8 ms·

I don't see why I would want to use anything else. Even if Chrome is marginally faster in an arbitrary benchmark test, I doubt I'd notice. And so far, I have no

by zahma 3y ago

I don't see why I would want to use anything else. Even if Chrome is marginally faster in an arbitrary benchmark test, I doubt I'd notice. And so far, I have no interoperability issues between Firefox on my laptop (macOS) and my iPhone (iOS), which runs Safari + Firefox Focus (because it's all the same webkit underneath). The add-on and plug-in marketplace is quite healthy, too. At the end of the day, I care about open-source software that doesn't model its business around capturing and manufacturing my data for export -- just the opposite. Thank goodness for Mozilla and all its collaborators.

stronglikedan 3y ago
In my opinion, Chrome is more polished (no pun intended). Just the little things that allow me to work faster, whether the browser itself is faster or not. I try FF about every 3 months or so, but keep coming back to Chrome.
- berkes 3y ago
  > I try FF about every 3 months or so, but keep coming back to Chrome I don't know your specific reasons. But commonly this is just familiarity bias. That doesn't say that X is better than Y in general (it often isn't) just that you know X better than Y and therefore it's better for you. It's why I've never been able to switch to emacs despite trying it out. It's why I'm forever stuck on Ubuntu, despite the fact that there are DEs/distros out there that suit my use case better, probably.
- jwells89 3y ago
  I use Firefox as a secondary browser on my Macs and primary browser on Windows and Linux, but I agree. It lacks polish, and its UI feels “off” in ways that are difficult to articulate. It’s probably fixable, though. One of these days when I have some surplus time I’d like to grab a copy of the Firefox source, see how practical changing its UI is, and figure out if the root cause of lack of polish is technical or organizational. If it’s the latter a fork may be in order.
dominick-cc 3y ago
I use chromium-browsers only for video conferencing because I have had some weird scenarios with choppy video on firefox.
skizm 3y ago
I still need to use Chrome for YouTube when I'm on my Windows 11 desktop unfortunately. YouTube in FF causes weird issues with my monitor turning on and off after I've been watching YT for more than like 20 min. It gets into a state where any new windows I open or close cause the screen to turn off then on. I have no idea where to even begin diagnosing what's going on. This behavior seemingly goes away when I run YT in chrome and everything else in FF.
- yoyohello13 3y ago
  Same, I don't know what it is but firefox locks up whenever I try to watch youtube on my laptop. It's only my windows laptop too. My linux laptop, and windows desktop at work are fine.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  Does that also happen for other video sites?
- cardboardmetal 3y ago
  Weird. I would try changing the browser's hardware acceleration settings.
- swat535 3y ago
  Yup, you also need Chrome if you are using Google Meet, otherwise our experience will be significantly degraded.
  - wiether 3y ago
    Now on FF you also have the webcam filters and stuff like that on Google Meet. It was my only reason to launch Chrome on my job laptop and it's been six months that I use Google Meet daily on FF without issue.
    - foobarchu 3y ago
      I and my coworkers have recently switched from WebEx to Meet in the last month (thank goodness), and all found meet unbearable on ff. The most common issue is audio simply going out a few minutes in until you refresh. These issues, for whatever reason, don't happen on chrome, so we all keep both installed (except the regular chrome users). For whatever reason, the experience just isn't there. Maybe it's Mozillas fault, maybe it's Google's, maybe it's even Apple's.
ajorgensen 3y ago
I have tried to switch quite a few times over the years to Firefox and I still to this day consistently run into websites that are unusably broken on Firefox, do you have the same experience? I realize this probably speaks volumes to the need for more people to use browsers other than Chrome but its unfortunately frequent enough that I always end up switching back to Chrome after a few months.
- jstanley 3y ago
  People always say this but almost never are they able to give examples.
  - rprospero 3y ago
    Concrete examples: The web interfaces for both Jitsi and Zoom fail to recognise my web camera. I've gone through the permissions settings a dozen times and Firefox says that it sees camera, but it only displays a black feed. Vivaldi correctly accesses the camera on both sites. imascientist.org.uk makes it "impossible" to sign up for outreach sessions under Firefox. The div with the sessions has a `max-width` parameter, but the contents are significantly larger than this width, resulting in the buttons being outside the rendering area and inaccessible. I have to go into the dev tools and edit the CSS every time I open the page. These are just the issues that I've dealt with today. Don't get me wrong - I'm literally typing this in Firefox at this moment. However, it doesn't help anyone to pretend that these issues never pop up. I simply feel that the benefits outweight these annoyances.
    - tmottabr 3y ago
      I just tested both sites from my default firefox profile. zoom worked without problem.. both audio and video.. imascientist.org.uk i opened the registration page and it showed without problem buttons where in the end of the page as i would expect. It look like it is something in your end and not with firefox..
    - Forgeties79 3y ago
      Very strange. I run Zoom constantly in FF - my company does several events a week that I edit, so i’m thick in the weeds on zoom’s site doing admin/recording management stuff. Almost 3 years on zoom’s site almost every single day, never had to swap browsers. Mac Studio if that matters.
deanishe 3y ago
> I don't see why I would want to use anything else I use FF, too, but I can see why someone wouldn't want to: It's just not a very good Mac app. Weird windowing and focus bugs in fullscreen mode. Keyboard shortcuts that randomly stop working. Zero scripting capabilities (it used to have the bare minimum, but Mozilla bizarrely ripped it out), and just poor integration in general. My system-wide shortcuts — the ones that are so important I've added them to every context menu on the system? That's a big nope because FF devs apparently think showing poxy extension icons is more important. Google had the good sense to copy Safari's keyboard shortcuts in Chrome. Mozilla didn't. The bookmark manager is straight out of Windows 95. Awful UX. I do like Firefox, but it's just not up to snuff on macOS.
- snarfy 3y ago
  To be fair, Apple is a bit hostile towards open source developers. I can write windows and linux software from both windows and linux, but to write apple software I need a mac and a developer account that costs money. If firefox depends on patches from the community, they will receive less patches for macos features because of this asymmetry.
  - dotancohen 3y ago
    Linux user with no care for Mac features. Firefox may be open source, but Mozilla is a company with a paid development team. It is exactly these types of issues - UX, UI - on which the dev team should be working. I'm sure that a lot of features come from the open source community, but the polish and sound implementation is on the dev team. For what it's worth, Firefox on KDE is fine.
  - nightpool 3y ago
    I have never needed to pay for a developer account to run my own code on my own machine. What? How does this have anything to do with OP's point?
- Forgeties79 3y ago
  I use Firefox as my daily driver on my personal and work computers with no issues. I guess YMMV there. I haven’t used chrome for about 3 years now. I keep a chromium browser around o just for testing things across browsers, but I never really need it.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"At the end of the day, I care about open-source software that doesn't model its business around capturing and manufacturing my data for export -- just the opposite." Of course, that is exactly the model used by Mozilla. It exports search query data to Google for capture, by default, in return for payment. "Thank goodness for Mozilla and all its collaborators." Indeed, thank goodness for long-time Mozilla collaborator Google, LLC. Mozilla employees left to join Google beginning in 2005. They wrote Chrome. Without Google's payments to Mozilla, who knows what might happen.
- gitaarik 3y ago
  Yes this is the reason Firefox can still survive. But it's easy to turn off, giving you easy and real privacy. On Chrome you don't have real privacy.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
    One can change settings but one cannot change the default unless edit source and compile. Almost no one does this. What is "real" privacy. There is no small amount of telemetry by default in Firefox, far more than Chrome. Unless one changes each of these settings, Mozilla collects data about Firefox users. Defaults can only be changed by editing the source and compiling Firefox. Almost no one does this.
    - gitaarik 3y ago
      Telemetry and Google as a default search engine are two different things. Also Telemetry doesn't collect any personal data, it's used for anonymous Firefox usage statistics to improve their product. And it's something Firefox asks you to opt in/out when you install Firefox.
      - gitaarik 3y ago
        And regarding: "One can change settings but one cannot change the default unless edit source and compile. Almost no one does this." There are some popular Firefox forks that have several improvements over security and privacy. Check LibreWolf and Waterfox for example.
jklinger410 3y ago
> I don't see why I would want to use anything else. I am back again to remind people that profiles suck on Firefox, container tabs are not a great solution, and there are tons of extensions that Chrome has that Firefox doesn't. So just 3 very simple examples of why someone would use Chrome over Firefox.
- SR2Z 3y ago
  I mean, sure, but I (and probably most people) only have a few extensions that actually matter regardless of the browser. In my case it's Dark Reader and uBlock, and both work well in FF.
incontrol 3y ago
Funny enough on my machine, Chrome is the slowest on https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.1/ https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.1/ 401 - Chrome 446 - Firefox 546 - Safari
- Meegul 3y ago
  357 - Chrome with extensions 511 - Chrome without any extensions 433 - Clean firefox install 500 - Clean edge install On an AMD Ryzen 7950X3D / 5600MHz RAM Interestingly, I got substantially different results depending on whether I used chrome with my typical extensions or not. Looking at the flamegraph, I don't seem to see the full picture of why there's such a substantial difference. Bitwarden/React Developer tools (the 2 primary extensions I use) don't seem to make enough of an impact to account for the roughly 40% performance increase seen without them. The browserbench javascript accounted for ~38.6% of the overall time taken for the benchmark, but the sum of my extensions was only 6.5%. I'm not incredibly familiar with browser performance profiling, so there's probably more to the story.
- nozzlegear 3y ago
  Neat site but it almost needs a flash/epilepsy warning =P
- tasuki 3y ago
  Isn't that pretty much irrelevant? Won't network speed etc make much more of a difference?
- brokencube 3y ago
  Probably subjective to your particular set up - I just got the opposite results on my mac: 202 ± 4.7 - Chrome 184 ± 5.0 - Firefox 171 ± 2.6 - Safari
  - throwaway4PP 3y ago
    fyi, if you're uncertain in the single-digits place, you have no precision in the tenths place. for experimental uncertainty, it's always one sigfig
reportgunner 3y ago
I think more recent benchmarks showed that Firefox became faster than Chrome, although I'm not keeping a close eye on it and I agree with you that it's arbitrary. For the past 6+ years I only use Chrome rarely and as an Internet Explorer replacement.
javajosh 3y ago
I agree. I would also suggest occasionally checking out the other browsers like Opera and Vivaldi because they often have a surprising feel and feature set. Vivaldi in particular has a very nice RSS/Atom feed reader built into it, and Opera tends to be very fast. (Mozilla and Goog were smart to start offering account-based sync because this creates a moat for regular adoption. But anyone can and should go window-shopping for browsers - it's cheap entertainment, at the very least.)
- J253 3y ago
  Agreed. I find Vivaldi’s split pane ability incredibly useful. Surprised other browsers haven’t implemented this kind of this yet.
  - wilsonnb3 3y ago
    I think edge has it
- zahma 3y ago
  I try Orion once in a while when my Firefox configuration breaks a website. I actually enjoy it and appreciate the zero telemetry and functionality with both Google and Firefox plugin marketplaces. It’s also great for my laptop’s battery life. Firefox can drain that quickly depending on which tabs I keep open.
- dartos 3y ago
  I wouldn’t touch opera with a 1000ft pole. Any non OSS browser makes me feel weird. The amount of trust you place in a browser is insane.
  - robin_reala 3y ago
    That, and the predatory short-term loans part of their business. https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-opera-browser/ https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-opera-browser/

by zahma 3y ago

stronglikedan 3y ago

In my opinion, Chrome is more polished (no pun intended). Just the little things that allow me to work faster, whether the browser itself is faster or not. I try FF about every 3 months or so, but keep coming back to Chrome.

berkes 3y ago
> I try FF about every 3 months or so, but keep coming back to Chrome I don't know your specific reasons. But commonly this is just familiarity bias. That doesn't say that X is better than Y in general (it often isn't) just that you know X better than Y and therefore it's better for you. It's why I've never been able to switch to emacs despite trying it out. It's why I'm forever stuck on Ubuntu, despite the fact that there are DEs/distros out there that suit my use case better, probably.
jwells89 3y ago
I use Firefox as a secondary browser on my Macs and primary browser on Windows and Linux, but I agree. It lacks polish, and its UI feels “off” in ways that are difficult to articulate. It’s probably fixable, though. One of these days when I have some surplus time I’d like to grab a copy of the Firefox source, see how practical changing its UI is, and figure out if the root cause of lack of polish is technical or organizational. If it’s the latter a fork may be in order.

dominick-cc 3y ago

I use chromium-browsers only for video conferencing because I have had some weird scenarios with choppy video on firefox.

skizm 3y ago

I still need to use Chrome for YouTube when I'm on my Windows 11 desktop unfortunately. YouTube in FF causes weird issues with my monitor turning on and off after I've been watching YT for more than like 20 min. It gets into a state where any new windows I open or close cause the screen to turn off then on. I have no idea where to even begin diagnosing what's going on. This behavior seemingly goes away when I run YT in chrome and everything else in FF.

yoyohello13 3y ago
Same, I don't know what it is but firefox locks up whenever I try to watch youtube on my laptop. It's only my windows laptop too. My linux laptop, and windows desktop at work are fine.
ravenstine 3y ago
Does that also happen for other video sites?
cardboardmetal 3y ago
Weird. I would try changing the browser's hardware acceleration settings.
swat535 3y ago
Yup, you also need Chrome if you are using Google Meet, otherwise our experience will be significantly degraded.
- wiether 3y ago
  Now on FF you also have the webcam filters and stuff like that on Google Meet. It was my only reason to launch Chrome on my job laptop and it's been six months that I use Google Meet daily on FF without issue.
  - foobarchu 3y ago
    I and my coworkers have recently switched from WebEx to Meet in the last month (thank goodness), and all found meet unbearable on ff. The most common issue is audio simply going out a few minutes in until you refresh. These issues, for whatever reason, don't happen on chrome, so we all keep both installed (except the regular chrome users). For whatever reason, the experience just isn't there. Maybe it's Mozillas fault, maybe it's Google's, maybe it's even Apple's.

ajorgensen 3y ago

I have tried to switch quite a few times over the years to Firefox and I still to this day consistently run into websites that are unusably broken on Firefox, do you have the same experience? I realize this probably speaks volumes to the need for more people to use browsers other than Chrome but its unfortunately frequent enough that I always end up switching back to Chrome after a few months.

jstanley 3y ago
People always say this but almost never are they able to give examples.
- rprospero 3y ago
  Concrete examples: The web interfaces for both Jitsi and Zoom fail to recognise my web camera. I've gone through the permissions settings a dozen times and Firefox says that it sees camera, but it only displays a black feed. Vivaldi correctly accesses the camera on both sites. imascientist.org.uk makes it "impossible" to sign up for outreach sessions under Firefox. The div with the sessions has a `max-width` parameter, but the contents are significantly larger than this width, resulting in the buttons being outside the rendering area and inaccessible. I have to go into the dev tools and edit the CSS every time I open the page. These are just the issues that I've dealt with today. Don't get me wrong - I'm literally typing this in Firefox at this moment. However, it doesn't help anyone to pretend that these issues never pop up. I simply feel that the benefits outweight these annoyances.
  - tmottabr 3y ago
    I just tested both sites from my default firefox profile. zoom worked without problem.. both audio and video.. imascientist.org.uk i opened the registration page and it showed without problem buttons where in the end of the page as i would expect. It look like it is something in your end and not with firefox..
  - Forgeties79 3y ago
    Very strange. I run Zoom constantly in FF - my company does several events a week that I edit, so i’m thick in the weeds on zoom’s site doing admin/recording management stuff. Almost 3 years on zoom’s site almost every single day, never had to swap browsers. Mac Studio if that matters.

deanishe 3y ago

> I don't see why I would want to use anything else I use FF, too, but I can see why someone wouldn't want to: It's just not a very good Mac app. Weird windowing and focus bugs in fullscreen mode. Keyboard shortcuts that randomly stop working. Zero scripting capabilities (it used to have the bare minimum, but Mozilla bizarrely ripped it out), and just poor integration in general. My system-wide shortcuts — the ones that are so important I've added them to every context menu on the system? That's a big nope because FF devs apparently think showing poxy extension icons is more important. Google had the good sense to copy Safari's keyboard shortcuts in Chrome. Mozilla didn't. The bookmark manager is straight out of Windows 95. Awful UX. I do like Firefox, but it's just not up to snuff on macOS.

snarfy 3y ago
To be fair, Apple is a bit hostile towards open source developers. I can write windows and linux software from both windows and linux, but to write apple software I need a mac and a developer account that costs money. If firefox depends on patches from the community, they will receive less patches for macos features because of this asymmetry.
- dotancohen 3y ago
  Linux user with no care for Mac features. Firefox may be open source, but Mozilla is a company with a paid development team. It is exactly these types of issues - UX, UI - on which the dev team should be working. I'm sure that a lot of features come from the open source community, but the polish and sound implementation is on the dev team. For what it's worth, Firefox on KDE is fine.
- nightpool 3y ago
  I have never needed to pay for a developer account to run my own code on my own machine. What? How does this have anything to do with OP's point?
Forgeties79 3y ago
I use Firefox as my daily driver on my personal and work computers with no issues. I guess YMMV there. I haven’t used chrome for about 3 years now. I keep a chromium browser around o just for testing things across browsers, but I never really need it.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

"At the end of the day, I care about open-source software that doesn't model its business around capturing and manufacturing my data for export -- just the opposite." Of course, that is exactly the model used by Mozilla. It exports search query data to Google for capture, by default, in return for payment. "Thank goodness for Mozilla and all its collaborators." Indeed, thank goodness for long-time Mozilla collaborator Google, LLC. Mozilla employees left to join Google beginning in 2005. They wrote Chrome. Without Google's payments to Mozilla, who knows what might happen.

gitaarik 3y ago
Yes this is the reason Firefox can still survive. But it's easy to turn off, giving you easy and real privacy. On Chrome you don't have real privacy.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  One can change settings but one cannot change the default unless edit source and compile. Almost no one does this. What is "real" privacy. There is no small amount of telemetry by default in Firefox, far more than Chrome. Unless one changes each of these settings, Mozilla collects data about Firefox users. Defaults can only be changed by editing the source and compiling Firefox. Almost no one does this.
  - gitaarik 3y ago
    Telemetry and Google as a default search engine are two different things. Also Telemetry doesn't collect any personal data, it's used for anonymous Firefox usage statistics to improve their product. And it's something Firefox asks you to opt in/out when you install Firefox.
    - gitaarik 3y ago
      And regarding: "One can change settings but one cannot change the default unless edit source and compile. Almost no one does this." There are some popular Firefox forks that have several improvements over security and privacy. Check LibreWolf and Waterfox for example.

jklinger410 3y ago

> I don't see why I would want to use anything else. I am back again to remind people that profiles suck on Firefox, container tabs are not a great solution, and there are tons of extensions that Chrome has that Firefox doesn't. So just 3 very simple examples of why someone would use Chrome over Firefox.

SR2Z 3y ago
I mean, sure, but I (and probably most people) only have a few extensions that actually matter regardless of the browser. In my case it's Dark Reader and uBlock, and both work well in FF.

incontrol 3y ago

Funny enough on my machine, Chrome is the slowest on https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.1/ https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.1/ 401 - Chrome 446 - Firefox 546 - Safari

Meegul 3y ago
357 - Chrome with extensions 511 - Chrome without any extensions 433 - Clean firefox install 500 - Clean edge install On an AMD Ryzen 7950X3D / 5600MHz RAM Interestingly, I got substantially different results depending on whether I used chrome with my typical extensions or not. Looking at the flamegraph, I don't seem to see the full picture of why there's such a substantial difference. Bitwarden/React Developer tools (the 2 primary extensions I use) don't seem to make enough of an impact to account for the roughly 40% performance increase seen without them. The browserbench javascript accounted for ~38.6% of the overall time taken for the benchmark, but the sum of my extensions was only 6.5%. I'm not incredibly familiar with browser performance profiling, so there's probably more to the story.
nozzlegear 3y ago
Neat site but it almost needs a flash/epilepsy warning =P
tasuki 3y ago
Isn't that pretty much irrelevant? Won't network speed etc make much more of a difference?
brokencube 3y ago
Probably subjective to your particular set up - I just got the opposite results on my mac: 202 ± 4.7 - Chrome 184 ± 5.0 - Firefox 171 ± 2.6 - Safari
- throwaway4PP 3y ago
  fyi, if you're uncertain in the single-digits place, you have no precision in the tenths place. for experimental uncertainty, it's always one sigfig

reportgunner 3y ago

I think more recent benchmarks showed that Firefox became faster than Chrome, although I'm not keeping a close eye on it and I agree with you that it's arbitrary. For the past 6+ years I only use Chrome rarely and as an Internet Explorer replacement.

javajosh 3y ago

I agree. I would also suggest occasionally checking out the other browsers like Opera and Vivaldi because they often have a surprising feel and feature set. Vivaldi in particular has a very nice RSS/Atom feed reader built into it, and Opera tends to be very fast. (Mozilla and Goog were smart to start offering account-based sync because this creates a moat for regular adoption. But anyone can and should go window-shopping for browsers - it's cheap entertainment, at the very least.)

J253 3y ago
Agreed. I find Vivaldi’s split pane ability incredibly useful. Surprised other browsers haven’t implemented this kind of this yet.
- wilsonnb3 3y ago
  I think edge has it
zahma 3y ago
I try Orion once in a while when my Firefox configuration breaks a website. I actually enjoy it and appreciate the zero telemetry and functionality with both Google and Firefox plugin marketplaces. It’s also great for my laptop’s battery life. Firefox can drain that quickly depending on which tabs I keep open.
dartos 3y ago
I wouldn’t touch opera with a 1000ft pole. Any non OSS browser makes me feel weird. The amount of trust you place in a browser is insane.
- robin_reala 3y ago
  That, and the predatory short-term loans part of their business. https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-opera-browser/ https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-opera-browser/