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Comment by thenomad | Hacker News Reader

Oddly, I have recently found Firefox so slow - particularly on YouTube where for some reason it's unusable - that I'm considering a full-fledged switch to Chrome.

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I swear this conversation is as old as time --- or at least Firefox & Chrome.

person 1: "Firefox is slow now i'm moving back to Chrome"

person 2: "interesting! I find the complete opposite and am moving back to Firefox!"

I'm switching to Netscape.

And seemingly few people trying to diagnose why. Particularly when it's specific behaviour / sites that are slow.

You're making some assumptions there. It may also be that they have tried to diagnose why, haven't managed to find anything in an hour or so, and feel that their time could probably be more productively used, post browser switch, elsewhere.

(That's the case for me with FF at the moment, anyway.)

Those people should throw away and recreate their profile, including the server-side backup, which is exactly what switching browsers does.

It often seems like this is because <current browser> has dozens of old, forgotten extensions running in the background. They suck up memory and generally slow things down. Switching to <new browser> erases this problem! For a few years, anyway... And then the cycle repeats.

I just did a clean install of OS X El Capitan and within an hour it was obvious that Chrome was better at managing memory. [extensions: UBlock Origin, Ghostery]

Personally, I think the browsers actually do beat each other in performance every couple of months. i.e. Chrome Version 49.0.2623.87 (64-bit) is better than (current firefox version) but next month it'll be the reverse.

I've actually started switching browsers by website. General browsing? Firefox. Google Maps or YouTube? Chrome.

Dont get me started on how painful mobile chrome is. The most hilariously bad are ironically mobile "responsive" websites that just make it crawl and the scroll position skips around during long loads so tapping a link is Russian roulette - the link can move after the touch and you get whatever moved into its place.

And just writing this post I got that great "cursor skips around randomly and doubles words when undoing a mistaken autocorrect".

Yeah, I like Google software, but quality isn't really their thing.

I do the same. I was finding Chrome slow and bloated for general use so I switched back to Firefox but I still use Chrome for some Google sites.

I do the same, except I use Vivaldi for Google sites ;-)

I have managed to avoid it.

Feels like this would be like going back to the end of IEs reign..

Most Google properties work way better under chrome. Google docs is incredibly slower under Safari, and some docs will be exponetially worse in Sheets. Youtube is decent in Safari but getting worse in Firefox. Hangout is buggy under Firefox, Keep is way too slow for what it does in both.

It becomes a habit to switch between browsers depending on the service.

Youtube is slow and unstable on Firefox on non-high-end computers. I seriously wonder if Google does it on purpose, making the site work best on Chrome with enough plausible deniability for it to not be obvious. Other video sites (both flash and html5 video) work perfectly fine with no lag or jitter on Firefox on low end computers for me where Youtube is unusable.

It's not necessarily on purpose, but as far as I can tell they develop for Chrome first and then make it work in other browsers as needed. The result is that they do end up depending on various Chrome quirks, including both bugs and things it supports that other browsers don't yet, and the dependencies may or may not be found during testing (which is also Chrome-biased as far as I can tell; I can assure you they test more in Chrome on Android than in Firefox on Android!).

Seeing as most of Chrome is open-source and on Github, that's probably a little far-fetched....

https://github.com/chromium/chromium

It's more likely that most people within Google use Chrome (can confirm), and that if you notice your webapp is performing slowly, you could conceivably go over and speak to the Chrome developers to get them to look into it if it's a performance bug and fix it.

I meant the YouTube devs sabotaging it for Firefox, not the Chromium/Chrome devs doing something.

It's not great on high-end computers either. The PC I'm usually browsing from is high enough spec to meet Oculus VR's recommended spec for VR experiences (just about). But YouTube on FF is still pretty unusable.

YouTube's been fine in Firefox on my i5 6600 / r9 380, maybe you just need to start a new profile without old settings / extensions

Check if sending the Chrome user agent string from Firefox makes it any faster or usable. This has been an issue in the past.

Same experience. I've switched to Vivaldi, it feels like the Firefox of old. It's chromium under the hood though

Opera 12 is the only viable choice

I almost agree but sadly Opera 12 is now so far behind that there are websites that don't work properly with it. Especially if involves video.

I still have it installed. Otter is a good modern alternative for those of us who love Opera 12. It's still missing features but it's getting there, and it's blazing fast.

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