Hacker News Reader

Comment by hartator | Hacker News Reader

IMHO, Firefox has more and more trouble to renew itself.

This browser was great when it come out, fast, reliable and virus-free. I remember the good old time of IE when you have to wonder forever whenever if you'll click on a suspicious link or not. However, I have the feeling since chrome come out, they don't innovate anymore. Extensions are slow and unreliable, a lot of stuff feels like copy/paste from Opera or Chrome, Firebug, once the greatest, seems outdated, they have taken forever to support retina display on the mac, their engine crash or freeze in JS heavy environment... and they removed the blink tag.

My 5 cents.

View on HN

Oh no, not the BLINK tag!!! Fiends, criminals, collaborators with the devil! /sarcasm

While I share some sentiments in regards to their UI, Mozilla has done nothing but good moves so far - supporting PDF.js, Shumway, Servo, Rust, Mozilla Persona (login), Jetpack, etc. Firefox has performed admirably and I use it as a main browser.

With improvements to the garbage collector [1], the developer tools and the recent emphasis on performance [2], I think Firefox has really benefitted from the competition.

[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2013/07/18/clawing-our-w...

[2]: http://arewefastyet.com/

Your conventional wisdom is about two years out of date.

I've reacted because yesterday we have tried better_errors gem on our rails app. Safari and Chrome was fine but Firefox froze and crash while executing the JS.

Maybe I am wrong, but I keep using side by side with Chrome and Safari (Nerds has a lot of tabs and windows open!) and that's my feeling.

You really ought to log a bug about that.

I recently tried switching back to FF from Chrome and I find FF to lag horribly. Downloads are frequently broken and stall. The <filename>, <filename.part> thing is ridiculous. It feels like there is a molasses powered queue between input events and response, FF feels like a drunken master. I am in Chrome right now, I wish I was in FF.

Broken / stalled downloads don't sound like a Firefox problem to me. If you can reliably get a DL to fail in Firefox (that works fine in another browser) and reproduce it, file a bug :-)

I can't get things to reliably fail, admittedly the connections I am on are flaky. I have been traveling around the world for the last 8 months. From direct experience I know that Chrome handles flakey connections much better than FF. I routinely get downloads that are completely stuck in FF, showing 20KB/S as a download speed but the file hasn't been touched in 5 minutes and nothing gets written to disk and the activity monitor shows 0KB/s of network traffic. I would open a bug, but I would have to write a server that would expose the problem, no decent repro case and it wouldn't get fixed.

----

edit, Many times I have to pause a download and then resume to get the dl unstuck.

I refuse to install Chrome, but do install the pure open-source Chromium. I routinely get that behavior with Chrom[e|ium], which leaves files with a crx extension littered throughout my Downloads directory.

But to be fair from both our ends, neither is that useful individual anecdote(s) != empiricism.

Yeah, I have been toying with how to write a server to automated test cases to repro these bugs. Almost all issues I have with browsers is how they behave on slow connections. On the very fast and reliable connections we have in the states, many of the issues are not present.

The <filename>, <filename.part> thing is ridiculous.

Yep. Luckily it’s being fixed as we speak: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=420355

It's actually quiet nice to be able to rename the file and wget -c it.

I don't know if .crdownload has a header, but it doesn't seem to work the same way.

That's strange the only browser I got problems with downloading files is Chrome. Sometimes it takes a long time between clicking the download and seeing any visual clue from chrome that it started the download.

Good job their extension system allows you to easily restore the blink tag to your browsing, should you wish ;)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/restore-blink...

Disclaimer: I created the above extension

The main problem is not any of these things. The many problem is that they still have not implemented one-process-per tab which makes the browser severely inferior to Chrome.

I do not consider Firefox inferior to Chrome because of this, instead I consider Firefox superior to Chrome for this very reason. With 6 tabs open, Chromium is using 1.6GB of RAM, while I can browse forever in Firefox until it reaches that kind of memory consumption.

Am I missing something? Why is the one-process-per-tab model considered "severely" superior?

One tab can freeze (because of the js, for example) without killing the rest of the browser.

I don't remember when this has last happened to me. If this is the major reason, I, most definitely, prefer the current Firefox approach: much less memory utilization and the chance that I have to restart the browser once in a blue moon (not a problem for me in real use) vs very high memory usage but I'm protected in the off chance that one tab messes up my browser (and I always have to live with the high memory usage).

So FF devs, if you're listening, this is a vote against Electrolysis (if it means higher memory usage than current FF).

I seem to run into that pretty frequently on Firefox 19 at work, but I don't think I ever notice it when I'm running 23 at home.

I've been on the Aurora channel for some time now and it's been a pretty smooth ride for me. You should give it a try to see how it works out for you.

But you only get 15 tabs.

With plugins already in a different process, these situations are far less likely.

I still can't understand how a freezing js could stop browser, can't they handle that stuff on a different thread other than browser's main ui thread?

> Am I missing something? Why is the one-process-per-tab model considered "severely" superior?

I'm not sure process-per-tab is "severely" better. However, how are you measuring that 1.6 GB? If you're not careful, you're N-counting the copy-on-write pages that the processes are sharing. Even chrome://memory-redirect has a note that Chrome itself has a bug with N-counting its RAM usage across tabs. (Issue 25454) The RAM overhead of process-per-tab is more than the fanbois will tell you, but it's much less than you see by adding up the sizes you seen in top/taskmgr, and is less than seen in chrome://memory-redirect.

Sandboxing for security and fault tolerance is a big deal; it's certainly worth the difficulty in figuring out how much RAM is actually being used by N tabs, if that's your main complaint.

Edit: I'm notorious for browsing with 30+ tabs open. I currently have 48 tabs open, and I'm not noticing any ill effects from high RAM usage. I really wish there were a keyboard shortcut for pushing the address of a link onto a temporary bookmarks stack, and another shortcut for popping a bookmark and opening a tab.

> Sandboxing for security and fault tolerance is a big deal; it's certainly worth the difficulty in figuring out how much RAM is actually being used by N tabs, if that's your main complaint.

I use Firefox with tab groups and lazy tab loading and have probably over a thousand tabs in all the tab groups I use. This is very useful for me doing research and I haven't yet found a better workflow. I don't believe I would be able to achieve this with Chrome with any reasonable RAM usage.

> I really wish there were a keyboard shortcut for pushing the address of a link onto a temporary bookmarks stack, and another shortcut for popping a bookmark and opening a tab.

I use the Firefox addon "Save-to-Read" for this purpose and works great.

I'll be the first to admit that Chrome does have a pretty big memory footprint, I have not compared it to Firefox recently, but I assume Firefox is better. How ever as others have said using Chrome with over 40 tabs open still works well.

My macbook has 8 GB of RAM and my stationary has 12 GB so in my case the memory footprint is far less important than having tabs separated in processes.

If Firefox implemented one process per tab tomorrow, would you switch from Chrome to Firefox? I suspect this particular implementation detail is not a "main problem" for the majority of users comparing Chrome and Firefox.

Actually I probably would consider it. I like and trust mozilla as a company more than Google. Also Firefox has some extensions I would like to use such as No Script. I would probably still use Chrome for development hough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com