Firefox really needed the release of chrome to kick it back into gear because it had stagnated to some extent, easy in its "we're better then IE and that's all that really matters" mediocrity, and swapping over to the rapid release schedule has just accelerated things.
The fact that mozilla actively fights for internet freedom and user privacy is just the delicious icing on a technically solid browser cake.
One thing I've got used to in Chrome is the syncing between devices (well desktop machines anyway). I remember seeing some stuff a few years ago about this in Firefox. What is the state of it now?
Better than chrome, in my opinion. I switch between my tablet, my phone, my desktop, and laptop, and have access to all my bookmarks, passwords, etc. I don't have tab sync enabled, but that's just personal preference.
It is decent. Although the browser is not exactly impressive since it needs a lot of memory, hangs sometimes and has a weird UI. I really hope they get it together, because page rendering is, apart from font-weirdness sometimes, actually really good.
Firefox also syncs bookmarks, passwords, etc. The nice thing about firefox is that it also syncs history, which chrome (last I checked) did not do. History sync is great if you use a site like HN on multiple machines; you can just visually skip all the visited links, or focus on the visited ones if you're looking for something you saw before.
Chrome syncs history for me, but I could not tell you if this is strictly Chrome or the Google Account web history (which can be managed separately from Chrome). Also: Google Now settings come into play here. It is all starting to feel a bit confusing.
The best bookmarking in-browser. I am really convinced it's better than most others out there - even those dedicated "bookmarking" services e.g. Delicious, Pinboard(which is a disappointment other than when I look at my li'l bookmarks in a browser window in its webapp) etc - with its sync.
I am planning to plug my own server to Firefox sync service so that I can have it wherever I want. Great if I could just stumble upon sth good ready to deploy.
If you click the star on a website and you want your bookmark to go in the bookmarks menu, you need to press the star TWICE, then choose "Bookmarks Menu" from a dropdown, and then click ok. That is 4 click too much. And where it puts it after clicking the star once is useless.
Then, the bookmark menu itself. So many useless things in there first before your actual bookmarks start.
I actually like the fact that Firefox puts all my new bookmarks into "Unsorted Bookmarks" by default.
I often bookmark pages before I read them, and use the Unsorted Bookmarks folder as a kind of reading list and sorting area. After I've read a web page, I will either delete the bookmark (if the page turns out to be useless) or move it to its final location (if I want to reference it again). I also often change the title to be more descriptive, remove cruft from the URL, etc. while doing so.
For my workflow, a bookmarking system that automatically placed my bookmarks inside the Bookmarks Menu would be useless. It would be even worse if it tried to "guess" the folder where I wanted my bookmarks to be.
I never use bookmarks that way. I just star (once), and use the URLbar to search for bookmarked pages. It's much easier than trying to maintain a hierarchy.
If a page doesn't have a title I'll add a couple tags, and likewise if it ever takes too long to find a particular bookmark. But 99% of the time I don't even need to think about those things.
Firefox's bookmarking system is actually one of the things I hate most about it, compared to Opera.
In Opera you can right click a link and then select the exact place in the bookmark heirarchy to place it in. In Firefox you have to first bookmark the link, then go to the atrocious bookmark manager and move the bookmark where you want it to go.
Opera's bookmark manager is also just much nicer, more powerful, and more intuitive than Firefox's.
Unfortunately, Opera is closed-source software, and has been moving in anti-privacy directions I don't like, so I still use Firefox. But in many ways, Opera is a far superior browser.
In Firefox you have to first bookmark the link, then go to the atrocious bookmark manager and move the bookmark where you want it to go.
In Firefox you can click the star in the URL bar to set a bookbar. When you click the star for a second time immediately, you can select where in the bookmark hierarchy it should go without opening the bookmark manager at all.
You can also just drag&drop the tab title to the right location in the bookmarks toolbar and it will create a bookmark there.
No? You right click, and get a menu for placing the bookmark in the folder of your choice, or you drag the bookmark to the bookmark toolbar.
Or are you talking about in which order a bookmark is placed inside a folder, accessed from the first bookmark setup window? I am quite sure there is a add-on that do exactly this.
I totally hate Opera bookmarks, they are completly unintuitive. Each bookmark can be displayed/removed from the bar without any concern about which directory it is in.
You'll end up with one folder of bookmarks that should be displayed on bookmark bar and a few of them will be 'lost' (not really shown).
In Firefox, I right-click to bookmark the page, and then a little drop-down from the right side of the address bar allows me to modify the bookmark or cancel the whole thing. The main thing I do in this context is edit the tags.
I like Firefox's tagged bookmarks. I love how it's not slow anymore, and how I can browse by tag in the main bookmarks window I get through Ctrl+Shift+O.
But I'm using the MicroFox theme, which pretty much completely changes how Firefox looks. Nobody that I know of in the browser world does themes like Mozilla does for Firefox. Chrome doesn't even come close, and I don't remember Opera offering much beyond palette swaps, either. I have MicroFox and Status-4-Evar and a number of other Add-Ons that combine to give me the browser I want. I can do that with Firefox and with no other browser I know of.
Honestly I think the entire notion of a fixed bookmark hierarchy is outdated. I'm an avid Opera fan, but I can't fathom by it doesn't support bookmark tagging yet. It's just a much more fitting model of how I archive documents (many-to-one relationships?).
Apparently, people still use bookmarks. I stand corrected.
I've not used bookmarks for years, literally. I even tried to use GReader, Delicious and Kippt but I can not wrap my head around bookmarks. Instead, my "bookmarks" are my history, my most frequently visited websites and the few pinned tabs I keep open on all my browsers through syncing. I am alone in this?
Do you never find a page and think, "ah, this will be useful for project X later"?
Keeping them all in my browser session for six months before I put it to good use is just unnecessary, so I bookmark it and find it later when I need it.
I do, but most of the times it's been via Twitter, so I just fave it there. Or it's here, in which case I usually don't bookmark it.
Like Cthulhu_, I've been bookmarking for years till my bookmarks were filled and literally unusable; then I moved to Google Reader and carefully chosen RSS Feeds, which slowly became a bloated mess (more than 3,000 favorites there); then to Kippt, and bis repetita.
In the end, I've come to the conclusion that keeping bookmarks for "interesting stuff" isn't so interesting (no pun intended.) If it's a great thing and I must keep it in mind, it'll surely come back to the surface somehow.
I must add that I have an extremely complex memory: it is very small and forgetful when it comes to actual stuff I have to remember (like my friends's names or university lessons), and abnormally large when it comes to seemingly insignificant stuff (like ZURB's Foundation framework which is competing with Twitter's Boostrap). I'll usually remember all the URLs I've typed. I'm a strange weirdo.
Finally, I realize now that I'm quite the exception here in terms of bookmarks, but seeing the rise and fall of Delicious, as well as Xmarks's (one of the insignificant things I remember, even though I've never used the service or heard of it before it closed down) I thought it was more common.
Ah, now, you're on HN. This is the place where, in threads about browsers, we inevitably attempt to out-do each other with number of open tabs.
And sooner or later the guy shows up who hasn't closed his browser window or any tab in it since 2003, and now has essentially the entire Wayback Machine in memory.
I made the same switch about a year ago now. Firefox feels so much better than it did when Chrome first appeared. I also now have an Android tablet, and Firefox on Android has come on leaps and bounds since it was first released; the tab syncing feature it shares with the desktop is fantastic and I haven't even launched Chrome on my tablet since I got it.
Sometimes I wonder how comprehensive these comparisons actually are. This is what I currently have open in Chrome:
3 Chrome Beta windows, with 17, 14, and 1 tabs open.
1 Chrome Canary window with 2 tabs
A good number of these tabs have not-very-light applications open like Gmail, Google spreadsheets, and some YouTube vids.
If you say to yourself, "oh, let me go check out Firefox compared to this," and launch it with one tab, do a quick Google search, and then determine, "hey, this is way faster," well... yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. Not only do you not have multiple windows and tabs open, but if you haven't used it in years you've probably got a pretty small cache not bogging you down.
Personally I've never actually noticed Chrome's performance to have any issues. Maybe because I have 12 gigs of RAM and an otherwise decent setup. On a more constrained system perhaps problems start to show themselves more easily. But are you sure that those same problems don't also appear in other browsers, given you're using them as intensely as you've been using Chrome this whole time?
I'd really love to see some browser comparison stats that go in-depth on this. Basically the only numbers you ever see these days are javascript rendering scores, and I feel like that's a really poor way to determine a browser's overall speed and efficiency. It doesn't account for how long it takes to open a new tab (like .01 seconds vs .3 seconds, which IMO is a big difference), scroll lag, startup time, etc, and it certainly doesn't account for how and if browsers become bogged down by real-world use.
I fear that users may be making similar snap judgments by comparing on the basis of quick open-and-go tests, instead of actual in-depth testing. First impressions are everything. You may find yourself five years from now using a browser that is actually slower than you were using previously, but you maintain your use of it because one time five years ago you opened it and loaded a page and it was faster than the encumbered incumbent.
I honestly can't give hard numbers, but I really did switch back to FF because of the memory usage. My ancient-by-HN-standards but not-too-ancient-by-normal-standards desktop with 4GB RAM (Ubuntu 10.04 if that's relevant) was starting to thrash like crazy with a moderate number of tabs (maybe 6-12 on average), but most importantly, with a few open for long periods of time. Firefox seemed to really clean up their act wrt memory, where Chromium seemed to grow without bound and keep a lot of it in the working set, doubling the pain.
Firefox isn't perfect, but it seems to be more of a problem with Flash than the browser (clearing out my Rdio tab has the most effect). And measuring memory usage through top isn't perfect, but FF does seem to use significantly less RES even after long sessions.
So, anecdotal evidence, but I was using Chromium as my regular browser for years and ended up switching back to FF because I found the performance on my reasonable-but-aging machine to be far superior to Chromes under regular, long-term usage.
I have a win7 laptop with 4GB of RAM. After using Chrome from the beginning, I also was forced to switch back to Firefox because recent builds of Chrome began thrashing with 10+ tabs open.
Firefox has it's issues. It still doesn't silently update when run under a normal user account. Also the UI freezes when running heavy HTML5 pages.
Chrome is beginning to feel like FF 3. Google needs to take a page from Mozilla and start their own MemShrink program.
My trading platform, tradeking.com, has a web app called Live Trading. According to the task manager, it maxes out 1 of my cores, and makes Firefox's UI unusable in both my home and work computers. My solution has been to run that app in Chrome, and do my light duty browsing in FF. Chrome's CPU usage is also high, but the UI stays responsive.
Heh...it would be something I can't go to. It sounds more like inefficient JS than any HTML5 issues, but that is one drawback to not separating tabs; if the JS on one is maxing a core, you can't do anything anywhere else.
It is, I've had nothing but issues with it on Linux, including problems where it would lock up the entire computer. There's no choice for me on Linux but FireFox, even though I prefer Chrome on Windows.
first, a cache should never slow you down. old obscure settings can. and these can be in your old firefox profile as well.
second, the usecase of many open tabs is better in firefox. there are studies out there that show lower ram usage in firefox for many tabs. (first google link, because i don't find the one i had in mind right now: http://lifehacker.com/5976082/browser-speed-tests-chrome-24-...)
btw: if you are going to criticize test methodology, why do you include two browser? you know you can run various development version of firefox as well?
With Chrome you have to trade memory usage for the process sandboxing of each tab which adds a measurable overhead. But I think for the general population it is a trade worth making.
I think it definitely used to be, but these days Firefox crashes so rarely that I don't see it as an issue. I imagine other browsers are similarly stable, and it depends on your personal usage patterns, but I think the majority of users probably neither use dozens of tabs nor experience frequent crashes, so both should be fine for most users, but power users are likely to prefer one or the other.
Cache tangent: Of course it can and will, generally things that use caches wait for the results of those caches query before hitting whatever the slower thing is being cached. Anytime you have a cache miss and the slower thing must be queried anyway, the wasted time you spent waiting for the cache query results "slowed you down". Also applications that allocate huge caches for data sets with poor cache rates or low utilization can "slow things down" by starving other data-sets with better hit rates or higher utilization from being as large as they could be.
I actually don't know how much of an effect cache should have on performance, but the article mentioned the "disable cache" not working as having a negative effect for him, so I assume it was because he thought it made things slower for him.
Your second point is a good one. I didn't know!
I'm not sure what you mean by your last point. Include two browsers? Do you mean that I mentioned Canary? I didn't consider that specific to my point. Yes, I know FF has dev versions as well.
This memory bloat is why I switched back to Firefox. After reading this article I fired up Chrome and it loaded about 20 tabs, then a message popped up:
Close programs to prevent information loss. Your computer is low on memory.
Looking at the old browser comparisons on Toms, I can see that Chrome's memory has ballooned from 991MB in Chrome 13 to 1619MB in Chrome 23. This is a real problem. I wish Google would return to it's roots of making a lean responsive browser.
2. While a couple of hundred megabytes is usually a small portion of the total RAM, it could be a critical share of the free RAM, and this is what matters.
You should try Opera as well, it's is the only browser that runs smoothly with many tabs, every other browsers fails with 25+ tabs when it comes to speed and stability. ATM I'm running 50+ tabs with 1.5 GB RAM usage. I want my browser to be open all the time and run smoothly no matter how many tabs I have open, so it can use all the memory it needs, RAM is cheap, 16GB have to be filled with something.
I do like Opera because you can switch tab to the left natively. But where are my Firefox shortcuts ?
Ctrl + 1,2,3... let's switch between tabs. Do you know the equivalent? I'm going to try using it for a while if you say you can run that much tabs and it still runs smoothly. I usually have 40+ tabs open at all times.
Yes, having the tabbar on the left is amazing in Opera, esp. with a 16:9 display. I've uploaded a screenshot for you[1] to show you my current tab list. They're grouped into tasks I'm working on atm. On the left the groups are expanded, on the right minimized.
CTRL+# are reserved for websites stored in SpeedDial. But maybe [2] helps you. I doubt that any experienced Opera user would require such a feature, because the more fluent you become with the UI the more often you swap tabs around. Instead I stored sites into the SpeedDial that I visit regularly, e.g. CTRL+7 is HN :)
That's a lot of tab! That's how we're supposed to browse the web hehe. As for the shortcut replacings Firefox's Ctrl+# it seems to be Alt+w+#. Thanks for the tips.
I've recently switched back as well and I find that it's back to a much better experience. Firefox was horrible for a while, but I think the team have been doing an excellent job of optimising it.
My only annoyance is the development tools - Chrome still whips FF here - and they are still no where as good as Firebug, which continues to be the most required extension - but I believe work is being done there too.
Chrome Dev Tools were what ultimately lured me over to Chrome full time. The Sync tool is pretty good too. I don't really get these memory issues everyone talks about. Maybe it's because I'm not on OSX but on Linux and Windows I regularly have 20+ tabs open for weeks and have no issues... even if I'm playing video games that take up 60% of my memory when Chrome was taking up 50% as it was it seems to play nice.
My story is similar but goes further back, I tried Chrome shortly but soon learned that its only two noscript-options were flawed in various ways, mainly they loaded all the javascript once before they blocked it.
So the only reason I use firefox today is due to noscript.
I would love to switch back to Firefox, but, to be honest, the rapid relase cycle really annoys me. I would love to head back, if Mozilla switched to a more stable release cycle - or at least to updates, that don't interupt me everytime I start the browser up.
I believe Firefox now has mostly silent updates, just like Chrome does. At least, I don't usually notice it updating. It does however require (automatically) installing a service (in Windows), since it's installed on the system, and not in the user directory, like Chrome is.
If you set the about:config pref "app.update.silent" to true, Firefox should never show you an update dialog. A Mozilla user study showed that most Firefox users restarted their browser at least once a day, so the update dialog usually waits something like 12 or 24 hours. By then, most users will have restarted their browser without needing to be prodded.
There is no evidence that chrome tracks you anymore than FF with google as search engine. My gripe is that the article is all about "feelings" and makes claims without backing them up.
I use XUL/Migemo which marks matches in a similar way to what you describe and also allows a a regex search. It also has some Japanese language features (but I'm not interested in those).
Thank you so much! While XUL/Migemo seems to have problems with current FF versions, someone there linked Fastest Search [1] and it has everything I wanted plus way more (including RegEx).
Earlier it used to be ...-Firefox-Chrome-Firefox-... every 2/3 months but fot that 1 year or so it's been just Firefox, happily.
I switched back to Firefox sometime ago. It got back its speed and crashes less and fries my Mac less than other browsers. Well, on crashing part and getting stuck part Safari is better than all others on a Mac(at least) but for other purpose(for my usage) it's a pretty pretty useless browser. Safari uses more RAM in Mac than Firefox/Chrome and for less tabs it uses more RAM than both combined, it just does that in a different helper process.
Quick releases ensures FF gets thinks out and fixed faster.
Their mobile browser is not still there. I hope it becomes better so that I can replace Chrome on my Android too.
There are things I wish were there in Firefox. Like manage tabs separately. Like in Chrome. Visual tools/API(seems it's not that open, not sure) like Chrome. I really liked Cortex extension of Chrome in Firefox(it was my favourite).
And of course I love those people at Mozilla for always standing against those privacy-killers and keep telling them to suck it up their -----.
I don't get about FF on Android, I find it more useable than Chrome. It's about the same speed and it runs flash rather decently (as decently as Flash can run on ARM).
I have tried several times to switch back to firefox, but without success. I have to use different computers almost everyday, chrome does the sync work so well besides other functions, when I install firefox on a different pc, the sync configuration is so conplex for me... but there are some excelent addons on firefox I will miss, e.g. pantadactyl
The post is spot on. Firefox is a great browser, but reading the OP's last paragraphs, users rarely choose software for quality alone.
The most popular alternatives to Firefox are Google's Chrome and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. I doubt these alternative browsers would exist if they were not useful for Google's and Microsofts main businesses. These companies produce web browsers to support their main products/services. The rationale behind AOL Explorer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Browser) was similar. In settings like those privacy and other interests of web users are easily sacrificed.
Out of all the big browsers, Mozilla Firefox comes closest to being a web browser for the sake of web browsing.
Just to add, users rarely choose their software at all. If we're talking about the unwashed masses here, then the primary reason Chrome, Internet Explorer, or Safari are popular at all is almost entirely due to placement.
Joe consumer, comprising an ever increasing majority of the Internet population, simply doesn't care about which browser she is using. More often it is a result of what randomly got installed as the default through their last foray of random clicking and purchases. As a result, Chrome's regular placement on the Google homepage (and IE's default-installation) give it obvious "competitive" edges.
Of course when discussing browser market share this is rarely mentioned, instead popularity is usually attributed to fractional nanosecond differences in rendering time and so on that 99% of users never notice, and simply won't care about even if you told them.
(Edit: there is another reason to appreciate Mozilla in here, in that their efforts seem less focused on branding and positioning than they are much more so on function and vision. Mozilla's endgame shares a certain utilitarian theme compatible with what the masses seem to expect from technology (it's a "computer" with the "Internet" on it, not a "Chromebook" with "Google" on it), than does just about every other company in this space who are using their platforms to sell people more shit they don't need)
When it comes to Chrome, in many cases it's not even conscious or explicit user choice. Chrome is aggressively pushed as opt-out shovelware with installers of unrelated software (e.g. CCleaner) and is set up as the default browser if the user doesn't deselect the options.
If you try to install Flash on Windows, by default Chrome gets installed too (and probably prompts you to make it default). It doesn't even ask you at install time, it's a default checked checkbox on the webpage you download from - very easy to miss.
I don't think it's regional. I'm in Sweden and if I visit the Flash install page with IE I get Chrome as pre-selected and if I visit with Firefox I get the McAfee add-on. (And when I'm using Linux, as usual, there are no extra applications installed.)
Or people often have their decisions made for them by slightly more tech savvy friends. "Oh, you're using IE? Don't you know that it gives you viruses? Here let me fix that for you.."
I try not to tell less tech-savvy people any more that IE opens their computer to viruses, because afaik it's not really true any more. Back in the day many exploits targeted IE/ActiveX specifically, but nowadays it's Flash and Java that make holes in any browser. (Somebody correct me if I'm wrong and IE is still significantly more vulnerable)
But you can't convince people to drop Java if they as much have one site/app depending on it. I'd love to install an alternative non-Oracle Java (not because they're significantly more secure, but to diversify the ecosystem a bit, and to stick it to Oracle for bundling that Ask toolbar), but I haven't figured out how to install them in Win7 yet. (that's not for other people btw, but for the computers at the kids centre I teach)
Still, what I wanted to say, the reason I do give them Chrome (or Firefox, or Opera), is because I'm absolutely unfamiliar with IE, no idea how to enable the proper security settings (or if there are any) and I do want to help many people with an AdBlocker (which also can do wonders for one's Internet security, btw).
The real issue with IE is people running old versions of it. So, Chrome's auto update is significantly safer than IE if your going to install once and possibly never touch the computer again.
IE's updates are always limited to what version of windows your running. In theory windows update should be good enough, but I know plenty of people who can't upgrade to the latest version of IE and see no need to upgrade there computer.
Except that this doesn't really happen anymore unless the person's running an old version of Windows. IE updates with Windows Update, so it's just as "automatic" as Windows Updates.
Which is still slower: making the assumption that automatic updates are actually enabled (which is often not the case), Microsoft's update cycle is slower (monthly) whereas Chrome & Firefox have both deployed patches within a day of learning about a new zero-day. Microsoft also does not update Flash (prior to Windows 8) or blacklist known-insecure plugins as quickly – better than in the past, to be sure, but still concerning as the reaction loop speeds up.
And the important part is that Microsoft rapidly depreciates updates on old versions of Windows all the time. The adoption of Windows 7 in the poweruser space is probably significantly higher than the adoption in the grandparents category of people still running 2003 - 2004 Dells with XP. Most of them, if unassisted by more tech savvy relatives, would still be running IE 6 - 8, and 9+ won't be backported. Throw Firefox or Chrome on those old PCs and they will stay auto-updated forever.
Chrome is far safer than IE:
1. built in flash (sandboxed and up-to-date)
2. built in PDF reader
3. security updates are not delayed
4. the filtering is very good
5. friends & family on XP or Vista get the latest version
There are other good reasons why the security is better, with the only downside being the invasion of privacy, where Google are no worse than others, so pick your poison.
Go to settings, advanced, privacy, untick all boxes, don't sign in to a Google account. Or Facebook, for that matter. Heck, there's even a version of Gostery for Chrome iirc.
This is a very elitist and snobbish piece of writing and almost entirely inaccurate. Just for fun, I rewrote it a bit:
Just to add, users rarely choose their car at all. If we're talking about the unwashed masses here, then the primary reason Ford, Toyota, GM, or Volkswagon are popular at all is almost entirely due to happenstance. Joe consumer, comprising an ever increasing majority of the car buying population, simply doesn't care about which car she is driving. More often it is a result of what randomly went up for sale at the corner car lot. As a result, Ford's regular placement on the edge of the car lot give it "competitive" edges.
I'm having trouble understanding what point you're trying to make. What, exactly, is "entirely inaccurate" about the comment? How is your rendition with physical cars similar? How is it snobbish in the least?
Using terms like "unwashed masses" and "Joe sixpack" to describe the computer users of working class background where I come from is insulting. Why not just go all the way and them call them "white trash"? The inaccuracy I was trying to highlight with my rewrite was your idea that people of lower means and education don't care about what browser they use, presumably in your view because they are too ignorant to know the difference. Obviously, this is not the case with automobiles and is also not the case in choice of computers, browsers, mobile phones, etc... You don't have to have a college degree and a six figure income to be discerning about technology.
Right you are. That was unintentional on my part. My mind must have translated "unwashed masses" and "Joe" into "Joe sixpack." The overall tone of it still sounds derogatory to me.
Speaking as someone of "lower means" and mostly with a lifelong dedication to computers, I don't particularly care what software I use, and if you forced me to try and rationalize my choices, most likely I would, like the majority of people on the planet, spout mostly meaningless bullshit.
The "tech savvy" only differ in one sense: they are incredibly more delusional about their choices than the rest of the planet. I certainly haven't taken the time to study Chrome's design in depth (or for that matter Firefox's), and probably never will. My reasoning for using Firefox is due to a vague-warm-fuzzy ideological alignment I seem to have with Mozilla and their approach to software. Nothing quantitative, and certainly nothing adequately logical that I could use it to command authority over anyone else on the planet. In fact exactly the kind of thought processes that "joe user" experiences ("I like the icon.. it bounces"). 23 years spent in front of a machine, and that's still pretty much me.
If it's a matter of security, speed, or an issue with how a particular website is rendered, knowing that somebody uses "google" as a web browser is of little help when attempting a diagnosis, regardless of their point of reference.
I think (correct me if I'm wrong) that you misunderstood the post you were replying to. It seems that what your parent post was saying is that people respond that they use "Google" as in "Google search" (whether on Firefox or IE or Chrome or Opera or..), not as in "Google Chrome". THAT mistake is far from just a semantic issue, but demonstrates a lack of understanding of what a browser is, or even its existence as something discrete from the websites they use.
To make the example clearer, I've personally had the experience of asking someone what browser they use and getting "Yahoo" (as in the Yahoo.com homepage) as an answer.
> Using terms like "unwashed masses" and "Joe sixpack" to describe the computer users of working class background where I come from is insulting. Why not just go all the way and them call them "white trash"?
This highlights your confusion. The set of people that have average computer savvy contains all kinds of races and economic standing. It has nothing to do with "working class," wealth, or racial status and everything to do with computer skills.
> You don't have to have a college degree and a six figure income to be discerning about technology.
I'm not going to point any fingers, but I just want to say someone has some massive insecurities.
> someone has some massive insecurities.
That's true. My father and mother were constantly on the verge of going broke, even though they both were employed and worked very hard to save. Medical bills were a real problem. Growing up insecure, it's not surprising I have insecurities. I did manage to get accepted to U.C. Berkeley, although I couldn't finish because my parents or I couldn't afford it and didn't have the skills needed to pursue all the financial aid options.
> The set of people that have average computer savvy contains all kinds of races and economic standing
How is that different from what I'm saying? Saying the "unwashed masses" don't care about what browser they use is inaccurate. That's all.
You still haven't shown it to be inaccurate. It may simply be that the wealthy elite doesn't care either. That'd certainly be my guess.
To the users, browsers are mostly homogeneous, and choosing one over the other incurs in almost no cost (real or of opportunity). It stands to reason that most people (regardless of class) don't have any incentive to care, and therefore they don't.
That's just not the case or Microsoft wouldn't advertise it's "Do not track" feature, people wouldn't switch to Chrome just for incognito mode, and more people would be using IE on their Windows machines because it comes pre-installed. People do care.
So, "Do Not Track", first introduced by firefox and supported in just about all browsers, incognito mode, supported by all browsers (including pre-chrome)...
The market share of IE (and the usage habits of people of both normal and more advanced tech knowledge) points to the fact that people frequently DO use IE (or safari) because it's pre-installed and only change when it just happens (chrome getting installed and set as default by various other installers being a good example)
You'd be astounded at how your "whatever's up for sale" comment mirrors reality. The vast, vast majority of sales are from local inventory, very few people place orders for specific options, colors, etc. Most people shop for deals rather than specific models or even brands. That's why you see so many multi brand dealers. Positioning is also key, that's why the largest dealers are right off highway exits and why so many dealers end up next to each other on the same road.
The Big 3 made it through the miserable 70's and 80's mostly because they had dealers on every corner while superior Japanese brands were fighting to get lots built anywhere.
I think that you're being reactive here. The terms "joe consumer" and "unwashed masses" don't have specific economic connotations, they are basically a synonym for "average".
Wikitionary: unwashed masses (plural only)
(idiomatic) The collective group ("mass") of people who are considered by someone to be somehow uneducated, uninformed, or in some other way unqualified for inclusion in the speaker's elite circles.
It's implied. I'm trying to think of a group of unwashed above average income people. Burning Man attendees are the only group that comes to mind. Maybe you live in a country where rich people don't wash up. Edit: then there's the filthy rich.
Well said. in 2008 i was a big advocate for firefox. Yet my clients knew about chrome and wanted to use it. But nobody aside from technies stuck with it. My wife still uses FF exclusively.
However chrome became stable. And then it built on it -- multi processing made one site not crash the browser. Startup speeds were fast, etc. Eventually I switched. It was a minimalistic interface that I could teach to my grandparents. And performance was ALWAYS great.
So the question remains: Switch back to FF? I vote no, until they finally implement what IE has done since IE9 -- multi processing, or solve the damn problem in other ways. Also chrome's sandbox is pretty much unbypassed except for a couple of times in pwn2own (all the exploits are already patched)
Mozilla focusing on the user while google on profit is a point, but it is not a selling point. Show me features. So far chrome's porn mode has been an innovator in the space, and firefox had to hack that mode on to their browser. So from an objective perspective... idk.
How many billions of dollars (in opportunity costs) has Google spent advertising Chrome on their google.com home page? How can Mozilla compete on that playing field?
What you say is probably true for IE, AOL browser, etc., but Chrome (when it came out) was really just a better browser. It was significantly faster than any browser of its time, the new interface to increase vertical space was wonderful, the auto-update was a great feature, the tab sandboxing was great. I had been using Firefox for a long long time before I jumped ship to Chrome.
But now I'll try Firefox again because of this post. :)
> It was significantly faster than any browser of its time
How was it faster than Opera? I have never seen another browser give you the previous page instantly when pressing the back button. Chrome needs to start its spinners for a few ms and then reflow the page, Opera just does it. I'm hoping that, with the move to WebKit, I can switch back to it.
EDIT: I just checked, Firefox does this too. It didn't, at the time that Chrome was released, though.
Firefox and Chrome both do this. It is part of the memory caching, which many people disable without knowing the consequences. There were many news articles back around Chrome's release that advised "speed-ups" by disabling cache to free up memory.
And the speed people refer to is JavaScript execution. There is no doubt that V8 was much faster than competitors a few years back.
It is enabled for me, pages are served from memory (it doesn't request them from the network again). It's just that Chrome is slow at it, while Opera/FF are instant.
Maybe this is due to their infinite caching? There was a article on HN a while back about how it impacted performance after a while[1]. Turns out checking a large cache of files (apparently with a poor choice of data structure backing the search) for visited links ends up being non-negligible a year into browsing.
I thought I saw that being debunked by a Chrome developer, I remember him saying that this was changed a while ago, and now the cache has a maximum limit. Clearing the cache doesn't seem to do anything for this problem, though (the page still reflows). It doesn't take more than a few ms, but it's annoying when other browsers do it instantly.
javascript - exactly - before Chrome v1 no one was even talking about speeding up javascript in the browser space. Chrome v1 blew everything out of the water with that. And js speed has a big impact on everything these days, pretty much
TraceMonkey was in the works since late Spring 2008. Apple was also doing more advanced JS performance work before Chrome launched.
V8 had the world-class VM team and at least two years lead (Lars Bak went to Google in 2004; I met him in August 2006 when he was definitely working on V8), so it indeed was fastest at the usual benchmarks, but not by the sometimes-asserted 3x factor.
Maciej Stachowiak of Apple and I were both noting back then how V8's advantage seemed more like 1.3x at the time, but I don't have performance charts from Sep 2008 at hand. Perhaps someone reading does.
V8 got faster over time, as did other engines. Again, it's an excellent piece of work and tops by many measures, but not all -- see http://kripken.github.com/mloc_emscripten_talk/#/17 for two large benchmarks of three where SpiderMonkey beats V8 currently.
Speaking as a dev, but from a user's POV, the thing that made jump to Chrome on release day was the immediate recognition that a single bogged down tab did not impact the responsiveness of the chrome (heh) and other tabs noticeably.
I remember, vividly, in Firefox: I would middle-click on a Slashdot link to load it in the background while reading the current one. My focused tab would begin to hesitate and sometimes altogether freeze for several seconds. In Chrome, only the spinning tab would be affected by their bloated DOM.
For me the speed-up I liked in Chrome was the UI responsiveness, and start-up time. And it seemed to just load pages faster. My current browser of choice is surf from suckless.org (although it's pretty limited) because it somehow just manages to load pages in a quarter the time of Chrome/Firefox (on my computer/internet connection, anyway). I'm sure it'd lose in js benchmarks though.
For me tab sandboxing was basically the reason I switched from Firefox. For years I thought it was normal for the browser to slow down and become increasingly unresponsive the more tabs you had open. It was frustrating, but you had to accept it was your "fault", you can't possibly have 30 tabs open and expect the browser to be cool with that, I thought. Then Chrome came, and I was SO blown away by being able to have dozens of open tabs without the slightest change in the overall performance of the browser, I didn't even care I couldn't use many of the extensions I had on FF. I couldn't help but recommend everyone I knew to do the switch aswell after realizing I would not be back to FF.
Agreed. On my 2GB netbook, Chrome was one of the first apps I installed. At the time, it was a lean and lightweight browser. But recently Chrome's memory bloat has gotten so bad, I had to switch to Firefox. One killer is the GPU process often taking 200+MB.
Before giving up, and switching to FF, I tried the --disable-gpu --disable-software-rasterizer switches to disable the GPU process but that prevented videos from playing at full speed.
Some people here mentioned Chrome runs great on their rigs with 16GB of RAM. But for the rest of the world, Google should force their devs to use Chrome on a machine with a mere 2GB.
How is it that sites like anandtech and investing.com run fine on my old iPhone 3GS, yet take up 256+ MB in Chrome, more RAM than the phone has? Somehow the 3 year old phone loads and displays the sites smooth as butter. Apple is doing something right or Google is doing something terribly wrong to webkit.
I've uninstalled EVERY plugins in Chrome. It still freezes up occasionally. Very very annoying. Had to keep remind me that it's a good time to take a break when that happens. No, it's not the Flash plugin as many have mentioned because it is also disabled/uninstalled. So what now?
> Try removing some of your Chrome extensions down and you'll be back in the 50MB range.
Thanks, but I'm a extremely tech savvy user. When I first noticed Chrome getting slow on my netbook, I created a fresh profile and removed all my extensions.
It's clear from my own experience, posts here, and benchmarks that Chrome has strayed from it's original design goals of being a lightweight browser. My reference to this iPhone was just to point out that I think it's a issue with Chrome itself, and not the underlining webkit browser.
> It's clear from my own experience, posts here, and benchmarks that Chrome has strayed from it's original design goals of being a lightweight browser.
It's clear that it's fashionable in certain circles to claim this. It's also clear that these claims are based on subjective impressions rather than anything measured, which makes me suspicious given that an effect of that magnitude should be obvious and I haven't seen any sign of it.
If you have actual data showing that the current Chrome browser performs worse than it used to, I'm sure the Chrome development team would love to see it.
"The most popular alternatives to Firefox are Google's Chrome and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. I doubt these alternative browsers would exist if they were not useful for Google's and Microsofts main businesses."
The generic argument is empty. Firefox is good for Mozilla's business. Same for Opera.
The business cases for IE and Chrome are significantly different. Distributing IE with Windows benefits users for the same reasons that Ubuntu Linix distros ship with Firefox - they providing a rational and reasonable path from the act of stuffing an install disk into a drive to the point where the user is surfing the internet and possibly completing the installation. IE allows windows to be used right out of the box.
It's hard to make that sort of case for Chrome - but easy for Safari. Chrome was primaily developed to improve Google's data mining and reduce search server loads by collecting keystokes from the address bar.
Stupidity isn't about the individual developers -- it's about the incompetent decisions that Microsoft made about the browser. They decided that IE would be released only in-sync with new Windows releases. Vista troubles meant IE was effectively on hiatus between 2001 (IE6) and 2006 (IE7). Corporate interests were definitely keeping IE development back, but not as an intentional defensive move to sabotage the Web. Lack of competition in browsers during that period served as a pretty good demotivator, too.
"One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities."
-- Bill Gates, 1998 a memo to the Office product group[2]
Seems like the guy in charge knew when to actively "stop putting effort into" things and intentionally sabotage the open web when necessary.
Ironically the reason I've tried my best to avoid MS Office is because they are not easily accessible by anyone. I once sent my CV as an HTML file along with a PDF. Still to this day, I prefer to send HTML and PDF over sending a Word document they only need an app that everybody uses, a browser.
What is more believable is that spell check in the browser is somewhat of an edge case relative to general browser usage (i.e. web consumption) which Microsoft was historically able to address by allowing plug-ins. They rolled it into the development of their plug-inless browser and rolled their plug-inless browser into their not quite so backward compatible OS release.
I suspect that the corporate interests have long known that IE is not a sales critical feature.
You're telling me that you actually believe that developers at Microsoft pick and choose what features they include in a browser?
You can blame software designers at Microsoft for that decision (or lack of decision), but I'm fairly sure that dev's at Microsoft are on the "fulfill the design" side of developing...
Agreed. I usually use the version of Hanlon's Razor that substitutes "incompetence" for "stupidity." Not that they didn't understand what was at stake, but made a series of bad decisions.
That is patent nonsense. The web grew because Windows users were able to browse it with IE in the days before Netscape and when the second choice was going with *nix and Mosaic. IE killed Gopher by taking browsing to the masses.
Netscape was a startup and its founder had a Fuck You Money exit before it met its fate as a corporate subsidiary managed across a continent. The legacy of IE6 lives with us because of suboptimal architectural decisions by web developers. Yet, the web is escaping it - unlike the warts of JavaScript.
IE bootstrapped access to Navigator for the general population of computer users. People got Navigator using IE to download it from Netscape's website - just like they get Chrome, Firefox, and Opera today.
Until IE shipped with Windows, the only way a typical user was going to get Netscape was on a floppy disk via the shareware community or perhaps from a BBS. It wasn't being downloaded through AOL or Compuserve and if it was, what would one have done with it August 1995?
It would be naive to ignore Netscape's IPO occurred one week before IE 1.0.
>That is patent nonsense. The web grew because Windows users were able to browse it with IE in the days before Netscape and when the second choice was going with *nix and Mosaic.
There were no IE days before Netscape. Netscape came first, and IE was originally just a defensive response. That's not to deny that there was a period where IE was arguably a superior browser, but IE simply would not have have been created were it not for Netscape becoming the first mainstream browser.
What evidence do you have that Microsoft would not have created a web browser but for Netscape? Or rather licensed one, because that's what they did when they could not purchase Booklink.
Had Microsoft not shipped a browser with Windows, browsers would have remained obscure shareware like Netscape Navigator and AOL or Compuserve would have been the standard online experience of most people for much longer.
From Bill Gates's "Internet Tidal Wave" internal memo:
"A new competitor "born" on the Internet is Netscape. Their browser is dominant, with 70% usage share, allowing them to determine which network extensions will catch on. They are pursuing a multi-platform strategy where they move the key API into the client to commoditize the underlying operating system. They have attracted a number of public network operators to use their platform to offer information and directory services. We have to match and beat their offerings including working with MCI, newspapers, and other who are considering their products."
The past is never dead, and so we shovel it full of the present when we talk about it.
70% of browser usage was probably less than 1,000,000 browsers in 1994 and those primarily in large commercial and educational settings. The consumer internet didn't exist because the web wasn't viable at 9600 baud (2738 websites of which 370 were .com in June '94).
It's obvious that once Microsoft got serious about the web, they quickly moved beyond MCI and newspapers of the memo to a vision of browsers "on every desk and in every home."
The scale at which Microsoft distributed browsers made the web commercially viable in the way we know it today. It's easy to forget that Netscape was bundled with AOL - keyword: walled garden.
I seriously doubt IE did much for the adoption of the world wide web. By the time IE made a dent, WWW was already a huge success and obviously growing rapidly. Being (eventually) pervasive it almost certainly introduced some people to the internet, but if it hadn't been MS it would have been someone else.
I bet the adoption was faster that it would have been if microsoft hadn't integrated IE. Of course, if microsoft hadn't integrated IE it's quite possible company would have died by now (or been a footnote of desktop computing history - like IBM). They didn't really have much of a choice.
Who's making big bucks off Mozilla then? No employee or Mozilla higher-up is making more than average. On the other hand, I can name tons of Google, Microsoft, and Apple guys making billions.
>It's hard to make that sort of case for Chrome - but easy for Safari. Chrome was primaily developed to improve Google's data mining and reduce search server loads by collecting keystokes from the address bar.
This statement is not just technically ignorant; it's downright absurd. More than probably any company, Google lives and dies by the web as a platform. Chrome is Google's best way to influence and improve that platform. It's why Google previously had a team of mostly former Mozilla/Netscape employees contributing fulltime to Firefox (including one of the original creators of Firefox), and why that team eventually chose to create Chrome. When the web is so essential to your business, it only makes sense to invest heavily in its improvement, and ensure you have a say in its trajectory.
Google lives and die by its ability to deliver eyeballs and credit cards to advertisers, nothing else. Never forget that. That they want to "help the web" or "help the internet" is only a strategic play to help their primary objective.
This is a fair argument, but "improving the web as a platform" doesn't necessarily equal "good for the web". If a local developer (I mean a land developer here) runs for city council because he believes in his city and wants to improve it for the good of his business, it's still quite possible that the decisions he makes could be bad for the city as a whole in the long run (i.e. favoring parts of town he develops over others for services, businesses, etc.).
I'm not saying Chrome is a data-mining tool (though I don't doubt that it could be doing some of that), but it's also not a purely altruistic contribution to the community. Google is the big developer that's doing lots of beautification and really contributing to the growth of the city, but Firefox is the community activist that's trying to make sure all the developers play by the rules that benefit everyone, not just them.
> Out of all the big browsers, Mozilla Firefox comes closest to being a web browser for the sake of web browsing.
There's a flip side to this coin; Firefox exists to support Mozilla's main business, which is the web.
This also means that Mozilla staunchly and without fail opposes any technological shift that could unseat the entrenched market position of the existing web technology stack, even if it would improve things for end users.
Google developed SPDY, NaCL, Dart, all in an effort to improve the underlying constraints of delivering code/information -- in any form -- to users.
If we only had Mozilla, we'd be locked into HTTP/HTML/CSS/DOM/JS forever. Technology has to evolve to move forward, but Mozilla has very little reason to want the web to evolve.
That requires evolving to embrace the strengths of the non-web mobile app ecosystem -- which means evolving away from the web as Mozilla sees it: dom/js/css/html.
If you accept 'the web' as more of a conceptual ideal of openness, then there's a lot more room for innovation.
The problem is, at its core, that the people who are best suited to change the way the web works, are the developers that stuck it out through learning JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and browser quirks, and then spent the years required on top of that to begin working on the browsers themselves.
Of that self-selecting group, how many of them are likely to want to voluntarily rework and/or abandon core web technologies?
On the other hand, Chrome, existing to further Google's interests, has every reason to employ whatever creative technology solutions are necessary to improve the user experience, even if that means changing or abandoning the legacy web technology stack in the process.
Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft will not implement NaCl and Dart because they feel that they are technically worse than alternatives (asm.js and either ES6 or compiling other languages to JS).
The technical problems will ultimately provide a worse experience to end users. For example, NaCl is not portable, meaning that users' apps will not work on all the users' devices like they expect, and PNaCl is not backwards compatible, so the apps won't work on all browsers. Dart threatens to make garbage collection slower because of cross-language cycle collection, which results in a worse experience to end users.
Mozilla has every reason to want the Web to evolve. If the Web doesn't evolve and loses to native platforms, Mozilla becomes irrelevant and dies. How is that not incentive?
After Google designed it, developed it, and then deployed it to their properties. And even then Mozilla was still questioning whether it should be implemented, because "would anyone use it?".
> Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft will not implement NaCl and Dart because they feel that they are technically worse than alternatives (asm.js and either ES6 or compiling other languages to JS).
We fundamentally disagree on that. I see NaCL as a route to the future of haardware-supported sandboxing, in the same way that virtualization was. NaCL is a way to fundamentally re-invision how we implement sandboxing of process, and move beyond the legacy ring-0 design.
asm.js is just another application-level hack on top of a huge pile of application-level hacks. It's time to coalesce the stack of these hacky abstractions, and clean up shop.
> For example, NaCl is not portable, meaning that users' apps will not work on all the users' devices like they expect, and PNaCl is not backwards compatible, so the apps won't work on all browsers.
So what? You know what happens when I fire up a PPC Mac from 1998 and try to use Netscape 4 on the modern web? Nothing works.
At least something like PNaCL has a MUCH smaller surface area than something like the full HTML/DOM/CSS/JS stack, which makes supporting it in a backwards compatible manner indefinitely far, far easier.
> Mozilla has every reason to want the Web to evolve. If the Web doesn't evolve and loses to native platforms, Mozilla becomes irrelevant and dies. How is that not incentive?
Because the web needs to evolve away from what it currently is, and that's the one thing Mozilla ideologically doesn't want and won't do.
> Pepper is a huge surface area, comparable with the web stack in size.
It's neither comparable in size or complexity to the entire browser stack. CSS, HTML, DOM, and JavaScript are so large that they that require the full weight of large-scale corporations to provide a working implementation that's even remotely compatible with the web as its deployed today.
Mozilla received a leg-up in terms of having the majority of the code donated by a large corporation, and by having the web be compatible with that existing technology stack. I can see how I could spend $1M and have a team implement the Pepper API in 6-12 months, and that includes an independent implementation of NaCL/PNaCL sandboxing (if we leveraged google's development tools).
I can't even begin to imagine trying to create an independent browser stack for any reasonable amount of money.
[edit] This is the current Pepper API documentation:
I didn't realize what you meant before. Yes, if you add the internal stuff of HTML and CSS, it is a lot. But Pepper is comparable in size to the APIs needed for general input and output on the web - both contain rendering, audio, input control, etc. In that respect they are comparable.
The difference is that as a 3rd party, I actually have a snowball's chance in hell of implementing something like Pepper. This improves competitiveness and diversity.
Pepper, NaCL, et al also collapse a huge number of complex and nuanced layered web abstractions back down to the approachable problem of running somewhat arbitrary user code, at speed, in a relatively open and loosely define environment.
That's the same environment that projects like Mozilla needed to ever have the chance of producing a web browser in the first place. It sure seems to me that you guys -- consciously or not -- have divided the market into 'browser makers' and 'non-browser makers', and then decided to constrain the tooling and power available to everyone that is not a browser maker.
The fact is, browsers evolved to render pages. HTML and CSS were invented for that, and JS added to make content more dynamic. So it's not surprising the web has the ability to render documents as a fundamental capability.
NaCl is something new. It isn't meant to render documents. It sandboxes native code.
Both the web and NaCl are great, just for different things.
> Both the web and NaCl are great, just for different things.
Well, now we're getting to the core of it! :)
I agree! I think the web should stick to rendering documents, which it has always done reasonably well, and leave applications to technologies such as NaCL, which people can use to produce the next web browser.
I almost agree. But I don't think the web should stop from improving just because there is stuff like NaCl. If it's easy and straightforward to run code at near-native speeds in JS, and it took just a few months to build the asm.js prototype, then why not?
Given that the above text covers a ton of ground, I'm very curious what parts specifically downvoters are objecting to. Something about the comment (and its location in the thread) seems to have evoked a very negative response, but given the broad and very technical subject matter, I'm not sure exactly what or why.
[1] NaCL and the future of hardware, Google's investment in SPDY, surface area of NaCL's complexity, evolution of the web ...
How would replacing HTTP with SPDY offset Mozilla? It's not a threat. NaCL? NaCL is a different applet sandboxing, again not a threat to the browser or Mozilla. Dart? Dart is an alternative webpage scripting language (an alternative to Javascript).
Each of these does not threaten the importance of the browser. On the contrary, they both widen the use cases of the browser and raise the entry barrier for competing browsers. These effects protect Mozilla, instead of threatening Mozilla.
On the other hand, Google pushes OAuth single sign-on against Google accounts, whereas Mozilla is pushing Mozilla Persona, a distributed, no-central-authority SSO for the web.
I conclude the exact opposite of what you state. If we use Chrome, we're locked into technologies that serve Google, if we use Firefox we're pushing open technologies.
Internet Explorer was never an alternative for Firefox. It's only used by those who don't know any better, or those who are forced to use it in corporate environments and etc.
I personally didn't buy the whole Chrome hype when it came out, and stayed with Firefox, observing how Mozilla gradually made it much better.
When I first taught my dad to use the brand new laptop. He asked me what that blue e icon was. I told him that was a tool to download internet browser called Firefox. :P
Due to issues with memory usage on Chrome I recently tried switching back but page rendering and UI response felt noticeably slower. I am also so fluent with web inspector that the burden of re-learning Firebug or the built-in tools was a drag.
So I decided that the easiest way to reduce Chrome's memory usage was to curb my slightly irrational usage patterns - keeping dozens of tabs open that I rarely ever get around to going back to.
1) Firefox is the new IE7/8 - i having more and more issues with standard css settings, which are f* up in the ff, but are nice and shiny in all other brothers (yes even in ie)
2) "I honestly believe Mozilla is committed to freedom and privacy on the web." - haha thats funny :D you know about chromium right? :D its free, you can code on it too if you want too, sure there are might be 1-2 functions in the chrome, which belongs to google, but all in all you can know the code. and google did there learnings after the first versions where they sending stuff to there servers.
and in the end, all browser are logging the same shit, where are we clicking, what are we doing, where we enter this and that. why? because they want to make there money too, and collect a big big big database, which they can sell to other companies. and learn stuff out of it. i guess on this view all brothers are the same crap
3) memory management - yes its true chrome get stuck more and more often, and eating the memory, and it is annoying.
but for me, firefox still is worse. everytime i start firefox for debugging some website or whatever, i'm totally pissed, because this stupid software still needs like forever for the initialised start. and when you keep it open for 2 days, you done :D in my opinion even photoshop has a better memory management then firefox.
=
i hope for the chrome too, that the switch from opera to webkit, give them a little ass kick, because that is that what all browser companies needed, an ass kick.
first there was an IE everybody used it, so why should they update it? then there was the firefox, ie was screwed, everybody used ff now, so why should they update it? then there was the chrome, ff was screwed, everybody used chrome now, so why should they update it?
and everybody took there lesson out of it, IE is getting better, FF starts updating there browser after sitting on 3.6 like forever... and thats ok, people now having like 3-4 good brothers and can choose.
The second part to 2) sounds a little paranoid, can you back it up?
I switched from Opera (then known as the lightweight) to Chrome (then known as the chugging oversized beast) because of Opera's (sudden in v11 ish) memory leaks. Hopefully they fix that and I'll switch abck to Opera for the same reasons as OP did for Firefox.
Going through that listing, aside from the -webkit- atill being required for CSS transforms, the current versions of Chrome and Safari are ahead of the current version of Firefox. But it's pretty much the same for all the major browsers across the board.
Here we go again! This is a sentiment that is spreading in the dev community, Chrome is starting to lose it's edge.
I'm currently working on a slightly heavy page, and Chrome is the slowest of the bunch to render, despite having smoother animations in most cases after it has done it's thing. Firefox, Safari and even IE9 are visibly faster by a couple seconds.
I feel like it slowly got worse and worse over the years. These days Chrome is the main CPU hog in my machine, uses GBs of memory and is responsible for most system hangs (OSX). The com.google.keystone agent thing even causes the trackpad and keyboard to malfunction every once and a while.
With "keep tabs at exit" setting, I managed to reach over 250 tabs in Firefox. Had no issues what so ever, even when a game like guild wars 2 and bt was also up and running.
I would very much like to see a memory and cpu comparison between Firefox and chrome when the tab sizes reaches that size.
WTF! THAT is the thing which makes my input go away for a few seconds? I thought I had hardware which was flaking out, since really, how does the whole system regularly "lose" both input devices at once?
What OS? I have noticed that Firefox on Ubuntu (12.04 clean install) looks way worse and feels worse than FF on Windows 7. I feel like Firefox on Windows is still more peppy than Chrome / Firefox on Ubuntu despite my Linux box being way beefier. I feel like the author's post is 1 dimensional (which browser) when it should be a 2 dimensional comparison (browser and OS).
For me the big difference wasn't the browser itself; it has been excessive javascript that's slowing the browsers. Many media sites are loading 20-30 external scripts, and I found that switching back to Firefox with NoScript has made a huge difference in load times and memory usage. The other issue with Chrome was releasing memory. I can close a tab in FF and the memory is recovered.
I haven't tried it myself, but apparently it's a kind of reverse Noscript (hence the name).
"YesScript lets you make a blacklist of sites that aren't allowed to run JavaScript. Use YesScript on sites that annoy you or hog your system resources. One click to the icon in the status bar turns scripts on or off for the current site."
I had Ghostery, but didn't like it. It seemed to "talk too much".
Noscript can be paranoid (a feature, not a bug) and occasionally stop sites from working even if they are white-listed; I consider having to open a site in another browser sometimes less of a nuisance than having my main browser slowed down by dodgy JS.
Two add-ons anthropomorphized in one comment! I guess that's what happens when you spend so much time in front of a screen ;-)
ghostery does accomplish the same thing, the notifications can be turned off. You can explicitly turn on and off services all the time or in real time.
Ghostery is supposed to help you avoid tracking but is owned by Evidon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidon) so I feel like they have quite the conflict of interest.
I think all sites annoy me and hog my resources :) I like rejecting everything and then temporarily allowing sites that require it if I really think it would be useful.
The "Temporarily allow top-level sites by default" option gets you most of those benefits, while allowing most websites to run just fine without having to explicitly whitelist anything.
> Chrome doesn't require to restart when installing an extension (even if Firefox starts moving to this too)
Mozilla did introduce an api to do restart-less addons about two years ago, as a side effect these addons don't depend on specific firefox versions anymore.
The problem with firefox addons is that they have always hooked directly into XUL, a layout language used inside firefox, which changes (nearly) every version. This means addons needed to be updated regularly. However it did allow them many capabilities (that I suspect the new api doesn't give them).
Same here, but for a slightly different reason for me:
When you're not logged into your google account, typing into the address bar with periodically kill chrome on mountain lion.
Not often, but maybe 3 or 4 times a day. Not kill the tab; hard kill chrome, instantly, destroying all the tabs, no recovery, all chrome processes go poof. It happens on all three of my mac devices (and this is on Version 25.0.1364.160).
It's not even a choice; that's just unusable.
I've also found firefox to be a lot better than I remember. Firebug is still a memory hog though, and as we saw in the other epic thread, the firebug / native developer tools thing is still just idiotic.
...but it's pretty good.
I honestly didn't expect to be ever returning to firefox because it was more stable than the alternative.
I've had the same problem with Chrome on ML, reinstall the browser and the bug will disappear (you'll need to erase it from your Applications and from ~/Library/Caches).
Firefox is great, but I think is a unfair comparison Chrome vs Firefox as he's talking about freedom and Chrome is not free software[1]. He may want to try Chromium instead.
I know is supposed to be the same source code, but it gives me some peace of mind that a 3rd party I trust (Linux distro) had access to the source code and built the actual binary I'm using.
I too have switched Firefox as my main browser, so far I like the better addons,
* ad block is much better
* addons work in private mode by default,
* an addon to use keepaas as my password manager
* many addons that allow me to customize youtube which i could not do in chrome (force 240p etc..),
* I missed Instant search but Firefox already searches bookmarks better and with the instantFox addon i can also search any site ala google instant and ddg
Better in chrome
* Addons by HNers (HN in chrome is great with a few addons like tldr.io, HNbox)
* Firefox seems unable to do multiple downloads as well as chrome (I'm unable to download multiple videos at once from coursera when using firefox)
* some chrome store apps
* Developer tools (which I don't really need)
I don't see much of a performance difference (maybe Firefox is better now or it may be hardware accelerated as I'm using Windows)
I haven't seen this multiple download issue with Firefox, but you may like the DownThemAll! download manager, it provides a queue, maximum downloads, bandwidth limits, and other very nice features: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/downthemall/
Thanks for the suggestion, I already use DownThemAll but it could not even grab the download. It may be the site's fault, once I click on the download link it opens a new tab and the download starts, on chrome I can start another download but it gets stuck on Firefox, it may be that the page was made with chrome in mind idk.
Actually you're right, multiple downloads is working fine now, it might have been V19 or maybe the site was updated anyway its now fixed, thanks for the heads up!
Regarding YouTube on Chrome, have you tried the "YouTube Options" extension? Among other things, it can set the default resolution and size of videos. The version on the developer's site can also add links to download videos (the Chrome Web Store version cannot due to YouTube's TOS).
I'm surprised to hear that you've not found a KeePass addon for Chrome. I'm using LastPass right now, but I've been thinking of switching to take advantage of KeePassDroid on Android. Do the popular options on the Chrome Web Store not pass muster?
I just tried the YouTube plugin, it's really great! but it couldn't force 240p (I have a slow internet connection so i need to have this low quality option) and there is a keepaas plugin for chrome too [1] it even has a version for Firefox! but from what I read in its description, keeFox is the better addon.
Firefox is great for his philosophy, but for my part, Chrome is better for dev., performance, memory, etc. (And recently, I'm having a weird bug with text while scrolling with Firefox).
Anyway, I think everyone here using Firefox AND chrome.
I feel Chrome is becoming the new IE. Firefox always works. I keep finding obscure bugs in Chrome. I report them. They are confirmed by 3+ people. 9 months later issues remain unfixed. It feels like all development is targeted at new features instead of rounding off and fixing existing functionality.
The two things I dislike about Firefox. The development tools are funky. I am sure many people like them but when you are used to firebug / webkit tools the default Firefox tools are a bit of a shock.
The second issue is the lack of tab sand-boxing. A fairly large part of my job is testing for edge cases in our products. Our products are JavaScript heavy. I often find issues which crash the browser... well.. they crash Firefox. In Chrome the tab shows an error in the console and I have the option to close the tab. In Firefox I never get an error in the console. The whole browser freezes and stops responding.
It would be fantastic if Firefox sandboxed tabs to stop the entire browser crashing.
Two of the main advantages of Firefox for many are its memory usage and its extensibility. Those two advantages would be lost if Firefox added sandboxing. I'm glad that I can choose between sandboxing and better extensions and I would be sad to see that choice disappear.
>Two of the main advantages of Firefox for many are its memory usage and its extensibility. Those two advantages would be lost if Firefox added sandboxing. I'm glad that I can choose between sandboxing and better extensions and I would be sad to see that choice disappear.
Totally orthogonal issues.
Not to mention Firefox ate memory like a pig until recently, despite not having sandboxing.
Now it's somewhat better with post 16 stuff, but still it's slow. Chrome is much more responsive and fast.
They're really not. Many add-ons would function without issues with sandboxing (once updated), but there are many cases where requiring IPC between tabs/windows would be prohibitive (particularly for individualized add-ons).
>Now it's somewhat better with post 16 stuff, but still it's slow. Chrome is much more responsive and fast.
This has not been my experience. Chrome used to be faster, but for the past year, Firefox's responsiveness have blown Chrome's out of the water for me personally on the PCs I use.
Two of the main advantages of Firefox for many are its memory usage
Really? I've heard that said before, but right now Firefox is grabbing almost half a gigabyte of my RAM just to have about a dozen tabs open on simple forum sites like HN. Some of the extensions are significant offenders at the moment, particularly things like the AdBlock ones, but Firefox itself is still greedy even with no pages open and running in safe mode with all the plug-ins disabled, and of course Firefox without any of the major plug-ins is much less useful as a default browser.
Please file a bug with the contents of about:memory if you find situations in which Firefox uses much more memory than alternative browsers; Firefox is very serious about memory usage these days. You can cc me on the bug if you like to make sure it gets to the right people.
Thanks for the tip; I hadn't heard of about:memory before.
Is there a sane way to report bugs these days? I'm happy to do things like describing a useful test case or attaching a screenshot of about:memory, but I've spent too many half-hours trying and ultimately failed to report useful information via Bugzilla to ever go near it again. It's like a case study of how to do every possible thing wrong in usability terms. :-(
I know the interface got upgraded recently, and I've heard good things about the new upgrade—although I don't actually work with Bugzilla on a daily basis, so I don't have first hand experience. Anyhow, you might want to try the new version and see whether it works better for you.
I agree. One partial workaround I use is to test sketchy pages in a second Firefox process. If things go bad, it takes out all of those tabs, but not my primary browser tabs.
> The second issue is the lack of tab sand-boxing. A fairly large part of my job is testing for edge cases in our products. Our products are JavaScript heavy. I often find issues which crash the browser... well.. they crash Firefox. In Chrome the tab shows an error in the console and I have the option to close the tab. In Firefox I never get an error in the console. The whole browser freezes and stops responding.
Why not simply run two FF instances in parallel (e.g., via the profile manager) - one for actual browsing, and another for testing, that can blow up as often as it "needs" to?
My experience* is that Firefox has many more bugs than Chrome, Firefox bugs take much longer to be fixed, and users are more likely to be using older versions of Firefox so bugs affect us for longer.
In 3 years our webapp has been affected by very few Chrome specific bugs none of which caused us serious problems, or hard to work-around. Chrome has fixed bugs that affected us within a release or two (not years).
Currently our app has about 4 Firefox specific work-arounds. The worst was opened in 2004 and last month took me over 20 hours work to diagnose due to it only affecting us under specific circumstances: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=263945
* we have a complex pure JavaScript front-end, 95% written by me, with no library dependencies (because we started with scriptaculous many years ago, and outgrew it).
Switched to Firefox from Chrome due to the following:
- I dislike Google tracking everything that I am doing
- Chrome with one tab starts out smoothly but with more tabs, its memory usage increases at a faster rate compared to Firefox
- A browser that puts an advertisement in a blank page (chromebook anyone?) is a total turn-off
I have returned to firefox for the following reasons:
1) It feels more stable. Almost never crashes.
2) Can run separate profiles at the same time in a nicer way than chrome. I use this to have a work and personal browser in work.
3) I use vimperator now which I find works best on firefox.
4) I get that happy feeling that I am using software which actually values some of the open source philosophy that I value.
I've been a lifelong Opera user and given the current situation (it's dying), I am considering Firefox the only viable alternative. I've never even liked having chrome on my computer, and in fact I would not be surprised if Google simply dropped chrome as a product, leaving it to the hands of the open source community anyway. They've abandoned many good products and dropping chrome wouldn't surprise me. Then again, maybe I am bitter, I thought Opera would be around forever.
Was it ever not dying? I liked the browser, but the lack of support and incorrectly rendering websites got me off of it after at most one evening. (I tried a few times.)
Please, don't swap the facts. Opera (Presto) was conform to the standard, but most web developers focused only on webkit and implemented too much browser-specific code.
It is not dying. It had have around 2% market share for the last couple of years and it will stay in that region for next years. It might even get more user due to the recently announced shift to Webkit and its increasing popularity on mobile devices. Just keep using it.
If you need Chrome as a 2nd browser you should consider using any of the Chromium forks available. E.g. I use Comodo Dragon.
I have no idea what the article and some of you guys are talking about. I'm a very heavy user of Chrome, usually I have around 3 windows and 50-60 tabs in total; with this is setting I feel it's running pretty snappy, animations runs very smooth compared to the choppy experience I get with a single window and a single tab using Firefox. And don't get me started about Firebug; it's still so slow and clumsy compared to the chrome dev tools, every time I have to debug something Firefox specific the mere thought of being forced to use it gives me pain. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to discourage Mozilla, I have a huge appreciation for what they are doing. But when it comes to day-to-day usage, and as a developer tool, Chrome still wins in my book.
Same experience here (well my Firefox experience is ok too but I don't see anything better then Chrome so I'm not switching back).
As a web dev, I have 10+ tabs open all day long and I never see a chrome crash. I'm not even looking at the RAM usage, if everything run smooth there is not reason to...
22 tabs open now in Firefox on Win7, and they've been open for days in between hibernation, gaming, other stuff. All kinds of dodgy developer tabs and video sites etc.
Firefox takes it, and provides a huge range of tools and options to make the browser environment exactly how I like.
Amazing add-ons, custom looks. I prefer an old fashioned status bar at the bottom of the browser. Thank God for status-4-eva add-on.
I'm glad Chrome was made, it's an option for anyone who doesn't mind the 'Google feel'. There's a Google vibe that has a sort of marketing agenda that you can sometimes see, manifesting in a few different ways in and out of browser. No big deal, just sometimes it feels like you're renting your online experience from Google rather than on your own journey. Hard to explain.
They make amazing things, so can forgive, just don't want to sign up to Google every time I'm online.
They currently push you to sign in and stay signed in on Google.com search when not logged in. And they try to sell you Chrome too, with "no thanks" as the button to hide the ad. You know when you make a button that says "no thanks", you're assuming the user who clicks the button is thankful, for being given the ad on google for the 500th time. Your assumption would be wrong.
I was a Firefox user since the Phoenix/Firebird days, but I switched to Chrome about a year ago. On two separate occasions recently, I tried to switch back to Firefox for daily use. In both cases, I was back on Chrome within a week. Firefox has made great strides in memory usage, Javascript performance and overall UI polish, but on my hardware* and with my usage patterns, it absolutely CRAWLS compared to Chrome. I found myself restarting it almost daily to keep it responsive, and even on a fresh startup it wasn't as snappy as a fully-loaded (15-20 tabs open) and long-running Chrome.
I can honestly say that if performance wasn't an issue, I would prefer Firefox. I love the addons that are available, particularly NoScript, ABP and Vimperator. The Chrome equivalents are imperfect due to Chrome's extension model, and I miss the real things almost daily. However, I just can't go back to a browser that's slow and unresponsive. Maybe Firefox and Chrome are just making different trade-offs, and I happen to benefit more from Chrome's choices. I don't know. What I do know is that I can't tolerate my browser freezing up or taking 5 seconds to process clicks.
* - A fairly modest laptop with a 1.6ghz dual-core AMD APU, 6gb of RAM and an SSD. It's easily fast enough for everything else that I do, and Chrome flies on it. On my much beefier desktop, Firefox is usable, but still noticeably slower than Chrome.
That doesn't sound typical. Have you tried doing a Firefox reset? I've seen it make a large improvement to performance, especially with older Firefox profiles:
(In short: Go to "about:support" and click reset. It will prompt you before doing anything, and will rebuild your profile while preserving bookmarks/history/saved-forms/etc)
For what it's worth, I've got 16 tabs open in Chrome at the moment -- the process has been running for days -- and it's taking 2.6 gigs of RAM. This is without tabs like Facebook and Twitter, which I will not leave open any more because of noticing how much memory they were burning through just sitting there. A lot of those tabs are simple things like a static page I generated myself or github pages.
At the moment, Chrome's response is still snappy, but it certainly is not unusual for it to get pretty bad in my experience, particularly if I'm doing something else memory intensive at the same time.
This was exactly my experience with FF back in the day -- while everyone was bitching about it being a bloated memory hog, I had no problem using it on an old machine with 256MB of RAM.
I use Firefox on KDE with a dark theme (obsidian coast). Parts of some pages, like this very comment input on HN, specify either text color or background color, but not the other, and so you get dark text on dark bg or light text on light bg. However, these are relatively rare, and I have little issue with this setup.
The KDE integration is also not that bad. I use ArchLinux and never installed any special packages, and while tabs and menus do not look exactly like Qt/KDE apps, the difference is barely noticable. And they are the correct color.
It's getting better and it's now overtaken Safari as my default when I need a second browser. However I'll never consider switching back until they completely eliminate popups of any kind. I never want to be asked to restart the browser or update my plugins or anything. I don't care if Mozilla is filing for bankruptcy and they are turning it over to Kim Jong-un - I don't want a fucking popup announcing it.
Edit: immediately after making this post I realized there might be a way to disable all popups and notifications. Is there? If so, I might give it a spin for a week.
If you set the about:config pref "app.update.silent" to true, Firefox should never show you an update dialog. A Mozilla user study showed that most Firefox users restarted their browser at least once a day, so the update dialog usually waits something like 12 or 24 hours. By then, most users will have restarted their browser without needing to be prodded.
I was actually thinking the same thing and am giving it a try.
One thing that strikes me as vastly inferior in FF given my use cases is the way private browsing works. I use incognito tabs in Chrome all the time in dev to get a clean tab with no sessions etc. FF only allows for either normal tabs or private tabs, not both. Oh well :-)
I'm sticking with firefox for most of the same reasons as the author notes, but I do wish the mozilla team used some common sense when they think of new features.
A good example of the lack of common sense (imho) is the addon bar. Why do I want an extra bar with 2 or 3 icons? Most people will probably remember the status bar in browsers and they ditched that because it was not needed and you lost valuable screen estate. What was the best solution mozilla could come up with to handle the extension icons? An extra bar in the bottom of your browser. Just implement an omnibar already and put those things there...
If anyone from mozilla is reading this: you've done a great (GREAT!) job at making firefox faster and use less memory, and if you're ever in the neighbourhood I'll buy you a beer. Now please also start thinking about those little things that just don't make any sense.
It might not be useful for you, but I for one find the "addon bar" really great. I've about 10 addons installed and configured most of them to be at the bottom, all in a single place. You can toggle it with "CTRL + /" at anytime, which pleases both parties.
If you customize toolsbars (on Mac, View > Toolbars > Customize..., similar on Linux and, I assume, Windows) you can move all (most?) of those icons to the addressbar. I think this is going to be the new default in the upcoming new Firefox theme (see <https://people.mozilla.com/~bwinton/australis/customization/...).
I recently switched back to Chrome because I felt Firefox was too slow. Strange how we experience the exact opposite :\.
Also, the feature I most appreciate with Chrome is the synchronization of tabs across all my devices (PC, laptop and phone). Firefox also has this but it never really worked for me (it was slow to update the tab list of my PC so I could access it from my phone, or it didn't update it at all "Ubuntu 12.04 - 4 days ago").
Strangely this was one of the main reasons I switched off Chrome.
I found that this was not useful at all. My three main consumptions are:
-> Work Computer
-> Tablet and phone
-> Home computer
The tabs on my work computer are almost always not relevant for when I am at home and on tablet phone. There is also certain cases where I would not particularly want my tabs from my work machine (sensitive information perhaps) shared to my home computer or a mobile device I could get stolen and vice versa.
For any sharing of tabs I want, I just use pocket, as the tabs I really want to share are usually just articles that I want to read, either way pocket will take those links.
I simply click the link, and a real PDF viewer shows me the content. I close the viewer when finished, and forget about it.
It's the same experience, except that the PDF is rendered right, the fonts are nicer, and the scrolling is far better. I can also view it as a presentation with slides easily.
I get where everyone is coming from when they say Firefox is getting better, but I really don't see Chrome getting worse and I certainly don't see Firefox surpassing Chrome.
Firefox dev tools in Nightly are much better, but still don't beat Chrome's. Firefox is still ugly. Firefox still won't let me open Nightly and Aurora. Firefox's Javascript performance is getting faster and memory usage is getting better, but when running tight loops in Javascript doing lots of calculations (specifically rendering fractal flames) Firefox becomes unresponsive and unusable, where as Chrome is fine and I can still browse normally while it runs in the background. Chrome might use a but more RAM but that's not a problem for me. I have buckets of RAM. Firefox needs restarting all the time when I change extensions or get updates.
Firefox's dev tools are still inadaquate compared to the ones in Chrome, even with Nightly. Thankfully Firebug and another Firefox profile solves that.
As far as opening both Nightly and Aurora, create a shortcut to Nightly with the following options "...\firefox.exe -p -no-remote". This will let you select a profile on startup, keeping your Aurora and Nightly profiles separate and running both at the same time.
Firefox isn't ugly. Maybe the default style, but it's the most customizable browser in common use. You can make it look however you want with a few addons and config settings.
Spot on, OP. Spot on. Firefox is a great browser and its truly open.
Unlike you I always been a Firefox user mostly because I still can't the basic addons for Chrome which I use on Firefox. And privacy concerns. I still use Chrome for cross-browser checks.
The one thing that Chrome was been said to be better than Firefox was the memory management. Over the past years, Firefox's memory leak issue has almost diminished and Chrome's has started.
Mozilla was and always is making Firefox for web browsing, they never pulled in any other feature/add-on/plug-in which would side track their motto.
Recently, it seems Chrome is saving history online between browsers on different machines. This has freaked me out to the point where I'm moving back to using Firefox.
Very true, on windows at least every single browser renders fonts however they feel like. I wish someone would stand up and propose a standard way to render fonts (yes, I know pages don't necessarily have to look exactly pixel perfect across browsers, but it would simplify the design process a lot)
It drives me bonkers when I highlight text to read (I don't highlight everything, but I do it unconciously). When I highlight the text in chrome, it feels like my vision suddendly dropped out and I need glasses.
There has been talks of directwrite coming to Chrome for nearly a year now. We have to suffer the poorly hinted fonts looking terrible for a while longer.
I never switched to Chrome for the silly and simple reason that I prefer a less corporate internet over a more corporate one. On top of that I am not sure that Chrome is or is not spyware but I'd like to err on the side of caution with stuff like this.
IIRC when Google released Chrome they said (I'm paraphrasing) they were doing it to raise the bar by which web browsers were measured. They needed to do this so that their other products (gmail, google docs) were viable replacements to their desktop competitors. They weren't really interested in developing a browser for its own sake.
If Firefox is now seen as being as good as or even better than Chrome, it looks like Google have succeeded.
Seeing ads in Google Chrome, I'd say they use the browser for more than that. But yes, I can also remember hearing something like that. They're profiting regardless of the outcome.
I frequently have tabs become completely unresponsive
This started happening to me a few months ago, and yesterday I had about 5 tabs do this. I even cleared the cache and restarted, and it happened again.
I've been having the same thoughts as the OP, and having fled FF around the same time frame, perhaps I should give it another try.
If you are an extremely fast typer, pretty much any time you use Firefox on OS X to "Save As" you will hit this incarnation of a bug that hangs every tab in your browser and forces you to kill it and start from scratch: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=528149
Total bummer, I love Firefox but I'm not gonna train myself to type slower to keep from breaking it. This is no Therac-25.
I love Firefox and use it every day. But you bring up an important point. The Google Chrome team has some pretty annoying bugs and limitations that they ignore for years, but the same is true for Firefox.
For example, my largest pet peeve with Firefox is that two sessions cannot share the same profile. I can't have Firefox open for user abc in desktop session 1 and try to open it again as user abc in desktop session 2. Chrome and IE have no problem doing that. No joke, the issue is a decade old. And Mozilla recently marked the issue as a wont-fix.
I didn't lodge a complaint in the bug's comment trail. It's disappointing, but I figure it's essentially impossible for any of these guys to have a stellar record on bugs when you're got bug IDs in the high six-digits.
I used to be a Firefox user a couple of years ago and then when I switched to Chrome I noticed a BIG difference in the performance. Chrome was faster and more stable.
Now, similar to the OP I keep having issues with Chrome, the biggest of which is its memory usage.
"Memory usage is off the charts and I frequently have tabs become completely unresponsive."
In my case, it not only eats 2GB of my RAM, but also takes a bit proportion of my hard-disk. I did a quick experiment yesterday and measured my FREE HDD space before closing Chrome and after that.
Before: 800 MB free.
After: 10.9 GB free :)
It's true I keep a lot of tabs open (>70), but 10GB.. I think that's too much. Now, I'm considering switching back to Firefox, too.
It's the consistent tic- tic-tic of disk access by Chrome. I have all extensions and plug-ins disabled. All caching disabled. And yet when I try to concentrate on something I'm reading in Chrome I'm continuously distracted by the tic-tic-tic of chrome accessing the hard disk every second or two.
Right now this window I'm writing in is the only Chrome window open. Yet there are three Chrome processes running. One of which is writing 7k per second to a temp file.
Chrome is not the sleek beast it once was. It's living off its reputation at this point.
Mozilla continues to exist because there is competition among search engines for marketshare. If Google was the only search engine in the world, they likely wouldn't see any need to fund Mozilla. But given that Bing does exist, and that it has non-negligible marketshare (16.5% [1]), Microsoft would be more than willing to fund Mozilla if Google wasn't willing to pony up. We can only speculate, but bids from Microsoft are likely why Google increased the amount that they're paying Mozilla in the most recent round of negotiations.
Personally, I hope that the venture with Firefox OS will be successful in making Mozilla less reliant on search engine licensing agreements.
No, because in order to use DDG you had to change the default away from Google. That default is the entirety of what Google is paying for, and I'm sure it actually gets them a lot of traffic from people who don't care enough to switch (or who just don't care at all).
Well, with both Chrome and Firefox on rapid mandatory release schedules, all I can say is: Get comfortable supporting IE for large enterprise customers forever.
Interesting... I've been consulting for one of the biggest of the biggest you could dream of.
There's a tendency which you may have heard of: mobile (smartphones and tablets) and there's a lot of push for making these supported and available to employees (the push very often coming both from the employees and from very high up the chain).
As a result mobile browsers support in large enterprise are becoming very often mandatory.
Why do you think large enterprise are supporting browsers at all? why do you think large enterprise are switching en masse to internal webapps instead of internal desktop apps? To free themselves from a particular technology vendor. It's the way they regain control. And you think they'd ruin all that by mandating "IE only"!?
This is not at all what I'm seeing in the enterprisey webapp world. On the contrary: the shift is to more platform, more standards, more openness.
People trading security (sandboxing) for performance (lower memory usage and faster speed in Firefox) deserve to be a) owned and b) have their whole browser crash when one tab crashes.
I'd be using Firefox if they started to sandbox all the tabs. To me the argument that it's faster and use less memory because it's not sandboxed is a very poor one.
Actually that argument shows what is wrong with the mindset of many people in our field.
You should never trade security for a bit more perfs.
I don't believe Chrome took appreciably longer than Firefox to compromise in the recent PWN2OWN competition. Chrome's sandboxing implementation is not a silver bullet, and FF has run plugins out-of-process for some time. That said, full sandboxing is probably preferable and I believe it is on the agenda.
I also switched back for similiar reasons. FF has really stepped up their memory management and patching IMO. Also, i went back because of plugins.
Say what you will about chrome, but tab plugins are king in firefox. Tree style tabs on the left hand side and tab grouping what really sank it for me. I even merged the the search box and address bar in FF to give me that chrome omnibar feeling.
I think the most important takeaway is this: FF is still competitive among technical people and so is chrome. There even might be room for IE. We as a community, would need to keep voting with our feet and we can make sure the "browser wars" never end.
Til people are snobbish and only use one browser , personally i use whatever is avail i have no allegiance to one or the other just the one that works first.
I develop on Chrome all day every day and I cannot relate at all to these people saying it is full of bugs and crashing all the time. Nor do I find that Firefox is faster.
Chrome dev tools are still the best in the business, and Chrome just works.
Also I did a memory usage comparison on Chrome and Firefox 2 months ago and Firefox was using more memory by quite a bit (and got worse the more tabs you had open.) And this was Firefox with NO Flash and Chrome with Flash.
This is the first comment I've read so far that I 100% agree with.
I personally see no reason to keep more than 8-10 tabs open at a given time which doesn't affect my CPU performance whatsoever (running a "standard" dev machine of 12GB+ RAM, i7, etc) so I could care less if FF handles 40 tabs better.
And quickly, some reasons I love Chrome (& Google):
- Accessible nightly builds (Canary)
- AngularJS debug extension
- Built-in bookmark/history/search sync (read something at home yesterday - can easily find it in my history at work or on mobile)
I generally will have anywhere from 12-50 tabs open in Chrome, and have no problems whatsoever. I suspect that Chrome isn't actually the problem for these people complaining about it.
With all the recent audio work chrome was unusable for many sites with flash audio playback. The problem persisted for months. There was one were whole tags of content would disappear due to a gpu bug. Unplugging headphones while the browser was focused would crash it. I find it amazing you haven't seen one in the past 6 months. Everyone I know has encountered some sort of problem
This post seems weird to me as I recently switched back to Chrome for Firefox precisely because Chrome is faster than ff. It is visibly faster for me and most recent articles I could find after I googled 'Chrome versus Firefox' showed exactly that - that Chrome is faster than Firefox on the more important metrics right now.
I switched from Firefox to Chrome around the same time as the author. However, I'm having the opposite experience. Chrome is great; everything is blazing fast, even with my ~25 tabs open.
I tried Firefox a few weeks ago just to see if I had been missing out on anything. Nope. Opening new tabs in Firefox was sluggish. Page navigation was even worse. I assumed that most browsers would be roughly on par these days but Firefox was not even tolerable after having used Chrome.
It pains me because I, too, share the sentiment that Mozilla is committed to freedom and privacy on the internet. I guess I am just willing to give that up in exchange for a better internet experience for the time being.
I'm currently using an early 2006 iMac with Core Duo and 2GB of memory, running OS X 10.6.8, while my main computer is being repaired. For two years I thought it was dead (or on its last gasp), after some futile attempts to revive it with an external HDD. Finally I managed to boot it with an USB flash drive and later transferred its contents to an external USB hard drive.
Firefox is the only browser that runs comfortably on it. I'm using a lot of extensions, including ABP with multiple filter lists. After disabling caching on hard drive, I'm keeping around 25 tabs, sometimes 30 or more, and there's still RAM to spare, and the CPU isn't getting pounded.
Of course, browsers should be optimized for current use cases and computers, but what I've experienced for the past two weeks really changed my impression of Firefox as a bloated and slow browser that was only fast in comparison to old IE.
Firefox is still slow as heck for me. Not sure what performance you guys are talking about. I unfortunately have to use Firefox heavily at work. When I can I use something else, sometimes even IE.
If you have any specific test case like a website or certain operation, please file a bug so we can look at the issue. Otherwise a profile reset and a test in safe-mode is always a good idea.
>2) On Ubuntu, Chromium always seems to be behind Chrome wrt updates.
This has to do with an Ubuntu repository (for chromium) vs PPA from Google (for chrome). Ubuntu is always going to be a bit behind upstream. The same way it is a few days behind upstream firefox or other software. If you absolutely need the bleeding edge version of google chrome, either use something like archlinux (where you get updates within a day or two), or continue with Ubuntu, but use a ppa for chromium beta which is available from here (http://askubuntu.com/questions/126092/where-are-the-daily-bu...).
Unfortunately, in my experience, Chrome's WebGL performance is several times better than Firefox's. Upon several benchmarks, there is just no comparison.
I've always stuck to Firefox for its customizability and because it has less reasons to collect all my data and become an Apple like walled garden which Chrome is slow turning into.
That said, yes, they also have less reasons to be 'answerable' to their users or to fix problems. On Bugzilla, I've mostly seen arrogant and rude contributors who are mostly like, if you can't contribute or fix it yourself, go away! Don't even complain. See the example of this major/critical 12 years old bug, which no one wants to fix, and now they don't even want users to express their displeasure on that. There's no resolve, while other browsers have fixed that problem.
I've always stuck to Firefox for its customizability and because it has less reasons to collect all my data and become an Apple like walled garden which Chrome is slow turning into.
That said, yes, they also have less reasons to be 'answerable' to their users or to fix problems. On Bugzilla, I've mostly seen arrogant and rude contributors who are mostly like, "If you can't contribute or fix it yourself, go away!" Don't even complain. See the example of this major/critical 12 years old bug, which no one wants to fix, and now they don't even want users to express their displeasure on that. There's no resolve, while other browsers have fixed that problem.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78414
One of the things I tried out was WebGL performance using the recently posted WebGL terrain flyover demo (http://www.zephyrosanemos.com/windstorm/20130301/live-demo.h...), but I can't get over 30.5 fps in Firefox whereas on Chrome I get 50 - 60. Hardware acceleration seems to be enabled for both, perhaps Firefox is not recognizing the graphics card?
One of the things that impressed my about Chrome in the beginning was when they launched Chrome Experiments to show off the performance. There was no comparison at the time between any other browser and Chrome. This may still hold true to a certain extent.
However, for general browsing I can't tell a difference with the current iteration.
I switched my main browser Chrome to Canary some time ago. And recently i have been using Firefox Nightly. And all i can say is that Chrome now lacks the quality it used to have (yes, even in the canary build) and Firefox has gained a lot in terms of stability, memory consumption and Dev-features.
The bad thing is: hardly anyone knows about this, because Google is investing tons and tons of money for Chrome marketing purposes (and developer evangelisation; a point you also have to consider).
Only thing i like more about Chrome: the dev tools
There must be some shifting in the geekforce. I just switched back to Firefox a couple of weeks ago on OSX 10.7. Flawless, which is more than I can say for Chrome or Safari.
I use both Firefox and Chrome. But I prefer Firefox. Better addons and extensibility were already mentioned. But one thing that seems to be commonly overlooked is the superior typography of Firefox. Firefox even does stuff like ligatures. That makes reading longer text much more pleasant.
Firefox is also capable of handling large amounts of tabs. In Chrome the tab bar is of fixed length (length of the window) and thus the maximum number of tabs is limited by my screen width. In Firefox the tab bar can extend to the sides or even better you can use the TreeStyleTabs addon to organize tabs in a tree view.
I think the biggest problem for Firefox was the long wait before FF4 was released. That was the exact time many people moved to Chrome. FF3.6 wasn't bad but was clearly slower than Chrome and had a huge memory appetite. Later versions improved this dramatically and Firefox now feels lighter/faster than Chrome. But every time FF vs. Chrome there are people claiming otherwise who have stopped using FF at version 3.6...
My biggest complain with Chrome right now is it freezes up and take over the entire CPU for 10 to 30 seconds every now and then. It's the case on both Windows 7 and Mac (10.8 Mountain Lion). Usually when that happens, I take a mini-break. Before it was lightning fast. I tried to switch back to Firefox but it's still IMO considerably slower in general but admittedly much more stable and doesn't freeze up for no good reason. Chrome seems to be slowly slipping to where Firefox was before as author ranted.
The ultimate parameter for me is speed. As much as I love Mozilla's open source policy, I just can't use it because it is slower. RAM is not a problem to anyone, so I prefer more RAM used than slower performance.
I use firefox, always have even when it was buggy as hell, mostly because i needed all the web dev tools and was confortable with it, but i also use chrome for watching youtube and quick browsing (unfortunately firefox till this day is damn slow to open and become responsive).
Thats why im looking forward to opera's webkit version (so i can ditch google chrome for opera), i think google chrome is getting more and more creepy and has made some decisions that are more in google's interest than the users (like posting links on the speed dial or all the extensions that are nothing more thank links and all the extensions that are not links but behave like links, its weird).
I still prefer firebug over the firefox dev tools. The built in tools look pretty but they aren't that useful to me. I just figured out how to show the style window, but there doesn't seem to be any javascript tools. Where is the console?
edit: After I posted this I figured I should dig deeper before I get all kinds of negative comments. I found the console and also some other useful tools that I didn't know existed. Things like the responsive view and scratch pad are pretty cool.
> The post is spot on. Firefox is a great browser, but reading the OP's last paragraphs, users rarely choose software for quality alone.
Quality is not the same for everyone. I have switched to Chrome, and it feels like it's build much better than Firefox. Maybe Firefox is actually built better, but as an user, I perceive Chrome to be better, starting with rare crashes instead of Firefox's frequent ones. Yes, Firefox's crashes may be because of its plugins, but that's a moot point, because without any plugins, Firefox is too basic a browser.
Switching between Firefox and chrome will happen often for at least few years to come. Chrome was a good thing because it brought some real competition in the Market.
Webkit is supported by Apple as well as Google which happen to be worlds largest companies. Firefox on other other had is open, non profit organization giving a tough fight to both of them.
The exact reason I jumped out of Chrome to back Firefox. Privacy. I will never trust Google with my information and it seems they do collect it without me knowing as well. I have scoured over Chrome's source code to see if they are doing anything nefarious as tracking my url visits but still I never felt safe in that platform. I moved to duckduckgo, Firefox and I am happy.
I've been using Mozilla code since the Netscape 7.X days (and tried to use NS6, but it was way too buggy.) I progressed from MS7 to the Mozilla Suite to Firefox, and have stayed there.
I have Chrome (and Opera, Safari, Midori, Konqueror, K-Meleon, D+, and a few other things including IE installed, but mostly to keep up on what others are doing. Firefox is what I use in production, and I currently run Aurora (which will be the next release when it gets out of beta.)
FF isn't the smallest or fastest browser on the machine I'm on at the moment (and old netbook) but is the most capable. FF, like other current browsers, makes assumptions about what you will run it on, and assumes a reasonably current machine with a reasonable CPU, GPU, and amount of RAM. I have another old machine I don't even try to run FF on.
My reasons are tied up in the architecture. FF uses the Gecko engine, like everything else Mozilla puts out. Aside from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, Gecko interprets and renders XUL, an XML language for designing user interfaces. The look and feel of FF is determined by XUL, CSS, and widgets, and the browser is simply an instance of something Gecko renders.
This makes it possible to create themes that change what FF looks like, and extensions that modify and extend what it does, and that power is why I use it. My RSS reader, IRC client and several other things that would ordinarily be external programs are implemented in FF as extensions. Since the browser is always running when I'm at the computer, this make things very convenient.
Other browsers like Chrome added an extension capability, but they are pure JavaScript and limited by what the device API will let you do in JavaScript. Half of what I do in FF isn't possible in Chrome.
Chrome is a worthy browser, and I'm glad it's there, but it's not what I use. It invokes somewhat faster than FF, but page rendering is equivalent, and memory usage rises rapidly as you add extensions, so there's little difference between FF and Chrome in use. Faster invocation is a non-issue here: I start the browser when I sit down at the machine and simply leave it running, so a few extra seconds to invoke it isn't a concern. Too many people have the bad habit learned from IE of hopping in and out of the browser, and I just tell such folks "You're doing it wrong".
On my desktop booted into Windows, I run FF from a RAMdisk. The desktop still runs XP and has 4GB RAM, but 32 bit Windows can only use 3.2GB of it. I found a RAMdisk driver that can use the rest and have a 768MBR ramdrive seen as Z:. Firefox, its cache, and its profile all live there and FF is run from there. It's quick. (Batch files populate the ramdisk on start up, and store the contents back to HD on shutdown.) I don't believe I can do that with Chrome.
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