Firefox with uMatrix will smoke Chrome without it, in nearly any real world use-case.

This is an excellent point. There is absolutely no way a browser which loads and executes ad-loading and tracking script can be possibly be faster than one that doesn't.

It's the same reason why Firefox for Android it's faster that Chrome android

Yeah, even with all the speed increases from the rewrite, Firefox still feels awkward and slow at times when compared to Safari and Chrome. Every time I decide to try and switch over from Safari, I get pages where scroll performance is a lot slower than what I'm used to and then I get bothered by it and switch back.

It annoys me because I really want to use it. I'm very happy that we have it and I hope that the wider community will hold Mozilla to account every time they try something shady to protect the best free and open browser we have. If we lose Firefox, we lose the Internet to corporations.

This is strange, because Firefox is much faster than Safari for me. Have you tried Firefox Nightly?

I haven't but I'll give it a shot, thank you!

If you want to try their experimental GPU rendering (webrender) you can enable it via about:config -> gfx.webrender.all = true

It works well on windows, I don't know how far the mac support is.

Note that the WebRender can only be enabled in the Firefox Nightly channel. To confirm that it's working, flip the pref, restart Firefox Nightly, and then search for "WebRender" in about:support.

WebRender does work on macOS (and Android and maybe Linux), but Mozilla is prioritizing a Windows MVP first (because something like 90% of Firefox users are on Windows). Work on macOS, Linux, and Android will then resume.

Also good to start with a fresh profile[1], lots of times you may have some cruft built up in an old profile.

1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

> I'm very happy that we have it and I hope that the wider community will hold Mozilla to account every time they try something shady to protect the best free and open browser we have. If we lose Firefox, we lose the Internet to corporations.

Yet how long will we have it if everyone keeps using excuses to continue using Chrome?

Firefox on Windows is no slower as far as I can tell, and renders fonts better.

Firefox on Mac is noticeably slower.

In my experience Firefox on Mac got a good amount faster in the last year.

Agreed. While I still use it, Firefox on Mac just hangs on some js-intensive sites.

Came upon this review the other day, that placed Firefox on #1. Didn't read the detailed report (I'm on FF and feeling happy), but maybe worth a look: https://www.toptenreviews.com/software/internet/best-interne...

Hey, you should give w3m a try then.