Firefox has really turned a corner with version 89. The UI looks great out of the box for the first time in a long while. Native context menus on macOS. Performance is absolutely on par with Chrome. Dev tools are fantastic. Even the Android build is totally competitive now.
Literally every version for the last 5 years people say "Firefox has really gotten better for real now with version N", and every single time, I try it and immediately find it's still an order of magnitude slower and more power hungry than Chrome.
That was true several years ago, when Firefox was essentially the only player and optimization seemed a concept unheard of in web browsers. Then came Chrome, which in its earlier versions was really fast compared to Firefox, this paired with pervasive advertising by Google made many users jump ship to Chrome (including myself, for a brief while before caring about privacy became more important than speed). Years passed with Chrome totally deserving the prize for speed, although it was just like today a nightmare privacy-wise, but hey, it comes from the #1 targeted advertising company in the world, what should I expect?
Fast forward a few years (iirc it was roughly in 2018) and Mozilla devs show they learned the lessons: the next Firefox release runs on par with Chrome, then following versions get some further improvements in speed too. So yeah, Chrome was indeed faster than Firefox, but that is a thing of the past.
Speaking personally here, but I value privacy a lot more than bells and whistles or speed, so Chrome is a no-no here regardless of its performance.
I've never used chrome, but have had a linux desktop for the past 20+ years and have run firefox for at least the past five years (whenever that full-page advert about firefox in the new york times came out, that's when I switched. I remember paying for my name to be included).
I've never ever thought "Firefox is slow", instead I think sometimes "the network is slow", or "this wifi is terrible". I imagine if people are using heavy web-applications maybe this is visible, but using gmail, slack, and similar sites everything works just fine. Sure it might be nicer if things were even faster, but the speed of my browser is not something I've ever thought about.
I often wonder why people have some different opinions of their browsers..
It's different this time. Firefox really caught up in terms of speed. But it was always held back by its clunky ui. I'm very happy with the new version, and I'm definitely not a regular Firefox user. Give it another shot.
I've used Firefox as my primary browser basically forever it seems like. I never really liked Chrome. But Firefox still has some annoying rendering issues. For some reason text which should be aligned vertically center will look fine in Chrome but be slightly offset in Firefox (Windows). Or colors appear as they should in Chrome but not in Firefox (MacOS). Just little things that get under my skin.
As a web developer and designer, rendering inconsistencies like this cost me hours every month. I dream of world with a single standard rendering library that all browsers share. The current system seems ridiculous- multiple parties implementing their own engine, aligned by a single spec, with the ultimate goal of rendering the same content identical to one another- is silly, wasteful, and bound to result in a shitshow. I don’t get it.
It wouldn't be so bad if that single spec wasn't whatever Google wants to be. Even if we give up and adopt Chromium as the One True Engine, it should be taken away from Google and maintained by some kind of an independent foundation.
I find the new UI to be far worse; luckily there are (for now, but it only needs to stick around long enough for a UI replacement add-on to be developed) about:config options you can use to disable the new UI (that is, set the following to false: browser.proton.enabled, browser.proton.modals.enabled, browser.proton.doorhangers.enabled, and browser.proton.contextmenus.enable).
It seems the FF devs are following "cargo cult" development, blindly imitating the Chrome UI without seeming to understand that Google's monopolistic practices that allows them to force Chrome on people rather than because Chrome is fundamentally good or user-friendly. Given Firefox has such small (~3.36%) market share, they should probably focus on avoiding alienating the user base they have.
The tabs icon seems narrower, such that it is now impossible to read more than 4 letters of the title. I don't remember how many letters where visible before but it feels a little bit harder to find the correct tab again if I switch away.
They changed the order of the burger menu and removed the icons. Something that could immediately be used to find things like settings. Now i have to read the entire thing to know where to go.
The menu is redone to be larger, and not follow theming rules.
I'm ok with the new changes, but the removal of icons and rejigging the order seems to be the antithesis of human centered design.
Performance for me has been awful since a few releases ago. I have eight cores, and I often find that Firefox is using 100% of all eight cores when I'm not even using the browser. I ran perf on the processes and what it's doing is beyond me (something with futexes and the DOM).
(And before anyone asks, no I have not submitted a bug report, because I don't know how to reproduce the problem. I have seen other users complaining on reddit, and I so I know I'm not the only one, and I expect a proper bug will eventually get filed by someone who knows how to diagnose and communicate this better than me. I've searched the bug tracker every few weeks and haven't seen one yet, though. It's just frustrating to have a release with so many frivolous changes when the browser's performance is already abysmal).
Firefox is the only major browser left that doesn't use Webkit/Blink, and its market share is constantly shrinking (<4% now?). Its funding is unstable, Mozilla keeps losing staff and failing to gain traction with their experimental projects/partnerships (Pocket, Send, etc.), all while Chrome becomes the new de facto standard, iterating features that only Chromium based browsers fully implement.
It's a losing game... Firefox is treading water, just waiting to drown. It's sad because it's the last significant open source browser, but I guess the world just doesn't care. Google and Apple are taking over everything.
Getting away from Chromium would be great, but if somebody doesn't want to switch to the only viable non-Chromium browser, getting them away from Google is still an improvement.
"At least try Edge, it's literally the same thing as Chrome but with Microsoft instead of Google."
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Yes, and on Fedora it's the only way to watch videos. I also use Firefox on Android for some months. For some sites you need to fallback to Chrome though, mostly Google sites.
Probably because your only options to get them on mac/windows are to download binaries from some random guy off the internet (who the hell is "Marmaduke" and why should I trust him?), or compiling it yourself (~1 hour build time on a mid-tier desktop CPU).
I use Ungoogled Chromium on Gentoo, and it takes my machine 5 hours. Well worth it, because I know that what is built is the source I see. Even FireFox is a binary on Gentoo.
I empathize, but for a project as complex as a browser, how valid is this though? It's basically reliant on "the community", of which ungoogled chromium has a vanishingly tiny one, to flag any potential issues in a massive, complicated code base that is likely constantly moving. Sure, compiling yourself eliminates the middle-man who might have compiled the binary for you, but the trust element is still very much there. You're trusting eloston and other project maintainers.
There is some trust there, but again, I can and have looked at what he's doing. Plus the fact that someone who has taken Google out of Chromium probably cares about privacy.
It's still less trust required than the trust required for Google.
It's not for everyone, not even close. But I am glad it's an option for me.
And that probably means you don't rebuild the browser every time an update is available, because you don't want to load down your machine for five hours right now. And, in turn, that means you're vulnerable for significantly longer than you would be with a more centralized build.
I compiled it once and it took several hours, like 10. So I left it and came back only to find I was prompted and the prompt timed out and the process ended.
Downloaded a binary from somewhere (I don't remember but it was some repo I have used before that I trust) and it needed some specific older version of some C library (I also don't remember) that I had to mess with for compatibility.
Ungoogled chromium is a bit messy. I use it, it is my go to browser, but it certainly isn't something you're going to get by downloading installer.exe from "the official website."
Firefox has really turned a corner with version 89. The UI looks great out of the box for the first time in a long while. Native context menus on macOS. Performance is absolutely on par with Chrome. Dev tools are fantastic. Even the Android build is totally competitive now.
Never been a better time to make the jump!
Literally every version for the last 5 years people say "Firefox has really gotten better for real now with version N", and every single time, I try it and immediately find it's still an order of magnitude slower and more power hungry than Chrome.
What OS and sites are you talking about? Firefox is as fast (if not maybe a smidge faster every once in a while) as Chrome on macOS.
Seriously, genuinely don't know what you're talking about. I have like 500 tabs open any given time. It is blazing fast, always
Maybe every new version converts more people?
that was my experience a couple of times, but the last time i gave it a shot it was permanent, haven't looked back.
That was true several years ago, when Firefox was essentially the only player and optimization seemed a concept unheard of in web browsers. Then came Chrome, which in its earlier versions was really fast compared to Firefox, this paired with pervasive advertising by Google made many users jump ship to Chrome (including myself, for a brief while before caring about privacy became more important than speed). Years passed with Chrome totally deserving the prize for speed, although it was just like today a nightmare privacy-wise, but hey, it comes from the #1 targeted advertising company in the world, what should I expect? Fast forward a few years (iirc it was roughly in 2018) and Mozilla devs show they learned the lessons: the next Firefox release runs on par with Chrome, then following versions get some further improvements in speed too. So yeah, Chrome was indeed faster than Firefox, but that is a thing of the past. Speaking personally here, but I value privacy a lot more than bells and whistles or speed, so Chrome is a no-no here regardless of its performance.
I've never used chrome, but have had a linux desktop for the past 20+ years and have run firefox for at least the past five years (whenever that full-page advert about firefox in the new york times came out, that's when I switched. I remember paying for my name to be included).
I've never ever thought "Firefox is slow", instead I think sometimes "the network is slow", or "this wifi is terrible". I imagine if people are using heavy web-applications maybe this is visible, but using gmail, slack, and similar sites everything works just fine. Sure it might be nicer if things were even faster, but the speed of my browser is not something I've ever thought about.
I often wonder why people have some different opinions of their browsers..
As an exercise, if you open https://github.com on anonymous mode. What do you see on Chrome and Firefox?
This is what I see on my Windows machine:
Chrome ~2.5% CPU https://streamable.com/flb8rh
Firefox ~3.5% CPU https://streamable.com/dkrp0w
It's different this time. Firefox really caught up in terms of speed. But it was always held back by its clunky ui. I'm very happy with the new version, and I'm definitely not a regular Firefox user. Give it another shot.
I've used Firefox as my primary browser basically forever it seems like. I never really liked Chrome. But Firefox still has some annoying rendering issues. For some reason text which should be aligned vertically center will look fine in Chrome but be slightly offset in Firefox (Windows). Or colors appear as they should in Chrome but not in Firefox (MacOS). Just little things that get under my skin.
As a web developer and designer, rendering inconsistencies like this cost me hours every month. I dream of world with a single standard rendering library that all browsers share. The current system seems ridiculous- multiple parties implementing their own engine, aligned by a single spec, with the ultimate goal of rendering the same content identical to one another- is silly, wasteful, and bound to result in a shitshow. I don’t get it.
It wouldn't be so bad if that single spec wasn't whatever Google wants to be. Even if we give up and adopt Chromium as the One True Engine, it should be taken away from Google and maintained by some kind of an independent foundation.
I find the new UI to be far worse; luckily there are (for now, but it only needs to stick around long enough for a UI replacement add-on to be developed) about:config options you can use to disable the new UI (that is, set the following to false: browser.proton.enabled, browser.proton.modals.enabled, browser.proton.doorhangers.enabled, and browser.proton.contextmenus.enable).
It seems the FF devs are following "cargo cult" development, blindly imitating the Chrome UI without seeming to understand that Google's monopolistic practices that allows them to force Chrome on people rather than because Chrome is fundamentally good or user-friendly. Given Firefox has such small (~3.36%) market share, they should probably focus on avoiding alienating the user base they have.
Or attracting the userbase they need
>I find the new UI to be far worse
Is that about e.g. the tabs looking different, and similar design dislike, or something substantial that affects usability?
The tabs icon seems narrower, such that it is now impossible to read more than 4 letters of the title. I don't remember how many letters where visible before but it feels a little bit harder to find the correct tab again if I switch away.
They changed the order of the burger menu and removed the icons. Something that could immediately be used to find things like settings. Now i have to read the entire thing to know where to go.
The menu is redone to be larger, and not follow theming rules.
I'm ok with the new changes, but the removal of icons and rejigging the order seems to be the antithesis of human centered design.
They also seem to have removed the option to hide toolbars in fullscreen mode.
No separation between tabs and they keep hiding useful context menu items [0].
[0] As an example:
1) close tabs to the right/left and - are now hidden under menus
2) show image on current page was removed - only allowed to show image on a new tab (which the mouse middle button already used to do)
Performance for me has been awful since a few releases ago. I have eight cores, and I often find that Firefox is using 100% of all eight cores when I'm not even using the browser. I ran perf on the processes and what it's doing is beyond me (something with futexes and the DOM).
(And before anyone asks, no I have not submitted a bug report, because I don't know how to reproduce the problem. I have seen other users complaining on reddit, and I so I know I'm not the only one, and I expect a proper bug will eventually get filed by someone who knows how to diagnose and communicate this better than me. I've searched the bug tracker every few weeks and haven't seen one yet, though. It's just frustrating to have a release with so many frivolous changes when the browser's performance is already abysmal).
Firefox is the only major browser left that doesn't use Webkit/Blink, and its market share is constantly shrinking (<4% now?). Its funding is unstable, Mozilla keeps losing staff and failing to gain traction with their experimental projects/partnerships (Pocket, Send, etc.), all while Chrome becomes the new de facto standard, iterating features that only Chromium based browsers fully implement.
It's a losing game... Firefox is treading water, just waiting to drown. It's sad because it's the last significant open source browser, but I guess the world just doesn't care. Google and Apple are taking over everything.
> Even the Android build is totally competitive now.
Are they still blocking most extensions?
https://vivaldi.com/ . I know it isn’t fully open source, but it is amazing.
It's not even partially open source, really, but that is me being pedantic. Really smooth browser, though.
High time indeed. There are plenty of good alternatives:
Vivaldi, Brave, Microsoft Edge, Firefox
The first three are all Chromium-based, so their rendering is identical to Chrome’s, just without all the Google creepiness.
>its market dominance gives it the power to help set new standards across the web
Using anything based on Chrome/Chromium defeats much of the point
Getting away from Chromium would be great, but if somebody doesn't want to switch to the only viable non-Chromium browser, getting them away from Google is still an improvement.
"At least try Edge, it's literally the same thing as Chrome but with Microsoft instead of Google."
I have been trying Opera just recently and I like it a lot, especially using workspace feature, feels more productive with less clutter on my screen.
Which is yet another Chrome based browser.
I've been pretty vary of Opera ever since that whole predatory lending thing happened. How is it now?
It's owned by a Chinese company now. Wouldn't trust it.
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Yes, and on Fedora it's the only way to watch videos. I also use Firefox on Android for some months. For some sites you need to fallback to Chrome though, mostly Google sites.
Edge and Opera are working pretty well, from my experience.
Is there any solid evidence that Microsoft Edge, which is based on Chromium, eliminates Google's built-in tracking?
I like Surf (webkit) https://surf.suckless.org
Not mentioned in the article is the 'ungoogled Chromium' project, which can be downloaded here [0] or compiled from here [1]
[0] https://chromium.woolyss.com (look for the ungoogled tag)
[1] https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Probably because your only options to get them on mac/windows are to download binaries from some random guy off the internet (who the hell is "Marmaduke" and why should I trust him?), or compiling it yourself (~1 hour build time on a mid-tier desktop CPU).
I use Ungoogled Chromium on Gentoo, and it takes my machine 5 hours. Well worth it, because I know that what is built is the source I see. Even FireFox is a binary on Gentoo.
Just my 2 cents.
I empathize, but for a project as complex as a browser, how valid is this though? It's basically reliant on "the community", of which ungoogled chromium has a vanishingly tiny one, to flag any potential issues in a massive, complicated code base that is likely constantly moving. Sure, compiling yourself eliminates the middle-man who might have compiled the binary for you, but the trust element is still very much there. You're trusting eloston and other project maintainers.
There is some trust there, but again, I can and have looked at what he's doing. Plus the fact that someone who has taken Google out of Chromium probably cares about privacy.
It's still less trust required than the trust required for Google.
It's not for everyone, not even close. But I am glad it's an option for me.
And that probably means you don't rebuild the browser every time an update is available, because you don't want to load down your machine for five hours right now. And, in turn, that means you're vulnerable for significantly longer than you would be with a more centralized build.
You're talking to a gentoo user. They compile every chance they get.
I...can neither confirm nor deny how much I love watching compiles happen...
I update every night, including Ungoogled-Chromium. I'm not awake for the night, so why not do it then?
Gentoo may be rolling release, but they batch the updates every day.
firefox-bin is a binary on Gentoo. Regular firefox is not. You're not pushed toward the binary package at all.
My mistake, though it seems that it might be default for something, since it is installed on my system.
Edit: figured out what it is: firefox-bin can be installed, no fuss, but firefox requires elogind or systemd, neither of which I have on my system.
ungoogled Chromium is well known and good. Like uBlock Origin.
Why on earth are you complaining about compile time?
There always is a necessary trade off between time exhausted and privacy/security
I'm not, but both are barriers for the typical Wired reader.
Good luck having random user to do that.
I compiled it once and it took several hours, like 10. So I left it and came back only to find I was prompted and the prompt timed out and the process ended.
Downloaded a binary from somewhere (I don't remember but it was some repo I have used before that I trust) and it needed some specific older version of some C library (I also don't remember) that I had to mess with for compatibility.
Ungoogled chromium is a bit messy. I use it, it is my go to browser, but it certainly isn't something you're going to get by downloading installer.exe from "the official website."