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Comment by 88840-8855 | Hacker News Reader

I just switched from FF to Brave. Despite the unnecessarily built-in adblocking (I prefer blocking on router level + 2nd layer via ublock) and the BAT stuff, it is a good browser. It feels so fast and snappy. I wished FF was as fast.

Macbook Air M1

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The best I ever did for performance was switching away from macOS. Sure, Safari and Chrome is really fast on Mac hardware/macOS, but nothing beats the performance of Firefox on Linux.

Sure, and FF for Linux was always second to FF for Windows, where the experience was better than both platforms.

On Linux hardware accel is still iffy, on macOS they implemented support for CoreAnimation one or two years ago, and still looks out of place with the rest of the OS.

> Sure, and FF for Linux was always second to FF for Windows, where the experience was better than both platforms.

Not for me on desktop with a pretty well specced machine, Firefox still runs better on Linux than Windows and I constantly boot into the other during one day.

Good or bad specced machine, it's fun seeing the Firefox process use 150% CPU when playing a 4K video with no hardware acceleration. Meanwhile it uses 15% CPU on Windows.

Might be my underpowered 10900K or $1500 GPU.

> nothing beats the performance of Firefox on Linux

Firefox on Windows does.

Yeah I moved away from FF as well after they got too political, very happy with Brave.

That sounds like an “out of the frying pan into the fire” kind of thing.

Yeah, what on Earth does he even mean by "too political". I've never seen Mozilla make "political" statements beyond their user privacy rhetoric, which Brave is far more aggressive about.

I'm almost certain they are referring to this blog post https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-d...

That blog post can also be interpreted very differently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26646748#26647158

Since when has Firefox ever been "political"?

Mozilla has increasingly become more of a political organization than a technology one. Where it used to focus on stewardship of the Mozilla code, its scope has now shifted to broadly "building a better internet".

The Mozilla mission 2005:

"Established in July, 2003, with start-up support from America Online's Netscape division, the Mozilla Foundation exists to provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the Mozilla open-source software project."

The Mozilla mission 2021:

"Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent."

This shift has manifested itself in different ways which broadly align with American left politics. The homepage and blog are speckled with articles promoting diversity initiatives, endorsing BLM, calling for systemic change, endorsing net neutrality, and fighting misinformation.

Mozilla is also one of the organizations at the forefront of sanitizing language it deems problematic in any way:

* Removing "meritocracy" from the governance docs - https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/words-matter-moving-beyond-...

* Changing "master password" to "primary password" - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/primary-password-replac...

* Removing "crazy" from the codebase - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1675987

* Removing words deemed as reference to mental illness - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1675986

Some like this sort of thing and see it as positive, to other it's alienating.

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