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Firefox 71 Doesn't Do Much For Performance

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  • arQon
    replied
    (I know this thread is "old" now, but I apparently made a post to it that didn't post, and the forum sw just restored it!)

    Originally posted by Hibbelharry View Post
    A lot. Take an older and a newer browser and dry to open bigger files in Google Docs/Spreadsheets. Try to play agar.io. Scroll Facebook or Flicker. Seriously performance has gotten better over time, and I appreciate that. Performance does still matter.
    Thanks. I tend to avoid infinite-scroll pages but yeah, that makes sense. I'd be curious how much of that is just garbage code, but that's curiosity only - it doesn't really matter if it's the site that's shit or the browser's handling of it: if the end result sucks, it sucks. (I'd also be curious how much of that improvement is explicitly from profiling sites like Facebook and addressing their problems directly rather than an intrinsically-better engine, but it doesn't matter from a user standpoint).

    > This depends on the used codec. There are currently many highly compressed videocodecs available, used on multiple bigger platforms, which won't playback nicely without huge cpu hits or failing on older systems. We still need more performance work here (=gpu acceleration)

    That, I'm less sure we can agree on: I don't think you're ever going to get decent decode performance for anything more complex than HEVC without dedicated blocks. It's not browser developers that made h264 performant, it's having hardware support for the basic principles of it in commodity CPUs. We had (albeit generally pretty crappy) versions on ATI / nvidia cards long before that, but it wasn't really relevant to almost anybody. Modern IGP is much more capable now I suppose, and general enough that you could probably offload "enough" to get ... well, low-precision blocky versions for almost anything :P, but it's not going to be the browsers that make even that much happen: it'll be nvidia / ATI / Intel, or plugins built out of ffmpeg code. (Unless it "has to be" the browsers for DRM reasons). And again, we're already there: that's the old Atom CPUs I referenced, 1080p x265, and nothing to do with the browser. All they have to do is link to the damn thing. (Unless, again, DRM issues).
    The "huge cpu hits" CAN'T really be magicked away on older systems: the grunt simply isn't there, and no amount of optimization will change that. As long as the browser isn't doing something Incredibly Stupid (tm) of course, in which case all bets are off anyway.

    > Based on my explanations, I think you're wrong.

    I like being wrong. I'm good at it. :P
    TBH, I'm not convinced by some of your points - but you are, and that's enough. You're probably a more normal case than I am as well, so overall that's a bigger win.

    > These matter, too. That's why mozilla invested in new anti tracking mechanisms, fixing memory leaks, and so on. They do all of that, in a balanced way.

    Maybe. But the CTRL-Q bug, even if it only hits you once a year, costs you more time than all their optimisations over that same year combined save you. And it could trivially be fixed in a day. So it's fairly annoying that their "balanced way" is still more worried about "winning" BS benchmarks than actually fixing bugs. (And, c.f. the 2-line browser lockup script that we were reminded of this week, which they've ALSO been ignoring for over 2 years).
    @starshipeleven - No Adblock, but yeah, I do use NoScript on most sites. That's probably a bigger factor for *perceived* performance than every browser change from the last 5+ years combined. And, running the browser in a VM cut down to 2GB this weekend, because my desktop is undergoing maintenance, Firefox basically exhausts the VM's RAM with only a dozen tabs open. Without NoScript, the garbage code of 50 trackers / Like buttons / etc per site would probably have cut that down to half that.

    ADD> The reason I came back to this thread was because I had to boot the HTPC into W7 the other day, and while I was messing around there I ran a 1080p x264 clip for yuks. It takes *12%* of the CPU to play that, fullscreen. mpv takes about 20%. But Firefox, for just *720p* video? Well over 50%. And whatever the "Webrender" BS is supposed to be doing, it's "blocked by hardware/etc" on Linux FF on that machine, despite it clearly being fully capable of hardware decode and running the same Mesa stack as other machines where it IS available. So, I reiterate, the Firefox devs should be fixing their damn bugs first, instead of doing a shitty job of something that other people have already done much better that's readily available for them to just link to. Bah!

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  • bwat47
    replied
    Originally posted by Anvil View Post

    Firefox will never be solid with Waylamd unless ya write the browser from Scratch again
    The last few versions have been very stable on wayland. I'm using it natively on wayland right now (with webrender too) and it works great.

    Leave a comment:


  • Ray_o
    replied
    most tests are javascript tests, so probably webrender won't make a difference on these.
    Last edited by Ray_o; 29 October 2019, 06:01 AM.

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  • Ray_o
    replied
    Originally posted by HyperDrive View Post
    Yeah, but… Text subpixel positioning! 🤩
    you will see this in the nightly(v72) not the beta(v71) unless they uplift it to the beta.

    Leave a comment:


  • Anvil
    replied
    Originally posted by Marc Driftmeyer View Post
    I just want Firefox to be rock solid with Wayland and so scaling is the same, across all apps. It's still a bit hankie.
    Firefox will never be solid with Waylamd unless ya write the browser from Scratch again

    Leave a comment:


  • ssokolow
    replied
    Originally posted by Anvil View Post
    all Mozilla Firefox will be from 73 onwards will be a maintenance release, you might as well use Chromium
    Maybe a more privacy-oriented Chromium fork. The only reason I have Chromium installed (and reconfigured to always run in private browsing mode) is to test sites I create.

    That said, it'd be a big hassle if I had to write an HTTP proxy to work around all of the extension APIs Firefox has and Chromium doesn't.

    Leave a comment:


  • Anvil
    replied
    all Mozilla Firefox will be from 73 onwards will be a maintenance release, you might as well use Chromium

    Leave a comment:


  • ssokolow
    replied
    Originally posted by betam4x View Post
    I've used both Firefox and Chromium on Linux, and I can definitely tell the difference in speed. Chromium is faster, more responsive, and less buggy.
    It just has some kind of race condition that rolls the dice on whether to wedge the browser window behind a broken modal GTK+ Save dialog.

    (Seriously. I gave it a year of waiting for them to fix this before switching to Firefox exclusively. Visit a *chan board in Chromium to download a few dozen porn pics by middle-clicking the ones you want, then alternating Ctrl+S, Enter, Ctrl+W. You'll wind up wedged in some kind of conflict where the GTK+ Save As dialog didn't load properly and isn't responding, that particular browser window is blocked on it, and the only way forward is to kill Chromium.)
    Last edited by ssokolow; 28 October 2019, 06:34 PM.

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  • betam4x
    replied
    Originally posted by Hibbelharry View Post
    So feel free to use Chromium. For me, it doesn't fit my usecase.

    Chromium is way worse in memory consumption when many tabs are opened, I easily reach 200-300, which isn't any problem in Firefox. Chromium already eats up gigabytes of ram when there are 20 tabs. I also prefer the privacy options and developer Tools in Firefox. Ever tried to debug a lenghtly javascript in Chromium? Good Luck. Chromium also has a natsy habit of blurring images when scaling, and isn't even able to do nice hyphenation.... and so much more....

    I also do like the controls and UI of Firefox just more than chromium, but thats really up to personal preference.
    You reach 200-300 tabs? You have other issues to worry about. I don't have memory issues because I don't run machines that are constrained by memory. However, with 3 tabs open right now chromium is using 74 mb. Are you sure you aren't looking at cache being used?

    I've used chrome (not chromium) to extensively debug LARGE javascript code bases without issue.

    EDIT: Large meaning huge healthcare apps that are written in angular, react, etc.

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  • Marc Driftmeyer
    replied
    I just want Firefox to be rock solid with Wayland and so scaling is the same, across all apps. It's still a bit hankie.

    Leave a comment:

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