Spidermonkey has passed V8 on Octane performance (opens in new tab)

Same here. Especially as Google becomes more and more evil, Chrome looks less attractive. Even on mobile, I use FF, despite it needing a lot of work and having a lot of rendering and input issues. And Chrome on Android looks very sexy. On desktop, FF is fine, once more.

Rust is also one of the most promising languages with a potentially massive impact on the world. Not only safer software, but exposing more programmers to better ways of coding. (Imagine how different the world would be if a popular OS had adopted a Rust-like two decades ago.)

Mozilla is really an important thing these days.

I've been reminding everyone I know who still uses Chrome to try Firefox again. Many have switched back. It's simply a better browser. One e10s is in stable, it's going to be even better.

Google is a for-profit company that makes money selling your data and targeted, personal ads.

Mozilla is not-for-profit and just wants to make the web better.

TBH, the fact that bookmarking has not been completely separated from browsers makes me very sad. I know I can use a cloud service like pinboard.in. A universal bookmark sharing format would make the world a much better place. The fact that importing and exporting is still a thing sucks. Give me a content addressable store upon which multiple indices and management tools can be built and give me a way to choose how to view my bookmarks based on information about them. Near as I can tell bookmarking tools still only record url and title and let me organize into folders by copying entries. This is simply archaic. I should have to adopt a cloud solution to get something better, faster and easy to pull up in any browser on my computer.

If process isolation is indirectly responsible for the "page freezes, doesn't re-render, doesn't respond to input" symptom then it seems to have cost more than it was worth in the stability department. Those freezes have dogged chrome on both my mac and my pc for the last 4 or 5 years every time I've tried it. Safari and firefox, OTOH, almost never seem to crash or become unresponsive.

I'm all for having clever damage control mechanisms, but having less damage in the first place seems to be the winning strategy.

Hah, I did the same. I've been using Firefox Aurora for about 6 months now, and I don't miss Chrome in the slightest; in fact, I prefer Firefox for nearly everything. Now we've moved to Slack instead of Hangouts, I've never had a reason to open Chrome.

Never used Chrome for regular browsing really. Firefox was kind of behind in the 3.x days but not to the point of switching for me, especially since I value Mozilla's goals.

Is there a reason they don't have the new Safari 8 FTLJIT in those numbers? JSC (Java Script Core?) was Safari 7 wasn't it?

Don't look at asm.js benchmarks if you're interested in real-world JS. Look at them if you want to know something about the performance of C++ code transpiled to run in a browser, which is an interesting thing to know. And it's getting to be more and more relevant these days. (Even "real-world JS" is going to start using asm.js libraries, I bet.)

But asm.js execution is very different from JS execution, even in browsers that don't have specialized asm.js paths. Executing regular JS is all about balancing compile time and garbage collection with code execution. asm.js barely uses GC, and allows lots of opportunities to cache compilation in ways that would be invalid for regular JS. So the whole space of tradeoffs is different.

Being representative of "existing real world JS" is one way benchmarks can be interesting. On the other hand, asm.js benchmarks are interesting because improving asm.js performance expands the scope of what the Web can do. Ditto for new language features.

The vast majority of real-world JS don't need JITs to perform adequately, but heavyweight asmjs games are CPU-bound and it makes sense to optimize for them. Watching Firefox creep up on Chrome performance on the arewefastyet.com charts, all JS engines seemed to be converging on some performance asymptote. asmjs changes the rules of the game and break through for specific content.

Resetting might help: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi...

It resets your profile while preserving history, cookies, bookmarks, etc.

> I'm really looking forward to the new threading model coming up. I have a feeling that once each tab has a thread, things like this will be much more self-repairing. It's not always easy to kill a rogue execution path in an event loop, but killing a thread is pretty straightforward =].

First, it's "process", not "thread" :)

The plan is to start with just two main processes -- one for chrome (browser UI, mostly) and one for web content. So no processes will be killed in normal operation. This is because additional processes incur certain extra costs, particularly when it comes to memory consumption.

Still, it might help with your problem; it's hard to say for sure.

I have hundreds (not kidding here, it's the nature of my work) of tabs open routinely for days or even weeks on end and this is not an issue for me. This is under Linux (which may be a factor) on a machine with plenty of RAM (which may be another factor), firefox is extremely stable and if it goes down it is because I power off the machine.

Do you have any plug-ins or add-ons installed that might be the cause of this problem? If you do I suggest you disable all plug-ins and then slowly re-enable them to figure out if any one of those is the culprit.

I've heard other people say this too, but it must be a workflow or use case thing. I run Firefox as my browser of choice on Linux, Mac, and Windows every day, and have for 10 years at least. I do remember a time when memory was an issue, but those problems have been resolved for a few years. I routinely have dozens of tabs open, often with Flash video or lots of javascript, sometimes 50 or more (with the excellent TreeStyleTabs plugin for hierarchical side tabs) and I have never had these problems. I restart my browser maybe once a month, usually along with OS updates.

It's not threading, it's processes that's coming up. I would be surprised if each tab didn't already have its own thread, because eg. multiple tabs can load at the same time...

And umm, not sure what I'm doing differently but I usually keep Firefox open for weeks at a time and have no issues. Though I cut back a bit on keeping tabs open, I used to keep like 60-80 tabs open all the time but now I usually clean up when I'm done with something (more to reduce cognitive overhead than resource utilization).

I'll second the motion that there's something going on specifically with your setup. A reset as another poster suggests might be worth a go. Or even just creating a separate, fresh profile and trying that out for a day or two. [1]

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

Genuinely curious if this is a common use case or not. I personally close chrome maybe half a dozen times an hour.

right-click on the page and you have a refresh button right where your pointer is

Mozilla is currently testing Electrolysis (or "e10s") [1] - their project to run web content in a separate process - on nightly, and I've been using it for the past few weeks. It's getting pretty reasonably stable, so hopefully we'll see it in a release version soon enough. According to [2], the tentative plan is for Electrolysis to be released with Firefox 36.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

[2] http://www.ghacks.net/2014/07/12/mozilla-plans-release-elect...

I could survive without processes-per-tab, if Firefox gave some hint – any hint! – which tabs are being naughty. Maybe just a per-tab counter of allocations, or timeouts, or DOM edits, or some other operation? Anything that serves as a proxy for "more active than average while not in foreground".

  As soon as firefox gets per process tabs in stable I'll switch back

As strange as it sounds, this is a reason why I don't use chrome as my "default" browser. I seem to find the web sites that leak resources and leave them open in tabs (one of my projects at work is a big culprit too). With firefox a runaway tab or two simply results in a single CPU pegged at 100% and max about 2GB of ram consumption. With chrome it will peg out a couple CPU's and eat RAM until my machine goes into swap. Usually this happens while I'm gone so simply unlocking the screen is a painful process as everything gets swapped in.

In other words I prefer having to kill firefox on a regular basis because its run out of RAM, than to have to reset my machine because its taking 10 minutes to unlock the screen.

What version of Firefox are you using? It hasn't done that in ages. You have to open the About window to check for new updates and install them.

Yeah. Unfortunately for Mozilla, they don't have a download button on the #1 page on the web (google.com) and they dont bundle it either with any OS (Windows + IE, Mac/iOS + Safari, Android + Chrome) or software (Chrome auto installed from Flash upgrades, etc.)

So I don't know how strong the switch back would be...

They are working on it on several fronts, constantly cutting off tasks from the main thread onto their own ones (downloading, cache v2, Awesomebar), making other things asynchronous (project snappy), garbage collection improvements also help in some cases. Most of these are smaller wins, and several big ones like OMTC, tiled rendering or e10s are yet to come.

Edit: It may not be as responsive as Chrome (I don't know as I don't use it), but I believe it is miles ahead of it's former self.

I pointed my smile.amazon.com account at the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation.

(Which isn't entirely altruistic; I am employed by the Mozilla Corporation. But hey, I do support Mozilla's mission; what can I say?)

That bug is intractable with the current NPAPI and plugin vendor landscape. Slowly plugins are being replaced by web accessible technology. That is the way forward.

There are some things a user can do to avoid the issue as much as possible. Setting all plugins to ask to activate in about:addons resolves a number of common occurrences where plugins take focus on load. Set YouTube to use the 'HTML5' player [0]. Use pdf.js. If you are on OS X 10.7+ use Mozilla's Aurora branch to get h264 playback [1]. If you develop sites check for support of h264 playback instead of assuming Firefox does not have it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/html5 [1] https://aurora.mozilla.org

memory is has been getting better over the years, thanks to the memshrink project though. https://www.areweslimyet.com/

Media Source Extensions are a high priority right now, so problems with html5 video (esp. with youtube) should be solved soon.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=778617

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1083588

HTML5 video and audio in Firefox works perfectly in every site I visit. What problems do you hit? I haven't used it on Mac so perhaps the support is less good there.

Some sites don't attempt to use <video>/<audio> in Firefox for me, but that's a site issue, not a browser issue - h264 and webm both work fine.

This comes down to your definition of "support".

Unlike SpiderMonkey, V8 doesn't have a special mode for "use asm" code, as far as I know. E.g. it still does JIT compilation, unlike SpiderMonkey, which does AOT compilation.

But the V8 team is certainly working on making asm.js code fast. This is clear from the fact that V8's performance on asm.js benchmarks has increased significantly since asm.js was first announced. (As you note, they put an asm.js test in their own benchmark suite.)

And even if V8 doesn't have a special mode for asm.js, they're benefitting from asm.js's existence, because asm.js makes clear exactly which subset of JavaScript they need to be optimizing for.

Octane is Google's own benchmark suite. I don't think getting beaten on your own hand-picked set of performance metrics satisfies any definition of "impressive".

That is not the point of the post. The point is that Mozilla for a long time have thought these benchmarks to be sidetracking and useless for normal users, and now that they are beating the competitions they can rightly say "we need to focus on something else" without sounding like sore losers.

Mozilla sees big potential in ASM-js and if the competition starts working on getting that optimized a whole new type of web application will be broadly feasible, which is something Mozilla cares much more about.

> Even I know Google's policies and still choose to use Chrome purely because it's more convenient.

What do you find is more convenient with Chrome over Firefox?

I don't (yet) use all of the sync features in Firefox, but just having a unified history on Android and desktop is quite convenient, as is syncing saved passwords -- and knowing both how data is handled, and that I can set up a personal sync-server if I want to (actually tried that with the previous generation of sync) -- gives me peace of mind.

There are enough browser benchmarks that you can typically find one that any browser wins on. Unfortunately many of them aren't very good.

Here's how I think browser benchmarking should be done: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/06/16/a-browser-be...

The point in this one is SpiderMonkey is beating V8 in the benchmark designed such that V8 wins on it.

Just try them, and believe your eyes. For me, Firefox feels much more bloated and sluggish than Chrome. I don't know if it's actually raw performance, or just UX issues, but it's no contest.

TreeStyleTabs.

I use Netflix on Linux (firefox) with pipelight.

There's also nothing that says you can't have two different browsers open at once :)

I think this is pretty common. In fact, this can happen even if neither browser changes at all. Your profile builds up and your history searches etc. slow down, so you switch browsers and get a clean profile to start with. Repeat. (I'm not saying that that is what you are experiencing, but I think it's a factor for every browser user.)