Chrome is faster in M91
blog.chromium.org
blog.chromium.org
It is in my opinion that the gatekeeper of the web (browser) should not also be the one taxing web traffic (via ads).
Personally, I am on Microsoft Edge because it was low-effort coming from Chrome. But I have learnt that Microsoft Edge is as bad as Google Chrome (for me) because they are mirroring Google Chrome with regards to Manifest V3. I had thought the only other guy that will stand up to Google is Microsoft but hey, what do I know.
Anyways, it seems like Firefox is the last non-chromium browser that has the balls to keep uBlock Origin supported as it is. I'll be moving to Firefox as soon as I port my personal productivity extensions over.
That may seem like a plus from a user's perspective when websites were only tested with / optimized for Chrome. From the perspective of someone who's concerned about Google's power as a monopoly, alternative browsers being Chromium-based is just part of the problem. Sure, you can fork Chromium in theory, but making changes that are incompatible with Google's vision is going to be a problem for you. So Google is still going to be in control as long as they ship the browser that dominates all others. Brave don't have the resources to maintain an engine by themselves anyway. Besides Mozilla, only Apple and Microsoft could do it, and Microsoft already gave up.
I'm more concerned with things like Manifest V3, which Brave certainly has the engineering capacity to fork around, and plans to.
Also, I am personally not really okay with their shady crypto practice where content creators didn’t get their share made before their joining. Any reason to prefer it over Firefox?
With regards to the crypto donations, that was an early version of the system which they improved after receiving feedback. Hearing feedback that your product is misleading and then fixing it is exactly the type of behavior I want to see, not sure about anyone else.
I prefer it to Firefox because of the best-in-class adblocking and because (for JS heavy workloads) I still find that V8 is far superior to SpiderMonkey.
Also because I don't think Mozilla has been a great steward, and most of their revenue comes from Google, so if your goal is to de-google I think Firefox is a worse bet than Brave.
That doesn’t contradict my question. If google does go through with crippling ad blockers at a deep level of the engine, how long till forks will break under backporting every security update, etc. And that is without thinking of any sort of malice. If google deliberately builds heavily on top of these changes, they will pretty much cripple every fork, except for perhaps edge.
And I do agree that V8 is a superior engine when it comes to performance, but for me the minimal performance gain is meaningless (especially with good ad blocking it is almost insignificant for the majority of websites)
And just because it is a symbiosis where Google won’t face anti-monopolism lawsuits if Mozilla is around and Mozilla gets some money, I doubt it would shine negative light on Firefox.
Yes. Google is unable to separate their ad business from making a browser engine (as any profit-seeking corporation in the same position would be). So far their power hasn't been absolute, so some of their less nice efforts have failed, but they'll keep trying.
Isn't Brave doing just that? They have created a whole new business model on top of Chromium that is incompatible with Google's vision. I'm not convinced that it's a better model, but that's beside the point. Brave has also said that they won't be supporting FLoC.
But if you mean Google's vision for the rendering and JavaScript engines then I agree with you. Only Google can really steer the core technology into any particular direction.
In case you don't know, Edge is built on Chrome's engine - using Edge is just as bad as using Chrome if you want the web to be more open with different vendors having a say in how it works.
With all of that said, Google is still the gatekeeper, Microsoft's contributions don't really solve the Chromium browser monopoly, and Microsoft is being really scummy with their push for Edge (i.e. Windows and Bing annoyances about it). I'd still prefer to have more independent browser options like Firefox.
Firefox and multi-account containers was a game changer the first time I used it.
I quickly became delighted at just how speedy everything was. It's not as if I'd never opened Chrome before, but the difference was much more noticeable after using it as my primary browser for a few days. Even on my weird platform where Chromium can't use graphics acceleration, the browser is just stupid fast at getting web pages on screen.
I'm not, well, particularly happy about this. I think that browser diversity is super important, and I do still use Firefox on Windows and Safari on modern Apple platforms. But Chromium really does seem to provide the better experience.
Yes, browser engine hegemony is not a good thing. No, Firefox is not the solution.
Mozilla has proven repeatedly that they are not up to the task of competing with Chrome. The market has steadily moved away from them ever since shortly after Chrome was released. They've not once, in the last 13 years, done anything to make a dent in that loss of market share.
Firefox is now 19 years old. It has always ran on "webdevs just need to be better about testing in Firefox". When the only alternative was IE 6 and 7, that worked. But it's now been longer that that strategy has not worked than the period of time that it did work.
I don't have a solution, but without massive upheaval within Mozilla, "just use Firefox" is also not a viable solution. People aren't going to "eat their vegetables". You need to come up with a more compelling, longer term strategy than backing a perennial loser.
You're free to try to convince me that Mozilla has the capacity for change. That somehow, they are going to completely change their management corps and corporate culture enough to be able to get out of their quagmire. Extraordinary claims are going to require extraordinary evidence.
Seriously? Mozilla has simply proven they can't compete with Google on ads: Chrome has been promoted everywhere from TV, Web banners on all major media websites, Adwords placements on all "browser" queries, even subway stations in all big cities... starting with the bundling with Google Earth more than a decade ago. Most people around me switched to Chrome because of all the popups on the Google homepage and because companies slowly replaced the "IE required" with "Chrome required" over the years.
Mozilla also couldn't get Firefox to be preinstalled on billions of Android devices either. I wonder why.
Not an attack, really interested in ideas other than just give up.
With Microsoft, Facebook, and Samsung shipping Chromium-based browsers and being in direct competition with Google across industries, I don't think there is much danger of Google taking over the web. If things get really bad, I can easily see all of the chromium-based browsers forming a consortium together and hard-forking. But I only see them staying in the game if the web grows and continues to be a viable alternative to native applications. So what I do is I make sure that my apps are usable across as many of them as possible, and not just Google Chrome.
I'm sorry for the vent of frustration that is coming up next. But I'm sick of hearing 5% of the market being one of the loudest voices in threads like this. WebRTC is killing the CPU, WebAudio keeps clipping, I can't run graphics ops in a worker thread, so the UI becomes unresponsive during scene transitions. I can't do anything about these things. I've tried. I've gone to great lengths to maintain as much fall-back compat with Firefox as I could. I finally just gave up because it was taking such a large percentage of my time that it couldn't justify it for being able to reach only 5% of the market. A portion of the market that, quite frankly, tends to not be very interested in spending money. Making Firefox better is not my job. My job is to make web apps.
Have you ever talked to any Mozilla employees? The stories they tell of the corporate culture make my blood boil for them. I mean, hell, after the latest purge, one of the projects they kept on (Hubs) has no developers working on the API support in their browser (WebXR, they fired all of the VR developers working on Firefox).
Maybe if we gave up on Firefox, those developers at Mozilla could be put to better use on browser projects that aren't managed poorly. People said Google was stupid for starting a new browser engine. They didn't start from scratch, but eventually they got there. There are other browser engine projects out there. Mozilla even chucked one of the more promising ones out of their umbrella. So yes, let's stop sending good money after bad and give up on Firefox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
How can you look at that graph and say "you got this, Mozilla"?
I personally think a big part of the problem is that part where you said they implement "most of the web standards". Most isn't good enough, especially when the web standards are growing. We need the web standards to grow so that web applications can successfully compete with apps in walled-garden app stores. That's what I care about. I care about not being beholden to Apple, Facebook, and Google taking a cut of my revenue or having a say in what content I publish.
I have apps that would be hobbled to the point of being nearly unusable because of missing web standards in Firefox. I can release very high-tech apps in Chromium-based browsers that can go toe-to-toe with native apps on features and performance. I can't do that in Firefox, both because they have given up on several platforms that I care about and because they are falling behind on web standards on the other platforms that are left.
I don't think it's very surprising that share of Safari for browsers across all OSes closely matches the share of iOS. Safari on macOS is only about 1/3rd of an OS that has 6 or 7% of the market, so you're only going to get about 2 points there. Firefox on macOS mirrors the rest of the market.
Chrome is #1 on all platforms except iOS, where it just literally does not exist. Safari's relative popularity over Firefox is due to lack of choice on iOS. So no, I don't think you can make that claim that technical merit does not matter.
If Apple were forced to allow other vendors distrubte their browsers on iOS (and they should be forced to), you would not see any uptick in Firefox's numbers, but a relatively big uptick in Chrome's numbers. I'm guessing like 10 points.
The GCP console breaks Firefox every month or two, Meet is the lone service which can't reliably do video chat, etc. That's probably not an explicit goal but it definitely highlights the risks of a single company setting priorities for so many different popular services.
Yes, you've accurately described the challenges that Mozilla faces. If anything, it was easier for Chrome, because at that time Firefox had successfully clawed about 1/3 of the market from IE. So yes, things are harder for Mozilla today.
Which is my point! That's all just excuses for the inevitable failure of Firefox as a viable platform. It is not a viable plan for making sure Firefox survives. It's self-pitying, backwards-looking, naval gazing, and as long as Firefox's biggest proponents continue to engage in it as their main line of defense, Mozilla will never claw back any market share.
Sorry, not following. Honestly, what I want is privacy and not seeing ads (esp. malware laden ones). FF is better than Chrome in that respect.
It's somewhat of a moot point now- the latest Firefox redesign is physically painful for me to use (eye strain), so I just moved back to Chrome.
Really? I've only used Firefox for over 5 years now, on Mac, Linux and Android. I don't need extensions to change my user agent either.
No? Unless you're a web dev and need to test under chrome, maybe. I have chrome on none of my personal devices.
When done site doesn’t work for some reason I go and use some other site. I’ve yet to encounter an essential chrome-only site.
That may or may not be an option.
At the time Firefox Android was a bit slow and would crash weekly or more, but I stuck with it for uBlock and Sync. After the Android app rewrite its been working well. I like having the navigation bar on the bottom (can Chrome do that yet?). The password autofill integration API took a while to get integrated since that happened during the app rewrite. At least with Bitwarden it's still a bit buggy when it decides to show the autofill prompt, but that seems to happen in other apps and in Chrome. It's annoying that most Google apps will ignore your system preferences and open things in Chrome where I don't have any sign-in cookies etc. Still like the Google search/assistant experience and haven't found an alternative so I live with it.
Overall, a very mild sacrifice for the open web. Very easy slacktivism.
PS: agreed on the main sentiment of your post, it really doesn't matter which browser extracts your private data fastest
Make sure you enable all of the additional filter lists in uBlock's settings page (regardless of browser) as well. Well, except lists for languages you don't regularly use, those will just slow things down with no benefit to blocking.
While I don’t yet know if this particular change improves server-side work flow, I am hoping it does. I plan to do some tests.
I applaud the work done by v8 team, releasing it as an open source JavaScript executor, and excellent technical articles on the v8 blog [1]
Can we please separate the blaming and shaming of ads-ecosystem for a moment and appreciate the technical achievements this team is creating?
[1]. https://v8.dev/blog
But... It's true that trying Safari or Firefox or Brave showed great speed improvements over Chrome. The memory hog is real with Chrome, too.
So, if this is true and replicates in my session then this is amazing news.
On the firefox side there is node-firefox that should accomplish the job. That hasn't been updated in like 5 years, so who knows if it actually works.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/about:debuggi... [2] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=firefox-...
Edit: I suppose that's what you meant by "responsive"
> For some CPUs, calling functions that are further away from your generated code can cause CPU-internal optimizations (such as branch prediction logic) to fail. The fix for this is to copy the builtin functions into the same memory region as the generated code. This change is especially impactful for the new Apple M1 chip.
Let the downvotes count the number of Google employees that mob HN everytime their chef-made lunch and massage provider is slighted. :-)
...so turning that off would be pretty much pointless on most sites
But that's irrelevant
Not loading images will nix >99% of what people actually use the web for
I don't like ads but its the only business model that seems to be viable online, other than instituting outright paywalls. Or perhaps we should just burn it all down...
I see people talking about WASM and “why bother with JS at all”, but keep in mind that JS code is more expressive than WASM, so if you’re aim is to minimize costs you still save bandwidth using JS over WASM. You could argue that it’s negligible or worth the performance increase, but if you’re a big site the cost savings add up, right?
Also, JS is of course widely used outside of the browser, and there’s a reason it got so popular: it lets you focus on the domain instead of all the other stuff. I can’t think of another mainstream language I’d rather use to prototype and algorithm, application, system, whatever. And the fact that V8 makes it so fast is the reason people just stick with JS. Gradual typing with TS eliminates the only remaining downside (dynamic typing and a big code base).
Dubious, given that WASM is bytecode, unlike JS. Do you have data to cite?
- M90 (90.0.4430.66): April 13 2021
- M91 (91.0.4472.77): May 25 2021
- M92 (estimated): July 20, 2021
About the split, it depends a lot on the type of content.
If you're visiting a statically generated page, that's negligible on the server and puts the strain on the client: Document formatting, JS execution, image rendering, etc.
If you're dialling into a 10 person google meet, your laptop fans will start spinning fast, but also the server needs to transcode/serve the video (well, multiple servers, multiple services most likely) so heavy on both sides.
If you're consuming some elaborate web dashboard with high data requirements, then the strain is probably on the server side.
So if you have a few tabs and want the fastest experience, it’s good I think.
Unpopular opinion: JS should be slow to discourage abuse. Browsers should not be embracing SPAs.
What else?
> a rich open-source ecosystem (~1.3 million packages on npm)
And people using those packages without ever understanding what's inside, resulting in unneeded abstraction layers and enormous bloat.
The article talks about speed improvements in Chrome yet some folks want to immediately jump to discuss lack of privacy and moving to Firefox.
What happened to just talking about Tech?
> Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Downvote and move on. Flag if egregious. Email if you see huge off-topic threads.