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Comment by Melatonic | Hacker News Reader

Honestly modern Firefox works better than Chrome for me at everything - better memory management - faster loading times - better extension support.

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There is only one set of site where Chrome performs better than Firefox: sites made by Google. I can't help but assume that it's intentional.

Unfortunately, for many people those are very important sites.

The Internet desperately needs some government to step in and force Google to spin off Chrome as an independent company. It's the only hope we have of stopping Google from completely ruining the Internet.

In this era we need to move to the idea of "effective monopolies". Just because Chrome isn't an absolute monopoly, doesn't mean it can't essentially dictate whatever direction it wants in a mostly unchecked manner.

Even American "monopoly" legislation, and our horrible "only care about the consumer" opinion on monopolies has ALWAYS supported breaking up companies that don't have 100% of the industry because they do anti-consumer shit with whatever percentage control they have.

And yet, despite being widely understood as purposely handicapped on non-chrome browsers by using a specific, internal library that is especially optimized inside the V8 javascript engine, Youtube works just fine on Firefox.

There is no "it's slow" excuse to not use firefox. Even if it took a full second longer per page load, WHICH IT EMPIRICALLY DOES NOT, that would still be an acceptable price to pay to not HELP ONE MEGACORP LITERALLY HAVE FINAL SAY OVER ANYTHING THAT HAPPENS ON THE INTERNET

On Linux the one area where I feel (nothing scientific) that Chrome is faster is for JavaScript code execution. But I still use Firefox instead of Chrome.

I used to feel that too but not anymore. Now when I boot up chrome to test something I don't notice a difference. I think it's improved quite a bit over the last few years.

I mean, chrome is the slowest js engine at the moment: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/graphs?timerange=3...

I love it.

Although currently I am mostly using Chrome for web dev, and Firefox for everything else. On my current project, FF just couldn't seem to handle the churn of constantly loading heavy pages, dev tools etc.

I should switch to a chromium really.

Firefox is great but I can't make it my daily driver because of two issues:

- Terrible font kerning on canvas (Google Docs, Spreadsheets) (probably a decade old bug)

- Doesn't sync icons in favorites bar (which I use without accompanying text, so, big deal)

Never noticed the fonts, but I noticed the vastly reduced image quality in Chrome on many websites that scaled down images.

So, having slightly harder to read fonts, and the wrong favicons, is enough to help google own the web.

Jeeze. C'mon, this is exactly what I'm bitching about. How horrific would Google have to be in their position of power over the web before you finally are willing to suffer even a minimal drawback to prevent it?

Yes, and maybe, there's a lesson for you to take from this: such small things may accumulate into world overlordship of an evil corporation. Do you remember how Google Chrome gained marketshare over Internet Explorer? It was all minor annoyances with IE like slow startup, a single page crashing the whole browser, unmovable tabs, big download windows, having multiple search bars. That was it[1]! Chrome never promised "an entirely new web experience", but fixed all the minor annoyances that had lingered during IE's dominance and never been fixed.

So, guilt-tripping users into using Firefox is a terrible idea, and might actually backfire. This is an institutional crisis we've been experiencing by both Firefox and Google making bad product management decisions. Firefox has come a long way, and I applaud it for it, but it's not my fault that Firefox has been so behind in the race. Keep blaming people as much as you want, that's the truth.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080903104921/http://www.google...

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