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Comment by hans1729 | Hacker News Reader

As a chrome-user: this. Firefox lost me years ago due to performance differences, and since chrome works fine for me, there was no ux-related reason to switch back. The day I'll see ads everywhere will be the day I'm back to firefox, and without second thoughts at that. If I really like your service, I'll happily pay for it. I hate ads, the psychological strats behind them are completely unacceptable. I'd happily pay google a subscription-rate, if that's what it takes tbh. Take my money, not my attention.

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I think Firefox is faster than Chrome these days. Unfortunately I prefer the web developer tools in Chrome, so I use Chromium as I wasn't a fan of every URL I type going to Google.

Likewise. Unfortunately, some services such as YouTube TV don't work on chromium. Also if you're not on linux, updating is a pain (you must do it manually iirc)

Opera was my other workaround.

Have you tried the Edge[0] preview dev tools? I have not but I know it also has an extension[1] for VSCode that seems interesting.

[0]https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/

[1]https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-edged...

I use Linux.

Edge is macOS/Windows only but VSCode is available over there. Worth keeping an eye out because I wouldn't be surprised if Edge lands on desktop Linux[0] someday. I'm not a web developer and a Firefox diehard for almost 20 years now, but the Edge beta has become my fulltime Chrome alternative when I feel I need to try something on a Chromium-based browser.

[0]https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/04/microsoft-edge-may-come-...

Just a general warning. A few days ago I noticed Chromium from Chocolatey did not receive any updates in quite a while.

Is unlimited system resource usage ok for you? If not, you should really re-evaluate your premise of performance differences. Fire up sys mon, activity mon, top, or what have you, open both browsers. Firefox wins on every metric by substantial amounts (memory for example wins by an order of magnitude).

Since I never max out my resources (mbp 2016, 16 gigs, entire workload happens on servers and not on my local machine) that doesn't really affect me - and with 50+ tabs open frequently, just go ahead and take my ram to keep them available, sure. Unused resources are wasted resources - and again, I'm never above 10gigs, maybe 12-13 if I have a local vm running.

Like I said: ux-wise, I'm not impacted negatively by using chrome, at all. If my laptops resources were more limited or my local workload was bigger, I'd probably check out Firefox, but since I'm not bottlenecked, why bother?

Chrome uses more memory than Firefox. Just try opening 50 tabs in each - chrome will eat your RAM.

I've never understood this argument. What's the purpose of having RAM if it's not utilized?

That logic works if you're not bounded on RAM, but it's not an inexhaustible resource; personally I'd rather keep it free for VMs or other high cost operations.

Firefox is fast again

Firefox always was fast. You were using it wrong.

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