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Firefox Got Faster for Real Users in 2023
(hacks.mozilla.org)
Firefox: uses telemetry to improve performance
Lemmybrains:
Most loud mouth opensource/privacy enthusiasts:
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Never contribute anything to any project
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Gets triggered and repeats regurgitated stuff every time "tracking/ad" is mentioned even when they are anonymous and have valid use cases
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Has no solutions to any problems, just buzzwords
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Always complain on open source projects for being shit
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Wants someone else to work for free to fix their annoyances
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Wants feature parity and more with commercial alternatives
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Rinse and repeat
there's got to be some way to make embeds not oversized
But what about us posers?
No brum brum for you
Mines faster because .. noscript
I haven't used noscript in a long time, but it is the only way I feel truly safe on the internet.
That said, I would never recommend it to the average non-technical user.
Average user, I would direct to uBlock Origin (make sure it is Origin, from gorhill or raymond hill, preferably from the extensions shop for your browser with lots of ratings).
For anyone inbetween uBlock Origin and noscript in techinical skill, I would recommend uBlock Origin + uMatrix (from the same developer). Has a small learning curve, but provides decent protection from 3rd party sites.
If you want protection from first party sites though... noscript all the way.
How about privacy badger for non technical users? Heard about it couple of times.
I know nothing about it. I know there are a group of extensions people generally use, and I feel like I've heard that name.
I stick with what I know and trust reputation wise. uBlock Origin is known and trusted far and wide, and any technical community should have at least heard of it.
NoScript back in the day was pretty well known, but I don't think it is so well known now days; in large part because until you configure it for each site you visit, it makes every site unusable... the number of websites that don't make use of javascript for some critical site functionality are almost 0 nowdays. It just cannot be recommended to any non-technical user; they might figure it out, but it is so frustrating for every site you visit to require configuration.
uMatrix died years ago since you can do the same things in uBlock & the result is easier to share.
I use uBlock in allowlist mode for JavaScript. The number of SPAs that shouldn’t be as well as zero effort put into a basic, semantic noscript to at minimum say what the script will do & remind to allow JS is pretty gross tho. Web developers need to do better.
people keep saying you can do the same thing in ublock as in umatrix but the UI is completely different and not nearly as intuitive and I don't nearly have as granular control as I had in umatrix
I won't disagree that uMatrix wasn’t a clearer UI for what it was doing but, a) it’s (IIRC) not as granular just blocking per domain & b) it’s mare difficult to share your settings with others. If you go thru the more obnoxious process of uBlock Origin of looking thru its request log window, you’ll have a plaintext file that easy to host for others to share or to contribute to a larger filter list project.
Because of this, I now maintain a public filter list I know some folks subscribe to, github-less-social. Now others can use or pitch in to a project where others don’t want to see Microsoft GitHub’s social features or product upsells when interacting with code projects that don’t respect the freedom of their users/contributors by forcing them into a Microsoft ecosystem.
It's a shame the mobile firefox is such a flaming turd in comparison. Can't imagine using anything else on desktop bit they made me switch to cromite. And the devs gaslight you if you complain about the degenerate ui issues on firefox mobile. I wish there was firefox sync for chromite
It's really not that bad. I've been using it for years, it's fine... Plus you can use an adblocker and dark reader.
Been using firefox for at least 3 years (forever on desktop). Try cromite and see, you get all of the same stuff except it's really fast. No idea why, loading times and all are pretty much the same, but the UI is responsive and doesn't get in the way. I want to use ff but it makes me want to break my phone
On Android Firefox is great.
- Performance is good
- you can choose between bottom or top navigation
- pull to refresh (needs to be enabled in the settings)
- swipe to change tabs
- extensions
Can handle my more than 100 open tabs quite well.
Performance is not good at all. I have a 120hz phone now and scrolling feels like Firefox is still on 60hz. Settings and the like are perfectly smooth tho, so it's not actually only rendering at 60hz, it's just rendering webpages so slowly that it can't keep up with my screens refresh rate.
Feature-wise Firefox is way better than Chrome on mobile but performance is just horrible. Firefox also looks a little dated on mobile by now, especially compared to Chrome but that's not a deal breaker. Would be nice if they adopted Material Design 3 tho.
No, sadly performance is not good. With less installed addons and no opened tabs it takes more time to start up than the old version, which had a few dozen opened tabs opened and more addons.
It also lags quite a lot while in use after startup.
If you dont mind updating manually Icraven is a pretty good port. It's on GitHub but they are working on a Fdroid release
You can use ffupdater to get updates of various FF forks, including Iceraven, and other browsers.
Thanks, that's neat!
There's also Obtainium, which might be better to use if you need to update other stuff aside from browsers, that's not on F-Droid. Better to have just one of them running in the background instead of both if them.
never thought a firefox fork to be faster than chrome in android
It's not good, developer has no guarantee for updates and the app is notably left outdated for months.
That's literally not true in the slightest. I've had at least two updates in the past month.
friend i've been tracking that browser from 2 years now and it really has a bad update cycle, i gave up on that browser due to same reason.
"Gave up on" and "tracking for 2 years now" in the same sentence...you're sending mixed messages.
English is not my primary language, it's still raw pardon it convyed certain message that i basically don't use that browser anymore due to updates even the developer agrees on this.
Thanks will try it. And I try to use obtanium, it's really good for this kind of stuff, checks and downloads fr github
Edit: tried it, it's faster it seems. But it has the same problem as the regular ff - if there is a firefox purple notification on the screen the rest of the ui is locked. You can swipe, sure, but for some reason this is infuriating
Iceraven is faster than vanilla FF, but updates are slow, this can hurt your security
I've noticed updates getting a lot more frequent. I hope they can keep this upand grow their user base.
Yeah, I'm on their github page rn, and I see that, last time I used it, updates took months to arrive.. Now it's just a week or two 👍
Mull browser for android is really good especially with uBlock origin
Telemetry is how we got here origanlly... These companies broke the trust, I don't share shit.
Nothing against FF has been using since before faceberg. But I use forks now since telemetry is a no no spot got me
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
381 points (98.2% liked)
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