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Comment by danielbarla | Hacker News Reader

I don't have a good answer to your question, but for me it was actually performance. And this is particularly baffling, since Firefox seems to do extremely well in all benchmarks, often beating out Chrome.

But, as a quick test, I closed Chrome, and it was up again instantly (say 500ms). I did the same with Firefox (after a generous warmup / caching session), and got 4 to 6 seconds each time. Clicking links and page loading feels similar; on Chrome I don't notice it, on Firefox I always do. Am I the only one that feels this way?

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> Clicking links and page loading feels similar; on Chrome I don't notice it, on Firefox I always do.

Because Chrome, by default, enables prefetching [0] (it loads links before you decide to click on them). Firefox will never do that due to obvious privacy concerns.

It's the usual "principle vs convenience" thing, where most people choose the latter.

[0] https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/1385029?hl=en

Actually http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.prefetch-next says

> Link prefetching is when a webpage hints to the browser that certain pages are likely to be visited, so the browser downloads them immediately so they can be displayed immediately when the user requests it. This preference controls whether link prefetching is enabled.

> Possible values and their effects

> true

> Enable link prefetching. (Default)

You can check the value in your Firefox with about:config and searching for network.prefetch-next

My one is "false" and it's shown in bold face, meaning that I changed it to that value. Privacy concerns and also legal concerns: what if a site links another site that the legislation of your country (or the country you're travelling to) doesn't allow you to access? At least I get some hints of where I'm heading to if I'm loading pages myself.

How does prefetching affect things like the not-yet-viewed website's stats? Since it is a Google browser and Google Analytics is so dominate, is it to Google's advantage to do this for reasons other than convenience to the user? (Inflated stats for the prefetched website even though the user never viewed it?)

Google Analytics checks the visibilityState of a loaded page and does not fire the GA tag if the page is prerender.

> Am I the only one that feels this way?

Nope. I really want to like Firefox but its performance is just so much worse across the board than Chrome.

Another example is video playback: Firefox, when viewing video, heats up my laptop to the point where the fans kick in at full blast. Chrome stays nice and cool on the same material. The difference in battery life is noticeable too.

Sorry Firefox, you need to do better.

For VP8 and VP9, Firefox and Chrome use the same video decoding backends, so it's likely not video decoding that is causing the problem. For H.264, Firefox uses the OS-provided codecs; I'm not sure what Chrome does, but in any case that's the only possible solution for Firefox due to patent issues.

If it's making that much of a difference in heat, it's probably using a software renderer instead of passing the decoding to the GPU. Check (Menu)->Help->Troubleshooting Information and see if it says "Supports Hardware H264 Decoding: No;". If you can't fix it, I recommend using an extension that adds video URLs to your VLC playlist. VLC supports playing YouTube URLs natively.

I'm on Linux and I don't feel any noticeable speed difference using FF vs Chrome (startup time doesn't bother me at all, my browser is always running and I rarely restart my machine). I've been using FF since the early days and never found enough reason to switch to any other browser and I'm quiet happy with the improvements that have been coming to FF lately and what the future holds.

I think for me it's specifically UI performance. Opening a new tab in Chrome is instantaneous. In Firefox there's a slight but noticeable stutter that annoys me just enough to avoid using it.

Session restore can make firefox take a lot longer to start. It's possible your profile has a very old session with a lot of tab history. Maybe try unpinning and closing all your tabs (there should be a 'bookmark all tabs' you can use to get them back later), and then exit firefox. This should prune all that tab data and history (session restore saves a pretty considerable amount of back and cookie history for each tab.)

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