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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

Something I could never quite understand. I'm using Firefox but occasionally run Chrome for a few minutes. I do have a couple of extensions installed in Firefox. To me, Chrome might be faster, or maybe not. But honestly, I couldn't care less: even if Firefox takes a second, or two or even three more to show me a page sometimes, so what? I mean, two seconds? I guess I can wait that long, even if I look at tens of websites each day (which I'm not even sure I do).

If somebody gave me a Ferrari for free with the caveat that there's a guy sitting on the passengers seat who keeps track of where I'm going at all times, I guess I'd still keep driving my current car (hint: it's not a Ferrari).

And before the downvote reflex sets in in some of you: I'm not saying that you should be like me. If you like Chrome, great, good for you! It's just that the speed difference to me personally has never been a good enough reason to switch. YMMV.

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Are you saying that you only look at 10s of websites or 10s of pages? As a (frontend or full-stack) web developer you end up looking at many 100s of page views a day, and those extra seconds matter. Both in maintaining a semblance of flow, and in real cumulative time. I switched to Chrome the very first time I tried it, very soon after it was released, and never looked back because it made me happier and more productive.

That's exactly why I wrote "YMMV" and put a big focus on stressing that this is how things work for me. I'm not a web developer and so my usage pattern is certainly much different from yours (if you are one).

I'm glad to hear that you found a web browser that makes you happy. So have I.

The problem is that when you get more and more tabs going, Firefox's single-threadedness becomes more and more painful. When one misbehaving tab locks up (or crashes) the whole browser, that's bad.

This has been fixed. Firefox is now fully multi-process on all release channels.

Unless you have an add on that isn't compatible, like the one that ubuntu for some reason bundles with the browser out of the box.

I hate it when people who know how to disable them don't do it and complain about it. It is really Ubuntu's fault for bundling an addon that is not compatible with multiprocesses.

It looks like the development of that extension stopped in 2014 but it's still bundled with Firefox in Ubuntu https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=xul-ext-ubufox

That could explain why it doesn't support multiprocessing. I disabled it because it doesn't do much. This is a list of its functionality from https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/what-are-the-ubuntu-firefox-...

* Enable searching for missing plugins from Ubuntu software catalog

* Add the following options to the Help menu

Get help on-line

Help translating Firefox

Ubuntu Release Notes

* Set homepage to Ubuntu Start Page

* Display a restart notification after upgrading Firefox

* Add ask.com to the search engines. You can uninstall this if you prefer to use a pristine Firefox install.

Firefox is now a multiprocess browser.

I have lots of tabs open all the time, it's not really an issue for me most of the time. But it's true that every now and then it happens that something goes wrong and CPU consumption in Firefox stays way up. (I blame plugins/extensions though.) In such a case, I don't mind killing the process and restarting Firefox to remedy that.

It is similar to Chromes memory usage, add one tab after another and you will hit memory wall pretty fast (100 tabs?), with firefox 1000 tabs is not a problem.

That's why I switched back from Chrome after using it for a month few years ago.

Now I would switch because Chrome is the new IE, some developers don't test on Firefox, they say "just use Chrome", no WAY.

Firefox is multiprocess now.

I find it uses probably 50% of the memory that Chrome does in my typical use-cases as well (4-5 windows open with around 10-20 tabs in each).

Why run Chrome at all then? What's wrong with Opera, Iridium or even Chromium?

I think majority of people just use Chrome because they either don't know better or because when it came out, it was legitimately a cooler more innovative browser than Firefox at the time.

Only very few people need a few extra codecs that Chrome provides or maybe the bundled Flash plugin.

I just tried on two popular websites, espn.com and cnn.com, and Firefox was slower to first paint on both, noticeably. No extensions installed on Firefox but a few on Chrome. It's slower.

Maybe I wasn't quite clear with what I've been trying to say: even when Firefox is slower, it does not matter to me.

If it took a minute to render, it would matter. If it's a matter of a few seconds, it doesn't.

That's fine, but I wonder if that carries over to most people. There have been plenty of studies that suggest perceivable slowness has a large effect on user engagement. Amazon famously did a study on their website that showed 100ms of latency cost them 1% of sales.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's a large percentage of people to whom rendering speed matters. Of course, you'd have to have some frame of reference: if you've never experienced Chrome's faster rendering times, you might not think of Firefox as being particularly slow.

However, I also know that folks like my parents who do not deeply care about IT and performance in general don't really care too much. They do not spend their day in front of the screen like some of us do, but rather look something up once or twice a day. In the greater scheme of things, the difference in rendering times across different browsers doesn't make a measurable difference in their lives.

IIRC there is no significant rendering times differences, there is a perceived difference though. Too bad I don't have the URL of the test but it was featured on HN a little while ago.

Firefox was noticeably faster for me on first paint when I just tried both of those. Caching effects? CDN latency? Some part of the network? Nondeterministic browser behaviors? who knows.

This gut-check test isn't particularly useful.

I did both in incognito fwiw, it prevent the caching effect. It's not a thorough study, and I'm not concluding that it is, but i'm not doing a study when picking a browser. I just use it and stuff is slow, that's all I have time to try.

The point of the OP was

> If somebody gave me a Ferrari for free with the caveat that there's a guy sitting on the passengers seat who keeps track of where I'm going at all times

The price you pay is much higher than you think.

Think twice, you have a choice.

Such anecdotal evidence is invalid. Try the scientific method instead.

> there's a guy sitting on the passengers seat who keeps track of where I'm going at all times

You seem to be implying that Chrome tracks every site that you go to and shares it with Google. Care to cite a source on that?

Perhaps this (under 'Browser History')?

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068

Of course, this can be turned off, but it is very likely to be turned on if a user has set up an Android device (lots of prompts to do so).

It is called an "End User License Agreement", most users check the box without reading it. To give Goog some credit, they do tend to state their intent plainly(not legal jargon) in the first couple paragraphs. Of course, sometimes they have to edit/whitewash out the "creepy" aspects.

Edit: link

https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2329414,00.asp

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