When people say oh firefox performance is like so intolerably bad that they HAVE to use a chromium based browser, I always wonder what device people are using and how many things they got going on in the background. I don’t understand why ANYONE would need to have like 200 tabs open at once and even if Firefox is slower loading source heavy stuff by like a second, I think that is a sacrifice worth making.
Personally Firefox has been perfectly fine for me even when Im running it on a Win 11 virtual machine on top of Linux that also has Firefox with 10 tabs open and like five other applications in the background on a very mid range laptop.
I do that (100+ tabs open at any given time) due to my work (research tends to take up a ton of windows) and because I’m too scatterbrained to focus on a single thing at once, but even then I find that Firefox is really good and arguably better than Chrome. Maybe Chrome has improved since I switched over, but Firefox uses significantly less resources than the Chrome that I remember
I have ~800 tabs open in Firefox, no real issues unless I flip through all of them or Tab Groups shuffles them all around. My desktop until recently was over a decade old and the new one is barely any faster.
Jesus fucking christ I get uncomfortable having 30 tabs open at times I can not imagine 800
Tab Groups+ Tree Style Tabs
I try to open new windows for every individual thing I do, but sometimes I forgot and the big tab Groups grow.
… I don’t know if I can even think of a reason I would have thirty tabs open at any given ven time. I’ve never experienced any issues with Firefox, speaking purely from my own personal experience it performs vastly better than Chrome did when I made the switch a couple of years back. To be clear, I can’t conceive of a reason in 2023 where I would feel compelled to open Chrome, or any chromium browser outside of manufactured limitations imposed by a third party. If someone more knowledgeable on the subject has an objection to the above claims I would be happy to hear them; but at this point in time I can’t think of a good reason to use Chrome.
I have actually always found Firefox to perform better. Especially compared to the RAM whore, Chrome.
Well unfortunately it’s about double the CPU and RAM usage for equivalent tabs and extensions to Vivaldi, and V has more baked into it too.
People really got to learn how to use
Bookmark All Tabs...properly.If you’re in the middle of something and you got to switch to something else, organize all the tabs to separate windows, and use
Bookmark All Tabs...to Saved Sessions folder or whatever you want to name it. This will allow each window to be saved individually. Save it with a date and at topic name, like “20230625 Bread maker” then close the window.I have a fear of crashing Firefox, restore failing, and losing all my tabs. This fixes most of that.
Using the
Bookmark All Tabs...method has help me organize my tabs, makes syncing with devices easier, and has allowed me to keep browsing sessions completely off my mind until I need them again.Since when is that option a thing? Always thought I need an extension for that.
Since before version 64, ~2018. There were a bunch of add-ons adding it back in to the menu since Mozilla decided to get of it from the menu but still keep functionality. Besides that, I have no idea how far back they had it.
I use One Tab and Auto Tab Discard.
Firefox is super slow on my Galaxy S8 though.
I second auto tab discard. I like my thousand tabs and it keeps them unloaded when not used actively.
You sound like someone that doesn’t open 200+ tabs of furry adult imagery on e621 while playing processor intensive games.
I mean… I’m obviously not that person either, but it would be cool to have the RAM to support it or the correct web browser if I was that type of person. But I’m not. But having that capability would be nice (not because I need it).
…I don’t look at furry porn.
I run at 16GB of RAM and have 40+ tabs open 24/7. There are zero RAM issues, you need to plug your leaks.
Thou art a saucy boy, Tybalt
32GB of RAM is less than $50, I just built a new PC, and it was the easiest upgrade I made to my build, regardless of what you put in your tabs
32GB of RAM is less than $50
Cool, now how much is it outside “the US and maybe select parts of Europe where it’s close enough”? Because not all the world uses dollars, and certainly not US dollars.
Bojler ?
Probably depends on where you are, how much is it for you?
It ultimately doesn’t matter where I am from. I’m just trying to highlight the fact that not all the world is the US.
I’m relatively familiar with the global population distribution, but not at all familiar with the pricing differences. It’s the price of RAM drastically different outside the US?
No cap ong
Even when having 500+ tabs, Firefox is very stable.
I can confirm, the problem is, when you have 500+ tabs, you dont know what you actually have opened.
For years Firefox on Windows had this weird random bug for me where audio just would not work at random times. I tried every fix imaginable. I spent hours crawling the internet trying to find a solution. Couldn’t fix it. I’ve used it on Linux but not on Windows for a few years now; I’m going to be doing a fresh install of Windows on my computer soon, so we’ll see if the bug finally disappears then.
Windows audio issues are the most impossible shit to diagnose. So many programs fight over supremacy in order to control devices. It takes uninstalling vast swaths of shit to determine what the incongruity is. If you can’t figure it out, link me to the most relevant post you got and I’ll try to hack at it.
Sorry, friend. Figuring that shit out is hell. I know.
Ever since firefox switched to quantum it’s been great. I would say it outperforms chromium under typical circumstances.
I’ve had 5k+ tabs open at some points, because I just don’t close any of them, and I often middle click as I want to navigate back to the page I was at. Additionally, a lot of sites break the back button, like collapsing comments re-expanding, or it loads slowly and I wanted to look at it quick. Organization is pretty nice with Tree-Style Tab for Firefox.
Every few months I purge all of my tabs, but for the most part, I just don’t care when I have 32 GB of RAM.
Firefox supremacy! Keep the non-chromiuim branch alive forevermore, no centralization please.
non-chromium branch
There’s a chromium branch‽
That’s just my werid phrasing, I mean the non-chromium branch that is Firefox and its backend.
What’s with all these comments saying Firefox is slow!? I’ve never noticed FF slowing down? I also can’t find anything online particularly damning (they all are pretty close in scores. No massive performance numbers for one or the other). I thought this was just a common misconception. Can anyone explain?
People complain about Firefox performance and site compatibility all the time and I have no idea what they are talking about. I use both it and other browsers all the time and Firefox for me is the better one.
It is a common misconception, they perform functionally identical across multiple PC’s and updates. People are just slow to change their minds.
Can you show me data showing that Firefox with dark theme, does a first load on a website just as fast as Chrome or edge? Same data point for with video buffer in frame? Pretty sure its noticeably slower in both scenarios with a dark theme.
I run a dark theme by default, first load of google.com in chrome is functionally indentical in performance as I said. Statistically there is a difference, probably only 0.1 - 0.25s max faster load in Chrome but it’s not reliable at all in the few tests I did quick (t’s 4am), so something that does not effect function itself, only form, makes me still correct in what I said originally.
I used to to think the android mobile app was slow. It’s gotten allot better though. Now that it supports uBlock I think it’s the best browser for Android.
Also browsing the web with the uBlock Origin installed, will signifiy improve the speed. Meanwhile protect you from various bad stuff, adds being nonexistent. :)
Check this app & also tick all the boxes within its Settings.
“It works on my PC”
I think there were some bad releases many many years ago, but right now Firefox works great. But unfortunately that reputation lingers, and people don’t like changing their browsers often.
It’s not slow, people are slow in their heads. Chrome may feel a bit faster but it’s not even what matters when picking a web browser. Will it protect your privacy online? Yes or no.
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Firefox is slower on synthetic benchmarks compared to Chromium ones but I’ve never seen a noticeable difference while surfing sites.
@blotz @siriusmart I have like 32 gb of high speed ram and my browser would still run slow the last time I used firefox. This was a very very very very long time ago and I have like 400 tabs open but that’s why I have a computer with 32gb of ram to browse the web…
I’ve actually started using Firefox more because Chrome has been causing me problems. Recently downloading more than 3 files from Google takeout at a time broke Chrome. With Firefox I hit 20 simultaneous files with no slowdown. Chrome actually hung until my downloads finished. Made it impossible to work at all while I downloads files. Same issue in incognito. Firefox was great.
I recently built a PC and included 32GB of RAM specifically so I can have a hundred tabs open without any lag, never had a issue with Firefox.
first of all, this meme gets posted a lot. second, but more importantly, the format should be reversed. in this scene of the film, Peter Parker sees clearly without glasses, and blurred with glasses, coz he’s been bitten and his eyesight is restored. /flies away
Didn’t the memes sub on Reddit end up adding a rule that only allowed original memes (that people have “handmade” themselves), to avoid excessive reposts? Heh.
But the point is that they may seem different but really all are using the same engine. So the order is correct.
This is why I use Firefox. I honestly don’t think that a browser engine monopoly is good for the world. Single point of failure for everyone with no alternatives is very bad if something nasty happens.
I think the creators of WINE said something similar about one of their reasons for creating WINE. Wish more browsers would use Gecko.
I just wish chrome wasnt so fucking useful by comparison. its integration into my android phone is equal to none. the firefox browser on android is ok but it does not integrate quite as well as the whole google platform. then there’s the performance on linux. I hate to say it but chrome feels so much smoother and nicer to use on linux than even firefox does. I’ve tried making the full switch to firefox several times, last time I daily drove it for probably almost 3 months but eventually found my way back to chrome, it was just a more enjoyable experience.
then there is the fact that every website builds their code to ensure it works with chrome, that is one advantage of chrome being the vast majority of the browser user pool, web devs can focus on making sure the one thing works really well.
that all said, just like wine and linux, it is important that we have a completely separate alternative so we’re not entirely reliant should the ship start to sink. I’ve already fully converted to linux and its been my daily driver for a few years now, not looking back. I know plenty of people are still on windows but with ever new release it feels like they’re doing more and more to punch holes in the SS.Windows ship and i’ll eventually be a sinking boat for enough people who see that an alternative exists. Same will need to be said for chrome vs firefox
Chromium being so prevalent means that it’s a monopoly (internet explorer anyone?) and it can control the web standards, which is something Google already does to some extent.
They also push their agenda with extensions, manifest v3 being way less powerful for ad blocking extensions. All in all, the more people use Firefox, the less power Google has over web standards, and the more devs are forced to make sure that their site works on Firefox.
I actually use Edge as a daily, but I also use Firefox because I want to support them. Unfortunately, Edge and Chrome are superior to Firefox in performance. Edge especially is really really great at resource management, and it doesn’t matter if I have 1 or 700 tabs and windows open. It’ll manage it without any issues. Firefox however, won’t. Sure, it’s rich in features and it’s very very flexible, but it’s not as stable or fast as the former.
Still love Firefox, though!
Well if you use Firefox Nightly with ad-blockers and the latest version of Windows Defender the performance will be comparable to edge and chrome, the only thing is that Firefox uses the RAM that you are not using and that means if you have something open it will run slower.
cpu and memory on my firefox and edge are about equivalent but I have some browser add ons for managing lots of tabs. I have way more on firefox because its my main browser but I have a fair amount on edge which I use like scratchpad.
I still remember version 2 of Firefox. It was an awesome feeling to install. Even today, just using Firefox still feels like I’m doing to right thing.
I think there is nothing like it. It’s not perfect but it’s damn good still.
I love Firefox
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Do you know of any vi extensions or configs I can look at for Nyxt. The OOB experience isn’t great, but I see the potential. EDIT: Also tree tabs if possible
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Thanks. I’m not so much interested in tree tabs for switching around, but to bulk close tabs based on origin. Basically to bulk delete tabs based on how they were created. But it seems flexible enough.
This the 97th time I am seeing this meme.
a little more work and you can make it to 100! keep going, you can do it!
Really, I feel like in Groundhog Day and click every time hopping something will be different.
“Wait, it’s all Chrome?”
“Always has been 🌏👨🚀🔫👨🚀🌌”
sadly, firefox is in fact hte lone bastion against the tide of evil. And even now, we need to abandon MS and IOS. I am not even sure Linux is thsat good. We need a new OS which will defeat all virii. Yes, an OS built on completely new mechanics, to again begin the new pc revolution!
I’ve been using TempleOS to fight back against the demons.
Make a man spit his tea.
Dude was insane… But he made a hell of an OS lmao
you bastard. I though some nifty form of linux was out. That was a cringe click.
Everyone is quick to shit on Apple and MS, but let’s be real, Google is also a piece of shit company that needs to be lumped into that group.
They removed “Don’t be evil” as their big motto. So indeed fuck them. And yes I know it is still somewhere in their code of conduct or something, but holy cow why would they ever feel the need to move that in the back? Was that after employees did not want to work for military stuff?
I am not even sure Linux is thsat good.
I’ve been using linux mint for a year or two now maybe. It’s fine, and actually there are several things I prefer compared to Windows.
One of the main issues with Linux as a PC OS is that you can’t run as much different software as you can on Windows. This is largely due to the user base being smaller(IE, why develop an application for an OS when 99% of you userbase is not using that OS).
Creating a new OS to compete with Windows would have the same issue, and would also struggle to compete.
Also, there are so many different versions of Linux(distros), as in there are 600+ different distros so if you don’t like one, there are many to choose from. Not liking Linux based on one distro is saying you don’t like ice cream because you tried strawberry ice cream and didn’t like the taste.
That’s my main complaint with Linux. I really want to switch over, but the software compatibility is abysmal, and I would rather not run a virtual machine or dual boot. I’m really glad that Valve is at least helping out with software compatibility on the gaming side, but compatibility really just needs to improve across all software in general
The many different distros are also bad thing for the same reason. The same way 100 different types of flour in the shelve would be overwhelming.
Librewolf, icecat, qutebrowser, iceraven, surf… are not chromium-based.
Qutebrowser is chromium-based, and barely anyone uses icecat since the modern web heavily relies on JS, iceraven is a Firefox for Android fork, which could maybe have like 50 users and librewolf is unusable for daily usage because of RFP (resist fingerprinting worsens a lot of sites that rely on canvas). (This is just my opinion)
I use Librewolf on a daily basis. (With disabled FPR)
FPR is the main selling point of librewolf though
Yeah, it’s a lot better if you disable RFP, but it still wouldn’t save my passwords and enabling Firefox Sync isn’t accessible. Again, it’s just my opinion.
Saving your password in your browser is a really really bad idea, use a password manager instead, like keepassxc (desktop), keepassxd (android).
Agree, but I use Bitwarden. I prefer it because it syncs my passwords from pc with my phone.
Same. But self-hosted with vaultwarden on my raspberry pi.
Very true !! For me Enpass On Linux pop-os and on my Pixel running graphene-os Perfect Enpass basically big database with more then just passwords Contacts, notes, files …😊
I think you could enable Firefox Sync from the settings
Unpopular opinion, brace yourselves.
As a web developer, I would love to root for Firefox but they’ve made some really odd decisions regarding the implementation of web standards (which are published on the Mozilla MDN site, oddly enough), async/defer script loading order for example. Firefox is also often multiple years late with implementing new tech, being surpassed by Chromium and even Safari most of the time.
While I love the non-profit style of Mozilla and think competition in the browser space is a good thing. The reality is just that their browser lags behind the other two. Firefox is a large part of the reason polyfills are still used in this world of evergreen browsers, and requires multi-browser testing/tweaking even though I exclusively follow the standards written on the MDN website…
Yeah it lags behind because Chromium is developed by Google, which is the 4th biggest company in the world. And Safari is obviously from Apple which is the largest company in the world. I don’t think the fact that Mozilla lags behind should upset anyone. The fact they can compete at all is impressive I think.
Or maybe, just maybe, it lags behind because Mozilla decided that their priorities are ruining the UI and to remove features.
Yeah, keep downvoting. 50M (and counting) users lost since 2019 are surely a proof of how well Mozilla roadmap for FF is working.
Please, feel free to engange to show me that I’m wrong.
Here’s a POV, and it’s important to note that in general most users don’t care (or even know) what their default browser is. At this point in time there are five “major” operating systems with the following global market shares [0]:
- Android 35%
- Windows 30%
- iOS 17%
- macOS 9%
- Linux 1.5%
If we can agree that most users (not being technically literate, interested or inclined) will not change their default browser, we can easily see why Firefox is losing market share. Basically 91% of the world is - by default - using a non Firefox browser. If their current one is working well enough, why should they care to change it? Can we blame Mozilla for losing some users? Yeah, maybe a few. But that’s not really the whole picture.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share
Edit: I should point out there’s a 6.6% group marked as “unknown” in the OS market share data - I left this out to keep things simple.
The statcounter web page uses data coming from trackers blocked by Firefox ETP, radar.cloudflare.com is more accurate.
No, I don’t agree. The loss was net, I mean 50M users migrated, the same users that before installed FF over the default browser. Something happened there.
Can we blame Mozilla for losing some users? Yeah, maybe a few. But that’s not really the whole picture.
50M (and counting) was 20% of their user base, not “some users”. There’s nothing wrong in admitting that Mozilla erratic development model has alienated at least some of “us” (by the way, I’ve been a FF user for almost 20 years before leaving). And, personally, I’ll make whatever I can to make more users leave FF. Fuck Mozilla, really. They’re just a cash-grab machine right now.
Firefox is behind in some areas, but ahead in others - eg. privacy/tracking.
exactly, and that’s what matters more than anything else. modern websites are insanely bloated anyway; i care more about blocking the 50MB of ads, trackers, third-party cookies and other garbage every site shoves down your throat, than shiny new stuff that arguably is often part of that overengineered bloat.
look at this. it’s fucking beautiful. as far as i’m concerned, websites like these put the modern web and web developers to shame.
So not the things that benefit website owners
Yeah. Instead, the things that benefit users
I see it the other way around. I have a feeling that FireFox follows the specs while Chromium kind of has its own plan and directly introduce new behavior without much care for standards.
Since Chromium based browsers have the majority of the market share, you have the feeling that FireFox is awkward/lag behind. Now look back at Opera when they still have their own engine and you will see that while they try to introduce new behaviors just like Chromium, their limited market share means that people don’t feel the need to make use of these “innovations”.
I miss old opera.
You want an even more unpopular opinion? I use WebKit based browsers for web developing because of the clarity of the devtools, performance and Interop.
You can go take a look at the web inspector documentation on WebKit.org to check the features.
So one and only thing I miss from Chrome is Lighthouse.
Edge used to be unique,but then they just copied chromium… It had much smaller scrolling which was great on touch screens. Now I have no reason to use it.
opera also used to maintain their own browser engine if i remembered correctly, but they all just dipped
Opera did have its own engine; it was a proprietary one named Presto.
And it was really great and innovative for its time. Presto was pressing the envelope for so long while other browser engines were happy to do the bare minimum.
It’s really a shame they just moved to making their own Chromium skin but making and maintaining a Browser engine is expensive. It really is quite impressive that Firefox has lasted this long.
Yeah, didn’t Opera invent tabbed browsing? Huge game changer.
They sure did! That was the main reason why I swapped to Opera from Firefox forever ago. I believe they also were the first to make the landing page where you could click regular sites that you wanted to go to as well as saving your browser session when it’s closed or crashes, restoring it when you next launch.
They had one more thing that was the bomb back when 56kbit was enviable, and that was that when you turned off the image loading (some browsers still support “offline” mode, this was a subset of that) it would still display any images that it had in its cache - so you could read your news with the common page elements rendered but not spend time downloading huge article images.
I’ll shut up now before I reveal my age… 😅
I think part of the problem was websites needing to work on other browsers too. When it’s your own engine if a website doesn’t test against it, the website might be broken. So then the websites say they don’t support such and such browser.
Less of an issue when its all chromium.
We run into problems on safari a lot like this since my partner keeps using it on her Mac.
That wasn’t really part of the problem. The most used browser engines are often some of the most irritating and frustrating to deal with, just look at Internet Explorer for most of its existence. Safari is an obnoxiously widely used browser because Apple enforces its use on iPhone no matter the browser you use and it has a bizarre update schedule tied to OS version. This causes many iPhones to have ancient versions of Safari.
The problem here is not that there are or were too many browser engines, it is big companies making their browser engines in anticompetitive ways.
We’re “lucky” that Blink, the engine that runs all Chromium-based browsers, is currently keeping up with browser standards. For now. Who knows if Google will keep it that way or decide to change course and move away from FOSS standards.
It is dangerous to put so much stock and power into a single huge corporation like this. A large variety of innovative and competing browser engines is far healthier than one dominant engine.
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Proof?
Edit: I used to use it years ago and somebody I know is considering switching from Chrome to it and I’ve not heard anything about this.
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So it is like browsers out of the USA then with their secret (company is not allowed to tell anyone about it) data draining laws?
On the flipside, atm Edge seems to be the better Chromium choice (if you don’t have a Microsoft hate boner).
Let’s be clear: it’s a very good browser, very HTML5 compliant, and perhaps one of the best browsers…
…Assuming you don’t care about insane amounts of spyware - AND not having a lot of really cool browser add-ons (those having spyware and memory leaks is a separate topic, but I want to acknowledge these problems).
Edge makes more calls home per second than any other piece of software on my computer. I looked at my live log and it was a literal stream. Nearly every single action you do is tracked and sent… (waves hands confusingly up in the air in circles) …somewhere. Likely Microsoft, but I really don’t know.
Almost all of Windows is like this too. I hate it so much. There’s just no great way to have nice things right now.
@SCmSTR Linux, Firefox, Lineage OS
So I need to install Windows to use a “better Chromium choice” than Vivaldi?
Edge is available on Linux
Edge is available as a DEB and RPM, as well as Flatpak
Edge is on Linux, and brave is pretty good as well imo
Edge used to be unique, and sucked for it.
Only reason is free access to GPT 4 and Dall-e
The bing ai thing works on Firefox if you just change your user agent
Except that GPT4 in Bing seems to suck every time I try it.
hey hi what do you mean? one can access gpt4 and dall e from ff?
Firefox 🥰
I don’t know why, but even on my machine which gets 40-60 FPS in FFXIV while simultaneously encoding a movie, Firefox was always slower than chromium browsers.
I truly don’t understand it.
It’s web builders deliberately building their sites and webapps for chromium based browsers only, because it has over 80% market share. They only test on firefox rudimentally. The experience is subpar and people use chromium instead because of it, cementing chromium as the most used browser. Some site builders do this because they don’t have the time to extensively test a browser with low market share, others, like Google, do it deliberately.
I mean everybody is free to block them trash scripts from these developers with uMatrix or NoScript.
I just wish I didn’t have to! I’m always hunting through uMatrix to find the filter that broke the website I need.
UMatrix is no longer under development, right? uBlock has that functionality built in iirc. It came from the same dev, unless I’m confusing them with something else.
I’ve been using both, side by side. Had no clue I could block scripts with uBlock. I thought it just handled ads.
Are the ad block changes from the new manifest going to be opt-in?
Depends on what sites you are using, google sites are slower for me, others are faster.
Also looks like chrome is better at looking faster somehow, probably starts to render page sooner.
And of course: wgich extensions do you have in firefox and how old is your profile. Try it out with new, clean profile and than you will feel it.
And of course: wgich extensions do you have in firefox and how old is your profile. Try it out with new, clean profile and than you will feel it.
I mean this is fair, but eventually the profile ages and I may choose to add more extensions, no? Why would a selling point be “we’re fast on a brand new install, but after a couple years and adding some extensions, we’re gonna slow down like fuck”?
It is not perfect, I know. I also know that firefox keeping history locally, sqlite database gets huge and slow and fragmented.
There are solutions, but at the end it is easiest to create new profile. They also have some success with “refreshing” profiles. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings but it is removing some settings.
Blink is somewhat faster than Gecko in most sites, but it use somewhat more resources, because render every tab independly. Because of this some Chromium hibernate tabs in background (Chrome itself don’t)
