7 ms·

At this point, is there still any good reasons to use Chrome? A few years ago some new web apps only supported Chrome, like they only supported IE a few years

At this point, is there still any good reasons to use Chrome? A few years ago some new web apps only supported Chrome, like they only supported IE a few years before, but today I haven't had to use Chrome for months. I might just have been lucky but I don't know. Does anyone else?

vbeeaz 3y ago
It's faster than Firefox. Also it integrates better with Google services.
- Larrikin 3y ago
  How is it faster than Firefox in a meaningful way? Is this even still true for the people who insist on keeping hundreds of tabs open at a time?
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    At least on mobile, Firefox is so unresponsive it's a complete nonstarter on a slower phone. Chrome is fine.
    - concordDance 3y ago
      Seems fine on mine. You speaking anecdotally or do you have data?
      - marginalia_nu 3y ago
        Yeah, it's slow to the point of being completely unusable on my phone.
        Larrikin 3y ago
        What's the point of even using the web if you don't have an ad blocker in your browser?
        marginalia_nu 3y ago
        I mainly use the parts of the web that doesn't require one.
        leodag 3y ago
        Have you used it recently, or just years ago? It definitely used to be very slow, but since ~2 years ago it's very good, and my go to browser (my phone is not high end, by the way)
        marginalia_nu 3y ago
        I give it a spin every few months. Then I uninstall it because it's still irredeemably unresponsive.
    - flerchin 3y ago
      This is the opposite of my experience on android. Firefox with uBlock Origin is the only way to get some sites to load in any reasonable timeframe. The difference can be measured in 10s of seconds, and is more noticeable with worse hardware.
  - fooker 3y ago
    It is, Firefox is tangibly slow for me on mac. Rendering/JS performance seems reasonable nowadays, but the UI has weird skips and freezes fairly often.
  - boudin 3y ago
    My experience is the opposite, Firefox feels quite lighter, Chrome tends to use more resources and feels bloated.
    - easton 3y ago
      Me too and I don't really understand why. On Windows, pressing F12 to open Dev Tools takes a good five seconds in Edge but takes fractions of a second in Firefox. And page renders feel faster, although apparently they actually aren't in controlled experiments. Maybe one of the extensions I typically use in both works differently in Firefox.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    I'm on Linux, and Firefox's performance is still behind Chromium. Mozilla only recently enabled hardware acceleration. There are benchmarks in which Firefox beats Chrome (https://arewefastyet.com/linux64/benchmarks/overview?numDays=60 https://arewefastyet.com/linux64/benchmarks/overview?numDays... has an overview) but in general Chrome is faster. On Windows and macOS Firefox is a bit more competitive, but important benchmarks such as JetStream and Speedometer still have Firefox easily beat (note the inverted score axes). That doesn't mean Firefox is slow per se, it just means Chromium (and WebKit) are faster. On Android I use Firefox for its addon support, but the UI is notably more glitchy and buggy than Chrome's.
    - ahartmetz 3y ago
      > JetStream and Speedometer If a website uses enough JS for that to matter, it's a problem on all browsers
      - jeroenhd 3y ago
        These web apps are quite usable on Chrome and useless lag fests on Firefox. Do I prefer the modern "let's ship a JS renderer with every webpage" approach? No, definitely not. Unfortunately, quite a few web applications and websites u visit disagree with me. There's also a perceptable difference in terms of browser responsiveness outside the page itself. Firefox seems to take longer to process UI input in my experience, for reasons I don't entirely get. There's a slight but visible delay before the page starts rendering that Chrome doesn't have, and that small delay adds up when you're working in web UIs fir a significant part of the day.
    - kelnos 3y ago
      Strange, on Linux I've found Firefox to be just as fast as Chrome. Granted, I've had all the hardware accel stuff force-enabled for years now, with no issues (on Intel iGPUs), so maybe that's why I haven't noticed any slowness.
- Anthony-G 3y ago
  I’d agree that Google Chrome was noticeably faster than Firefox up until around a decade ago. However, I haven’t noticed it to be any faster since then. What makes web browsing faster for me is the use of web extensions that disable the downloading of unnecessary resources and/or the execution of pointless Javascript, e.g., NoScript, uMatrix, uBlock, Privacy Badger, etc – the same extensions that will have their abilities greatly reduced by Manifest v3.
- kelnos 3y ago
  I haven't noticed any speed differences between Chrome and Firefox for quite some time now (Linux here, so maybe it's different on Windows or macOS). And I haven't found the Google services integration to be all that deep or interesting to matter. In fact, I'd found the opposite to be true: it's gotten in the way. Having the browser log into your Google Account directly has led to some confusing behavior, especially when signing into a second account via some webapp, which sometimes changes how the browser is signed in. Regardless, I think we all would be better off with a bit less integration of Google services in our lives.
jddj 3y ago
I need to use chrome for maybe 2 websites per year on mobile which give me infinite loading spinners on Firefox. One website on desktop, which I only use chrome (actually edge but I consider them to be the same thing) for because the developers don't take bug reports seriously unless it's Chromium based
VPenkov 3y ago
One that I feel is underappreciated is the inline translation of whatever website you are browsing. I don't speak well the language of the country I currently live in and Chrome really helps. I haven't really found a comparable feature or add-on in other browsers. I'd switch to Firefox in a heartbeat if it offered a decent version of this.
- bantunes 3y ago
  Firefox has had this since Sep 26 https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/118.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/118.0/releasenotes/
  - kibwen 3y ago
    Note that it supports fewer languages for automatic translation, but all the translation happens client-side, which is super cool.
    - TonyTrapp 3y ago
      And several more languages to be added soon have already been announced: Russian, Farsi, Icelandic, Norwegian, Ukrainian and Dutch. So there's probably much more to come.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linguist-translator/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linguist-tran... Includes offline translation. I very rarely need this, so I can’t speak about the quality, though.
- BossHogg 3y ago
  I use Translate Web Pages daily. https://github.com/FilipePS/Traduzir-paginas-web https://github.com/FilipePS/Traduzir-paginas-web
- kelnos 3y ago
  On top of the integrated support for this in Firefox as of recently (that a sibling mentions), Mozilla has offered an extension for this for quite a while now.
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago
Security. The Chrome security team(and other Google security teams like Project Zero) is top notch. Mozilla can't really compete in this field, unfortunately, Google can afford to and does invest more into browser security.
- generic92034 3y ago
  But if (! - I am not sure on that, yet) v3 is preventing ad-blockers from working the attack surface is that much larger using Chrome.
  - rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago
    v3 is no preventing adblockers, it changes the way they'll have to be implemented(they'll be less powerful than before).
    - redserk 3y ago
      Reducing functionality is preventing adblocking, which is overwhelmingly the primary action of adblockers. Thus it is fair to state they are preventing adblockers.
      - rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago
        >Thus it is fair to state they are preventing adblockers No it's not fair to say that. The same way it's not fair to say Apple is preventing adblocking in Safari even if the current state of adblocking there RIGHT NOW is exactly how manifest v3 Chrome will be(using declarativeNetRequest)
        saurik 3y ago
        But, they are, right? They aren't preventing ALL ad blockers, but they aren't even merely preventing theoretical ad blockers: they are blocking concrete ad blockers that people have built and would actively use. If there is a checkpoint at an event which seems to be turning away cars it doesn't matter if other cars are also getting through: the way we use the relevant phrasing allows us to say that "they are turning away cars" as that is a bit ambiguous as to why or how many.
buro9 3y ago
> At this point, is there still any good reasons to use Chrome? I use Firefox for everything... except work. At work we have Google Suite, Google Meet, etm and these do not work as well, as consistently, or with the same features in Firefox. A specific example, if you have a 1080p webcam you can use this in Firefox and https://webcamtests.com/ https://webcamtests.com/ will reveal that I have a 1920x1080 FHD webcam @ 50fps ... all good, but Google Meet will only allow 1080p webcams in Chrome. That's a rich feature example, but even things like Docs behaves subtly differently and a little more rich and fluidly in Chrome. What this means is that I segment my life by browser, Firefox is my personal life, and I treat Chrome as my work sandbox.
- ghusto 3y ago
  We use Google Suite too, and I have no problems with 100% Firefox usage there too. I can't say anything about things like the resolution of your webcam, but I don't know, it all just works here.
- akjshdfkjhs 3y ago
  Just use the slightly lower resolution. Btw, in 2020 Google was caught red handed shipping broken code to firefox to make it look like broken/slow. Everytime that happens, just open support tickets with your IT dept. That is the only wining move. Otherwise you are just a fool being pushed around :(
- kelnos 3y ago
  I've come to see this as a feature, not an issue (I accept this as my "punishment" for refusing to install Zoom's app, and instead use it through my browser). Frankly I don't care all that much about what people see on the other side of my webcam. They're universally crap quality anyway. If I really needed decent camera quality for a video call, I'd use my phone, and a dedicated video conferencing app. (Sure, if you've specifically bought an external webcam so you can have high-quality video chats, that's another story. But I don't think all that many people do that.) Outside of the webcam issue, I've never had any problems using any of the GSuite webapss with Firefox.
baz00 3y ago
I use Safari and Edge. I haven't noticed anything that doesn't work on those.
- donatzsky 3y ago
  Edge uses the same engine as Chrome, so that at least is not surprising.
pingec 3y ago
I use it to watch youtube, because youtube on FF causes way higher cpu load and battery drain on my windows laptop.
- Supermancho 3y ago
  Brave is sufficient on phone, smart tv, and desktop for me.
tambourine_man 3y ago
I use it for the dev tools only. I remember when Safari used the WebKit dev tools and I had one browser to do everything I needed. Those were the days. Then Apple decided to release some terrible new thing with way less features and much worse interface that’s better at integrating with the iPhone when plugged in, but useless otherwise.
50 3y ago
I've tried different browsers, more so these past few years, and always end up back with Ungoogled Chromium. It seemingly uses half of the memory of Firefox.
ghusto 3y ago
I've never had a Chrome based browser installed on my 7 year old Macbook, no problems here.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

vbeeaz 3y ago

It's faster than Firefox. Also it integrates better with Google services.

Larrikin 3y ago
How is it faster than Firefox in a meaningful way? Is this even still true for the people who insist on keeping hundreds of tabs open at a time?
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  At least on mobile, Firefox is so unresponsive it's a complete nonstarter on a slower phone. Chrome is fine.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    Seems fine on mine. You speaking anecdotally or do you have data?
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      Yeah, it's slow to the point of being completely unusable on my phone.
      - Larrikin 3y ago
        What's the point of even using the web if you don't have an ad blocker in your browser?
        marginalia_nu 3y ago
        I mainly use the parts of the web that doesn't require one.
      - leodag 3y ago
        Have you used it recently, or just years ago? It definitely used to be very slow, but since ~2 years ago it's very good, and my go to browser (my phone is not high end, by the way)
        marginalia_nu 3y ago
        I give it a spin every few months. Then I uninstall it because it's still irredeemably unresponsive.
  - flerchin 3y ago
    This is the opposite of my experience on android. Firefox with uBlock Origin is the only way to get some sites to load in any reasonable timeframe. The difference can be measured in 10s of seconds, and is more noticeable with worse hardware.
- fooker 3y ago
  It is, Firefox is tangibly slow for me on mac. Rendering/JS performance seems reasonable nowadays, but the UI has weird skips and freezes fairly often.
- boudin 3y ago
  My experience is the opposite, Firefox feels quite lighter, Chrome tends to use more resources and feels bloated.
  - easton 3y ago
    Me too and I don't really understand why. On Windows, pressing F12 to open Dev Tools takes a good five seconds in Edge but takes fractions of a second in Firefox. And page renders feel faster, although apparently they actually aren't in controlled experiments. Maybe one of the extensions I typically use in both works differently in Firefox.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  I'm on Linux, and Firefox's performance is still behind Chromium. Mozilla only recently enabled hardware acceleration. There are benchmarks in which Firefox beats Chrome (https://arewefastyet.com/linux64/benchmarks/overview?numDays=60 https://arewefastyet.com/linux64/benchmarks/overview?numDays... has an overview) but in general Chrome is faster. On Windows and macOS Firefox is a bit more competitive, but important benchmarks such as JetStream and Speedometer still have Firefox easily beat (note the inverted score axes). That doesn't mean Firefox is slow per se, it just means Chromium (and WebKit) are faster. On Android I use Firefox for its addon support, but the UI is notably more glitchy and buggy than Chrome's.
  - ahartmetz 3y ago
    > JetStream and Speedometer If a website uses enough JS for that to matter, it's a problem on all browsers
    - jeroenhd 3y ago
      These web apps are quite usable on Chrome and useless lag fests on Firefox. Do I prefer the modern "let's ship a JS renderer with every webpage" approach? No, definitely not. Unfortunately, quite a few web applications and websites u visit disagree with me. There's also a perceptable difference in terms of browser responsiveness outside the page itself. Firefox seems to take longer to process UI input in my experience, for reasons I don't entirely get. There's a slight but visible delay before the page starts rendering that Chrome doesn't have, and that small delay adds up when you're working in web UIs fir a significant part of the day.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    Strange, on Linux I've found Firefox to be just as fast as Chrome. Granted, I've had all the hardware accel stuff force-enabled for years now, with no issues (on Intel iGPUs), so maybe that's why I haven't noticed any slowness.
Anthony-G 3y ago
I’d agree that Google Chrome was noticeably faster than Firefox up until around a decade ago. However, I haven’t noticed it to be any faster since then. What makes web browsing faster for me is the use of web extensions that disable the downloading of unnecessary resources and/or the execution of pointless Javascript, e.g., NoScript, uMatrix, uBlock, Privacy Badger, etc – the same extensions that will have their abilities greatly reduced by Manifest v3.
kelnos 3y ago
I haven't noticed any speed differences between Chrome and Firefox for quite some time now (Linux here, so maybe it's different on Windows or macOS). And I haven't found the Google services integration to be all that deep or interesting to matter. In fact, I'd found the opposite to be true: it's gotten in the way. Having the browser log into your Google Account directly has led to some confusing behavior, especially when signing into a second account via some webapp, which sometimes changes how the browser is signed in. Regardless, I think we all would be better off with a bit less integration of Google services in our lives.

jddj 3y ago

I need to use chrome for maybe 2 websites per year on mobile which give me infinite loading spinners on Firefox. One website on desktop, which I only use chrome (actually edge but I consider them to be the same thing) for because the developers don't take bug reports seriously unless it's Chromium based

VPenkov 3y ago

One that I feel is underappreciated is the inline translation of whatever website you are browsing. I don't speak well the language of the country I currently live in and Chrome really helps. I haven't really found a comparable feature or add-on in other browsers. I'd switch to Firefox in a heartbeat if it offered a decent version of this.

bantunes 3y ago
Firefox has had this since Sep 26 https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/118.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/118.0/releasenotes/
- kibwen 3y ago
  Note that it supports fewer languages for automatic translation, but all the translation happens client-side, which is super cool.
  - TonyTrapp 3y ago
    And several more languages to be added soon have already been announced: Russian, Farsi, Icelandic, Norwegian, Ukrainian and Dutch. So there's probably much more to come.
Semaphor 3y ago
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linguist-translator/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linguist-tran... Includes offline translation. I very rarely need this, so I can’t speak about the quality, though.
BossHogg 3y ago
I use Translate Web Pages daily. https://github.com/FilipePS/Traduzir-paginas-web https://github.com/FilipePS/Traduzir-paginas-web
kelnos 3y ago
On top of the integrated support for this in Firefox as of recently (that a sibling mentions), Mozilla has offered an extension for this for quite a while now.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago

Security. The Chrome security team(and other Google security teams like Project Zero) is top notch. Mozilla can't really compete in this field, unfortunately, Google can afford to and does invest more into browser security.

generic92034 3y ago
But if (! - I am not sure on that, yet) v3 is preventing ad-blockers from working the attack surface is that much larger using Chrome.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago
  v3 is no preventing adblockers, it changes the way they'll have to be implemented(they'll be less powerful than before).
  - redserk 3y ago
    Reducing functionality is preventing adblocking, which is overwhelmingly the primary action of adblockers. Thus it is fair to state they are preventing adblockers.
    - rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago
      >Thus it is fair to state they are preventing adblockers No it's not fair to say that. The same way it's not fair to say Apple is preventing adblocking in Safari even if the current state of adblocking there RIGHT NOW is exactly how manifest v3 Chrome will be(using declarativeNetRequest)
      - saurik 3y ago
        But, they are, right? They aren't preventing ALL ad blockers, but they aren't even merely preventing theoretical ad blockers: they are blocking concrete ad blockers that people have built and would actively use. If there is a checkpoint at an event which seems to be turning away cars it doesn't matter if other cars are also getting through: the way we use the relevant phrasing allows us to say that "they are turning away cars" as that is a bit ambiguous as to why or how many.

buro9 3y ago

> At this point, is there still any good reasons to use Chrome? I use Firefox for everything... except work. At work we have Google Suite, Google Meet, etm and these do not work as well, as consistently, or with the same features in Firefox. A specific example, if you have a 1080p webcam you can use this in Firefox and https://webcamtests.com/ https://webcamtests.com/ will reveal that I have a 1920x1080 FHD webcam @ 50fps ... all good, but Google Meet will only allow 1080p webcams in Chrome. That's a rich feature example, but even things like Docs behaves subtly differently and a little more rich and fluidly in Chrome. What this means is that I segment my life by browser, Firefox is my personal life, and I treat Chrome as my work sandbox.

ghusto 3y ago
We use Google Suite too, and I have no problems with 100% Firefox usage there too. I can't say anything about things like the resolution of your webcam, but I don't know, it all just works here.
akjshdfkjhs 3y ago
Just use the slightly lower resolution. Btw, in 2020 Google was caught red handed shipping broken code to firefox to make it look like broken/slow. Everytime that happens, just open support tickets with your IT dept. That is the only wining move. Otherwise you are just a fool being pushed around :(
kelnos 3y ago
I've come to see this as a feature, not an issue (I accept this as my "punishment" for refusing to install Zoom's app, and instead use it through my browser). Frankly I don't care all that much about what people see on the other side of my webcam. They're universally crap quality anyway. If I really needed decent camera quality for a video call, I'd use my phone, and a dedicated video conferencing app. (Sure, if you've specifically bought an external webcam so you can have high-quality video chats, that's another story. But I don't think all that many people do that.) Outside of the webcam issue, I've never had any problems using any of the GSuite webapss with Firefox.

baz00 3y ago

I use Safari and Edge. I haven't noticed anything that doesn't work on those.

donatzsky 3y ago
Edge uses the same engine as Chrome, so that at least is not surprising.

pingec 3y ago

I use it to watch youtube, because youtube on FF causes way higher cpu load and battery drain on my windows laptop.

Supermancho 3y ago
Brave is sufficient on phone, smart tv, and desktop for me.

tambourine_man 3y ago

I use it for the dev tools only. I remember when Safari used the WebKit dev tools and I had one browser to do everything I needed. Those were the days. Then Apple decided to release some terrible new thing with way less features and much worse interface that’s better at integrating with the iPhone when plugged in, but useless otherwise.

50 3y ago

I've tried different browsers, more so these past few years, and always end up back with Ungoogled Chromium. It seemingly uses half of the memory of Firefox.

ghusto 3y ago

I've never had a Chrome based browser installed on my 7 year old Macbook, no problems here.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]