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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

The Mozilla tech blogs are always a good read.

Informative and easy to digest. I can only think of one other company blogging with similar consistency/quality: Cloudflare.

Firefox performance has seen tremendous gains since their Project Quantum efforts.

It mostly feels on par with Chrome for me pretty much everywhere.

There is one glaring omission though: a single company where I have problems with FF on multiple apps - Google.

Gmail was still dog-slow the last time I tried, Youtube can send my fan into a frenzy and Docs is also regularly problematic. (on Linux)

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I have the opposite experience with YouTube.

With an AMD GPU on Linux, Chrome churns, drops frames, and stutters horribly on even 1080p videos at 30fps. Firefox, meanwhile, handles 1440p60 video with no problem. Even two such videos simultaneously, on separate monitors.

Chrome became inexplicably better for parts of early 2019 (I did not note which versions), but starting 2 or 3 months ago Chrome returned to being unusable for YouTube beyond 720p videos.

Before anyone asks, this is on an AMD RX 580 with Mesa 18.0.

have you double checked whether firefox is set to use your gpu or not, for video?

Neither Firefox nor Chrome under Linux are capable of using GPU for video decoding.

Only some distribution-specific Chromium builds do.

I seem to remember that some GPU acceleration under Linux was disabled voluntarily, on both Firefox and Chrome, because they actually ran much slower than CPU, probably due to bad drivers.

That’s certain GPU acceleration of rendering - specifically for Firefox I think compositing is disabled by default. It’s not the same as GPU accelerated video decoding which isn’t implemented in either browser, except via a set of patches for Chromium.

It is slower not due to drivers, but due to how the browsers[1] compose the final webpage. It does that using CPU, not GPU as on other operating systems, so hardware video decoding would involve moving the compressed video to GPU, waiting for it to decode, moving the decoded video back to RAM, do the composition, and then move the result back to GPU for display.

For hw decoding to have sense, GPU composition is needed. Hopefully webrender will bring that in for Linux too.

[1] Firefox actually, Chrome does use GPU composition. Chrome for ChromeOS even uses the same driver (libva+intel-vaapi-driver) as desktop linux for video decoding, Google just is not willing to support it on desktop. That's what some distributions enable in their Chromium builds.

GPU layer composition was available in Firefox for ages, long before WebRender. It just was not enabled on Linux by default due to fear of bad drivers. But anyone who heard about it or asked about performance on various forums knows about layers.force-enable in about:config.

Hey, I'm on the chromium videostack team, would you mind filing a bug report for what you see happening with youtube? https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/entry

Well, if you're willing to investigate, using ungoogled chromium resulted in tremendous gains while using youtube to the point where I can speed up a video to 2x without the fan ever running amok against my ears.

I will take a look this weekend and if I can properly explain and document the issue in detail, I will definitely give you everything I can.

I should add that for an identical Linux distro-and-version, and identical browser versions, my laptop (I forget the SKU, but Intel Broadwell U-series GPU) is about equal in performance between Chrome and Firefox. That is to say, 1440p60 runs smooth on each, so they're good enough that there's no issue from which to discern a difference (which is damned impressive for a 4-year old mobile chip, imo).

Fixing this would be like eight steps forward: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137247

The annoying part is that hardware acceleration works on chrome OS, so we know the support is buried in there somewhere.

Google closed that as Won't Fix, they are very opinionated and steadfast in their opinion as an organization.

I doubt they will take Linux outside their own walled gardens seruously, Google has already shown their indifference to us Linux users.

They opened it as Won't Fix, which appears to be their way of saying that they'll accept work but it has a priority of less than zero.

Asking to do the work of raising a bug to make a product better which is competing with other non profit product is in itself a bit arrogant in my opinion. On top of that the attitude to be lazy to search for the issue which was already marked as won't fix https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137247 is not the right thing to do. I would have appreciated if you have created the issue with the details provided and shared the link her for the op to fill in more details.

When chrome slows down for me, it normally means I need to run clear browsing history, delete cookies, cache, logins, etc. I have modern hardware, on both linux/windows same issue.

But using res on reddit and click "show images" you can tell chrome isn't as fast as other browsers, firefox/brave are visually faster/smoother in scrolling with pics. Hell, even firefox focus is faster on android. But I like chrome addons and sync with my mobile, its my daily driver. Normally I never notice, but a quick clean if starts acting out fixes it for me.

Sync with my mobile and all the other devices (4 other computers) is one reason why I use Firefox. It's because it's the only browser, as far as I know, which lets me run my own sync server and offers a open source implementation of it.

https://jeena.net/firefox-sync-15

Oh neat, when they first switched to sync that wasn't the case (the previous system did allow it over WebDAV and such), but because sync wasn't just a data dump with WebDAV it wasn't possible at launch to run your own server. I'll have to look into that again.

As far back as I remember the code behind sync was on GitHub and I do mean the backend. It probably still is. But I let Mozilla host it cause they encrypt it. If I lose my password I lose my synched items.

Nothing stressed me out more than the time I genuinely forgot my FF password for a few days!

If it's for a few days, how did you un-forget?

It was there I think, but wasn't immediately possible to use a different server as they hadn't enabled or built that into the browser yet. They were still working out issues and I never bothered to check up on it because it seemed like the encryption was secure enough for me.

Hey, I remember the time when Chrome was soooo fast and we needed to clean up all the stuff to get Firefox to run adequately :)

Check about:gpu - sounds like hardware acceleration isn't working.

It seems intentionally disabled. The about:gpu page reports the following:

>Accelerated video decode is unavailable on Linux: [137247](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=137247)

>Disabled Features: accelerated_video_decode

Just video or everything?

At least on MacOS firefox plays nice with Gsuite. Youtube can be hit or miss at high framerates every now and then.

YouTube is faster on Firefox on my laptop for some reason. I get zero dropped frames on Firefox too, compared to Chrome/Chromium.

Still waiting on Firefox to support hardware-accelerated decoding of videos though.

> Still waiting on Firefox to support hardware-accelerated decoding of videos though.

Wait, Firefox doesn't do this already? Didn't know.

I'm fairly certain it does it already.

It says its using the GPU but if you look at the cpu time required to play a 1080p video within firefox vs playing the same video with mpv

www.mpv.io : a lightweight player that among other things can transparently stream any url understood by youtube-dl

It uses 20x as much cpu as mpv. For purposes of comparison this is like Toyota selling a car that goes just as fast as your Ford so long as you are OK with only getting 4MPG.

There is an addon if you prefer to right click on a url and open in mpv or in an addon like Tridactyl you can do the same with your keyboard. It also lets you speed up and slow down the playback speed which is nice for speakers who talk too slow and take a while to get to the point.

I use mpv on my laptop to get more out of the battery and to stop the fan annoying me.

It uses the GPU but doesn't use it to actually decode video on linux.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726

Bug opened 4 years ago. Hundreds of millions in revenue and can't task one person for a summer to hook into the support that already exists.

> Hundreds of millions in revenue

and probably < 0.5% of it due to its linux userbase?

It's not that they have huge userbase lately, so they could afford to lose it any further.

What would you consider a huge userbase?

Firefox has 230 million monthly users, using FF for an average of over 5 hours per day.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

Given that Linux has 2% desktop market share (let's be generous) and Firefox has 10% (let's be generous the same way), that would mean that Linux has potential to be 20% of Firefox users. Is that something you are going to ignore?

Many executives would sell their families for less opportunity.

The big difference is that those executives would be getting money out of those 20% customer base.

I seriously doubt that those 20% Firefox users even consider doing a $1 donation.

Firefox makes money from the install base via the search engine default setting. Fairly sure more so than donations

Might be, is there any official numbers?

After all plenty also switch to other search engines.

Are you sure? I bet 99% just leave it configured to use google.

Linux distros tend to ship with firefox and linux users are more concerned with open source. It would be strange if the percentage of mozillas userbase using linux was smaller than the general percentage of pc users running linux.

Its probably more fair to go on profit not revenue.

100 million in revenue * 2.18% is 2.2 million. A decrease of 10% of that is 220k. If engineers at mozilla are 150k then 3 months of work is aprox 38k.

This would put the break even point at losing 2% of its linux users by not spending the money.

there are a lot of assumptions in your reply.

> 3 months of work

according to whom? this will almost certainly need more than a single engineer's eyes on it. and even if it is 3 months, that's 3 months they don't spend working on features for 98% of their userbase.

i want this to happen as much as anyone, but i just don't see the compelling math here. it's a chicken-egg problem (if FF could use VA API [1], then more might switch to linux).

personally, i'm happy that Panfrost recently got mainlined.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Acceleration_API

It does on Windows and Mac. On Linux it does not but hopefully WebRender should pave the way to enabling it (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726).

Something is still extremely funky with video on macOS Firefox. Playing MP4s on YouTube still uses 200-400% more power than on Safari, and that's with transparent window disabled. Hell, Twitch turns my 2015 MBP into a vacuum cleaner but Safari barely breaks a sweat.

Have you tried using a Nightly build of Firefox? There's recently been some work to use CoreAnimation on MacOS to reduce power consumption that hasn't made it to the Beta or Release channels yet. (See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522)

There's also [0] which investigates streamed video including YouTube specifically.

While for all major platforms even including Windows on ARM64 the performance is good for VP9, and somewhat degraded for high resolution H264 videos, the results for Mac are bad across all of them. It's not even possible to playback videos with a 480p resolution, without being affected by a lot of framedrops.

In those 15s of playback a 480p VP9 video produces around 5 dropped frames, a 720p and 1080p video already ~45 dropped frames. Really worse it is with 4k@60fps videos which have more than 400 dropped frames even with a playback speed of 1.0x!

[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1576107

Forgot to mention that I use GNU/Linux. My bad.

> Gmail was still dog-slow the last time I tried, Youtube can send my fan into a frenzy and Docs is also regularly problematic.

It seems to work fine on my system running Ubuntu 18.04 with ublock origin installed. Which OS are you using?

Anecdotally with Firefox on macOS, Gmail is by far the worst offender. Switching inboxes/labels takes several seconds in FF and is near instant in Chrome. Scrolling performance in FF is also much worse.

In my opinion, macOS is definitely FF's weakest desktop platform. I've personally experienced terrible performance, out-of-place UI for the platform (e.g. default dropdowns), and just a generally less polished experience compared to Safari, Chrome, and Chromium derivatives.

I still use it as my default browser on macOS though because it does excel in other areas.

Interesting i never had such problems. I do webdev and Safari seems to be always the worst. But i dont use gmail.

I have zero problems with FF MacOS. Might be something in your setup?

Same for me, I tried the latest Nightly a couple days ago to test the CoreAnimation work, and after 1 hour of use my Slack tab because so unbearably sluggish each keypress would take 1 second to render.

No extensions, no GIFs, no heavy tabs open, perhaps one or two open tabs.

No slowdowns at all after 8 hours on Slack w/ Safari or Brave. Firefox is definitely the worst browser on macOS, compared to the Windows version where it's absolutely perfect and always quick.

I know about the CoreAnimation work. Hadn't heard about this accumulated sluggishness that you describe. Have you tried safe mode? A "Refresh"?

It was an installation from scratch, no leftover files or configs. And I actually did a manual refresh in the preferences.

Yea YouTube performance is nuts! It seems to be exacerbated when playing in full screen or @2x speed as well.

Google has been getting better though with supporting FF. They now support Hangouts on FF and Gmail is actually faster for me in FF than it is in Chrome.

On Edge the slowness increases to the point that loading a ZX Spectrum game from tape feels psychologly faster.

A mute point however now with EdgeChrome.

Not to nitpick, but it's "a moot point".

Fun fact, the word "moot" has the same origin as "meet". A "moot point" was originally "something that has to be discussed and decided at a meeting" (like a town hall or similar). Thus there was no sense in discussing it, since it was up to the meeting to decide. Also, scouts still call their congregations "a moot".

Thanks for the correction.

Nowadays I have two sources of errors when writing.

My own lack of knowledge, or incorrect knowledge, and then the stupid auto corrections that just go down the drain due to me mostly typing across multiple languages. </small rant mode>

So whatever caused it, thanks again.

I wanted to keep using FF despite being a gmail user so much so that I switched to Thunderbird for my emails.

I guess Mozilla wins this way.

I did the same and then ditched gmail for payed email service + my domain.

Thumderbird is underrated.

Same here. Gmail is only an easy way to aggregate my emails, which I used yahoo for, and eventually might use something else.

Back home, Thunderbird, and the occasional donations.

I thought Thunderbird was not under development anymore?

They released a new version on the 27th of August[1]. It looks like it that was the first release since August 2018[2].

[1]: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/68.0/releaseno...

[2]: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/60.0/releaseno...

I believe Thunderbird is now ESR. So it gets a major version then security updates for a year until the next one.

What is the meaning of ESR? Because that sounds like life support to the layman.

Nah. I means Extended Support Release. After Firefox moved to the quicker release train, larger organizations were annoyed because they like stability in order to test stuff prior to release and make sure extensions and everything remains the same. So like Ubuntu (iirc) and some others, they created a Firefox ESR that gets security updates and only major updates ~once a year. I think Thunderbird actually just tracks with Firefox ESR.

Do you want your mail reader constantly tracking the latest web tech?

The layman hates updates.

It's been a weird story. Here's how I remember things going:

1. Mozilla Corp. dropped Thunderbird as one of their projects, and told the community they would have to figure out how to move ahead with the project if they wanted to. News of "Thunderbird is dead" spread out after this announcement.

2. It turned out there was plenty of interest in the project among the public. Donations came in, and the project was kept alive. They established the "Thunderbird Council" as their governance body.

3. The project still needed some legal home and assistance. The Mozilla Foundation (the non-profit) offered to serve as that. The council studied several options and decided to accept this offer.

And this is how they got here: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/about/

I solve this by using Firefox for all web browsing, and Chrome for gmail/gapps/anything by google.

It sucks that we have to do that, but I can't entirely blame them for making their own products work better on their own browser.

Rambox was a FOSS desktop app based on Electron to house all your Chrome apps in tabs.

Rambox went proprietary, but was forked into Hamsket. Might be easier than what you're using now.

https://github.com/TheGoddessInari/hamsket

> It sucks that we have to do that, but I can't entirely blame them for making their own products work better on their own browser.

You mean like MS for a long time did with MSIE?

Are we really back in the 90s, back to “This page works best in $one_specific_browser”?

This is not the future I was hoping for... On the flip side I can use Linux for almost anything, so i guess it’s not all bad.

Well .. consider you are back in the 90s ... would you think in general, that this is "the future you was hoping for..."?

I was considering a future of native applications, connected via network protocols, with the browser being used for hypertext documents.

> Are we really back in the 90s, back to “This page works best in $one_specific_browser”?

Do webdevs really check for Chrome AND Firefox compatibility? The devs I know consider the job done as long as their site works with Chrome.

This... is more fraught than you might guess. Really fiddly details can make things look goofy if you don't check.

> Do webdevs really check for Chrome AND Firefox compatibility? The devs I know consider the job done as long as their site works with Chrome.

That would technically only make them Chrome-devs.

Yes, because Google is a cool company, do no evil and such.

Just like you can't blame Microsoft for making ActiveX work best on Windows.

If they did it while talking about open standards, then we would.

If it's any consolation, Gmail is dog-slow on my Samsung Chromebook 3. I switched to "Basic HTML" mode to make it bearable.

Speaking of good tech blogs, Netflix has an excellent one as well.

Do they have a doc detailing the full architectural design? I feel like I'm walking into a movie during the last 15 minutes.

I suggest checking out the Dolphin Emulator tech blogs as well, they're also consistently great in quality. https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/

Gmail is really crazy slow on Firefox, it’s such a deal breaker. I have regularly 30s to load the web application, it’s closer to 2-5s on Edge with the same setup (same ad blockers, etc).

I suspect this is because chrome supports WebSQL while Firefox does not.

I suspect you have suspected incorrectly: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/audits/we...

I realize Mozilla spearheaded an effort to remove webSQL from the standards. But chrome still uses it for fulltext search in gmail.

https://caniuse.com/#search=websql

https://nolanlawson.com/tag/websql/

That has to be something wrong with your PC, it only takes a few seconds on even my 6 year old laptop on Firefox to load up from zero. Switching between folders is under a second as is opening an email. Firefox (latest Ubuntu)

I don't know about Gmail or Docs, but IME (also on linux) Youtube doesn't work in any browser[0]; I'd recommend http://youtube-dl.org/ and a real video player.

0: Even with remote code execution vulnerabilities enabled it shows a corporate spam clip instead of the video I'm trying to watch.

It is mostly par with Chrome now pretty much everywhere. Well browsing most website should not trigger lag in any browsers. But if we look at benchmarcks: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-...

Amended to "feels on par".

Baseline interpreter is a good example of doing things that help most Web pages instead of benchmarks. One of the major things that ARES-6 and other benchmarks test is whether generators are JIT'd, for example. This doesn't really help Web pages, as it's a rarely used feature at present and even rarer in hot loops.

SpiderMonkey should get around to jitting generators, but I have a hard time blaming the team for focusing on real-world improvements first.

Pcwalton! While I agree that most synthetic benchmarcks are mostly not representative for the real world, there is a benchmarck suite for real world.

That is benchmarcking most used ALEXA websites. It's named TP 5 and TP6, mozilla use it internally (e. G to measure progress on stylo) Why is the real world (TP5/6) not public?? Phoronix has never used it, mozilla has never publicly published benchmarcks. I guess they favor chromium but I've never seen all results only the few mozillians posted on bugzilla. Let the world know, publish the results, even if it favor chromium. Anyway the mainstream will never be affected by that public information (most people have difficulties discerning a search engine from the concept of browser, let alone talking about benchmarcks)

Did you look at the raptor dashboards? Let me help you: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perf.html#/graphs?timerange=2...

Thank you! But without being able to compare it with chromium the results are meaningless to my brain.

You're free to port it to Chromium and run it yourself.

JSC's async-await is constructed on the generator's mechanism so that high performance generator is critical for all the web code using async functions. Not sure how SpiderMonkey is doing.

As the gp said, async/await is rarely used in hot loops, so it would probably never get jit-ed in a real webpage.

I don’t agree given that async iterator can be iterated. But I’m ok if SpiderMonkey folks thinks so ;)

Async is mainly useful for asynchronous operations, like network requests if file system access. If used in this context, the loop cannot be "hot"…

Maybe there are people (ab)using the async stuf do do something else, but at least it's not really common.

I'm sure SM will get around to jitting that stuff at some point. All I'm saying is that Baseline Interpreter gives users bigger wins right now.

Does anyone know if those same phoronix tests have been run against the new Firefox 70 Nightly or Developer Edition apps?

I'd be curious to see how 68 versus 69 versus 70 compare.

I don't think it has yet been done. But as you probably noticed he tested with webrender too

I mean, WebRender and spidermonkey are two separate things.

YouTube freezes so damn much. Very annoying. But probably good since I watch too much damn YouTube haha.

> Gmail was still dog-slow the last time I tried

I use the HTML version instead to deal with this issue

My yt experience is both play @ same frames but firefox waits for a couple of seconds before I'm able to click play / when I skip to a part in the video - whereas chrome is instant in both cases which can becoming annoying

Confluence is also pretty bad on firefox for whatever reason, so I'm pretty sure this is going to be a problem wherever chrome is the dominant browser in the dev culture there.

All the Atlassian suite is somehow dog slow on Firefox on Mac. They're unusable.

I still need to either use chrome on android or explicitly navigate to the mobile page to get the title text on xkcd.com ... android firefox cuts the title text off with no apparent way to read the full one :/

Just use the mobile version, works fine on android ff

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