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Comment by yummypaint | Hacker News Reader

Firefox is already the best browser and has been for a long time. The problem is that most laypeople don't even know it exists. Combined with dark patterns used by microsoft and google to steer users toward their own browsers, it's an uphill battle. I'll stick firefox and appropriate extensions on a friends computer so they can watch youtube etc completely ad free, which is a major tangible QOL improvement, but then find them watching ads in ms edge a few days later without having realized.

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I don't know about Windows or Linux, but on Mac it's far from the best browser. It uses more resources (power/battery, memory, etc) than Safari (and sometimes Chrome[ium]), the UI is a mix of old and new code, and system integration is worse than Safari and Chrome.

I use it, but both Chromium and Safari are better on this platform.

It's not that Firefox isn't an excellent browser on its own, but on macOS Safari rises the bar very high if you care about details (most people don't).

How's that? It seems to be the least standards-compliant browser with any significant user share.

Yes, Safari is the most buggy browser in common use other than IE11. It's also the one that uses the least battery life, it's standards-compliant enough to render most web pages, and it's the only option on iOS.

> It's also the one that uses the least battery life

Battery life has always been very top priority for Apple. That's the reason why Apple stopped supporting Flash and basically killed it (thank gosh).

It's somewhat a myth that Safari is less standard-compliant. True, Safari's release cycle is slower and Apple has the motivation to prevent PWAs to become too good, but in many things Safari has always been very innovative browser.

Built on top of KHTML foundation, it then became webkit and later the most successfull engine. It was the first to implement full ES6 support, and basically invented CSS transformations/transitions (really amazing stuff back then but not really used until all major browsers caught up years later), was the first to ditch Flash support, has argueably the best privacy policy, has superb font rendering, etc.

Internet explorer is also a very innovative browser. It introduced XHR and a bunch of other stuff. But that is a different measure from standards-compliant.

Yes, IE was very innovative in its heyday (up to version 4). But back then there was no strong standard body (sort of status quo) like we have today, and due to Windows monopoly they could come up with stuff which was never even intented to be implemented by other vendors (well, Mozilla). You cannot really compare that era to today's situation.

Well, at least for me, Safari is often still the fastest browser and has long been the best at power management (important when you're running on battery power). And I like its UI a little more; its tabs, for instance, are native macOS tabs. Firefox and Chrome both make up their own stuff.

As far as "least standards-compliant," I understand that when it comes to supporting progressive web apps, Safari has largely dropped the ball, but in day-to-day practice there just aren't many sites that I have trouble with on Safari. (The biggest one seems to be new Reddit, and I am not entirely convinced that issue is on Safari's end.)

I disagree with this. Safari and Chrome are both noticeably better than Firefox on OSX.

I'm a Firefox fanboy, still use it on OSX because it's important to me, but the amount of random pauses, crashes, etc is just painful on OSX. It's like none of the Firefox developers use it on OSX or something.

And before someone says "oh it's your extensions", that IMO leads to two talking points

1. It's 2020 and major extensions still cause memory leaks in Firefox. Debugging them isn't easy at all. Almost all of the resources say something like "Run in safe mode and see if it fixes things" and then lots of posts of "post your about:memory here and I'll analyze it." I'm a software engineer by trade and it's been difficult for me to diagnose...

2. Nah because I don't run any extensions on my OSX firefox install

Sorry for nitpicking, but it's 2020 and OS X has been called macOS since 2015 ;)

Well, if we’re nitpicking, it was 2016, not 2015 :)

And wow. Has it really been that long? I thought it was like 2 years ago, so when I first saw your comment, I had to go check myself!

In places. In some places it's still called Mac OS X.

I've run nightly on crap macbooks for 3 years and had 0 of this experience. I run uBlock origin as one of my only extensions.

if you care about details (most people don't).

Most people don't care about battery life?

This. I was a FireFox long time supporter, but switched off when I started using Mac as my daily driver. It crashed more, used more resources, etc than Safari, Chrome, and Brave.

I also stopped recommending it to randos when they started coming back and complaining about weird behavior. Now if I don’t know someone and want them to just have the simplest working experience I recommend Safari on Mac and Brave on windows.

There's some kind of longstanding bug with non-default scaling on Mac apparently. It's great on Linux, but it's hard to get Mac friends to switch over.

For me Firefox has been chasing the Chrome market share by trying to replicate the Chrome user experience for so long it's no longer distinct from Chrome in a meaningful way. Give me the Firefox experience from ten years ago and I'll drop Chrome on the spot.

So, slow? I switched from FF to Chrome back then because Chrome was much faster. Before Quantum, FF couldn’t hold a candle to Chrome performance-wise.

Disclaimer: For my use-case, which did not include having 1000 tabs open forever.

Slow and does what you need it to do beats fast while not doing what you need it to do.

>Firefox is already the best browser and has been for a long time.

I used FF for years before switching to chrome when it came out. Every attempt I've made since to switch back (windows and macOS) as been a disaster. Hogging resources, pages that skip around while scrolling, and rendering issues (perhaps GPU related) are a few of the numerous issues I've run into.

I try to switch back to FF about twice a year. I'm going on about a eight years with no success.

Firefox isn't even the best browser on Linux.

On my aarch64 devices, Chromium in a Docker image loads faster, never dominates the CPU, renders video and websites faster, and has working DRM. Firefox is slower in every respect and can't render Netflix.

Really? Firefox works fine with netflix on my pop_os laptop.

GP is talking about aarch64 Linux laptops, and IIUC Pop_OS uses x86_64.

The key is `aarch64` ;)

I don't think you can make a blanket statement like this. My experience has been almost the opposite, Chrome always uses significantly more CPU for me.

I think it really depends on hardware, drivers etc.

Opposite experience. For starters, Chromium doesn't even support video hardware decoding on Wayland properly.

That's unfair. Not even Emacs master works under Wayland. It's nowhere near a replacement for X.

> It's nowhere near a replacement for X.

It is for me and many others. Emacs works great under XWayland but Chromium HW video acceleration doesn't.

Emacs is a community project whereas Chromium has billions poured into it. Even Wine's getting Wayland support now and that ran under XWayland fine.

I don't think it's that unfair. Firefox on Linux is just better. Leaves some to be desired, sure, but a lot less than Chromium.

Using Firefox every day, somewhat on principle. The experience is nowhere as good as Chrome.

It takes FOREVER after starting Firefox to load saved tabs -- like 30 seconds to 1 minute of delay before the first tab starts to load.

Recently, it also has been updating quietly in the background and FORCING me to restart Firefox to view any content. I'm sure there's a setting I can change somewhere that makes it require manual updates. That should be the default.

It's definitely not the best browser on macOS.

or in Windows

I’ll have to disagree there. It’s by far the best on Windows.

Agreed with you, the best Firefox experience is on Windows. Hardware acceleration is on point, always very snappy rendering with no lag. Can't say the same about FF on macOS or Linux, where the experience is worse.

Support for CoreAnimation compositing was added last year. Support for hardware acceleration on Linux was added this week.

It's so weird to me this type of comment pops up on every firefox discussion, but I use firefox on mac everyday and it's rock solid, never run into any problems.

I think it's for non default scaling.

And the non-standard UI, the weird animations, the increased power consumption, the general non-macOS-ness of it all.

I disagree.

I've had so many issues with the Firefox Developer edition I stopped using it and have switched to Opera for my browsing needs.

Way more reliable, doesn't constantly hang and time out, and isn't a total resource hog like Firefox has become.

Speaking from personal experience doing user support in firefox IRC channel on freenode and formerly moznet, the vast majority of "resource hog" complaints are due to the user running AdBlock with a million block rules (or some similar addon). Occasionally it is a particular long running website with JS memory leaks though. Like a gmail pinned tab. In terms of performance, until recently a common issue was lack of default graphics acceleration on linux, requiring manually enabling layers.acceleration.force-enabled

How can someone determine this? I wonder Firefox itself does not tell me the resource issues are due to an extension.

Firefox has a suite of `about:` URLs[1], one of them is about:performance which will show you the Task Manager (their name) which has a sort of CPU and RAM column. It even shows you when it's javascript on a tab chewing up resources and not the extension.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/The...

about:about is the fastest way to look these up. :-)

I don't know if the situation has improved, but at least in past it seems about:performance has a problem picking out problems created by an addon doing a ton of DOM manipulation that chews up resources in the tab. Bisecting addons or my preference, a clean profile or safe mode, was usually what I suggested, but YMMV.

Firefox ought to have native blocking with a fast rules processing engine.

> The problem is that most laypeople don't even know it exists.

How can most people not know it exists, when it had a majority user share at some point?

That's when you change the edge icons in the shortcut bar and on the desktop to point to firefox.

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