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Comment by darkengine | Hacker News Reader

If Firefox 56 is the last release to support Tree Style Tabs, it will be the last release of Firefox before I begrudgingly switch to Chromium.

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Why? Does Chromium support Tree Style Tabs despite using WebExtensions? If that's the case, why would that not be possible for Firefox? Or would you switch to make a statement?

It wouldn't really be to make a statement. Chromium is a better browser but because of the powerful add-ons Firefox's overall experience is better. Take that away and there's no real reason to stay with Firefox unless you like their license and Mozilla as a company.

The question is, why is Chromium the better browser?

Firefox 57 will have sandboxing and per-tab processes (most likely) plus a better extension system than Chrome's.

Firefox 57 should be at least equivalent to Chromium.

Why is it better? just the two links I'm going to give should be enough to give you pause :

http://www.cvedetails.com/product/3264/Mozilla-Firefox.html?...

http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?v...

During 2016, Firefox had 53 code execution CVE reports.

Chrome had 2.

Firefox only has around 8% of the browser marketshare. Chrome sits between 44% and 60% depending on the source. So it's not a case of Firefox being more popular and attracting more people to target it for hacks. It's just worse software.

And then there's just user inconveniences like how Firefox becomes extremely slow if you open multiple heavy tabs. e10s has yet to fix it, currently, if you enable it, it only opens 2 processes, one for the UI, and one for the rendering engine. So the UI itself might not slow to a crawl but all your tabs will still feel slow if you open heavy stuff.

Firefox also has a slower rendering engine. My eyesight isn't great and I browse web pages with zoom active in between 120% and 150% depending on pages. That makes Firefox behave extremely slow on some pages. It's particularly unbearable, on, say, slashdot pages with lots of comments.

For the same reason smooth scrolling is the first thing Firefox users disable in Firefox. Smooth scrolling works fine on Chrome. FF has never managed to implement smooth scrolling in a way that doesn't slow things to a crawl and makes the scrolling look like stuttering or low framerate.

People often rely on Javascript benchmarks to say "Hey firefox is as fast as chrome!!!11!!" but JS is only one part of what makes a browser fast or slow. What about the parts that actually render the page to something your screen can display?

> Firefox 57 should be at least equivalent to Chromium.

Chrome would have had to stop all development years ago for that sentence to be true.

And Firefox is less secure and slower because (drumroll, please...) the major architectural changes required to improve on those fronts is completely stymied by the desire to maintain backwards compatibility for addons. Firefox is at last forced to decide between being a bad but very extensible browser or a (hopefully) good but less extensible browser. IMO, the choice is pretty obvious.

But chrome is already a great and less extensible browser, which is the point. If chrome is great and less extensible, and Firefox is good and less extensible, there's little reason to use Firefox unless you just don't like Google.

Firefox's "less extensible" seems to be "more extensible" than Chrome's.

So true there is way more to the browser than the java script engine. So I ran ye old browser showdown on my comp (Fresh everything). Firefox and Chrome are very similar in speed with Java benchmarks, but once you get into the "real-world" type benchmarks, Firefox was faster by a large margin and was almost 3x as fast as Chrome in some tests.

You can take a look at my results here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0

Each browser has it's strengths and weaknesses it seems, So I run all of them lol For my day to day tab filled behemoth I have to use Firefox, any other browser can't handle the ~80 tabs I have open at once.

In fact me and my roommate have on going challenges on how many tabs we can keep open and up times of the browsers/OS's (He is on Win7). During our battles we have tried tweaking some things and using odd browsers and such, but to be competitive with one another we have to each use Firefox cause it just has that much better memory management/stability.

How will the extension system of FF 57 be better than Chrome's?

Can Chrome do this: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center/?

That doesn't use the new model. This is the WebExtension version of TabCenter: https://github.com/bwinton/TabCenter/tree/webext

That add-on won't run on ff57, either.

Mozilla's test pilot projects there serve to prototype proposed extension APIs. It's there to inform the design of what hooks are needed to make such an addon possible, so that it will still be possible in a world with only WebExtensions.

Are the APIs required to make TabCenter as a WebExtension guaranteed to work on FF 57? If not, temgo is still right, no? At least an argument could be made that the elimination of XUL should only happen when the current experiments can actually be implemented using the new model.

It's much more safer browser to being with.

There is still one major reason to stay with Firefox - it is not Chrome.

Chromium isn't, either.

But the extension flexibility was one of the major points for me.

I'll have to pin Firefox to 56.x in my package manager.

That's a pretty terrible idea. Your web browser is probably the most important piece of software to keep up to date, besides the OS for security reasons.

For me, I have no alternative but to pin Firefox.

No browser on Linux can handle different DPI per screen. For Firefox, there's an addon implementing that today, but it won't work with WebExtensions.

So I have to use today's Firefox - or I can't use any browser.

Well, there's also the third option of using a magnifying glass to read websites.

Agreed. I need time to consider alternatives.

Because Chromium runs far better in my experience, especially on Linux, and especially where graphics and WebGL are concerned. If all I can use are WebExtensions, I may as well use Chromium for the speed.

You really should use Firefox if you are a heavy WebGL user, Firefox is 3 times as fast as Chrome now on Unity3D, an it's the complete opposite, Chrome is more snappy with Java and Firefox with animations/Graphics.

Here is my latest benchmark as solid proof: https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0

In my experience on Linux, the difference is night and day, and not in Firefox's favor. Really basic demos struggle to get 30fps while Chromium handles them at the refresh rate of my display no problem.

Firefox WebGL works much better on Windows for me; never tried it on OS X. It's probably a Linux-specific issue, but I rarely use Firefox on anything else.

Also if you want to get to the root of the problem, when you install Firefox 51.0.1 in the URL bar type "about:support"

It will list HW acceleration info. You want to make sure electrolysis is running, in the line "Multiprocess Windows: 1/1 (Enabled by user)" should be enabled by default, if it says 0/1 it not active and you will have to manually turn it on.

You can also see if the WebGL renderer is loading properly. On my Debian box it says WebGL2 creation failed (drivers), which would explain my poor performance on that box.

It's worth a shot since Firefox's WebGL rendering is 4x faster then other browsers, it's worth your time taking a quick check.

Linux is another beast, on my Ubuntu box Firefox gives similar performance to OSX. But on my Debian stable box Chromium plays a lot better with it and the Firefox build feels like it has a gremlin in it haha.

Try Pale Moon. It has Tree Style Tabs and will continue to even after Firefox gets rid of XUL

Been a happy Pale Moon user for a while. I hope the project keeps ticking on.

It is going strong and with Firefox removing XUL it is going to get stronger.

I switched to Chrome a year ago and while it was a little rough at the start I am very happy overall now. Shame but Firefox was just so much slower that it was annoying me. Plus Chrome syncs everything much better than Firefox ever did.

I switched to Pale Moon and I've been happy with it.

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