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Comment by dinkumthinkum | Hacker News Reader

Spiraling into irrelevance? Care to explain that?

Completely anecdotal, but all of the people I know who used Firefox now use Chrome.

What compelling reason is there to use Firefox any more? All of the reasons that previously applied to switching to Firefox now apply to switching from Firefox to Chrome.

Chrome is faster, more light weight, more standards compliant, more compatible with broken pages, supports more standards/technologies, more actively updated/enhanced, and leaks less memory than Firefox. It's also open source and cross platform.

The one place Firefox may "win" is by sheer number of extensions. Even then, all the "big" ones (AdBlock, Ghostery, ...) are ported over, and I don't think gimmicky extensions are a big influence for most people.

> Chrome is faster

Sometimes, but it depends. For example, Firefox beats Chrome at JSGameBench here (a gaming benchmark including canvas hardware acceleration and JS),

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-chrome-20-fire...

Also, while Chrome wins on most standard JS benchmarks, real-world JS is different. New code often runs faster in Firefox than Chrome. For example, the Linux emulator in JS ran 2x faster in Firefox when it came out, and I can link you to bugs I've filed on Chrome where it currently runs code 10x-15x slower than Firefox.

> more light weight

Many browser shootouts find Chrome to use more memory than Firefox, especially with large amounts of tabs. For example, Firefox beat Chrome at both memory benchmarks here

http://lifehacker.com/5917714/browser-speed-tests-chrome-19-...

> more standards compliant

Definitely not so. First, while Chrome has various standards implemented first, so does Firefox (a few examples off the top of my head: anisotropic filtering in WebGL, Mouselock, various JS ES6 features like WeakMaps, etc.).

Also, Chrome ships with a lot of non-standards-compliant technologies that are enabled by default. For example, WebSQL, NaCl, Flash.

> It's also open source

Chromium is, Chrome is not. Chrome contains a lot of additional closed source code, from a PDF reader to a software shader engine.

Bottom line, there are plenty of good reasons to use either Chrome or Firefox. What is important is both drive each other to do better.

The big one for me was, when flash crashes in Chrome, only 1 tab is affected. In Firefox the whole browser crashes. And no, disabling flash and avoiding it is not an option, not with online video and music playing through flash. One day when flash is gone this won't be a problem but we haven't reached that day yet.

My usage is now 99% Chrome, 1% Firefox (for testing purposes), and keep in mind I was one of those die-hard Firefox fans. I bought my Firefox t-shirt from the Mozilla store, installed it on school computers, supported it from the beginning and everything. Now I'm all Chrome and so is my whole family.

Looking back, the 3 main reasons why I loved Firefox was that was open source, which was emotionally appealing, its call-to-action was to end the tyranny of Internet Explorer, it was standards compliant, and it had extensions. Chrome now does those very same things, some much better than Firefox, and is catching up to the amount of useful extensions. And it looks and behaves better.

I will say this, Firefox has one thing that I really love over Chrome. When you set Firefox and Chrome to remember your last tabs open and load them on each startup, Firefox doesn't load all 80 tabs immediately I open it. Instead it only loads the currently selected tab and leaves the others unloaded, thus speading things up and preventing a system slowdown. Chrome on the other hand loads all 80 tabs at once, so I have to wait 15 seconds before the browser becomes responsive again.

> The big one for me was, when flash crashes in Chrome, only 1 tab is affected. In firefox the whole browser crashes.

Firefox has run Flash in a separate process for a long time now (2 years, I think?) - so a Flash crash only brings down Flash, not the browser or even the tab for that matter (the rest of the web page will still run).

Huh...I have the latest Firefox 14.0.1 and about 2 days ago I had the whole browser just slow down, crash, and self destruct because of 1 tab. I restarted it, reloaded all the tabs and it crashed again as soon as that 1 tab loaded. I think it was a news aggregator too, so it's not like it was an experimental html5 site or anything. I had to quickly kill it before it loaded on next startup. Perhaps maybe it's not flash then?

same for me...i'm using ff on linux, flash runs in a process called plugin-container. you can even kill it, which just kills the flash content in browser pages.

Yeah, manually killing the flash process is useful. If I see my CPU is being hogged for no reason, killing flash generally fixes it (and Firefox keeps running).

when flash crashes in Chrome, only 1 tab is affected

At least in Chrome for Mac, when Flash crashes, it crashes in every tab.

Chrome and Firefox run all instances of Flash, from all tabs, in a single plugin process. I think this demonstrates that sandboxing plugins may be less for security as for protecting the browser from Adobe's bugs. :)

Completely anecdotal, but all of the people I know who used Firefox now use Chrome.

Well, it's only an ancedote. The data suggests something different.

> all of the people I know who used Firefox now use Chrome.

Have you (or they) tried Firefox lately? I made the switch exclusively to Chrome and Chromium back in 2009: Firefox felt slow and bloated, and Webkit's tools and inspector seemed far better and smoother than Firebug.

And then three years passed.

A lot has changed.

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