Are we behind?

[Rubén Martín]

Hi,

I've just been pinged about this interesting article on Firefox being
years behind Chrome:

http://www.howtogeek.com/165264/heres-why-firefox-is-still-years-behind-google-chrome/

It's interesting to see what some people feel about our browser and also
interesting to read post comments.

We have encounter a lot a people, specially developers, that feel the
same way as the post author even if they love Firefox and Mozilla values.

I think it's a good thing to make us think how to improve the browser
and how it's communicated as a brand to the public.

Regards.

--
Rubén Martín [Nukeador]
Mozilla Reps Mentor
http://www.mozilla-hispano.org
http://twitter.com/mozilla_hispano
http://facebook.com/mozillahispano

[David Rajchenbach-Teller]

Individually, each of these points is mostly correct. There are even a
few other points in which Chrome has innovated and Firefox has followed
(I'm thinking of SPDY). The conclusion, however, is false, as it assumes
that Firefox has not been innovating in the meantime. The truth is that
competition between Chrome and Firefox has been extremely good for the
web ecosystem – much more so than between any other two browsers.

Now, let's see a few points on which Chrome is lagging years behind
Firefox. From the top of my head.

* Advanced JavaScript features
- Firefox has had generators, let-bindings, destructuring of arrays,
etc. for, what, 7 or 8 years? I seem to remember that Chrome doesn't
have any of these. Which is unfortunate, because these constructions are
extremely useful to write large JavaScript programs. More generally,
Firefox consistently implements new JavaScript features years before Chrome.
- Firefox is introducing asm.js, which is a way of letting
high-performance code (e.g. games, multimedia codecs) be executed on the
web. By comparison, Chrome has introduced (a few years ago, admittedly)
NaCl, for the same reason. Unfortunately, NaCl is actually pushing the
web backwards towards code that works only on some combinations of
processors and operating systems.

* Add-ons
- The feature set of Chrome add-ons has improved, but it is still way
below the feature set of add-ons of Firefox 1.0. For instance, it is not
possible to implement a "true" Adblock, or a Ghostery on Chrome. So
that's ~10 years lag.

* Performance and performance analysis
- Chrome's developer tools are very nice, but for code performance
analysis, they are very imprecise, in comparison to the advanced Gecko
profiler, which I have been using for ~1 year.
- Firefox used to be slower to start than Chrome. This has stopped being
true quite some time ago.
- Firefox project Memshrink managed to make Firefox the least
memory-hungry of the main browsers. That was a few years ago. It is my
understanding that Chrome hasn't gone through such a project and is
actually the most memory-hungry of the family.
- Chrome used to be the most stable browser. Now, I hear repeated
reports that you can't browser with more than 30 tabs in Chrome. I
haven't checked that out myself, but I generally browse with ~300 tabs
in Firefox, so that doesn't make me want to try Chrome.

* Privacy – not sure it counts as "lag", but it's definitely something
for which we are spending much more time than Google innovating.
- Firefox has pioneered Do Not Track, Collusion, is adopting Third-Party
Cookie Blocking, etc. In these domains, Chrome is either following
slowly or not at all.
- Both Firefox and Google use real-world performance analysis through a
library called Telemetry (based on Google's great work). Firefox'
version, however, does take steps to ensure anonymity of the users.
Google's version, last time I checked, didn't even try to.
- Google has a number of privacy-breaking features for e.g.
synchronizing bookmarks between devices. Firefox has comparable
features, without the privacy breaking.


Now, don't take me wrong. My mail might be a little of a knee-jerk
reaction, but Google has been doing a great job with Chrome. It is
largely thanks to the competition between Chrome and Firefox that the
web has been able to progress at such speed, during the past few years.


Cheers,
David

On 6/20/13 1:05 AM, Rubén Martín wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've just been pinged about this interesting article on Firefox being
> years behind Chrome:
>
> http://www.howtogeek.com/165264/heres-why-firefox-is-still-years-behind-google-chrome/
>
> It's interesting to see what some people feel about our browser and also
> interesting to read post comments.
>
> We have encounter a lot a people, specially developers, that feel the
> same way as the post author even if they love Firefox and Mozilla values.
>
> I think it's a good thing to make us think how to improve the browser
> and how it's communicated as a brand to the public.
>
> Regards.
>
>
>

> _______________________________________________
> mozillians mailing list
> mozil...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozillians
>


--
David Rajchenbach-Teller, PhD
Performance Team, Mozilla

[David Bruant]

Le 20/06/2013 08:30, David Rajchenbach-Teller a écrit :
> Individually, each of these points is mostly correct. There are even a
> few other points in which Chrome has innovated and Firefox has followed
> (I'm thinking of SPDY). The conclusion, however, is false, as it assumes
> that Firefox has not been innovating in the meantime. The truth is that
> competition between Chrome and Firefox has been extremely good for the
> web ecosystem – much more so than between any other two browsers.

Agreed.

> Now, let's see a few points on which Chrome is lagging years behind
> Firefox. From the top of my head.
>
> * Advanced JavaScript features
> - Firefox has had generators, let-bindings, destructuring of arrays,
> etc. for, what, 7 or 8 years? I seem to remember that Chrome doesn't
> have any of these. Which is unfortunate, because these constructions are
> extremely useful to write large JavaScript programs. More generally,
> Firefox consistently implements new JavaScript features years before Chrome.

That's not really true. All these features were in Firefox, but not
standard. Every browser has its browser-specific features, it doesn't
make all them innovations or even good ideas (__noSuchMethod__, the idea
of JavaScript versions, E4X come to mind on the SpiderMonkey side).
Firefox has to catch up on some features (let, const, generators...)
because the ES6 standardized version doesn't match the 7-8 yo
implementation.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666399
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=611388
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=589199

It'd be more accurate to say that SpiderMonkey has been experimenting *a
lot* especially until ~5 years ago, some things survived, some others
didn't. Over the last 5 years, there were less unilateral innovation
from Mozilla and some heroic effort by Brendan Eich and others to get
the standard track work again; "ECMAScript Harmony". This work to get
everyone on board is more important to my eyes than the very features
implemented in SpiderMonkey.

V8 implements ES6 features too. Generators most recently
http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/05/08/generators-in-v8 .
Map/Set/WeakMap have been there for some time, but hidden behind a flag.
V8 has had an experimental version of Object.observe (ES7) very early
and that helped shaping the spec through implementation feedback. They
had started an implementation of proxies and stopped as the spec was
seeing lots of changes.

Both Google and Mozilla have an equivalent impact on ES6 and both try to
implement some features early.

> * Add-ons
> - The feature set of Chrome add-ons has improved, but it is still way
> below the feature set of add-ons of Firefox 1.0. For instance, it is not
> possible to implement a "true" Adblock, or a Ghostery on Chrome.

Interesting. Do you have more infos on that? (bug number in Chromium or
articles explaining what's lacking, etc.)

> So that's ~10 years lag.

That's a bit tough to say 10 years lag here :-p
Some UX concerns make it more enjoyable to write Chrome addons
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=880883 :-)
It is also easy to debug Chrome addons as the same devtools can be used.
Firefox is getting there, but... oh boy... that's still quite painful.
These have counted in making the Chrome extensions grow a lot over the
last few years.

Privacy concerns are not everyone's use case when thinking of addons. A
friend of mine wanted to make a play/pause button for a radio. He did
that as a Chrome extension and didn't see limitations.

> * Performance and performance analysis
> - Chrome's developer tools are very nice, but for code performance
> analysis, they are very imprecise, in comparison to the advanced Gecko
> profiler, which I have been using for ~1 year.

That you've been using as a web developer?
Chrome dev tools have both a structural and sampling profiler. Is the
Gecko profiler doing both?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxXkquTPng8
Firefox has internal tools to study memory, but nothing for developers
as far as I know; Chrome has the heap profiler.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9Jlu_h_Lyw
There is also their Timeline panel to study relayouts and repaints.
https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/timeline?hl=fr
I don't think I have seen that in Firefox (but I don't know enough about
the Gecko profiler, so correct me on that one)
For more on webdev perf and Chrome devtools related to performance:
http://www.igvita.com/slides/2013/fluent-perfcourse.pdf
I really don't think Firefox matches yet unfortunately.

Also... Chrome is doing an absurd amount of work (webpages, videos,
conferences...) so that we know that their perf analysis tools exist and
that we know how to use them. Something I'd love to see Mozilla make
more of.

> - Google has a number of privacy-breaking features for e.g.
> synchronizing bookmarks between devices. Firefox has comparable
> features, without the privacy breaking.

People think of Sync as a backup tool and care less about their privacy
than finding their data back. Google offers them their data back,
Firefox says "too bad you lost your key". I'm not sure the right balance
has been stroke yet between benefiting the user and protecting its privacy.
Improvement ideas from a year ago: http://vid.ly/5x1u5r

David

[Amavi d'almeida]

[Amavi d'almeida]

yep, I switch between Firefox and chrome, the critics seem not far from the reality, but Mozilla philosophy is the right