Hi,
I find that firefox 105 or 107 are almost unusable on a laptop runningMy older 2014 machine has similar 4gb ram & I have found arcticfox works best there.
NetBSD 10.0 BETA.
but at the end ArcticFox is really close to Firefox, something
like a mix of FF 40-52 things... backports, in features and fixes,
but at the "core" it should behave as FF 40-45. This means its
process setup, it does not use E10s/Electrolysis yet and has the
old-old interface and is "full C/C++" without rust.
Being the main author behind it, I do know. It comes from PaleMoon 27, but I "firefoxized" it a lot since the fork - trying not to sacrifice much.
Besides startup times, on a normal Intel computer with 2 cores
with 2-4GB of RAM I must say general usage of Firefox compares
well with ArcticFox. Something like the NetBSD website, wikipedia,
DuckDuckGo. What changes a lot is opening more tabs! but with less
than 3GB or ram one shouldn't really have more than a couple of
tabs nowadays.
I too notice things are slower on NetBSD with Firefox and ArcticFox seems to do better, so the hint that "threads" and "processes" might be an issue is a hint.
Also, acceleration does make a difference and on similar systems,
Linux still seems to be a tad better and/or supporting more cards.
Unfortunately, on my two best NetBSD laptops where I would browse, I can't test well.
-> on one laptop, x86 + nvidia, nouveau doesn't work and the
"nv" driver is so slow and full of scrolling artifacts that beyond
compilation and startup, I can't "test and compare" ArcticFox
-> my other, x86-64 + i915, is running current NetBSD and there ArcticFox stopped building. So if you like ArcticFox on NetBSD, help :)
As another comparison, there is FreeBSD. Unfortunately, ArcticFox doesn't support most recent versions of FreeBSD either, but on my workstation with x86-64 and i915 I can still compare and there ArcitcFox and FireFox are "closer" like linux, although FF uses more ram with many tabs.
Summary:
- I think NetBSD trails in performance, due to some thread&process related thing + graphic acceleration, but it is just a gut feeling.
- if you like ArcticFox, it needs help on BSDs :)
Riccardo