This is useful feedback for building non browser uis. Instant feedback followed by a progressive loading rather than build it all then render.

> Chrome takes 102-200ms to render the page, Firefox takes 150-400ms. 1.5 to 2x slower -- and that's after all the performance upgrades they've done with Rust and Quantum.

How did you actually measure this? I wonder whether these small timing differences may just be differences in how the respective dev tools report the timing info.

FWIW I also don't think the relative difference will be this large for bigger sites - I'd be very surprised if a site that takes 1s to load in Chrome would take 1.5-2s in Firefox.

I'm using Firefox and getting navigation times on par with Chromium when loading simple documents (tested with example.com).

From pressing enter to the browser initiating a fetch was around 16ms.

Also performance issues, especially on Linux. Fan works in ~50% of my laptop usage.

This is always the answer for me. I stayed on Firefox long after most of my friends had switched to Chrome back when it came out, but it was eventually impossible to deny the difference. Every time I've tried to switch back over the years, the difference in latency is still noticeable.

I am using Firefox now for almost 7 years as my main browser (Chrome still installed for some pages not properly working in other Browser). But the number you are mentioning here are just not true with current versions of both browsers. Overall I agree that FF still has potential to improve it’s rendering performance (like every other browser). But as an end user it’s not noticeable anymore. Quite the opposite is the case for me since FF always used way less resources than Chrome on my notebook.

Firefox does support media keys, but it's experimental and you have to enable them in about:config:

- media.hardwaremediakeys.enabled

- dom.media.mediasession.enabled

#1 seems nice. Note however that Firefox was safer even before they introduced their permissions system simply by having a review system that works.

The review system of Chrome Web Store is broken, there's a lot of malware on it, extensions bought and turned malware and then you've got completely legitimate extensions being banned due to some automatic process flagging them. And then it's really hard to get in touch with humans. All the while reported malware take months to be taken down.

Of course, it's also true that Chrome is simply the bigger target. And what Mozilla is doing now probably doesn't scale. But for now Firefox's ecosystem of add-ons is much, much safer (and arguably more useful). Has been that way for some time.

I used to complain that it doesn't have a permissions system, I then complained that you can't disable add-ons in private mode. But it keeps evolving and I'm sure it will implement your favorite too, if useful.

Chrome had v8, it was fast. Forefox sort of got left behind performance wise.

You could still have a million tabs open, something chrome struggled with, so it kept some users.

But it took quantum to get users back.

First, old firefox (pre-quantum) really started to be slow and non-competitive.

Second, Google actually were caught on making their resources work worse on firefox and other competitors with some hacks.

E.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

Assuming that literally everyone use gmail, youtube, etc - it had looked that mozilla doesn't work reliably for end users.

I moved because Chrome shown a nice promise in speed, standard support and features, it seemed a good move. Same move I did back in the day when Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4, it was so good in comparison with Netscape 3-4 than it was too late when i got tired of it.

The devtools really were ahead of any browser.

For the average person it was so much faster than ie 6,7,8,9 and google pushed it everywhere.

It comes default on android helps.

I can’t speak for the users of other OS, but for a long time Firefox was essentially unusable for me on OSX.

I have always liked Mozilla though so kept trying builds over time, eventually leading up to Quantum the nightlies became better and better and it was easy to switch back at that point.

What a shame it happened in the first place though.

Other than the performance, I think Mozilla changed their focus to browser based mobile operating systems and starved Firefox from developer talent.

Chrome was waaaaaay faster. It made Firefox look like a student project. I held out a lot longer than all of my laymen friends, but the gap eventually was hard to ignore.

There were also a ton of innovations that caused real quality of life improvements that it took firefox an incredibly long time to catch up to, like process isolation preventing a single misbehaving tab from crashing your entire session.

I've never used a Chromium-variant as a primary browser. Used Opera until they switched to Chromium and their Presto-based brower became untenable, then switched to Firefox.

Have you written about your experience with Firefox somewhere else? I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

I just wrote another comment here about its performance, about how I want it to succeed, how I donate to Mozilla, and yet still use a Chromium-based browser due to the performance issues.

At this point (I mean, they've literally invented a new programming language to make it faster, and it's still slow) I think the only thing left to do is to learn C++ and Rust and fix it myself...

I have the feeling that Firefox development is a bit distanced from the real users.

It's bugzilla is quite unfriendly, and pretty much everything users wish for is already there, in a ticket that is several years old with no action taken.

An then, the next Firefox version comes with some crappy UX decision made, and it is not configurable. /r/Firefox comes up with _yet another_ userChrome.css tweak to revert it.

And the cycle continues as the user base grows thin. I wonder why.