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Comment by kken | Hacker News Reader

These articles always feel like i missed something. I have stayed with Firefox all the time, never switched to Chrome.

Why should I have switched to Chrome, again?

When Chrome first came out it was much faster and leaner than Firefox. The gap has closed significantly in the past few years.

I used Chrome as my main browser for a year or so before switching back to Firefox. I’m glad that Firefox is now catching up again, hopefully developers will start treating Firefox as a first class browser again. Occasionally I will come across a website which was clearly only tested on Chrome.

I originally switched about a decade ago because Chrome was significantly more stable for me. I gave FF another shot when they released quantum. I experienced some stability issues at first, but I now consider it to be a superior browser.

I use Chrome and FF simultaneously at work because Google holds hangouts for ransom and that's our enterprise IM solution. Recently, FF seems to be much more stable than Chrome.

I also use FF on my smartphone and, IMO, it's a significantly better experience than Chrome.

The one feature I really miss from Chrome is the ability to easily switch between browser profiles. You can use the about:profiles page on Firefox for a similar effect, but it's nowhere near as seamless as Chrome.

Would account containers[0] help you with the profile issue?

[0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

These single handedly are what keeps me in Firefox. So convenient at work where I often need to be logged into the same site with a few different accounts.

But Firefox always had superior and better performing AdBlock which made whatever speed advantage Chrome had pretty irrelevant.

I think the draw to Chrome for developers at the time was the better built-in dev tools compared to Firebug.

It was faster for about a year. And at what cost?

The cost was huge, but Firefox is much more competitive than it was. Chrome was faster for a pretty long time and was heavily marketed. It was bundled with lots of common utilities on Windows.

Then things got to the point where developers started doing the "IE thing" and only testing with Chrome. Developers were complicit in this because they repeated the same mistakes of the past. It's amazing how just a few years pass and the next wave of developers are oblivious to what came before.

My move to the latest (quantum?) Firefox has been beset by horrific energy use problems on macOS. Those have only just been fixed, but things are much better now. I hope the FF team keep their focus because with Microsoft and Opera giving up on their engines we need Mozilla more than ever.

> Then things got to the point where developers started doing the "IE thing" and only testing with Chrome. Developers were complicit in this because they repeated the same mistakes of the past.

Not all developers. In fact I remember quite a few meetings where I couldn’t convince product that Safari and Firefox should be supported and ended up leaving the meeting yelling “Fine I’ll support them myself”. To this day I still test in all 3 hoping one day I can stop testing in Chrome.

It was, anecdotally, faster-feeling until maybe a year and a half ago. The lack of sufficient parallelization meant that Firefox would feel sluggish and constantly freeze at the UI layer from a misbehaving website.

I switched back around then, because now it's fantastic.

Hm I have a different anecdote... Although chrome was way faster when it first came out, I switched off of chrome when writing the wrong JavaScript in chrome would cause Linux to lock up, and Firefox was sufficiently fast to not suck anymore. That was about six years ago.

Chrome is glorified spyware, simple truth.

When $GOOG gets squeezed, they always find new ways to use your data for commercial purposes.

On my old hardware, Chrome based browsers run significantly faster. Faster startup, significantly faster page loading. More responsive UI (new tab, new window etc). Once a web app loads it’ll be equally fast though.

I keep switching back to Firefox as it’s supposedly “as fast now” but it never was, and on my hardware, it still isn’t.

I gotta add to this that when it comes to ethics and privacy there is no contest. But the bulk of Mozilla’s funding coming from its arch-nemesis is tragi-comical.

> hopefully developers will start treating Firefox as a first class browser again

I’m a webdev and we’re still fighting this one and will be for a while. Chrome has such a huge market share it’s hard to convince the decision makers to consider even Safari, much less Firefox. Please help give those of us fighting for Chrome alternatives and give us something to back up our arguments better than “But Google!!”

It's a little silly to ignore the impact that Chrome had on the browser market. A from-scratch multiprocess architecture, considerable performance improvements, a fairly significant departure with UI, etc.

Sandboxed flash was huge at the time. People forget so quickly that only a decade ago the internet was a lot more malicious. Exploits hosted on compromised ads were not uncommon at all. These days all of the big exploit kits rely on social engineering.

Those were very appealing things for many people, rightfully so.

I agree that Chrome has been good for healthy competition in the browser market. What I don't agree with is that Firefox hasn't been holding it's own the whole time.

They did force Mozilla to actually innovate on Firefox, which was great, but they closed the performance gap to insignificant levels pretty quickly.

I really think the majority of people switching to Chrome was just momentum of "I use Google and they say Chrome is better".

I told everyone I could to use Chrome because the risk of being infected by malware was radically lower. Flash 0days used to be so common, I know plenty of people who'd get hit. Java plugin was the other big one and Chrome had it click to play early on IIRC.

Chrome had a massive advantage over Firefox, security wise, for quite a long time.

> I told everyone I could to use Chrome because the risk of being infected by malware was radically lower.

I used to say so too, but that was because at that time everyone was using Internet Explorer, not Firefox. Both Firefox and Chrome had and have been much more secure than IE (and Edge used to be unstable for a long time), so this was not a good reason to prefer Chrome over Firefox even at that time.

Chrome was the first browser to sandbox Flash. That was huge for security.

I don't disagree that Chrome had been (and is still, due to the personpower) more secure than Firefox. But a gap between both and IE is much wider [1] than a gap between Chrome and Firefox and the latter didn't affect the recommendation. Chrome was much more secure than IE and had a good UX, that's it.

[1] Qualitatively: both didn't really support ActiveX. Quantatitvely: even back in 2010 (where Chrome's Flash sandboxing and Firefox's out-of-process NPAPI "isolation" was still at their infancy) both crashed much less often than IE.

I've been on Linux the whole time, so I suppose the security worries weren't really something that came up for me.

Also have always been more cavalier about security than I probably should be.

Not just the browser market, but software in general.

Remember when people had a conniption about Chrome auto updating and now literally all software does that?

Remember when using tabs was kind of a chore and not really worth the effort? Remember when the chrome of a browser would take up 10% of the screen? Remember when browsers had an address bar and a search bar? Remember when installing extensions was a huge, painful process?

This whole, "I don't get it," thing is so transparent and juvenile.

> Remember when people had a conniption about Chrome auto updating and now literally all software does that?

Sure. And is that a good thing? From a developer's perspective maybe, from a user's not so much.

> Remember when using tabs was kind of a chore and not really worth the effort?

No, I dont. Tabs have not fundamentally changed since they were introduced in NetCaptor some twenty years ago. Yes, you can drag and drop them now, but thats basically it.

If anything, tabs have de-evolved. Chrome never allowed any customisation and Firefox stopped supporting it (e.g. vertical tabs) when they switched to "Quantum".

> Remember when the chrome of a browser would take up 10% of the screen? Remember when browsers had an address bar and a search bar?

If that was Google's only achievement ;)

> Remember when installing extensions was a huge, painful process?

I dont. Installing extensions was never any of that. It was always fairly straightforward in Firefox and has not really changed since the first versions, again some twenty years ago :)

> Chrome never allowed any customisation and Firefox stopped supporting it (e.g. vertical tabs) when they switched to "Quantum".

Current Firefox has vertical tabs, with the Tree Style Tab extension (like it always has been). The only UI difference is that TST cannot hide the horizontal tab bar automatically, but it will explain to you on first use how to do that.

True, they kind of managed to semi-port that but it still rather is a crutch.

My point was though the claim Chrome fundamentally improved how we use tabs simply is nonfactual.

Chrome made tabs practical through multiprocess browsing. Firefox would happily let a backgrounded tab wedge the entire process and it took many years for them to rectify that.

First, this is an exaggeration in my opinion. Second, this is only peripherally related to tabs and how they are used.

It’s presumptive of you to call it an exaggeration and it’s wrong to say it’s “only peripherally related to tabs.” JavaScript-heavy web apps came along well before Firefox could deal with them well. Leaving Google Docs in a background tab while somebody else was editing the same document would faceplant Firefox for years. Making a tab-centric workflow viable with complex applications by isolating them in their own process space and minimizing their impact on the UI process was revolutionary.

Firefox is awesome now. We can celebrate that without rewriting the past.

So using a Google product on a non Google browser while they’re trying to gain marketshare for said browser didn’t work well (and presumably would push you towards using said browser)? Color me surprised.

I mean you get that Chrome exists because Google wanted to do more with a web page, yeah? And that Firefox wasn’t up for it at the time?

Chrome’s approach enabled new things and I knew somebody was mgoing to /r/iamverysmart about my example being a Google app—but Google Docs is my go-to example exactly because at the time nobody else really made a web app with some weight to it. Chrome enabled them to be mainstream and for that it deserves a lot of credit. But there is no super secret MakeFirefoxSlow.js in Google Docs. There never was. Firefox was slow and poorly designed by comparison.

Firefox has now improved. It’s great. I don’t even use Chrome anymore. But I’m really allergic to this kind of galaxy-braining.

> But there is no super secret MakeFirefoxSlow.js in Google Docs. There never was.

https://fortune.com/2018/07/25/youtube-slow-mozilla-firefox-...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/18/google_monopoly_abu...

I still stand by my previous statements.

Mozilla certainly improved on overall performance with Quantum, but to say Firefox was unusuable is actually not even an exaggeration - I stand corrected on this - but plain wrong.

AFAIK, Chrome did introduce the multi-process approach but that touched tabs only peripherally. Tab management itself has not improved.

> Remember when browsers had an address bar and a search bar?

Well, my pet theory is that this is the same as Facebook's internet.org program: just how Facebook wants to (and benefits) to train the "global" (sub)conscious that Facebook essentially is the Internet, Google stands to profit from everyone confusing/conflating Google search results with the Internet.

Why give people an address bar when they can (slightly) misspell their destination and go through Google instead? Maybe, if they're lucky, over time, every network request will go through Google.

I've also noticed this in how Google mandates the placement of the Google search widget on the home screen on Android devices. Place "the Internet" front-and-center on everyone's favourite screen, and people naturally "fall in."

> Remember when browsers had an address bar and a search bar?

Firefox still has that as an option. I use it.

Firefox also could be configured to only show one bar and split based off of it being a url or not. I remember configuring mine that way right around Chrome launch.

Oh shit, yeah, Windows software used to not ever autoupdate I forgot about that.

Who is ignoring it? Also keep in mind most of these security benefits only helped Windows. There’s a lot of non-windows users here who had app level sandboxing before Chrome sandboxed Flash. Regardless of what they did they’re too “Googlfied” these days and Chrome is a massive window into your personal data. People that have done good things can go on to doing bad things.

That's true, but Google replaced websites exploiting users, to doing the honor themselves.

Absolutely agree. I'm mystified that so many people abandoned the consistently excellent Firefox for the debatably equal but run by Google Chrome.

When Chrome came out the fact that it was built by Google was a positive, not a negative.

This definitely applied to me. I picked up Chrome partly because I trusted Google, and I moved away from it mostly because I no longer do.

I remember stating that I wished Google would make a bank (because the web experience with my current bank was so bad). That sentiment feels so distant now that I am almost not sure if it was real or not.

When I switched Firefox liked to make my Macbook run hot and to trigger frequent system-wide beachballs when it wasn't foregrounded, with just a few tabs loaded. And just having it open killed my battery. This was, like, 2011 I think. Chrome didn't do these things, even with way more tabs. I'd used FF almost exclusively since it was called Phoenix, before that, though I hadn't loved and evangelized it since some time in the 2.x series.

Of course I moved to Safari after that when I realized I could gain like another 1.5-2hrs of battery life over even Chrome, and Firefox has largely replaced Chrome as the thing I use if I need something non-Safari, now.

The native browser advantage that Safari and Edge hold is real. Firefox was built in the era of desktops being dominant. I think their next priority needs to be power usage.

I'm a Phoenix adopter as well, but never left for the almost 2 decades that have passed. I do it the opposite way, Firefox is my main, but the native browser is my goto if I need something non-Firefox.

I'd like to do it your way, but there's many Firefox-only usability features that losing simply ruins the web for me.

Things Chrome had around the time when it debuted that made it stand out: A unified search and website address bar Separate processes for tabs so that if one crashed, it didn't take the whole browser down with it Flash built in

Don't underestimate the power of the exclusive Ad spot on the world's most visited web page.

Iirc Google didn't quite have today's reputation in 2008 or whenever it first came out. My peers genuinely believed that their don't be evil slogan was genuine

It was faster and more secure. It's probably still more secure.

Exactly. It's a decade behind us now, so presumably many posters here never even experienced it, but it's hard to convey just how much of an innovation Chrome was when it landed in the browser world of the late aughts. We'd been subjected, at that point, to almost 15 years of perpetual bloat and decay by Netscape and then Microsoft.

Chrome wasn't just faster, it was viscerally faster (V8 in particular was just completely without peer at the time). It was cleaner, without all the buttons and features adorning its competitors.

We all swapped instantly. Really it was amazing. But that was 11 years ago, Chrome has grown the warts IE used to have, and Firefox has largely caught up on the features geeks care about.

I was around then. I don’t remember Chrome ever actually feeling faster. Maybe it was my system, maybe it was just me, but I’ve never understood the “faster” argument. The Chrome is “faster” argument is eerily reminiscent to Sega’s “blast processing” propaganda from the 90’s.

What Chrome did do better than Firefox was pay to put advertisements everywhere. I remember feeling dumbfounded that we needed Chrome Browser ads on TV to sway people away from IE. Strange, strange times.

I ran Mac, windows and Linux on the desktop. Chrome was shockingly faster on all of them if you had the ram for it. Even Safari was clearly faster on Mac for a long time.

It was significantly faster on Windows, but not so much on other platforms.

It was significantly faster on all platforms, plus looked good on all platforms. That also was a big deal on Linux, where things usually don`t look good.

I cannot stand the Chrome UI. Always thought it looked cheap compared to Firefox. "Sleek" I suppose people would say.

I was on Firefox back then as well, and the only place Chrome(ium) ever seemed faster to me was initial startup - which was irrelevant because I always had the browser open in the background.

That was never my experience in practical, day to day usage. I feel like an odd man out though. I see many posters here talking about terrible performance on Mac. I've been running Firefox on MacBook Pros since 2007. I don't know what you guys are doing...but I can't replicate the poor performance.

> We all swapped instantly.

Certainly not "all". When chrome came out I tried it a few times over the years, but it had no observable advantage and was (and is) less configurable than firefox so it's clearly inferior on that front. I never switched.

I was well aware of the hype around it being faster, but was never able to observe any evidence in my usage/systems. And it was produced by an advertising company so that was always a huge minus.

This mirrors my experience exactly.

I was a Firefox user since it was called Phoenix. Chrome came out, I used it for a bit, never did see much of an advantage of switching and I kinda hated the chrome UI. Never saw an observable performance improvement. Stayed on Firefox. Still always use chrome to test when web developing though.

It mirrors my experience as well.

I will admit that Firefox has gone through periods where the UI is just plain butt ugly, kind of like the current iteration (sorry Mozilla guys, I'm just not a fan). That has always been easy enough to remedy. When Firefox still had real themes, you could make it seamlessly fit most UIs or even mock Chrome, if that was your thing. At least you can still modify userchrome.css. The Australis era UI was pretty nice. It's a shame they left it behind to compete with Chrome looks.

I always found the XUL plugin ecosystem to be significantly more robust than Chrome offerings. They are kind of on par now that they're both using WebExtensions.

I keep Chrome around for testing and other things that only want to work on Chrome now. For example, Google drive never seems to want to download my files when I'm using Firefox. They just redirect to a blank white tab. On the Mac, Chrome does this annoying thing when you hit Cmd+Q to quit. It tells you that you have to hold Cmd+Q for a period of time instead. I move quickly on the keyboard and that pattern breaks my flow. I know you can change the setting, which I have done, but it's totally different from nearly every other app on my system.

This whole time I have been a "Firefox when using X11, Chrome when using Mac or Windows" guy.

The relative snappiness of Chrome in the early days was really most true on Windows. And Firefox was usually not great on Mac to begin with (there used to be a number of Mac specific ports trying to get Mozilla/gecko in shape iirc - Camino?), so really its competition was Safari.

Meanwhile Chrome/Chromium didn't really feel at home on an X desktop. So I usually stuck with Firefox there just the same way I did from the start, like when it was Phoenix or Mozilla or just as I used Netscape for Linux back in the 90s. (This statement is making me feel old.)

> It's a decade behind us now, so presumably many posters here never even experienced it

Well that makes me feel old...

Is the HN crowd really that young?

> We all swapped instantly

Not all of us...

"Faster" was one of the huge selling points of FF initially, too. Non-nerds could tell the difference (over, say, IE or Mozilla/Netscape Navigator) even. It was light and lean as hell. Hasn't been the case since well before Chrome came out, but it used to be.

There was a period where every web forum discussion of Firefox included a joke about memory leaks. I’m surprised no one remembers this...

must’ve slipped my mind.

When Chrome came out I didn't have the problem with Google I have now. But I could never switch to Chrome because I hate having the tabs above the address bar. At least with Firefox I could tweak userChrome.css to keep tabs right above the content. So I never switched either.

It gets harder all the time though. It was the default, then it was an option in about:config, then you could tweak userChrome.css, and now loading userChrome.css is disabled by default. The day is coming when we won't be able to do it at all. User control crumbles bit by bit, slowly but surely.

My conclusion as someone who never felt like Firefox was slow enough to be an issue, even when Chrome first came out, is that people must go to much more adware-laden sites than I ever do.

The only times I ever had Firefox perform in the laggy and stuttering ways people always describe have been when I get sucked into the "20 things you can't believe she said" type articles where every page is an exercise in squeezing the most ads per unit area.

Really it's just incentive for me to not waste time on that garbage. Plus now Firefox blocks most ads by default.

Firefox's ‘quantum’ migration killed off some significant extensions (e.g vimperator/pentadactyl) introduced a bunch of new bugs, some of which remain.

Dev tools were superior for a while, I think.

It’s still superior.

In what way?

Around 2011 I switched from Firefox on my macbook pro to Chrome because Firefox was unusable because it was too slow.

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