Comment by ashark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ashark | Hacker News Reader

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I switched to Chrome in ~2011 or 2012 after being a Firefox user and evangelist since... was the first one Phoenix or Firebird? Anyway, that one.

Reasons:

- Firefox got bogged down with just a few tabs open, and caused beachballs (OSX/macOS) systemwide. Chrome was snappier and didn't harm my system's overall responsiveness with several times as many tabs open. This was the main reason.

- Dev tools. Liked Chrome's better.

- Profile handling was, at the time anyway, better.

- IIRC Firefox didn't do per-tab crashing at the time, while Chrome did, which aided overall stability.

Advertising had nothing to do with it. Chrome was just way, way better, especially its (apparent, which is mostly what matters) resource footprint.

Now I'm mostly on Safari, even though it's the worst mainstream browser, just because I gain 1-2hrs of battery life using it over Chrome or Firefox.

> Dev tools. Liked Chrome's better.

They definitely are. To this day I'm baffled I'm not sent to the debugger when clicking a line reference in the console.

But I still use Firefox as main browser. Since the pages I visit and the pages I develop are always in different places it's pretty easy to have one browser for development only.

For a while, Firefox was crashing Linux as well, probably from some accelerated graphics bug. (It used to happen sometimes when ArsTechnica would play an ad, for example.)

Whichever version of Ubuntu introduced pulseaudio crashed any time Flash was used on a website, often in ads. May have been that. I mean, Pulseaudio crashed xwindow (or just stopped working) all the time in that version, but Flash was the easiest way to kill it.

I switched to Chrome around that time too, for many of the same reasons (mainly performance and stability).

I've since switched back because Chrome is a terrible memory hog and I can have tons of tabs open on Firefox with no impact on performance (as long as I don't actually load them), and I don't have problems with crashing the way I used to.

Chrome recently introduced some changes to background tabs (to a bit of grumbling from sites that wanted to use background resources/service workers):

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/03/background...

And also - they're aggressively throttling background tabs:

http://blog.strml.net/2017/01/chrome-56-now-aggressively-thr... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13471543

I'm on Chrome Canary - and there's been noticeable improvements in memory/responsive wise for a few months now.

I have around 320+ tabs open, spread over 2 Chrome profiles (around 160 per profile).

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