6 ms·

Why I’m breaking up with Google Chrome

58 points by yanis_t 11y ago

brandmeyer 11y ago
I never did switch to Chrome or Chromium, simply because it doesn't integrate as well with the XFCE desktop compared to Firefox/Iceweasel. So maybe I don't know what I'm missing. Regarding the author's comment, "The problem is that the Web is now optimized for Chrome users and that means alternatives often provide a terrible experience." What are some examples of sites that provide a terrible experience to non-Chrome users?
- zuron7 11y ago
  I'm not aware of any non-Google sites that are optimized for Chrome, but Google's Search and literally every single one of their products was optimized for Chrome using the SPDY protocol. This was the major one. https://developers.google.com/speed/spdy/ https://developers.google.com/speed/spdy/
  - djrogers 11y ago
    A website being able to run on a nearly abandoned network protocol (I know, most of sdpy is in http/2) hardly results in a horrible experience for everyone else. It's the perfect kind of optimization - nobody without chrome would ever know it exists.
  - JohnBooty 11y ago
    Firefox has supported SPDY for quite a few years. Did any of Google's sites perform badly on Firefox? I use a few of Google's services; for browsers I mainly use Firefox and sometimes Chrome. I've never noticed a big difference between the two browsers when it came to performance, on Google's properties or otherwise.
    - zuron7 11y ago
      Didn't know that. I just remember reading on a lot of scattered reports that Chrome performed better than Firefox. I wouldn't know because I never did move from Firefox.
beat 11y ago
I'm probably dumping Chrome soon too. What gets me is the random crashing. I can count on Chrome to still be running maybe 50% of the time when I re-open my Macbook in the morning. Note to Chrome engineers... stability is a must-have feature, not a nice-to-have. Being a good battery citizen is a must-have. Performance is a must-have.
- jeffasinger 11y ago
  Chrome's stability greatly improved for me when I disabled Flash. I'd really like to switch to Firefox, but there's a few things I just can't seem to get used to every time I try to.
  - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
    Like? Most of my annoyances with FF were fixed by moving to a fork (Pale Moon).
- owenwil 11y ago
  I actually just found this single mention of Google engineers specifically addressing this in the next major build of Chrome. Maybe there is hope after all: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=453303#c12 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=453303#c...
pcwalton 11y ago
> Maybe something like Vivaldi, which builds on top of Chrome’s rendering engine, could be the answer? Not likely if the main complaint is power usage. The browser engine is likely to be the main driver there, and switching skins won't help, especially for an engine as tightly coupled to its shell as Blink is.
- karmakaze 11y ago
  Just tried Vivaldi on Mac and it shows roughly about the same process and thread usage for tabs as Chrome so probably not the answer to battery life. It does feel quite snappy so I'll continue using it instead of Chrome for other reasons. Generally I use Safari because it renders text better than Chrome (Yosemite) on external displays, but for developer tools still use Chrome.
criley2 11y ago
The loss of NPAPI is what's going to drive me away. If they stick to their guns and drop NPAPI in 42 including the flags, then I'll finish my transition to making Firefox my new main browser. I've heard the arguments for why it shouldn't be present, I've heard Google's argument for a more pure web experience, but quite frankly I don't care. I don't like Google's "our way is the only way" vision for the internet, where Chrome has morphed into an operating-system like amalgamation of resource heavy proprietary features, while simultaneously shutting down flags, features and settings that power users rely on to wrestle back any control at all of our own personal browsing experience. Chrome was a great step forward and I will remember it fondly, but it really is post-peak on the technology adoption curve. Google is focused only on that giant laggy late adopter side of the curve and simply could not care less about early adopters and bleeding edge users anymore. If you feel like Chrome and Google actively design against our use cases -- you're right, because the laggard phase of adoption is in full swing and we're, once again, pointless nothings and easily ignored voices, drowned out by Google's Master Vision. Oh well, Firefox has really solidified into a nice product these past few years, even if they are following Google down the stupid proprietary forced-bundled of useless features (here's looking at you, "Hello", which I ironically am not allowed to say "Goodbye" to).
- ohitsdom 11y ago
  Curious- what tasks do you do that are reliant on NPAPI? Job related or personal?
  - bbarn 11y ago
    Not the OP but lots of people who use acrobat reader plugins to fill in / sign forms. Chrome's built in PDF reader got better, but it still can't A. post a filled form back to the browser/server or B. sign a document.
    - currysausage 11y ago
      Also, when I turn on full page view in Chrome's PDF viewer, why can't I turn pages with my mousewheel, the way I can in Adobe Reader? When I need to skim a document, doing normal scrolling with the mousewheel would give me RSI or something.
CSMastermind 11y ago
I switched off of Chrome on all my personal PCs for Firefox about a month ago and I'm happy I did.
de_dave 11y ago
I'm an accidental convert. Since upgrading to Fedora 22, I've found myself using Firefox almost exclusively for both normal browsing and webdev. Previously I was 100% Chrome, and I've somehow transitioned without really thinking about it nor meaning to! (IMHO Chrome's developer/debugging tools are more pleasant to use, but Firefox is getting there...)
- droidist2 11y ago
  You ever use Firebug on Firefox? So awesome.
  - _lce0 11y ago
    I been a Firefox user since 2004 I think, and used Firebug till something like 2012 .. when the dev console was launched --I haven't touched firebug since then. nowadays the native console works great! you should give it a try
    - rrss1122 11y ago
      Agree with this. The dev console in Firefox is better than Firebug now for me.
- Aoyagi 11y ago
  Yeah, about developing tools, I still have a faint hope that Opera's Dragonfly (which is open-source, I hear) will someday be implemented to either Vivaldi or Chropera.
WorldWideWayne 11y ago
thenextweb.com has just lost Javascript privileges in my browser for using a dirty trick to push ads. As a matter of fact, after disabling Javascript, I didn't read the article and I won't be talking about the article or sending other users to the site by linking to it. I would have liked to talk about the actual article here, but instead I'm talking about this horrible advertising technique and that should be OK with anyone who supports Internet advertising because that seems to be what you want. Let's start off talking about something else and then maybe we'll get to the article you came here for.
- codezero 11y ago
  What's the dirty trick? I doubt the author is aware of it, or had anything to do with implementing it. Can you elaborate on what TNW is doing?
  - at-fates-hands 11y ago
    When you go to the page, you're served a full page ad, and you have to move your mouse to the right in order to get the actual article to move left in order for you to read it. As far as UX goes, this is about as bad as you get to force people to view an ad. I'm a developer and it took me a few seconds to realize what was happening. I'm fairly certain most users would go to the page, see the ad and think, "Where's the article I just clicked on?" not see it and then leave right away.
    - borisvvz 11y ago
      That's too bad. We did test it extensively and although some people were distracted by the ads, they do understand theres a post hovering on the right that wants to move back into the page. But we are working on ways to make this more clear. I do understand this is a big difference from the ads you see on other websites and we do hope you'll give them another chance.
    - codezero 11y ago
      Ah, when visiting from mobile, there wasn't anything invasive for me. Thanks for clarifying. edit: just visited this from desktop – wow. That's bonkers.
ohitsdom 11y ago
I would love for Chrome to spend an entire version's development focused on reducing memory. I haven't heard of any focused effort in this area from the development team, has anyone else? I know computers are coming out with increasingly large memory, but I don't want that taken up by a sluggish browser. For all my complaints with Chrome, there's not an alternative that's attractive enough to entice me to switch (yet).
- afsina 11y ago
  There is a memory team formed for Blink[1]. Also, soon they will start rolling out a garbage collector mechanism (code name Oilpan) which would make Blink more stable, safer and faster. But I am not sure about the overall effect of these on Chrome. Presentations in the link has more details. [1] https://www.chromium.org/blink/memory-team https://www.chromium.org/blink/memory-team
djim 11y ago
i dont have any issues with chrome. love my chromebook and my browser it is synced to all my devices.
jonathansizz 11y ago
I was seeing some of the problems discussed in the article. Chrome had slowed over time, and tabs were frequently hanging or crashing. I usually have around 30-35 tabs open across several virtual desktops on my linux machine, and the whole browser would hang for around 5 minutes whenever they were restored on a browser restart. Deleting my Chrome data (I mean deleting .config/google-chrome, not just deleting the profile through the browser settings) and purging then reinstalling Chrome fixed everything, even with the same extensions and settings restored and all the same tabs open. Data syncing meant this process was very quick. Everything is working great on my linux desktop now, and my Toshiba Chromebook 2 gets 8-9 hours on a charge and has never had any problems. Maybe the OSX version is particularly poor? Maybe some problems are plugin-related? I set 'Let me choose when to run plugin content', rather than having plugins automatically run.
alfiedotwtf 11y ago
It would be interesting to see the browser usage stats for HN...
cabirum 11y ago
I suspect disabling Flash, etc. plugins and removing extensions will make battery life closer to Safari. And Google Trends shows increasing amount of 'Chrome slow' searches because it mostly depends on browser market share, which is still rising for Chrome.
akilism 11y ago
oh man just tried Vivaldi I think I'm switching just for tab stacks alone.
ajmarsh 11y ago
I was having the same issue, until I enabled "click to play" for flash etc. Currently with 8-10 tabs open 1.4 GB of memory. YMMV.
ninkendo 11y ago
I'm in the same boat: I've been a Chrome user and advocate since 2008 and I definitely feel the bloat they've added to it over the past few years. Vanilla Safari with zero extensions has been completely satisfactory for me for quite some time. I have Chrome installed, but nowadays I only use it for a kind of "Flash Browser", where I only use it when there's a flash-requiring that I'm convinced is worth my time (most flash-requiring sites definitely aren't.) Occasionally I'll use Chrome's developer tools, which I find to be more robust than Safari's too. Safari is by far the faster browser in my experience, it scrolls faster, it uses less battery, it has nicer OS integration on OSX (swipe-to-go-back feels much more natural in Safari, for instance), and it just seems simpler than Chrome (the UI gets out of your way better, IMO.)
- commentnull 11y ago
  Yep. Chrome had its moment in the sun, helped push some vital changes in the web ecosystem in its day, but now it has become a parody browser. When it is not crashing it is a fragile thing that seems to break every page, despite the fact all the web gurus try to optimise for it. And how much system resource does it want? Makes me miss simple browsers like Dillo.
narrowrail 11y ago
I am of the opinion that one should use multiple browsers, not just one. I stick with Chromium for certain things (with uMatrix), and I refuse to install Silverlight or Flash. I don't have any issues with crashes or memory consumption.
rrss1122 11y ago
For me, it wasn't just desktop chrome crashing. Mobile chrome also crashed and lost all my tabs occasionally. But on desktop chrome, what really drove me away was how bad it got using on Ubuntu running in a virtual box. I'm unable to drag to do anything in chrome any more, making it very inconvenient to use. I've been forced to switch to Firefox, and chrome still isn't fixed even though I've seen this issue reported online many times.
ufmace 11y ago
I haven't gotten to that point yet, but what really gets me is the random high CPU usage that kills batter for things that other browsers can render with virtually no CPU usage. The main offender that I've noticed is animated GIFs. Chrome seems to handle huge, complex DOMs and piles of JS just fine, but throw a few animated GIFs at it, and CPU usage rapidly spikes, fans spin up, if it's a laptop, it'll get noticeably hotter and the battery life remaining will drop fast. On OS X, Safari can render lots of animated GIFs like it's nothing. I have no idea how they let such an old and widely used piece of web tech get and stay so bad for so long. WTF Chrome?
franciscop 11y ago
This article is so misguided that I am actually surprised... here's a the same search for the browsers: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=chrome%2C%20firefox%2C%20internet%20explorer%2C%20safari&cmpt=q&tz= https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=chrome%2C%20firefox%... We can clearly see that each browser's "slow" search mimics similarly the browser's popularity. If they could provide a "browser's slow" / "browser" graph that would be a much more useful graph.
aikah 11y ago
In my experience, Firefox is slower than Chrome when it comes to expensive "javascript stunts" like JS games or interactive js experiments. However, as a browser Firefox consumes WAY WAY less memory than Chrome. On Windows, just opening the process manager helps confirm these facts. So it's a trade off.Personnally since I usually limit the amount of paginated memory available on my computer, Firefox seems like a better Choice.
at-fates-hands 11y ago
I go in cycles and use Chrome for a while and then switch back to Firefox. The last few months, I've found myself using FF Developer version a lot more. The dev tools are much better than Chrome's, and it uses a fraction of the memory and tends to be much more stable. I have an HP Elite book with 8GB of RAM with an Intel i5 processor. If I leave Chrome open long enough, it will bring my system to its knees.
alooPotato 11y ago
Is anyone on the chrome team lurking here and want to comment? I believe I remember reading that the chrome team had tons of automated tests that get run on every change list measuring compatibility, performance, memory usage, battery usage(?) etc. So either these tests are broken and they don't know there's a problem or they are ignoring the problem (to work on other features) or there is no actual problem and ours in our heads.
wimagguc 11y ago
I'm surprised that privacy wasn't even mentioned here. (As in: most people switch to DuckDuckGo not to be tracked at all times. And if a browser wants you to sign in, that implies quite some volume of data being collected.)
kldavis4 11y ago
I've had issues with Chrome consuming tons of memory for quite some time. I found a single tab with gmail consuming ~700MB. Seems like a common issue: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/86yzpxX7aws%5B1-25%5D https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/86yzpx...
Grue3 11y ago
I don't use Chrome, but I installed Chromium to test websites on webkit, and, amazingly, it still manages to crash after a few hours of uptime despite being a fresh, barely used install. It's beyond me how people are using such buggy software regularly.

58 points by yanis_t 11y ago

I never did switch to Chrome or Chromium, simply because it doesn't integrate as well with the XFCE desktop compared to Firefox/Iceweasel. So maybe I don't know what I'm missing. Regarding the author's comment, "The problem is that the Web is now optimized for Chrome users and that means alternatives often provide a terrible experience." What are some examples of sites that provide a terrible experience to non-Chrome users?

zuron7 11y ago
I'm not aware of any non-Google sites that are optimized for Chrome, but Google's Search and literally every single one of their products was optimized for Chrome using the SPDY protocol. This was the major one. https://developers.google.com/speed/spdy/ https://developers.google.com/speed/spdy/
- djrogers 11y ago
  A website being able to run on a nearly abandoned network protocol (I know, most of sdpy is in http/2) hardly results in a horrible experience for everyone else. It's the perfect kind of optimization - nobody without chrome would ever know it exists.
- JohnBooty 11y ago
  Firefox has supported SPDY for quite a few years. Did any of Google's sites perform badly on Firefox? I use a few of Google's services; for browsers I mainly use Firefox and sometimes Chrome. I've never noticed a big difference between the two browsers when it came to performance, on Google's properties or otherwise.
  - zuron7 11y ago
    Didn't know that. I just remember reading on a lot of scattered reports that Chrome performed better than Firefox. I wouldn't know because I never did move from Firefox.

beat 11y ago

I'm probably dumping Chrome soon too. What gets me is the random crashing. I can count on Chrome to still be running maybe 50% of the time when I re-open my Macbook in the morning. Note to Chrome engineers... stability is a must-have feature, not a nice-to-have. Being a good battery citizen is a must-have. Performance is a must-have.

jeffasinger 11y ago
Chrome's stability greatly improved for me when I disabled Flash. I'd really like to switch to Firefox, but there's a few things I just can't seem to get used to every time I try to.
- TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
  Like? Most of my annoyances with FF were fixed by moving to a fork (Pale Moon).
owenwil 11y ago
I actually just found this single mention of Google engineers specifically addressing this in the next major build of Chrome. Maybe there is hope after all: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=453303#c12 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=453303#c...

pcwalton 11y ago

> Maybe something like Vivaldi, which builds on top of Chrome’s rendering engine, could be the answer? Not likely if the main complaint is power usage. The browser engine is likely to be the main driver there, and switching skins won't help, especially for an engine as tightly coupled to its shell as Blink is.

karmakaze 11y ago
Just tried Vivaldi on Mac and it shows roughly about the same process and thread usage for tabs as Chrome so probably not the answer to battery life. It does feel quite snappy so I'll continue using it instead of Chrome for other reasons. Generally I use Safari because it renders text better than Chrome (Yosemite) on external displays, but for developer tools still use Chrome.

criley2 11y ago

The loss of NPAPI is what's going to drive me away. If they stick to their guns and drop NPAPI in 42 including the flags, then I'll finish my transition to making Firefox my new main browser. I've heard the arguments for why it shouldn't be present, I've heard Google's argument for a more pure web experience, but quite frankly I don't care. I don't like Google's "our way is the only way" vision for the internet, where Chrome has morphed into an operating-system like amalgamation of resource heavy proprietary features, while simultaneously shutting down flags, features and settings that power users rely on to wrestle back any control at all of our own personal browsing experience. Chrome was a great step forward and I will remember it fondly, but it really is post-peak on the technology adoption curve. Google is focused only on that giant laggy late adopter side of the curve and simply could not care less about early adopters and bleeding edge users anymore. If you feel like Chrome and Google actively design against our use cases -- you're right, because the laggard phase of adoption is in full swing and we're, once again, pointless nothings and easily ignored voices, drowned out by Google's Master Vision. Oh well, Firefox has really solidified into a nice product these past few years, even if they are following Google down the stupid proprietary forced-bundled of useless features (here's looking at you, "Hello", which I ironically am not allowed to say "Goodbye" to).

ohitsdom 11y ago
Curious- what tasks do you do that are reliant on NPAPI? Job related or personal?
- bbarn 11y ago
  Not the OP but lots of people who use acrobat reader plugins to fill in / sign forms. Chrome's built in PDF reader got better, but it still can't A. post a filled form back to the browser/server or B. sign a document.
  - currysausage 11y ago
    Also, when I turn on full page view in Chrome's PDF viewer, why can't I turn pages with my mousewheel, the way I can in Adobe Reader? When I need to skim a document, doing normal scrolling with the mousewheel would give me RSI or something.

CSMastermind 11y ago

I switched off of Chrome on all my personal PCs for Firefox about a month ago and I'm happy I did.

de_dave 11y ago

I'm an accidental convert. Since upgrading to Fedora 22, I've found myself using Firefox almost exclusively for both normal browsing and webdev. Previously I was 100% Chrome, and I've somehow transitioned without really thinking about it nor meaning to! (IMHO Chrome's developer/debugging tools are more pleasant to use, but Firefox is getting there...)

droidist2 11y ago
You ever use Firebug on Firefox? So awesome.
- _lce0 11y ago
  I been a Firefox user since 2004 I think, and used Firebug till something like 2012 .. when the dev console was launched --I haven't touched firebug since then. nowadays the native console works great! you should give it a try
  - rrss1122 11y ago
    Agree with this. The dev console in Firefox is better than Firebug now for me.
Aoyagi 11y ago
Yeah, about developing tools, I still have a faint hope that Opera's Dragonfly (which is open-source, I hear) will someday be implemented to either Vivaldi or Chropera.

WorldWideWayne 11y ago

thenextweb.com has just lost Javascript privileges in my browser for using a dirty trick to push ads. As a matter of fact, after disabling Javascript, I didn't read the article and I won't be talking about the article or sending other users to the site by linking to it. I would have liked to talk about the actual article here, but instead I'm talking about this horrible advertising technique and that should be OK with anyone who supports Internet advertising because that seems to be what you want. Let's start off talking about something else and then maybe we'll get to the article you came here for.

codezero 11y ago
What's the dirty trick? I doubt the author is aware of it, or had anything to do with implementing it. Can you elaborate on what TNW is doing?
- at-fates-hands 11y ago
  When you go to the page, you're served a full page ad, and you have to move your mouse to the right in order to get the actual article to move left in order for you to read it. As far as UX goes, this is about as bad as you get to force people to view an ad. I'm a developer and it took me a few seconds to realize what was happening. I'm fairly certain most users would go to the page, see the ad and think, "Where's the article I just clicked on?" not see it and then leave right away.
  - borisvvz 11y ago
    That's too bad. We did test it extensively and although some people were distracted by the ads, they do understand theres a post hovering on the right that wants to move back into the page. But we are working on ways to make this more clear. I do understand this is a big difference from the ads you see on other websites and we do hope you'll give them another chance.
  - codezero 11y ago
    Ah, when visiting from mobile, there wasn't anything invasive for me. Thanks for clarifying. edit: just visited this from desktop – wow. That's bonkers.

ohitsdom 11y ago

I would love for Chrome to spend an entire version's development focused on reducing memory. I haven't heard of any focused effort in this area from the development team, has anyone else? I know computers are coming out with increasingly large memory, but I don't want that taken up by a sluggish browser. For all my complaints with Chrome, there's not an alternative that's attractive enough to entice me to switch (yet).

afsina 11y ago
There is a memory team formed for Blink[1]. Also, soon they will start rolling out a garbage collector mechanism (code name Oilpan) which would make Blink more stable, safer and faster. But I am not sure about the overall effect of these on Chrome. Presentations in the link has more details. [1] https://www.chromium.org/blink/memory-team https://www.chromium.org/blink/memory-team

djim 11y ago

i dont have any issues with chrome. love my chromebook and my browser it is synced to all my devices.

jonathansizz 11y ago

I was seeing some of the problems discussed in the article. Chrome had slowed over time, and tabs were frequently hanging or crashing. I usually have around 30-35 tabs open across several virtual desktops on my linux machine, and the whole browser would hang for around 5 minutes whenever they were restored on a browser restart. Deleting my Chrome data (I mean deleting .config/google-chrome, not just deleting the profile through the browser settings) and purging then reinstalling Chrome fixed everything, even with the same extensions and settings restored and all the same tabs open. Data syncing meant this process was very quick. Everything is working great on my linux desktop now, and my Toshiba Chromebook 2 gets 8-9 hours on a charge and has never had any problems. Maybe the OSX version is particularly poor? Maybe some problems are plugin-related? I set 'Let me choose when to run plugin content', rather than having plugins automatically run.

alfiedotwtf 11y ago

It would be interesting to see the browser usage stats for HN...

cabirum 11y ago

I suspect disabling Flash, etc. plugins and removing extensions will make battery life closer to Safari. And Google Trends shows increasing amount of 'Chrome slow' searches because it mostly depends on browser market share, which is still rising for Chrome.

akilism 11y ago

oh man just tried Vivaldi I think I'm switching just for tab stacks alone.

ajmarsh 11y ago

I was having the same issue, until I enabled "click to play" for flash etc. Currently with 8-10 tabs open 1.4 GB of memory. YMMV.

ninkendo 11y ago

I'm in the same boat: I've been a Chrome user and advocate since 2008 and I definitely feel the bloat they've added to it over the past few years. Vanilla Safari with zero extensions has been completely satisfactory for me for quite some time. I have Chrome installed, but nowadays I only use it for a kind of "Flash Browser", where I only use it when there's a flash-requiring that I'm convinced is worth my time (most flash-requiring sites definitely aren't.) Occasionally I'll use Chrome's developer tools, which I find to be more robust than Safari's too. Safari is by far the faster browser in my experience, it scrolls faster, it uses less battery, it has nicer OS integration on OSX (swipe-to-go-back feels much more natural in Safari, for instance), and it just seems simpler than Chrome (the UI gets out of your way better, IMO.)

commentnull 11y ago
Yep. Chrome had its moment in the sun, helped push some vital changes in the web ecosystem in its day, but now it has become a parody browser. When it is not crashing it is a fragile thing that seems to break every page, despite the fact all the web gurus try to optimise for it. And how much system resource does it want? Makes me miss simple browsers like Dillo.

narrowrail 11y ago

I am of the opinion that one should use multiple browsers, not just one. I stick with Chromium for certain things (with uMatrix), and I refuse to install Silverlight or Flash. I don't have any issues with crashes or memory consumption.

rrss1122 11y ago

For me, it wasn't just desktop chrome crashing. Mobile chrome also crashed and lost all my tabs occasionally. But on desktop chrome, what really drove me away was how bad it got using on Ubuntu running in a virtual box. I'm unable to drag to do anything in chrome any more, making it very inconvenient to use. I've been forced to switch to Firefox, and chrome still isn't fixed even though I've seen this issue reported online many times.

ufmace 11y ago

I haven't gotten to that point yet, but what really gets me is the random high CPU usage that kills batter for things that other browsers can render with virtually no CPU usage. The main offender that I've noticed is animated GIFs. Chrome seems to handle huge, complex DOMs and piles of JS just fine, but throw a few animated GIFs at it, and CPU usage rapidly spikes, fans spin up, if it's a laptop, it'll get noticeably hotter and the battery life remaining will drop fast. On OS X, Safari can render lots of animated GIFs like it's nothing. I have no idea how they let such an old and widely used piece of web tech get and stay so bad for so long. WTF Chrome?

franciscop 11y ago

This article is so misguided that I am actually surprised... here's a the same search for the browsers: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=chrome%2C%20firefox%2C%20internet%20explorer%2C%20safari&cmpt=q&tz= https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=chrome%2C%20firefox%... We can clearly see that each browser's "slow" search mimics similarly the browser's popularity. If they could provide a "browser's slow" / "browser" graph that would be a much more useful graph.

aikah 11y ago

In my experience, Firefox is slower than Chrome when it comes to expensive "javascript stunts" like JS games or interactive js experiments. However, as a browser Firefox consumes WAY WAY less memory than Chrome. On Windows, just opening the process manager helps confirm these facts. So it's a trade off.Personnally since I usually limit the amount of paginated memory available on my computer, Firefox seems like a better Choice.

at-fates-hands 11y ago

I go in cycles and use Chrome for a while and then switch back to Firefox. The last few months, I've found myself using FF Developer version a lot more. The dev tools are much better than Chrome's, and it uses a fraction of the memory and tends to be much more stable. I have an HP Elite book with 8GB of RAM with an Intel i5 processor. If I leave Chrome open long enough, it will bring my system to its knees.

alooPotato 11y ago

Is anyone on the chrome team lurking here and want to comment? I believe I remember reading that the chrome team had tons of automated tests that get run on every change list measuring compatibility, performance, memory usage, battery usage(?) etc. So either these tests are broken and they don't know there's a problem or they are ignoring the problem (to work on other features) or there is no actual problem and ours in our heads.

wimagguc 11y ago

I'm surprised that privacy wasn't even mentioned here. (As in: most people switch to DuckDuckGo not to be tracked at all times. And if a browser wants you to sign in, that implies quite some volume of data being collected.)

kldavis4 11y ago

I've had issues with Chrome consuming tons of memory for quite some time. I found a single tab with gmail consuming ~700MB. Seems like a common issue: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/86yzpxX7aws%5B1-25%5D https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/86yzpx...

Grue3 11y ago

I don't use Chrome, but I installed Chromium to test websites on webkit, and, amazingly, it still manages to crash after a few hours of uptime despite being a fresh, barely used install. It's beyond me how people are using such buggy software regularly.