Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer
treeherder.mozilla.org
treeherder.mozilla.org
Chromium, last I tried it, by default sets the necessary HTTP timeout(s) to infinity if its DevTools is open.
My searches of Firefox docs/wiki, StackExchange, HN Algolia for a fix have come up empty.
Navigating to "about:config" and searching for "timeout" finds 27 different settings prefixed with the substring "network". Some are obviously in units of milliseconds, others perhaps whole seconds.
Anyone know which one (or what combination) might incant the necessary black magic?
Chrome's ability to temporarily edit and save changes to JS sources through the debugger editor is fantastic though.
Other than that it's mostly just improvements to what FF already has.
Search could be made much more useful, especially network requests. Searching all request bodies/responses for a particular string/json/regex would be a huge step up.
You can search the response of individual requests but there's a UI bug that makes it look like your filter is no longer applied when you select the next one in the list.
Does this affect the live code so the change is available immediately? I once had a thought about wondering if this was possible to have the change available without refreshing
New features also land quicker, as it is built against Firefox beta.
I'd rather not have my professional work tools be built against a beta channel when there are better alternatives.
I find different browsers excel at different things in regards to the developer experience. As an example I appreciate that Firefox had a formatted JSON view without requiring an extension. However Chrome also has capabilities that I wish were included in Firefox.
I'll go even further; As I remember it Chrome Dev Tools pretty much copied Firebug's homework in terms of UI and feature set.
Here is a somewhat foolish test with a shell script, that forks "/bin/true" 10 million times.
C:\>busybox sh
~ $ echo 'x=10000000; while [ $x -gt 0 ]; do true; x=$((x-1)); done' > timetest
~ $ time sh timetest
real 0m 46.86s
user 0m 46.76s
sys 0m 0.04s
$ cat timetest
x=10000000; while [ $x -gt 0 ]; do true; x=$((x-1)); done
$ time dash timetest
0m33.79s real 0m33.50s user 0m0.05s system
> How do I capitalize Firefox? How do I abbreviate it?
> Only the first letter is capitalized (so it's Firefox, not FireFox.) The preferred abbreviation is "Fx" or "fx".
– Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Release Notes, https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...
Edit: so I just looked and it turns out you can enable tab bar scrolling on chrome://flags/#scrollable-tabstrip. Why is that even disabled by default?
It's my understanding that on mobile, tabs are unloaded from memory nearly instantly. You lose state but they use almost no resources. (I wish this was an option out of the box on Desktop. I've had extensions that do this and it's a godsend)
Infinite scroll is an especially bad offender here. If I'm 50 screens down on an infinite scroll that is work and a page refresh losing my place should be treated as a data-loss bug.
(an even better idea is not to use infinite scroll at all)
And yeah fuck infinite scroll. I usually interact with such sites via their API or data export. Eg searching my YouTube Likes playlist is impossible on the web because I'd have to spend an hour scrolling before I can Ctrl+F
It's not that my phone was memory-constrained, we're talking a recent Samsung Galaxy flagship[3] - it's purely overly aggressive memory management on part of Firefox.
--
[0] - Have 5 tabs open, all something trivial like HN, put away phone, grab it 5 minutes later, switch to other HN tab, ... wait half a minute for it to reload on a spotty connection at my in-laws' countryside home.
[1] - Talking with others about how we experience technology, I'm starting to feel that I'm abnormally annoyed by large or unpredictable UI latency.
[2] - TypingMind.
[3] - I learned to save up and only buy high-end, thanks to the experience with my first smartphone, that turned out to be underspecced for its own functionality. It's probably a case of [1], but one time I deviated from this rule and got my wife a mid-range phone, we both started to regret it in a few months, so it's not only me who has low tolerance for jank.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Tab list usability remains pretty much the same regardless of how many tabs are open.
Firefox: https://yld.moe/raw/nVE.png
Chrome: https://yld.moe/raw/vu8.png
Also, if you're wondering why my tabs look like they're from 2017, that's just another benefit of using Firefox [1]. Although as nice as it being able to actually customize our browsers, it would be nice for Mozilla to stop breaking things for sake of breaking things.
Thanks.
What do you lose from closing tabs versus what do you gain from keeping them open? For me, if I use a site open it’s bookmarked or already in history so it’s fast to reopen. Closing tabs keeps my machine fast and memory usage low and also makes me faster at switching between the open tabs as I don’t need to search or parse through many UI bits.
One is as a sort of ad-hoc to-do list. When I leave a tab open it's because something is unfinished and I mean to come back to it soon. (I just wish there was a chronological view so that I could easily delete the oldest tabs).
The second purpose is to store the scroll position of longer articles that I haven't finished reading.
With vertical tabs, you don't have this problem. Every tab is the same width, making them easier to interact with. You'll need to vertically scroll the list if it gets too large, but that's a natural enough action. In this situation, you now close tabs because you want to, not because the browser is strong-arming you into it.
Where things really get fun is with vertical tabs that track ancestry, like Tree Style Tabs or Firefox or what's built into Orion. These tabs will nest as you follow links from one page to another, capturing context.
HN is a perfect example of where this works well. I can go to the home page, see a few stories that look interesting, open each comment page as a child tab. Then on each child I can open the associated article. And, as I read the comments, I can open new links that look interesting and that page is now associated with the root story.
I could bookmark all of these pages, but short of creating folders for each story there's no good way to capture that context. Naturally, that makes it harder to restore the same state when opening bookmarks. Instead, I leave the tabs open and when I'm ready to take an action on them (read an article, make notes in Obsidian, bookmark into a topic of interest) I do so and then I close them out. It makes context switching much easier when I know I'm not going to lose the context I just left. As an added benefit, I find if I leave tabs open I get better use of the browser cache than I do if I close an open later from a bookmark.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grasshopper-u...
If a closed tab only remains in the bookmarks or history it might as well not exist for my brain.
> Closing tabs keeps my machine fast and memory usage low
I just restart the browser now and then, which will unload all tabs again. They're still in the tab bar but require almost no memory until I use them.
The only things I hoard are books. They are more like my antilibrary (things I’d like to have read already) than collecting everything I encounter.
Simple, 20 tabs already drives me nuts.
Is that really the only reason to install Brave?
Starting to wonder if I should just set up a Firefox that bundles uBlock Origin by default with a brand new name.
"I see people talking about the Brave browser in the whole Firefox vs chrome debate, and while people rightly point out that it's just chromium and that they do shady cryptocurrency shit, I never see anyone point out that Brave's founder and CEO is Brandan Eich.
"He founded Brave after massive protests against him becoming CEO of Mozilla, resigning after 11 days. And the reason for those protests? He donated a lot of money to the Prop 8 campaign to ban gay marriage.
"So just remember: it's not just another chromium fork, it's not just a browser with cryptocurrency bullshit, it's also the browser founded by a homophobe because he got kicked out of his former organization for being a homophobe.
"Also, he invented Javascript. I'm willing to believe that maybe he has grown on the gay marriage issue, and made amends for his former mistakes. But Javascript cannot be forgiven."
The donation getting publicised, going viral and becoming a shitstorm was what forced the end of his tenure as CEO, and I've heard comments since that his being replaced with a more business-y CEO has been a disappointing experience.
(I've no idea what percentage of the relevant subset of employees made such comments and/or held such opinions, and I'm not expressing an opinion on should/shouldn't about any given event, but it does seem to have been a little more complicated than "he got kicked out ... for being a homophobe")
It seems disingenuous to sweep "actively working to deny people civil rights" under the rug of "having an unpopular political opinion."
Partially because this wasn't just a matter of having an opinion; this was an extremely concrete _action._ Even if you want to take the (dubious) stance that people should not be held responsible for their beliefs, surely we should still hold people responsible for their actions?
Any reductive moral framework that abstracts every possible political position into interchangeable spherical cows in a vacuum does a disservice to its users.
The two scenarios are precisely symmetrical. The only difference is that the cause on one side is one that you agree with, and on the other side is one that you disagree with.
You cannot decide moral questions by couching them in terms of “rights” and assuming that whichever side “advances rights” must be the correct side. Why? Because you can do that arbitrarily either way and for anything. e.g. “admitting gay marriage denies people the right to live in a society where traditional marriage is protected”.
Now what do you do? Both sides can say their cause is “advancing rights”.
Yep! That's pretty much what agreeing or disagreeing with something means.
But the reasoning you seem to be proposing is "here is something you agree with and something you disagree with, therefore those two things are interchangeable and you should not favor one over the other."
> Now what do you do? Both sides can say their cause is “advancing rights”.
I exercise human discretion and decide which of those rights is better, more valuable, more important.
In this case, that's not a tough call. Marriage provides a bunch of very concrete mechanical effects, from inheritance to medical decision making to finances to immigration. Whereas some people feeling happy about the fact that some other people can't access those rights is, at best, abstract and intangible.
And you'll also note that some of my previous references were to the uniformity of rights. Generally speaking, making rights more uniformly accessible to all people is better than having rights be selectively, arbitrarily limited to some people.
>Yep! That's pretty much what agreeing or disagreeing with something means.
Not to me. The difference between us is that I am perfectly happy to work with people who do not share my political viewpoints.
More precisely, why 100 tabs in 1 window instead of 10 tabs times 10 windows?
Imagine you snap your browser to half your screen. Assuming it's not an ultrawide, you'll be able to fit maybe a dozen tabs before they're so tiny to be essentially useless.
I still don't understand why some people believe that the correct answer is anything other than 100 windows.
My platform has 40 years of well refined tools for managing windows, all of which work nicely and consistently across all applications. By comparison, all of the tab management systems are crude amatuerish knockoffs trying to reinvent the same tools from first principles, and isolated to a single application that's then inconsistent with everything else.
Yeah, because he'll be back to up hundreds of tabs again.
Alternatively, you can use Ctrl-W keyboard shortcut.
(Sorry!)
I have five windows open with about 1000 tabs in each, no performance problems at all. It's great!
I find it useful to periodically prune, though. Save to Pocket or other "to read" list for things I intend to eventually read. Bookmark things I may want sometime, but don't need open. Potentially use Tab Stash to save groups of references for particular research tasks. Toss things that realistically I'm just not going to get to ever.
- I'm likely to return back to some of them. I might not know which ones. Typing in the address bar brings them back fast and the page does not need to be loaded again. Having the tab already open is also a strong signal that this is what I'm looking up.
- no noticeable slowdown anyway, Firefox is actually quite efficient.
- I don't care for taking the time of closing them progressively. It happens that I will close them all at the same time at some point when I feel like I need some clean up. Usually when I'm done with something.
- I think I learned to mostly ignore this part of the screen. Everything happens in the address bar.
In short, it's a combination of intentionally leaving tabs open so I can go back to them later without reloading the page, and not wanting to spend the time to manage them.
I usually have under 100 tabs open though, often even fewer.
With a good UI the unused ones just don't bother you anymore anyway until you scroll or filter them. They show me my train of thoughts without having to consciously organize anything. Unused tabs get unloaded from RAM anyway, so the cost of keeping them open is minimal.
A few years ago there was a version of Firefox that didn't slow down and opened quickly even at tens of thousands of tabs, but unfortunately it quickly regressed, so throwing everything out periodically is still inevitable:)
I've been doing this for years and have never, not once, looked at the bookmarks. But it gives me the peace of mind I need to close all tabs and start over.
And there are users of Firefox out there with >15000 tabs.
Two reasons for tab hoarding: 1) spatial -- related tabs are close together (frequently open a bunch of related search results; if I come back to them to continue later, they're all together). 2) history -- unlike bookmarks or history entries, tabs retain the forward and back history, so when you return to them you can know how you go there (go back to the search for example).
I do periodically clear out tabs, especially duplicates. The Tab Stats extension by glandium is very handy for tab hoarders
I've been staying with Firefox not for the performance (today Chrome loads Google sites like YouTube faster), but mainly for Tree Style Tab extension. I couldn't imagine opening more than a dozen of tabs without it.
I can't imagine having more than a dozen tabs open, period. You tab hoarders will never make sense to me...
For games, I often have a bunch of wiki tabs open at the same time.
As for history, imagine you're researching a topic and have gone through fifteen search results, decided three of them were relevant, and closed the others. Your history is polluted with all fifteen, whereas this tab search will directly return you these most relevant pages only.
I hardly use it, though, because I usually have < 100 open tabs, not thousands like others have. I identify tabs by their tree structures (parents, children, siblings tabs) and the prefixes of the titles, whose lengths don't depend on how many tabs opened, because the tabs are arranged vertically.
You can save all of the tabs of your current session as a bookmark folder in one fell swoop! Your research tabs can be all saved together and opened as a group! Your gift ideas that you won't close because you don't want to forget about them can be saved in a folder named gift ideas so the next time you need them you have them, without the cost of using up your extra RAM and CPU cycles!
I remember both Chrome and FF making a big deal over that point years ago.
Fortunately, I also habituated the simple behavior of "If I realize I have a lot of HN tabs open, right-click and close the entire pane". That's how I know I'm clocking about 100 tabs per two days on HN alone.
Also, Sideberry changed my tab hoarding habit in a way that still results in keeping hundreds of tabs, but using them in much more sensible way. I keep them arranged in trees stemming from topical groups on high-level panels, and trim or kill as they're no longer useful. Most of those tabs are unloaded anyway, but the interface works as excellent short-term (days to weeks, sometimes a few months) bookmarking system - and I don't lose tabs anymore (as in knowing the tab is there somewhere, but not being able to find it in the vast sea of other tabs).
Can't really point to any concrete issue, other than I have a distinct feeling Sideberry is much faster/lighter, and feels more like part of Firefox vs. some bunch of JS faking an UI on top of it. Sorry I can't give you a more objective comparison. I did find this though:
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/118ddge/tab_manage...
which is a recent(ish) discussion, and the points made there seem accurate.
I was surprised at how decent it converted TST tabs, but I can't remember how low my bar was; maybe try a new profile?
One thing I'm finding really nice in Sidebery though that TST can't do, is that I can create a parent node that is not attached to a specific page (via grouping).
Panels I'm undecided on. They seem useful, but they also seem like a bandaid over window management tools. One problem I'm having is that they don't restore, and all the tabs go back to the main panel. That may be some setting I toggled though.
Except for the annoying interaction (I think) with "open new tabs next to current tab", which causes Sideberry to somehow leave behind lots of stupid empty tabs named after the page the real new tab had. I deal with it, but it's annoying.
So, I have groups for casual browsing, work, volunteer work, etc. So I don't have to close tabs when switching from one to the other. I just switch and those tabs are still there when I want to next look at them.
The question is... is there an easier way these days or do you still have to use CSS?
Firefox/Sideberry is useful for mitigating that. I also have workflows set up for mass-exporting my tabs from Firefox to a text file and reorganizing them in plain-text and re-opening just the tabs I care about[0].
Bookmarking on any browser is cumbersome and leads to disorganization over time. Tree-style tabs helps make that organization at least a little bit easier.
The big change for me has been realizing that all my "tabs" are still there, in the form of my browser history, or if not, via Google search. If I can't find my way back to a website via my history or via searching the web, then I probably also wouldn't be able to find it among 1000 tabs. So why not close the tabs and be free of them?
So I do have bad news about this that may or may not be news: Firefox cycles history even if you never clear it. Unbelievably it's not permanent.
This has bitten me a couple of times in the past because I always assumed that naturally history wouldn't just get randomly deleted in the background, so I'd search for a tweet or article from an obscure blog and couldn't figure out why nothing was coming up in my history searches. Took me a long time to actually check "is this article I looked up 6 months ago even there anymore?"
There is a way to set up recurring database backups manually if you're willing to do some gruntwork, but it's kind of a pain and means you need to break out an SQLite browser across multiple backups in order to search.
---
Where searching is concerned, :shrug: that doesn't generally work for me, but I'm happy for anyone that it does work for :) My tabs aren't just so that I remember where a document is (although they serve that purpose as well), they're also a reminder that the thing exists at all. When it gets to 1000 tabs, is that useful? Arguably no, but the process getting there is pretty organic, it's not really a conscious choice.
---
In support of your comment though, being able to just stick all of my tabs in an open text file does genuinely help a lot[0] because it's permanent history and it serves the same purpose of being a reminder. It could be better, sometimes I leave tabs open on images that I forget to get around to saving or on open sessions and then the link rot hits whatever I'm looking at -- but it helps a lot. Being able to have an intermediary step between "leave everything open" and "categorize and organize everything you're looking at and save what you need" does allow me to do things like grab 500 tabs that I haven't checked in weeks and just stick them in a text file and write some notes at the top about what I was working on.
Split browser sessions, better windowing would help a lot with this, although I worry I'd end up with similar situations as my Emacs window, where everything looks clean but behind the scenes I have 1000 open files and 20 of them are unsaved scratch buffers ;) But the text file does kind of work the way you're describing; you can be free of the clutter, but if you really need to find everything, you know it's in a static text file that you can grep through at any time and that you know the browser won't do anything shifty with in the background.
[0]: I say that it's common to have 1000 tabs open, and it is, but currently I only have about 200, largely because of that method. I went through a bunch of stuff a few weeks ago and stashed most of the stuff I had open.
The only reliable way that I've come across for finding stuff after a long time has passed is saving every sightly interesting webpage to Zotero and using fulltext search afterwards (including webpage body).
I'm curious, do you find the builtin browser history facilities sufficient for your needs, or are you using some third party tool for that?
Mostly though I realize I have focused heavily on not having clutter vs. being able to recall quickly everything I've ever found necessary or useful. It's a trade off I like, but it may not be for everyone.
I mentioned this below, but check to see what your history limits are in Firefox (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1039372). It's possible if you do enough browsing that you might have trouble finding older pages because they're not there anymore.
I'm not sure what the best mitigation is for that, I've kind of accepted that history for Firefox is short-term, not long-term. It might be possible to rig up a webextension to save history more permanently, but I suspect it would need to do native messaging I think to do that, and at that point maybe it's better to just do regular copies of the SQLite database.
Relying on Firefox history less also has the kind of minor advantage of allowing you to be more aggressive about cleaning it yourself, which can have a noticeable performance impact in some cases.
I find that browser windows are much easier to manage than tabs and make it possible to see more than one site at a time as well as have different sites/pages sized differently. If I'm doing heavy web research, I'll typically have many browser instances, each with three or four tabs.
If you use the word "just" then it's a you issue. Close the tabs and you'll be happier.
You choose to open tabs. Don't open tabs if you know you cannot handle that.
This is an interestingly narrow take on what is a pretty common broadly used phrase with multiple meanings. If you're familiar with people with ADHD, you should realize that ADHD isn't something you can "just" choose to ignore or decide not to be affected by. Executive dysfunction isn't something you get to opt out of.
That knowledge should clue you in that when I use the word "just" in this context that I'm not dismissing anything or treating ADHD like a joke or using it as an excuse to be lazy. Particularly given that I immediately follow up that usage by talking about practical strategies and techniques I've developed to try and mitigate the outcome.
My point with the word "just" is that there isn't some complicated reasoning going on in my head for why it's good for me to have 1000 tabs open, in the same way that it's not some kind of life strategy that I forget to eat when I'm hyperfixated. It's not a workflow or a decision that I've made about my life, it's just a consequence of ADHD.
> you're trying to justify it
Having a lot of tabs open doesn't need to be justified. It's not a moral failing. I don't need an excuse for having a lot of tabs open because it's not behavior that needs to be excused.
The only reason to mitigate it is because mitigating it makes my individual life better. It's not really relevant whether you or anyone else approves beyond that. I'm not trying to justify anything because there is nothing about the number of browser tabs a person has open that needs to be justified or condemned. Opening a browser tab is a morally neutral act.
I replied to a comment that was curious about why someone might have that many tabs open: was it easier to work that way? Is there some browser config that makes 1000s of tabs more efficient than bookmarks? No, the cause is just ADHD.
> You choose to open tabs. Don't open tabs if you know you cannot handle that.
??? I genuinely have no idea what you're suggesting or getting at here. People who open too many (?) tabs shouldn't be using browsers? What does this mean?
Given that you are saying you're familiar with ADHD, I know you're definitely not suggesting that the solution is to just choose not to open a lot of tabs in the first place. Because you know what executive dysfunction and impulsivity is and you're familiar with how people with ADHD operate, and so I know that you wouldn't make such a pointless or useless suggestion. But I'm at a loss for what you're actually trying to convey then.
Dashboards can easily take two or three tabs.
The bug tracker is opened on a tab as well as the ticket page. You have a pull request opened to review it, and you check something in the repository. Pop open a couple of diffs to check where someone messed up in the past.
And in the meantime you have Spotify/YouTube.
A dozen tabs easily.
Factor in task switching, checking CICD pipelines, and of course HackerNews opened somewhere, and you can get multiples of that.
I've got 30 tabs open today, and the oldest of them is only a few hours old.
I look down a page, see interesting links, and middle click them all. They open tabs but don't actually load until I click that tab. I close each tab after I'm done reading it, or after a few hours if I never got around to reading it and lost interest.
Is that hoarding? I don't think so. But it's the sort of workflow that TST makes pleasant but is extremely frustrating with a horizontal tab bar.
Nonetheless, it's clear that people do. I don't have to understand.
But I completely trust Firefox on the password issue, to the point that I let it generate them for me.
Not that I don't trust them but I always recommend using a dedicated PW manager like KeePassXC which is FOSS and has been security audited, plus it gives you full control over where you get to store your PWs and how they're secured and generated.
Wen I use a password, I look it up and type it in by hand. No autofill is possible, intentionally.
We all have to gear our security mechanisms toward our particular threat assessments.
That's certainly possible, but if malware were able to get installed despite my other protections, then I probably have much larger issues. And the keylogger would have to phone home with the data, which is unlikely (but not impossible) to happen without raising some alarms.
So I'm more worried about sharing data with the password management company systems themselves. If there's no real reason to send data over the net, then I don't want to send data over the net. The smaller the attack surface, the better.
It's just my personal policy. In reality, I don't consider either keyloggers or password management company computers to be huge enough risks that I lose sleep over them. Plus, I don't want to become reliant on a particular piece of software to do important things -- typing my password by hand means that I'll have the most common passwords memorized, so if something goes wrong that prevents the use of the password manager, I'm not locked out of anything.
Much more convenient and quick and still reasonably secure.
Not to say that KeePassXC isn’t useful if you want even more fine-grained controls, but it seems like in the
> Use password in browser
Use case, KeePass would actually weaken the security guarantee by adding a second component you need to trust.
This is what Firefox says when I go to export my logins: "[!] Your paswords will be saved as readable text (e.g., BadP@ssw0rd) so anyone who can open the exported file can view them."
KeePassXC on the other hand gives me a simple encrypted database file that I can copy around to different places for some peace of mind.
That's effectively what almost all of them say when you export your logins (usually as CSV, JSON, or XML), because they export in plain text, because you don't know what the user needs it for, up to and including manual imputation (better than expect a random user to have to learn how to print out a database, or worse submit that database file to some online service to print out).
Users aren't necessarily highly computer literate, we don't want to prevent people from having security, but even if they were they may still have use cases that do not accept such a database (migrating password manager that don't know your previous one, perhaps), so most of them use (unencrypted) plain text and just accept they'll have to leave it in the user's hands, and warn them it's exposed.
We'd absolutely love there to be safe, portable ways to move our data around such that it remains encrypted while migrating, yes, but that's just not something our current crop of software really enables fully these days, unfortunately.
I'd even say "adding a second vendor you need to trust". Yes, these days there seems to be a strong drive to just get a big package out of a single hand. Like having the browser closely tied to the OS. I don't like it. I prefer to choose the individual parts as i see fit. Keepass and some bit of custom sync, in this case. Now, in the same vein I expect MS & Google making it easy to support different browsers, I'd want Mozilla making it easy to integrate other password managers. I'd love to be corrected, but afaik the "password manager with extraordinarily well-integrated browser compatibility" doesn't offer any way or API to connect my keepass with it. Its only for Mozilla's own stuff. Not the open, user controlled system i'd love Firefox to be.
The Firefox Android Addon system is even worse... only a very short list of pre-approved extensions are available. With the escape hatch for devs requiring some stupid online-account. Sorry, but how is that different from an App store without side-loading?
Still recommend using Firefox, since it is the best we have. But yeah, i don't like the less and less open direction apparently chosen by Mozilla. And wonder if not being a good role model will hurt them down the line...
You need to install Firefox Nightly.
Same, I like to pretend I use Firefox for other reasons but 99% of it is tree tab.
Massive GitHub PRs can refuse to load in chromium-based browsers. Firefox renders them effortlessly.
I think it's worth mentioning the caveat, that it doesn't natively support PWA in the same way WebKit browsers do. It has little to no support (depending on your definition of support).
Works fine for me on Linux Mint 21.1
I also use Firefox for Android and that does natively support PWAs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
They're a game changer; so much better than using a third party extension IMO.
I'm gonna die on this hill but I'd like to add that Opera had tab groups natively without extensions since 2010 [1]. Damn I feel old now.
Also, UX of tab groups in old-Opera was way nicer than current-Chrome since you could just drag and drop tabs on top of another and it would automatically create groups.
[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2512081/opera-11-ships...
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-4-beta-updated-w...
[2] https://venturebeat.com/mobile/mozilla-is-removing-tab-group...
Sidebery responds noticeably faster, and the panels are a great feature.
And I know, people with limited resources would have had a different experience, I don't know, I never had RAM issues. With enough RAM, FF was noticably slower than chrome.
Chrome definitely lit a fire under Firefox, and that’s saying something because, at the time chrome came out, Firefox was “fast”.
I switched to chrome early on for the speed benefits.
At some point, Firefox started getting pretty close. Albeit not on parity with chrome, but chrome started major spying oriented pushes. So the minor loss in speed was worth it.
Now chrome could never win me back anyway. Google is evil.
Chrome's manifest v3's entire purpose for existence is to ultimately snuff out ad blockers so they can make the internet worse for everyone and get more money in the process.
And if you don't believe me then you are wrong.
Of course they won't do it immediately. They won't entirely rug pull their browser's user base.
They'll just keep raising the bar to get approved for Chrome Store, making it harder and harder to comply with their extension requirements while also changing the way they deliver their ads.
This way the ad blockers have to be updated and then go back through the extension store review process until the developers either get tired of jumping through their hoops and gives up or until they can no longer afford to keep the extension alive.
And then they'll rug pull, just like Reddit and Twitter, and all of a sudden ad blocking extensions will require that the users pay Google for the privilege of having fewer ads while still letting some ads through anyway, and that will be that.
Best to jump ship now, things are nice and cozy over here in "user wants are respected within reason" land.
Manifest v3 is just everyone's get out of jail free card for not being responsible for the destruction of ad blocking and privacy extensions. Blame it on Google, who says they "had to do it" for some reason that ultimately profits them and their ilk to the detriment of humanity.
There is no evidence of that, while there is evidence that manifest v3 provides security, privacy, and performance benefits. Manifest v3 doesn't stop ad blocking from working.
>so they can make the internet worse for everyone
Ads make the internet better for everyone since it provides a monetization model for sites to give away valuable services for free instead of everything being behind a paywall.
>And if you don't believe me then you are wrong.
This way of arguing doesn't convince people. This kind of stance only appeals to people who are antitech or antigoogle.
>They'll just keep raising the bar to get approved for Chrome Store, making it harder and harder to comply with their extension requirements
Adblockers are highly priviledged. They steered have a high bar to make it into a extention store.
Firefox has been very smooth since couple of years.
Mobile has to catch-up though.
It's strange hearing reports of "scroll lag" in the other comments. It's possible I'm just lucky. Or there's a misconfiguration somewhere in their setup that Chrome somehow avoids.
It's true that I still mostly use Chrome for webdev - I've become more used to it's (excellent) dev tools, even though Firefox and Firebug started that whole trend. It feels very right to separate my "user browser" from my "dev browser" in this way!
Camino was originally named Chimera. It was started by Dave Hyatt, the guy who went to Apple to build Safari and WebKit, which Chrome now uses.
Don't forget the other possibility: someone using Firefox having internalized this lag as "normal behavior".
Have some humility.
I've known lots of developers who thought that some broken, slow, erratic, or stupid, program or OS behavior is the normal, because that's what they've been used to. They could be great programmers too, they just didn't venture much outside the stuff they used.
As for the diatribe, I don't care for this recent trend of perceiving something somebody said as some kind of abuse of "therapy speak" (before this comment I've seen a few stories about some actor "abusing therapy speak" and such lately, so I assume it's some new fad going on). I don't read about therapy, or had any therapy speak in mind. "Internalized" has been used for decades as a term, and here just means "accepted this lag as the baseline as they don't have a frame of reference". Might not even be the right word, I probably was looking for normalized (is that therapy speak too?). So there's that.
This describes so much software that I don't see how you can fault anyone for thinking it is normal.
>One other possibility is that I know what scroll lag is, don't see it in Firefox on my devices"
Yes, that's "one other" possibility.
Now, can we also entertain the possibility I suggested as something that one can't just rule out in advance, and that one would be OK in suggesting could also be the case?
I don't know you, have not met you, and I don't speak about you as a person. I made a general observation about what could be the case when someone says what you said. Another commenter also corroborated having seen this in the wild (assuming it even needs corroboration). It's hardly something that doesn't happen. And because I'm a somewhat insulted by your tone, notice how I didn't even said anything about you directly. I wrote:
"Don't forget the other possibility: someone using Firefox having internalized this lag as "normal behavior".
The rest, you brought into this. Enough is enough. Over and out.
That said, there is something to be said for modern applications just running way below the limits of the refresh rate of our screens: https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1671670996921896960
In the next tweet he compares it to a stock Surface Go 2 (quad-core i5 processor at 2.4GHz, 8GB RAM, SSD) and seems to be surprised that it performs like crap. His 600MHz CPU is sufficient to get decent input lag from NT 3.51 which lists a 25 MHz CPU as it's minimum spec just as my machines get decent input lag from Windows/macOS which list a 1.2 GHz CPU as the minimum spec.
I know clock speed is a bad metric, but you get the point. Your hardware needs to be well above the minimum spec by an order of magnitude if you want acceptable latency
(Personally I'm with you in preferring Firefox dev tools - although I'm not someone who needs to use them more than a few times a month - not because I have any specific issues with Chrome dev tools, but because I prefer Firefox, and Mozilla, generally, and I've not found anything that FF can't do.)
(I use firefox devtools primarily)
I find this very common with Credit Card and Banking Sites. Very often they either refuse to log me in or log me out sooner than they should on Firefox, or certain pages within the site will just not load. I'm guessing they prioritize security, and only test this stuff in Chrome ;(
Reddit.com and Discord have replaced many individual forums.
I was sad when they discontinued Firefox for my TV (even though it was mostly an Amazon-funded workaround to get youtube on FireTV which went away when YouTube started working...).
I'm working on a pretty nasty (legacy and poorly optimised) but otherwise still rather "normal" website at work.
Opening the dev tools makes Firefox hang for almost a minute, I suspect this is due to some issue with source maps, thousands of source files and large (several megabytes of) minified code.
The debugger often reports _wrong_ values on hover especially in useEffects whereas console.log shows the right one.
Other than the js debugger I have 0 problems with the Firefox devtools, it often spearheads features that I use on a day-to-day basis like highlighting grid layouts. Super nice!
[0]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/which-browsers-wo...
tab grouping uses the same cookies everywhere, whereas container tabs provide isolated workspaces each with their own set of cookies
Firefox allows you to create/manage multiple containers, and set up rules to assign specific sites to specific containers if desired.
I think the closest feature in Chrome is the ability to create multiple profiles, but this is less flexible/ergonomic IMO.
I have two password managers, one for work and one for home. Multiple profiles lets me work with both.
Container tabs lets me log into a site multiple times, or when they have a session cookie that prevents me from navigating to two different flows.
Both great, both fill completely different niches.
The profiles plugin, is great.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/profile-switc...
I would want to see this integrated.
I actually tested this and Firefox is significantly faster in rendering CSS and tables. (Not sure about complex Javascript.)
Chrome's snappiness is mostly UI smoke and mirrors, actual sites load faster for me in Firefox.
I'm still not a fan of the latest UI revision on Firefox.. Chrome is able to make me forget there is an UI
I remember switching to Chrome because of a new UI update many years ago (performance too)
If Firefox manage to catch up performance wise, I might give it another try
This can be very effective, which is why optimising complex pages for first contentful draw (perhaps at the expense of overall load speed) can make a huge difference to how your pages/app are perceived.
Back in the dial-up (and early ADSL) days many were convinced that IE was faster because of progress bar trickery: it would actively lie and could inch up to ~85% before the first byte of data had arrived from the server (I forget if it waited for the HTTP request to be sent or if it started edging up immediately upon TCP connection). It still did it right up to the end, though with local connectivity getting faster these days the amount you'll notice it is greatly reduced.
Are you referring to Firefox's multi-account containers extension?
Sandboxed tabs is brilliant.
I just wish they added better overall profile support.
You can send a few tabs through one socks proxy, a few through another, all while segmenting that from work, personal, etc. if you have a vpn for one work location and different ones for other work.
It's amazing how well it works!
I just set a few glob rules on the URLs I need proxied and I don't have to think about it anymore :)
1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...
Pair Firefox with a fast DNS, and it's noticably faster than Chrome, for the last 3 years or so.
I discovered it accidentally, after switching to local DNS at the office. We run one of the nation-wide ones in a pretty close proximity in network terms.
From my desk:
local one - 0.029 seconds
1.1.1.1 - 0.035 seconds
8.8.8.8 - 0.120 seconds
CTRL+SHIFT+R always disables cache for that reload, too.
I investigated and found that Firefox's in-memory DNS cache can be manually cleared by clicking a button in about:networking. To be fair Chrome also has a similar cache and method for clearing it. See: https://www.makeuseof.com/chrome-edge-firefox-safari-opera-b...
All of the networks I have have a DNS server around that speed now, and Firefox works visibly faster on all of them. Possibly an intersection between human perception and hardware capabilities of my systems at hand.
Or as a slightly more thorough approach, you can use something like namebench or dnsbench:
Another through method will be hyperfine[0], yet I wanted to provide a method which requires no installation and can be done in a whim, without jumps and hoops, with the tools already at hand.
So I use 8.8.8.8 and 9.9.9.9 in parallel through dnsmasq. Whoever responds the first wins. If you're not stuck in the middle of nowhere, you're probably better off with the latter as it's somewhat more trustworthy than Google.
Instead I increase the directory size to 4K and be done with it.
It makes sense here because of bad peering: 8.8.8.8 may be responding in 90 ms right now, but could very well start taking 200 ms a few hours later. So I use multiple services as a backup of sorts.
> recommends quad9
huh?
And by random I mean downloaded from a website of corporation with less than $100B valuation :)
Yes, and the lack of a viable vertical tabs solution for Chrome (though some Chrome based browsers have native implementations).
I am baffled how anyone could still be using horizontal tabs as it is clearly inferior. I am also annoyed as hell that it is not native in Firefox.
Enabling the desired behavior likely requires quite a few steps beyond just installing the extension.
https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
Originally, Firefox had a dropdown menu that allowed the user to choose whether tabs were on the top, bottom, left, or right.
This has been an annoying trend with Firefox for some time. They take the default, expected functionality, marginalize it while saying "Users who prefer the old way can enable it in a setting / extension" and then the setting gets deprecated or the extension stops working.
See also: "Classic Theme Restorer".
All the while software that might work better as an extension is bundled with Firefox and enabled by default. e.g. "Pocket", "Hello".
Mozilla sucks, but it is because all of this should be baked in, not because of pocket or whatever political thing that HN regularly brings up.
I have tried the vertical tab implementation in several other browsers and they are all inferior. Safari’s is hilariously bad.
I don't tend to work with a browser full-screen on my larger monitor (2560×1440) instead often using half the screen (so 1280px wide) or there abouts. My other screen is 1080×1920 (standard 1080 but portrait not landscape). In those cases I have less room for tabs on the side. It might be less of an issue but most of the side-tab options I tried had a minimum width noticeably wider than the minimum width of a tab in the standard layout.
What might work for me is tabs that can be flipped from horizontal to vertical at a keystroke, or perhaps even if they reacted to window size (with the default choice being easily overridden).
For example: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2023/04/14/dropping-the-ban...
> The two big jumps are from these two fixes. Great job, Performance Team!
_Finally_. It's only been _years_ that I haven't been able to search through my (admittedly far too big) list of disabled add-ons to find the one I want and turn it on.
Now we just need the collection limit on Firefox nightly removed. It only fetches the first page of 50 addons in a collection. I add things to my collection any time it seems useful, and keeping a collection in sync with what's being used across _seven_ browsers on two devices is difficult (I use multiple browsers on Android the way I use multiple browser windows on desktop; extensions usually only get installed in the workspace I actually need them for, so each install has a slightly different set of extensions and slightly different settings)
Because when it was originally released like 15 years ago, the pitch/consensus were the exact opposite of that, i.e. ultra clean and efficient.
I stuck with Firefox for literally 20 years, only caving in last year due to noticeable performance difference (went to Brave).
But this news makes me want to try it again, I'd rather be using Firefox just to have another browser engine thriving.
Competition is good.
I am surprised to see Chrome faster than Chromium. What is google doing in their branded flavor?
1. https://download-chromium.appspot.com/ 2. https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-bina...
Even prebuilt Firefox tend to be faster than distro provided ones, at least at some point on the past.
Now Firefox numbers have remained constant, but Chrome struggles to hit 20m ops/s in my desktop. Chrome has sacrificed front end performance across the board for modest performance improvements to query string access of the DOM. Pretty unfortunate.
That makes me super suspicious of 1.4B op/s. Surely Firefox isn't accessing the DOM in ~2 CPU cycles?
Its just a crude memory operation for Firefox. The video card in my laptop is super inferior compared to my desktop, so in most other benchmarks the laptop is much slower. The laptop has DDR4 memory where the desktop has slower DDR3 memory.
1.4b ops/s also sounds like it might not be testing what you think it's testing. Access in that case might just be hitting a cache, so possibly not at all representative of real performance of a web app.
I also see five orders of magnitude between the fastest and slowest operations there (`document.getElementById("canvas")` vs `document.getElementsByAttribute("href")`) on my machine, so it's not clear what you're disagreeing with my comment about.
On my machine, Chrome is slower by an order of magnitude on the first three tests, but is approximately the same (slightly faster or slower) on the rest. And I'll still assert these microbenchmarks aren't testing anything meaningful. Millions of calls to `document.getElementById("canvas")` in a loop is almost certainly just hitting a cache, which is fine but also reveals little about how it will affect execution of actual scripts (is the querySelector even a bottleneck in a particular piece of code? how big is the cache vs the actual uses before a `document.getElementById("canvas")` comes back around again? etc)
I do wonder though, is this performance improvement Windows specific? It's hard to believe that Mozilla could make up the difference in only three or four months.
Edit: looks like Chromium still beats Firefox on Linux: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...
In fact, all benchmarks browsers seem between a quarter and a third slower on Linux in speedometer. That's strange, I wonder if this has to do with the limited availability of hardware acceleration?
Looks like it really depends on the benchmark. In some Firefox gets slaughtered, in some Firefox is the clear winner.
Turns out having years of history, extensions, and a multi-gigabyte cache makes any browser slow.
It's a real pita for the same reason. Needed to look at browser history older than a few months and discovering it's all been deleted (by Firefox) was a very unpleasant experience.
Seems to be a needless data loss "optimisation" (sic), but I have no idea what the real world use case for that would be.
On my setup the "manage history" window goes back a bit over 6 months. Unfortunately the list entries don't show a date, so I can't give more precise numbers.
I suspect they need to do this to keep history searches fast, since I also separately hacked a bunch of `about:config` options to retain more history and they run quite slowly now, particularly on my phone.
History and extensions are there for a reason. And managing the cache is the browser's job, not the user's.
Years ago I remember it was the one app that could reliably kernel panic my MacBook
Strange stuff
Given the number of devs at GOOG that presumably used Macs, it was astonishing sloppiness to have been let out the door
2012 there was ultimately an Apple driver issue, but only seemed GOOG was impacted / let the code out the door / couldn't be bothered to patch around in meantime https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/google-yes-chrome-is-cra...
This was not the first or last Chrome MacOS kernel panic. Personally I recall them happening post 2017 as they were happening when I lived in an apartment I moved into around then. Searching around I see references to more of these types of incidents in later years like 2016 & 2019.
If it falls below 2% it may lose official support on .gov websites according to https://designsystem.digital.gov/documentation/developers/#b...
I support Firefox because competition makes market healthier. Current status of Manifest v.3 is a shining example.
Because for me chrome vs firefox (both 115)
- ubuntu desktop: 148(+-2.2) vs 126(+-6.5)
- android phone: 95.8(+-2.0) vs 78.5(+-4.3)
I suppose it is about nightly 117
- chrome 114: 472 ± 30
- firefox 115: 390 ± 22
- firefox 117: 420 ± 12I always will have 20 to 50 web browser windows open as well as many tabs in each of those windows.
The main issue I was encountering, and my best guess, from a lot of testing over the past three years, is related to the large pixel count of my desktop - I would frequently encounter 1 to 2 seconds of lag/unresponsiveness when switching from chrome to another (chrome) application in the background. As this has been a nearly 3 year long issue, I’ve tried many , MANY fixes/work arounds The two most impactful were upgrading from windows 10 to windows 11. And switching from chrome from primarily using chrome to Firefox. (The issue was actually the same with chrome canary, as well as with GPU rendering enabled or disabled in each browser.)
while I now run Firefox 24/7, I will occasionally open up chrome or chrome canary in unique use cases, and still notice the performance improvement in firefox during those times.
I even do some design work so it's honestly pretty bad.
I love my set up, I work for myself, and from home, so purchased it myself.
The GPUs I use, used to be 2X Nvidia, P1000 Quadro. But as I was trying to troubleshoot this latency issue I was referring to I’ve upgraded to 2X Quadro, RTX 4000 GPUs. (Which actually made little difference/improvement to the issue).
By the way, set ups like mine aren’t as expensive as you might think, you can get a nvidia Quadro P1000 or P2000 GPU on eBay for very inexpensive, as in around maybe 200 or less, each.
I really don’t play games, the rare times I do it’s exclusively on my Xbox (so none of this is for gaming / gaming optimized)
Edit: also, the 4K monitors are 30 inch in physical size, one might be 32-inch. This is very important I have found over the years (and going through many different monitors and resolutions to finally find the optimal set up for myself.) - 30 or 32 inch I have found is the sweet spot for 4K resolution.
I don’t use any windows OS text size increase (or whatever the 100% 125% 150% thing is called, mine is set to 100%.)
I have a decent salary but I don't have throwaway money to just spend 2k on monitors. Or on anything for that matter, that requires a year of saving :x
OT: Just curious... does anyone have a good cross-browser extension (chrome and FF browsers) that can sync the bookmarks, in particular the bookmark toolbar. I use a password manager (Bitwarden) that integrates well, wish I could get the same for the bookmarks toolbar.
It seems the only way are tools that directly edit each respective browsers setting files (ie from the command line) but I’d rather not go down that path.
Found a couple extensions, so will probably export to be safe, then start playing to see how it goes.
Firefox also handles lots of tabs really well and its Tab Containers plugin enables perfect separation of work tabs and personal tabs (I've got 1.4k tabs split across personal/work containers. I've got a problem, I know)
Every six months, I go back to Firefox for a day or two, only to notice this scroll lag. Every time.
My usage changed a lot from then, now I need:
- Tracing graph for network events in Firefox which it does not have.
- Applications tab that would show me the status of workers, cache ... is just plain in Firefox
- And UI seems condensed, I guess I just got used to a more relaxed Chrome.
- The whole debacle we don't want you to install a web app as a shortcut because it's bad for some reason. (They lost me initially with this years ago when I still had Linux).
It's a shame but Firefox is just not what I need and prefer anymore.
However, I've found their refusal to implement or offer alternatives to WebSerial and screen-casting utterly depressing. It's made a number of tasks more difficult and inconvenient and makes Firefox a less useful tool overall.
On the WebSerial discussion ticket, an educator articulates how this decision essentially forces what was a Firefox based classroom onto Chrome. I'll be sticking with Firefox but missing functionality drives users away.
It doesn't help that their reasoning for not implementing WebSerial feels extremely paternalistic and runs counter to the ethos of user empowerment at the core of most open source projects.
What is the justification for making everyone's browser able to "read from and write to serial devices"?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Serial_...
I know it is really for user fingerprinting but what is google's overt justification for pushing it?
Personally, it would make flashing ESPHome devices much more convenient. Not having to switch browser for a start. The ability to plug a board into whatever PC on my LAN and just flash it, without having to install and maintain the entire toolchain is nice as well.
More broadly, there are web based IDEs for microcontrollers. Arduino has one: https://docs.arduino.cc/learn/starting-guide/the-arduino-web...
A few of these are aimed at the education sector, removing a some of the significant barriers faced by educators that would otherwise have trouble getting the software installed and keeping it updated.
In one of the discussions, someone was using it to help dental offices retrieve data from some specialised hardware. Browser support dealt with similar concerns of how to distribute the software to non-technical clients and keep it up to date. It was also something their clients understood, rather than something new.
I try Firefox once in a while and it admittedly feels slower and more choppy compared to Chrome, but would definitely consider switching if there's more focus on performance.
That didn't stop me from using Firefox tough. I just have my first bookmark in the toolbar point to "about: profiles" and use this page to launch new profile instances, create new ones etc.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...
Having the ability to only default to one really sucks.
I've been a Firefox advocate and user for many years, but then about 6 years ago I had to face the hard truth of how bad it performed with lots of tabs open, and how much of a pain I was causing myself for not switching to a Chromium powered browser.
About one month ago, I've checked it out again under the same conditions... and sadly it's still not even close to competitors' memory management.
Everyone pushing Chrome and Electron apps will not suddenly adopt Firefox.
is it the same? no.
but is it close? hell yeah. it really helps me with productivity!
We all absolutely do benefit greatly from having multiple competing browsers and render engines - regardless of which one we individually prefer to use.
Therefore I really don't understand the many, many, many "my-browser-is-better-than-yours-you-should-switch" comments in this thread here. Why's everyone trying to convince everyone else that they should use the one and only "best" browser too? What for?
Are people truly that desperate for confirmation and validation, that they need others to agree on their choice of browser?
It's important to have at least 2 healthy browsers (in market share). They keep each other honest, if I might put it so tersely. We all remember IE6, and were in danger territory again with the current percentages.
For this reason, personally, Chrome would have to be 2x or more better than Firefox for me to consider switching to it. Do what you can to keep the market diverse.
If the percentages were reversed, I'd absolutely be running Chromium or a variant.
Also because they say FF is better but... for what/who? what parts are better?
I try it a couple times a year, and always go back to Chrome, because the UX is so bad (for me). I get more stressed about the browser I'm using, than actually enjoying the browsing
Edge on my 5950X + RTX3080 + 32GB RAM can't play some chiptune without glitching while Firefox can handle it like butter. Firefox's becoming a strong competitor every day.
TL;DR: Firefox usually uses AV1. Hardware prior to intel 11th gen tiger lake, amd rdna2 (pre rtx 6000 series) and nvidia 3000 series has no hardware AV1 decoding support (and neither does Apple Silicon). This results in higher CPU usage on Firefox, whereas Safari and Chrome usually resort to codecs that have hardware decode support on the machine.
This can easily be fixed by going to `about:config` and setting `media.av1.enabled` to false.
Why is that? Just good old-fashioned competitive optimization?
Firefox & its containers have been fantastic. Fast, stable, and I get the impression that security still matters.
E.g.: to add a keyword for a search engine, it saves a bookmark, but there isn't (or wasn't) any way to filter for those later if you wanted to check what you had already created
Edit: I use the Tree Style Tabs add on
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
With TST, I can open a link as a new tab (middle click) and it is shown as a child of the opening tab. This makes it easy to minimise or close a whole tree of tabs.
Is there a way to fix it with some tweeking?
*Our site is shit.
https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...
Something that might be less exciting is finding where Chrome beat Firefox on a benchmark and then tuning Firefox one knob at a time until it didn't, then moving on to the next benchmark - that would mean that there's not much more room to grow since it's basically just "ah, they did that we should do that". It would still be good work just not sustainable.
If it's part of a larger performance initiative I'd really like to learn more.
It's like "The Cubs beat the Yankees in the World Series! (But the Astros actually won the World Series)"
https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...
https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...
FF (114.0.1): 101 +- 1.9 Chromium (114.0.5735.198): 94.5 +- 2.2
FF (115.0.2): 104 +- 2.4 Chromium (115.0.5790.90): 101 +- 2.6
Machine Specs: Intel i5-3470 @ 3.2 GHz, 16 GB DDR3, 128 GB SSD. Linux kernel 6.1.38 (latest longterm branch) on Arch.
Safari and Chrome run it surprisingly well. Firefox was getting basically 1fps. I had to turn off half the effects before it felt reasonable.
Firefox containers have been there long back before tab groupings were available in Chrome as well.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-contain...
No complaints.
OTOH, you might feel it doesn’t mean much depending on your priorities. I mean, JavaScript is bad anyway. So I guess anyone they cares about performance/security blocks it as much as possible and/or avoids JavaScript heavy sites.
Or, big picture, Firefox wasn’t built by a spying company, so even if Chrome had much better benchmarks switching to Chrome would be a silly thing to do.
https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/
If you are interested in just JS, JetStream 2 is a good metric IMO, but is perhaps less "real world" as it doesn't really do DOM stuff. FF is slower here, but has made a lot of progress recently. (going from somewhere around 35% slower to around 10% slower).
"I hate the way this vendor does things, but I'm locked in and can't leave" is vendor lockin.
Google can offer this because you are using a single, fairly unified, ecosystem and they own both your account and browser. However, this ecosystem does not offer interoperability so you are effectively locked-in.
Ironically, this feature is exactly why I can't use Chrome or login on accounts on Android applications: this will auto-sync everything and log you into Google, make logging out very hard, enroll your devices on Google Workspace if that's a professional account, ...
Vendor lockin is where the vendor does things to lock you in, such as "Google made it so my Chromebook can only run Chrome", or "Google made it so my GMail only works in Chrome". Lockin generally is when people other than the vendor do things to lock you in, "Meta made WhatsApp web only work in Chrome", "My bank website only works in Chrome".
"The vendor made a more integrated, better, product and I prefer it" is not lockin of any kind, that's ordinary competition.
Firefox syncs extensions, preferences, open tabs, etc. The only thing it can't do is automatically log into Google, but having to enter one extra username/password one time per computer seems like a pretty minor reason to pick a browser, unless you're constantly logging in on new computers.