this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Firefox is awesome now. It was great, then it lost out a bit to chrome, but it’s back to being awesome. If anyone’s reading this and isn’t using Firefox, please switch!
And importantly, their import mechanisms are great. A typical user can switch with basically no effort. Next time they ask you for help, switch your parents too, and your siblings, and that neighbour who keeps referring to the internet as “the google”. Set them up with Firefox and ublock origin and they’ll be set.
What changed?
The person you replied to was mistaken. Firefox isn't "back to" being awesome because it never stopped being so.
Well... there is a reason why so many folks sswitched to Chrome. Especially back when Chrome was new, Firefox just felt sluggish and slow. Chrome was a new breeze.
It took Firefox a long time to catch up. I've been trying semi regularly and just 3 years ago it was "okayish". Tried it a few days ago again and switched all my devices over.
I don't know what happened, but I installed it and it just felt snappy and fast. Apart from having some awesome features. Luckily if you don't really keep bookmarks and such, switching isn't that hard.
At least with Firefox Quantum (v57) they have tried to continuously bring in optimizations to bump the performance. In the meantime there has been lots of work with WebRender, a newer and more robust Javascript Engine and better CSS engine which made it get faster every update. Being quite fast and snappy isn't just a placebo since Firefox has lately started to get better Speedometer scores than Chrome
What changed?
Depends on what you mean by "when". From my POV for the last few years, it has an amazing plugin ecosystem (almost complete interoperability with Chrome's), a revamped/minimal UI, performance optimizations, a better DX for web devs than Chrome, and an active R&D (Firefox View, new plugins button, better personalization, etc). I'm missing a few things but those are the ones that stand out to me.