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Comment by DangerousPie | Hacker News Reader

If you haven't used Firefox in a while you should really give it another chance. It has vastly improved in terms of CPU and battery usage. It also has a lot of great privacy-enhancing features like tracking protection enabled by default and extensions like Facebook Container make it trivial to prevent tracking even further.

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As someone who had repeatedly tried to make the jump to Firefox, it _finally_ stuck after quite a few attempts. (CPU and laptop heat issues were problems for a while, now they aren't!)

I second this; keep trying even if it isn't for you after a few times, it was worth it to keep trying, officially Firefoxer :)

I love FF and have gone back you it for the last few months, after using chrome for years, CPU and battery usage is great now, but coincidentally I've been getting these weird hangups on my laptop. So yesterday I opened up my activity monitor with 6-7 tabs (including 1 youtube tab in a separate window) open I found FF using ~12gb of memory on my MBP. Then to get a comparison, I opened the exact same tabs in a chrome browser (separate window for youtube and all) and found it using under 1gb of memory. This may be is an exceptional case, but for now I just don't have the memory to run FF with docker and dev environments up too.

I used FF for a couple of months. Its heart is noble but it's just not as polished as other options.

Edit:

I didn't want to expand because I've already banged that drum too many times on HN.

See these other comments of mine:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22177747

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22059567

Thank you! Someone said that finally. I really tried hard to like Firefox. But it just really doesn't replace Chrome for me. Maybe it's the ecosystem, extensions, user experience, I'm not sure but the browsing experience is never really the same on FF.

The one thing that keeps bugging me is the widgets in Firefox (Ubuntu 18.04) look super-dated -- reminds me of NCSA Mosaic and makes me want to close it. Can they please update their widget library?

https://imgur.com/a/JYWKhpu

Or just use Ungoogled Chromium, and get the performance advantage of Chrome without the tracking.

Is there a quick summary of what major site/features that will be unavailable in Chromium vs. Chrome? I assume, for example, that 'netflix' will be prominently on that list. Thanks.

I use Chromium; you can still Netflix. It does, however, require installation of "WideVine", which is an opaque, closed, binary blob. (But you're getting that with Chrome, too, I believe.)

You can also do Netflix in Firefox, through exactly the same mechanism.

>You can also do Netflix in Firefox, through exactly the same mechanism.

It's somewhat better on Firefox because they run the binary blobs in a sandbox.

Is there actually still a performance advantage these days? Would be curious to see some benchmarks.

I will say that Gmail/Hangouts feels faster in Chrome but that's obviously not a fair comparison.

Yes, there is definitely a performance advantage especially on mobile. see for example some benchmarks for brave browser, and also a couple of recent tests for desktop browsers.

[0] https://brave.com/brave-one-dot-zero-performance-methodology...

[1] https://brave.com/brave-saves-batteries/

[2] https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/15/browser-benchmark-battle-...

[3] https://linuxreviews.org/Web_Browser_Showdown:_Six_Browsers_...

The conclusion of the linuxreviews article doesn’t really make a strong case for any major difference between the browsers —

It is hard to declare an absolute winner. Brave and Chromium, seem to be the overall winners but Pale Moon, SeaMonkey and Firefox are not bad choices if you never visit pages with fancy WebGL or WebAssembly ever. Chromium may be the best choice if you watch a lot of video on a laptop if your distributions Chromium package has the hardware video acceleration patches.

Lots of “ifs” in there for all conclusions.

Is there definitive proof that all of the Google stuff is really out of a naked Chromium install? I remember reading stuff about it being impossible to wholly untangle Google's stuff from it.

This is my question as well. Additionally, I've wondered if there are non-explicit behaviors of the browser that are used for fingerprinting.

https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/blob/master/do...

"those binaries that cannot be removed do not contain machine code."

I'm not sure what's meant by them not containing machine code, but it does seem like some of the binary blobs are retained that can't be built from source or substituted.

Honestly, I'd just switch to Firefox to be safe, though Ungoogled-Chromium does automatically set a lot of sane pro-privacy defaults that you'd have to manually change in Chromium/Firefox.

Has Firefox fixed the bug that made it eat up resources, crank the fans and go nuts on retina MacBook Pros?

Long ago.

Given the purpose of the x-client-data header, I'll be shocked if Mozilla doesn't have a similar header for feature-enable-identification to do its own tracking of bugs at scale.

... and if it doesn't, they're developing their browser with one hand tied behind their back on quality assurance relative to alternatives.

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