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Posted by mikece 4 days ago

Firefox 120 to Firefox 141 Web Browser Benchmarks(www.phoronix.com)
119 points | 107 comments
saubeidl 4 days ago|
Firefox is good these days!

Mozilla (despite its issues) is nowhere near as evil as Google and a browser monopoly is good for nobody.

Manifest v2 will stay supported on FF - uBlock will keep working properly.

It's time to switch. If you would rather have a UI like Arc, give Zen a shot! (It's what I use!)

uallo 3 days ago||
Fully agree. With Multi-Account Containers [1] and the recent addition of tab groups [2] / vertical tabs [3], Firefox got even better.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/tab-groups-community/

[3] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/vertical-tabs-and-the-fi...

snapplebobapple 4 days ago|||
stock firefox is decent but, depending on your goals, there are better flavors. If security is really important there is librewolf and if you care way less about security and just want awesome then floorp is pretty sweet. For me sidebery brings it all together because it lets you do things like set per container socks5, which is a game changer for me (default is all traffic through my favorite vpn provider, but I have containers to make my browser look like my local ip, American, etc.)
gruez 3 days ago||
>security is really important there is librewolf

Does librewolf do anything that you can't do via user.js?

snapplebobapple 3 days ago||
you would have to look at their website. I dont know
edhelas 4 days ago|||
Long live the Red Panda <3
BuckRogers 4 days ago|||
I used Firefox for roughly 19 years at least or a bit more. I switched to Edge and have been very happy for years now. I didn't know they committed to supporting V2 but it does appear they intend to as long as it serves user choice and privacy needs.

I left because they kept stripping features out that I was used to whether it was my RSS toolbar feeds or something else. I forgot which feature removal was the final straw, or if it was a bug or two that irked me. While I was never a Chrome user, I found Edge was an alternative that I was happy with. I also see a lot of benefit to native browsers. Ironically, that I learned about from Mozilla's own devblogs.

Supporting V2 like this is the exact opposite of what drove me away. I'm cruising so happily on Edge that I'm unsure if I'm willing to do another shift, but I am going to reconsider my life choices.

remram 3 days ago|||
As an outsider, it seems weird to me that you would go to Edge when you are unsatisfied by Mozilla's spotty long-term support. Edge exists because Microsoft dropped support for IE (and then for their own rendering engine altogether when they switched to Chromium). It seems to me that they have a strictly worse track record in the aspect you care about.

Or maybe I am wrong about the facts? I never used Edge.

DyslexicAtheist 3 days ago|||
sounds great, how do I install Edge on Debian?
ossusermivami 3 days ago|||
you have a .deb there https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/download?form=MM145U (i don't use it, just saying)
BuckRogers 3 days ago|||
I don't know what you mean by this. For one, I wasn't trying to sell it to you. I don't care what you use at all. Two, I'm using it on Debian.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3 days ago||
"Mozilla (despite its issues) is nowhere near as evil as Google and a browser monopoly is good for nobody."

Truthfully, it is good for somebody. For example, it is good for Google.

By extension, it is also good for Mozilla because Mozilla sends FF user data, e.g., default search query data, to Google in exchange for money.

If Google's search business declines due to loss of monopoly (aka competition) and as a result Google decides to stop funding Mozilla, then that's bad for somebody.

Perhaps the reader can figure out who that somebody might be.

re: "nowhere near as evil"

Why would I want to use the lesser of two evils when I can generally avoid popular modern browsers altogether. Zero evil.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2 days ago|||
This comment is submitted without using a browser

Not that it matters, but I am using a 935-character Bourne shell script

No Bash, no cURL

WWW users are free to choose whatever software they like

Steven420 3 days ago||||
> Why would I want to use the lesser of two evils when I can generally avoid popular modern browsers altogether. Zero evil.

What browser are you using?

JohnTHaller 3 days ago||
Most (but not all) folks with posts like this invariably use Chrome
saubeidl 3 days ago||
How is that zero evil?
em500 4 days ago||
Firefox (and Chromium according to their own blog) might be objectively faster (and hardware is certainly much faster), but getting anything done on websites doesn't feel any faster than 20 years ago. In the end we keep bumping into some form of Wirth's law / Jevons Paradox: both browser and hardware speed gains will be eaten by more abstract web frameworks, more authentication walls, more ads, etc.
Night_Thastus 4 days ago||
I find that these days the browsers are all about the same performance-wise and it ends up not mattering much. PCs are so fast that it's very rarely the browser that is the bottleneck. Cool that they're still working to keep it snappy though.

I will say mobile is a bit different. I prefer mobile browser to apps when possible so I can have ad-blocking, but some websites run like complete garbage on mobile browser. They're so slow it's almost unusable. I'm almost 100% certain that's not on the browser itself though.

cosmic_cheese 4 days ago||
In my experience speed differences between browsers are indeed negligible on properly engineered sites/apps. Every so often I run into one that was only ever developed for and tested against Chromium and has major performance issues under Gecko and/or WebKit. Some of it might come down to poorly pruned or outdated polyfills, which in many cases are filling in for features that those engines gained support for quite some time ago.

I wish there were something that could thwart the “Chromium by default” assumption at large amongst devs, because it’s making the web worse than it needs to be.

OkayPhysicist 4 days ago|||
I daily drive Firefox serving a Chrome User-Agent, out of frustration with a couple applications that work perfectly on Firefox, but because they didn't test on Firefox, they just assume it won't work and block my connection (If there's any Devs at Snapchat who wants a free ticket completion, you can "Add Firefox support" by deleting your UA check)

I noticed this exact thing. While a lot of sites worked perfectly fine when I was informing them I was using Firefox, when I started lying, they ran faster. Drove me nuts.

Frontend Devs: If your code reads the user-agent string for any reason but logging/spying, you're doing it wrong.

cosmic_cheese 4 days ago||
This is the natural consequence of the notion at large that non-Blink web engines are lightyears behind, which was never true in the strictest sense and has only become less true with time as the gap has narrowed. Besides that, even if you’re relying on some feature that Chrome has implemented as an early draft spec thing or something, maybe consider toggling off that one feature instead of blocking off the whole app.
OkayPhysicist 4 days ago||
To clarify, I didn't mean don't check if the feature you want to use exists on the user's browser. I meant don't come to that conclusion using User-Agent strings. JavaScript makes if very easy to check if a method you want to use exists or not: just check if the function is undefined.

If you do it the right way, if/when another browser implements the feature you used, suddenly you support that browser, with no code changes. If you check UAs, then you need to keep tabs on browser updates and manually update your website when features get added to browsers, and you need to check what version people are using because maybe it's out of date, it's a whole thing.

What drives me nuts is that the right way is the easy way.

cosmic_cheese 4 days ago||
We’re in full agreement here, all I was saying is that the menality that leads to user agent sniffing is likely the idea that engines that aren't Blink are so incapable and will break the site/app so badly that it’s better to just rule out their usage altogether. Checking on a per-function basis (or alternatively, just not insisting on using bleeding edge features in the first place) is absolutely the way to go about avoiding brokeness.
tracker1 4 days ago||||
The past few projects I've done, I've made some effort to just not polyfill anything, it's always too easy to wind up with fills for things long supported in every major browser for the past 3-5 years.

On the flip side... if you're running something bespoke relying on an older JS engine, it's becoming harder to find pure polyfills/shims that aren't a tangled mess relying on DOM specific features.

While there are some newer features I don't mind seeing early, I've mostly just avoided touching some of the more recent features for now, only to avoid the mess that are the current state of fills.

bigstrat2003 4 days ago||||
> I wish there were something that could thwart the “Chromium by default” assumption at large amongst devs...

I don't think that is possible. It used to be that lazy devs assumed people were on IE, these days lazy devs assume people are on Chrome. In the future if there is a new browser with a majority of the market, lazy devs will assume people use that browser. The problem isn't any one browser, it's that some people are lazy and seek out shortcuts rather than doing things the correct way.

internet_points 4 days ago|||
> Every so often I run into one that was only ever developed for and tested against Chromium and has major performance issues under Gecko and/or WebKit

and invariable it's under a google domain

TheAceOfHearts 4 days ago|||
This feels generally true but there's some exceptions. For example: I use Firefox as my daily driver, but if I want to watch more than one Twitch stream in parallel I'm forced to use Chromium. Opening multiple Twitch streams on Firefox grinds the browser to a halt.
kokada 4 days ago|||
As a counter example, I remember that I needed to do big reviews in GitHub using Firefox because Chrome would slow to a crawl in the Files tab in GitHub, while Firefox was just as fast as it was with small reviews.

I don't think this is an issue anymore, but it shows that a few things have completely performance in different browsers.

qualeed 4 days ago|||
I wonder how experiences can differ so much with the same program. I've never had an issue having 3-5 twitch streams open at the same time, across multiple computers and multiple FireFox versions.
Night_Thastus 4 days ago||
Addons and configuration can make a big difference. It's why FF likes to push the 'refresh' of the browser if you'd had it installed awhile.
ahartmetz 4 days ago||
Possibly video drivers and hardware for the Twitch issue.
rafaelmn 4 days ago||
Memory and battery usage matters on desktop browser for laptops as well.
Milpotel 4 days ago||
On modern machines I blame websites (and maybe network connections) for being slow and not the browser anymore.
tracker1 4 days ago|
That's largely my own take as well. And while many hate SPAs or client-driven web apps, it reduces the server surface a lot. It should be faster/better... that people make really crappy front ends doesn't mean the tech itself is bad.

There is some really bloated crap out there, and you can create every bit as much bloat on the server as in the client.

cadamsdotcom 3 days ago||
Firefox is excellent. I use it exclusively on my mac and am grateful to all the humans who make such great software.

Pleasantly it also has working adblock and using it helps prevent browser monoculture. So that’s nice too.

butz 4 days ago||
Best way to improve performance on the web is to install an ad blocker.
alberth 4 days ago||
It seems like battery life is no longer a major difference between browsers now either:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41542413

lend000 4 days ago||
This finally convinced me to press the update and restart button. Nice to see that not all commercial software projects tend towards bloat.
chrisweekly 4 days ago|
OMG the phoronix website is appalling. Reader mode made it tolerable but masked the "next page" link, which just, come on. That link led to a full-screen interstitial ad, at which point nope.
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