Why do you use firefox?
Why do you use firefox?
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384 comments
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Waaaaaaay better privacy, faster than chrome, don’t need to worry about them killing mandatory add ons so they can push ads, also the add ons just work better but maybe that’s confirmation bias.
I’m sure there’s more I’m forgetting
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It is not really faster than Chrome, but hey, at least I don't have to manually opt out of monetizing my browsing history and my adblocker still works.
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not really faster than Chrome
Its also not really slower. If you are blocking plugins, it can be faster.
Its fast enough I think is the broader point.
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It's a weird pissing contest that still makes people angry for no reason, is what it is.
It's not the 90s, you're not trying to parse a bunch of tables on a creaking chunk of barely cooked sand. You're basically running standalone software through your browser anyway.
Honestly, the one performance thing that bothers me on any modern browser is that some extension in my stack somewhere is memory leaking and makes me restart Firefox to restore performance every few hours. Can't tell which one, but I need all of them, so hey, frequent reboots it is.
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Once it’s slower, hit F12 -> memory -> snapshot
Should be pretty easy to check out which extension has shitloads of storage. Then you can decide how to go from there - maybe contact the author?
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Memory leak may have been a misdiagnosis. The issue is clearly with Youtube, which is what most extensions I use are about, there is nothing obvious in the memory snapshot (not that it'd be easy to see, because video is a resource hog anyway) and the profiler seems to label the stutter with the very useful label of "jank", so...
Someone more familiar with web dev than I am may be able to take the profiler logs and debug this, but a) that's not me, and b) not my job.
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Jank means that the renderer was delayed due to a resource conflict - usually because there’s something on the main thread that’s taking too long. Basically your issue is probably a CPU (or GPU) one, not a RAM one - It’s hard to help you out without knowing more about your environment, so all I can really give you is vague advice: if you’re using an adblocker other than uBlock Origin, switch to uBlock Origin, it has much better performance. Check the plugins and extensions and make sure there isn’t something you don’t recognise, if your computer was compromised at some point, cryptominer plugins can really tank performance.
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Figured that much. I'm not a web developer, but I can read a profiler, and the CPU usage spikes before those gaps are a pretty good sign that this isn't a memory leak. I use uBlock Origin, by the way, but there's likely some weird interaction between it, other Youtube extensions and Youtube's own attempts to nuke adblockers from orbit. And no, it's not a cryptominer as far as I can tell. This looks like either a bug or an unintended behavior of the very popular, very sanctioned plugins running on Firefox (or Firefox itself).
Which is why, as I said, I have settled for periodic reboots. Convenience wins over principle often, but I happen to be stubborn.
Gotta say, though, I appreciate the attempts at troubleshooting, but the OSS and privacy communities in general have a tendency to respond to comments on poor performance, compatibility or UX with tech support, and I think it's kinda missing the point.
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The unfortunate thing is, most people aren’t having these kinds of performance issues. If a bug can’t be reproduced, it can’t be fixed. That makes these kinds of things pretty much impossible to fix until someone who is having the problem has the time/energy to dig into it, and the technical expertise to know what information and data to provide for a good bug report (which, honestly, is very rare), and then make themselves available for all of the inevitable follow-up questions and troubleshooting steps.
OSS devs are volunteers 99.9% of the time and they work on whatever they want to work on. A well written bug report with lots of context, a full memory snapshot, clear reproduction steps, expected/actual behaviour, full information on how to set up the environment from a fresh install, and so on, has a really good chance of being picked up by a developer. But if it’s even a little bit harder to just get to work on it, it’ll probably be ignored, because there are a hundred other more interesting issues to work on.
People can only help as much as they’re able to, we can’t fix your issue unless we know what it is, and usually the best place to start is by trying to make sure the surrounding environment is sane. If we went off assuming there was a Firefox bug and spent hours looking at a memory dump only to discover that your computer is a 2003 Intel Celeron or something, it would be a bit frustrating.
And yeah, most people just do not have the technical expertise to write a good bug report for a web browser - most devs are web developers or do business logic stuff - so it’s a tough nut to crack, and there’s not a huge number of people volunteering to help out open source software teams doing the soft skills stuff to coax useful information out of people who report issues :)
Hope that makes sense! OSS is very much a “be the change you want to see in the world” kind of place!
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Well, yeah, which would make perfect sense if a) Firefox was made by volunteers instead of whatever weird blend of non-profit and for-profit companies are running Mozilla these days, and b) if I was filing a bug report instead of casually mentioning that Firefox can be buggy sometimes in social media.
If I was filing a bug report I'd be attaching... you know, logs. And repro steps. As you do in a bug report. I don't even know if Firefox has a bug submission process for the public. I assume they don't. Most of those are worthless anyway.
Look, besides the notion that the whole discussion is rather pointless, the idea I was trying to impress earlier is that the end user doesn't care or need to care about the challenges of OSS development. Being free and open source may be a practical selling point, a moral selling point or not a selling point at all, but ultimately when you use a thing you just kinda need it to work first. When you complain, or even just mention, an issue with some piece of OSS in places like this you just tend to get a bunch of IT and workarounds back.
Which is fine, I get it, it's people trying to be nice, but... you know, it doesn't make a great case for the ecosystem. Me saying "eeeh, FF can be a bit flaky sometimes you may want to reboot it every now and then" is an anecdote. Me saying that and going down a rabbit hole of profiling and memory snapshots in the futile attempt to fix some arcane interaction between Youtube and a bunch of add-on software Youtube doesn't want me to run is rightfully enough to put off the average person. All I'm saying is not every person mentioning a thing they noticed in a piece of OSS needs a howto doc and a list of highly technical homework as a response.
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I guess I don’t really understand - can you help me understand your viewpoint? What do you think a good response would be? Just like, “oh yeah, that sucks dude?” Sorry if I made it feel like I was expecting you to do technical tasks, it was just an offer of help to get it fixed, but obviously if you’d rather not do that, you’re not compelled! Just trying to help really. I don’t know what the better response would be - I’m autistic so sometimes I miss social cues so sorry if that’s the case!
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I'm actually having similar issues. Seemingly at random, my PC will freeze up due to lack of memory and killing Firefox fixes it. Im also sure it must be an extension causing it.
Here are my extensions, let me know which of these you are using and maybe we can narrow it down from that:
- Neat URL
- uBlock Origin
- Return YouTube Dislikes
- Firefox Multi-Account Containers
- SponsorBlock
- Vimium
- Decentraleyes
- Enhancer for YouTube
- Privacy Possum
- I don't care about cookies
- First Party Isolation
- Startpage Privacy Protection
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FWIW, the only ones we share on that list are uBlock, Dislikes and Enhancer.
Again, best guess is Youtube is desperately trying to poop out some ads and getting reinvented within an inch of its life by those extensions (not to mention dragged kicking and screaming into having pop-up playback windows) and something breaks in there somewhere. I'm not holding my breath for a fix anytime soon.
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i looked at the graph and it seems like the speed of firefox is way more stable. At the moment i think the normal speeds are equal. Chrome has sometimes very big spikes in booth directions (the grey dots on the right sides that seem to be out of order) so the fastes from the records is still chrome, on this one specific date
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Firefox actually has surpassed Chrome recently in benchmarks
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It is not really faster than Chrome
It is if I close my eyes and stick my fingers in my ears.
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LOL
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Sadly not everywhere. On mobile it lacks behind. Even more on video content and low power cpus.
Chromium is slightly better in a way where I could clic on the video buttons without lag : On my android TV, (sideloaded) Firefox had issues with video buttons. So I tried using kiwi browser (for the extension support), and it worked well for buttons. The video wasn't a lot smoother, but it just seemed maybe just slightly better.
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When you say video, do you mean YouTube and on other Google sites? Not sure if you knew this, but Google has proprietary shit on their websites that enables special features just for Chrome. Even if Firefox wanted to implement those features, Google wouldn’t let Firefox use them.
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I can confirm that Firefox is terrible on Android.
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Used Firefox android for at least a long arse time now. I can't remember any issues. Other than one site, but that works perfectly in duckduckgo browser.
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Sorry to hijack, but can anyone help me with my issue?
I'm using librewolf and since about a week or two I noticed a speed issue. Overall my internet is fast, way faster then I need in fact, but websites load at a unreasonably slow speed.
When opening anything librewolf just sits there loading for a few second (probably up to ~10) then page opens fine. Video playback works great too. What could be the issue?
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Could be DNS?
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Nah, it can't possibly be DNS....
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Narrator: It was DNS. It's always DNS.
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It's almost never DNS, except when it is.
Try setting your DNS to adguards default servers and see if that helps.
Those addresses are 94.140.14.14 and 94.140.15.15.
If you don't want to do that you could always set it to 1.1.1.1 but adguards DNS servers also help filter ads so that's nice.
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I don't know. If I use chrome on the same device there are no issues. You can't be certain but I think it's not DNS.
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That might be evidence in favour of it being a DNS issue. Google Chrome doesn't always use the system's DNS.
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Good to know, but for now it seems like the issue solved itself. Will report later if anything changes.
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Do you use many addons? Resetting everything to stock and reinstalling addons one by one is my go-to as occasionally your profile is the issue. Just backup your profile beforehand and there’s 0 loss, aside from like 20 minutes.
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384 comments