I really just don't understand the obsession with Chrome, especially in hacker communities. Sorry Google, I feel "icky & gross" when I use you.
Chrome used to be very lightweight, fast and basically unseated IE as the top browser. It got that love because at the time Firefox was bloated and IE had a stranglehold. Chrome was also safer with a process per tab. Chrome made web browsing/dev pleasant like Firefox/Firebug did and it really took off being based on Webkit like Safari which also worked well on mobile. Chrome (and Safari) or Webkit pushed HTML5/Canvas/WebGL/SVG into real world use which changed the landscape of browsers.
Nowadays Chrome is bloated like Firefox was, has a stranglehold like IE did, is now pushing its own market standards and breaking existing open/market standards and generally being a forceful, non respecting to standards, web browser. It sure is unfortunate and another sign that bizdev/marketing/executives rule over engineers at Google now.
Firefox was top dog when chrome came out - it had unseated IE already for many users fed up with XP-era crapware.
Firefox was not simply 'bloated', but designed for classic HTML rendering at a time when javascript (aka 'web 2.0 ajax') dev was taking off and memory was not as abundant as it is now - though slow, it was more that the core architecture was out of date than it was 'bloated'. Indeed firefox was already a stripped down version of 'the mozilla suite' (see also seamonkey, thunderbird, etc - all of which predate chrome).
Chrome then came in, borrowed another project's browser engine, and decided to say 'screw memory, just fork processes' and avoided the whole multithreaded thing all together, oh yes, and open blank tabs faster with a little animation for perceptions sake.
This facilitated html5/javascript bloat, and by extension kept it in the lead as the only browser that could handle it.
of course I'm biased here (as is parent) - but chrome unseating firefox which unseated IE is born out by the facts.
Maybe in mindshare for devs but Chrome officially unseated IE browser saturation in 2012. Firefox didn't pass IE until 2015 [1].
Firefox was amazing on its resurgence in mid-2000s but did get into memory/bloat stages that opened it up for minimal/performant Chrome that was also more secure at the time primarily due to the process per tab. This possibly did lead to more js bloat later, initially it was lightning fast and also had a debug console and was based on Webkit which was better than Firefox rendering.
Firefox definitely saw Web 2.0 come in from 2006 on and was revolutionary in web development/debugging with Firebug and eventually that was part of the browser and is now industry standard to have a console/debugger on the browser.
Most developers were using Firefox by 2005-2006 and then Chrome a couple/few years later and it has been top for almost a decade now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
This is the big one for me. When I'm not developing I actually prefer to use Safari-- I like it's interface better and it feels more at home in macOS. It's "good enough" too.
What I'm really a user of is the Chrome Dev Tools. Firefox's are looking quite solid lately but I just haven't switched over.
Firefox highlights the edge lines of the selected element automatically, and in all directions (if I recall correctly). I have to use an extension – VisBug – to achieve that in Chrome.
There's also the fonts window, which lets you in on what fonts are used on the page, and lets you modify the selected element's font settings – size, weight, slant/italic etc.. I pay a lot of attention to typography, so that part is important to me.
Also that it's not Chrome or based on Chromium is reason alone to like Firefox, because we need diversity for healthy web standards. That Chromium is open source is a red herring and open standards are more important.
I know developers have been preferring Chrome and for good reasons, but I've switched back to Firefox for the last 3 years and personally I find it hard to use Chrome these days, because Firefox has a better UI.
The only downside is that Chrome's dev tools still has some capabilities that Firefox lacks, but Firefox has been improving a lot, as you have seen.
And didn't get to this spot on any kind of technical or feature merits, but essentially by relentless nagging on the Google search page to have users install it. Sure, devs/geeks etc were eager early adopters, but the bulk of users were steered this way by Google.
Microsoft have been stalling IE development for years, which allowed Mozilla to gain huge marketshare. This resulted in a lot of people learning, how to install a third party web browser. By the time Chrome was unveiled, Mozilla have coincidentally slowed Firefox development to a crawl. I remember the point, when the stable Firefox version was close to unusable, while everyone technologically proficient used a development release. It have been so bad, that some addons simply recommended not using the stable Firefox version. Btw, things have only gotten worse since then.
Chrome's dazzling success is result of it's aggressive advertising as well as sabotage and mismanagement, that killed off alternatives.
At the end of the day, this is the end-all-be-all argument to the Facebook and Google duopoly. People just don't give a goddamn (excuse the language) about their data - they simply do.not.care.
I believe my generation (Y), and possibly a few after us (X, etc), will be known as the generation(s) who didn't think privacy/data was that big of a deal - until one day it was.
We are the guinea pig.
This wasn't meant to be a plug, just a happenstance of "if you like 'x', have you seen 'y' based on it?". =]
[0] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
Sadly, Mozilla also seem to promote containers as an alternative to user profiles, while they're nowhere near as full-featured - sharing saved logins and bookmarks between my "personal" and "work" containers is almost never desireable. Managing and switching profiles, on the other hand, is virtually unchanged since the Netscape Communicator days.
Firefox has mostly strived, in the Quantum era, to stay mostly-ish compatible with Google's interpretation of WebExtensions, from what I can tell.
I'm at the point of installing chromium just to be able to manage my videos, but I refuse to give in.
My main browser is Firefox, but I have to switch over to Chrome more often than I would like. Electron is also based on Chromium, isn't it? IMHO, the rise of Electron just reinforces Chromium's status and I think Microsoft is going to accelerate that trend (I'm guessing MS adopted Chromium because of Electron).
Other web developers may want to chime in but I rarely have cross-browser problems between Firefox and Chrome. I can't recall the last one.
The only time I encounter a problem with Firefox is looking at people's codepens where they're using webkit only prefixes or a draft API.
I do use Gmail, and don't have any but have long planned to move to Outlook.com.. perhaps knowing about this ShadowDOM issue will spur me on to make the move.
Google only has one product that's truly best-of-breed (Maps) and I don't mind using it, but don't want to be entirely in any one vendor's ecosystem. I would say Youtube is the best of its kind, but it's really held up by its community, not functionality as Maps is. Outlook may not be the absolute best for privacy either (it's also no-charge), but it at least gets me to a place where I'm well diversified.
Google Maps, Youtube, InoReader, Outlook, DuckDuckGo all on Firefox with containers is a good enough of a spread for me.
If one cannot avoid it, I think it's a better idea to create Chrome desktop shortcuts for Gmail/YouTube and use Chrome exclusively for that, if you cannot use a desktop email client for Gmail and VLC/mpv/youtube-dl for some reason.
Moreover, once you give in on this, what's Google going to do next? Use APIs only in Chrome that Mozilla needs to implement only after they're made public in Chrome by literally looking at the source code? There's always going to be a lag if that's the dynamic, so there's always going to be the perception that Firefox is behind.
Moreover if Firefox adopts it, it makes it more likely to be adopted by Apple too, since Google's now not the only kid on the block to support it and now you turned it into a de-facto standard.
Mozilla already partially caved to Google in pursuit of the "best browser" as perceived by the average user. That was on DRM. Now I say partially because at least they made it opt-in, but so they caved and next Google came up with this thing.
If you going to keep paying ransom, you're going to have a lot of hostages.
+1. I'm hopeful of Servo. So far it (ServoShell) also a good 50MB smaller than Electron which would be a very good reason for developers to switch. It'll all depend on API compatibility at the time of release I guess.
In Firefox, macOS was showing 4+GB of memory usage and formulas would take hours to run. I switched to Safari where memory usage was closer to 1-2GB, but it had this habit of refreshing the page as soon as you switched away (before a formula would finish running). I finally switched to Chrome and memory usage was about 1-2GB and heavy formulas behaved in a way more predictable manner.
Using both for years, Chrome has just been faster and more reliable. I don't do web dev professionally, but I use multiple browsers in tandem and often try to use one full time every once in awhile. On my old laptop, I'm pretty sure Chrome was the only one to support webGL for whatever reason. At work we're stuck with Firefox 38.3.0 ESR (Cent6/7) and Prometheus Alert Manager (and I also believe Prometheus graphing interface) has broken widgets, but Chrome works. Chrome has always seemed to better support the very few websites that require crazy performance. This was even the case when we would have an ancient version of Chrome and a new version of Firefox. It sucked when Firefox switched plugin architecture and Google Hangouts never added support. Now Google Meet does not support Safari.
I'm not saying any of these comparisons are "fair" but its what I deal with day-to-day.
Kind of, only because Google uses the ShadowDOM API to break its product on competing browsers and playing into it will only reinforce this behavior.
Today I'm browsing the Adidas website, and the images don't load for any of the products in Firefox.
https://www.adidas.com/us/ultraboost-all-terrain-ltd-shoes/B...
Apparently they're WEBP images and my version of Firefox (version 64) doesn't support them, but searching online I read that the upcoming Firefox version 65 is suppose to fix that issue.
Strangely enough, the images were working fine a few weeks ago on the Adidas website, but I had a different Firefox issue. When I clicked the images to see the fullscreen view and zoomed in, they wouldn't pan or drag correctly, so 80% of the image was hidden off the screen. In Chrome, they worked as expected.
That's one example, but as I said, I get these kind of issues almost daily from companies that should know better. I still primarily use Firefox because I have no trust in Google, but I'm forced to open Chrome on a regular basis to resolve random quirks.
I loaded the page with Firefox 65 beta and all the images worked for me. The site doesn't seem to be serving WebP images to Firefox. When I checked all the image types via Page Info they were mostly JPEGs with some PNGs and one SVG image.
There's probably some other reason why the site is broken for you. Have you perhaps changed your browser's user agent string and so the site is giving you WebP images because it thinks they will work?
So, I'm left scratching my head and using Chrome to browse the site.
As someone who always has too many tabs open, I consider this a plus.
I do however think you can disable this in about:config : browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand
For what it's worth, Chrome stopped doing this for me in a recent update (I think version 71).
You can also disable smooth scrolling only for the touchpad in about:config to keep the animation for scrolling with the keyboard. Search for "smooth"; I think it's the mouseWheel one, but I'm not at home to verify.
Disclaimer: I contribute to Firefox and enjoy it quite a bit.
On Ubuntu and Kali (both debian-based), it most certainly does.
I tried using Firefox for Linux for about 6 months last year, but had to give up. I got frustrated with the random UI pauses/latency, random crashes, and broken web rendering (not its fault). On the other hand, Chrome just works, and provides a very smooth, low latency experience on Linux. I don't like that I have to give up my privacy for a decent browsing experience on Linux, but that's the state of things.
I am honestly perplexed what the issue could be then, I was sure you were using an NVidia with the proprietary drivers or something like that, as such setups have caused me trouble in the past.
The only thing is I wouldn't recommend turning on WebRender for everything yet, but it's not on by default so I doubt you had it on.
Guys who maintain Firefox - thank you. I hope I'll join the FF users once more in the near future.
I assume that Chrome has a similar design, but I'm not familiar with it.
Check their dev blog, they add cool features every couple of weeks:
> I've got nothing to hide.
However, if this data ever gets into the hands of someone acting in bad faith, even the most innocent behaviour can be weaponized against you. Let's say, for example, that you are wrongly suspected of committing a crime, and the investigating police are more interested in cooking up a conviction than determining if you actually did it.
All sorts of details about your life can be leaked and "spun" to make you look very, very bad. You went to a bar on a certain evening? So did these known crime figures. Were you meeting them?
You spend time on Hacker News. HACKER NEWS. You could find yourself the target of a smear campaign designed to turn public sentiment against you.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."—Cardinal Richelieu
If you hand over your data without hesitation to a nation-state or to powerful and unscrupulous corporations, I believe you will discover that there is no such thing as "nothing to hide."
Someone could be alarmed about the state of privacy in society and not want to take an extreme action.
It seems entirely reasonable to want to remain a part of civilization and advocate for change on a topic you are passionate about.
If you are ok with that and still think you have nothing to hide, ask yourself if you’d be ok with this trove of data ever being exposed publicly.
Ever googled something embarrassing? Perhaps a medical condition or symptom? Sent a very personal email? Visited a less than savory location, or lied to an employer about your whereabouts?
I’d be willing to bet most people have some data that could be weaponized for blackmail.
Surely many people (especially the ignorant) will find Google’s products and services “worth using” but privacy concerns are anything but overblown.
I already did, and the answer was "Yes, I'd be okay" (although the likelihood of that happening is extremely rare).
> Ever googled something embarrassing?
Use incognito mode.
> Perhaps a medical condition or symptom?
I have only one medical condition, which I'm not embarassed to talk about publicly (I already do it).
> Sent a very personal email?
I rarely send "very personal"/ intimate information over email in lieu of just talking over phone.
> Visited a less than savory location,
Never in my life.
> or lied to an employer about your whereabouts?
I never had to do it (why would I?).
> I’d be willing to bet most people have some data that could be weaponized for blackmail.
If--note "if"--I were to engage in an activity that could potentially be used to blackmail or harm me in any way, I would of course be doing it in as private manner as possible. However it would be silly to spend the rest of my normal life cowering and being phobic to technological advances.
> Surely many people (especially the ignorant) will find Google’s products and services “worth using” but privacy concerns are anything but overblown.
You confuse being naive (in its original sense of the word) with being ignorant. But I guess that's what fear does to one.
All this means is that it's not stored on your computer/history. This doesn't mean Google doesn't still have everything from those periods.
Google also operates some of the most popular DNS services 8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4 which can capture domains you query from your IP.
There are various measures you can go through to stop this to some degree, like DNS blocking, client-side ad/tracker blocking, VPNs etc. but to go all-out is very cumbersome and I'm not convinced that it would even be 100% effective. Google's business DEPENDS on collecting your data and tracking you, and they are very, very good at it. I highly recommend reading "The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism".
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/18124718/google-search-re...
This is a flawed study by a Google's competitor (the for-profit organization called DuckDuckGo). FTA:
> Following the study’s publication this morning, Google told The Verge in a statement that it found the methodology flawed and the findings misleading. “This study’s methodology and conclusions are flawed since they are based on the assumption that any difference in search results are based on personalization. That is simply not true,” a Google spokesperson said. “In fact, there are a number of factors that can lead to slight differences, including time and location, which this study doesn’t appear to have controlled for effectively.”
and:
https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1070027261376491520
Facts won't change being facts no matter how many times you downvote them. :-P
For a lot of people they possibly hold that view due to a lack of understanding about the situation, but some people like you understand the situation and still are OK with it. That's an entirely reasonable point of view which should be eagerly debated with.
People are notoriously bad at acting in their own best interest. I recall reading a forum, where a guy asked for medical advice, because he was diagnosed with fibrosis (his lungs basically got scarred all over). His work required him to continuously inhale toxic exhaust, and he wanted a way to avoid further health complications (but keep a work!) because "the pay was good".
Fibrosis causes you to cough non-stop and significantly increases probability of dying from lung infection. Compared to that, using Google's products does not result in any visible long-term effects on health. Therefore, it is natural to conclude, that using Google's sites and services is safe, healthy and should be widely encouraged. It does not matter, that Google uses anti-competitive practices to monopolize market, restrict user freedom and lead us to future, when we won't be able to refuse shoehorned "services", shoved in our face, right?
Please stop with those creepy "understanding" antics. Encouraging self-harm is bad, and wishing to view advertisements is definitely a form of self-harm.
You are essentially deciding for me that what I choose to do with my technological choices is "a form of self-harm" (when in fact I only experience total pleasure).
Is it really that hard to comprehend that, when one does not share the alarmist feelings of the crowd, they will make intelligent choices based on personal preferences?
Don't mean to insult you, and some people just have an easier time opening up about everything, but a life with nothing whatsoever to hide sounds limited, uninventive and uninteresting.
> a life with nothing whatsoever to hide sounds limited, uninventive and uninteresting.
Ever familiar with the phrase "un unexamined life is not worth living"? Here, of course, the thing to be examined is your belief that a life with nothing whatsover to hide is limited, uninventive and uninteresting.
So if you don't mind would you share some nudes, your CC numbers and your medical history with us?
Why? In what ways is Chrome more useful than Firefox on Chrome OS?
Moreover I use Chrome to sync my Google account, including passwords (which I can't live without) and browsing history.
That's not your call to make.
It annoys me because I really want to use it. I'm very happy that we have it and I hope that the wider community will hold Mozilla to account every time they try something shady to protect the best free and open browser we have. If we lose Firefox, we lose the Internet to corporations.
It works well on windows, I don't know how far the mac support is.
WebRender does work on macOS (and Android and maybe Linux), but Mozilla is prioritizing a Windows MVP first (because something like 90% of Firefox users are on Windows). Work on macOS, Linux, and Android will then resume.
1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
Yet how long will we have it if everyone keeps using excuses to continue using Chrome?
Firefox on Mac is noticeably slower.