[HN Gopher] Firefox finally outperforming Google Chrome in SunSp...
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Firefox finally outperforming Google Chrome in SunSpider
Author : marcodiego
Score : 738 points
Date : 2023-08-15 13:58 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.phoronix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.phoronix.com)
| ErneX wrote:
| Unrelated to this benchmark but Chrome vs Firefox on the same Mac
| has significantly worse scrolling performance on pages with a
| reasonable amount of images. Or at least that's what I have
| observed.
|
| In Chrome while you scroll you get these moments of empty white
| space while it is probably loading the content in and out. On
| Firefox I don't get these empty white chunks at all it is just a
| smooth content scroll all the way.
|
| To me this is more jarring than being faster in JS.
| kwanbix wrote:
| I used to love Firefox, and I even was part of the organization
| team that make Asas Dotler's presentation in Argentina. I have
| pictures with him, an original Firefox bag, and an actual Firefox
| push. I also put money for the NY times add.
|
| But Google crushed them with the rapid releases. I remember that
| to realease firefox 3.0 (from 2.0), it took them like 2 years.
| Crazy slow.
|
| Today is much faster and is really nice, but I don't like the UI,
| i really prefer the one by chrome, it is much slim.
| KORraN wrote:
| > _But Google crushed them with the rapid releases. I remember
| that to realease firefox 3.0 (from 2.0), it took them like 2
| years. Crazy slow._
|
| Back in the days, increasing major version number meant
| something. What are the major changes between Chrome 114 and
| 115? For some reason, Mozilla decided to take part in this race
| that Google has started.
| tgv wrote:
| I like FF's UI better than Chrome's, but the small differences
| can be overcome quickly once you start using it. There is much
| more at stake than a few pixels here and a button there: do you
| want Google to control "the internet"?
| ur-whale wrote:
| > do you want Google to control "the internet"?
|
| Also: do you care at all about Google knowing every single
| thing you do on the internet?
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Some years ago it was common that some sites did not work or was
| slow in FF. I can't remember that I've had that problem for
| years. Good work by the FF team regardless of these benchmarks.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Doing well on benchmarks is fine, but real-world code is what
| matters and programmers will write their javascript to match what
| is fast on Chrome and not test on Firefox, meaning there will be
| some code that is accidentally fast on Firefox, the balance will
| be purposefully fast on Chrome.
| jve wrote:
| Pay attention to vertical x axis scale for the graphs - it
| doesn't scale visually.
| postalrat wrote:
| What am I suppose to see?
| elashri wrote:
| That's great. Also on a side note regarding performance. Does
| anyone else use Firefox developer edition as their main browser
| because they feel that the performance is better than Firefox
| vanilla itself?
|
| I feel that based on a heuristic measurements (that is probably
| not reproducible)
| putlake wrote:
| I don't trust anyone other than Google with my passwords. Google
| password manager is only available on Chrome. So unfortunately
| I'm locked into Chrome. I do like Edge and Firefox but the
| passwords are an issue.
| est31 wrote:
| Then you are one Google account compromise away from disaster:
| https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/warning-dont-let-google-manag...
|
| Google password manager is not end to end encrypted.
|
| LastPass, Bitwarden, and Firefox too, are end to end encrypted
| with the user chosen password at least. If your password is
| strong enough, it should be safe.
|
| Apple also uses end to end encryption, although there you might
| also be vulnerable via a hack of your iCloud account, not sure.
|
| 1Password is the most secure option: here, in addition to your
| password being encrypted with your master password, it's _also_
| encrypted via a secret key that is pre-generated. So a leaked
| encrypted 1Password backup won 't be brute-forceable.
| sp332 wrote:
| You can enable "on-device encryption" for Google password
| manager. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/11350823?
| sjid=178...
| Grazester wrote:
| LastPass should not even be mentioned.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| You trust Google with your passwords? And you trust them more
| than 1Password, Apple, etc.?
|
| I'd love to hear more about that statement.
| andersa wrote:
| Is the Apple password manager available on non-Apple devices?
|
| It could be argued that Google has significantly more
| resources to invest in security of the password storage than
| these smaller companies. We've recently seen LastPass
| implode, but I've never heard of any successful attack on
| Google password manager.
|
| Still prefer to keep them offline though.
| tiltowait wrote:
| It's available on Windows. Not sure about Linux/Android.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't really get how people keep falling for online
| password managers. The only thing I can think is there must
| be some psychological effect: "well, this person is
| suggesting something that I know to be very dumb. So, I
| guess they must know something I don't, better trust them!"
| tristan957 wrote:
| Or we just appreciate convenience. I trust Bitwarden to
| operate a great secure service.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| > Is the Apple password manager available on non-Apple
| devices?
|
| As of last month or so, it is now available on Windows as
| well.
| Propelloni wrote:
| Of course this is only my opinion, but I'd rather trust an
| open-source password manager such as KeePassXC. They all have
| browser integration (native or plug-in) if this is important.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > I don't trust anyone other than Google with my passwords.
|
| At this stage in their corporate life-cycle, where greed and
| complete and utter lack of care towards user happiness reigns
| supreme, trusting google with _anything_ is a rather large
| mistake IMO.
| jusoren wrote:
| What happen if google itself is the adversary in the safety of
| your passwords? That spur of the moment trollish YouTube
| comment might get flagged, bringing down your google account
| and all services tied with it; gmail, gdrive, your saved
| passwords etc. Then trying to rectify the situation is close to
| impossible since theres no human support for (free) google
| account.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...
| [deleted]
| ur-whale wrote:
| While that's great news, in recent years, AFAIC, the decision to
| use firefox over Chrome has been entirely unrelated to
| performance issues.
|
| In my book, Chrome is now officially in the same doghouse IE6 was
| confined to back in the days: a buggy spying machine that is
| mostly a vehicle designed to shove Google's policies down the
| collective throats of internet users.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Okay, time to risk a switch back.
| codedokode wrote:
| I think that benchmarks are made wrong way. They typically
| calculate how many times per second a browser can run some code.
| But this causes browser vendors to do trade-offs, for example,
| increase memory consumption which increases the probability of
| swapping which causes everything to stall.
|
| A more fair way would be to account for memory usage:
|
| score = speed / (RAM usage)2
|
| Or they should run their tests at 2Gb system with lot of other
| applications running in background.
| liendolucas wrote:
| I only run Firefox on every computer and phone that I own. I'm
| extremely satisfied with its performance so far and sincerely
| hope they keep improving. My second alternative is Brave, just in
| case I can't use Firefox. My very last choice is Chromium. On
| Firefox I highly recommend these plugins:
|
| AdNauseam: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/
|
| Consent-O-Matic: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...
|
| Firefox Multi-Account containers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
|
| I don't care about cookies: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a...
|
| Edit: As mentioned below, avoid Consent-O-Matic unless you trust
| Avast.
| takoid wrote:
| Just so you know, "I don't care about cookies" was sold to
| Avast last year:
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/21/avast_buys_i_dont_car...
|
| There is a fork called "I still don't care about cookies" which
| is probably worth switching to unless you trust Avast:
|
| https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-Dont-Care-About-Cookies
| liendolucas wrote:
| Thanks for that and I wasn't aware it's owned by Avast. I'll
| switch to the one that you suggested!
| kristofferR wrote:
| Your edit makes no sense though, 'I don't care about
| cookies' is the tainted one, not Consent-O-Matic.
| liendolucas wrote:
| Oh yes, I made a mistake it's the one that you mentioned.
| I can't edit the post anymore :(
| hinkley wrote:
| I knew NodeJS and Chrome were in for darker times when v8.dev
| discontinued their engineering blog. That spoke to me of
| engineering losing steam. Either will or manpower or both.
|
| Congratulations to Firefox of course. The hare is napping under a
| tree and you just keep trucking.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| I feel like you are reading way too much into this. You can
| look up thread and see both a SpiderMonkey and V8 dev/xdev
| agree SunSpider is basically worthless to almost harmful to
| benchmark against and that V8 continues to absolutely dominate
| SpiderMonkey overall.
| uluyol wrote:
| What did they discontinue? https://v8.dev/blog/speeding-
| up-v8-heap-snapshots was posted less than a month ago.
| [deleted]
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| You know. That actually highlights an understated risk of the
| Chromium monopoly.
|
| What happens if Chrome... doesn't become evil, it's just
| _mismanaged_? What happens if the team loses personnel and
| gains too much tech debt? What happens if Chromium is run into
| the ground just by happenstance? I don 't know, maybe they give
| it to a product manager, or they try Scrum or something.
|
| It's a lot of influence to put in the hands of a single
| fallible team.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> What happens if Chrome... doesn 't become evil, it's just
| mismanaged?_
|
| When executed by an entity with enormous power, incompetence
| is indistinguishable from malice.
| surajrmal wrote:
| Is chromium hostile towards non Google contributions? It's
| not clear to me why a community of many parties couldn't form
| and prevent this possibility. From what I can tell, the
| problem is largely a lack of companies who want to
| participate in chromium development.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| This article from Igalia describe pretty well the situation
| around contribution to gecko/webkit/blink :
| https://bkardell.com/blog/2023-Mid-Season-Power-
| Rankings.htm...
|
| Very interesting read!
| The_Colonel wrote:
| That depends if you contribution is conforming with
| google's strategy / vision. Very likely google is going to
| be hostile to the future contribution to re-enable
| extension manifest v2.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| If the chromium community are unable to write their own
| browsing engine, then they are shackled to whatever google
| implements. When WEI turns out to be so intertwined with
| deep functionality that you can't really excise it, what
| are these so called "alternatives" going to do, just not
| update the chromium codebase ever?
| ebilgenius wrote:
| I'm seeing this already with how they're handling the new
| right-click contextual Search feature being moved to open the
| results in the new "Search sidebar" rather than a new tab.
| This was supposedly able to be disabled with the flag "Search
| web in side panel" (there's no option for it in the
| preferences), however if the completely undocumented "CSC"
| flag was left at it's default then it overrides any other
| flag to force enable the feature. You can see the
| consequences of this decision to this very day in places like
| /r/chrome with users complaining that disabling the feature
| flags isn't working.
| VancouverMan wrote:
| As we've seen happen before with other formerly-popular
| browsers like Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer,
| and Firefox, the users just move on to whichever other
| browser works better for them at the time.
| Eji1700 wrote:
| Which was back when you had a bunch of options. If firefox
| goes under and chromium throws up, it's not like there's a
| large field of choices.
| zamadatix wrote:
| "What if nobody wanted to continue developing browsers"
| is an unrelated issue. If Firefox goes under, Chromium
| throws up, and nobody else thinks it's worthwhile to do
| anything with the codebases or make a new separate one
| then the problem is nobody wants to build a browser not
| how many wanted to build a browser in the past.
| hinkley wrote:
| Internet Explorer was a lot of wandering in the desert.
| Let's not repeat IE 6 mkay?
| pjmlp wrote:
| We're already there, ironically mostly pushed by the
| anti-IE generation.
|
| If it wasn't for the special Safari status on Apple
| devices, it would be total domination, Web == ChromeOS.
| gottorf wrote:
| I use Firefox everywhere I can, warts and all, just to avoid the
| Chromium monopoly. It was actually a huge bummer for me when Edge
| gave in and switched to Chromium; having a giant like Microsoft
| support a third browser engine would really have been a boon to
| the health of the ecosystem.
| _coveredInBees wrote:
| Same here. Then again, I'll never leave Firefox as long as Tree
| Style Tabs[1] continues to be supported as an extension. It's
| been a life-changer since I discovered it well over a decade
| ago and makes every other browser pretty much unusable for me
| as a daily driver.
|
| [1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-
| style-ta...
| knd775 wrote:
| There are multiple chromium alternatives for this extension.
| gowld wrote:
| And they are all terrible.
|
| One of them is called TabFern, get it? It's like TabTree
| but _it doesn 't have branches_.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _And they are all terrible._
|
| For other Chromium-based browser users, Tabs Outliner is
| great, more powerful (but with a steeper learning curve)
| solution.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| It's not a one for one replacement but edge has vertical tabs
| and tab groups built in. I have to use edge for work and it's
| a decent compromise.
| sdnas211 wrote:
| Have you given Sidebery a try? Also for firefox.
| behringer wrote:
| Me too. I find the vast majority supports it fine. I find those
| that do not are happy to fix the problem, often within a few
| days or maybe a month.
| yomlica8 wrote:
| Edge seems like a blunder in general. Prior to the initial Edge
| introduction IE seemed to have 20-25% of the desktop browser
| marketshare. Nothing like the crazy 90+% it had at its height
| but certainly not a browser you can ignore. Now they're at
| about 10% and it seems like they have to use every manipulation
| tactic in the book to get it.
|
| But I agree, that third browser engine kept things interesting
| even if I didn't use it. Selfishly I hope Apple continues using
| its iron grip on iOS to prevent anything other than Safari's
| engine there. I don't use Apple products personally but benefit
| from the diversity of ecosystem it provides.
| afavour wrote:
| > Prior to the initial Edge introduction IE seemed to have
| 20-25% of the desktop browser marketshare.
|
| It had been on the decline for years. Statscounter shows 26%
| in January 2013, 17% January 2014, 13% in January 2015, then
| Edge was introduced in July of that year.
|
| If anything Edge was a recognition of that reality: the
| investment in maintaining their own browser engine wasn't
| worth it when compared to the resulting market share. IMO the
| failure of Windows Phone was the death knell of Trident (the
| IE engine): desktop share overall is smaller and they have no
| footprint in the mobile OS space.
|
| https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
| share/all/worldwid...
|
| https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
| share/all/worldwid...
|
| https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
| share/all/worldwid...
| temac wrote:
| You are confusing the old Edge that had an engine forked
| from IE and that MS exclusively maintained, with the new
| Edge that is a fork of Chromium. Maybe that the old Edge
| was not of stellar quality was simply because the age of
| the codebase of its engine.
| afavour wrote:
| I'm simply replying to the OP's assertion that "Edge
| seems like a blunder in general".
|
| IE market share was declining before Edge was introduced,
| and it continued to decline after Edge was introduced.
| Since the browser engine switch their market share has
| actually increased a small amount! So all in all I don't
| think there's any evidence that Edge was a blunder.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > death knell of Trident (the IE engine)
|
| Nitpick, but the Edge name signaled the switch to the
| ground up rewrite Spartan engine. Trident is still sort of
| alive in its zombie corporate state in the Windows
| backwards compatibility swamp. Trident was still maintained
| for backward compatibility (and still exists in IE Mode in
| Chromium Edge), but Edge was always Spartan and it is
| Spartan that is dead (RIP).
| yomlica8 wrote:
| Yeah, this does seem to line up more with the
| Windows8/Windows phone failure more than anything.
|
| Despite people having a better opinion about Edge Chromium
| it didn't seem to stem the decline.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I think the problem with Edge was two-fold:
|
| - People were trained to automatically install a new browser
| on their computers when they got it.
|
| - Edge is a never ending nagfest and that became another
| prompt to go and download Chrome.
|
| Less is more was probably the better strategy to take with
| Edge.
| softfalcon wrote:
| > Less is more...
|
| You hit the nail right on the money. Every time I
| accidentally open Edge through the Windows search, it never
| ceases to shut up about itself. There is fanfare, there are
| notifications for details I don't care about, popups
| showing me all the features that are standard in any web
| browser.
|
| You know what would make me use your browser Microsoft?
| Getting the hell out of my way. I do not care that it's
| Edge, I don't care that it's new, I don't care that it has
| 7 ways to input and take pictures and who knows what else.
| Just show me the search result.
|
| Contrast this to how Safari behaves when it pops up to show
| you something. It just gives you the web page. That's it.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > Edge seems like a blunder in general. Prior to the initial
| Edge introduction IE seemed to have 20-25% of the desktop
| browser marketshare.
|
| The only reason IE retained any marketshare was because it
| was required for legacy enterprise and government
| applications. For security this was bad all around and
| Microsoft was right to kill it off even to their own
| detriment.
| n0tinventedhere wrote:
| I can tell you from doing testing on Edge back when it
| represented a potential third engine to support: that browser
| crashed a lot. It was very unreliable prior to switching to
| becoming another chromium fork. It is clear the dev team was
| either underfunded or plain incompetent and Microsoft was in
| dire need of a default browser that didn't make people wince,
| ASAP, they could not afford to wait [insert X years to get a
| mature engine] so they went the obvious route and chose to
| make a chromium fork.
|
| Making a reliable engine that supports all of the modern web
| is a monstrous undertaking. Not just "support", it needs to
| be reliable. Microsoft missed the boat when they allowed IE
| to rot and it was too late to catch up now. Every year spent
| without a reliable browser preinstalled on your OS is
| detrimental.
| [deleted]
| ajross wrote:
| > Selfishly I hope Apple continues using its iron grip on iOS
| to prevent anything other than Safari's engine there.
|
| It's so weird these days seeing people literally cheering for
| the success of a proprietary product on a completely closed
| platform over an open source engine. Firefox, sure. I can get
| behind that even if my professional life technically argues
| against it. I see the draw there and won't argue about
| benefits.
|
| But Safari? Seriously? Even discounting the existence of
| Firefox, the "monoculture" argument falls down in the face of
| products like Edge and Opera (and countless others -- Linux
| distros ship Chromium, Teslas all have a build installed,
| etc...), which are *successful forks* of Chromium. If Google
| goes evil and turns into a bad steward, we know already that
| Microsoft et. al. won't be impacted and can continue to ship
| their unadulterated products. Because that's what they're
| doing today.
|
| Really? Safari?
| afavour wrote:
| > If Google goes evil and turns into a bad steward, we know
| already that Microsoft et. al. won't be impacted
|
| I suspect that's not OP's fear. Google is powerful enough
| that they can do whatever they want with Chrome. They could
| even close source the thing and implement a load of
| proprietary APIs if they wanted and the bulk of users would
| continue to use it.
|
| One of the things holding them back from doing so is the
| fact that Chromium can't run on the most popular mobile
| platform in the US. I'm no defender of Safari but I can see
| the logic at work.
| ajross wrote:
| > They could even close source the thing and implement a
| load of proprietary APIs
|
| Right, but that capability is _exactly what the upthread
| comment is cheering for_ Apple having. Apple goes even
| farther and straight up denies competitors access to its
| platform entirely.
|
| It's the asymmetry I don't understand: why is proprietary
| control good for one side but not for the other? Is the
| goal here preserving open systems and interoperability or
| is it just to Beat Google?
| afavour wrote:
| > why is proprietary control good for one side and not
| the other?
|
| It isn't for either, this is a "least worst" scenario.
| Both sides have the _capability_ to push proprietary APIs
| but largely fail at doing so because they don't have a
| monopoly over the market. They are forced to compromise
| on a middle ground (supporting the open web), which is
| better than one side being able to entirely dominate the
| market and do whatever they want.
|
| > Is the goal here preserving open systems and
| interoperability or is it just to Beat Google?
|
| In this specific scenario they are one and the same but
| the aim is the former. Google controls the desktop
| browser market already, one of the only reasons they
| haven't done the same on mobile is because Apple won't
| allow it. The argument is not that Apple should control
| everything, it's that stalemate is the best we've got.
| ajross wrote:
| > Google controls the desktop browser market already, one
| of the only reasons they haven't done the same on mobile
| is because Apple won't allow it.
|
| Yeah, I think this is wrong, but I'm going to bail on
| this discussion since it's too close to my employment.
|
| But my opinions haven't really changed anyway: from my
| perspective both sides have "control" over a market, but
| one side has been a _good_ steward, allowing forks and
| experimentation and open implementation, and the other
| side has been an _inarguably bad_ steward by disallowing
| competition entirely. And it 's shocking (and frankly a
| little Orwellian) to see people trying to argue the
| opposite.
| yomlica8 wrote:
| I haven't commented really since afavour has mostly
| articulated my position for me. I don't use Apple
| products as I am philosophically opposed to the control
| of the hardware. And my life goes on fine.
|
| WEI alone is enough for me to disagree with you on who is
| the bad steward.
| ajross wrote:
| > WEI alone is enough for me to disagree with you on who
| is the bad steward.
|
| But... again, WEI is just duplicating features that have
| been there from day zero on iOS (and mobile apps more
| generally).
|
| I _understand_ that you dislike WEI. I understand why you
| might argue against its implementors and push platforms
| like Firefox that don 't do that. I get that part.
|
| What I don't get is your celebration of a platform that
| is _even more locked down_ , in every reasonable
| interpretation. Your ability as an arbitrary client to
| connect to the service of your choosing using the
| software of your choosing (which is all WEI is about) is
| _objectively much weaker_ with iOS than any other
| significant client platform. So maybe you should revisit
| your thinking here?
| afavour wrote:
| One side having been a "good steward" is your opinion,
| describing counter opinions as "a little Orwellian"
| strikes me as hyperbole.
|
| From my perspective I agree that Google has been a
| _better_ steward of the web than many others would be or
| have been. But I have spent too much of my professional
| life dealing with things like AMP pages and shitty,
| browser-crashing ads provided via Google ad networks to
| say they are a total objective good (to say nothing of
| the Web Environment Integrity proposal and other stuff
| that never succeeded, remember when they wanted to put
| Dart in Chrome?).
|
| Even if you think they are objectively good, remember
| that they've been a good steward _within the current
| context where they don 't hold overall power_. Microsoft
| is a good steward of the web these days but I've been
| around long enough to remember the IE6 days. If given
| total control over the future of the web I have every
| expectation that Google would behave like MS did back
| then. It's nothing personal against any company, I think
| it's inherent in the nature of any private company in
| total control of a market to bend it to their will.
| Expecting them to do anything else is foolish.
|
| I fear the native future Apple wants but can't achieve
| because of the open web. I fear the dominated web future
| Google wants but can't achieve because of Apple. I'm
| equal opportunity scared of all these bastards.
| tapoxi wrote:
| Firefox has lost about 20 million users since the announcement
| of Chrome moving to Manifest v3. It can't avoid the monopoly
| even with the press in their favor.
|
| https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
|
| Call me a pessimist but I don't think Mozilla is managed well
| enough to actually compete against Chrome. We'd need the Linux
| Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork
| Chromium at this point and create a vendor-neutral platform
| that everyone can rally behind.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Ah yes, so Firefox is faster than chrome, allows you more
| latitude for adblockers, and isn't pushing garbage hostile
| web standards, but clearly, _mozilla just isn 't doing
| enough_
|
| Can we stop pretending that this is mozilla's fault that the
| GIANT corp sitting in front of the internet, being the
| homepage of 90% of computers, that nags users to install
| chrome "for a better experience" on every single web site it
| can, is able to get onto more systems than firefox?
|
| How many average users even KNOW about firefox anymore?
| darklycan51 wrote:
| I am a tab hoarder, and on multiple different operating
| systems, with different installs, etc.
|
| Firefox ALWAYS seems to have random leaks after weeks that
| other browsers don't have, once I saw Firefox taking 24GBs
| of RAM, while Edge and Brave on the same or more tabs and
| time were taking only ~2-3gb of RAM.
|
| This has been going on since at least 2019-2020 or so, when
| I started dropping Firefox because of this behavior. It is
| just random websites that seem to cause leaks but this has
| never happened with Edge or Brave and no website should
| really be breaking a browser like this, the system becomes
| unusable after a while.
|
| They are seemingly unable to fix the issue or pretend it
| doesn't exist even when its reported so I basically had to
| stop using FF as my main browser.
| n0tinventedhere wrote:
| > so Firefox is faster than chrome
|
| Faster on sunspider. In practice, on real web pages, as
| someone who occasionally browses the web using a low end
| tablet PC (Surface Go 2 with linux. The CPU is downright
| anemic but good enough for treating it like a reading
| device/video stream platform), I experienced many more
| stutters on Firefox that I did not on Chrome and it has
| become one of the reasons I stopped using it (the syncing
| is also way worse and often breaks. "Read latest tab from
| other device" is almost useless if you don't manually
| trigger a sync because it sure won't do it by itself in any
| reasonable time frame).
|
| The performance difference is much less visible on my main
| computer though. But yall really need to try firefox on low
| end devices before you make generic statements about its
| performance. Or the android version.. lord, firefox on
| android is just unpleasant.
| caskstrength wrote:
| I have very similar experience - subjectively I
| experience more stuttering in FF than Chrome both on
| Android and Linux laptop.
| Dah00n wrote:
| I have the exact opposite experience. Streaming video is
| stuttering and buffering so bad that I can't use Chrome
| at all on those sites (Brave isn't any better). It was
| the reason I switched to Firefox and the performance was
| so much better.
| caskstrength wrote:
| Your experience is not "exact opposite" since for me
| video in FF with VAAPI-based hardware decoding also works
| better than in Chrome. However, FF can stutter while
| scrolling animation-heavy sites or when open/closing
| tabs.
| drawfloat wrote:
| It's about 12 months ago now, but I worked on a GL
| project where Firefox was _significantly_ slower than
| Chrome - and, agreed, it was often on lower end devices.
| This was to the point it was easier to just drop features
| wholesale from Firefox, in order to ensure a steady 30
| FPS (with Chrome solidly performing 60). I believe a
| large amount of it related to WebAudio APIs.
| garciansmith wrote:
| Firefox still runs great on my ThinkPad T420s running
| Linux, which is 12 years old at this point.
|
| And while I never use Firefox on Android without uBlock
| Origin, I don't get how it can be described as unpleasant
| after the rewrite a few years ago. The combo makes
| browsing bearable compared to Chrome.
|
| The sync tabs thing used to be flaky, I agree, but now
| sending tabs to and from Linux and Android always works
| for me.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| By stuttering, if you mean video stuttering, I used to
| experience those a lot; I installed Brave for that very
| reason, because Netflix, Twitch, etc. were performing
| pretty poorly on Firefox (on a 4GB RAM low end laptop).
| But I very rarely experience that these days, to the
| point I've switched back to Firefox for those sites too.
|
| But general performance-wise, Firefox is so easily better
| than Chromium in my experience, it's not even a
| competition. Firefox with hundreds of tabs open performs
| better than Chromium with 10-20 tabs. It's more
| responsive to interactions, uses less memory, and is much
| less likely to freeze up. With Chromium, I have to
| constantly keep a watch over open tabs, and close them
| mercilessly, or suffer from overall system slowdown and a
| browser that's almost a slideshow.
| vtee44 wrote:
| I use Firefox fork as main because anything else is worse
| on QubesOS. Both WebKit and Chromium have scroll lags,
| while Librewolf is smooth almost as on bare metal. I
| don't know what's the difference on normal websites, but
| I can use it and there are almost no lags on it when
| running few VMs on 8GB RAM.
|
| Android variant is actually shit, but it's getting only
| better. It's much faster now than 5 years ago. Hopefully
| they will improve it further.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Funny, I use Mull on my Android, which is basically
| Firefox on Android but even more heavily restricted. Have
| for at least a year. Didn't know people considered it
| unpleasant.
| onli wrote:
| I don't think they really do. Firefox, at least after the
| rewrite, is what made browsing on low-powered android
| machines bearable, in my experience.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Especially since it supports uBlock Origin and Dark
| Reader.
| TX81Z wrote:
| Uh, clearly you don't know anybody who actually worked
| there? Management is very very very unpopular and they've
| been facing a massive brain drain for years.
|
| Because they do have a great browser, but have a horrible
| strategy and have wasted money in any number of ways, and
| made themselves wholly dependent on Google for handouts.
| leviathant wrote:
| >Ah yes, so Firefox is faster than chrome, allows you more
| latitude for adblockers, and isn't pushing garbage hostile
| web standards, but clearly, mozilla just isn't doing enough
|
| >How many average users even KNOW about firefox anymore?
|
| A hard lesson I learned at my last company was that it's
| not enough to have the better product. Better marketing and
| better relationships will, more often than not, trump a
| better fitting solution to a problem. It sucks, but it's
| real.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Yeah! In fact, I would say a large portion of this is
| every android phone coming with Chrome pre-installed, and
| you know, that entire decade google spent with literal
| super bowl advertisements and THE GOOGLE DOT COM WEBSITE
| URGING YOU TO INSTALL CHROME with a mountain of dark
| patterns that plenty of smarter people than I have
| written about.
|
| Can you imagine the fucking fit HN would throw if mozilla
| dared to buy a super bowl ad?
| wslh wrote:
| > Can we stop pretending that this is mozilla's fault
|
| Clearly it is Mozilla fault: the world is not fair, if they
| are where they are they should crunch their resources and
| win. Google haven't started being the home of most
| computers. It is the nature of competition. Is it hard?
| Sure.
| n0tinventedhere wrote:
| I find it amazing how people forget that being a
| monopolistic power doesn't help if your product sucks:
| Google has, time and time again, failed to gain traction
| in the messaging app market on Android, the market being
| entirely occupied by competitors like WhatsApp.
|
| Chrome won partly because of the marketing and being
| preinstalled, sure, but also by being a good product. If
| nagging people to install Chrome was all it took to win,
| then why is Edge in such a precarious position on Windows
| with all the nagging Windows 10 and 11 brought? Microsoft
| failed to succeed time and time again.
|
| People on HN have weird preconceptions about how
| suggestion and marketing works.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >I find it amazing how people forget that being a
| monopolistic power doesn't help if your product sucks:
|
| Which is why none of our companies use microsoft teams,
| right? Or wait, maybe when it comes to products that
| aren't that different, what comes with the package
| matters.
| Dah00n wrote:
| I don't know where you are from but you seem very biased
| to your own friend or country bubble. For reference I
| don't know anyone at all who use WhatsApp. I use Google
| Chat and Facebook Messenger with a few but SMS with
| Google's RCS with everyone else, including my younger and
| much older family members.
| n0tinventedhere wrote:
| I live in France, and WhatsApp has a pretty big presence.
| Not a monopoly style one though, there's plenty of other
| apps used: Facebook Messenger, Skype, Snapchat, Discord..
| I have friends who have family in other countries and
| some different apps will be dominant, like Viber, but the
| common theme is that the only time I've seen people use
| SMS is when they're unsure as to whether the other person
| has any other means of communication. Most importantly,
| I've never seen someone use Google's own non-RCS chat
| apps, like Google Chat, Google Hangout, Google Allo,
| Google Talk.. Google has had many chat apps, sometimes
| just different names for the same thing, but in the end,
| they have no users here. Google continuously tried to
| make a dent in that market and failed.
|
| RCS is a non-starter if you need to do group chats with
| iPhone users or send them pictures without a massive loss
| in quality, as iPhones do not support RCS. As long as
| Apple refuses to support it, it will continue being a
| terrible choice in any country with significant Apple
| user base. An Android user with WhatsApp shares an
| identical experience with an iPhone user with WhatsApp.
| RCS on the other hand will drop you back to what cell
| phone messaging was many decades ago.
| wslh wrote:
| WhatsApp is used all over Europe and Latin America. Very
| easy to check. For example [1].
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1311229/whatsapp-
| usage-m...
| Dah00n wrote:
| According to statista.com 12% use WhatsApp in Denmark. As
| I said, living in a bubble if one believes everyone uses
| it.
|
| Edit: A quick search said this from the same source:
|
| >Using WhatsApp less often than once a month was the most
| common usage frequency among Danes in 2019, according to
| 23 percent of the service users. 15 percent used the app
| weekly and 13 percent used it several times a day.
| tristan957 wrote:
| If you use anti-trust practices to get your foothold, it
| isn't fair.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| "The world is not fair" in part because we refuse to
| punish Google for their blatantly anti-consumer practice
| of purposely making their websites work worse on non-
| chrome browsers and advertising chrome on every google
| property.
|
| How the fuck is mozilla supposed to compete with a GIANT
| that is nearly everyone's homepage? Even if they had
| comparable budgets (Which they don't) mozilla still
| wouldn't get the free advertising that google gives
| chrome
| pessimizer wrote:
| > purposely making their websites work worse on non-
| chrome browsers
|
| This is wild exaggeration that I never hear about except
| from people defending the mismanagement of Firefox. I've
| used Firefox since forever, and I don't have much trouble
| anywhere that I can remember. The browser works. This is
| an article showing that it's outperforming Chrome on some
| metrics. It's Firefox's business and design decisions
| that wreck their browser. It went from being awesome to
| being janky Chrome that calls you abusive when you
| complain that they put an ad for a tv show in your
| browser.
| wslh wrote:
| I think the Mozilla foundation has enough money to lobby
| about monopolistic practices. Did they?
|
| If your argument would be 100% true there will be no
| innovation or market dynamics. Business history has
| proven that one day you are at the top and another you
| aren't anymore.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If firefox sued google over monopolistic practices, that
| lawsuit would have to be funded completely by google.
| Google is 80% of firefox's revenue and 0% of its
| expenditure.
| ido wrote:
| It's not about speed, compatibility with Firefox is
| actually getting _worse_. I switched (back) to FF and DDG a
| few months ago and FF is having trouble with multiple
| websites I use on occasion (for an example off the top of
| my head, if I want to log-in to Haaretz.co.il to get past
| pay walls I have to use safari as FF doesn't manage to log
| in).
|
| This is still the small minority of sites but I keep safari
| and chrome around as it still happens often enough.
| solardev wrote:
| That never stopped Phoenix in the early days, or Chrome
| itself in its early days. Firefox just offers nothing
| substantial over Chrome and breaks a lot of sites. And over
| the last decade it kept pushing crapware and spam on you,
| right in the browser.
|
| Mozilla mismanaged it to hell. They don't even really care
| about the browser anymore.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Which sites don't work with Firefox?
|
| Safari is a huge simply due to iOS but it's a shame that
| Apple stopped maintaining the windows port.
| solardev wrote:
| Sadly I don't remember anymore. I ran into plenty of them
| 3 or 4 years ago (every week or so), then I stopped using
| Firefox altogether because of that. At work, some
| coworkers were using Firefox last year and it broke
| various third party libraries (especially graphics heavy
| ones). Rather than trying to fix the bugs, we just
| decided to deprecate Firefox support altogether because
| its usage was down to like 2 or 3 percent. Those
| resources were better spent on, say, improving mobile
| usability and performance for everyone.
|
| Edit: I wish Mozilla would just fork Chromium and
| add/delete whatever privacy things they want, like Brave.
| There's no reason to maintain Gecko anymore.
| n0tinventedhere wrote:
| I didn't have websites outright breaking on FF like
| solardev, but I had other issues with it, like cloudflare
| getting me into an infinite loop of asking me if I'm
| human and not letting me browse the website. This
| happened even if I deleted my firefox profile and started
| fresh with no extension. Note that this behavior of
| Cloudflare is highly dependent on the settings of their
| anti-ddos stuff, some websites have it set on a higher
| level of defensive behavior than others, I didn't have
| this issue everywhere.
|
| This wasn't due to my computer's IP, the problem went
| away the moment I browsed the same website with Chrome,
| and this time I wasn't even asked to click the checkbox
| to prove that I'm human.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| >Firefox just offers nothing substantial over Chrome
|
| Hah! Let's see you try to use vertical tabs in Chrome. If
| you ever have more than 8 tabs open at once, Horizontal
| tabs are clearly inferior.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Firefox is still hostile to vertical tabs, adding a
| useless sidebar header that can be hidden with css, but
| you have to know that and spend the possible _hours_ it
| could take to figure out how. Then, since that 's
| unsupported, you have to prepare for it to possibly be
| broken after every update.
| solardev wrote:
| Anecdote: I tried that back in the Netcaptor days but it
| didn't really stick (or something like it, anyway).
| Having to read a long list isn't particularly fast for
| me, personally, so I just use a combination of multiple
| windows (one per context, and easy to switch between on
| Mac) and the search engines feature (where you can make
| custom keyword lookups for Wikipedia, Stackoverflow,
| etc.) to quickly look things up. Chrome also has
| collapsible tab groups and pinnable tabs now, but it's
| not particularly great.
|
| I never have more than 4 or 5 tabs open at a time,
| closing them as I'm done with them. If I need to recover
| them later they're always in the history.
|
| I'm sure Firefox and other browsers offer some power user
| features that's good for some folks. I just don't care
| enough.
|
| As a user I just want to see the information I need
| without tinkering with settings, and Chrome does that
| well. As a web dev I'd much rather focus on UX than cross
| browser compatibility, and the Blink/Webkit duopoly makes
| that possible in a way that standards never did (and
| still don't). So there's just no need for Firefox in my
| personal or work life. YMMV of course.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| >Firefox just offers nothing substantial over Chrome
|
| Hah! Let's see you try to use vertical tabs in Chrome. If
| you ever have more than 8 tabs open at once, Horizontal
| tabs are clearly inferior.
|
| Brave and Edge can do vertical tabs natively, but chrome
| doesn't. The extensions I have tried in Chrome are as
| unusable as Safari's native vertical tabs implementation.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Hah! Let's see you try to use vertical tabs in Chrome.
| If you ever have more than 8 tabs open at once,
| Horizontal tabs are clearly inferior.
|
| That's it, though. If Firefox breaks that _again, like
| they intentionally broke it before_ , that 3% usage will
| drop down to 2%.
| madars wrote:
| What Firefox definitely offers is uBlock Origin on
| Android. Augment it with anti-paywall blocklists and the
| experience is basically a killer feature for Android over
| iOS. I use Chrome on desktop (mostly for better
| sandboxing) but on mobile there is no real competition
| between Firefox and Chrome: Firefox just wins.
| solardev wrote:
| You can get the same experience (but across all apps)
| using Adguard, which acts as a fake VPN and MITM
| certificate. No more ads in any app, while still keeping
| your Chrome synced tabs and logins and such between
| devices.
| madars wrote:
| Is the experience really equal? E.g. uBlock Origin
| operates at the DOM layer so it can and does block
| dynamically generated content using CSS selectors. Does
| Adguard simply inject the same DOM-aware JS in every
| page?
| solardev wrote:
| I dunno, but it's good enough. And way more useful to
| block in app ads than to be limited to the browser only.
| Of course you can use both if you want, but then you'd
| have to use Firefox or another browser.
| Dah00n wrote:
| VPN and MITM?! What a horrible horrible security
| nightmare!
| solardev wrote:
| It sure is. But what a great user experience afterward!
| Security and convenience are usually tradeoffs, and in
| this case it's totally worth it.
| kilolima wrote:
| Except there's no way to export your bookmarks on android
| out of Firefox without using their sync service. I think
| this omission (a simple export!) speaks volumes about
| Mozilla's true goal of browser lock-in and another
| example of their chronic mismanagement.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Ah yes browser lock in, from the company that makes zero
| dollars selling their browser, compared to the company
| that wants to actively harm the open internet.
|
| What's wrong with you guys? Could google stab you in the
| face and you still swear up and down that firefox is
| negligibly slower than chrome? What will it take? Google
| is pushing a "feature" to completely lock down the
| internet, take away all meaning from "user-agent", and
| make blocking ads functionally impossible! When will you
| stop aiding and abetting this behavior because you feel
| mozilla is "not perfect"
| solardev wrote:
| In truth I just don't really care? We've gone through
| this cycle so many times with various kinds of DRM, from
| DVD CSS to Denovo to WideVine to Adobe Cloud to various
| other schemes that at the end of the day just aren't big
| deals.
|
| A lot of the tech echo chamber bandwagons and freaks out
| about things like this, but I bet in a few years it'll
| turn out either a non issue or else alternate browsers
| will naturally rise to popularity. No point fussing about
| it beforehand. In the meantime Chrome just works, Google
| is whatever, Firefox is annoying, and Mozilla just feels
| irrelevant.
|
| Shrug. I feel way more annoyed by Firefox than anything
| Google's ever done. Whatever their ideology, their
| product just isn't great.
| Kuinox wrote:
| Not shipping WebReplay in firefox (instead it's a startup
| called replay.io),
|
| Killing the servo project.
|
| Running metaverse projects instead.
|
| Yes, mozilla could do better.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| These are all things that the average user _doesn 't even
| know exist_
|
| "Power users" aren't most of anyone's user base. The vast
| majority of people use chrome because google told them
| to, because _google IS the internet_
| Kuinox wrote:
| Websites arent made with firefox, so they are not
| optimized for firefox. They also can be buggy, firefox is
| my daily browser, yet, multiple times per year, a website
| is simply bugged on firefox.
|
| Google Chrome was recommended by power user, and that how
| they took the market lead, not because they are the
| internet, but because power users told regular users to
| use chrome.
| 878654Tom wrote:
| Google massively advertised Chrome at the start with
| banners on Gmail, Search,... telling you you should
| download it.
|
| Powerusers don't shift the market.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Google also paid freeware application developers to
| bundle Chrome in their installers.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I have never found a website that is broken on firefox
| that isn't also non-functional on chrome. What does
| firefox break?
| Kuinox wrote:
| Most are due to the firefox tracking protection. Others
| (with everything disabled) were for an airline company,
| some french governements website, and recently an SVG
| editor that just call to use chrome and doesn't works on
| firefox.
| Reubachi wrote:
| Folks mistakenly associate "breaking" with "not being
| completely compatible with an illegal streaming website
| with improper TLS/cyphers." That's just an example but
| you know what I mean.
|
| Those are the types of websites that have issues with
| firefox, because mozilla maintains it's own root trust
| store held to various standards/compliances, and
| many..less savory web addresses use not HTTPS content on
| their HTTPS pages.
|
| This is a feature/value added bonus, but because it
| "breaks" sites for people....back to chrome.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Somehow they managed to have a huge market share when
| Microsoft was fighting tooth and nail in courts and out
| to tell people to use IE, and _Microsoft WAS home
| computers._
| mda wrote:
| Note that in the Phoronix post it also mentions in the
| modern and demanding Jetstream benchmark, Firefox is still
| way behind. While seeing improvements is good, Sunspider is
| a very old microbenchmark not sure how relevant it is.
| tapoxi wrote:
| Faster on one benchmark, but they don't have a consistent
| history of performance wins. The bigger issue is that
| nobody is embedding Gecko. Every Electron app is another
| developer targeting Chrome. Applications that embed a
| webview? Chrome. Any new web browser that wants to deliver
| a new experience (like Arc, or even Brave) is built atop
| Chromium.
|
| The problem is that "not pushing hostile web standards" and
| "more flexible ad blocking" clearly isn't stopping the
| insane bleeding of the userbase. These are people actively
| migrating away from Firefox in droves.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| 1. I use firefox in Windows, Linux, and Android. I am NOT
| suffering.
|
| 2. Most people aren't actively choosing their web
| browser. For example, my wife uses the Samsung web
| browser on her phone because that is the default.
|
| 3. Most people think Google is the internet, can't
| distinguish between the browser and the google webpage,
| etc.
|
| 4. A dwindling marketshare percentage does not directly
| imply old userspe are moving from Firefox to another
| browser, it could imply that new users don't know/use
| firefox
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| _> 4. A dwindling marketshare percentage does not
| directly imply old userspe are moving from Firefox to
| another browser, it could imply that new users don't
| know/use firefox_
|
| You're right that it could theoretically mean that, but
| unfortunately monthly active users have actually fallen
| by ~20% since 2019 according to Mozilla:
|
| https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
| WorldMaker wrote:
| It may also just mean more users are opting out of
| telemetry. Given Mozilla's privacy focus in their
| marketing and their UX, it may not be a shock that a
| large number of users are also opting out of even
| Mozilla's telemetry.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I do.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Keep moving the goalposts, Firefox is going to go real
| far this way.
|
| Google is _forcing_ Chrome, onto everyone. Gecko is fully
| embeddable on Android, through GeckoView. Nobody uses it,
| because the default WebView is chrome. androidx.browser
| is Chrome. And if you want to delegate to the browser
| while still staying in an app context, the feature is
| called Chrome Custom Tabs. Everything is made to make
| people forget about Firefox's existence. Google actively
| harms Firefox performance on their websites, while
| happily displaying a "it's better on Chrome" everywhere
| you browser. They force the WHATWG's hand on 90% of
| features. There's articles every month on new-obscure-
| feature-that-is-only-implemented-by-chrome-and-requires-
| an-army-to-implement, pushed and paid for by Google,
| which dumbass webshits are going to go and implement
| because obviously their VC backed startup _really_ needs
| WebUSB and WebMIDI, as well as Google's shitty,
| unfinished implementation of WebGPU.
|
| Google is a cancer that grows everywhere, killing
| everything it touches. Firefox smoking a cigarette from
| time to time is not responsible for that.
| cxr wrote:
| Google sucks. Your position seems to be, though, that
| because Google sucks, we can't talk about the self-
| inflicted wounding of Firefox and other buffoonery that
| happens under the Mozilla Corp umbrella--since Google
| sucks so much more. There's a word for that:
| whataboutism.
| lostmsu wrote:
| > self-inflicted wounding of Firefox
|
| This makes no sense. The parent argument is that Chrome
| wins due to aggressive bundling and free ads on Google.
| Neither of those are self-inflicted wounds. The claim is
| that Mozilla doesn't actually have self-inflicted wounds.
| cxr wrote:
| > The claim is that Mozilla doesn't actually have self-
| inflicted wounds.
|
| Not in the comment I was responding to; you would have to
| be arguing that "Firefox smoking a cigarette from time to
| time" doesn't describe a type of self-inflicted wound--
| and for you to be right--for that to be true. (Whether
| you genuinely think that or not is one thing, but you
| definitely wouldn't be right about it, in any case.)
|
| The _entire_ comment I responded to belongs to the flavor
| of apologia that takes the form, "it doesn't matter if X
| is bad, because Y is worse".
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| >it doesn't matter if X is bad, because Y is worse
|
| In the case of Mozilla and Google, yes. Mozilla's
| leadership fucking sucks, and I've written at length
| about how the entire Foundation board is a bunch of
| useless MBA clowns that are here to suck from the golden
| teat.
|
| But it doesn't matter, when the alternative is Google
| having absolute and total control of the web. Mozilla,
| for what they're still worth today, still have a weight.
| Write an article titled "Mozilla opposes API proposal X
| from Google for privacy reasons" and people will at the
| very least give it a listen. RFCs from them are listened
| to. The WHATWG has to at least pretend to hear them out.
|
| Go on. Let Mozilla die. See what the web looks like when
| Google can push every API they want, unopposed. WEI would
| look like a walk in the park. Apple could say nuh uh we
| don't want to, and Google would do the exact same thing
| they did with Firefox: snuff it out. Microsoft wouldn't
| even need to be pressured to work with them, pissing off
| Apple sounds like a lovely distraction for them. Little
| by little, websites would stop working on Safari (not
| that they work quite well currently, most Safari users
| are doing it because of a complete lack of technical
| knowledge and it's the default browser, with three nerds
| on HN saying it's because it's better for their battery
| life), APIs unsupported because Apple isn't interested in
| the open web.
|
| At best, you end up with an Apple Web, and a Google Web,
| both of them sucking ass in their own right. At worst,
| Apple becomes irrelevant because of their focus on native
| apps. Most of which are already Chromium wrappers
| anyways.
|
| So yes. Pinch your nose and go in. Mozilla is worth the
| support, no matter what. Their leadership already sucks,
| what's the worst that could happen ? They keep sucking,
| but take back marketshare ? Good. For once, give them
| support instead of being the worst user in the world, the
| one the just shits on them for not being good enough,
| while flocking to Google anyways.
| cxr wrote:
| You seem to be replying to an argument no one is making
| (e.g. "Don't use Firefox"). Not sure why.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The claim is that we have to blame Firefox's failure on
| bundling and google.com banners, and can't discuss how
| hostile and bizarre they've been. We also can't discuss
| that 80% of their revenue comes from Google, for nothing,
| and that the other 20% of their revenue is the entire
| return on _100%_ of their investment in the browser.
| dataangel wrote:
| maybe don't forget that firefox probably would have died
| a much sooner death if mozilla hadn't been google's pet
| charity project though. mozilla has yet to demonstrate
| really being a self sustaining organization
| iscream26 wrote:
| Corporations (and the wealthy in general) don't do
| charity. The tacit objetive of every corporation is and
| will always be profits uber alles. Every time you see a
| corporation donating money to some cause there's an
| ulterior motive that ultimately grows their bottom line.
| The most common motives are: pay less taxes (or none at
| all), PR move to improve their public image, and,
| finally, publicity (sometimes because of controversy).
|
| Now, of course, Google's financial relationship with
| Mozilla is no exception. The stated reason is that they
| give money to Mozilla in exchange for having Google as
| the default search engine, but its actual purpose is to
| mitigate claims about Google having a monopoly on the
| browser market and thereby avoid anti-trust laws.
|
| If Firefox were to gain the majority of the marketshare
| Google would no longer have an incentive to give them
| money. Mozilla wouldn't be happy about that because
| they'd lose their biggest source of income. And Google
| wouldn't be happy either because they make money through
| web ads and harvesting data to sell it to ad companies,
| and there's no better way to go about doing that than
| creating their own web browser and a whole ecosystem
| surrounding it, and then making sure it's the most
| popular one.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I would argue that Electron webapps shouldn't really
| count towards the browser marketshare. If _would_ be nice
| to have a Firefox version, but it doesn't matter
| precisely because the end user is not choosing the
| browser - the company pushing the product is. And let's
| be honest: nerdy HN users aside, Joe Schmoe has no clue
| Teams is a web app running in an emasculated browser at
| all.
| dataangel wrote:
| every time someone uses electron they buy into the chrome
| ecosystem -- when they run into problems they write
| mailing list posts or stack overflow questions that other
| people can read to help them when they have the same
| problem, and if they actually want to contribute bugfixes
| or features upstream they go into chrome not firefox.
| also if they have a webapp version the webapp version
| that's running in chrome works exactly the same as the
| same code running in electron without really having to do
| any separate testing so which browser are they going to
| push to be used internally?
| lkbm wrote:
| > I would argue that Electron webapps shouldn't really
| count towards the browser marketshare.
|
| Perhaps not, but if you're writing your desktop app in
| Electron, you'll be benchmarking your performance
| optimizations against the Chrome engine. If that same
| code is used for your web app, you're optimizing your
| website for Chrome.
|
| Mozilla can pour resources into making Firefox more
| performance, but the real-world ecosystem will change
| behavior to improve Chrome's performance on their webapp
| with little concern as to whether it hurts Firefox's
| performance.
|
| (I assume people use largely the same code between
| Electron and their webapps, and that optimizations for
| Electron translate reasonably well to optimizations for
| Chrome.)
| remram wrote:
| Where does this data come from?
|
| I use Firefox because I am privacy-conscious, as a result I
| have telemetry turned off. Do people like me show up in those
| stats?
| lamontcg wrote:
| > We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral
| standards body to fork Chromium
|
| Why is the answer always more chromium?
|
| And for a userbase nominally so positively biased towards
| open source it is weird to see how google gets a pass on
| pretty much everything, while mozilla/firefox has this
| incredibly carefully curated list of offenses that is
| maintained and spread by the community, doing most of the
| work at ensuring that firefox never goes anywhere. There's a
| lot of Linux proponents here who are doing all the heavy work
| of carrying water for Google when it comes to chrome
| dominance.
|
| Yeah, so every time you actually restart firefox after it
| updates you probably get an ad for mozilla VPN. Okay compare
| that to Google literally being the central advertising and
| spyware hub of the entire internet. "I'll just have to use
| the worst option possible, because the alternative isn't 100%
| ideologically pure".
| hooverd wrote:
| Nobody hates FOSS more than FOSS users.
| afavour wrote:
| Manifest v3 announcement feels like a pretty arbitrary line
| to draw in the sand.
|
| > I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough to actually
| compete against Chrome. We'd need the Linux Foundation or
| some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium
|
| Ah, yes, Linux, the OS used on something like 3% of desktop
| machines! I'm sorry but I don't see the logic at work here at
| all. Chrome dominates because Google pushes it and they have
| the means to reach basically every internet user out there.
| Switching out Mozilla for the Linux Foundation would do
| absolutely zero to counter that. Case in point: by most
| measures ChromeOS has a higher desktop market share than
| vanilla Linux already.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Linux accounts for:
|
| 82% of the smartphone market
|
| 90% of public cloud workloads
|
| 62% of the embedded market
|
| 99% of the super-computer market
|
| The first figure alone makes it more relevant to the
| general population than windows or any other OS.
|
| Let's see, 55% of all web traffic is mobile devices so that
| means roughly 45% of all web traffic comes from linux-based
| smartphones.
|
| And that isn't counting things like Chrome OS, or linux
| desktop browsing, which account for another 2-4%
|
| So roughly 49% of all web traffic is literal user-facing
| linux devices, and 90% of the websites they are browsing
| are served by linux servers...
|
| So yeah, if anything linux is probably the most important
| OS in existence right now. Definitely not obscure..
| afavour wrote:
| And how much of that 82% is attributable to the Linux
| Foundation as opposed to Google?
| Krutonium wrote:
| 100%, because Google is using Linux?
| afavour wrote:
| That makes no sense. 82% of the market is using Linux not
| because of the inherent goodness of the OS, it's because
| Google chose to use it. If they change their mind
| tomorrow (see Project Fuschia and all that) there isn't
| anything the Linux Foundation would be able to do about
| that.
| josteink wrote:
| > Call me a pessimist but I don't think Mozilla is managed
| well enough
|
| No disagreement there.
|
| > We'd need the Linux Foundation
|
| Who spends a whooping' 3% of their total spending on actual
| Linux? [1]
|
| Call me a pessimist, but I might look for a better candidate.
|
| [1] https://lunduke.substack.com/p/linux-foundation-spends-
| just-...
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| I'm confused why people would move away from Firefox to
| Chrome because of Manifest v3. If anything, it should
| convince one to move even harder in the other direction.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| Indeed, the point OP is trying to make is that _despite_
| Manifest v3, Firefox is _nevertheless_ still losing users
| (to highlight how dire the situation for Firefox is).
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Got it, thanks for clarifying. Definitely points to a
| management problem IMO.
| postalrat wrote:
| Why does the announcement of manifest v3 mean anything? They
| keep pushing the date v2 will no longer work back. Why?
| pessimizer wrote:
| Because they've already taken the media heat for the switch
| a half dozen times, each time less intensely. Eventually,
| when they finally switch it off, there will be one article
| about it on the Register, and it will be mostly jokes.
|
| It's a tactic.
| burkaman wrote:
| I wouldn't expect Manifest V3 to have any effect until
| Manifest V2 is actually disabled and ad blockers stop
| working. Approximately 0% of Chrome users are following
| technical browser announcements, they won't care until their
| stuff actually breaks.
| comte7092 wrote:
| Have to agree here. Most people have no idea what manifest
| v whatever is and have no reason to switch.
|
| Not to mention, google pulls its own underhanded tactics.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| There was a huge wave of anti-chrome propaganda about how
| manifest v3 would prevent all ad-blocking* on Reddit and
| Tumblr (and probably tiktok) and such. Even if none of them
| read the actual announcements, the low-info folks still
| learn about it from the outrage machine.
|
| *Which isn't actually true; "cosmetic" blocking (altering
| the DOM), the original type and the one most users actually
| care about, will still work just fine. It's only privacy
| tracking which is going to be totally broken, and frankly,
| outside of the unreality bubble of HN, most users care much
| less about "privacy" than you'd think.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Not sure why you're being downvoted. I agree, I myself
| was waiting for ublock to stop working before I migrated
| to Firefox but now that I'm hearing it will still mostly
| work... I just don't care that much. So they collect all
| this info on me... as long as I don't see ads I just
| don't care
| croes wrote:
| Just because people don't care doesn't mean it's
| unimportant.
|
| So these limitations of manifest V3 don't exist?:
|
| >One of the main issues with Manifest V3 is its
| limitation to filter lists: an extension can only include
| up to 50 static lists, and only 10 of them can be active
| at the same time.
|
| >There are also limitations to the number of filter rules
| inside these lists: installed extensions cannot
| collectively exceed 300,000 static filters and it is no
| longer possible to update
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| I never said it wasn't important, but it _is_
| misinformation. Case and point: to answer your question,
| no, those aren 't limitations on DOM-manipulation ad
| removal; those are limitations on the new
| declarativeNetRequest API, and they ONLY apply to blocked
| web requests.
|
| Also, even that part isn't as catastrophic as you'd
| think; ad blocking, like most things on the internet,
| roughly follows the 90-10 rule: 90% of the ads are
| blocked by 10% of the rules. So even with a tenfold
| reduction, you should still see the vast majority of the
| ads blocked by even the intentionally-gimped
| declarativeNetRequest API.
|
| Yes, it's going to make ad blockers slightly less
| effective and make your page loads slightly slower. But
| that doesn't get as many clicks as "Chrome is banning
| adblockers!!1". And it's important to note the difference
| because when v3 rolls around, all those users that were
| lied to are going to see that their ad blockers still
| mostly work, and lose even more trust in whistle blowing.
| hooverd wrote:
| If that's their takeaway about Chrome, good.
| dataangel wrote:
| > It's only privacy tracking which is going to be totally
| broken, and frankly, outside of the unreality bubble of
| HN, most users care much less about "privacy" than you'd
| think.
|
| explaining this distinction is actually enough to drive
| me to switch thanks
| yorwba wrote:
| Even among Firefox users, only about 41% have add-ons
| installed in the first place:
| https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior So 59% of
| current Firefox users could switch to Chrome without being
| affected by the Manifest V3 change at all.
|
| I don't know how many Chrome users use add-ons that would
| become less useful after the change, so it'll definitely be
| interesting to see whether Firefox's numbers will show a
| sudden uptick at some point.
| caskstrength wrote:
| > Even among Firefox users, only about 41% have add-ons
| installed in the first place
|
| This seems like surprisingly low percentage. I wonder
| whether these stats count people who disable telemetry or
| install add-ons from their distro's repository.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Firefox should really (somehow or another) come with
| ublock origin installed and on by default.
| infamia wrote:
| This isn't accurate since Firefox comes with a built-in
| ad blocker, which Chrome lacks.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Not really. Firefox blocks more things out of the box for
| a better browsing experience than Chrome does. But I
| admit that there's a good chance that at least some not-
| insignificant percentage of those 41% wouldn't notice and
| realize that they would need to install uBlock to use
| Chrome comparably.
| arp242 wrote:
| I expect that number to be biased since more tech-savvy
| users tend to disable/block telemetry, and they're also
| the sort of people who install add-ons. I have no idea if
| it's biased by 1%, 10%, or 50% though.
| toastal wrote:
| Even still, add-ons have always been a Fx selling point
| so I'm still quite shocked.
| tapoxi wrote:
| The Manifest v3 version of uBlock Origin (uBlock Lite) has
| been out for a long time now, and it still works its just
| less effective.
|
| For people using Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Arc, etc it won't
| impact them. Their adblockers are all native and not using
| the extension API.
| gowld wrote:
| Extensions including ad blockers don't work _at all_ on
| Android Chrome.
|
| I use Chrome on desktop because websites work properly in
| Chrome, and Firefox on Android for the adblocker, except when
| a site is unusable.
|
| What is FF marketshare on Android?
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| Us two probably?
| toastal wrote:
| Make it trouble.
|
| I really wish the timing of FxOS was better as well as
| the marketing. I'd certainly choose it over Android, but
| we're now sort of locked into the duopoly with terrible
| decisions from apps like Signal requiring you have a
| Android or iOS primary device or no service for you.
| m_a_g wrote:
| I tried migrating from Chrome to Firefox with the recent
| developments. The user experience of Mozilla could be better,
| imo.
|
| After not liking Firefox, I tried four more browsers: Orion,
| Arch, Brave, and Vivaldi. I finally landed on using Brave.
|
| After you turn off everything related to crypto, it becomes a
| great and user-friendly browser with adversarial
| interoperability with Chrome. It's the only browser with an
| actual chance of beating Chrome by convincing its users to
| migrate.
|
| I'm hoping they can continue maintaining the Chromium fork
| (it's an actual fork, by the way), as it'll get harder and
| harder as it diverges more and more.
| matsemann wrote:
| What's wrong with the user experience? To me they're all the
| same there: you have tabs and a toolbar and the rest is the
| webpage. Little else I actually interface with in a normal
| day.
| freediver wrote:
| What was your experience with Orion and why do you think it
| does not have a chance of convincing Chrome users to migrate?
| Novosell wrote:
| It's not an actual fork, by the way. Them saying so doesn't
| make it so. It uses chromium as a base and applies quite a
| lot of patches. Otherwise every chromium based browser is a
| fork, despite all pulling in more or less all upstream
| patches?
| [deleted]
| gowld wrote:
| OK it's a branch.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| More importantly: _being a fork or not doesn 't matter!_ As
| long as the Brave team is not able to write their own
| browser engine that could compete with chromium, they are
| stuck with whatever development goes into chromium. "Oh
| it's just patches and things", but it won't be forever, and
| we WILL see work go into chromium that is deep enough to be
| difficult to untangle and subtly designed to to force you
| into whatever path google wants. There will be a day where
| Brave is unable to degoogle chromium to a useful point.
| Participating in a chromium browser is only helping google,
| and there's no way around that.
| Karunamon wrote:
| ... Taking an upstream project, and then applying your own
| patches to it, along with a commitment to not ship anti-
| user changes (like manifest V3) is a fork by any objective
| definition.
| r053bud wrote:
| Maybe I'm naive, but Brave doing anything with crypto doesn't
| inspire confidence in their long-term product vision. Why
| does a browser need a business model?
| Bloating wrote:
| Why do developers need to be paid?
| Justsignedup wrote:
| Personally I think ms did the right thing. Edge compatibility
| is no longer an issue and their maintenance cost plumetted.
|
| I still love Firefox. Not seeing ads anywhere is worth whatever
| warts I hit
| nomilk wrote:
| What are firefox's warts ooc?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Usually it's some nitpick about the time they advertised Mr.
| Robot "breaking our trust", or buying pocket, a bookmarking
| utility that lots of people liked and used and integrating it
| into the web browser, which is clearly a user-hostile move,
| to buy and integrate functionality that might be useful. With
| such horrible missteps, you should obviously instead use the
| browser that has pushed MULTIPLE APIs with negligible real
| world use and significant fingerprinting capacity, lead the
| change to limit add-on functionality, makes it harder to
| block ads (BECAUSE THEY ARE AN ADVERTISING COMPANY), sends
| most of what you do to their advertising engine, and FUCKING
| WEI.
|
| Or, oh no, the CEO of the foundation makes more than they do
| as an engineer at google, that must be corruption! Meanwhile
| Firefox is faster, less buggy, has never stopped being a very
| good browser and the only one made by a group that can't
| subsidize it, and doesn't get to shove it's advertising down
| your throat on every single website that Google owns.
| [deleted]
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Me too. I wonder though what would have happend if we had given
| $7B to Andreas Kling.
|
| I guess with WebDRM this point is moot though.
| Tade0 wrote:
| You would need to spend at least a billion to clone him first
| - this whole project is moving forward because the man is an
| exceptional programmer.
| stephen_g wrote:
| I think now with the sponsorships he's hired one of the
| contributors full time, and I think Linus Groh was also
| going full time so that makes three people dedicated to
| working on it as well as the other contributors.
|
| Better than nothing, and just incredible what they've
| achieved so far!
| yummypaint wrote:
| I do the same thing but it isn't much of a sacrifice. It feels
| icky to use google's software knowing it's actively working
| against my interests.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Kinda like Brave.
| Calamitous wrote:
| How is Brave working against the user's interests? Not
| being snarky, I've been using it for a while and it seems
| fine.
| baal80spam wrote:
| It isn't, but on HN the agenda is "Brave bad".
| input_sh wrote:
| Anything Chromium-based bad, Brave is no different than
| Opera, Vivaldi, Edge, Samsung Internet etc.
|
| We need more _engines_ , not browsers. If every other
| engine dies, Google gets to dictate what the web is even
| more than they do right now.
| sdfghswe wrote:
| Crypto.
| some_random wrote:
| Yet another Chromium browser contributing to Google's
| massive market share which enables them to push all the
| anti-consumer shit Brave is supposed to fix.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| It's heavily tied in with crypto, but even if you don't
| care about that they have done extremely shady shit like
| inserting their own referral code in registration forms.
| px43 wrote:
| > It was actually a huge bummer for me when Edge gave in and
| switched to Chromium
|
| I don't get it.. that was the day that open source won the web.
| There are now no major closed source browser engines remaining.
| It was a massive indication that in the end, open source
| software will always win in any market. We just needed Google
| to dump in billions of dollars to help accelerate the process,
| but they did that, and now we're all better off for it.
|
| Now we just need Windows, OSX, and iOS to die out, and the
| whole world will be running on open source software.
| theallan wrote:
| I think the GP is more disappointed that Microsoft choose to
| use Blink rather than Gecko as their rendering engine. Not
| that they abandoned the closed source EdgeHTML.
| cxr wrote:
| > I don't get it.. that was the day that open source won the
| web. There are now no major closed source browser engines
| remaining.
|
| Microsoft announcing an open source "Edge Core" (cf .NET
| Core, ChakraCore) would have satisfied the same criterion.
| ragnese wrote:
| Free software and open source software are great. But, web
| pages are "you get what we serve". So, if there's a hostile
| standard that web pages all start using, having an open
| source implementation of the thing working against you is a
| very small consolation...
| xibo9 wrote:
| Hard pass. Monocultures are bad.
| px43 wrote:
| What monoculture? There is an incredibly rich ecosystem of
| Chromium forks, all playing with different ideas for how
| the web should work. There's a nice, clean, stable base for
| people to work with, and extend upon. This seems like the
| ideal scenario.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| The real shame is Mozilla cutting back on Firefox development
| despite being a billion dollar corporation. Google would have
| had no leverage to push stuff like WEI if Firefox was the
| dominant browser.
| toyg wrote:
| Tbf, they cut back because they thought that, strategically,
| they needed a competitive mobile OS. Unfortunately,
| regardless of whether it was the right decision, they then
| mismanaged development of such OS (particularly on the
| commercial side).
| gowld wrote:
| Giving up on a failing browser, and trying to make a whole
| OS instead, is insane. The OS is much harder.
| afavour wrote:
| IMO it's not insane (and they didn't give up on their
| browser in order to do it).
|
| It was a Hail Mary for sure but really their only way to
| be competitive on mobile. iOS and Android are both owned
| by direct competitors in the browser space, Mozilla is
| never going to be given a fair shot there. FirefoxOS
| would have their way to rectify that and I think we would
| have all benefitted from greater competition in the
| mobile market. But alas, it was never to be.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| Not sure in which reality you're living, but FirefoxOS was
| developed at Mozilla from 2011 to 2016, before any cut
| back. Mozilla Corp actually grew a lot during that time.
|
| About FxOS being mismanaged, well... you have to understand
| that if you follow a model where you rely on others for
| distribution (carriers and open market OEMs), you are bound
| to their constraints. In that case, it was a chicken and
| egg situation where selling devices without a WhatsApp app
| was very difficult, but WA didn't want to develop an app
| for a new OS until it grew to tens of millions of users.
|
| Then Moz top management lost some key proponents of the
| project, and the FirefoxOS haters got their wish. I still
| don't understand why Mitchel Baker didn't agree to support
| a community based project (like Thunderbird) or try a
| strong privacy based spin.
| toastal wrote:
| Capyloon is an alternative trying to carry the FxOS
| torch, but its focus on IPFS & things other than
| telephony make it hard to recommend if you can't use a
| phone as a phone.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| Thanks for the mention! Capyloon (https://capyloon.org)
| had a grant from Protocol Labs (the IPFS stewards) in
| 2022 so we focused quite a bit on that indeed. We learned
| a lot - especially about the maturity and usability of
| the IPFS stack.
|
| I'm still very bullish on the dWeb pieces: content based
| addressing, UCANs (https://ucan.xyz/) for distributed
| auth, new web app models (https://hackmd.io/@robin-
| berjon/tiles) to create an ecosystem that is not locked
| by centralized app stores.
|
| There's a lot to do, all contributions are welcome
| (frontend, device ports, platform apis...). We have a
| Matrix channel (https://matrix.to/#/#capyloon:matrix.org)
| and you can try desktop builds easily following the steps
| at https://github.com/capyloon/nutria#quick-start
| toast0 wrote:
| > In that case, it was a chicken and egg situation where
| selling devices without a WhatsApp app was very
| difficult, but WA didn't want to develop an app for a new
| OS until it grew to tens of millions of users.
|
| Disclosure: I worked at WA during the FirefoxOS time
| period as well as when the KaiOS client was developed and
| launched.
|
| I honestly don't remember the internal sentiment on
| FirefoxOS, and I don't know if Mozilla ever approached WA
| to ask for a client. But the public interfaces for apps
| were insufficient for a WhatsApp client, so that's a
| bigger issue. The KaiOS client (which afaik, Jio
| approached FB/WA to ask for) was difficult to build in
| part because the OS was missing important features for
| apps, and that takes time and collaboration to get added
| to the OS and then pushed out to users.
|
| From memory, the major missing interfaces were around
| access to TCP sockets and ability to run code that
| accesses the network in response to a (silent) push
| message that optionally submits a notification for the
| user. If FirefoxOS didn't have push messaging (I can't
| remember), then ability to keep a socket open always and
| post notifications at will would suffice. Arbitrary tcp
| sockets are needed because the chat protocol is not http
| based; running code on pushes is required for e2e, so
| sender names can be populated from the device's address
| book, and to avoid notification horrors. Horrors include
| getting a notification about a message you can't read
| because the client hasn't fetched it yet and getting a
| notification about messages you've already read;
| WhatsApps model is the client is the source of truth, and
| so there's no reason to accept notification horrors that
| are common with server source of truth systems. e2e was
| under development for quite some time, so even if the
| public timelines don't match up, it would be a
| requirement for supporting new OSes.
|
| For calling, access to UDP sockets would also be needed
| as well as ability to run native code as the voice codec
| and data marshalling is in C; although Firefox OS came
| out before WhatsApp calling. Calling didn't make it to
| all platforms, and would have been an acceptable thing to
| defer, IMHO.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| Hi! Yes Mozilla approached WA (talks were held with Brian
| Acton if I remember correctly). We tried various
| workarounds:
|
| - 3rd party clients. That worked initially, but WA was
| quite aggressive in breaking them, and once e2ee was
| added they stopped working.
|
| - we wrote a j2me VM in Javascript
| (https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet) to run the S40
| version :) Perf was not good enough when dealing with
| java threads.
|
| - we collaborated with a company (OpenMobile) to run the
| Android app in a container, rendering in a DOM element.
| That was a pain in term of OS integration, and OpenMobile
| finally didn't get the distribution agreement from WA.
|
| I implemented the KaiOS additional APIs, basically
| exposing a subset of libsignal. You're right that there
| are missing pieces in the web stack for these apps - it's
| very frustrating that you can't rely on WebCrypto for all
| the e2ee. Let's hope WebAssembly will fix that!
| toast0 wrote:
| > - 3rd party clients. That worked initially, but WA was
| quite aggressive in breaking them, and once e2ee was
| added they stopped working.
|
| Yeah, that happened. :/ I was mostly in favor of a light
| touch, but e2ee would have been a hard cutoff anyway, and
| we didn't have the desire to make a compliance program
| for 3rd party clients, so they just got the boot whenever
| they caused inconvenience. There would usually be a
| flurry of activity around individual changes, but afaik,
| third parties saw the writing on the wall when e2ee
| started showing up.
|
| > - we wrote a j2me VM in Javascript
| (https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet) to run the S40
| version :) Perf was not good enough when dealing with
| java threads.
|
| Wow, that's impressive! (and kind of terrible!) Were you
| able to leverage this for other things, I hope?
|
| > - we collaborated with a company (OpenMobile) to run
| the Android app in a container, rendering in a DOM
| element. That was a pain in term of OS integration, and
| OpenMobile finally didn't get the distribution agreement
| from WA.
|
| I was unaware of this. That's interesting to hear about.
| I think you're right from your earlier post, that user
| count would have pushed WA the other way, and that lack
| of WA support made it harder to get user count. Samsung
| (Tizen) and Jio (KaiOS) got WA to make clients by
| subsidizing handsets and leveraging user counts / other
| business relations; s40 got a client because Nokia was
| clearly going to sell at least a few million of them (s40
| predates WA, of course, but the earlier ones never ran
| WA); same with WP7, although no client until 7.5, because
| the platform was missing pieces.
|
| WebOS didn't get a client because the platform was
| missing pieces and didn't survive long enough to add them
| (lack of WA support wasn't really an issue, given the
| timing). MeeGo didn't get a client because Nokia
| cancelled the N9 before they launched it, and limited the
| release.
| toyg wrote:
| _> FirefoxOS was developed at Mozilla from 2011 to 2016,
| before any cut back_
|
| It absorbed resources and focus, which resulted in the
| browser stalling development, which resulted in shrinking
| marketshare, which resulted in less money from the search
| deals, which resulted in the ongoing job losses.
|
| _> you have to understand that [hard realities of the
| mobile market that everyone knows already]_
|
| I don't disagree, but: none of that was new or unexpected
| when going in. That's why a lot of people thought FFOS
| was hopeless: because breaking the mobile duopoly is so
| hard, by then it had already claimed a giant (Nokia) and
| seriously humbled another (Microsoft). The play for the
| "developing market" and low-end devices was hopeless and
| misguided. We had just seen Nokia dying while trying to
| hang on that same market... There was a lot of wishful
| thinking in all the strategic moves, and unsurprisingly
| they didn't pan out.
| toast0 wrote:
| > The play for the "developing market" and low-end
| devices was hopeless and misguided.
|
| I don't think that's right. The developing and low-end
| devices are probably the only plausible route into the
| phone market. Especially during the time period that
| FirefoxOS was active, there was a tremendous opportunity
| for a phone that cost very little and was widely
| available. I don't know that FirefoxOS could have really
| addressed that market, given their software stack, but
| the market was there. Wikipedia claims 23 million KaiOS
| devices were produced in Q1 2018; given that KaiOS is a
| fork of FirefoxOS, I think that's a demonstration that
| the targeting was fine. 23 million devices is a small
| chunk of the mobile market, but it's still a lot of
| devices.
|
| Microsoft was making significant gains in market share
| with WP7 and WP8 by having devices that were low cost and
| worked much better than similar cost Androids. In the US,
| you could go out and get a $60 wp7 device or a $100 wp8
| device when they were new and have a much more usable
| phone than a $150 Android. and an iPhone was like
| $400-$500 at the time. Microsoft had some high end wp7
| and wp8 devices too, but not many people bought them,
| because high end iPhones and Androids worked well, and at
| that price point you're looking for different things.
| WM10 had promise and interesting features (Continuum
| might have been pretty cool, especially if Intel hadn't
| dropped development of x86 phones days before the
| Continuum public demo), but WM10 didn't run well on low
| end phones, so there were no low end WM10 phones, and
| user growth evaporated. (It doesn't help that WM10
| included at least the 3rd new framework for windows
| phones in 3 generations, and called this one 'universal',
| which meant it only ran on the OS which had the least
| number of phones for its whole lifetime....)
| fabrice_d wrote:
| > It absorbed resources and focus, which resulted in the
| browser stalling development, which resulted in shrinking
| marketshare, which resulted in less money from the search
| deals, which resulted in the ongoing job losses.
|
| That's history revision. The browser development didn't
| stall because of FirefoxOS, it was slow for other reasons
| (look at the leadership team changes when the Quantum
| started).
|
| Please remember that FxOS started in 2011. At the time
| WindowsPhone was quite new (first release in 2010),
| Samsung was pushing Tizen and Android was not nearly as
| dominant. Context matter. Mozilla already knew that
| Firefox would not be the default browser on Android
| (Google waited for Chrome to be ready to replace the
| crappy default one that was subpar compared to Firefox)
| so owning a platform was a logical step. It would still
| be better these days.
| cxr wrote:
| > Moz top management lost some key proponents of the
| project, and the FirefoxOS haters got their wish
|
| That's an interesting way to say that the people who
| foresaw its imminent failure were correct--but
| (conveniently) does so in a way that not only
| downplays[1] the correctness of their prediction, but
| also maligns them by ever-so-subtly suggesting the reader
| consider whether blame for the resulting failure
| shouldn't perhaps be shifted onto those who made the
| prediction [1 again, unfortunately]...
|
| 1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20201022224913/https://ww
| w.colby...>
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Meanwhile firefoxOS as kaios has been successful in their
| goals. There are likely more kaiOS users than firefox users
| at this point. That points to there being a commercial
| solution that Mozilla missed, as you say.
|
| In terms of being the right idea, the idea of firefox OS
| was great and really needed in the face of chromebooks
| popping up and iOS dominance. I can't imagine building a
| browser and not also planning a response to mobile lock-in
| and cloud based devices.
| echelon wrote:
| Write your legislators and tell them it's unfair for Google to
| control the web's leading browser.
|
| Google dominates web search, controls mobile as part of a
| duopoly, pays the other mobile provider to feature their
| search, dominates mobile advertising, ranks websites based on
| ads and chrome performance, increasingly takes over
| functionality from the websites they index, etc.
|
| They use their money and power to transform the web into a
| platform they own and control with AMP, Manifest v2, WEI,
| WHATWG, and repeated attempts to kill the URL bar.
|
| Chrome is a key instrument of their monopolization. Their
| business units need to be carved up, and Chrome needs to go its
| separate way, kept apart from search and ads.
| tudorw wrote:
| so Microsoft adopting chromium as it's engine, would, erm,
| make this more likely or less?
| echelon wrote:
| Microsoft, in third place, barely has a 5% market share. I
| don't think they contribute to the present situation.
|
| I hope they gain in browser market share alongside Firefox
| and all the other non-Chrome, non-Safari browsers.
| pwython wrote:
| Probably a very unpopular opinion, but it seems any time a
| business/product reaches the point where they have majority
| of market share, people say it's a monopoly. At what point
| are businesses forced to scale down because their products
| are TOO successful? I still don't understand what the big
| deal was with Microsoft having IE bundled with Windows. If a
| competitor has a superior product, then why not just leave it
| up to the consumers to decide if it lives or dies. Imagine an
| amateur boxer fighting a pro twice their size and saying
| "it's no fair, they're stronger and have more experience."
| Well, the pro put in all the work to get to where they're at.
| alluro2 wrote:
| People start complaining something is a monopoly when the
| business starts squashing potential competition from the
| position of power, using bully or shady tactics, or
| screwing their customers by being more and more greedy.
|
| In case of Microsoft and IE, even if you don't read up on
| the history and details of it, it's obvious that they were
| just trying to do what Google is doing now - gatekeep the
| web and get some of that toll money. I don't think many
| would have issues with Microsoft just including a simple
| web browsing tool and leaving it at that. Instead, they
| were actively working to kill the competition, took over
| the majority of market share and then just killed off
| innovation basically completely, and held back the web for
| years and years afterwards.
| coldpie wrote:
| Good question! Speaking in legal terms, not popular usage,
| generally the problem being addressed is _not_ "you have
| too much market share," but rather, "you used your dominant
| position in one market to then dominate a different
| market." To stretch your analogy, it'd be like your pro
| boxer entering an amateur tournament and taking all the
| prize money. In the case of Microsoft's IE bundling, they
| were using their dominant position in the Operating System
| market to become dominant in the Web Browser market, by
| bundling IE with the OS and providing specific OS
| integration hooks which were unavailable to other browsers.
|
| > If a competitor has a superior product, then why not just
| leave it up to the consumers to decide if it lives or dies.
|
| The trouble comes when the entity in the dominant position
| squashes competition unfairly. In the IE case, Microsoft
| included a browser with every copy of the OS, so consumers
| had to overcome hurdles to even try a competitor's browser.
| Additionally, as I mentioned above, Microsoft provided
| secret hooks into the OS that were unavailable to other
| browsers, so it was impossible for a competitor to create a
| superior product. Those actions limited fair competition in
| the browser space, which usually results in worse outcomes
| for consumers or the market as a whole, hence the laws
| forbidding monopoly abuse.
|
| Hope that helps give some idea of what happened there. Of
| course, you can read much more detail about the case &
| anti-trust law in general elsewhere.
| Kab1r wrote:
| I don't really like this boxing analogy (because browsers
| don't directly interact with each other and browsers aren't
| a sport, etc), but I'll go with it anyway. When there are
| only two boxers and nobody apparently cares about the
| amateur, gloves that fit the amateur stop being made. All
| boxing gloves produced only fit the pro. But I guess "the
| pro put in all the work to get to where they're at." Again
| this analogy doesn't make much sense to begin with, but I
| think I've made my point about websites being designed
| exclusively for chrome. I have had websites tell me that my
| browser is unsupported and promptly refuse to let me use
| the site until I fake my user agent and then it works
| perfectly fine.
| tudorw wrote:
| can they afford to turn on a dime at some point?
| alexisbear wrote:
| Worth noting that SunSpider hasn't been updated since 2013.
| JetStream is more representative of modern JavaScript workloads,
| but the gap is also getting closer on that benchmark.
| flas9sd wrote:
| having recently looked at a firefox performance regression for
| filing a bugreport, tooling that tracks performance (quite
| publicly) sees attention, easy upload to share tracing profiles
| also helps: https://firefox-source-
| docs.mozilla.org/testing/perfdocs/ind...
|
| Their dedicated blog keeps you posted if firefox perf is your
| interest https://blog.mozilla.org/performance/
|
| If you have a particular website you notice chromium being
| significantly faster with, for an easy report, there's
| https://webcompat.com/ - though bugzilla is better than it seems
| when coming from github issues
| hpb42 wrote:
| The article links to the benchmarks in
| https://arewefastyet.com/linux64/benchmarks/overview?numDays...
|
| Some benchmarks evaluate "execution time", so the lower the
| better.
|
| Some benchmarks have a "score" instead, that the lower the higher
| in the chart. I'm not familiar with these benchmarks and don't
| know how to interpret it. Is higher score worse or better?
| snet0 wrote:
| I'd also appreciate some kind of notes about what these tests
| actually represent. What's "Assorted DOM", and why is Firefox
| so much better (if the scale is representative of anything
| useful)?
| alecmg wrote:
| I think that site opted for consistent graphs - points lower on
| the graph is faster/better, indicated by blue down arrow
| vorticalbox wrote:
| > Firefox easily beating Chrome in this decade-old JavaScript
| benchmark
|
| while also
|
| > Meanwhile for the newer and more demanding JetStream 2.0
| benchmark, Google Chrome continues to win easily over Firefox
| baliex wrote:
| Big firefox fan here and it's kinda sad to read that
| fabrice_d wrote:
| fwiw, https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numD
| ays=6... tracks a number of benchmarks.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| Optimizing for benchmarks tends to not work all that well for
| real-world sites. I wouldn't worry about it.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I wouldn't, firefox has less resources and faced an uphill
| battle for years. The fact that they keep improving regularly
| and significantly, even though late on some front is applaud
| worthy to me.
| insanitybit wrote:
| Can someone tell me how much Chrome has in terms of
| resources? Firefox, a company with one main product, has
| hundreds of millions of dollars coming in + millions in
| donations. That should pay for a sizeable engineering team.
|
| Is the Chrome engineering team much larger? Is the V8 team
| larger than the SpiderMonkey team, significantly so?
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| Unfortunately the money for within Mozilla is not that
| straightforward in favor of Firefox and I imagine I am
| not the only Firefox user who is incredibly annoyed with
| that. I'd rather send money to individual devs' Github
| Sponsors sounds than give Mozilla a donation the devs
| will never see a cent of.
| tristan957 wrote:
| Donations don't pay for Firefox development. Chromium is
| a bit more than Google these days. Mozilla's largest
| failure to date has been their inability to attract other
| significant corporate interest, which Google has done
| with Chromium
| londons_explore wrote:
| Drawing a precise boundary around "Chrome" is hard, since
| many people work on it part time, or are associated with
| tangentially related projects, like the skia graphics
| engine, v8 javascript engine, etc.
|
| However, there were 767 unique authors who committed code
| direct to chromium in the last week:
|
| https://github.com/chromium/chromium/pulse
|
| And I would guess the Chrome team is probably 3-5x that,
| since many people may not be working on code, may not
| commit directly, or might be working on big things on
| branches and didn't commit anything this week. Also, that
| doesn't count work on external dependencies, which are
| counted as "autoroll bots".
| lossolo wrote:
| > However, there were 767 unique authors who committed
| code direct to chromium in the last week:
|
| This also includes all people from outside the org
| (Google), right?
|
| I found this but I think it's for Chrome? There are also
| things like v8 engine.
|
| > The team consists of around 40 engineers, in addition
| to a number of PMs, test engineers, UX designers,
| researchers, and others. We built a lot of features in
| Chrome that are used by more than a billion people.) Feb
| 22, 2019
| londons_explore wrote:
| 3000 engineers * $200k average total comp = $600M. It's
| in the same ballpark as mozilla's total revenues.
| smarnach wrote:
| Average total comp for an FAANG engineer in the US is
| more like $450k, and last time I heard numbers, Chrome
| and adjacent teams were more like 4,000 people.
| astrange wrote:
| Which average is that? Don't think it's median W2 income.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Yeah it seems a touch low. I'm not at one of the big boys
| and $200k is more like base salary then total comp. RSUs
| show up on a W2.
| insanitybit wrote:
| I don't really think it's fair to extrapolate github
| contributors into FTE employees paid by Google, let alone
| to throw out a '3-5x' number on top.
| yborg wrote:
| And on macOS, Safari beats the pants off of Chrome by an even
| larger margin.
| [deleted]
| adventured wrote:
| I have been using Firefox on a daily basis since 2005-2006.
|
| When Chrome leaped far out ahead in terms of speed,
| responsiveness, Firefox nearly lost me as a user (as it was quite
| slow at the time). Since Firefox largely caught up all has been
| well. I'd give Firefox an 8.5 out of 10 in terms of how happy I
| am as a user. They would have to do something atrocious to lose
| me at this point. I also prefer their engine over Chrome in terms
| of visual rendering.
|
| The sole meaningful complaint I have about Firefox is its memory
| usage, which still seems high. It wants 1-2gb of ram no matter
| what I do.
| toastal wrote:
| I remember that time & feeling the absolute _need_ to run
| Minefield (for Fx v4.x) over stable since the next gen features
| /performance were too important even without add-on
| compatibility. The 4.0 release took forever in testing & Chrome
| flew out like a rocket. And even thru the lulls, Fx performance
| has always been good enough to stick around (tho eventually I
| moved to LibreWolf due to management of the new browser feature
| defaults).
| mezobeli wrote:
| Firefox with uBO is more than 100% faster than Chromium based
| browsers. uBO doesn't properly work on Chromium based browsers
| due to their limitations
| ur-whale wrote:
| >Firefox with uBO is more than 100% faster than Chromium based
| browsers. uBO doesn't properly work on Chromium based browsers
| due to their limitations
|
| THIS.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I got back to firefox 3 or 4 years ago on mac and it's truely
| excelent.
|
| The only chokepoint were occasional Google properties, the same
| way Safari chokes on them, so I ended up compartimenting them in
| Chrome. Otherwise it has been pleasant to use.
|
| I also use it on android, but surprisingly it was really hard to
| use on Windows tablets. It performs well enough as a mouse and
| keyboard browser, but touch support is too accurate and
| mechanical to be useful.
|
| An example: on HN the upvote arrow is a really small target and
| clicking everywhere else should result in either nothing or
| opening the link next to the arrow. Chrome "fuzzies" the click
| area to include the upvote arrow even if I click completely on
| the left of it. Firefox will accurately send the click to text
| part left of the arrow, making it crazy hard to hit the upvote
| button.
|
| Firefox is technically accurate, but the extra "magic" on
| Chrome's side is really helpful as a user. Performance wise I
| think it's already on the right track, from there I hope we can
| get UX improvements as well. Touch optimizations on the desktop
| feels like a hard nut to crack, but it would be so nice.
| [deleted]
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Firefox has some about:config variables to tweak the touch
| support. The out of box behaviors should definitely be
| improved, and maybe even a real settings panel would be nice
| instead of just about:config hidden things.
| FractalHQ wrote:
| As much as I hate monopolies, I hate having to write apps for 5
| platforms at once even more. If my app works on Chrome, Brave,
| Vivaldi, Android, and Edge, and I have to jump through hoops and
| litter the code with if (isSafari) workarounds to get it working
| on iPhone, the last thing I want to do with the remainder of my
| time is start from scratch to fix all of the bugs or missing apis
| so Firefox can run it for 1% of users.
|
| I understand the risk of a chrome monopoly, but boy do I feel a
| the conflict of interest when these conversations come up...
| makeitdouble wrote:
| 1% is an interesting number [0]
|
| Instinctively it feels small, but in practice increasing your
| CVR on your registration page by 1% is usually a big deal. What
| kind of other costs in ads or marketing would you pay to get a
| 1% increase to your user base ?
|
| For most company I worked for, a bug affecting 1% of the users
| would be a critical show stopper.
|
| [0] Setting aside if you really have 1% in firefox vs more % in
| Brave or Vivaldi,
| no_way wrote:
| From my experience, if things work in Chrome, they will likely
| work with Firefox too, excluding very new apis, it isn't much
| of maitenance burden. With Safari every project I work o I
| discover new Safari quirk or bug. If you can make it work in
| Safari you can make it Firefox too.
| amatecha wrote:
| why checking for specific browser rather than using feature
| detection to properly handle different browser capabilities? (
| Good docs at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes... )
| mattnewton wrote:
| For safari, I used to run into a lot of graphical bugs,
| (especially when pushing things into layers on the gpu with
| transforms). The second big category would be things that are
| performant on low end android phones with chrome are not
| performant on older iPhones and vice versa.
| no_way wrote:
| Semi related, I was suprised just how many bugs Safari has
| with animation timing while using Web Animation API. You
| can't possibly feature detect that, Motion one lib even
| disables GPU acceleration for them in Safari. In that case
| parsing user agent is the only option.
|
| https://motion.dev/guides/waapi-improvements#webkit-
| bugfixes
| nottorp wrote:
| But how is which browser is faster relevant?
|
| Can you set up a google container in Chrome? :)
|
| And even if there is such an extension, can you trust the browser
| not to send everything you do to Google behind your back?
| mmastrac wrote:
| I'm working with the v8 engine and it's a minefield of de-
| optimizations and random slowdowns for things that you would not
| expect to be slow.
|
| Exception handler structures can dramatically change performance
| characteristics of code. async/await is a real crapshoot --
| sometimes promises are faster, sometimes async blocks are.
|
| We can blame the poor specs for some slowdowns (why does `...`
| destructuring use iterators??), but I wonder if the v8 team is
| chasing benchmarks at the expense of real-world code that might
| not be so perfectly written.
| lossolo wrote:
| > but I wonder if the v8 team is chasing benchmarks at the
| expense of real-world code that might not be so perfectly
| written.
|
| Isn't it the other way around? https://v8.dev/blog/real-world-
| performance
|
| I recall there was some newer blogpost discussing this topic
| with numbers and examples but can't find it atm, maybe it was
| chromium/chrome team blog, maybe someone else can find it.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| > why does `...` use iterators??
|
| If you couldn't use the iterator protocol, generators in
| particular would be a lot less powerful
| mmastrac wrote:
| I think the JS spec would have been better served with a
| different syntax for generator/iterator destructuring. Most
| code I've seen assumes that: [a, b, ...rest]
| = array
|
| is implemented like this: a = array[0]
| b = array[1] rest = array[2...]
|
| When instead it is a giant performance footgun to the point
| where it should only be used outside of performance critical
| code.
|
| EDIT "next -> rest"
| postalrat wrote:
| I don't assume it's implemented like "next = array[2...]".
| I don't even know what that means.
| mmastrac wrote:
| Sorry, I assumed that most people could understand the
| pseudocode syntax for a subarray operation. In
| Javascript, this is:
|
| array.slice(2)
| depressedpanda wrote:
| I understood it, without even thinking about it. In my
| opinion it's more elegant than the real syntax, and I
| didn't even realize it wasn't real JavaScript until this
| comment thread made me look again.
| nightpool wrote:
| Is it not able to be specialized like that when the object
| is a (non-sparse) array? What is preventing engines from
| making that optimization?
| IainIreland wrote:
| It's possible. We have plans to do so. There are a bunch
| of finicky corner cases, though. For example,
| destructuring will call the `return` method of the
| iterator when it's done
| (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...), so we have to be careful
| if somebody has defined `return` on the Array iterator
| prototype. You can supply a default value when
| destructuring, which is lazily evaluated, so we have to
| be careful about arbitrary side-effects taking place in
| the middle of the destructuring. We need to be able to
| fall back to something less optimized if we suddenly see
| a generator, or a user-written iterator. And so on.
|
| Fundamentally, it's the same thing that impedes most
| optimizations: there are hundreds of different patterns
| we could optimize, it takes a fair bit of thought to get
| it right, and we have finite resources, so we have to
| pick and choose. This particular pattern turns out to be
| idiomatic in a lot of React code, which is why we're
| looking at it now. (Or so people tell me; most JS I write
| is gross little testcases.)
| zamadatix wrote:
| Thanks for taking the time to drop these nuggets
| throughout the thread.
| insanitybit wrote:
| > but I wonder if the v8 team is chasing benchmarks at the
| expense of real-world code that might not be so perfectly
| written.
|
| They aren't. V8's benchmark performance for this benchmark has
| been stagnant because they haven't cared about it for a long
| time. Firefox has an incentive to care about it (unfortunately)
| because even when a benchmark doesn't matter it still looks bad
| to be behind on it.
| IainIreland wrote:
| To be clear, Firefox doesn't care about this benchmark
| either. It just so happens that changes we made for
| Speedometer also improved our performance here, which is a
| fun coincidence but not important in the grand scheme of
| things.
|
| (Speedometer is the benchmark that most closely approximates
| messy real-world code.)
| insanitybit wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying, that's interesting + good to know.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| I would love to switch to Firefox but I'm stuck trying to deploy
| the Firefox Sync server myself in a way that 'just' works.
|
| The old version is not developed anymore, and the new version
| isn't easily deployable without going through 10 separate issues
| and trial and error (and I've never succeeded in it).
| WorldMaker wrote:
| That's an interesting reason not to use Firefox.
|
| Do you just not sign in to Chrome at all? It's not like it has
| ever offered a self-hosted version of Google Accounts.
|
| Sync says all data is E2E encrypted. If you trust that (and
| you've been close enough to source to verify it yourself, it
| sounds like), it shouldn't matter who hosts Firefox Sync for
| you.
| mihaic wrote:
| Honestly, for me Firefox is a second choice until their debugging
| tools match Chrome's and they tighten up their tab UI just a bit.
|
| I really want use firefox daily it's just that I do feel a
| development speed hit when using it.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Interesting, I find Firefox's devs tools a lot easier to work
| with.
|
| Firefox's design doesn't sit right with me, but there are
| themes and addons to fix that.
| mihaic wrote:
| What themes and addons do you use? I never changed more than
| the stock color scheme.
| majestic5762 wrote:
| Same for me
| hruzgar wrote:
| Same, the UI needs a bit of change. It doesn't need to be
| anything fancy. Just something simple like basic chromium would
| be nice
| duringmath wrote:
| Bragging about your sunspider score is like bragging about how
| many myspace followers you have.
|
| Besides I'm not sure how much these benchmark tests are relevant
| to real world performance anyway.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It doesn't look like bragging to me. The only comment Phronix
| has from a Firefox person is:
|
| > We're now apparently beating Chrome on the SunSpider
| JavaScript benchmark!
|
| "Apparently" seems to indicate that it isn't something they are
| putting a ton of stock in.
| duringmath wrote:
| I think that's what you'd call a "humble brag".
| chippiewill wrote:
| It would only be a humble brag if it was something that the
| Firefox developers thought others would be impressed by.
| It's a single line item on their internal dev blog, the bar
| for entry is not exactly high.
| titzer wrote:
| Speaking from the perspective of a (former) V8 engineer,
| SunSpider is crappy benchmark, and I can't believe people still
| track it. It has misdirected JavaScript performance engineering
| work for going on 15 years now, leading to all kinds of weird
| contortions in JavaScript engines that do not benefit real world
| sites.
|
| Years ago, V8 switched away from microbenchmarks for the most
| part. See:
|
| https://benediktmeurer.de/2016/12/16/the-truth-about-traditi...
|
| edit to add: Don't take the above to mean that Firefox's
| performance improvements aren't significant, and welcome. It's
| just that SunSpider is the absolute _worst_ benchmark to look at.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| Firefox tracks their performance across many different
| benchmarks. Here is the performance vs Chrome over the past
| year on many different ones. It is encouraging to see steady
| improvements being made on a substantial number of them over
| time.
|
| https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=3...
| yborg wrote:
| It appears that Chrome still wins most of these. Even the
| touted Speedometer win has apparently been trumped by Chrome
| over the last couple of weeks. The competition doesn't stand
| still. Which is good, imagine if Firefox threw in the towel,
| Chrome would become IE 6 in short order.
| scrum-treats wrote:
| See also, significant regressions in Firefox's memory
| consumption:
| https://arewefastyet.com/mac/memory/overview?numDays=365
| elcritch wrote:
| In general I've preferred Firefox's lower memory usage
| than pure speed.
| nwienert wrote:
| Safari is faster than either across almost all dimensions,
| lighter on battery, nicer UI, better standards support
| generally than FF and even matches chrome for what I care
| about. It's the clear best browser imo.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| On Mac? Probably because only Safari has access to the
| private api's
| zuhsetaqi wrote:
| Just compare the results from Windows and macOS.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Safari is only well maintained on MacOS and iOS. That
| makes it a non-starter for most people.
| Retric wrote:
| More than half of US users run iOS or MacOS on one or
| more of their devices.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Less than 5% of people live in the US. Not sure how your
| statement is relevant to my statement about most people
| in general.
| Retric wrote:
| Which is irrelevant if 95+% of your users are coming from
| the US...
|
| Unless you're equally interested in non English speaking
| users then the global average is absolutely meaningless.
|
| What matters to organizations is some subset of everyone
| and what their specific access looks like.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| We're talking about web browsers. Pretty much everyone
| with a personal computer(including smartphones) needs
| one. The US makes no sense as a subset here. If we were
| discussing what markets for a company to target, then
| sure. But we're not, are we?
| wongarsu wrote:
| The US is hardly representative. Globally, 25.3% of
| website visits happen from a device running iOS or MacOS.
| That's impressive, but still a mere quarter. Windows
| (29%) and Android (40%) each account for more users.
|
| https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share
| Retric wrote:
| Which isn't actually relevant to any specific website as
| they all favor either some subset of users and generally
| a subset of their devices. Ie: Fewer than normal stack
| overflow users are coming in on cellphones let alone
| PlayStations.
|
| You need to know your target audience, not simply lookup
| overall statistics. I've seen Windows make up less than
| 4% of all users and I've seen it be over 90%.
| ryder9 wrote:
| [dead]
| pmontra wrote:
| I can run Chrome and Firefox on my Debian laptop and on
| my Android devices. How do I benchmark Safari there? I
| can't, so Safari is barely relevant to me. Nice to know
| that it's faster than the other two browsers on Macs, but
| I'm not very surprised. Apple should be able to integrate
| it with their hardware and OS more than Google and
| Mozilla.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| Customization and freedom means Firefox is always the
| best for me.
|
| How's the safari world of add-on's? Do you have tab
| containers? What about mobile? Can you block ads?
| olliej wrote:
| In fairness, when sun spider was first released it did
| accurately reflect the core pain points in JS engines, as
| present on the web. That applied to V8 as well (though V8
| introduced its own benchmark suite as well on release, it was
| overly focused on property access, and insufficiently on the
| parts of initial page load that sun spider just happened to
| cover).
|
| Of course all of that was _15 years ago_, no benchmark from
| back then is really reflective of anything useful, and they are
| largely no longer valuable for anything other than catching
| regressions.
| mhh__ wrote:
| As the saying goes any compiler engineer can make their
| compiler the fastest if they know what the code is.
| IainIreland wrote:
| To be clear: we track it in the sense that we still have it
| running as part of old dashboards. It's cheap, and every so
| often it catches an unintended regression.
|
| The SpiderMonkey team is very much on board with ignoring
| microbenchmarks. We care about Speedometer, because it
| correlates reasonably well with real-world performance. We pick
| and choose which parts of Jetstream2 we bother with. Anything
| older than that is strictly a measuring stick, rather than a
| target: it's nice when the numbers go up, but it will only
| happen as a side-effect of work we're doing for other reasons.
|
| Notably, all the SunSpider wins on this graph are side-effects
| of Speedometer work we've been doing this year.
| titzer wrote:
| I understand the logic, but I never understood why we (and I
| mean, collectively, the JS VM engineers across the browser
| vendors) didn't just rewrite the benchmark (or fix it) and
| name it SunSpider 2. I suggested this many times. It's not
| that much code.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Presumably because replicating the mix of operations used
| in real react/jquery code all over the web accurately isn't
| trivial...
| IainIreland wrote:
| Yeah, I've been making this argument for years too.
|
| Speedometer 3 is in the works, and it's moving in this
| direction. On multiple occasions we've done performance
| analysis of the latest draft version, noticed a particular
| chunk of code is hot, considered what it would take to
| optimize it, and then changed it because we don't think it
| reflects real-world usage.
|
| EDIT: And I guess the answer for "why not fix SunSpider
| specifically?" is that once you've done the work to turn it
| into something worth optimizing, it no longer bears any
| resemblance to the original. It probably looks a lot more
| like Speedometer, honestly.
| titzer wrote:
| > EDIT: And I guess the answer for "why not fix SunSpider
| specifically?" is that once you've done the work to turn
| it into something worth optimizing, it no longer bears
| any resemblance to the original. It probably looks a lot
| more like Speedometer, honestly.
|
| I get that, yeah, but superseding the old name is
| probably worth it though; the internet is full of people
| who never get the memo except via version numbers :)
|
| I tongue-in-cheek proposed that we match the Sunspider
| ASTs in V8 and either make it infinitely fast or
| infinitely slow. Now _that_ will kill a benchmark once
| and for all!
| IainIreland wrote:
| JSOP_SUNSPIDER was apparently a running joke back in the
| day inside SM.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| This isn't an agreement or disagreement:
|
| Having benchmarks based on real-world sites seems like both a
| good and a bad idea.
|
| Good for obvious reasons. Bad because it creates a feedback
| loop. People develop based on performance. Performance is
| improved based on what people develop.
|
| Did you/your colleagues tackle this in some way?
| titzer wrote:
| Here's one example from 2016: https://v8.dev/blog/real-world-
| performance
| tgv wrote:
| I agree, but speaking as someone who's been using JS for
| computationally medium-intensive tasks: Firefox and Chrome
| don't differ that much. For most users, the difference is
| negligible.
| hiimkeks wrote:
| The link you posted promotes Speedometer, where Firefox
| reportedly already surpassed Chrome.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36770883
| demizer wrote:
| I don't care. Firefox is fast enough for me, even on my Pixel 4a,
| and without ads.
| [deleted]
| butz wrote:
| Are there any "real life" benchmarks, e.g. comparing how long
| each browser takes for a typical popup, banner and autoplay video
| laden website to load and finally become responsive for user? And
| of course this should be a moving target, as website sizes just
| keep increasing.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Given all the recent chatter about Chrome turning evil, I spent a
| few days polishing my Chrome extension (IPvFoo, for observing the
| IPv6 transition) to run properly on Firefox. Technically it's
| been available since 2017, but there were numerous compatibility
| bugs that I was hoping Firefox would fix eventually. I finally
| decided to just hack around the remaining ones, so Chrome/Firefox
| are now at feature parity from a common codebase:
|
| https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo
| gadders wrote:
| I don't know what version of Firefox this is, but the version I
| use is so slooooow using Gmail. It takes close to a minute to
| finish loading if I refresh the screen, compared to seconds with
| Chrome.
| exceptione wrote:
| Oh no, Google must be really sorry about that!
|
| EDIT to clarify: Google is known to make sure the web
| experience breaks for firefox, same story for youtube, so this
| is not an accident. Don't use chrome and don't use gmail if you
| want to keep the web open.
| gadders wrote:
| Well, exactly. I used to work for Lotus when every new
| release of Windows or Dos broke something in 1-2-3.
| foob wrote:
| I use Firefox for nearly everything, but I need to keep a
| Chrome window open because Gmail and Google Meet will max out
| my CPU and barely work in Firefox. Google properties are
| literally the only sites where I experience this issue.
|
| Does anybody know technical details about why this is the case?
| The anti-competitive incentives for them doing this are
| obvious, but I imagine that there must be some technical
| explanation that makes for a plausible excuse. Something like
| them using Chrome only APIs with slow polyfills on other
| browsers?
| liminalsunset wrote:
| For what it's worth, you can add YouTube to the list of
| Google sites with CPU consuming bugs - particularly in dark
| mode.
|
| I'm not sure whether Chrome _entirely_ fixes it, but if you
| watch YouTube in dark mode, there was a UI upgrade that they
| added that puts a "glow" behind the YouTube video player.
|
| It's intended to look like a light strip behind your TV (but
| to me, I originally thought there was just something wrong
| with the monitor or my eyes), but in reality it's just more
| Canvas/GPU bound calculations running at 60fps constantly
| which would cause the CPU/GPU in the laptop to pull tens of
| watts, killing battery life.
|
| There is no way to turn this "feature" off, other than
| disabling dark mode or blocking the "effects (do not remember
| exact item name)" DOM item in uBlock Origin. If you want to
| replicate this, go to a video on YouTube and use the three
| dots near the sign in button on the top right to enable the
| dark theme (may already be enabled). Play a video with bright
| picture, and after about ten seconds, you should start seeing
| "stuff" show up under the video as if it was a reflection.
| kccqzy wrote:
| My Gmail loads just fine on my Firefox even on a low-end Intel
| NUC. On the modern web Gmail isn't that heavy on resources and
| any modern browser should handle Gmail fine.
| everdrive wrote:
| I'm really not excited about JavaScript performance. You know
| what happens when everyone's JavaScript performance improves?
| Webpages just add more JavaScript until it becomes just as slow
| as it was before. People won't optimize on a large scale until we
| hit some upper limit.
| ape4 wrote:
| Congrats Firefox team! No mention of Rust - but I imagine it
| helped.
| toyg wrote:
| I wouldn't think so. It's not like Rust in FF replaces slow
| Python or Java code, it replaces heavily-optimized C++. If
| anything, Rust would likely impede speedup efforts (even if it
| might improve overall code quality and safety).
|
| Also, I believe the project to rewrite the entirety of Gecko in
| Rust has long been abandoned.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| How much of SpiderMonkey (JS engine) is Rust? AFAIK, besides
| the bindings, it is still mostly C++ and my guess is that it
| would be difficult to get the core parts in Rust without a full
| rewrite.
| tristan957 wrote:
| Chromium is fairly invested in cxx[0]. Firefox could do the
| same if they haven't already.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/dtolnay/cxx
| monooso wrote:
| I can't say I've ever considered switching browsers because of
| concerns about JS performance.
|
| I'm pretty confident this is the case for most "average" users,
| but I'm curious whether it makes me an outlier on HN.
|
| Anyone else share my indifference?
| rumdz wrote:
| I am pleased with the performance of Firefox over Chrome in every
| area except GPU-related tasks. I've noticed most (all?) sites
| that use my GPU (1080 Ti) regularly run around an order of
| magnitude slower on Firefox than Chrome on my Windows desktop.
| thatcherthorn wrote:
| Will Brave ever separate from Google?
| Sporktacular wrote:
| Firefox is so good. It's fast, modern, extensible and worth
| almost any downside if only because of Google's approach to
| privacy.
| [deleted]
| sentientslug wrote:
| This is always hilarious to me to read considering Firefox is
| full of garbage like Pocket and "recommended" (sponsored) sites
| on the new tab page.
| VancouverMan wrote:
| If privacy is a concern of yours, especially when it might
| involve Google, you should probably read Firefox's privacy
| notice:
|
| https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
|
| There are more data and participants involved than one might
| expect, especially considering the prominent "At Mozilla, we
| believe that privacy is fundamental to a healthy internet."
| notice at the top.
|
| You'll find the name "Google" in there a number of times, for
| example.
|
| It could be argued that some of the privacy-compromising
| functionality can be disabled, or that Firefox is still the
| "least worst" option, and so on.
|
| Ultimately, though, I don't think that Firefox is as privacy-
| respecting as some people seem to mistakenly believe it is.
|
| If Firefox truly did respect the privacy of its users, that
| privacy notice would be a lot simpler than it actually is.
| toyg wrote:
| Perfect is the enemy of the good.
|
| I'll self-godwinize myself, but: if Google is the Hitler of
| privacy, Firefox is like Churchill - still quite the racist
| and imperialist guy, but a last bastion of defense against
| absolute evil and deserving of all the support.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I don't see anything objectionable at all on that page. If
| anything, seeing that Firefox makes stuff like this opt-in
| makes me feel better about using it:
|
| > If you enable "Improve the Firefox Suggest Experience," we
| and our partners may also receive your search queries. Learn
| more below.
|
| All the other data being sent is pretty standard. It uses
| location data to configure search and show Recommended by
| Pocket articles (though, I'm not sure they actually use
| location data for this - unless it's really high level, such
| as country). And they use analytics to know how often you
| click on items - which practically every app does these days.
| jasfi wrote:
| Is Firefox + uBlockOrigin close enough to Brave's protections?
| eco wrote:
| It seems like it's somewhat close (assuming uBlock Origin grabs
| most of the tracking query/content).
|
| https://privacytests.org/
|
| HTTPS Only can be enabled (it's still off by default) to score
| a few more points.
|
| It gets better in Nightly and even more so in Nightly Private.
| fulafel wrote:
| The graph shows a cliff, presumably there's a specific code
| change associated, anyone have a link?
| freediver wrote:
| The gain is real. Just tested with latest Speedometer 3.0 [1]
| (unreleased, but open source). Latest versions of the browser
| were used.
|
| Firefox Nightly (Gecko) 11.6
|
| Safari TP (WebKit) 11.4
|
| Chrome Canary (Blink) 9.9
|
| [1] https://github.com/WebKit/Speedometer
| huggingmouth wrote:
| M6 one and only problem with Firefox is its signed add on policy.
| I want to write my own add ons and istall them on mobile and
| desktop without creating an account on some random website.
|
| With chrome and kiwi, I can do this.
| lovasoa wrote:
| That is great news. I hope Mozilla's PR team will use this as a
| chance to bust the old myth that firefox is slow. We need more
| firefox users if we don't want to end up in a world where the web
| is Google's thing.
| simula67 wrote:
| > Meanwhile for the newer and more demanding JetStream 2.0
| benchmark, Google Chrome continues to win easily over Firefox
|
| It is a good outcome that we have for the web: good standards and
| a reference implementation in the form of WebKit/Blink.
|
| This is a boon for web developers: follow the standards, but if
| there are gaps in the standard, check the behavior on Chrome. If
| there were multiple mainstream browser implementations with split
| market share; it would be painful for web developers. Large
| amounts of time and energy would be wasted on testing the web
| apps on every possible browser implementation. This is probably
| why platform technologies such as Operating Systems, browsers,
| etc. trend towards monopolies or duopolies. A highly fragmented
| market is not in users, developers, or even platform developers'
| best interests.
|
| Chrome also has well-resourced competition in the form of Apple
| and Microsoft. As Chrome adds more user-hostile changes, users
| will switch away to friendlier browsers, such as Brave, Edge,
| Safari, etc.
| Spivak wrote:
| > If there were multiple mainstream browser implementations
| with split market share; it would be painful for web
| developers.
|
| But good for users which is the tension. Having multiple
| browsers that have significant differences that you can't not
| develop for means that you actually have to gracefully degrade
| instead of demanding everyone else behave more like Chrome. If
| we're at the point where were calling Chrome the reference then
| what's even the point of other browser engines? What would they
| even bring to the table except the skin?
|
| This is one of those weird arguments that actually supports iOS
| forcing developers to use Webkit. The only differentiating
| features of browsers are the skins so quit caring about the
| engine /s.
| ozim wrote:
| I am using Firefox on principle - I don't care about some
| benchmarks or that Firefox is only browser that still has
| connecting to local host so owning developers somewhere on
| backlog.
|
| But at work there is no real way I could use Firefox and I am web
| dev. Dev tools in Firefox are nowadays also behind what Chrome
| has. Biggest upside for Firefox was Firebug but now it is only
| history. Let alone mentioned security issue....
|
| I think here it is easy to understand that if all web devs work
| in chrome we have IE situation back again.
| omoikane wrote:
| I hope Chrome team send Firefox team a cake for this milestone.
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