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> It's 2023, Safari and Firefox have been very good for a while. This has not been my experience. Every once in a while I try to make the switch (to Firefox be

> It's 2023, Safari and Firefox have been very good for a while. This has not been my experience. Every once in a while I try to make the switch (to Firefox because I'm not generally a mac user, but I use safari on iOS and I'm basically resigned to its limitations) Slow rendering is for sure a problem. Buggy rendering is very common -- maybe the site, or maybe the browser, who knows, but anecdotally I've had a lot of bad experiences, including lost work filling out multi-page forms. And I hate to mention it, but aesthetically I find Firefox to be very clunky and ugly. Yes, Chrome is terrible for even more reasons than the ones shown here -- the direct integration of Google sign-on into the browser is awful, and the in-page text highlighting through (#:~:text=) is a big anti-feature (that now is being copied by the others, oh well), and after I spent so much effort trying to prune down the stupid buttons on my address bar only to find that they keep adding new, useless ones that are un-removeable ("reading panel"? why are they doing this?). But even with those things it's still the most performant and capable browser.

webstrand 3y ago
I do a bunch of CSS work, and I've found more bugs in Chrome's rendering than in Firefox's, Lots of half-pixel errors. What kind of rendering issues are you seeing in Firefox? If you do a lot of web development, I strongly recommend getting familiar with Firefox's containers. You can set up SOCKS proxies for each individual container so you can easily pretend your dev server is running on the production server's domain without disabling your own access to the production servers. It's so much nicer than working with multiple proxies in Chrome. That said, you might enjoy ungoogled-chromium if you're annoyed by google-integration. I use it for testing (because cross-browser testing is still a must). Brave also exists and is open-source, to break up market share.
- andrewla 3y ago
  I'm sure that Chrome's rendering is buggy as hell, but people design websites to work with the bugs; so they design them to work with Chrome, and in Firefox they look wrong unless they make the effort to work with both browsers. I'm not a web developer; when I have to do web development I use Chrome because that's what we target and anything else is an afterthought (or is work taken on by more specialized frontend developers). I tried ungoogled-chromium, but on upgrades it would frequently crash or fail to start so I gave up. Brave maybe is worth a try; the cryptocurrency tie-in was enough to make me reluctant even to give it a try. I want my user agent to be as agnostic as humanly possible with regards to presenting data from web pages -- that's why I hate the auto-login feature and the "view search results" feature; I want my browser to render content and do only the minimum possible work in reacting to that content.
r00fus 3y ago
Name the sites because I find Firefox to be faster and more compliant
- andrewla 3y ago
  The most recent data loss incident was when I was trying to use the New York DMV website to upgrade to a RealID driver's license at the same time that I was changing my address. Validation error on one page became unrecoverable (fixing the problem didn't fix it) and going back started me at ground zero. I then tried the same flow on Chrome (including the validation error) and couldn't get it to repro; things just worked. Totally possible that the actual failure was unrelated to the browser -- I never tried to establish a consistent reproduction on Firefox. The other one was using SAP Concur for an expense report in a corporate environment. This is a horrible experience regardless of browser, but I ended up closing out Firefox and finishing the report in Chrome because things kept giving me strange errors.
  - snowwrestler 3y ago
    This is such a great example of the problem with Chrome dominance. You've come to believe that Firefox is broken with respect to Chrome. When in reality you only know that websites work better in Chrome. But that's not because Chrome works better, it's because those web teams only test against Chrome, and when Chrome is broken, they break their own website to match, so it works in Chrome but not other browsers. This is exactly the danger being highlighted in this thread. How long until the DMV site and Concur (and other sites) have little notes that say "Chrome required to use this website"? And then we're right back to the bad old IE days again.

webstrand 3y ago

I do a bunch of CSS work, and I've found more bugs in Chrome's rendering than in Firefox's, Lots of half-pixel errors. What kind of rendering issues are you seeing in Firefox? If you do a lot of web development, I strongly recommend getting familiar with Firefox's containers. You can set up SOCKS proxies for each individual container so you can easily pretend your dev server is running on the production server's domain without disabling your own access to the production servers. It's so much nicer than working with multiple proxies in Chrome. That said, you might enjoy ungoogled-chromium if you're annoyed by google-integration. I use it for testing (because cross-browser testing is still a must). Brave also exists and is open-source, to break up market share.

andrewla 3y ago
I'm sure that Chrome's rendering is buggy as hell, but people design websites to work with the bugs; so they design them to work with Chrome, and in Firefox they look wrong unless they make the effort to work with both browsers. I'm not a web developer; when I have to do web development I use Chrome because that's what we target and anything else is an afterthought (or is work taken on by more specialized frontend developers). I tried ungoogled-chromium, but on upgrades it would frequently crash or fail to start so I gave up. Brave maybe is worth a try; the cryptocurrency tie-in was enough to make me reluctant even to give it a try. I want my user agent to be as agnostic as humanly possible with regards to presenting data from web pages -- that's why I hate the auto-login feature and the "view search results" feature; I want my browser to render content and do only the minimum possible work in reacting to that content.

r00fus 3y ago

Name the sites because I find Firefox to be faster and more compliant

andrewla 3y ago
The most recent data loss incident was when I was trying to use the New York DMV website to upgrade to a RealID driver's license at the same time that I was changing my address. Validation error on one page became unrecoverable (fixing the problem didn't fix it) and going back started me at ground zero. I then tried the same flow on Chrome (including the validation error) and couldn't get it to repro; things just worked. Totally possible that the actual failure was unrelated to the browser -- I never tried to establish a consistent reproduction on Firefox. The other one was using SAP Concur for an expense report in a corporate environment. This is a horrible experience regardless of browser, but I ended up closing out Firefox and finishing the report in Chrome because things kept giving me strange errors.
- snowwrestler 3y ago
  This is such a great example of the problem with Chrome dominance. You've come to believe that Firefox is broken with respect to Chrome. When in reality you only know that websites work better in Chrome. But that's not because Chrome works better, it's because those web teams only test against Chrome, and when Chrome is broken, they break their own website to match, so it works in Chrome but not other browsers. This is exactly the danger being highlighted in this thread. How long until the DMV site and Concur (and other sites) have little notes that say "Chrome required to use this website"? And then we're right back to the bad old IE days again.