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Comment by haack | Hacker News Reader

Having switched back to Firefox and Duckduckgo very recently, I'm feeling much more optimistic about the future of a free web. Both have been on par with Chrome/Google in terms of speed and performance.

Now just need to break away from gmail and calendar.

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Firefox is not on par in terms of performance at all, at least on the Mac. I use it at home and at work but it just uses too much CPU for me to recommend it to anyone.

I keep wanting to use Firefox on Mac, but the CPU issues cause constant fan churn.

I end up having to stick with Safari as my resistance browser. (Which isn't so bad, actually. I feel like Safari is pretty underrated in these discussions.)

I appreciate I'm a single data point and it's not scientific but with the same "typical" session open, the idle stats spread across all processes, on MBP2017:

  Chrome (v70): ~10% CPU
  FF (v63): ~7% CPU

For me the problem with Firefox on Mac are random CPU spikes, the average idle usage is OK. Or some tab getting stuck and skyrocketing to 100% CPU, killing 10% of my battery if I don’t notice it in time.

If you check on Bugzilla, there are many bug reports about it.

When's the last time you used firefox? The latest updates have made big strides in performance.

Just recently moved to fastmail with my own domain, and I am slowly moving all my accounts to it.

It definitely has fewer features than gmail/calendar, and a less "slick" UI, but you know what? I don't even care. It's just a webmail! Do it, the experiment will cost you very little, if you don't already own your own domain (I'm going to take a stab and guess you already own your own domain...)

Next step: Android. Any suggestions?

I especially like how relevant the search results in DuckDuckGo are whenever I query `[search term] !g`

I have noticed that too :-). That's one problem with Google: On the one hand I think they should be restricted but on the other hand their products are just very good.

sadly that's also my go-to query when using startpage

Ddg is worse than Google and Firefox is maybe a little bit worse than Chrome. But it's bearable 90% of the time and that matters a lot.

Nothing beats searx.me - Google's results are good (but slipping), but when you combine Google, DDG and Bing, it doesn't get any better

Never heard of this before but will give it a try.

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