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Comment by mindfulhack | Hacker News Reader

It's sad how, although I personally prefer to support Firefox by using it, I have still stuck with Google's Chrome due to a speed/sleekness factor which I can't quite put my finger on, that Firefox has never been able to overcome in my mind since fully switching over to Chrome several years ago.

It's little touches like how you can't re-order extension buttons with a basic mouse drag - no, you have to go into 'Customize...', and that's so clunky and 2004. They have some more work to do to really make it competitive with the mighty Chrome.

So after all that time, Brave is the first browser registering my interest due to these regular news stories. I still use Google services, but I don't like their current dominant position in shaping how the web works. That's too much power.

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Recently I've had terrible performance issues with chrome. Freezes, crashes, and really long delays, as well as significant memory usage. I switched to Brave, but it was worse. Safari, by contrast, has been amazingly fast and responsive.

If only my corp allowed me to upgrade the macOS on my laptop, I would be using the latest Safari too instead of messing with Chrome / Brave.

I hear the opposite sentiment at my workplace. "If only they didn't force us to update OS X ASAP"

I've had quite the opposite experience there. I eventually settled on Brave because of my browsing habits. In particular I tend to have several windows of a browser open with dozens of tabs a piece and tend to rarely reboot my machine. Capping all this off is that I enjoy playing chess, which relies on millisecond responsivity. This [1] is a screen cap of the current performance usage of Brave. It's completely negligible, and hasn't been restarted for days. The higher memory processes are exclusively from pages I am currently using with extensive content loaded on them.

No clue about Safari but Firefox dies under these conditions, and I'm not interested in Chrome given not only Google but their 'vision' for the future of that browser including native anti-ad blocking. Opera was okay, but I enjoy the privacy features of Brave. Native ad-block, tracker blocking, etc that can all be customized per site in literally two clicks. Lion->Third Party Trackers for instance would allow me to enable third party trackers exclusively on Hacker News if, for some reason, I wanted to. Pretty cool stuff.

[1] - https://i.postimg.cc/Xq9fjFsc/Capture.png

That may be a Firefox on Windows issue (not that it helps you in this case). I regularly have ~1000 tabs open in Firefox on Linux with no issues (related to tabs and performance, anyway).

The only related issue for me recently was a failure to restore a session after Firefox forced a restart for an update. That's the behavior that chases me back to Brave on other systems (where it's not as easy to `tabs.sh > current_tabs` just in case).

Firefox on Windows handles hundreds of tabs also just fine in my experience (assuming you run some kind of ad/script-blocker, otherwise some runaway ad somewhere will probably get you). Only thing I can think of that something might have triggered the multi-process mode to disable - that'd cause performance problems, but can be forced through the settings.

From my personal experience, I tried using Chrome for few months (approximately when FF versions were 3X.X) and Chrome caused certain perceptible lag. FF wasn't lightspeed fast at that time but Chrome wasn't either, just differently somehow.

PS: using Brave browser, which is essentially a Chrome mod, also cements Google monopoly, indirectly.

I can almost put my finger on firefox problems. The html/js engine is great. It's the GUI that severly lags. Tabs, menus, url. On the same machine Chromes never stutter, firefox nightly does way too much.

Mozilla did a lot for so long, let's hope they can circle the issues and find resources to fix them.

How old is your PC? Mine is ~5 years old and Chromium has worse performance for me.

Thinkpad x201, probably 2011. Maybe Firefox needs a minimum to perform adequately. But again, chrome really is slicker (massively so).

These are all just anecdotes. I use a low-end laptop from 2010 and Firefox works fine on it. I switched to it from Chrome years ago when they removed some functionality (I think it may have been the backspace to go back but it may have been something else) and I didn't notice any performance issues. If anything it got faster with the Quantum update though I haven't used Chrome since so I don't know how they compare.

I agree with you that it's usable, but on my machine (an i5 iMac/16 gb/Debian) it's slightly slower than Chromium. Not enough that I won't use it, but noticeablely slower.

I also agree with the upstream comments about UI clunkiness. There are a lot of things that irritate me about Firefox that Chromium just handles better.

Mostly little things like the "Recently Closed Tabs" menu is buried 6 levels deep in the "Library" menu. And the completion list that pops up when typing in the address bar always seems to miss pages I've visited but includes things that seem unrelated to what I'm typing in.

what cpu/gpu do you have ? my i5 520m 8GB mx500 ssd really struggles.. maybe you have a discrete gpu ?

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