from Hacker News

Our Year in Review: How We’ve Made Firefox Faster in 2020

by bhaile on 12/15/20, 5:59 PM with 19 comments

  • by sopromo on 12/16/20, 10:05 AM

    > The new Firefox for Android that launched in August loads pages 20 percent faster than at the start of the year making it the fastest Firefox browser ever on Android.

    But messes up video experience when going full screen, dropped support for almost all extensions without warning, sometimes I have to restart the app because it freezes, header sometimes doesn't show up when scrolling up and ux is not quite there yet.

    I had to downgrade the android app version and don't even get me started on my experience with Firefox on Ubuntu (random crashes, sometimes I can't close tabs or open them, I keep hearing audio from a tab I already closed and some more).

    I really love the product and I hope the Firefox teams makes it better.

    Sorry for the rant.

  • by xnyan on 12/16/20, 5:10 AM

    I recently became a developer for a terrible no good platform that I shouldn’t name (ServiceNow). It’s bad in ways you can’t even understand unless you develop for it. I want to use Firefox for all kinds of reasons, only problem is chromium is an order of magnitude faster working with their shitty javascript. I truly wish it was not so, but if I want to go home to my family as soon as possible, it’a chrome/edge. FF introduces too much lag.

  • by SanchoPanda on 12/16/20, 8:56 AM

    But most importantly, search keywords now become blue on activation. I am unreasonably pleased with this improvement.

  • by Epskampie on 12/16/20, 8:03 AM

    I’ve found that firefox has become quite slow on X11 on linux, can anyone suggest some fixes? Can’t switch to wayland because of nvidia.

    On windows it’s solid however!

    Edit: just saw this in the release notes for 84: “ Additionally we'll ship an accelerated rendering pipeline for Linux/GNOME/X11 users for the first time, ever!”

    Fingers crossed, gonna check it right away!

  • by yangvz on 12/17/20, 9:50 AM

    "We did it by making it slower in 2019, then bring it back to the original speed in 2020."

  • by anentropic on 12/16/20, 1:37 PM

    If only they would fix the font rendering

    Particularly small point sizes seem lumpy and not anti-aliased correctly

    (on macOS)

  • by backing on 12/16/20, 1:00 AM

    I didn't experience faster Firefox on: high end desktop, laptop, mobile. UI changed, promotion of features like Pocket that I don't use. But not performance. Chromium is still faster in everything sadly.