[antibland]

It's sad how these valuable optimizations are unknown to the average person. When I hear "the browser" discussed in almost any parlance, the implication is Chrome. It's rare to even hear someone say "Chrome," as it's the defacto choice for the non-mobile web. Convenience breeds ignorance.

[momokoko]

Or Mozilla’s leadership was distracted by a bunch of meaningless distractions instead of focusing on unsexy things like this and lost out to a competitor.

It wasn’t the users that lost interest in Firefox. It was Mozilla that lost interest in Firefox.

[kybernetikos]

> distracted by a bunch of meaningless distractions

I often find that the specific things that are thought of as 'meaningless distractions' by different people don't entirely overlap.

For example, I think having a mobile OS not controlled by google or apple would be phenomenally important, so I was entirely in favour of FirefoxOS.

Rust has led to improvements in Firefox that were previously said to be nearly intractable. I'd definitely include that as something valuable, not just for firefox but for the world.

Mozilla Persona seemed like a really good way to solve something that we're still struggling with - to have a universal web identity that belongs to me rather than some surveillance monetiser.

I could see value in emscripten, Firefox sync, Rhino, Shumway, thunderbird.

Now that is already a selection of projects that includes a bunch that were widely considered to be failures and were killed. It's also already probably too much for a company of Mozilla's size.

The projects that we see mozilla doing at the moment, I sort of get - they're trying to pitch the brand as a 'privacy' play, but if they really want to do that plausibly, they're going to need to change their income model.

[_-___________-_]

Do you think that focusing on more unsexy things would have helped? It seems to me that it's fundamentally a marketing problem. Many people are not even aware that Firefox exists, despite it being basically as good as Chrome, and in some ways considerably better.

[manquer]

ultimately if there value , word of mouth works pretty well .

Firefox does not have a brand visibility problem , no amount of marketing will convince users if the browser is not significantly better. If the value is marginal convenience trumps.

Firefox did not gain market share orginally because they did better marketing than IE. They became big because they built a better product.

Chrome became because of the same reason too. They did a lot of early innovations with per tab process isolation headless or v8 decoupling and myriad to new features giving performance boost and making it possible for projects like electron to exist.

Firefox got a major usage boost post quantum.

If they could rebuild the full stack on rust there will be a massive usage boost.

Mozilla is in a unique position they don't have revenue targets or shareholders to please. They have users, and a single customer who is also their only competitor.

It is no brainier to say largest chunk of investment should have gone there.

P.S. yes google has a unfair advantage, they implement web standards well before it is accepted then force their version by sheer force the market dominance. This is not new IE did it to netscape . However google also owns a lot of the pages people visit. They will optimize their sites for their browser. This is why youtube will always be faster in chrome than firefox.

[floatboth]

Firefox did gain over IE because major websites pointed IE users to it.

And of course Chrome became dominant the same way.

Word of google.com main page > word of mouth :(

[abacadaba]

All I'm really looking for out of any possible anti-trust is a big "try firefox for better privacy" popup on google.com.

[manquer]

Website admins pointed IE users to Firefox because it worked better, supported APIs and features which made their site better.

Chrome was the same too. Yes Google does have unfair advantage because they own lot of properties people interact with every day, they are a significant player for user mind space, but they are not so large that people spend 50-60% time on google products only .

[birksherty]

I don't agree. Google is many times bigger than Mozilla. I am not talking about tech people here. Everyone uses search, youtube and android is huge outside usa. Chrome comes preinstalled in major plateforms. Even if it's not going to a google site tells them to install it. These people don't even know they can install firefox.

[makapuf]

Well then focusing on firefox marketing and unsexy optimizations more than cool projects was the thing to do. In any case, focusing on the browser.

[krick]

I'm not sure I see it. Do you perhaps use Chrome yourself and hence the implication? Because it seems everyone just says "browser" regardless of if it's Safari, Edge, Firefox or something else (but it's a fact that Chrome is currently most popular by far). Why would somebody even draw the distinction between what is mostly interchangeable products, unless they have specific technical discussion about that product? It's not like instead of saying "my shoes are wet" people usually would say "my Nike Air Max 93 are wet". It's nonsense.

[Barrin92]

Not OP but I've made similar experiences. Here in Germany Firefox for a really long time had the plurality of the market share even while in most other countries Chrome had already won. Everyone knew what Firefox was.

Three to four years ago was the first time, particular among young people, teenagers say, that I met kids who didn't know what Firefox was. It has lost an extreme amount of awareness.

[skybrian]

A 10-15% speed bump in CPU performance is certainly nice but in most cases it's not going to be something that users are consciously aware of. Web page performance varies a lot due to network performance, new versions of websites being deployed, different ads being served, and so on. This noise obscures things enough that it probably won't be easy to attribute a change in performance to the browser if you're not looking for it.

But even if the users aren't aware of what changed, it will likely affect user behavior.

For the better? Hard to say. Websites that load a little faster are a little more addictive.

[Nextgrid]

If they want to actually improve user experience they can always include uBlock Origin by default - its permissive license should allow this just fine.

[jatgoodwin]

Despite it being an absolute dumpster fire in other ways, the new firefox android almost has that. It's nice for telling my friends who I've gotten to switch over to just open firefox, open the hamburger and tap addons then addons manager, then tap ublock origin at the top of the list and that's all it takes to get my friends rolling with it. They're all extremely happy with the new firefox and don't notice how webpages are pretty broken in it now.

[manquer]

Web chrome is soon deprecating the APIs which allow ad blockers to work too.

[avery42]

I wonder if blocking Google Analytics by default would affect their default search engine deal with Google...

[ShinTakuya]

There's nothing stopping them from adjusting the defaults, but I guess users would criticise them for it.

[manquer]

They could just show users the recommended plugins to install as part of user onboarding .

It is not just about privacy or blocking ads. It is matter of security . I am trust nytimes , I cannot trust every third party whose code nytimes decided to include. Who in turn has included a bunch that nytimes doesn't even know about. How can I trust a website when they themselves do not know what crapware runs?

[boogies]

Their Tracking Protection doesn’t do that? I’d hope at least the Private Browsing protection does.

[dorgo]

There is a move toward 1st party proxys as a result of GDPR and similar ruling. Google has already published a framwork or something in that direction. It is not mandatory yet, but when the web moves in that direction there will be no blocking of domains any more. (Technical) Users won't even know that Analytics tracks them.

[Kiro]

I'm dealing with a Firefox issue where painting on canvas with a CSS filter is magnitudes slower than Chrome. It makes my app almost unusable for Firefox users. Improving the performance would certainly make users notice since it's one of the most common complaints.

[kevingadd]

Stuff like CSS filters is generally going to be down to lack of GPU acceleration or video driver shenanigans, though some obscure filters still run on the CPU. If you run a filter on the entire page for example (some addons do this) it pessimizes rendering in a bad, noticeable way.

[Kiro]

In this link about a similar (or same?) issue it sounds like filters are done on the CPU in Firefox unless you enable a flag but it may be outdated: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=925025

> Safari and Chrome both do blur on the GPU Firefox does it in software unless WebRender is turned on. You could try turning on the gfx.webrender.all pref and that should improve things.

[ripdog]

webrender is on by default for Windows 10, but Mozilla is still struggling with mac and Linux drivers, so it's still off by default there.

See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where

To check if you're using webrender, check about:support. Check the graphics>compositing section.

(Edited to correct first paragraph.)

[cpeterso]

In the Firefox Release channel, WebRender is currently only enabled on Windows 10. Windows 7/8 support should be coming soon in Firefox 83 (2020-11-17) and macOS and Linux after that. As you say, GPU drivers are the biggest problem.

[hvis]

It is changing, though.

I have an Intel video card (UHD 630), and Webrender (which I had to forcibly enable) is working very well. Video acceleration, too. Even with a 4K screen.

[aww_dang]

Agreed for most cases. However, it matters in the context of canvas/WebGL games.

[rikroots]

Firefox used to be a lot faster, and smoother, at rendering <canvas> than Chrome when I was developing early versions of my canvas library (around the mid 2010s). But then Chrome caught up and for the past couple of years has been considerably faster[1].

One thing that really annoys me about Firefox on MacOS is that they disable keyboard focus of links by default. Which is not good for accessibility - it took me days to work out why my accessibility testing demos were failing[2].

[1] - I use this demo for my goto stress test: https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/demo/canvas-006.html

[2] - https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/keyboard-focus-of-links-on-m...

[chrisseaton]

> It's sad how these valuable optimizations are unknown to the average person.

Does the average person really need to understand JIT optimisations?

[robbyt]

No, but they enjoy faster performance that JiT optimization yields

[moonlighter]

That's technically true, but most average users probably don't care. It's like optimizing your car's fuel efficiency by changing your spark plugs more often. When was the last time you changed your spark plugs?

[fingerlocks]

Misfires on a spark plugs are pretty obvious though. Maybe changing the air filter or cleaning the intake manifold is a more apt comparison?

[saagarjha]

If it was free and happened largely painlessly every couple weeks, why not?

[67868018]

Every oil change

[cik2e]

So you change your oil every 20,000 miles?

[rascul]

There is motor oil rated to 20,000 miles or more.

https://www.mobil.com/en/lubricants/for-personal-vehicles/ou...

https://www.amsoil.com/p/signature-series-5w-30-synthetic-mo...

[damnyou]

Well, what actually happens is that there's less pressure on web developers to make their sites faster (in contrast to other business goals) and so we reach a new equilibrium where sites perform just as badly.

Web developers aren't alone here, of course. It's the same story for systems software as well.

In general, thinking in terms of equilibriums is helpful.

[stjohnswarts]

to be fair most firefox people I know call it "my browser" as well

[rurban]

What are you taking about?

Warp is only a bit faster in some cases, and about 10% slower in typical benchmark code. The speed improvements don't come from optimizations, but from skipping many costly optimizations. The "value" of these skipped optimizations is that some type optimizations are just too costly for them, using also a lot of memory. It's a typical jit trade-off.

[matlin]

The speed of someone's browsing is less of a factor of what browser you use and largely a factor of what websites they browse. The web browser is a commodity for most people.

[ekianjo]

> When I hear "the browser" discussed in almost any parlance,

Well at least it's an improvement over the browser being referred to as "Internet" before.

[thejosh]

I say "my car", not "my hyundai".

[nichos]

For obvious reasons :D

[jjeaff]

But if it was just about convenience, wouldn't everyone be using Edge?

Because as far as I know, chrome doesn't come loaded on safari or windows

[bishalb]

Even for the mobile on Android.