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Comment by ThatMedicIsASpy | Hacker News Reader

As a Firefox user on Linux I'm about to switch honestly. The browser is in a terrible state on Linux in terms of performance.

There is video playback on without fan noise (Chromium) or a very audible fan noise on Firefox (Notebook & Steam Deck + Fedora/Pop/Arch/Ubuntu) => More use of power resulting in less time for me.

Switching to Linux resulting in me ditching my forever browser Firefox is something I would not have guessed.

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You might want to check out that it's using hardware acceleration properly, and that's it's configured correctly to use wayland if you're on wayland.

Personally, I bounce between macOS, Windows and Linux (mostly Linux, with Wayland), between Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari (mostly Firefox), and also between laptops/desktops and Firefox on Linux is consistently the fastest one with the least amount of crashes for me. Also the combination that lets me get the most battery life out of my laptop.

>"You might want to check out that it's using hardware acceleration properly, and that's it's configured correctly to use wayland if you're on wayland."

Maybe it should be browser's task to do it. As a user I just do not want to waste my time on things like that unless they're vital. In this case I'll just use different browser.

> Maybe it should be browser's task to do it.

Unfortunately you don't really get that luxury if you use Linux.

Running Linux on a desktop pretty much guarantees that you have an endless parade of small problems to fix.

I really wish this weren't true, but the user experience has barely improved in the past 15-20 years. The specific problems may be different, but it's still the same struggle.

Takes time to migrate to a completely new display manager :) For now it's opt-in, in the future it'll obviously be default if you're on Wayland.

If you don't like bleeding edge, warts or sometimes unpolished experiences, might be better to go with Windows or macOS, no one would blame you.

I use both Windows and Linux. Linux runs on server and workstation class hardware dedicated for deployment mostly so the last thing I care about is what / how browsers run on those.

So you don't run browsers on Linux, I don't see what you have a problem with then? The particular issue you're complaining about doesn't seem to affect you at all.

Where did you see me complaining about the issue? I just stated my opinion that it should be in general task of the software to figure out the environment it is running under and adjust accordingly.

That's completely fair. The reason that everyone is half-in on Wayland is likely because it's not yet default on Ubuntu. That, and Gnome window decorations.

> Firefox on Linux ... the combination that lets me get the most battery life out of my laptop.

If you've managed to get battery life from Linux and Firefox even remotely near default fresh install of MacOS and Safari, you should write that up and post the link to it on HN.

My laptop only uses Windows and Linux, only Apple hardware I have is desktop. But makes sense that Safari gets best battery time on Apple laptops, friends with Apple laptops says the same.

I think it'd be worth reading how you got your Linux machine to behave itself though. Any time I've tried to run Linux on a laptop (even a supposedly well-supported Dell laptop) it's been a buggy mess.

Then again, Windows was even worse. It was constantly waking itself up in a cramped bag, where it would try to forcibly install updates, overheat, drain the entire battery, then shut down and need to charge for 30 minutes just to light up at all. At which point it would boot into the recovery menu since it botched an update and needed to try again.

So why not just run Linux in a VM? According to your description, the hardware isn't working correctly natively when running the OS on bare metal, and that's always been the reason people say against using a VM. They want the native performance, but in your case, native sux.

To add to that, Firefox sandboxing on Linux is awful.

https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...

Please try to resist. I bought an external battery, it's less convenient but if that's the cost of privacy then so be it. Supporting Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird is critical, some sites are now chrome-only, this is a nightmare. The battle for a free phone is already lost it seems as banks mandate google or iphone apps for 2FA and we don't have functional linux-only phones with browsing/email/mapping/sms/calls/photos that work reliably yet. I'm truly concerned we might loose the ability to use a linux desktop too: MS-Windows was required for many things in the past, these things are now possible on Linux, I'd hate to see Chrome become the next Windows.

Are you running a distro provided build or one downloaded from mozilla?

Firefox notoriously has bad performance on Linux compared to Chromium. Chromium does a pretty good job at implementing new hardware acceleration features while Firefox just got around to it like a year ago and it is still no where as performant. There is noticeable delays for me on Firefox when doing things like resizing windows in a tiling window manager as well.

That's weird, I use Mac (x86) and Linux (x86 Debian) and Firefox works great on Linux but is unusable on Mac (at least it was two or so years ago when I last tried).

I have an nvidia card and non free drivers if that matters

Firefox has improved a lot on mac in the last two years. It's still less battery efficient than Chrome, but not by too much anymore. I've just switch for it's better tab management features (tab groups).

While based on chrome without the privacy issues, I'd highly recommend Vivaldi browser (the company is also a worker co-op). They removed a lot of proprietary stuff too from the source.

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