Firefox’s JavaScript engine is rather slow… and so it uses a lot of processor cycles, and time to evaluate any given script, compare to, say, Chromium.
What do you use?
There aren’t many web browsers out there these days. There is Firefox and its derivatives, Chromium and its derivatives and Safari. What other browsers are there?
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As for as browsers go I think there are only 3 java engine choices, V8 (Blink-Chromium) Spidermonkey (Gecko-Firefox) and Javascriptcore/Nitro (Webkit-Safari)
Personally I use Librewolf and Firefox and don’t use Chromium based browsers. Ungoogled Chromium is the only one I would think to use but I rather not make that monopoly bigger and I don’t think that project can indefinitely keep the Google out of Chromium. Browsers are a lot of code.
I see Brave suggested often but would avoid them, they have a shady history and again Chromium based.
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I don’t see it as all that shady. Everything identified there Brave corrected and made better. On top of that, Brave is pushing a search engine that is actually result independent and unbiased. That is something which is laudable by itself. I’m not saying people should rush out and use it (although I do and think it is a great browser) but I think people should really just do their homework, and see that making a browser is very complicated and mistakes and issues will happen. A company’s willingness to correct them is the best guarantee one could have about a browser, because nothing else is enough. Also, Brave has shown to be considerably more efficient than the other mainstream browsers. This means less power, and a smaller memory footprint. Those sorts of tests seem to be born criticism and are still true, so take that for a grain of salt.
That said, there are a lot of Chromium based browsers. Vivaldi is a great one for power users who want to customize their browser, but is probably the least energy efficient one out there. Epiphany or Gnome Web is a nice lightweight browser as well made for Linux. I think it is probably one of the least power hungry.
Using forks of Firefox is not really a solution either. They are not tweaking or writing any part of the engine. They are merely editing some of the functionality. (gross over simplification, I know.)
I pretty much steer clear of Firefox as the company behind it is more concerned with virtual signaling and political agendas than truly focusing on their browser tech. (that is not me saying that I have a problem with those agendas, just that my browser company should be focused on the browser) I hope that changes, because I do see Firefox being VERY important for the health of the internet.
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They got caught intentionally misleading people into donating money to them instead of the stated recipient.
They changed the user entered URL to add their affiliate link to several crypocurrancy websites.
“Sorry for this mistake — we are clearly not perfect, but we correct course quickly.”
So if they didn’t get caught would it still have been a mistake?
Maybe I would feel differently about there “mistake” if they were open about it but that they choose to do these things is enough for me that I wouldn’t trust them, you do you.
I use waterfox. which is a fork of firefox
Waterfox was sold in 2019 to the same UK advertising/analytics company as SpartPage, System1. The director Michael Bland was made director of Waterfox.
WATERFOX LIMITED filing history - Find and update company information - GOV.UK.
Not recommended if you care about privacy. Alex Kontos sold out.
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I’ve been using Vivaldi for quite some time. The UI is second to none in my opinion. CPU efficiency seems way way better over the past few months, especially if you have a billion tabs open like I usually do.
I cannot vouch for it’s security all the way through, though. There’s a lot of not so open/audited UI customization code on top of chromium core. I don’t tend to do high security things like banking through it.
I understand what you mean. I think I am just aware of the difficulties of writing a browser and the need to pay the people doing that work. I’m not saying it is ok, but it isn’t the biggest deal to me, because I have NEVER messed with the crypto end of the browser. I turn it off first thing, and they make that pretty easy to do.
I also appreciate that Brave is actually trying to do something about the ad problem. The fact of the matter is that many people make money from their content through ads. By simply using an adblock and calling it a day, you potentially cut off a lot of people from their revenue stream.
Brave is actually working with the reality of this. This is important, because should everyone just use adblock, ads will evolve to more complex, more evasive, and able to overcome adblock. Is this what anyone really wants? So we need solutions. Brave is the only browser company I see trying to do anything about it.
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Everyone always seems to have this complaint, but paid no mind to when Both Firefox and Chrome installed software on their machines without permission that literally changed the content of every website you went to as a promotional stunt for a dumb TV show.
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Agreed we all need to make money to survive and a browser is’t made for free. I believe Firefox and Google signed a deal to pay Modzilla $400M P.A. (for 3 years in 2020) to make Google its’s default search engine. Modzilla makes it’s money with deals like this, pocket intergration and royalties
I appreciate they seem to be trying something new I was interested in what they were trying to do but I don’t feel like I can trust them.
I assume you are referring to the Mr Robot stunt where they installed the “looking glass” addon without users consent and probably for a chunk of change? Or is this another Shield study?
Modzilla and Alphabet are not saints and you are right to make this point here.
I feel like I’m being a downer by saying this but I honestly feel ALL browsers are bad and a “hardened” Firefox or better one of it’s derivatives are the lesser of the evils. Pale Moon would have been a good choice but I think it might be dying slowly…
firefox is fine for both security and compliance, i’d rather have a browser maintained by a big team than one maintained by a small one (so firefox and chromium rather than derivatives). performance i’m not sure, i use both firefox and chromium (basically firefox for personal stuff and chromium to manage work accounts) and i don’t notice any difference whatsoever, with firefox having more addons installed and chromium having none.
as far as “energy efficiency” goes, one needs to make sure to have vaapi enabled because the moment you’re watching videos that will drain two digit %s behind your back, way more so than regular javascript does. on my side it was slightly easier to enable it with firefox, but i managed with chromium too.