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Comment by throwaway123x2 | Hacker News Reader

With FireFox becoming more and more unusable, does anybody with experience know if Vivaldi or Brave are objectively better (or faster or more stable)?

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Honest question, how is FireFox becoming unusable for you? I am using it on both Linux and Windows and do not really have any problems with it. Sure, sometimes a web site does not load properly but more often than not is because some add-ons like ad-blocker and no-script are intervening for me. In other cases, its obvious that the website was never tested in anything but chrome. In those cases where I really need it, I have some chromium-based browser as backup on all my devices. But daily work on FireFox is just fine for me.

Your comment reminds me of how people were complaining for a long time that FireFox had become so slow, while I was browsing with multiple dozens of open tabs on my 8GB system all along. I do not want to say that this is not the case for you, but I honestly cannot reproduce it on three different laptops.

Agreed, it has been my daily driver for years and I have never had any problems with it. I think the guy your replied to is just riding on the Mozilla hate train.

To be fair, Mozilla does deserve 99.999% of the hate it gets, but that doesn't justify making dishonest claims about Firefox just to stick it to Mozilla.

With Firefox 93, I was restarting the browser 3 or 4 times a day because it kept crashing while playing videos. It would start with videos loading but not playing, and then moments later the whole browser would lock up and leave no choice but to kill it and restart. So far Firefox 94 seems to have that issue resolved, but that experience with 93 was very nearly enough to make me quit.

(I should probably mention, another long-running complaint I have with Firefox is the community's habit of gaslighting anybody who talks about Firefox's problems with the usual "I never experience that so your experiences are invalid" So please spare me this time.)

I had this issue in my Firefox Nightly for about a day. Next update or so resolved the issue for me. Obviously unstable bleeding edge isn't for everyone, but I does have it's benefits at times.

Yeah, I totally understand what you are saying. One should point out however that my parent comment is pretty much the same, i.e implying that 'it's become unstable and slow for everyone'. Not that I want to blame them, we all have a limited point of view and comments on the internet often sound harsh simply by negligence and not intentionally.

I'm also curious about this. I finally upgraded from a 4GB RAM system to something modern, but FireFox was my primary on that machine for years with no issues. Firefox mobile has atrocious performance for me, but their desktop app is solid and it's what I'm viewing HN on right now. I especially love the silent updates.

EDIT: by "modern" I mean I'm on an I5 with 8GB RAM lol. I do have a Lenovo Legion 7 with a 3080 but use it only for gaming. This I5/8GB combo is my daily driver and works great with Firefox, loads instantly and I can have a dozen or more tabs open no problem.

What's your problem with FF specifically? I keep hearing people complain, but it seems like the same ol browser to me?

I switched to Brave this past year... so far so good. Firefox is fine, but I need a chromium browser for development, so chromium - google seems like a good alternative. I tried Vivaldi a couple of years ago but it didn't stick... will try again.

I switched from firefox to vivaldi about a year ago. So far it's been an improvement, tab stacks especially in my opinion.

Mozilla should switch to chromium.

No. Competition is healthy and that includes browser rendering engines too.

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