Comment by esskay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by esskay | Hacker News Reader

I really struggled going back to Firefox after being a Chrome user for so long, it just feels so incredibly slow in comparison - I know it's probably just perception but I couldn't shake that feeling.

I ended up going with Brave. Once you turn off their crummy VPN and crypto advert it's effectively just google chrome with a built in ad blocker.

I know there were arguments/concerns about the crypto thing, but I did a bit of research before picking a new browser (as should you) and once I realised it was a simple thing to turn off and never see again I was fine with it, it's all opensource as well so you can see how things work.

Of course it's just a chrome fork, so is still somewhat influenced by Googles decisions but that really wasn't the issue here, I just wanted to keep ublock origin and that's been the outcome.

I still have syncing and such all running between my desktop and mobile, I still have all the same extensions I've used for over a decade, so it's been relatively pain free to switch.

Give us an example where Chrome is faster than Firefox, so we can see if it is more important than having uBlock Origin.

I use both Firefox and Chrome for work and haven't noticed any speed differences (without measuring).

As I said I think it's more of a perception thing than an actual slowness.

I don't think Firefox is actually any slower in a practical test of loading a site for example, I just perceived it as being slower, perhaps more likely its something like the transitions between tabs and other actions being different enough to feel slower.

If your life has been as unfair to you as it has been to some of us, and forced you to work on SPAs as the result, try opening any large frontend project that uses Vite (or any other dev server that serves each file separately instead of bundling them).

If you're unfamiliar with this stuff, it results in your browser fetching thousands of JavaScript files from the local dev server.

Any Chromium-based browser handles that just fine in about 1-2 seconds. Firefox takes at least ten, including full page reloads. No adblocking on either, and yes I've tried all combinations of about:config knobs, fresh/empty profiles, etc.

That's the only reason I use Chromium for development work.

> If your life has been as unfair to you as it has been to some of us, and forced you to work on SPAs as the result…

Hehe

Life is unfair to me and Firefox works just fine.

I use firefox to work on SPA’s and occasionally use chrome for compatibility checks. I haven’t really noticed a difference in speed, except for startup time (which firefox is definitely slower, but I also have it open pretty much all the time anyway)

https://www.browserating.com/#rankings

Chrome is faster and smoother on my Linux machines and on Android. On Windows and macOS, the difference is much less obvious.

I still use Firefox everywhere, but Mozilla still has some catching up to do in my experience.

I suspect part of it might be interactive-ity with the event loop: let me explain.

I regularly have to use web browsers (I try and want to use Firefox, but Chrome is faster for me in this scenario) on an under-provisioned (yes I know, but I don't have any control over that!) VM which runs VDI sessions on both Linux and Windows (with VMWare on Windows).

On both Windows and Linux, Firefox's UI (in this CPU-constrained env - it fluctuates, and sometimes is okay, but often is slow) in terms of UI interaction is very notice-ably much slower than Chrome, especially when there's animated content in the document. It seems like Firefox prioritizes thread-wise the HTML/JS content at the expense of any UI signals/presses/drags or other interaction, and so sometimes clicking close tab does nothing for > 30 seconds, but animated content within the document keeps playing perfectly.

Chrome does none of this (on same VM machines) with same content: I click the close button, and instantly a tab closes, or I can drag a tab around instantly.

I think that Chromium’s UI stack is also just more solid, being closer to “native” and being drawn with Skia and such, as opposed to the Firefox approach (previously XUL, which was always slow and clunky and later switching to a web tech based UI).

There used to be Gecko based browsers that fixed this with alternative native UIs (Camino, K-Meleon, and Epiphany aka GNOME Web), but then Mozilla removed embedding support and ever since anybody wanting to use Gecko are stuck with the design decisions of the Firefox team whether they want to be or not.

One example that I can give is that when Firefox has been running for long time, especially in Private window, the memory usage of "main" processes will grow a lot (normal & GPU). Compacting memory via about:memory does free up a bit but Chrome in similar situation will use a lot less memory. This does slow down Firefox (especially in system where you don't necessarily have a lot of memory), restarting it will make it a lot snappier.

For example I currently have Firefox & Chrome sessions which have been open for about a month on my laptop (16GB of memory). I closed every tab and only left the "blank" page open. Firefox's process manager shows 4GB GPU usage, a bit under 1GB usage for Firefox & about 250MB for extensions. After clicking "minimize memory usage" the GPU memory dropped to 3GB and Firefox process memory usage dropped by about 50MB.

For comparison Chrome uses 400MB of GPU, about 200MB for "Browser", ~150MB for for "utility" processes and about 100MB for extensions (extension list is different so we can ignore the memory usage difference for them, listed it just for completeness sake).

Despite this I do use Firefox as my primary browser.

May be a leaky extension, I rarely get over 1gb with firefox.

https://arewefastyet.com/win11/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6...

This is from Mozilla themselves.

I have used Firefox for many years now on all my devices, and I find it much better at almost anything: password management works better accross devices, history syncs better, etc. With chrome I could never really rely on saving a password on desktop, taking the phone and having a password just there.

Maybe it improved in the past few years, I didn't bother to check.

Also, Firefox is the last non-chrome-engined browser so it is worth using for that reason alone. Browser monopoly is bad and WILL be used against you, eventually.

Interesting. I don’t notice any difference in stock browsers. With a ton of privacy extensions I do feel FF gets a bit laggy but that’s a price I’m willing to pay. On chrome I can’t even do these things.

As someone who was exclusively Firefox until a month ago due to privacy had to go back to chromium on MacOS due to Firefox's inability to handle multiple dev react frontends. They just seems slow and would stall Firefox with that loader in blank screen.

The dev experience has been better with chromium so I have been using chromium for development and Firefox for regular usage.

I still see random crypto ads on new tab page.

I never bothered to turn it off, it's possible I guess but it's an interesting window to a bizarro world for me. (Oh some new blockchain NFT game! People still do that in 2025 apparently? Now with AI hype crap instead of metaverse hype crap?)

It's never bothering me as it never advertises anything that I am actually interested in.

I don't know if it's just me but in my case the problem isn't really the crypto bs, but rather Brendan Eich himself.

As much as Mozilla and Firefox can be criticized for both technical and non-technical reasons, at least I share the same core values. I don't seem to share any core value with Brave or its creator. Plus, yeah, still smells like Google :)

Brendan Eich’s contributions to computing are immeasurable. Your opinions of his social or political views don’t change that.

Do you not use Linux because you don’t like Linus? He’s quite a controversial figure. And before you say Linux is not Linus, the same can be said about Brave and Brendan.

Many other people work on these projects than just the leader.

Do you not use JavaScript because you don’t like Brendan?

> No moral choice is possible unless all your choices are moral.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

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