Chrome takes 102-200ms to render the page, Firefox takes 150-400ms. 1.5 to 2x slower -- and that's after all the performance upgrades they've done with Rust and Quantum.
Network inspector says Firefox is spending 150-270ms "blocked" before it even initiates the connection. On Chrome the block is 3-18ms (15-50x (!!) faster).
There's also UI lag. When I press Ctrl+N, I expect a new window to open immediately. Chrome and Chromium based browsers do that. I cannot even perceive the delay between pressing Ctrl+N and a new window appearing. With Firefox it takes about 0.5-1 seconds before anything happens at all. This seems to be another 10-20x difference (though I'd have to record my screen and measure the difference).
Curiously, Re: UI lag, I think the actual time until the navbar is usable is about the same. But Firefox waits until the whole window is built before it displays it, while Chrome opens the window immediately and fills it in. From a user experience (I do command, I expect feedback) this makes a huge difference.
I switch back to Firefox roughly once a year after reading how fast it's gotten. But I have been disappointed on this front every single time. I want Firefox to succeed, I really do. I am donating to Mozilla every month. But as it is right now, I can't tolerate such lag, for a trivial action I perform thousands of times a day.
How did you actually measure this? I wonder whether these small timing differences may just be differences in how the respective dev tools report the timing info.
FWIW I also don't think the relative difference will be this large for bigger sites - I'd be very surprised if a site that takes 1s to load in Chrome would take 1.5-2s in Firefox.
So once the page is loaded, JS performance seems to be about on par, but page loads are faster in Chrome.
To measure I just used dev tools. But there is quite a lot of randomness involved -- sometimes the engine scheduling planets align, and sometimes they are way out of alignment. You'd need thousands of samples or more to get an accurate reading. I just refreshed a few times to get ballpark numbers.
From pressing enter to the browser initiating a fetch was around 16ms.
1. Chromium based browsers give me control over extensions that require access to everything. https://imgur.com/a/ENZkQyc
2. Firefox doesn't support media keys.
Edit: Turns out it does if you enable them in about:config. See bad_user's comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442732
3. There are still some areas in which Firefox's performance isn't competitive. Try using it with something like Rainway and it will completely fall over.
#3 isn't that big of a deal to me. #2 I could probably adapt to. #1 makes Firefox a non starter for me.
- media.hardwaremediakeys.enabled
- dom.media.mediasession.enabled
#1 seems nice. Note however that Firefox was safer even before they introduced their permissions system simply by having a review system that works.
The review system of Chrome Web Store is broken, there's a lot of malware on it, extensions bought and turned malware and then you've got completely legitimate extensions being banned due to some automatic process flagging them. And then it's really hard to get in touch with humans. All the while reported malware take months to be taken down.
Of course, it's also true that Chrome is simply the bigger target. And what Mozilla is doing now probably doesn't scale. But for now Firefox's ecosystem of add-ons is much, much safer (and arguably more useful). Has been that way for some time.
I used to complain that it doesn't have a permissions system, I then complained that you can't disable add-ons in private mode. But it keeps evolving and I'm sure it will implement your favorite too, if useful.
Nice! Thank you. :)
Second, Google actually were caught on making their resources work worse on firefox and other competitors with some hacks.
E.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
Assuming that literally everyone use gmail, youtube, etc - it had looked that mozilla doesn't work reliably for end users.
There were also a ton of innovations that caused real quality of life improvements that it took firefox an incredibly long time to catch up to, like process isolation preventing a single misbehaving tab from crashing your entire session.
I have always liked Mozilla though so kept trying builds over time, eventually leading up to Quantum the nightlies became better and better and it was easy to switch back at that point.
What a shame it happened in the first place though.
You could still have a million tabs open, something chrome struggled with, so it kept some users.
But it took quantum to get users back.
For the average person it was so much faster than ie 6,7,8,9 and google pushed it everywhere.
It comes default on android helps.
I just wrote another comment here about its performance, about how I want it to succeed, how I donate to Mozilla, and yet still use a Chromium-based browser due to the performance issues.
At this point (I mean, they've literally invented a new programming language to make it faster, and it's still slow) I think the only thing left to do is to learn C++ and Rust and fix it myself...
It's bugzilla is quite unfriendly, and pretty much everything users wish for is already there, in a ticket that is several years old with no action taken.
An then, the next Firefox version comes with some crappy UX decision made, and it is not configurable. /r/Firefox comes up with _yet another_ userChrome.css tweak to revert it.
And the cycle continues as the user base grows thin. I wonder why.