> Of course everyone likes a responsible browser, but I actually didn't see that much difference.
Same here. The only difference I noticed was startup speed when restoring 200+ tabs; that was indeed far faster in Quantum, but I never noticed any other speed improvements. And it was something I only encountered once every couple of weeks anyway.
what OS though? It seems like only Windows users really saw speed improvements
Ah, I didn't really catch that, but it would make sense. I use Ubuntu.
Re:State of web browsers in 2018
by Wowfunhappy on Thursday December 06, 2018 @01:58PM
(#18620948)
I said this up-thread, but Firefox Quantum made me switch back to Firefox, after years away. I noticed a marked speed improvement.
For Single Tab instances, Chrome and Safari still wins. For multiple Tabs, Firefox wins hands down.
But the majority of users rarely open more than a few.
Firefox will need to continue iterate, until it is as fast or even faster in every corner.
exactly what i saw - i regularly use over 200 tabs and in Chrome the performance goes to hell above that number (even on i7 6700k - also managing tabs is PITA), while Firefox just keeps chugging without any problems
I use ~1200 tabs. I used to deal with what you and ksec experienced in Chrome by periodically killing all Google Chrome Helper processes, and a few months ago switched to Firefox (less sluggish) from Chrome. Last week I decided to try Chrome again and was pleased to find that (with the same tab set) Chrome 71 is amazingly fast; new tabs open instantly, I can immediately enter a search query or URL, and the browser remains stable over time. So it's back to Chrome for me; it is now only slow when starting for the first time, when it processes the 1200 tabs for a few minutes.
(I do use The Great Discarder, but did so before switching to Firefox, too.)
When Firefox decided to attack the problem of market share with engineering, 2 things were happening (almost) at the same time[1]: 1) the deprecation of the old add-on engine and 2) the introduction of the new Quantum engine.
For the 1), while I understand there are some reasons in doing so (it was not a stable API as it was always breaking the extensions and security-wise), I think these problems could be managed. On the other hand, there were lots of good add-on depended on this API.
Particularly, even when Firefox was behind technically-speaking, that was the main reason I used it. Firefox replaced the old API without offering all the new interfaces with the new API. So, I lost what made Firefox really unique.
For the 2), I think it was a consequence for the 1). Firefox was finally "better" with Quantum. Of course everyone likes a responsible browser, but I actually didn't see that much difference. And there was another browser which was already really good: Chrome.
Suddenly, there was no real advantage in using Firefox anymore. Someone my say privacy. But in some corners of the Internet, it's already impossible to navigate without some privacy-wise add-on/extension, which usually work on both browsers.
Added to these, if you go deep down, security-wise there are some real technical advantages in running Chrome instead of Firefox in some OSs. For instance:
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=152872551609819&w=2
[1] I'm pretty sure a lot of other things were happening, but I'm in the perspective of the user here.