cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1376783
Thought I’d never see the day when Firefox would match Chrome on Speedometer.
There’s also a few other benchmarks got a sizable boost. https://arewefastyet.com/
I stopped using Firefox because it had issues playing videos. I also ran into a number of web sites that were displayed badly.
I don’t think site displayed badly is Mozilla problem, because there are web standard. If they don’t follow the standard, it won’t even show on anything I suppose, even chrome. But if in chrome it displayed neatly, then you need to ask to yourself, does that a website, or chromiumsite
I use FF to help keep the browser “market” competitive. We don’t want to end up in the same situation as early 2ks where html standardisation was essentially “internet explorer compatibility”, and if you wanted to use newer features as a web dev you had to put multiple implementations, one for IE, and one for the others, as in the browsers actually implementing the specifications correctly. Now MS didn’t exactly do nefarious things with their market power, it was rather neglect, but it damaged the industry nevertheless. For Google, in today’s market, I’d anticipate they would use it to make it very difficult to block ads etc. Internet will become less free.
I use FF because it’s good.
MS didn’t do nefarious things with their market power? They virtually killed all competition in the market.
Chrome is worse. Because Chrome isn’t about having you use the browser, its about knowing what you do with the browser. Google already changes it’s search page, for example, on mobile Firefox can’t see the same sports results and league tables, and can’t easily see the reviews of local restaurants etc.
And that’s even considering the fact that Google deliberately throttles Firefox on their sites
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Google.com on Firefox Android is an inferior experience compared to Chrome. You have to use an addon that changes your user-agent string to get the same experience.
@lazycouchpotato @xthedeerlordx just use brave search or startpage instead?
I use DuckDuckGo.
Heard good things about Brave. Gotta remember to use it.
Is that relevant for the benchmarks?
No
Why does anyone use chome, its way worse then any other browser you can install, they put so much junk on it.
Not sure if it’s still a thing (I use DDG now), but back then when you visited Google on a non-Chrome browser, you would get a recommendation to use Chrome instead.
There’s a lot of non-Chrome Chromium browsers.
Forced to with work.
I utterly hate it. I don’t have it on my personal setup or android mobile - been using Firefox for twenty years now, not gonna stop!
Don’t you have the option to use the Chromium Edge at your workplace? At least it has better features as compared to Chrome. My employer has all 3 of Chrome, FF & Edge installed but I use Edge over FF at office because they don’t allow 3rd party extensions.
What a world we live in where people are recommending what used to be Internet Explorer over Chrome.
To be fair, internet Explorer used to be pretty good some time ago…
Nope, it’s completely locked down by IT policy restrictions unfortunately.
I can use portable installs but last time I got found out I got a right bollocking!!
Financial org, so everything is very black and white unfortunately, although I did argue my way into having Notepad++
If you are on linux wayland, enable wayland mode for firefox and enjoy the huge performance boost
This sounds like what I’m missing 😁
Sadly I’m using XFCE, and XFCE isn’t ready for wayland, so I will keep waiting until wayland stable enough on XFCE. Other DE isn’t suiting my taste tbh. well it’s mater of preference, but XFCE is stable roboust DE for me to keep me focus on works
Good news: Xfce is working on Wayland support!
Bad news: We don’t know when it will be done…
Hahahaha… Well, let the dev team work in real life for a while tho. Hahaha
I have been using Firefox for basically as long as I can remember and I love it. However, there’s one website that I go to Chromium for: GeoGuessr/Google Street View. For some reason it’s unbelievably slow and sluggish in Firefox whereas it works normally in Chromium. Why could this be? To be clear, it’s only the Street View part (and moving/panning/zooming) that’s slow on GeoGuessr.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the implementation has bias towards Chromium based browsers as both street view and Chromium are from Google.
They were literally caught artificially slowing down page loads and responsiveness on non-chrome browsers a while back.
Do you mean the time when YouTube’s UI was built using a pre-standardized version of the Shadow DOM API, and had to polyfill it in Firefox? If so, that was tech debt, not artificially slowing down page loads for Firefox on purpose. It was a tradeoff that let non-Chrome users use YouTube until they finally upgraded a year or two later.
If that’s not it, I’d love to see what you’re referring to.
Anything that Google site engineering mostly against web standard, and pushing chromium standard. So I don’t even… Surprised I guess?
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I rarely feel like the slowness of a website was due to the browser. I mean .4 seconds or .5 seconds does it really matter? I’ve been using Firefox since it was Firebird and speed has never really been a complaint. People need to measure and quantify everything.
What appeals to me about Firefox is how customizable it is, and all the extensions.
Same for me. Since I switched to Firebird/Firefox, no other browser has given me a reason to seriously consider switching.
My bigger complaint is memory usage
Firebird?
Phoenix became Firebird which became Firefox.
Since Firebird, eh? That means you are responsible for my beloved Mozilla suite being ditched for this upstart.
On old HW it does matter. I use X220 Thinkpad, it’s still fast using chrome, and slow using firefox. But since 115, it’s noticeably fast… so… it matter, for me.
I’m still a little mad that they had to change it from Phoenix. Such a great and evocative name.
I miss Galeon a little too. Practically invented the tabbed browser.
Remind me: Mozilla is the company that couldn’t cope with … building Mozilla. Right? #seamonkey
I’m proud of Firefox, but man, that’s a bad graph :)
Great, now implement modern exploit mitigations and sandboxing like Chrome uses. Firefox is objectively less resistant to exploitation. Some Firefox security has improved since the article was written, such as some sandboxing on Windows, but it’s definitely not as mature.
I’m not writing that Firefox is insecure. Security is very important to Firefox! However, Chrome has had more work done in the realm of browser hardening.
I think it’s already on par with Chromium, most attack won’t work with sandboxing that introduced to firefox, and mostly now each site/iframe have it’s own process, so it’s on par with chrome, imho
As a security researcher, running each site in its own process isn’t enough. Chrome has a much stronger multiprocessing model on most platforms. For example, Chrome on Android sandboxes between processes whereas Firefox simply relies on the built-in Android sandbox, which provides limited protection between these processes. It’s much easier to break out of the sandbox in Firefox because it’s easier to move laterally, for one. Those processes have to communicate with each other at some point.
But, don’t believe me just because I claim any sort of credential on the Internet. It’s such a difference in security that GrapheneOS strongly discourages using Firefox for its weak implementation in addition to the link I provided above. From the link:
Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox’s sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole.
I love Firefox. I use it anyway. It’s not insecure. But it’s absolutely not as secure because it lacks modern exploit mitigations. Running process per site is an improvement but it’s still less secure than the architecture used in Chrome.
EDIT: Sound less entitled.
I can’t speak for Android, it’s long way to go for sure, but on desktop, it’s great. And for Fedora PhoneUI / Phosh seems already working because it’s linux ootb.
in short android not included I suppose. They have custom multiple process sandbox, but last time I enable it, it broke everything in nightly
@garam
Firefox is not that bad 4 android, not that brilliant either
@henfredemarsWell, for me it’s great, but if we talk about sandboxing, it’s not there, not even in nightly, but it’s useful for me for day to day task, almost anything in Android
That is fair, but Chrome is undeniably more open to corporate exploitation. See things like the dramatically reduced utility of ad blockers on Chromium browsers.
I guess it depends on who you see as the greater threat at present.
This is why I use Firefox! For freedom.
I might start using Firefox when I will get a laptop later. Currently using Vivaldi for Android
Is this for both desktop and mobile versions? Sorry if that is a silly question.
I think for now it’s on desktop Windows? But on Linux I do notice faster react app load like reddit new design is faster. But I use lemmy, so it doesn’t matter now.
This is specifically for the Windows version. You can also find Linux and Mac results here by selecting the OS from the drop-down list at the top.
I only see Chromium and Chrome on the speedometer for Linux, not Firefox. Am I missing something?
Here’s what I see: https://i.ibb.co/g9yLrmp/image.png
Probably desktop. Or desktop and android. Remember that iOS locked down the browser years ago and require any third parties to run on safari’s bones.
Chrome and Firefox are building iOS browsers that do not require the apple WebKit. Everyone, including apple, expect apple to drop that requirement soon to help avoid antitrust issues.
That’s quite good to hear, do you have any further reading that you know of?
Edit: here’s the top article from DDG - https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/07/mozilla_google_apple_webkit/
expect apple to drop that requirement soon to help avoid antitrust issues.
I’m surprised it took this long.
Definitely not Android. Firefox is unfortunately quite a bit slower than Chrome based browsers. I still use it as I don’t really do much on my phone, but I hope they can optimize it further.
I use Firefox on android (specifically fennec f droid) and i use it since ublock origin can be installed and my fennec is hardened too
Why is Chromium slower than Chrome?
~~Wild guess: APM? ~~
Edit:
It seems that chromium here on these benchmarks is unoptimized and it depends on what flags where enabled during building time: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/6q3AyYacjOo/m/XKQMdW4fBgAJThe real question
So, a larger number is better for this speed benchmark?
I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is keeping certain performance enhancements closed source so they can have a competive advantage over the competition that uses the Chromium source. They have been slowly making Android open source worse by not updating parts and moving things to closed source Google Play apps.
So when Google removed don’t be evil, they really meant it. It shows more and more each day.
They didn’t remove “don’t be evil”. It’s still there today: https://abc.xyz/investor/google-code-of-conduct/ (final paragraph)
Wow. I’ve heard that rumour being spread all over the place for YEARS now, and you’re the first to pull up proof that it’s still there. Interesting!
It looks like the code of conduct used to include a preface about don’t be evil, that’s what was removed.
“Preface Don’t be evil.” Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users. But “Don’t be evil” is much more than that. Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can. But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably, and treating co-workers with courtesy and respect.
The Google Code of Conduct is one of the ways we put “Don’t be evil” into practice.”
“We’re open source but not open source enough to your liking” is a VERY strange criteria for “evil” when most other commercial software companies are not open source at all.
They’re just build flags or compiler versions being different, no need to be melodramatic.
“Who put this ‘Don’t’ here? We’ll just get rid of that!”
Librewolf.
Lags behind on updates by a few days, which is a non negotiable for me. I use normal FF + Arkenfox User.js
I did not know about this option, I will investigate. Thanks for sharing
The graph totally threw me off, first I thought this post was a joke that Firefox got slower and is now as slow as Chrome.
For some dumb reason the y-axis shows the score, but it’s inverted…
It’s inverted because on most occasions the y axis represents time, so less is better.
In order to not have bemchmarks where a lower result on the Y-axis is worse, they kind of invert it for scores.
I know it is confusing, but it helps non-technical people.
What does speed mean in this regard? Download speed?
JS Render speed, so in past website like facebook, new.reddit.com, discourse based forum, etc that rely heavily in JS, now load and render faster in Firefox than ever
Oh, well that’s good. I’ve never thought Firefox took too long to load but I’m happy with shit being faster.
For anyone else wondering, I’m assuming they’re talking about JavaScript.
