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Comment by elktea | Hacker News Reader

anyone using this site that still uses chrome, why?

I use Chrome on a slower PC. Although Chrome consumes more RAM than Firefox does, it actually feels noticeably faster on any PC. On old slow PCs (and mobiles) this makes a hell of difference. Firefox became usable again when it abandoned XUL (for some years before that it was pure torment to use so I had no choice but to switch to Chrome) but still isn't as fast as Chrome is. I only use Firefox happily on faster PCs.

My guess? Better supported by many sites, both on the internet and internal company sites. Faster for some things. And of course, inertia.

Studies have shown that people just don't change defaults, as a rule. Only a small minority of people change them.

> Better supported by many sites

Interesting. I haven't had much trouble with Firefox yet, even with uBlock Origin. Any idea what kind of sites?

Useful link where you can see and report browser-specific issues: https://webcompat.com/

> Webcompat.com is developed by volunteers and supported by Mozilla.

https://web.skype.com/ because one of the largest IT companies on the planet cannot support a standard-compliant browser on their web client.

> My guess? Better supported by many sites,

No difference with real sites. A developer may notice some difference in latest features support (not always in favor of Chrome).

> Faster for some things.

If your PC is new and fast. Otherwise it's much faster for most of the things.

> No difference with real sites. A developer may notice some difference in latest features support (not always in favor of Chrome).

I use Firefox (desktop and mobile/Android). You sound like a Firefox evangelist. There are real site where Firefox is buggy or slow. Youtube is one of them. I know it's not technically their fault, but the average user can't fix the site. They can (and do) change their browser. So they use Chrome.

> I use Firefox (desktop

So do I.

> and mobile/Android).

I found it unbearably slow on my Galaxy Note 3 with uBlock. The only reason I tried it was uBlock. So I rarely do. I've switched to Brave.

> You sound like a Firefox evangelist

Kind of, but an honest (if not say cruel) one - I always say Firefox is slow. I also use Chrome on slower machines.

> There are real site where Firefox is buggy or slow. Youtube is one of them

I don't know a single site where Firefox would be buggy but it indeed is slow - on all of them. On YouTube in particular yet still pretty much usable. On a modern PC the difference is easy to ignore. I watch a lot of YouTube in Firefox Every day and I enjoy the "picture in picture" mode. I have hardware decoding enabled and high-FPS and high-res (above 720p) modes disabled as I don't appreciate them.

My daughter on one of our computers had a problem with firefox being able to launch roblox (which frankly roblox's launching mechanisms seem buggy, I don't know why - I assume it is just an uri scheme doing the launching), as a consequence of which my daughter now tends to use Chrome. Which has the benefit of when I get on that computer she uses chrome I use firefox my browsing experience doesn't get littered with an 11 year old's behaviors.

There's profiles in browsers these days, and computers usually have multi account support too.

and 11 year olds grab the computer when you're not there and use it, actually from the age of 8 I think.

But yes, browser profiles and computer multi account support are tools that would solve this problem if they worked for the particular problem description - which fair to say they weren't really designed for that scenario so no reason to expect they would work.

You can have your child use the default profile, and have a shortcut whose target is `firefox -P <adultprofilename> --no-remote` somewhere out of her way. This way, she can just open the browser and use it (on the default profile), and you can click this shortcut to open your profile easily.

Just an option to keep in mind in case you decide to get rid of Chrome in the future.

yeah but the scenario is really, dad is on computer, dad goes in kitchen to make food, child goes gets computer, opens new tab in running browser.

It's really a parenting issue, I could stop her doing it but I don't care enough to do so, and if I don't stop her via parenting there will always be ways she slips through the profile guards.

I always lock <machine> whenever I'm not around it, that'd force the 11 year old to use their own designated non-admin account on the machine too.

> Better supported by many sites

On that note, here's a regular reminder that Slack still doesn't support calls on Firefox for over 3 years now: https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/958645632620748800

Firefox's default scrolling behaviour didn't feel as responsive as Chrome. I changed a few settings below in about:config and now Firefox is a pleasure to use again. With the uBlock Origin, Cookie Autodelete and ClearURLs add-ons, it's better for privacy too.

  general.smoothScroll: false
  mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_y: 300

I really wish someone at Mozilla would take the time to document the settings related to scrolling or make a GUI to simulate the behavior you're setting up. Getting it to work "close enough" to how well it works on chrome took a bit of time and was basically looking through forums where people mentioned what had worked for them.

It's not the most central thing a browser has to do, but every user does it so often and it's a constant annoyance when it doesn't work the way you like/expect it to.

For almost 6 years, I've been using

    general.smoothScroll: false
    mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount: 60

I'd never given mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_y a try. But now with both

    mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount: 60

and your

    mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_y: 300

it's a little too much for me. But ymmv.

mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_y and mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount seem identical in function.

This also helps on Pale Moon, if anyone other than me is still using it.

As a developer, Chrome's tools are pretty good. As a user, the sync options for history and bookmarks are what keep me in. It's definitely not perfect but it's fine for now. I like Firefox but not enough to switch

I was first a Firefox user, switched to Chrome, back to FF and finally to Chrome once I got a smart phone and they added sync

Firefox has sync as well, though, and it can even send tabs to other sessions.

I don't think it has history sharing, that sounds useful.

Firefox syncing can also be self-hosted if you're into that..

FF does indeed have history sharing.

For web development, it's kinda mandatory as nobody wants a site that doesn't work in the most popular browser. That doesn't mean you have to use it for browsing as well though- I found that having Chrome for testing / debugging and Firefox for browsing was quite a productive setup last time I did web dev.

Chrome's dev tools just work better for me, too. For instance, when there's an error in the console, clicking on the filename/line does nothing most of the time in Firefox now. I once fixed it by resetting firefox (per some instructions on the web) but it broken again within days.

Chrome's just works, every time.

Oddly, it sorta worked for me in FF the other day, but it took me to the minified source, which wasn't terribly helpful in an app that I'm writing.

I still use Firefox 99% of the time, but it really pains me that that one feature is so broken.

Firefox's tools are still competitive with Chrome and there are even a few things I miss about them when debugging in Brave. It gives a little joy to know that Mozilla is still competitive in something, but not holding my breath for it to stay that way.

Because Chrome is objectively the best browser.

I left Chrome for Firefox about 2 years ago because Chrome was becoming slow (I was more likely the reason) but Firefox was always “just okay” in many regards. No automatic omnibox search that I enjoyed since probably 2010 in Chrome, for example. That feature alone makes navigation a breeze.

Then last summer probably I switched to Safari. Nice browser, but very barebones if not for the beautiful Reader view, reading list and iOS Keychain integration. Generally smooth but extremely sluggish on the new Facebook site.

I don’t use Chrome because my dislike for Google grows by the day, but I recognize that Chrome is still the best at what it does, and that’s why many still use it.

If Edge supported the keychain I’d probably consider it.

I enjoy Edge and Firefox a lot and never use Chrome. I certainly think that Chrome being Google's browser is grounds enough to look critically at it aside from everything else.

I don’t disagree, I don’t see why my comment was downvoted.

The browser itself is fine, it’s the company that isn’t — and that’s why I don’t use it myself.

If I were to guess, it would be saying something is "objectively the best" followed by personal anecdotes with no objectivity.

I used Firefox for years.

I recently moved back to a Chromium based browser (Edge). Even on a fairly powerful system (16 logi cores/4GHz) it's just noticeably faster. SPAs are actually usable again. Video decoding is hardware accelerated and I can now play 4k videos without every interaction with the browser lagging like crazy.

Firefox is great, theoretically. But even then, Mozilla keep making inane decisions - lately their plans to remove compact mode [0] were in the news. Why?!

[0] https://www.ghacks.net/2021/03/14/mozilla-plans-to-remove-th...

I don't like how mouse scrolling works in Firefox. I can't determine exact details what's wrong (jitter? inertia? delay?), but it feels subtly broken, and after a while it makes me nervous.

I use in on some older machines, where video is choppy on Firefox. I also use it for videoconferencing websites on my work laptop, because with Firefox the fans (sometimes?) are out of control.

The google translate integration.

I missed that too, but it turns out I need ot veery rarely. For when I do, I have a userscript that injects the GTranslate widget into the page. It's basically the same, albeit with uglier button. I don't think it's available as an extension since it by definition injects external scripts into a page, but it's available as a userscript for *-Monkey.

battery life

rPI comes with Chromium.

better devtools compared to any other browser is what keeps me on Chrome

Have you tried Firefox recently? I switched a few months ago and so far I haven't found myself missing anything.

I actually much prefer Firefox devtools. The one thing I occasionally go to Chrome for is when stepping through minified JS code - Firefox doesn't fully resolve the variable names in the map files.

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