I'm about the same, I don't even know what the loading speeds issue is about, I still remember Firefox Quantum beating the daylights out of Chrome, and I don't know if Chrome ever fully caught up to Quantum?
What's really funny is for ages Chrome would load the browser window even if the whole browser UI wasn't done loading, and sometime after Quantum, Firefox started doing the same trick to make you feel as though it instantly runs.
I've been using Firefox for about 20 years or so, and I don't regret it, but also I have not noticed a degrade in performance. I'm using it on Linux so I don't know if that's drastically different on a Mac these days.
I don't have anything but anecdotal experience here, but I think Google Chrome was gaming Windows Defender better for awhile, when Windows Defender treats you poorly IO grinds to a halt and then some.
My experience on Linux running on very old hardware (4th Gen Intel) is also good. Firefox feels quick and snappy. It uses a reasonable amount of resources, and has a relatively modest memory footprint by modern browser standards. In comparison, Chromium makes my fans spin on every site and eats several GB of memory.
The annoying part of Firefox is that development seems a bit stagnant in some areas, especially taking into consideration the amount of resources Mozilla has. For example, bookmarks and history still rely on a very old native UI that is quite clunky. Customization via user.js is too imperative and most options are largely undocumented.
And no standard way to configure extensions is something I feel they could spearhead. Ofc extensions can store state however it wants, but more often than not I'm quite fond of my extension settings.
I've had various Firefox issues on Linux such as mysterious bad frame rate that I wasn't able to track down (despite toggling every feature related to gpu acceleration in about:flags), slow startup (which I found was due to some dbus configuration), and inability to print (apparmor blocked cups).
I'm certain people have issues, especially when you stick NVIDIA into the mix. I do always run rolling release software on "older"/well supported hardware with good drivers. (And I trust Firefox enough to not sandbox it though Flatpak or snaps)
It's just an anecdote, but I've had several FF issues on Windows, might be a timeline thing however.
Yes I hate how Ubuntu sandboxes firefox by default (even when you install it via apt, it secretly installs the snap instead). Terrible. I eventually had to use a PPA just to get firefox.
Also, Nvidia is non-negotiable due to performance requirements and local deep learning experiments. I think Nvidia has gotten a lot better lately, even Sway (Wayland window manager) works these days. Incidentally I think the bad firefox framerates were only on i3 and not on Sway.
I'm docking my NVIDIA GPU with the vfio driver and have an Intel cheapest dGPU for my desktop.
Then i attach the NVIDIA GPU to either a Windows VM or a NixOS one for gaming or "work".
It takes space and PCIe lanes to do so however, so I run SATA6 drives still :)
But if you can splurge, having multiple GPUs isn't unreasonable, as "Postgrest" docs says(0): Use a collection of sharp tools rather than building a big ball of mud.
I used to have both an AMD GPU and an Nvidia GPU and also dual boot Linux and Windows. But that is an incredible hassle. Nowadays, Nvidia on Linux works pretty well, and gaming on Linux on Steam often works flawlessly with one click, so it's more like a Swiss army knife rather than a big ball of mud.
I never dualboot, Linux runs my hardware. I just pass my NVIDIA GPU between different VMs.
I also wrote a little Python script that uses evdev to capture a numpad I bought and bind keys to different scripts that bind and unbind USB devices from my VMs for gaming.
I run sound though QEMU and pipewire and I get 45ms headphones to mic latency (measured with audacity) so slightly below 23ms latency. (I get essentially half doing the same measurement in Linux)
Nvidia is really the one hurdle preventing me from fully embracing firefox-- I've had a lot of trouble getting hardware acceleration on Wayland with Nvidia drivers. At this point, I'm not sure if it's a configuration issue or if it doesn't work at all.
The app itself is insanely slow to start up, and it always has been. Try killing Firefox and Chrome, open the browser via a link from another app and see how long it takes for the page to start rendering. I suggest a page with a different color background and nothing else. Chrome is always fast, while Firefox is almost always very slow (pinning the app to my recent list helps on Samsung devices, but isn't available elsewhere)
This is actually not a good test because there are a lot of tricky and subtle things that can make the comparison highly unfair. Smartphones will cache apps so that they don't fully close. Then, if you do actually force kill them they will start up in the background.
Are we surprised a Google phone caches the Google browser which is considered to be a high priority app, commonly used, and even the backbone of other apps?
It is a realistic user scenario, which in my opinion makes it a good test. The real world performance is what matters here. The user doesn't care if technically there is some trick that is being used to "cheat."
> The user doesn't care if technically there is some trick that is being used to "cheat."
You framed the "benchmark" around performance, not perceived performance. Those are two very different things. We're on HN, so don't be surprised when people correct you or nitpick. Either accept the clarification (if it is correct), clarify what you originally intended to say (without being overly defensive), or move on.
Besides, if we're talking about average user, they're not force closing apps and the phone should be caching the most frequently used apps. So even then the test won't mimic real world experience even if it's about perception. Maybe initially, but not after sustained usage. People usually normalize to whatever they're using
The device should be absolutely caching the most recently used apps, yes. Force closing is unnecessary, but I manage my apps on my phone not because I want to close background apps, but because I want to keep certain apps running (I don't care about steam or my email or messenger, etc, they open fast; the browser is slow and I want that to stay loaded).
Unfortunately, I can dismiss/force-close all apps on my phone, open Firefox, switch to the home screen--and when I switch back it has to start up again fresh about 25% of the time.
The only reliable way I've found to use termux (as an ssh client, not anything high-resource) and Firefox at the same time is to use multi window, dragging termux out of the way of the keyboard every time I switch, as Firefox will regularly need to be reloaded otherwise; if I'm on certain heavy or lazy-loading websites or using a link with a hash in it, it'll then also lose my scroll position. This is particularly frustrating when I ssh into minimized containers with no command completion or man pages.
This is true, but it also applies to not just the chrome browser by Google itself, but also to derivatives (I don't actually use chrome proper unless I need to disable adblock; I still use Kiwi browser for my PWAs, because you can't export your browser profile from one device to another for Chrome[1])
[1]: you actually can with devtools and dexie import export, but it always times out for my databases. Meanwhile on Firefox you can just use devtools to backup the entire profile directory and then replace it in-place.
I browse with Orion (for ad blocking) but still have Firefox installed because I can click Share -> Firefox -> Send Tab. Maybe I stumble upon a video I want to watch but not now. Maybe I stumble upon a long form article or reference or something that just is shitty on a mobile interface and I push it to the computer I'm literally sitting next to while having my phone in hand too.
What I've found recently is that Linux is surprisingly Firefox's achilles' heel. Canvas and WebGL run easily an order of magnitude slower than Chromium.
Check with https://webglsamples.org if you don't believe it. All of it runs capped at 60 fps on Chrome for me, Firefox struggles to break 30 on mid tier settings in aquarium and stutters horribly throughout most of them. I'm sure it's fast at loading static sites, but I wouldn't ever use it to run any web app. On Windows they're both the same though, which is weird to me.
I didn't believe it and after trying those samples, I still don't. All of them run flawlessly for me on FF 104.0.4 on an up-to-date Arch install on my laptop.
Also not seeing any issues, on Firefox 140.0.1 (via Flatpak) on Aeon (GNOME, Wayland). Everything's at my screen's native 165fps (except for the very first aquarium demo, which bottoms out at around 45fps with the maximum number of fish).
Wayland or X11? I'm on Kubuntu and from what I remember reading a while back it may be Firefox using something native on X11 that Chrome rolls its own thing for, but I may be misremembering.
Linux should be the focus. Windows Recall is a hell-to-the-no for me, and then having to have 'cloud accounts' to log in on desktops should be demonized. "Oh but you can just run brew for all your .." -- No, no I can't.
FF, being a pioneer of privacy (not anymore, with anonym adds): Go to Settings -> type 'advert', turn that off.
FF, being a major player in FOSS, and community (irc.mozilla.org etc), now I think they do matrix
Many Firefox devs are on Linux; however note that not many Firefox users are on Linux (mostly because desktop Linux has a much much smaller userbase than Windows or Mac). About 4% are Linux, looks like 8-10% Mac, the rest Windows:
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware
I've tried perhaps one third of the samples. All of them ran in 120 fps in 3840x2160 px in Firefox on Linux on my machine. Perhaps it is a configuration problem. My screen has a 120 fps refresh rate, so it probably is capped there.
Aquarium: 60fps until 20k fish, where I hit 50fps. 30k at 34fps
Blobs: maxed out resolution and number of blobs, still 60fps
Field: 60fps at "lots"
Fishtank: 60fps with 1k fish and sharks
Spacerocks: 60fps on lots
Sprites: 60fps on 10k
Try indexeddb. Apparently Firefox is faster than Chrome in recent years when it comes to putting items into a database, but my experience with multi-gigabyte databases (the database contains image blobs and metadata for use as a local webapp) is that chrome is far faster than Firefox. I'd rather use Firefox sure to increased indexeddb limits (for mobile devices with limited storage), but it's just that much slower. I have a chrome-based browser installed on my phone just for PWA use.
Hmm that might also be contributing to dogshit Firefox performance on a web app of mine, I'm using that to store and fetch map tiles. Though that's all async so it shouldn't really matter in terms of rendering aside from having to wait a bit longer to retrieve.
But it already lags like fuck even without that part running or anything much at all, while being buttersmooth on Chrome almost regardless of how much I load up rendering. It infuriates me to hell because there is no optimization I can make to get equal or even usable performance.
I ran some of these in comparison with Chrome, and Chrome was consistently faster, but only marginally (1-20%). I'm actually quite impressed, an integrated Intel HD 620 / 4x2.4 GHz (!) rendering 10,000 fishes at 30 FPS in a webbrowser.
For reference my numbers are for an RTX 4070, Firefox has no excuse for not being able to crack 60 fps on a demo that looks like it's from the late 2000s in terms of graphics.
Isn't the fps capping? I'm pretty confident it is because it won't go above that on my system even when I do a trivial number of fish and my monitor maxes out at 60fps...
> on a demo that looks like it's from the late 2000
Okay... now I think I shouldn't take you seriously...
The literal visual aesthetics aren't really important for the test. You could place some nicer shaders and it wouldn't necessarily change the compute load. Hell, it could just be highly unoptimized. Benchmarks are mostly about having something static to test, not making something visually pleasing.
I'm half kidding, it's entirely possible to overload any GPU with too many draw calls with the end result not looking like much. These fish would run reasonably well on something from that era though I'm sure, it's no GTA San Andreas.
But no it's not capped at 30, it jumps to like 33, 34 sometimes with those settings, it's capped to 60 like Chrome as well. Probably vsync.
I'm running Gazebo at 10 times realtime and inference through cuda, trust me it's working. If Firefox doesn't take advantage of it that's its problem. I've enabled every config setting for acceleration I could find.
What's really funny is for ages Chrome would load the browser window even if the whole browser UI wasn't done loading, and sometime after Quantum, Firefox started doing the same trick to make you feel as though it instantly runs.
I've been using Firefox for about 20 years or so, and I don't regret it, but also I have not noticed a degrade in performance. I'm using it on Linux so I don't know if that's drastically different on a Mac these days.