Oh tell me again how it loads faster and takes up less resources

You mean hope that they too don't become subject to enshittification? I don't have a lot of faith in that.

Besides that, Google is controlling as fuck. They might keep fucking themselves over but there's no way they won't start attempting to ruin things for the rest of us.

Thats the problem tho, the new mozilla leadership is on the "do anything but nothing" ship. I really hope they either dont do anything too horrible or someone forks it if they do.

Steam's strategy was to be first to market and essentially the only player in the game for a decade, making themselves the default.

I'm pretty sure someone discovered that is true recently, but can't be assed to try to find it right now.

It's not tinfoil, they have been caught doing it and they continue to do it. It's a scumbag company.

One thing you can test is to apply a Chrome user-agent on Firefox when visiting YouTube. In my personal experience that actually noticeably improves the situation.

Well, Google will probably optimize their shit for their own privacy invasion sniffing tool browser twice as hard as for Firefox and such

Google does that a lot with their own web properties. I remember Google Meet didn't support background replacement on Firefox, but switching Firefox's user agent to Chrome suddenly fixed it.

For YouTube on IOS, I use Brave. It does a decent (but not perfect) job of hiding ads on YT.

Same happens with Safari. The page loads in a weird funky way, video sorta first and then comments and suggestions many seconds later.

On Chrome on the exact same computer it’s instant.

They’re doing it on purpose.

Do you use YouTube so much that a small performance difference on a single Site has an influence on your browser choice?

You haven't experienced slow until you try to take Firefox through Google Cloud Console or Search Tools. 15 seconds in Chrome, somehow turns into 3 minutes in Firefox, funny how it does that.

Ironically I use a chrome type browser for YouTube and mail checking only. This is also the only browser in which I am logged in with my Google account.

My main Firefox is for everything else including search.

I tried both and the videos played at the same speed for me

Google definitely did extend video loading times on FF a while ago, not sure if they still do it.

Google somehow throttles YouTube on Firefox.

Because they do. A while back, it was discovered they were injecting delays if they detected Firefox as your user agent.

Firefox is good for webpages not web apps

This. Firefox has always been just good. It wasn't great or anything, it was just a good browser. Then chrome came around and it had more, better features. It was a bit more memory usage, but those were for the additional features Firefox didn't have.

Firefox didn't really change a whole lot, it added synching features across accounts, and didn't get worse. It just stayed the same.

The people made Firefox better, because now they're creating add-ons for Firefox, where chrome had more.

I feel like once chrome got the majority of browser users, it immediately started going to shit. I have no proof of this, just a memory of it being better until it was announced that chrome was the most used browser, and the near immediate heavier memory usage.

I mean, I clearly remember firefox being terrible back when Chrome was just beginning to take off.

It was a lumbering monolith that ate all your ram and loaded pages at a glacial pace. Chrome was a multi-process revolution from that.

Then, firefox got it's shit together and chrome got overloaded with corpo bullshit.

firefox is going on a steady decline more recently with ads on the homepage by default, plus new telemetry being introduced. hopefully it can change direction

It used to be a lot slower, which is why when Chrome showed up with its shiny new V8 engine (and other features) people switched from Firefox en masse. Now the performance difference is no longer noticeable.

61 Firefox windows and 427 tabs (don't judge, I know I have a problem) and I have no performance complaints - admittedly, not all of them are active/rendering simultaniously, but still...

Firefox (and its forks) have been my go-to for 15 years.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks

I wish firefox was faster but benchmarks are pretty common, it's not hard to test. It's kind of an unfair fight at this point honestly, large swaths of the web are just built for chrome. There are other benchmark options out there, but even using Mozilla's own kraken benchmarking solution, it loses tremendously more than it wins. I honestly really respect them for not building their benchmarking system to make their solutions come out on top.

In some benchmarks the lag from firefox is very significant and then on the other hand, when firefox does win, chrome is usually right behind it. It's not ideal.

Last time I tried it? Like freeze and be unresponsive on my phone for seconds at a time slow. (My phone doesn't lock up though, I can still go to the home screen, swipe to see notifications so it's not the phone locking up completely)

It's clear, slower is relative. FF is slower in the startup and rendering some heavy loading webs, but the difference certainly isn't sooo dramatic. It's not a reason to avoid it, the only reason depends of the use of a browser, if it fits your needs or not.

and ads.

ads are awful.

The thing is, using a Chromium-based browser isn't contributing to their monopoly unless Google holds sway over the fork. Brave, Vivaldi, those two are generally fine and stand against what Google has been up to.

I remember being confused as to why everyone loved Chrome suddenly

Because they were still using Explorer before that

I switched from FFX to Chrome back in the day because Chrome tabs were all independent processes in task manager, and one crappy website wouldn't kill my whole browser.

When Google started their war on addons, I switched back to Firefox.

Over the years my customized Firefox looks like chrome ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I grew up with a 56k modem. Anything after adsl is warp speed for me. I never understood or observed the speed differences between browsers.

Maybe I'm just so slow myself that I dont notice the difference but come on.. how much can it be? A few seconds? Who is so busy that a few seconds is a worthy amount of time to try and save (not talking about F1 drivers here)?

Chrome is very good at running Google's pages. Even before Google owned YouTube chrome was better at YouTube.

noscript is your web condom. I will not touch a page without it.

I use ghostery to remove the obnoxious cookie popups here in the EU.

Mouse gestures is the killer-app for me on Firefox. Hate surfing without it.

P.S. Do wish Firefox had tab groups tho.

Figured I’d stay on FF until I had no choice. Don’t see myself leaving.

i'm in a similar boat and given the overwhelming majority popular use of chrome, it feels clear to me that firefox will eventually stop working and i wonder what surfing will like like for me in the future.

i suspect i'll have to go back to use chrome again.

Well bud, you can literally customize Firefox with css. So get to learning

You can drag and drop your toolbar, extensions, and layout.

I have the same problem the other way around. When I use chrome it feels like I'm using a kids browser. Slightly cutesy with too many curvy bits. Sort of like the difference between Duplo (chrome) and Lego (Firefox). Basically the same thing, but also not.

This is certainly a hurdle to overcome. Google helped by changing the Chrome UI for the worse in some ways I care about, but migrating to a new browser and getting used to different UI is enough of a hassle that I'm still holding out until adblock actually stops working before I make the switch.

I'm curious as to why Firefox is checking for updates, have you configured it to do so? I've never seen Firefox do that (and it feels weird to have a program sidestep the update mechanism of the package manager)

This might be fixed on Firefox nightly

Lol the webcam thing hanned to me too.

At that point it will be forked yet again, and that fork will take over. Mozilla is a very active open source member though.

Then it will be forked and the cycle continues.

Mozilla has no traditional profit motive. The Mozilla Corporation, which develops Firefox, is a 100% subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, which is legally a non-profit organisation.

So, if the Mozilla Corporation makes a profit, they cannot pay out that profit to shareholders. Practically all they can do with that money, is to pay higher wages or set it aside for future invest in their products.

That does not mean that they cannot stagnate or use money badly. And it does not either mean that they never need to make money. But it does mean that there's no shareholders demanding short-term profit above all else.

The browsers are all quite good at copying your links, tabs, and history. Don't worry, there will always be a good option, especially since open source has no strong path to enshittification

I didn't care until it consistently loaded faster.
That's now my new baseline, and anything slower than 'instant' is annoying.
I would care if that was no longer the case, because I don't like being constantly annoyed.

That said, I don't think the page loading speed is noticeably different between major browsers.
The addons, customisation, privacy and resource usage are where it's at.

I'm just hoping that some competition to chromium stays afloat.

Not with your Google account directly. You create a Firefox account that is client-side encrypted, and you'll probably use your Gmail for that. Then, you can import your bookmarks/passwords from there. This might be a good time to move your passwords to an actual password manager like Bitwarden.

Afaik, all modern browsers can import/export passwords and bookmarks? FF lets you set up an account and sync across devices with a unique PW if you want (not your computer user PW, but it could be).

No idea on touchscreens outside the Android app.

Firefox mobile isn't there yet. Passwords will conveniently autofill from your Google account thanks to the Android level implementation of password management, but more importantly it's resource heavy and bad UI design. Ublock support is nice but some websites just don't deal with it well. The nightly builds do fix my main problems with the UI but they crash all the time. So there's hope for the future, but for now it's not great unless you absolutely need proper browser level ad blocking rather than Blokada.

Probably secure DNS? Try disabling that in the privacy settings page.

What is literally one thing Chrome can do that Firefox cannot? Cause I can tell you right now, after tomorrow, only one can block ads.

By default, I doubt that Firefox is better at privacy than Chrome. Actually even worse than Chrome I'd say. But you can customize Firefox to be much more privacy friendlier than Chrome. That is the functionality Chrome lacks. The last time I tried out Ungoogled chromium, it sucked ass. Websites actually loaded slower than on Firefox for me. And both had uBlock Origin installed. I tried those fancy GPU stuff as well, almost nothing changed.

you may not even have to change to another browser or fork, please have a look at some designs in https://trickypr.github.io/FirefoxCSS-Store.github.io/ select a design and follow the page, and you shall find the instructions (usually just downloading/pasting userChrome/Content.css)

and for scrolling tabs, if your problem is very small tab size, then try changing browser.tabs.tabMinWidth in about:config

Floorp, I use it and I love it. It's especially great for Opera refugees, it has workspaces and stuff. Soon Firefox will support tab groups natively, and then Floorp will be perfect. It's a Firefox fork though.

w3m with framebuffer image support, my man.

pretty sure thats a goat. rugged, contrary and independent. one might even say... the Greatest Of All Time.

Are they? I watch YouTube on Firefox all the time, seems fine on my machine.

I think maybe 5+ years ago there were some performance issues caused by YT relying on features that were only implemented in Chrome, but I don't recall having any issues wrt that for years.

Wym? Youtube works just fine for me with uBlock Origin. Very rarely there's some wonkiness but nothing unbearable.

Yay, another Chromium based web browser. That will show them.....

You are definitely brave to admit that.

Ew.