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Daily Firefox user here. Switched back from Chrome a couple years ago and haven't looked back. Just seeing the comments here exasperates me... So for those wh

Daily Firefox user here. Switched back from Chrome a couple years ago and haven't looked back. Just seeing the comments here exasperates me... So for those who don't know, the Internet is heavily biased towards Chrome. Simple pages that should render no differently in FF than Chrome are often broken. This "Chrome is great, screw everything else" attitude is exactly how we ended up with IE and stagnation in standards/development in the late 90s/early 2000s. The biggest feature of IE was faster rendering and better performance versus Netscape. It's seriously an issue that developers/engineers are only targeting Chrome and I think a large part of that is also due to V8 powering Node.js. I'm not trying to bash Node here... Developers are so hooked in its (chrome) ecosystem they don't even realize the bias. I'm beyond excited to see things like Chakra being able to replace V8 in node because I think it will be a huge boon to making a more free and open web. Anymore I've started to protest by refusing to use sites that are flagrantly broken in FF. I block em in /etc/host and call it a day. What happened to standards? Why can't I use a browser you don't like? Also FF for those that haven't used it in a while: •) it uses less ram than chrome especially with a lot of tabs open •) is quite performant and getting better •) has vastly improved its Dev tools... the folks responsible for them are very receptive to ideas and happy to hear them. •) multi-process Firefox is MUCH more responsive than its single process alternative but must be enabled currently (I think). Also make sure your extensions are compatible with it. •) personally, I think, the developer edition Firefox I think is much more attractive than Chrome I really hope the web doesn't just work in one browser and that things start to improve. Reading comments here gives me little assurance that will happen :( Edit 1: formatting and note about folks making the FF Dev tools. Edit 2: clarity in final paragraph and added sad face.

midgetjones 10y ago
So much this. It just seems like everyone repeats the "Chrome is better and Firefox is slow" mantra without spending a couple of days trying Firefox. It's a browser owned by an advertising company. An advertising company that knows a lot about you, and constantly strives to learn more by whatever nefarious means they can think of. I can't see how anyone is okay with that.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  Because it's faster.* The day I can open Firefox and it feels as snappy as Chrome I'll switch back to Firefox. * Opinion of one blue-collar worker.
  - midgetjones 10y ago
    I don't feel like the bottleneck nowadays is the browser. It's several mb of advertising flotsam that Google is actively endorsing.
  - annnnd 10y ago
    No it is not. Whenever I use Chromium to see if some page renders well, I am surprised how slower it is. That said, it probably depends on the type of pages you are visiting, but startup time in FF is much lower in my experience.
roystonvassey 10y ago
+1. Moreover, I find Google/Chrome behaving like MS of late 90s when they used to force IE down Windows users. For instance, to use Chromecast to stream youtube videos from my laptop, I am required to necessarily use a buggy, bloated Chrome that takes ages to boot up. There's no plugin made available for Firefox which is exasperating.
- lmedinas 10y ago
  Same here unfortunately i was not able find an alternative to chromecast that can work with Firefox. Its these little things and in general Video support that I keep my Chrome installed. Most of the times i end up using Chrome at home more than Firefox.
necessity 10y ago
Can you cite some of those pages? I have been using Firefox forever and haven't had any rendering issues in the past years. I imagine it must be some fancy niche node+webgl websites...
madshiva 10y ago
There are broken because like IE Firefox don't support all standard. Chrome has been every time pushing news technology, ban or isolate adobe flash for the best for the users. Firefox take decision for me and I don't like it.
- nindalf 10y ago
  > Firefox don't support all standard Could you give some examples? Let me make it easy for you. Check out [1] and tell me which API you found difficult to manage without. > ban or isolate adobe flash Firefox doesn't come bundled with Flash. Chrome does. Does that count as a decision taken on your behalf? [1] - http://caniuse.com/#compare=firefox+53,chrome+58 http://caniuse.com/#compare=firefox+53,chrome+58
a_imho 10y ago
I'm seriously baffled by a big red UK based telecommunications company, which prompts me to use their e-billing features, yet can't make their local website work with Firefox for years now.
amelius 10y ago
> This "Chrome is great, screw everything else" attitude is exactly how we ended up with IE and stagnation in standards/development in the late 90s/early 2000s. A similar thing can be said about Apple versus other hardware companies. It saddens me that especially people on dev forums don't want to see this.
kakarot 10y ago
I regularly find myself with 200-300 tabs open, it was a very sad day when Mozilla axed the Tab Group feature, but luckily addons stepped up and even improved it a bit.
agumonkey 10y ago
I know Firefox has made immense progress in a lot of hard components. But the UI lag is ... ridiculous. And I mean it lovingly, I have nothing against "slow", I still love my HP48 calc which is sluggish in a way, but it's not jitter-lag. I love Firefox extensions, I love the bookmark editor, I love the non-big-corp centric coupling. But I can only use it for long periods of time if chrome has a bug (I use canary). Or when they send a memory debugging build which are as sluggish as Firefox. Every time I run Firefox I'm sad thinking about Firefox 2 with good old basic windows gui. Also, since Chrome 56, maybe it's just an accounting trick, but memory usage dropped tremendously...
- nachtigall 10y ago
  You might want to "refresh" your Firefox, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13227658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13227658
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    Let's see if that improves things. ps: refresh done, still lagging on tab open/close. That said, I use Nightly, and I'm not sure it's not instrumented and thus slower..
    - nachtigall 10y ago
      I do not think that Nightly should be any slower than say Dev Edition (Aurora) or the stable release. What's your default page when opening a new tab? Maybe it's because your start page needs long to load?! Mine is "about:home" (set with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-override/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-overr...)
    - snovv_crash 10y ago
      If you have LastPass, make sure you updated to plugin 4.x. Earlier versions didn't play nicely with the new multithreading, causing big lags.
amelius 10y ago
My personal biggest problem with FF is that it uses too much screen real estate compared to Chrome. For example, the tabs are really fat, and the address bar is much thicker, leaving less space for actual content. Perhaps FF should include a "look-like-chromium" option to win over users (since chromium is open-source, I guess they will not run into copyright issues there).
- cornedor 10y ago
  The difference is 5px [1] on my system (osx, 1080p), it also does look a lot like Chrome. [1] http://i.imgur.com/h4acDaK.png http://i.imgur.com/h4acDaK.png
  - amelius 10y ago
    On Linux the difference is 10px (FF versus Chromium), [1]. [1] http://imgur.com/a/TX7Qm http://imgur.com/a/TX7Qm
    - cornedor 10y ago
      You could try the developer edition, the default theme is more compact, even smaller than chrome on osx. (you can choose a dark and light theme in the developer tools) http://i.imgur.com/jsvfSvU.png http://i.imgur.com/jsvfSvU.png
- Tharre 10y ago
  There is an addon that does just that[0]. That being said, it unfortunately breaks from time to time, and it's not e10 compatible. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fxchrome/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fxchrome/
- midgetjones 10y ago
  Personally - and this isn't for everyone - I use vimperator, which allows me to just hide the url bar and do everything from the keyboard. I end up feeling the opposite; that the viewport is small whenever I have to test in Chrome.
LordWinstanley 10y ago
I used Firefox for a long time as I wanted to use the same browser across all my devices [for synching reasons]. The Android version of Firefox is definitely the least 'crippled' browser I've used on mobile, with full support for plugins [not that I'm one of those who load up their browser with dozens of plugins, but I like to add a few things like uBlock, NoScript, etc]. Unfortunately [and call it subjective, if you like] Firefox on Android is slow and gets noticeably slower as you use it. It needs regular 'fettling' by manually wiping its caches –more so than any other Android browser, in my experience. After getting fed up with Firefox, I gave Opera a try and, for a while, that was my default browser across all devices. It has a brilliant text reflow on Android, which is a real 'killer feature' and, of course, the desktop version supports those 3 or 4 'must-have' plugins. Unfortunately, Opera seem to be on a kamikaze mission to drive away their few remaining users –and contrive to make each release worse than the one before. The last straw for me was when they started pushing those trashy clickbait type junk articles on the homepage as a "News Feed" and adding spamvertising bookmarks to your 'speed dial' page. Opera on mobile also seemed to suffer the FF style slow-downs, after prolonged use. So, after a brief trek through a couple more browsers [Vivaldi on desktop, Ghostery on Android], I arrived back [reluctantly, I thought at the time] at Chrome [or Chromium for the desktop version]. And you know what?... it runs great on Android. It doesn't slow down after a couple of weeks of use and have to be given a 'cache enema'. It's the only browser I've used on Android that can be relied on to communicate semi-reliably with LastPass's atrocious mobile version... [OK. I'll admit. That's LastPass's fault for making their Android app so bad that it only [just about] works with Chrome] ...and, since I've got my Android devices rooted and have AdAway patching my hosts file, I actually find out that, in daily use, the lack of plugins for Chrome on Android isn't such a big deal after all. I'd like to use Firefox for all the reasons you mentioned but, I've evaluated them all and switched between them all quite recently and have come to the conclusion that, while all browsers are flawed and all have their particular strengths and weaknesses across platforms and in terms of 'philosophy', Chrome/Chromium is currently the best of a bad bunch, for my use case. I'll be happy to take Firefox for a spin again, if they make any measurable improvements to the browser [I've read that they're working on re-writing it in Rust, which may make it a leaner machine] but frankly, the whole 'Firefox experience' recently has been a complete turn off. Are they still carrying on that lunacy of what seems like a new release every couple of days which appears to do nothing other than annoy me with yet another hefty download?
ryandrake 10y ago
As someone who's never used Chrome in his life, and who's not a web developer, I can say I don't notice any of this in my day-to-day browsing.
bigzen 10y ago
Chrome tends to perform better than Firefox handsdown on my 2015 mbPro. I went back and tried both the developer edition and the stable release after seeing this post because I want to move away from google as much as possible. But the fact of the matter is that in the hour I was attempting to use firefox I saw the OsX spinning wheel about 20 times. I have never once seen it while using chrome. This killed it for me immediately. (Notes. I had GPU acceleration turned on, and nearly 6 gigs of free memory.)
jedikv 10y ago
What about the fact that Firefox isn't considered as secure as chrome - http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/pwn2own-2016-firefox-missing-in-action,news-52637.html http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/pwn2own-2016-firefox-missing-i... (I say that as someone who mains chrome but jumps on to FF now and then).

midgetjones 10y ago

So much this. It just seems like everyone repeats the "Chrome is better and Firefox is slow" mantra without spending a couple of days trying Firefox. It's a browser owned by an advertising company. An advertising company that knows a lot about you, and constantly strives to learn more by whatever nefarious means they can think of. I can't see how anyone is okay with that.

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
Because it's faster.* The day I can open Firefox and it feels as snappy as Chrome I'll switch back to Firefox. * Opinion of one blue-collar worker.
- midgetjones 10y ago
  I don't feel like the bottleneck nowadays is the browser. It's several mb of advertising flotsam that Google is actively endorsing.
- annnnd 10y ago
  No it is not. Whenever I use Chromium to see if some page renders well, I am surprised how slower it is. That said, it probably depends on the type of pages you are visiting, but startup time in FF is much lower in my experience.

roystonvassey 10y ago

+1. Moreover, I find Google/Chrome behaving like MS of late 90s when they used to force IE down Windows users. For instance, to use Chromecast to stream youtube videos from my laptop, I am required to necessarily use a buggy, bloated Chrome that takes ages to boot up. There's no plugin made available for Firefox which is exasperating.

lmedinas 10y ago
Same here unfortunately i was not able find an alternative to chromecast that can work with Firefox. Its these little things and in general Video support that I keep my Chrome installed. Most of the times i end up using Chrome at home more than Firefox.

necessity 10y ago

Can you cite some of those pages? I have been using Firefox forever and haven't had any rendering issues in the past years. I imagine it must be some fancy niche node+webgl websites...

madshiva 10y ago

There are broken because like IE Firefox don't support all standard. Chrome has been every time pushing news technology, ban or isolate adobe flash for the best for the users. Firefox take decision for me and I don't like it.

nindalf 10y ago
> Firefox don't support all standard Could you give some examples? Let me make it easy for you. Check out [1] and tell me which API you found difficult to manage without. > ban or isolate adobe flash Firefox doesn't come bundled with Flash. Chrome does. Does that count as a decision taken on your behalf? [1] - http://caniuse.com/#compare=firefox+53,chrome+58 http://caniuse.com/#compare=firefox+53,chrome+58

a_imho 10y ago

I'm seriously baffled by a big red UK based telecommunications company, which prompts me to use their e-billing features, yet can't make their local website work with Firefox for years now.

amelius 10y ago

> This "Chrome is great, screw everything else" attitude is exactly how we ended up with IE and stagnation in standards/development in the late 90s/early 2000s. A similar thing can be said about Apple versus other hardware companies. It saddens me that especially people on dev forums don't want to see this.

kakarot 10y ago

I regularly find myself with 200-300 tabs open, it was a very sad day when Mozilla axed the Tab Group feature, but luckily addons stepped up and even improved it a bit.

agumonkey 10y ago

I know Firefox has made immense progress in a lot of hard components. But the UI lag is ... ridiculous. And I mean it lovingly, I have nothing against "slow", I still love my HP48 calc which is sluggish in a way, but it's not jitter-lag. I love Firefox extensions, I love the bookmark editor, I love the non-big-corp centric coupling. But I can only use it for long periods of time if chrome has a bug (I use canary). Or when they send a memory debugging build which are as sluggish as Firefox. Every time I run Firefox I'm sad thinking about Firefox 2 with good old basic windows gui. Also, since Chrome 56, maybe it's just an accounting trick, but memory usage dropped tremendously...

nachtigall 10y ago
You might want to "refresh" your Firefox, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13227658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13227658
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Let's see if that improves things. ps: refresh done, still lagging on tab open/close. That said, I use Nightly, and I'm not sure it's not instrumented and thus slower..
  - nachtigall 10y ago
    I do not think that Nightly should be any slower than say Dev Edition (Aurora) or the stable release. What's your default page when opening a new tab? Maybe it's because your start page needs long to load?! Mine is "about:home" (set with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-override/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-overr...)
  - snovv_crash 10y ago
    If you have LastPass, make sure you updated to plugin 4.x. Earlier versions didn't play nicely with the new multithreading, causing big lags.

amelius 10y ago

My personal biggest problem with FF is that it uses too much screen real estate compared to Chrome. For example, the tabs are really fat, and the address bar is much thicker, leaving less space for actual content. Perhaps FF should include a "look-like-chromium" option to win over users (since chromium is open-source, I guess they will not run into copyright issues there).

cornedor 10y ago
The difference is 5px [1] on my system (osx, 1080p), it also does look a lot like Chrome. [1] http://i.imgur.com/h4acDaK.png http://i.imgur.com/h4acDaK.png
- amelius 10y ago
  On Linux the difference is 10px (FF versus Chromium), [1]. [1] http://imgur.com/a/TX7Qm http://imgur.com/a/TX7Qm
  - cornedor 10y ago
    You could try the developer edition, the default theme is more compact, even smaller than chrome on osx. (you can choose a dark and light theme in the developer tools) http://i.imgur.com/jsvfSvU.png http://i.imgur.com/jsvfSvU.png
Tharre 10y ago
There is an addon that does just that[0]. That being said, it unfortunately breaks from time to time, and it's not e10 compatible. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fxchrome/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fxchrome/
midgetjones 10y ago
Personally - and this isn't for everyone - I use vimperator, which allows me to just hide the url bar and do everything from the keyboard. I end up feeling the opposite; that the viewport is small whenever I have to test in Chrome.

LordWinstanley 10y ago

I used Firefox for a long time as I wanted to use the same browser across all my devices [for synching reasons]. The Android version of Firefox is definitely the least 'crippled' browser I've used on mobile, with full support for plugins [not that I'm one of those who load up their browser with dozens of plugins, but I like to add a few things like uBlock, NoScript, etc]. Unfortunately [and call it subjective, if you like] Firefox on Android is slow and gets noticeably slower as you use it. It needs regular 'fettling' by manually wiping its caches –more so than any other Android browser, in my experience. After getting fed up with Firefox, I gave Opera a try and, for a while, that was my default browser across all devices. It has a brilliant text reflow on Android, which is a real 'killer feature' and, of course, the desktop version supports those 3 or 4 'must-have' plugins. Unfortunately, Opera seem to be on a kamikaze mission to drive away their few remaining users –and contrive to make each release worse than the one before. The last straw for me was when they started pushing those trashy clickbait type junk articles on the homepage as a "News Feed" and adding spamvertising bookmarks to your 'speed dial' page. Opera on mobile also seemed to suffer the FF style slow-downs, after prolonged use. So, after a brief trek through a couple more browsers [Vivaldi on desktop, Ghostery on Android], I arrived back [reluctantly, I thought at the time] at Chrome [or Chromium for the desktop version]. And you know what?... it runs great on Android. It doesn't slow down after a couple of weeks of use and have to be given a 'cache enema'. It's the only browser I've used on Android that can be relied on to communicate semi-reliably with LastPass's atrocious mobile version... [OK. I'll admit. That's LastPass's fault for making their Android app so bad that it only [just about] works with Chrome] ...and, since I've got my Android devices rooted and have AdAway patching my hosts file, I actually find out that, in daily use, the lack of plugins for Chrome on Android isn't such a big deal after all. I'd like to use Firefox for all the reasons you mentioned but, I've evaluated them all and switched between them all quite recently and have come to the conclusion that, while all browsers are flawed and all have their particular strengths and weaknesses across platforms and in terms of 'philosophy', Chrome/Chromium is currently the best of a bad bunch, for my use case. I'll be happy to take Firefox for a spin again, if they make any measurable improvements to the browser [I've read that they're working on re-writing it in Rust, which may make it a leaner machine] but frankly, the whole 'Firefox experience' recently has been a complete turn off. Are they still carrying on that lunacy of what seems like a new release every couple of days which appears to do nothing other than annoy me with yet another hefty download?

ryandrake 10y ago

As someone who's never used Chrome in his life, and who's not a web developer, I can say I don't notice any of this in my day-to-day browsing.

bigzen 10y ago

Chrome tends to perform better than Firefox handsdown on my 2015 mbPro. I went back and tried both the developer edition and the stable release after seeing this post because I want to move away from google as much as possible. But the fact of the matter is that in the hour I was attempting to use firefox I saw the OsX spinning wheel about 20 times. I have never once seen it while using chrome. This killed it for me immediately. (Notes. I had GPU acceleration turned on, and nearly 6 gigs of free memory.)

jedikv 10y ago

What about the fact that Firefox isn't considered as secure as chrome - http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/pwn2own-2016-firefox-missing-in-action,news-52637.html http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/pwn2own-2016-firefox-missing-i... (I say that as someone who mains chrome but jumps on to FF now and then).