5 ms·

Or just use Firefox, even if it is slightly slower than Chromium it's at least a browser that works for you not one that treats you as a pawn. A Chrome monocul

Or just use Firefox, even if it is slightly slower than Chromium it's at least a browser that works for you not one that treats you as a pawn. A Chrome monoculture is harmful, even if Google has the best intentions which I don't think they do - they definitely value their profits over an open web.

DominoTree 9y ago
FWIW, at this point, the Firefox 57 betas are more responsive than Chromium for me. Not planning on looking back any time soon.
- tazjin 9y ago
  Same for me, I've also enabled all the experimental webrender flags on both private and work machines and have had basically no issues at all for the last weeks. It's actually almost slightly uncanny how well it's working.
  - snowpanda 9y ago
    >It's actually almost slightly uncanny how well it's working. Indeed, I've caught myself thinking "it's not supposed to render this fast" a few times myself. Really am enjoying the nightlies.
    - kibwen 9y ago
      This might be a placebo effect, because last I heard enabling WebRender would leave the usual renderer enabled as well in order to paper over yet-unimplemented features, which should often result in double the work and, one would assume, worse performance. But if it doesn't feel slower, then, well, that might be some kind of triumph. :P
- merb 9y ago
  I'm still on chrome, because of pepper flash.. :/ and because debugging angular sucks on firefox. Edit: still checking out if it might be possible. i've just seen that the newer firefox has also some kind of flash player integrated. just the debugging is now strange.
  - jhasse 9y ago
    Flash also works in Firefox, what do you need pepper flash for?
mariusmg 9y ago
>even if it is slightly slower than Chromium Funny thing is Firefox Quantum is both faster and eats less memory compared with Chrome. >not one that treats you as a pawn. And sadly, Firefox is the only browser that doesn't treat you like a pawn. For MS, Google, Apple, that chinese company which owns Opera you are just a pawn. (later edit : fixed the second remark).
- akerro 9y ago
  >And sadly, Firefox is the only browser that does this. Not any more, I recently discovered that my firefox at work got infected with Firefox Pioneer. I didn't install that, it just appeared on list of my addons, no warning or anything. I heard on Reddit about similar cases from a few months ago, people got Safe Browsing installed without their knowledge. Both are signed addons from Mozilla. https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/firefox-pioneer/ https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/firefox-pioneer/
  - unethical_ban 9y ago
    >at work Is youre IT group policy doing this?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - akerro 9y ago
      Small company, we don't have such policies, root account on my PC at work belongs to me. It's Ubuntu. your
  - ryuuchin 9y ago
    Safe browsing is now built in to Firefox (and Chrome) so I'm not sure what you're seeing there. It hasn't shipped as an addon for quite some time.
  - Vinnl 9y ago
    > Participation is voluntary, and you can remove yourself by disabling the add-on after you install it. So it sounds like a bug or another case of non-malice. Tried reporting it at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/?
laurent123456 9y ago
Firefox is not slower, it's just that most websites are optimised and tested only or mainly under Chrome. We are slowly getting back to the way things were with IE, but I hope that Mozilla won't give up and switch to blink or webkit like everybody else.
- nicoburns 9y ago
  That is definitely not true. Firefox 57 is about as fast as chrome, and Firefox 59 may well overtake, but chrome has genuinely been faster than Firefox for a long time.
- GordonS 9y ago
  I'm curious as to how you can optimise a site to be faster specifically for Chrome?
  - laurent123456 9y ago
    I don't write JS-heavy websites these days so I don't have a technical example to give, but for instance I've opened the Vue cinema website recently on Firefox mobile. The thing was unusable - when I typed my postcode, nothing would show up on screen, the whole website seemed frozen while waiting to load something. I had to press several times certain buttons for something to happen. On Chrome however everything worked fine right away. Overall it was just a few images, some text and a search bar, so no matter the performances of the browser that should work everywhere, but since it was probably only tested on Chrome and Safari, it only worked in these browsers.
  - adzm 9y ago
    Optimize for the v8 engine and/or browser-specific errata like the way chrome handles composition or svg etc.
  - ballenf 9y ago
    A trivial example is that a 'for' loop vs. 'while' loop can be faster on one browser compared to another. These differences are even starker if you use newer features without polyfills. For example, 'forEach' implementations as of a year ago varied by orders of magnitude. Native array sorting is another obvious one. Chrome, Firefox and especially Safari use quite different algorithms each based on array size with varying results. If you add up all those little changes and always go with the option that's fastest in Chromium, in a reasonably complex SPA you could easily generate noticeable differences.
PeachPlum 9y ago
Brendan Eich's Brave browser - https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/ Chrome without the tracking
usernam 9y ago
Firefox is not immune to this behavior. Please look up the preference "experiments.enabled" before recommending blindly. In fact, Firefox has increased in the amount of unwarranted telemetry and "experiments" a lot in the last years, a direction I'm really not happy with. The main difference is that Firefox still gives you pretty liberal access to most internal settings, while Chromium is abysmal, if not ridiculous.
- CapacitorSet 9y ago
  >In fact, Firefox has increased in the amount of unwarranted telemetry and "experiments" a lot in the last years I can understand "experiments" (Pocket comes to mind), but what are you referring to wrt "unwarranted telemetry"?
  - usernam 9y ago
    I'm not talking about Pocket. I'm talking about A/B testing internal features exactly like Chrome, such as ip v4/v6 path preference, pipelining support, TLS faststart (and so on) according to a random cohort selection.
    - rhelmer 9y ago
      While you can certainly turn off these sorts of features, I just want to emphasize that these are intended to make the product better, and Mozilla abides by a fairly strict privacy policy (when comparing to most tech companies at least): https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ The intention is to ship features that people actually want, and to ensure that Firefox is actually working for people (not everyone can/will file bug reports or post on twitter or hackernews etc)
      - usernam 9y ago
        Exactly like Chrome. I do not argue about the good intention behind.
  - 9y ago
Dylan16807 9y ago
Firefox just broke the bulk of their extensions, and I'm sitting and praying the APIs needed for non-broken gestures get implemented... I'm not being treated as a pawn, but it's still pretty rough.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  The extension API change has been widely available information for ages now, with a significant migration period. If an extension developer chooses to not update their extensions, that's their choice.
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    It is impossible to update a gesture extension into something that works properly. The APIs don't exist. The workaround is to inject scripts into the page to track gestures, which means gestures don't work until the DOM is parsed, and don't work on about:newtab or other about pages. Multiprocess had a significant migration period. Webextensions had "Well here's some APIs, we'll try to get you more before the day we switch. Some of the important ones are coming the version after, oops. And some are still missing but suck it up."

DominoTree 9y ago

FWIW, at this point, the Firefox 57 betas are more responsive than Chromium for me. Not planning on looking back any time soon.

tazjin 9y ago
Same for me, I've also enabled all the experimental webrender flags on both private and work machines and have had basically no issues at all for the last weeks. It's actually almost slightly uncanny how well it's working.
- snowpanda 9y ago
  >It's actually almost slightly uncanny how well it's working. Indeed, I've caught myself thinking "it's not supposed to render this fast" a few times myself. Really am enjoying the nightlies.
  - kibwen 9y ago
    This might be a placebo effect, because last I heard enabling WebRender would leave the usual renderer enabled as well in order to paper over yet-unimplemented features, which should often result in double the work and, one would assume, worse performance. But if it doesn't feel slower, then, well, that might be some kind of triumph. :P
merb 9y ago
I'm still on chrome, because of pepper flash.. :/ and because debugging angular sucks on firefox. Edit: still checking out if it might be possible. i've just seen that the newer firefox has also some kind of flash player integrated. just the debugging is now strange.
- jhasse 9y ago
  Flash also works in Firefox, what do you need pepper flash for?

mariusmg 9y ago

>even if it is slightly slower than Chromium Funny thing is Firefox Quantum is both faster and eats less memory compared with Chrome. >not one that treats you as a pawn. And sadly, Firefox is the only browser that doesn't treat you like a pawn. For MS, Google, Apple, that chinese company which owns Opera you are just a pawn. (later edit : fixed the second remark).

akerro 9y ago
>And sadly, Firefox is the only browser that does this. Not any more, I recently discovered that my firefox at work got infected with Firefox Pioneer. I didn't install that, it just appeared on list of my addons, no warning or anything. I heard on Reddit about similar cases from a few months ago, people got Safe Browsing installed without their knowledge. Both are signed addons from Mozilla. https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/firefox-pioneer/ https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/firefox-pioneer/
- unethical_ban 9y ago
  >at work Is youre IT group policy doing this?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - akerro 9y ago
    Small company, we don't have such policies, root account on my PC at work belongs to me. It's Ubuntu. your
- ryuuchin 9y ago
  Safe browsing is now built in to Firefox (and Chrome) so I'm not sure what you're seeing there. It hasn't shipped as an addon for quite some time.
- Vinnl 9y ago
  > Participation is voluntary, and you can remove yourself by disabling the add-on after you install it. So it sounds like a bug or another case of non-malice. Tried reporting it at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/?

laurent123456 9y ago

Firefox is not slower, it's just that most websites are optimised and tested only or mainly under Chrome. We are slowly getting back to the way things were with IE, but I hope that Mozilla won't give up and switch to blink or webkit like everybody else.

nicoburns 9y ago
That is definitely not true. Firefox 57 is about as fast as chrome, and Firefox 59 may well overtake, but chrome has genuinely been faster than Firefox for a long time.
GordonS 9y ago
I'm curious as to how you can optimise a site to be faster specifically for Chrome?
- laurent123456 9y ago
  I don't write JS-heavy websites these days so I don't have a technical example to give, but for instance I've opened the Vue cinema website recently on Firefox mobile. The thing was unusable - when I typed my postcode, nothing would show up on screen, the whole website seemed frozen while waiting to load something. I had to press several times certain buttons for something to happen. On Chrome however everything worked fine right away. Overall it was just a few images, some text and a search bar, so no matter the performances of the browser that should work everywhere, but since it was probably only tested on Chrome and Safari, it only worked in these browsers.
- adzm 9y ago
  Optimize for the v8 engine and/or browser-specific errata like the way chrome handles composition or svg etc.
- ballenf 9y ago
  A trivial example is that a 'for' loop vs. 'while' loop can be faster on one browser compared to another. These differences are even starker if you use newer features without polyfills. For example, 'forEach' implementations as of a year ago varied by orders of magnitude. Native array sorting is another obvious one. Chrome, Firefox and especially Safari use quite different algorithms each based on array size with varying results. If you add up all those little changes and always go with the option that's fastest in Chromium, in a reasonably complex SPA you could easily generate noticeable differences.

PeachPlum 9y ago

Brendan Eich's Brave browser - https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/ Chrome without the tracking

usernam 9y ago

Firefox is not immune to this behavior. Please look up the preference "experiments.enabled" before recommending blindly. In fact, Firefox has increased in the amount of unwarranted telemetry and "experiments" a lot in the last years, a direction I'm really not happy with. The main difference is that Firefox still gives you pretty liberal access to most internal settings, while Chromium is abysmal, if not ridiculous.

CapacitorSet 9y ago
>In fact, Firefox has increased in the amount of unwarranted telemetry and "experiments" a lot in the last years I can understand "experiments" (Pocket comes to mind), but what are you referring to wrt "unwarranted telemetry"?
- usernam 9y ago
  I'm not talking about Pocket. I'm talking about A/B testing internal features exactly like Chrome, such as ip v4/v6 path preference, pipelining support, TLS faststart (and so on) according to a random cohort selection.
  - rhelmer 9y ago
    While you can certainly turn off these sorts of features, I just want to emphasize that these are intended to make the product better, and Mozilla abides by a fairly strict privacy policy (when comparing to most tech companies at least): https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ The intention is to ship features that people actually want, and to ensure that Firefox is actually working for people (not everyone can/will file bug reports or post on twitter or hackernews etc)
    - usernam 9y ago
      Exactly like Chrome. I do not argue about the good intention behind.
- 9y ago

Dylan16807 9y ago

Firefox just broke the bulk of their extensions, and I'm sitting and praying the APIs needed for non-broken gestures get implemented... I'm not being treated as a pawn, but it's still pretty rough.

KozmoNau7 9y ago
The extension API change has been widely available information for ages now, with a significant migration period. If an extension developer chooses to not update their extensions, that's their choice.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  It is impossible to update a gesture extension into something that works properly. The APIs don't exist. The workaround is to inject scripts into the page to track gestures, which means gestures don't work until the DOM is parsed, and don't work on about:newtab or other about pages. Multiprocess had a significant migration period. Webextensions had "Well here's some APIs, we'll try to get you more before the day we switch. Some of the important ones are coming the version after, oops. And some are still missing but suck it up."