Hacker News Reader

Comment by NoGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Chrome is semi-stagnant because it's dominant, which means not much drive to change.

I wouldn't call Firefox stagnant. It's just got E10S (multiprocess). The Quantum project promises to gradually improve both speed and stability (and consequentially security). They are working on replacing the traditional Firefox extensions archetecture with WebExtensions. Fennec (Firefox on Android) is an underappreciated gem.

I'm playing with Vivaldi now. It's nice, it's fast, there's a fair amount of UI innovation. But underneath, it's just Blink, so it's hard for me to get that excited about it.

View on HN

Why do you care what the rendering engine is? It's literally the least exciting part. I never said "man, I wish this rendering engine ran different code". I've frequently said "I wish mouse gestures worked as well as Opera's did".

Fennec is pretty great, yes. I've been using Firefox on ideological grounds for years, and it's getting harder and harder. I currently have a tab open that will just keep loading forever every time I load the browser, taking 100% CPU, until I go and press escape to stop loading. It's slow as hell and frequently freezes.

Ideology can only take you so far if the product is a piece of crap.

Can you file a bug on this with the URL causing the problem? The tab not loading fully isn't necessarily our fault, but of course it shouldn't use 100% while doing that.

The rendering engine is fairly important for apparent speed and smoothness (e.g. with scrolling). These are issues where Firefox was traditionally not rated highly.

Done, thanks.

Do you mind linking to the bug report?

Sure, it's here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=860478

Thank you. I'll follow up there!

Are you in Firefox proper, or Nightly (just asking for a friend of a friend) ;)

Erm, I'm using Aurora, not sure if that's nightly or between stable and nightly... I don't think it's either.

Ah, mainly I just care that there's a diversity in rendering engines. A) to prevent stagnation, and B) to prevent a monoculture of vulnerabilities. I don't care that much about which rendering engine a given browser uses all that much.

About that particular tab (which I guess you're sending a bug report about), maybe you want to try the same URL in a fresh Firefox profile?

You say

> Why do you care what the rendering engine is?

then later you say

> I currently have a tab open that will just keep loading forever every time I load the browser, taking 100% CPU, until I go and press escape to stop loading. It's slow as hell and frequently freezes.

Do you not see that those two things may be related?

> I never said "man, I wish this rendering engine ran different code".

Then I guess you were never an IE6 user.

A lot of major extensions still turn off e10s, so no, it isn't here yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com