Firefox Is as Fast as Chrome Now, and No One Cares | Hacker News Reader

Firefox Is as Fast as Chrome Now, and No One Cares

theawl.com

26 pointssmacktoward34 comments

Just a quick historical excurse from the certain doom and inevitable gloom: Once upon a time, there was a browser that held 95% of market share, and there was no way this monopoly could ever be broken.

No, it wasn't Chrome: it was called Internet Explorer. "What is Internet Explorer," I hear the younger members of the audience asking. My point exactly.

And that was because Microsoft made a huge mistake. I don't find it likely that Google will make such a mistake, given how web is central to their business.

Ha!

I was really expecting this to be Mosaic (97% in 1994), or at least Netscape Navigator.

I guess I'm showing my age.

IIRC, in 1994 the Web was a newish technology trying to get a foothold against the omnipresent Gopher; I don't think that would be a great time to compare market share.

The younger members of the audience that work at any big company know pretty well what is Internet Explorer.

Or if they happen to belong to the 96% Windows desktop users as reported by Steam Hardware survey.

Oh! I thought that the browser in Windows is Microsoft Edge-not-IE-nosir-notatall. Are you telling me it's just a rebrand? Inconceivable, in-con-cei-va-ble!

(Also, using the Steam HW survey as representative for anything else than "on what are the people running Steam" is practically screaming "bias" in bold, capital, blinking, marqueed letters)

Not everyone in on Windows 10.

Windows 10 has Edge and Internet Explorer. type iexplore into the start menu

I know it exists and it can be even started, but so do various other vestigial utilities; the question is "why would anyone do that besides downloading an actual browser" ;)

Many many (MANY!) corporate "web" portals are written for IE 6-8 level renderer and have never been updated since. Not only does IE exist on Windows 10, it includes all the "classic" / legacy renderers, so that admins can add their corporate garbage to a blacklist with a specific renderer version in the group policy. It's really sad.

I don't think speed is the real issue.

I still use FF as my main browser, but in the past year I have noticed that more and more sites have started to drop full support of FF, sometimes a button doesn't work, other times it is impossible to log in, or post a form... Bottom line, we are at a point where even if we wanted we cannot use FF 100% of the times, I'm forced to load specific pages in Safari or Chrome from times to times. I'm used to it, but I think that kind of experience must be extremely confusing for the non-dev user, not understanding why a page doesn't work and not knowing what to do. I think it's an underestimated problem that must lead some users to switch from FF and never come back.

It was like that when Firefox first appeared as well. The solution was to email the webmasters and say, "your website doesn't work in Firefox. The URL is <url>, the browser version is <version>, and the operating system is <os>." That often got things fixed and reminded developers that they need to consider more than just one browser (IE at that time).

It might be a solution - albeit painful - but more largely I think the problem is somewhat different, whereas before sites didn't support FF because they didn't really know FF because it was new, now it seems they don't support it because they don't care anymore. I don't know what the appropriate solution is but if I were the FF team it would worry me at least as much as anything else. I see this as a long-term threat.

I guess it's time to try Firefox again. Always missed the superior URL bar experience over Chrome, and it seems my other excuses have been dealt with :).

I found the switch to be incredibly easy with LastPass, or any password manager for this matter.

The extensions I use work in either browser so I just install these, and after couple minutes the switch is complete.

The problem with FF is its targeting a niche market. A small % of the pie.

Let's take a look at FF homepage:

* 100% fresh, free range, ethicl browser.

* More speed, more privacy, more freedom.

In comparison here is Edge's:

* The faster, safer browser designed for Windows 10.

* Longer battery life.

Um, sorry, no. Long time (since 1.0) FF user here, on some site it's same as chrome, but on picture & JavaScript heavy site (such as Facebook) FF is simply not smooth as chrome. Also if you don't regularly restart FF (my experience is between 3 days to 1 week), whole FF instance just starts being unresponsive. This whole experience is the same before and after e10s introduction and is consistent across lots versions. (I just use TreeTabStyle and uBlock Origin in case someone wonder if it's due to add-on, and remade a clean profile around version 51.)

Where can I get a good idea of the current market shares? My gut tells me the default browsers Safari and Edge still have a dominate share among people that don't care. For years I've installed Firefox with uBlock Origin for people that ask me to set up their machines, no one has ever complained about speed or site compatibility and I've never had any issues myself.

I use Safari and I care. I actually don’t understand why it’s not used more for people on macOS. Granted I have an iPhone so the syncing works well between the two, but aside from that it really is a better browser for me than chrome. Faster for sure, better UI, lower memory usage, and better rendering of text.

I don’t use a lot of extensions, but now having a faster mechanism for Ad blocking (by building the blacklist set into the engine vs a JavaScript layer on top) makes my primary extension usage even better!

Safari has been making investments that chrome hasn’t. I’ve confirmed this with a former Chrome team developer who told me they started turning off unit tests that prevented startup time blowing past some milisecond threshold after the business asks were deamed more important.

Can’t wait for servo to finally land and hopefully Firefox will smoke them all once again.

Not only as fast in general. I've been using for some Microsoft related sites (e.g. Office 365), and the difference with Chrome in stability, resource consumption, and general speed is noticeable. Granted, probably an issue on both client and server, but I'm switching (back!) to Firefox for more and more sites every day.

The question is: does closing the speed gap (which used to favor Chrome) come at the expense of also closing the memory-use gap (which used to favor Firefox)? I mostly use Chrome, but on my ARM mini-desktop I had to use Firefox because Chrome just gobbled too much memory. If that option is gone, I'd call this a step backward.

> "Firefox has advanced privacy controls, but so does Chrome."

Actually, Firefox has better tools for that.

Details? Is this some special version of Firefox, some plugin?

I don't think Chrome has a control to reject 3rd party cookies from sites never directly visited.

It has a setting "Block third-party cookies".

It be more interested in how fast it runs with uBlock Origin or other quality 3rd-party resource loading control (especially javascript, but all content really), easy per-site javascript whitelisting and pop-up blocking.

Yep, and block 3rd party cookies breaks a lot more sites than block 3rd party cookies unless visited.

Firefox has better controls for that. You can reject 3rd party cookies only from non-visited sites.

It also blocks some trackers by default when using private browsing mode.

Example: self-destructing cookies automatically clears localStorage in Firefox after closing a tab (unless you toggle the setting on a per-site basis). I don't think Chrome can do that, even with its cookie destroying add-ons.

When I open the storage settings on Chrome there is often a lot of data saved by sites that is not cleared by the extensions. The Firefox community also tends to be more conscious of privacy issues.

Yes that is a (deliberate) deficiency in Chrome. I guess I manage it by running multiple profiles: sensitive sites (banking etc), regular trusted sites (whitelist cookies, js), random surfing (clear cookies on exit). Which is definitely more involved than it needs to be. The firefox open-in-container mode seems a better solution (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Projec...).

Because clearly it's not enough to "finally be as fast as the one that beat you, five years later."

Now Firefox needs to be faster/more secure/better than Chrome, and it will also take it 5 years or more to recover the market it lost from that point forward.

Give it time. Client side web is about to get _really_ resource intensive. So much so that memory and CPU usage will have to be communicated to the server.

What are you talking about?

Resource restrictions, like this tab is limited to 20MB of heap, X cycles of CPU and no GPU unless the user allows more resource consumption. These restrictions should be communicated to the server as part of the encoding headers, that the device can support some level of computation.

Firefox is not faster than chrome for me

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