Nothing pisses me off like getting a message that some website only supports Chrome in 2020
I've used Firefox for 15+ years now and never had the problems that people talk about.
On Linux, I use Firefox primarily for browsing, but for development I use Chromium. The reason for that is because the JS debugger in Firefox is pretty damn buggy. Some things I've encountered (though they don't happen every time):
- On a breakpoint, type expression in console, hit Enter and it just hangs there without giving you the result. The console will be unresponsive until you unpause.
- On a breakpoint in some part of the callstack, type expression in console and see that variables that should be in scope at that point in the callstack are not in scope for the console.
- Go to a different spot in the callstack and see that the place that Firefox tells you you're at is not correct. It might be off by a few lines.
This might be a very good reason why developers prefer to develop for Chromium/Chrome. Not because they prefer it for browsing or for its performance, but because its development tools actually work.
I made the switch recently, like a month ago, and I've been discovering little things that are just more pleasant when working in Chromium. For example "Copy as cURL", is formatted neater. Firefox puts all the curl options in a single line, but Chromium separates the options in multiple lines.
It's also wonderful that the browser is truly privacy conscious.
A lot of it has to do with design, though. ie. when opening a new window, Chrome draws the window instantly and then fills in the UI, while Firefox waits until the window is completely built to display it. Even though they become usable at roughly the same time, Chrome responds instantly to the command while Firefox exhibits zero sign of life for hundreds of milliseconds.
And also: Come on, that wouldn't make a browser slow. Users open new windows once when starting the browser. The rest is about how fast they render pages, react to JS workloads, and maybe how fast they open tabs. FF is more than on par in all of this.
Curious what you said about FF reorganizing the window contents, in my experience Chrome does that and not FF.
It's true JS performance is quite similar. But I've noticed (measured) differences in page load speed as well -- including latency again, the time until it actually responds to the enter key and initiates a network request. (In the network panel this is reported as Stalled.)
The modern equivalent is tuning uBlock Origin, uMatrix, Privacy Badger, or similar products, on top of correctly configuring your browser itself.
You also need a Mac to debug safari on iOs. I hate Safari.
Also, I agree. I have a laptop with about 256 mb of working ram, so I only use terminal apps with it. If I'm trying to look up documentation and the site doesn't work with lynx it is not a happy day.
And that doesn't even touch on servers.
That's what I don't understand. How hard is it to just make a plain text copy of the data to serve to people who want it instead.