That is delightful news. The near-monopoly of chrome (and chromium based browsers) that has developed over the past few years has given Google way to much power to define quasi-standard behaviour...
That is delightful news. The near-monopoly of chrome (and chromium based browsers) that has developed over the past few years has given Google way to much power to define quasi-standard behaviour for websites.
As long most people use Chrome or some of its derivatives, web developers will primarily optimize their sites and tools for the chrome ecosystem, creating the illusion that sites simply run smoother in chrome even if that hadn't been the case given a set of sites developed without browser-bias. Also Google can basically use their monopoly to introduce subtle chrome-specific behaviour to optimize their own sites to further support this effect.
I personally mainly use firefox for a variety of reasons, some relating to privacy and some relating to greater freedom with regards to extendability and control of your own Browser.
Let's hope that, if this trend of firefox becoming more efficient than chrome continues, we'll see a little more healthy competition in the Browser world again.
Although this is very good news, I’m afraid that Chromium market share is way too massive right now and it’s been snowballing for a while. Even Edge is Chromium based now, which comes...
Although this is very good news, I’m afraid that Chromium market share is way too massive right now and it’s been snowballing for a while. Even Edge is Chromium based now, which comes pre-installed with Windows systems, and of course Chrome comes pre-installed on, well, Chromebooks.
I love Firefox, I’ve been using it for many years. It’s been really sad to see its market share get less and less every year and I don’t really have an answer to what Mozilla can do to increase the market share.
Android is natively Google, and Chrome is the default mobile browser, but Firefox has a mobile browser too. Sync settings across platforms, and great privacy protections.
Android is natively Google, and Chrome is the default mobile browser, but Firefox has a mobile browser too. Sync settings across platforms, and great privacy protections.
With the exception of a few high demanding websites, I doubt that web developers optimize their websites at all. The amount of bloat, frameworks, trackers and poor html/css usage is staggering. If...
As long most people use Chrome or some of its derivatives, web developers will primarily optimize their sites and tools for the chrome ecosystem.
With the exception of a few high demanding websites, I doubt that web developers optimize their websites at all. The amount of bloat, frameworks, trackers and poor html/css usage is staggering. If developers cared at all, they would start there.
Fair point. But even if web developers do not optimize, there is at least some testing involved in the development process. And if this testing is only done against one ecosystem and cross-browser...
Fair point. But even if web developers do not optimize, there is at least some testing involved in the development process. And if this testing is only done against one ecosystem and cross-browser testing is omitted, this will have a similar effect. Not only will bugs of the ignored ecosystems not be noticed, but browser-specific non-standard behaviour of the tested ecosystem may be assumed to be well defined and readily supported behaviour, ultimately leading to issues that only occur in browsers that the site hasn't been tested against.
It is very sad that at Mozilla they laid a lot of brilliant people off and have consistently increased senior executive compensation, even in spite of the fact that Firefox continues to lose...
It is very sad that at Mozilla they laid a lot of brilliant people off and have consistently increased senior executive compensation, even in spite of the fact that Firefox continues to lose market share.
This appears to be the source of the claim. Personally I've always found Firefox to be faster than Chrome. Especially if you don't have a lot of RAM in your system or have slow storage for virtual...
Personally I've always found Firefox to be faster than Chrome. Especially if you don't have a lot of RAM in your system or have slow storage for virtual memory. When I owned a Chromebook, there were very notable performance benefits from running Firefox via chroot than non-chroot Chrome.
But honestly this news doesn't really affect anyone. Firefox has been fast enough that any difference is negligible for the vast majority of users. Chrome is essentially a monopoly at this point and now many devs have basically abandoned cross-browser testing, and while both Google and Mozilla have done a good job of making their browsers standards-compliant, there's still far too many instances of new bugs coming up that only affect Firefox.
Seems like this could be system dependent too. I just did the test on my system, and a clean installation of Firefox was at first faster than chrome (156>148), but doing the test again in private...
Seems like this could be system dependent too. I just did the test on my system, and a clean installation of Firefox was at first faster than chrome (156>148), but doing the test again in private mode on chrome with all add-ons disabled resulted in a score of 180. At least on my system chrome is still faster according to the test.
Firefox betrayed us all too many times to try and be like chrome and destroyed its entire extension community. I will never use Firefox as my main browser again I am currently waiting for ladybird.
Firefox betrayed us all too many times to try and be like chrome and destroyed its entire extension community. I will never use Firefox as my main browser again I am currently waiting for ladybird.
Ladybird is part of a hobby project which main goal is experimentation, not mass use so I would't hold my breath if I were you. I don't know what you mean with the extentions. Besides, you can't...
Ladybird is part of a hobby project which main goal is experimentation, not mass use so I would't hold my breath if I were you. I don't know what you mean with the extentions. Besides, you can't possibly argue that Mozilla is equal to Google because they do care more about FOSS.
Blink(Chromium) Gecko(Firefox) WebKit(Safari, Epiphany, probably others I don't know) I dislike how bloated modern web as a whole honestly... And how everything is chromium based, and FireFox...
Blink(Chromium)
Gecko(Firefox)
WebKit(Safari, Epiphany, probably others I don't know)
I dislike how bloated modern web as a whole honestly... And how everything is chromium based, and FireFox feels more like lesser of two evils than "the best" over time.
tl;dr my crappy console script to expand reddit comment threads works well on Firefox but causes Chromium to fail rendering the fully expanded page and asks you to reload where you start from...
tl;dr my crappy console script to expand reddit comment threads works well on Firefox but causes Chromium to fail rendering the fully expanded page and asks you to reload where you start from unexpanded original page again.
Anecdata:
I recently wrote a small script to run in the console on reddit threads with many comments that have "load more comments" and "continue this thread" links dotted about. I am not a javascript dev, so my script is horrendously slow e.g. on huge comment threads like the disastrous API changes AMA (~ 34-35,000 comments). There is a user script (grease monkey, violent monkey, tamper monkey...) for this but it fails very often for me especially on large threads or automatically expand everything.
When you click load more comments there are 2 actions. First "load more comments" is replaced with "loading...", second the contents of the page are altered in-situ with whatever comments ares returned from the backend. Clicking the links too fast e.g. in a scripted loop won't work though - the first action is OK but the 2nd action doesn't work. Probably rate limited on the backend or something.
After some tinkering a delay of 400ms is needed for my machine.
Secondly clicking a "continue this thread" replaces the whole page with the deeper thread. So I adapted it to open them in new tabs instead.
It took about 3h 11m to run on that AMA thread in Firefox and a similar time on chromium. However closing the console causes the page to re-render which Firefox handles but cause Chromium to fail and offer to re-load the page again.
One reflection I should probably open the dev tools in a different window to run the script to stop the re-rendering of the page when they're closed it works all the large threads I've tested it on.
That is delightful news. The near-monopoly of chrome (and chromium based browsers) that has developed over the past few years has given Google way to much power to define quasi-standard behaviour for websites.
As long most people use Chrome or some of its derivatives, web developers will primarily optimize their sites and tools for the chrome ecosystem, creating the illusion that sites simply run smoother in chrome even if that hadn't been the case given a set of sites developed without browser-bias. Also Google can basically use their monopoly to introduce subtle chrome-specific behaviour to optimize their own sites to further support this effect.
I personally mainly use firefox for a variety of reasons, some relating to privacy and some relating to greater freedom with regards to extendability and control of your own Browser.
Let's hope that, if this trend of firefox becoming more efficient than chrome continues, we'll see a little more healthy competition in the Browser world again.
Although this is very good news, I’m afraid that Chromium market share is way too massive right now and it’s been snowballing for a while. Even Edge is Chromium based now, which comes pre-installed with Windows systems, and of course Chrome comes pre-installed on, well, Chromebooks.
I love Firefox, I’ve been using it for many years. It’s been really sad to see its market share get less and less every year and I don’t really have an answer to what Mozilla can do to increase the market share.
Does android count too? I'm talking android with Google play services, not sure what comes bundled with AOSP. I assume some chromium variant as well?
Android is natively Google, and Chrome is the default mobile browser, but Firefox has a mobile browser too. Sync settings across platforms, and great privacy protections.
With the exception of a few high demanding websites, I doubt that web developers optimize their websites at all. The amount of bloat, frameworks, trackers and poor html/css usage is staggering. If developers cared at all, they would start there.
Fair point. But even if web developers do not optimize, there is at least some testing involved in the development process. And if this testing is only done against one ecosystem and cross-browser testing is omitted, this will have a similar effect. Not only will bugs of the ignored ecosystems not be noticed, but browser-specific non-standard behaviour of the tested ecosystem may be assumed to be well defined and readily supported behaviour, ultimately leading to issues that only occur in browsers that the site hasn't been tested against.
Edit: typo
It is very sad that at Mozilla they laid a lot of brilliant people off and have consistently increased senior executive compensation, even in spite of the fact that Firefox continues to lose market share.
Exec exit strategy.
It's a story well told, time and again from faltering businesses.
This appears to be the source of the claim.
Personally I've always found Firefox to be faster than Chrome. Especially if you don't have a lot of RAM in your system or have slow storage for virtual memory. When I owned a Chromebook, there were very notable performance benefits from running Firefox via chroot than non-chroot Chrome.
But honestly this news doesn't really affect anyone. Firefox has been fast enough that any difference is negligible for the vast majority of users. Chrome is essentially a monopoly at this point and now many devs have basically abandoned cross-browser testing, and while both Google and Mozilla have done a good job of making their browsers standards-compliant, there's still far too many instances of new bugs coming up that only affect Firefox.
Seems like this could be system dependent too. I just did the test on my system, and a clean installation of Firefox was at first faster than chrome (156>148), but doing the test again in private mode on chrome with all add-ons disabled resulted in a score of 180. At least on my system chrome is still faster according to the test.
Firefox betrayed us all too many times to try and be like chrome and destroyed its entire extension community. I will never use Firefox as my main browser again I am currently waiting for ladybird.
Can you explain a bit more about this? I have never heard of this.
Ladybird is part of a hobby project which main goal is experimentation, not mass use so I would't hold my breath if I were you. I don't know what you mean with the extentions. Besides, you can't possibly argue that Mozilla is equal to Google because they do care more about FOSS.
Blink(Chromium)
Gecko(Firefox)
WebKit(Safari, Epiphany, probably others I don't know)
I dislike how bloated modern web as a whole honestly... And how everything is chromium based, and FireFox feels more like lesser of two evils than "the best" over time.
tl;dr my crappy console script to expand reddit comment threads works well on Firefox but causes Chromium to fail rendering the fully expanded page and asks you to reload where you start from unexpanded original page again.
Anecdata:
I recently wrote a small script to run in the console on reddit threads with many comments that have "load more comments" and "continue this thread" links dotted about. I am not a javascript dev, so my script is horrendously slow e.g. on huge comment threads like the disastrous API changes AMA (~ 34-35,000 comments). There is a user script (grease monkey, violent monkey, tamper monkey...) for this but it fails very often for me especially on large threads or automatically expand everything.
When you click load more comments there are 2 actions. First "load more comments" is replaced with "loading...", second the contents of the page are altered in-situ with whatever comments ares returned from the backend. Clicking the links too fast e.g. in a scripted loop won't work though - the first action is OK but the 2nd action doesn't work. Probably rate limited on the backend or something.
After some tinkering a delay of 400ms is needed for my machine.
Secondly clicking a "continue this thread" replaces the whole page with the deeper thread. So I adapted it to open them in new tabs instead.
It took about 3h 11m to run on that AMA thread in Firefox and a similar time on chromium. However closing the console causes the page to re-render which Firefox handles but cause Chromium to fail and offer to re-load the page again.
One reflection I should probably open the dev tools in a different window to run the script to stop the re-rendering of the page when they're closed it works all the large threads I've tested it on.