I don't know why people choose their browser based on resource usage. You can have a browser run by a company looking to loot the public good for their own gain, or a non-profit looking to keep the web open and free.

Hold on I'm going to pick the one that's marginally faster and more ram efficient...

> Hold on I'm going to pick the one that's marginally faster and more ram efficient...

In both cases, people are choosing products because they're better. "Better" for most favors properties of the product. "Better" for you favors the politics of the product. Both are completely valid approaches.

Eeeehhh... He's arguing for principles and I'm not comfortable with the claim that not having principles is every bit as valid as having them.

It's a pretty big leap from someone not sharing your exact principles to them not having principles at all.

I'd say that's a pretty uncharitable reading of my comment! That wasn't intended, to be clear.

> Hold on I'm going to pick the one that's marginally faster and more ram efficient...

It's about immediate pain vs future gain. People are susceptible to temporal discounting.

Exactly. Come on, we're engineers we understand basic tradeoffs.

I've always thought "browser performance" was a trope (relic?) from when tabs were new and chrome did tabs the best.

If I can't have ublock origin, I'm going back to internet explorer 11.

I think you should look more in to FF financials. They are not exactly as liberated as you are thinking.

There is the Mozilla Foundation which holds all the IP, governs development, and provides supporting infrastructure.

Then there is the Mozilla Corporation-- the profit seeking portion of the conglomerate. They are guiding product development and contracts which will either bring profit now, or in the future. Think about their big forced Pocket feature. This is a future profit driver, if it is not already.

Source where FF gets the lions share of their funds.

I'm not saying they are bad, but use some critical thinking and stop making corporations heros, generally. Hold them accountable.

Be aware, use your voice, vote with your patronage.

Is your firefox using Webrender?

Vanilla firefox is slower than chrome but WebRender is noticeably faster than chrome. Chrome on a 4K monitor slows down to a crawl, but WebRender handles it like a champ. It can be easily enabled with a flag.

If any firefox devs are reading this

- Can you please make this a default?

- Can you please fix text rendering on mobile? Sites like reddit render at desktop resolution on mobile screen, and there is no clear text sizing that works. With Chrome I just set my size option and move on with life.

Can we just say it? Reddit's redesigne has made it measurably less performant and harder to us. Nothing happens when u press a link for about half a second. They clearly switched to some kind of spa but I don't understand why.

It's why I usually use the old i.reddit.com

I mean if their crappy mobile site encourages you to switch to their annoying app, I guess they consider it mission accomplished?

We are working on making it default on more platforms, see https://arewewebrenderyet.com/

This doesn't work as HTTPS. http://arewewebrenderyet.com/

I have webrender testing enabled and three days ago I opened Firefox Nightly and the UI was completely wrecked due some unexpected WebRender bug that was fixed after updating. So I’m glad they’re testing it on expert users first :)

EDIT: Nope, I’m not one of the default-on “safe” configurations.

It's basically in testing, they might break on too many machines were it made default

I could be wrong, but AFAIK, webrender is the default on latest versions.

It is enabled by default for a small subset of system configurations (Windows desktop machines with AMD or NVIDIA GPU).

The matrix is more complicated.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where

In some configurations you have to set a config flag to enable it.

Hey, I think this site's audience is technical enough that it's okay to just give them the name of the option: about:config -> gfx.webrender.all -> true

Go to about:support and search for WebRender to check if it worked.

Works great for me with Kubuntu 19.10 / Mesa / AMD. It didn't work when I tried it a couple of months ago.

And only if you don't have a battery.

Benchmarks on e.g phoronix doesn't show webrender as being as fast as chrome, not even close.

I can't notice any real difference, having been using Nightly (dev) edition for a full year now. Incidentally, my company (one of the largest tech in the world) uses Firefox by default (and nobody had any reason to switch).

Google simply can't be trusted with all that ads stuff

You should try installing the extensions that help FF become faster than Chrome: Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin and optionally HTTPS Everywhere.

Have you tried a fresh profile as a test? It’s possible you have about:config settings or other random hacker detritus that may be leading to slowness.

I would interpret efficiency in terms of resource usage, not just clock time.

Agreed. Plus it doesnt have Picture-in-picture

But I use FF as my main

I recommend using the "Open With" extension with mpv. This allows you to right click on any sort of video link that youtube-dl supports and launch that link in mpv. mpv has a "stay on top" feature that can be enabled by default when mpv is invoked in this way. The result is picture-in-picture that supports virtually every video site on the net.

Happy to tell you that PIP functions if you enable in in config!

Only on Windows.

PIP is a good point, not supporting play/stop via Bluetooth is another for me personally.

it does though, at least in beta

Firefox scroll lags like 500ms behind my input, on my mbp. How does anyone live like that?

"I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard statements like the following.

  Firefox crashes ten times a day for me.
  I don’t understand how anyone can use it.

There’s a simple answer: for most people it doesn’t crash ten times a day. But the person making the statement hasn’t realized that what links the first sentence to the second is an assumption — that other people’s experiences are the same.", quoted from https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/01/02/yeinu-your-e...

I have some sympathy for those complaints: I've been using Firefox since 2004, but for whatever reason I can't use it on my lab computer. It's a ThinkPad t430 running windows 10, and on that machine Firefox will slow the machine to an absolute crawl even with only 3 tabs open. I spent an hour trying to diagnose it to no avail (I can't just install Linux, I have some serial hardware that is windows-only) before just giving up and switching to chrome.

However, this is the only time I've encountered this issue, and I tend to think it's more likely an issue with the windows installation than Firefox. I'm just too lazy to reinstall, this isn't my main computer after all.

> It's a ThinkPad t430 running windows 10, and on that machine Firefox will slow the machine to an absolute crawl even with only 3 tabs open.

You can try taking a profile and reporting it -- developers may have some ideas: https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Mozilla/Performance/Repor...

I feel exactly the same when I read people saying that Firefox is faster than Chrome. It's been exactly the opposite for me and for everybody else I know on all kinds of computers and mobile phones.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=firefox6...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=firefox6...

Personally, I'm working towards moving to Vivaldi...

By disabling smooth scrolling (available in settings). Feels much snappier to me

But then you don't have smooth scrolling.

Enabling apz kinetic scrolling is another approach. That cuts the lag by about 90%, getting it much closer to chrome.

Exactly. This is what fixed this issue for me as well. What I haven't been able to fix is that new windows open rather slowly.

I'm so used to scrolling by keypress (i.e. any of the vim-like extensions), with smooth scrolling disabled and a higher scroll step, that I just recently noticed that this reduces resource usage/heat.

My setup:

1. Firefox Nightly

2. WebRender enabled

3. Tracking Protection set to Strict + DuckDuckGo extension

Not sure if its representative, but I am extremely picky about framerates and jitter. On Ubuntu 19.10 Beta with Firefox 69.0.3 it feels noticeably faster than my Macbook.

Something must be weird with your machine. My mbp is from 2009 and Firefox scrolls smoothly.

It's smooth as butter on my early 2015 macbook air too. I suspect the issue is related to "retina" screens, which I don't have. (a 2009 mbp doesn't either iirc, right?)

Smooth on my mbp early 2015 as well. It's not related to Retina.

I believe some people have narrowed it down to retina screens set to a non integer scaling.

I usually scroll with the spacebar which doesn't appear to have any lag to me.