[cannam]

I'd be surprised if any of those, up to the last three, was a big deal for more than 1% or so of users. And I am inclined to think the original article probably has it right about simple saturation marketing as the cause of most user switching.

But performance. Firefox very often outperforms Chrome in microbenchmarks and computationally-intensive code in my tests, but in the real world an awful lot of sites really are much more responsive in Chrome.

For me as a user, most recently an update to the FastMail web UI a couple of weeks ago made it lamentably slow in Firefox -- just mousing over the folder tree caused CPU spikes and lag in updating -- and in the end I switched to opening FastMail in a separate Chrome instance while continuing to use Firefox for everything else. I've just switched it back to Firefox as I type this, to see whether anything has improved.

The web app I'm working on as a developer just now also has problems updating as smoothly in Firefox as in Chrome, and I'm not at all sure whether we'll be able to do anything about it.

I can't think of an example at the moment of a site that feels faster in Firefox.

I believe I have come to think of Firefox as a web browser, and Chrome as a platform for web apps. Things written to be web apps are almost always more responsive in Chrome, even though many of their components (number-crunching work) really do run measurably quicker in Firefox.

[aibara]

I use Firefox (Linux) and Fastmail, and definitely don't have any problems: the web UI is just as fast as always and have no CPU issues. Maybe it's some addon or something?

[ronjouch]

Can definitely be due to addons. That innocuous Emoji keyboard addon [1] for example, caused horrible page load performance and unresponsiveness (due apparently to parsing the entire DOM in order to replace/insert emojis); filed a bug at [2]. Hope the move to WebExtensions lets Mozilla provide less opportunities for extension developers to shoot users in the foot.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/emoji-keyboar...

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1339822

[bigbugbag]

>hope the move to WebExtensions lets Mozilla provide less opportunities for extension developers to shoot users in the foot.

If there are firefox users left to shoot.

[cannam]

I think you're right about this one. Sorry about that. It seems to have started interacting badly with Ghostery -- which I had been using for years, but which did have an update recently as well. I tried a different ad-blocker and it's been a lot quicker since.

I think I jumped to conclusions because the change roughly coincided with a visible update to FastMail (the one that added the little progress spinners to the folder tree).

[cannam]

I'll add, for the record, that simply trusting the site in Ghostery appears to be enough to speed it up again.

(My earlier post lost a couple of HN points after I posted that reply, even though it was many hours after the original discussion. I wonder whether people had upvoted it because of potentially useful material about Firefox and FastMail and then unvoted when I admitted that particular bit was bogus. It would be rather encouraging if that were the case)

Later edit: I spoke too soon. After editing an email extensively, the whole UI slows down again.

[emn13]

Yeah me too - and even the last three(perf/mem, extension breakage, and OS support) are partially questionable - FF has essentially always been better behaved in low-memory scenarios that chrome; and desktop OS support is (again, to this day) better that chrome's. Even XP still has FF 52 ESR support up to june 2018, and v52 isn't that old yet.

[GlennS]

It seems to me like Firefox has a lot of tiny delays everywhere, and they're just long enough to be distracting. It's like going back to a hard disk after having used an SSD.

On the other hand, Firefox Focus on mobile seems to run pretty fast and comes with enough ad blocking to make the web bearable.

If it had either tabs or a way to open multiple processes then I would probably ditch the other mobile browsers.

[NoGravitas]

I love Firefox Focus, but it's not suitable for your main mobile browser. What it is is a substitute for Chrome Custom Tabs.

Full Firefox on Android has a slow startup time if it's been pushed out of memory, which it usually is, because it's big. Firefox Focus is a way of quickly opening links from other apps without paying the cost of opening Firefox, while keeping an acceptable level of ad-blocking and privacy.

You should have both installed, set Focus as your default browser, but liberally use the "Open in Firefox" menu on Focus when you have real browsing to do.