Hacker News Reader

Comment by deugtniet | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla is really fighting the good fight for the users privacy. I've been using Firefox for as long as I can remember, even when there were faster and more fancy alternatives available. Their ideology and service to the user is what makes me loyal to them

View on HN

I've noticed that Firefox has become even snappier than Chrome.

One big advantage is that I now have way more addons installed on Firefox that would otherwise make Chrome utterly slow and unusable.

I have tried regular as well as the developer version of Firefox, but no matter what I use, YouTube videos always skip frames after every 10-15 seconds or so. So I use Brave for YouTube and other WebGL heavy stuff and Firefox developer version for daily browsing.

That sounds very strange. Certainly don't see that in Firefox on Mac (work laptop) and both Linux and Windows (personal laptop). Try adding the h.264 extension. That forces YouTube to provide h.264 videos which is hardware accelerated on pretty much any hardware.

Adding that extension disables 4k video on YouTube.

Tried the addon. Still nothing. I have also tried clean installing Firefox with no addons, but same issue.

I don't know if you're on Linux. But I had issues with Youtube as well. Two things helped me an updated graphics driver and Wayland.

I'm on Windows 10 with latest drivers for Nvidia 1050Ti. Still the same issue.

> even when there were faster and more fancy alternatives available

This seems to indicates there's not faster alternatives around anymore, but the last time I tried FF (4-6 months ago) I couldn't make the transition because the lag was pretty obvious when coming from Chrome based browsers. Is this not the case anymore?

No. I still use Firefox, but when I use Edge or Chrome it hurts a bit just how much snappier they are.

I think this might be more about perception than anything else.

I've used Firefox since 2006, and Chrome always seemed heavier, laggier and uglier. Maybe it's the snappy iOS-like animation when you scroll to the bottom of the page that makes it seem snappier?

It's not imaginary - for years Firefox drained battery on macbooks really fast. Then there is this pesky issue of randomly freezing whole laptop for a minute or so, usually associated with file uploads or locking screen [1], [2], [3], ... Fixed in one version, then appears again in the next version.

I still used Firefox a lot for various reasons (and still do), but I'm not blind to how it performed.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1595998 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1415923 [3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1489785

How much faster is it for you guys? I legitimately can not tell the difference.

I find them to be close enough to imperceptible for just normal html and css etc.

The stumbling block for me as FireFox user is I am increasingly bumping into web apps that preform poorly in FF but are fine in Chrome for one reason or another. One instance I bump into a lot is ElasticSearches Kibana runs like trash in FF for some reason.

It sounds like the old "nobody uses Firefox because nobody tests on Firefox because nobody uses Firefox" vicious cycle, unfortunately.

I am guessing performance differences might be masked by good hardware? Sometimes performance differences don't show up until you use an underpowered machine.

I don't think it's just that. I have a half-dead Chromebook with linux, and I use Firefox on it. Some years back I ran Chrome on it because it worked better, but at some point I started seeing issues with Chrome and tried Firefox again. I've been using Firefox since.

Did you see lag on all websites? Or in specific instances? Which platform and on what kind of hardware?

I use Firefox and Chrome at the same time and I don't really notice any difference. Maybe a bit for Google apps (Hangouts, Docs, Meet, etc) but I just see that as a symptom of Google's attempts at using their market dominance to harm competitors, which makes me want to use Firefox even more.

It seems to me that Google is always trying to make their products run much slower on browsers that aren't Chrome.

It's unlikely they put any effort into intentionally make them run slower, it's just that they are written to work optimally on Chrome and minor differences in the behavior of things like the V8 vs. SpiderMonkey and Blink vs Gecko. Given that each one is written with different tradeoffs, it's not surprising things perform differently.

Whether or not the Google programmers use specific proprietary knowledge about the behavior of Chrome to optimize performance is different. If they do, that would be similar to the things that got Microsoft in trouble.

I'd agree with you, except for Google's long and sordid history of doing exactly that, time and time again (found with a 30-second search):

https://tech.co/news/google-slowed-youtube-firefox-edge-2019...

https://www.techspot.com/news/79672-google-accused-sabotagin...

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

Google knows that every time they release a Firefox bug, FF's user percentage goes down a tiny bit. Repeat over dozens of bugs, for years, and you have a strategy.

There's one blog post from another Mozillian that I can't find anywhere that came out within the last year with other examples, I think it was on HN.

I read that post. It was enough to convince me of malice at the time. I don't have the link though.

> There's one blog post from another Mozillian that I can't find anywhere

You are looking for https://web.archive.org/web/20180728122724if_/https://twitte...

What is your opinion of Brave Browser.

I use Brave + Ublock exclusively.

I haven't tried Brave, never understood the point of it. What does Brave + uBlock offer you that Firefox + uBlock doesn't?

I hope you mean uBlock Origin.

Brave and uBO share filter tech and we aim to make uBO unnecessary (this may require setting shields to aggressive). We do much more than any extension can do, and Google has made it clear they will further restrict extension APIs.

https://www.theregister.com/2019/05/29/google_webrequest_api...

https://brave.com/privacy-updates-7/ (latest in series)

What does Google restricting APIs in Chrome have to do with Firefox? I haven't heard of any plans like that from them.

Firefox has had same API as Chrome for a while.

Did you have ublock origin installed on Firefox?

I feel that most people complaining about slow browsers have no blocker installed.

My CPU immediately pumps to 100% usage after opening google docs. Granted, it's on my old laptop, but I can use electron apps and they run far better than gdocs.

Interesting, I have uBlock Origin and indeed I can't tell the difference between Chrome and Firefox.

Firefox is fine and quick as long as you don't need to use any heavy Google apps. Some people might even consider this a plus. For me, between work and personal use I'm effectively married to Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Hangouts. Unfortunately that makes Firefox a non-starter for me. Not to mention Firefox's privacy settings trigger countless reCAPTCHA gates across most of GSuite. I get that this is not Firefox's "fault" and it's done intentionally by Google, but as a user it becomes my problem.

I really want Firefox to work for me and I'd love to drop Chrome, but last time FF made big noise about performance improvements I tried it out and Gmail was still unusably slow.

FWIW I use all of those apps on a daily basis with Firefox and have not noticed any performance issues. It may be worth giving it another try if you haven't in a while.

Indeed. Hangouts is one I find works better in Firefox even! But I observe it seems to vary. Perhaps Intel Macs has some quirks that makes it more peformant and reliable in Firefox.

I switched to FF when Quantum came out. I use it exclusively. Not because I hate Chrome, but because I don't see any need for chrome. Once in a while I see a website that forces me to use something other than FF. But it happens rarely, and it is mostly some webgl-based under-development demo website.

I even use it on my phone. The mobile version is definitely worse than Chrome, but it has plugins (or it used to! nowadays it only support a few popular ones which is a shame) and also I can send tabs from my phone to my computer (which is a better place to read articles anyways).

I switched back to Firefox last week and I had the same experience -- Google apps and Slack were dog slow. But after a day or so they were working fine, I imagine it's a matter of populating the cache. YMMV.

Have not ever noticed any performance problems using FF for Google products, personally. Works great.

I use Google Calendar and Google Docs without any issues in Firefox. I agree Gmail is coded terribly and do not use the web site! I stick to using Thunderbird on the computer, and checking email on my phone. Have not been using Hangouts for a couple years, though.

For me, the way Google is keeping Gmail terrible for other browsers is exactly the reason to not use Chrome. No way I'm OK with that.

It also depends upon the operating system among several other variables,

I didn't find noticeable difference between FF and Chrome based browsers(Vivaldi, Edge) on macOS(although Safari runs circles around them) after using them extensively. I used each of them for a separate project with several common websites loaded in them, there were different quirks for each browser(especially reg tab hibernation) but latency was not one of them.

On Linux FF seems definitely faster than Chromium, although there are occasional DNS errors which stops loading the web pages altogether(likely result of my own doing). I've stopped having different browsers for different projects and just use FF for all.

On Android with Chrome, not just Chrome but even WebView using it is astonishingly fast(e.g. DDG browser), I presume it's because of data saver feature. On de-googled android like LineageOS, FF/Fennec seems to be on same level as Chromium and DDG is faster here as well.

On iOS, everything is Safari.

I don't use Windows much, but I've seen others mentioning Edge seems to be faster than Chrome recently.

I switched from Chrome to Firefox about a year and a half ago. Chrome definitely felt more snappy, but the difference wasn't that much.

Except on Facebook. My Facebook tab is incredibly laggy, and gets more and more laggy the longer I leave it open. I'm one of those users that tends to keep 50+ tabs open, and I have to close and reopen the Facebook tab at least once a day to keep it from becoming a nearly frozen mess. Even then, if a video is playing and I click it to make it fill the window, it takes several seconds for it to happen. And with an i9-9900K, 32 GB of RAM, RTX 3080, and a 1 TB NVMe drive, my computer is definitely no slouch.

But facebook is a pile of... like I have a screenshot of FF’s task manager showing facebook using 800 MB of memory!

In a way I see it as a win, I really really hate opening it on desktop.

Keep in mind that Firefox opens their website on first run and on every update and that includes Google Analytics.

I find the majority of their privacy claims dubious and dangerously misleading for those that don't know any better. If they were serious about privacy they'd offer uBlock Origin (or equivalent functionality) preinstalled by default.

Their current countermeasures such as containers, tracking protection and this cookie thing is trivial to bypass with browser fingerprinting and IP address tracking if you have a global view of the Internet (which Facebook and Google do have).

What do you think of enabling letterboxing, uBlock, and DoH to prevent fingerprinting?

Are there any other config changes you would recommend to Firefox to harden it?

> Keep in mind that Firefox opens their website [...] on every update

I haven't experienced this since the rapid release schedule started. They're pretty silent now.

Not only that, but Firefox for US users will track what websites you visit to target their discover campaign content.

https://discover.buysellads.com/firefox-new-tab

From Mozilla's Firefox New Tab FAQ:

"neither Mozilla nor Pocket ever receives a copy of your browser history. When personalization does occur, recommendations rely on a process of story sorting and filtering that happens locally in your personal copy of Firefox."

https://help.getpocket.com/article/1142-firefox-new-tab-reco...

I modified the settings long ago to come up with a blank tab on startup. I use NoScript and do not allow google analytics through. No facebook domains make it through NoScript as far as javascript is concerned, very few google ones do.

I get you about the updates. It's a risk-reward ratio I accept because firefox + noscript + always starting in a private session is way more helpful than the update problem is harmful. Using a VPN a lot of the time helps, too. There is no solution I know of that is perfect. My threat model is pretty relaxed, though, so what I do is mostly for my peace of mind. You have reminded me that I should start spoofing my user agent again.

I don't disagree that it's possible to configure Firefox to respect your privacy. I myself use it sometimes and have a similar configuration.

But it is extremely misleading for them to be shouting "privacy" at every opportunity while the truth is that their browser leaks personal data like a sieve in the default configuration. This would give a false sense of security to non-technical people who don't have the skills to see through these lies.

And here are the FUD-spreaders yet again, that instead of the tiny “bad” things like some form of harmless analytics (it is not even that) they would run towards the goddamn gate of Hell itself. Like, what do you imagine chrome does? Or do you think brave have eveything removed? It’s the exact same browser with different name and logo and preinstalled adblocker..

Sorry for the somewhat angry comment, but I honestly can’t understand this mentality.

Google Analytics isn't harmless though. It's giving a single party a wide view on the entire Internet (thus the ability to circumvent cookie-based tracking by just using IP addresses and heuristics) and said party makes its money by tracking people online.

I'm not saying Chrome is any better, but at least Chrome doesn't toot the "privacy" horn at every opportunity.

Brave does have some kind of blocker built-in which might actually help even if it's not perfect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com