I keep trying to switch. The thing that stops me is it chokes on big single page apps. Arguably the problem is the sites being choked on (too much javascript) but there's not much I can do about that.
But yes once in a while I still have to restart it when its memory usage and responsiveness become a problem (used to have an extension to have a restart entry in the menu, killed as many others by the new system, yeah for progress).
In fact I use Chrome more since Quantum, ironically.
- don’t use browser navigation
- need a specific login to have any use
- they are pinned,and I never close them, ever
With that in mind, I stopped thinking about them as web sites, and use chrome windows as application containers, while doing all my browsing and search in firefox.
I wish there was a simple way to have dedicated chrome windows acting as independant applications, like Gears was. For now it’s just too much friction to my taste to have each site in an electron style wrapping.
Here you are: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
What should be its "own independent program"? Where do we draw that line? Why should we be constrained to our own offline system, when the web enables millions of (more) user-friendly use-cases?
I'm an edge case, but nearly everything. I prefer to not only "own" the program so that I may use it beyond the lifespan of the creator or hosting company supports it but I also prefer to own my files (cloud storage is prohibitively expensive for me). At $0.02 per GB per month I would be spending in excess of >$4,000/yr - and that's just my photos. It would be in excess of $10,000/yr if I also wanted to store videos.
For me to move into an "online, cloud-based software" world online storage would have to be price competitive with purchasing my own local storage for the TB's of data I have and the software would have to be fast enough to work on the files and work with whichever cloud storage I was using. (Let's also pretend that internet is always-present and always-fast-enough.)
On the note of expensive cloud storage... non-affiliated shout-out to Backblaze. I'm probably a borderline "abusive user", $5/mo is an absolute steal to backup the huge amount of data I backup with them.
I want to be able to remove my network card and still have programs which work. I want to own everything about my own PC and all the data that enters or leaves it. When everything's in the browser, that's not possible, because you're essentially turning a PC back into a network terminal. I want my computer to be mine. I want my data to be mine. I do not want anyone or any program to have the authority to edit data on my PC over a network without my clear consent. And if you say that installing and/or activating the browser executable means I'm giving consent to it to edit data freely on my machine, then I think I'm going to need to go a different way than the Web.
We need the freedom to have our own computers, our own thoughts, our own data. We need to be able to say at a user level that we wish to interact with this data in our way, rather than "the Web way". Not every piece of data needs to be viewed or manipulated in a way that works in a Web browser. And the processor load should absolutely be a concern. A well-written and optimized program written in asm will always run faster and better when compared to a "program" written in a web-deployed JavaScript on top of a browser.
Why should we be constrained by the lowest common denominator of the Web, when having the ability to use our own offline system enables the use of millions of more user-focused use-cases?