Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gotoeleven 684 days ago
Is there something fundamental to the design of firefox that makes it use tons of memory and be prone to letting web pages peg a core at 100%? Every time I try to use firefox I have to quit because sometimes it runs like a 90s java applet.
4 comments

It’s always been a GPU driver issue when I’ve seen a meaningful difference in performance between Chrome, Safari or Firefox. (I’ve seen such issues on everything from 128 thread xeons to one core atoms, and also on Arm).

One of them ends up falling back on some legacy thing when the other two don’t.

Once, I encountered two identical machines with the same version of debian. Chrome was unusably slow on one, and Firefox was unusably slow on the other. The other browser ran great.

Browsers and modern hardware are complicated.

shrug

Usually it's an ad laden local news website. I usually decide the solution is to stop visiting that website.
Go to about:processes and see. You can also choose to kill that process, which doesn't close the tabs - they will refresh when you select them again.
Oh no. Just block every connection through uBlock Origin so you get a mostly JavaScript-less website.

There are so many benefits to browsing without JS

There's 3 extensions which I consider must-haves:

- Noscript Security Suite which has made it very obvious how absolutely fucked today's web is (there's sites which can't display static text without js, as though HTML and CSS are insufficient to display styled text with some markup).

- uBlock Origin because obviously.

- Multi-account Containers, which aren't quite as good as profiles, but get like 70% of the way there.

> there's sites which can't display static text without js

as developers, we understand how stupid that is and the utter insanity of javascriptium that got us there, but how is that a selling point? If I install that extension, I get a degraded experience and I get to be judgey because the framework the developer(s) they hired used some bit javascriptium that doesn't degrade nicely. am I supposed to feel smug that I've figured that out? why would I want to make things worse for myself? just for some small sense of feeling better than other people?

JavaScript makes the surf experience a PITA with constant pop ups with consent, subscription. “Cookies or coins”, etc.
Aren’t no script and uBlock Origin redundant?
I don't think so? I admittedly haven't played around much with uBlock's js blocking, but I thought it was a binary on/off rather than the more granular control NSS offers.
I could exchange Firefox for Javascript and land on the same result... but people are going to be equally mad about it... the problem is not the browser.
it's frustrating to watch this, especially since Rust started off within Mozilla.