We used LastPass in our benchmarks because it's by far the most popular password manager. We don't use, nor recommend it.

Remember when like every KZfaqr was sponsored by operagx

I've been using Firefox for twenty years. It's has some ups and downs, but these days it's rock solid, stable, fast and reliable.

Firefox NEEDS more users. We can't allow the chromium monopolization of the web

Hello from Firefox gang

I love that almost all of the comments are about how people should be ditching google for Firefox.

I haven't used Chrome in years. Firefox + uBlock Origin is a winner. I'll never go back.

Switched from chrome to Firefox 4 years ago, still a great choice, whould definitely recommend

Firefox user here, I look forward to your Firefox performance review. Actually stacking up the popular browsers against each other would be a neat thing to do as well to get people to shut up about "Chrome is faster!" "NUH UH! Firefox is!" "Hey guys, Opera he-" "Shut up, we're talking!"

I gotta say, one thing I love about LTT: You guys make your own stock footage.

I actually switched over to Firefox a few months ago due to the manifest V3 announcement. I actually love it. I did have to switch to the nightly build however, due to the stable branch lacking in performance for browser games

I'd love to see how Firefox stacks up these days. I've been considering switching back to FF for a while now

Yet another reason not to use lastpass, who would have thought.

PLEASE do a firefox one. I was sad to see you didnt do a comparison. I've been using it since it was released and have always loved it

Thanks for the mention! 👋☺

Please do a version of this for Firefox! I daily drive it, and I think the exposure will encourage more people to give it a try!

Firefox user here. Been using it for the better part of a decade and never seen the need to swap browsers. It's fast, is immune to Google's manifest v3 and handles everything I've ever thrown at it. Would definitely be down for a browser showdown to silence the keyboard warriors.

Firefox has containers now which is really cool. You can open websites in totally seperate containers to prevent cross site tracking. You can even open up the same website in two seperate containers and be logged in at the same time with two seperate accounts.

its been years since i last used chrome since i switched to brave, not only it protects me from some non desired ads, and it doesn't block or skips sponsors or in video advertisements (which i like) and the only extensions i use is dark mode, return youtube dislike , and zoom block (so chilling) + in efficiency mode it only uses like 3% or ram or so

I've noticed recently that KZfaq's Playlist page is slow as a snail on Chrome and seemingly all Chromium browsers. When testing the playlist page on Firefox it was fast and responsive.

Remember when browsers like Opera, Safari for Windows etc had their own rendering engines? I do. Firefox is one of the few holdouts and it’s such an important thing for open standards on the web.

Another vote for Firefox here, I have been using it since 2008 when Firefox 3 was released and I remeber trying out FF3 for the first time and my mind was blown away by how superior it was compared to IE. Then the chrome wave came everyone moved to Chrome, I myself never found a reason to switch, still using FF to this day. I recommend everyone in Android to give a try to FF mobile with unlock origin, it's a great mobile browser, there is literally no ads is a bonus.

On May 1st, 2024 google APIs started rejecting non-Chrome browsers (at least FF). I used the User-Agent Switcher addon to trick Google into thinking I was using Chrome. There had been no update to FF so that wasn't the problem. About a week later FF fixed it and now it's fine w/out having to spoof being Chrome. But this goes to why Google is way too powerful. Most of you use phones but FF is about 7% of desktops and it shows how avaricious and evil Google is about controlling choice that they consider that 'too much competition'. That kind of monopoly should be broken. Hopefully YT bots don't kill this comment.

I USE FIREFOX

Firefox is the way to go because it isn't Google trying to manipulate you at every turn. Ad blockers will always work perfectly on Firefox too and for me this is the single most important part of a browser. Ads completely ruin my browsing experience.

I actually switched to Firefox on all my devices (yes, even my phone, though that took a bit longer) because of the decreased effectivness of ad-blockers. KZfaq was honestly the main culprid, I swear to god there weren't that many ads a few years ago.

The amount of times ive removed/uninstalled something because i didnt remember what it did for me, then a week or two later wonder why something isn't acting like it used to and completely forgot i uninstall that thing....

Aww, 6 Tabs is adorable. Back in 2017 my ADHD forced me to do an incredibly deep dive into browser mechanics just to keep myself afloat. I would regularly run 100+ tabs (per browser), and I had seen that number climb up to 700 tabs or so in a single browser on occasion. 2017 was not so far back that webpages were measurably simpler, in fact they may have been quite a bit heavier, with clunky streaming video applets, lazy Ajax, webpage crypto mining scripts, and Adobe Flash was even still in use a bit. All on the much slower hardware of 7 years ago, albeit quite good for the time. Still with the proper tuning the question of browser performance changes from how we typically think of it. This video focused on the impact of various extensions on performance, however I prefer to begin with what browser extensions I require in my day-to-day usage, regardless of performance impact (within reason, assuming all the extensions I choose are well developed). From there I then see what performance I am able to get through normal usage and with a reasonable (relative to each person) number of tabs open. The truth is there is no reason we should not be able to keep hundreds of tabs open without it affecting performance measurably in the primary foreground tabs, however web browsers need to be developed and designed with this usage pattern in mind, and of course we know they are not. In order to browse the web with hundreds of open tabs and minimal performance impact, there are quite a bit of tweaks and control mechanisms that need to be carefully put in place to acquire full control of the resource usage of the browser, and to list everything here would be impossible. However there are a handful of primary tweaks that did the bulk of the heavy lifting. The TOP #1 requirement is to restrict and limit network usage to ONLY the necessary interactions of actively used web pages. In I.T. we learn about the OSI model in which higher layers tend to wait on lower layers to complete operations, which in a nutshell means that lagging network activity with have a domino and cumulative effect on just about every other operation on the system. And EVERY tab is always trying to talk to the Internet. So another main key at the time was using extensions to timeout inactive tabs, putting them to "sleep" PROPERLY, to free up the RAM memory usage, the GPU memory usage, limiting the CPU processing, and stopping the network activity attempts. Major modern browsers are just getting to implementing better tab sleep mechanics, although there are various ways in which they work, which have various pros and cons. In a perfect world the tab gets entire unloaded, replaced with a locally hosted lightweight screengrab or replacement page, reloading the original page when the tab is re-accessed. Another important change to maximize the number of tabs and windows, is to implement a mechanic that even unloads the foreground tab of windows that are not being used beyond your custom "timeout" time, because normally even with sleeping tabs, the topmost tab on every browser window is still active enough that will add up with enough open windows. I needed to write a custom placeholder page for an extension, that did not have a google analytics script or other unneeded javascript libraries loaded in the background, at the time I was unable to find a simple empty html page. There's no money to be made in simple and light on today's web. Third, as Linus mentioned, adblockers will help AND hinder performance simultaneously depending on how you look at it and how you measure performance. What I found to be a more reliable lightweight solution to lean on as my primary adblocking mechanism was to use an adblocking "hosts" file, which forcibly responds to DNS requests for advertiser domains with an "instant fail" no-response local address, no waiting on responses from overloaded web servers and no loading lazy inefficient advertiser resources. There are projects online that maintain these type of hosts files for this purpose. And as mentioned earlier, there are a lot more considerations to achieve degenerate levels of tab mismanagement, and they are always changing as technology changes. I only wish browser manufacturers prioritized user experience much more than they do, as they bend to the big machines that run the web. Of course not on by default, but in the very least as buried advanced option switches already built into the browser experience for those with hacker mindsets to privately enable for themselves. Interesting tidbits I found back then during that research: Google Chrome used more memory by default than Firefox, but ironically was far better about memory management due to it using individual sandboxed process mechanics, allowing a user to see exactly which website is eating up all the resources, and empowering the user to kill that process, deactivate or uninstall that extension, unload that tab, or close it all together, freeing up specific resource bottlenecks. Some websites required tweaks to keep resources lower, but a couple websites were just about impossible to reign in, Facebook being perhaps the most egregious at the time. To add to the surprising findings further, although Chrome was better at memory management as mentioned, of the two, I was able to run Firefox with the highest number of simultaneous tabs, capping out a bit over 1200 tabs, and that was only because Firefox processes did not like hitting that 2GB of memory limit even though they theoretically could have gone beyond it at the time as I understood it, although I understand that testing for that issue would be extremely low priority 😄 especially at the time. The reason Firefox was able to run more tabs overall was because of some of the more detailed advanced switch options firefox offered over chrome at the time, and the slightly better performing similar-but-not-identical tab management extensions I was able to use in Firefox versus Chrome. It would be interesting to revisit research like this 7-ish years later.

I switched back to Firefox ever since I heard Chrome was getting rid of ad blockers. it's been fine 🤷🏻‍♂️

LTT should do a browser experiment where the LTT staff would use a selection of browsers and swap to the next browser after a week or few. Brave Edge Vivaldi Firefox (or its LibreWolf version) Arc Browser OperaGX After 6 to 18 weeks everyone compiles and share their experience and pick which browser they'd personally stick with and which features they'd like to see in every other browser.

This was one of your best videos. I moved from Chrome to Edge and with the move I also installed the same extensions. Needless to say, and given Edge is based on Chromium, after a little while everything became slow and I get spikes of CPU usage that go above 90% just like I had on Chrome. It was a miserable experience until I went through the extensions and purged most of them. And now everything is fast again. Thank you for the valuable information.

I never abandoned Firefox. No because it's good, but rather because it's the least bad...

I've been using firefox for about 10 years or so. Never even considered using Chrome, unless I am forced to.

It's impossible to please everyone, but THIS is a topic - browser performance with labs results - that I am completely interested in! Man I wish you did more of a long form video on this and compared browsers (i know that wasn't necessarily the point of this particular video). We watch 30 minute videos without blinking about some crazy ass server cooling that we 10 percent understand (some of us 15 percent) and will never ever have a need or desire to replicate. But we use the darn internet all day, every day. These are videos we want to watch!! So please, LTT, give us a more in depth comparison. You will get a huge audience for that video. Trust me bro :)

Was a Firefox user when it was popular in late 2000s-early 2010s, switched to Chrome in like 2011 and stayed there for 12 years until I switched back to Firefox on both PC and phone last year. Started with the phone first due to Google forcing Tab Groups feature on Android Chrome (and now I heard Firefox has a similar feature called Containers, it's rather interesting and I hope it won't be as mandatory). Eventually proceeded by uninstalling Chrome and Reinstalling Firefox on the Linux install on my laptop and noticed better UI integration with my Linux DE and integration between devices than Chrome, which made me decided to do the same on Windows as well. Didn't regret the switch 😁

The worst thing is that Brave, which I love, is also based on Chromium. But having ONE, LITERALLY ONE KZfaq tab open uses up to 4 GIGABYTES OF RAM. 4 GIGABYTES OF RAM. WHAT THE FCK. It's usually up to 1.5GB and up for a single KZfaq tab, but I have A LOT of tabs open, and just not having that many is not an option. But this is just insane. And no, deleting all my extensions is also not an option, because I need all of them, truly. This never used to be a problem till about a few months ago and it's made Chrome and Brave basically unusable...

I've been using Firefox for a few years now because no other browser can handle having 1000 tabs open with such ease. Sidebery extension is also a godsend for managing these.

Just embrace the Fox blessing and your problem shall be forgotten

Thanks for the tech tip! I definitely had some useless extensions that I hadn't used in a long time that were just sucking up memory in the background.

I switched back to firefox recently. And I can say it definetily is over it's strange stuttery phase. And it gets some love on the extension side of things too! I am happy and don't look back.

Firefox Multi-Account Containers, can't live without it atm ❤

I've been using Firefox since version 3.0 and will never switch to another browser. Especially since most browsers nowadays are just Chromium reskins.

Insightful deep dive into the complex world of browser performance, extensions, and RAM usage. I appreciate the thorough testing and analysis. Makes me reevaluate my approach to tab and extension management in Chrome.

I just did a Motionmark 1.3 test and I got 268. Not far from Google's 308 average. I guess when the browser's only so good that your hardware's no longer a factor. Not to mention upgrading to 64 bit operating systems and doubling RAM to 8GB (my laptop's max) made browsing so much nicer.

I've been leaning towards Firefox a lot more recently

Firefox keeps looking better and better just as long as you remember to disable all of their adware too lol I can personally attest it is totally worth it though. What sucks is doing things for work a lot of times you still have to use a separate browser like edge

Killing it lately guys. For real so helpful and entertaining too. Thank you everyone who made it happen and keeps making it happen. As a viewer I appreciate the hard work you guys do so I can lay in bed and learn. Cheers to you 🍻

Great video linus! <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="345">5:45</a> just want to let you know that video part browser is spelled broswer.

PLEASE make a vid doing a comparison in benchmarks between all the popular / good browsers and make a pro / con list of each

Been using Firefox since before Chrome existed. It way outpaced Safari back when I was a Mac user as a teen. Now I've always kept the fox over any other browser even on Windows, even though OperaGX's features seem enticing, but I don't feel the need to switch.

From my experience, I've never had a ram issue with Google Chrome. I don't really use browser extensions, and Edge used similar amounts of ram. The main problem I've had with it is it adding and changing to a "Person 1" profile, then adding a new Chrome desktop icon for my specific profile when I switch back. I couldn't find any explanation for it and have just had to put up with it.

700 tabs guy here, The Great Suspender used to be the way, but now Chrome handles suspending background tabs well enough itself. However it sometimes decides to unsuspend every tab and pretty much stall the system.

I'm not sure how this compares, but I'm a big advocate for Firefox on Mobile (or at least Android). I'm a web developer and I notice that FF desktop and FF mobile is much much more consistent than Chrome Desktop vs Chrome Mobile. As a professional, I have to cater towards Chrome as it's most of the marketshare, but I would love it if more people adopted FF. Being able to have uBlock on FF mobile work exactly the same as on desktop is a massive plus for me.

I love videos like this with actual tech tips. I don't mean for that to be *too much* of a backhanded compliment but it feels like LTT has been making more content that's pretty light on the tech tips and leaning more into show-and-tell vids, react vids, and build a PC for a web celebrity vids

As someone who is a HEAVY browser tab count usually sits around 150 I cull when I hit 300 lol. But this made a huge difference. A small tip that I would of suggested to mention in this video that I find help are tab suspenders Ones that turn old tabs into just hyperlinks ready to click to reload the page. Helps me alot. (Btw Dont suggest bookmarks thats WAY worse) Imma data hoarder leave me alone. Regardless amazing vid loved it.

I'm a developer of a couple web applications and I've noticed that LastPass and grammarly can significantly impact the FCP score (key metric for page load speed) of my website

Been rocking Firefox since 2004 and haven't looked back.

Performance aside, DON'T USE LASTPASS

Yesterday i was looking for this issue but i didnt find a good explanation like you have done linus, good job man 👍 i foud alot of extensions that are using cache for no reason

It upsets me that the LTT logo and the center of the spin animation weren't lined up. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

The second I read up on the Manifest V3 rollout, I migrated all of my Chrome data to Firefox. The user experience was a seamless transition, plus it gave me an opportunity to do some customization that I haven't thought of before. (Tree style tabs with the title bar being hidden is awesome!)

Been using Firefox for years without any issues, except for maybe a couple of weird broken websites which basically refuse to work on almost anything.

I had severe perf issues with Chrome for several weeks and tried everything from disabling extensions to hardware acceleration to no avail. Tried Opera GX and Edge so will be using either of those from now on.

I'm daily driving Firefox now. It's working fine for me. I switched when I first got wind of the Manifest V3 update for Chrome.

Been using Firefox for years never looked back

Since I'm a developer, I have installed the _wasm debugger._ I now realize that that's _probably_ why Chrome got so slow for me, it's analyzing *every instruction* the browser is executing just in case something happens!

Video summary by Bard/Gemini: In the video, it is explained that Chrome extensions can slow down your browsing experience. The video suggests reviewing your extensions and disabling or uninstalling any that you are not using.

It will be interesting to see what will happen once the new Manifest V3 will hit us. Back in the old days Firefox tried something similar and basically killed every single extension which kept me using Firefox. The only difference is that now we don't have anywhere to go...

This video couldn't be more timely. I noticed Chrome running incredibly slow for the past month. I've finally swapped back to Firefox after years - not been disappointed!

Adblock Extensions are easily worth a decrease in performance 5x over.

Honestly, Firefox has been a fine replacement for Chrome and Edge for years now. I've been using it ever since Edge got too annoying with unnecessary features (past 2 years I think). People keep on dogging on Firefox for no reason imo. It's been extremely rare to have a site not work on Firefox. The only thing that is kinda lame is that HDR video support still isn't (fully?) implemented. Other than that, zero complaints!

Die hard firefox user here, I have not trusted google chrome for a long time, and from what you are telling me that distrust is not unwarranted

It is kinda disappointing that you didn't do firefox. It would have been relevant for me; but I get that you guys need to do the most common UI, for the same reason you aren't constantly evaluating Linux.

The video releasing at the same time I/O starts lmao

Overwolf, Firefox, Brave and Vivaldi are the best browsers around

Firefox. Never had a single issue with it. It's always worked well, and without the BS you get with other browsers. It just works...

I run Firefox with 14 Extentions and have 66 Tabs open as of right now and it works fine just fine. Plus the extentions are not that lightweight, talking about bitwarden, an adblocker, a tracker blocker, automatic darkmode across the entire web and a custom tab ribbon. It's just Browser diff, what can i say?

I've been using Firefox for as long as I can remember. I'd love to see these tests done for Firefox as well!

Maybe I am one of the fiew that still use firefox but everytime I hear that most DON'T use it, I simply can't believe it. I tried chrome, I tried opera, i tried brave, I tried edge, but even though there ARE now other alternatives to the internet explorer then just firefox, i am always confused how others could settly on it. especially chrome. I don't know what everyone is measuring but when i used it, I couldn't notice a difference in performance. It was just "the same" but with a worse user interface.

I mainly use Firefox or Firefox forks. I do have a trimmed down chromium installations for the occasions when something isnt optimized for non chromium

I switched to firefox when chrome did the youtube block ad block. Listen very clearly: Im captain. You serve me. I OWN you. Do what I want or get kicked to the curb. Google made the mistake of misunderstanding our relationship, so Im slowly pulling the plug

16 years of Firefox use smoothly transitioned into 17 years of Firefox use for me this year.

I'm currently using the new ARC browser that's just come out of Beta this month. It takes a little getting used to, but Wow, so much faster and loving the new features like split view and tabs.

Firefox user here since day one of it's stable release - and I've never looked back. Constantly rocking 130+ tabs with what feels like 50 extensions and it runs rock solid. I love my Firefox.

I've been a Firefox user since well before Chrome was a thing. I never left because I never had issues with the browser and have been a heavy desktop user my whole life. It sucks to see how much people have resource issues, generally speaking, with extensions and all. I always sort of saw that behavior with Chrome anyway, so I stuck to Firefox and uninstalled the few times I did try it. That said - not a big fan of their mobile client. Chrome's integration into Android feels so clean and easy. I'd love to see some analysis there - for both iOS and Android. Maybe a discussion on how browsers and mobile work given the continued rapid rise in mobile internet browsing compared to desktop browsing. Also - where's the Netscape Navigator crew at?! ;)

someone at google sat up in their chair and sprayed coffee all over the room when Linus told 15 million people to go to their settings and uncheck the ad settings they likely checked by accident years ago 😆

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="154">2:34</a> if we're talking about obsidian the note taking tool. It is a web app that could be run in your browser so I'm not sure why it's not crossed out here.

After all the ads and ad blocker wars, i simply uninstalled chrome that i have been using for years and was happy, and switch to superior Firefox, when it comes to ad blocker addons

This is actually really helpful for me, my chrome has been kinda slow lately.

would be neat to see the comparison between browsers and their respective versions. like ei, edge, edge chromium, chrome, firefox, waterfox, brave, opera, etc

The elephant sitting on top of my Chrome performance was Windows "Efficiency mode". Disabling that for Chrome fixed major issues that I had with mundane tasks such as typing into a text box.

You SHOULD do the same evaluation for Firefox extensions. Maybe showing all this will actually help convince people to switch by showing how uBlock Origin actually works more optimally in Firefox, and if other extensions are also more efficient on it too.

Been on Firefox for most of the past decade and no plans to change that. New Tab Suspender is incredible.

Firefox is the best browser for OLED monitors because you can use the tabs in full screen mode by moving your cursor to the top of the screen, while in Chrome, you have to keep going out of full screen to open a different tab and then go into full screen again to prevent burn-in.

Only time I use(d) Chrome was on my various incarnations of the Raspberry Pi. However, now RPi has updated its OS to Bookworm, Firefox is fully supported, so I now do what I have done for eons on the PC... use FF on my RPis.

Using Edge for a year. I love it. Battery life has increased too along with performance benefits

Watching this in Brave to support Linus.

I very recently switched over to Firefox for this exact reason.

great video, love to learn about this stuff. thanks Linus

I am searching about why my chrome is lagging while using youtube I glad you made a video about this topic. Thank you Linus.