Thanks for your answer. Being able to discuss these things feel good.
> However, the Javascript engine leaves something to be desired; the trend to make everything an application has ruined the performance of many sites.
I'm pretty bitter about "everything is an application" trend though. Coming from the original web, limited by 56K days creates a lot of "old man yells to cloud" moments, performance wise. However, as a Linux user, I suspect not all of the performance penalty comes from the JS pipeline. Accelerated rendering of webpage is severely lacking in Linux (especially with nVidia proprietary drivers).
The graph animations are smooth in Chrome & Firefox for Windows but, not in Firefox for Linux. I think rendering engine is fine, JS is more than good enough, but HW acceleration in Linux needs attention.
> There's also downsides to the way Firefox protects your privacy. If you enable the default privacy blocking, some resources fail to load on websites, making many websites load fallbacks or lag while they're waiting for their ad script to initialize.
It may be but I didn't notice anything to be honest. I'll look out for this.
> Finally, I've noticed Firefox has significant performance issues in video decoding compared to Chrome. This manifests itself as memory leaks and some tabs being frozen (every tab within the same browser subprocess, basically) and can be resolved by killing the process that's been messed up, but it's still an issue for normal use.
I don't experience anything similar in Firefox. Sometimes I leave Youtube open for weeks (because, long music mixes) and nothing stutters or goes awry. Sometimes a tab consumes too much resources (something like reddit or, HN) and it creates input lag while writing into textboxes like this. Everything recovers when I kill the offending tab. Similarly watching 2K and 4K videos over youtube doesn't tax my system at all. Everything is gracefully HW accelerated OTOH, picture in picture implementation of Firefox is so much behind that I can see the frame rate drops below 15FPS most of the time, so it's unusable. I guess, it the FF could HW accelerate everything, the problem will solve itself.
All in all, Firefox has some missing parts and needs some serious work in these parts and FF people looks not very interested in these parts (I'm not very firm on this opinion. This is how it looks from here).
> I'm pretty bitter about "everything is an application" trend though. Coming from the original web, limited by 56K days creates a lot of "old man yells to cloud" moments, performance wise. However, as a Linux user, I suspect not all of the performance penalty comes from the JS pipeline. Accelerated rendering of webpage is severely lacking in Linux (especially with nVidia proprietary drivers).
I totally a agree.
> It may be but I didn't notice anything to be honest. I'll look out for this.
The worst offender are some AMP sites; they try to use the Google CDN for whatever resource (probably fonts or CSS) and when that fails, wait for the fallback.
> Everything is gracefully HW accelerated OTOH, picture in picture implementation of Firefox is so much behind that I can see the frame rate drops below 15FPS most of the time, so it's unusable.
Interesting. I don't have much trouble with PiP and such, only the memory issues. I suppose it might just be a difference between hardware, drivers and OS/system config.
> However, the Javascript engine leaves something to be desired; the trend to make everything an application has ruined the performance of many sites.
I'm pretty bitter about "everything is an application" trend though. Coming from the original web, limited by 56K days creates a lot of "old man yells to cloud" moments, performance wise. However, as a Linux user, I suspect not all of the performance penalty comes from the JS pipeline. Accelerated rendering of webpage is severely lacking in Linux (especially with nVidia proprietary drivers).
I have a COVID-19 tracker (who doesn't in these days) it's at https://hbayindir.github.io/covid-19-turkey/
The graph animations are smooth in Chrome & Firefox for Windows but, not in Firefox for Linux. I think rendering engine is fine, JS is more than good enough, but HW acceleration in Linux needs attention.
> There's also downsides to the way Firefox protects your privacy. If you enable the default privacy blocking, some resources fail to load on websites, making many websites load fallbacks or lag while they're waiting for their ad script to initialize.
It may be but I didn't notice anything to be honest. I'll look out for this.
> Finally, I've noticed Firefox has significant performance issues in video decoding compared to Chrome. This manifests itself as memory leaks and some tabs being frozen (every tab within the same browser subprocess, basically) and can be resolved by killing the process that's been messed up, but it's still an issue for normal use.
I don't experience anything similar in Firefox. Sometimes I leave Youtube open for weeks (because, long music mixes) and nothing stutters or goes awry. Sometimes a tab consumes too much resources (something like reddit or, HN) and it creates input lag while writing into textboxes like this. Everything recovers when I kill the offending tab. Similarly watching 2K and 4K videos over youtube doesn't tax my system at all. Everything is gracefully HW accelerated OTOH, picture in picture implementation of Firefox is so much behind that I can see the frame rate drops below 15FPS most of the time, so it's unusable. I guess, it the FF could HW accelerate everything, the problem will solve itself.
All in all, Firefox has some missing parts and needs some serious work in these parts and FF people looks not very interested in these parts (I'm not very firm on this opinion. This is how it looks from here).