17 ms·

agreed. the term upgrade also brings with it a connotation of being better. I am doubtful that this is this case.

by bonzoT 12y ago

frabcus 12y ago
I've been using Firefox again recently - I stopped when it was slower and less stable than Chrome. These days it often feels faster than Chrome.
- b-ryan 12y ago
  I've been using Firefox for several months and have no regrets. On Ubuntu Chrome was doing all sorts of weird things, plus being slow. Firefox's tab groups is also a great feature.
  - vegabook 12y ago
    I can second the Ubuntu motivation. Chrome is buggy and unreliable on Ubuntu, and I was tired of the Aw Snap several times a week. Firefox appears to be much more stable, and Developer Edition looks better too.
  - smtddr 12y ago
    On my Linux MINT machine, chrome keeps doing something[1] that ends up locking up my whole machine and I have to hard-reboot. It got to a point where I actually had to set up Ctrl+Alt+K to issue "pkill -9 chrome" so as soon as I see the mouse-pointer movement become non-smooth or music start to skip, I slam on those keys to kill chrome before I have to restart my whole machine. Then I just went to Firefox developer edition[2]. Is it better? I dunno, but I like its cool dark theme, my system hasn't locked up since and now I got all those cool extensions back again. 1. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2203672 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2203672 2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Developer_Edition https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Developer_Editio...
    - kcorbitt 12y ago
      I had that problem with Linux Mint on some configurations too. I found that by going into chrome://flags/ and disabling everything related to GPU acceleration the crashes went away. YMMV, of course.
    - Mikeb85 12y ago
      Hate to say it, but Linux Mint is a buggy mess. Chrome works fine on the vast majority of Linux distros. Even if a page hangs, Chrome doesn't crash...
      - barbs 12y ago
        I'm running Linux Mint and I don't have this problem. Chrome runs pretty well for me.
        674266966223478 12y ago
        How is that relevant? It doesn't matter if it works for you. It doesn't work for somebody else, which means there is a problem of some sort.
        barbs 12y ago
        The discussion is about Google Chrome not working on Linux Mint. I said that Google Chrome works for me on Linux Mint. How is that not relevant? I'm not saying there's no problem, I'm just offering my experience to demonstrate that perhaps the problem isn't just "Chrome runs poorly on Linux Mint", and to offer a counterexample to "Linux Mint is a buggy mess".
  - Maascamp 12y ago
    I'm on the same page. Chrome locks my computer around once a day on Ubuntu. Startup is horribly slow as well.
- razster 12y ago
  If you're like me, I have a swatch of addons for each browser. In time they all start to slow down to a crawl. I use all browsers for website testing, but my primary is Chrome at the moment, looking to head back to FF.
- chc 12y ago
  I think this can be generalized further: I've been using $RELATIVELY_FRESH_BROWSER_INSTALL again recently. I stopped when it was slower and less stable than $BROWSER_I_HAVE_NOW_BEEN_USING_A_LONG_TIME. These days it often feels faster than $BROWSER_I_HAVE_NOW_BEEN_USING_A_LONG_TIME.
  - debacle 12y ago
    Browsers aren't like Windows 98. You don't need to reformat or defragment from time to time.
    - mrisse 12y ago
      Installing extensions can dramatically slow down browsers. I wonder if the lack of extensions is responsible for the quickness users experience with a fresh install.
      - at-fates-hands 12y ago
        Absolutely. When I first starting using FF and all the developer tools, it would grind to a halt. Now that I'm a lot more comfortable with the FF toolset, I have a minimal set of extensions and it feels much snappier. I also use Aurora which is still super fast to me. I also develop with Chrome Canary and the stable Chrome version. Canary has times when its totally useless or when someone breaks the build and I can't use it for a week so until the next update comes out. All in all, yes, less overhead means a snappier browser to me.
      - seanp2k2 12y ago
        That's my biggest reason for switching from AdBlock+ to Privoxy + https://github.com/skroll/privoxy-adblock https://github.com/skroll/privoxy-adblock . Same blocking rules but uses a ton less memory, since each tab isn't running all of AB+ .
        ripdog 12y ago
        That's fine for image and flash ads, but provides no support for CSS blocking of elements. My understanding is that the CSS blocking is the slowest part, too. Of course, if you don't want that, you're sweet.
- mbrutsch 12y ago
  I use FF daily, for work, and wouldn't use anything else.
- dzhiurgis 12y ago
  It's the end 2014. Has anyone implemented pinch-to-zoom on Firefox yet?
  - wlesieutre 12y ago
    Nope. Pinch to zoom "works", but it's the same zoom increments as Ctrl - and Ctrl =. I've been using Firefox for a few years (switched back from Chrome), but it's IE for me on the Surface until someone else does proper touchscreen support. The only time I open Firefox on here is when I need a bookmark that's synced from my desktop or phone.
- Igglyboo 12y ago
  Firefox still doesn't have per process tabs(yes I know about nightlies), so it's a no go for me.
  - arthurcolle 12y ago
    It just rolled out in the last update, you have to set it yourself in the settings as far as I know but yeah its not just in nightly releases anymore
  - sp332 12y ago
    Firefox won't have a process per tab. Even in the multiprocess versions, it has one process for the UI and one for all the tabs' content. That way it doesn't take tons of RAM for overhead if you have lots of tabs, but heavy tab content can't freeze the UI. You can change the number of tab-processes in about:config under dom.ipc.processCount.
    - EpicEng 12y ago
      "That way it doesn't take tons of RAM for overhead" Weird; I switched from FF to Chrome specifically because FF was a huge memory hog. I have read that it is better these days though. -- what does the downvoting mean here exactly? That I didn't experience excessive memory usage in FF and I'm lying?
      - sp332 12y ago
        Yeah, they have a MemShrink team now. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink They got serious about memory leaks in their own code, and even took steps to limit hogging by 3rd-party plugins. Now they host https://AreWeSlimYet.com/ https://AreWeSlimYet.com/ to track regressions. Edit: and Chrome really does take a ton of RAM if you have lots of tabs open.
        EpicEng 12y ago
        "and Chrome really does take a ton of RAM if you have lots of tabs open." Yup, it does. My problem with FF years ago was with leaks. It would eventually bring my entire system to a state of paging hell until I killed it. That was years ago though, I've since become comfortable with chrome and haven't found aneed to go back.
- curiously 12y ago
  I was using Firefox in the past few months because Chrome felt slower after the new update. I am back to using Chrome however. It's really hard to break the habit even though I made it a conscious effort to use Firefox and have enjoyed it thoroughly. My only gripe with Firefox would be watching youtube I see a Adobe process that takes up a lot of memory even though I force HTML5, it seems to revert to Adobe. All in all Firefox is the Chrome browser I once loved, but now that Chrome is working back to what it was doing, I forgot about Firefox.
- gw 12y ago
  I switched back to Firefox recently as well after using Chrome for years. Mostly it was due to problems on Linux, like Flash not working. I also love the work Mozilla has been doing -- Rust, Servo, and asm.js in particular -- which seem to be very promising vis-à-vis future versions of their browser.
- calbear81 12y ago
  Same here, for some reason Google Images doesn't work in Chrome for me. I switched back to Firefox.
gcb0 12y ago
how is having more features and options not being an upgrade? chrome is removing customization after customization (specially the ones that harm google business model. Referrer preferences, anyone?) while adding stuff for speed and network. So you have a fixed experience browser that is very fast. and not that firefox is not faster in most use cases anyway. Chrome just have better marketing (and arguably a head start on speed a long time ago)
zobzu 12y ago
Anecdotal and all but these days i catch myself killing chrome because the computer fan starts to be loud - and reopen the page in firefox - fixes it everytime (granted, i check it is the issue with htop first). I remember when this was the exact opposite and had to kill Firefox...
existencebox 12y ago
This is a very broad statement. I use both browsers because each has slightly different behavior in some edge cases that I prefer. To me, firefox is occasionally an upgrade, and chrome occasionally is.
barrkel 12y ago
It depends on what you want. If you're primarily interested in speedy javascript, process isolation across tabs (so busy tabs don't lock out the UI), or debugging web apps, I think Chrome is better. Chrome in particular seems to have a much smoother JS execution profile; it may be down to GC, or something else, but Chrome generally has fewer frames dropped for any given demo. On the other hand, Firefox is way more featureful, and has a better library of extensions. I find it very difficult to configure Chrome to be how I like it - with a bookmarks menu, zero history, and tree style tabs - whereas Firefox is much easier to shape to my purposes. The combination of tree-style tabs and tab panorama means I can - and do - keep in excess of a hundred tabs open without any difficulty in management. So Firefox is my primary browser, and Chrome is strictly for testing and pseudonymous browsing.
- paulhebert 12y ago
  Yeah, they both have different benefits. Chrome seems faster for most high performance sites I visit and crashes less often. However, I prefer to have less of my browsing data recorded and so primarily use firefox and duckduckgo.
- psychometry 12y ago
  Firefox certainly has a larger library of add-ons and those add-ons are more powerful than ones available from Chrome in terms of customizing the browser. The problem is that once you install all the add-ons you're accustomed to having in Chrome, Firefox slows down enough that it's not even worth it. This was my experience using FirefoxDeveloperEdition for the past month and although I miss Firefox's far superior address bar and customizability, the huge performance hit just wasn't worth it and I switched back to Chrome.
  - swift 12y ago
    Which add-ons did you have installed?
    - psychometry 12y ago
      In Chrome: 1Password, AdBlock, a Gmail checker, a cookie editor, FlashBlock, Ghostery, Hacker News Enhancement Suite, Imagus, Reddit Enhancement Suite, Stylish. Once I'd installed the corresponding Firefox add-ons, the UI became too unresponsive too often for me to put up with it.
colechristensen 12y ago
I wear both glasses and contacts, I regularly upgrade from one to the other because I am annoyed by a particular aspect of each. Much the same with browsers I regularly switch between Safari, Chrome, and Firefox because the upgrades/site/support/whatever become troublesome or advantageous.
tn13 12y ago
When in doubt people should interpret it in a way that is convenient to them and not others. It makes total sense for Yahoo! to promote Firefox as a "Better browser". Google in past too has tried similar tricks.
eitland 12y ago
For some heavy users, including me, Firefox has always felt better. I've honestly tried to switch to both Opera and Chrome but once you are spoiled with real extensions there is always one of them holding you back. ATM the most obvious one is treestyletabs. This is not to say that there is not a lot of people to whom Chrome is better. Just that you can rest assured that Firefox is better as well, -for some of us, just like Safari is the best browser for some people and others want Opera. (Same goes for Linux, Mac and Windows and I love being able to chose one that I like.)
canvia 12y ago
Supporting Mozilla over Google is definitely an upgrade.

agreed. the term upgrade also brings with it a connotation of being better. I am doubtful that this is this case.

by bonzoT 12y ago

agreed. the term upgrade also brings with it a connotation of being better. I am doubtful that this is this case.

I've been using Firefox again recently - I stopped when it was slower and less stable than Chrome. These days it often feels faster than Chrome.

b-ryan 12y ago
I've been using Firefox for several months and have no regrets. On Ubuntu Chrome was doing all sorts of weird things, plus being slow. Firefox's tab groups is also a great feature.
- vegabook 12y ago
  I can second the Ubuntu motivation. Chrome is buggy and unreliable on Ubuntu, and I was tired of the Aw Snap several times a week. Firefox appears to be much more stable, and Developer Edition looks better too.
- smtddr 12y ago
  On my Linux MINT machine, chrome keeps doing something[1] that ends up locking up my whole machine and I have to hard-reboot. It got to a point where I actually had to set up Ctrl+Alt+K to issue "pkill -9 chrome" so as soon as I see the mouse-pointer movement become non-smooth or music start to skip, I slam on those keys to kill chrome before I have to restart my whole machine. Then I just went to Firefox developer edition[2]. Is it better? I dunno, but I like its cool dark theme, my system hasn't locked up since and now I got all those cool extensions back again. 1. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2203672 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2203672 2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Developer_Edition https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Developer_Editio...
  - kcorbitt 12y ago
    I had that problem with Linux Mint on some configurations too. I found that by going into chrome://flags/ and disabling everything related to GPU acceleration the crashes went away. YMMV, of course.
  - Mikeb85 12y ago
    Hate to say it, but Linux Mint is a buggy mess. Chrome works fine on the vast majority of Linux distros. Even if a page hangs, Chrome doesn't crash...
    - barbs 12y ago
      I'm running Linux Mint and I don't have this problem. Chrome runs pretty well for me.
      - 674266966223478 12y ago
        How is that relevant? It doesn't matter if it works for you. It doesn't work for somebody else, which means there is a problem of some sort.
        barbs 12y ago
        The discussion is about Google Chrome not working on Linux Mint. I said that Google Chrome works for me on Linux Mint. How is that not relevant? I'm not saying there's no problem, I'm just offering my experience to demonstrate that perhaps the problem isn't just "Chrome runs poorly on Linux Mint", and to offer a counterexample to "Linux Mint is a buggy mess".
- Maascamp 12y ago
  I'm on the same page. Chrome locks my computer around once a day on Ubuntu. Startup is horribly slow as well.
razster 12y ago
If you're like me, I have a swatch of addons for each browser. In time they all start to slow down to a crawl. I use all browsers for website testing, but my primary is Chrome at the moment, looking to head back to FF.
chc 12y ago
I think this can be generalized further: I've been using $RELATIVELY_FRESH_BROWSER_INSTALL again recently. I stopped when it was slower and less stable than $BROWSER_I_HAVE_NOW_BEEN_USING_A_LONG_TIME. These days it often feels faster than $BROWSER_I_HAVE_NOW_BEEN_USING_A_LONG_TIME.
- debacle 12y ago
  Browsers aren't like Windows 98. You don't need to reformat or defragment from time to time.
  - mrisse 12y ago
    Installing extensions can dramatically slow down browsers. I wonder if the lack of extensions is responsible for the quickness users experience with a fresh install.
    - at-fates-hands 12y ago
      Absolutely. When I first starting using FF and all the developer tools, it would grind to a halt. Now that I'm a lot more comfortable with the FF toolset, I have a minimal set of extensions and it feels much snappier. I also use Aurora which is still super fast to me. I also develop with Chrome Canary and the stable Chrome version. Canary has times when its totally useless or when someone breaks the build and I can't use it for a week so until the next update comes out. All in all, yes, less overhead means a snappier browser to me.
    - seanp2k2 12y ago
      That's my biggest reason for switching from AdBlock+ to Privoxy + https://github.com/skroll/privoxy-adblock https://github.com/skroll/privoxy-adblock . Same blocking rules but uses a ton less memory, since each tab isn't running all of AB+ .
      - ripdog 12y ago
        That's fine for image and flash ads, but provides no support for CSS blocking of elements. My understanding is that the CSS blocking is the slowest part, too. Of course, if you don't want that, you're sweet.
mbrutsch 12y ago
I use FF daily, for work, and wouldn't use anything else.
dzhiurgis 12y ago
It's the end 2014. Has anyone implemented pinch-to-zoom on Firefox yet?
- wlesieutre 12y ago
  Nope. Pinch to zoom "works", but it's the same zoom increments as Ctrl - and Ctrl =. I've been using Firefox for a few years (switched back from Chrome), but it's IE for me on the Surface until someone else does proper touchscreen support. The only time I open Firefox on here is when I need a bookmark that's synced from my desktop or phone.
Igglyboo 12y ago
Firefox still doesn't have per process tabs(yes I know about nightlies), so it's a no go for me.
- arthurcolle 12y ago
  It just rolled out in the last update, you have to set it yourself in the settings as far as I know but yeah its not just in nightly releases anymore
- sp332 12y ago
  Firefox won't have a process per tab. Even in the multiprocess versions, it has one process for the UI and one for all the tabs' content. That way it doesn't take tons of RAM for overhead if you have lots of tabs, but heavy tab content can't freeze the UI. You can change the number of tab-processes in about:config under dom.ipc.processCount.
  - EpicEng 12y ago
    "That way it doesn't take tons of RAM for overhead" Weird; I switched from FF to Chrome specifically because FF was a huge memory hog. I have read that it is better these days though. -- what does the downvoting mean here exactly? That I didn't experience excessive memory usage in FF and I'm lying?
    - sp332 12y ago
      Yeah, they have a MemShrink team now. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink They got serious about memory leaks in their own code, and even took steps to limit hogging by 3rd-party plugins. Now they host https://AreWeSlimYet.com/ https://AreWeSlimYet.com/ to track regressions. Edit: and Chrome really does take a ton of RAM if you have lots of tabs open.
      - EpicEng 12y ago
        "and Chrome really does take a ton of RAM if you have lots of tabs open." Yup, it does. My problem with FF years ago was with leaks. It would eventually bring my entire system to a state of paging hell until I killed it. That was years ago though, I've since become comfortable with chrome and haven't found aneed to go back.
curiously 12y ago
I was using Firefox in the past few months because Chrome felt slower after the new update. I am back to using Chrome however. It's really hard to break the habit even though I made it a conscious effort to use Firefox and have enjoyed it thoroughly. My only gripe with Firefox would be watching youtube I see a Adobe process that takes up a lot of memory even though I force HTML5, it seems to revert to Adobe. All in all Firefox is the Chrome browser I once loved, but now that Chrome is working back to what it was doing, I forgot about Firefox.
gw 12y ago
I switched back to Firefox recently as well after using Chrome for years. Mostly it was due to problems on Linux, like Flash not working. I also love the work Mozilla has been doing -- Rust, Servo, and asm.js in particular -- which seem to be very promising vis-à-vis future versions of their browser.
calbear81 12y ago
Same here, for some reason Google Images doesn't work in Chrome for me. I switched back to Firefox.

gcb0 12y ago

how is having more features and options not being an upgrade? chrome is removing customization after customization (specially the ones that harm google business model. Referrer preferences, anyone?) while adding stuff for speed and network. So you have a fixed experience browser that is very fast. and not that firefox is not faster in most use cases anyway. Chrome just have better marketing (and arguably a head start on speed a long time ago)

zobzu 12y ago

Anecdotal and all but these days i catch myself killing chrome because the computer fan starts to be loud - and reopen the page in firefox - fixes it everytime (granted, i check it is the issue with htop first). I remember when this was the exact opposite and had to kill Firefox...

existencebox 12y ago

This is a very broad statement. I use both browsers because each has slightly different behavior in some edge cases that I prefer. To me, firefox is occasionally an upgrade, and chrome occasionally is.

barrkel 12y ago

It depends on what you want. If you're primarily interested in speedy javascript, process isolation across tabs (so busy tabs don't lock out the UI), or debugging web apps, I think Chrome is better. Chrome in particular seems to have a much smoother JS execution profile; it may be down to GC, or something else, but Chrome generally has fewer frames dropped for any given demo. On the other hand, Firefox is way more featureful, and has a better library of extensions. I find it very difficult to configure Chrome to be how I like it - with a bookmarks menu, zero history, and tree style tabs - whereas Firefox is much easier to shape to my purposes. The combination of tree-style tabs and tab panorama means I can - and do - keep in excess of a hundred tabs open without any difficulty in management. So Firefox is my primary browser, and Chrome is strictly for testing and pseudonymous browsing.

paulhebert 12y ago
Yeah, they both have different benefits. Chrome seems faster for most high performance sites I visit and crashes less often. However, I prefer to have less of my browsing data recorded and so primarily use firefox and duckduckgo.
psychometry 12y ago
Firefox certainly has a larger library of add-ons and those add-ons are more powerful than ones available from Chrome in terms of customizing the browser. The problem is that once you install all the add-ons you're accustomed to having in Chrome, Firefox slows down enough that it's not even worth it. This was my experience using FirefoxDeveloperEdition for the past month and although I miss Firefox's far superior address bar and customizability, the huge performance hit just wasn't worth it and I switched back to Chrome.
- swift 12y ago
  Which add-ons did you have installed?
  - psychometry 12y ago
    In Chrome: 1Password, AdBlock, a Gmail checker, a cookie editor, FlashBlock, Ghostery, Hacker News Enhancement Suite, Imagus, Reddit Enhancement Suite, Stylish. Once I'd installed the corresponding Firefox add-ons, the UI became too unresponsive too often for me to put up with it.

colechristensen 12y ago

I wear both glasses and contacts, I regularly upgrade from one to the other because I am annoyed by a particular aspect of each. Much the same with browsers I regularly switch between Safari, Chrome, and Firefox because the upgrades/site/support/whatever become troublesome or advantageous.

tn13 12y ago

When in doubt people should interpret it in a way that is convenient to them and not others. It makes total sense for Yahoo! to promote Firefox as a "Better browser". Google in past too has tried similar tricks.

eitland 12y ago

For some heavy users, including me, Firefox has always felt better. I've honestly tried to switch to both Opera and Chrome but once you are spoiled with real extensions there is always one of them holding you back. ATM the most obvious one is treestyletabs. This is not to say that there is not a lot of people to whom Chrome is better. Just that you can rest assured that Firefox is better as well, -for some of us, just like Safari is the best browser for some people and others want Opera. (Same goes for Linux, Mac and Windows and I love being able to chose one that I like.)

canvia 12y ago

Supporting Mozilla over Google is definitely an upgrade.