> It makes me wonder where things went wrong, as I recall the Firefox of ~2005 being snappier than the one of ~2015.
If you visit any page made in 2005 with any recent browser it will be unbelievably fast. Pages became more bloated in the last decade because they could.
chrome's day-one multiprocess support was really the big shift since it allowed js bloat to not kill your session, which in turn allowed more js bloat to exist, which in turn made ff slower..
Yeah, when you think about Chrome's being selling points - a browser that won't crash just because one tab does, sandboxing, and responsiveness - it's literally all just from their multiproc architecture. It bought them so much to have that from the state.
But, like Firefox, they now have a big codebase to maintain and it's not so easy to get massive perf improvements because changing up architecture is painful.
first releases of firefox were also pretty bare. in a good way, it didn't do much but did everything I, as a coder, wanted. Now think about devtools and live customization .. and every other bits added.
If you visit any page made in 2005 with any recent browser it will be unbelievably fast. Pages became more bloated in the last decade because they could.