Firefox stays winning.
Whatever happened to Netscape?
For all the jokes people made at the expense of AOL that is actually extremely based.
- Show
Netscape was the sacrifice for Firefox. In the before times, there was the problem of slow and bloated browsers before memory was plentiful (and easy to download😉) so Mozilla created Phoenix which was a lightweight no frills browser that crashed every time I tried to open a jpeg with it, but other than that it was awesome and so much faster than IE or Netscape. Then due to a lawsuit, or threat of one, they changed the name to Firefox which stayed winning until about 3.5 when Chrome started really taking over in speed and abilities. :abe-simpson:
eh, netscape 4.7 was an incredibly fast and stable browser IIRC. but it was being left behind in the features department.
then the next netscape they released was called mozilla (and was a huge rewrite), which had all the features but was dog-slow.
THEN they released phoenix/firefox, which was somehow mozilla but not quite, and that was faster (but still nowhere as fast as netscape 4.7).
that's how i remember it.
Firefox ftw.
but you're missing Gamer Chrome (OperaGX), which is very sad
I've been using "Not Chrome" for 20 years and I'm not changing anytime soon. Always has been reliable for me. Though I wish they didn't change their icon.
Firefox is best unless you have 224,538 tabs open. Or so I've heard.
I checked yesterday and my extensions were also taking up 1.3 GB of ram. I think one has a memory leak or some shit but idk which. Firefox just takes forever to launch for me and after a couple days of running it goes to a crawl.
E: thanks everyone for trying to help me btw E2: I might be an idiot. I think it might have been the amazing 2 GB of cached data I just deleted.
As someone with literally 1.5 thousand open tabs - Firefox is way better than Chrome. Launches in ~10 seconds. Both use insane memory honestly, a few gigs, but that's modern internet for you.
We expect better tab hygiene than that in the worker's commune, comrade.
In the revolution, just as every comrade plays a part in the march towards a brighter future, so too do my 1,500 tabs form a robust vanguard of knowledge and productivity.. probably.
I mean hey at least like 20% of them I need and will one day get to.
It takes like ten minutes for FF to load for me and I really don't know why.
Hard drive? Firefox loads in under a second on all of my machines, including a nine-year-old desktop and a raspberry pi that’s running off’a SD card. Actually, the pi takes between 1-2 seconds.
Just checked and it's installed in /user/bin which is my SSD. But that is just the binary. My SSD isn't exactly new or that fast but still.
Strange! My SSDs on my old machines are old as shit hahaha.
Would reinstalling and creating a new profile help, I wonder?
So I did check my cached data and it was almost 2 GB. I deleted it and it's running a lot faster now. The reason I never considered that is because I thought that in 2024, deleting browser cache wasn't really needed anymore.
Weird, I’ve never had to do that! Maybe just a weird fuckup on* the program’s side? Stranger things have happened, I suppose!
My partner’s Firefox is firefucked—some sites are just all black, some load super weird, some are unreadable. We know it’s the profile but have been too lazy to fix it… for over a year now. I feel like it’d be easy to fix. New profile, save the bookmarks, done. Yet here we are, using it all fucked up. Netflix and Twitch just crash if we’re not in a private window hahaha.
Dang, that is rough. My dumbass wouldn't have thought to backup my bookmarks but I really hope they are actually saved to my account. I have a lot. Hope y'all get it fixed soon. And lol @ "firefucked"!
Thank you, friend! We don’t use accounts so we’ll have to back up locally. Eventually we’ll fix this! I don’t understand how theirs is so fucked when my 8yo local profile isn’t?
Firefox isn’t perfect but I quit google and also I’m a bit of a furry fuck so it’s all I got, and it’s always been good to me!
I also hope your bookmarks are backed up!
I think my bookmarks are tied to my account. I can access my desktop browser ones from my phone. I have had a weird bookmark duplication glitch plague me though. It's just a mess all the way down.
Your personal Firefox profile is located in your home folder though. Is that on an SSD too?
My binary is on my SSD and I guess my profile is on my 2TB dedicated HDD for my /Home.
I don't know what you mean, I have more tabs than that open and they unload if I haven't opened them in awhile. memory usage doesn't scale with number of tabs. I think your extensions are bugged.
I wish I could see what extension is taking up what ram allocation but FF's task manager just have a listing for "extensions" and that was when I found out that after a long time it goes up to 1.3 GB from like a normal 300 MB. I think at the end of the day I'm gonna just need to play extension roulette and see if I can find which one it might be. But it literally takes 10 minutes to load FF on startup.
extensions can each have a performance impact that adds up, so it can be good to turn off any uncommonly used or redundant ones. like having multiple ad blockers installed doesn't block the ads twice as hard, it just means they each have to run on every page
When I transitioned to Firefox from Chrome, I did so in large part because it at least was better at managing 224,538 open tabs. At the very least at the time, it seems that Chrome held all of the information about the tabs in RAM.
Firefox is the best, but I noticed Edge is more snappy at loading pages. Especially if its a page with a lot of images. But Edge is for libs, so I don't use it.
The conspiratorial side of me wants to believe that websites are coded to perform poorly when a non-Chrome browser is using them, in order to get people to switch to Chrome or Edge or whatever. Like the site detects the User Agent as "Firefox" and lowers its download speed.
websites are coded to perform poorly when a non-Chrome browser is using them
many of them basically are, but not intentionally. a lot of web developers only test in Chrome, and Chrome does some really weird shit (especially with JS and CSS) that means if you target Chrome you’re passively degrading the experience for not-Chrome.
I personally develop my code targeting Firefox or Safari most of the time, since both work a lot closer to spec with JS and CSS than Chrome does.
There's circumstantial evidence that most of google's sites degrade performance intentionally.
And plenty of sites try to stop you with a "only works on chrome" message, but work perfectly fine if you just spoof your browser string to look like you're using chrome.
For me, when I use FF in private mode or troubleshooting mode, it's snappy as fuck so it's all on me lol. I'm running a dark mode extension that does client side rerenderimg on page load which is pretty heavy but like I also have 32GB of ram to use.
After a ton of testing I can't really tell if it's too many tabs or too many extensions. I have a leaky habit of leaving tabs open because what if I need it later? And like right now I'm building a theme for AstroJS so I have like 12 tabs open just for that. I also have like 8 pinned tabs for my most used sites like proton, Gmail, reddit, Hexbear, SoundCloud, etc. I think it's mostly just my bad browsing habits.
I like to be as FOSS as possible so FF isn't going away for me any time soon.
You can go to
about:profilesand then relaunch the web browser with all add ons disabled to see if that changes things up for you. Though I imagine browsing the web without uBlock Origin on is its own special hell.I have wondered if it is my uBO that is making things load so slow. But don't Donna get rid of it because special hell like you said. I use the most popular dark mode extension. And people have reported that that one can slow down but I cant imagine it would slow down this bad.
I just ran it without extensions and it's the same. Only thing I can really think is the amount of tabs. I can go to a private tab, and basically any sites loads instantly.
You may not need all those tabs. Create a new profile and roll with it, you can always launch the old profile if you need something from the old tabs.
How did this happen? Didn’t different browsers used to be, like, different?
10-15 years ago cross-browser javascript and rendering compatibility was a nightmare for web developers and chromium was free, popular/winning, and legitimately very good so it made sense to standardize on it rather than independently develop inferior engines
but now that it monopolizes internet browsing of course it has started to bloat and suck. let a hundred browser engines bloom
also i would argue that not enough was done to oppose scope creep in web standards. i don't agree that your web browser should be a platform for complicated applications that do more than deliver content and receive posts. even flash was a bridge too far.
They said they weren't evil! Who were we to know they'd lie about it, what are they, the Chinese?? This is just like communism
I channeled a redditor for this comment
make sure you perform a thorough banishing to get that spirit out of your head
don't worry I just thought too many thoughts about how china stay winning and it fled in a seething rage
the power of socialism with chinese characteristics knows no bounds
Here's a quote from the Wikipedia page:
In 2016, Opera was acquired by an investment group led by a Chinese consortium, the consortium included several Chinese companies such as Kunlun Tech and Qihoo 360.
Android Not Chrome would always make my entire phone freeze, apparently many people have that issue. I haven't had that problem with Android Chinese Chrome so far.
But Not Chrome is still the best by far on computer of course.
I love Android Not Chrome. You can install uBlock Origin on it, which kicks ass
Apparently there are pretty big security problems with it?
I just learned this like last week, but haven't had the will to leave.
what security issues? genuinely curious, I no longer use it but havent heard anything particularly out of ordinary
I know it used to have a certain reputation/one specific issue but that's been fixed for years
Per site isolation
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/mobile-browsers/#recommended-brave-configuration
yeah but if you do some googling, it seems they actually did add such isolation in the past couple years. Though from what I read, the isolation still isnt as good as chromium's, its not fair to say they don't have it
Yes I use it on my tablet and it works great, but it breaks my phone for some reason.
I had times where the android Not Chrome would freeze on my phone. I turned off an extension that adds a panel for more buttons and the freezes disappeared. Idk if this will be relevant to your problem since it's your whole phone that froze but maybe you're using some problematic extensions or you may have had some settings that caused it.
Yeah I can try that. Hopefully it's not uBlock thats causing the freezing because I can browse without an adblocker.
if you have to use a chrome, crypto chrome has very good ad and tracker blocking built in at least. you can turn off the crypto nonsense
Meh, it's just Firefox with a config applied out of the box and some new branding. They don't really patch anything of importance out of Firefox, pretty much all of their patches are just changes for their branding/styling.
You can find the config that comes out of the box here: https://codeberg.org/librewolf/settings/src/branch/master/librewolf.cfg which appears to just be https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/blob/master/user.js with a couple of extra things added like Brave's query stripping list.
Librewolf also avoids adding AI bullshit that firefox is planning :)))
Which you will most likely be able to disable with a
policy.jsonjust like Librewolf does with Pocket and other Mozilla services. I personally rather just build Firefox from Mozilla's sources and use my own configuration rather than having to put trust into some third-party to do that for me. Though I understand that is definitely not everyone's cup of tea, so I guess Librewolf is good enough for the majority of people. Though I'd be weary because a lot of the settings Librewolf enables (namely the things underprivacy.resistFingerprinting) break a lot of websites which some people may not want to deal with. In that case, I'd just take Arkenfox's configuration and remove all that stuff from it and call it a day.
Not in the slightest. I actually use Safari over Chrome, that’s how sick I am of it.
Would be funny if it was, but it is a different engine than both chrome and firefox.
I actually didn’t know that, good to know that chrome is actually safari.
Firefox is more like Chrome’s little sibling, tagging along and going to all the same places. I wish it would grow up and decide for itself where to go and how to get there. I’m hopeful with the Manifest V3 resistance that this is changing.
It doesn't really have a choice, unfortunately. Any little way that Firefox deviates from Chrome basically just breaks stuff, because Google have successfully forced through their will about every web standard ever.
that's kind of the point of a standard. the problem is when a single stakeholder has such outsize influence.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
