Hacker News Reader

Comment by helmholtz | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this is a good moment to rant, but I just don't get what the fuck it is that Chrome does that people just _will not_ get off the Chromium ride. They will happily bend over a table for Google/MS, all in order to not have to use Firefox. I've used Firefox for a decade and a half now, and I've never understood it. It has never failed me, and I've never needed anything else.

Email? Works. News websites? They work. Banking sites? Yep. Google Maps in 3D? Works. Which special, golden webshit is it that breaks on Firefox? And what do people mean Firefox is slow? I've tried Chrome, and boy either we live in differen universes, or there isn't, in fact, any difference in speed.

View on HN

There was a few too many years when Google Chrome was much faster. Used less CPU, battery life was noticably better on laptops etc.

I find this no longer the case, and I am now back on Firefox :)

Firefox, for me, was very slow between 2019 and 2021. I used Firefox exclusively from 2016 to 2020, until I had to stop, because it just became unusable.

Now in 2023 Firefox is fast again, but so is Edge. As soon as Edge was usable, I ditched Chrome, and will only consider Firefox again if they add native vertical tabs.

My point is, browsers are continuously updated, so any claim about a characteristic must be specified in some timeframe.

Quick note, Brave has Edge style vertical tabs now if you want the good stuff with a more privacy-respecting browser.

https://imgur.com/a/dAAysvy

Yeah totally agree. Ok tbh firefox was slow and heavy a few years ago, but that has not been the case anytime recently.

Honestly, imo for a decade or so now (since the times of the old opera), most browsers are more or less the same utility-wise, with only minor differences between them. Most of them nowadays are chrome clones anyway. And if there is a feature in one and not the other, there will certainly be some extension that adds it. So I do not see why not at least go for the best privacy option.

All my passwords & bookmarks are on chrome and to a lesser extent also Safari because for most of the last decade they were head and shoulders above Firefox in extensions support and speed/features I cared about and Firefox is still not meaningfully good enough to make me switch. There's just nothing especially compelling about it.

Not until a few years ago, Firefox on macOS just kept spinning the fans because it used that much CPU, for no reason. I stopped using FF since then, haven't bothered to install it again, might do it in the near future.

I tried using Firefox last year, I did for a few months. But it's the slowest out of all the major browsers on macOS. So I'm back to using Safari with Chrome/Edge for the few sites that don't work in it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com