Shame YouTube and other sites are completely fucked on Firefox.
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.
Yeah especially with user agent switcher google services run fine if needed
I wouldn’t say “completely fucked”, but for a few years I noticed YouTube on Firefox has this occasional quirk where videos will quit playing and infinitely buffer at the exact same timestamp. Like there’s no way around it except skipping about 30 seconds ahead with the seek bar, or doing a Ctrl-F5 (hard refresh) and starting the whole video over. Opera GX doesn’t seem to have this problem at all.
But it’s still not a big enough deal to make me give up Firefox completely.
Wym? Youtube works just fine for me with uBlock Origin. Very rarely there’s some wonkiness but nothing unbearable.
I’ve got uBlock and Privacy Badger but turning them off or going incognito doesn’t help at all. The most common issue I get with YouTube is the video keeps freezing. Apparently this is because Google deliberately fuck it so that other browsers have to play catch up constantly. I have heard this is why Microsoft gave up and adopted Chromium.
The other issue is that if I open more than one YouTube tab my laptop sounds like it is about to take off into space. I can have an unlimited number of tabs from any other website open though.
Sounds to me like some hardware issue, I’ve literally never experienced any of this in the last 5 years on Firefox. My guess is considering it works fine with other browsers the graphics drivers are a bit wonky, or maybe Firefox is falling back to software rendering for some reason. Are you using Linux or Windows?
Are you using Linux or Windows?
Mac
Strange, usually things just work there considering the limited hardware variety. Is it an older Mac? I’m typing this on an M2 macbook and it works perfectly.
Anyway try to dig into the config and check if you’re using hardware rendering: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Firefox_Hardware_acceleration
If it turns out you’re using software rendering try forcing hardware rendering on: https://jamcity.helpshift.com/hc/en/6-genies-and-gems/faq/5737-how-do-i-enable-hardware-acceleration-on-my-browser/
Mfw when plebs are still using GUI browsers while I use Lynx.
w3m with framebuffer image support, my man.
Pfhh images. Back in my dad we had ASCII art. And we liked it!
Always gonna note too that Google Chrome (and chromium + derivatives to a lesser extent) kneecaps adblock plugins so that up to 50% fewer ad domains are blocked, blocklists are out of date, many in-page ads can’t be caught, it’s slower, and invisible trackers can bypass it.
Maybe not the best image to use. Sheep bleating on about Firefox.
pretty sure thats a goat. rugged, contrary and independent. one might even say… the Greatest Of All Time.
I’ve switched to Firefox but there’s definitely a few things that irritate me about it.
First thing is when I boot up my computer, launch Firefox, it launches long enough for me to click a bookmark then closes to perform an update. And then doesn’t automatically reopen…
I also have it set to not “remember” my tabs after closing. Yet when I launch Firefox for the first time after rebooting or closing ally tabs, it gives me a “hmm… we’re having a hard time finding your previous session” message. Uh, yeah, I told you not to look for it… can I just have the regular “new tab” page?
It also might just be because I’m used to chrome, but I feel the mobile app is severely lacking. I hate that I can’t access my bookmarks directly from the new tab page, and that the tablet version doesn’t show you your bookmark bar. The synchronization between mobile and desktop isn’t great either, I’ll have a very long specific search query that I’ve used multiple times on my phone, yet it doesn’t offer it for auto-complete on desktop, I have to search the entire term again or go digging through my history. When you’re searching long model numbers and the like, this is incredibly frustrating.
Finally, and I don’t know if this is a Firefox issue, but there’s some memory leak that occurs when viewing a webcam stream from my raspberry pi that only has happened in Firefox. The first time I noticed it happening my PC slowed to a crawl, when task manager finally opened Firefox was taking 23GB of RAM. So I have to use chrome to keep that steam open for more than a few minutes at a time.
This might be fixed on Firefox nightly
Lol the webcam thing hanned to me too.
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)
Firefox auto updates itself by default I’ve found
They’re probably on windows
That has a background update service. It’ll only immediately kick you out for serious security updates. Unless you f’ed with the configuration.
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I haven’t experienced that. What is the use-case that makes this happen? I have one machine with only 8 gig and firefox is fine, and a 16 and 32 gig machine, firefox has never eaten 8 gigs
I have a VPS with 1 GB of RAM and Firefox with up to 3 tabs is fine. OK, it’s running Linux maybe FF on Windows is worse.
What they mean is “I use woefully malformed websites loaded up with all sorts of weird shit that eats ram on the regular, and somehow that’s my browser’s fault”
chrome used to be good. Emphasis on the past tense.
Firefox was always good. Chrome was very briefly better. Firefox has not suffered enshittification like chrome did.
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 don’t know what rock you’ve been living under where you think base Firefox wasn’t ever improved
It’s all telemetry so the advertising company that made Chrome can harvest your data for resale at bargain bin prices
Yes, but not neccesary other Chromium do it, that depends only on the corresponding devs. Chrome is a RAM and Data Hog, because use for every tab a own process, but Vivaldi Hibernate the background tabs and because of this use less RAM than other Chromium and even FF. But generally all US browsers send data to Alphabet, googleanalytics and googletagmanager, except Edge (also Chromium), but in change it sends data to other MS partners which are even worst (Towerdata). I use Vivaldi for this, because it’s the only existing EU browser (after the French UR browser died some years ago) maybe apart Konqueror from KDE (Linux only, KHTML or KDE WEBKit engine), no data for third parties, nor Google, despite the Chromium base. The Browser companies are the problem, not the engine which they use.
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.
It used to take firefox ages to open. I switched back after the big update in the mid 2010s that made it good again.
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If you’re switching a couple extensions are uBlock origin and no script with Firefox, prevents most ads and lets you choose which hosts to accept JavaScript from temporarily or permanently.
Do you need noscript if you have ublock?
You can use the advanced mode of ublock to replace noscript too
yes, noscript blocks all javascript from running unless allowed, while ublock just blocks ads and trackers to my knowledge.
Would noscript allow you to block things like when a site packs your history with their website making it impossible to back out to the page you came from? How does it work considering so many sites now are built with JavaScript libraries like React?
I dunno about the history but single page apps like react apps you can just accept the JS from the actual host in the address bar and leave all the rest turned off. Just tested on twitch. Accepting no JS loaded the home page and a spinner gif after selecting a stream. Accepted just twitch.tv and I could see the video stream and chat without having to accept any of the other hosts blocked.
Rad. Thank you. Working on my switch to Firefox today. Between this noscript stuff and learning about styling Firefox with CSS I’m absolutely sold on the switch and no longer dread the process of ditching Chrome (mostly due to familiarity than anything else).
Thanks for the info!
You can set uBlock to disable/enable JavaScript per site too, as per wiki page.
interesting, good to know!
noscript is your web condom. I will not touch a page without it.
Mouse gestures is the killer-app for me on Firefox. Hate surfing without it.
P.S. Do wish Firefox had tab groups tho.
Surely there is an add on for that
Firefox add-on for Tab Groups? I looked and couldn’t find one. At some point they appeared to try to support tab groups, but gave up? I dunno. I’ve only used Chrome a little. I don’t personally care for Chrome, but I found the tab groups useful.
I just searched “tab groups Firefox” and found results saying it has them. No idea as I wasn’t able to find relevant settings last time I tried on a PC. Mobile just now I tried adding tabs to a collection, but it doesn’t look like it did anything
Thanks, but I tried a few weeks back to get tab groups working for Firefox on MacOS. No joy.
Hope someone else chimes in on how to do this. I typically have hundreds of tabs open, groups were a godsend
On mobile chrome I have “:D” tabs open which I occasionally go through and cull
I use ghostery to remove the obnoxious cookie popups here in the EU.
Vivaldi has in its inbuild ad/trackerblocker also filters to block cookie popups, no problem with this
Honestly, I’m less worried about the speed and moreso I just don’t like supporting Google’s de facto monopoly of the Web’s infrastructure.
and ads.
ads are awful.
They have ads in Chrome now? Yikes, it’s worse than I thought.
Im’ma be honest. I’ve been using FF for so long that if that’s the case I didn’t even know.
i was talking more about how mobile chrome can’t adblock, so it has ads just not on the app itself, and desktop chrome will soon not be able to effectively
…ew.
Firefox has ads. Very many ads. Out of the box, Firefox sends everything you type into the URL bar to a ‘search provider’. They also place traditional ads in the New Tab page, in the URL area chrome, and in your bookmarks. And probably other places I’m forgetting right now.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-your-default-search-settings-firefox
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I dunno. Using chromium with a little editing, but 90% og chromium is basically the same monopoly.
De-googled chromium works for me.
You can’t truly degoogle chromium without a hard fork. Soft forks are still enabling them and their grip on the web, even if they’re not specifically spying on you in particular.
The Vivaldi team is working hard to gut the Google spyware in Chromium on every update. Because of this only security patches are in realtime, all other updates are 1-2 weeks behind. The rest remains as user choice in the settings (save browsing, Chrome Store (without Vivaldi isn’t even recognized as Chromium), G DNS and little else). Therefore, Vivaldi can be seen a hard fork. No data sended to Google, nor other third party companies (excepting naturally extensions and search engines you use, they can be not so private in any browser, Mullvad also recommend to use less extensions possibles).
Sure it is. Everyone starts trying to be sure things render correctly on Chromium based browsers and nothing else. Next thing you know people say “Wow Chromium based browsers render pages more reliably than everything else” and then you end up somewhere not too differently from where we were heading. Everything that’s not based on Chromium starts getting tossed aside.
They are contributing to Google’s hold over web specs. If Google decides to implement a feature off spec, then website developers will optimise for that implementation because it will be the implementation used by all chromium based browsers. And that leads to worse performance for other browsers with a more correct implementation.
Firefox masterrace
I remember when Chrome was released, all marketing was on how much faster it rendered webpages, I never saw that as an issue, Firefox was fast enough, I tried Chrome for a bit, and hated the UI, I remember being confused as to why everyone loved Chrome suddenly, and frankly, I still am a bit confused by both the sudden shift, and the absolute market dominance by Chrome…
Chrome is very good at running Google’s pages. Even before Google owned YouTube chrome was better at YouTube.
Google bought YouTube in 2006, Chrome was publicly released in 2008, so I believe you are misremembering the events…
Entirely possible, I was pretty busy in my early career back then
The interesting thing is that I was quite certain that I tested it in 2006, but there is zero evidence that that could have happened.
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.
That is a good point, I had not thought about that.
Pretty much my same progression except I’ve come back to LibreWolf instead.
Greetings, fellow LibreWolf user! Hurrah!
I remember being confused as to why everyone loved Chrome suddenly
Because they were still using Explorer before that
Fair, I can see that, I guess my question was more for the people who already had switched to Firefox
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)?
With browsers it added up to a few seconds of difference per day. It was completely preposterous.
Over the years my customized Firefox looks like chrome ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I hated Chrome’s UI so much that I switched from Firefox to Pale Moon when Firefox started the whole Australis design language, and only switched back when the current design was launched
I love Firefox, but I can’t shake the feeling that it is slower on YouTube. My tinfoil hat theory is that Google somehow throttles YouTube on Firefox.
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.
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.
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.
That’s super interesting! I’m not versed enough though, do you have like a tutorial you recommend or should I just Google it?
There’s a bunch of extensions that allow you to switch user-agent easily, I personally use this one, it includes a list of known strings to choose between as well.
And to check that it’s working, there are websites you can go to which will tell you what browser they have detected you are using.
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.
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.
For YouTube on IOS, I use Brave. It does a decent (but not perfect) job of hiding ads on YT.
It’s not tinfoil, they have been caught doing it and they continue to do it. It’s a scumbag company.
How the fuck they haven’t been slapped with an anticompetitive is beyon - oohh right. End stage capitalism
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.
Google Sheets is a mess on FF too. Cell selection is broken af.
Google definitely did extend video loading times on FF a while ago, not sure if they still do it.
I’m pretty sure someone discovered that is true recently, but can’t be assed to try to find it right now.
They used to also use the unreleased version 0 of shadow DOM for building the Polymer UI, which - being a Chrome-only prototype - understandably didn’t work on Firefox, and therefore instead used a really slow Javascript polyfill to render its UI.
I haven’t checked on it lately, but I imagine they must’ve changed at least that by now.
I tried both and the videos played at the same speed for me
Do you use YouTube so much that a small performance difference on a single Site has an influence on your browser choice?
Firefox is good for webpages not web apps
A web app is just a fancy name for a dynamic web page. Change my mind.
That’s a really weird take. Like… what even is the difference supposed to be?
This sounds more like “everything should be as it was back when <insert arbitrary point in time here>! When there were still Webpages, and we were frolicking about the internet! Until
the fire nation attackedWeb apps took over!”What an oddly aggressive take on someone’s opinion
Basically I am saying Firefox is not as performant as chromium when loading JavaScript.
Don’t agree, nothing noticeable for me anyhow. Chrome has the ultimate drawback: being under the control of a monopolistic evil corporation
In general, browser benchmarks seem to often favor Firefox in terms of startup and first interaction timings, and often favor Chrome when it comes to crunching large amounts of data through JavaScript.
I.e. for pages which use small amounts of JavaScript, but call into it quickly after loading, Firefox tends to come out on top. But for pages which load lots of JavaScript and then run it constantly, Chrome tends to come out on top.We’re usually talking milliseconds-level of difference here though. So if you’re using a mobile browser or a low-power laptop, then the difference is often not measurable at all, unless the page is specifically optimized for one or the other.
Well, Google will probably optimize their shit for their own
privacy invasion sniffing toolbrowser twice as hard as for Firefox and such
does anyone recommend any Firefox alternatives? I genuinely hate Firefox’s UI and keybinds and the scrolling tabs
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.
Tab groups and non-independent tab muting (seems like it was domain-specific rather than tab-specific last I tried) are the two main things that kept me from switching back to FF as my primary browser (still use it for DTA, for example, but DTA got a big nerf back during the major extension overhaul, so that was a letdown). Tried some extensions, but none really worked in a way I considered usable and didn’t want to just keep trial and erroring through them given I already have a browser that functionally meets my needs, even if I’d rather not be using a chromium browser.
If native tab groups work well enough, I’ll probably give it another chance.
That we all need something like tab muting really shows that the internet has gone to shit.
I sometimes just need to mute something for a second that I’m otherwise listening to. Or I’m switching between multiple sources, and don’t want like 3 or more playing at the same time… usually all on the same domain. I don’t want to have to actually go to the tab and mute it. I’m frequently muting and unmuting things that way to the point that even if its the only source of sound, I still mute by tab instead of just turning my computer volume off sometimes out of habit, so its a deal breaker.
I think this just says more about the perils of embracing untreated ADHD than the internet itself.
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.tabMinWidthin about:config
FF is doing great. All the have to do now is the Steam strategy. Do nothing and wait for the competition to fuck themselves over.
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.
It seems Mozilla is not immune to the AI hype. I just hope their AI endeavour won’t kill them when the AI hype finally ends.
to be fair they are the only ones i know of putting it to actual good use.
ai itself is not the problem.
Thankfully the AI use is very tame so far, used for stuff like offline alt text generation and offline translation. I’m personally still concerned about copyrights and ethics of the models used, but at least it’s directed towards providing specific features, not a magic cure-all.
I’m more concerned with Mozilla spending its meager resources to chase some fads instead of focusing on improving firefox.
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.
Yeah, it’s been a huge waste of resources trying to reinvent everything.
there are already forks in place if you’re dissatisfied with firefox like librewolf, floorp or the new one from mullvad
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 have been on the firefox train since it was new. I witnessed the rise of Chrome and Chromium, and never really felt the pull, and worried about everyone targeting the same platform. Figured I’d stay on FF until I had no choice. Don’t see myself leaving.
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.
