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.
I’m pretty sure someone discovered that is true recently, but can’t be assed to try to find it right now.
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
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 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.
Well, Google will probably optimize their shit for their own
privacy invasion sniffing toolbrowser twice as hard as for Firefox and suchFirefox is good for webpages not web apps
A web app is just a fancy name for a dynamic web page. Change my mind.
Umm yeah? Like I do like access to collaborative software within browser so that’s kind of important.
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.
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.
Steam’s strategy was to be first to market and essentially the only player in the game for a decade, making themselves the default.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
People saying FF is slower: like how much slower? are we taking like 14 millisecond slower? Cause everything seems pretty instantaneous here. Maybe its because i’m old enough to remember DSL and 56k internet, but I think FF os crazy fast and even if Chrome would be 25% faster I wouldn’t switch to evil google for that.
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.
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.
Same as the flavors of Ubuntu are superior to Ubuntu it’s self, the forks of Firefox are better than Firefox it self.
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.
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
Firefox is slower, not because it’s worse, but Gecko is a minority engine in the web (~3-4%) and because of this the most webs are optimized for Blink. That is the only reason and because most current Browsers are using it, a devils circle. The result of leaving Google hands-free for too long and that for 20 years the number of available engines has remained stagnant (3 and some testimonial exotic forks) because it is the most complicated part of a browser. Little can be done now.
Well, Apples WebKit is even worse than Gecko, as a small consolation for FF users.
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.
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
I never really cared that a browser could load a page in 1.5 seconds instead of 1.9… I mean who cares?
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.
The thing is, using a Chromium-based browser isn’t contributing to their monopoly unless Google holds sway over the fork. Brave, Vivaldi, those two are generally fine and stand against what Google has been up to.
Functionality wise, chrome is better than Firefox but it’s bad when it comes to privacy and ads
I’d like to try out ff but I’d have to use it for a few days. Is it possible to possible to sync passwords and bookmarks with my Google account like chrome? How’s the touchscreen support?
Firefox mobile isn’t there yet. Passwords will conveniently autofill from your Google account thanks to the Android level implementation of password management, but more importantly it’s resource heavy and bad UI design. Ublock support is nice but some websites just don’t deal with it well. The nightly builds do fix my main problems with the UI but they crash all the time. So there’s hope for the future, but for now it’s not great unless you absolutely need proper browser level ad blocking rather than Blokada.
Tbh I switched to Firefox mobile from Chrome and have the opposite experience. While it is in someway less convenient for auto fill, as long as my Google account is logged in on another browser page I can always use it for that and they have password and credit card auto fill features should you want to take care of them.
Shame YouTube and other sites are completely fucked on Firefox.
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/
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.
