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Comment by notheguyouthink | Hacker News Reader

I just wish it was .. faster.

Lately I've been moving away from Google everywhere I can. I moved everything but Google Voice. Yes, even Google Search - I've moved to DuckDuckGo. On windows however, I had to fall back to Chrome, because I was just shocked at how slow Firefox was.

Opening pages like Twitch.tv proved to be shockingly slow. Furthermore, my habit of opening many tabs in the background like I do in Chrome/Safari was massively slower in Firefox because while Chrome doesn't autoplay new-hidden tabs, Firefox does - I imagine Chrome feels faster there because it's not running nearly as much stuff at once.

Pretty much everything of Firefox felt slower for me. And this is from someone that really wants to get away from Chrome! On OS X, I've long switched to Safari and DuckDuckGo, and been quite happy. I've had zero complaints about performance with Safari.

So.. I don't know what they need to do, but I'm really hoping they do something.

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It's getting there. They recently added multiprocess support. A new CSS engine is coming. In the further future we're going to get more and more pieces of their new rendering engine in.

Personally, I dropped Chrome 2 years ago or so, for the same reasons (moving away from everything Google that I reasonably can). Firefox is more painful to use, for sure, but it's gotten "okay" enough that I'm willing to keep using it in favor of its benefits (privacy).

By the way: In Firefox, open `about:support` and check that "Multiprocess Windows" says something like "2/2 (enabled by Default", where the numbers can really be anything but 0. If it's disabled, that means your Firefox isn't using the new multiprocess support, most likely because you're running an incompatible addon.

Is there a way to figure out which addon or addons are the cause, without disabling them all and enabling them one by one?

Yeah: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...

Personally I've found the recent Nightly with the new Rust CSS engine to be pretty snappy. I'd say anecdotally faster than Chrome.

There was also a recent post regarding having large numbers of tabs open in Firefox (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823807) and it did pretty well.

Yea I'm definitely going to try switching to Nightly based on the comments here. As well as adjusting some of the configuration. Thanks!

Would you comment back here and gives your first impression on it? How fast is it compared to stable.

Not the OP, but I switched to Nightly a week ago and unlike stable I would recommend it to anyone. Not just to people who don't want to use anything Google. It's fast and doesn't hog memory. A far better experience than before.

Over the course of the next two weeks, they'll be merging some major UI overhauls, as well as remove swaths of legacy code, so things might be a bit rockier for some time and I wouldn't necessarily install it on my gramma's PC right in this moment, but other than that, yeah, it is pretty crazy how big the difference is, with Nightly being just three months ahead.

Okay, fair point: To everyone who understands that nightly means "unstable at times".

I have Nightly in one machine (Linux) and the R55 in a Windows machine. It's way fast than the previous versions I used to have and looks definitely snappier than G. chrome. Don't have any benchmarks with me, purely based on perception/ felt response times.

I switched to Nightly based on comments on this thread and it's great.

Much more streamlined UI, and much faster. I already preferred Firefox because of better handling of large numbers of tabs, but Nightly beats Chrome even at smaller number of tabs so far (I synced my FF account so my extensions, etc got reproduced, and I manually replaced legacy ones with newer ones). I still have to see how it holds up over a period of use, but so far with my data synced it looks great.

Just downloaded Nightly and it's a much better experience than the beta channel I was using before. Snappier page load, cleaner UI (compact theme).

However it still seems to lack in the animation department. CSS transformations and transitions, particularly if affecting complex elements, just aren't as smooth as in Chrome or Safari. Your own menu animations, like the global drop down menu, are finally fluid and smooth though.

I just installed the nightly, (and with several privacy extensions).

BLAZING >>>>>>> FAST

I have Chrome as reference to my FF here and since their beginning, it never was faster again. As in every FF post, there will be people saying that and the opposite. I guess the difference depends on other factors like Addons or Plugins as well as the probably narrow difference between both.

I never really came upon a reason to leave FF behind. It works good, has all the addons, and I can still make it look like a real window with options and things where they should be. I also have a "special" relationship to Chrome due to this "bundling to freeware" they use to push the browser onto people who don't want it.

@your tab problem: I just googled this up https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/load-tab-on-sele... No idea how good it is though since I never felt I'd need that.

There is a solution/addon for everything ;)

Google does not want you to move from their services and APIs.

Chrome/Chromium, as a recent example allowed serviceURI in Web Speech APIs for third party recognition to be plugged in. Here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/SpeechRecog...

It was dropped in Chrome 49 and we're now all stuck with using Google. There has been little coverage on this, some speculated it was hardly implemented, or was dropped because lack of a standard API format.

Whatever the case. Google / Chrome choose not to fully develop that feature and its now gone. Which ultimately works in Googles favor.

I mean, I don't care what Google wants lol. I've moved everything except Chrome on Windows, and Google Voice because of no replacement.

I'm not complaining because I'm locked in by Google, I've switched to Safari on OS X with no issue at all - I don't miss Chrome in the slightest. Yet, on Windows, Firefox is proving to be a hurdle.

It's on Mozilla, not Google. Imo

What does "faster" mean? honest question. I've been using Firefox since its early days and never jumped on the Chrome bandwagon simply because I didn't see the need to do so. When Firefox felt slow, it usually was the whole operating system that's slow and neither Chrome or any other browser could solve that. Nowadays, all the machines I use are powerful enough to not feel any such slowness and I just don't understand what is this "speed" people keep attributing to Chrome and what is so "slow" in Firefox (regardless of that fact they're working on speeding it up).

In addition, Chrome recently crashed on me multiple times while using Google Spreadsheet which is supposed to work better with Chrome than other browsers.

Not OP, but what I think is that FF renders the twitch.tv page very slow. On macOS, not just the tab but the whole FF app locks up, showing a spinning beach ball. It's the only site that I found that does that.

I don't personally visit twitch.tv but I just did and it loaded normally and streaming auto-played without enabling Flash (although the site requested it for some reason).

Speaking of Flash, some sites request Flash on Firefox but not on Chrome for example (although it's totally unnecessary). This is becoming less frequent recently but it shows that a lot of websites are not taking advantage of Firefox's full features as they do with Chrome (something to consider as well).

Option to disable autoplay in background tabs exists in Firefox for so long that I forgot it isn't enabled by default.

Go to about:config and set: media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground = true

In older versions they used another config variable media.block-play-until-visible .

There is also media.suspend-bkgnd-video.enabled to stop decoding video in background tabs after set amount of time (10s default).

I find FF actually faster than Chrome. But maybe that's because I actually open multiple tabs which load in background, then I just switch between them. Though to be fair, I never knew about this difference... It just felt that Chrome is slower somehow.

I wonder if they are both the same, it's just that us users have learned different workflows based on strengths of each browser?

This has a lot to do with the ever increasing incompetence of web devs than it has to do with Firefox imho. I do performance testing for a living and Firefox creams Chrome on sites where the devs know what they are doing. I don't think of Chrome as faster, but better designed to hide developer mistakes. Chrome basically keeps the mediocre developer who can't rtfm in business just the same way Microsoft did back in the day. Same pointlessness on Android. I call it the Trump definition of success - pander to the lowest common denominator and pretend there isn't a price to be paid.

speaking as a web dev who's obsessed with payload size, TTFB and web app performance, i find your statement to be patently false.

i have well-written code that runs very fast in FF, and it always runs even faster in Chrome. not just JS, but also repaint and layout. FF does handle some absurd cases better: giant dom trees & scrolling, RAM usage, lazy tabs.

as a long-time Firefox bug hunter and nightly user, i hope Firefox/Quantum & Servo can reverse this pattern, for sure.

Firefox stable feels relatively slow. Firefox nightly is really snappy, especially with Stylo enabled.

Also, go to about:config, and make sure preloading is turned on. I checked it last week and for some reason it was turned off, even though I don't recall ever doing that.

> I just wish it was .. faster.

They're working on it, to see the progress, install nightly (which is already a huge improvement) and turn on servo CSS for an extra boost. It feels much faster.

When did you try?

I've been on Firefox developer edition for awhile now, because it's just SO MUCH FASTER than chrome, especially on high tab volume.

seconding Firefox developer, although still have problems when it has been open for a while, evidently because it needs to update.

Try disabling HTTPS Everywhere, if you have it. It made everything many seconds slower for me.

You might as well open it's options and disable SSL Observatory since it's exactly what cause slowdown.

Hmm, interesting, that sounds plausible, thank you.

The auto playing issue is fixed and making its way down towards general release.

Weirdly enough - I found gmail was running VERY slow on Chrome. I switched to the Brave browser and it's been blazing fast.

Weird that Google products don't even seem to run the best on their own products.

Routinely have similar issues with gmail/chrome whereas I never have any issues on Firefox. Odd.

Do you like Brave? I've not done too much research on alternate browsers, but at this point as long as I trust the company I'd be willing to try it.

Cliqz is another one I thought about trying, but it is based on Firefox so I'm a bit dismayed haha.

I do!

It has some issues with sites because of cookie storage + I believe it disables scripts - but it's really fast :)

Isn't Brave based on libChromium? At least on Linux

I think part of the issue here is that it just visually seems slower. In my experience it isn't actually doing things much slower, it's just a little visually clunky in comparison. And as far as resource usage goes, RAM is way down now because their multiprocess implementation is a lot less intensive than Chrome's. I switched for that reason and I'm enjoying it a lot.

Oh c'mon it's not that much slower. Some things feel chunkier (scrolling) but JS performance is 80%-90% of the way there.

Oh so apart from the one thing that needs to be perfect, everything is fine? Sorry but if scrolling is not smooth af you don't have a viable browser.

Someone should dump all y'all in some redneck craphole out in the middle of third-world nowhere for a few years. With that environment you'll find out just how important "perfect scrolling" is when most of the web loads for shit under your spotty 3G connection.

I was born and have lived my whole life in India :/

~as an asside

Its not a real solution, but for twitch, which i agree is essentially unusable, ive replaced it with streamlink + mpv + a couple of scripts to notify me of who i follow is live. Twitch chat works in irc too.

Speaking of speed, or lack thereof on Googke properties, has anyone else noticed how insanely slow the Google Admin interface is?

Pale Moon, been using it for a few years OR Chromium.

It doesn't help that they keep cramming features into Firefox. Chrome feels pretty bare in comparison.

The features they're 'cramming' into Firefox don't slow down the browser.

Chrome has consisted of significantly (i.e. millions of lines) more code than Firefox has for quite a while now.

I feel like I heard that a Chrome install was comparable in size to an average Linux install a year or two ago.

Many of said features are just bundled web extensions, add-ons, so they don't pollute the main code base. Please, don't spread FUD when it is not needed.

I always admired Mozilla for their efforts in making Firefox better. But I switched to Chrome many years ago. For me, the problem with FF was UI and UX.

Chrome and Safari just feel more "smooth and sleek", and UI elements are consistent (Look how Chrome buttons are rounded-rectangles).

The other reason I switched from FF was that Chrome has always been simply better. Sure, FF can handle many tabs, but I save that for times I want to work with Selenium or something. For an ordinary user (and even pros), Chrome just beats FF.

A redesigned UI is coming to Firefox with version 57. Maybe you'll like that one better.

Can't exactly argue with your other point, since you don't explain how Chrome beats Firefox, but as many people in this thread have already said, Firefox is currently picking up a lot of speed. You can try Firefox Nightly, if you want a taste right now. Or wait until Firefox 57, which will hit stable on Nov 14.

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