Firefox for me is MUCH faster on all hardware I use it on, without or without extensions.
Chrome feels bloated and sluggish... Firefox just flies, and never slows down. I don't understand where complaints of FF performance come from... personally, I've never experienced an issue, on my i7 desktop or my horrible m3 Surface.
To me, it's Firefox that feels like the physical machinery, while Chrome is a piece of software, and a bloated, creepy, predatory one at that.
>Write bindings to all relevant OS composition libraries. For Windows, we already have DirectComposition bindings, and for Linux, there are already bindings to Wayland. We need bindings for macOS Core Animation (which runs in the window server on relatively recent versions of macOS) and Android SurfaceFlinger.
https://github.com/servo/webrender/issues/3115
On the Mac you can pick up performance improvements now by opting out of the OS's window scaling feature for the Firefox app.
Get info for the Firefox app in the Finder and select the option to "Open in Low Resolution".
I'd happily contribute to a patreon or something if it meant increasing the chances of having a usable version of firefox on my mac at some point.
For the people who suffer the bugs ( which seems to be a majority of users that have a retina display, and specifically those who use it set on high resolution) just opening firefox will quickly lead to the macbook's fans spinning at full throttle and battery drain. There are issues opened and development supposedly in progress, but it's been like that for months if not years. At this point I would take whatever could speed up the process...
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
I don't think Firefox can fix all the bugs at the same pace Chromium can.
For some reason every time I talk about these bugs on the internet people treat it as a weird edge case I'm going through, but talking IRL with people about Firefox everyone seems to know how unusable it is in a Mac - not only in my circle of acquaintances.
Firefox does not use Core Animation, unlike Chrome and Safari, which causes an extra full-window blit on GPU in some cases. It also uses a transparent window, so macOS has to composite the content behind the window whenever Firefox draws. I have a patch in there to improve things, as well as a crate planeshift to help the situation with WebRender, but the patch causes some usability regressions so it has not landed. In the meantime you can set gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true in about:config to get an opaque window at the cost of rounded window corners and vibrancy.
From what I've seen on the chromium bug tracker, Google has been on a ~5 year crusade to improve Mac performance. Around half the issues Ive seen include something like "We don't know what Mac does here, let's ask some people at the next conference" (these were core rendering performance bugs). I totally get why Firefox can't compete with that. It's fast on the platforms that don't seem to be hell-bent on making custom rendering slow.
"What if we stopped trying to guess what layers we need? What if we removed this boundary between painting and compositing and just went back to painting every pixel on every frame?
This may sound like a ridiculous idea, but it actually has some precedent. Modern day video games repaint every pixel, and they maintain 60 frames per second more reliably than browsers do. And they do it in an unexpected way… instead of creating these invalidation rectangles and layers to minimize what they need to paint, they just repaint the whole screen.
Wouldn’t rendering a web page like that be way slower?
If we paint on the CPU, it would be. But GPUs are designed to make this work."
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-f...
Any modern CPU and GPU can do a lot of DMA and copying of memory in a very short amount of time, but that doesn't mean it'll be efficient wrt. power... which is what I think you were 'complaining' about?
You can feel this by playing any 3D shooter on your laptop and see the battery being sucked empty.
As for Chrome, I used to use it a lot, but the privacy concerns and controls it comes with bothered me too much to want to continue to use it on any of my systems.
Firefox containers are also essential to me while browsing the web - I don’t know if Chrome provides anything similar.
I have a really hard time understanding where this commenter is coming from saying FF > Chrome. Have not heard anyone else with that opinion.
1. On Linux - Firefox feels much more snappier than Chrome. Specically on Fedora, Chrome as a input lag which is non-existant in Firefox.
2. On Windows and Mac - Chrome is either on-par or feels snappier. I use either browser on these on two platforms.
3. On Android (galaxy-s8+), Firefox is fine but it integrates poorly with rest of the OS. Youtube links don't open in youtube app, searching for locations is bit of pain because Chrome produces Google maps hyperlinks.
I am still sticking to firefox though, because my main computer is Linux and Firefox is just to much better on Linux (lately).
It is odd; I don't dispute that Firefox evidently has some performance issues for some people – there are enough reports from people on varied enough hardware that I don't doubt the authenticity of what people are reporting.
But personally, for me Firefox is noticeably faster than Chrome, and I know I'm definitely not the only one.
For reference: I run Windows 10 (currently 1803) on i7-7700K/32GB with typically 20-30 tabs across multiple windows; Firefox RAM consumption can be up to 4GB after a whole day's use like that. I never find the browser slows down at all, and is always immediately snappy and responsive... whereas Chrome, in a way which is hard to quantify or describe, does feel as though it's a few milliseconds behind me sometimes.
I also find the same on my truly atrocious m3/4GB Surface though (massively regret that one, "should be alright for what I need" I thought as I reached the checkout, should have known better). Chrome quickly kills the Surface, Firefox manages to keep going far longer...
So in conclusion... I don't dispute that some people find Firefox to be slower, but I know for sure that isn't true of everyone. I have no complaints whatsoever about Firefox performance and have been using it daily for 18+ months (switched from Vivaldi... now there's a browser which has performance issues, for me at least...)
My hunch is the CPU is the differentiator. Chrome eats RAM, FF eats CPU. Maybe someone with more knowledge here has a more educated guess.
I did recently update my BIOS and it improved FF performance dramatically, reinforcing my belief it's the CPU. Pre and post spectre fix or whatever.
This also frees up my RAM for other memory intensive operations leading me to use Firefox more often.
Some of those tabs will be lightweight, like GitLab issues, forums or webpages I'm building, whereas others will be more complex sites and web apps... Office 365 apps, YouTube, social networks, Figma instances etc.
Firefox will consume sometimes 4GB or more by the end of the day.
I run an i7-7700K and 32GB of RAM though, so it's never going to get near a low-memory situation. I'll end the day with about 50% total system memory consumption... no app is individually too demanding, just I run a ton of things simultaneously and because there's so much RAM available, Windows never has to take action to kill anything or reclaim memory back again.
This is particularly evident in UWP apps (although I hardly ever use them)... if I open one at 9am and close it, I can then reopen at 9pm and it will be there instantaneously despite effectively being cold start from user perspective, because it's been suspended in RAM all day!
Right now I'm sitting at 50.2% RAM consumption, of which Firefox is using 2.1 GB over 7 processes.
Next biggest are Figma (400 MB on a big document), Microsoft Teams, Spotify... oh yeah, Electron RAM usage is still abominable. But I don't need to worry about it ;)
Sadly, I still find Chrome to be much easier to work with for dev than Firefox. Firefox has made great progress lately with the devtools, and the new bits like Grid Inspector are awesome, but it's sad the basics still aren't there.
It's the little things... Firefox still displays cryptic JavaScript errors with internal stack traces, whereas Chrome gives clear explanations and always links the stack to a line in my code. That's just one example, none of the issues I have are anything major really in isolation, but together, I find Firefox less efficient to dev with than Chrome.
The sad thing... I really, really wish this wasn't the case, because it unfortunately reinforces the point made in the article.
Despite all my best intentions, I do end up building for Chrome first. I loathe and resent that but it saves me time overall. Every new release I try Firefox tools again though and I'm confident they're going in the right direction... hopefully in another few months, I'll be able to report back and confirm I use Firefox as my primary dev browser too.
Stability and performance are about the same, in my experience. Neither are perfect. Though it's been at least a year since I really used Chrome so I can't say for sure.
One thing you could try to see if Firefox speeds up by changing the number of processes it creates (defaults to 4) to 8, esp if you're on a machine with considerable RAM (16GiB+).
As for web-dev tools, doesn't Firefox ship a developer-only edition? Might want to try that out.
[0] On the flip side, you might want to try Chromium-based Brave or Vivaldi instead.
I highly value my privacy; I switched to iOS because of it. I only use Chrome at work. I've got comprehensive content blockers set up on mobile Safari, which is where most of my personal browsing happens.
> As for web-dev tools, doesn't Firefox ship a developer-only edition?
I'd assume that's a version designed for developers who work on Firefox itself, not developers who use Firefox to work on the web. There would be no reason for them to omit some of their dev tools from the regular builds.
> On the flip side, you might want to try Chromium-based Brave or Vivaldi instead.
I tried and loved Vivaldi for a little while, until I ran into a catastrophic dev tools bug (can't remember what exactly). I also enjoyed Brave for a while, but it ended up being too slow too (this was when it had an Electron interface instead of being a fork, so it's probably better now).
That is a an incorrect assumption:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/
And why would there be no reason to omit these tools? If they're only going to see the light of day when a developer is using them, they're a waste of space for the average user, correct?
I don't know how it is for other people, but the way Firefox's scroll works on mobile makes me want to not do anything on it. If Firefox were my only option to browse the internet on my phone then I just wouldn't.
But multiple forks of it are, Brave being the chief example. The rendering and JavaScript engines do not impact privacy.
> A browser fueled by huge amounts of corporate money is generally going to look and act better, but at the end of the day, you're still corporately controlled, open source or not.
Partly true. They hold a certain amount of leverage, which I agree it would be great if they didn't have, but they can't just do whatever they want or people will simply jump ship. There's a ceiling on how hard they can push things in a given direction at a given moment. Of course they can push slowly over an extended period of time, which is the real danger. But I still think enough people are paying attention that the power center would shift if they started truly abusing it.
Actually they absolutely do. You need to do mitigations against fingerprinting in order to protect privacy.
In 10 years Chrome will be to internet browsers what Vista was to the OS. Bloated, over-built, poorly thought out, and a complete dumpster fire. By giving Google such a one-sided market share we're encouraging them to stop taking us seriously. They already don't, but at least right now they have to pretend.
Does anyone else remember how fast they added an opt-out of single sign-on to Chrome after the outcry from 69? We won't have the luxury of moving those mountains when Google has the last mountain around.
There's also plenty of little UX niceties you don't even notice on Chrome, but which are missing on Firefox. Eg. if you create a new bookmarks folder and you add a bookmark to it, this folder stays selected as the default option when you're adding another bookmark. This doesn't happen on Firefox for some reason.
Or, another example off the top of my head: I always customize my browsers so that the next tab gets open right next to the current one - not at the end. There are lightweight extensions for both browsers that accomplish just that. But only on Firefox the new tab jumps back and forth when you open it; opening at the end for a fraction of a second, then bouncing back where I want it. On Chrome it's instantaneous.
Or downloading files: Chrome automatically shows a download bar for an ongoing download, and you can open the freshly downloaded file right from there. Firefox doesn't do it. You have to manually tap a rather discreet arrow icon on the toolbar to open the downloads list. (Which you may even forget to, if we speak of a large download that takes several minutes). Maybe there's some extension for that, but Chrome has this by default.
Translating webpages is another one. There are several extensions available for Firefox, but not one of them comes close to the convenience Chrome offers by default in this regard.
I know a lot these are arguably petty things, but boy is there so many of them. And I think at least the majority of don't really fall into the "matter of taste" category. Chrome simply offers more polished user experience, and while these may be details, at the end of the day all these details add up.
The very few times I have experienced such a thing, a peek at the console tells me that FF is blocking the page from doing something insecure or otherwise harmful.
It reminds me of ActiveX stuff. Junky webcams still ship with an ActiveX control to embed video into their html page. When it doesn't work in FF or Chrome, some people think IE6 is a superior browser.
I don't know the reason behind your various broken pages. It could be something is wrong with FF. But it could also be that something is _right_ with FF. If you don't know which, why are you complaining about FF?
I'm not complaining about FF. I'm complaining about my experience using FF. I'm not attributing blame, only stating facts.
Even if it's something wrong with the websites as you say, what matters to me is whether I can use them or not.
And by the way, quietly blocking the page without any sort of a message or warning to the user would be more evidence of bad UX in my book. I shouldn't have to go the console to find out how the browser decided to protect me, if that's the case.
Whenever I tried to share my woes with friends or colleagues who used Firefox or chrome, they just went like "well you can have feature x too by installing add-on y". But it was the little things, the way things worked in detail, were laid out etc. And it's very hard to explain this to someone who has always done it another way, or never got used to a certain feature in the first place.
I kept using opera 12 for almost two years after they retired it, until just too much stuff was inaccessible due to the browsers age. Then followed a confusing time of using Firefox, chromium and Vivaldi in parallel, eventually drifting to Firefox, in recent times driven by growing reluctance towards google and the building up of their browser (or engine) monopoly.
The odd font rendering is another problem. Fonts in Firefox look different than fonts in other native apps.
Actually what annoys me more on mobile is that chrome seems much better at guessing right where I wanted to touch on non-mobile websites. On HN I can hit the upvote button easily, with Firefox I need to smash several times and sometimes even zoom in in frustration. OTOH I can just install ublock origin on ff mobile and make browsing much faster, especially since I'm using a rather old device; the difference is huge.
We are now getting back to IE days it seems .... :(
I've been using Firefox since the Bush administration and never felt a need to switch. Like a lot of people, I experimented with Chrome in college, but at the time it didn't have an equivalent to many of the extensions I valued (ex: NoScript).
Could I get a slight performance boost switching to Chrome? Maybe. But I don't. I guess for the same reason I stick with my credit union - they accomplish what I need, I trust they won't screw me over, and I think the market needs to be more diverse. Getting an extra bit of percent in speed/interest just isn't worth the switch.
(In the spirit of full disclosure, I interned with Mozilla in the summer of 2014.)
OSS but owned totally by google.
I don't believe such a product should get any credit for being OSS. It will never do what the community wants.
This exists as:
I do like Firefox on Android though as you can block ads on it. Chrome for Android doesn't support plugins.
DOM instruction speed, last I checked, was twice as fast in Chrome compared to Edge but still dozens to hundreds of time slower than Firefox.
Riding my bike everywhere is inconvinient. If I take my car to the grocery shop, I'm much faster and don't get wet, even if I'm wasting a lot of energy and causing more traffic.
Using ecosia is more inconvinient than using Google because 1 out of 10 times ecosia has no idea what I'm searching for.
My point being that no one is saying switching away from chrome is all roses. There is a small sacrifice to be made for what I believe is the greater good. I'm a developer and use Firefox as my development environment 99% of the time - the dev tools are pretty good. I do switch to chrome that 1% of times if I find a trickier bug to debug.
1) Opposite experience for me: Chrome loads things slowly and performing actions on pages just feels far less responsive than FF. Chrome also seems to use insane amounts of memory for a few tabs, while FF is a lot more reasonable.
2) You're probably right on this one, I don't use dev tools often.
3) The whole reason I switched to FF on Android was to run uBlock. Can Chrome on mobile run extensions yet?
And this problem has been around for years. It makes Firefox unusable for me on a phone.
1) It's simply not as responsive. They've worked really hard to keep up with Chrome, and I respect that, and the recent overhaul did make a big difference. But Chrome just feels like a piece of physical machinery, where Firefox still feels like a piece of software.
2) The dev tools are just not quite as good. As with general performance, they've always been very close, but there's just something about them that's off. Enough to disrupt my work.
3) Firefox mobile, at least on Android, has weird high-friction scrolling behavior that doesn't match the rest of the OS and feels terrible, and there's no way to turn it off.
I use Firefox for casual browsing on my gaming desktop, but that's about it. I'm rooting for them, but there are just improvements that still need to be made.
On the bright side, Chromium is 99% OSS (as opposed to Android, which is like 70% OSS). I think a fork could become a competitor if Google took the project in a direction that was just really egregiously bad. Let us not forget that Chrome's rendering engine, Blink, was itself a fork of Safari's WebKit.