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.
