• Firefox offers better privacy and security than Chrome, with upcoming support for 200 new add-ons. • While Chrome dominates, Firefox gains ground with user-friendly browsing experience and open-source model. • Mozilla’s focus on user privacy and transparency challenges Google’s ad-centric approach, making Firefox a viable alternative.
I’ve been using Firefox on desktop and mobile exclusively for a number of years now. I will say the experience isn’t perfect but it’s better than using a browser made by a company that is actively hostile to its users.
It is important to take note that you will experience issues with some websites. For example, https://astro.build/ Try scrolling quickly up and down on this page on Firefox vs Chrome (on mobile).
What’s wrong with that page? I’m not seeing anything in particular.
Same
Scrolling was a little jittery on both ff and Chrome for me, but the page has a lot of content on it, so I wouldn’t expect it run silky smooth on everything.
I think because of the JS framework it’s using is causing performance issues. Ironic because the website claims 98/100 performance score - the highest of all those that they tested. It works perfectly smoothly on Chrome for me. A simple page like that should not lag/hitch at all.
Massive lag on scrolling. Are you not seeing this? I’ll record the screen in a minute.
It was a tiny bit jittery on the first scroll through the page but not very noticeable and it happened in both browsers anyway. That’s about it. I’m on an Xperia 10 III.
video is uploaded here
sorry I wasn’t sure where to upload the video running a pixel 7 pro it’s hard to come across on video but it is there. hitching/jittery/lag on ff, perfectly smooth on chrome
i’m surprised by the comments, everyone has been having mixed results
It’s completely fine for me on FF mobile.
Very strange! Everyone who has replied has had a different experience on this website. It’s probably an issue with the website, not Firefox per se. It simply manifests on Firefox for me personally.
Video link doesn’t work - have you tried testing with extensions disabled?
try this link instead and let me know if it works
and yes. while not in the video, I did download the beta ff version to have a seperate/clean environment to test in and the same behaviour is replicated
I wonder if they aren’t using the “stop and look at image” - trick with css/js. So when you scroll you’re supposed to center on the next image. Also stops the scrolling to center
Could be but I don’t think so in this case. It seems (based on no evidence - purely feel) that there’s some kind of event listener being triggered every time the page scrolls (whether this be touch/scroll event, visible contents, etc idk) and this event listener has different optimisation or performance characteristics depending on the device and rendering engine.
I’m scrolling an have absolutely no issues. Android 12 and Firefox 120.0b9 (Build #2015985090),
What refresh rate is your display running?
That’s jittery. What’s causing that?
I honestly have no idea of the root cause. Different users are reporting different things. It seems to manifest differently for everyone. At a high level I would say it’s due to the use of a JavaScript framework as a purely static HTML/CSS only site should not be doing this.
I see no difference between mobile chrome/Firefox?
A lot of people have been saying this, some have been saying it lags in chrome, and some have been saying it lags in firefox. I’m interested to know what device you have and perhaps what refresh rate your display runs?
60hz Android 11 Xiaomi
exactly this…
i started out in firefox back in early 2000s… then made the switch to chrome and never looked back…
im not the biggest google-groupie but for me to make the switch, google really had to f up in my eyes… and they did
What were the main pain points?
Not OP but one thing I am missing, especially in mobile, is grouping tabs.
Chrome auto groups your tabs, so if I open 5 Amazon links looking for something they are already sorted.
For some reason Firefox doesn’t seem to get this feature
I agree, although I forgot that feature ecists in Chromium based ones
How do you turn that on? I can manually create tab groups but chrome never auto-groups tabs on my Mac at work
To be honest, I have not used this on desktop, but it’s the default on mobile.
Random performance issues
Menu doesn’t open in landscape mode
Tab overview page not working consistently - this one is hard to capture right now but what happens is when you have a large amount of tabs open (say over 30), when you hit the tab overview button it doesn’t take you to the currently open tab in the list, instead it takes you to the very top. This is not the normal behaviour. If you open and close it a few times it will randomly work properly 1/10 times.
Oh on Android I thought mostly for Desktop.
Thank you for sharing. I experience more issues with mobile equivalent apps than their desktop counterparts
Sorry for not clarifying. I tried to on other comments but this is also a post about Firefox Android specifically so I sometimes left that part out.