Firefox Got Faster for Real Users in 2023
Firefox Got Faster for Real Users in 2023
We’ve been working hard on making Firefox even faster and we’re extremely happy to report that this has resulted in an improvement in speed.
Really, the fact that they still have working adblockers makes it faster. Sitting through a minute of ads is way more noticable than a second or two of delay.
And the reason they work still is because they empower the users to use it how they want, instead of how corporate can monetize them.
than a second or two of delay.
The differences between Chromium And Firefox are for years now in the range of milliseconds.
I thought the browser, my computer or something was slowing down. Turns out I just had way too many ublock rules.
Where they really need to improve performance is on mobile. On my old phone, I never really noticed how bad it was aside from the high energy usage reported by Android for Firefox. I recently got a new phone tho, which has a 120hz screen and yesterday I tried Cromite, a Chromium fork for Android, which improves privacy and adds adblock. I tested it against Firefox (Mull to be precise), which is what I use as my default browser, and I noticed that scrolling pages was way smoother on Cromite. First I thought that maybe Firefox is just running on 60hz but scrolling through settings and the like was perfectly smooth, just webpages felt laggy. This means that Firefox is simply very slow at rendering pages on mobile, to the point that it can't keep up with my screens refresh rate at all.
Firefox on desktop is great and I really wanna use it on mobile too but I'm honestly contemplating just switching to Cromite. The only feature I'm missing in Cromite, that I can get for Firefox with the extension Libredirect, is redirecting to privacy respecting and lightweight frontends / proxies, like Reddit to Libreddit but it might be possible to add a userscript to Cromite with that functionality.
Did you try with firefox on mobile rather than Mull?
I don't know if it will make a difference but Mull is quite recent and focus on privacy first then usability and does way more than adblock and few privacy enhancement.
I don't know the benchmark but it would not surprise if Mull was slower than Firefox.
I'm using Firefox on mobile and I'm not really seeing a difference but I'm on an older phone.
Just tested it with normal Firerox and surprisingly, that is actually smooth. Maybe it's just an extension.
I'm using regular Firefox and its still the same, pages take too long to load or they randomly reload if left unattended. It feels like a browser from the early era of mobile apps with a coat of paint, and yeah it has only existed for a few years
I also have a 120hz display and use Fennec and can state that it works smoothly and scrolling feels like 120hz.
I just tried normal Firefox and that seems to be as smooth as expected. Maybe it was just an extension.
and I noticed that scrolling pages was way smoother on Cromite.
Scrolling? You mean pages automatically loading new content?
No I don't, it's the same for static websites
For me it’s unusable on desktop too! Edge and Chrome just have so much nicer animations it’s like a paper cut every time I click on the UI in Firefox
Firefox supports CSS themes tho, you can install something like this, for example, to make it look like Chrome. I haven't tried it myself but it probably has the animations as well. If you're on GNOME there's also a Firefox GNOME theme.
Firefox is faster at loading webpages and content than Chrome, and thats without adblockers. The only thing Chrome is good at is being a webapp and spyware platform.
And web based serial connections, though that may fall into the web app category.
I felt this. Last year I pretty much avoided firefox because it just wasnt performant enough, but since this year they've really improved things.
Not fake users?
Rendering was never a problem with FF, but it's good to see some progress on that front as well. Startup times are still atrocious. My whole OS can book 4 times over before Firefox decides it's the right time to start rendering something.
Opens just as quickly as any other program for me.
Either your boot time is like 0.05 seconds or you have a problem.
I for sure have a problem. But it basically boils down to remove your profile, which is not an option. I did report the issue number of times and always got "do a refresh", which I always do and it always doesn't help. Even made a video for them, since it doesn't sound believable. This is on my X1 Carbon, which has M.2 drive. On my desktop with, at the time, HDD it was this slow.
At this point am only using Firefox out of spite so everyone doesn't end up on Chrome since I remember what it was like for one company to have a huge monopoly. But I'd switch in a blink of an eye otherwise.
Damn, what are you using, WinME?