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Comment by twodayslate | Hacker News Reader

I used to be an avid Firefox user. I switched to Chrome because it was faster and had all the same extensions I used on Firefox. Why should I switch back? Chrome is still faster no?

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Nowadays Firefox typically uses less memory than Chrome (though of course this depends on exactly what you measure and how). It's highly debatable which is faster -- this depends even more on how you measure -- but Chrome certainly isn't miles ahead. Chrome may have all the extensions you currently use, but Firefox still has a lot more; perhaps the next one you'd find useful will be Firefox-only.

None of which means that you actually should switch back: Chrome is a great web browser. But it isn't obvious that you shouldn't.

If you use a lot of tabs and don't close your browser for long periods of time Chrome is vastly superior to Firefox (and all other browsers) in terms of memory use and stability.

Even if you don't use any add-ons at all. I've always taken issue with Firefox, it has the broadest support and community centered around add-ons - but if you actually use any add-on the browser becomes completely useless. I've been bitten so many times in the past that I barely trust any add-ons on any browser, eventhough I've only had issues with Firefox.

Hopefully it will be better now.

I have 396 tabs in FF right now. That would be impossible to handle for Chromium on my laptop. It starts heavily sweating at 25. Does Chrom(e|ium) do lazy loading of tabs these days? That'd be the main point that makes Firefox much more usable for many tabs to me.

I have over 1000 tabs open in Chrome. I would never be able to reach 500 tabs in firefox before giving up.

> If you use a lot of tabs and don't close your browser for long periods of time Chrome is vastly superior to Firefox (and all other browsers) in terms of memory use and stability.

That has been the opposite of my experiences, I am sitting on 100 tabs with 800MB of memory used in firefox. Sometimes I have 200+ with 1.5 GB of ram used.

Actually, just looking at chrome://memory-redirect/ in Chrome, it compares firefox's and chrome's memory usage. Chromium 1,394,260k 877,088k (about 40 tabs) Firefox 889,576k 62,692k (about 100 tabs).

Now this is on Linux, but I haven't used Firefox on windows recently to compare properly. One good explanation for all this is that the tab-per-process model means that you have a memory overhead for each process, so you naturally have more memory usage per tab.

> If you use a lot of tabs and don't close your browser for long periods of time Chrome is vastly superior to Firefox (and all other browsers) in terms of memory use and stability.

But not in terms of ui, tabs shrink till they hold no text in chrome instead of scrolling like in firefox.

I love the way chrome handles tabs, especially the way they shrink. The icon is enough to distinguish it and even if there is no icon for that page you already know its appromixmate position and can quickly find it (which you just can't when everything scrolls and you have no idea where you are).

The firefox tab scroll feature is probably the feature I hate the most, in any browser (yes, you can disable it - but bad defaults stink and you can't just go around and change the settings in everyones browser).

First time I've come across someone that doesn't hate it :o

The icon frequently isn't enough to distinguish tabs especially if you have a bunch of reddit/hacker news/wikipedia/google/tvtropes tabs open. Once it has shrunk to nothing there is little chance of knowing what any tab is except when going back and forth between a couple of tabs. Firefox also has a drop down list and lets you switch to a tab by entering a partial title/address in the address bar.

I remember Firefox used to have the bad behaviour like chrome(back in the 1.5 days) and I would occasionally use an IE shell called crazy browser to do my extremely many tab surfing(I also used 2 browsers partially so I could surf something else while 70+ political blogs or webcomics were loading since browsers tended to freeze for a long time on that back in those days).

I much prefer the Firefox tab scroll feature, compared to Chrome's way of handling tabs. The handy "show all tabs" dropdown is nice as well. Between the two, I find managing large numbers of tabs to be easier and less painful in FF than in Chrome.

YMMV.

I hated it too and then I installed the "Tree style tabs" add-on. It's great, they should add that functionality in the vanilla Firefox IMO.

Once the tabs get small chrome hides all the icons. It's awful. Whereas firefox can be configured to shrink tabs indefinitely and it never stops showing the icons.

I don't use Chrome because I think it is bad for the web to be influenced so heavily by an Advertising company.

Ultimately, Chrome exists for Google to increase it's advertising profits. It's a clear conflict of interests.

Plus, Firefox is a great browser and works really well on my reasonably high spec'd laptop, so it's not so difficult to be idealistic here.

I wonder if I'm the only person that feels anxious that Gmail + Google Calendar + Chrome + Google Drive + Google Search + Google Docs + Android Phone + Google Maps + Google Voice + ... gives one company an astoundingly deep and unfettered view of exactly everything you are doing, who you are talking to, and even what you are thinking (to the extent it is reflected in those activities) at every waking moment of your life. Rational nervousness?

Maybe, but so far Google has behaved much better that any other company would have in their exact position. Give Apple and Microsoft the same market dominance in online ads and search, and I think we would be a lot worse. Those 2 are behaving pretty badly even when they have much smaller market share.

While some of those things don't have alternatives, some certainly have. You just need to use them.

> Gmail + Google Calendar + Chrome + Google Drive + Google Search + Google Docs + Android Phone + Google Maps + ...

What about: Gmail + Google Calendar + Firefox + Dropbox/Wuala + DuckDuckGo + Live Docs + Android Phone + Nokia Maps + ...

Of course, you could go Google free if you want, I just pointed the alternative that doesn't regress in usability and convenience from what you currently use.

I actually still POP my mail (if you can believe it), so I haven't yet adopted Gmail, but I feel the lure. If I want to share my archives across any of my machines, I have to constantly sync them, and I don't really have remote access to my mail, unless I leave it on the server for X days, and then I don't benefit from deep search. But I do get access to my mail and archives going back to 1998 while I'm offline, and that's definitely a plus.

I've been looking for a good, self-hosted version of Gmail that can replace my POP for a while, but the main reason why the lure of Google is so strong is convenience. And cost. And to some extent, reliability. Living a Google-free life is definitely doable but it can come at a cost (time, expense, convenience, functionality, reliability). That's the main tradeoff.

If you use IMAP then you have access to all your mail from anywhere, using a standard protocol.

GMail supports IMAP, but then so do many other mail servers.

(You can also use a web front end like RoundCube, if you want to.)

I use FF for Vimperator/Pentadactyl. There's no equivalent in Chrome (and never will be because of Chrome's design choices), and it makes every other browser's interface feel hopelessly pedestrian to me now.

Precisely. I was a diehard chrome-lover until I tried pentadactyl.

Now I realize that any tiny reduction in perceived speed (not due to slower JS or loading, but probably some of chrome's UI speed tricks) is made up for by the lack of a context switch between terminal and browser.

Unfortunately, pentadactyl doesn't seem to work with Firefox 15, so I guess I'll have to stay at 14. I tried both 1.0rc1 and the latest nightly and neither work.

I just switched back to vimperator for the time being. It's not so terrible.

TreeViewTab extension. Until an equivalent shows up for Chrome I will never...no, strike that, I am physically unable to switch.

It pains me because I have to restart Firefox every few days or else it turns into a slow, memory-eating blackhole. But, sigh, I cannot live without that extension.

I agree with this. I use the similarly named: tree style tab it is the bees knees, tree style tabs on the left of the screen, its simple and genius. Its the reason firefox is my default browser, despite its gradual slowing as it keeps running

Whoops, this is probably the extension I use. I'm horrible with names =)

When this happens, please visit about:memory and then file a bug or email me the contents.

I did the ff-chrome-ff switcheroo a number of times. Now I generally use both: I find that chrome is a snappier startup and has a better flash runtime (since it does its own rather than relying on adobe). Firefox is more stable / uses less memory for a larger number of tabs.

I do believe in the mozilla mission for an open web, and it's got fairly comparable performance overall, so I use it for my main browsing / firebug. Chrome's for flash-heavy sites and playing with webrtc occasionally.

Inspector on chrome has certainly become quite good -- I've missed firebug less and less over time as I started using it. Though Firefox's new built-in developer tools are really sweet and might add enough functionality for me to miss in the near future. They're adding a command line thing that is super cool!!

> rather than relying on adobe

I may be over-thinking this, but in case you didn't know, Flash Player in Chrome is still developed mostly by Adobe. Chrome has a different plugin API, I think, and some extra sandboxing, but the core parts of Flash Player in all browsers come from the same Adobe-owned codebase, including Chrome's bundled version.

I find this true as well. Right now I have Chrome open with a number of JS heavy tabs (gmail, analytical, Wordpress dashboard because it apparently hates Firefox). I'll also open up Youtube videos on Chrome because Firefox is always laggy with flash videos.

But the bulk of my tabs are open in Firefox, and I prefer Firebug over the Chrome console for development

Firefox support for WebRTC should be coming soon: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/04/webrtc-efforts-underway-at...

I recently switched back to Firefox (as main browser), as its speed improved (for me it even started to feel leaner than Chromium recently), and happily I could again use NoScript and a browser which doesn't send so much information to Google under the cover.

Firefox extensions, from my experience, are much better - even when there are Chrome equivalents. Plus I don't trust the Chrome extension store, whereas I do trust the Mozilla store (all addons, unless marked, are checked by staff).

Same here (used Firefox, switched to Chrome), but I recently switched back. The only reason: I started using Windows on my desktop PC, and the font rendering in Chrome is horrible on Windows.

These days Firefox feels just as snappy as Chrome to me, though this has only recently been the case in my experience.

I know JS isn't the only thing that makes browsers feel slow, but Chrome 20.0 just scored 276ms on Sunspider on my machine and FF 15 (alpha) got 248ms. Honestly I haven't noticed FF "feel" slow in at least a year.

I am also a happy FireFox user, but recently I have found a growing number of websites that won't even let you use their functionality unless you are using Chrome or Safari (Fluid for one: https://www.fluidui.com/editor/live/). It must have something to do with FF's support of certain capabilities, although specifically what I'm not sure.

This is pushing me to use Chrome for those reasons - so I hope that FF fills whatever gap is causing sites to exclude FF (oh, and IE, Opera, etc.)

Half the time the UA sniffing has nothing to do with capabilities and just has to do with people only wanting to test in one browser and use only one set of prefixed CSS properties...

> I am also a happy FireFox user, but recently I have found a growing number of websites that won't even let you use their functionality unless you are using Chrome or Safari

This seems unlikely as FireFox user share was bigger then Chrome until recently and is much bigger then Safari. Except for Mobile, where I think the dominance of Android/ios has led to a lot of use of webkit specific features.

It's not that unlikely when Google is the author of some of these sites, sadly. At this point they seem to have a policy of writing Chrome-specific things first and then maybe making it work in other browsers and maybe not.

I find (especially on my phone) that sites often have no idea what does and doesn't work in recent versions of Firefox. Sadly, it is worth spoofing your user agent to check whether or not they are right.

I use both browsers, but Firefox is still the primary browser. The add-ons selection is not matched by Chrome.

AdBlock sucks on Chrome due to Google's architecture choices.

Architecture choices or business model?

I'm not close enough to divine the details, but I'm talking about Chrome plugins not being able to block requests. This might appear to be a facility to protect advertising vectors, but I don't know for sure.

http://superuser.com/questions/257102/why-doesnt-chromes-adb...

This used to be true, not thing have changed since then. Chrome didn't have any WebRequest api, so Adblock Plus for Chrome loaded some JS/CSS in the page and tried to hide/block as much ads as possible. [1]

Since Chrome 14 (i'm not totally sure about this version) WebRequest api where implemented, but only as experimental api (you would have to enable them from chrome://flags), and Chrome >17 enable them by default.

So Adblock Plus >1.2 beta [2] and Chrome >17 should block ads just like Firefox. It's possible that there are some small difference, but that's likely a bug and should be reported.

[1] http://adblockplus.org/development-builds/experimental-adblo...

[2] http://adblockplus.org/releases/adblock-plus-12-beta-for-goo...

I'm not sure what's the situation with other adblocker for chrome.

Been a firefox user since the beginning, and still haven't found a reason to switch to chrome. A "faster" browser doesn't convince me, and I like firefox's UI teaking possibilities. Besides, never had those memory hogging problems everyone talks about (even on a 1GB ram linux desktop).

Why do you think it's still faster?

I have never understood Chrome users.

Chrome is easily the worst browser on the market, short of IE <= 7. It is slow and grossly unstable. Across multiple computers and OSes, across the past few years, this has been my consistent experience with Chrome, so it's not just my current install.

I would rather use IE 8 than Chrome. As a web dev, I loathe my time testing in Chrome. When a bug report comes in, more times than not, the answer to "which browser?" is "Chrome" because V8 is buggy as hell. And the developer tools are simply worthless because they inject markup into the freaking DOM.

I don't like the fact that Chrome acts as a spider for Google's search engine.

Nope.

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