[HN Gopher] Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
___________________________________________________________________
Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
Author : kevincox
Score : 472 points
Date : 2023-10-31 16:39 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hacks.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (hacks.mozilla.org)
| Doches wrote:
| > We've been motivated by the improvements we're seeing in our
| telemetry data, and we're convinced that our efforts this year
| are having a positive effect on Firefox users.
|
| Mozilla gets a lot of flak (especially around here!) for their
| sometimes heavy-handed usage analytics, but it's nice to see that
| used for its stated purpose! Great use of data here.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| I'm not a fan of telemetry in any browser (I love Lynx because
| of this), but Mozilla is definitely more trustworthy than
| Google or Microsoft.
|
| Edit: I'm not saying that Lynx should be a daily driver or that
| it's more secure, but it's a neat little project that avoids
| some of the bad patterns in modern browsers.
| smegsicle wrote:
| > Mozilla definitely hold a public perception of being more
| trustworthy than Google or Microsoft
|
| 100% true, definitely
| noman-land wrote:
| Mozilla, the legally registered non-profit foundation with
| a mission statement[0], for sure _is_ more trustworthy than
| a for-profit data behemoth whose sole revenue comes from
| collecting as much data a possible, or a for-profit tech
| company with a history of corporate abuse and user hostile
| behavior.
|
| [0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
| crawsome wrote:
| I'm not trying to be a contrarian, but Google paid
| Firefox lots of money to force Google as the default
| search. Likely an offer they would refuse at their own
| peril, but I really liked how my search engine settings
| persisted when I reinstalled. Now it defaults to google.
|
| There's also a ton of promoted garbage on your homepage
| and privacy switches that need to be toggled off by
| default. Those settings don't carry-over when you sync
| your account settings.
|
| I still prefer Firefox, but they are not immune to the
| encroaching enshittification.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There was the "thoroughly pizzled" pocket
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofac
|
| on the other hand Microsoft and Facebook are doing this
| all the time.
| noman-land wrote:
| I agree they're not immune whatsoever. In fact I hold
| them to a higher standard than the others because it's
| their mission to do it, so their failures sting much
| harder.
|
| But I hold the others to zero standard. There is less
| than zero trust there. I expect to be abused by them
| because their mandate requires them to ignore my wishes.
| It's not a failure but a success to them.
| tapoxi wrote:
| That's the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is
| the for-profit developer of Firefox that's owned by the
| Foundation. If Mozilla never established the Corporation
| I'd give them more slack, but from a "it's nonprofit"
| perspective it's on the same level as IKEA, which is also
| owned by a nonprofit foundation.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Technically, google doesn't sell people's data. It uses
| data to train AIs to predict people's behaviour, modify
| that behaviour, modify attitudes/beliefs (it's an ad
| company), and eventually replace people
| noman-land wrote:
| Thanks, I updated my original post because how they
| profit from the data is immaterial to the fact that they
| want it and they coax people into letting them collect
| it.
| shawnz wrote:
| Doesn't that more general statement now apply to anyone
| that collects telemetry, even for "noble" purposes, like
| Mozilla?
| kortilla wrote:
| It sells a direct derivative of the data though, which is
| targeted ads.
| astrange wrote:
| "Non-profits" are still just as motivated to increase
| revenue as "for-profits".
|
| Most US hospitals are non-profits but you still see
| people complaining about them.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Did they remove public perception or did you quote
| something they didn't say?
| jeffbee wrote:
| > I love Lynx because of this
|
| Pseudonymous user so concerned about privacy that they use
| the browser with by far the greatest density of exploitable
| flaws.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| Friend, it is okay to enjoy things. Lynx is just a cool
| project :)
| tombert wrote:
| Well wait, I don't think jeffbee was saying it's bad to
| enjoy things, but rather that the person they were
| responding to was implying something, namely "Lynx is (in
| some way) better than Firefox because it doesn't take
| telemetry data."
|
| Lynx definitely takes less telemetry data than Firefox,
| but it also gets substantially fewer updates, including
| security updates. I think text-based browsing is pretty
| fun but I don't really use it in no small part because of
| the infrequency of updates.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| I can see how the post could be interpreted that way.
| I've added an edit at the bottom to clarify that I'm not
| suggesting people actually use it as they main one.
| s3p wrote:
| The person you are replying to is the same person that
| they are replying to. you can just say "you".
| tombert wrote:
| I didn't see that! Silly me!
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Pseudonymous user so concerned about privacy that they
| use the browser with by far the greatest density of
| exploitable flaws.
|
| "I love Lynx" is different from "I use Lynx for security-
| sensitive browsing," and "greatest density of publicly
| documented exploitable flaws" is, even if true (I don't
| know), not the same as "greatest density of exploitable
| flaws."
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| If it doesn't run JavaScript it immediately loses most
| attack surface relative to other browsers.
| TylerE wrote:
| It also doesn't (nor can it) load images, which is #2
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Yeah, right after I hit post it occurred to me that
| assorted media codecs (pictures, video, audio) were
| probably the next largest attack surface that lynx would
| _also_ necessarily be immune to :)
| jraph wrote:
| I don't know about Lynx, but terminal browsers can
| display images. w3m is able to do it on virtual terminals
| and terminal emulators that support it if you install the
| right packages (w3m-img on Debian for instance).
| astrange wrote:
| Attack surface matters for unknown attacks. If the
| browser just never gets security updates, it's got more
| than enough known attacks.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| https://lynx.invisible-island.net/current/CHANGES.html
| seems to show it still getting updates; can you point to
| these known attacks that aren't getting fixed?
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| And also probably one of the most distinct footprints.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| I just went through Lynx's the <20 CVEs over the last 20
| years and couldn't find any that haven't been fixed. Same
| cannot be said for Chrome or Firefox which have dozens
| every year.
| kwanbix wrote:
| How do you expect companies to understand how their products
| are used for improvement purposes without telemetry? Honest
| question.
| mftrhu wrote:
| They could ask their users.
| mo_42 wrote:
| Or observe people how they interact with the browser. If
| they would observe my parents, they could learn a lot
| that cannot be captured by telemetry.
| kwanbix wrote:
| So how many users do you have to ask for it to be
| statistically relevant for a user base of 360 million
| users?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Others have answered this, but I just wanted to point out
| the software devs have been managing to understand how
| their products are used for improvement purposes from long
| before telemetry was a realistic possibility.
|
| Telemetry doesn't make it possible, it makes it less
| expensive.
| kwanbix wrote:
| Do you think it is the same asking a small subset of
| users than having info on all the users? I work as a
| Product Manager, and trust me, it is not the same.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Of course it's not the same. But having detailed
| information from all users is also not required in order
| to produce a quality product.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| 1) Ask
|
| 2) Conduct user studies
|
| How are companies that aren't software vendors and aren't
| able to spy on their customers able to do it? Did software
| companies not have good ways to do this before spying on
| their users?
| kevingadd wrote:
| 1 and 2 are problematic because it's very hard to get
| representative data from either one. The people who have
| time for user studies or post on your forums are _not_
| representative users.
|
| Only listening to data from 1 & 2 results in the sort of
| angry posts you frequently see on HN complaining that
| devs aren't listening to "real users" or have the wrong
| priorities.
|
| You end up needing data from additional sources,
| telemetry being one of them.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Only listening to data from 1 & 2 results in the sort
| of angry posts you frequently see on HN
|
| If that's the sort of responses your studies produce,
| then your studies are seriously flawed.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| You _do not_ need it. This is a really weird attitude.
| Until like the late '00s "telemetry" was, full stop,
| spyware (still is, for those of us who didn't shift our
| attitudes with the prevailing winds). I wouldn't say that
| responsiveness to user needs and desires has improved
| since then, in software design.
| kwanbix wrote:
| But what is the problem? That I can know that you press
| the print button? That you chose the Edit menu? I really
| don't see the problem. Please, explain, I really want to
| understand.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| You don't see the problem of someone recording the
| actions you take using your own computer in your own home
| or office? It's like having a stranger sitting over your
| shoulder watching you. It's creepy and weird, and it's
| gross that people try to do it at all.
| kevingadd wrote:
| It's one thing to argue over whether basic user facing
| software like an image compressor or a text editor should
| have telemetry, but a web browser is one of the least
| controversial scenarios for telemetry I can imagine. It
| is constantly sending and receiving data on your behalf
| with hundreds or thousands of servers spread across the
| internet as a user agent. Your usage patterns - i.e. is
| it crashing, is the feature you're trying to use failing
| to work for some reason, is it rendering at a good
| framerate, is it running out of memory, are you having
| trouble finding the information you're looking for - are
| going to be incredibly complex and specific to you.
|
| Significant bugs can affect only 1% or 0.1% of a
| browser's userbase but at Chrome scale or even Firefox
| scale that's like a million people. If you don't have
| telemetry it is REALLY hard to hear from those people
| about their problems and understand them. There simply
| are not alternative solutions that work half as well as
| opt-in (or opt-out) telemetry. People who say web
| browsers don't need telemetry are simply ignorant of what
| it's like to ship one and try to keep it working in the
| face of a constantly shifting environment - broken
| drivers, broken VPNs, malicious websites, malicious
| extensions, broken hardware, and users who are confused
| or tired or simply just bad at using software. No one is
| speaking on their behalf, you have to dig their suffering
| out of the data by looking at crash reports and
| performance metrics.
|
| Shipping a web browser used by a million (or a billion)
| users means that you have a responsibility to do a good
| job. If your browser is not well engineered and reliable
| and responsive to users' needs that can result in data
| breaches or third-party server outages when your browser
| misbehaves or incorrectly channels user intent.
|
| I'm personally a fan of making usage telemetry opt-in
| instead of opt-out, but browsers are a case where I don't
| opt out because I know how important the data is for
| browser vendors to make informed decisions.
|
| This is of course different from sending your browsing
| history to Google, Microsoft, or any other company. I
| encourage people not to opt in to that stuff and not to
| sync their history/bookmarks/etc to those companies.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| > It's one thing to argue over whether basic user facing
| software like an image compressor or a text editor should
| have telemetry, but a web browser is one of the least
| controversial scenarios for telemetry I can imagine. It
| is constantly sending and receiving data on your behalf
| with hundreds or thousands of servers spread across the
| internet as a user agent.
|
| It's probably no accident that spying on users got
| popular just as this became the case. Constant network
| traffic while web browsing didn't start to become the
| norm until late in the '00s, either. If you weren't
| clicking links, you could often open Wireshark or sniff
| with Netcat and see _nothing_. Not from your browser, not
| from anything. Certainly ~nobody was collecting heatmaps
| of where you move your mouse, or firing a network request
| if you selected text. Or recording entire user sessions
| for playback, or so you can watch them live (god, those
| tools are creepy as hell)
| kevingadd wrote:
| The prevalence of "every app you use is a web browser
| now" is absolutely a catastrophe for user privacy and
| software reliability for this reason, IMO. Every tiny
| component now has a thousand moving parts that can spy on
| you.
| rurp wrote:
| Taking stock of the connected devices and software that I
| am familiar with, I'd say there is a strong correlation
| between detailed user tracking and _worse_ UX. It seems
| weird at first glance but I think there are some solid
| explanations for why that might be.
|
| Data analysis is difficult to perform and understand well.
| It is easy to draw mistaken conclusions or to twist results
| to show the conclusion a person wants, and using detailed
| numbers can lead to a false sense of confidence in the
| results.
|
| Companies are first and foremost optimizing for their
| benefit, not the user. Detailed tracking can uncover
| interesting ways for a company to make more money at the
| expense of the user.
| tester756 wrote:
| That's good question
|
| I feel like people who are fully against telemetry never
| had to deal with such issues in big apps
| Zekio wrote:
| Especially considering that google and microsoft probably
| collects 10x the data
| chrisjc wrote:
| While you're probably right and we should be concerned, I'd
| say what is more concerning that than the quantity is the
| content.
|
| Whenever I hear that an app is collecting telemetry I feel
| conflicted between leaving it on for maintainers to gain a
| better understanding of performance and potential issues, or
| off so that it's not used to profile me.
|
| It would be nice if telemetry was somehow simply
| differentiated through some app options.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Chromium is open source. And unsurprisingly all the data
| collection bits are open source too. (They call it UMA
| metrics in the codebase.) Search in the codebase for things
| like UMA_HISTOGRAM_ENUMERATION or SCOPED_UMA_HISTOGRAM_TIMER
| and with a free afternoon you'll have a pretty good idea what
| kind of telemetry Google really collects.
|
| Example: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/
| main:bas...
| pornel wrote:
| Chrome is closed-source though. There's no way to make a
| reproducible build of Chrome (the Google binary adds DRM
| and could be adding more).
|
| I'm mentioning this, because this open-closed ambiguity is
| a typical Google strategy. Similarly, Android in the AOSP
| flavor is open, but the OS that actually ships on phones is
| different.
| lxgr wrote:
| Happy to see the top comment on a Mozilla/Firefox article not
| being somebody grinding their axe with Mozilla (and I say that
| as somebody definitely having a few) :)
| g-b-r wrote:
| Sure it really led to great things on Firefox Android
| :facepalm:
| user3939382 wrote:
| I just don't like being bullshitted. Constant marketing about
| privacy while they're phoning home a bunch of data when you
| start and stop the browser. I did at some point find a doc page
| with a zillion steps to disable all of it but that doesn't
| remediate the hypocrisy IMHO.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| A zillion?
|
| Preferences > Privacy > Firefox Data Collection and Use.
| Uncheck a couple boxes.
| user3939382 wrote:
| That's some of it but not all of it. If you uncheck those
| and proxy FF when it's starting you'll see the chatter. I
| have the doc page I'm talking about somewhere but I have no
| idea where it is. Fully disabling it is a long complex
| process involving about:config.
|
| * Found this: https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-
| Telemetry-and-Dat... I haven't compared their list to the
| one I've used before but it's along the same lines and
| explains the discrepancy between the config settings and
| Firefox's actual behavior.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Those largely appear to affect _local_ collection of
| telemetry.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7k3r9u/mozilla_
| is_...
|
| > Telemetry data is stored locally by default. As long as
| the relevant options in the settings' UI are unchecked,
| or datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled is set to
| false in about:config, this data won't be sent.
| <https://medium.com/georg-fritzsche/data-preference-
| changes-i...>
|
| There's likely to still be some non-telemetry chatter,
| like checking for available Firefox/plugin updates etc.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| << this data won't be sent
|
| If there is one thing we should have learned over the
| past decade, it should be that if the data is collected,
| it will be sent.
|
| I followed the argument and I understand what you are
| saying. What I am saying is that it was not that long ago
| that FF decided to disable plugins remotely ( I think we
| even discussed it on HN[1]). What makes you think they
| won't one day push an update to just upload that local
| data?
|
| [1]https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/7/1.html
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > What makes you think they won't one day push an update
| to just upload that local data?
|
| I'd imagine it's a buffer; presumably someone using
| Firefox for a decade with telemetry off won't accumulate
| ten years worth of telemetry pings.
| StressedDev wrote:
| What telemetry are you objecting to? Telemetry has good and
| bad uses. For example, sending in automatic crash reports
| helps companies find bugs. It can also expose sensitive
| information which was in ram at the time of the crash.
|
| Another example is usage telemetry tells developers what part
| of the app is being used and can help them focus popular
| features or on working to let people know about useful but
| under used portions of the app.
|
| My main complaint about people who dislike telemetry is they
| never acknowledge its good uses and they never state what
| telemetry is objectionable.
| kortilla wrote:
| If "being useful" is your argument for it, I don't think
| you're ever going to see eye to eye with people who don't
| want it.
|
| It's like you're arguing about the good things the church
| does when it's a discussion on separation of church and
| state.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Religion seems like a needlessly incendiary example that
| is going to bring up some strong rhetoric.
|
| But I mean I'm an atheist and I think religion is, on
| net, bad. But we've allowed a sort of less dangerous
| version of it to persist in most advanced countries, in
| the form of separation of church and state. If it was
| really just _all_ bad, I suppose we'd ban it altogether.
|
| I think people can generally see that there are some pros
| to things they don't like. Not engaging with the aspects
| of something that are inconvenient to your case puts you
| in the realm of propaganda and rhetoric, not good faith
| discussion.
| Fnoord wrote:
| > My main complaint about people who dislike telemetry is
| they never acknowledge its good uses and they never state
| what telemetry is objectionable.
|
| There's a good reason for that: it is an asymmetric
| relationship.
|
| The person who enabled telemetry isn't necessarily the user
| of the software. Ie. it can be mandated or put on by a
| sysadmin (even by mistake), without user's say. On top of
| that, the user of the software and/or sysadmin are unable
| to assess whether they want to share the data _because they
| cannot analyze the data beforehand_. They lack the
| expertise in doing so.
|
| Meanwhile I have to disable telemetry every friggin' time I
| use Mozilla Firefox. It gets old, having to say 'no' all
| the time, ya know? I now realize how it feels being a young
| woman on the market. Geez, I feel sorry for my daughter.
| The shit she'll have to endure, sayin' 'no' all the time.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > they never acknowledge its good uses
|
| Probably because there's little disagreement about the
| existence of the benefits of it or what they are. That's
| not the issue.
|
| For me, the issue (as with all things like this) is about
| consent. Opt-in telemetry? I have no issue with it. Opt-out
| telemetry? Very sketchy, but at least you can opt out.
| Undisclosed or mandatory telemetry? Completely
| unacceptable.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Click the menu button Fx89menuButton and select Settings.
| Select the Privacy & Security panel. Scroll to the Firefox
| Data Collection and Use section. Deselect the Allow Firefox
| to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla checkbox.
|
| You can get directly there by copying into the url bar
|
| about:preferences#privacy
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I don't think that data gave them anything more than what
| testing on a few consumer computers in different price ranges
| would have.
|
| (Edited, original comment read: "What more information does
| that give them than just buying a few computers at different
| price points?")
| lolinder wrote:
| A vastly larger variety of different computers and computer
| setups than they could have come up with on their own.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| (Sorry I edited my comment before I saw your reply.)
|
| That doesn't seem very useful for the metrics shown in that
| article. For hard to find bugs sure, for 95th percentile
| calculations and so on you can just buy a few computers at
| a retail store and get the same information.
| astrange wrote:
| New computers don't behave like old computers, and it's
| not worth trying to guess why that might be. Could be
| anything running in the background, old NAND, old
| battery, low disk space, satellite internet...
|
| Once you do have a model of badness I agree it's better
| to try to set that up yourself.
| lolinder wrote:
| That can get you 95th percentile calculations for brand
| new computers that you bought from the store in 2023 that
| are running Firefox alone, but that doesn't help you
| understand what your performance will look like when
| you're running on a 10-year-old machine running Windows 7
| while the user is also running Microsoft Word, Excel, and
| Outlook at the same time. Your P95 numbers aren't
| especially meaningful if you've only tested ~10 different
| PC configurations.
| sefeng wrote:
| Maybe you get the same result, but with the real user data,
| you can confidently say the performance has been improved
| without an disclaimer saying the data was collected in-house.
| ta1243 wrote:
| Since upgrading to 118 I've had random hangs of firefox every few
| days. Not clear why, no CPU or swap. All windows just freeze and
| need a "killall firefox", which works - shutting firefox down
| cleanly.
|
| Of course it's impossible to find anything anywhere about this
| due to search engine spam
|
| Was fine for years until 118 and is rare enough to not be able to
| reliably reproduce it (and thus do things like disabling
| extensions, running the pain of a new profile, etc), so I guess I
| have to live with it, as life's too short.
| krona wrote:
| Same for me. It happened twice yesterday.
| flanfly wrote:
| I got these on Brave on two different computers. Disabling
| hardware acceleration fixed it. Both had Intel graphics.
| qup wrote:
| I've been getting these but I hadn't figured out what to blame
| yet. I imagined it was one tab doing something bad.
|
| I'll have to pay attention now to if it's happening on all my
| machines. it for sure happened on a Windows 10 machine
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Are you using anything other than a Linux distro's stable,
| extended-support release? Most of the complaints on HN about
| Firefox instability seem to be either Windows users, or Linux
| users upgrading to the latest and greatest, often outside of
| their distro's packaging. Meanwhile, I have been running Debian
| stable's Firefox for many years and simply have never
| encountered the bugginess that gets described on these HN
| threads.
| dinosaurdynasty wrote:
| Debian uses Firefox ESR. It's rare for Linux distros to use
| ESR (Ubuntu and derivatives notably don't, I don't think
| flatpak does either).
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| And I on the other hand use Mozilla's latest & greatest all
| the time on Debian, and "simply have never encountered the
| bugginess that gets described on these HN threads" either.
|
| So there's that ...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I use Debian's Firefox ESR, and for at least five major (ESR)
| versions there's been a bug where sometimes if multiple tabs
| try to do a web push notification at once, the entire browser
| process hangs maxing out a core and nothing I do will recover
| from that. (I use X11 with PulseAudio.) One of these days,
| I'll get around to reliably reproducing it. (I haven't tried
| `pulseaudio -k`, which might fix it if it's an issue playing
| the sound: videos hang kinda like that, though more
| recoverably, if the sound isn't working right.)
| yorwba wrote:
| Does it happen while typing? Might be
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1844505 I'm
| affected by that bug, but I hadn't considered to search for a
| ticket until now. Guess I'll have to start using plain Mozilla
| binaries to reproduce...
| padenot wrote:
| Firefox developer here. There are a few ways to diagnose this,
| depending on your setup. If everything is frozen on Linux, it's
| probably the parent process that is having an issue. The
| "parent process" is the process that oversees all the tabs,
| it's the top process in a Firefox process tree, the one that
| has lots of children.
|
| If our crash reporter is enabled, you can also just kill the
| parent process with `SIGABRT`, this will produce an entry in
| `about:crashes` that you can look up on restart, and submit.
| This will then give a link to our crash reporting front-end.
|
| If you have `gdb` and `debuginfod` on your distro, and you're
| using your distro's Firefox, attach `gdb` to the parent process
| of Firefox, let it download symbols, and do `thread all apply
| bt`, this will dump the stacks of all the threads of your
| parent process.
|
| If you're using one of our Firefox builds, you can use
| https://firefox-source-
| docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/crashreporte..., that will integrate
| with our own symbol servers. Depending on your distro this
| might or might not work on your distro's Firefox (some distros
| submit their symbols to our infra to help diagnosing crashes).
|
| Once you have some info about the crash, you can open a ticket
| on your distro bug tracker, or
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core to
| reach us directly, attaching the stacks, Firefox version, crash
| report, about:support, or anything else that you think is
| relevant.
|
| Oftentimes, those freezes (on Linux) are caused by a bug
| between Firefox and the desktop environment, or by graphics
| drivers, that kind of thing, and stacks allow narrowing down
| the issue greatly, sometimes it's just a package update or a
| configuration flip away!
| ce4 wrote:
| Wow, thanks for the information!
|
| Side question: what can be done on Windows in such a case?
| LoganDark wrote:
| Holy crap, this is the most helpful answer I've ever seen
| from a Firefox developer on HN. When I was having a memory
| exhaustion issue, I was just told "enable the page file,
| running without overcommit is a recipe for disaster" (looks
| at my 40GB of memory). I should figure out if that issue
| still occurs.
| jraph wrote:
| > running without overcommit is a recipe for disaster
|
| (but yes, it probably is, even with 40GB of memory. I bet
| many things are designed on Linux with overcommit as an
| assumption)
| LoganDark wrote:
| Well, that was just the wrong answer, since their
| software is supposed to be releasing memory back to the
| OS properly. Overcommit is just a coping mechanism, you
| should be addressing the root cause.
|
| I have since enabled the page file for other reasons -
| LLMs demand up to 50GB of memory sometimes, and my new
| desktop only has 16.
|
| The change of machine is why I should probably try
| Firefox again to see if it behaves.
| ColonelPhantom wrote:
| Overcommit != Swap.
|
| Overcommit is allocating virtual memory without any
| backing. Swap is allocating physical memory backed by
| disk.
|
| Overcommit is useful in some cases, for example to
| preallocate a large heap without immediately making it
| all resident. Or to allocate 'guard' pages to fight
| buffer overflows. On Linux, overcommit is commonly
| assumed and as such disabling it tends to break some
| programs, as it's not out of the ordinary for something
| to allocate 100s of GBs of virtual memory.
| pivo wrote:
| Same for me on a mac. I only saw this on 118 and haven't seen
| them again since upgrading to 119.0
|
| Edit: Spoke too soon. Just happened again while joining a
| GoogleMeet meeting, if that's relevant.
| emgeee wrote:
| throwing in a "same here" -- macosx v118 and 119
| tbihl wrote:
| I was a consistent Firefox user, probably for the past 15 years,
| but I recently switched to Brave and Edge after too much
| frustration with power consumption. Firefox makes my laptop
| shriek, while the other 2 normally don't cause the fan to start
| at all.
|
| Does anyone actually care about loading speeds (apart from the
| necessary ad blocking)?
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| > Does anyone actually care about loading speeds (apart from
| the necessary ad blocking)?
|
| It's kinda like money imo: You think you don't care about it
| until you don't have it. The only time I've ever cared about
| loading speeds was when I stayed on LTS Firefox for 2 years to
| avoid switching to WebExtensions, because I wanted to keep
| using several addons that were discontinued in Quantum. And
| near the end...yeah I cared about loading time. Felt amazing
| when I finally did upgrade (although I'm still pissed af that
| they never re-added the ability for extensions to access _tab-
| specific_ history & will never get over this unless they do
| one day add it).
|
| So I do think it's important to pay attention to even when no
| one cares, just to make sure that no one _starts_ caring.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _they never re-added the ability for extensions to access
| tab-specific history_
|
| Curious, what was the use case for this?
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| In MouseGestures extension, you can bind right-click
| scroll-up & right-click scroll-down to whatever you want. I
| bound this to back & forward (within this tab),
| respectively. So you'd get a little context menu at your
| cursor to be able to navigate however many ticks you
| wanted. Insanely useful, especially when websites bullshit
| autoredirected you once, so navigating away from them
| requires either super quick reflexes to go back twice with
| hotkey or mouse gesture, or actually moving your cursor all
| the way to the back button @@
|
| I still actively get mad that I can't use this shortcut
| every single time I have to go to the physical buttons.
| frandroid wrote:
| Are you serious?
| tbihl wrote:
| I'm absolutely serious. Apart from using my work laptop to
| visit an ad-ridden page, doing stupid timed sign-up
| activities like going to Disney World, or using my older work
| desktop that was so old and slow that it spent 10 minutes
| every morning at 100% disk utilization before calming down, I
| can't think of a time when I've experienced noticeably slow
| webpage loading in years, maybe a decade.
| jwells89 wrote:
| With laptops having taken over computing aside from a small
| sliver of professionals and enthusiasts and browsers being one
| of the most consistently used categories of software, one would
| think that energy efficiency would be a bigger priority for
| browser devs... I mean who _likes_ their laptop's fans
| screaming and finite battery cycles being torn through?
|
| It's rarely ever mentioned though and not something that
| significant gains are regularly made in, which is a bit strange
| to me. Browsers across the board have crossed the threshold of
| diminishing returns when it comes to speed, I'd personally
| rather they shift focus towards battery friendliness.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| A lot of laptops don't even have fans, and as a Firefox user
| who has owned ultrabooks for the last several years, I can't
| say that this choice of browser has had any noticeable
| detrimental impact; I still get the many hours of battery
| life that ultrabooks are known for. I suspect that the devs,
| faced with limited resources and the need to prioritize,
| would consider this a matter for the hardware and OS to deal
| with.
| oldshatterhand wrote:
| I had to switch from Firefox to Safari on my M1 Max 16" MacBook
| Pro because the battery drains in a few hours. I experimented a
| lot with turning different plugins on and off, but the power
| draw remained almost constant.
| chrisjc wrote:
| Interesting. Up until recently I was on a intel Mac and
| Firefox was always in the list of "Apps Using Significant
| Energy". I don't know if it coincided with some Firefox
| improvement, but after switching to an M2 it has never show
| up since.
|
| Fortunately it never affected any need to switch to another
| browser since I'm plugged in 95% of the time.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I'm mostly working on a desktop computer so I don't care that
| much about energy consumption, however I do notice that a lot
| of websites have some timer going off at very high frequency,
| as part of some framework or whatnot.
|
| Personally I don't see why Firefox can't just stop JavaScript
| execution on tabs that aren't visible after say 5 seconds,
| unless the user has enabled background execution.
| jakub_g wrote:
| All browsers already heavily throttle js timers execution in
| background tabs. You also have specific apis like
| requestAnimationFrame to decouple UI timers from non-UI
| timers like setInterval.
|
| Stopping it entirely and then suddenly restarting on
| foreground would be probably too much of a breaking change
| for the websites' developers. I mean, I guess it could be
| possible but would require properly thinking it through. Some
| browsers aggressively freeze background tabs but AFAIR they
| do full reload on unfreeze.
|
| The breakage area of shipping that kind of change into the
| web ecosystem of a major browser is huge.
| xxpor wrote:
| Only looking at the 95th percentile is pretty disappointing.
| Enough page loads happen that higher percentile experiences
| aren't exactly rare.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It's not like real users aren't hitting loading times in those
| higher percentiles. They really should be showing p100.
| persnickety wrote:
| p100 would include those where the uplink is so slow that the
| page takes minutes to render completely. Those users are
| useful to see, but the browser is much less of a bottleneck
| for them, and the data should be broken out into a separate
| bin.
| sfink wrote:
| It would also include users who happened to close their
| laptop lids and suspend for an hour, right during pageload.
| astrange wrote:
| That's if it's measured by wallclock time, but they
| should be using a monotonic timer that ignores sleep and
| clock changes.
| sfink wrote:
| You mean only displaying and discussing the 95th percentile in
| a blog post?
|
| There's no reason to assume that what is brought up in a blog
| post is going to match what engineers are looking at. In this
| case, I'm a developer at Mozilla, and I would say that I agree
| that it's worthwhile to look at the 99th percentile as well.
| And the median (50th percentile). And other platforms. And
| segregate it by website, but we don't collect that, or by
| country, but although I think we might be collecting that we
| avoid correlating too many things before discarding the non-
| aggregate data. There are too many German users to worry about
| identifying one by knowing they're German, but there's aren't
| that many German users with >100 tabs running on Windows 7 on
| slower hardware, etc.
|
| I wouldn't want to pile up any more data than necessary in a
| blog post, though. The point would get buried. _Man Bites Dog
| Whose Litter Mate Once Skipped A Veterinary Visit Because Owner
| Was Out Of Town At A Wedding Between Two People Whose Names
| Start With D_
|
| (Yes, we do consider many different percentiles when making
| decisions. We kind of have to come up with arguments for what
| matters, given a change we made or are contemplating. Some
| things improve the 50th and regress the 95th, for example, and
| that's a useful clue. Telemetry tracks half a dozen different
| percentiles.)
| xxpor wrote:
| I'm sure internally folks are looking at more stuff, but blog
| post wise, it makes it look like you're intentionally
| omitting it (see https://youtu.be/lJ8ydIuPFeU?t=1239)
| bingemaker wrote:
| When more and more parts of FF are written in rust, I thought FF
| will get a lot faster. But for the past 1 year, I can only see
| marginal improvements w.r.t speed. And occasionally FF hangs when
| I have 20 tabs opened.
| rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote:
| Why would you think that? Rust is certainly a little bit slower
| than C/C++
| qup wrote:
| Everything I've read says that you're right in theory, but in
| practice, rust rewrites tend to outperform.
|
| At Mozilla's level, though, I wouldn't necessarily expect
| that to hold water. They should be able to write great code
| in either language.
| lxgr wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if rewrites in any language
| (including the original one!) would have a tendency to
| outperform.
|
| A rewrite (by people familiar with the original and its
| pain points) is an excellent opportunity to optimize.
| lrem wrote:
| Eh, no. A rewrite is pretty much always better. You now
| know the problem you're actually facing. Drop all the
| little wrong assumptions. And in general are better
| equipped than the last time.
|
| I vaguely remember reading here about a company that
| slapped a backend together in Python. When they took off,
| the compute costs stung, so they rewrote in Go. Saved most
| of the bill. Some time later that started creaking, so they
| rewrote again. In Python, but managed to save most of the
| bill again.
| pcwalton wrote:
| They use the same compiler backend and you can generate
| pretty much any LLVM IR you want with Rust. You can argue
| about the performance characteristics of the kind of code the
| language encourages you to write, but a blanket statement
| like that isn't true.
| bingemaker wrote:
| Not sure why am I getting down voted for posting an observation
| :shrug:
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| > _Please don 't comment about the voting on comments. It
| never does any good, and it makes boring reading._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| bpbp-mango wrote:
| After the CSS parser and Webrender has there been any more new
| rust components?
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| Only because fake users didn't receive the update.
| nfriedly wrote:
| fake users?
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| "Firefox got faster for real users..." why include "real"?
| Are there fake users? Just strange phrasing.
| mcpherrinm wrote:
| I think they're distinguishing from synthetic benchmarks
| sojsurf wrote:
| Perhaps as opposed to "Firefox got faster in the
| benchmarks", which do not always correlate to how normal
| users use the web.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I assume it implies "we base our claims on data from real
| users, not artificial metrics"
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| Firefox's analytics allows Mozilla to analyze changes in
| the real world for Firefox users. Testing things like
| startup time and load times for actual users as opposed to
| synthetic benchmarks.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I trust the Firefox team knows what they're doing and came to the
| right conclusion re: performance.
|
| That said, I have a small nit. I would have liked to see how
| performance changed relative to the same time last year, to
| control for seasonal effects. Image 1 is showing changes on the
| scale of 1/100 of a second. I'm not an expert in the field, but
| when you'r looking at signal of that magnitude controlling for
| noise is more relevant.
|
| EDIT: I should add, I am a satisfied user of FF.
| temp0826 wrote:
| I think that's what arewefastyet is?
|
| https://arewefastyet.com/
|
| Edit- also see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Areweyet
| alwa wrote:
| I'm curious what seasonal effects you hypothesize might be in
| play here. I don't know enough about the browser performance
| space to understand what might change: do people really consume
| a different mix of web technologies through their browsers
| seasonally?
|
| It looks to my naive eyes like the trajectories here are
| consistent and that the "signal" looks bigger than the
| variance. The measurements seen consistent with a bunch of
| smart engineers working to optimize for them during the time
| period they were measured.
|
| At the same time you're right: that big August improvement
| might well have something to do with Northern-hemisphere people
| switching to lighter vacation reading rather than just the
| Firefox 116 release happening to drop August 1. I'd share your
| interest in the longer timescale.
| Osmose wrote:
| To the first question: Yes. An example would be travel sites
| and shopping sites getting way more use during holidays. A
| big one is always December: end of the year holidays mess
| with usage metrics a ton given how many people take off work
| or spend time away from their computers, to the point that
| most companies I've worked at tend to ignore data from that
| month or try to be very careful about only comparing it to
| data from December in other years.
| Centigonal wrote:
| I switched to Firefox from Chrome for personal browsing several
| months ago, after the Manifest v3 debacle. So far, it's been
| good!
|
| Very few sites only work on chrome. Firefox is fast, and the auto
| tab discard works better for me than Chrome's equivalent (or the
| Marvelous Suspender), I really like container tabs, and the whole
| experience feels pretty snappy. There are some product
| affordances I don't get with Firefox (ex. being able to run math
| expressions in the address bar), but it's small potatoes.
| tempusr wrote:
| I started using Firefox as a main driver a year ago due to me
| interfacing with Linux distros a lot more often. It's the
| browser that is usually always installed from the get and
| offers the best experience after logging into my Firefox
| account.
|
| They also have some other really good tools they support such
| as firefox relay which is basically a proxy email address for
| your main email so you can post your an address on the airwaves
| w/o compromising your main email.
|
| Pocket for saving articles you read on the internet.
|
| Mozilla Thunderbird?
| zanellato19 wrote:
| > ex. being able to run math expressions in the address bar
|
| This works here for me just fine, at least for simple ones
| Centigonal wrote:
| division breaks it, because FF doesn't want to send a
| potential URL to google (which evaluates math expressions).
| details here:
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1318813
|
| Thanks to your comment, I did some more research and
| discovered an about:config flag
| (browser.urlbar.suggest.calculator) that fixes this for me!
| agumonkey wrote:
| I applaud firefox devs, and wish they can keep on improving
| everything they want or can.
| fooker wrote:
| I must be a virtual user or something.
|
| I have Firefox installed for testing WASM targets, and everything
| seems slower than usual.
|
| If you open 20+ tabs, the UI seems to be laggy. At some point, I
| had to kill a tab, the whole browser froze for a while.
| diggan wrote:
| I regularly have 100+ tabs open depending on what I'm doing,
| and killing tabs in groups of 10+ sometimes without any lag.
| But then I'm on a 5950x CPU + Linux so maybe that plays some
| role. What hardware are you using?
| throitallaway wrote:
| > the whole browser froze for a while.
|
| Are you swapping out? I think a lot of people don't realize how
| heavy web pages are, often taking up hundreds of MB of RAM (at
| least) for each tab. I highly recommend the Auto Tab Discard
| plugin. I'm terrible with leaving tabs around, and tab
| suspension plugins let me continue that bad habit.
| xedrac wrote:
| I like seeing Mozilla actually improving Firefox instead of just
| shuffling UI components around. I've been a longtime user, and am
| happy to support the underdog here to try and keep some balance
| of power on the web. Having Mozilla focus more on their tech, and
| less on politics is a good thing. Regardless, Firefox is a good
| piece of software and I have no major qualms with it.
| ksec wrote:
| >Having Mozilla focus more on their tech, and less on politics
| is a good thing.
|
| And not just a focus on Tech but also focus on product. i.e
| Firefox.
|
| You could have them focus on Tech and they spend all their
| resources on Firefox OS.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| I've made the switch. The difference is so minimal at this point
| it's unnoticeable. And regardless of telemetry and who sees what,
| I simply cannot stomach touching anything even remotely related
| to Google anymore.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| I stopped using Firefox because every single time I opened the
| application it would pause while it forced a new update on me.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| This is good news, and makes me want to start using it again.
|
| Was a user from the Phoenix/Firebird days with the "unzip it
| somewhere" fancy installation process, used it for almost 20
| years, and then switched to a Chromium-based browser due to
| perceivable speed differences.
|
| I wasn't running benchmarks to confirm my suspicions or that
| performing some action was x milliseconds slower in Firefox or
| anything. But when you're using something all day, every day
| including as part of your job, it is easy to get a feel for.
|
| With these multiple reports recently of performance work, along
| with real-world metrics ... I'm thinking of sticking with it for
| a few days again. If I don't notice the difference, or it
| actually seems faster, I'll switch back.
|
| I want to switch back, because we need to ensure there are
| alternate browser engines, and I don't want standards committees
| to turn into "this year, Google deems we shall be doing the
| following" sort of events.
| diroussel wrote:
| Combine the good performance with great add-ons like Multi
| Account Containers, and Tree Style Tabs, and you have a great
| browser.
| mackrevinack wrote:
| the user.js file is a very underrated feature as well. i have
| a few computers and some of them are dual boot which means i
| have a lot of firefox installs so its great just being able
| to drop in the user.js file and have everything set up the
| way i like it
| diroussel wrote:
| I have a userChrome.css to hide the default tabs. What do
| you have in your user.js and have you automated the install
| of it?
|
| Here is a reference for the userChrome.css to hide the
| default tabs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23268077
| sfortis wrote:
| In the Speedometer 2, Firefox is much slower than Chrome, which
| is a bit slower than Edge. But who cares! In real life, this
| makes no real difference. I respect and trust the privacy of
| Mozilla. Features like containers and the ability to run Ublock
| and Tampermonkey on mobile are priceless!
| criddell wrote:
| All of the major browsers are probably fast enough for now. It
| would be nice to see the emphasis shift to decreasing power
| consumption.
| astrange wrote:
| Those are mostly the same thing. You save power by being
| faster so that you can go idle faster.
|
| Of course, there's a difference between going faster by using
| more resources and by just taking less time.
| rg111 wrote:
| With a 75 MBPS connection, FF loads everything I need
| instantaneously.
|
| Who cares about benchmarks?
| MBCook wrote:
| See the sibling comment about the person using a very low
| spec PC.
| windowsrookie wrote:
| It does still matter for people using low-end computers. My
| MacBook's screen cracked while on vacation recently and I had
| to buy an emergency laptop. I picked up a device with a Celeron
| 6305 and 4GB of RAM. I loaded up Firefox like I normally do,
| and it was so slow and laggy to the point it was unusable.
|
| I then switched over to Edge and it performed significantly
| faster, and was using less of the 4GB of RAM. I was surprised
| at how significant the difference was, but there was no denying
| it. Edge performs much better than other browsers on low-end
| PC's.
| inparen wrote:
| Yay! Happily using Firefox since 3.5 release. Keep going guys.
| chungy wrote:
| Been using it since it was called Mozilla Firebird. :)
| bombledmonk wrote:
| The killer app for Firefox is it still allows some flexibility in
| tab management. Sidebery and TreeStyleTab have been my anchors in
| the FF ecosystem. The experience is so vastly superior for tab
| hoarders and tab-todo methodology that I really can't imagine
| using something else. I also use FF on android because it has
| ublock origin and dark reader addons. This make browsing the web
| on mobile far better. I actually hold little allegiance to FF as
| whole, I just haven't found any Chromium based browser that works
| as well for me.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| In regards to treestyletab did you get rid of the top tabs or
| do you have both on your screen. I feel like i lost quite a lot
| of real estate on smaller screens with both.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| You can remove the top tab bar with some CSS.
|
| https://superuser.com/questions/1424478/can-i-hide-native-
| ta...
| andreashaerter wrote:
| As a tab hoarder, I also
|
| a) need "Auto Tab Discard" which sends unused tabs in the
| background to sleep, not consuming resources.
|
| b) enjoy I can still use CSS to hack the tab bar for e.g. three
| scrollable rows
| clumsysmurf wrote:
| I tried both but ultimately preferred Safari tab groups which
| is seamlessly integrated into the browser experience.
| wongarsu wrote:
| > I just haven't found any Chromium based browser that works as
| well for me.
|
| The native vertical tabs in Edge are also pretty good. Not
| nearly as feature-rich, basically just vertical tabs with
| automatic unloading and tab groups; but in return it's
| incredibly stable and bug-free.
| dmix wrote:
| Is there a reason Chrome hasn't adopted this? Tabtree is the
| only reason I'm using FF (not that I'm unhappy with FF I just
| use Chrome for work cuz the devtools is better).
| milliams wrote:
| Graphs like https://hacks.mozilla.org/files/2023/10/FCPRUM.png
| which don't start at zero on the y-axis are very misleading.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| Gotta say I've been using Firefox for years as my daily driver
| and it has been great. Maybe it is because I'm running on higher
| end machines for the most part, but I've had no complaints with
| it across Linux, windows, and Mac.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Same. And I'm not using high-end machines, all of my daily
| drivers are 5 years old or more. I've been completely happy
| with Firefox + uBlock Origin.
| NTARelix wrote:
| I've also been using it for several years and almost completely
| agree with your sentiment. The only areas that have given me
| trouble are in the dev tools. On my machines the debugger is
| significantly slowed down when opening very large JS files,
| source maps compound the debugger slow down, and I can't always
| inspect variables' values when using source maps (possibly a
| build tool config problem).
| brianbreslin wrote:
| So firefox was ahead of the pack on the add-ons/extensions game,
| but then didn't push it or support it after a while. Now after
| years of chrome having a few integrations or add-ons that make my
| life easier, i have a hard time switching back to firefox even
| though chrome is such a giant memory hog. These aggregator moats
| are real that stratechery talks about.
|
| Maybe I'll give firefox another shot.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| I have been trying firefox for last 1-2 months it was running
| great but last week or so it suddenly freezes my whole computer.
| This happens both on windows and a different linux pc.
| mike_hock wrote:
| > Collecting data while holding ourselves to the highest
| standards of privacy can be challenging.
|
| Yes, explaining away a blatant self-contradiction can be
| challenging.
|
| You're not holding yourselves to the highest standards of
| privacy, you've explicitly prioritized data collection over
| privacy.
| abound wrote:
| While I'm glad the data is trending in the right direction, isn't
| this what you'd expect to see from these metrics as people adopt
| faster hardware and better internet connectivity?
|
| I know it's hard to control for those things while maintaining
| anonymity and doing aggregate analysis, but this would be a much
| stronger argument controlling for at least some level of
| available compute.
|
| (I exclusively use Firefox on all the platforms)
| myfonj wrote:
| I can subjectively confirm that Firefox feels snappier recently
| and deeply appreciate and enjoy all improvements.
|
| But I have some itching concerns about that methodology with
| heavy anonymisation and stuff there:
|
| Couldn't it be that the web itself got faster, and folks have
| better hardware?
|
| I mean, yes, generally these sloppy script kiddies with bloated
| frameworks produce less and less effective code ... but I can
| imagine, that when some heavily visited page deploys a new better
| optimized and leaner version (I assume such things happen in
| reality, don't they?), there is no way to tell it apart from
| telemetry data telling that everything got slightly faster on
| average. Or with people getting better hardware, or with OS and
| driver updates, etc.
| wldlyinaccurate wrote:
| The web is getting faster, yes. This manifests as a constant
| (albeit slow) downward trend in global aggregate metrics. We
| think this trend is mostly due to Google pushing performance
| metrics being linked to search rankings.
|
| However the data presented in this post shows obvious step
| changes in performance that correlate with browser version
| rollout. It would be disingenuous not to attribute this to a
| concerted effort on performance improvements from the Firefox
| team.
| ro-ka wrote:
| As older Firefox versions are still in use, too, it's possible
| to check whether the improvements come from updates in Firefox
| itself or the web in general.
| MBCook wrote:
| It would've been nice to see this normalized by CPU cycles or
| javascript tokens executed or something like that.
|
| Something so that more megahertz/cores doesn't throw off the
| number.
|
| Whatever the reason, it is nice to see it improving. I think it
| would be interesting to also see a median figure in addition to
| a 95% figure.
| jraph wrote:
| I bet it's difficult to normalize because performance depends
| on so many things. CPU cycles, but also other factors like
| RAM speed, swap usage, CPU cache sizes and speeds, background
| tasks, GPU and GPU drivers, OS, display servers (X11 vs
| Wayland on Linux), window managers, available fonts, and
| probably a ton of other things are other factors that will
| play a role.
| toldyouso2022 wrote:
| I've used an older firefox version from 2020(the why I did is a
| long story) and only updated after the webp security issue. New
| version felt immediately faster.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| It was starting to really "feel like a hog" to me over the last
| 6 months, including random crashes and stutters, and I
| considered switching to Chrome.
|
| I hadn't noticed until I read this, but I think that feeling
| has gone away recently and I had already stopped thinking about
| switching.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| I mostly use Firefox but I have to use Chrome on a regular
| basis[1] and Chrome feel slower than Firefox despite having
| only one open tab. On a pretty old Linux computer.
|
| [1] Because Slack still doesn't support WebRTC on Firefox
| after 8 years...
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Sounds wonderful, but they've been claiming speed increases for
| years, causing me to go and check if they're true, and being
| deeply disappointed. I don't use powerful laptops with fancy
| hardware for my browsing, but how stupid can a browser be if it
| only works well even with heavy use if your hardware is great?
| Not everyone has that luxury even if they'd like a bit of privacy
| features.
|
| As much as I detest and avoid all things Google in so many ways,
| Chrome remains preferable because at least it can deliver 50+
| open tabs on a completely ordinary laptop without completely
| freezing everything to shit.
|
| You've had so many years to get this basic thing right Mozilla,
| yet you keep failing, and for a company that claims to track less
| than the others, then what the fuck is your browser doing to keep
| being so goddam slow?
| orev wrote:
| Firefox is definitely on par with Chrome these days, so if
| you're seeing issues like this, I would first suspect that it's
| the web sites you have loaded in those 50+ open tabs instead of
| the browser itself. So many sites use bad JavaScript and that's
| often what causes the problems.
| jacobyoder wrote:
| > Firefox is definitely on par with Chrome these days,
|
| The GP is likely going to be triggered by those words,
| because... I've seen this repeated every X months/years...
| "Oh... yeah, you had problems in the past, but it's so much
| better now"... and... it rarely is. GP will just need to try
| out again at their own schedule and make their own
| determination.
|
| I had this standard issue with desktop/laptop linux for
| _years_... "xyx doesn't work well"... "Oh yeah, it's so much
| better now - no problems now". Try the new recommendation -
| still broken.
|
| I had a f2f with someone at a local meetup, and we got in to
| "xyz is subpar/broken on linux" (some gnome thing possibly).
| This happened to be a linux user group, and someone
| challenged me with "no, you're wrong, it's fine now". So... I
| pulled out the laptop and fired it up and showed the
| irritation/bug. The response - after showing that what I was
| saying was a bug - was a shrug and "Oh, I don't care about
| that - doesn't affect me". The verbal equivalent of
| "WONTFIX". In person.
|
| tldr: telling people who've been burned - often for years -
| that things are "better now" is generally not all the
| productive. Most of the time, people who have specific/legit
| issues will figure out if/when they're fixed or tolerable
| enough.
| Osmose wrote:
| This is valid but in both directions: people will say
| "Firefox is slow" because they don't have the time/interest
| to say "Firefox is slow on this specific webapp that is
| very important to me on my specific laptop". Of course the
| responses to the first statement are going to interpret it
| generally rather than specifically.
| aembleton wrote:
| > So many sites use bad JavaScript and that's often what
| causes the problems
|
| Then Firefox needs to handle that better. As an end user, I
| don't care about the quality of the JS of the sites I want to
| browse - I just want it to work, and if it works in Chrome
| but not Firefox then I guess I'll switch to Chrome.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Exactly this. Often with complaints about FF performance
| someone comes along and says something like the above,
| about JS or my laptop's hardware, or etc, but if Chrome,
| with all its shitty tracking, can make those same sites
| load just fine on nearly any machine, then FF should be
| able to do the same if it wants more users. I don't care
| about your browser's problems and exceptions to decent
| performance. I shouldn't be expected to filter the sorts of
| sites I visit for the sake of making sure they don't harm
| my delicate little FF instance. I just want the damn thing
| to work as other browsers apparently can.
| secondcoming wrote:
| I don't know if it's the fault of Firefox or Cloudflare WARP but
| I've been getting a lot of "PR_END_OF_FILE" errors (something
| like that) when browsing.
| knodi wrote:
| Been a user of Firefox from when he launch the renderer, loving
| it and never looked back at chrome or safari.
| insanitybit wrote:
| Really cool to see the real world performance as well as a new
| Speedometer. I think anyone who's against the telemetry collected
| is really nuts, as long as it's done responsibly - the idea that
| Firefox could compete without that data is just a fantasy.
| joduplessis wrote:
| Love headlines like these. As opposed to what, fake users?
| rhdunn wrote:
| Synthetic benchmarks or tests. For example, improving
| performance of an empty loop is useful for starting somewhere
| [1], but does not show how fast the browser is on a real page
| with complex JavaScript such as a vue/react component used to
| render a tree-based select control with searchable items.
|
| [1] E.g. creating the new jitter for Ladybird.
| dabedee wrote:
| In the last five years, my experience with Firefox has always
| been far superior in terms of performance than when using Chrome.
| I just can't bring myself to justify using a Google product for
| something as important as browsing. I guess it's ideological, but
| I just want Firefox to succeed.
| post_break wrote:
| Has anyone at firefox used the iOS app? I want you to track what
| the workflow is to access a password in the app. Tap tap tap left
| side, right side, can't get out of the settings to check the
| website while doing so. It's maddening. Besides that... it's
| lovely.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| Is it complex in all iOS browsers due to the whole 'you're
| actually running Safari underneath' thing? Or is it Firefox
| specific on iOS?
| saagarjha wrote:
| This sounds like a UI issue?
| sharno wrote:
| My battery with FF on a Macbook Pro with M2 still lasts less than
| the same device with Chrome. Hope this improves soon.
|
| Ofc, Safari beats them both but I hate Safari's plugins system so
| I need a browser that doesn't need an AppleID to install plugins.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| I don't know what their definition of a "real user" is. But
| everyone I've met who uses Fiercefox does so for philanthropic or
| political reasons. I have a hard time believing some non techie
| in Minnesota has noticed performance improvements. Idk, the data
| looks very pseudo sciencey, just feels like another marketing
| ploy from the blue haired people.
| IainIreland wrote:
| Generally we say "real users" internally as a comparison to
| benchmarks, as in "this improves JetStream by 5%, but I don't
| think it will make any difference to real users".
| IshKebab wrote:
| What about memory usage? For some reason Chrome gets a lot of
| flak for this but Firefox is significantly worse in my
| experience. I'm considering switching just because of that. :/
| M95D wrote:
| > In order to measure the user experience, Firefox collects a
| wide range of anonymized timing metrics related to page load,
| responsiveness, startup and other aspects of browser performance.
|
| So, they collect lots and lots of telemetry and what do they do
| with it?
|
| > Let's start with page load. First Contentful Paint (FCP) is a
| better metric for felt performance than the `onload` event.
|
| Misinterpret and misuse it. Better, my a**.
|
| I can't describe how much I HATE pages that are rendered before
| they are completely loaded.
|
| I type an adress, I hit enter, and promptly I see the page
| content. I try to click a link or a button on the page, but guess
| what? Just before I click it, an image just loaded above the
| link. The link moved down from under the cursor, and now I click
| the image instead of the link. And the image IS AN AD!!!
|
| It's like FF devs are actually TRYING to make me click ads!
| someNameIG wrote:
| For normal use it does feel the same speed as Safari. But the
| font rendering seems a little of on macOS compared to
| Safari/Chrome, anyone else notice this?
| sillyalbatross wrote:
| Unfortunately Firefox still has a lot of issues when it comes to
| font rendering on macOS. For example, it's been two years and it
| still renders San Francisco incorrectly:
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1721612
|
| Not to mention all fonts appearing bolder than they should
| compared to Chrome and Safari. It might seem like a small thing
| but I'm a stickler for typography and it really stands out on a
| Mac.
|
| I hope they get around to fixing these issues but two years is a
| long time for such an obvious bug. What confuses me is how few
| people have noticed given that it seems to affect all Apple
| silicon devices.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| > Not to mention all fonts appearing bolder than they should
| compared to Chrome and Safari.
|
| No they don't. https://imgur.com/a/p9V4GdN
| sillyalbatross wrote:
| Interesting, must be only happening on some native MBP
| displays. I'm on an M1 MBP and haven't tested it on an
| external display but it's definitely noticeable on mine,
| although not as big of a deal as the letter spacing thing
| karmakaze wrote:
| I confirmed the letter spacing is still an issue by comparing
| the "How I digitize books" paragraph on Chrome and FF. _I had
| to override the CSS as the site has switched to "Newsreader,
| serif"._
|
| I don't see the fonts appearing bolder difference (on my 4k
| screen). Actually that's not true, I have seen differences on
| lower DPI displays. I get around that using BetterDisplay to
| enable HiDPI on the external. I've also never noticed San
| Francisco font rendering improperly which I only would if it
| didn't fit in a clipped box.
|
| Now that performance is largely improved, maybe they'll get
| around to fixing this one.
| ksec wrote:
| So after e10s, Quantum, Azure. Are there any upcoming major
| changes to Firefox or Gecko?
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Been using Firefox back since version 2 way back when.
|
| After all these years, it still does what I need, how I need it
| done. That's the best recommendation of a product I think I can
| give.
|
| Just about my only complaint is I wish there was a way to more
| quickly cancel saving a duplicate file. When the prompt appears
| with "this file already exists, do you want to overwrite?" it's
| much faster to just click "yes" than to click "no" and then drag
| the mouse down to "cancel" to close the window. Do this once it's
| no biggy. Do it hundreds or thousands of times and it gets
| obnoxious. Waste of bandwidth and disk writes, or waste of time.
|
| I know that sounds dumb, but it's one of the only pain points I
| have.
| sputr wrote:
| Great for them. The mobile app, at least for me, is getting
| unusuble. I have a crappy phone and reopening a page takes 3x the
| time opening a new tab and writing the url does.
|
| Even then it's still significantly slower than chrome, even with
| ads.
|
| I think it's time I find a different mobile browser with
| adblocking.
| rickstanley wrote:
| I really could not tell if it is better or not. But I've had 2
| problems that seems to never be resolved:
|
| - using hardware accelerated video decoding is bizarre if the
| video uses VP9 (even disabling it or forcing AV1) it stutters
| from time to time;
|
| - watching a video in the background and playing game at the same
| time, with hybrid graphics, freezes/hangs kWin, then, the video
| that was playing in the browser becomes green and everything that
| used either iGPU or dGPU starts to struggle and stutters a lot,
| forcing me to log in and out, i. e. restart my session manually;
|
| The last one may be because of Nvidia (yes, my fault for having
| this card) prime offload in Wayland, but even so, I did not find
| any topic related to this, that has not otherwise been solved in
| bugzilla, and honestly I am kind of afraid to report this and be
| met with judging questions; I'd like to debug some more, but I
| don't have the patience.
|
| These are the two ever lasting headaches that I have with
| Firefox. None of this bothers me enough to leave Firefox though.
|
| Anyway, my congratulations to the team. Today, I have
| successfully converted 5 people to use Firefox.
| cmplxconjugate wrote:
| That second point is something that drives me CRAZY. For years
| I would keep YouTube or Twitch streams open on the second
| monitor. Now I deal with constant fps loss, video stutters or
| freezing. Absolutely bizarre regression in performance.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Yup, I'll co-sign this. I'm using FF right now on inferior
| hardware and have done for quite a few years. Feels pretty new
| and snappy.
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