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Comment by el_duderino | Hacker News Reader

I hope they step it up in the browser area again. I know they were top dog, but as we all know, Chrome is now the reigning champ in speed. Firefox has come a long way. I still try it out for a couple weeks every few months, but I continue to come back to Chrome.

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That sounds pretty inaccurate to me. Firefox seems as fast or faster than Chrome these days.

I couldn't imagine switching away from Firefox + Vimperator. It's an incredible combo, and I don't think the speed difference between FF & Chrome is noticeable nowadays.

> I don't think the speed difference between FF & Chrome is noticeable nowadays.

It is, if you turn off ad-blocking. Certain sites will then just hang all of Firefox.

If you notice such sites, please file a bug about them so they can be investigated and fixed.

Certain sites will then just hang all of Firefox.

Which ones?

To see the effect on a small scale, load up a single JS timer[1] and watch the seconds increment by 1 each second.

If I disable both RequestPolicy and Ad Block Plus, loading up http://cracked.com, http://failblog.cheezburger.com/, and http://www.wikia.com/Wikia, and then just blindly clicking around one of those sites, it will cause the counter to jump/skip over seconds.

Chrome does no such skipping (on the same machine). RequestPolicy and ABP seem to help, but not eliminate the problem.

Okay, so that test is totally artificial, but surf the internet for a couple days without restarting Firefox (27.0.1) on Ubuntu (13.10) and Firefox still grinds to a half, taking more than half a second to change tabs or register other UI input.

Rather than debug Firefox, I can just use Chrome.

[1] http://www.w3schools.com/js/tryit.asp?filename=tryjs_setinte...

but surf the internet for a couple days without restarting Firefox (27.0.1) on Ubuntu (13.10) and Firefox still grinds to a half, taking more than half a second to change tabs or register other UI input.

Shrug, I do this all the time as I never restart the browser. And your timer test is WORKSFORME too :-/

as we all know, Chrome is now the reigning champ in speed.

Oh really? Sources please, or I call total bullshit.

Firefox has a long way to go.

* Australis

* Electrolysis (http://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/multiprocess-f...)

* Fx Accounts

Speed wise, I really think Fx is pretty much on par with Chrome. There are areas where Fx is faster and Chrome is faster. In general, both are great.

If you install a lot of addons/extensions, I will expect some performance hit. But that's an not excuse, yet I personally not a big fan of addons (well, addons are common in web development) anyway so that doesn't really concern me.

Memory hike usually happens with plugins (flash, java applet) but normal browsing is fine. Plus I have 16GB to spare...

Australis will be a large step backwards in many aspects, so I would not count it as a "should have". Read this preliminary FAQ, especially the answers: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=13350353#p1335...

I don't have much opinion about Australis. I was referring to performance regression, addon/extension compatibility. Mozilla has a lot of work to put into after enabling it in the release; I believe it's 29?

ATM the target release is 29, but it may be bumped to 30.

Wow. That's going to take like... every single piece of my firefox UI except maybe the location bar, and either reset it to the current defaults I can't stand or simply drop it all on the floor. Given that it's looking like I may have to rewrite a good chunk of the UI in an extension to fix this, I'm wondering if I'll even be able to find the time to upgrade.

Mozilla has been making some horrific decisions lately, and it seems they are going to be yet another business set to learn the hard way that surprising and pissing off users that you depend on for survival is a BAD idea, when they can leave for your competitor at any time.

Just about the worst thing you can do when users don't like your Cool New Design is to say "you'll get over it" and repeat how the features they cared about were removed.

This is what you will want: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classicthemer...

As far as JavaScript performance goes, they seem on par according to their own benchmarks at http://arewefastyet.com/.

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