Firefox 82 Released With Performance Improvements, Video Playback Enhancements

[topolinik]

WTF?!
Once there was Mozilla Suite. (formerly Netscape)
People said "OMG it's bloated! Let's take the browser part alone and make it fast. And let's call it Firefox."
That happened around v3. After that it became more and more obese so sometimes the whole Seamonkey suite (successor of Mozilla Suite) felt faster and had better handling.
Now they're desparately rowing back, trying to catch up with the mess they made.

Nah, this maybe was true a looong time ago, today firefox is getting better with every new release and my user experience is about speed and responsiveness as Opera was in its golden age.
Further, I would say firefox performs better under linux than windows, but this may just be my personal feeling.

[Mike Frett]

I really...hate PIP.

Website devs should be forced to create a website, and use it, on an old PII with 384MB ram during their learning process. Bloated and not optimized websites are a scourge on the Internet.

In my opinion, of course.

[Guiluge]

Thanks to Quantum, Firefox is now quite fast.
Benchmarks will still put Chromium and its derivatives on the lead, but I don't feel the difference on most websites.
I'm currently using Vivaldi on all my devices (Android version is really great btw), as it offers me much more features, and one feature in particular : a full-featured speed-dial.
I know many users don't care for it, but I find it useful for my own workflow.

Firefox do offer many SD extensions, but they're not really on par with Vivaldi (or Opera) default page : before Quantum, there were better SD extensions (eg. Super Start), but they're long gone now.

[Michael_S]

Question to you: Are you paying the publishers for providing whatever site contents you visit?

Lemme see - I have a membership to TheGuardian, Arstechnica, Wired, SourceHut, and Phoronix, so when I visit those sites, yes.

I have a simple web app I wrote that uses no cookies, a single CSS file for a very simple Grid layout, and no JS. Pages load instantly (well, it's written in a slow programming language so it still takes a few hundred ms - I plan to rewrite it) and Firefox Task Manager says pages use from 500k-1.3MB of RAM.

When I visit SourceHut, which also doesn't use JS, most pages use under 1.5MB of RAM.
When I visit Phoronix, the Firefox task manager states that the main Phoronix page uses 5 MB of RAM and an individual article uses 2.6MB.
When I visit my Roundcube page (an open source web based email client) it takes 8MB of RAM with no messages open and 12 MB or so with messages open.

Wired gets into the 15-40MB range. Arstechnica and TheGuardian are somewhere in between.
Yahoo Mail (admittedly all of the following except JIRA are ad-funded) takes 40 MB.
Outlook and GMail take 70 MB.
Github pages take 80 MB.
Reddit pages take 100MB.
Youtube pages take 100MB.
JIRA (for work) takes 150MB - 500MB.

That's bloat for you. And Michael Larabel, by the looks of it, is doing pretty well at fighting it. I'd prefer a SourceHut level of efficiency, but an old computer can run 20 tabs of Phoronix.com for every Reddit tab.

Should support for advertising really take web pages from using 5MB of RAM (Phoronix Premium) to 100MB? (Reddit, Youtube)? Really?

[SystemCrasher]

WTF?A colourful web is okay, but this is just senseless bloat. And it makes things slow and wastes energy and time.

But this is cause "web designers" never learnt how to code, never handeled an old computer (8086 similar class, or C64 if you want, or microcontrollers). You learn to fight for every byte of RAM there...

That's why web devs are collaterally known as webmonkeys. Bad news are: firefox team gone webmonkeys & marketing as well. That's why they're doomed in 1st place. Few more years and we'll see Mozilla corp leftovers sold to obscure china company or something like this, just like Opera did.

[Citan]

Still slower than Chrome/Chromium, what a shame...

On desktop, that assessment can hold true only as long as the following conditions are all fulfilled.
1) No more than 10-20 tabs at any given time.
2) No more than one extension, and none related to tab management.
3) Adblocker installed and properly configured.

For having made extensive tests with all browsers, and making an extensive, near-industrial use of everything a browser can offer to me with first and foremost the combo "tab management + sessions + bookmarks", I can assure you that Chrome (and all browsers derived from it, which is about all) is a real tadpole compared to Firefox as soon as you start doing serious work.

And that's putting aside the fact that Chrome doesn't even have the most basic functionality of a modern browser correctly supported: nestable tabs in sidebar.

[enigmaxg2]

In other news, MS Edge for Linux has popped up in the AUR (and other distribution methods) and it totally DESTROYS the competition performance-wise.

I have Manjaro KDE on a very old testbed (Athlon X2, 4 gigs RAM, Radeon X1200) Firefox struggled a lot to run (and even froze the computer sometimes) Chrome was better but Edge manages to run on that toaster better than anything else.

Firefox and Chrome are now wiped from it.

[Michael_S]

The agencies that get clients sold on visuals / functionality alone and use website builders with minimal coding are usually the ones at fault for bloat though. They prefer speed and meeting the clients requirements, it's not something they continue to benefit from afterwards by spending additional time/effort to optimize for.

Same reason AWS is popular with businesses (with actual developers), it makes things easier for them, there's better and cheaper alternatives but it's easier to take vendor lock-in and hire developers that know those platforms well, common knowledge without having to upskill so much.

Initially time to market outweighs most other concerns, and the on the long term supporting APIs for long periods carries weight. Performance optimization for any software aside games, video editors, and image editors is rarely a priority.

I don't see that changing, really. If priorities were different a PC from 2003 would be usable today. But I might as well ask for a unicorn.

[polarathene]

Performance optimization for any software aside games, video editors, and image editors is rarely a priority.

I don't see that changing, really.

I get what you're saying with software dev in general, but for web this isn't always the case. It doesn't always apply, but when you make money from customers and they are in regions or on devices where data is expensive and/or slow, reducing the network overhead can make a world of a difference.

If the webflow kitchen sink demo was an actual product page for some business, you'd have an incredibly high bounce rate for all the customers that gave up before that 15MB was downloaded and the preload screen that blocked any interaction was removed. I wasn't the only one, it was a sponsored facebook ad and filled with comments asking if the website was broken due to nothing changing for over 30 seconds. For those with the patience or faster connections, the constant CPU overhead from animation logic further down the page was slowing down responsiveness.

You don't have to go hardcore with optimizations, but a page should ideally be loading up and accessible within 3 seconds at most (based on UX studies). As a business, besides the desire to retain potential customer interest, you also don't want to waste money on bandwidth unnecessarily (it did not need to download 15MB per user to begin with), if it was a high traffic site, they could have cut their bandwidth costs down 90%, depending on expenses that could be pretty decent savings.

Not always about saving money though, as you point out other priorities will have convenience and speed to develop come out on top. Using BunnyCDN instead of AWS services for CDN alone has it's own fair share of savings. Not having a high bounce rate due to poor UX is the bigger justification though.

[polarathene]

And that's putting aside the fact that Chrome doesn't even have the most basic functionality of a modern browser correctly supported: nestable tabs in sidebar.

Pretty sure I've seen something like that in one of the derivatives, Vivaldi or Opera.

Chrome recently got a tab group feature, might not be sidebar managed, I only saw a brief clip of it, but probably good for organization. I've used an extension in the past that gave me a tree view of my session (windows + tabs, and nested within a tab in the tree were other tabs that had been navigated to from it), I think it supported other organizational features too.

I think my main reasons I stopped using Firefox was when it changed the extension support, preventing some APIs from working and my session being saved either by firefox or the session every 30 mins would consume large amounts of RAM (10GB or so) and bring the browser to a halt from the CPU activity (might have been before multi-process arrived). There were times it wasn't able to recover my sessions, and one update insisted on wiping my profile (tabs/bookmarks/etc) which really annoyed me (the message wasn't that clear about what it was going to do either).