4 ms·

Spiraling into irrelevance? Care to explain that?

jlarocco 14y ago
Completely anecdotal, but all of the people I know who used Firefox now use Chrome. What compelling reason is there to use Firefox any more? All of the reasons that previously applied to switching to Firefox now apply to switching from Firefox to Chrome. Chrome is faster, more light weight, more standards compliant, more compatible with broken pages, supports more standards/technologies, more actively updated/enhanced, and leaks less memory than Firefox. It's also open source and cross platform. The one place Firefox may "win" is by sheer number of extensions. Even then, all the "big" ones (AdBlock, Ghostery, ...) are ported over, and I don't think gimmicky extensions are a big influence for most people.
- kiba 14y ago
  Completely anecdotal, but all of the people I know who used Firefox now use Chrome. Well, it's only an ancedote. The data suggests something different.
- azakai 14y ago
  > Chrome is faster Sometimes, but it depends. For example, Firefox beats Chrome at JSGameBench here (a gaming benchmark including canvas hardware acceleration and JS), http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-chrome-20-firefox-13-opera-12,3228-10.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-chrome-20-fire... Also, while Chrome wins on most standard JS benchmarks, real-world JS is different. New code often runs faster in Firefox than Chrome. For example, the Linux emulator in JS ran 2x faster in Firefox when it came out, and I can link you to bugs I've filed on Chrome where it currently runs code 10x-15x slower than Firefox. > more light weight Many browser shootouts find Chrome to use more memory than Firefox, especially with large amounts of tabs. For example, Firefox beat Chrome at both memory benchmarks here http://lifehacker.com/5917714/browser-speed-tests-chrome-19-firefox-13-internet-explorer-9-and-opera-1164 http://lifehacker.com/5917714/browser-speed-tests-chrome-19-... > more standards compliant Definitely not so. First, while Chrome has various standards implemented first, so does Firefox (a few examples off the top of my head: anisotropic filtering in WebGL, Mouselock, various JS ES6 features like WeakMaps, etc.). Also, Chrome ships with a lot of non-standards-compliant technologies that are enabled by default. For example, WebSQL, NaCl, Flash. > It's also open source Chromium is, Chrome is not. Chrome contains a lot of additional closed source code, from a PDF reader to a software shader engine. Bottom line, there are plenty of good reasons to use either Chrome or Firefox. What is important is both drive each other to do better.
- ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
  The big one for me was, when flash crashes in Chrome, only 1 tab is affected. In Firefox the whole browser crashes. And no, disabling flash and avoiding it is not an option, not with online video and music playing through flash. One day when flash is gone this won't be a problem but we haven't reached that day yet. My usage is now 99% Chrome, 1% Firefox (for testing purposes), and keep in mind I was one of those die-hard Firefox fans. I bought my Firefox t-shirt from the Mozilla store, installed it on school computers, supported it from the beginning and everything. Now I'm all Chrome and so is my whole family. Looking back, the 3 main reasons why I loved Firefox was that was open source, which was emotionally appealing, its call-to-action was to end the tyranny of Internet Explorer, it was standards compliant, and it had extensions. Chrome now does those very same things, some much better than Firefox, and is catching up to the amount of useful extensions. And it looks and behaves better. I will say this, Firefox has one thing that I really love over Chrome. When you set Firefox and Chrome to remember your last tabs open and load them on each startup, Firefox doesn't load all 80 tabs immediately I open it. Instead it only loads the currently selected tab and leaves the others unloaded, thus speading things up and preventing a system slowdown. Chrome on the other hand loads all 80 tabs at once, so I have to wait 15 seconds before the browser becomes responsive again.
  - azakai 14y ago
    > The big one for me was, when flash crashes in Chrome, only 1 tab is affected. In firefox the whole browser crashes. Firefox has run Flash in a separate process for a long time now (2 years, I think?) - so a Flash crash only brings down Flash, not the browser or even the tab for that matter (the rest of the web page will still run).
    - ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
      Huh...I have the latest Firefox 14.0.1 and about 2 days ago I had the whole browser just slow down, crash, and self destruct because of 1 tab. I restarted it, reloaded all the tabs and it crashed again as soon as that 1 tab loaded. I think it was a news aggregator too, so it's not like it was an experimental html5 site or anything. I had to quickly kill it before it loaded on next startup. Perhaps maybe it's not flash then?
- callahad 14y ago
  > all of the people I know who used Firefox now use Chrome. Have you (or they) tried Firefox lately? I made the switch exclusively to Chrome and Chromium back in 2009: Firefox felt slow and bloated, and Webkit's tools and inspector seemed far better and smoother than Firebug. And then three years passed. A lot has changed.

Completely anecdotal, but all of the people I know who used Firefox now use Chrome. What compelling reason is there to use Firefox any more? All of the reasons that previously applied to switching to Firefox now apply to switching from Firefox to Chrome. Chrome is faster, more light weight, more standards compliant, more compatible with broken pages, supports more standards/technologies, more actively updated/enhanced, and leaks less memory than Firefox. It's also open source and cross platform. The one place Firefox may "win" is by sheer number of extensions. Even then, all the "big" ones (AdBlock, Ghostery, ...) are ported over, and I don't think gimmicky extensions are a big influence for most people.

kiba 14y ago
Completely anecdotal, but all of the people I know who used Firefox now use Chrome. Well, it's only an ancedote. The data suggests something different.
azakai 14y ago
> Chrome is faster Sometimes, but it depends. For example, Firefox beats Chrome at JSGameBench here (a gaming benchmark including canvas hardware acceleration and JS), http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-chrome-20-firefox-13-opera-12,3228-10.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-chrome-20-fire... Also, while Chrome wins on most standard JS benchmarks, real-world JS is different. New code often runs faster in Firefox than Chrome. For example, the Linux emulator in JS ran 2x faster in Firefox when it came out, and I can link you to bugs I've filed on Chrome where it currently runs code 10x-15x slower than Firefox. > more light weight Many browser shootouts find Chrome to use more memory than Firefox, especially with large amounts of tabs. For example, Firefox beat Chrome at both memory benchmarks here http://lifehacker.com/5917714/browser-speed-tests-chrome-19-firefox-13-internet-explorer-9-and-opera-1164 http://lifehacker.com/5917714/browser-speed-tests-chrome-19-... > more standards compliant Definitely not so. First, while Chrome has various standards implemented first, so does Firefox (a few examples off the top of my head: anisotropic filtering in WebGL, Mouselock, various JS ES6 features like WeakMaps, etc.). Also, Chrome ships with a lot of non-standards-compliant technologies that are enabled by default. For example, WebSQL, NaCl, Flash. > It's also open source Chromium is, Chrome is not. Chrome contains a lot of additional closed source code, from a PDF reader to a software shader engine. Bottom line, there are plenty of good reasons to use either Chrome or Firefox. What is important is both drive each other to do better.
ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
The big one for me was, when flash crashes in Chrome, only 1 tab is affected. In Firefox the whole browser crashes. And no, disabling flash and avoiding it is not an option, not with online video and music playing through flash. One day when flash is gone this won't be a problem but we haven't reached that day yet. My usage is now 99% Chrome, 1% Firefox (for testing purposes), and keep in mind I was one of those die-hard Firefox fans. I bought my Firefox t-shirt from the Mozilla store, installed it on school computers, supported it from the beginning and everything. Now I'm all Chrome and so is my whole family. Looking back, the 3 main reasons why I loved Firefox was that was open source, which was emotionally appealing, its call-to-action was to end the tyranny of Internet Explorer, it was standards compliant, and it had extensions. Chrome now does those very same things, some much better than Firefox, and is catching up to the amount of useful extensions. And it looks and behaves better. I will say this, Firefox has one thing that I really love over Chrome. When you set Firefox and Chrome to remember your last tabs open and load them on each startup, Firefox doesn't load all 80 tabs immediately I open it. Instead it only loads the currently selected tab and leaves the others unloaded, thus speading things up and preventing a system slowdown. Chrome on the other hand loads all 80 tabs at once, so I have to wait 15 seconds before the browser becomes responsive again.
- azakai 14y ago
  > The big one for me was, when flash crashes in Chrome, only 1 tab is affected. In firefox the whole browser crashes. Firefox has run Flash in a separate process for a long time now (2 years, I think?) - so a Flash crash only brings down Flash, not the browser or even the tab for that matter (the rest of the web page will still run).
  - ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
    Huh...I have the latest Firefox 14.0.1 and about 2 days ago I had the whole browser just slow down, crash, and self destruct because of 1 tab. I restarted it, reloaded all the tabs and it crashed again as soon as that 1 tab loaded. I think it was a news aggregator too, so it's not like it was an experimental html5 site or anything. I had to quickly kill it before it loaded on next startup. Perhaps maybe it's not flash then?
callahad 14y ago
> all of the people I know who used Firefox now use Chrome. Have you (or they) tried Firefox lately? I made the switch exclusively to Chrome and Chromium back in 2009: Firefox felt slow and bloated, and Webkit's tools and inspector seemed far better and smoother than Firebug. And then three years passed. A lot has changed.