- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- foss@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- foss@beehaw.org
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Waaaaaaay better privacy, faster than chrome, don’t need to worry about them killing mandatory add ons so they can push ads, also the add ons just work better but maybe that’s confirmation bias.
I’m sure there’s more I’m forgetting
It is not really faster than Chrome, but hey, at least I don’t have to manually opt out of monetizing my browsing history and my adblocker still works.
not really faster than Chrome
Its also not really slower. If you are blocking plugins, it can be faster.
Its fast enough I think is the broader point.
It’s a weird pissing contest that still makes people angry for no reason, is what it is.
It’s not the 90s, you’re not trying to parse a bunch of tables on a creaking chunk of barely cooked sand. You’re basically running standalone software through your browser anyway.
Honestly, the one performance thing that bothers me on any modern browser is that some extension in my stack somewhere is memory leaking and makes me restart Firefox to restore performance every few hours. Can’t tell which one, but I need all of them, so hey, frequent reboots it is.
Once it’s slower, hit F12 -> memory -> snapshot
Should be pretty easy to check out which extension has shitloads of storage. Then you can decide how to go from there - maybe contact the author?
Memory leak may have been a misdiagnosis. The issue is clearly with Youtube, which is what most extensions I use are about, there is nothing obvious in the memory snapshot (not that it’d be easy to see, because video is a resource hog anyway) and the profiler seems to label the stutter with the very useful label of “jank”, so…
Someone more familiar with web dev than I am may be able to take the profiler logs and debug this, but a) that’s not me, and b) not my job.
Jank means that the renderer was delayed due to a resource conflict - usually because there’s something on the main thread that’s taking too long. Basically your issue is probably a CPU (or GPU) one, not a RAM one - It’s hard to help you out without knowing more about your environment, so all I can really give you is vague advice: if you’re using an adblocker other than uBlock Origin, switch to uBlock Origin, it has much better performance. Check the plugins and extensions and make sure there isn’t something you don’t recognise, if your computer was compromised at some point, cryptominer plugins can really tank performance.
Figured that much. I’m not a web developer, but I can read a profiler, and the CPU usage spikes before those gaps are a pretty good sign that this isn’t a memory leak. I use uBlock Origin, by the way, but there’s likely some weird interaction between it, other Youtube extensions and Youtube’s own attempts to nuke adblockers from orbit. And no, it’s not a cryptominer as far as I can tell. This looks like either a bug or an unintended behavior of the very popular, very sanctioned plugins running on Firefox (or Firefox itself).
Which is why, as I said, I have settled for periodic reboots. Convenience wins over principle often, but I happen to be stubborn.
Gotta say, though, I appreciate the attempts at troubleshooting, but the OSS and privacy communities in general have a tendency to respond to comments on poor performance, compatibility or UX with tech support, and I think it’s kinda missing the point.
I’m actually having similar issues. Seemingly at random, my PC will freeze up due to lack of memory and killing Firefox fixes it. Im also sure it must be an extension causing it.
Here are my extensions, let me know which of these you are using and maybe we can narrow it down from that:
- Neat URL
- uBlock Origin
- Return YouTube Dislikes
- Firefox Multi-Account Containers
- SponsorBlock
- Vimium
- Decentraleyes
- Enhancer for YouTube
- Privacy Possum
- I don’t care about cookies
- First Party Isolation
- Startpage Privacy Protection
FWIW, the only ones we share on that list are uBlock, Dislikes and Enhancer.
Again, best guess is Youtube is desperately trying to poop out some ads and getting reinvented within an inch of its life by those extensions (not to mention dragged kicking and screaming into having pop-up playback windows) and something breaks in there somewhere. I’m not holding my breath for a fix anytime soon.
i looked at the graph and it seems like the speed of firefox is way more stable. At the moment i think the normal speeds are equal. Chrome has sometimes very big spikes in booth directions (the grey dots on the right sides that seem to be out of order) so the fastes from the records is still chrome, on this one specific date
Firefox actually has surpassed Chrome recently in benchmarks
It is not really faster than Chrome
It is if I close my eyes and stick my fingers in my ears.
LOL
Sadly not everywhere. On mobile it lacks behind. Even more on video content and low power cpus.
Chromium is slightly better in a way where I could clic on the video buttons without lag : On my android TV, (sideloaded) Firefox had issues with video buttons. So I tried using kiwi browser (for the extension support), and it worked well for buttons. The video wasn’t a lot smoother, but it just seemed maybe just slightly better.
When you say video, do you mean YouTube and on other Google sites? Not sure if you knew this, but Google has proprietary shit on their websites that enables special features just for Chrome. Even if Firefox wanted to implement those features, Google wouldn’t let Firefox use them.
I can confirm that Firefox is terrible on Android.
Used Firefox android for at least a long arse time now. I can’t remember any issues. Other than one site, but that works perfectly in duckduckgo browser.
Sorry to hijack, but can anyone help me with my issue?
I’m using librewolf and since about a week or two I noticed a speed issue. Overall my internet is fast, way faster then I need in fact, but websites load at a unreasonably slow speed.
When opening anything librewolf just sits there loading for a few second (probably up to ~10) then page opens fine. Video playback works great too. What could be the issue?
Could be DNS?
Nah, it can’t possibly be DNS…
Narrator: It was DNS. It’s always DNS.
It’s almost never DNS, except when it is.
Try setting your DNS to adguards default servers and see if that helps.
Those addresses are 94.140.14.14 and 94.140.15.15.
If you don’t want to do that you could always set it to 1.1.1.1 but adguards DNS servers also help filter ads so that’s nice.
I don’t know. If I use chrome on the same device there are no issues. You can’t be certain but I think it’s not DNS.
That might be evidence in favour of it being a DNS issue. Google Chrome doesn’t always use the system’s DNS.
Good to know, but for now it seems like the issue solved itself. Will report later if anything changes.
Do you use many addons? Resetting everything to stock and reinstalling addons one by one is my go-to as occasionally your profile is the issue. Just backup your profile beforehand and there’s 0 loss, aside from like 20 minutes.
Mobile adblock
I don’t use it because of mobile adblock only. There are multiple private chromium browsers which have mobile adblock, and also one supporting extensions : kiwi browser.
I use Firefox because it’s a competing engine to chromium, and it looks good.
I also have all the synced bookmarks from my PC Firefox, which I use for the same reason, and because I got used to it.
I normally don’t jump on bandwagons, but this is the way. After using ublock on firefox on my phone, it was an easy decision to switch from chrome to firefox (librewolf) on my computer too (so everything would sync lol)
Because it’s the only browser not based on Google’s Chromium rendering engine (Webview, WebKit? whatever). Using any other browser supports Google’s monopoly over how we browse the internet and what we are allowed to see. No, fuck Google.
Edit: spelling
I just wanna add that one reason this monopoly is dangerous is that Google (could and nowadays) does use it to dictate “web standards”. So e.g. they don’t come anymore from organizations that develop standards but Google just forces their own standards by sheer power of market dominance.
Yes! I failed to dive deeper, but you expressed it well. They have already planned to remove the option to have ad-blockers in Chrome… what will come next?
Thank you, I used to know the rendering engines fairly well a few years ago, but I’m out of the loop now.
What about WebView? It’s the rendering engine used in Android, closely related to Blink I assume.
I honestly wasn’t super familiar with WebView until you asked!
It looks like WebView is a stripped-down browser, more than anything else. It can leverage different rendering engines depending on the platform, and on Android it looks like it leverages Blink just like Chrome.
If you’re interested at all:
Google Chrome is a fork of the open source Chromium with several Google proprietary features. Chromium uses the Blink engine. Blink is a fork of a large component of WebKit called WebCore. Apple primarily develops WebKit (and by proxy WebCore), itself being a fork of KHTML and KJS which were actually discontinued this year.
Thank you, it gets complicated as you dive deeper. Am I right when I think that Chromium, although Open Source, is mainly developed by Google and therefore follows Google’s agenda?
As of 2020, Chromium was made more permissive in accepting additional code. Before this, Chromium rejected a lot of outside code. Microsoft is now the biggest contributor outside of Google. Samsung, Intel, ARM and Apple are other notable contributors. There are several features found in the code that aren’t used by Google at all. Chrome is 100% Google’s agenda. Chromium does include Google services that Google rejects the removal of. Of course Google would rather you use them. Microsoft just removes them. As do others. But the features others have submitted to the Chromium code are of course used in their forks and possibly others. I would say Chromium is less of Google’s agenda than it used to be. As it’s not entirely neutral, there is still Google influence behind it.
This.
Because it’s not Chrome
Because it’s open source
Because I can get it on all my devices
Because I like the work Mozilla does
Because it’s private and secure by default
Cause fuck Google
I was going to say that lol
We can say it together!
Fuck Google.
Because it’s never let me down.
I started using it pretty much from the beginning and have never had a reason to stop. When Chrome came along, I thought the whole idea of using a browser made by Google was obviously awful, so I just kept using Firefox. And I’m still using it.
There were a few moments where Firefox seemed to stumble a bit and I did give Chrome a try. Otherwise, Firefox has been my primary browser for ages. Even to the point where I was using a portable version on a locked down computer ages ago. It just works and it respects me as a user.
Because I’m not comfortable using a tool of a mega corporation trying to shape the internet to show more ads to ppl
It’s pretty much this. No one is going to notice a ~40ms difference in render time. It’s functionally the same as alternatives. The main benefit is simply that it’s not controlled by Google.
Because it’s one of the only remaining browsers (the other one being Safari) that doesn’t run on Chromium. We must protect FireFox and Safari with our lives because if they die out then Google has a monopoly on the browser space. Not something anyone wants… I mean look at their Manifest V3, and web DRM controversies. They are trying to ruin the web. Don’t let them people!
Plus, I just like the ability to customize the toolbar, and FireFox Sync is just brilliant for syncing between mobile and desktop!
Ublock Origin
deleted by creator
It’s FOSS, respects my privacy, doesn’t try to kill my adblock and it’s the only option that doesn’t support a big evil monopoly
Chrome runs like garbage compared to Firefox, and this has always been the case for me. I didn’t make the switch in 2008. I also had a bad feeling that Chrome would become the new IE with every other browser ditching their own rendering engine and basing on Chromium.
People back then said it was OK because Chromium is ostensibly open-source. Look where that got us. Surprise, it’s still controlled by Google!
I just don’t want to support the monopoly.
Also Firefox has been so tempting since the new engine written in Rust came out. It has a wide range of supporting add-ons.
Works well
Extendable
Open source
Not chrome based
I think Firefox is a pretty cool guy. Eh has great add-ons and customization and doesn’t afraid of anything
