
Firefox Is as Fast as Chrome Now, and No One Cares - smacktoward
https://theawl.com/firefox-is-as-fast-as-chrome-now-and-no-one-cares-b99a9b3f701f
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Piskvorrr
Just a quick historical excurse from the certain doom and inevitable gloom:
Once upon a time, there was a browser that held 95% of market share, and there
was no way this monopoly could ever be broken.

No, it wasn't Chrome: it was called Internet Explorer. "What is Internet
Explorer," I hear the younger members of the audience asking. _My point
exactly._

~~~
shaftway
Ha!

I was really expecting this to be Mosaic (97% in 1994), or at least Netscape
Navigator.

I guess I'm showing my age.

~~~
Piskvorrr
IIRC, in 1994 the Web was a newish technology trying to get a foothold against
the omnipresent Gopher; I don't think that would be a great time to compare
market share.

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doe88
I don't think speed is the real issue.

I still use FF as my main browser, but in the past year I have noticed that
more and more sites have started to drop full support of FF, sometimes a
button doesn't work, other times it is impossible to log in, or post a form...
Bottom line, we are at a point where even if we wanted we cannot use FF 100%
of the times, I'm forced to load specific pages in Safari or Chrome from times
to times. I'm used to it, but I think that kind of experience must be
extremely confusing for the non-dev user, not understanding why a page doesn't
work and not knowing what to do. I think it's an underestimated problem that
must lead some users to switch from FF and never come back.

~~~
JoshMnem
It was like that when Firefox first appeared as well. The solution was to
email the webmasters and say, "your website doesn't work in Firefox. The URL
is <url>, the browser version is <version>, and the operating system is <os>."
That often got things fixed and reminded developers that they need to consider
more than just one browser (IE at that time).

~~~
doe88
It might be a solution - albeit painful - but more largely I think the problem
is somewhat different, whereas before sites didn't support FF because they
didn't really know FF because it was new, now it seems they don't support it
because they don't care anymore. I don't know what the appropriate solution is
but if I were the FF team it would worry me at least as much as anything else.
I see this as a long-term threat.

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napoleoncomplex
I guess it's time to try Firefox again. Always missed the superior URL bar
experience over Chrome, and it seems my other excuses have been dealt with :).

~~~
amadeusw
I found the switch to be incredibly easy with LastPass, or any password
manager for this matter.

The extensions I use work in either browser so I just install these, and after
couple minutes the switch is complete.

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vatotemking
The problem with FF is its targeting a niche market. A small % of the pie.

Let's take a look at FF homepage:

* 100% fresh, free range, ethicl browser.

* More speed, more privacy, more freedom.

In comparison here is Edge's:

* The faster, safer browser designed for Windows 10.

* Longer battery life.

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chikei
Um, sorry, no. Long time (since 1.0) FF user here, on some site it's same as
chrome, but on picture & JavaScript heavy site (such as Facebook) FF is simply
not smooth as chrome. Also if you don't regularly restart FF (my experience is
between 3 days to 1 week), whole FF instance just starts being unresponsive.
This whole experience is the same before and after e10s introduction and is
consistent across lots versions. (I just use TreeTabStyle and uBlock Origin in
case someone wonder if it's due to add-on, and remade a clean profile around
version 51.)

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jasonkostempski
Where can I get a good idea of the current market shares? My gut tells me the
default browsers Safari and Edge still have a dominate share among people that
don't care. For years I've installed Firefox with uBlock Origin for people
that ask me to set up their machines, no one has ever complained about speed
or site compatibility and I've never had any issues myself.

~~~
azinman2
I use Safari and I care. I actually don’t understand why it’s not used more
for people on macOS. Granted I have an iPhone so the syncing works well
between the two, but aside from that it really is a better browser for me than
chrome. Faster for sure, better UI, lower memory usage, and better rendering
of text.

I don’t use a lot of extensions, but now having a faster mechanism for Ad
blocking (by building the blacklist set into the engine vs a JavaScript layer
on top) makes my primary extension usage even better!

Safari has been making investments that chrome hasn’t. I’ve confirmed this
with a former Chrome team developer who told me they started turning off unit
tests that prevented startup time blowing past some milisecond threshold after
the business asks were deamed more important.

Can’t wait for servo to finally land and hopefully Firefox will smoke them all
once again.

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bassman9000
Not only as fast in general. I've been using for some Microsoft related sites
(e.g. Office 365), and the difference with Chrome in stability, resource
consumption, and general speed is noticeable. Granted, probably an issue on
both client and server, but I'm switching (back!) to Firefox for more and more
sites every day.

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notacoward
The question is: does closing the speed gap (which used to favor Chrome) come
at the expense of also closing the memory-use gap (which used to favor
Firefox)? I mostly use Chrome, but on my ARM mini-desktop I had to use Firefox
because Chrome just gobbled too much memory. If that option is gone, I'd call
this a step backward.

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JoshMnem
> "Firefox has advanced privacy controls, but so does Chrome."

Actually, Firefox has better tools for that.

~~~
angry_octet
Details? Is this some special version of Firefox, some plugin?

~~~
greglindahl
I don't think Chrome has a control to reject 3rd party cookies from sites
never directly visited.

~~~
angry_octet
It has a setting "Block third-party cookies".

It be more interested in how fast it runs with uBlock Origin or other quality
3rd-party resource loading control (especially javascript, but all content
really), easy per-site javascript whitelisting and pop-up blocking.

~~~
greglindahl
Yep, and block 3rd party cookies breaks a lot more sites than block 3rd party
cookies unless visited.

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mtgx
Because clearly it's not enough to "finally be as fast as the one that beat
you, five years later."

Now Firefox needs to be faster/more secure/better than Chrome, and it will
also take it 5 years or more to recover the market it lost from that point
forward.

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nerpderp83
Give it time. Client side web is about to get _really_ resource intensive. So
much so that memory and CPU usage will have to be communicated to the server.

~~~
majewsky
What are you talking about?

~~~
nerpderp83
Resource restrictions, like this tab is limited to 20MB of heap, X cycles of
CPU and no GPU unless the user allows more resource consumption. These
restrictions should be communicated to the server as part of the encoding
headers, that the device can support some level of computation.

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miskamyasa
Firefox is not faster than chrome for me

