18 ms·

I've made multiple attempts recently to switch to Firefox as my primary browser, but I never could stick with it. 1) It's simply not as responsive. They've wor

by _bxg1 8y ago

I've made multiple attempts recently to switch to Firefox as my primary browser, but I never could stick with it. 1) It's simply not as responsive. They've worked really hard to keep up with Chrome, and I respect that, and the recent overhaul did make a big difference. But Chrome just feels like a piece of physical machinery, where Firefox still feels like a piece of software. 2) The dev tools are just not quite as good. As with general performance, they've always been very close, but there's just something about them that's off. Enough to disrupt my work. 3) Firefox mobile, at least on Android, has weird high-friction scrolling behavior that doesn't match the rest of the OS and feels terrible, and there's no way to turn it off. I use Firefox for casual browsing on my gaming desktop, but that's about it. I'm rooting for them, but there are just improvements that still need to be made. On the bright side, Chromium is 99% OSS (as opposed to Android, which is like 70% OSS). I think a fork could become a competitor if Google took the project in a direction that was just really egregiously bad. Let us not forget that Chrome's rendering engine, Blink, was itself a fork of Safari's WebKit.

ams6110 8y ago
I use Firefox exclusively. If a site only works in Chrome, I won't use it. Stability and performance are about the same, in my experience. Neither are perfect. Though it's been at least a year since I really used Chrome so I can't say for sure.
- Spearchucker 8y ago
  Exactly the same for me. Except that I've never used Chrome in my life. I had to install Chromium once because a German government site I needed to use insisted on Chrome.
- bachmeier 8y ago
  I just came across a cool video sharing service called Loom this afternoon. Then I saw that it requires Chrome. Guess I'll never use Loom. Edit: And coda.io too.
  - jonny_eh 8y ago
    YouTube works great with Firefox though.
deogeo 8y ago
We must be willing to make at least a few sacrifices to maintain software freedom, or we won't be able to keep it.
- _bxg1 8y ago
  Were I not a professional web developer who needs to use the best tools available, and were it not for the awful scroll physics on mobile, I'd probably put up with the rest and use it out of principle.
  - classichasclass 8y ago
    What are your specific issues with the scrolling? (Posted from Firefox mobile; I don't even use Chrome on Android anymore.)
    - _bxg1 8y ago
      The friction is far too high. It's impossible to scroll more than one screen or so in a single swipe. It's maddening. I can't fathom why they didn't just use the OS default behavior.
      - ben-schaaf 8y ago
        I have both Firefox and Chrome installed. I can't tell the difference between the two in terms of scrolling. On both I can flick and it keeps going for ages. It sounds like a bug to me.
        _bxg1 8y ago
        It could have also been fixed. Last I tried was around a year ago.
      - rebelwebmaster 8y ago
        FWIW, the release notes for Firefox for Android call out scrolling performance improvements in 3 of the last 4 releases. Might be worth taking another look :)
jccodez 8y ago
I have been using ff with noscript and have no desire to switch. If a site does not load with ff, I can do without.
Not_a_pizza 8y ago
Forgive me, but I dislike all this pandering. Obviously Chrome is good at what it does, but it still not the privacy-oriented browser of choice. A browser fueled by huge amounts of corporate money is generally going to look and act better, but at the end of the day, you're still corporately controlled, open source or not. If you want yourself (and the rest of society) not to be like that, then you have to step out a bit.
- _bxg1 8y ago
  > it still not the privacy-oriented browser of choice But multiple forks of it are, Brave being the chief example. The rendering and JavaScript engines do not impact privacy. > A browser fueled by huge amounts of corporate money is generally going to look and act better, but at the end of the day, you're still corporately controlled, open source or not. Partly true. They hold a certain amount of leverage, which I agree it would be great if they didn't have, but they can't just do whatever they want or people will simply jump ship. There's a ceiling on how hard they can push things in a given direction at a given moment. Of course they can push slowly over an extended period of time, which is the real danger. But I still think enough people are paying attention that the power center would shift if they started truly abusing it.
  - anth_anm 8y ago
    > The rendering and JavaScript engines do not impact privacy. Actually they absolutely do. You need to do mitigations against fingerprinting in order to protect privacy.
    - _bxg1 8y ago
      That has to do with what gets sent over the wire, not with rendering content or running arbitrary code
      - recursive 8y ago
        This is kind of puzzling. Fingerprinting (among other things) render to a canvas, and then send the resulting pixel data over the wire. So yes, fingerprinting requires sending stuff over the wire, but it also depends on running arbitrary code and rendering behavior.
ignoramous 8y ago
Firefox Mobile puts you seemingly in control by letting you install plugins like uMatrix, Privacy Badger, NoScript, Https Everywhere that are simply invaluable [0]. Once you start valuing your privacy, you'd see that no amt of fast scroll behaviour is going to convince you otherwise. One thing you could try to see if Firefox speeds up by changing the number of processes it creates (defaults to 4) to 8, esp if you're on a machine with considerable RAM (16GiB+). As for web-dev tools, doesn't Firefox ship a developer-only edition? Might want to try that out. [0] On the flip side, you might want to try Chromium-based Brave or Vivaldi instead.
- _bxg1 8y ago
  > Once you start valuing your privacy, you'd see that no amt of fast scroll behaviour is going to convince you otherwise I highly value my privacy; I switched to iOS because of it. I only use Chrome at work. I've got comprehensive content blockers set up on mobile Safari, which is where most of my personal browsing happens. > As for web-dev tools, doesn't Firefox ship a developer-only edition? I'd assume that's a version designed for developers who work on Firefox itself, not developers who use Firefox to work on the web. There would be no reason for them to omit some of their dev tools from the regular builds. > On the flip side, you might want to try Chromium-based Brave or Vivaldi instead. I tried and loved Vivaldi for a little while, until I ran into a catastrophic dev tools bug (can't remember what exactly). I also enjoyed Brave for a while, but it ended up being too slow too (this was when it had an Electron interface instead of being a fork, so it's probably better now).
  - rufugee 8y ago
    > I'd assume that's a version designed for developers who work on Firefox itself, not developers who use Firefox to work on the web. There would be no reason for them to omit some of their dev tools from the regular builds. That is a an incorrect assumption: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ And why would there be no reason to omit these tools? If they're only going to see the light of day when a developer is using them, they're a waste of space for the average user, correct?
  - 8y ago
ilmiont 8y ago
Find the exact opposite (except for devtools, unfortunately that's still a real issue). Firefox for me is MUCH faster on all hardware I use it on, without or without extensions. Chrome feels bloated and sluggish... Firefox just flies, and never slows down. I don't understand where complaints of FF performance come from... personally, I've never experienced an issue, on my i7 desktop or my horrible m3 Surface. To me, it's Firefox that feels like the physical machinery, while Chrome is a piece of software, and a bloated, creepy, predatory one at that.
- _bxg1 8y ago
  It could be a platform difference. I mostly use macOS; sounds like you're on Windows.
  - hellofunk 8y ago
    Yes, it has been quite widely reported here and elsewhere such as the Firefox bug trackers, that the Firefox performance on Mac is quite inferior. Which makes me very sad. Though it does not seem to affect all Mac users
    - _bxg1 8y ago
      If they want to gain market-share they should prioritize Macs, since most web developers these days prefer them. The more developers who use Firefox, the more it'll get tested with, the better support it'll have.
      - kace91 8y ago
        Is there any way to provide incentives to devs to prioritize mac development? Like a bug bounty of sorts? I'd happily contribute to a patreon or something if it meant increasing the chances of having a usable version of firefox on my mac at some point.
        petercooper 8y ago
Phracture 8y ago
This is effectively 99% of my experience with FF. I have tried on a few occasions to make it my daily driver, but it just falls short in enough areas to make it too frustrating at the moment.
V-2 8y ago
I switched quite recently, kind of out of principle. I'm trying to return from Chrome to Firefox every couple of years or so. I've been on Firefox for a few weeks now. And I've run into several issues that simply wouldn't affect Chrome, such as certain websites not working properly (eg. only today I had troubles downloading papers from academia.edu - works perfectly on Chrome). This really throws me back. There's also plenty of little UX niceties you don't even notice on Chrome, but which are missing on Firefox. Eg. if you create a new bookmarks folder and you add a bookmark to it, this folder stays selected as the default option when you're adding another bookmark. This doesn't happen on Firefox for some reason. Or, another example off the top of my head: I always customize my browsers so that the next tab gets open right next to the current one - not at the end. There are lightweight extensions for both browsers that accomplish just that. But only on Firefox the new tab jumps back and forth when you open it; opening at the end for a fraction of a second, then bouncing back where I want it. On Chrome it's instantaneous. Or downloading files: Chrome automatically shows a download bar for an ongoing download, and you can open the freshly downloaded file right from there. Firefox doesn't do it. You have to manually tap a rather discreet arrow icon on the toolbar to open the downloads list. (Which you may even forget to, if we speak of a large download that takes several minutes). Maybe there's some extension for that, but Chrome has this by default. Translating webpages is another one. There are several extensions available for Firefox, but not one of them comes close to the convenience Chrome offers by default in this regard. I know a lot these are arguably petty things, but boy is there so many of them. And I think at least the majority of don't really fall into the "matter of taste" category. Chrome simply offers more polished user experience, and while these may be details, at the end of the day all these details add up.
- pers0n 8y ago
  There are things missing in Chrome like their refusal to allow you to tab through the drop down list that appears when you type something, that was marked as will not fix like 10 years ago
- freeopinion 8y ago
  I keep seeing reports of pages that work in Chrome but not in FF. What puzzles me is that people usually hold this against FF instead of holding it against Chrome. The very few times I have experienced such a thing, a peek at the console tells me that FF is blocking the page from doing something insecure or otherwise harmful. It reminds me of ActiveX stuff. Junky webcams still ship with an ActiveX control to embed video into their html page. When it doesn't work in FF or Chrome, some people think IE6 is a superior browser. I don't know the reason behind your various broken pages. It could be something is wrong with FF. But it could also be that something is _right_ with FF. If you don't know which, why are you complaining about FF?
bproven 8y ago
I really have no problem with FF on Linux - I switched from Chrome right around the release of the quantum version of FF. everything is fast and works fine unless 1. It is a Google service that only runs on Chrome 2. MS service that only runs on Chrome We are now getting back to IE days it seems .... :(
anth_anm 8y ago
> Chromium is 99% OSS OSS but owned totally by google. I don't believe such a product should get any credit for being OSS. It will never do what the community wants.
- _bxg1 8y ago
  But it can be forked. Which means I can go start a Chrome competitor by myself, today, with zero up-front investment.
  - zepto 8y ago
    Good luck with making meaningful changes with zero investment.
    - incompatible 8y ago
      At best, you could probably maintain a patch that changes some of the more Google-oriented behaviour of Chrome. A full-blown fork would never keep up with new development in Google or Firefox.
      - anth_anm 8y ago
        I worked for a team that did maintain a fork. It was an insane amount of effort just to keep up with the commits going in.
      - Jaruzel 8y ago
        > maintain a patch that changes some of the more Google-oriented behaviour of Chrome This exists as: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
aylmao 8y ago
My biggest issue is that they keyboard shortcuts are not the same. If you could select a "Chrome" keyboard-shortcut profile that'd be ideal.
zelon88 8y ago
Sure, Chrome feels better now. But if you want to have any say in what Chrome 99 feels like you should switch right now to Firefox. In 10 years Chrome will be to internet browsers what Vista was to the OS. Bloated, over-built, poorly thought out, and a complete dumpster fire. By giving Google such a one-sided market share we're encouraging them to stop taking us seriously. They already don't, but at least right now they have to pretend. Does anyone else remember how fast they added an opt-out of single sign-on to Chrome after the outcry from 69? We won't have the luxury of moving those mountains when Google has the last mountain around.
- mrtweetyhack 8y ago
  Jez. You're crystal ball needs some more polishing.
effie 8y ago
The "better tools" is a common theme, but I suspect this is just a matter of switching being costly, in any direction. There are weird bugs in Chrome's devtools as well, such as misrepresenting headers sent - try to find the Authorization header for HTTP Basic Auth. When I see stuff like that, I wonder what else may be off.
TheTruth321 8y ago
>>I've made multiple attempts recently to switch to Firefox as my primary browser, but I never could stick with it. Then you're a dumb@ass.
megous 8y ago
It's interesting to compare on slow hardware, where the performance difference is easily visible. On my Orange Pi 3 (4xA53), with no GPU acceleration, Firefox maintains smooth scrolling without any issues and Chromium is very yanky and sluggish (unusable).
toper-centage 8y ago
Recycling is inconvinient. I have to carry my trash around until I can separate the trash at home. Riding my bike everywhere is inconvinient. If I take my car to the grocery shop, I'm much faster and don't get wet, even if I'm wasting a lot of energy and causing more traffic. Using ecosia is more inconvinient than using Google because 1 out of 10 times ecosia has no idea what I'm searching for. My point being that no one is saying switching away from chrome is all roses. There is a small sacrifice to be made for what I believe is the greater good. I'm a developer and use Firefox as my development environment 99% of the time - the dev tools are pretty good. I do switch to chrome that 1% of times if I find a trickier bug to debug.
dheera 8y ago
I have a lame reason but FireFox won't play nice with my dark theme. That's most of what keeps me from switching. https://imgur.com/cebF7v1 https://imgur.com/cebF7v1 I do like Firefox on Android though as you can block ads on it. Chrome for Android doesn't support plugins.
- dajonker 8y ago
  What is the last version you tested that with? I had that issue months ago but it was also fixed months ago for me.
  - dheera 8y ago
    That was from yesterday. Running 65.0.1, Ubuntu 16.04, Cinnamon with a custom dark theme.
YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
I second this.
dontbenebby 8y ago
> I've made multiple attempts recently to switch to Firefox as my primary browser, but I never could stick with it. I've been using Firefox since the Bush administration and never felt a need to switch. Like a lot of people, I experimented with Chrome in college, but at the time it didn't have an equivalent to many of the extensions I valued (ex: NoScript). Could I get a slight performance boost switching to Chrome? Maybe. But I don't. I guess for the same reason I stick with my credit union - they accomplish what I need, I trust they won't screw me over, and I think the market needs to be more diverse. Getting an extra bit of percent in speed/interest just isn't worth the switch. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I interned with Mozilla in the summer of 2014.)
austincheney 8y ago
Chrome is by far the slowest modern browser at large CSS animations. I had to dumb down a recent site I worked on to make it barely functional in Chrome. DOM instruction speed, last I checked, was twice as fast in Chrome compared to Edge but still dozens to hundreds of time slower than Firefox.
Mirioron 8y ago
>3) Firefox mobile, at least on Android, has weird high-friction scrolling behavior that doesn't match the rest of the OS and feels terrible, and there's no way to turn it off. And this problem has been around for years. It makes Firefox unusable for me on a phone.
parliament32 8y ago
If we're sharing anecdotes: 1) Opposite experience for me: Chrome loads things slowly and performing actions on pages just feels far less responsive than FF. Chrome also seems to use insane amounts of memory for a few tabs, while FF is a lot more reasonable. 2) You're probably right on this one, I don't use dev tools often. 3) The whole reason I switched to FF on Android was to run uBlock. Can Chrome on mobile run extensions yet?

by _bxg1 8y ago

ams6110 8y ago

I use Firefox exclusively. If a site only works in Chrome, I won't use it. Stability and performance are about the same, in my experience. Neither are perfect. Though it's been at least a year since I really used Chrome so I can't say for sure.

Spearchucker 8y ago
Exactly the same for me. Except that I've never used Chrome in my life. I had to install Chromium once because a German government site I needed to use insisted on Chrome.
bachmeier 8y ago
I just came across a cool video sharing service called Loom this afternoon. Then I saw that it requires Chrome. Guess I'll never use Loom. Edit: And coda.io too.
- jonny_eh 8y ago
  YouTube works great with Firefox though.

deogeo 8y ago

We must be willing to make at least a few sacrifices to maintain software freedom, or we won't be able to keep it.

_bxg1 8y ago
Were I not a professional web developer who needs to use the best tools available, and were it not for the awful scroll physics on mobile, I'd probably put up with the rest and use it out of principle.
- classichasclass 8y ago
  What are your specific issues with the scrolling? (Posted from Firefox mobile; I don't even use Chrome on Android anymore.)
  - _bxg1 8y ago
    The friction is far too high. It's impossible to scroll more than one screen or so in a single swipe. It's maddening. I can't fathom why they didn't just use the OS default behavior.
    - ben-schaaf 8y ago
      I have both Firefox and Chrome installed. I can't tell the difference between the two in terms of scrolling. On both I can flick and it keeps going for ages. It sounds like a bug to me.
      - _bxg1 8y ago
        It could have also been fixed. Last I tried was around a year ago.
    - rebelwebmaster 8y ago
      FWIW, the release notes for Firefox for Android call out scrolling performance improvements in 3 of the last 4 releases. Might be worth taking another look :)

jccodez 8y ago

I have been using ff with noscript and have no desire to switch. If a site does not load with ff, I can do without.

Not_a_pizza 8y ago

Forgive me, but I dislike all this pandering. Obviously Chrome is good at what it does, but it still not the privacy-oriented browser of choice. A browser fueled by huge amounts of corporate money is generally going to look and act better, but at the end of the day, you're still corporately controlled, open source or not. If you want yourself (and the rest of society) not to be like that, then you have to step out a bit.

_bxg1 8y ago
> it still not the privacy-oriented browser of choice But multiple forks of it are, Brave being the chief example. The rendering and JavaScript engines do not impact privacy. > A browser fueled by huge amounts of corporate money is generally going to look and act better, but at the end of the day, you're still corporately controlled, open source or not. Partly true. They hold a certain amount of leverage, which I agree it would be great if they didn't have, but they can't just do whatever they want or people will simply jump ship. There's a ceiling on how hard they can push things in a given direction at a given moment. Of course they can push slowly over an extended period of time, which is the real danger. But I still think enough people are paying attention that the power center would shift if they started truly abusing it.
- anth_anm 8y ago
  > The rendering and JavaScript engines do not impact privacy. Actually they absolutely do. You need to do mitigations against fingerprinting in order to protect privacy.
  - _bxg1 8y ago
    That has to do with what gets sent over the wire, not with rendering content or running arbitrary code
    - recursive 8y ago
      This is kind of puzzling. Fingerprinting (among other things) render to a canvas, and then send the resulting pixel data over the wire. So yes, fingerprinting requires sending stuff over the wire, but it also depends on running arbitrary code and rendering behavior.

ignoramous 8y ago

Firefox Mobile puts you seemingly in control by letting you install plugins like uMatrix, Privacy Badger, NoScript, Https Everywhere that are simply invaluable [0]. Once you start valuing your privacy, you'd see that no amt of fast scroll behaviour is going to convince you otherwise. One thing you could try to see if Firefox speeds up by changing the number of processes it creates (defaults to 4) to 8, esp if you're on a machine with considerable RAM (16GiB+). As for web-dev tools, doesn't Firefox ship a developer-only edition? Might want to try that out. [0] On the flip side, you might want to try Chromium-based Brave or Vivaldi instead.

_bxg1 8y ago
> Once you start valuing your privacy, you'd see that no amt of fast scroll behaviour is going to convince you otherwise I highly value my privacy; I switched to iOS because of it. I only use Chrome at work. I've got comprehensive content blockers set up on mobile Safari, which is where most of my personal browsing happens. > As for web-dev tools, doesn't Firefox ship a developer-only edition? I'd assume that's a version designed for developers who work on Firefox itself, not developers who use Firefox to work on the web. There would be no reason for them to omit some of their dev tools from the regular builds. > On the flip side, you might want to try Chromium-based Brave or Vivaldi instead. I tried and loved Vivaldi for a little while, until I ran into a catastrophic dev tools bug (can't remember what exactly). I also enjoyed Brave for a while, but it ended up being too slow too (this was when it had an Electron interface instead of being a fork, so it's probably better now).
- rufugee 8y ago
  > I'd assume that's a version designed for developers who work on Firefox itself, not developers who use Firefox to work on the web. There would be no reason for them to omit some of their dev tools from the regular builds. That is a an incorrect assumption: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ And why would there be no reason to omit these tools? If they're only going to see the light of day when a developer is using them, they're a waste of space for the average user, correct?
- 8y ago

ilmiont 8y ago

Find the exact opposite (except for devtools, unfortunately that's still a real issue). Firefox for me is MUCH faster on all hardware I use it on, without or without extensions. Chrome feels bloated and sluggish... Firefox just flies, and never slows down. I don't understand where complaints of FF performance come from... personally, I've never experienced an issue, on my i7 desktop or my horrible m3 Surface. To me, it's Firefox that feels like the physical machinery, while Chrome is a piece of software, and a bloated, creepy, predatory one at that.

_bxg1 8y ago
It could be a platform difference. I mostly use macOS; sounds like you're on Windows.
- hellofunk 8y ago
  Yes, it has been quite widely reported here and elsewhere such as the Firefox bug trackers, that the Firefox performance on Mac is quite inferior. Which makes me very sad. Though it does not seem to affect all Mac users
  - _bxg1 8y ago
    If they want to gain market-share they should prioritize Macs, since most web developers these days prefer them. The more developers who use Firefox, the more it'll get tested with, the better support it'll have.
    - kace91 8y ago
      Is there any way to provide incentives to devs to prioritize mac development? Like a bug bounty of sorts? I'd happily contribute to a patreon or something if it meant increasing the chances of having a usable version of firefox on my mac at some point.
      - petercooper 8y ago

Phracture 8y ago

This is effectively 99% of my experience with FF. I have tried on a few occasions to make it my daily driver, but it just falls short in enough areas to make it too frustrating at the moment.

V-2 8y ago

I switched quite recently, kind of out of principle. I'm trying to return from Chrome to Firefox every couple of years or so. I've been on Firefox for a few weeks now. And I've run into several issues that simply wouldn't affect Chrome, such as certain websites not working properly (eg. only today I had troubles downloading papers from academia.edu - works perfectly on Chrome). This really throws me back. There's also plenty of little UX niceties you don't even notice on Chrome, but which are missing on Firefox. Eg. if you create a new bookmarks folder and you add a bookmark to it, this folder stays selected as the default option when you're adding another bookmark. This doesn't happen on Firefox for some reason. Or, another example off the top of my head: I always customize my browsers so that the next tab gets open right next to the current one - not at the end. There are lightweight extensions for both browsers that accomplish just that. But only on Firefox the new tab jumps back and forth when you open it; opening at the end for a fraction of a second, then bouncing back where I want it. On Chrome it's instantaneous. Or downloading files: Chrome automatically shows a download bar for an ongoing download, and you can open the freshly downloaded file right from there. Firefox doesn't do it. You have to manually tap a rather discreet arrow icon on the toolbar to open the downloads list. (Which you may even forget to, if we speak of a large download that takes several minutes). Maybe there's some extension for that, but Chrome has this by default. Translating webpages is another one. There are several extensions available for Firefox, but not one of them comes close to the convenience Chrome offers by default in this regard. I know a lot these are arguably petty things, but boy is there so many of them. And I think at least the majority of don't really fall into the "matter of taste" category. Chrome simply offers more polished user experience, and while these may be details, at the end of the day all these details add up.

pers0n 8y ago
There are things missing in Chrome like their refusal to allow you to tab through the drop down list that appears when you type something, that was marked as will not fix like 10 years ago
freeopinion 8y ago
I keep seeing reports of pages that work in Chrome but not in FF. What puzzles me is that people usually hold this against FF instead of holding it against Chrome. The very few times I have experienced such a thing, a peek at the console tells me that FF is blocking the page from doing something insecure or otherwise harmful. It reminds me of ActiveX stuff. Junky webcams still ship with an ActiveX control to embed video into their html page. When it doesn't work in FF or Chrome, some people think IE6 is a superior browser. I don't know the reason behind your various broken pages. It could be something is wrong with FF. But it could also be that something is _right_ with FF. If you don't know which, why are you complaining about FF?

bproven 8y ago

I really have no problem with FF on Linux - I switched from Chrome right around the release of the quantum version of FF. everything is fast and works fine unless 1. It is a Google service that only runs on Chrome 2. MS service that only runs on Chrome We are now getting back to IE days it seems .... :(

anth_anm 8y ago

> Chromium is 99% OSS OSS but owned totally by google. I don't believe such a product should get any credit for being OSS. It will never do what the community wants.

_bxg1 8y ago
But it can be forked. Which means I can go start a Chrome competitor by myself, today, with zero up-front investment.
- zepto 8y ago
  Good luck with making meaningful changes with zero investment.
  - incompatible 8y ago
    At best, you could probably maintain a patch that changes some of the more Google-oriented behaviour of Chrome. A full-blown fork would never keep up with new development in Google or Firefox.
    - anth_anm 8y ago
      I worked for a team that did maintain a fork. It was an insane amount of effort just to keep up with the commits going in.
    - Jaruzel 8y ago
      > maintain a patch that changes some of the more Google-oriented behaviour of Chrome This exists as: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

aylmao 8y ago

My biggest issue is that they keyboard shortcuts are not the same. If you could select a "Chrome" keyboard-shortcut profile that'd be ideal.

zelon88 8y ago

Sure, Chrome feels better now. But if you want to have any say in what Chrome 99 feels like you should switch right now to Firefox. In 10 years Chrome will be to internet browsers what Vista was to the OS. Bloated, over-built, poorly thought out, and a complete dumpster fire. By giving Google such a one-sided market share we're encouraging them to stop taking us seriously. They already don't, but at least right now they have to pretend. Does anyone else remember how fast they added an opt-out of single sign-on to Chrome after the outcry from 69? We won't have the luxury of moving those mountains when Google has the last mountain around.

mrtweetyhack 8y ago
Jez. You're crystal ball needs some more polishing.

effie 8y ago

The "better tools" is a common theme, but I suspect this is just a matter of switching being costly, in any direction. There are weird bugs in Chrome's devtools as well, such as misrepresenting headers sent - try to find the Authorization header for HTTP Basic Auth. When I see stuff like that, I wonder what else may be off.

TheTruth321 8y ago

>>I've made multiple attempts recently to switch to Firefox as my primary browser, but I never could stick with it. Then you're a dumb@ass.

megous 8y ago

It's interesting to compare on slow hardware, where the performance difference is easily visible. On my Orange Pi 3 (4xA53), with no GPU acceleration, Firefox maintains smooth scrolling without any issues and Chromium is very yanky and sluggish (unusable).

toper-centage 8y ago

Recycling is inconvinient. I have to carry my trash around until I can separate the trash at home. Riding my bike everywhere is inconvinient. If I take my car to the grocery shop, I'm much faster and don't get wet, even if I'm wasting a lot of energy and causing more traffic. Using ecosia is more inconvinient than using Google because 1 out of 10 times ecosia has no idea what I'm searching for. My point being that no one is saying switching away from chrome is all roses. There is a small sacrifice to be made for what I believe is the greater good. I'm a developer and use Firefox as my development environment 99% of the time - the dev tools are pretty good. I do switch to chrome that 1% of times if I find a trickier bug to debug.

dheera 8y ago

I have a lame reason but FireFox won't play nice with my dark theme. That's most of what keeps me from switching. https://imgur.com/cebF7v1 https://imgur.com/cebF7v1 I do like Firefox on Android though as you can block ads on it. Chrome for Android doesn't support plugins.

dajonker 8y ago
What is the last version you tested that with? I had that issue months ago but it was also fixed months ago for me.
- dheera 8y ago
  That was from yesterday. Running 65.0.1, Ubuntu 16.04, Cinnamon with a custom dark theme.

YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago

I second this.

dontbenebby 8y ago

> I've made multiple attempts recently to switch to Firefox as my primary browser, but I never could stick with it. I've been using Firefox since the Bush administration and never felt a need to switch. Like a lot of people, I experimented with Chrome in college, but at the time it didn't have an equivalent to many of the extensions I valued (ex: NoScript). Could I get a slight performance boost switching to Chrome? Maybe. But I don't. I guess for the same reason I stick with my credit union - they accomplish what I need, I trust they won't screw me over, and I think the market needs to be more diverse. Getting an extra bit of percent in speed/interest just isn't worth the switch. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I interned with Mozilla in the summer of 2014.)

austincheney 8y ago

Chrome is by far the slowest modern browser at large CSS animations. I had to dumb down a recent site I worked on to make it barely functional in Chrome. DOM instruction speed, last I checked, was twice as fast in Chrome compared to Edge but still dozens to hundreds of time slower than Firefox.

Mirioron 8y ago

>3) Firefox mobile, at least on Android, has weird high-friction scrolling behavior that doesn't match the rest of the OS and feels terrible, and there's no way to turn it off. And this problem has been around for years. It makes Firefox unusable for me on a phone.

parliament32 8y ago

If we're sharing anecdotes: 1) Opposite experience for me: Chrome loads things slowly and performing actions on pages just feels far less responsive than FF. Chrome also seems to use insane amounts of memory for a few tabs, while FF is a lot more reasonable. 2) You're probably right on this one, I don't use dev tools often. 3) The whole reason I switched to FF on Android was to run uBlock. Can Chrome on mobile run extensions yet?