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Comment by Cyclone_ | Hacker News Reader

It's been about 15 years since I've used Firefox as my main browser but I'm not sure what their value proposition is at this point. They're not faster than the best browsers, and if they're not going to be better on things like privacy I don't see where they are going to position themselves. I mostly use brave now and some chrome when the occasional site doesn't work in brave.

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Firefox is actually faster in practice than Chrome. It also uses less memory, often far less, to accomplish the same tasks.

It absolutely is not faster. It just isn't. I have no doubt you can find some bollocks benchmark which proves your point but in real world usage it's just not.

Memory is there to be used. Have at it.

At least on our ram limited work VMs I literally can't launch Chrome without it crashing on launch. Firefox runs with no issues dozens of tabs, although occasionally I do get a tab OOM crash, which restarting Firefox resolves.. And yes, this is even if I completely quit Firefox to ensure Chrome gets as much RAM as possible.

If I've just restarted the machine, sometimes I can launch Chrome.

Chrome print preview never renders about 90% of the time when I am able to launch it. Firefox, no issues.

On a large complex page, when Chrome does manage to launch and print preview does load, it takes tens of seconds to render. Firefox, no issues.

I pretty much just use Chrome when I absolutely have to do a cross-browser test these days.

BTW, a Chrome-tangential annoyance is that the code process in VSCode which is basically an embedded browser sometimes runs wild sucking up gigabytes of RAM on another VM dedicated pretty much just to VSCode (and a couple of other minor tools on a lightweight desktop). The irritating thing there is that due to, apparently, a limitation of the blink embed they are using, you can't restrict the RAM available to VSCode to any number (even 100% of system ram) so you basically have to wait for the oomkiller to kill it, or run a parallel monitor to kill it once it sucks up too much ram.

What you're describing is <0.1% of browser use case though.

shrug This is a Windows VM with 8GB of RAM - if 8GB is no longer enough for Chrome, that's kinda sad. But does mean it is useless for at least the longer tail of lower end hardware.

This is not a good argument.

Many different users have many different use cases.

What you're basically saying is: It works OK for me, so the fact that it doesn't work for you is insignificant.

No, I'm saying it's working for >99% of the users.

(oh, and I suspect about:memory might fix the demanding sites that OOM, but restarting is easy enough too)

Memory is there to be used by all my applications, not to be hogged by one application when it could get by just fine with less.

Keep in mind that Mozilla is heavily focused on Windows. It's very fast and responsive on Windows, but I fund it unusable on Mac and Linux.

In my experience, Chromium can feel somewhat faster when you keep a low number of open tabs. It doesn't deal with many tabs as well as Firefox though.

That said, these days I only use Chromium occasionally, so this could have changed over the least few years.

I use both and I think they are similar in speed.

> Firefox is actually faster in practice than Chrome.

If you are going to make such a wild claim, you should back this up with data, your “feelings” are not enough.

There are benchmarks on https://arewefastyet.com. Sadly they do not go as far back in time as they used to; the absolute speed increase that Firefox has had over its lifetime is quite impressive. They’ve made progress in virtually every release since version 4.0.

Firefox is slower in pretty much every benchmark though?

Chrome's UI is written in C++/native GUI toolkit. Firefox's UI is written in JavaScript/HTML (thinly wrapped in native toolkit).

You say this as if the GUI is a major part of a browser's compute budget, and not wildly smaller than rendering the page you asked for, in >95% of the window's available space.

I wouldn't care one bit if the GUI was rendered in immediate-mode software rendering, if it worked. I interact with websites far more.

The value is it has ublock origin.

As compared to Brave, that isn't much value since the built-in ad blocking in Brave works great.

Its other value is the engine not being owned by Google. Those were 2 strong value propositions for many people.

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