7 ms·

These articles always feel like i missed something. I have stayed with Firefox all the time, never switched to Chrome. Why should I have switched to Chrome, ag

by kken 7y ago

These articles always feel like i missed something. I have stayed with Firefox all the time, never switched to Chrome. Why should I have switched to Chrome, again?

AlexCoventry 7y ago
It was faster and more secure. It's probably still more secure.
- ajross 7y ago
  Exactly. It's a decade behind us now, so presumably many posters here never even experienced it, but it's hard to convey just how much of an innovation Chrome was when it landed in the browser world of the late aughts. We'd been subjected, at that point, to almost 15 years of perpetual bloat and decay by Netscape and then Microsoft. Chrome wasn't just faster, it was viscerally faster (V8 in particular was just completely without peer at the time). It was cleaner, without all the buttons and features adorning its competitors. We all swapped instantly. Really it was amazing. But that was 11 years ago, Chrome has grown the warts IE used to have, and Firefox has largely caught up on the features geeks care about.
  - weci2i 7y ago
    I was around then. I don’t remember Chrome ever actually feeling faster. Maybe it was my system, maybe it was just me, but I’ve never understood the “faster” argument. The Chrome is “faster” argument is eerily reminiscent to Sega’s “blast processing” propaganda from the 90’s. What Chrome did do better than Firefox was pay to put advertisements everywhere. I remember feeling dumbfounded that we needed Chrome Browser ads on TV to sway people away from IE. Strange, strange times.
    - zerkten 7y ago
      It was significantly faster on Windows, but not so much on other platforms.
      - aganame 7y ago
        It was significantly faster on all platforms, plus looked good on all platforms. That also was a big deal on Linux, where things usually don`t look good.
        war1025 7y ago
        I cannot stand the Chrome UI. Always thought it looked cheap compared to Firefox. "Sleek" I suppose people would say.
        weci2i 7y ago
        That was never my experience in practical, day to day usage. I feel like an odd man out though. I see many posters here talking about terrible performance on Mac. I've been running Firefox on MacBook Pros since 2007. I don't know what you guys are doing...but I can't replicate the poor performance.
        Izkata 7y ago
        I was on Firefox back then as well, and the only place Chrome(ium) ever seemed faster to me was initial startup - which was irrelevant because I always had the browser open in the background.
    - dbt00 7y ago
      I ran Mac, windows and Linux on the desktop. Chrome was shockingly faster on all of them if you had the ram for it. Even Safari was clearly faster on Mac for a long time.
  - asveikau 7y ago
    This whole time I have been a "Firefox when using X11, Chrome when using Mac or Windows" guy. The relative snappiness of Chrome in the early days was really most true on Windows. And Firefox was usually not great on Mac to begin with (there used to be a number of Mac specific ports trying to get Mozilla/gecko in shape iirc - Camino?), so really its competition was Safari. Meanwhile Chrome/Chromium didn't really feel at home on an X desktop. So I usually stuck with Firefox there just the same way I did from the start, like when it was Phoenix or Mozilla or just as I used Netscape for Linux back in the 90s. (This statement is making me feel old.)
  - shantly 7y ago
    "Faster" was one of the huge selling points of FF initially, too. Non-nerds could tell the difference (over, say, IE or Mozilla/Netscape Navigator) even. It was light and lean as hell. Hasn't been the case since well before Chrome came out, but it used to be.
  - war1025 7y ago
    > It's a decade behind us now, so presumably many posters here never even experienced it Well that makes me feel old... Is the HN crowd really that young? > We all swapped instantly Not all of us...
  - jjav 7y ago
    > We all swapped instantly. Certainly not "all". When chrome came out I tried it a few times over the years, but it had no observable advantage and was (and is) less configurable than firefox so it's clearly inferior on that front. I never switched. I was well aware of the hype around it being faster, but was never able to observe any evidence in my usage/systems. And it was produced by an advertising company so that was always a huge minus.
    - astura 7y ago
      This mirrors my experience exactly. I was a Firefox user since it was called Phoenix. Chrome came out, I used it for a bit, never did see much of an advantage of switching and I kinda hated the chrome UI. Never saw an observable performance improvement. Stayed on Firefox. Still always use chrome to test when web developing though.
      - weci2i 7y ago
        It mirrors my experience as well. I will admit that Firefox has gone through periods where the UI is just plain butt ugly, kind of like the current iteration (sorry Mozilla guys, I'm just not a fan). That has always been easy enough to remedy. When Firefox still had real themes, you could make it seamlessly fit most UIs or even mock Chrome, if that was your thing. At least you can still modify userchrome.css. The Australis era UI was pretty nice. It's a shame they left it behind to compete with Chrome looks. I always found the XUL plugin ecosystem to be significantly more robust than Chrome offerings. They are kind of on par now that they're both using WebExtensions. I keep Chrome around for testing and other things that only want to work on Chrome now. For example, Google drive never seems to want to download my files when I'm using Firefox. They just redirect to a blank white tab. On the Mac, Chrome does this annoying thing when you hit Cmd+Q to quit. It tells you that you have to hold Cmd+Q for a period of time instead. I move quickly on the keyboard and that pattern breaks my flow. I know you can change the setting, which I have done, but it's totally different from nearly every other app on my system.
hanoz 7y ago
Absolutely agree. I'm mystified that so many people abandoned the consistently excellent Firefox for the debatably equal but run by Google Chrome.
- quantummkv 7y ago
  Don't underestimate the power of the exclusive Ad spot on the world's most visited web page.
- hkmurakami 7y ago
  Iirc Google didn't quite have today's reputation in 2008 or whenever it first came out. My peers genuinely believed that their don't be evil slogan was genuine
- bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
  Things Chrome had around the time when it debuted that made it stand out: A unified search and website address bar Separate processes for tabs so that if one crashed, it didn't take the whole browser down with it Flash built in
- plorkyeran 7y ago
  When Chrome came out the fact that it was built by Google was a positive, not a negative.
  - stefco_ 7y ago
    This definitely applied to me. I picked up Chrome partly because I trusted Google, and I moved away from it mostly because I no longer do.
    - kristiandupont 7y ago
      I remember stating that I wished Google would make a bank (because the web experience with my current bank was so bad). That sentiment feels so distant now that I am almost not sure if it was real or not.
- 7y ago
cbsks 7y ago
When Chrome first came out it was much faster and leaner than Firefox. The gap has closed significantly in the past few years. I used Chrome as my main browser for a year or so before switching back to Firefox. I’m glad that Firefox is now catching up again, hopefully developers will start treating Firefox as a first class browser again. Occasionally I will come across a website which was clearly only tested on Chrome.
- hanoz 7y ago
  It was faster for about a year. And at what cost?
  - eropple 7y ago
    It was, anecdotally, faster-feeling until maybe a year and a half ago. The lack of sufficient parallelization meant that Firefox would feel sluggish and constantly freeze at the UI layer from a misbehaving website. I switched back around then, because now it's fantastic.
    - dnautics 7y ago
      Hm I have a different anecdote... Although chrome was way faster when it first came out, I switched off of chrome when writing the wrong JavaScript in chrome would cause Linux to lock up, and Firefox was sufficiently fast to not suck anymore. That was about six years ago.
  - zerkten 7y ago
    The cost was huge, but Firefox is much more competitive than it was. Chrome was faster for a pretty long time and was heavily marketed. It was bundled with lots of common utilities on Windows. Then things got to the point where developers started doing the "IE thing" and only testing with Chrome. Developers were complicit in this because they repeated the same mistakes of the past. It's amazing how just a few years pass and the next wave of developers are oblivious to what came before. My move to the latest (quantum?) Firefox has been beset by horrific energy use problems on macOS. Those have only just been fixed, but things are much better now. I hope the FF team keep their focus because with Microsoft and Opera giving up on their engines we need Mozilla more than ever.
abnry 7y ago
Around 2011 I switched from Firefox on my macbook pro to Chrome because Firefox was unusable because it was too slow.
benburleson 7y ago
Dev tools were superior for a while, I think.
- bureaucrat 7y ago
  It’s still superior.
  - astura 7y ago
    In what way?
mxcrossb 7y ago
There was a period where every web forum discussion of Firefox included a joke about memory leaks. I’m surprised no one remembers this...
- hprotagonist 7y ago
  must’ve slipped my mind.
kps 7y ago
Firefox's ‘quantum’ migration killed off some significant extensions (e.g vimperator/pentadactyl) introduced a bunch of new bugs, some of which remain.
staticassertion 7y ago
It's a little silly to ignore the impact that Chrome had on the browser market. A from-scratch multiprocess architecture, considerable performance improvements, a fairly significant departure with UI, etc. Sandboxed flash was huge at the time. People forget so quickly that only a decade ago the internet was a lot more malicious. Exploits hosted on compromised ads were not uncommon at all. These days all of the big exploit kits rely on social engineering. Those were very appealing things for many people, rightfully so.
- BuckRogers 7y ago
  That's true, but Google replaced websites exploiting users, to doing the honor themselves.
- war1025 7y ago
  I agree that Chrome has been good for healthy competition in the browser market. What I don't agree with is that Firefox hasn't been holding it's own the whole time. They did force Mozilla to actually innovate on Firefox, which was great, but they closed the performance gap to insignificant levels pretty quickly. I really think the majority of people switching to Chrome was just momentum of "I use Google and they say Chrome is better".
  - staticassertion 7y ago
    I told everyone I could to use Chrome because the risk of being infected by malware was radically lower. Flash 0days used to be so common, I know plenty of people who'd get hit. Java plugin was the other big one and Chrome had it click to play early on IIRC. Chrome had a massive advantage over Firefox, security wise, for quite a long time.
    - war1025 7y ago
      I've been on Linux the whole time, so I suppose the security worries weren't really something that came up for me. Also have always been more cavalier about security than I probably should be.
johnpowell 7y ago
When Chrome came out I didn't have the problem with Google I have now. But I could never switch to Chrome because I hate having the tabs above the address bar. At least with Firefox I could tweak userChrome.css to keep tabs right above the content. So I never switched either.
- Causality1 7y ago
  It gets harder all the time though. It was the default, then it was an option in about:config, then you could tweak userChrome.css, and now loading userChrome.css is disabled by default. The day is coming when we won't be able to do it at all. User control crumbles bit by bit, slowly but surely.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
war1025 7y ago
My conclusion as someone who never felt like Firefox was slow enough to be an issue, even when Chrome first came out, is that people must go to much more adware-laden sites than I ever do. The only times I ever had Firefox perform in the laggy and stuttering ways people always describe have been when I get sucked into the "20 things you can't believe she said" type articles where every page is an exercise in squeezing the most ads per unit area. Really it's just incentive for me to not waste time on that garbage. Plus now Firefox blocks most ads by default.

by kken 7y ago

These articles always feel like i missed something. I have stayed with Firefox all the time, never switched to Chrome. Why should I have switched to Chrome, again?

AlexCoventry 7y ago

It was faster and more secure. It's probably still more secure.

ajross 7y ago
Exactly. It's a decade behind us now, so presumably many posters here never even experienced it, but it's hard to convey just how much of an innovation Chrome was when it landed in the browser world of the late aughts. We'd been subjected, at that point, to almost 15 years of perpetual bloat and decay by Netscape and then Microsoft. Chrome wasn't just faster, it was viscerally faster (V8 in particular was just completely without peer at the time). It was cleaner, without all the buttons and features adorning its competitors. We all swapped instantly. Really it was amazing. But that was 11 years ago, Chrome has grown the warts IE used to have, and Firefox has largely caught up on the features geeks care about.
- weci2i 7y ago
  I was around then. I don’t remember Chrome ever actually feeling faster. Maybe it was my system, maybe it was just me, but I’ve never understood the “faster” argument. The Chrome is “faster” argument is eerily reminiscent to Sega’s “blast processing” propaganda from the 90’s. What Chrome did do better than Firefox was pay to put advertisements everywhere. I remember feeling dumbfounded that we needed Chrome Browser ads on TV to sway people away from IE. Strange, strange times.
  - zerkten 7y ago
    It was significantly faster on Windows, but not so much on other platforms.
    - aganame 7y ago
      It was significantly faster on all platforms, plus looked good on all platforms. That also was a big deal on Linux, where things usually don`t look good.
      - war1025 7y ago
        I cannot stand the Chrome UI. Always thought it looked cheap compared to Firefox. "Sleek" I suppose people would say.
      - weci2i 7y ago
        That was never my experience in practical, day to day usage. I feel like an odd man out though. I see many posters here talking about terrible performance on Mac. I've been running Firefox on MacBook Pros since 2007. I don't know what you guys are doing...but I can't replicate the poor performance.
      - Izkata 7y ago
        I was on Firefox back then as well, and the only place Chrome(ium) ever seemed faster to me was initial startup - which was irrelevant because I always had the browser open in the background.
  - dbt00 7y ago
    I ran Mac, windows and Linux on the desktop. Chrome was shockingly faster on all of them if you had the ram for it. Even Safari was clearly faster on Mac for a long time.
- asveikau 7y ago
  This whole time I have been a "Firefox when using X11, Chrome when using Mac or Windows" guy. The relative snappiness of Chrome in the early days was really most true on Windows. And Firefox was usually not great on Mac to begin with (there used to be a number of Mac specific ports trying to get Mozilla/gecko in shape iirc - Camino?), so really its competition was Safari. Meanwhile Chrome/Chromium didn't really feel at home on an X desktop. So I usually stuck with Firefox there just the same way I did from the start, like when it was Phoenix or Mozilla or just as I used Netscape for Linux back in the 90s. (This statement is making me feel old.)
- shantly 7y ago
  "Faster" was one of the huge selling points of FF initially, too. Non-nerds could tell the difference (over, say, IE or Mozilla/Netscape Navigator) even. It was light and lean as hell. Hasn't been the case since well before Chrome came out, but it used to be.
- war1025 7y ago
  > It's a decade behind us now, so presumably many posters here never even experienced it Well that makes me feel old... Is the HN crowd really that young? > We all swapped instantly Not all of us...
- jjav 7y ago
  > We all swapped instantly. Certainly not "all". When chrome came out I tried it a few times over the years, but it had no observable advantage and was (and is) less configurable than firefox so it's clearly inferior on that front. I never switched. I was well aware of the hype around it being faster, but was never able to observe any evidence in my usage/systems. And it was produced by an advertising company so that was always a huge minus.
  - astura 7y ago
    This mirrors my experience exactly. I was a Firefox user since it was called Phoenix. Chrome came out, I used it for a bit, never did see much of an advantage of switching and I kinda hated the chrome UI. Never saw an observable performance improvement. Stayed on Firefox. Still always use chrome to test when web developing though.
    - weci2i 7y ago
      It mirrors my experience as well. I will admit that Firefox has gone through periods where the UI is just plain butt ugly, kind of like the current iteration (sorry Mozilla guys, I'm just not a fan). That has always been easy enough to remedy. When Firefox still had real themes, you could make it seamlessly fit most UIs or even mock Chrome, if that was your thing. At least you can still modify userchrome.css. The Australis era UI was pretty nice. It's a shame they left it behind to compete with Chrome looks. I always found the XUL plugin ecosystem to be significantly more robust than Chrome offerings. They are kind of on par now that they're both using WebExtensions. I keep Chrome around for testing and other things that only want to work on Chrome now. For example, Google drive never seems to want to download my files when I'm using Firefox. They just redirect to a blank white tab. On the Mac, Chrome does this annoying thing when you hit Cmd+Q to quit. It tells you that you have to hold Cmd+Q for a period of time instead. I move quickly on the keyboard and that pattern breaks my flow. I know you can change the setting, which I have done, but it's totally different from nearly every other app on my system.

hanoz 7y ago

Absolutely agree. I'm mystified that so many people abandoned the consistently excellent Firefox for the debatably equal but run by Google Chrome.

quantummkv 7y ago
Don't underestimate the power of the exclusive Ad spot on the world's most visited web page.
hkmurakami 7y ago
Iirc Google didn't quite have today's reputation in 2008 or whenever it first came out. My peers genuinely believed that their don't be evil slogan was genuine
bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
Things Chrome had around the time when it debuted that made it stand out: A unified search and website address bar Separate processes for tabs so that if one crashed, it didn't take the whole browser down with it Flash built in
plorkyeran 7y ago
When Chrome came out the fact that it was built by Google was a positive, not a negative.
- stefco_ 7y ago
  This definitely applied to me. I picked up Chrome partly because I trusted Google, and I moved away from it mostly because I no longer do.
  - kristiandupont 7y ago
    I remember stating that I wished Google would make a bank (because the web experience with my current bank was so bad). That sentiment feels so distant now that I am almost not sure if it was real or not.
7y ago

cbsks 7y ago

When Chrome first came out it was much faster and leaner than Firefox. The gap has closed significantly in the past few years. I used Chrome as my main browser for a year or so before switching back to Firefox. I’m glad that Firefox is now catching up again, hopefully developers will start treating Firefox as a first class browser again. Occasionally I will come across a website which was clearly only tested on Chrome.

hanoz 7y ago
It was faster for about a year. And at what cost?
- eropple 7y ago
  It was, anecdotally, faster-feeling until maybe a year and a half ago. The lack of sufficient parallelization meant that Firefox would feel sluggish and constantly freeze at the UI layer from a misbehaving website. I switched back around then, because now it's fantastic.
  - dnautics 7y ago
    Hm I have a different anecdote... Although chrome was way faster when it first came out, I switched off of chrome when writing the wrong JavaScript in chrome would cause Linux to lock up, and Firefox was sufficiently fast to not suck anymore. That was about six years ago.
- zerkten 7y ago
  The cost was huge, but Firefox is much more competitive than it was. Chrome was faster for a pretty long time and was heavily marketed. It was bundled with lots of common utilities on Windows. Then things got to the point where developers started doing the "IE thing" and only testing with Chrome. Developers were complicit in this because they repeated the same mistakes of the past. It's amazing how just a few years pass and the next wave of developers are oblivious to what came before. My move to the latest (quantum?) Firefox has been beset by horrific energy use problems on macOS. Those have only just been fixed, but things are much better now. I hope the FF team keep their focus because with Microsoft and Opera giving up on their engines we need Mozilla more than ever.

abnry 7y ago

Around 2011 I switched from Firefox on my macbook pro to Chrome because Firefox was unusable because it was too slow.

benburleson 7y ago

Dev tools were superior for a while, I think.

bureaucrat 7y ago
It’s still superior.
- astura 7y ago
  In what way?

mxcrossb 7y ago

There was a period where every web forum discussion of Firefox included a joke about memory leaks. I’m surprised no one remembers this...

hprotagonist 7y ago
must’ve slipped my mind.

kps 7y ago

Firefox's ‘quantum’ migration killed off some significant extensions (e.g vimperator/pentadactyl) introduced a bunch of new bugs, some of which remain.

staticassertion 7y ago

It's a little silly to ignore the impact that Chrome had on the browser market. A from-scratch multiprocess architecture, considerable performance improvements, a fairly significant departure with UI, etc. Sandboxed flash was huge at the time. People forget so quickly that only a decade ago the internet was a lot more malicious. Exploits hosted on compromised ads were not uncommon at all. These days all of the big exploit kits rely on social engineering. Those were very appealing things for many people, rightfully so.

BuckRogers 7y ago
That's true, but Google replaced websites exploiting users, to doing the honor themselves.
war1025 7y ago
I agree that Chrome has been good for healthy competition in the browser market. What I don't agree with is that Firefox hasn't been holding it's own the whole time. They did force Mozilla to actually innovate on Firefox, which was great, but they closed the performance gap to insignificant levels pretty quickly. I really think the majority of people switching to Chrome was just momentum of "I use Google and they say Chrome is better".
- staticassertion 7y ago
  I told everyone I could to use Chrome because the risk of being infected by malware was radically lower. Flash 0days used to be so common, I know plenty of people who'd get hit. Java plugin was the other big one and Chrome had it click to play early on IIRC. Chrome had a massive advantage over Firefox, security wise, for quite a long time.
  - war1025 7y ago
    I've been on Linux the whole time, so I suppose the security worries weren't really something that came up for me. Also have always been more cavalier about security than I probably should be.

johnpowell 7y ago

When Chrome came out I didn't have the problem with Google I have now. But I could never switch to Chrome because I hate having the tabs above the address bar. At least with Firefox I could tweak userChrome.css to keep tabs right above the content. So I never switched either.

Causality1 7y ago
It gets harder all the time though. It was the default, then it was an option in about:config, then you could tweak userChrome.css, and now loading userChrome.css is disabled by default. The day is coming when we won't be able to do it at all. User control crumbles bit by bit, slowly but surely.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

war1025 7y ago

My conclusion as someone who never felt like Firefox was slow enough to be an issue, even when Chrome first came out, is that people must go to much more adware-laden sites than I ever do. The only times I ever had Firefox perform in the laggy and stuttering ways people always describe have been when I get sucked into the "20 things you can't believe she said" type articles where every page is an exercise in squeezing the most ads per unit area. Really it's just incentive for me to not waste time on that garbage. Plus now Firefox blocks most ads by default.