Google is where Microsoft was not long ago: engaging in self-destructive user-hostile behavior to protect their profit center. It can't work forever.
Chrome is definitely smoother on mobile but using extensions is worth it for me. Does Firefox Mobile's codebase closely match that of the desktop browser? Are their release schedules similar? Wondering if we should see it speed up with Firefox's latest improvements.
But it's not my experience that Chrome is smoother on mobile; it doesn't work very well and crashes often.
On desktop however (Windows) I still use Chrome, and I don't know why. Every time I launch FF I then come back to Chrome. I'm kind of ashamed of myself for it but can't quite pinpoint the real reason. Maybe FF looks a litle more "fragile", I don't know.
We are aware of the importance of those three things. They're all not-trivial problems to solve, but we're working on all three:
1) Performance is an insanely complex problem. We can't easily measure the "real" performance, in a scientific way. We can measure performance of so called "microbenchmarks" which can tell you that, for example, our JavaScript engine can perform X million regular expression computations per second. The X may be higher or lower than what Chakra or V8 can, but how it translates to real world experience is insanely complicated. What we know by now is that JS engine performance is not the problem. At this point all modern engines are fast. What we need to advance are things like performance of DOM, CSS, layout, painting and prioritization (ability to ensure that UI performance cannot be blocked by website's JS computations). We're working hard on several projects this year, under the umbrella of codename "quantum" that is aiming at making Firefox blazingly fast. We're taking lessons and code from Servo and applying it in Firefox. The end result, if we succeed, is that we'll have ability to perform DOM, layout, CSS and painting orders of magnitude faster (even if it's 2x it's still huge!). The other piece of performance, is what's called perceived performance. That one is even more tricky because it's all about what your brain tells you. In cognitive psychology and HCI there are tons of studies that prove that depending on how we use tricks like animation, colors, shapes and gimmicks like focus, we can trick your eye to think that things are faster or slower. Chrome is really good at that and kudos to them! I love watching their UI painting order in 120fps slow-mo just to see all the things they employed. Together with Quantum we're going to look into ways to improve the perceived performance of Firefox. I hope we'll get it right :)
2) On the privacy front we're working with Tor browser and we're also working on several projects aiming at disrupting the current way of browsing the Internet. Read about Firefox+Tor browser and Activity Streams if you're interested.
3) On the QA front, we've made major progress over the last year. That's a huge part of the technical debt that we had to remodel in 2016. We now have much better fuzzers, tests and APIs that makes it easier to write code that will not break. On top of that, multi-process helps us make sure that painting crash doesn't crash your browser, that plugins can't crash your browser and finally that content can't crash your browser. We also designed a whole new language that is significantly better suited to write security critical code than C++ is. It's called Rust and we just started moving pieces of our engine to it. If we can succeed with this, we should end up with a codebase of the unprecedented stability for a project this size and facing third-party code. If you're interested, read about Mozilla Oxidation project.
It is a major bet. We're betting on JS, we're betting on Rust. We're betting on Gecko and our ability to "change the engine mid-flight". I'm excited about the opportunity, but it's going to be a huge effort to pull it off.
If any of this is interesting for you, help us! We're a small team (compared to all other browser engines), but we have a culture that fosters community participation and I believe that we can compete and shape the Web together: https://whatcanidoformozilla.org/
Performance hasn't really been an issue for me, even on an ancient (6-year-old) laptop. Anything on shadertoy reliably kills it, but other than that it's been fine.
If I had to pick one thing that really needs improvement, it'd be the intersection of extensions and security. FF has always leaned heavily on extensions to avoid feature bloat in the core product, but I've never really been comfortable installing them because pretty much all of them seem to demand full access to page content on all sites, and that's a very uncomfortable ask for things like primary webmail or banking sites.
Now, you could imagine a honking great siteXextension matrix for this, bikeshed refinements until the cows come home and then bikeshed the cows, but I think you could get 95% of the way there with a way to persistently flag domains as "paranoid", and have all extensions disabled on those domains. Maybe something like this already exists, but if so I haven't been able to find it. The best advice seems to be "use a separate profile", but that's pretty inconvenient for heavily-used things like webmail.
Please, track Mozilla progress over the next months if you have the time. We're drafting a workforce to start the UX updates and I hope we'll get voices like yours well represented. I'll make sure to post about it on HN once we begin.
I'm not sure if it makes any difference whether its flash or html5 video.
Graphic driver bugs are nasty :)
Hope we'll be able to address it and remove the one and only reason you can't use Firefox!
Another out there idea would be a protocol handler for the IPFS protocol.
I also have some JS benchmarks from a real world app involving encryption and erasure coding in JS where Chrome significantly outperforms Firefox if you're interested (I'm talking 3.3X faster).
Happens for the map at Google Flights (https://www.google.de/flights/) that is the No 1 search result when googling for Flights (that's of course a clever move by Google to create a top site that only works fine with Chrome, I wonder how long it will take that YouTube or GMail only work "optimal" with Chrome)
Anyway, I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1329141 but this is only P3 priority (that is, marked a "valid" bug but nobody is working on it). Which I found really "strange" because website not working in Firefox and being force to temporally switching to Chrome (and maybe staying) are the worst that can happen. Eventually, when booking a flight I even had to tell other family members that they should use Chrome for it (who were surprised because normally I tell them to use Firefox ;)
P3 is not that bad tbh. I understand that for each one of us the bug that affects us is the most important one, but working with bugzilla is a bit like data mining. We have 1.3 million bugs reported and we track our respective components, cluster similar bugs and solutions and prioritize what is affecting most people in most crucial ways.
The fact that your bug got triaged and [gfx-noted] is a good sign. It's on their triageboard now and may soon get clustered with other Google website related graphics bugs. You'll get an email when it happens.
Thanks for your help!
That really depends how "normal" the user is.
If you have basic HTML/JS/CSS skills, you can try to minimize the testcase - https://css-tricks.com/reduced-test-cases/
If you don't, you can always contact the website author and inform him about performance problems and ask him to get in touch with us. He does have access to the whole website and could help us get a temporary account for us to investigate.
If you have more knowledge and curiosity, you can even use our performance devtools to generate a profile. It's actually fairly easy - just start recording in the performance tab and do what you would normally do that is slow.
Then file a bug and attach the profile.
This will give us an insight into what takes so much time. It may not be enough, but sometimes it is, and in those cases we are able to "peak" into what your Firefox is spending so much CPU cycles on.
It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing :)
You guys clearly care deeply about the web, and while I'm sure Google cares too I feel like their primary motivation is becoming more to do with maintaining their ad revenue sources than advancing the state of the art.
I've been a volunteer for Mozilla since 2000 and got hired in 2010. I've been through thick and thin, and I deeply believe in Mozilla Manifesto and care about the role we serve in making the Internet a public resource.
In the meantime, you can test more tab processes by increasing the "dom.ipc.processCount" pref in about:config. I set my process count limit to 999. :)
The UI said it was due to accessibility features.
Is there a timeline for getting it working with touch screens or has that already happened?