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Comment by myfonj | Hacker News Reader

I can subjectively confirm that Firefox feels snappier recently and deeply appreciate and enjoy all improvements.

But I have some itching concerns about that methodology with heavy anonymisation and stuff there:

Couldn't it be that the web itself got faster, and folks have better hardware?

I mean, yes, generally these sloppy script kiddies with bloated frameworks produce less and less effective code … but I can imagine, that when some heavily visited page deploys a new better optimized and leaner version (I assume such things happen in reality, don't they?), there is no way to tell it apart from telemetry data telling that everything got slightly faster on average. Or with people getting better hardware, or with OS and driver updates, etc.

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I've used an older firefox version from 2020(the why I did is a long story) and only updated after the webp security issue. New version felt immediately faster.

As older Firefox versions are still in use, too, it’s possible to check whether the improvements come from updates in Firefox itself or the web in general.

>the web in general

That would certainly be overly optimistic.

The data will be biased though. Few people will buy new hardware and install old firefox versions.

Seems like the easiest path to increased speed is to hold software constant whilst processing and networking continue to improve.

Historically, software has continued to behave like a gas, expanding to fill space and consume resources. The resources generally do not belong to the software authors.

Software isn't eating the world, it's eating your computer's resources and the bandwidth you pay for every month.

It was starting to really “feel like a hog” to me over the last 6 months, including random crashes and stutters, and I considered switching to Chrome.

I hadn’t noticed until I read this, but I think that feeling has gone away recently and I had already stopped thinking about switching.

I mostly use Firefox but I have to use Chrome on a regular basis[1] and Chrome feel slower than Firefox despite having only one open tab. On a pretty old Linux computer.

[1] Because Slack still doesn't support WebRTC on Firefox after 8 years…

The web is getting faster, yes. This manifests as a constant (albeit slow) downward trend in global aggregate metrics. We think this trend is mostly due to Google pushing performance metrics being linked to search rankings.

However the data presented in this post shows obvious step changes in performance that correlate with browser version rollout. It would be disingenuous not to attribute this to a concerted effort on performance improvements from the Firefox team.

It would’ve been nice to see this normalized by CPU cycles or javascript tokens executed or something like that.

Something so that more megahertz/cores doesn’t throw off the number.

Whatever the reason, it is nice to see it improving. I think it would be interesting to also see a median figure in addition to a 95% figure.

I bet it's difficult to normalize because performance depends on so many things. CPU cycles, but also other factors like RAM speed, swap usage, CPU cache sizes and speeds, background tasks, GPU and GPU drivers, OS, display servers (X11 vs Wayland on Linux), window managers, available fonts, and probably a ton of other things are other factors that will play a role.

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