Just about 5 years ago, it was looking to me like it was the end of Firefox. It was Chrome all the way. New features were coming out one after another. Faster rendering. Safe process isolation for each tab. Looked better.
But I just switched back last month. It happened kind of randomly. Saw an announcement of a new release ( 33, I think ), downloaded, re-imported my bookmarks from Chrome and just kind of kept using it instead of Chrome since then.
I like how the tabs look also I think it feels lighter and snappier on my (now old-ish) laptop.
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.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simplewhite/
But soon I'll be moving from iOS to Android, the wonderful land of being able to change your default browser. And I'll be using FF there for the bookmark syncing. Firefox on 2/3 devices ain't bad.
There was a lot of hate over the australis redesign, but I like it better than Chrome.
One of the co-founders is still the CEO. He is one of the world's wealthiest men. He doesn't need the money and I doubt he feels the need to put shareholders first.
Why would he let Google stray from an ideal he ascribed to previously? Has he been corrupted by having more money than he could possibly spend?
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.
1. disrupt IE/MS - i can say for certain they originally backed Firefox for this effort and only decided to split away to build chrome in the first place because they felt starting fresh they could build a better core and i believe they did.
2. enabling more people to build on the web, enables more of their ads to be shown. Firefox achieves this just as well as chrome. IE was dominating not too long ago and you could argue much of google's ad revenue growth can be attributed to more people having access to a higher quality web.
That said... I don't see why you should believe google would need or desire to sell data from what it might collect from Chrome. More likely they see it as a means to ensuring web dominance by ensuring the web is never locked down by one mega corp. It's similar in away to what they have done in the mobile space. Android is more of a technology to disrupt Apple and ensure it can't be dominate, but really does google have any control over Android?
I really like Google, but I want to support open source(and am not quite willing to put up with Chromium). But for me, core usability is still king, and nothing really touches Chrome for that.
To... other advertisers? Google is the advertiser. It not only goes against their Terms of Service to sell that data, but also makes zero business sense.
I swear people just make things up when it suits their world views.
Mozilla does not respect the rules of my native OS. For over five years, they insisted that double-clicking the upper-left corner of the window should not close the window like every other app on the system. Nope. They insisted on doing it their way ignoring the complaints of thousands of users.
Firefox also makes you press Shift to use access keys. Totally non-standard amongst browsers and OSes and annoying for devs and users.
Is Firefox the only browser left that hasn't switched to multiple processes?
No, Firefox isn't better and I don't trust Mozilla anymore than Google.
I just spent an hour trying to figure out why ff freezes on the partner's computer. Yay 780mb sqlite wal. Who the fuck knows what that's doing. Why on earth does using a browser require vaccuming sqlite files? Dunno, because there's no good reason.
If she'll finally switch to chrome I'll stop hearing complaints the internet is slow.
I'm all for having clever damage control mechanisms, but having less damage in the first place seems to be the winning strategy.
It also makes everything about the interactive experience worse, or at least it did last week. `perf top` shows a pretty damning story around locks, too. So- we're probably not going to see it until 2015.
[1] Octane (google's benchmark), Sunspider (Apple/Webkit's benchmark), and Kraken (Mozilla's benchmark).
You can see JSC performing better than chrome on the asm.js benchmarks: http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=12&view=breakdown&suite=asm...
[1] http://blog.llvm.org/2014/05/llvm-weekly-19-may-12th-2014.ht...
But are asmjs benchmarks interesting? They are not representative of the vast majority of real-world JS, so wouldn't an asmjs-laden benchmark suite really be a case of optimizing for your own set of benchmarks, tuned to your own idiomatic-JS?
But anyway, congrats on the achievement. I like the fact that V8, JSC, and FF performance are converging. If the performance differential is too great, it creates additional headaches for the developer targeting a certain level of efficiency.
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.
Over the course of a day, the browser becomes unresponsive and CPU usage idles at 10-15%. Restarting with the same tabs brings it down to 0%. Yes, I know, disable addons, blah blah...doesn't work for me. Same problem.
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 =].
Also, congrats on the firefox team for really taking performance seriously.
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.
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.
Kudos to the developers.
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).
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
While this may sound petty, one feature I'd really love to see come back in Firefox is the ability to see the refresh button match the style / movability of the back/home buttons. It is very annoying having to use precise clicking on the eeeency little arrow on the URL bar.
But thats the thing, even if I am annoyed by small issues or lacking features, I don't abandon a project based on that.
[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
[2] http://www.ghacks.net/2014/07/12/mozilla-plans-release-elect...
│ ├────6.04 MB (01.59%) -- top(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8518903, id=105)
│ │ ├──5.89 MB (01.55%) -- active/window(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8518903)
│ │ │ ├──4.64 MB (01.22%) ++ layout
│ │ │ └──1.25 MB (00.33%) ++ (4 tiny)
│ │ └──0.15 MB (00.04%) ++ js-zone(0x7fb875a85800) 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.
Good job Mozilla!
Go Firefox!!!
p.s. Great work on Firefox OS too!
So I don't know how strong the switch back would be...
I think Mozilla would get a lot of mileage out of improving the performance of the rendering engine. FF doesn't feel slow because of JS, it feels slow(-er than Chrome, at least on my Mac) because repaints and layout seem to take longer.
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'm looking forward to such a statement from Mozilla. The web needs mature suppott for languages other than JavaScript and C++/C are very widely used languages(as opposed to some new hobby language) and compile to JS tools are the only realistic way of getting there. So I can hardly wait until browser venders and standards organizations embrace efforts like Asm.js and the nessary extensions to make it support other memory and language models and features (Shared memory, SIMD, JVM languages etc.).
Improvements like this and Rust, is where I like seeing Mozilla spending their resources.
(Which isn't entirely altruistic; I am employed by the Mozilla Corporation. But hey, I do support Mozilla's mission; what can I say?)
For example, every other browser fixed this 12 year old bug [0] one by one, but Firefox doesn't care much about it. In fact, not only that they don't have any solution to it whatsoever, when people's resentment about the bug increased, they chose to just shut down their voices on it.
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
I'm glad to see strides being made in JavaScript performance, but basic browser functionality is far more important.
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.
http://www.otsukare.info/2014/10/28/google-webcompatibility-...
I think it's quite impressive how close V8 is in performance to SpiderMonkey which actually goes out of it's way to support "use asm".
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.
Also, as much as I keep hearing "Google is evil" in the tech echo chamber, again, the average consumer doesn't care. Even I know Google's policies and still choose to use Chrome purely because it's more convenient.
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.
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.
Also, unrelated, I think Firefox spent too long copying Google Chrome's interface and now they are playing catch up.
Regardless, Firefox usage continues to decline month after month. I think they've lost the general consumer appeal.
Here's how I think browser benchmarking should be done: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/06/16/a-browser-be...
My only complaint is that it requires a plugin to get a reasonable number of tabs in a window before requiring scrolling. It's downright absurd that it stopped being configurable many, many, many versions ago.
1. Support for Netflix on linux
2. Webapps as native applications (like the old project prism). We use slack at work and a Chrome webapp is how they choose to support Linux.
Admittedly though, I will switch to Firefox for the rest of the week to see if I can live with these caveats.