab group which only has blogs, about 30 for Mozilla and GNOME projects, 17 for my minor project, 14 for reddit, imgur and chan, 23 for placements interview and coding stuff plus a lot of miscellaneous stuff puts the total at 143 tabs with ONLY 1.5GB of RAM and almost idle CPU (2 to 3%). I exported the bookmarks and opened them all on chrome and it died!!!

It feels like I have hundreds more often than not and days between reboots. (W10 mostly now)

Firefox performance has been miserable on Linux and still is.

Here's what I find interesting about that: I tend to run Linux on a bunch of older hardware for various purposes. One of those devices is a netbook with an Atom N450 CPU, in other words a single core dog of a processor that struggles with the lightest of loads. With it running Slackware (which actually makes the netbook usable as a mobile daily driver) Firefox runs circles around Chromium. Granted, neither browser is nowhere near as fast as it is on my daily workstation, but on such an underpowered machine Firefox surprisingly outperforms Chromium by a measurable margin.

Typically it takes about three seconds for Firefox to open on a fresh boot, whereas Chromium takes nearly 20 seconds. This is with the same extensions installed on both browsers, so that's not the issue. Having about five tabs open in either browser, with Firefox switching tabs is nearly instant, whereas in Chromium it takes several seconds to redraw the canvas for the newly selected tab.

Then there's multimedia performance. Firefox can play videos (both webm and Youtube HTML5) without stuttering at 480p and lower resolution, while Chromium chokes on even 360p content in either format.

For these reasons, even though Chrome/Chromium is my normal daily browser in Windows, I happily use Firefox on Linux and other OSes as it just performs better for me.

On my machine there is no hardware acceleration, there is a noticeable lag with rendering and input response in Firefox. Pages load slower, scrolling is not smooth.

I'm curious then, which GPU do you have and if it's AMD or Nvidia, are you using the proprietary driver or the open source driver? I ask because I've had lag and rendering issues under the Nouveau driver that disappeared on the proprietary driver. This is on a modern workstation with a GTX 960 and both Firefox and Chromium were affected.

On my very old laptop with Via graphics chipset and Debian, Firefox works much smoother, but it might just be that CPU is too old for Chrome.

Intel.

On my other machine with Catalyst it isn't much better either, it is worse with the open source AMD driver.

I've found the Intel Linux driver to be generally slower than the Windows counterpart, and on post-Haswell machines there are still numerous bugs in the Intel driver, so I'm not surprised. It's sad too, given that Intel tries to position themselves as friendly to the Linux community, yet they keep losing Linux devs[1].

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Chad-Ver...

My issue with firefox is mainly it's startup time. It's horrible. Edge and Chrome start instantly while firefox takes 20-30 seconds. Maybe its because I have pinned tabs only in firefox since its my main browser and that I have more plugins there but it's still unresponsive and feels sluggish.

> My issue with firefox is mainly it's startup time.

I'm 'll try not to argue the details too much here, but at least I'll outline how I experience it:

Firefox's start time may not be instant, but its quick enough and more importantly is consistent no matter how many windows and tabs I have. Starting Firefox does not impair the overall performance of my machine.

Chrome presents an initial window pretty quickly, but its not done loading, and from there on it's slow until everything is loaded, and its startup gets progressively slower the more tabs and windows you have. And due to Chrome's multi-process implementation, this can lock up your machine because Chrome uses it 100% across all cores. That's bad IMO.

The closest analogy I can think of is how Windows 95 booted and seemed to be "ready" back in the days, but then you had tons of background-processing slowing the machine down for another minute or so before things stabilised and the machine was actually ready. That's how I perceive Chrome's "quick" loading, and I find it genuinely annoying.

Personally I much prefer the predictability of Firefox here.

That aside: How often do you honestly restart web-browsers? Not questioning your answer or anything, I just find it a weird problem to have, so I'm genuinely curious :)

Personally I only restart browsers when I reboot my machine. So for me, the metric that matters is time from reboot to having ready to use browser session. If that takes 20 seconds, or 25, I really don't care.

That's 5 seconds once a month which I definitely wont worry over. How's your usage pattern since you think this is a big thing?

Recent versions of Firefox also have tabs as seperate processes but is just as slow to start as before. Chrome might take equal time to load (it does not on my machine) but it presents the user with a smoother experience. It doesn't feel laggy at all.

I game a lot so I use to close down Firefox since it drains so much memeory and CPU. So I restart my browser a bit too often to not suffer from it. This has basically led me to start Edge more and more since it is the quickest of the three and drains the least performance of my computer.

I honestly care about start time and if it's not going to improve I will leave firefox for chrome sooner or later (even if I do not wish to). But that is honestly not either the only issue Firefox has, it is laggy in rendering web stuff that actually surprises me. Agar.io for example, is laggy for me in Firefox but not in Chrome or Edge.

I use exactly 3 extensions and hardly EVER have more than 2 or 3 tabs opened. In this scenario, using Firefox over Chrome, at least on Linux, is gruesome. The startup time is terrible, the constant stuttering and delays opening things is terrible. I wish I was able to use Firefox, I tried many times, but the performance nowadays is just subpar.

> Firefox also has a reputation for being slow, gotten probably from people doing ridiculous things as keeping tens of tabs open and not restarting it for dayes

Do you mean it has the reputation from people doing this 5 or 10 years ago and it's stuck? Or is this still a problem for Firefox?

Firefox developers did a lot of work in the recent years to reduce memory use and leaks (MemShrink) and visual stutter (jank), and e10s will improve the latter even further (while regressing memory use a bit).

However, Firefox will not magically better itself; developers - paid and volunteer - will need to fix issues as they are discovered, and that means that if you run into performance problems, you should file a good bug.

I use both Chrome and Firefox on my Windows 7 box, simultaneously for various reasons.

The Chrome (vanilla install except for uBlock Origin) performance is... not great for me, at least once I get more than 10-15 tabs open, mostly when switching and/or opening tabs. A lot of it seems to be swap-thrashing.

Firefox performance on the other hand is OK to great, even tho it being my main browser with usually 50+ tabs open (with tons of overlap with those Chrome tabs) and rather add-on laden. I am using Nightly since forever, with e10s off at the moment because of one or two add-ons that would fail otherwise; tho I also have Firefox Stable installed and when I use that it behaves the same.

Sure, webgl and/or js benchmarks might be a little behind on Firefox (tho not by a large margin). So that nifty html5/webgl 3D ego shooter might perform a little worse, but that is nothing I personally really care about. Firefox excels for me for regular browsing performance, and that is what I want.

Chrome on OSX always performed abysmal for some reason, so I am using Firefox (Nightly) exclusively on a recent MacBook Pro, which runs fine (sans the occasional memory swap/uncompress stutter when switching back to really old tab that got paged out).

I cannot comment much about startup performance as I usually have long-running sessions in the order of days or weeks, but it seems OK for both browsers.

In my use case, it's still a problem if you have a bunch of tabs loaded, but I think the class of problem is somewhat different than it is in, say, Chrome. Sure, Firefox gets a bit sluggish with 500-700 tabs open, but since I don't have a habit of keeping a single session open for days (then it IS a problem), the net effect is relatively small since restarting Firefox generally behaves as if the inactive tabs from the last session weren't open. Obviously, if you click through tabs you opened previously, then it'll load them but otherwise it's fine. So there's some truth to it, but as with most things, it depends.

I use Firefox mostly because I have a terrible habit of clicking any link that looks remotely interesting with the intent to come back to it for later reading. Granted, it rarely works quite like that, but Chrome became a bear after 150-200 tabs (and often started capping my RAM). For all its faults, Firefox (again, in my use case) still manages to stay around ~2GiB unless I do something stupid or watch a bunch of YouTube videos (under Linux). Chrome does well, but the UI became unusable since you couldn't scroll through opened tabs without having specialized addons and such. I'm not sure if this is still the case, and even if it's changed, I don't think I'd go back. The RAM usage was too much, but I fully understand Chrome was probably never designed with my browsing habits in mind. Whereas I've seen claims that allege a handful of Firefox developers are tabholics. I'd believe it.

Somewhat off-topic: One thing I really like about Firefox is the profile manager. I've started creating separate profiles for general browsing, documentation, and videos sometimes with extensions tailored for each. It was a slight pain to change my habits around to accommodate that, but I've noticed if one instance hangs, it's not much of a problem. With multiprocesses on the horizon, maybe this will cause me to change my browsing habits again, but I think I like the profile isolation for enough reasons unrelated to performance to continue as is. Perhaps this is abusing it somewhat, but it works for me. If you keep a relatively clean profile with few tabs open, Firefox stays pretty snappy.

> Google is winning because it's bundling its browser just like Microsoft used to and is aggressively advertising it on all of its web properties, which might have a reach of close to 100% of the web-using population

Not because Chrome is a better browser. All these sheep ( like me ) which get hoodwinked into using Chrome by Google's marketing blitzkrieg. Silly us. But wait,

> Firefox also has a reputation for being slow, gotten probably from people doing ridiculous things as keeping tens of tabs open and not restarting it for days - learn to use bookmarks!

What a bunch of dummies, amirite ? Firefox is obviously the best browser. If you find that it is not 'Teh Awesome', you are using it wrongly and there must be something wrong with you.

PS: I am trying to use Yandex browser. So far, so good.

Chrome being better or not is irrelevant as long as Firefox is good enough - and it is.

From my perspective there is something wrong with people using and supporting google: they gave up on their privacy and dignity.

If one has principles and cares for something they will fight for it. If not they give up and make sarcastic comments, so that they can at least feel better about themselves.

Don't make the mistake to think that I'm trying to convince you of something, use whatever browser you want.

Actually, the tab argument is very poor. Chrome does not cope well with more than low tens of tabs open, while Firefox handles it very well (from my experience up to around 1000).

No, I at least just say stop spreading FUD (Firefox is way behind, unusable in 2016 etc)

Saying: I prefer Chrome for reasons x, y and z is fine with me.

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