When talking about a piece of software as complicated as a modern browser, “became faster” is too broad to have any meaning at all — you can find specific features where almost any browser is faster.
In the case of Chrome and Firefox, they're competitive enough that you really need to say both what you're measuring and how you measured it. People tend to say one is faster than the other when they most commonly mean “the set of extensions I installed in A slowed it down more than B”.
No, we are talking about the architecture of the browsers in areas where there is significant impact (ie. UI Responsiveness), this has nothing to do with extensions.
In Chrome when you load a JS-intensive website (ex. Facebook) you can switch to a different tab while the website finishes doing that JS-intensive task (ex. loading), but in Firefox the opposite happens, the entire browser freezes so you are forced to wait until the browser becomes responsive again.
We are talking in the order of magnitude of milliseconds, but unfortunately it is enough to be perceptible (and annoying).
Fortunately for FF, e10s[1] is almost baked, it still doesn't feel as responsive as Chrome BUT it feels significantly better so you can easily neglect the difference until it matures or something better (Servo[2]) gets baked.
That may be what you thought we're talking about but the comment I replied to was simply “Firefox became faster than Chrome quite a while ago already”.
My point was simply that without providing more detail, those comments are so vague to be useless.
This. I love FF and use it wherever I can, but there are small tricks in Chrome that make it seem much faster in normal use. No matter what you do, action feedback is instant. Firefox should really imitate this.
I have a policy of keeping personal browsing on chrome and work based browsing on FF. Every now and then FF will inexplicably hang for over 5 seconds on a page that is probably already cached. I never notice this on chrome, and my connection speed is over 100MBps..
Other times, FF is lightning quick - near instantaneous loads - only other thing I can think of is that I'm running FF on Fedora?
Honestly I just like Chrome's UI better... I have to use IE/Edge, Chrome, Safari and Firefox regularly to test things... I keep coming back.
I had higher hopes for FF android, as it allows plugins (adblock), but the browser is so horrible on the platform, I wound up switching back... I also tried dolphin for a while. Neither was satisfactory.
My experience in Android is a different one, I'm using a FF fork (Adblock Browser) and my mobile life has never been better.
Unfortunately outside America the mobile web is a malvertising minefield, and the malvertisers target the carriers directly, so there is no way to expect ad networks (ex. AdSense) to proactively hunt for them.
A browser with integrated AdBlock is the most sensible option you can have in a non-rooted device, and the easiest one you can recommend to friends and colleagues.
Do you happen to use lastpass? Is there an integration there either with the android app, or with the browser itself that works? I'm just curious as the chrome app can tell what url is in the browser, and peak into the page... This detail doesn't work in ff, dolphin and others I've tried so far.
I know that is a separate issue... would really like my password manager & adblock & the app window/tabs where each "tab" is a separate window instead of integrated tab-bar, which isn't very nice at all on a phone.
