I'm one of those ~nobodies. Firefox is actually quite good these days, I use it at home and at work, 100% of the time - i.e. no Chrome or Safari fallback needed.

If anyone's looking for a reason to try a switch again, consider this your sign.

Is the performance hit sorted yet when opening a page? For me Firefox used to hang for a second or two doing something? Just a blank screen with the progress bar paused around 20% or so and apparently nothing happening...(DNS? HTTPS handshake?) and then it would kick off and load normally. Happened on mobile(android) and desktop(windows, Linux, macros).

On chrome-based browsers the same pages on the same computers on the same network would load in within the blink of an eye, with no pause.

I eventually gave up and went back to chrome after Firefox being my daily for years. I prefer the dev tools in chrome anyway TBH

Sorry to say but I've never seen that bug

Did you happen to have used uBlock Origin during your stay?

It's the most common source of browser-load latency, as it by default blocks the main page request until it is able to load its blocklists, so when you open the browser afresh, or reopen a window, it takes a while until the browser gets to continue loading the thing you asked.

I think by default it comes as enabled in Firefox, go to the "uBlock settings > Filter Lists > Suspend network activity until all filter lists are loaded", though of course it is a tradeoff.

From the Wiki: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dashboard:-Filter-lis...

> In Firefox-based browsers, this setting is enabled by default. Disabling it gives the option to potentially speed up page load at browser launch, at the cost of possibly not properly filtering network requests as per filter lists or rules.

> In Chromium-based browsers, this setting is disabled by default, since Chromium-based browsers do not support natively suspending network requests.2 Enabling this setting in Chromium-based browsers may lead to negative side-effects at browser launch.

Same here. I have Safari and Chrome only for cross browser testing.

I use Firefox too, and I agree it is great - which goes to show that having a great browser engine is not enough to break the moat.

Firefox is great. I use Nightly. Sync bookmarks and everything. Chrome completely unnecessary.

To clarify: My point is not that Firefox sucks, my point is that Firefox is great - better at handling the web than these new other web-browser engines will be for a long time, and yet it still hasn't broken the moat. It's not enough to make a great non-chrome web-browser - we already have one. It wouldn't make any difference toward that goal if we had 4 of them.

What is needed to break the moat are users - and enough for website operators to care. This is what Apple/Safari has. This is what Firefox increasingly lacks.

For and for that someone will have to do something other than make a great browser.