A Chrome monoculture is harmful, even if Google has the best intentions which I don't think they do - they definitely value their profits over an open web.
Funny thing is Firefox Quantum is both faster and eats less memory compared with Chrome.
>not one that treats you as a pawn.
And sadly, Firefox is the only browser that doesn't treat you like a pawn. For MS, Google, Apple, that chinese company which owns Opera you are just a pawn.
(later edit : fixed the second remark).
Not any more, I recently discovered that my firefox at work got infected with Firefox Pioneer. I didn't install that, it just appeared on list of my addons, no warning or anything. I heard on Reddit about similar cases from a few months ago, people got Safe Browsing installed without their knowledge. Both are signed addons from Mozilla.
https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/firefox-pioneer/
Is youre IT group policy doing this?
your
So it sounds like a bug or another case of non-malice. Tried reporting it at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/?
> And sadly, Firefox is the only browser that does this.
Do you mean to say Firefox treats you as a pawn? How so?(Genuinely interested)
What about Safari? (May not be an option based on OS though)
I'm running nightly which in theory ought to have more chance at issues but more chances of fixes for said issues faster too.
With quantum, Firefox is performing well. Even if chrome catches up I will not give up Firefox until it becomes so slow that I'm unable to use it normally. I don't care about the performance delta, just that it be good enough.
Go Firefox!
We are slowly getting back to the way things were with IE, but I hope that Mozilla won't give up and switch to blink or webkit like everybody else.
On Chrome however everything worked fine right away. Overall it was just a few images, some text and a search bar, so no matter the performances of the browser that should work everywhere, but since it was probably only tested on Chrome and Safari, it only worked in these browsers.
These differences are even starker if you use newer features without polyfills. For example, 'forEach' implementations as of a year ago varied by orders of magnitude.
Native array sorting is another obvious one. Chrome, Firefox and especially Safari use quite different algorithms each based on array size with varying results.
If you add up all those little changes and always go with the option that's fastest in Chromium, in a reasonably complex SPA you could easily generate noticeable differences.
The array sorting is a great example where the length of the array chosen or the pre-sort ordering can affect which browser is faster. No single browser may be able to claim the fastest for every scenario.
1) Write browser-detection code and execute different code, with different performance characteristics, in different browsers. This happens, though less than it used to.
2) Write your code to hit the specific JIT heuristics in a Chrome particularly well, even if that requires contortions that slow it down in every other browser.
3) Write your code to effectively depend on Chrome bugs, where Chrome manages to be faster due to doing something that violates the standards.
4) Arrange the order in which you load your subresources/assets to play particularly well with Chrome's HTTP heuristics, even if it requires contortions that make the downloads slower in other browsers.
5) Write your code to rely on specific behavior in Chrome's HTML prescan, even if it requires contortions that break HTML prescans in other browsers.
That sort of thing.
Basically, if you just write some code, chances are it will run in times X, Y, Z in three different browsers, with the times closer or further apart depending on what features you're using and how the browsers optimized them, etc. But if you then set out to make it faster in X at the expense of any other considerations, you can get it to look like 0.9X, 2Y, 2Z. Or in some pathological cases 0.5X, 10Y, 10Z...
Anecdotally.. Firefox was always slower rendering pages compared to other browsers. On some sites that I visited regularly, using FF was depressing. Later on, it started to suffer from caching issues on my machine. This caused a massive system slowdown.
Tried Palemoon (non-blink\webkit, etc). It blazed through pages- even the heavy ones FF had problems with historically. The rendered results were spot on too. It was like getting a new machine.
What I'm saying is that we can't blame everything on pages being optimized for Browser X or Browser Y. Sometimes we need to call out our favorite browsing application and let them know this is an issue. Otherwise, they keep losing users based solely on performance.
Having said that, looking forward to Quantum.
I also switched to chrome back when Firefox was a lot slower, but now I'm tempted to switch to Firefox or Safari and I try to occasionally.
I've historically had to switch back partly because I (stupidly) rely a lot on chrome's omnibox autofill memory and also because we use the switchyomega plugin at work and I don't want to deal with having a non-standard setup.
From a developers standpoint it does. From a "health of the web" standpoint it does also.
But if I understood correctly that could be finally fixed in upcoming releases.
It's actually almost slightly uncanny how well it's working.
Indeed, I've caught myself thinking "it's not supposed to render this fast" a few times myself. Really am enjoying the nightlies.
Edit: still checking out if it might be possible. i've just seen that the newer firefox has also some kind of flash player integrated. just the debugging is now strange.
In fact, Firefox has increased in the amount of unwarranted telemetry and "experiments" a lot in the last years, a direction I'm really not happy with.
The main difference is that Firefox still gives you pretty liberal access to most internal settings, while Chromium is abysmal, if not ridiculous.
I can understand "experiments" (Pocket comes to mind), but what are you referring to wrt "unwarranted telemetry"?
I'm talking about A/B testing internal features exactly like Chrome, such as ip v4/v6 path preference, pipelining support, TLS faststart (and so on) according to a random cohort selection.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
The intention is to ship features that people actually want, and to ensure that Firefox is actually working for people (not everyone can/will file bug reports or post on twitter or hackernews etc)
I'm not being treated as a pawn, but it's still pretty rough.
Multiprocess had a significant migration period. Webextensions had "Well here's some APIs, we'll try to get you more before the day we switch. Some of the important ones are coming the version after, oops. And some are still missing but suck it up."
Chrome without the tracking