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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I love Firefox too but this is a really weird post.

The OP is clearly having performance issues with Chrome presumably due to extensions interfering or something else. I can guarantee you that Google makes sure Gmail loads at least as fast in Chrome as in Firefox.

Chrome is customizable too (panes you can open/close), Chrome extensions are also thriving, and Chrome was the one who invented the "clean look", same as Firefox invented tabs.

This post just feels like weird marketing. There's nothing actually substantive about it. It doesn't feel like it belongs on HN.

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> There's nothing actually substantive about it. It doesn't feel like it belongs on HN.

Most of the comments on every new Firefox release post are just as bad and have nothing to do with the actual release (folks whining about how their incredibly-niche use-case isn't supported anymore which breaks their workflow etc.), so in some ways it's nice to see something positive (which I would wager is more representative of the average user).

https://xkcd.com/1172/

Wow there really is an xkcd for everything.

You didn't know that one?

You must be one of today's lucky 10000 [1].

  [1] https://xkcd.com/1053/

It's xkcd's, all the way down.

> It's xkcd's, all the way down.

Forgot your link [1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/1416/

BRUH

It really is

https://xkcd.com/1416/

Incredible

By coincidence, just this morning I had a panic because I tried to close FF by closing the only window (which is something I need to do periodically because memory usage will build up over time), and I thought I had lost the tabs because when I opened it back up, they were gone with no way to restore. Apparently the behavior had changed so that closing the last window no longer closes FF, but just that window a la Skype.

(Fortunately I was able to figure out what was going on and restored the previous window.)

Also, the automatic "check before exiting FF" got turned off somehow.

So, yeah, lots of fun surprises to deal with.

Firefox normal collection, automatic or triggered in about:memory, will reduce memory used by Firefox about the same as restarting firefox. The latter only SEEMS to reduce usage because it also unloads all tabs which are only reloaded when accessed. If you want to prove that to yourself compare a restart preserving tabs and manually trigger tab unloading in about:unloads

If you are dealing with normal amounts of memory usage and you have less than 16GB you may consider upgrading RAM considering this is as little as $40-60 at this point and well worth the look.

The check before closing multiple tabs didn't get turned off somehow the default changed in 2021 to default unchecked.

Lastly the behavior regarding closing the last window closing Firefox remains unchanged. It does in fact still work that way. If it didn't properly close I would suggest that is a bug or a second window on another workspace. If all you desire is to restart as opposed to actually closing firefox you can trigger a restart in about:profiles this has the benefit of working no matter how many windows you have open.

>Firefox normal collection, automatic or triggered in about:memory, will reduce memory used by Firefox about the same as restarting firefox.

Obviously not, since the memory usage is increasing without bound despite no corresponding increase in memory-intensive tabs. Thanks for suggesting an alternate workaround for the collection failures though.

>If you are dealing with normal amounts of memory usage and you have less than 16GB you may consider upgrading RAM considering this is as little as $40-60 at this point and well worth the look.

I have 32 GB, which it (thankfully) hasn't come close to, but would, if I weren't periodically restarting. Kinda funny how we automatically don't expect 16 GB to be enough memory for text/image web pages though.

>The check before closing multiple tabs didn't get turned off somehow the default changed in 2021 to default unchecked.

Makes sense, I think it was a while since I was shocked to see that behavior.

>Lastly the behavior regarding closing the last window closing Firefox remains unchanged. It does in fact still work that way. If it didn't properly close I would suggest that is a bug or a second window on another workspace.

No other workspaces, so probably a bug. I found this report of something very similar, though on Mac rather than Windows:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1772056

>If all you desire is to restart as opposed to actually closing firefox you can trigger a restart in about:profiles this has the benefit of working no matter how many windows you have open.

Thanks, but I'd prefer the option that can be done with a few quick key commands, and Firefox isn't customizable in that way anymore.

The quit behavior does seem to be a Mac specific behavior not a bug. You'll note the request to change it is labeled an enhancement as opposed to a bug. I agree it seems a sub-optimal choice.

Your memory usage growing without bounds on the other hand is obviously a bug. I would create a fresh profile and see if you can reproduce this behavior without extensions and report it.

I also suggest using Tab Session Manager. Sometimes I save a session and close everything and start working on a different project, but I know I can go back to my previous session and continue the previous project. I'm not afraid of losing any tabs because it also has an autosave.

Does it save each tab's back/forward history? AFAIK, the WebExtension API doesn't provide any robust mechanism to obtain it directly.

> and I thought I had lost the tabs because when I opened it back up, they were gone with no way to restor

You know ```Ctrl+shift+t``` this opens the last closed tab and - at least in chrome - restores the previous environment after restart

Yeah. The votes are just the normal FF fanclub, which I'm a card holding member of. This post seems a bit like karma farming to me.

> (folks whining about how their incredibly-niche use-case isn't supported anymore which breaks their workflow etc.)

If these complaints come up every release, then perhaps they aren't "incredibly-niche" after all. At least not what they represent in aggregate.

Browsers remind me a lot of superstores and why successful ones go out of their way to stock low-volume specialty items despite them having low profit margins, costing more to handle and stock, and having a very small subset of their customers care enough to buy them:

1. Customers will usually go to a store that's further away from them if it has 100% of the items they want even when your store is much closer but only has 95%.

2. Cut enough of those low-volume items and you'll become that 95% store for most of you customers.

What the team steering firefox need to understand is that the average user is a myth. The average user does not exist. Every user is unique and has their own set of peculiarities. If you remove enough functionality based on telemetry or your own limited perception of what "niche" is (hello, gnome!), everyone will eventually be affected.

I think most of Firefox's hemorrhaging of users today is because Firefox became a 95% browser for most developers and users.

> Chrome extensions are also thriving

Yeah, especially with Manifest v3 :) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-ma...

This post is over a year old. Requiring Manifest v3 has been indefinitely postponed. There are arguments for using Firefox, but if people keep crying wolf about Manifest v3 before it hits and has a negative impact, especially over such a long timespan, it loses its impact.

"Mandatory beatings have been indefinitely postponed"

I have seen this phrase in several places, but cannot find the origin of the phrase. Where is it from?

It could well be a riff on the more famous, "The beatings will continue until morale improves"

I thought it was an upside down version of "the beatings will continue until morale improves."

Oh that's it.. no wonder why I couldn't find it. I didn't have enough coffee this morning.

Yeah, there was some blowback to make the big G reconsider, but don't you worry. I'm sure they're cooking up something similarly nefarious to accomplish their goal.

Google is the world's biggest ad company. Sufficiently few people use ad blocking that I don't think it's an existential threat, but as long as the shareholders demand infinite growth, getting rid of ad blocking will be seductive to Google.

    The goals of the advertising business model
    do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
    - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
    - The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

Ditto for extensible browsers.

I feel like they lost me when they got rid of "Don't be Evil" as their motto. I realized their slide down the slippery slope was well underway.

> Requiring Manifest v3 has been indefinitely postponed.

From docs [1]: "As of January 17, 2022 the Chrome Web Store has stopped accepting new Manifest V2 extensions."

[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/intro/

Mv3 blocking has some advantages, and may be enough for most people, currently, at least until things escalate. Mv3's blocking capabilities are similar with Safari's, and have the advantage of performance and security.

You can see it for yourself by trying uBO Lite:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin-lite...

This extension is Mv3 compliant and decent enough. It blocks Google's trackers and ads, it blocks YouTube ads.

Also, keep in mind that other Chromium browsers have ad-blocking built-in, e.g., Brave and Vivaldi.

And Google's problem will be that all of Chrome's competition will have better adblocking as a selling point (except for Edge). So they can't keep Mv3 functionality too ineffective.

Which ironically could have solved the network performance problems that the OP is experiencing.

> Firefox invented tabs

Wow, that's false. Firefox was NOT the first browser with tabs. From the top of my head, Opera had tabs before Firefox, confirmed by a quick Google search. And apparently Opera wasn't the first browser with tabs either, although it was probably the first browser with a significant market share with tabs.

Also tabs were not invented by any browser, other programs used to have tabs before it was integrated into browsers.

simplebrowser had them before opera

dont know what kind of googling prodigies you are, but I googled 'first browser with tabs' and it says the InternetWorks Browser was the first

They’re not googling. Google is useful but sometimes has incorrect answers. The truth is we probably won’t know the true first browser with tabs. It could have been before the one you found.

These people are saying “I personally used browser Z with tabs before your example Browser A was even released”. If enough people continue the chain, we’ll get to “the oldest tabbed browser that anyone on HN remembers using”.

The nice thing about these anecdotes is that they can generally be validated quickly and easily. But your google result cannot be validated easily.

you know, you're alright with me

Related to this, the first browser I experienced with tabs was a custom VB3 wrapper around shdocvw.dll (IE) somewhere around early Windows 9x that I wrote myself. I'm not suggesting I invented tabbed browsing and certainly that VB project never influenced anyone else, I just find it a fun anecdote.

The easiest way to track it down isn't looking for the oldest memory. It's looking for reviews of Firefox when tabs were added and looking for the ones that complain about that earlier browser doing it better.

Way to jump in with a quick retort, when GP already conceded that Opera wasn't the first browser with tabs. But it was arguably the first browser that popularized tabs.

Besides, their point was refuting the "Firefox invented tabs" statement, which is valid.

listen here poindexter if you're feelin froggy you can @ me in the parking lot about it and we can nerd out

It’s only a “retort” if you read it uncharitably, and there’s no reason to do that.

I have a feeling it was either omniweb or icab. But I’m probably wrong. And anyway, tabs existed in other applications before browsers adopted, rather than invented, them. Right?

There's also the antecedent called the Mozilla Suite, that Firefox branched off from. It still lives on, somewhat zombie-like, as the Seamonkey Suite.

I think tabs are a terrible ideas (and I have probably more than 200 opened right now).

I think the browser should just make windows and it should be the window manager responsibility to group them in tabs or show them side to side or do whatever it's needed.

Same for code editors.

I often times need to group together tabs from different applications and that's obviously impossible.

I think it’s just some uncritical excitement. Given the typical discourse on our browser options, I thought it was nice :) perhaps not academic or technical, but relatable.

>It doesn't feel like it belongs on HN.

A discussion about the state of two modern web browsers doesn't belong on HN? Why not? There are 300 comments in a couple hours.

>This post just feels like weird marketing.

Come on. Direct links to Apples new product announcements aren't?

No need to police the articles, just skip over them.

In these discussions, I am always mindful that the two browsers have shared developer DNA (not to say code) from the inception of Google's offering: "Messrs. Brin and Page hired some Firefox developers who built a demonstration of Chrome. “It was so good that it essentially forced me to change my mind,” Mr. Schmidt said..." [0]

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200805000248/https://blogs.wsj...

You can add Safari to the mix: Dave Hyatt (ex-Netscape/Mozilla) was part of the team at Apple that created Safari.

Agree; and in general I think people underestimate how heavy and potentially dangerous extensions are. Adding an extension is like loading an additional webpage on each primary page load, and it can make as many requests and consume as many resources as it wants. It can also interfere with or alter the behavior and performance of the primary page in any manner that the DOM allows. As a web dev who has investigated a lot of performance complaints, disabling extensions is one of my first debugging steps.

I ran virtually the same extensions and set of open tabs when I tried Firefox and I have to say my (yes, anecdotal) experience was that FF loaded Gmail quicker than Chrome as well...

Chrome also has objectively better performance (https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks), especially for 3D performance. I'm sure on modern machines both browsers are more than fast enough, but I'm not quite sure why everyone seems to think firefox is faster.

On the other hand, I feel like the nyxt browser (https://nyxt.atlas.engineer) has a spot on HN, its very much like emacs in the sense everything is just Common Lisp you can redefine. Its definitely still considerably slower than chrome and firefox, webkit doesn't perform all too well.

"objectively better performance" What are yon talking about? How many people browse the web on an i9 13900K with 32GB RAM? Try a 5 year old laptop with 4GB RAM and you'll see a completely different picture - Firefox is far better at managing limited memory.

Also on Android (probably on iPhones as well) Chrome doesn't allow installation of ad-blockers - making it 10x slower than FF with uBlock Origin.

>Chrome doesn't allow installation of ad-blockers

That is not accurate. The Android version of Chrome does not support web extensions at all. It's not like Google has a switch somewhere that they can flip and make web extententions work. Supporting web extensions on Android would be a brand new feature and would need significant development time.

Not even Firefox properly supports web extensions on Android. They tried, but then seemingly gave up and just whitelisted a select few extensions from developers they could trust not to abuse the security of it.

If I say your chevy doesn't allow you to travel the friendly skies in your car this covers both lacking wings and a lock on the throttle keeping you from achieving sufficient lift. They chose not to port that pre-existing feature from desktop chrome when they built mobile chrome and I think arguably for an ad company not supporting ad blockers is a feature.

I use 8 extensions on firefox nightly on Android. They work quite well.

You have to jump through a bunch of hoops to use them, to the point that only a handful of people do it, which decreases the motivation for anyone to put effort into supporting Firefox for Android in their extensions.

It really seems to me like Firefox wanted to prevent a healthy extension ecosystem on Android, but they have not been transparent about their reasoning.

What hoops do I have to jump through to get some extensions on Chrome on Android?

Whataboutism isn't a particularly useful response. Firefox used to have thousands of supported extensions and allow users to install unsupported extensions. Now it doesn't, deliberately, and I would like them to reverse that decision. The fact that a more popular browser has a worse situation is irrelevant.

You can run a fork of Chromium that supports most desktop Chrome extensions: Kiwi Browser. That's not so different from having to run an unstable build (nightly) or fork (Iceraven) of Firefox.

> Supporting web extensions on Android would be a brand new feature and would need significant development time.

Kiwi Browser, a Chromium fork for Android with a small development team manages to have extensions, and successfully runs almost all extensions for desktop Chrome.

Google doesn't have extensions in Android Chrome because it doesn't want them. I'm not surprised; many popular extensions make Google's business model less profitable. Firefox also significantly crippled extensions in its Android version, and I'm more puzzled as to their motivations.

Did Google reject an effort to upstream this support? The priorities of a small browser trying to have unique features to offer people to use it are different from a large existing browser which isn't trying to attract new users, but are more focused on more impactful changes.

It appears they accepted changes to make it easier for third-party projects based on Chromium to enable extensions, implying they are actively choosing not to enable it on Chromium or Chrome.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=107471...

Firefox did win in the small JavaScript benchmark they had, which covers 99% of the use case “websites that I’d willingly return to.”

Good think with firefox is if an extension slow down a page, it'll tell you which extension to blame. I was having an issue with a page with a huge form loading super slow (10 minutes!) in chrome until I tried loading it on firefox and it told me that lastpass was the culprit.

I hope you've dumped Lastpass and changed all your passwords [0]

[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/lastpass-cus...

There is also "about:performance" which will tell you resource use by page.

Yes, I also felt similarly. I guess OP has this overwhelmingly positive opinion and is so easily impressed because his bar of acceptance is so low.

> Same as Firefox invented tabs

I think opera did https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)

> I can guarantee you that Google makes sure Gmail loads at least as fast in Chrome as in Firefox.

Why? I can imagine them working hard to make sure that Gmail loads fast in Chrome. The Gmail team probably suggests changes to the Chrome team and vice versa.

So long as Gmail is fast in Chrome, I can't imagine Google would be all that upset about Firefox or any other browser loading it faster. At most it would be an indicator that they need to make changes to stay competitive.

> Chrome is customizable too

Not really. Got a link to a Tree Style Tab that properly renders itself in a chrome sidebar? Because that's still not possible.

It might be the excitement from the novelty:

> Some really cool observations in first 30 mins of using it

> Chrome was the one who invented the "clean look"

Ironic naming given their aim was to get rid of as much chrome as possible.

I'm pretty sure that Opera invented tabs, not Firefox.

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