Mastodawn

moaningfridge Jul 30, 2023

If you're still using Chrome for performance reasons:
- Firefox is now faster than Chrome out-of-the-box
- Firefox uses less memory than Chrome
- Contrary to Chrome, Firefox does not restrict Ad blockers, which will make your browsing experience much faster (and safer).

nitrofurano Jul 28, 2023

@bladecoder and what about Waterfox? ;)

@nitrofurano Never tried that one and I'm not convinced it's better than a tweaked Firefox (also it seems to be based on an older version of Firefox)

nitrofurano Jul 28, 2023

@bladecoder so, which Firefox alternatives (based on Firefox and drm-free) would you recommend?

@nitrofurano I never tested any Firefox derivative. Why do you need one?

nitrofurano Jul 29, 2023

@bladecoder i can't remember precisely, perhaps from Firefox developers (and Debian packagers as well, i wonder why...), like lack of transparency or stuff like that, leading to my total lack of trust - anyway, if Firefox were that good it wouldn't needed to be "tweaked" (cleaned) anywhere

Spicewalla Jul 29, 2023

Just because some randos feel that *they* need to tweak firefox does not mean that firefox 'needs' to be tweaked.

nitrofurano Jul 29, 2023

@Spicewalla @bladecoder what i think is that, before using a software we should trust on it - i don't trust Firefox, and i think i'm not alone... :S

Spicewalla Jul 29, 2023

Then why would you trust some randos?

Aurora Penguin Aug 15, 2023

@Spicewalla @nitrofurano @bladecoder people don't "trust" Firefox but usually have a hard time explaining what the only real concerns I have seen is the "Firefox studies" being used to quote unquote "install adware", such as the Firefox Mr robot ad campaign and then something recently about the weather channel. Other examples include pocket integration and maybe supporting the video DRM thing

But as for completely not trusting Firefox I have a hard time understanding the reason behind it. Waterfox / ice weasel got it's start because the hardcore OSS purists were upset that Mozilla wanted the Firefox IP to not be completely open source , which is it's right to do, so they just shipped a different png and called it ice weasel.

s�d Jul 29, 2023

@nitrofurano @bladecoder Firefox DRM is opt in and you can permanently disable it

[moved] stereo griever Jul 29, 2023

@pl @nitrofurano @bladecoder that on desktop, and on Android, if you have F-Droid, use Fennec (fork with a little amount of patches, fast-tracking to upstream)

nitrofurano Jul 29, 2023

@selfisekai @pl @bladecoder thanks!

Gourd Jul 29, 2023

@selfisekai @pl @nitrofurano @bladecoder Fennec F-Droid also has arbitrary extension support in a stable release! (Standard Android Firefox only allows extensions from a supported list by Mozilla in stable, and arbitrary extensions in Beta.)

You have to do a weird thing called a Custom Collection to make extensions available to it then, but it'll support 95% of Firefox extensions then. (Some will have UI weirdness on phone.)

uhmmm Jul 30, 2023

@selfisekai @pl @nitrofurano @bladecoder

Thanks !

I didn't understand what the heck Fennec was !

nitrofurano Jul 29, 2023

@pl @bladecoder one of the problems is that is turned on by default, and the other one is that they started on implementing it - and how easily we will be able to disable it in the next versions?

s�d Jul 29, 2023

@nitrofurano are you annoyed by the code being bundled or activated? Firefox for me on Android asks for consent to actually load DRM content

nitrofurano Jul 29, 2023

@pl both, actually!!! xD

m0xEE Jul 29, 2023

@nitrofurano
That's exactly what it is about — the defaults. My FF has all telemetry, WebP and VP9 disabled. Has all the necessary exts: uBO, LibRedirect, DecentralEyes, ForgetMeNot and Privacy Possum + a few others I like. And its UI is *heavily* tweaked. I doubt it's any different from LIbreWolf at this point. But were I starting afresh, I'd probably go with LibreWolf because saner defaults make sense.
@pl @bladecoder

m0xEE Jul 29, 2023

@nitrofurano
One more thing: you get security updates earlier with base FF, forks take some time at least for the patches to get rebased and to get built for all platforms — but I'm pretty sure it doesn't take a great deal of time 🤷
@pl @bladecoder

@nitrofurano Why should I disable WebP and VP9?

🚲 🇳🇱Jul 30, 2023

@tealcows @nitrofurano @m0xee I’m confused about this as well

nitrofurano Jul 30, 2023

@lil5 @tealcows i was thinking webp was just a format, not that obscure - i saw that it took a long while for a gimp and imagemagick support... :S

@nitrofurano @bladecoder LibreWolf. https://librewolf.net/

LibreWolf Browser

A custom version of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom.

nitrofurano Jul 29, 2023

@governa @bladecoder thanks!

nitrofurano Jul 29, 2023

@governa @bladecoder trying it now, seems to be a good one - i needed to do this anyway... https://leafandcore.com/2021/06/02/firefox-gets-major-redesign-and-how-to-fix-those-huge-tabs/

Firefox Gets Major Redesign (and How to Fix Those Huge Tabs) - Leaf&Core

There's a new Firefox in town and it's well, it's just an improvement on the old Firefox design. However, in pre-production, it was referred to as

Leaf&Core

Avoid the Hack!

@bladecoder Waterfox keeps up with upstream Firefox patches. Only Waterfox classic is based on the older Firefox source code.

Kiudecan Oct 30, 2023

@nitrofurano
Used to use Waterfox for years. I stopped however as some weird thingies keep happening behind the scene. Top o f my head, it was bought out by some capitalist investor trying to juice money out of it.. not very libre and opesource spirit..
@bladecoder

nitrofurano Oct 30, 2023

@kiudecan @bladecoder and what about librewolf? (i'm using it now)

@nitrofurano @kiudecan It's based on Firefox so yes it's good

Waterluvian Jul 28, 2023

@bladecoder I find this to still be, sadly, very untrue for high performance Canvas use cases.

Specifically when doing a lot of raster work with the 2D context.

I know I’m not bringing the reciepts here. I’ll see if I can put together a public facing example.

@waterluvian I'm sure there are still corner cases where performance could be improved.
What's important is that it's fast enough for most end users to move away from Chrome without regrets.

Waterluvian Jul 28, 2023

@bladecoder I somewhat agree. But from a UX point of view, it just takes a couple cases of “this website is weirdly janky” for the common user to discount Firefox.

@waterluvian Unfortunately more and more web developers optimize for Chrome and Safari and don't test their work in Firefox anymore, making it easier for people to dismiss Firefox when something doesn't work. Mentalities must change.
Let's keep Firefox alive and make it the cool choice again!

Waterluvian Jul 28, 2023

@bladecoder At work I’ve managed to get everyone over to Firefox by treating it as the primary target for all internal tooling my team develops, making it a requirement for all company laptops. Bit by bit we’ll liberate everyone!

eklem Jul 28, 2023

@bladecoder I'm waiting for Mozilla to figure out that Firefox needs to do installable PWAs on the desktop too. Not just phone. So it's Vivaldi now.

Oliver Conzen Jul 30, 2023

@eklem @bladecoder I am confused. Isn’t Vivaldi Chromium based?

eklem Jul 30, 2023

@miladiir @bladecoder Yes it is. For me it's the best choice when Firefox is not an alternative.

Yora Jul 28, 2023

@bladecoder And of course, you're not dealing with Google.

@Yora My relationship with Google is complicated since I'm an Android developer... At least I'm sure I don't want them tracking my browser or feeding me ads.

Medea Vanamonde🏳️‍⚧️ ♀Jul 28, 2023

@bladecoder NetScape lives!

Kancept Jul 29, 2023

@bladecoder I never left Firefox, so win win.

nunux Jul 29, 2023

@bladecoder
From @davidrevoy

slamp Jul 29, 2023

@bladecoder Is there a recent benchmark available between #firefox and #chrome ?

@slamp These stats from speedometer made the headlines lately:
https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?highlightAlerts=1&highlightChangelogData=1&highlightCommonAlerts=0&series=mozilla-central,3735773,1,13&series=mozilla-central,3412459,1,13&timerange=31536000&zoom=1658147734710,1689995242473,75.78916106949023,217.12296299642983
Benchmarks are still biased in general, Chrome is optimized to win some benchmarks which is not indicative of real-life performance.

Treeherder

Laura 🐸Jul 29, 2023

@bladecoder @slamp I don't agree Firefox is faster, I use Firefox daily with adblockers etc and with the same set of extensions on Ungoogled chromium I find myself having a much smoother experience, on Fedora Linux.

I still use Firefox as my main browser because it's better packaged for Fedora.

I would like to use Librewolf as a Firefox alternative because Firefox has lots of undesirable things built in, but Librewolf has been stubborn with hardware acceleration so I still use Firefox.

@lle_bout @slamp I didn't know about ungoogled Chromium, I may give it a try as secondary browser. Makes me wonder how much of the Google stuff is still present in all those Chromium-based browsers.

Laura 🐸Jul 29, 2023

@bladecoder @slamp Google or not, I think Chromium engine, v8 javascript engine, blink web engine, are more efficient than Firefox's, for good or bad reasons I don't know, but Google has so many engineers to work on this stuff, and performance, so..

Firefox on Android is also so bad in terms of load times, I often wait multiple seconds for pages to load. On Chromium-based it's much smoother, but also no extensions which is why I still use Firefox. I wish so much Firefox would be faster there.

@lle_bout @slamp Some components like v8 are definitely faster but I don't think it matters that much overall. Also Firefox has very good wasm performance

Laura 🐸Jul 29, 2023

@bladecoder @slamp Realistically WASM is a very very small percentage of the web so it being fast is a good thing but practically what matters for smoother experience is HTML render performance and JavaScript execution latency performance

Laura 🐸Jul 29, 2023

@bladecoder @slamp Also if I open too many tabs (60-80) without paying attention Firefox makes my 16GB laptop with 8GB compressed swap run out of memory on its own and crash to oblivion which is not a good experience. I don't know about ungoogled-chromium since I don't use ungoogled-chromium as much. I wish Fedora Linux or Linux in general had better OOM handling that actually work.

Justified Ancient of Moomin Jul 29, 2023

@bladecoder @jpm and it has been this way for years! Firefox 57 (Quantum) came out in late 2017 and has been wiping the floor with Chrome ever since on performance metrics

RobCornelius Jul 29, 2023

I have to use Chrome for work....

*sigh*Ber nard Jul 29, 2023

@bladecoder pivoted to the LibreWolf fork. Lot less things to tweak on install (e.g. disable Pocket, reporting,...)
Crazy ass setup with uBlock/uMatrix, Containers, temp containers, Cookie Autodelete, ...
I may be a bit deep on the security/convenience balance

@brnrd As long as you're happy with it, it's still Firefox 👍

Hawkwinter :firefish:Jul 29, 2023

- Firefox uses less memory than ChromeIs this true? I switched to firefox a year ago, it seems to be constantly guzzling all my ram. So much so that sometimes it crashes and my video card glitches out and all three screens go blank (one goes magenta) for like 10 seconds.

It's been a major nuisance. Can't seem to run anything else with firefox open.
Maybe a reinstall will fix that.

komrade@mastodon ~ %Jul 31, 2023

@Hawkwinter @bladecoder that’s sounds more like a problem with your machine then with a single app

Hawkwinter :firefish:Jul 31, 2023

@coffeekomrade @bladecoder

Hmm. Maybe so. It only seems to happen when I'm running firefox and then try to run photoshop or blender or some other piece of resource-intensive software at the same time, and I didn't notice it happening back before I switched from Brave. I was thinking FF had an annoying memory leak or something, and have been mitigating it by trying to limit the number of tabs I have open (I can get carried away and have a couple hundred open sometimes if I'm not vigilant), and also restarting Firefox frequently.

But it could also be a system issue of some kind. I don't really want to format and reinstall. But I might if the issue persists and reinstalling firefox doesn't help.

Adolfo Neto Jul 29, 2023

@bladecoder Firefox doesn't work as well as Chrome with Google Meet and StreamYard.

@adolfont For Google Meet I'm not surprised

Adolfo Neto Jul 29, 2023

@bladecoder Unfortunately Google Meet has a partnership with my university that allows me to record meetings.