Firefox 57 (aka Quantum) out now. Huge performance improvements.

[ScratchCat]

5 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

They are probably giving it priority then, that would explain the Steam thing, but just like boosting the priority of an app when there's nothing else competing doesn't really affect performance, I can't see how that would impact download speeds without anything else running

It may additionally be that when downloading a file which required a confirmation to start Edge starts downloading the file during this period. This would give Edge a head start while Firefox does not do this last time I checked.

[vanished]

4 minutes ago, ScratchCat said:

It may additionally be that when downloading a file which required a confirmation to start Edge starts downloading the file during this period. This would give Edge a head start while Firefox does not do this last time I checked.

Well that's just an interface thing that I'm pretty sure can be changed in Firefox, or just disabled entirely if you want (I mean if you are ok with it starting before you even confirm, then you probably don't need to be asked at all, right?)

and I'm not so sure, I think Firefox might pre-download while waiting for a reply too

[dalekphalm]

12 hours ago, Drak3 said:

My working hypothesis is that Edge is capable of getting more access to network resources due to its integration with Win10. It's also the only browser that doesn't slow down to a crawl when  downloading games on steam or anime through the Movies & TV app.

 

12 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

They are probably giving it priority then, that would explain the Steam thing, but just like boosting the priority of an app when there's nothing else competing doesn't really affect performance, I can't see how that would impact download speeds without anything else running

 

To be honest, if Windows 10 is actually giving Edge Browser higher priority over FF57, that sounds like an anti-trust lawsuit waiting to happen.

 

If so, Microsoft is using it's integrated browser to give an unfair advantage to Edge. I don't see why they couldn't easily give the same advantage to any installed browser.

[Drak3]

4 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

 

 

To be honest, if Windows 10 is actually giving Edge Browser higher priority over FF57, that sounds like an anti-trust lawsuit waiting to happen.

 

If so, Microsoft is using it's integrated browser to give an unfair advantage to Edge. I don't see why they couldn't easily give the same advantage to any installed browser.

It's not an unfair advantage. It's also entirely possible that Edge can get higher priority because it's a signed UWP app that is maintained through the store.

[dalekphalm]

Just now, Drak3 said:

It's not an unfair advantage. It's also entirely possible that Edge can get higher priority because it's a signed UWP app that is maintained through the store.

And why would a signed UMP app that is maintained by the store mean it gets higher priority?

 

The Operating System should be able to detect "Hey, this is a web browser - assign priority group A".

 

It's an unfair advantage IF the higher priority is artificial and serves no purpose other than making people think Edge is better than it is.

[Drak3]

Just now, dalekphalm said:

And why would a signed UMP app that is maintained by the store mean it gets higher priority?

UWP is completely sandboxed and Microsoft has a trail to follow if red flags are set off.

 

1 minute ago, dalekphalm said:

It's an unfair advantage IF the higher priority is artificial and serves no purpose other than making people think Edge is better than it is.

It's only unfair if alternatives on platform are being made non viable artificially and there aren't alternative platforms.

Long and short, MS could make Chrome unusable tomorrow by dropping the registry, and it would be completely fair. Those that still use Chrome and refuse not to can migrate to Linux or OSX. The former is free.

[dalekphalm]

6 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

UWP is completely sandboxed and Microsoft has a trail to follow if red flags are set off.

 

It's only unfair if alternatives on platform are being made non viable artificially and there aren't alternative platforms.

Long and short, MS could make Chrome unusable tomorrow by dropping the registry, and it would be completely fair. Those that still use Chrome and refuse not to can migrate to Linux or OSX. The former is free.

...

 

That's not how fair competition works. If Microsoft changed Windows so fundamentally that it broke Chrome installs on existing editions of Windows (Eg: Not Windows RT or Windows 10 S), Google would be suing Microsoft for anti-trust violations faster than The Flash.

 

Saying "Yeah well, use Linux or OSX" is not a valid reason or argument for doing so.

 

Microsoft has already been in trouble before due to the integrated nature of the old Internet Explorer. They got fined millions of dollars because of it.

 

Also, what exactly does Sandboxed have to do with higher priority? You're still not explaining or justifying why a UWP app would get higher priority over the Network Adapter, compared to say, Chrome or FF.

[Drak3]

2 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

That's not how fair competition works. If Microsoft changed Windows so fundamentally that it broke Chrome installs on existing editions of Windows (Eg: Not Windows RT or Windows 10 S), Google would be suing Microsoft for anti-trust violations faster than The Flash.

 

Saying "Yeah well, use Linux or OSX" is not a valid reason or argument for doing so.

No one is forced to use Windows, or any Microsoft product. There are alternatuved to every thing they offer. Stupid consumers being stupid fucks is not reason to infringe on the right for corporations to serve THEIR product as they see fit if it, provided they don't serve it on false advertisement or harm is cause by flaw in design or slip of QC.

 

2 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

Also, what exactly does Sandboxed have to do with higher priority? You're still not explaining or justifying why a UWP app would get higher priority over the Network Adapter, compared to say, Chrome or FF.

Windows has tighter control on how resources are managed when they exist in their own area, not intermixed with the processes of other programs.

[dalekphalm]

30 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

No one is forced to use Windows, or any Microsoft product. There are alternatuved to every thing they offer. Stupid consumers being stupid fucks is not reason to infringe on the right for corporations to serve THEIR product as they see fit if it, provided they don't serve it on false advertisement or harm is cause by flaw in design or slip of QC.

 

Windows has tighter control on how resources are managed when they exist in their own area, not intermixed with the processes of other programs.

There are crucial flaws in your argument.

 

Windows is a de facto monopoly when it comes to Desktop Operating Systems. How so? Because approximately 83% of all desktop computers run some form of Windows:

http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/

 

What does that mean? It means that even though, yes, you could use Linux or MacOS, if you want to use all of the third party applications that most people take for granted, you have to use Windows.

 

Therefore, if Microsoft abuses it's dominant position in the market with shady and underhanded practices (Which it has done before), this is bad for consumers. Those consumers could certainly use another OS. But what if that OS didn't have the things they need? They are effectively forced to use Windows.

 

Yes it would be nice if there was enough valid competition (no offense Linux or macOS) so that Microsoft could do whatever it wanted. But that's not reality. I live in reality, not a fantasy world where Corporations have our best interests at heart.

 

If Microsoft is artificially limiting performance of a competing browser, that would be straight up illegal.

 

Also I'm not convinced that Sandboxed apps automatically mean higher priority to access the Network Adapter. Any higher priority there would be arbitrary, as I see no reason why a UWP app would need a higher priority to the Network Adapter over something like a Win32 Web Browser.

 

Windows 10 is already smart enough to tell which browsers you have installed (Default Browsers list) - they could easily therefore use that list to set priority access equally between all browsers, whether UWP or Win32.

[LAwLz]

Well, I just spent about an hour downloading a variety of different files from my NAS in both Edge and Firefox (on both my laptop and desktop, both are on the latest version of Windows 10), and I can safely say that there is no difference in terms of download speed.

If someone is experience a difference in speed then I can only assume it is for one of these reasons:

1) One of your browsers is broken in some way.

2) You have throttled one of them using priorities yourself. This is not something Windows does automatically.

3) You are experiencing placebo.

4) You're lying.

 

 

Edit:

I should also add that I was by no means bandwidth starved when I did these tests, but I sincerely doubt that would actually make a difference. Testing it would be a pain in the ass though so I'll leave that to someone else.

[vanished]

4 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

To be honest, if Windows 10 is actually giving Edge Browser higher priority over FF57, that sounds like an anti-trust lawsuit waiting to happen.

 

If so, Microsoft is using it's integrated browser to give an unfair advantage to Edge. I don't see why they couldn't easily give the same advantage to any installed browser.

Yeah I hadn't thought of that.  Although at this point it's just an unsubstantiated guess based on a single anecdotal claim.  However, it wouldn't surprise me if that really is what's going on.  After all, I've been in that situation before where Steam is downloading a game and it really does choke out everything else (youtube, general browsing, etc.) to an amazing degree (at least in my experience with chrome in the past) so if Edge is able to cut through that, it seems to me the only way that would be possible is if it was being given a higher priority.

 

There could be a lot more at play though.  I've seen everything from additional software to router features that claim to help automatically prioritize the "right traffic" for this purpose (not letting downloads impact an online game, not letting other traffic affect general browsing, etc.), or even give you the ability to set which programs get priority.  Do they work?  I can't say I've noticed enough evidence to say "yes", but then I've never played with them all that seriously.

[MyName13]

Firefox is definitely using more ram than chrome on my PC (100 MB more just on this site, sometimes over 200 MB).

[raphidy]

It's weird, with FF57, I have 6 tabs open and it starts around 600mb of ram after 5 mins it goes up to 1.2 gigs and stabilize there. The same tabs in opera consume only around 600mb. The beta, FF58, seems better with ram. Overall, quantum feels smoother and faster than the last build for me.

[kilgore_T]

youtube home page takes forever to load now after update

[dalekphalm]

5 hours ago, raphidy said:

It's weird, with FF57, I have 6 tabs open and it starts around 600mb of ram after 5 mins it goes up to 1.2 gigs and stabilize there. The same tabs in opera consume only around 600mb. The beta, FF58, seems better with ram. Overall, quantum feels smoother and faster than the last build for me.

What tabs are you using?

 

I have 4 windows, with a combined total of... *counting*... 22 tabs. And I'm currently sitting at ~415MB of RAM for FF57.

 

Hmm belay that. It appears to have additional processes, not accounted for before. If I'm reading this correctly, I'm actually using approximately 3.1GB of RAM.

 

FF shows up as one "group" under "Apps" (if you expand it, you get one process per window). But there are a half dozen additional FF processes under Background Processes.

[ScratchCat]

8 hours ago, MyName13 said:

Firefox is definitely using more ram than chrome on my PC (100 MB more just on this site, sometimes over 200 MB).

How many tabs do you have open in this case?

Firefox and Chrome use different methods when it comes to multiple tabs. Firefox will use normally 4 content processes + some extra while chrome will use 1 per tab / extension. Therefore initially chrome will use less memory while Firefox will use less as the tab count increases. On a graph of memory on y and tab count on x Firefox would have a greater y intercept but have a smaller gradient. From my testing the memory usage of Firefox is better or equal to that of chrome once 4 or 5 tabs are open and chrome having a 25-40% greater memory usage at 20 simple tabs.

 

7 hours ago, kilgore_T said:

youtube home page takes forever to load now after update

I think that is YouTube in general after the YouTube update, switching to old YouTube makes it load much faster so it seems not to be Firefox (not tested with other browsers)

[vanished]

OK seriously this is getting annoying now.  I've done some more looking in to quantify my experience, and when playing back 4k60 vp9 video on a 1080p screen, FF57 normal and beta both drop frames like crazy (~5%), Chrome 62 (newest it seems) is about an order of magnitude better (0.2 - 0.3%), both are on "new youtube", and bother (obviously) are on the same hardware.  As far as I can tell, hardware acceleration is turned on for both (Chrome has it on and FF57 is "using recommended performance settings").  I've heard Edge is good with video so I tried that but it doesn't even support 4K youtube apparently

Is it just crap or is there something I can do to make FF57 work properly?  I like it for everything else but this is just silly

[MyName13]

15 hours ago, ScratchCat said:

How many tabs do you have open in this case?

Firefox and Chrome use different methods when it comes to multiple tabs. Firefox will use normally 4 content processes + some extra while chrome will use 1 per tab / extension. Therefore initially chrome will use less memory while Firefox will use less as the tab count increases. On a graph of memory on y and tab count on x Firefox would have a greater y intercept but have a smaller gradient. From my testing the memory usage of Firefox is better or equal to that of chrome once 4 or 5 tabs are open and chrome having a 25-40% greater memory usage at 20 simple tabs.

Just one tab.

[Marculingus]

I use to use Firefox but after a while, and i still don't why, once i opened too many tabs it froze my computer... So I changed to chrome, same problem after 2 months...

 

I'm using quantum now and it is working peeeerfectly I love their new version!!

[Hellion]

On 11/30/2017 at 5:48 PM, Ryan_Vickers said:

OK seriously this is getting annoying now.  I've done some more looking in to quantify my experience, and when playing back 4k60 vp9 video on a 1080p screen, FF57 normal and beta both drop frames like crazy (~5%), Chrome 62 (newest it seems) is about an order of magnitude better (0.2 - 0.3%), both are on "new youtube", and bother (obviously) are on the same hardware.  As far as I can tell, hardware acceleration is turned on for both (Chrome has it on and FF57 is "using recommended performance settings").  I've heard Edge is good with video so I tried that but it doesn't even support 4K youtube apparently

Is it just crap or is there something I can do to make FF57 work properly?  I like it for everything else but this is just silly

Looks like a self made problem to me. Why are you streaming 4k video with a 1080p monitor? It will just downscale to 1080p anyway while consuming more bandwidth. Use the appropriate resolution for your monitor.

[vanished]

6 minutes ago, Hellion said:

Looks like a self made problem to me. Why are you streaming 4k video with a 1080p monitor? It will just downscale to 1080p anyway while consuming more bandwidth. Use the appropriate resolution for your monitor.

Because it looks significantly sharper?  I take it you've never tried it... it's actually recommended by many places and once you do it you will instantly see why.

Not to mention that that's besides the point: it should work, and it does not.  That's the issue.

[Zodiark1593]

30 minutes ago, Hellion said:

Looks like a self made problem to me. Why are you streaming 4k video with a 1080p monitor? It will just downscale to 1080p anyway while consuming more bandwidth. Use the appropriate resolution for your monitor.

The bit rate is greater with 4k streaming, leading to substantially improved image quality even with a 1080P panel.

[ScratchCat]

On 1 December 2017 at 12:48 AM, Ryan_Vickers said:

OK seriously this is getting annoying now.  I've done some more looking in to quantify my experience, and when playing back 4k60 vp9 video on a 1080p screen, FF57 normal and beta both drop frames like crazy (~5%), Chrome 62 (newest it seems) is about an order of magnitude better (0.2 - 0.3%), both are on "new youtube", and bother (obviously) are on the same hardware.  As far as I can tell, hardware acceleration is turned on for both (Chrome has it on and FF57 is "using recommended performance settings").  I've heard Edge is good with video so I tried that but it doesn't even support 4K youtube apparently

Is it just crap or is there something I can do to make FF57 work properly?  I like it for everything else but this is just silly

From the rest of this thread it seems Firefox is not particularly reliable at hardware decoding.

In help -> troubleshooting information search for hardware decoding , it may be that it has been disabled by a flag.

[LAwLz]

On 12/1/2017 at 1:48 AM, Ryan_Vickers said:

OK seriously this is getting annoying now.  I've done some more looking in to quantify my experience, and when playing back 4k60 vp9 video on a 1080p screen, FF57 normal and beta both drop frames like crazy (~5%), Chrome 62 (newest it seems) is about an order of magnitude better (0.2 - 0.3%), both are on "new youtube", and bother (obviously) are on the same hardware.  As far as I can tell, hardware acceleration is turned on for both (Chrome has it on and FF57 is "using recommended performance settings").  I've heard Edge is good with video so I tried that but it doesn't even support 4K youtube apparently

Is it just crap or is there something I can do to make FF57 work properly?  I like it for everything else but this is just silly

The Fury X your profile says you have doesn't support VP9. Try turning off hardware acceleration and see if it gets better. 

 

If you are on Windows, set this flag to false and see if it gets any better. 

media.wmf.vp9.enabled

[Dabombinable]

On 12/1/2017 at 10:48 AM, Ryan_Vickers said:

OK seriously this is getting annoying now.  I've done some more looking in to quantify my experience, and when playing back 4k60 vp9 video on a 1080p screen, FF57 normal and beta both drop frames like crazy (~5%), Chrome 62 (newest it seems) is about an order of magnitude better (0.2 - 0.3%), both are on "new youtube", and bother (obviously) are on the same hardware.  As far as I can tell, hardware acceleration is turned on for both (Chrome has it on and FF57 is "using recommended performance settings").  I've heard Edge is good with video so I tried that but it doesn't even support 4K youtube apparently

Is it just crap or is there something I can do to make FF57 work properly?  I like it for everything else but this is just silly

That's actually very odd, as my i7 4790K (stock) and GTX 970 handle VP9 just fine without drops (peaks of 40% usage on the CPU, and 40% on the GPU with the clock speed at 1177MHz playing back 4K 30fps videos)

Edit: This is the one I just tested with for reference.

God 4K videos look so much better on my 27" 1080p screen and 15.5" 768p screen.

Edit2: Ok...not even Vega can decode VP9. And Nvidia has it partially decoded with Maxwell, and fully decoded with GTX 960/950 and newer. AMD's GPU don't seem to be that good for Youtube.
AMD's solution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder#UVD_7

Nvidia's solution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo#The_seventh_generation_PureVideo_HD