Down and to the Right: Firefox Got Faster for Real Users in 2023 – Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog
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We’ve been working hard on making Firefox even faster and we’re extremely happy to report that this has resulted in an improvement in speed.
  • ArgentRaven@lemmy.worldEnglish
    912·
    1 year ago

    Really, the fact that they still have working adblockers makes it faster. Sitting through a minute of ads is way more noticable than a second or two of delay.

    And the reason they work still is because they empower the users to use it how they want, instead of how corporate can monetize them.

    • MonkderZweite@feddit.chEnglish
      23·
      1 year ago

      than a second or two of delay.

      The differences between Chromium And Firefox are for years now in the range of milliseconds.

  • NightAuthor@lemmy.worldEnglish
    36·
    1 year ago

    I thought the browser, my computer or something was slowing down. Turns out I just had way too many ublock rules.

  • Fisch@lemmy.mlEnglish
    353·
    1 year ago

    Where they really need to improve performance is on mobile. On my old phone, I never really noticed how bad it was aside from the high energy usage reported by Android for Firefox. I recently got a new phone tho, which has a 120hz screen and yesterday I tried Cromite, a Chromium fork for Android, which improves privacy and adds adblock. I tested it against Firefox (Mull to be precise), which is what I use as my default browser, and I noticed that scrolling pages was way smoother on Cromite. First I thought that maybe Firefox is just running on 60hz but scrolling through settings and the like was perfectly smooth, just webpages felt laggy. This means that Firefox is simply very slow at rendering pages on mobile, to the point that it can’t keep up with my screens refresh rate at all.

    Firefox on desktop is great and I really wanna use it on mobile too but I’m honestly contemplating just switching to Cromite. The only feature I’m missing in Cromite, that I can get for Firefox with the extension Libredirect, is redirecting to privacy respecting and lightweight frontends / proxies, like Reddit to Libreddit but it might be possible to add a userscript to Cromite with that functionality.

    • BastingChemina@slrpnk.netEnglish
      24·
      1 year ago

      Did you try with firefox on mobile rather than Mull?

      I don’t know if it will make a difference but Mull is quite recent and focus on privacy first then usability and does way more than adblock and few privacy enhancement.

      I don’t know the benchmark but it would not surprise if Mull was slower than Firefox.

      I’m using Firefox on mobile and I’m not really seeing a difference but I’m on an older phone.

      • Fisch@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        Just tested it with normal Firerox and surprisingly, that is actually smooth. Maybe it’s just an extension.

      • InfiniWheel@lemmy.oneEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        I’m using regular Firefox and its still the same, pages take too long to load or they randomly reload if left unattended. It feels like a browser from the early era of mobile apps with a coat of paint, and yeah it has only existed for a few years

    • FrameXX@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I also have a 120hz display and use Fennec and can state that it works smoothly and scrolling feels like 120hz.

      • Fisch@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I just tried normal Firefox and that seems to be as smooth as expected. Maybe it was just an extension.

    • Archer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      For me it’s unusable on desktop too! Edge and Chrome just have so much nicer animations it’s like a paper cut every time I click on the UI in Firefox

      • Fisch@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Firefox supports CSS themes tho, you can install something like this, for example, to make it look like Chrome. I haven’t tried it myself but it probably has the animations as well. If you’re on GNOME there’s also a Firefox GNOME theme.

  • AlijahTheMediocre@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    Firefox is faster at loading webpages and content than Chrome, and thats without adblockers. The only thing Chrome is good at is being a webapp and spyware platform.

  • merthyr1831@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I felt this. Last year I pretty much avoided firefox because it just wasnt performant enough, but since this year they’ve really improved things.

  • MeanEYE@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1124·
    1 year ago

    Rendering was never a problem with FF, but it’s good to see some progress on that front as well. Startup times are still atrocious. My whole OS can book 4 times over before Firefox decides it’s the right time to start rendering something.

      • MeanEYE@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Nope, Debian Testing on machine with 12 cores and 32GB of RAM and 3GB/s M.2 drive.

        And my systemd-analyze says graphical.target reached after 5.690s in userspace. Most of which is network manager waiting for online status, mounting filesystems, and timesyncd waiting clock update.

        • pajn@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          Sounds like you have a borked dbus or is using the GTK_USE_PORTAL env variable, 20 second timeouts are gtks standard way of dealing with something it doesn’t like. Firefox should take < 1 second to start fresh and takes < 3s for me, restoring hundreds of tabs