Well, as a long time fan of Firefox, I am sitting here with quite the smile on my face. Not sure how long it will last but this little victory is rather sweet.
This is sweet. Also because I love what they are doing on javascript development. For example,
1. Destructuring references is not yet supported on Chrome
[a,b,c]=[c,d,f]
[a,b]=[b,a+b]
2. Shorthand functions are sweet
[1,2,3,4].map(function(x) x*x)) // [1,4,9,16]
3. Chrome doesn't have an inbuilt shell (Shift+F4 in Firefox)
Granted CoffeeScript makes some of these easy, but they are too paranoid in my opinion to support new and useful syntaxes (e.g. yield keyword for generators, getters/setters).
I haven't used Firefox seriously in a while, but the shift+F4 shortcut looks fairly similarly to the Chrome developer console (F12, select the Console tab). It looks like the Firefox shell is more designed for making new pages though, while the Chrome one is more for debugging the current page.
I use Firefox, and I had no idea about Shift+F4 either. Firefox also has Ctrl-Shift-K (probably Cmd-Shift-K on Mac) which is much more similar to the Chrome console you're talking about, and is useful for debugging the page you're on.
This blog post explains the differences between these functions and current functions: http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/javascript-... i wish the unbound "->" alternative is included, so that functions used as methods can also use the new syntax.
What's truly impressive to me (in a bad/sad way), is how despite all it's great features Firefox manages to feel so, I don't know, I guess clunky would be the word. And it's not a habit thing because I use it every day, although for disclosure Chrome is my personal browser.
It just doesn't feel like a piece of software that I enjoy using, like it used to some long years ago. Fix that, and you win me back.
PS: I think the memory score is not so relevant as a few years ago. People talked a lot about FF memory, but that was because it was leaking like crazy and ultimately lead to crashes of your browser. I don't care how much ram my browser is using as long as it doesn't start swapping nor crashing.
Perhaps on a strong development machine, the resource-heavy Chrome is enjoyable.
However, on a more limited machine (Since when is a 4GB machine not good enough to browse the web???), Firefox definitely wins and is much more enjoyable.
I was a long time Chrome user ever since it came out. However, recent versions (on OS X and Windows) are unusable with a large number of tabs. Firefox handles many tabs much better.
It's a simple tradeoff: you want the security that Chrome's sandboxing provides? Then you have to accept the memory overhead.
Frankly the memory usage isn't as infuriating as the "tabs extend past the right edge of the window" bug, which has been open for forever -- I'd link to a bug report but it's a nightmare to find with a search engine because of how hard it is to describe. Firefox has a simple fix for this -- they let you scroll the "row" of tabs -- but for some reason Google refuses to fix it this way. It's probably too rare of a use case; you have to have a relatively small resolution monitor and at least ~70-80+ tabs open in a single window, IIRC.
I don't really care about benchmarks these days; I am much more interested in whether a browser supports HTML5, WebGL, etc. I'm currently bummed that Opera 13 doesn't display shapefiles on GitHub. :(
Well, I still wouldn't be able to reopen the bug on a hand-waving comparison between two unrelated software projects. Also, I'll have it known that I love Eclipse and think it's way better than IntelliJ. I know that's not a very popular opinion around these parts, but still.
In this hypothetical scenario, you're not trying to fix a bug for a user, he already left for (what he considers) better horizons. If the FF team wants to win me back they can try, but I'm not asking them anything.
So yes, I'm hand waving a comparison between two pieces of software who have great technical features but feel painful to use, because this is a comment on a benchmark post and not me doing a bug report.
For me, it's the opposite. I've been using the FF lineage since it was Netscape. I've been trying to switch to Chrome lately, but Chrome keeps doing things that annoy me. I don't open FF on the same pages to see if FF has the same problems, but FF just feels comfortable.
The only reason I can't get my wife to switch to Chrome is that Chrome has no "left sidebar history". If I could find an extension or something which duplicate that, I'd switch her over in a heartbeat.
blame the add ons. I had a vicious memory problem in FireFox and it turned out to be the ad blocker not handling cycletrader.com correctly, I could watch memory just climb and climb. Turn off the add on and all was fine.
FWIW, firefox still took more than twice the memory to show that site than IE did.
These mechanical benchmarks may be true, but FF still feels sluggish and the dev tooling still leaves A LOT to be desired. Even in recreational browsing, I tend to use dev tools and would get bothered easily having to open another browser.
The memory efficiency doesn't explain much to me. It's like complaining that linux is holding memory hostage in buffers/cache or that Chrome should lose points for its process model. The test surely doesn't tell the whole story; not to mention, I can't be bothered to worry about a couple 100M when I can get 160 of them for the price of dinner. For all I know, the chunking I experience with FF could very well be a relic of their process and/or memory model.
And security is just a smudge on the score? No thanks.
I find it interesting that when Firefox consumed too much memory it was bashed for it.
When it fixed that and became one of the most efficient browser, while Chrome uses tons of memory, Firefox still gets bashed for "spending time on making the browser efficient".
This only leads to one conclusion: unless your product is largely better than the competition, its all about who's the cool kid on the block and who has the most financial interests.
Firefox was and is chided for feeling sluggish, crashing, and the likes. Most assume(d) these problems are related to the memory and process model. As well, the "memory bashing" was largely related to presuming the memory was "leaked," which turned out to be true. Such assumption have not been applied to Chrome, as far as I know. It was never anything I was much concerned with -- Firefox consuming too much memory. It was better than IE, in speed (re: not appearing to be sluggish) and tooling. Now Chrome takes a lead in those regards; mechanical test-results do not parallel my experiences.
You're talking about memory leaks as though they were a subjective thing (because nobody accused Chrome of having leaks, it doesn't). They are not. Objectively, both Gecko and WebKit have leaks, as a search through the bug trackers of both projects will confirm. (IMO, Gecko's approach to dealing with leaks -- a cycle collector -- is a superior approach to WebKit's more ad-hoc approach.)
As a developer, I couldn't possibly say with a straight face that a codebase like FF's or Chrome's, in size and language, are immune to leaks. I'm speaking about them the way every armchair developer has attacked FF over the years. I'm not saying they are right or wrong. I haven't invested myself in the issue, and I've stated or alluded to, several times, that it was not the "why" but the "what" that drove me. Firefox was slower and did less, so I switched. Anecdotal; 100% agree; I couldn't tell you exactly what I want; I don't necessarily have the time. For some, I'm sure the scale has dropped the opposite way (eg. they need more from FF's extension model).
Curiously, I went back to Iceweasel from Chromium after the latter kept crashing reproducible on some sites – among them plus.google.com and many others with Flash. So far, I have no encountered Iceweasel to crash, and the dev tools are only slightly worse than Chromium’s.
Not bugs, but features. And frankly -- sorry to be short -- everything Chrome has (or doesn't yet). I and my colleagues use just about everything.
I see a lot of these things landing in the FFs landing in the last week, so I can't commend those efforts enough. Literally, I don't want to have to ever install Firebug; it makes the browsing experience even more sluggish. And I would have probably never started using FF, a decade ago, if it wasn't for the tooling, and I would have never had a chance to convince as many friends and family to use FF. The same reasons I will just recommend Chrome, today.
Frankly, you will have to have something that Chrome doesn't to bring us back, and it's been a long time coming for the tooling to be even on par. Again, I commend your efforts, because I think your community involvement and dev blogs are really great.
My Chromium-using coworker is jealous of my (Firefox's) 3D View and my Responsive Design View. I use both browsers in order to have access to all the best tools.
(I keep development separate from regular browsing, either through Incognito or separate Firefox profiles. This way, my regular browser addons don't distort my view of how-my-website-looks-to-most-people, and Firebug speed becomes irrelevant.)
Just a note, we use bugzilla for everything, so if there is ever a specific feature you want, you can make a bug for that feature. For example, "integrate source maps with the debugger" was the title of a bug that I worked on.
I'm loving the focus that's been going into the FF dev tools over the last few releases, they are improving rapidly and dramatically!
One thing that irks me is inspecting returned JS values - I almost never want to see [object Array]. I vastly prefer the Chrome dev tools output: inline, expandable, and a meaningful representation for objects.
Not a bug, but I think it would be a big improvement :)
I've never felt that Firefox feels "sluggish", at least not since version 20. I've been running Aurora (24a2) for a while now, and it feels quite snappy - not Sublime Text 3 like, but far better IMO than Chrome/IE10
I switched from FF -> Chrome some years ago. Sometimes I try to switch back. Maybe FF is fast.. but it feels clunky, I wish they would copy Chromes GUI right off :). Also the "screen" flickers when I scroll, in Chrome it doesn't. And that's on a high-end windows PC.
I like what Mozilla is doing with regards to privacy and so on though...
Chrome devs got the `snap` right. It is 99% instantaneous, it's beating any of my extremist~ expectations impressively. Sometimes, though, it gets stuck in async hell. And with lots of tabs it loses some responsiveness (on my old core duo). Firefox is slower but regular, I'm abusing it with dozens of tabs and it stays stable.
All in all, I can't applaud Mozilla enough for pulling prolongated and difficult efforts (the new 3-layered releases process, memory compaction, js jit) with only a tiny percent of Chrome's ressources. This is really impressive.
Firefox downloads image data but doesn't decode it until you browse to that spot on the page. Do you think that's what you're seeing? You can disable that in about:config, just toggle image.mem.decodeondraw to false.
Pinned tabs on demand (introduced early 2012) is Firefox's killer feature that got me using Firefox again after using Chrome almost exclusively for a year. When you pin tabs, and then restart the browser, the tabs are not loaded until you click on them (not yet loaded, pinned tabs, are visually dim).
Pinned tabs are not included in any benchmarks I've seen but have a drastic positive impact on memory usage and speed. I typically have 20 or so pinned tabs and only 1-3 unpinned tabs when I quit Firefox. A cold start takes just a few seconds and about the only time I restart the browser is when I restart my system (2-3x per week).
Chrome loads all tabs on start so it can take around a minute to load the same 21-23 tabs. And furthermore Chrome tends to operate sluggishly after a couple hours of use with so many open tabs, so when using Chrome I tend to close then reopen the browser every couple hours.
Chrome 5 had a similar feature called phantom tabs but it was removed in Chrome 6. I loved that feature and was very unhappy when it was removed.
The option "Don't load tabs until selected" gives similar behavior for unpinned tabs too. This helps significantally where I use tabs and tabgroups as something a little more temporary than bookmarks.
Firefox used ~50% less memory than Chrome on open pages, but the composite memory score was slightly for Chrome because after closing the tabs Firefox used more memory over its starting amount. Tom's basically treated this as a leak when really it was just fixed overhead (wouldn't grow when opening and closing the tabs over and over).
FF 'won' this benchmark despite a unfair memory score against it.
Pages that were recently visited are stored in memory in such a way that they don't have to be re-parsed
I guess the same applies for closed tabs, since those can be re-opened as well.
What does Tom think caching is, or what unused RAM is good for? To be a pretty and useless number in the task manager? That not all users understand this is one thing, but a so-called reviewer? Just wow. Thanks for actively making people worse informed, Mr. Expert.
I used Chrome from when it came out until recently, when I switched back to Firefox.
I gave up on Chrome because of Flash crashes, general crashes (two or more per day), and pages showing up as plain, pale blue pages (instead of the web page content). Maybe I had too many tabs open and not enough RAM (3GB). Either way, the tabs were too small to show what the pages were, which wasn't helpful.
Firefox has worked perfectly, and it doesn't feel any slower, so I've no complaints....
When Chrome first came out, I remember double-clicking the icon and having it appear almost before I registered that I finished clicking. Now it takes like a second.
I use suckless.org's surf now, and it "feels" faster than any of the other browsers, despite no doubt faring worse in benchmarks (and not being generally accessible, lagging tabbing and a url bar)
In the 'real world' when it comes to memory I believe the google chrome is still winning. If you keep these two browsers with more than 10 tabs open for a while (1h+) and then close a few tabs, google chrome will have an immediate reduction in memory usage, unlike Firefox, which continues to consume the same amount.
If you're on a limited memory machine, like my 2GB netbook, Firefox is the best choice. Chrome is a pig in both the real world and these tests with 768 vs 1521 MB used.
Congratulations to the memshrink team for fixing all the memory leaks in FF 4. Now if they could only do something about the UI responsiveness when multiple intensive tabs are open, I might consider switching back from Chrome on my desktop.
Maybe Firefox simply holds longer on to cached stuff if the system has still free memory? Unless it fails to release it when needed, I would see this as a plus.
Well, it isnt for me. I use Google+ and Youtube frequently and these services consume a LOT of memory. When i close these tabs , Firefox keeps holding this memory space alocated. Generally i need to use some app to remove the 'inactive' memory alocated by FF. I don't think this is a 'plus'.
Why? Unused RAM is just wasted RAM. In an ideal world, we would use all unused RAM for aggressive caching, and release it just before it's needed by something other than caching. That Firefox frees up the memory when you start other apps seems to indicate it does it exactly right.
I you are talking about rendering speed, you'll be pleased to know that people have been working on multithreaded image decoding. Not sure when it will be available in release, but it is in my Firefox Nightly.
Not that this should be considered proof, but I just compared nightly and 22 side by side on Ubuntu 12.10 (Unity) and I can certainly perceive an appreciable difference. Great stuff.
The backed-out-of-FF22 patch has been fixed and is present and enabled in FF24 (currently in Aurora).
> all downloaded images are decoded and live forever regardless of if they are shown.
Nope. Before the backed-out-of-FF22 patch landed, all images in a page were decoded and kept in memory as long as that page was in the foreground. But if you switched to another tab, the decoded images would be discarded.
With the backed-out-of-FF22 patch in place, most images that are downloaded are decoded temporarily, but those that aren't visible are discarded quickly.
When bug 847223 is done, the not-visible images won't even be decoded on page loading.
So, to summarize: in FF24, on image-heavy pages you'll see a memory spike on first load, but it'll quickly drop down. And once bug 847223 is done (hopefully soon, though these things are hard to predict), you won't even see that spike.
And there are some bad corner cases on numerous large images html leading to memory consumption so fast (1GB+ in a few seconds) your system will soon swap to hell and probably stop responding.
Per (0) I don't think "don't decode until you scroll" is done yet. This issue alone makes Firefox annoying for use on image boards and "infiniscroll"-style galleries like Facebook's.
Also, "discard images when you scroll them offscreen" was disabled in (1) because it broke sites with lots of images (like Pinterest and Tumblr Archives, according to the bug).
These two issues alone make Firefox pretty painful for a lot of common use cases on real-world machines (like my old web browsing machine with only 2GB of RAM).
Bug 689623's fix is re-enabled in FF24, which is currently in Aurora. It goes a long way towards fixing the problems with image-heavy pages. And bug 847223 should fix them completely once it's done; there are numerous patches but some haven't passed code review, so it's unclear how much longer it'll take.
Just a suggestion while the comments are still sparse: When we're posting about new Firefox features a lot of us already use Aurora or Nightly, so it's not really news. When a feature hits the beta or stable channel we might've used it for weeks. This problem exists on 4chan's /g/ board as well.
Would be interesting to see how IE11 fares since it's close to release. Also sad to see one less engine because of Operas' Presto being retired because of things like this.
Also, a new engine is being built which goes by the name Servo. Mozilla, Samsung and independent contributors from the open source community are actively working on it. Git: https://github.com/mozilla/servo
I'm not sure I can pinpoint why, but I have grown to dislike Firefox more and more with each release.
First it was the memory leak issues that were there for a long time, then it was the feature creep of things I didn't care about, then it was Mozilla's stances on formats and junk that seemed a bit to self-interested, and then Mozilla making their own OS instead of just making webOS or Android more awesome.
It's weird, but I get the vibe that Mozilla is sort of selfish and is becoming less relevant over time. That is a stark contrast to Firefox making the web awesome back in the pre 1.0 days. Maybe they haven't changed and I have, but it's kind of odd
Mozilla selfish? May be to a few of the for-profit competing companies.
I like Firefox more and more. Their memory leak issues have been fixed. Their memory leaks in add-on have been contained. Mozilla make other tech besides browsers to advance the state of computing - Persona, Rust, Thunderbird, PDF.js, asm.js, FirefoxOS, etc. All incredibly useful and innovative. All these benefit most people and advance the web.
Ok, but I've learn to take a liking to Firefox. And more. Their initiatives have pushed web further and further. Subjectively, I like their initatives a bit more than GOOGs so far. And there is the whole PRISM fiasco.
Their experiment with FxOS will repay itself as their API will make way into a W3C standard for mobile connectivity.
> It's weird, but I get the vibe that Mozilla is sort of selfish and is becoming less relevant over time.
Funny, I'm starting to swing the other way. I keep wondering how we let a web advertiser on all our boxes.
The dominant browser shapes standards. It was true with Navigator, it was true with IE. Decisions on cookies, tracking, even some protocol designs over the next ten years will occasionally pit the interests of users against the interests of advertisers.
I like Google, a lot. But I do not trust Google to lobby on my behalf on these issues.
Even if Android let them make money, it is broken beyond repair with its funny idea to run everything in Java sandboxes, invent a new packaging format and releasing source code months after the actual release.
