FF is doing great. All the have to do now is the Steam strategy. Do nothing and wait for the competition to fuck themselves over.
You mean hope that they too don’t become subject to enshittification? I don’t have a lot of faith in that.
Besides that, Google is controlling as fuck. They might keep fucking themselves over but there’s no way they won’t start attempting to ruin things for the rest of us.
It seems Mozilla is not immune to the AI hype. I just hope their AI endeavour won’t kill them when the AI hype finally ends.
Thankfully the AI use is very tame so far, used for stuff like offline alt text generation and offline translation. I’m personally still concerned about copyrights and ethics of the models used, but at least it’s directed towards providing specific features, not a magic cure-all.
Thats the problem tho, the new mozilla leadership is on the “do anything but nothing” ship. I really hope they either dont do anything too horrible or someone forks it if they do.
I love Firefox, but I can’t shake the feeling that it is slower on YouTube. My tinfoil hat theory is that Google somehow throttles YouTube on Firefox.
I’m pretty sure someone discovered that is true recently, but can’t be assed to try to find it right now.
They used to also use the unreleased version 0 of shadow DOM for building the Polymer UI, which - being a Chrome-only prototype - understandably didn’t work on Firefox, and therefore instead used a really slow Javascript polyfill to render its UI.
I haven’t checked on it lately, but I imagine they must’ve changed at least that by now.
It’s not tinfoil, they have been caught doing it and they continue to do it. It’s a scumbag company.
One thing you can test is to apply a Chrome user-agent on Firefox when visiting YouTube. In my personal experience that actually noticeably improves the situation.
That’s super interesting! I’m not versed enough though, do you have like a tutorial you recommend or should I just Google it?
There’s a bunch of extensions that allow you to switch user-agent easily, I personally use this one, it includes a list of known strings to choose between as well.
Google does that a lot with their own web properties. I remember Google Meet didn’t support background replacement on Firefox, but switching Firefox’s user agent to Chrome suddenly fixed it.
That’s a really weird take. Like… what even is the difference supposed to be?
This sounds more like “everything should be as it was back when <insert arbitrary point in time here>! When there were still Webpages, and we were frolicking about the internet! Until the fire nation attacked Web apps took over!”
Basically I am saying Firefox is not as performant as chromium when loading JavaScript.
chrome used to be good. Emphasis on the past tense.
Firefox was always good. Chrome was very briefly better. Firefox has not suffered enshittification like chrome did.
This. Firefox has always been just good. It wasn’t great or anything, it was just a good browser. Then chrome came around and it had more, better features. It was a bit more memory usage, but those were for the additional features Firefox didn’t have.
Firefox didn’t really change a whole lot, it added synching features across accounts, and didn’t get worse. It just stayed the same.
The people made Firefox better, because now they’re creating add-ons for Firefox, where chrome had more.
I feel like once chrome got the majority of browser users, it immediately started going to shit. I have no proof of this, just a memory of it being better until it was announced that chrome was the most used browser, and the near immediate heavier memory usage.
It’s all telemetry so the advertising company that made Chrome can harvest your data for resale at bargain bin prices
Yes, but not neccesary other Chromium do it, that depends only on the corresponding devs. Chrome is a RAM and Data Hog, because use for every tab a own process, but Vivaldi Hibernate the background tabs and because of this use less RAM than other Chromium and even FF. But generally all US browsers send data to Alphabet, googleanalytics and googletagmanager, except Edge (also Chromium), but in change it sends data to other MS partners which are even worst (Towerdata). I use Vivaldi for this, because it’s the only existing EU browser (after the French UR browser died some years ago) maybe apart Konqueror from KDE (Linux only, KHTML or KDE WEBKit engine), no data for third parties, nor Google, despite the Chromium base. The Browser companies are the problem, not the engine which they use.
I mean, I clearly remember firefox being terrible back when Chrome was just beginning to take off.
It was a lumbering monolith that ate all your ram and loaded pages at a glacial pace. Chrome was a multi-process revolution from that.
Then, firefox got it’s shit together and chrome got overloaded with corpo bullshit.
People saying FF is slower: like how much slower? are we taking like 14 millisecond slower? Cause everything seems pretty instantaneous here. Maybe its because i’m old enough to remember DSL and 56k internet, but I think FF os crazy fast and even if Chrome would be 25% faster I wouldn’t switch to evil google for that.
It used to be a lot slower, which is why when Chrome showed up with its shiny new V8 engine (and other features) people switched from Firefox en masse. Now the performance difference is no longer noticeable.
61 Firefox windows and 427 tabs (don’t judge, I know I have a problem) and I have no performance complaints - admittedly, not all of them are active/rendering simultaniously, but still…
Firefox (and its forks) have been my go-to for 15 years.
indeed! had I not posted this, I would be asking the same question!
so, its quite a bit more mundane than you might have hoped for.
a mix of…
- ~40% locally served internal pages (mostly zabbix, mail/web server monitoring, some development pages, etc).
- ~60% non-local pages - currently lots of retro computing stuff, debian stuff, github (sigh)
the most recent page I opened was an archive page on TI-84 firmware disassembly.
I make heavy use of Firefox containers for separation. honestly, Firefox is an absolute workhorse for me. if the Firefox ecosystem were to fall into the void, I would be dead in the water.
Last time I tried it? Like freeze and be unresponsive on my phone for seconds at a time slow. (My phone doesn’t lock up though, I can still go to the home screen, swipe to see notifications so it’s not the phone locking up completely)
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks
I wish firefox was faster but benchmarks are pretty common, it’s not hard to test. It’s kind of an unfair fight at this point honestly, large swaths of the web are just built for chrome. There are other benchmark options out there, but even using Mozilla’s own kraken benchmarking solution, it loses tremendously more than it wins. I honestly really respect them for not building their benchmarking system to make their solutions come out on top.
In some benchmarks the lag from firefox is very significant and then on the other hand, when firefox does win, chrome is usually right behind it. It’s not ideal.
I remember when Chrome was released, all marketing was on how much faster it rendered webpages, I never saw that as an issue, Firefox was fast enough, I tried Chrome for a bit, and hated the UI, I remember being confused as to why everyone loved Chrome suddenly, and frankly, I still am a bit confused by both the sudden shift, and the absolute market dominance by Chrome…
I remember being confused as to why everyone loved Chrome suddenly
Because they were still using Explorer before that
I switched from FFX to Chrome back in the day because Chrome tabs were all independent processes in task manager, and one crappy website wouldn’t kill my whole browser.
When Google started their war on addons, I switched back to Firefox.
Pretty much my same progression except I’ve come back to LibreWolf instead.
I grew up with a 56k modem. Anything after adsl is warp speed for me. I never understood or observed the speed differences between browsers.
Maybe I’m just so slow myself that I dont notice the difference but come on… how much can it be? A few seconds? Who is so busy that a few seconds is a worthy amount of time to try and save (not talking about F1 drivers here)?
Chrome is very good at running Google’s pages. Even before Google owned YouTube chrome was better at YouTube.
Google bought YouTube in 2006, Chrome was publicly released in 2008, so I believe you are misremembering the events…
