Firefox Finally Outperforming Google Chrome In SunSpider

[moonlite]

The Y axis in those graphs doesn't start from zero. Best case this just makes it impossible to read the graph as intended (that is: intuitively getting a feel for the ratios between the values). Worst case the reader will be fooled to think that Firefox is about five times faster than Chrome in SunSpider.

[muncrief]

I've always felt bad about abandoning Firefox. But it had become extremely slow, and many websites were broken with it.

So after reading this article I thought I should give it another try. I imported all my latest bookmarks and passwords from Chromium and fired up Firefox, and was immediately surprised that when multiple tabs were open the font color on background tabs was such a light grey that I couldn't see the text.

To make a long story short at first I tried to get it to use my system title bar and borders like Chromium/Chrome but that didn't work, so I tried looking around for some way to modify the default themes manually but couldn't find any, and then finally went through many add on themes which were all quite ugly and didn't begin to match my system colors.

And since I've spent almost almost a decade developing my own custom theme for XFCE, even translating it from GTK 2 to GTK 3, I had to give up on Firefox before I could even get started. The appearance of my desktop is critical to me, and everything must be absolutely perfect or it drives me up the wall. And since Firefox is so dysfunctional that I can't even control the colors it's of no use to me.

I wish this weren't the case, as I dislike the hegemony of Google. But someone has to offer a viable alternative before I can switch to anything else.

[sarmad]

Nice!
I'm fine with performance actually, but I keep dreaming about a PWA comeback 👉👈

Yes please. Why the hell is PWA not supported in Firefox?

[fitzie]

I wish firefox would stop these benchmark measurements, and just go after performance in the top 10-20 websites (youtube, facebook, twitter, reddit). Here's an example of how the edge team delivered improvements to the webbrowser, developer tools and websites:

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2023/08/10/collaborating-office-performance-better-web-performance-tools/

Of course it helps that microsoft has developers on the webservice side and the browser side, but I'm sure some of those top websites would be happy to collaborate with firefox team. They could also go to framework developers like svelt or chartsjs etc to figure this stuff out. The long term viability of the browser isn't just raw performance (it just has to be close) but things like having lacking performance tools are killer.


Firefox does some good engineering, and some standards development work, but it's over shadowed by their poor management and lack of focus.

[Tuxee]

I've always felt bad about abandoning Firefox. But it had become extremely slow, and many websites were broken with it.

So after reading this article I thought I should give it another try. I imported all my latest bookmarks and passwords from Chromium and fired up Firefox, and was immediately surprised that when multiple tabs were open the font color on background tabs was such a light grey that I couldn't see the text.

To make a long story short at first I tried to get it to use my system title bar and borders like Chromium/Chrome but that didn't work, so I tried looking around for some way to modify the default themes manually but couldn't find any, and then finally went through many add on themes which were all quite ugly and didn't begin to match my system colors.

And since I've spent almost almost a decade developing my own custom theme for XFCE, even translating it from GTK 2 to GTK 3, I had to give up on Firefox before I could even get started. The appearance of my desktop is critical to me, and everything must be absolutely perfect or it drives me up the wall. And since Firefox is so dysfunctional that I can't even control the colors it's of no use to me.

I wish this weren't the case, as I dislike the hegemony of Google. But someone has to offer a viable alternative before I can switch to anything else.

Cool story bro.

[marlock]

First Google murdered Chromium's ability to sync bookmarks and passwords to a google account

Then they started silently and repeatedly failing to maintain the sync login in Google Chrome on Linux

Microsoft did a ton of work on the new Microsoft Edge browser (based on Chromium just like Google Chrome) and yet their own Office 365 web stuff exhibits browser-specific issues that happen throughout the Chromium browser family and in Teams desktop app (Electron orsome other embeded browser also based on Chromium family) but the same stuff works fine in Firefox (eg: broken percent encoding of some url patterns... i have a support ticket for this pending in the IT deptof the company I work for)

Meanwhile there's a bunch of Office 365 and 3rd-party web apps that work fine in Edge and Google Chrome but refuse to work in Firefox at work, despite some of our IT dept mentioning they contracted MS to provide those services under a browser-neutral clause (obviosly derived from being burnt by IE shenanigans in the past)


Using FF by default and raising hell with IT tickets when websites don't run in FF and force you to Google or Edge is a necessary part of preventing things from getting worse in today's almost hegemony of chromium-family browsers

And google certainly has an active hand in producing more situations where stuff "accidentaly" don't/can't work elsewhere

[MastaG]

The primary obstacle is that Chrome doesn't suck like ie did back then. It is in a similar position being the de facto standard, and despite using Firefox myself and feeling like I'm not missing anything, I see very little arguments I could use with normal users to switch them over to Firefox.

True dat

[richardnpaul]

I wish firefox would stop these benchmark measurements

These tests have been running on this arewefastyet website for over a decade now, I think, and are primarily there for a sanity check to see if they have introduced any glaring performance regressions is how I understand it. As such it's not there for actually measuring real world performance but as a generic aid against regressing performance significantly.

[NeoMorpheus]

I have been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix.

But sadly at work, we are moving to Edge and Chrome, thanks to Avid, since they only support Chromium.

I don’t know the technical reasons, but thats our situation.

[Sonadow]

They can benchmark all they want.

Fact remains Firefox is dog slow when it comes to various web services, specially SaaS.

Microsoft 365, Outlook.com, OnlyOffice, Twitter/X are just a handful of examples.

And for Privileged Access Managers like BeyondTrust, the encrypted and monitored RDP sessions generated by the manager only works on Chromium.

As do the devices I manage at work; they automatically end the user's session if Firefox is used. Try spoofing the agent to masquerade as Chromium, and just about half the web interface fails to function correctly.

Using FF by default and raising hell with IT tickets when websites don't run in FF and force you to Google or Edge is a necessary part of preventing things from getting worse in today's almost hegemony of chromium-family browsers

You can raise all the hell you want; I'm not going to tell our supplier to modify their devices just to fit one self-entitled user's ego and delusion about "crusading against Chromium hegemony". And neither will Google, Microsoft, BeyondTrust and all other enterprise service providers who actually know what it means support one thing properly.