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Comment by 0x5002 | Hacker News Reader

For non-technical people, this is not surprising, as Google shoves it down your throat when you go to their website(s).

For technical folks, I really don't understand it - I'm not a web developer, so my use case might be different, but I really don't see what exactly people are missing. I've never had issues with browser performance (I use FF on mac, Windows, Linux, and (slow out of the box) development Linux VMs).

People here usually complain about performance, but how does one even objectively measure that? Do people's browsers freeze up? Do websites load noticeably slower?

This is a genuine question - not just a rant.

As a side node, syncing to your own server is a huge feature for me - as far as I'm aware, Chrome can't do that. That + DDG as default search engine is an open alternative to Google's/Chrome's monopoly, which in my opinion should take precedence over pure convenience for the audience of HN.

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Anything but Safari takes an hour or two off my laptop's battery life and harms systemwide performance more than Safari does. Yes, still. I open FF or Chrome for specific purposes then close them as fast as I can. It's bad enough that I have Electron running amok on my system—all the more important that my actual web browser respect power use, memory, and processor cycles.

Maybe give Firefox 70 a try when it comes out next week? They've redone animation rendering on macOS to do it the same way Safari does, which should increase performance and reduce battery consumption.

Last I saw the favorable comparison for the upcoming performance improvements was "now uses as little battery and performs as well as Chrome"... so I'll try it—I mean I do use it pretty often anyway in short bursts—but there's a ways between that and Safari.

[EDIT] to be clear, I'm rooting for them. I've used Firefox since it was Phoenix. And Firebird. Back then I evangelized it, hard. I've not loved it since somewhere in the 2.x range, but I wish I could again. It's just, you know, been a while.

Unpopular opinion: as a "technical" person, Mozilla and Firefox's behavior over the last few years really should raise red flags in the technical community. The various so-called "experiments" with advertising and other features might have helped with the bottom line, but it erodes confidence at a time where people are more conscious of privacy-related matters. Even the open source advocates should consider that huge parts of Pocket are still closed source

[1] https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/31/mozilla-ad-on-firefoxs-ne...

[2] https://www.ghacks.net/2017/10/06/mozilla-to-launch-firefox-...

[3] https://drewdevault.com/2017/12/16/Firefox-is-on-a-slippery-...

[4] https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/update-looking-glass-add/

[5] https://github.com/Pocket/extension-save-to-pocket/issues/75

I've switched from Chromium to Firefox on Ubuntu. Performance has been a bit worse with regards to rendering, tab switching etc. The scrolling isn't as smooth in Firefox. Otoh, Firefox stays responsive even if one page runs a lot of scripts; it freezes the tab, not the browser (as Chromium does).

It's not necessarily an issue for me, I won't switch back because of it, and I like Firefox for development, though the Chromium dev tools are still a bit better in some regards, but yeah, lower performance has been noticeable for me.

I don't remember what made me switch on Desktop, but I had switched on android before, simply because the internet was unusable on Chrome with ads.

For me, firefox's touchpad scrolling is much smoother than chromium's on linux.

Also, firefox implements kinetic touchpad scrolling on linux, whereas chromium still does not (this is a huge missing feature IMO)

I've noticed on MacOS (on two MBPs) that Firefox 69 (with ublock origin as only plugin) is noticeably slower to render / lay out sites and maybe download content than Chrome (with ublock origin as only plugin) on same machines. Battery life is noticeably worse as well compared to Chrome.

I've switched though to using Firefox despite the above on MacOS at least.

On Linux however, Firefox seems quite a bit worse than Firefox to the extent that it's approaching "painful" levels to use it - scrolling is very laggy (messed around with hardware accel, drivers, etc), downloading / rendering is noticeably slower, etc. (Same setup of only plugin in each browser on Linux being ublock origin). Even starting it seems much slower (with cold FS caches). This is on several Linux machines, and seems pretty universal in my experience.

At work, we have to use the internet through a VDI terminal (main network is completely segregated from internet), and I've noticed that with this setup, Firefox is even slower than my "native" Linux comparisons. Also, as I can see the network traffic between the VDI and my machine, I've also noticed that a single blank page window in Firefox keeps sending updates (300KB/sec, like it's refreshing constantly in an event loop or something), whilst a blank page window in Chrome has no updates, which seems a bit weird to me, and indicates something's non-optimal in Firefox, as I don't see why a blank page should cause firefox to apparently re-render stuff...

Yeah I do not exactly understand why FF is not the preferred browser of developers either. :shrug emoji:

I can't speak for others, but

>[...] which in my opinion should take precedence over pure convenience for the audience of HN.

is a no from me. Maybe I've done tech too long, but I don't feel obliged to ditch convenience for nerdcred or the feeling of authenticity or whatever your frame is. Several years ago, FF was slower -talking margins of magnitude- for me, both on windows and linux-machines. Maybe it was due to addons and whatnot, but I migrated to Chrome, and, in simple words, had no UX-related reason to switch back ever since. Chrome does what I want it to do, and I cba to switch back to FF unless I'll actually start seeing ads again. And I'm not a webdev either, for that matter.

When you say "orders of magnitude" slower, are you referring to specific measurements you made, or are you just saying that Firefox seemed a lot slower?

> I don't feel obliged to ditch convenience for nerdcred or the feeling of authenticity or whatever your frame is.

That's an awfully dismissive way of putting it given the prevailing topic of this thread: privacy. Firefox isn't perfect in that regard, but I trust Mozilla a hell of a lot more than I trust Google.

Not to mention I don't want Google dictating how the web works through sheer force of market share. It's like nobody remembers the 90s and IE anymore. Do we really want a repeat of that?

Obviously there's a line to be drawn: when "convenience" turns into "browsing is actually a difficult chore because FF has bugs X, Y, Z", then sure, it's of course understandable that you'd ditch FF for an alternative. But I don't think that experience should be common.

Actions speak louder than words, and the actions of Mozilla in the last few years surrounding so-called "experiments" makes Google look like the more trustworthy actor wrt browser components. At least Google never called ads "user-enhancing"

[1] https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504

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