There was a time when Firefox felt a lot slower than Chromium, but for a few years now it's been close enough (even if still somewhat slower) to not bother me, while Firefox clearly offers superior functionality and much better performance under high load. The last time Chromium has felt attractive compared to Firefox was a really long time ago. Glad to see it moving in the right direction still.
I switched to Firefox from Chrome years ago because Chrome was slower. Specially, when there were many tabs opened, switching tabs in Chrome were usually prefaced with a blank white screen for about 2 seconds.
I've been staying with Firefox not for the performance (today Chrome loads Google sites like YouTube faster), but mainly for Tree Style Tab extension. I couldn't imagine opening more than a dozen of tabs without it.
I've stayed (edit: with Firefox) because of (1) containers and (2) password storage. I have to use Chrome for some things, and every now and then it prompts me for a password and refuses to use the auto-fill. Totally torques me off because my passwords are not easy.
But I completely trust Firefox on the password issue, to the point that I let it generate them for me.
>But I completely trust Firefox on the password issue, to the point that I let it generate them for me.
Not that I don't trust them but I always recommend using a dedicated PW manager like KeePassXC which is FOSS and has been security audited, plus it gives you full control over where you get to store your PWs and how they're secured and generated.
To be fair, Firefox is also FOSS, contains an integrated password manager with extraordinarily well-integrated browser compatibility, and by opting to use a master password to encrypt or decrypt the store also gives you control over securitization, storage location, and generation.
Not to say that KeePassXC isn’t useful if you want even more fine-grained controls, but it seems like in the
> Use password in browser
Use case, KeePass would actually weaken the security guarantee by adding a second component you need to trust.
My problem with Firefox's password manager is there doesn't seem to be a way to export/import to/from an encrypted file that I can back up to other places. I can export to an unencrypted text file (and no apparent way to import again), or I can use their sync service (or run my own maybe?), or I can backup the entire firefox profile.
This is what Firefox says when I go to export my logins: "[!] Your paswords will be saved as readable text (e.g., BadP@ssw0rd) so anyone who can open the exported file can view them."
KeePassXC on the other hand gives me a simple encrypted database file that I can copy around to different places for some peace of mind.
> "[!] Your paswords will be saved as readable text (e.g., BadP@ssw0rd) so anyone who can open the exported file can view them."
That's effectively what almost all of them say when you export your logins (usually as CSV, JSON, or XML), because they export in plain text, because you don't know what the user needs it for, up to and including manual imputation (better than expect a random user to have to learn how to print out a database, or worse submit that database file to some online service to print out).
Users aren't necessarily highly computer literate, we don't want to prevent people from having security, but even if they were they may still have use cases that do not accept such a database (migrating password manager that don't know your previous one, perhaps), so most of them use (unencrypted) plain text and just accept they'll have to leave it in the user's hands, and warn them it's exposed.
We'd absolutely love there to be safe, portable ways to move our data around such that it remains encrypted while migrating, yes, but that's just not something our current crop of software really enables fully these days, unfortunately.
I'd even say "adding a second vendor you need to trust". Yes, these days there seems to be a strong drive to just get a big package out of a single hand. Like having the browser closely tied to the OS. I don't like it. I prefer to choose the individual parts as i see fit. Keepass and some bit of custom sync, in this case.
Now, in the same vein I expect MS & Google making it easy to support different browsers, I'd want Mozilla making it easy to integrate other password managers. I'd love to be corrected, but afaik the "password manager with extraordinarily well-integrated browser compatibility" doesn't offer any way or API to connect my keepass with it. Its only for Mozilla's own stuff. Not the open, user controlled system i'd love Firefox to be.
The Firefox Android Addon system is even worse... only a very short list of pre-approved extensions are available. With the escape hatch for devs requiring some stupid online-account. Sorry, but how is that different from an App store without side-loading?
Still recommend using Firefox, since it is the best we have. But yeah, i don't like the less and less open direction apparently chosen by Mozilla. And wonder if not being a good role model will hurt them down the line...
It would limit the scope of the damage. Instead of getting the entire password database, the keylogger would only get those passwords that were used while the system was compromised.
True, but keyloggers aren't one of the threat vectors I am most concerned about, and as mcpackieh said, it still limits the potential damage quite a lot.
We all have to gear our security mechanisms toward our particular threat assessments.
What is your biggest concern? I would think key loggers are a more common threat than attacks on the password manager directly, especially if you're running something niche. What else do you gain from keeping it air gapped?
Keyloggers rank low for me because I'm only using my own devices that I have physical control over, so a dongle is unlikely. A keylogger would have to come in through malware.
That's certainly possible, but if malware were able to get installed despite my other protections, then I probably have much larger issues. And the keylogger would have to phone home with the data, which is unlikely (but not impossible) to happen without raising some alarms.
So I'm more worried about sharing data with the password management company systems themselves. If there's no real reason to send data over the net, then I don't want to send data over the net. The smaller the attack surface, the better.
It's just my personal policy. In reality, I don't consider either keyloggers or password management company computers to be huge enough risks that I lose sleep over them. Plus, I don't want to become reliant on a particular piece of software to do important things -- typing my password by hand means that I'll have the most common passwords memorized, so if something goes wrong that prevents the use of the password manager, I'm not locked out of anything.
This is unfortunately not robust against phishing which is for most users the bigger risk IMO (not necessarily power users, but I'd argue that most power users are too sure about themselves in this regard). It's always a question about the threat vectors and this weight you give them.
Firefox password management on desktop is great. I've got very frustrated with it on mobile (Android) over the last 6 months, with it failing to recognise password fields on account creation to generate passwords. I was relying on Firefox password management but have just transitioned to Bitwarden.
I've got 30 tabs open today, and the oldest of them is only a few hours old.
I look down a page, see interesting links, and middle click them all. They open tabs but don't actually load until I click that tab. I close each tab after I'm done reading it, or after a few hours if I never got around to reading it and lost interest.
Is that hoarding? I don't think so. But it's the sort of workflow that TST makes pleasant but is extremely frustrating with a horizontal tab bar.
It's just ADHD, there's not really a workflow reason that I have 1000+ tabs open. It just kind of happens.
Firefox/Sideberry is useful for mitigating that. I also have workflows set up for mass-exporting my tabs from Firefox to a text file and reorganizing them in plain-text and re-opening just the tabs I care about[0].
Bookmarking on any browser is cumbersome and leads to disorganization over time. Tree-style tabs helps make that organization at least a little bit easier.
It's ADHD sure, but it's also an unwillingness to close tabs, and (generally) that we have poor windowing systems that force us into ~1-2 browser windows at a time because browser windows are harder to manage than tabs.
The big change for me has been realizing that all my "tabs" are still there, in the form of my browser history, or if not, via Google search. If I can't find my way back to a website via my history or via searching the web, then I probably also wouldn't be able to find it among 1000 tabs. So why not close the tabs and be free of them?
Most of the times when I've tried finding stuff in (Firefox) history, I wasn't able to. Unless it's in the last week or so. In my experience, history filtering and search options are too basic to be useful. Once I was even desperate enough to try to load some Firefox sqlite file directly, hoping to query history entries, but that didn't work out.
The only reliable way that I've come across for finding stuff after a long time has passed is saving every sightly interesting webpage to Zotero and using fulltext search afterwards (including webpage body).
I'm curious, do you find the builtin browser history facilities sufficient for your needs, or are you using some third party tool for that?
I do find the built-in browser history is sufficient for _my_ needs, in that I mostly want a super-fadt autocomplete of certain hot items. Everything else that I know I want to revisit and find again I've bookmarked, but I don't bookmark that many things, maybe ~1 new bookmark a month.
Mostly though I realize I have focused heavily on not having clutter vs. being able to recall quickly everything I've ever found necessary or useful. It's a trade off I like, but it may not be for everyone.
> Most of the times when I've tried finding stuff in (Firefox) history, I wasn't able to. Unless it's in the last week or so.
I mentioned this below, but check to see what your history limits are in Firefox (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1039372). It's possible if you do enough browsing that you might have trouble finding older pages because they're not there anymore.
I'm not sure what the best mitigation is for that, I've kind of accepted that history for Firefox is short-term, not long-term. It might be possible to rig up a webextension to save history more permanently, but I suspect it would need to do native messaging I think to do that, and at that point maybe it's better to just do regular copies of the SQLite database.
Relying on Firefox history less also has the kind of minor advantage of allowing you to be more aggressive about cleaning it yourself, which can have a noticeable performance impact in some cases.
I stopped using persistent browser history because I realized without it I become more diligent at bookmarking pages. Deliberately bookmarked pages are alot less clutter than my entire browsing history, so with my address bar only searching my bookmarks and current session's history, it's easier for me to find what I'm looking for. It results in smaller haystacks for my needles to get lost in. I loath using general purpose search engines to pull up pages when I already know what page I'm trying to get to, so I bookmark any page I think I'll care about in the future.
> because browser windows are harder to manage than tabs.
I find that browser windows are much easier to manage than tabs and make it possible to see more than one site at a time as well as have different sites/pages sized differently. If I'm doing heavy web research, I'll typically have many browser instances, each with three or four tabs.
> in the form of my browser history, or if not, via Google search.
So I do have bad news about this that may or may not be news: Firefox cycles history even if you never clear it. Unbelievably it's not permanent.
This has bitten me a couple of times in the past because I always assumed that naturally history wouldn't just get randomly deleted in the background, so I'd search for a tweet or article from an obscure blog and couldn't figure out why nothing was coming up in my history searches. Took me a long time to actually check "is this article I looked up 6 months ago even there anymore?"
There is a way to set up recurring database backups manually if you're willing to do some gruntwork, but it's kind of a pain and means you need to break out an SQLite browser across multiple backups in order to search.
---
Where searching is concerned, :shrug: that doesn't generally work for me, but I'm happy for anyone that it does work for :) My tabs aren't just so that I remember where a document is (although they serve that purpose as well), they're also a reminder that the thing exists at all. When it gets to 1000 tabs, is that useful? Arguably no, but the process getting there is pretty organic, it's not really a conscious choice.
---
In support of your comment though, being able to just stick all of my tabs in an open text file does genuinely help a lot[0] because it's permanent history and it serves the same purpose of being a reminder. It could be better, sometimes I leave tabs open on images that I forget to get around to saving or on open sessions and then the link rot hits whatever I'm looking at -- but it helps a lot. Being able to have an intermediary step between "leave everything open" and "categorize and organize everything you're looking at and save what you need" does allow me to do things like grab 500 tabs that I haven't checked in weeks and just stick them in a text file and write some notes at the top about what I was working on.
Split browser sessions, better windowing would help a lot with this, although I worry I'd end up with similar situations as my Emacs window, where everything looks clean but behind the scenes I have 1000 open files and 20 of them are unsaved scratch buffers ;) But the text file does kind of work the way you're describing; you can be free of the clutter, but if you really need to find everything, you know it's in a static text file that you can grep through at any time and that you know the browser won't do anything shifty with in the background.
[0]: I say that it's common to have 1000 tabs open, and it is, but currently I only have about 200, largely because of that method. I went through a bunch of stuff a few weeks ago and stashed most of the stuff I had open.
If your advice to someone struggling to stay organized is "be organized", you probably don't have much experience with ADHD or disorganization problems.
If you say "just" then you're trying to justify it without effort. Most of the people I interact with have ADHD and yes it's annoying as fuck but I don't fault them or blame them when they communicate in good faith. Using "just" to justify it means it's bad faith.
You choose to open tabs. Don't open tabs if you know you cannot handle that.
> If you say "just" then you're trying to justify it without effort
This is an interestingly narrow take on what is a pretty common broadly used phrase with multiple meanings. If you're familiar with people with ADHD, you should realize that ADHD isn't something you can "just" choose to ignore or decide not to be affected by. Executive dysfunction isn't something you get to opt out of.
That knowledge should clue you in that when I use the word "just" in this context that I'm not dismissing anything or treating ADHD like a joke or using it as an excuse to be lazy. Particularly given that I immediately follow up that usage by talking about practical strategies and techniques I've developed to try and mitigate the outcome.
My point with the word "just" is that there isn't some complicated reasoning going on in my head for why it's good for me to have 1000 tabs open, in the same way that it's not some kind of life strategy that I forget to eat when I'm hyperfixated. It's not a workflow or a decision that I've made about my life, it's just a consequence of ADHD.
> you're trying to justify it
Having a lot of tabs open doesn't need to be justified. It's not a moral failing. I don't need an excuse for having a lot of tabs open because it's not behavior that needs to be excused.
The only reason to mitigate it is because mitigating it makes my individual life better. It's not really relevant whether you or anyone else approves beyond that. I'm not trying to justify anything because there is nothing about the number of browser tabs a person has open that needs to be justified or condemned. Opening a browser tab is a morally neutral act.
I replied to a comment that was curious about why someone might have that many tabs open: was it easier to work that way? Is there some browser config that makes 1000s of tabs more efficient than bookmarks? No, the cause is just ADHD.
> You choose to open tabs. Don't open tabs if you know you cannot handle that.
??? I genuinely have no idea what you're suggesting or getting at here. People who open too many (?) tabs shouldn't be using browsers? What does this mean?
Given that you are saying you're familiar with ADHD, I know you're definitely not suggesting that the solution is to just choose not to open a lot of tabs in the first place. Because you know what executive dysfunction and impulsivity is and you're familiar with how people with ADHD operate, and so I know that you wouldn't make such a pointless or useless suggestion. But I'm at a loss for what you're actually trying to convey then.
Agreed, but once I switched to vertical tabs (via Sidebery with Firefox), it is WAY more manageable. Multiple tab spaces, named groupings, and a scrollable view that doesn't crowd and shorten names make it great for having many items in there with little downside.
If I'm still thinking about something and there is a related tab for it, it stays open. When researching/debugging/developing things, I usually end up with tangents, tries, multiple things to read/try and so on, so naturally, having a tree to represent my thoughts and my tabs makes sense.
I use Simple Tab Groups in addition to Tree Style Tabs. Simple Tab Groups allows you to show tabs from only one group.
So, I have groups for casual browsing, work, volunteer work, etc. So I don't have to close tabs when switching from one to the other. I just switch and those tabs are still there when I want to next look at them.
> I can't imagine having more than a dozen tabs open, period. You tab hoarders will never make sense to me...
Dashboards can easily take two or three tabs.
The bug tracker is opened on a tab as well as the ticket page. You have a pull request opened to review it, and you check something in the repository. Pop open a couple of diffs to check where someone messed up in the past.
And in the meantime you have Spotify/YouTube.
A dozen tabs easily.
Factor in task switching, checking CICD pipelines, and of course HackerNews opened somewhere, and you can get multiples of that.
A bunch is reasonable but I’ve seen people here on HN claim to have multiple windows with thousand of tabs on them. That is beyond comprehension for me but if it works for them that’s awesome.
One thing I've noticed since I started using Sideberry extension (a different/better take on Tree Style Tabs) is that after a day or two, the whole tab panel I separated specifically for HN tends to accumulate 100+ tabs. Having them laid out vertically in tiny font makes this apparent in a way that the regular tab bar doesn't.
Fortunately, I also habituated the simple behavior of "If I realize I have a lot of HN tabs open, right-click and close the entire pane". That's how I know I'm clocking about 100 tabs per two days on HN alone.
Also, Sideberry changed my tab hoarding habit in a way that still results in keeping hundreds of tabs, but using them in much more sensible way. I keep them arranged in trees stemming from topical groups on high-level panels, and trim or kill as they're no longer useful. Most of those tabs are unloaded anyway, but the interface works as excellent short-term (days to weeks, sometimes a few months) bookmarking system - and I don't lose tabs anymore (as in knowing the tab is there somewhere, but not being able to find it in the vast sea of other tabs).
Except for the annoying interaction (I think) with "open new tabs next to current tab", which causes Sideberry to somehow leave behind lots of stupid empty tabs named after the page the real new tab had. I deal with it, but it's annoying.
Oh, I'm yet to hit that problem. My current annoyance is that sometimes it gets confused after Firefox restarts, and I end up with a flat dump of tabs + an unending spam of those tiny warning popups at the bottom of its UI. The few times that happened, I ended up restarting Firefox again to stop the warnings, and then rearranging the flat list of tabs into groups and panels I want them to be in. Fortunately, it's not that big of a chore.
I switched to Sidebery a couple of months ago, and I find that it's somewhat better at restoring trees (though that could just be luck). I feel it's a bit more responsive, but these days I trim my tabs a bit more aggresive than I used to so my TST memories are somewhat biased.
I was surprised at how decent it converted TST tabs, but I can't remember how low my bar was; maybe try a new profile?
One thing I'm finding really nice in Sidebery though that TST can't do, is that I can create a parent node that is not attached to a specific page (via grouping).
Panels I'm undecided on. They seem useful, but they also seem like a bandaid over window management tools. One problem I'm having is that they don't restore, and all the tabs go back to the main panel. That may be some setting I toggled though.
Honestly, I don't remember. A year ago when I was considering going back to vertical tabs, I read a bunch of discussion thread and articles, and got the impression Sideberry might be better. Tried it, and it resonates with me - unlike TST, which I tried and quickly abandoned several times over the year.
Can't really point to any concrete issue, other than I have a distinct feeling Sideberry is much faster/lighter, and feels more like part of Firefox vs. some bunch of JS faking an UI on top of it. Sorry I can't give you a more objective comparison. I did find this though:
I'm convinced that a significant proportion of people today don't use bookmarks and have never leveraged their power because they grew up with tabs and never bothered to explore their other options for organizing websites.
You can save all of the tabs of your current session as a bookmark folder in one fell swoop! Your research tabs can be all saved together and opened as a group! Your gift ideas that you won't close because you don't want to forget about them can be saved in a folder named gift ideas so the next time you need them you have them, without the cost of using up your extra RAM and CPU cycles!
There were extensions for it more than a decade ago already, but these days it is indeed the regular out-of-box behavior (though Chrome got it only a few months ago IIRC).
Nah, I grew up with bookmarks and was constantly annoyed at the terrible UI for them and then when tabs got good enough I stopped using bookmarks since the default bookmarks UI is terrible.
For me I just type titles or word back into the browser bar and Firefox searches history. How are you searching/navigating to find the right tab of several hundred to go back to that tab?
Too many sites have useless titles, or URLs that if you go back to you don't get to the same state you had when you closed the window. So, I find that history is for the most part useless. Sometimes it works - but not reliably.
I hardly use it, though, because I usually have < 100 open tabs, not thousands like others have. I identify tabs by their tree structures (parents, children, siblings tabs) and the prefixes of the titles, whose lengths don't depend on how many tabs opened, because the tabs are arranged vertically.
Bookmarks are long-term useful things to keep saved, and don't serve the same purpose as these open tabs.
As for history, imagine you're researching a topic and have gone through fifteen search results, decided three of them were relevant, and closed the others. Your history is polluted with all fifteen, whereas this tab search will directly return you these most relevant pages only.
I switched about a year ago as well, partially because of performance pains but also because I tried to leave as many google products behind as I could for privacy reasons. I have not been disappointed so far... There are a few plugins I miss on Chrome but nothing I couldn't live without or find an acceptable alternative.
I switched to Orion[0] as a test, discovered the awesomeness of superbly integrated, native, tree style tabs, and now I'm stuck with this browser where sites I need for work are half broken.
I tried Firefox with Tree Style Tab extension, but it's not nearly as good :(
On firefox you can also use sidebery. If I recall correctly it worked decently well. Currently I'm using Arc which performs well enough for my use cases, although being locked into chromium kinda sucks.
Tree style tabs along with changing the CSS to remove the tabs from the top of the screen has been a game changer for me. Back when I had an M1 macbook air, it was the difference between everything feeling cluttered to feeling like a real laptop screen.
Edge has had vertical tabs with tab groups natively for a couple years now. It also has a nice Reader mode, good text-to-speech, and a screenshot tool built in. And it supports uBlock Origin as an add on.
Yeah, that's not the same, or even functionally close. Just a superficial resemblance. The value of tree style tabs is that you don't manually organize anything, and the tabs are nested arbitrarily deep so that you literally end up with a hierarchical tree of tabs that shows you the logical view of your browsing history with no manual input on your part. (Note the comparison to edge has been made before, which is why I specifically said tree-style tabs, not vertical tabs.)
Unfortunately due to limitations of chrome's extension model, there is no way to have a built-in extension sidebar like on firefox. I just manually position the tab window next to the browser window and it's fine. The window sizes are remembered and so it's really a non-issue.
Same. Recently I tried Brave because of all the praise but turns out the browser can only display around 80 tabs on the tab bar and every further tab simply never shows up even if it's in the foreground. I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better. I'm staying with Firefox, though I think Brave is probably still a good recommendation for users that don't want to go through the effort of installing an ad blocker.
Edit: so I just looked and it turns out you can enable tab bar scrolling on chrome://flags/#scrollable-tabstrip. Why is that even disabled by default?
It also has nice privacy centric and QoL features that strip tracking URLs, removes "Open in App" banners and AMP pages + redirects (e.g. old.reddit) for mobile, fingerprint randomisation and of course, will probably be the best Chromium-based browser adblocker post Manifest V3, but yeah you can also spin these features into a bundled Firefox or use one of those Libre* forks which already does most of this afaik.
"I see people talking about the Brave browser in the whole Firefox vs chrome debate, and while people rightly point out that it's just chromium and that they do shady cryptocurrency shit, I never see anyone point out that Brave's founder and CEO is Brandan Eich.
"He founded Brave after massive protests against him becoming CEO of Mozilla, resigning after 11 days. And the reason for those protests? He donated a lot of money to the Prop 8 campaign to ban gay marriage.
"So just remember: it's not just another chromium fork, it's not just a browser with cryptocurrency bullshit, it's also the browser founded by a homophobe because he got kicked out of his former organization for being a homophobe.
"Also, he invented Javascript. I'm willing to believe that maybe he has grown on the gay marriage issue, and made amends for his former mistakes. But Javascript cannot be forgiven."
A number of Mozilla's LGBT+ employees spoke out at the time saying that they'd already known about the donation but since he'd been utterly professional at work they still felt quite sufficiently supported by the company and leadership.
The donation getting publicised, going viral and becoming a shitstorm was what forced the end of his tenure as CEO, and I've heard comments since that his being replaced with a more business-y CEO has been a disappointing experience.
(I've no idea what percentage of the relevant subset of employees made such comments and/or held such opinions, and I'm not expressing an opinion on should/shouldn't about any given event, but it does seem to have been a little more complicated than "he got kicked out ... for being a homophobe")
Regardless of what you think about gay marriage, the mere fact that Mozilla forced out its CEO for having an unpopular political opinion is reason enough not to trust its leadership. Its one of the reasons I use Brave and not Firefox.
It seems disingenuous to sweep "actively working to deny people civil rights" under the rug of "having an unpopular political opinion."
Partially because this wasn't just a matter of having an opinion; this was an extremely concrete _action._ Even if you want to take the (dubious) stance that people should not be held responsible for their beliefs, surely we should still hold people responsible for their actions?
I invite you to imagine the equivalent but reversed scenario. What if Brendan Eich had been contributing money to the pro-gay-marriage campaign and had been forced out by right-wing staff at Mozilla? Would that have been appropriate?
Nope! But that's because extending civil rights more uniformly to more people is a good thing, and selectively denying civil rights is a bad thing.
Any reductive moral framework that abstracts every possible political position into interchangeable spherical cows in a vacuum does a disservice to its users.
You think that gay marriage is a good thing, but many people do not.
The two scenarios are precisely symmetrical. The only difference is that the cause on one side is one that you agree with, and on the other side is one that you disagree with.
You cannot decide moral questions by couching them in terms of “rights” and assuming that whichever side “advances rights” must be the correct side. Why? Because you can do that arbitrarily either way and for anything. e.g. “admitting gay marriage denies people the right to live in a society where traditional marriage is protected”.
Now what do you do? Both sides can say their cause is “advancing rights”.
> The two scenarios are precisely symmetrical. The only difference is that the cause on one side is one that you agree with, and on the other side is one that you disagree with.
Yep! That's pretty much what agreeing or disagreeing with something means.
But the reasoning you seem to be proposing is "here is something you agree with and something you disagree with, therefore those two things are interchangeable and you should not favor one over the other."
> Now what do you do? Both sides can say their cause is “advancing rights”.
I exercise human discretion and decide which of those rights is better, more valuable, more important.
In this case, that's not a tough call. Marriage provides a bunch of very concrete mechanical effects, from inheritance to medical decision making to finances to immigration. Whereas some people feeling happy about the fact that some other people can't access those rights is, at best, abstract and intangible.
And you'll also note that some of my previous references were to the uniformity of rights. Generally speaking, making rights more uniformly accessible to all people is better than having rights be selectively, arbitrarily limited to some people.
>> The two scenarios are precisely symmetrical. The only difference is that the cause on one side is one that you agree with, and on the other side is one that you disagree with.
>Yep! That's pretty much what agreeing or disagreeing with something means.
Not to me. The difference between us is that I am perfectly happy to work with people who do not share my political viewpoints.
Whereas I feel that Desmond Tutu covered this pretty well already: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."
the general discussion about crypto aside, if the genuine purpose had been to faciliate direct payments the obvious solution would have been to integrate some currency like Ethereum or Bitcoin, not pre-mined Brave Bucks, which is effectively like "paying" your users in your own quasi worthless gift cards.
There's flags for Firefox style scrolling horizontal tabs, and native scrollable vertical ones don't need a flag at all. Plus you get collapsible tab groups built in.
I'm old and I code for a living, I have maybe at most a dozen tabs open on any day. I can't imagine needing 80 but now I see why chrome has that new search tabs drop down.
On my main Firefox profile I'm rarely below 1000 tabs. I also use them as bookmarks and backlog, and every couple of months I scroll through the entire tab bar and close everything unimportant. The address bar also searches all open tabs and lets me jump to matches.
This is blowing my mind right now, how do you operate with so many tabs? For me, as soon as I can’t tell which site is in which tab it means I need to close some. And I don’t see the utility of having so many tabs open, since you can obviously only use one at a time. So if you have 100 or 1000 open, most are not being used most of the time, so why not close them?
What do you lose from closing tabs versus what do you gain from keeping them open? For me, if I use a site open it’s bookmarked or already in history so it’s fast to reopen. Closing tabs keeps my machine fast and memory usage low and also makes me faster at switching between the open tabs as I don’t need to search or parse through many UI bits.
I don't keep hundereds of tabs open, but tabs do serve two purposes that are not covered by either the browser history or by bookmarks.
One is as a sort of ad-hoc to-do list. When I leave a tab open it's because something is unfinished and I mean to come back to it soon. (I just wish there was a chronological view so that I could easily delete the oldest tabs).
The second purpose is to store the scroll position of longer articles that I haven't finished reading.
Tabs are the RAM of my TODO list, my README bookmark folder is the disk. Every so many months I purge the README folder, while regretting never really learning Blender, GIMP, SVG, d3, Godot, Rust, Julia, React, Svelte, CSS, shaders, machine learning, wavelets, Ableton, ....
If you can't tell which site is open, that's likely due to Chrome's poor tab UX. Constantly shrinking the click target makes tabs harder to work with. Not being able to read the tab title doesn't help either. Thus, Chrome incentivizes people to close tabs.
With vertical tabs, you don't have this problem. Every tab is the same width, making them easier to interact with. You'll need to vertically scroll the list if it gets too large, but that's a natural enough action. In this situation, you now close tabs because you want to, not because the browser is strong-arming you into it.
Where things really get fun is with vertical tabs that track ancestry, like Tree Style Tabs or Firefox or what's built into Orion. These tabs will nest as you follow links from one page to another, capturing context.
HN is a perfect example of where this works well. I can go to the home page, see a few stories that look interesting, open each comment page as a child tab. Then on each child I can open the associated article. And, as I read the comments, I can open new links that look interesting and that page is now associated with the root story.
I could bookmark all of these pages, but short of creating folders for each story there's no good way to capture that context. Naturally, that makes it harder to restore the same state when opening bookmarks. Instead, I leave the tabs open and when I'm ready to take an action on them (read an article, make notes in Obsidian, bookmark into a topic of interest) I do so and then I close them out. It makes context switching much easier when I know I'm not going to lose the context I just left. As an added benefit, I find if I leave tabs open I get better use of the browser cache than I do if I close an open later from a bookmark.
Btw, you can bookmark the entire tree, to re-open the entire tree later. I mostly have the same workflow as you, though, except for a few regularly scheduled things (book clubs, DnD sessions, etc), where I have a bookmarked tree ready to open for necessary context.
I never have 1000+ open but I do have many open in a couple different windows for long periods. Firefox does unload tabs when you restart (at least, it can be set that way. And there are extensions that let you unload them manually or after a time period). Unloaded tabs take no resources (or an unnoticeable amount if any) and allow this trick to work. That and vertical tab addons (I use sideberry).
A tab bar is similar to a bookshelf for me: I see the icon and title of open websites in a neat list. Closing tabs and banishing them to some hidden history/bookmark menu is like putting your books into boxes in the basement instead of a shelf. Sure they're still there, but you might forget you have a book because you never see it and you have to dig through boxes to find it.
If a closed tab only remains in the bookmarks or history it might as well not exist for my brain.
> Closing tabs keeps my machine fast and memory usage low
I just restart the browser now and then, which will unload all tabs again. They're still in the tab bar but require almost no memory until I use them.
FWIW the Firefox address bar also searches your history and bookmarks, so you can still retrieve those sites by searching for them without keeping a tab open for each one. Feel free to do what you like, obviously, but if having a zillion tabs open is causing you problems, know that there are other solutions :)
Just curious, what does that UI look like with 1,000 tabs open? Isn't it just like, one pixel per tab, or a scrollbar 50 times wider than your monitor? Is that actually useful?
The handy part about Firefox, unlike Chrome, will shrink tabs to a minimum width and then make them a horizontally scrolling list. I am somewhat of a tab hoarder (I also keep browser windows on vertical monitors), so using Chrome, where it would shrink tabs more and more until there's nothing but a sliver, wouldn't work. Below are screenshots of examples. Firefox keeps things usable; Chrome not so much. (I also know it isn't 1000 tabs, nor is it close to the amount I keep open on my work laptop).
Also, if you're wondering why my tabs look like they're from 2017, that's just another benefit of using Firefox [1]. Although as nice as it being able to actually customize our browsers, it would be nice for Mozilla to stop breaking things for sake of breaking things.
I was not aware of this, I will probably check this out on my Windows machine, since I've had a nasty bug where Firefox will decide to just use ALL of my GPU resources, crashing whatever game I am playing. Very annoying bug and I should probably take the time to report it, but every time I encounter it I'm usually focused on my game.
If it weren't for TreeStyleTab, the browser would be barely usable for me. This is the biggest reason that I won't use Chrome at all, and stay away from Edge.
I have Safari, Anybox, and Alfred, and the three works together in a nice way to save anything interesting quickly. And once in a while, I comb through the inbox and sort them out. If I ever need to explore a subject, I then have a collection of links ready. I feel uncomfortable whenever I have 10+ tabs open. It felt that I’m not focusing enough on my research (taking the proper time to read and reflect in order to find a solution).
The only things I hoard are books. They are more like my antilibrary (things I’d like to have read already) than collecting everything I encounter.
I usually have 600 tabs across several windows and desktops. Doesn't hurt performance if you have 64G or more so the real question is "why not?". Switching to an open tab using title text search is way faster than opening a bookmark
Hard for me to say, I guess I feel better not using more memory than needed, I think my security surface may less than it would be with a lot of tabs open but don't hold me to that as researched opinion, it isn't, can't think of anything else though.
> I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better.
It's my understanding that on mobile, tabs are unloaded from memory nearly instantly. You lose state but they use almost no resources. (I wish this was an option out of the box on Desktop. I've had extensions that do this and it's a godsend)
Huh. And I actually had to play around in Android settings to exempt Firefox from regular memory management, so it stops unloading tabs so aggressively. Not only this was a huge annoyance when browsing[0][1], it actually prevented me from using the one PWA I cared about[2] - it would literally blank out every time I switched away from and back to it, while having as much as a single trivial other app open, forcing me to kill and relaunch it.
It's not that my phone was memory-constrained, we're talking a recent Samsung Galaxy flagship[3] - it's purely overly aggressive memory management on part of Firefox.
--
[0] - Have 5 tabs open, all something trivial like HN, put away phone, grab it 5 minutes later, switch to other HN tab, ... wait half a minute for it to reload on a spotty connection at my in-laws' countryside home.
[1] - Talking with others about how we experience technology, I'm starting to feel that I'm abnormally annoyed by large or unpredictable UI latency.
[2] - TypingMind.
[3] - I learned to save up and only buy high-end, thanks to the experience with my first smartphone, that turned out to be underspecced for its own functionality. It's probably a case of [1], but one time I deviated from this rule and got my wife a mid-range phone, we both started to regret it in a few months, so it's not only me who has low tolerance for jank.
That seems like a good way to lose work if you're not careful. Although I would also argue that any well-designed web app should be able to handle this gracefully so maybe it will lead to better web apps.
Infinite scroll is an especially bad offender here. If I'm 50 screens down on an infinite scroll that is work and a page refresh losing my place should be treated as a data-loss bug.
(an even better idea is not to use infinite scroll at all)
I've never lost any unfinished messages due to this. I'm pretty sure Chrome prioritizes tabs where you've typed in text. Link in that other comment suggests that Firefox does something similar: "This is a smart process that avoids unloading tabs that are playing media, using Picture-in-Picture, or WebRTC. For more technical information, see this blog post"
And yeah fuck infinite scroll. I usually interact with such sites via their API or data export. Eg searching my YouTube Likes playlist is impossible on the web because I'd have to spend an hour scrolling before I can Ctrl+F
> More precisely, why 100 tabs in 1 window instead of 10 tabs times 10 windows?
I still don't understand why some people believe that the correct answer is anything other than 100 windows.
My platform has 40 years of well refined tools for managing windows, all of which work nicely and consistently across all applications. By comparison, all of the tab management systems are crude amatuerish knockoffs trying to reinvent the same tools from first principles, and isolated to a single application that's then inconsistent with everything else.
I don't understand tab hoarding either but Chrome/Brave's tab bar poor design becomes a problem even in what I'd consider pretty mundane scenarios.
Imagine you snap your browser to half your screen. Assuming it's not an ultrawide, you'll be able to fit maybe a dozen tabs before they're so tiny to be essentially useless.
It's not something I ever do, but I imagine the answer to your question is that you can easily search for a particular tab when they are all in one window, but it would become a big chore if you had to switch between multiple windows and search each one to find a tab.
On Firefox, at least, search will surface tabs in other windows. I often have 2 browser windows open, one for each monitor (one mostly for streaming content while I dick around on the other one).
The thing that I really like in Chrome (which I use for work) is Tab Groups. There is nothing like it for Firefox. Even the "Simple Tab Groups" extension, which is well liked, cannot do the simple "grouping" of tabs in a larger window - it simply hides all the tabs that are not in current use (which defeats the purpose of tab groups, I can just use windows for that). Another thing that Chrome has is the ability to name individual windows for easy Alt-Tabbing. Shame that Firefox doesn't have these things (that I know of).
Honestly you are the first person I’ve ever heard that prefers chromes tab system. Check out tree style tabs it’ll change your life. I hate chrome now solely due to it
I installed it to see. I don't want something on the "side" - I want the tab organization to be on the top where the tabs ordinarily live anyway. That's what the Chrome tab groups does well. I can just visually see which tabs are grouped together, and collapse all of them.
I haven't used chrome tab system, but Safari's tab groups are nice. Point being, most other browser, including esoteric ones like Vivaldi, have a way to organize tabs beyond simple order and moving them to other windows. If you are in a corporate environment, it is unlikely a user can install extensions like sideberry.
Tab groups in Chrome are a relatively new feature (and might still be behind an experimental feature flag, or at least the ability to save tab groups might be).
They're a game changer; so much better than using a third party extension IMO.
>Tab groups in Chrome are a relatively new feature
I'm gonna die on this hill but I'd like to add that Opera had tab groups natively without extensions since 2010 [1]. Damn I feel old now.
Also, UX of tab groups in old-Opera was way nicer than current-Chrome since you could just drag and drop tabs on top of another and it would automatically create groups.
Firefox had them. In fact, it had them since version 4 [1]. Then Firefox got rid of them again [2]. For no clear reason. And then Chrome copied the idea. And that's just a messed up timeline of events.
But it should never have needed to be one. Every extension is an increase in security exploit surface. They removed it because "it wasn't popular enough", rather than "it had problems that don't have the capacity to fix" in a period where they had no idea what to do with FF in order to not bleed money all over the floor. Removing it was a short sighted decision that did nothing to push the needle up.
Use Sidebery in Firefox for vertical tabs and it has not only better grouping but also entire "tab spaces" (workspaces) which you can switch between as well, if wanted.
I've been trying Sidebery since about 2 minutes after I made my last comment, and I think I like Sidebery more--and I've been using Tree Style Tab for _years_
Sidebery responds noticeably faster, and the panels are a great feature.
In Tree Style Tab you can create a tab group (which is basically a custom tab whose title you can rename, e.g. "Docs"), then move all tabs you want to group as one "inside" it. That makes all the tabs the children of the tab group. Now you have the best of both worlds: tab groups and tree-based tab structures.
I am a longtime and proud Firefox user, but this feature of Chrome is the one thing I want. When I see colleagues using it, it just looks like the right way to tackle that need.
The Firefox extension API (which wasn't an API really at all when it was first used) was created to support cases like the DOM Inspector and others which abused Mozilla's XPInstall and XUL overlays (both created for other purposes) to invent extensions. The same people that created the APIs were the same people building those extensions (see Joe Hewitt for Firefox and DOMI and later Firebug.)
I also like that Firefox isn't putting artificial limitations on the plugins that we can use in order to appease their infinite hunger for ad revenue.
Chrome's manifest v3's entire purpose for existence is to ultimately snuff out ad blockers so they can make the internet worse for everyone and get more money in the process.
And if you don't believe me then you are wrong.
Of course they won't do it immediately. They won't entirely rug pull their browser's user base.
They'll just keep raising the bar to get approved for Chrome Store, making it harder and harder to comply with their extension requirements while also changing the way they deliver their ads.
This way the ad blockers have to be updated and then go back through the extension store review process until the developers either get tired of jumping through their hoops and gives up or until they can no longer afford to keep the extension alive.
And then they'll rug pull, just like Reddit and Twitter, and all of a sudden ad blocking extensions will require that the users pay Google for the privilege of having fewer ads while still letting some ads through anyway, and that will be that.
Best to jump ship now, things are nice and cozy over here in "user wants are respected within reason" land.
Edge provides a compelling alternative that is a drop-in replacement for Chrome for most users. I wonder if the competition will keep Google in check. I also wonder if Edge will end up providing its own ad-blocker if Google's restrictions become too onerous. Probably easier than forking the core browser to maintain a parallel build without the extension limitations.
AFAIK all chromium based browsers will follow Manifest V3. Edge will also as otherwise adblockers and the like would impact M$ revenue.
Manifest v3 is just everyone's get out of jail free card for not being responsible for the destruction of ad blocking and privacy extensions. Blame it on Google, who says they "had to do it" for some reason that ultimately profits them and their ilk to the detriment of humanity.
>Chrome's manifest v3's entire purpose for existence is to ultimately snuff out ad blockers
There is no evidence of that, while there is evidence that manifest v3 provides security, privacy, and performance benefits. Manifest v3 doesn't stop ad blocking from working.
>so they can make the internet worse for everyone
Ads make the internet better for everyone since it provides a monetization model for sites to give away valuable services for free instead of everything being behind a paywall.
>And if you don't believe me then you are wrong.
This way of arguing doesn't convince people. This kind of stance only appeals to people who are antitech or antigoogle.
>They'll just keep raising the bar to get approved for Chrome Store, making it harder and harder to comply with their extension requirements
Adblockers are highly priviledged. They steered have a high bar to make it into a extention store.
That is what always irks me when people (usually only on here) say FF should have stayed with xpi and their old architecture. Only after all those changes did FF finally become performant enough for me to use it again, before it was a slow drag to me.
And I know, people with limited resources would have had a different experience, I don't know, I never had RAM issues. With enough RAM, FF was noticably slower than chrome.
TL;DR: Windows Defender had a bug that made certain system calls expensive on CPU cycles when Defender's Real-time Protection feature is enabled. After discovery, Mozilla reported this issue to Microsoft. Microsoft is releasing a patch that should result in lower CPU usage when using Firefox on sites like YouTube (a ~75% CPU usage reduction was noted when browsing YouTube in Firefox with the fixed version of Defender).
For example, Mozilla compiles Firefox’s official macOS and Windows builds on Linux because cross-compilation is faster and cheaper than compiling on macOS or Windows in the cloud.
Windows does not fork processes as fast as Linux, although this is improved somewhat in the in the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Here is a somewhat foolish test with a shell script, that forks "/bin/true" 10 million times.
C:\>busybox sh
~ $ echo 'x=10000000; while [ $x -gt 0 ]; do true; x=$((x-1)); done' > timetest
~ $ time sh timetest
real 0m 46.86s
user 0m 46.76s
sys 0m 0.04s
Here is the same test with Debian's dash shell, one of the fastest:
$ cat timetest
x=10000000; while [ $x -gt 0 ]; do true; x=$((x-1)); done
$ time dash timetest
0m33.79s real 0m33.50s user 0m0.05s system
Not a great test, but there is quite a difference there.
No other browser has something like container tabs. Temporary Containers is an excellent extension to make each new tab its own isolated browser session too. First Party Isolation is 1 thing, but Chrome cannot do containers.
2K? Not bad. My main linux box is running around 7500 tabs in 34 windows right now. Takes about 30s to start, which is fine since that browser gets restarted only every few weeks. My secondary desktop (windows) only has 2750 tabs.
And there are users of Firefox out there with >15000 tabs.
Two reasons for tab hoarding:
1) spatial -- related tabs are close together (frequently open a bunch of related search results; if I come back to them to continue later, they're all together).
2) history -- unlike bookmarks or history entries, tabs retain the forward and back history, so when you return to them you can know how you go there (go back to the search for example).
I do periodically clear out tabs, especially duplicates. The Tab Stats extension by glandium is very handy for tab hoarders
I just mass-bookmark mine into a new bookmark folder periodically. Keeps it from getting anywhere near 2k.
I've been doing this for years and have never, not once, looked at the bookmarks. But it gives me the peace of mind I need to close all tabs and start over.
Exactly. You can even name the bookmark folder either with the thing you're researching/interacting with or just by the date if it's a ton of miscellaneous stuff. Then later on you can go thru and delete all the date-named bookmarks older than 6 months. At that point just search your browser history
As a fellow tab hoarder, I recommend using Tab Session Manager plugin. You can easily save all tabs, although from my own experience I've almost never restored them anyway lol
I prefer Tab Stash. It can be also used as a side bar for your tabs, but can close every currently open one and put them into a group you can optionally name for later reuse.
Pocket is builtin to Firefox, but in my experience, searching something you saved to Pocket (a thing that should be pretty core to the Pocket product) sucks and you really need simonw's https://github.com/dogsheep/pocket-to-sqlite to actually search it.
Not sure how it works now, but 2k tabs in Chrome used to be outright impossible on any reasonable hardware anyway, while Firefox always handled it pretty well aside of slowdowns ;)
As a fellow tab hoarder, I recommend Auto Tab Discard. Tabs are still open but aren't actually loaded until you click on them. With various configurable options for how that works.
I have five windows open with about 1000 tabs in each, no performance problems at all. It's great!
If you restart Firefox, it won't load a restored tab until you navigate to it, so presumably most of his are already backgrounded.
I find it useful to periodically prune, though. Save to Pocket or other "to read" list for things I intend to eventually read. Bookmark things I may want sometime, but don't need open. Potentially use Tab Stash to save groups of references for particular research tasks. Toss things that realistically I'm just not going to get to ever.
- I'm likely to return back to some of them. I might not know which ones. Typing in the address bar brings them back fast and the page does not need to be loaded again. Having the tab already open is also a strong signal that this is what I'm looking up.
- no noticeable slowdown anyway, Firefox is actually quite efficient.
- I don't care for taking the time of closing them progressively. It happens that I will close them all at the same time at some point when I feel like I need some clean up. Usually when I'm done with something.
- I think I learned to mostly ignore this part of the screen. Everything happens in the address bar.
In short, it's a combination of intentionally leaving tabs open so I can go back to them later without reloading the page, and not wanting to spend the time to manage them.
I usually have under 100 tabs open though, often even fewer.
Same applies to thousands of them, the "close everything" time just happens later in that case. I usually clean them up once Firefox starts slowing down, which is at tens of thousands.
With a good UI the unused ones just don't bother you anymore anyway until you scroll or filter them. They show me my train of thoughts without having to consciously organize anything. Unused tabs get unloaded from RAM anyway, so the cost of keeping them open is minimal.
A few years ago there was a version of Firefox that didn't slow down and opened quickly even at tens of thousands of tabs, but unfortunately it quickly regressed, so throwing everything out periodically is still inevitable:)
What cripples FF DevTools for me is being unable to find the setting for timeout on HTTP GET, during full-stack development. If I've set a breakpoint in a debugger on my server and proceed to single-step there, FF aborts the GET request with an error. So client-side JS doesn't see the eventual result of the GET, it has to recover from the error to proceed, e.g. by a full page-reload.
Chromium, last I tried it, by default sets the necessary HTTP timeout(s) to infinity if its DevTools is open.
My searches of Firefox docs/wiki, StackExchange, HN Algolia for a fix have come up empty.
Navigating to "about:config" and searching for "timeout" finds 27 different settings prefixed with the substring "network". Some are obviously in units of milliseconds, others perhaps whole seconds.
Anyone know which one (or what combination) might incant the necessary black magic?
One of the reasons I stopped using Firefox was that the columns in the devtools were unexpandable. I couldn’t see any data past what Firefox decided was enough to show. Did they fix this?
I'm assuming you're talking about table views like the Network or Storage/Cookies tabs? You can resize columns and each cell has a tooltip that shows the full content if it's hidden.
I really like that the Chrome profiler shows you the profile right there. Firefox insists on opening the profile in a browser tab. This is fine, but is an unnecessary context switch for me.
I use the FF devtools daily, and for what I'm working on, it has everything I need to help me get the things I need done. Knowing that I'm not everyone and have plenty to learn, what things are missing from the devtools for you?
Chrome's ability to temporarily edit and save changes to JS sources through the debugger editor is fantastic though.
Other than that it's mostly just improvements to what FF already has.
Search could be made much more useful, especially network requests. Searching all request bodies/responses for a particular string/json/regex would be a huge step up.
You can search the response of individual requests but there's a UI bug that makes it look like your filter is no longer applied when you select the next one in the list.
>Chrome's ability to temporarily edit and save changes to JS sources through the debugger editor is fantastic though.
Does this affect the live code so the change is available immediately? I once had a thought about wondering if this was possible to have the change available without refreshing
It made no sense for how that could work that I could imagine, but it would be holycrapthatscool if it could. some sort of second JIT or something, but i can only imagine the security nightmare that'd open up
The only issue I have (which, is happening less and less lately) is my debugger doesn't jump to the source. It hits and everything pauses, but I don't get routed to it and have to start progressing just to get it to work, which can make the debugger useless as you've gone past what you were looking at. This has happened across machines for years for me, and happens much less in chrome. But doesn't happen enough for me to switch.
Me too. I'm using FF since 3.6, and before that Camino (a derived version for the mac), and the only thing Google has done is strengthen my resolve to keep using Firefox, but I still prefer to debug on Chrome (well, Chromium). It just feels better, even though it's starting to slip and FF is improving slowly.
Looking at https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/developer/ I'm a bit confused... Which features are just new features which will soon be in the main Firefox DevTools, and which are specific to installing the Developer Edition?
AFAIK, Firefox Developer Edition is currently just a repackaging of Firefox Beta and doesn’t have different devtools. It used to be a rebranding of Firefox Aurora (an alpha release channel between Firefox Nightly and Beta, now retired) with a different theme and a few different devtool setting changes.
I have been using the Developer Edition since 2014, when it was released, without issue. You are not locked into a single browser. Personally I use more then one browser, and professionally I always validate against multiple browsers.
I find different browsers excel at different things in regards to the developer experience. As an example I appreciate that Firefox had a formatted JSON view without requiring an extension. However Chrome also has capabilities that I wish were included in Firefox.
Firefox's GC seems to be much slower than chromium at least as of 109. Certain Vue websites are rather prolific in their garbage generation and The performance difference between chromium and firefox is easily noticeable, particularly if you leave an SPA open for a while.
I have never doubted the performance of Firefox. There’s a really old computer sitting in my house, never updated it for almost a decade now and my parents occasionally use it. The Chrome on it kept getting slower and laggier, while the Firefox always work fine. At some point, I just removed Chrome and told my parents to use Firefox: “the red fox is the Internet”
Chrome definitely lit a fire under Firefox, and that’s saying something because, at the time chrome came out, Firefox was “fast”.
I switched to chrome early on for the speed benefits.
At some point, Firefox started getting pretty close. Albeit not on parity with chrome, but chrome started major spying oriented pushes. So the minor loss in speed was worth it.
Now chrome could never win me back anyway. Google is evil.
Fx provided a decent enough performance boost with its builtin tracking blocker that more than made up for any difference in real world scenarios. …But I never switch away from Gecko since Fx v2.x.
“Fx” is and basically has always been (v1.5) the official abbreviation for “Firefox”. This abbreviation is basically the only one used inside Mozilla & you can see it reflected in their project names to this day.
> How do I capitalize Firefox? How do I abbreviate it?
> Only the first letter is capitalized (so it's Firefox, not FireFox.) The preferred abbreviation is "Fx" or "fx".
I tested Chrome and Firefox about 1 week ago. On about 30 tabs, Firefox uses about 1G more RAM than Chrome. Their speed is difference is unnoticeable. I also tested Edge and Vivaldi for RAM usage. The result is Chrome < Edge < Firefox < Vivaldi.
Those results say nothing. Were you RAM-constrained? When I am not, I have found that Firefox tries to use more memory. If I use Firefox while also having 3 VMs running and compiling stuff it stays down, whereas if I don't it easily starts using over 4gb (i have 64).
I think it's worth mentioning the caveat, that it doesn't natively support PWA in the same way WebKit browsers do. It has little to no support (depending on your definition of support).
Firefox is a great browser and Mozilla is a (generally) great organization. It's my daily driver on all my devices (except my TV ha), it's fast and has great plugins that also work in mobile. Philosophically I'm very much a "root for the underdog" type of person so it makes me happy that way, too. Only very rarely (every few months) am I forced to use Chrome for a site - and in my view, that's a huge ding on the site devs, not on Firefox.
It's strange hearing reports of "scroll lag" in the other comments. It's possible I'm just lucky. Or there's a misconfiguration somewhere in their setup that Chrome somehow avoids.
It's true that I still mostly use Chrome for webdev - I've become more used to it's (excellent) dev tools, even though Firefox and Firebug started that whole trend. It feels very right to separate my "user browser" from my "dev browser" in this way!
> Only very rarely (every few months) am I forced to use Chrome for a site - and in my view, that's a huge ding on the site devs, not on Firefox.
I find this very common with Credit Card and Banking Sites. Very often they either refuse to log me in or log me out sooner than they should on Firefox, or certain pages within the site will just not load. I'm guessing they prioritize security, and only test this stuff in Chrome ;(
Many businesses don't bother with a website anymore and just have a Facebook page. It's like how in 1998 businesses would mention their AOL Keyword alongside www.example.com.
Reddit.com and Discord have replaced many individual forums.
I took an old laptop and transformed it into an Arch Linux based smart-tv (thanks to a stabilized "air mouse" and AwesomeWM to configure windows positions and shortcuts through LUA). Now I basically do everything through Firefox in kiosk mode: it's fast, you can avoid ads, telemetry et similia through configuration tweaks and extensions. The only problem I have is with Sky/NowTV services, that are not accessible by web browser and don't have Linux apps and are not (yet?) working through wine. All the rest I use (Prime Video, Netflix, Mubi, Discovery+ etc) work great with it, way faster and cleaner than usual smart TV apps. This with a 15W-TDP 4th-gen i3 based old entry level laptop.
That's just to say that Firefox can actually be pretty good for TV!
They just said they're more used to the Chrome version, not that the Firefox version is lacking.
(Personally I'm with you in preferring Firefox dev tools - although I'm not someone who needs to use them more than a few times a month - not because I have any specific issues with Chrome dev tools, but because I prefer Firefox, and Mozilla, generally, and I've not found anything that FF can't do.)
Firefox dev tools have been letting me down the past few months.
I'm working on a pretty nasty (legacy and poorly optimised) but otherwise still rather "normal" website at work.
Opening the dev tools makes Firefox hang for almost a minute, I suspect this is due to some issue with source maps, thousands of source files and large (several megabytes of) minified code.
The debugger often reports _wrong_ values on hover especially in useEffects whereas console.log shows the right one.
Other than the js debugger I have 0 problems with the Firefox devtools, it often spearheads features that I use on a day-to-day basis like highlighting grid layouts. Super nice!
As for sites that don't work in FireFox, here's a huge one: Office365 does not support FireFox on MacOS[0]. Mostly it works, but some things unfortunately don't. For instance, my employer's Teams site just doesn't render at all in FF.
I was sad when they discontinued Firefox for my TV (even though it was mostly an Amazon-funded workaround to get youtube on FireTV which went away when YouTube started working...).
>It's strange hearing reports of "scroll lag" in the other comments. It's possible I'm just lucky. Or there's a misconfiguration somewhere in their setup that Chrome somehow avoids.
Don't forget the other possibility: someone using Firefox having internalized this lag as "normal behavior".
As an aside, I am very much against this trend of accusing people of "internalizing" a bad thing such that they aren't aware of it. It's using therapy-speak as an ad hominem attack, and in my view reflects poorly on the speaker. Most of the people on HN are software developers and are conversant in a wide variety of tools on many platforms, and certainly I am (one can infer that from my post). So to assert that I simply don't know what scroll lag looks like is not only absurd, but also fundamentally disrespectful and ignorant. The simple fact is that you do not, cannot, know what other people experience on their machines. Each physical system is characterized by roughly 10e10 bits - the number of combinations is (10e10)!. In other words, wild and alien configurations exist that you've never seen, and cannot imagine. Compared to this, the chances that someone has software that behaves slightly differently on their system than on your system is approaching 1.
Considering this as a possibility is anything than "fundamentally disrespectful and ignorant".
I've known lots of developers who thought that some broken, slow, erratic, or stupid, program or OS behavior is the normal, because that's what they've been used to. They could be great programmers too, they just didn't venture much outside the stuff they used.
As for the diatribe, I don't care for this recent trend of perceiving something somebody said as some kind of abuse of "therapy speak" (before this comment I've seen a few stories about some actor "abusing therapy speak" and such lately, so I assume it's some new fad going on). I don't read about therapy, or had any therapy speak in mind. "Internalized" has been used for decades as a term, and here just means "accepted this lag as the baseline as they don't have a frame of reference". Might not even be the right word, I probably was looking for normalized (is that therapy speak too?). So there's that.
One other possibility is that I know what scroll lag is, don't see it in Firefox on my devices, and you really don't want to accept that for some reason. So much so you double-down on your out-of-the-blue speculation about my mental state. People also have petit mal seizures, and that could also explain not seeing lag. Or perhaps an eye problem. Or maybe I'm a paid shill for Mozilla. Why not propose these as well? It would make just as much sense, and reflect just as poorly on you.
Sorry, but this reaction has little to do with my comment. I didn't do any "speculation about your mental state", except to the degree that saying that someone can be so used to a certain program behavior/lag/etc that they consider it normal describes a "mental state".
>One other possibility is that I know what scroll lag is, don't see it in Firefox on my devices"
Yes, that's "one other" possibility.
Now, can we also entertain the possibility I suggested as something that one can't just rule out in advance, and that one would be OK in suggesting could also be the case?
I don't know you, have not met you, and I don't speak about you as a person. I made a general observation about what could be the case when someone says what you said. Another commenter also corroborated having seen this in the wild (assuming it even needs corroboration). It's hardly something that doesn't happen. And because I'm a somewhat insulted by your tone, notice how I didn't even said anything about you directly. I wrote:
"Don't forget the other possibility: someone using Firefox having internalized this lag as "normal behavior".
The rest, you brought into this. Enough is enough. Over and out.
Except people really do internalize lag as "normal behavior". Back when PC monitors were stuck at 60Hz, people would unironically claim that "the human eye can't see more than 60 fps". Of course they changed their tune after experiencing lower input lag
I agree that the human eye can see higher than 60Hz, especially in the peripheral vision where VR research shows we need at least 90Hz to not get sick and 120Hz works better.
I saw that thread and could not relate. Both my desktop (5800x3d/64GB/4090/4K120) and laptop (M2 Pro/32GB/3K120) are just as snappy as that 600MHz machine. More importantly, my machines stay snappy under more demanding workloads which that old machine can't do.
In the next tweet he compares it to a stock Surface Go 2 (quad-core i5 processor at 2.4GHz, 8GB RAM, SSD) and seems to be surprised that it performs like crap. His 600MHz CPU is sufficient to get decent input lag from NT 3.51 which lists a 25 MHz CPU as it's minimum spec just as my machines get decent input lag from Windows/macOS which list a 1.2 GHz CPU as the minimum spec.
I know clock speed is a bad metric, but you get the point. Your hardware needs to be well above the minimum spec by an order of magnitude if you want acceptable latency
I've used Firefox as my primary browser since the "Quantum" in 2017. Chrome still feels snappier, but Firefox's Container Tabs is hard for me to imagine losing.
Maybe FF should take some tips on those UI "smoke and mirrors". What feels faster is what users are going to go off of. For example, a page that fully loads in 1 second vs a page that incrementally loads in 1.5 seconds - the latter may feel faster because the time to start loading is faster.
That makes the user experience worse though. Anyone who's had a webpage layout change while they were trying to interact with it knows how frustrating it is.
> Chrome's snappiness is mostly UI smoke and mirrors
This can be very effective, which is why optimising complex pages for first contentful draw (perhaps at the expense of overall load speed) can make a huge difference to how your pages/app are perceived.
Back in the dial-up (and early ADSL) days many were convinced that IE was faster because of progress bar trickery: it would actively lie and could inch up to ~85% before the first byte of data had arrived from the server (I forget if it waited for the HTTP request to be sent or if it started edging up immediately upon TCP connection). It still did it right up to the end, though with local connectivity getting faster these days the amount you'll notice it is greatly reduced.
Yup. I found that Firefox does incredibly well at long text documents and tables. I remember that Google's internal source code browser would warn you if you tried to open a "large" file (I don't remember what the threshold was). However with Firefox the files always opened fine and things like scrolling performed well. I thought the warning was just a relic of an earlier time. However I realized that my colleagues using Chrome would actually respect this warning and download the file to open it in a text editor. Testing showed that the files would truly grind Chrome to a halt. It seems that Chrome still has a performance edge on highly dynamic content but Firefox does appear to be significantly better at large pages of mostly-static content like long HTML and text documents.
As a person who habitualy closes everything, I often average around 5 tabs open, rarely going above 10. With so few open at a time, the giant column of vertical space for the tab tree would be a waste of screen real estate, which can be better utilized to open another window i a vertical split arangement, or just for the website's content. Having said that, I know one of my friends has always at minimum 100 tabs open at any time, so he jumped at this feature as soon as ut released. It's a matter of preference I'd say.
The benefit of vertical tabs is (IMO) more about organization than having tons of tabs open. It's particularly useful to have a tree of tabs when browsing API documentation, to allow for quickly navigating to different doc pages in the hierarchy without having to wait for page loads.
I'm the same. In the rare case I do have a lot of tabs open it tends to be a queue that I work through in order anyways so having them not fit on screen isn't a problem. My theory is that once I get over 20 tabs or so it will be quicker to just re-open the document (just type a few words in the URL bar and history-search will find it) than actually locate and click it. I'm glad that Firefox is flexible enough for tab hoarders and tab closers. Having a horizontal tab bar that doesn't take up too much space is perfect for me.
> I am baffled how anyone could still be using horizontal tabs
I don't tend to work with a browser full-screen on my larger monitor (2560×1440) instead often using half the screen (so 1280px wide) or there abouts. My other screen is 1080×1920 (standard 1080 but portrait not landscape). In those cases I have less room for tabs on the side. It might be less of an issue but most of the side-tab options I tried had a minimum width noticeably wider than the minimum width of a tab in the standard layout.
What might work for me is tabs that can be flipped from horizontal to vertical at a keystroke, or perhaps even if they reacted to window size (with the default choice being easily overridden).
Originally, Firefox had a dropdown menu that allowed the user to choose whether tabs were on the top, bottom, left, or right.
This has been an annoying trend with Firefox for some time. They take the default, expected functionality, marginalize it while saying "Users who prefer the old way can enable it in a setting / extension" and then the setting gets deprecated or the extension stops working.
See also: "Classic Theme Restorer".
All the while software that might work better as an extension is bundled with Firefox and enabled by default. e.g. "Pocket", "Hello".
Sidebery without using trees because they waste valuable tab name space. Having more name space is a key advantage to vertical tabs. I use separate windows for high level categories and use the titler extension to name the windows. Sidebery doesn’t recognize the titles when you want to move a tab to a new window though. That’s one of a few pieces of kruft in my setup.
Mozilla sucks, but it is because all of this should be baked in, not because of pocket or whatever political thing that HN regularly brings up.
I have tried the vertical tab implementation in several other browsers and they are all inferior. Safari’s is hilariously bad.
Not OP, but personally I'm using Tab Center Reborn with a bit of custom browser CSS to make it slide out on hover (so there are only favicons visible until hovered). It's just a vertical UI for tabs with handy filtering entry box, rather than a complex tab management thing like TST. The only thing I'm missing is filtering/jumping to the tabs that play sounds - it's easy to miss a tiny icon when you have thousands of tabs open :P
I use “tree tabs” and like it best due to its features like folders and unload-tab. However it is a pain in the ass to configure the theme to look right in dark mode. Plan on investing an hour. But once done is done.
Tree Style Tabs would be so great if it had folders/nodes for categories of tabs. My workaround are tabs with fittingly named Wikipedia articles, but a builtin feature would be more pleasant to use.
That I need to install additional extensions for features I wanted and also relying on those extensions to stay maintained. Also I don't like tree structuring generally, because I noticed that that just enables my tab hoarding habit. Configuration was also a bit annoying (in my memory) due to the drop down menus
Chrome's most of the snappiness is coming from how it handles the DNS queries internally from my experience.
Pair Firefox with a fast DNS, and it's noticably faster than Chrome, for the last 3 years or so.
I discovered it accidentally, after switching to local DNS at the office. We run one of the nation-wide ones in a pretty close proximity in network terms.
I recently noticed something similar, when I had to enable DoH (unfortunately Cloudflare — good that this thing lives in a separate browser profile) to reach atlassian websites. Suddenly the pages loaded faster than without DoH. Still not sure what changed on my system (nothing?) or what my ISP did so that I could no longer resolve those websites, but at least DoH solved the problem for me.
Anything you can "time nslookup" in or under 0.03 seconds (in "real" terms).
From my desk:
local one - 0.029 seconds
1.1.1.1 - 0.035 seconds
8.8.8.8 - 0.120 seconds
Normally it should be, but Firefox's behavior is very sensitive to DNS response speed. Sounds not intuitive, but I think they're not using glibc's caching, or doing something by themselves.
Yeah, while it's not as thorough as these tools, the method is at least reproducible and sane, and with ~10 or so samples, you get an interval with a nice confidence.
Another through method will be hyperfine[0], yet I wanted to provide a method which requires no installation and can be done in a whim, without jumps and hoops, with the tools already at hand.
Good reason to avoid Firefox for development imo. Nothing is more annoying than mysterious cache interventions when you're trying to get a handle on an unrelated problem.
In the dev tools settings there is a checkbox "Disable HTTP Cache (when toolbox is open)" which name seems to imply that this only applies to the resources that make up the page, not to DNS lookups (about:config name is devtools.cache.disabled, and it defaults to false).
I investigated and found that Firefox's in-memory DNS cache can be manually cleared by clicking a button in about:networking. To be fair Chrome also has a similar cache and method for clearing it. See: https://www.makeuseof.com/chrome-edge-firefox-safari-opera-b...
Nothing special. Just that if I have a DNS resolving around that timeframe, Firefox becomes noticeably faster.
All of the networks I have have a DNS server around that speed now, and Firefox works visibly faster on all of them. Possibly an intersection between human perception and hardware capabilities of my systems at hand.
Depends on your region and what sites you're using. I live in the middle of nowhere far from civilization, and 1.1.1.1 returns terrible IPs for many sites including google.com (which pings at 350-400 ms if you resolve it through 1.1.1.1, but at 90-100 ms if you're using any other resolver). They do it because they block EDNS0 in order to protect your privacy or something like that.
So I use 8.8.8.8 and 9.9.9.9 in parallel through dnsmasq. Whoever responds the first wins. If you're not stuck in the middle of nowhere, you're probably better off with the latter as it's somewhat more trustworthy than Google.
Maybe. I don't recommend it for the typical user of this site (probably could have phrased that one better — I believe `EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK` should use 9.9.9.9 instead of Google or Cloudflare, not that they should implement my parallel bullshit).
It makes sense here because of bad peering: 8.8.8.8 may be responding in 90 ms right now, but could very well start taking 200 ms a few hours later. So I use multiple services as a backup of sorts.
I spend more than my fair share of time in AWS consoles. My company uses multiple accounts to segregate data and services were appropriate, and container tabs let me have several consoles open at once when I need them. That's such a wonderful productivity boost over having to have multiple browsers open.
I switched to Chrome a few months ago and Container Tabs are the one thing I really miss. I can no longer quarantine Facebook. I can no longer easily juggle multiple login profiles for sites like Twitter. There's nothing like it in Chrome. Multiple profiles don't work well, too many UI problems. The SessionBox looks promising but it's such a complex mess and basically requires a paid plan to use effectively.
This is indeed fantastic, but paired with container proxies, it's awesome.
You can send a few tabs through one socks proxy, a few through another, all while segmenting that from work, personal, etc. if you have a vpn for one work location and different ones for other work.
I'm just starting to use this, I have a VPN that I put in a network namespace along with a local `danted` socks proxy, so it doesn't disturb the rest of the system
It's amazing how well it works!
I just set a few glob rules on the URLs I need proxied and I don't have to think about it anymore :)
That's the one! I thought it was an inbuilt feature of the browser. I guess the Facebook Container[1] extension must bring it down as a dependency or something, because I have never installed that extension knowingly.
Container tabs are unfortunately not very usable for me. I have extensions that are unique to the profile. When they decided to redo the tabs rather than modernize the profile workflow, it basically forced me to use chrome.
one deficiency in the FF network stack is that it doesn't properly detect existing pooled connections being broken by net route changes while Chrome does
That's not what container tabs are. Think of it as isolated environments for groups of sites. You can even set it up so that each new link opens in a new environment, without any cookies, etc.
In the Firefox Nightly blog, there is some discussion of the performance improvements they've delivered in each release: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org
> Starting from Firefox 112, users can now search for text inside the about:addons page (through the usual associated keyboard shortcuts, e.g. Ctrl-F and ‘/’) – Bug 1499500
_Finally_. It's only been _years_ that I haven't been able to search through my (admittedly far too big) list of disabled add-ons to find the one I want and turn it on.
Now we just need the collection limit on Firefox nightly removed. It only fetches the first page of 50 addons in a collection. I add things to my collection any time it seems useful, and keeping a collection in sync with what's being used across _seven_ browsers on two devices is difficult (I use multiple browsers on Android the way I use multiple browser windows on desktop; extensions usually only get installed in the workspace I actually need them for, so each install has a slightly different set of extensions and slightly different settings)
You can expect some blog posts from us on this topic at the end of the year / early next year. In short: Organizational focus on a performance target, significant investment, and some great new tooling. We're also reaping the benefits of foundational work that happened over the last few years.
You can click the dots and get a link to what was changed in that commit. e.g. in the sudden bump after April there is a 4 part cache related patch linking to the issue tracking ID which describes (in human terms) additional jit caching mechanisms.
It's kinda interesting that some of the younger amongst us might have only ever known Chrome through the lens of its meme-like reputation for being a big fat hog.
Because when it was originally released like 15 years ago, the pitch/consensus were the exact opposite of that, i.e. ultra clean and efficient.
As was Firefox (originally Pheonix, then Firebird), which was the ultra clean and efficient version of Mozilla. It was crazy how much better it was compared to IE6. It just didn't have a monopoly and anti-competitive marketing behind it like Chrome and IE did.
As a JavaScript developer my priorities are limited to visual render and DOM access. Going back 5+ years ago Chrome was able to access the DOM at about 45m ops/s on my desktop and Firefox was achieving about 850m ops/s on the same hardware. On my laptop (faster memory) Chrome was getting up to 55m ops/s while Firefox was around 1.4b ops/s.
Now Firefox numbers have remained constant, but Chrome struggles to hit 20m ops/s in my desktop. Chrome has sacrificed front end performance across the board for modest performance improvements to query string access of the DOM. Pretty unfortunate.
"access the DOM" is not a constant operation, though, it will vary wildly based on what you're doing and what you were doing just before that (think of reading a computed style before vs after writing a style that forces layout).
1.4b ops/s also sounds like it might not be testing what you think it's testing. Access in that case might just be hitting a cache, so possibly not at all representative of real performance of a web app.
No, the DOM is a living artifact, but it lives in memory. So access to the DOM, at least for Firefox, appears to just be a crude memory operation of walking a tree from a narrow collection of pointers in the JIT.
I mean, these aren't just any access of the DOM, they're specifically selectors on the DOM (with a few stepping into children and then running selectors on them). So that does narrow the original claim significantly.
I also see five orders of magnitude between the fastest and slowest operations there (`document.getElementById("canvas")` vs `document.getElementsByAttribute("href")`) on my machine, so it's not clear what you're disagreeing with my comment about.
On my machine, Chrome is slower by an order of magnitude on the first three tests, but is approximately the same (slightly faster or slower) on the rest. And I'll still assert these microbenchmarks aren't testing anything meaningful. Millions of calls to `document.getElementById("canvas")` in a loop is almost certainly just hitting a cache, which is fine but also reveals little about how it will affect execution of actual scripts (is the querySelector even a bottleneck in a particular piece of code? how big is the cache vs the actual uses before a `document.getElementById("canvas")` comes back around again? etc)
Its just a crude memory operation for Firefox. The video card in my laptop is super inferior compared to my desktop, so in most other benchmarks the laptop is much slower. The laptop has DDR4 memory where the desktop has slower DDR3 memory.
Doesn't windows check the signature or something to decide if an application should be allowed to bypass antivirus? Seems like doing it based on the filename would be a pretty huge security hole.
I believe this domain started at the big 4.x version drop which was the turn of a new era in the Browser Wars. I remember using Minefield because the new features were too tempting to miss & this was before evergreen versioning became the norm.
That's very interesting! Last time I benchmarked Firefox, it performed half as fast as Chrome or Gnome's WebKit. I should run my benchmarks again!
I do wonder though, is this performance improvement Windows specific? It's hard to believe that Mozilla could make up the difference in only three or four months.
In fact, all benchmarks browsers seem between a quarter and a third slower on Linux in speedometer. That's strange, I wonder if this has to do with the limited availability of hardware acceleration?
This was not the first or last Chrome MacOS kernel panic.
Personally I recall them happening post 2017 as they were happening when I lived in an apartment I moved into around then.
Searching around I see references to more of these types of incidents in later years like 2016 & 2019.
Chrome automatically prunes history for quite a while now. Which I personally dislike, as I sometimes need to find something I visited a long time ago.
Firefox does the same thing too unfortunately, and it doesn't seem like it can be turned off.
It's a real pita for the same reason. Needed to look at browser history older than a few months and discovering it's all been deleted (by Firefox) was a very unpleasant experience.
Seems to be a needless data loss "optimisation" (sic), but I have no idea what the real world use case for that would be.
I wrote a script (https://github.com/osmarks/random-stuff/blob/master/histrete...) to dump a Firefox places.sqlite database to a separate SQLite database for long-term storage (I run it nightly). It seems to delete stuff based on some combination of visit frequency and last visit time.
I suspect they need to do this to keep history searches fast, since I also separately hacked a bunch of `about:config` options to retain more history and they run quite slowly now, particularly on my phone.
browser.history.maxStateObjectSize and places.history.expiration.max_pages (both accessible through about:config) should be the settings to modify. Do a web search for those properties to get more information on how they interact.
There's a good chance an about:config setting lets you change it. FF has a ton of detailed settings but most are hidden.
On my setup the "manage history" window goes back a bit over 6 months. Unfortunately the list entries don't show a date, so I can't give more precise numbers.
You'll pry the Firefox developer tools and container tabs from my cold dead hands. It would have to be significantly slower for me to switch off of it.
Not OP but I think it's a lot about familiarity. I'm sure chrome has most of the things I use in firefox. But I'm just not familiar with it anymore so I always revert back to firefox if i need to use the dev tools.
Im also a recent to firefox from Chrome convert recently (win 11). My reason is UI latency related, and my used case is a tad unique. As a network engineer, and system administrator, my daily PC is very high end enterprise hardware and running windows 11, and has 8 x 4K monitors.
I always will have 20 to 50 web browser windows open as well as many tabs in each of those windows.
The main issue I was encountering, and my best guess, from a lot of testing over the past three years, is related to the large pixel count of my desktop - I would frequently encounter 1 to 2 seconds of lag/unresponsiveness when switching from chrome to another (chrome) application in the background. As this has been a nearly 3 year long issue, I’ve tried many , MANY fixes/work arounds The two most impactful were upgrading from windows 10 to windows 11. And switching from chrome from primarily using chrome to Firefox. (The issue was actually the same with chrome canary, as well as with GPU rendering enabled or disabled in each browser.)
while I now run Firefox 24/7, I will occasionally open up chrome or chrome canary in unique use cases, and still notice the performance improvement in firefox during those times.
(to be clear when I say I’ve tried and tested just about everything, I mean it from fresh new iOS installs with no applications, except chrome, two upgrading every piece of hardware a few times over) - the issue persisted.
Thanks, to be fully accurate, it’s 6X 4K monitors normal orientation,, and 2x 2560p - 29 inch widescreen type monitors both rotated vertically , and touching each other (via one of those $60 or so floorstanding 40 inch tall dual monitor mounts from Amazon).
I love my set up, I work for myself, and from home, so purchased it myself.
The GPUs I use, used to be 2X Nvidia, P1000 Quadro. But as I was trying to troubleshoot this latency issue I was referring to I’ve upgraded to 2X Quadro, RTX 4000 GPUs. (Which actually made little difference/improvement to the issue).
By the way, set ups like mine aren’t as expensive as you might think, you can get a nvidia Quadro P1000 or P2000 GPU on eBay for very inexpensive, as in around maybe 200 or less, each.
I really don’t play games, the rare times I do it’s exclusively on my Xbox (so none of this is for gaming / gaming optimized)
Edit: also, the 4K monitors are 30 inch in physical size, one might be 32-inch. This is very important I have found over the years (and going through many different monitors and resolutions to finally find the optimal set up for myself.) - 30 or 32 inch I have found is the sweet spot for 4K resolution.
I don’t use any windows OS text size increase (or whatever the 100% 125% 150% thing is called, mine is set to 100%.)
Haha, I wasn't worried about the GPU price. I was worried about the price of 8 decent quality monitors.
I have a decent salary but I don't have throwaway money to just spend 2k on monitors. Or on anything for that matter, that requires a year of saving :x
Glad to see this, browsers have been mostly Chromium based for a while. Safari seems to be lagging a lot since the split, and I just don't like the Firefox UI as much.
OT: Just curious... does anyone have a good cross-browser extension (chrome and FF browsers) that can sync the bookmarks, in particular the bookmark toolbar. I use a password manager (Bitwarden) that integrates well, wish I could get the same for the bookmarks toolbar.
I’ve tried to find something like this multiple time over the past years, but it seems browsers do their best to protect bookmarks from extensions
It seems the only way are tools that directly edit each respective browsers setting files (ie from the command line) but I’d rather not go down that path.
There used to be xbookmarks.com but it is long gone. There is an open source tool by the name of XBrowserSync [1] which came up when I searched for xbookmarks. What they say on their website sounds promising, but I did not do any further research or try it out. I'm on Firefox on all my devices ;)
Yeah... I'd been keeping my "source of truth" to my google account, so it's easy enough to export and import to other browsers... but trying to distance myself from the google account for everything.
Found a couple extensions, so will probably export to be safe, then start playing to see how it goes.
This is great to hear and I hope it will mean more people give Firefox a decent try! We need more people on alternative browsers in order to keep healthy competition between rendering engines.
Firefox also handles lots of tabs really well and its Tab Containers plugin enables perfect separation of work tabs and personal tabs (I've got 1.4k tabs split across personal/work containers. I've got a problem, I know)
I don't know but inspect tools just irritate me soo much in Firefox that I don't like to use the browser then at all. I started my career in Firefox and still remember you had to have an extension for debugging HTML, the editing style was fun and useful.
My usage changed a lot from then, now I need:
- Tracing graph for network events in Firefox which it does not have.
- Applications tab that would show me the status of workers, cache ... is just plain in Firefox
- And UI seems condensed, I guess I just got used to a more relaxed Chrome.
- The whole debacle we don't want you to install a web app as a shortcut because it's bad for some reason. (They lost me initially with this years ago when I still had Linux).
It's a shame but Firefox is just not what I need and prefer anymore.
Firefox has been my browser of choice since I switched from Internet Explorer as a child.
However, I've found their refusal to implement or offer alternatives to WebSerial and screen-casting utterly depressing. It's made a number of tasks more difficult and inconvenient and makes Firefox a less useful tool overall.
On the WebSerial discussion ticket, an educator articulates how this decision essentially forces what was a Firefox based classroom onto Chrome. I'll be sticking with Firefox but missing functionality drives users away.
It doesn't help that their reasoning for not implementing WebSerial feels extremely paternalistic and runs counter to the ethos of user empowerment at the core of most open source projects.
Mozilla's argument isn't that you'll be tracked or fingerprinted. It's that you're too stupid to be permitted control over whether or not you want to allow access to devices you've connected to your machine. Rather than work to mitigate those risks, they've decided to hobble the utility of their browser.
Personally, it would make flashing ESPHome devices much more convenient. Not having to switch browser for a start. The ability to plug a board into whatever PC on my LAN and just flash it, without having to install and maintain the entire toolchain is nice as well.
A few of these are aimed at the education sector, removing a some of the significant barriers faced by educators that would otherwise have trouble getting the software installed and keeping it updated.
In one of the discussions, someone was using it to help dental offices retrieve data from some specialised hardware. Browser support dealt with similar concerns of how to distribute the software to non-technical clients and keep it up to date. It was also something their clients understood, rather than something new.
This is awesome, looking forward to performance improvement efforts from Firefox.
I try Firefox once in a while and it admittedly feels slower and more choppy compared to Chrome, but would definitely consider switching if there's more focus on performance.
Thanks for mentioning this. Somehow I've searched for something like this before and couldn't find it.
That didn't stop me from using Firefox tough. I just have my first bookmark in the toolbar point to "about: profiles" and use this page to launch new profile instances, create new ones etc.
I use profiles extensively and would love to know which extension you are using. Containers cover most of my sandboxing needs for private browsing, but I prefer to have a separate Firefox profile for business accounts/apps.
The thing that has me stuck on Chrome is that it doesn’t automatically open the profile you last had focus of. For example, if I have last touched my personal profile I don’t want to open a new link from Slack in my work profile.
Having the ability to only default to one really sucks.
I just wish that Teams would load in a reasonable time on Firefox. It's a corporate enforced need and it takes minutes to load the web Teams version in Firefox. Microsoft seem not to treat Firefox as a legitimate web client.
Ok, now take the number of years during which Firefox was slower and calculate an averaged value of its speed. This will account for all the frustration it would have caused switching to it in the past. Being faster for 2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months, and probably even for 2 years wouldn't be enough to cause a big change in that averaged value. And that would also measure how much of a guarateed good choice would be switching to Firefox right now. As soon as it will stay faster for enough time to smooth out the differences then I'll start consider using it.
I've been a Firefox advocate and user for many years, but then about 6 years ago I had to face the hard truth of how bad it performed with lots of tabs open, and how much of a pain I was causing myself for not switching to a Chromium powered browser.
About one month ago, I've checked it out again under the same conditions... and sadly it's still not even close to competitors' memory management.
I use Firefox on my phone, it's the only one that allows me to block popups/ads/autoplay videos and disable javascript via add-ons when I need to, and the web is pretty much unusable without being able to do that now. Who cares if it's faster if you can't even load the content without it blocking your view with popups and trying to play videos without your consent before crashing?
It would be really bad if everyone used Firefox - just as it would be very bad if everyone used Chrome (or even any other browser based on the same rendering engine).
We all absolutely do benefit greatly from having multiple competing browsers and render engines - regardless of which one we individually prefer to use.
Therefore I really don't understand the many, many, many "my-browser-is-better-than-yours-you-should-switch" comments in this thread here. Why's everyone trying to convince everyone else that they should use the one and only "best" browser too? What for?
Are people truly that desperate for confirmation and validation, that they need others to agree on their choice of browser?
The problem is the percentage use is so unbalanced right now (IMO due to Google and Microsoft using their other platforms to drive installing their browsers) that I now run across sites that only function in Chrome properly. A lot of devs feel that "Eh, I've targeted the 90+%, why do the rest matter?" and that is how you hand control of web standards to Google. The usage ratio needs to be more balanced to prevent a browser monopoly, hence people trying to ensure there continues to be a choice.
I regret I have but one thumbs-up to give this comment.
It's important to have at least 2 healthy browsers (in market share). They keep each other honest, if I might put it so tersely. We all remember IE6, and were in danger territory again with the current percentages.
For this reason, personally, Chrome would have to be 2x or more better than Firefox for me to consider switching to it. Do what you can to keep the market diverse.
If the percentages were reversed, I'd absolutely be running Chromium or a variant.
Browser wars are almost as old as the internet. There was even a time when people would put little rectangle animated gifs at the bottom of their websites saying things like "Best viewed with Netscape!" or "MSIE SUX!" or "Best Viewed with MSIE!" and then after a while those evolved into memes and then they vanished. There would be flamewars on Usenet about which browser is better. It isn't just browsers. There's tabs-vs-spaces. Scripting language vs scripting language. Meat vs plants. I think this would be best answered by a psychologist. I am curious what the personal preference wars will look like in another 20 years. Maybe "Real human skin vs. synthetic skin on my LoveDroid!"
> many "my-browser-is-better-than-yours-you-should-switch" comments in this thread here
Also because they say FF is better but... for what/who? what parts are better?
I try it a couple times a year, and always go back to Chrome, because the UX is so bad (for me). I get more stressed about the browser I'm using, than actually enjoying the browsing
I use Safari as my primary browser, only for its tab groups implementation. In my opinion they just nailed it, I think it's much better than the Chrome one.
I would really like to switch to Firefox as I prefer it in every other way, but I don't think I will move until they offer a robust native tab group implementation (I've tried Simple Tab Groups but I don't want to rely on a hacky extension for such a core functionality).
I have considered making the switch, but on Ubuntu touch screen is poorly implemented as mouse clicks instead of touch events. Chromium sidesteps this by doing its own touch detection, allowing me to comfortably browse through pages with touch. Firefox does not. Until either Firefox or Linux starts taking touchscreens on desktop seriously I will stick to Chrome, and in desperate times, Windows.
I love Firefox, but there's just one thing I miss from Chromium: run-in-background mode. My PinePhone has lots of memory but very slow IO, which means that Firefox can spend nearly twenty seconds loading. Once running, it'll load pages really quickly because local storage isn't involved. If there was a way of keeping a Firefox daemon running to instantly bring back a window, I would be very pleased indeed.
I think that because of the new "efficiency" initiatives at Microsoft, Edge is very bad compared to the others at handling web sites that need low latency and moderate execution speed (such as 3D demos, games, emulators, audio players).
Edge on my 5950X + RTX3080 + 32GB RAM can't play some chiptune without glitching while Firefox can handle it like butter. Firefox's becoming a strong competitor every day.
TL;DR: Firefox usually uses AV1. Hardware prior to intel 11th gen tiger lake, amd rdna2 (pre rtx 6000 series) and nvidia 3000 series has no hardware AV1 decoding support (and neither does Apple Silicon). This results in higher CPU usage on Firefox, whereas Safari and Chrome usually resort to codecs that have hardware decode support on the machine.
This can easily be fixed by going to `about:config` and setting `media.av1.enabled` to false.
It's nice to hear that they are not falling behind. I switched to Firefox after Opera started to decline. I rely heavily on multi-account containers, but it is a pity that they can't run their own engine on iOS.
I have nothing against the dev tools in Firefox, but it is way easier to google issues for chrome dev tools.
Chrome and Safari still feel way faster in normal usage though, as they try to predict the most likely page the user will open and start pre-loading it even before the user has pressed Enter. Firefox is my daily driver, but sometimes I use Safari for some specific cases and Safari certainly is stupidly fast compared to Firefox.
I find that, in every domain, second place is almost always superior to first place where it counts despite being somewhat rougher around the edges. Firefox is a particularly excellent example of this phenomenon.
Why is that? Just good old-fashioned competitive optimization?
I may bee the outlier here since everyone seems to gush about firefox every now and then on here ... but as a webdev firefox still feels second rate to me when it comes to PWA, Push Notifications, CSS animations (glitchy/graphics tearing) and a host of other things I test for browser compatibility
I've been a fan of Firefox for many years. Seems that those friends of mine still using Chrome are doing so because they are firmly trapped in the Googleverse. (gmail, YouTube, Google Docs, etc.)
Firefox & its containers have been fantastic. Fast, stable, and I get the impression that security still matters.
Nice, maybe someday I'll give it another chance. My main gripe is the UX for some things, and how some features seem half-baked.
E.g.: to add a keyword for a search engine, it saves a bookmark, but there isn't (or wasn't) any way to filter for those later if you wanted to check what you had already created
Been a firefox user since 2020 after switching from Chrome and haven't looked back. The only thing that I find myself missing is native casting support so that's the last piece that sometimes forces me to open up Chrome
Tree style tabs is a vertical tab extension for ff and the best ui around if you use a lot of tabs. I can't even use chromium vertical tabs anymore because they feel terrible in comparison. You can also fully style tree style tabs via css.
But then you get duplicates, since Mozilla made it a pain to disable the main tab bar. I'm using a Chromium offshoot (Arc) but I also like how Vivaldi handles vertical tabs. Firefox doesn't just compete with Chromium itself, but the entire ecosystem.
Does Vivaldi nest tabs yet? Its been a few years since I tried it but it didn't use to.
With TST, I can open a link as a new tab (middle click) and it is shown as a child of the opening tab. This makes it easy to minimise or close a whole tree of tabs.
you can stack tabs in a group, and when you're inside that group, new tabs are opened within that group, but not sure about the middle click for a single tab
It also has a great alternative - workspaces, that helped me much better vs. the stacking, that for some reason didn't stick
Eh? Firefox vertical tab support is much better than Chromium's in my experience. The chrome addons I've seen are hacky and clunky. It doesn't seem like chrome UI has nearly the same modifiability as firefox.
I will always vouch for Firefox, It's been my primary browser since 2018 and there's no turning back. However its worth noting that while my FF windows experience has been painless I cannot say the same for Linux.
My only suggestion is for FireFox to implement the native UI elements of the system (dropdowns, menus) etc. Than using something of their own. Where Chrome uses the system native UI elements.
The only thing it prevents me for using Firefox is it's XML viewer, clicking on text collapses nodes, it makes copying text very hard. I haven't found a workaround for this.
Does anyone else use Firefox on Android and have the bug where any unassuming tab can become unresponsive when you leave and come back to it, to the point where opening a new tab is the only option?
I’d be curious to see how Safari stacks up. I switched to it when I was finding Firefox too slow a long time and have largely stuck with it because of inertia. Very happy with it as a browser though.
Safari has the fastest JavaScript engine by far. It has been #1 on JetStream for years by large margin, JavaScriptCore greatly outperforming both V8 and SpiderMonkey.
It's great to see Firefox competing on a core metric - performance. It doesn't look like a one time thing, either, I suspect an ongoing initiative to close this gap. I'd be curious to hear more about what that entails.
Something that might be less exciting is finding where Chrome beat Firefox on a benchmark and then tuning Firefox one knob at a time until it didn't, then moving on to the next benchmark - that would mean that there's not much more room to grow since it's basically just "ah, they did that we should do that". It would still be good work just not sustainable.
If it's part of a larger performance initiative I'd really like to learn more.
I'm a bit confused by the UI. Looks like the test is for windows. Did someone manage to test it for Linux and MacOS as well? (not sure what test we are supposed to use)
I’ll stick to FF for lack of manifest 3 alone. Adblocking is superior of ff as a result…and that affects my experience more than a microsecond diff either way
I had to switch back to Firefox on desktop because Chrome has rendering bugs on Ubuntu. I use it infrequently, and noticed that Firefox has gotten much faster.
I just benchmarked both Firefox and Chromium on my desktop using Speedometer 2.1. Each browser was configured as out of the box, with no extensions, and with a blank profile:
I’ve got a landing page I’ve been working on that pushes the limits on things by overlapping all sorts of effects: WebGL, mix-blend-mode, clip-path, SVGs, overlapping animations on custom fonts, etc.
Safari and Chrome run it surprisingly well. Firefox was getting basically 1fps. I had to turn off half the effects before it felt reasonable.
That's great. But Google Maps Street View (-> GeoGuessr) is still a slideshow under Firefox (Linux) for me. (I tried all the things under about:config) Really hope that gets fixed some day. On that day I will switch back. Really missing browser containers (well, I'm booting Firefox just for that, actually).
Firefox containers are tab groups on steroids. Tab groups are just aesthetic while Firefox containers can not only group and colour code the tabs but isolate cache and stuff. This means you can use two gmail accounts in two separate tabs. It also means you can isolate you personal bank or other websites so that other data harvesting website cant get to that information. :)
Firefox containers have been there long back before tab groupings were available in Chrome as well.
Last time I checked it didn't allow me to group tabs, so not sure why it would be applicable to my usecase which is an UI thing. Seems to be two separate features to me at least, but maybe you know how to use containers to group tabs in top bar of browser.
Please follow the link. You should be able to group it, colour code it and isolate them. For example, I have different colours for different different containers. I can also open only container designated websites in it. For example, if I am in facebook container and I open google websites, it can switch the google tab to google container. There are so many things you can do with it.
Yeah - not the OP but I investigated containers and they didn't do what you're asking for. I ultimately ended up installing Simple Tab Groups to get similar behavior to chrome. It would be nice if this functionality was actually built into the browser.
I stopped using Firefox because it was killing my battery life. Also because I noticed more and more websites stopped supporting it and I just kind of gave up. I'm using Safari these days and it's fine.
Sadly I cannot update Firefox anymore as any newer release would mean my other monitors would only show a black screen when looking at anything even remotely encoded with copy protection.
Speedometer is one of the primary benchmarks used by the Chromium team as a proxy for real-world use of popular JavaScript frameworks: https://v8.dev/blog/speedometer-2
Speedometer executes a bunch of TodoMVC projects, so it's a mix of JS and DOM work. FF has done a lot of cool work on their DOM and have started to focus some on making JS faster, so they are pretty fast here.
If you are interested in just JS, JetStream 2 is a good metric IMO, but is perhaps less "real world" as it doesn't really do DOM stuff. FF is slower here, but has made a lot of progress recently. (going from somewhere around 35% slower to around 10% slower).
It looks to measure a bunch of little JavaScript-driven interactions. It has been around for a while, so I guess it probably measures what it says it measures.
OTOH, you might feel it doesn’t mean much depending on your priorities. I mean, JavaScript is bad anyway. So I guess anyone they cares about performance/security blocks it as much as possible and/or avoids JavaScript heavy sites.
Or, big picture, Firefox wasn’t built by a spying company, so even if Chrome had much better benchmarks switching to Chrome would be a silly thing to do.
It's using a fake "app", but it measures UI updates across multiple real JavaScript frameworks. In other words, probably not a good benchmark for things that are compute-bound or I/O-bound, but probably a pretty good benchmark for "snappiness".
The biggest reason I stick with Chrome is how easy it is to resume your work on a new machine. You just log into your Google account and boom, all of your data and extensions start syncing in the background. With Firefox, I've to log into a new FF account and then log into my Gmail again anyway. I admit I'm lazy but for me, ergonomics usually comes before ideology.
This is only true for your Google account, right? You're not magically logged into HN already on the new machine? Chrome isn't actually syncing your cookies, it's just that logging into the browser logs you into all your Google apps too.
Firefox syncs extensions, preferences, open tabs, etc. The only thing it can't do is automatically log into Google, but having to enter one extra username/password one time per computer seems like a pretty minor reason to pick a browser, unless you're constantly logging in on new computers.
I'd argue that "I prefer the way this vendor does things and I can't leave" is still vendor lock-in. There may be different reasons as to why you can't leave, even if it is just personal preferences.
Google can offer this because you are using a single, fairly unified, ecosystem and they own both your account and browser. However, this ecosystem does not offer interoperability so you are effectively locked-in.
Ironically, this feature is exactly why I can't use Chrome or login on accounts on Android applications: this will auto-sync everything and log you into Google, make logging out very hard, enroll your devices on Google Workspace if that's a professional account, ...
I'd argue that that's ridiculous. "The door is closed and locked and I can't leave" is so very very different from "the door is open and I can leave but I prefer it inside" that calling the second "being locked in" is an insult to people who actually are locked in.
Vendor lockin is where the vendor does things to lock you in, such as "Google made it so my Chromebook can only run Chrome", or "Google made it so my GMail only works in Chrome". Lockin generally is when people other than the vendor do things to lock you in, "Meta made WhatsApp web only work in Chrome", "My bank website only works in Chrome".
"The vendor made a more integrated, better, product and I prefer it" is not lockin of any kind, that's ordinary competition.
