[HN Gopher] Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer
___________________________________________________________________
Firefox has surpassed Chrome on Speedometer
Author : akyuu
Score : 1106 points
Date : 2023-07-18 12:00 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (treeherder.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (treeherder.mozilla.org)
| impoppy wrote:
| Chrome and Safari still feel way faster in normal usage though,
| as they try to predict the most likely page the user will open
| and start pre-loading it even before the user has pressed Enter.
| Firefox is my daily driver, but sometimes I use Safari for some
| specific cases and Safari certainly is stupidly fast compared to
| Firefox.
| gobip wrote:
| Firefox can render pages faster than Chrome, if it still has a
| laggy scroll on macOS, I won't be using it.
|
| Every six months, I go back to Firefox for a day or two, only to
| notice this scroll lag. Every time.
| dz0ny wrote:
| I don't know but inspect tools just irritate me soo much in
| Firefox that I don't like to use the browser then at all. I
| started my career in Firefox and still remember you had to have
| an extension for debugging HTML, the editing style was fun and
| useful.
|
| My usage changed a lot from then, now I need:
|
| - Tracing graph for network events in Firefox which it does not
| have.
|
| - Applications tab that would show me the status of workers,
| cache ... is just plain in Firefox
|
| - And UI seems condensed, I guess I just got used to a more
| relaxed Chrome.
|
| - The whole debacle we don't want you to install a web app as a
| shortcut because it's bad for some reason. (They lost me
| initially with this years ago when I still had Linux).
|
| It's a shame but Firefox is just not what I need and prefer
| anymore.
| Zamicol wrote:
| I had to switch back to Firefox on desktop because Chrome has
| rendering bugs on Ubuntu. I use it infrequently, and noticed that
| Firefox has gotten much faster.
| rukshn wrote:
| My only suggestion is for FireFox to implement the native UI
| elements of the system (dropdowns, menus) etc. Than using
| something of their own. Where Chrome uses the system native UI
| elements.
|
| Is there a way to fix it with some tweeking?
| mgoetzke wrote:
| Sadly I cannot update Firefox anymore as any newer release would
| mean my other monitors would only show a black screen when
| looking at anything even remotely encoded with copy protection.
| veave wrote:
| Is this one of those synthetic benchmarks that don't mean much?
| hajile wrote:
| Speedometer executes a bunch of TodoMVC projects, so it's a mix
| of JS and DOM work. FF has done a lot of cool work on their DOM
| and have started to focus some on making JS faster, so they are
| pretty fast here.
|
| https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/
|
| If you are interested in just JS, JetStream 2 is a good metric
| IMO, but is perhaps less "real world" as it doesn't really do
| DOM stuff. FF is slower here, but has made a lot of progress
| recently. (going from somewhere around 35% slower to around 10%
| slower).
|
| https://browserbench.org/JetStream2.0/in-depth.html
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Safari is like 30% faster than Chrome on JetStream. I have no
| idea why people think V8 is the fastest engine around.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Yes. But being fast, even at a synthetic benchmark, is rarely
| worse than being slow.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| They sure do seem to mean a lot when someone recommends Firefox
| and people shit on them.
| akyuu wrote:
| Speedometer is one of the primary benchmarks used by the
| Chromium team as a proxy for real-world use of popular
| JavaScript frameworks: https://v8.dev/blog/speedometer-2
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| It's using a fake "app", but it measures UI updates across
| multiple real JavaScript frameworks. In other words, probably
| not a good benchmark for things that are compute-bound or
| I/O-bound, but probably a pretty good benchmark for
| "snappiness".
| bee_rider wrote:
| It looks to measure a bunch of little JavaScript-driven
| interactions. It has been around for a while, so I guess it
| probably measures what it says it measures.
|
| OTOH, you might feel it doesn't mean much depending on your
| priorities. I mean, JavaScript is bad anyway. So I guess anyone
| they cares about performance/security blocks it as much as
| possible and/or avoids JavaScript heavy sites.
|
| Or, big picture, Firefox wasn't built by a spying company, so
| even if Chrome had much better benchmarks switching to Chrome
| would be a silly thing to do.
| LargeDiggerNick wrote:
| After this quick switch profile addon was release I have been
| 100% on firefox and love it.
| MilaM wrote:
| I use profiles extensively and would love to know which
| extension you are using. Containers cover most of my sandboxing
| needs for private browsing, but I prefer to have a separate
| Firefox profile for business accounts/apps.
| LargeDiggerNick wrote:
| Firefox containers are great but this is better imo:
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-
| switc...
| brunno wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning this. Somehow I've searched for something
| like this before and couldn't find it.
|
| That didn't stop me from using Firefox tough. I just have my
| first bookmark in the toolbar point to "about: profiles" and
| use this page to launch new profile instances, create new ones
| etc.
| LargeDiggerNick wrote:
| I did that too but I encountered fuckery. I forgot what it
| was though it was a while ago.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| Are you talking about this? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...
| LargeDiggerNick wrote:
| Thats the one!!
| trewqasdf wrote:
| It's nice to hear that they are not falling behind. I switched to
| Firefox after Opera started to decline. I rely heavily on multi-
| account containers, but it is a pity that they can't run their
| own engine on iOS. I have nothing against the dev tools in
| Firefox, but it is way easier to google issues for chrome dev
| tools.
| afavour wrote:
| I'd be curious to see how Safari stacks up. I switched to it when
| I was finding Firefox too slow a long time and have largely stuck
| with it because of inertia. Very happy with it as a browser
| though.
| magicalist wrote:
| If you switch to Mac you can get Safari numbers, which seem to
| be about the same or just slower than Chrome, and now Firefox
| as well:
|
| https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| Safari blows the doors off everyone. Nearly 10% faster on same
| hardware.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Safari has the fastest JavaScript engine by far. It has been #1
| on JetStream for years by large margin, JavaScriptCore greatly
| outperforming both V8 and SpiderMonkey.
| loeg wrote:
| Does anyone familiar with this work have some pointers to read
| more about it?
| jeroen wrote:
| This comment should be helpful:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36771201
| p-e-w wrote:
| That chart suggests massive improvements since the beginning of
| this year. Can anyone explain how this was achieved? What
| precisely has changed?
| mstange wrote:
| You can expect some blog posts from us on this topic at the end
| of the year / early next year. In short: Organizational focus
| on a performance target, significant investment, and some great
| new tooling. We're also reaping the benefits of foundational
| work that happened over the last few years.
| akyuu wrote:
| In the Firefox Nightly blog, there is some discussion of the
| performance improvements they've delivered in each release:
| https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org
|
| For example:
| https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2023/04/14/dropping-the-ban...
|
| > The two big jumps are from these two fixes. Great job,
| Performance Team!
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1444491
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1815069
| efreak wrote:
| > Starting from Firefox 112, users can now search for text
| inside the about:addons page (through the usual associated
| keyboard shortcuts, e.g. Ctrl-F and '/') - Bug 1499500
|
| _Finally_. It's only been _years_ that I haven't been able to
| search through my (admittedly _far_ too big) list of disabled
| add-ons to find the one I want and turn it on.
|
| Now we just need the collection limit on Firefox nightly
| removed. It only fetches the first page of 50 addons in a
| collection. I add things to my collection any time it seems
| useful, and keeping a collection in sync with what's being
| used across _seven_ browsers on two devices is difficult (I
| use multiple browsers on Android the way I use multiple
| browser windows on desktop; extensions usually only get
| installed in the workspace I actually need them for, so each
| install has a slightly different set of extensions and
| slightly different settings)
| zamadatix wrote:
| You can click the dots and get a link to what was changed in
| that commit. e.g. in the sudden bump after April there is a 4
| part cache related patch linking to the issue tracking ID which
| describes (in human terms) additional jit caching mechanisms.
| neycoda wrote:
| Uh, I find this hard to believe considering Firefox still
| consistently runs slower in most ways for me than Chrome.
| lmizell wrote:
| I will always vouch for Firefox, It's been my primary browser
| since 2018 and there's no turning back. However its worth noting
| that while my FF windows experience has been painless I cannot
| say the same for Linux.
| alcamech wrote:
| On Fedora, I usually have issues with video playback, wayland,
| and browser/tab crashes.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| I love Firefox, but there's just one thing I miss from Chromium:
| run-in-background mode. My PinePhone has lots of memory but very
| slow IO, which means that Firefox can spend nearly twenty seconds
| loading. Once running, it'll load pages really quickly because
| local storage isn't involved. If there was a way of keeping a
| Firefox daemon running to instantly bring back a window, I would
| be very pleased indeed.
| Soupy wrote:
| Been a firefox user since 2020 after switching from Chrome and
| haven't looked back. The only thing that I find myself missing is
| native casting support so that's the last piece that sometimes
| forces me to open up Chrome
| dt2m wrote:
| Anecdotally, Firefox has always been faster than Chrome on MacOS
| for me. Great to see it's only getting even better.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| I found chrome on macOS to be a sloppy implementation
|
| Years ago I remember it was the one app that could reliably
| kernel panic my MacBook
|
| Strange stuff
| itsTyrion wrote:
| how the shit does a browser just casually kernel panic _the
| OS_ !? O_o
| steveBK123 wrote:
| It was literally the only app that kernel panic'd any of my
| Macs in years, and it did it repeatedly on a few bad
| releases across a number of years.
|
| Given the number of devs at GOOG that presumably used Macs,
| it was astonishing sloppiness to have been let out the door
|
| 2012 there was ultimately an Apple driver issue, but only
| seemed GOOG was impacted / let the code out the door /
| couldn't be bothered to patch around in meantime
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/google-yes-chrome-is-
| cra...
|
| This was not the first or last Chrome MacOS kernel panic.
| Personally I recall them happening post 2017 as they were
| happening when I lived in an apartment I moved into around
| then. Searching around I see references to more of these
| types of incidents in later years like 2016 & 2019.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Blind guess: GPU driver bug
| steveBK123 wrote:
| as I recall, yes this was it
| londons_explore wrote:
| Try clearing your profile.
|
| Turns out having years of history, extensions, and a multi-
| gigabyte cache makes any browser slow.
| Avamander wrote:
| Chrome automatically prunes history for quite a while now.
| Which I personally dislike, as I sometimes need to find
| something I visited a long time ago.
| justinclift wrote:
| Firefox does the same thing too unfortunately, and it
| doesn't seem like it can be turned off.
|
| It's a real pita for the same reason. Needed to look at
| browser history older than a few months and discovering
| it's all been deleted (by Firefox) was a very unpleasant
| experience.
|
| Seems to be a needless data loss "optimisation" (sic), but
| I have no idea what the real world use case for that would
| be.
| osmarks wrote:
| I wrote a script (https://github.com/osmarks/random-
| stuff/blob/master/histrete...) to dump a Firefox
| places.sqlite database to a separate SQLite database for
| long-term storage (I run it nightly). It seems to delete
| stuff based on some combination of visit frequency and
| last visit time.
|
| I suspect they need to do this to keep history searches
| fast, since I also separately hacked a bunch of
| `about:config` options to retain more history and they
| run quite slowly now, particularly on my phone.
| wackget wrote:
| Not sure if I've done anything special but I've got
| history going back to 2021.
| justinclift wrote:
| Interesting. That gives me hope that there might indeed
| be a setting to change the behaviour. Thanks. :)
| alpaca128 wrote:
| There's a good chance an about:config setting lets you
| change it. FF has a ton of detailed settings but most are
| hidden.
|
| On my setup the "manage history" window goes back a bit
| over 6 months. Unfortunately the list entries don't show
| a date, so I can't give more precise numbers.
| svl wrote:
| browser.history.maxStateObjectSize and
| places.history.expiration.max_pages (both accessible
| through about:config) should be the settings to modify.
| Do a web search for those properties to get more
| information on how they interact.
| p-e-w wrote:
| That's like saying "If your car runs too slow, toss out the
| back seats."
|
| History and extensions are there for a reason. And managing
| the cache is the browser's job, not the user's.
| yborg wrote:
| It's more like saying stop carrying around the cassette
| boombox and corpses of your last 3 dogs in the back seats.
| throwaway104782 wrote:
| You still have to regularly give your (ICE) car an oil
| change in order to keep it in proper working order.
| askl wrote:
| You can also save some more weight by never filling the gas
| tank up to more than 25% capacity.
| dylan604 wrote:
| But that makes high speed chases impractical as you have
| to keep stopping for gas
| fullstop wrote:
| You reminded me of this sketch:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxY0-Qr_l78
| osdril wrote:
| I use Safari as my primary browser, only for its tab groups
| implementation. In my opinion they just nailed it, I think it's
| much better than the Chrome one. I would really like to switch to
| Firefox as I prefer it in every other way, but I don't think I
| will move until they offer a robust native tab group
| implementation (I've tried Simple Tab Groups but I don't want to
| rely on a hacky extension for such a core functionality).
| xd1936 wrote:
| I've used Firefox as my primary browser since the "Quantum" in
| 2017. Chrome still feels snappier, but Firefox's Container Tabs
| is hard for me to imagine losing.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Chrome's most of the snappiness is coming from how it handles
| the DNS queries internally from my experience.
|
| Pair Firefox with a fast DNS, and it's noticably faster than
| Chrome, for the last 3 years or so.
|
| I discovered it accidentally, after switching to local DNS at
| the office. We run one of the nation-wide ones in a pretty
| close proximity in network terms.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I recently noticed something similar, when I had to enable
| DoH (unfortunately Cloudflare -- good that this thing lives
| in a separate browser profile) to reach atlassian websites.
| Suddenly the pages loaded faster than without DoH. Still not
| sure what changed on my system (nothing?) or what my ISP did
| so that I could no longer resolve those websites, but at
| least DoH solved the problem for me.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| which is a fast DNS? 1.1.1.1 ? I thought the OS caches DNS
| anyway, so shouldn't matter much in day to day browsing.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Anything you can "time nslookup" in or under 0.03 seconds
| (in "real" terms).
|
| From my desk: local one - 0.029 seconds
| 1.1.1.1 - 0.035 seconds 8.8.8.8 - 0.120 seconds
|
| Normally it should be, but Firefox's behavior is very
| sensitive to DNS response speed. Sounds not intuitive, but
| I think they're not using glibc's caching, or doing
| something by themselves.
| jraph wrote:
| Curious, where does this number comes from? (0.03
| seconds)
| bayindirh wrote:
| Nothing special. Just that if I have a DNS resolving
| around that timeframe, Firefox becomes noticeably faster.
|
| All of the networks I have have a DNS server around that
| speed now, and Firefox works visibly faster on all of
| them. Possibly an intersection between human perception
| and hardware capabilities of my systems at hand.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| In the past, at least, firefox has done its own caching
| since expiring my OS dns cache was insufficient to get it
| to pick up a change in DNS.
| CmdrKrool wrote:
| Good reason to avoid Firefox for development imo. Nothing
| is more annoying than mysterious cache interventions when
| you're trying to get a handle on an unrelated problem.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Dev tools automatically disables caching for that tab, by
| default.
|
| CTRL+SHIFT+R always disables cache for that reload, too.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I didn't know about devtools doing that; C-S R is what I
| use when I run into it.
| bayindirh wrote:
| On the Dev Tools' network tab, there should be a checkbox
| about it on the top left.
| CmdrKrool wrote:
| In the dev tools settings there is a checkbox "Disable
| HTTP Cache (when toolbox is open)" which name seems to
| imply that this only applies to the resources that make
| up the page, not to DNS lookups (about:config name is
| devtools.cache.disabled, and it defaults to false).
|
| I investigated and found that Firefox's in-memory DNS
| cache can be manually cleared by clicking a button in
| about:networking. To be fair Chrome also has a similar
| cache and method for clearing it. See:
| https://www.makeuseof.com/chrome-edge-firefox-safari-
| opera-b...
| elishah wrote:
| > "time nslookup"
|
| Or as a slightly more thorough approach, you can use
| something like namebench or dnsbench:
|
| https://code.google.com/archive/p/namebench
|
| https://github.com/askmediagroup/dnsbench
| bayindirh wrote:
| Yeah, while it's not as thorough as these tools, the
| method is at least reproducible and sane, and with ~10 or
| so samples, you get an interval with a nice confidence.
|
| Another through method will be hyperfine[0], yet I wanted
| to provide a method which requires no installation and
| can be done in a whim, without jumps and hoops, with the
| tools already at hand.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Tried it on a few sites, yeah, 8.8.8.8 consistently
| returns slower.
| akino_germany wrote:
| Find out for yourself using
| https://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Not downloading a random exe to my computer, sorry)
|
| And by random I mean downloaded from a website of
| corporation with less than $100B valuation :)
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Depends on your region and what sites you're using. I live
| in the middle of nowhere far from civilization, and 1.1.1.1
| returns terrible IPs for many sites including google.com
| (which pings at 350-400 ms if you resolve it through
| 1.1.1.1, but at 90-100 ms if you're using any other
| resolver). They do it because they block EDNS0 in order to
| protect your privacy or something like that.
|
| So I use 8.8.8.8 and 9.9.9.9 in parallel through dnsmasq.
| Whoever responds the first wins. If you're not stuck in the
| middle of nowhere, you're probably better off with the
| latter as it's somewhat more trustworthy than Google.
|
| https://quad9.net/
| bayindirh wrote:
| Isn't enabling "query all DNS servers in parallel"
| discouraged in DNSMasq?
|
| Instead I increase the directory size to 4K and be done
| with it.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Maybe. I don't recommend it for the typical user of this
| site (probably could have phrased that one better -- I
| believe `EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK` should use 9.9.9.9 instead of
| Google or Cloudflare, not that they should implement my
| parallel bullshit).
|
| It makes sense here because of bad peering: 8.8.8.8 may
| be responding in 90 ms right now, but could very well
| start taking 200 ms a few hours later. So I use multiple
| services as a backup of sorts.
| itsTyrion wrote:
| > fast DNS
|
| > recommends quad9
|
| huh?
| [deleted]
| lattalayta wrote:
| I always get suspicious when someone describes performance as
| "feels snappier"
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Chrome has better network stack. For most other things Firefox
| is faster, but of course, network is the most important.
| hnav wrote:
| one deficiency in the FF network stack is that it doesn't
| properly detect existing pooled connections being broken by
| net route changes while Chrome does
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Container tabs are unfortunately not very usable for me. I have
| extensions that are unique to the profile. When they decided to
| redo the tabs rather than modernize the profile workflow, it
| basically forced me to use chrome.
| dsauerbrun wrote:
| pretty sure chrome has had tab grouping for over a year now
| CrampusDestrus wrote:
| container tabs != tab grouping
|
| tab grouping uses the same cookies everywhere, whereas
| container tabs provide isolated workspaces each with their
| own set of cookies
| post-it wrote:
| Are they containerized? I have separate containers for work
| and personal stuff, with separate sessions for Gmail, GitHub,
| etc.
| allarm wrote:
| That's not what container tabs are. Think of it as isolated
| environments for groups of sites. You can even set it up so
| that each new link opens in a new environment, without any
| cookies, etc.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| How are tab groups relevant here?
| [deleted]
| haswell wrote:
| Container tabs isolate sessions. I don't think tab grouping
| is related.
|
| Firefox allows you to create/manage multiple containers, and
| set up rules to assign specific sites to specific containers
| if desired.
|
| I think the closest feature in Chrome is the ability to
| create multiple profiles, but this is less flexible/ergonomic
| IMO.
| happymellon wrote:
| In some ways profiles works better, and in others container
| tabs does.
|
| I have two password managers, one for work and one for
| home. Multiple profiles lets me work with both.
|
| Container tabs lets me log into a site multiple times, or
| when they have a session cookie that prevents me from
| navigating to two different flows.
|
| Both great, both fill completely different niches.
| toyg wrote:
| Firefox has profiles too, btw.
| happymellon wrote:
| Profiles in Firefox isn't great.
|
| The profiles plugin, is great.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/profile-
| switc...
|
| I would want to see this integrated.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I spend more than my fair share of time in AWS consoles. My
| company uses multiple accounts to segregate data and services
| were appropriate, and container tabs let me have several
| consoles open at once when I need them. That's such a wonderful
| productivity boost over having to have multiple browsers open.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > Chrome still feels snappier
|
| I actually tested this and Firefox is significantly faster in
| rendering CSS and tables. (Not sure about complex Javascript.)
|
| Chrome's snappiness is mostly UI smoke and mirrors, actual
| sites load faster for me in Firefox.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Chrome 's snappiness is mostly UI smoke and mirrors_
|
| This can be very effective, which is why optimising complex
| pages for first contentful draw (perhaps at the expense of
| overall load speed) can make a huge difference to how your
| pages/app are perceived.
|
| Back in the dial-up (and early ADSL) days many were convinced
| that IE was faster because of progress bar trickery: it would
| actively lie and could inch up to ~85% before the first byte
| of data had arrived from the server (I forget if it waited
| for the HTTP request to be sent or if it started edging up
| immediately upon TCP connection). It still did it right up to
| the end, though with local connectivity getting faster these
| days the amount you'll notice it is greatly reduced.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Yes, that's important. The funny part about it is that it's
| probably a lot cheaper than optimizing the engine.
| kevincox wrote:
| Yup. I found that Firefox does incredibly well at long text
| documents and tables. I remember that Google's internal
| source code browser would warn you if you tried to open a
| "large" file (I don't remember what the threshold was).
| However with Firefox the files always opened fine and things
| like scrolling performed well. I thought the warning was just
| a relic of an earlier time. However I realized that my
| colleagues using Chrome would actually respect this warning
| and download the file to open it in a text editor. Testing
| showed that the files would truly grind Chrome to a halt. It
| seems that Chrome still has a performance edge on highly
| dynamic content but Firefox does appear to be significantly
| better at large pages of mostly-static content like long HTML
| and text documents.
| insanitybit wrote:
| Maybe FF should take some tips on those UI "smoke and
| mirrors". What feels faster is what users are going to go off
| of. For example, a page that fully loads in 1 second vs a
| page that incrementally loads in 1.5 seconds - the latter may
| feel faster because the time to _start_ loading is faster.
| ndiddy wrote:
| That makes the user experience worse though. Anyone who's
| had a webpage layout change while they were trying to
| interact with it knows how frustrating it is.
| insanitybit wrote:
| Sometimes. The big offender here is advertising.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Pretty much this, the overall feel of Chrome is snappier
| and the UI/UX is much better
|
| I'm still not a fan of the latest UI revision on Firefox..
| Chrome is able to make me forget there is an UI
|
| I remember switching to Chrome because of a new UI update
| many years ago (performance too)
|
| If Firefox manage to catch up performance wise, I might
| give it another try
| causi wrote:
| Not to mention that the things the user wants to see are
| probably early in the load order and all the worthless
| garbage is coming in later.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| Those SPA-filled days, all I get on those "early load
| order" pages are blinking blank rectangles and spinners.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| >Firefox's Container Tabs is hard for me to imagine losing.
|
| Yes, and the lack of a viable vertical tabs solution for Chrome
| (though some Chrome based browsers have native
| implementations).
|
| I am baffled how anyone could still be using horizontal tabs as
| it is clearly inferior. I am also annoyed as hell that it is
| not native in Firefox.
| kdklol wrote:
| As a person who habitualy closes everything, I often average
| around 5 tabs open, rarely going above 10. With so few open
| at a time, the giant column of vertical space for the tab
| tree would be a waste of screen real estate, which can be
| better utilized to open another window i a vertical split
| arangement, or just for the website's content. Having said
| that, I know one of my friends has always at minimum 100 tabs
| open at any time, so he jumped at this feature as soon as ut
| released. It's a matter of preference I'd say.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| The benefit of vertical tabs is (IMO) more about
| organization than having tons of tabs open. It's
| particularly useful to have a tree of tabs when browsing
| API documentation, to allow for quickly navigating to
| different doc pages in the hierarchy without having to wait
| for page loads.
| kevincox wrote:
| I'm the same. In the rare case I do have a lot of tabs open
| it tends to be a queue that I work through in order anyways
| so having them not fit on screen isn't a problem. My theory
| is that once I get over 20 tabs or so it will be quicker to
| just re-open the document (just type a few words in the URL
| bar and history-search will find it) than actually locate
| and click it. I'm glad that Firefox is flexible enough for
| tab hoarders and tab closers. Having a horizontal tab bar
| that doesn't take up too much space is perfect for me.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> I am baffled how anyone could still be using horizontal
| tabs_
|
| I don't tend to work with a browser full-screen on my larger
| monitor (2560x1440) instead often using half the screen (so
| 1280px wide) or there abouts. My other screen is 1080x1920
| (standard 1080 but portrait not landscape). In those cases I
| have less room for tabs on the side. It might be less of an
| issue but most of the side-tab options I tried had a minimum
| width noticeably wider than the minimum width of a tab in the
| standard layout.
|
| What might work for me is tabs that can be flipped from
| horizontal to vertical at a keystroke, or perhaps even if
| they reacted to window size (with the default choice being
| easily overridden).
| seapat wrote:
| What extension do you use for vertical tabs on FF? I tried
| tree style tabs and sideberry but liked neither.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I use "tree tabs" and like it best due to its features like
| folders and unload-tab. However it is a pain in the ass to
| configure the theme to look right in dark mode. Plan on
| investing an hour. But once done is done.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Sidebery without using trees because they waste valuable
| tab name space. Having more name space is a key advantage
| to vertical tabs. I use separate windows for high level
| categories and use the titler extension to name the
| windows. Sidebery doesn't recognize the titles when you
| want to move a tab to a new window though. That's one of a
| few pieces of kruft in my setup.
|
| Mozilla sucks, but it is because all of this should be
| baked in, not because of pocket or whatever political thing
| that HN regularly brings up.
|
| I have tried the vertical tab implementation in several
| other browsers and they are all inferior. Safari's is
| hilariously bad.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Not OP, but personally I'm using Tab Center Reborn with a
| bit of custom browser CSS to make it slide out on hover (so
| there are only favicons visible until hovered). It's just a
| vertical UI for tabs with handy filtering entry box, rather
| than a complex tab management thing like TST. The only
| thing I'm missing is filtering/jumping to the tabs that
| play sounds - it's easy to miss a tiny icon when you have
| thousands of tabs open :P
| hencoappel wrote:
| I use tree style tabs, what don't you like about it?
| akaij wrote:
| I use Sidebery, with some modifications from
| https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/wiki/Options
| RunSet wrote:
| Out of the box Tree Style Tabs is not very good, due to
| decisions made by Firefox that are beyond the control of
| Tree Style Tabs's developer.
|
| Enabling the desired behavior likely requires quite a few
| steps beyond just installing the extension.
|
| https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-
| fo...
|
| Originally, Firefox had a dropdown menu that allowed the
| user to choose whether tabs were on the top, bottom, left,
| or right.
|
| This has been an annoying trend with Firefox for some time.
| They take the default, expected functionality, marginalize
| it while saying "Users who prefer the old way can enable it
| in a setting / extension" and then the setting gets
| deprecated or the extension stops working.
|
| See also: "Classic Theme Restorer".
|
| All the while software that might work better as an
| extension is bundled with Firefox and enabled by default.
| e.g. "Pocket", "Hello".
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Tree Style Tabs would be so great if it had folders/nodes
| for categories of tabs. My workaround are tabs with
| fittingly named Wikipedia articles, but a builtin feature
| would be more pleasant to use.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Sidebery has this!
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Oh, that looks great, thanks.
| euazOn wrote:
| Tree Style Tabs are great, but y'all should really check
| out Sideberry! It's modern and works very well.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I switched to Chrome a few months ago and Container Tabs are
| the one thing I really miss. I can no longer quarantine
| Facebook. I can no longer easily juggle multiple login profiles
| for sites like Twitter. There's nothing like it in Chrome.
| Multiple profiles don't work well, too many UI problems. The
| SessionBox looks promising but it's such a complex mess and
| basically requires a paid plan to use effectively.
| rewmie wrote:
| > (...) but Firefox's Container Tabs is hard for me to imagine
| losing.
|
| Are you referring to Firefox's multi-account containers
| extension?
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers
| happymellon wrote:
| I can't speak for them, but it's what I thought of and agree.
|
| Sandboxed tabs is brilliant.
|
| I just wish they added better overall profile support.
| chaxor wrote:
| This is indeed fantastic, but paired with container proxies,
| it's awesome.
|
| You can send a few tabs through one socks proxy, a few
| through another, all while segmenting that from work,
| personal, etc. if you have a vpn for one work location and
| different ones for other work.
| tux3 wrote:
| I'm just starting to use this, I have a VPN that I put in a
| network namespace along with a local `danted` socks proxy,
| so it doesn't disturb the rest of the system
|
| It's amazing how well it works!
|
| I just set a few glob rules on the URLs I need proxied and
| I don't have to think about it anymore :)
| fooker wrote:
| This is awesome, looking forward to performance improvement
| efforts from Firefox.
|
| I try Firefox once in a while and it admittedly feels slower and
| more choppy compared to Chrome, but would definitely consider
| switching if there's more focus on performance.
| javajosh wrote:
| Firefox is a great browser and Mozilla is a (generally) great
| organization. It's my daily driver on all my devices (except my
| TV ha), it's fast and has great plugins that also work in mobile.
| Philosophically I'm very much a "root for the underdog" type of
| person so it makes me happy that way, too. Only very rarely
| (every few months) am I forced to use Chrome for a site - and in
| my view, that's a huge ding on the site devs, not on Firefox.
|
| It's strange hearing reports of "scroll lag" in the other
| comments. It's possible I'm just lucky. Or there's a
| misconfiguration somewhere in their setup that Chrome somehow
| avoids.
|
| It's true that I still mostly use Chrome for webdev - I've become
| more used to it's (excellent) dev tools, even though Firefox and
| Firebug started that whole trend. It feels very right to separate
| my "user browser" from my "dev browser" in this way!
| barrotes wrote:
| I took an old laptop and transformed it into an Arch Linux
| based smart-tv (thanks to a stabilized "air mouse" and
| AwesomeWM to configure windows positions and shortcuts through
| LUA). Now I basically do everything through Firefox in kiosk
| mode: it's fast, you can avoid ads, telemetry et similia
| through configuration tweaks and extensions. The only problem I
| have is with Sky/NowTV services, that are not accessible by web
| browser and don't have Linux apps and are not (yet?) working
| through wine. All the rest I use (Prime Video, Netflix, Mubi,
| Discovery+ etc) work great with it, way faster and cleaner than
| usual smart TV apps. This with a 15W-TDP 4th-gen i3 based old
| entry level laptop. That's just to say that Firefox can
| actually be pretty good for TV!
| RVRX wrote:
| > Only very rarely (every few months) am I forced to use Chrome
| for a site - and in my view, that's a huge ding on the site
| devs, not on Firefox.
|
| I find this very common with Credit Card and Banking Sites.
| Very often they either refuse to log me in or log me out sooner
| than they should on Firefox, or certain pages within the site
| will just not load. I'm guessing they prioritize security, and
| only test this stuff in Chrome ;(
| alekratz wrote:
| The place I run into this the most is, strangely,
| chipotle.com. Still can't order online on Firefox.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| I've had this happen and businesses have lost my business
| because of it.
| copperx wrote:
| Using Chrome to support small businesses seems reasonable
| to me. They might not have a big development budget to test
| their site on all browsers.
| supertrope wrote:
| Many businesses don't bother with a website anymore and
| just have a Facebook page. It's like how in 1998
| businesses would mention their AOL Keyword alongside
| www.example.com.
|
| Reddit.com and Discord have replaced many individual
| forums.
| Vrondi wrote:
| Chipotle is definitely not a small business.
| cozzyd wrote:
| > except my TV ha
|
| I was sad when they discontinued Firefox for my TV (even though
| it was mostly an Amazon-funded workaround to get youtube on
| FireTV which went away when YouTube started working...).
| systems_glitch wrote:
| Same. Been using it since it was called Camino then Firebird, a
| confusing namespace collision :P
| dylan604 wrote:
| Maybe they can use Screaming Chicken for a future name
| ragingrobot wrote:
| That's reserved for use after build 197.3.
| BearOso wrote:
| Camino was actually a separate, but similar slim-down project
| for Mac. It had Mac OS Cocoa controls, so it fit in better.
|
| Camino was originally named Chimera. It was started by Dave
| Hyatt, the guy who went to Apple to build Safari and WebKit,
| which Chrome now uses.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Phoenix for me.
| aden1ne wrote:
| As for sites that don't work in FireFox, here's a huge one:
| Office365 does not support FireFox on MacOS[0]. Mostly it
| works, but some things unfortunately don't. For instance, my
| employer's Teams site just doesn't render at all in FF.
|
| [0]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/which-browsers-
| wo...
| coldtea wrote:
| > _It 's strange hearing reports of "scroll lag" in the other
| comments. It's possible I'm just lucky. Or there's a
| misconfiguration somewhere in their setup that Chrome somehow
| avoids._
|
| Don't forget the other possibility: someone using Firefox
| having internalized this lag as "normal behavior".
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Firefox defaults to smooth scrolling, which
| can feel laggy even on reasonably powerful hardware, because
| animation is its own latency.
| javajosh wrote:
| As an aside, I am very much against this trend of accusing
| people of "internalizing" a bad thing such that they aren't
| aware of it. It's using therapy-speak as an ad hominem
| attack, and in my view reflects poorly on the speaker. Most
| of the people on HN are software developers and are
| conversant in a wide variety of tools on many platforms, and
| certainly I am (one can infer that from my post). So to
| assert that I simply don't know what scroll lag looks like is
| not only absurd, but also fundamentally disrespectful and
| ignorant. The simple fact is that you do not, cannot, know
| what other people experience on their machines. Each physical
| system is characterized by roughly 10e10 bits - the number of
| combinations is (10e10)!. In other words, wild and alien
| configurations exist that you've never seen, and cannot
| imagine. Compared to this, the chances that someone has
| software that behaves slightly differently on their system
| than on your system is approaching 1.
|
| Have some humility.
| coldtea wrote:
| Considering this as a possibility is anything than
| "fundamentally disrespectful and ignorant".
|
| I've known lots of developers who thought that some broken,
| slow, erratic, or stupid, program or OS behavior is the
| normal, because that's what they've been used to. They
| could be great programmers too, they just didn't venture
| much outside the stuff they used.
|
| As for the diatribe, I don't care for this recent trend of
| perceiving something somebody said as some kind of abuse of
| "therapy speak" (before this comment I've seen a few
| stories about some actor "abusing therapy speak" and such
| lately, so I assume it's some new fad going on). I don't
| read about therapy, or had any therapy speak in mind.
| "Internalized" has been used for decades as a term, and
| here just means "accepted this lag as the baseline as they
| don't have a frame of reference". Might not even be the
| right word, I probably was looking for normalized (is that
| therapy speak too?). So there's that.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > broken, slow, erratic, or stupid, program or OS
| behavior
|
| This describes so much software that I don't see how you
| can fault anyone for thinking it is normal.
| javajosh wrote:
| One other possibility is that I know what scroll lag is,
| don't see it in Firefox on my devices, and you really
| don't want to accept that for some reason. So much so you
| double-down on your out-of-the-blue speculation about my
| mental state. People also have petit mal seizures, and
| that could also explain not seeing lag. Or perhaps an eye
| problem. Or maybe I'm a paid shill for Mozilla. Why not
| propose these as well? It would make just as much sense,
| and reflect just as poorly on you.
| coldtea wrote:
| Sorry, but this reaction has little to do with my
| comment. I didn't do any "speculation about your mental
| state", except to the degree that saying that someone can
| be so used to a certain program behavior/lag/etc that
| they consider it normal describes a "mental state".
|
| >One other possibility is that I know what scroll lag is,
| don't see it in Firefox on my devices"
|
| Yes, that's "one other" possibility.
|
| Now, can we also entertain the possibility I suggested as
| something that one can't just rule out in advance, and
| that one would be OK in suggesting could also be the
| case?
|
| I don't know you, have not met you, and I don't speak
| about you as a person. I made a general observation about
| what could be the case when someone says what you said.
| Another commenter also corroborated having seen this in
| the wild (assuming it even needs corroboration). It's
| hardly something that doesn't happen. And because I'm a
| somewhat insulted by your tone, notice how I didn't even
| said anything about you directly. I wrote:
|
| "Don't forget the other possibility: someone using
| Firefox having internalized this lag as "normal
| behavior".
|
| The rest, you brought into this. Enough is enough. Over
| and out.
| NavinF wrote:
| Except people really do internalize lag as "normal
| behavior". Back when PC monitors were stuck at 60Hz, people
| would unironically claim that "the human eye can't see more
| than 60 fps". Of course they changed their tune after
| experiencing lower input lag
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| I agree that the human eye can see higher than 60Hz,
| especially in the peripheral vision where VR research
| shows we need at least 90Hz to not get sick and 120Hz
| works better.
|
| That said, there is something to be said for modern
| applications just running way below the limits of the
| refresh rate of our screens:
| https://twitter.com/jmmv/status/1671670996921896960
| NavinF wrote:
| I saw that thread and could not relate. Both my desktop
| (5800x3d/64GB/4090/4K120) and laptop (M2 Pro/32GB/3K120)
| are just as snappy as that 600MHz machine. More
| importantly, my machines stay snappy under more demanding
| workloads which that old machine can't do.
|
| In the next tweet he compares it to a stock Surface Go 2
| (quad-core i5 processor at 2.4GHz, 8GB RAM, SSD) and
| seems to be surprised that it performs like crap. His
| 600MHz CPU is sufficient to get decent input lag from NT
| 3.51 which lists a 25 MHz CPU as it's minimum spec just
| as my machines get decent input lag from Windows/macOS
| which list a 1.2 GHz CPU as the minimum spec.
|
| I know clock speed is a bad metric, but you get the
| point. Your hardware needs to be well above the minimum
| spec by an order of magnitude if you want acceptable
| latency
| hooverd wrote:
| They might be talking about "Smooth Scrolling." But
| personally I don't see any lag on Firefox.
| wackget wrote:
| What do you find lacking in Firefox dev tools? For me I
| actually prefer them to Chrome.
| javajosh wrote:
| I don't find them lacking - I just don't use them regularly
| so it feels awkward when I do use them.
| hardcopy wrote:
| Not who you replied to, but: performance analysis, service
| worker debugging, indexeddb inspection
|
| (I use firefox devtools primarily)
| azeirah wrote:
| Have you tried the new profiler since you're talking about
| performance analysis? It's insanely in-depth.
| swores wrote:
| They just said they're more used to the Chrome version, not
| that the Firefox version is lacking.
|
| (Personally I'm with you in preferring Firefox dev tools -
| although I'm not someone who needs to use them more than a
| few times a month - not because I have any specific issues
| with Chrome dev tools, but because I prefer Firefox, and
| Mozilla, generally, and I've not found anything that FF can't
| do.)
| Scarbutt wrote:
| Mozilla fired the dev tools team, so features get in more
| slowly compared to Chrome.
| azeirah wrote:
| Firefox dev tools have been letting me down the past few
| months.
|
| I'm working on a pretty nasty (legacy and poorly optimised) but
| otherwise still rather "normal" website at work.
|
| Opening the dev tools makes Firefox hang for almost a minute, I
| suspect this is due to some issue with source maps, thousands
| of source files and large (several megabytes of) minified code.
|
| The debugger often reports _wrong_ values on hover especially
| in useEffects whereas console.log shows the right one.
|
| Other than the js debugger I have 0 problems with the Firefox
| devtools, it often spearheads features that I use on a day-to-
| day basis like highlighting grid layouts. Super nice!
| javajosh wrote:
| Yes! Their grid layout/comprehension tool is first-rate.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Firefox is my main browser.
|
| No complaints.
| jrnichols wrote:
| I've been a fan of Firefox for many years. Seems that those
| friends of mine still using Chrome are doing so because they are
| firmly trapped in the Googleverse. (gmail, YouTube, Google Docs,
| etc.)
|
| Firefox & its containers have been fantastic. Fast, stable, and I
| get the impression that security still matters.
| sedatk wrote:
| I think that because of the new "efficiency" initiatives at
| Microsoft, Edge is very bad compared to the others at handling
| web sites that need low latency and moderate execution speed
| (such as 3D demos, games, emulators, audio players).
|
| Edge on my 5950X + RTX3080 + 32GB RAM can't play some chiptune
| without glitching while Firefox can handle it like butter.
| Firefox's becoming a strong competitor every day.
| magicbuzz wrote:
| I just wish that Teams would load in a reasonable time on
| Firefox. It's a corporate enforced need and it takes minutes to
| load the web Teams version in Firefox. Microsoft seem not to
| treat Firefox as a legitimate web client.
| nateb2022 wrote:
| I just benchmarked both Firefox and Chromium on my desktop using
| Speedometer 2.1. Each browser was configured as out of the box,
| with no extensions, and with a blank profile:
|
| FF (114.0.1): 101 +- 1.9 Chromium (114.0.5735.198): 94.5 +- 2.2
|
| FF (115.0.2): 104 +- 2.4 Chromium (115.0.5790.90): 101 +- 2.6
|
| Machine Specs: Intel i5-3470 @ 3.2 GHz, 16 GB DDR3, 128 GB SSD.
| Linux kernel 6.1.38 (latest longterm branch) on Arch.
| throwaway104782 wrote:
| You'll pry the Firefox developer tools and container tabs from my
| cold dead hands. It would have to be _significantly_ slower for
| me to switch off of it.
| adverbly wrote:
| Interesting. I actually switch to Chrome specifically if I need
| to use the developer tools. What do you prefer about the
| Firefox version?
| frou_dh wrote:
| It's kinda interesting that some of the younger amongst us might
| have only ever known Chrome through the lens of its meme-like
| reputation for being a big fat hog.
|
| Because when it was originally released like 15 years ago, the
| pitch/consensus were the exact opposite of that, i.e. ultra clean
| and efficient.
| globular-toast wrote:
| As was Firefox (originally Pheonix, then Firebird), which was
| the ultra clean and efficient version of Mozilla. It was crazy
| how much better it was compared to IE6. It just didn't have a
| monopoly and anti-competitive marketing behind it like Chrome
| and IE did.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| Yep, I was a Pheonix user from the beginning in 2002 ...
| where you just unzipped it to a folder and ran it.
|
| I stuck with Firefox for literally 20 years, only caving in
| last year due to noticeable performance difference (went to
| Brave).
|
| But this news makes me want to try it again, I'd rather be
| using Firefox just to have another browser engine thriving.
|
| Competition is good.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| There was a time when Firefox felt a lot slower than Chromium,
| but for a few years now it's been close enough (even if still
| somewhat slower) to not bother me, while Firefox clearly offers
| superior functionality and _much_ better performance under high
| load. The last time Chromium has felt attractive compared to
| Firefox was a really long time ago. Glad to see it moving in the
| right direction still.
| SomeHacker44 wrote:
| The thing that I really like in Chrome (which I use for work)
| is Tab Groups. There is nothing like it for Firefox. Even the
| "Simple Tab Groups" extension, which is well liked, cannot do
| the simple "grouping" of tabs in a larger window - it simply
| hides all the tabs that are not in current use (which defeats
| the purpose of tab groups, I can just use windows for that).
| Another thing that Chrome has is the ability to name individual
| windows for easy Alt-Tabbing. Shame that Firefox doesn't have
| these things (that I know of).
| ddoolin wrote:
| Use Sidebery in Firefox for vertical tabs and it has not only
| better grouping but also entire "tab spaces" (workspaces)
| which you can switch between as well, if wanted.
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| How does Sidebery compare to Tree Style Tab?
| ddoolin wrote:
| I've never used the latter, but they certainly look very
| similar! I may have to give it a shot actually.
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| I've been trying Sidebery since about 2 minutes after I
| made my last comment, and I think I like Sidebery more--
| and I've been using Tree Style Tab for _years_
|
| Sidebery responds noticeably faster, and the panels are a
| great feature.
| beltsazar wrote:
| In Tree Style Tab you can create a tab group (which is
| basically a custom tab whose title you can rename, e.g.
| "Docs"), then move all tabs you want to group as one "inside"
| it. That makes all the tabs the children of the tab group.
| Now you have the best of both worlds: tab groups and tree-
| based tab structures.
| jzoch wrote:
| Honestly you are the first person I've ever heard that
| prefers chromes tab system. Check out tree style tabs it'll
| change your life. I hate chrome now solely due to it
| unaindz wrote:
| This! But also check out sidebery, in my opinion is much
| better in every way to tree style
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Except in style.. it's on the ugly side.
| clumsysmurf wrote:
| I haven't used chrome tab system, but Safari's tab groups
| are nice. Point being, most other browser, including
| esoteric ones like Vivaldi, have a way to organize tabs
| beyond simple order and moving them to other windows. If
| you are in a corporate environment, it is unlikely a user
| can install extensions like sideberry.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Tab groups in Chrome are a relatively new feature (and
| might still be behind an experimental feature flag, or at
| least the ability to save tab groups might be).
|
| They're a game changer; so much better than using a third
| party extension IMO.
| nvm0n1 wrote:
| Tab groups are old. Maybe saving them not?
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Tab groups in Chrome are a relatively new feature_
|
| I'm gonna die on this hill but I'd like to add that Opera
| had tab groups natively without extensions since 2010
| [1]. Damn I feel old now.
|
| Also, UX of tab groups in old-Opera was way nicer than
| current-Chrome since you could just drag and drop tabs on
| top of another and it would automatically create groups.
|
| [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2512081/opera-1
| 1-ships...
| paranoidxprod wrote:
| I recently started using Sidebery over TST and found it
| much more customizable for how I use tabs. It's worth
| taking a look at if you haven't already.
| beltsazar wrote:
| Is there any kind of migration process from TST if I move
| to Sidebery? I don't want to lose my current tree
| structures in TST.
| mccolin wrote:
| I am a longtime and proud Firefox user, but this feature of
| Chrome is the one thing I want. When I see colleagues using
| it, it just looks like the right way to tackle that need.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Firefox had them. In fact, it had them since version 4 [1].
| Then Firefox got rid of them again [2]. For no clear reason.
| And then Chrome copied the idea. And that's just a messed up
| timeline of events.
|
| [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-4-beta-
| updated-w...
|
| [2] https://venturebeat.com/mobile/mozilla-is-removing-tab-
| group...
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| It still lives on as an extension:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-
| view...
| zamalek wrote:
| > much better performance under high load.
|
| Massive GitHub PRs can refuse to load in chromium-based
| browsers. Firefox renders them effortlessly.
| toastal wrote:
| Fx provided a decent enough performance boost with its builtin
| tracking blocker that more than made up for any difference in
| real world scenarios. ...But I never switch away from Gecko
| since Fx v2.x.
| copperx wrote:
| What is Fx? An extension?
| throwaway914 wrote:
| No other browser has something like container tabs. Temporary
| Containers is an excellent extension to make each new tab its
| own isolated browser session too. First Party Isolation is 1
| thing, but Chrome cannot do containers.
| rpgbr wrote:
| Safari will get that feature in iOS 17/macOS Sonoma.
| Semaphor wrote:
| That is what always irks me when people (usually only on here)
| say FF should have stayed with xpi and their old architecture.
| Only after all those changes did FF finally become performant
| enough for me to use it again, before it was a slow drag to me.
|
| And I know, people with limited resources would have had a
| different experience, I don't know, I never had RAM issues.
| With enough RAM, FF was noticably slower than chrome.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| I also like that Firefox isn't putting artificial limitations
| on the plugins that we can use in order to appease their
| infinite hunger for ad revenue.
|
| Chrome's manifest v3's entire purpose for existence is to
| ultimately snuff out ad blockers so they can make the internet
| worse for everyone and get more money in the process.
|
| And if you don't believe me then you are wrong.
|
| Of course they won't do it immediately. They won't entirely rug
| pull their browser's user base.
|
| They'll just keep raising the bar to get approved for Chrome
| Store, making it harder and harder to comply with their
| extension requirements while also changing the way they deliver
| their ads.
|
| This way the ad blockers have to be updated and then go back
| through the extension store review process until the developers
| either get tired of jumping through their hoops and gives up or
| until they can no longer afford to keep the extension alive.
|
| And then they'll rug pull, just like Reddit and Twitter, and
| all of a sudden ad blocking extensions will require that the
| users pay Google for the privilege of having fewer ads while
| still letting some ads through anyway, and that will be that.
|
| Best to jump ship now, things are nice and cozy over here in
| "user wants are respected within reason" land.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Chrome's manifest v3's entire purpose for existence is to
| ultimately snuff out ad blockers
|
| There is no evidence of that, while there is evidence that
| manifest v3 provides security, privacy, and performance
| benefits. Manifest v3 doesn't stop ad blocking from working.
|
| >so they can make the internet worse for everyone
|
| Ads make the internet better for everyone since it provides a
| monetization model for sites to give away valuable services
| for free instead of everything being behind a paywall.
|
| >And if you don't believe me then you are wrong.
|
| This way of arguing doesn't convince people. This kind of
| stance only appeals to people who are antitech or antigoogle.
|
| >They'll just keep raising the bar to get approved for Chrome
| Store, making it harder and harder to comply with their
| extension requirements
|
| Adblockers are highly priviledged. They steered have a high
| bar to make it into a extention store.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| If you're going to lick ad company boots, at least spit
| shine your spelling first.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Edge provides a compelling alternative that is a drop-in
| replacement for Chrome for most users. I wonder if the
| competition will keep Google in check. I also wonder if Edge
| will end up providing its own ad-blocker if Google's
| restrictions become too onerous. Probably easier than forking
| the core browser to maintain a parallel build without the
| extension limitations.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| AFAIK all chromium based browsers will follow Manifest V3.
| Edge will also as otherwise adblockers and the like would
| impact M$ revenue.
|
| Manifest v3 is just everyone's get out of jail free card
| for not being responsible for the destruction of ad
| blocking and privacy extensions. Blame it on Google, who
| says they "had to do it" for some reason that ultimately
| profits them and their ilk to the detriment of humanity.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Same. Recently I tried Brave because of all the praise but
| turns out the browser can only display around 80 tabs on the
| tab bar and every further tab simply never shows up even if
| it's in the foreground. I've seen mobile browsers handle many
| tabs better. I'm staying with Firefox, though I think Brave is
| probably still a good recommendation for users that don't want
| to go through the effort of installing an ad blocker.
|
| Edit: so I just looked and it turns out you can enable tab bar
| scrolling on _chrome: //flags/#scrollable-tabstrip_. Why is
| that even disabled by default?
| andybak wrote:
| > I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better.
|
| It's my understanding that on mobile, tabs are unloaded from
| memory nearly instantly. You lose state but they use almost
| no resources. (I wish this was an option out of the box on
| Desktop. I've had extensions that do this and it's a godsend)
| NavinF wrote:
| Chrome already does that by default:
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/chrome-110-will-
| auto...
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Firefox did for about two years now:
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/unload-inactive-
| tabs-sa...
| andybak wrote:
| That seems like a good way to lose work if you're not
| careful. Although I would also argue that any well-
| designed web app should be able to handle this gracefully
| so maybe it will lead to better web apps.
|
| Infinite scroll is an especially bad offender here. If
| I'm 50 screens down on an infinite scroll that _is_ work
| and a page refresh losing my place should be treated as a
| data-loss bug.
|
| (an even better idea is not to use infinite scroll at
| all)
| NavinF wrote:
| I've never lost any unfinished messages due to this. I'm
| pretty sure Chrome prioritizes tabs where you've typed in
| text. Link in that other comment suggests that Firefox
| does something similar: "This is a smart process that
| avoids unloading tabs that are playing media, using
| Picture-in-Picture, or WebRTC. For more technical
| information, see this blog post"
|
| And yeah fuck infinite scroll. I usually interact with
| such sites via their API or data export. Eg searching my
| YouTube Likes playlist is impossible on the web because
| I'd have to spend an hour scrolling before I can Ctrl+F
| [deleted]
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Huh. And I actually had to play around in Android settings
| to exempt Firefox from regular memory management, so it
| _stops_ unloading tabs so aggressively. Not only this was a
| huge annoyance when browsing[0][1], it actually prevented
| me from using the one PWA I cared about[2] - it would
| literally blank out every time I switched away from and
| back to it, while having as much as a single trivial other
| app open, forcing me to kill and relaunch it.
|
| It's not that my phone was memory-constrained, we're
| talking a recent Samsung Galaxy flagship[3] - it's purely
| overly aggressive memory management on part of Firefox.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Have 5 tabs open, all something trivial like HN, put
| away phone, grab it 5 minutes later, switch to other HN
| tab, ... wait half a minute for it to reload on a spotty
| connection at my in-laws' countryside home.
|
| [1] - Talking with others about how we experience
| technology, I'm starting to feel that I'm _abnormally_
| annoyed by large or unpredictable UI latency.
|
| [2] - TypingMind.
|
| [3] - I learned to save up and only buy high-end, thanks to
| the experience with my first smartphone, that turned out to
| be underspecced for its own functionality. It's probably a
| case of [1], but one time I deviated from this rule and got
| my wife a mid-range phone, we both started to regret it in
| a few months, so it's not only me who has low tolerance for
| jank.
| backendanon wrote:
| I'm old and I code for a living, I have maybe at most a dozen
| tabs open on any day. I can't imagine needing 80 but now I
| see why chrome has that new search tabs drop down.
| NavinF wrote:
| I usually have 600 tabs across several windows and
| desktops. Doesn't hurt performance if you have 64G or more
| so the real question is "why not?". Switching to an open
| tab using title text search is way faster than opening a
| bookmark
| backendanon wrote:
| Hard for me to say, I guess I feel better not using more
| memory than needed, I think my security surface may less
| than it would be with a lot of tabs open but don't hold
| me to that as researched opinion, it isn't, can't think
| of anything else though.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| On my main Firefox profile I'm rarely below 1000 tabs. I
| also use them as bookmarks and backlog, and every couple of
| months I scroll through the entire tab bar and close
| everything unimportant. The address bar also searches all
| open tabs and lets me jump to matches.
| secondcoming wrote:
| How messy is your bedroom?
| hakre wrote:
| No wonder, the tab bar is open only. Managing multiple
| tabs is a no-go with it, or lets say, a wonderful journey
| into Firefox UI.
| skydhash wrote:
| I have Safari, Anybox, and Alfred, and the three works
| together in a nice way to save anything interesting
| quickly. And once in a while, I comb through the inbox
| and sort them out. If I ever need to explore a subject, I
| then have a collection of links ready. I feel
| uncomfortable whenever I have 10+ tabs open. It felt that
| I'm not focusing enough on my research (taking the proper
| time to read and reflect in order to find a solution).
|
| The only things I hoard are books. They are more like my
| antilibrary (things I'd like to have read already) than
| collecting everything I encounter.
| coldpie wrote:
| FWIW the Firefox address bar also searches your history
| and bookmarks, so you can still retrieve those sites by
| searching for them without keeping a tab open for each
| one. Feel free to do what you like, obviously, but if
| having a zillion tabs open is causing you problems, know
| that there are other solutions :)
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Firefox already allows for proper tab UIs, so no need to
| search for other solutions there :)
| coldpie wrote:
| Just curious, what does that UI look like with 1,000 tabs
| open? Isn't it just like, one pixel per tab, or a
| scrollbar 50 times wider than your monitor? Is that
| actually useful?
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| My browser looks very similar to this:
| https://framagit.org/ariasuni/tabcenter-
| reborn/-/wikis/theme...
|
| Tab list usability remains pretty much the same
| regardless of how many tabs are open.
| AndroidKitKat wrote:
| The handy part about Firefox, unlike Chrome, will shrink
| tabs to a minimum width and then make them a horizontally
| scrolling list. I am somewhat of a tab hoarder (I also
| keep browser windows on vertical monitors), so using
| Chrome, where it would shrink tabs more and more until
| there's nothing but a sliver, wouldn't work. Below are
| screenshots of examples. Firefox keeps things usable;
| Chrome not so much. (I also know it isn't 1000 tabs, nor
| is it close to the amount I keep open on my work laptop).
|
| Firefox: https://yld.moe/raw/nVE.png
|
| Chrome: https://yld.moe/raw/vu8.png
|
| Also, if you're wondering why my tabs look like they're
| from 2017, that's just another benefit of using Firefox
| [1]. Although as nice as it being able to actually
| customize our browsers, it would be nice for Mozilla to
| stop breaking things for sake of breaking things.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
| efreak wrote:
| If this is the _only_ thing stopping you from using
| Chrome (ie you 'd prefer to use Chrome), this might help.
| https://www.ghacks.net/2022/08/29/how-to-set-a-minimum-
| tab-w...
| twic wrote:
| That may be a reference to this classic Firefox
| extension:
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-
| style-ta...
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| If it weren't for TreeStyleTab, the browser would be
| barely usable for me. This is the biggest reason that I
| won't use Chrome at all, and stay away from Edge.
| account42 wrote:
| Don't rely on you browsing history - Firefox will start
| deleting old entries without warning you if it gets big
| enough.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Same here. It's simply a convenient way to work with a
| browser.
| saberience wrote:
| This is blowing my mind right now, how do you operate
| with so many tabs? For me, as soon as I can't tell which
| site is in which tab it means I need to close some. And I
| don't see the utility of having so many tabs open, since
| you can obviously only use one at a time. So if you have
| 100 or 1000 open, most are not being used most of the
| time, so why not close them?
|
| What do you lose from closing tabs versus what do you
| gain from keeping them open? For me, if I use a site open
| it's bookmarked or already in history so it's fast to
| reopen. Closing tabs keeps my machine fast and memory
| usage low and also makes me faster at switching between
| the open tabs as I don't need to search or parse through
| many UI bits.
| temp0826 wrote:
| I never have 1000+ open but I do have many open in a
| couple different windows for long periods. Firefox does
| unload tabs when you restart (at least, it can be set
| that way. And there are extensions that let you unload
| them manually or after a time period). Unloaded tabs take
| no resources (or an unnoticeable amount if any) and allow
| this trick to work. That and vertical tab addons (I use
| sideberry).
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| I don't keep hundereds of tabs open, but tabs do serve
| two purposes that are not covered by either the browser
| history or by bookmarks.
|
| One is as a sort of ad-hoc to-do list. When I leave a tab
| open it's because something is unfinished and I mean to
| come back to it soon. (I just wish there was a
| chronological view so that I could easily delete the
| oldest tabs).
|
| The second purpose is to store the scroll position of
| longer articles that I haven't finished reading.
| kwoff wrote:
| Tabs are the RAM of my TODO list, my README bookmark
| folder is the disk. Every so many months I purge the
| README folder, while regretting never really learning
| Blender, GIMP, SVG, d3, Godot, Rust, Julia, React,
| Svelte, CSS, shaders, machine learning, wavelets,
| Ableton, ....
| nirvdrum wrote:
| If you can't tell which site is open, that's likely due
| to Chrome's poor tab UX. Constantly shrinking the click
| target makes tabs harder to work with. Not being able to
| read the tab title doesn't help either. Thus, Chrome
| incentivizes people to close tabs.
|
| With vertical tabs, you don't have this problem. Every
| tab is the same width, making them easier to interact
| with. You'll need to vertically scroll the list if it
| gets too large, but that's a natural enough action. In
| this situation, you now close tabs because you want to,
| not because the browser is strong-arming you into it.
|
| Where things really get fun is with vertical tabs that
| track ancestry, like Tree Style Tabs or Firefox or what's
| built into Orion. These tabs will nest as you follow
| links from one page to another, capturing context.
|
| HN is a perfect example of where this works well. I can
| go to the home page, see a few stories that look
| interesting, open each comment page as a child tab. Then
| on each child I can open the associated article. And, as
| I read the comments, I can open new links that look
| interesting and that page is now associated with the root
| story.
|
| I could bookmark all of these pages, but short of
| creating folders for each story there's no good way to
| capture that context. Naturally, that makes it harder to
| restore the same state when opening bookmarks. Instead, I
| leave the tabs open and when I'm ready to take an action
| on them (read an article, make notes in Obsidian,
| bookmark into a topic of interest) I do so and then I
| close them out. It makes context switching much easier
| when I know I'm not going to lose the context I just
| left. As an added benefit, I find if I leave tabs open I
| get better use of the browser cache than I do if I close
| an open later from a bookmark.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Btw, you can bookmark the entire tree, to re-open the
| entire tree later. I mostly have the same workflow as
| you, though, except for a few regularly scheduled things
| (book clubs, DnD sessions, etc), where I have a
| bookmarked tree ready to open for necessary context.
| dom96 wrote:
| > though I think Brave is probably still a good
| recommendation for users that don't want to go through the
| effort of installing an ad blocker
|
| Is that really the only reason to install Brave?
|
| Starting to wonder if I should just set up a Firefox that
| bundles uBlock Origin by default with a brand new name.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Don't forget the "basic attention tokens" (are we still
| doing crypto?)
| Given_47 wrote:
| It's an interesting concept tbf. I immediately disable it
| tho but I won't shit on the idea cuz it's at least a
| start
| Barrin92 wrote:
| the general discussion about crypto aside, if the genuine
| purpose had been to faciliate direct payments the obvious
| solution would have been to integrate some currency like
| Ethereum or Bitcoin, not pre-mined Brave Bucks, which is
| effectively like "paying" your users in your own quasi
| worthless gift cards.
| djbusby wrote:
| Work with libreFox?
|
| https://github.com/intika/Librefox
|
| Or LibreWolf?
|
| https://librewolf.net/
| elishah wrote:
| https://www.tumblr.com/foone/721395638537961472/i-see-
| people... remains the best take on Brave that I've seen.
|
| "I see people talking about the Brave browser in the whole
| Firefox vs chrome debate, and while people rightly point
| out that it's just chromium and that they do shady
| cryptocurrency shit, I never see anyone point out that
| Brave's founder and CEO is Brandan Eich.
|
| "He founded Brave after massive protests against him
| becoming CEO of Mozilla, resigning after 11 days. And the
| reason for those protests? He donated a lot of money to the
| Prop 8 campaign to ban gay marriage.
|
| "So just remember: it's not just another chromium fork,
| it's not just a browser with cryptocurrency bullshit, it's
| also the browser founded by a homophobe because he got
| kicked out of his former organization for being a
| homophobe.
|
| "Also, he invented Javascript. I'm willing to believe that
| maybe he has grown on the gay marriage issue, and made
| amends for his former mistakes. But Javascript cannot be
| forgiven."
| mst wrote:
| A number of Mozilla's LGBT+ employees spoke out at the
| time saying that they'd already known about the donation
| but since he'd been utterly professional at work they
| still felt quite sufficiently supported by the company
| and leadership.
|
| The donation getting publicised, going viral and becoming
| a shitstorm was what forced the end of his tenure as CEO,
| and I've heard comments since that his being replaced
| with a more business-y CEO has been a disappointing
| experience.
|
| (I've no idea what percentage of the relevant subset of
| employees made such comments and/or held such opinions,
| and I'm not expressing an opinion on should/shouldn't
| about any given event, but it does seem to have been a
| little more complicated than "he got kicked out ... for
| being a homophobe")
| Given_47 wrote:
| What ur describing is essentially Librewolf
| bashZorina_09 wrote:
| It also has nice privacy centric and QoL features that
| strip tracking URLs, removes "Open in App" banners and AMP
| pages + redirects (e.g. old.reddit) for mobile, fingerprint
| randomisation and of course, will probably be the best
| Chromium-based browser adblocker post Manifest V3, but yeah
| you can also spin these features into a bundled Firefox or
| use one of those Libre* forks which already does most of
| this afaik.
| amf12 wrote:
| Brave does some shady shit too:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36735777
| soundnote wrote:
| There's flags for Firefox style scrolling horizontal tabs,
| and native scrollable vertical ones don't need a flag at
| all. Plus you get collapsible tab groups built in.
| andai wrote:
| Not to do a "you're holding it wrong", but why would you want
| so many tabs that they go offscreen?
|
| More precisely, why 100 tabs in 1 window instead of 10 tabs
| times 10 windows?
| tredre3 wrote:
| I don't understand tab hoarding either but Chrome/Brave's
| tab bar poor design becomes a problem even in what I'd
| consider pretty mundane scenarios.
|
| Imagine you snap your browser to half your screen. Assuming
| it's not an ultrawide, you'll be able to fit maybe a dozen
| tabs before they're so tiny to be essentially useless.
| Digit-Al wrote:
| It's not something I ever do, but I imagine the answer to
| your question is that you can easily search for a
| particular tab when they are all in one window, but it
| would become a big chore if you had to switch between
| multiple windows and search each one to find a tab.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| On Firefox, at least, search will surface tabs in other
| windows. I often have 2 browser windows open, one for
| each monitor (one mostly for streaming content while I
| dick around on the other one).
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Because it's easier to handle? You open a new tab with a
| mindless Ctrl+T, if I wanted to do some organizing I would
| clean up my desk instead.
| elishah wrote:
| > More precisely, why 100 tabs in 1 window instead of 10
| tabs times 10 windows?
|
| I still don't understand why some people believe that the
| correct answer is anything other than 100 windows.
|
| My platform has 40 years of well refined tools for managing
| windows, all of which work nicely and consistently across
| all applications. By comparison, all of the tab management
| systems are crude amatuerish knockoffs trying to reinvent
| the same tools from first principles, and isolated to a
| single application that's then inconsistent with everything
| else.
| tmvnty wrote:
| I have never doubted the performance of Firefox. There's a
| really old computer sitting in my house, never updated it for
| almost a decade now and my parents occasionally use it. The
| Chrome on it kept getting slower and laggier, while the Firefox
| always work fine. At some point, I just removed Chrome and told
| my parents to use Firefox: "the red fox is the Internet"
| wredue wrote:
| Well.
|
| Chrome definitely lit a fire under Firefox, and that's saying
| something because, at the time chrome came out, Firefox was
| "fast".
|
| I switched to chrome early on for the speed benefits.
|
| At some point, Firefox started getting pretty close. Albeit
| not on parity with chrome, but chrome started major spying
| oriented pushes. So the minor loss in speed was worth it.
|
| Now chrome could never win me back anyway. Google is evil.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| I used to keep Chrome installed just for the dev tools, but the
| Firefox dev tools became good enough in probably 2013 or so.
| david2ndaccount wrote:
| Chrome's wasm debugging is much better than firefox's.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Firefox gave birth to the first good dev tools as an
| extension IIRC
| LunaSea wrote:
| And then completely lost the plot and has been behind
| Chrome for the last ten years.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| A testament to how open its old extension API was.
| asadotzler wrote:
| The Firefox extension API (which wasn't an API really at
| all when it was first used) was created to support cases
| like the DOM Inspector and others which abused Mozilla's
| XPInstall and XUL overlays (both created for other
| purposes) to invent extensions. The same people that
| created the APIs were the same people building those
| extensions (see Joe Hewitt for Firefox and DOMI and later
| Firebug.)
| ttfkam wrote:
| Yep, Firebug
| i_am_jl wrote:
| You're definitely right.
|
| I'll go even further; As I remember it Chrome Dev Tools
| pretty much copied Firebug's homework in terms of UI and
| feature set.
| netule wrote:
| I still keep Chrome installed for some sites that are just
| excruciatingly slow on FF like FoundryVTT and some video
| sites.
| Kholin wrote:
| For me, Firefox performs better on Linux than on Windows.
| nateb2022 wrote:
| This is true of a lot of things.
| chasil wrote:
| Windows does not fork processes as fast as Linux, although
| this is improved somewhat in the in the Windows Subsystem
| for Linux.
|
| Here is a somewhat foolish test with a shell script, that
| forks "/bin/true" 10 million times.
| C:\>busybox sh ~ $ echo 'x=10000000; while [ $x -gt 0
| ]; do true; x=$((x-1)); done' > timetest ~ $ time sh
| timetest real 0m 46.86s user 0m 46.76s
| sys 0m 0.04s
|
| Here is the same test with Debian's dash shell, one of the
| fastest: $ cat timetest x=10000000;
| while [ $x -gt 0 ]; do true; x=$((x-1)); done $ time
| dash timetest 0m33.79s real 0m33.50s user
| 0m0.05s system
|
| Not a great test, but there is quite a difference there.
| cpeterso wrote:
| For example, Mozilla compiles Firefox's official macOS and
| Windows builds on Linux because cross-compilation is faster
| and cheaper than compiling on macOS or Windows in the
| cloud.
| shmolf wrote:
| > clearly offers superior functionality
|
| I think it's worth mentioning the caveat, that it doesn't
| natively support PWA in the same way WebKit browsers do. It has
| little to no support (depending on your definition of support).
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwas-for-
| fire...
|
| Works fine for me on Linux Mint 21.1
|
| I also use Firefox for Android and that _does_ natively
| support PWAs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
| terafo wrote:
| Firefox is slower for me than Chrome, but that's because I have
| tab hoarding problem(2k tabs in Firefox right now).
| filchermcurr wrote:
| As a fellow tab hoarder, I recommend Auto Tab Discard. Tabs
| are still open but aren't actually loaded until you click on
| them. With various configurable options for how that works.
|
| I have five windows open with about 1000 tabs in each, no
| performance problems at all. It's great!
| lkbm wrote:
| If you restart Firefox, it won't load a restored tab until
| you navigate to it, so presumably most of his are already
| backgrounded.
|
| I find it useful to periodically prune, though. Save to
| Pocket or other "to read" list for things I intend to
| eventually read. Bookmark things I may want sometime, but
| don't need open. Potentially use Tab Stash to save groups
| of references for particular research tasks. Toss things
| that realistically I'm just not going to get to ever.
| stark98 wrote:
| As a fellow tab hoarder, I recommend using Tab Session
| Manager plugin. You can easily save all tabs, although from
| my own experience I've almost never restored them anyway lol
| kaba0 wrote:
| I prefer Tab Stash. It can be also used as a side bar for
| your tabs, but can close every currently open one and put
| them into a group you can optionally name for later reuse.
| olejorgenb wrote:
| +1 for Tab Stash. I find it really elegant that the
| storage is just simple bookmark folders. It's basically a
| nice UI on top of bookmarks.
| guillim85 wrote:
| Close them all today. It will feel weird for like 1 hour, but
| you will feel much better after.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >It will feel weird for like 1 hour, but you will feel much
| better after.
|
| Yeah, because he'll be back to up hundreds of tabs again.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| An order of magnitude reduction in unnecessary bloat is
| fantastic
| rileymat2 wrote:
| It seems like we need a better solution, between bookmarking
| and offline websites on disk, it feels like there is a better
| way.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| Pocket is builtin to Firefox, but in my experience,
| searching something you saved to Pocket (a thing that
| should be pretty core to the Pocket product) sucks and you
| really need simonw's https://github.com/dogsheep/pocket-to-
| sqlite to actually search it.
| almenon wrote:
| Wh....why?
| jraph wrote:
| On my side, a combination of:
|
| - I'm likely to return back to some of them. I might not
| know which ones. Typing in the address bar brings them back
| fast and the page does not need to be loaded again. Having
| the tab already open is also a strong signal that this is
| what I'm looking up.
|
| - no noticeable slowdown anyway, Firefox is actually quite
| efficient.
|
| - I don't care for taking the time of closing them
| progressively. It happens that I will close them all at the
| same time at some point when I feel like I need some clean
| up. Usually when I'm done with something.
|
| - I think I learned to mostly ignore this part of the
| screen. Everything happens in the address bar.
|
| In short, it's a combination of intentionally leaving tabs
| open so I can go back to them later without reloading the
| page, and not wanting to spend the time to manage them.
|
| I usually have under 100 tabs open though, often even
| fewer.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Same applies to thousands of them, the "close everything"
| time just happens later in that case. I usually clean
| them up once Firefox starts slowing down, which is at
| tens of thousands.
|
| With a good UI the unused ones just don't bother you
| anymore anyway until you scroll or filter them. They show
| me my train of thoughts without having to consciously
| organize anything. Unused tabs get unloaded from RAM
| anyway, so the cost of keeping them open is minimal.
|
| A few years ago there was a version of Firefox that
| didn't slow down and opened quickly even at tens of
| thousands of tabs, but unfortunately it quickly
| regressed, so throwing everything out periodically is
| still inevitable:)
| abdusco wrote:
| They probably don't know how to close tabs.
| penguin_booze wrote:
| On each tab, towards the right, you'll seen an X. If you
| click that, you can close a tab.
|
| Alternatively, you can use Ctrl-W keyboard shortcut.
|
| (Sorry!)
| account42 wrote:
| You can also middle-click the tab - that works for any tab,
| not just the current one.
| bamfly wrote:
| I just mass-bookmark mine into a new bookmark folder
| periodically. Keeps it from getting anywhere near 2k.
|
| I've been doing this for years and have _never_ , not once,
| looked at the bookmarks. But it gives me the peace of mind I
| need to close all tabs and start over.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Exactly. You can even name the bookmark folder either with
| the thing you're researching/interacting with or just by
| the date if it's a ton of miscellaneous stuff. Then later
| on you can go thru and delete all the date-named bookmarks
| older than 6 months. At that point just search your browser
| history
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Not sure how it works now, but 2k tabs in Chrome used to be
| outright impossible on any reasonable hardware anyway, while
| Firefox always handled it pretty well aside of slowdowns ;)
| jesup wrote:
| 2K? Not bad. My main linux box is running around 7500 tabs in
| 34 windows right now. Takes about 30s to start, which is fine
| since that browser gets restarted only every few weeks. My
| secondary desktop (windows) only has 2750 tabs.
|
| And there are users of Firefox out there with >15000 tabs.
|
| Two reasons for tab hoarding: 1) spatial -- related tabs are
| close together (frequently open a bunch of related search
| results; if I come back to them to continue later, they're
| all together). 2) history -- unlike bookmarks or history
| entries, tabs retain the forward and back history, so when
| you return to them you can know how you go there (go back to
| the search for example).
|
| I do periodically clear out tabs, especially duplicates. The
| Tab Stats extension by glandium is very handy for tab
| hoarders
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Do you use TST or anything like that? How do you navigate
| around that many tabs?
| kenniskrag wrote:
| TL;DR: Windows Defender had a bug that made certain system
| calls expensive on CPU cycles when Defender's Real-time
| Protection feature is enabled. After discovery, Mozilla
| reported this issue to Microsoft. Microsoft is releasing a
| patch that should result in lower CPU usage when using Firefox
| on sites like YouTube (a ~75% CPU usage reduction was noted
| when browsing YouTube in Firefox with the fixed version of
| Defender).
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35458746
| [deleted]
| theusus wrote:
| Yeah, while people here used to complain about it. But whenever
| I went to Chrome(or derivatives) on desktop. I experienced poor
| performance.
|
| Firefox has been very smooth since couple of years.
|
| Mobile has to catch-up though.
| emsixteen wrote:
| I use it, but just don't like the devtools. Or moreso miss some
| things from Chrome/Edge.
| tgv wrote:
| Me too. I'm using FF since 3.6, and before that Camino (a
| derived version for the mac), and the only thing Google has
| done is strengthen my resolve to keep using Firefox, but I
| still prefer to debug on Chrome (well, Chromium). It just
| feels better, even though it's starting to slip and FF is
| improving slowly.
| markandrewj wrote:
| Give Firefox Developer Edition a try, if haven't already, and
| are looking for more robust development tools.
| frabcus wrote:
| Looking at https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/developer/
| I'm a bit confused... Which features are just new features
| which will soon be in the main Firefox DevTools, and which
| are specific to installing the Developer Edition?
| cpeterso wrote:
| AFAIK, Firefox Developer Edition is currently just a
| repackaging of Firefox Beta and doesn't have different
| devtools. It used to be a rebranding of Firefox Aurora
| (an alpha release channel between Firefox Nightly and
| Beta, now retired) with a different theme and a few
| different devtool setting changes.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Maybe I was just unlucky, but the one time I tried it, it
| refused to launch.
|
| I'd rather not have my professional work tools be built
| against a beta channel when there are better alternatives.
| markandrewj wrote:
| I have been using the Developer Edition since 2014, when
| it was released, without issue. You are not locked into a
| single browser. Personally I use more then one browser,
| and professionally I always validate against multiple
| browsers.
|
| I find different browsers excel at different things in
| regards to the developer experience. As an example I
| appreciate that Firefox had a formatted JSON view without
| requiring an extension. However Chrome also has
| capabilities that I wish were included in Firefox.
| dns_snek wrote:
| What are the differences compared to regular Firefox?
| markandrewj wrote:
| Firefox Developer Edition is targeted towards developers,
| and contains the latest development tools available.
|
| New features also land quicker, as it is built against
| Firefox beta.
| wackget wrote:
| For me it's the opposite. Firefox's dev tools feel better.
| What things are missing?
| everybodyknows wrote:
| What cripples FF DevTools for me is being unable to find
| the setting for timeout on HTTP GET, during full-stack
| development. If I've set a breakpoint in a debugger on my
| server and proceed to single-step there, FF aborts the GET
| request with an error. So client-side JS doesn't see the
| eventual result of the GET, it has to recover from the
| error to proceed, e.g. by a full page-reload.
|
| Chromium, last I tried it, by default sets the necessary
| HTTP timeout(s) to infinity if its DevTools is open.
|
| My searches of Firefox docs/wiki, StackExchange, HN Algolia
| for a fix have come up empty.
|
| Navigating to "about:config" and searching for "timeout"
| finds 27 different settings prefixed with the substring
| "network". Some are obviously in units of milliseconds,
| others perhaps whole seconds.
|
| Anyone know which one (or what combination) might incant
| the necessary black magic?
| square_usual wrote:
| I really like that the Chrome profiler shows you the
| profile right there. Firefox insists on opening the profile
| in a browser tab. This is _fine_ , but is an unnecessary
| context switch for me.
| nicce wrote:
| On Chromium touch screen emulation feels much better.
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| I find them both pretty poor compared to running on
| emulators/simulators
| swang wrote:
| One of the reasons I stopped using Firefox was that the
| columns in the devtools were unexpandable. I couldn't see
| any data past what Firefox decided was enough to show. Did
| they fix this?
| tredre3 wrote:
| I'm assuming you're talking about table views like the
| Network or Storage/Cookies tabs? You can resize columns
| and each cell has a tooltip that shows the full content
| if it's hidden.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I use the FF devtools daily, and for what I'm working on, it
| has everything I need to help me get the things I need done.
| Knowing that I'm not everyone and have plenty to learn, what
| things are missing from the devtools for you?
| Jochim wrote:
| I use FF and prefer the devtools.
|
| Chrome's ability to temporarily edit and save changes to JS
| sources through the debugger editor is fantastic though.
|
| Other than that it's mostly just improvements to what FF
| already has.
|
| Search could be made much more useful, especially network
| requests. Searching all request bodies/responses for a
| particular string/json/regex would be a huge step up.
|
| You can search the response of individual requests but
| there's a UI bug that makes it look like your filter is no
| longer applied when you select the next one in the list.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Chrome's ability to temporarily edit and save changes to
| JS sources through the debugger editor is fantastic
| though.
|
| Does this affect the live code so the change is available
| immediately? I once had a thought about wondering if this
| was possible to have the change available without
| refreshing
| Jochim wrote:
| As far as I know, you have to reload the page sadly.
| tashoecraft wrote:
| The only issue I have (which, is happening less and less
| lately) is my debugger doesn't jump to the source. It hits
| and everything pauses, but I don't get routed to it and
| have to start progressing just to get it to work, which can
| make the debugger useless as you've gone past what you were
| looking at. This has happened across machines for years for
| me, and happens much less in chrome. But doesn't happen
| enough for me to switch.
| beltsazar wrote:
| I switched to Firefox from Chrome years ago because Chrome was
| slower. Specially, when there were many tabs opened, switching
| tabs in Chrome were usually prefaced with a blank white screen
| for about 2 seconds.
|
| I've been staying with Firefox not for the performance (today
| Chrome loads Google sites like YouTube faster), but mainly for
| Tree Style Tab extension. I couldn't imagine opening more than
| a dozen of tabs without it.
| dmix wrote:
| > but mainly for Tree Style Tab extension.
|
| Same, I like to pretend I use Firefox for other reasons but
| 99% of it is tree tab.
| generalizations wrote:
| That's pretty much the reason for me as well. The day some
| other browser makes tree-style tabs, firefox will probably
| lose a user.
| sp332 wrote:
| Edge has had vertical tabs with tab groups natively for a
| couple years now. It also has a nice Reader mode, good
| text-to-speech, and a screenshot tool built in. And it
| supports uBlock Origin as an add on.
| generalizations wrote:
| Yeah, that's not the same, or even functionally close.
| Just a superficial resemblance. The value of tree style
| tabs is that you don't manually organize anything, and
| the tabs are nested arbitrarily deep so that you
| literally end up with a hierarchical tree of tabs that
| shows you the logical view of your browsing history _with
| no manual input on your part_. (Note the comparison to
| edge has been made before, which is why I specifically
| said tree-style tabs, _not_ vertical tabs.)
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Tabs Outliner for chrome/edge is far superior than any
| other tab extension, and I've tried nearly all of them.
| capableweb wrote:
| Looks like a separate window, so clearly not superior to
| Tree Style Tabs in Firefox.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Unfortunately due to limitations of chrome's extension
| model, there is no way to have a built-in extension
| sidebar like on firefox. I just manually position the tab
| window next to the browser window and it's fine. The
| window sizes are remembered and so it's really a non-
| issue.
| kevinlinxc wrote:
| Longtime ff user, I use "Tab Groups Extension" for Chrome
| at work where ff is not allowed
| purerandomness wrote:
| What kind of work allows Chrome, but not Firefox? Google?
| whynotkeithberg wrote:
| I switched about a year ago as well, partially because of
| performance pains but also because I tried to leave as many
| google products behind as I could for privacy reasons. I have
| not been disappointed so far... There are a few plugins I
| miss on Chrome but nothing I couldn't live without or find an
| acceptable alternative.
| dhimes wrote:
| I've stayed (edit: with Firefox) because of (1) containers
| and (2) password storage. I have to use Chrome for some
| things, and every now and then it prompts me for a password
| and refuses to use the auto-fill. Totally torques me off
| because my passwords are not easy.
|
| But I completely trust Firefox on the password issue, to the
| point that I let it generate them for me.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> But I completely trust Firefox on the password issue, to
| the point that I let it generate them for me._
|
| Not that I don't trust them but I always recommend using a
| dedicated PW manager like KeePassXC which is FOSS and has
| been security audited, plus it gives you full control over
| where you get to store your PWs and how they're secured and
| generated.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I'm even stricter than you. I use a password manager, but
| on a separate device from where I use passwords and it
| does not talk over the network.
|
| Wen I use a password, I look it up and type it in by
| hand. No autofill is possible, intentionally.
| ychompinator wrote:
| [dead]
| LtdJorge wrote:
| That doesn't bypass keyloggers
| mcpackieh wrote:
| It would limit the scope of the damage. Instead of
| getting the entire password database, the keylogger would
| only get those passwords that were used while the system
| was compromised.
| JohnFen wrote:
| True, but keyloggers aren't one of the threat vectors I
| am most concerned about, and as mcpackieh said, it still
| limits the potential damage quite a lot.
|
| We all have to gear our security mechanisms toward our
| particular threat assessments.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| What is your biggest concern? I would think key loggers
| are a more common threat than attacks on the password
| manager directly, especially if you're running something
| niche. What else do you gain from keeping it air gapped?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Keyloggers rank low for me because I'm only using my own
| devices that I have physical control over, so a dongle is
| unlikely. A keylogger would have to come in through
| malware.
|
| That's certainly possible, but if malware were able to
| get installed despite my other protections, then I
| probably have much larger issues. And the keylogger would
| have to phone home with the data, which is unlikely (but
| not impossible) to happen without raising some alarms.
|
| So I'm more worried about sharing data with the password
| management company systems themselves. If there's no real
| reason to send data over the net, then I don't want to
| send data over the net. The smaller the attack surface,
| the better.
|
| It's just my personal policy. In reality, I don't
| consider either keyloggers or password management company
| computers to be huge enough risks that I lose sleep over
| them. Plus, I don't want to become reliant on a
| particular piece of software to do important things --
| typing my password by hand means that I'll have the most
| common passwords memorized, so if something goes wrong
| that prevents the use of the password manager, I'm not
| locked out of anything.
| fsflover wrote:
| I do it similarly, except passwords are stored in an
| offline VM on Qubes OS and copied every time using Qubes'
| secure copy/paste.
|
| Much more convenient and quick and still reasonably
| secure.
| fardo wrote:
| To be fair, Firefox is also FOSS, contains an integrated
| password manager with extraordinarily well-integrated
| browser compatibility, and by opting to use a master
| password to encrypt or decrypt the store also gives you
| control over securitization, storage location, and
| generation.
|
| Not to say that KeePassXC isn't useful if you want even
| more fine-grained controls, but it seems like in the
|
| > Use password in browser
|
| Use case, KeePass would actually weaken the security
| guarantee by adding a second component you need to trust.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| My problem with Firefox's password manager is there
| doesn't seem to be a way to export/import to/from an
| encrypted file that I can back up to other places. I can
| export to an unencrypted text file (and no apparent way
| to import again), or I can use their sync service (or run
| my own maybe?), or I can backup the entire firefox
| profile.
|
| This is what Firefox says when I go to export my logins:
| _" [!] Your paswords will be saved as readable text
| (e.g., BadP@ssw0rd) so anyone who can open the exported
| file can view them."_
|
| KeePassXC on the other hand gives me a simple encrypted
| database file that I can copy around to different places
| for some peace of mind.
| babel_ wrote:
| > "[!] Your paswords will be saved as readable text
| (e.g., BadP@ssw0rd) so anyone who can open the exported
| file can view them."
|
| That's effectively what almost all of them say when you
| export your logins (usually as CSV, JSON, or XML),
| because they export in plain text, because you don't know
| what the user needs it for, up to and including manual
| imputation (better than expect a random user to have to
| learn how to print out a database, or worse submit that
| database file to some online service to print out).
|
| Users aren't necessarily highly computer literate, we
| don't want to prevent people from having security, but
| even if they were they may still have use cases that do
| not accept such a database (migrating password manager
| that don't know your previous one, perhaps), so most of
| them use (unencrypted) plain text and just accept they'll
| have to leave it in the user's hands, and warn them it's
| exposed.
|
| We'd absolutely love there to be safe, portable ways to
| move our data around such that it remains encrypted while
| migrating, yes, but that's just not something our current
| crop of software really enables fully these days,
| unfortunately.
| Faark wrote:
| > adding a second component you need to trust
|
| I'd even say "adding a second vendor you need to trust".
| Yes, these days there seems to be a strong drive to just
| get a big package out of a single hand. Like having the
| browser closely tied to the OS. I don't like it. I prefer
| to choose the individual parts as i see fit. Keepass and
| some bit of custom sync, in this case. Now, in the same
| vein I expect MS & Google making it easy to support
| different browsers, I'd want Mozilla making it easy to
| integrate other password managers. I'd love to be
| corrected, but afaik the "password manager with
| extraordinarily well-integrated browser compatibility"
| doesn't offer any way or API to connect my keepass with
| it. Its only for Mozilla's own stuff. Not the open, user
| controlled system i'd love Firefox to be.
|
| The Firefox Android Addon system is even worse... only a
| very short list of pre-approved extensions are available.
| With the escape hatch for devs requiring some stupid
| online-account. Sorry, but how is that different from an
| App store without side-loading?
|
| Still recommend using Firefox, since it is the best we
| have. But yeah, i don't like the less and less open
| direction apparently chosen by Mozilla. And wonder if not
| being a good role model will hurt them down the line...
| hollander wrote:
| I hate the tab reload in Chrome after switching tabs, which
| often changes form input.
| yboris wrote:
| I believe you can disable this newly-added functionality.
| permo-w wrote:
| Brave has tree style tabs now
| mortalkastor wrote:
| I switched to Orion[0] as a test, discovered the awesomeness
| of superbly integrated, native, tree style tabs, and now I'm
| stuck with this browser where sites I need for work are half
| broken. I tried Firefox with Tree Style Tab extension, but
| it's not nearly as good :(
|
| [0] https://browser.kagi.com
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Too bad it only runs on Apple platforms.
| mthoms wrote:
| I've been looking into Orion. Are the broken sites you're
| referring to very niche or common ones? Do they work in
| Safari but not Orion?
| fht wrote:
| On firefox you can also use sidebery. If I recall correctly
| it worked decently well. Currently I'm using Arc which
| performs well enough for my use cases, although being
| locked into chromium kinda sucks.
| dahfizz wrote:
| > I couldn't imagine opening more than a dozen of tabs
| without it.
|
| I can't imagine having more than a dozen tabs open, period.
| You tab hoarders will never make sense to me...
| phlip9 wrote:
| As a serial tab hoarder, Vimium's SHIFT-T tab fuzzy search
| is what makes it manageable. : )
| 4w3 wrote:
| Just unfortunate that it does not work across windows for
| the window hoarders :)
| shock wrote:
| It does for me.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I truly don't understand how people benefit from using tabs
| that way, either. It makes no sense at all to me.
|
| Nonetheless, it's clear that people do. I don't have to
| understand.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| There are plenty of legitimate reasons to have multiple
| tabs open that doesn't really have to do with "hoarding".
|
| For games, I often have a bunch of wiki tabs open at the
| same time.
| grogenaut wrote:
| For me I just type titles or word back into the browser
| bar and Firefox searches history. How are you
| searching/navigating to find the right tab of several
| hundred to go back to that tab?
| SomeHacker44 wrote:
| Too many sites have useless titles, or URLs that if you
| go back to you don't get to the same state you had when
| you closed the window. So, I find that history is for the
| most part useless. Sometimes it works - but not reliably.
| beltsazar wrote:
| You can also search open tabs in the address bar:
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-
| autocomplet...
|
| I hardly use it, though, because I usually have < 100
| open tabs, not thousands like others have. I identify
| tabs by their tree structures (parents, children,
| siblings tabs) and the prefixes of the titles, whose
| lengths don't depend on how many tabs opened, because the
| tabs are arranged vertically.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| Vimium - press shift-T - search among all page titles and
| URLs of open tabs.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Why is that better than searching history or bookmarks?
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| A bunch is reasonable but I've seen people here on HN
| claim to have multiple windows with thousand of tabs on
| them. That is beyond comprehension for me but if it works
| for them that's awesome.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Oh, yeah thousands seems like a lot. But I'm not sure,
| maybe there's a workflow where that makes sense.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| One thing I've noticed since I started using Sideberry
| extension (a different/better take on Tree Style Tabs) is
| that after a day or two, the whole tab panel I separated
| specifically for HN tends to accumulate 100+ tabs. Having
| them laid out vertically in tiny font makes this apparent
| in a way that the regular tab bar doesn't.
|
| Fortunately, I also habituated the simple behavior of "If
| I realize I have a lot of HN tabs open, right-click and
| close the entire pane". That's how I know I'm clocking
| about 100 tabs per two days on HN alone.
|
| Also, Sideberry changed my tab hoarding habit in a way
| that still results in keeping hundreds of tabs, but using
| them in much more sensible way. I keep them arranged in
| trees stemming from topical groups on high-level panels,
| and trim or kill as they're no longer useful. Most of
| those tabs are unloaded anyway, but the interface works
| as excellent short-term (days to weeks, sometimes a few
| months) bookmarking system - and I don't _lose_ tabs
| anymore (as in knowing the tab is there somewhere, but
| not being able to find it in the vast sea of other tabs).
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Sideberry FTW. Sideberry tab panels FTWW.
|
| Except for the annoying interaction (I think) with "open
| new tabs next to current tab", which causes Sideberry to
| somehow leave behind lots of stupid empty tabs named
| after the page the real new tab had. I deal with it, but
| it's annoying.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Oh, I'm yet to hit that problem. My current annoyance is
| that sometimes it gets confused after Firefox restarts,
| and I end up with a flat dump of tabs + an unending spam
| of those tiny warning popups at the bottom of its UI. The
| few times that happened, I ended up restarting Firefox
| again to stop the warnings, and then rearranging the flat
| list of tabs into groups and panels I want them to be in.
| Fortunately, it's not that big of a chore.
| beltsazar wrote:
| What makes Sidebery better than TST? I'm consider trying
| it, but I don't want to lose all of my TST tabs.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Honestly, I don't remember. A year ago when I was
| considering going back to vertical tabs, I read a bunch
| of discussion thread and articles, and got the impression
| Sideberry might be better. Tried it, and it resonates
| with me - unlike TST, which I tried and quickly abandoned
| several times over the year.
|
| Can't really point to any concrete issue, other than I
| have a distinct feeling Sideberry is _much faster_
| /lighter, and feels more like part of Firefox vs. some
| bunch of JS faking an UI on top of it. Sorry I can't give
| you a more objective comparison. I did find this though:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/118ddge/tab_man
| age...
|
| which is a recent(ish) discussion, and the points made
| there seem accurate.
| accoil wrote:
| I switched to Sidebery a couple of months ago, and I find
| that it's somewhat better at restoring trees (though that
| could just be luck). I feel it's a bit more responsive,
| but these days I trim my tabs a bit more aggresive than I
| used to so my TST memories are somewhat biased.
|
| I was surprised at how decent it converted TST tabs, but
| I can't remember how low my bar was; maybe try a new
| profile?
|
| One thing I'm finding really nice in Sidebery though that
| TST can't do, is that I can create a parent node that is
| not attached to a specific page (via grouping).
|
| Panels I'm undecided on. They seem useful, but they also
| seem like a bandaid over window management tools. One
| problem I'm having is that they don't restore, and all
| the tabs go back to the main panel. That may be some
| setting I toggled though.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| You end up using them as bookmarks of some sort,
| especially with the search bar doubling as tab search
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| I'm convinced that a significant proportion of people
| today don't use bookmarks and have never leveraged their
| power because they grew up with tabs and never bothered
| to explore their other options for organizing websites.
|
| You can save all of the tabs of your current session as a
| bookmark folder in one fell swoop! Your research tabs can
| be all saved together and opened as a group! Your gift
| ideas that you won't close because you don't want to
| forget about them can be saved _in a folder named gift
| ideas_ so the next time you need them you have them,
| without the cost of using up your extra RAM and CPU
| cycles!
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| On modern browsers, don't unused/old tabs take up
| basically no resources?
|
| I remember both Chrome and FF making a big deal over that
| point years ago.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| There were extensions for it more than a decade ago
| already, but these days it is indeed the regular out-of-
| box behavior (though Chrome got it only a few months ago
| IIRC).
| Sunspark wrote:
| In my case, the open tabs are longer reads I mean to come
| back to read properly, except a new shiny opens and I never
| seem to get to them.
| danShumway wrote:
| It's just ADHD, there's not really a _workflow_ reason that
| I have 1000+ tabs open. It just kind of happens.
|
| Firefox/Sideberry is useful for mitigating that. I also
| have workflows set up for mass-exporting my tabs from
| Firefox to a text file and reorganizing them in plain-text
| and re-opening just the tabs I care about[0].
|
| Bookmarking on any browser is cumbersome and leads to
| disorganization over time. Tree-style tabs helps make that
| organization at least a little bit easier.
|
| [0]: https://textmark.netlify.app/
| Given_47 wrote:
| Nice! I went on a closing tab spree recently but rejoined
| the 1k club this morning (1018 brave tabs rn on my mac)
| lol
| lelandbatey wrote:
| It's ADHD sure, but it's also an unwillingness to close
| tabs, and (generally) that we have poor windowing systems
| that force us into ~1-2 browser windows at a time because
| browser windows are harder to manage than tabs.
|
| The big change for me has been realizing that all my
| "tabs" are still there, in the form of my browser
| history, or if not, via Google search. If I can't find my
| way back to a website via my history or via searching the
| web, then I probably also wouldn't be able to find it
| among 1000 tabs. So why not close the tabs and be free of
| them?
| danShumway wrote:
| > in the form of my browser history, or if not, via
| Google search.
|
| So I do have bad news about this that may or may not be
| news: Firefox cycles history even if you never clear it.
| Unbelievably it's not permanent.
|
| This has bitten me a couple of times in the past because
| I always assumed that naturally history wouldn't just get
| randomly deleted in the background, so I'd search for a
| tweet or article from an obscure blog and couldn't figure
| out why nothing was coming up in my history searches.
| Took me a long time to actually check "is this article I
| looked up 6 months ago even there anymore?"
|
| There is a way to set up recurring database backups
| manually if you're willing to do some gruntwork, but it's
| kind of a pain and means you need to break out an SQLite
| browser across multiple backups in order to search.
|
| ---
|
| Where searching is concerned, :shrug: that doesn't
| generally work for me, but I'm happy for anyone that it
| does work for :) My tabs aren't just so that I remember
| where a document is (although they serve that purpose as
| well), they're also a reminder that the thing exists at
| all. When it gets to 1000 tabs, is that useful? Arguably
| no, but the process getting there is pretty organic, it's
| not really a conscious choice.
|
| ---
|
| In support of your comment though, being able to just
| stick all of my tabs in an open text file does genuinely
| help a lot[0] because it's permanent history and it
| serves the same purpose of being a reminder. It could be
| better, sometimes I leave tabs open on images that I
| forget to get around to saving or on open sessions and
| then the link rot hits whatever I'm looking at -- but it
| helps a lot. Being able to have an intermediary step
| between "leave everything open" and "categorize and
| organize everything you're looking at and save what you
| need" does allow me to do things like grab 500 tabs that
| I haven't checked in weeks and just stick them in a text
| file and write some notes at the top about what I was
| working on.
|
| Split browser sessions, better windowing would help a lot
| with this, although I worry I'd end up with similar
| situations as my Emacs window, where everything looks
| clean but behind the scenes I have 1000 open files and 20
| of them are unsaved scratch buffers ;) But the text file
| does kind of work the way you're describing; you can be
| free of the clutter, but if you _really_ need to find
| everything, you know it 's in a static text file that you
| can grep through at any time and that you know the
| browser won't do anything shifty with in the background.
|
| [0]: I say that it's common to have 1000 tabs open, and
| it is, but currently I only have about 200, largely
| because of that method. I went through a bunch of stuff a
| few weeks ago and stashed most of the stuff I had open.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| I stopped using persistent browser history because I
| realized without it I become more diligent at bookmarking
| pages. Deliberately bookmarked pages are alot less
| clutter than my entire browsing history, so with my
| address bar only searching my bookmarks and current
| session's history, it's easier for me to find what I'm
| looking for. It results in smaller haystacks for my
| needles to get lost in. I loath using general purpose
| search engines to pull up pages when I already know what
| page I'm trying to get to, so I bookmark any page I think
| I'll care about in the future.
| specproc wrote:
| I like this idea, might give that a go.
| imdoor wrote:
| Most of the times when I've tried finding stuff in
| (Firefox) history, I wasn't able to. Unless it's in the
| last week or so. In my experience, history filtering and
| search options are too basic to be useful. Once I was
| even desperate enough to try to load some Firefox sqlite
| file directly, hoping to query history entries, but that
| didn't work out.
|
| The only reliable way that I've come across for finding
| stuff after a long time has passed is saving every
| sightly interesting webpage to Zotero and using fulltext
| search afterwards (including webpage body).
|
| I'm curious, do you find the builtin browser history
| facilities sufficient for your needs, or are you using
| some third party tool for that?
| lelandbatey wrote:
| I do find the built-in browser history is sufficient for
| _my_ needs, in that I mostly want a super-fadt
| autocomplete of certain hot items. Everything else that I
| know I want to revisit and find again I've bookmarked,
| but I don't bookmark that many things, maybe ~1 new
| bookmark a month.
|
| Mostly though I realize I have focused heavily on not
| having clutter vs. being able to recall quickly
| everything I've ever found necessary or useful. It's a
| trade off I like, but it may not be for everyone.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > because browser windows are harder to manage than tabs.
|
| I find that browser windows are _much_ easier to manage
| than tabs and make it possible to see more than one site
| at a time as well as have different sites /pages sized
| differently. If I'm doing heavy web research, I'll
| typically have many browser instances, each with three or
| four tabs.
| aj7 wrote:
| This right here is tab 46 on my phone right now.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I use Simple Tab Groups in addition to Tree Style Tabs.
| Simple Tab Groups allows you to show tabs from only one
| group.
|
| So, I have groups for casual browsing, work, volunteer
| work, etc. So I don't have to close tabs when switching
| from one to the other. I just switch and those tabs are
| still there when I want to next look at them.
| capableweb wrote:
| If I'm still thinking about something and there is a
| related tab for it, it stays open. When
| researching/debugging/developing things, I usually end up
| with tangents, tries, multiple things to read/try and so
| on, so naturally, having a tree to represent my thoughts
| and my tabs makes sense.
| pkulak wrote:
| I turn tabs off completely and hide the tab bar.
| ddoolin wrote:
| Agreed, but once I switched to vertical tabs (via Sidebery
| with Firefox), it is WAY more manageable. Multiple tab
| spaces, named groupings, and a scrollable view that doesn't
| crowd and shorten names make it great for having many items
| in there with little downside.
| mthoms wrote:
| Does Firefox have the ability to hide the top tabs when
| you have an extension like this? Last I tried it, it
| required some finessing with CSS.
| rewmie wrote:
| > I can't imagine having more than a dozen tabs open,
| period. You tab hoarders will never make sense to me...
|
| Dashboards can easily take two or three tabs.
|
| The bug tracker is opened on a tab as well as the ticket
| page. You have a pull request opened to review it, and you
| check something in the repository. Pop open a couple of
| diffs to check where someone messed up in the past.
|
| And in the meantime you have Spotify/YouTube.
|
| A dozen tabs easily.
|
| Factor in task switching, checking CICD pipelines, and of
| course HackerNews opened somewhere, and you can get
| multiples of that.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| >hoarding
|
| I've got 30 tabs open today, and the oldest of them is only
| a few hours old.
|
| I look down a page, see interesting links, and middle click
| them all. They open tabs but don't actually load until I
| click that tab. I close each tab after I'm done reading it,
| or after a few hours if I never got around to reading it
| and lost interest.
|
| Is that hoarding? I don't think so. But it's the sort of
| workflow that TST makes pleasant but is extremely
| frustrating with a horizontal tab bar.
| rat_on_the_run wrote:
| I tested Chrome and Firefox about 1 week ago. On about 30 tabs,
| Firefox uses about 1G more RAM than Chrome. Their speed is
| difference is unnoticeable. I also tested Edge and Vivaldi for
| RAM usage. The result is Chrome < Edge < Firefox < Vivaldi.
| bjoli wrote:
| Those results say nothing. Were you RAM-constrained? When I
| am not, I have found that Firefox tries to use more memory.
| If I use Firefox while also having 3 VMs running and
| compiling stuff it stays down, whereas if I don't it easily
| starts using over 4gb (i have 64).
| JshWright wrote:
| I'd love for Firefox to be my daily driver, but I just can't
| give up the quality of life improvement I get from TouchID
| based WebAuthn.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Firefox's GC seems to be _much_ slower than chromium at least
| as of 109. Certain Vue websites are rather prolific in their
| garbage generation and The performance difference between
| chromium and firefox is easily noticeable, particularly if you
| leave an SPA open for a while.
| tapper wrote:
| We are on firefox 115 now mate.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| That's why I qualified the version.
| jonco217 wrote:
| Can you point me at an example of this?
| throwaway29303 wrote:
| Great job, guys!
| natded wrote:
| [dead]
| Sarkie wrote:
| Firefox is faster for our site* so we have suggested customers to
| use it.
|
| *Our site is shit.
| alexghr wrote:
| This is great to hear and I hope it will mean more people give
| Firefox a decent try! We need more people on alternative browsers
| in order to keep healthy competition between rendering engines.
|
| Firefox also handles lots of tabs really well and its Tab
| Containers plugin enables perfect separation of work tabs and
| personal tabs (I've got 1.4k tabs split across personal/work
| containers. I've got a problem, I know)
| bobbob1921 wrote:
| Im also a recent to firefox from Chrome convert recently (win
| 11). My reason is UI latency related, and my used case is a tad
| unique. As a network engineer, and system administrator, my daily
| PC is very high end enterprise hardware and running windows 11,
| and has 8 x 4K monitors.
|
| I always will have 20 to 50 web browser windows open as well as
| many tabs in each of those windows.
|
| The main issue I was encountering, and my best guess, from a lot
| of testing over the past three years, is related to the large
| pixel count of my desktop - I would frequently encounter 1 to 2
| seconds of lag/unresponsiveness when switching from chrome to
| another (chrome) application in the background. As this has been
| a nearly 3 year long issue, I've tried many , MANY fixes/work
| arounds The two most impactful were upgrading from windows 10 to
| windows 11. And switching from chrome from primarily using chrome
| to Firefox. (The issue was actually the same with chrome canary,
| as well as with GPU rendering enabled or disabled in each
| browser.) while I now run Firefox 24/7, I will
| occasionally open up chrome or chrome canary in unique use cases,
| and still notice the performance improvement in firefox during
| those times.
|
| (to be clear when I say I've tried and tested just about
| everything, I mean it from fresh new iOS installs with no
| applications, except chrome, two upgrading every piece of
| hardware a few times over) - the issue persisted.
| azeirah wrote:
| 8 x 4K monitors, I'm so jealous wow. I wish my work would give
| me even one, I'm developing on 2 full hd monitors :(
|
| I even do some design work so it's honestly pretty bad.
| agumonkey wrote:
| kudos
| tracker1 wrote:
| Glad to see this, browsers have been mostly Chromium based for a
| while. Safari seems to be lagging a lot since the split, and I
| just don't like the Firefox UI as much.
|
| OT: Just curious... does anyone have a good cross-browser
| extension (chrome and FF browsers) that can sync the bookmarks,
| in particular the bookmark toolbar. I use a password manager
| (Bitwarden) that integrates well, wish I could get the same for
| the bookmarks toolbar.
| unilynx wrote:
| I've tried to find something like this multiple time over the
| past years, but it seems browsers do their best to protect
| bookmarks from extensions
|
| It seems the only way are tools that directly edit each
| respective browsers setting files (ie from the command line)
| but I'd rather not go down that path.
| Propelloni wrote:
| There used to be xbookmarks.com but it is long gone. There is
| an open source tool by the name of XBrowserSync [1] which
| came up when I searched for xbookmarks. What they say on
| their website sounds promising, but I did not do any further
| research or try it out. I'm on Firefox on all my devices ;)
|
| [1] https://www.xbrowsersync.org/
| tracker1 wrote:
| Yeah... I'd been keeping my "source of truth" to my google
| account, so it's easy enough to export and import to other
| browsers... but trying to distance myself from the google
| account for everything.
|
| Found a couple extensions, so will probably export to be
| safe, then start playing to see how it goes.
| hank_z wrote:
| A off topic question. Has anyone encountered the crash after wake
| from sleep for the latest Firefox on macOS Sonoma public beta?
| Jochim wrote:
| Firefox has been my browser of choice since I switched from
| Internet Explorer as a child.
|
| However, I've found their refusal to implement or offer
| alternatives to WebSerial and screen-casting utterly depressing.
| It's made a number of tasks more difficult and inconvenient and
| makes Firefox a less useful tool overall.
|
| On the WebSerial discussion ticket, an educator articulates how
| this decision essentially forces what was a Firefox based
| classroom onto Chrome. I'll be sticking with Firefox but missing
| functionality drives users away.
|
| It doesn't help that their reasoning for not implementing
| WebSerial feels extremely paternalistic and runs counter to the
| ethos of user empowerment at the core of most open source
| projects.
| [deleted]
| collinmanderson wrote:
| Firefox has 2.2% usage on US government websites according to
| https://analytics.usa.gov/
|
| If it falls below 2% it may lose official support on .gov
| websites according to
| https://designsystem.digital.gov/documentation/developers/#b...
| kyledrake wrote:
| I use Firefox on my phone, it's the only one that allows me to
| block popups/ads/autoplay videos and disable javascript via add-
| ons when I need to, and the web is pretty much unusable without
| being able to do that now. Who cares if it's faster if you can't
| even load the content without it blocking your view with popups
| and trying to play videos without your consent before crashing?
| loopz wrote:
| Firefox or Librewolf would be my preference if it had tab groups.
| unsungNovelty wrote:
| Firefox containers are tab groups on steroids. Tab groups are
| just aesthetic while Firefox containers can not only group and
| colour code the tabs but isolate cache and stuff. This means
| you can use two gmail accounts in two separate tabs. It also
| means you can isolate you personal bank or other websites so
| that other data harvesting website cant get to that
| information. :)
|
| Firefox containers have been there long back before tab
| groupings were available in Chrome as well.
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-contain...
| isodev wrote:
| Kind of a shame they didn't include Safari. But it's good to see
| Firefox has managed to climb to the second place.
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| Heh, yeah I enjoy that this is the missing context. It really
| does show progress though for Firefox.
|
| It's like "The Cubs beat the Yankees in the World Series! (But
| the Astros actually won the World Series)"
| magicalist wrote:
| Safari is slower, though? From the sibling comment:
|
| https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl.
| ..
| cpeterso wrote:
| Here are the Speedometer results for Firefox, Chrome, and
| Safari on macOS:
|
| https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...
| warabe wrote:
| I don't care about performance if differences are negligible
| enough.
|
| I support Firefox because competition makes market healthier.
| Current status of Manifest v.3 is a shining example.
| pingec wrote:
| FF is great, only two things left I go to Chrome for are DevTools
| and watching Youtube (lower cpu usage, lower battery drain).
| nateb2022 wrote:
| Regarding battery drain, see
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1716164
|
| TL;DR: Firefox usually uses AV1. Hardware prior to intel 11th
| gen tiger lake, amd rdna2 (pre rtx 6000 series) and nvidia 3000
| series has no hardware AV1 decoding support (and neither does
| Apple Silicon). This results in higher CPU usage on Firefox,
| whereas Safari and Chrome usually resort to codecs that have
| hardware decode support on the machine.
|
| This can easily be fixed by going to `about:config` and setting
| `media.av1.enabled` to false.
| dh-g wrote:
| Youtube performance/reliability on OSX made me switch to Brave.
| kevinlinxc wrote:
| Does anyone else use Firefox on Android and have the bug where
| any unassuming tab can become unresponsive when you leave and
| come back to it, to the point where opening a new tab is the only
| option?
| pdanpdan wrote:
| Does this require some special test environment (special OS,
| special builds of firefox/chrome)?
|
| Because for me chrome vs firefox (both 115) -
| ubuntu desktop: 148(+-2.2) vs 126(+-6.5) - android phone:
| 95.8(+-2.0) vs 78.5(+-4.3)
|
| So it looks like chrome is faster and delivers a more stable
| performance while firefox is slower and more inconsistent on
| performance
| mccr8 wrote:
| The linked graph is for Firefox Nightly (currently 117) running
| on Windows.
| pdanpdan wrote:
| Small update: Firefox 117 on Android phone 75.4(+-6.4) so still
| there
| tekni5 wrote:
| I get 260 for chrome & 160 for firefox on win 10.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Adding my anecdotes: on an M2 mac mini - chrome
| 114: 472 +- 30 - firefox 115: 390 +- 22 - firefox
| 117: 420 +- 12
| gorhill wrote:
| Extensions can have a measurable effect on the benchmark, be
| sure both browsers have no extension, or the same extensions
| with the same configuration.
| pdanpdan wrote:
| Chrome has ublock and very few others, Firefox only ublock
|
| I suppose it is about nightly 117
| hooby wrote:
| It would be really bad if _everyone_ used Firefox - just as it
| would be very bad if _everyone_ used Chrome (or even any other
| browser based on the same rendering engine).
|
| We all absolutely do benefit greatly from having multiple
| competing browsers and render engines - regardless of which one
| we individually prefer to use.
|
| Therefore I really don't understand the many, many, many "my-
| browser-is-better-than-yours-you-should-switch" comments in this
| thread here. Why's everyone trying to convince everyone else that
| they should use the one and only "best" browser too? What for?
|
| Are people truly that desperate for confirmation and validation,
| that they need others to agree on their choice of browser?
| some_random wrote:
| Don't worry, there's no risk of a 100% Firefox ecosystem[1]. To
| the point where even suggesting it as a risk is really silly.
|
| [1]https://gs.statcounter.com/
| [deleted]
| FalconSensei wrote:
| > many "my-browser-is-better-than-yours-you-should-switch"
| comments in this thread here
|
| Also because they say FF is better but... for what/who? what
| parts are better?
|
| I try it a couple times a year, and always go back to Chrome,
| because the UX is so bad (for me). I get more stressed about
| the browser I'm using, than actually enjoying the browsing
| globular-toast wrote:
| It wouldn't be _as_ bad if everyone used Firefox, though.
| 51Cards wrote:
| The problem is the percentage use is so unbalanced right now
| (IMO due to Google and Microsoft using their other platforms to
| drive installing their browsers) that I now run across sites
| that only function in Chrome properly. A lot of devs feel that
| "Eh, I've targeted the 90+%, why do the rest matter?" and that
| is how you hand control of web standards to Google. The usage
| ratio needs to be more balanced to prevent a browser monopoly,
| hence people trying to ensure there continues to be a choice.
| beej71 wrote:
| I regret I have but one thumbs-up to give this comment.
|
| It's important to have at least 2 healthy browsers (in market
| share). They keep each other honest, if I might put it so
| tersely. We all remember IE6, and were in danger territory
| again with the current percentages.
|
| For this reason, personally, Chrome would have to be 2x or
| more better than Firefox for me to consider switching to it.
| Do what you can to keep the market diverse.
|
| If the percentages were reversed, I'd absolutely be running
| Chromium or a variant.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Browser wars are almost as old as the internet. There was even
| a time when people would put little rectangle animated gifs at
| the bottom of their websites saying things like "Best viewed
| with Netscape!" or "MSIE SUX!" or "Best Viewed with MSIE!" and
| then after a while those evolved into memes and then they
| vanished. There would be flamewars on Usenet about which
| browser is better. It isn't just browsers. There's tabs-vs-
| spaces. Scripting language vs scripting language. Meat vs
| plants. I think this would be best answered by a psychologist.
| I am curious what the personal preference wars will look like
| in another 20 years. Maybe _" Real human skin vs. synthetic
| skin on my LoveDroid!"_
| some_random wrote:
| It'll be more browser wars but be between 4 different
| Chromium browsers.
| dherikb wrote:
| I'm just waiting for the vertical tabs support to give a new
| chance for Firefox.
| pokeymcsnatch wrote:
| Eh? Firefox vertical tab support is much better than Chromium's
| in my experience. The chrome addons I've seen are hacky and
| clunky. It doesn't seem like chrome UI has nearly the same
| modifiability as firefox.
|
| Edit: I use the Tree Style Tabs add on
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
| [deleted]
| eyegor wrote:
| Tree style tabs is a vertical tab extension for ff and the best
| ui around if you use a lot of tabs. I can't even use chromium
| vertical tabs anymore because they feel terrible in comparison.
| You can also fully style tree style tabs via css.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
| tapoxi wrote:
| But then you get duplicates, since Mozilla made it a pain to
| disable the main tab bar. I'm using a Chromium offshoot (Arc)
| but I also like how Vivaldi handles vertical tabs. Firefox
| doesn't just compete with Chromium itself, but the entire
| ecosystem.
| aembleton wrote:
| Does Vivaldi nest tabs yet? Its been a few years since I
| tried it but it didn't use to.
|
| With TST, I can open a link as a new tab (middle click) and
| it is shown as a child of the opening tab. This makes it
| easy to minimise or close a whole tree of tabs.
| eviks wrote:
| you can stack tabs in a group, and when you're inside
| that group, new tabs are opened within that group, but
| not sure about the middle click for a single tab It also
| has a great alternative - workspaces, that helped me much
| better vs. the stacking, that for some reason didn't
| stick
| dan_hawkins wrote:
| Something like this?
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
| n_time wrote:
| I stopped using Firefox because it was killing my battery life.
| Also because I noticed more and more websites stopped supporting
| it and I just kind of gave up. I'm using Safari these days and
| it's fine.
| nwienert wrote:
| I've got a landing page I've been working on that pushes the
| limits on things by overlapping all sorts of effects: WebGL, mix-
| blend-mode, clip-path, SVGs, overlapping animations on custom
| fonts, etc.
|
| Safari and Chrome run it surprisingly well. Firefox was getting
| basically 1fps. I had to turn off half the effects before it felt
| reasonable.
| e4m2 wrote:
| See also https://arewefastyet.com.
| flerchin wrote:
| Really cool how you can see Firefox speed enhancements showing
| up in discrete steps.
|
| I am surprised to see Chrome faster than Chromium. What is
| google doing in their branded flavor?
| kirbyfan64sos wrote:
| Chrome tends to be built with a rather slow and stringent set
| of optimization extras like PGO that people tend to leave off
| in Chromium builds.
| ttarr wrote:
| Probably PGO.
|
| Even prebuilt Firefox tend to be faster than distro provided
| ones, at least at some point on the past.
| kurtoid wrote:
| Looks like the Arch repos do PGO on firefox: https://gitlab
| .archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/fi...
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| On windows you can speed chromium up by renaming it to
| chrome.exe so it gets special treatment by antivirus
| software.
| tredre3 wrote:
| Chromium's executable[1][2] is already named chrome.exe
| unless the builder goes out of their way to rename it. This
| can't be the reason.
|
| 1. https://download-chromium.appspot.com/ 2.
| https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-
| bina...
| voxic11 wrote:
| Doesn't windows check the signature or something to decide
| if an application should be allowed to bypass antivirus?
| Seems like doing it based on the filename would be a pretty
| huge security hole.
| lolinder wrote:
| That's incredibly dumb if true, but can't be the whole
| story because the difference is still present in the Linux
| stats.
| toastal wrote:
| I believe this domain started at the big 4.x version drop which
| was the turn of a new era in the Browser Wars. I remember using
| Minefield because the new features were too tempting to miss &
| this was before evergreen versioning became the norm.
| dumpster_fire wrote:
| I'd prefer if they kept the y-axis starting at zero for a more
| realistic representation.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| As a JavaScript developer my priorities are limited to visual
| render and DOM access. Going back 5+ years ago Chrome was able
| to access the DOM at about 45m ops/s on my desktop and Firefox
| was achieving about 850m ops/s on the same hardware. On my
| laptop (faster memory) Chrome was getting up to 55m ops/s while
| Firefox was around 1.4b ops/s.
|
| Now Firefox numbers have remained constant, but Chrome
| struggles to hit 20m ops/s in my desktop. Chrome has sacrificed
| front end performance across the board for modest performance
| improvements to query string access of the DOM. Pretty
| unfortunate.
| magicalist wrote:
| "access the DOM" is not a constant operation, though, it will
| vary wildly based on what you're doing and what you were
| doing just before that (think of reading a computed style
| before vs after writing a style that forces layout).
|
| 1.4b ops/s also sounds like it might not be testing what you
| think it's testing. Access in that case might just be hitting
| a cache, so possibly not at all representative of real
| performance of a web app.
| kstrauser wrote:
| How many cores was laptop benchmark running on?
| austin-cheney wrote:
| I believe the CPU is 4 core, JavaScript is single threaded
| (multi-callstack) so you only get 1 logical CPU core.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I thought so, but wasn't sure.
|
| That makes me super suspicious of 1.4B op/s. Surely
| Firefox isn't accessing the DOM in ~2 CPU cycles?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Hey they forgot to include the WebGPU speed comparison... oh
| wait ;)
| Nezteb wrote:
| Also https://awsy.netlify.com/!
| [deleted]
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Nice, maybe someday I'll give it another chance. My main gripe is
| the UX for some things, and how some features seem half-baked.
|
| E.g.: to add a keyword for a search engine, it saves a bookmark,
| but there isn't (or wasn't) any way to filter for those later if
| you wanted to check what you had already created
| napo wrote:
| I'm a bit confused by the UI. Looks like the test is for windows.
| Did someone manage to test it for Linux and MacOS as well? (not
| sure what test we are supposed to use)
| junglistguy wrote:
| [dead]
| twism wrote:
| I may bee the outlier here since everyone seems to gush about
| firefox every now and then on here ... but as a webdev firefox
| still feels second rate to me when it comes to PWA, Push
| Notifications, CSS animations (glitchy/graphics tearing) and a
| host of other things I test for browser compatibility
| jeroenhd wrote:
| That's very interesting! Last time I benchmarked Firefox, it
| performed half as fast as Chrome or Gnome's WebKit. I should run
| my benchmarks again!
|
| I do wonder though, is this performance improvement Windows
| specific? It's hard to believe that Mozilla could make up the
| difference in only three or four months.
|
| Edit: looks like Chromium still beats Firefox on Linux:
| https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...
|
| In fact, all benchmarks browsers seem between a quarter and a
| third slower on Linux in speedometer. That's strange, I wonder if
| this has to do with the limited availability of hardware
| acceleration?
| return_to_monke wrote:
| I'd think that these improvements were started years ago but
| only now enabled
| 542458 wrote:
| https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6...
|
| Looks like it _really_ depends on the benchmark. In some
| Firefox gets slaughtered, in some Firefox is the clear winner.
| foota wrote:
| Some of these are score (higher is better) and some are time
| (lower is better) in case that wasn't clear.
| demizer wrote:
| Firefox is the best. I wish Mozilla would let me donate funds
| specifically to fund it's development for my own peace of mind.
| torartc wrote:
| Firefox might be fast, but it's majorly lacking in browser APIs
| these days.
| insanitybit wrote:
| It's great to see Firefox competing on a core metric -
| performance. It doesn't look like a one time thing, either, I
| suspect an ongoing initiative to close this gap. I'd be curious
| to hear more about what that entails.
|
| Something that might be less exciting is finding where Chrome
| beat Firefox on a benchmark and then tuning Firefox one knob at a
| time until it didn't, then moving on to the next benchmark - that
| would mean that there's not much more room to grow since it's
| basically just "ah, they did that we should do that". It would
| still be good work just not sustainable.
|
| If it's part of a larger performance initiative I'd really like
| to learn more.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Great, however it will take more than that to get out of the 3%
| adoption.
|
| Everyone pushing Chrome and Electron apps will not suddenly adopt
| Firefox.
| rednafi wrote:
| The biggest reason I stick with Chrome is how easy it is to
| resume your work on a new machine. You just log into your Google
| account and boom, all of your data and extensions start syncing
| in the background. With Firefox, I've to log into a new FF
| account and then log into my Gmail again anyway. I admit I'm lazy
| but for me, ergonomics usually comes before ideology.
| lolinder wrote:
| This is _only_ true for your Google account, right? You 're not
| magically logged into HN already on the new machine? Chrome
| isn't actually syncing your cookies, it's just that logging
| into the browser logs you into all your Google apps too.
|
| Firefox syncs extensions, preferences, open tabs, etc. The only
| thing it can't do is automatically log into Google, but having
| to enter one extra username/password one time per computer
| seems like a pretty minor reason to pick a browser, unless
| you're constantly logging in on new computers.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| more like vendor lock
| jodrellblank wrote:
| "I prefer the way this vendor does things" is not vendor
| lockin.
|
| "I hate the way this vendor does things, but I'm locked in
| and can't leave" is vendor lockin.
| Sayrus wrote:
| I'd argue that "I prefer the way this vendor does things
| and I can't leave" is still vendor lock-in. There may be
| different reasons as to why you can't leave, even if it is
| just personal preferences.
|
| Google can offer this because you are using a single,
| fairly unified, ecosystem and they own both your account
| and browser. However, this ecosystem does not offer
| interoperability so you are effectively locked-in.
|
| Ironically, this feature is exactly why I can't use Chrome
| or login on accounts on Android applications: this will
| auto-sync everything and log you into Google, make logging
| out very hard, enroll your devices on Google Workspace if
| that's a professional account, ...
| jodrellblank wrote:
| I'd argue that that's ridiculous. "The door is closed and
| locked and I can't leave" is so very very different from
| "the door is open and I can leave but I prefer it inside"
| that calling the second "being locked in" is an insult to
| people who actually are locked in.
|
| Vendor lockin is where the vendor does things to lock you
| in, such as "Google made it so my Chromebook can only run
| Chrome", or "Google made it so my GMail only works in
| Chrome". Lockin generally is when people other than the
| vendor do things to lock you in, "Meta made WhatsApp web
| only work in Chrome", "My bank website only works in
| Chrome".
|
| "The vendor made a more integrated, better, product and I
| prefer it" is not lockin of any kind, that's ordinary
| competition.
| panzi wrote:
| That's great. But Google Maps Street View (-> GeoGuessr) is still
| a slideshow under Firefox (Linux) for me. (I tried all the things
| under about:config) Really hope that gets fixed some day. On that
| day I will switch back. Really missing browser containers (well,
| I'm booting Firefox just for that, actually).
| izzydata wrote:
| I think it is finally time to de-google my digital footprint.
| fernandotakai wrote:
| as a pentadactly widow, i would recommend to anyone that is
| coming back to firefox tridactyl
| https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl
|
| is it the same? no.
|
| but is it close? hell yeah. it really helps me with productivity!
| bugmen0t wrote:
| The link is terrible. Maybe the article should link to
| https://arewefastyet.com or maybe the Speedometer selection at
| https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/raptor-desktop-spe...
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