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Comment by dedsm | Hacker News Reader

Since quantum arrived, firefox developer edition is my browser of choice, and with the containers functionality it checks all my marks.

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It was for me as well, but lately I have been experiencing incredible slow-downs in Firefox. I thought it must be my imagination until I tried other browsers and the difference was like between day and night. Firefox is just too slow, even with their new engine.

Funnily enough I noticed this just the other day.

On https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ (usual benchmark caveats apply) Chrome scored 68.7 and FF scored 50.

That was on Fedora 28 on a ThinkPad (i7-7700HQ), I was surprised at the delta between the two tbh.

I saw similar results on my MBP, with Chrome scoring ~90 and Firefox scoring ~60. Not enough to outweigh my reasons for using Firefox, but interesting.

On Safari 12, my 2015 13" rMBP scores 55, my iPhone X 89, and the new iPhone XS 125 !? Faster than the new iMac Pro (https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1043277162676072449)

Safari 12, High Sierra, 2017 15" MBP scores 104. I'm surprised at these discrepancies.

Firefox performs terribly on Linux, and lacks a lot of hardware support for acceleration that Chromium has. I am currently using:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chromium-vaapi-bin

On an iPhone 8+ with iOS 12.0, I got 93.

I'm only posting because the plural of anecdote is data.

The new rendering engine is not on yet.

How is it not? I remember being bombarded with news along the lines of 'New Firefox is blazingly fast!'. Which one is that? How do I get a version that has the new engine?

The part that shipped was Electrolysis which splits the formerly giant-single-processed Firefox into a set of 1-9 processes which work as task pools for tabs. Locking one tab hard will lock only that tab, and any others sharing that Electrolysis worker I believe.

The new upcoming part is Servo, the rendering engine written in Rust.

To try out the new engine, turn on webrender in the nightly about:config.

Ditto. I spent about 6 months using Quantum on Linux. While it's a lot faster than old Firefox, it's still got a lot of issues - random crashes, random hangs, high memory and cpu usage. I got so frustrated, I decided to go back despite my privacy concerns. Unfortunately, nothing comes close to Chromium on Linux.

Problem is when something crashes on Firefox it still tends to take everything with it. This is very annoying when developing something. Often when you have bad code as you are creating or changing things.

So for developing I still prefer Chrome. Besides that Firefox since quantum been very nice.

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