Browse Against the Machine
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I'm rooting for them but I really hope they get this done quickly. On Firefox, I often have ~.5 second UI freezes throughout the use which lead to an impression of sluggishness. Chrome, with the same number of tabs and equivalent extensions doesn't have this. By all means, Mozilla, use tricks if needed - keep stuff loaded in the background, defer script execution, prefetch DNS etc - but perceived responsiveness is really important. Freezing UI of all things is the worst that could happen.
Despite this, I'll stay on Firefox and look forward for the future.
You don't have to wait for them to enable it for everyone. Enable it yourself by setting browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true in about:config (on ff48-53 this'll use one one process for ui and one for all tabs, I believe on 54+ it'll use more). (As long as you don't have any addons that don't support it, anyway -- after enabling it, check in about:support under "Multiprocess Windows", and if not, about:addons should show the offending addon. IIRC there's a staged rollout, so it may already be enabled for you even if you don't force it on, unless you have an addon that doesn't support it)
And you can enable multiple content processes prior to Firefox 54 by setting dom.ipc.processCount to a number higher than 1. This is the maximum number of content processes that it'll use, as you open more tabs. So, if your number of tabs exceeds that value, it'll currently still distribute them among your content processes round-robin-style.
You get the best performance vs. RAM ratio with this value at 4 (or I believe rather just the number of cores your CPU has). This is also what Firefox 54 will ship with. You get the best security and best performance, disregarding RAM, by setting it to something really high, like 500, so that a new process starts up with each tab that you open (which allows each tab to be sandboxed individually).
And they still haven't done it? In 6 years? No wonder I'm still using Chrome...
Firefox, and Chrome to an extent, are powerhouses. They have a great community with awesome and really creative extensions. Safari only just started adding extensions and it shows: apart from the usual ad blocker stuff, there's not much out there.
But Safari is fast and is tied to the OS so well that it's great for just using the browser as a portal to the web. Safari has a menu option that allows me to save quickly to my Downloads folder. I can use the share sheet to send URLs, snippets of info straight to other apps. Also, if I'm crazy into automation, I can set up workflows via Automator for even more efficient text processing.
People champion Firefox as the sole defender of the web, but people often forget that Safari is quite unobtrusive too. Sure, it maybe lacking in pushing the frontiers of web standards, but for the most part, it stays out of your hair too (Firefox has this quirky default homepage that likes you to send these "witty" phrases)
Safari does pretty good I'd say. "The new IE" was pretty overblown.
Safari is my go-to daily driver for speed, OS integration, and battery life. I use Chrome for developing, but maybe I'll give FF another shot.
Zooming and scrolling is extremely smooth, the rubber effect when scrolling out of bounds is enjoyable. The transition animation when using two-finger swipe for back/forward makes me feel in control of my browsing, while on Firefox I feel like the gesture can fire at any time, without warning.
It also integrates with the MacOS dictionary, and since I do most of my reading on the web, it is nice to be able to easily look up words. I really miss my dictionary when I'm on Firefox or Android.
It is also the only browser that can keep my cooling fans quiet on youtube.
The user experience on Safari is extremely impressive.
The problem is everything today is mobile which means Apple and Google and one is not really trying. This is causing the imbalance, imo.
It seems as though the world is moving to an 'appliance' plus app-store model. In that world the browser is part of the appliance and considered part of the purchase by the consumer. In that world, the only way for FF to have a presence is via hardware partnerships.
Yet another FF alumni alludes to the threat in a comment on the 'Chrome won' post [1] (my emphasis)...
"...for historical reasons Web sites targeting large-screen non-touch devices tend to configure themselves in a more standards-friendly way. ChromeOS is changing that; it has the form factor of a desktop platform, but not the third-party browser viability. If Android expands into that space, or Windows and MacOS get locked down a lot more, then that also closes up the window for Firefox."
Why did I move from IE to Firefox? Speed.
Why did I move from Firefox to Chrome? Speed.
Why did I move from Chrome to Firefox? Negative feelings about Google.
So for myself the only things that work, hand on heart, are Speed or Repulsion. You can't really sell repulsion. Therefore, I think their only hope is Speed.
Admittedly I may be a crap example.
I don't know if it's just me, but nowadays, chrome just sucks so much firefox manages to be better. Chrome tab crashes occur more often than ever before and it uses a shitcrapton of memory. I remember the days where chrome was lean and small and fast. Those days are long gone.
I've been sailing firefox for a year now, and to my great surprise, it has gone from being an absolutely terrible memory hog and crash-o-meter to being fairly efficient and stable. Sure it is still a bit on the heavy side of memory, but in the meantime it doesn't lose my work every few days.
I believe that maybe Firefox has a card to play with decentralization. Think something like IPFS or MediaGoblin easy-to-use integration.
My vote is for speed. Then again, I use almost no non-core features of any browser.
I had a not-so-positive opinion of Google pretty early on, but it was mostly just a what-if. What if Google with its huge databases gets breached? What if they decide to just make a fortune by selling it all on the black market?
Then came along Snowden, NSA scandal, PATRIOT Act. That added onto this what-if: What if the NSA gets breached? What if some crazy dictator gets to power?
Well, and now we have Trump. A man who manages to seem all at the same time like such a crazy dictator, like a marionette and like an incompetent moron who constantly leaks classified information to the world.
I wouldn't be surprised at all, if in the next three months or so, he somehow managed to leak the NSA databases.
I'd like to see a project (even a productize variant of it) that'd make it easier to drop Google, Apple, Microsoft. Something like Lineage OS on the phone, Fedora or Endless on a NUC, and an IPv6 based VPN for the cloud connection between phone laptop and server - which just figures out how to make the proper connection in the background. A cluster option to either a local or remote server instance (2nd NUC, or a Pi, or AWS or other). All the software is out there to make this fairly well possible, it's just non-trivial to setup. I'm even willing for some services to be non-free, e.g. FastMail because email servers are a pain to maintain.
I, also, use (only) Firefox on mobile and desktop but sometimes I'm really suprised by the lack of features to control data/privacy.
Also (not affiliated): If you've been tinkering with Rust or have thought about doing so, Servo is well worth checking out or helping with - I think helping to prevent Chrome from having an effective monopoly in Web browsing is a noble cause even if you're not worried about Google's motives.
I experience the same issue and it's frustrating. Not that I use a lot of Google services, but when I do... yeah the effect is noticeable. So much as I like to point a finger, I expect it's just due to them not putting in as much time to make their stuff run perfect in anything other than Chrome.
Example: Google search with firefox mobile has unclickable links if I change my user agent to IE8. Literally nothing happens when I tap a link. They are in too deep and starting to break things.
inox-patchset - https://github.com/gcarq/inox-patchset
ungoogled-chromium - https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Iridium Browser - https://iridiumbrowser.de/
The only issue with Chrome I have been having lately, despite not remembering the error message, is I often can't type search terms on the url field and then get search results from Google. I get an error message with a dinosaur telling me something broke. I tried deleting profiles and even reinstall Chrome, but no. I can reproduce this problem on two Macbooks I own, which makes my experience with Chrome now pretty bad considering I can't search directly from URL bar!
Also, while Firefox's devtool has improved a lot over the years, I can't seem to find certain features. For example, it's pretty simple to preserve logs under Network tab in Chrome, but where is it in Firefox? But to be fair, I also use Firefox devtools in cases I can't easily from Chrome like editing request in Firefox is simpler IMO. So it's a bit of pick and choose, depending on what I need to do.
I love Firefox (I interned at Mozilla before), I've done some contributions to Firefox, and I think the folks there have been doing a great job. But my honest opinion is we still have some serious battle to fight, especially in performance and plugin. I don't care much about syncing bookmarks myself though so Chrome's integration with Google account doesn't matter to me.
Those two reasons were the only thing keeping me from switching to Chrome when it was fast (apparently it isn't now)...
But these days I just keep opening a new one... most of the time I am just searching for something on the Internet like documentations so going backward is not really always a requirements.
I will see if that helps for a few days. Thanks.
If the Marketing head for Firefox opens like this, I'm honestly not optimistic. So even he states that for some reason, using Firefox alone is not sufficient for him. I think unless they find out the reasons for that, they have little chance to become meaningful competition again - even though we really need it.
Slightly OT, that being said, my feeling is that Chrome played on an unfair playing field from the very beginning. I remember when Firefox was the newcomer. With enormous effort and help of a phenomenal community-driven grassroots campaign they managed to fight IE and, over 6 years, climb to ~30% market share. It was an enormous success.
Then came Chrome and went from completely unknown to beating IE in 2 years.
My feeling is that this can't be explained by better technology and features alone but the fact that e.g., Google was in a position to put a Chrome ad below the search field on the Google home page might have played a role.
Competitive analysis and compatibility testing. It's important for Firefox engineers and product people to understand, firsthand, what other browser vendors are doing.
Better technology and features are nice, but huge marketing spend and sleazy stealth-install agreements are nice too, if your goal is just market share.
Otherwise I'd use Firefox everywhere.
EDIT: numbers on 2013 11-inch Macbook Air
Firefox 3-10% vs. Safari 0.2-2% when idling
Firefox 10-40% vs. Safari 5-10% when scrolling HN
I'd consider Firefox for desktop, but it has to be Safari on mobile devices.
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2011032210281240...
I assume you're on a mac since you mention Safari? I don't have a mac. Please give it a try with the latest nightly. It should loom something like https://i.imgur.com/2EgjCIO.png
The article says this feature depends on support from your hardware.
Of course, in the typical Mozilla fashion there is a six year old bug that seems related https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=632733
I don't know what to say. Sigh.
What i was referring to was the "smooth" pinch to zoom like Safari and Chrome which works on any webpage (text + images). I don't know how to properly describe it, here's the example: http://i.imgur.com/AvLLbuy.gif
>I assume you're on a mac since you mention Safari?
Yea, a Macbook with a touchpad.
As a programmer, I really dislike remarks like this. There are so, so many features that are just as basic as that. All software will have features of this caliber that are not implemented, disregarding the thousands upon thousands of equivalently "basic" features that are.
Remember how people got in arms because Mozilla Firefox had some preference that allowed people to disable loading images and javascript whole scale across the browser? Well, I imagine Mozilla wouldn't be too excited to see blog posts like this: https://blog.codinghorror.com/this-is-what-happens-when-you-...
So what do we get? We get bugs that sit in Bugzilla for five years and nobody wants to do anything about it.
* I am not a Mozilla employee and I can't speak for Mozilla
I hate the pinch to zoom on any platform: on mobile it always rotates the view when I want north to be up (so I use the +/- buttons); and on a touchpad with one hand... I mean, my thumb is opposable but my other fingers are not made to move more in that direction. I'd have to get my other hand away from the keyboard (or from under my head, depending on what I'm doing). I'm curious how others do this.
actually i never thought about that. I just noticed that the person in the example video http://i.imgur.com/AvLLbuy.gif seems to use Thumb+Index finger.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pinch-to-zoom...
So I am really thankful for people who work on Firefox and letting me use it on a shitty laptop. Also it's one of the reasons I am learning Rust now so that I can contribute to it.
On a Macbook Pro from 2015, entering a simple Google Sheets documents and have the page fully loaded and ready to work takes me ~8 seconds on Chromium, but ~17 seconds on Firefox. It's really a huge diference.
Still, I'm trying to use Firefox more and more because of privacy considerations, but Mozilla really should up their game and have more focus in their roadmap.
The difference for google docs on my machine (three year old Laptop) isn't as big as the one you describe and on ownclouds I don't actually see a difference. Obviously google targets Chrome with Docs. You could equally well say that Google needs to up their game there.
Where they really have catching up to do is with battery usage. Unfortunately Friefox Mobile simply uses up considerably more battery for me.
If you access the marathon UI in Firefox, your browser will eventually slow down to a crawl and the job JSON description will be rendered incorrectly (it seems like a memory leak somewhere).
It works fine on Chrome.
On a historical note, I remember that ten years ago Firefox's memory usage was a topic that generated a lot of heat online. I described my issues in detail once and got flamed by Firefox fanboys saying "you must be lying, because the memory leak was fixed two years ago," and those fanboys got flamed by a wave of truer fanboys saying "stop saying 'memory leak,' because it wasn't technically a memory leak, you're libeling the developers." I can't think of a piece of open source software that has such a rabid following these days, or maybe I'm just too old these days to hang out in such rough internet neighborhoods.
Can someone please explain this statement to me. Does using chrome change which ads are displayed to you? Does Firefox do anything differently?
Personally I use ad blockers so my choice of browser is really based on which blocker plugin is easiest to install. Chrome does this pretty well...
A strong stance would include ad and tracking blocking, on...by default.
This is more like "Optionally Browse Against the Machine After Figuring out How".
I am the author of a reasonably large web app (https://partsbox.io/), and in real-life performance on a Mac, Chrome is #1, Safari follows right behind it, and Firefox lags far behind. So, Firefox isn't "faster" and doesn't "lag less", quite the opposite.
In any case, I'd like to try to figure out what's going on here. Is the problem reproducible with the publicly available demo of partsbox? If so, what are the steps to reproduce? That is, what operations are you measuring?
Yes, the public demo is just fine for trying things out. As for measuring, Chrome does seem to have a faster JavaScript engine, as operations like search indexing take shorter than in Safari. However, for interactive use, Safari provides the best experience. I do not know why — perhaps due to the way it updates the displayed DOM? In Chrome long computations in JavaScript run fast, but Safari feels more snappy in real use.
OK. Could you point me to the specific operations on the public demo that are slow in Firefox? I've been trying a few things side by side with Chrome/Safari and not really seeing a perceptible difference, but I don't really know my way around this UI, so it's possible I'm not finding the right things, or not noticing lag that you're noticing... Note that I was using a Firefox nightly; if you're seeing the slowness in a specific Firefox release, which one is it?
Sure — please try the search box. Enter "mkl" and observe: Safari and Chrome feel snappy and provide instant results as you type. Firefox is noticeably laggy.
I love that Chrome sandboxes itself. However, there's just too much Google in it. Sure there's Chromium. But even that contains Google blobs.
So yes, Firefox it is.
You can reasonably feel like Chrome is better than Firefox but I don't think it's so much better that it is worth the trade-off.
But the reason I came to Firefox was because I didn't want Chrome to be a clear monopoly and see a time when it was pretty much too late for any competition.
I respond that I use FireFox because of: Mozilla's mission/actions versus Google's mission/actions, and NoScript protection on FireFox to stop undesired behavior of websites I do not trust/have not vetted.
Personally, I use Chromium for the few websites where NoScript is over-aggressive to their functionality, and that I have already vetted as being acceptable to share all with (privacy, history, etc.).
And to make sure a problem I experience is not a FireFox-only problem :)
Do you prefer not having search suggest, or sending all your URLs to your search engine? Because with a unified bar, you have to pick one or the other.
2. Can pass work off to more CPU cores. I'm not sure of the real world performance gain, but theoretically you could render three heavy tabs and the Firefox UI on a 4 processor CPU almost as fast as one heavy tab in single processor mode.
Further, most popular modern operating systems handle processes and threads similarly internally.
I'm not sure what you mean by 60 fps. 2d apps typically don't have render loops as games do - they only "composit" graphics typically by updating the UI only if a section needs to be re-drawn.
I shouldn't have said 60fps. I just meant low or no interface lag. Regardless of what the system is trying to do internally, Firefox has performance issues in the UI, so hopefully they can address those.
This is no different than saying Microsoft only wants you to use Hotmail.
Firefox did not build Gmail, nor does it have any serious interconnected bookmarks manager. Why would I use Firefox when Gmail does not render well on it and there is no way for me to seamlessly carry bookmarks, history and everything else which is part of daily browser activity?
Sure, I use Firefox for work as well. It is fine. I don't need to worry about gmail and personal bookmarks, etc at work.
There is, Firefox Sync. It works pretty well and doesn't use your history to target ads. You can sync bookmarks, open tabs, history, password, add-ons, preferences.
When you sign up on a new device, FF also remembers your settings of what you want to sync. Chrome, by default, syncs everything, including history, and uses it to target ads.
You didn't follow the real problem. Firefox Sync only wants you to use Firefox Sync. Your data is not liberated to be used where you want it to be used.
I don't know, maybe complain to Google who purposefully fucks up things on Firefox, over and over?
>there is no way for me to seamlessly carry bookmarks, history and everything else which is part of daily browser activity?
...except there is? The Mozilla account stuff does just that.
Mozilla is developing a new feature called "Racing Cache With Network" (RCWN). Based on feedback from Facebook and user telemetry, it was discovered that the disk cache was very slow for some users, especially with non-SSD hard disks. With RCWN, if the disk cache doesn't return a cached result quickly enough, Firefox will issue a network request and just return whichever content returns first. Firefox will still check the cache first, but can avoid the extreme outlier cases.
If they can do that to an employee, what can't they do to you, an anonymous user?
That said, I stick with Firefox for private use. But the trust is gone.
See, that's why Eich's "resignation" is a massive red flag for me. Plenty of perfectly-decent people have misinformed political opinions. Any reasonable person could separate those personal beliefs from professional merits.
Instead, though, we have lots of unreasonable people who look at a handful of political beliefs (including past ones that may or may not still be in effect) as some sign that a person is irredeemably and permanently "evil".
I have many friends, family members, and coworkers who have political viewpoints that I find to be reprehensible. Some are diehard "Make America Great Again (but only for white people)" Republicans. Some are diehard "If you're not with Hillary and every last one of her political stances, you're a deplorable and evil person" Democrats. I'm able to maintain civil and productive relationships with these people because I'm able to see past political differences and recognize these people as human beings with perfectly valid (albeit horribly misinformed) opinions.
If Eich's resignation (forced or not) has no effect on Firefox users or the persecution thereof, then neither would Eich's continued tenure as CEO affect users. Same goes for Mozilla staff; unless there's actual evidence that Eich would have discriminated against non-heterosexual staff in a professional setting, the idea that Eich was somehow unfit to lead the project which he cofounded was a premature and unfounded idea at the very least.
But yeah nothing pissed me off more than them saying they support choice when they kill off well-supported standards they don't like [1], fire employees over their (common) religious beliefs [2], take the longest to roll out critical security features [3], and prioritize shitty UI updates that nearly everyone hates [4].
All I keep hearing is that the new multi-process is so much faster, everything is great now, but every time I run it on fairly decent systems (i7 from late 2013) it takes multiple seconds to switch tabs.
It really is a joke that their head of marketing wasn't fired for that post, it only supports the true thing that Mozilla has come to stand for: hypocrisy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich [3] https://community.qualys.com/thread/12421 [4] https://www.ghacks.net/2013/11/23/80-unhappy-firefoxs-austra...
EDIT: The parent said there was no evidence, here is evidence that the board already made its mind up, whether you like it or not is of no consequence. It's still evidence of that bias.
That Baker parrots Eichs own explanation for resigning does not make it so that she fired him.
Neither Eich nor the rest of Mozilla could figure out how to handle the huge media backlash, so they simply decided to give up. Mozilla has a history of being very weak against media onslaughts.
So did Nixon when it was clear he was going to be removed from office anyway.
>That Baker parrots Eichs own explanation for resigning does not make it so that she fired him.
Are you honestly going to tell me that he would not have been removed by a board that makes statements like the above?
Here's a better thing to say: 'no comment'
This is one thing to use it privately, this is another to say it publicly. I think he should be fired. Not even considering the other contradictions of this article. I think he has no idea how to lead Firefox marketing.
I hope he tries out Opera and PaleMoon fairly often, too.
- Firefox on Linux lets me configure the menu shortcut modifier key to Super, while Chrome is hardcoded to the Windows-style Control. (I use Control-W for word erase in vim and shell all the time, which means that the sequence of Control-W followed Control-Shift-T is a regular occurrence in Chrome.)
- Firefox's shift-click to bypass stupid web developer tricks.