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Comment by frostiness | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, as someone on an old android device, the performance difference between the two is massive and it isn't getting better. Some sites (usually the ones that are actually important such as restaurant menu) are perfect on Chrome and nearly unusable on Firefox, even with an adblocker.

Performance already matters a lot on desktop browsers, but when battery life is thrown into the mix, it matters even more.

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It's a bit perplexing to me that Firefox proponents keep denying performance issues for years.

You can just compare it yourself or look at the some of the zillion benchmarks.

Are they...issues?

Like, I frankly couldn't care less if Chrome is capable of running some funky JS that is mainly used on sites that I don't visit a bit faster, or is capable of rendering some css animation that I would honestly prefer died in a fire a bit faster.

They aren't if the goal is having a Firefox useful to you.

They are, if the goal is to figure out why Firefox market share has plummeted. People do care about `funky` websites being faster.

The modern web has immensely useful software which a good fraction of web users depend on that are rendered unusable on Firefox once in a while.

I don't disagree, I'm just trying to address the incredulity that perhaps for some people, Firefox might not have problems, or (gasp!) for some, Chrome might be the one with problems.

I'd argue that the market share reflects the ratio of these two `some`s.

Unfortunately the party with the deeper pocket tends to win in these cases as long as they care to.

Which is why it's even more frustrating when Mozilla ends up wasting a bunch of money on some boondoggle or other. They don't have the warchest Google has, they need to be smarter with how they spend their limited resources, especially since their income is proportional to their market share.

I know it's just anecdata, but on my 2 year old phone, Firefox+Adblock+NoScript uses about 33% less power than the stock Chrome. I grant that my browsing habits aren't such that I tend to use a lot of media-heavy sites in the first place, so perhaps on those I wouldn't see such savings.

I do the same, and honestly it's why I still use Firefox on mobile at all. But stock Firefox (which is what most people use anyways) has clear issues.

Which I think further speaks to my point I made elsewhere in this thread, that a huge part of the problem is that the web itself is shittier. Chrome can just handle that shittiness a bit better by default.

I would love to see a comparison of Firefox vs Chrome with the same set of uBlock and NoScript rules applied to both. I suspect Chrome would probably still win, but perhaps the gap won't be as big.

How old? My S10e isn't very new and FF works great.

It's an S7. Though newer phones probably don't have as noticeable performance issues, it still indicates that the browser's going to use more power even if the performance is fine.

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