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Comment by QuiEgo | Hacker News Reader

I find this whole thing frustrating.

Chrome is going full on user hostile. But, most people use it, so webpages "just work." It's also reasonably good on battery use and memory (as of late 2024 - it's come a long way).

Safari is resource efficient but has very few browser extensions, and sometimes webpages just don't work correctly with it.

Firefox has uBlock but has noticeably worse battery life, and does not honor the host OS UI conventions (right click, look up... is something I use all the time sigh).

None of them make me a happy user.

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For me Firefox with uBlock works just fine. It boggles my mind that so many people are willing to put up with all these ads. Unfortunately, most people don't even know that ad blockers are a thing. I cringe everytime I see a friend of mine opening a youtube video and wait until they can skip the ad. I aleays tell them about Firefox + uBlock Origin, but they typically just shrug it off... Never underestimate the power of inertia.

Ad-blocking, etc, are too important to me personally to delegate to just an extension, hence I use NextDNS, but naturally it can’t manipulate the DOM to tidy up the page.

Luckily I have long-preferred Firefox but I recognize that it’s not for everyone, or hardly anyone for that matter.

Maybe a local pi-hole would do the job properly.

DNS solutions like PiHole don’t work for YT ads because those ads are served from the same domain as YT.

What do you mean by "just an extension"? It does the job very, very well. NextDNS is great, but especially with embedded ads you get a lot of 404s, which the extension can remove without any trace.

You pulled three words completely out of context and misrepresented them. But to be clear, and put another way, (ad) filtering is too important to be left to an extension alone, especially as browsers can no longer be relied upon, and creating layers of filtering like defence in depth is better to avoid single points of failure.

Is there any benchmarking of Firefox vs Chrome?I have not seen any hard data, only anecdotal evidence. I use it on android with no noticeable difference.

I use Firefox everywhere, haven't had a problem.

On macOS, I've seen a few attempts like this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/12n7162/part_3_fin...

but it ends up being very user-workload-specific. Every webpage is different - e.x. Pintrest may be more battery efficient on Safari, but if I never go there, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

For my workflow, Safari and Chrome seem about the same, Firefox seems to land me 10-20% lower on battery after 4 hours or so of use. Unfortunately, I don't have any more scientific data than that.

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