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Comment by shaklee3 | Hacker News Reader

I remember about a year or two ago, there was a lot of press on HN about a new Firefox engine that made it extremely fast. Ever since then, I've only seen negative comments about Firefox. Did that just not pan out as much as people had expected?

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Firefox is fantastic! But I have noticed a similar trend with Firefox getting negative comments.

One particular reason might be that HN has a lot of current and former Google employees on it, and they are pretty vocal and actively defend Google and downvote everything else - I have experienced this multiple times when bringing up anything negative about Chrome - which is really not that great of a browser. Especially the security (look at past number of patches) and memory usage is bad. I'm not sure why the community here speaks so highly about it.

I personally find the opposite, where it is usually Mozilla fans bashing Chrome. Mozilla doesn't have any better record when it comes to security. I still have access to all my favorite privacy extensions within Chromium. I also find the performance on Linux (Arch with VAAPI) for Chromium to be much better than Firefox.

There's a new CSS engine: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-en... but the new compositor, WebRender, has not been enabled yet (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1311790). I believe it will be enabled for Windows users in version 67.

Initially, we'll only enable it for users on Windows+Nvidia, to minimize the risk of regressing stability (GPU drivers is a fun minefield). Then we'll gradually extend the scope and focus on other drivers and platforms.

I've only seen people complain about WebRender on Mac. Looks like the cause is known and looking to be fixed this year [1].

[1] See "Adding support for native OS compositors to WebRender" on https://pcwalton.github.io/2018/12/07/plans-for-2019.html

No, Firefox has become faster and overall better. But there was a price paid, and not much gain in other terms. Extensions were lost and Mozilla still didn't deliver important APIs which people wait for over 2 years now. Number of users didn't really grow yet. New Engine also has still several problems. And the important android-version didn't receive the update as many people anticipated. There were also some privacy-related scandals from Mozilla, which seems to have eaten most of the shaky progress from that time.

Overall, still many reasons for people to be grumpy.

I can't compare to Chrome since I haven't really used it for over 10 years, but Firefox for me is fast enough.

The main issue is still memory usage IMO. The way they implemented multiprocess browsing was to have a few long-lived processes rather than one per tab. Over time these processes tend to use a lot of memory, as scripts invariably seem to leak.

But, if I interpret the memes correctly Chrome isn't exactly frugal either.

HN users are just natural grumblers. Firefox is very fast these days.

My experience has been very positive. I recently noticed that Firefox had become slightly slow to recover my session at start-up. I investigated and found I had over 1800 tabs open. With a few hundred tabs open start-up is amazingly fast. I never even think about performance otherwise because it has ceased to be an issue.

I think many people are still angry about losing their extensions and not having capable apis to be able to replace them.

works fine on desktop, but it's unusable on android constant crashes, jumpy cursor or repeated words in text field, jittery scrolling, slow loading of pages and don't get me started on pull down to refresh ignored for years, because apparently giving users options it's against Firefox philosophy

The new rendering engine (WebRender aka Quantum Render) it not yet on by default. And at first it will be only enabled on Windows.

Here is the tracking bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1386669

Nah, Quantum is fast. People are mostly complaining about some Mozilla management decisions, rather than technical ones.

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