I've been using Firefox since "quantum" on both my MacBooks(one of which is old AF) and on Linux. I've yet to have problems playing video, streaming, or anything of the sort. I keep tons of tabs open. I just can't really say anything wrong about Firefox at this point.
It was once the case that Firefox had significant disadvantages in contrast to Chrome, but now the only reason I have to still keep Chrome installed is when work forces me to use some Google-proprietary page that doesn't work in other browsers.
If you had problems with Firefox 2 years ago, try it again before bringing up performance when people are considering it as an alternative to deleting Chrome. The more people who uninstall Chrome, the better.
It tricks you into thinking that session state is kept only per-tab by disabling a useful feature (history), however the incognito session's state is actually scoped per-window and not properly cleared/forgotten until you close the window.
Firefox knows how to have temporary window-local cookies/site data _and_ history. Chrome doesn't know how to keep the history. It's a missing feature IMHO.
I prefer this behaviour of limiting the browsing history per tab per session instead of the way Chrome implements it
* Multi-second UI jank/freeze (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1546847)
* HTTP2 is broken, infinite-stalls and internal errors surface if you upload enough files (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1540574)
* WebGL is very slow on Linux (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1010527)
* High CPU on Linux even when in the background, possibly due to frequent polling (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=508427)
These are just a few issues that I'm directly involved in and suffer from every day, and into which I've sunk over 100 hours profiling and reading code of, simply because they make it an absolute pain to use.
Provided this is anecdotal evidence, in my experience it's the opposite. I gained an enormous amount of performance-related comfort after switching to Linux Firefox from Windows Firefox/Chrome (where a JS-heavy web site that I use frequently would cause memory overflow and would stall the laptop). I've not experienced any problems with CPU usage since. I've not experienced the other problems either, though I don't use WebGL. You make it sound like Firefox is heavily broken for everyone. That's not the case.
The first issue was really enjoyable to read. A high quality bug report and the devs giving feedback.
Why did you reference that last issue? I haven't had that CPU usage issue since Quantum was released.
I've also had Chrome destroy my browser profile completely many times. It will start up and say something like 'your profile was unrecoverably corrupted and has been deleted'
Both are very complex pieces of software with lots of bugs.
I've filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1408699 quite a while ago with some measurements. Sadly, no progress so far.
I’d recommend using bookmarks instead of keeping tabs open and unloaded, but I do think that insane numbers of tabs should be something that Firefox can handle.
Is about:performance the best place to do this or is there something like Chrome's task manager that shows CPU and memory usage per page, and per extension?
One where on websites that don't explicitly set their form background to white, which is the default on most browsers, Firefox paints them the color of the user's desktop theme, even when the theme is dark. Black text on black background. This bug had been known about for almost 20 years and is marked "won't fix" because the devs still assert that universal user theming of websites is just around the corner. The bug manifests on mozilla.com
Another is that hard refresh sometimes flat out doesn't work. I'm a developer who occasionally makes changes to frontend code, and sometimes Firefox just decided that it's just going to cache everything and ignore what I tell it to do. Ctrl-refresh, shift-refresh, clear cache, all do nothing, I have to killall firefox and restart the browser to get my updated web page to show.
I don't think that's not the default. Are you sure you didn't change that? (It's configured under "Colors > Use system colours")
I am running nightly
The issue I have with firefox on both Linux and Windows is not speed, but stability. I think it's the process model. Windows freeze if I open too many tabs, and is an issue I've not really had much with Chrome (though it had its own issues). I've noticed it a few times today as well. I wonder if that's the speed issues people are describing?
With that said, removal of ad blocking is a deal breaker for me and Chrome will no longer be my default browser.
I don't know what to do. I want to use anything other than Chrome, but I also want a sane workday and not have the browser jank my day up constantly.
I would use Brave but they don't have a proper sync system yet. I switch between my imac, macbook pro and macbook air throughout the day, I need sync to be there.
Quantum improved it, but I still have lots of issues with Firefox on Linux. To name a few: (For reference I'm running Firefox 67 on NixOS, xmonad, no DE, 7700K, 64GB RAM, RTX2070, only extensions I use are uBlock Origin, Panorama View, but I've run into all the problems below in safe mode also)
* Still slower than Chrome if you use lots of tabs and windows (generally 100+ on 3 windows depending on current jobs). It's much faster than it used to be but I can't deny when I have to switch back to Chrome for some things, I'm surprised at the (slight) speed difference.
* Visual glitches with lots of tabs the tab bar will occasionally spasm, sometimes all the text will disappear etc.
* Sometimes a window will just stop working. All the tabs are still there, but they all show blank white pages, new tabs are also blank. Different windows will work and a new window will work. Restarting firefox, the same window will be all blank pages. The only solution I've found is open a new window and copy the tabs you want to save one by one to the new working window.
* Bunch of websites just don't work in Firefox. In particular several of my governments payment portals don't work in Firefox on Linux but work fine in Chrome.
* Sometimes I get crackling audio from Firefox that can only be fixed by restarting pulse, never had it happen in Chrome.
* Some streaming websites choke firefox out, for example ufc.tv PPVs are sometimes entirely unwatchable in FF, the audio and video fall out of sync after a few minutes, sometimes it can makes other tabs sluggish. Never have a problem with Chrome, will usually just open a chrome window to watch live streams.
I chalk most of these up to Linux weirdness, but I do quite often find myself annoyed at FF considering its running on a moderately well specced machine, and its literally the only app I run regularly that gives me heartache.
That being said I've stuck with FF over Chrome and still prefer it for various reasons and recommend people try it. I just disagree with the idea I see floating around that there's nothing wrong with FF at all and its just as fast and stable as Chrome. It's not been my experience.
That's the cause of your visual glitches (and the occasional "window stops working"). Switch to Nvidia's 430 driver and that should improve things considerably. It did for me anyway.
Never have these issues with Firefox on another PC I regularly use with an AMD GPU. Ditto for my Intel-only GPU laptop (though I don't use that much).
Furthermore, acceleration is enabled by default for loads of things. It's just some certain WebGL features that aren't hardware accelerated. For example, when you play back a video it's going to use hardware acceleration by default (if the underlying library supports it).
2Gb seems to totally reasonable for my habits, but I can't keep to it, there are just always leaks. Eg; Slack or Gmail just need reloading every few hours to reclaim RAM.
With this latest change to Chrome it's probably time for me to give it another go. I'd love to switch, but the experience needs to be roughly on par.
You can use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re... to always use that version automatically.
I've done all the tweaks and configurations found online, and nothing has made a marked improvement whatsoever. Not going to switch, but it's incredibly frustrating.
I had support temporarily disable McAfee's "on-access scanner" thing so I could test it and the problem went away immediately. Everything was nice and snappy again!
Of course, they turned it back on after the test...
Real astroturfing exists, of course, but is far rarer than insinuation. If you or anyone are genuinely concerned you might be seeing it, email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it.
I did a profile refresh last night and I think it's resolved the primary issues (despite retaining all my extensions). If it hadn't, I would have seriously considered switching to Brave or Chrome.
Ideologically, I believe it's very, very important to support Firefox, and I also think the work they're doing with the Stylo, Quantum, etc. is very exciting, but performance issues with the UI itself got me off of Firefox for years once before, and almost did it again recently. (The first time it happened it was shortly after they started using sqlite, and I suspect that both of these instances were sqlite/profile data issues.)
From my own personal experience, UI speed (partly influenced by "bad" profile data) is the area where Firefox is failing, and the only thing that keeps me from unabashedly telling everyone I know that Firefox is better (user-experience-wise).
That "you've yet to have problems" means I'm "very disingenuous" for pointing out that I did is simply ridiculous. This is borderline ad hominem and I call guidelines violation.
That a sibling implying that we're somehow paid by Google to clean up their PR mess is plain insulting.
Before Quantum on the other hand I had to regularly restart Firefox since it seemed to slow down over time and hog all of my CPU no matter if I had many or few tabs and no matter if I closed tabs so I am not surprised many got burned by Firefox and how it could not handle today's bloated websites until Quantum. The UI also got jankier and jankier the more CPU Firefox started using.
Chrome probably has had its own performance issues but I cannot comment on them since I have not used it much other than on mobile.
Before quantum, during quantum rollout, since quantum, doesn't matter.
I've just accepted that slightly increased privacy comes at the cost of being plugged in to the mains. That's fine, I accept it, but I hope it's hardly disingenuous.
It is VERY important for people to give things a try with and without a proper ad blocker. Any browser gets WAY slower and buggier when it has to deal with the nutty page takeovers with autoplay videos and javascript running.
Closed Firefox and tried this again couple of times. Both issues are still present.
Edit: I have uBO installed on both.
I'd love to get back to FF, but I have no idea how could that release with current state of things be allowed. Does your MacBook have Retina display?
To me, its incredibly ironic. On one hand, it makes sense for Firefox to focus on Windows because that's where most of its users are. On the other hand, what's the point of using Firefox in such a privacy-hostile OS filled with ads, telemetry, and tracking?
