[linkregister]

I love Firefox Quantum and it has replaced Chrome as my browser at home. It's memory consumption is far lower with the same amount of tabs open.

That said, why does it perform slower than Chrome on most benchmarks? Is it due to the Chrome team doing much more grunt work regarding parallelism and asynchronous I/O? Or are there still features in the current Firefox build that still call the original engine?

Does Rust have a runtime penalty as Golang does?

[steveklabnik]

> most benchmarks

Which benchmarks are you talking about? It depends on what those benchmarks measure.

For example, a lot of the Quantum work was in user-percieved UI latency; unless the benchmark is measuring that, and I imagine that's a hard thing to measure, it's not going to show up.

> Does Rust have a runtime penalty as Golang does?

Rust has the same amount of runtime as C does: very very little. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/src/libstd/rt....

[majewsky]

Looking at rt.rs:

  sys::stack_overflow::init();

I probably don't know what this function does, because my initial guess is not very comforting. :)

[rhencke]

It initializes stack overflow handling. You can read about what that means here, for Unix:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/71340ca4e181b824bcefa...

[nickik]

Just don't call sys::stack_overflow::exploit(); and you will be fine.

[steveklabnik]

Ha! That's for handling one, but that's pretty funny.

[linkregister]

Thanks, that's good to know about Rust's runtime.

I'm embarrassed to say that I just blindly trusted a couple of websites' claims that they ran benchmarks, without verifying they're even industry-standard. The articles were on Mashable and AppleInsider.

Mashable tested webpage load times, which only one dimension of many to optimize for. AppleInsider looked at speed, CPU usage, and memory consumption.

[steveklabnik]

No worries! Benchmarking is super hard, generally, and browsers are so huge, there's tons of things that you can measure. I'm not trying to say that you shouldn't trust any of them, just that that might be the source of discrepancy between what you've experienced and those numbers.

It also true that sometimes it's slow! There's always more to do.

[ricardobeat]

Not sure if this is normal, but I have very noticeable lag in the search/address bar autocomplete which does make the whole browser feel a bit slow (MacOS Sierra, using Developer Edition).

And since we are here, the prompt/dialog windows in FF are still not native looking too. These are my two major complaints :)

[chmln]

This isn't just a problem with the address bar, it also applies to HTML inputs and textareas.

From my understanding it stems from how Firefox renders and synchronizes frames.

I've filed a bug two months ago, but really unsure when it will get resolved.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1408699

[steveklabnik]

I don't work on Firefox, but you should file bugs. I've generally had a pretty good time doing so.

[labster]

I've enjoyed filing bugs too, but my first bug is about to celebrate its 10th birthday. Hopefully it will be fixed before it can legally drive a car.

[BuckRogers]

While that's a long time, in 10 years you could've contributed a fix by yourself. At this point one should consider it a reminder!

[labster]

While I could learn C++ or Rust in 10 years, I'm not going to do it for a bug that isn't even biting me any more. I've long since worked around it. It makes more sense for me to donate to Mozilla so they can hire someone who knows what they're doing.

[buckminster]

I've noticed this on Windows. The new Firefox seems to be a bit more chatty to the disk. If some other process is hammering the disk then autocomplete gets really laggy. I suspect it is optimized for SSDs.

On the other hand, if the disk is idle it is blazing fast.

[digi_owl]

Reminds me of behaviors i have seen on Android for the longest time (to the point that i have effectively given up on using Firefox on Android because it slows down so easily there).