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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.
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?
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).
I used to keep Chrome installed just for the dev tools, but the Firefox dev tools became good enough in probably 2013 or so.
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.
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 me, Firefox performs better on Linux than on Windows.
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.
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!
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.
That chart suggests massive improvements since the beginning of this year. Can anyone explain how this was achieved? What precisely has changed?
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.
See also https://arewefastyet.com.
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.
Edit: looks like Chromium still beats Firefox on Linux: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAl...
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?
Anecdotally, Firefox has always been faster than Chrome on MacOS for me. Great to see it’s only getting even better.
Firefox has 2.2% usage on US government websites according to https://analytics.usa.gov/
If it falls below 2% it may lose official support on .gov websites according to https://designsystem.digital.gov/documentation/developers/#b...
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.
I don't care about performance if differences are negligible enough.
I support Firefox because competition makes market healthier. Current status of Manifest v.3 is a shining example.
Does this require some special test environment (special OS, special builds of firefox/chrome)?
Because for me chrome vs firefox (both 115)
- ubuntu desktop: 148(+-2.2) vs 126(+-6.5)
- android phone: 95.8(+-2.0) vs 78.5(+-4.3)
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.
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.
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)
Firefox can render pages faster than Chrome, if it still has a laggy scroll on macOS, I won't be using it.
Every six months, I go back to Firefox for a day or two, only to notice this scroll lag. Every time.
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.
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.
After this quick switch profile addon was release I have been 100% on firefox and love it.
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?
Firefox is the best. I wish Mozilla would let me donate funds specifically to fund it's development for my own peace of mind.
Great, however it will take more than that to get out of the 3% adoption.
Everyone pushing Chrome and Electron apps will not suddenly adopt Firefox.
as a pentadactly widow, i would recommend to anyone that is coming back to firefox tridactyl https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl
is it the same? no.
but is it close? hell yeah. it really helps me with productivity!
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?
Does anyone familiar with this work have some pointers to read more about it?
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).
The link is terrible. Maybe the article should link to https://arewefastyet.com or maybe the Speedometer selection at https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/raptor-desktop-spe...
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.
FF is great, only two things left I go to Chrome for are DevTools and watching Youtube (lower cpu usage, lower battery drain).
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.