I was a consistent Firefox user, probably for the past 15 years, but I recently switched to Brave and Edge after too much frustration with power consumption. Firefox makes my laptop shriek, while the other 2 normally don't cause the fan to start at all.
Does anyone actually care about loading speeds (apart from the necessary ad blocking)?
> Does anyone actually care about loading speeds (apart from the necessary ad blocking)?
It's kinda like money imo: You think you don't care about it until you don't have it. The only time I've ever cared about loading speeds was when I stayed on LTS Firefox for 2 years to avoid switching to WebExtensions, because I wanted to keep using several addons that were discontinued in Quantum. And near the end...yeah I cared about loading time. Felt amazing when I finally did upgrade (although I'm still pissed af that they never re-added the ability for extensions to access tab-specific history & will never get over this unless they do one day add it).
So I do think it's important to pay attention to even when no one cares, just to make sure that no one starts caring.
In MouseGestures extension, you can bind right-click scroll-up & right-click scroll-down to whatever you want. I bound this to back & forward (within this tab), respectively. So you'd get a little context menu at your cursor to be able to navigate however many ticks you wanted. Insanely useful, especially when websites bullshit autoredirected you once, so navigating away from them requires either super quick reflexes to go back twice with hotkey or mouse gesture, or actually moving your cursor all the way to the back button @@
I still actively get mad that I can't use this shortcut every single time I have to go to the physical buttons.
With laptops having taken over computing aside from a small sliver of professionals and enthusiasts and browsers being one of the most consistently used categories of software, one would think that energy efficiency would be a bigger priority for browser devs… I mean who likes their laptop’s fans screaming and finite battery cycles being torn through?
It’s rarely ever mentioned though and not something that significant gains are regularly made in, which is a bit strange to me. Browsers across the board have crossed the threshold of diminishing returns when it comes to speed, I’d personally rather they shift focus towards battery friendliness.
A lot of laptops don’t even have fans, and as a Firefox user who has owned ultrabooks for the last several years, I can’t say that this choice of browser has had any noticeable detrimental impact; I still get the many hours of battery life that ultrabooks are known for. I suspect that the devs, faced with limited resources and the need to prioritize, would consider this a matter for the hardware and OS to deal with.
I'm mostly working on a desktop computer so I don't care that much about energy consumption, however I do notice that a lot of websites have some timer going off at very high frequency, as part of some framework or whatnot.
Personally I don't see why Firefox can't just stop JavaScript execution on tabs that aren't visible after say 5 seconds, unless the user has enabled background execution.
All browsers already heavily throttle js timers execution in background tabs. You also have specific apis like requestAnimationFrame to decouple UI timers from non-UI timers like setInterval.
Stopping it entirely and then suddenly restarting on foreground would be probably too much of a breaking change for the websites' developers. I mean, I guess it could be possible but would require properly thinking it through. Some browsers aggressively freeze background tabs but AFAIR they do full reload on unfreeze.
The breakage area of shipping that kind of change into the web ecosystem of a major browser is huge.
I had to switch from Firefox to Safari on my M1 Max 16" MacBook Pro because the battery drains in a few hours. I experimented a lot with turning different plugins on and off, but the power draw remained almost constant.
Interesting. Up until recently I was on a intel Mac and Firefox was always in the list of "Apps Using Significant Energy". I don't know if it coincided with some Firefox improvement, but after switching to an M2 it has never show up since.
Fortunately it never affected any need to switch to another browser since I'm plugged in 95% of the time.
I'm absolutely serious. Apart from using my work laptop to visit an ad-ridden page, doing stupid timed sign-up activities like going to Disney World, or using my older work desktop that was so old and slow that it spent 10 minutes every morning at 100% disk utilization before calming down, I can't think of a time when I've experienced noticeably slow webpage loading in years, maybe a decade.
Does anyone actually care about loading speeds (apart from the necessary ad blocking)?