HN Reader

Firefox is good these days!

Mozilla (despite its issues) is nowhere near as evil as Google and a browser monopoly is good for nobody.

Manifest v2 will stay supported on FF - uBlock will keep working properly.

It's time to switch. If you would rather have a UI like Arc, give Zen a shot! (It's what I use!)

On modern machines I blame websites (and maybe network connections) for being slow and not the browser anymore.

I find that these days the browsers are all about the same performance-wise and it ends up not mattering much. PCs are so fast that it's very rarely the browser that is the bottleneck. Cool that they're still working to keep it snappy though.

I will say mobile is a bit different. I prefer mobile browser to apps when possible so I can have ad-blocking, but some websites run like complete garbage on mobile browser. They're so slow it's almost unusable. I'm almost 100% certain that's not on the browser itself though.

Firefox (and Chromium according to their own blog) might be objectively faster (and hardware is certainly much faster), but getting anything done on websites doesn't feel any faster than 20 years ago. In the end we keep bumping into some form of Wirth's law / Jevons Paradox: both browser and hardware speed gains will be eaten by more abstract web frameworks, more authentication walls, more ads, etc.

Firefox is excellent. I use it exclusively on my mac and am grateful to all the humans who make such great software.

Pleasantly it also has working adblock and using it helps prevent browser monoculture. So that’s nice too.

It seems like battery life is no longer a major difference between browsers now either:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41542413

Best way to improve performance on the web is to install an ad blocker.

This finally convinced me to press the update and restart button. Nice to see that not all commercial software projects tend towards bloat.

OMG the phoronix website is appalling. Reader mode made it tolerable but masked the "next page" link, which just, come on. That link led to a full-screen interstitial ad, at which point nope.

[flagged]

Until Firefox acknowledges and takes serious

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1195654

I refuse to accept it. It served it's purpose to help us defeat IE6. That's it. Now it's useless and needs to die IMO.

Firefox has the worst update process. Idk how they haven’t figured this out yet, but the fact that I regularly get “restart to finish update and continue browsing” when opening new tabs or links is totally unacceptable. Also the fact that it can’t just update in the background and still requires me to manually accept a UAC prompt is crazy. Especially bec sometimes if you don’t accept the prompt… you can’t open Firefox until you allow it to finish updating. So you don’t really have a choice but to update to the latest.

TLDR: "On average Firefox 141 Beta was around 12% faster than the Firefox 120 release from November 2023."