Why I'm switching back to Firefox
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The most popular alternatives to Firefox are Google's Chrome and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. I doubt these alternative browsers would exist if they were not useful for Google's and Microsofts main businesses. These companies produce web browsers to support their main products/services. The rationale behind AOL Explorer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Browser) was similar. In settings like those privacy and other interests of web users are easily sacrificed.
Out of all the big browsers, Mozilla Firefox comes closest to being a web browser for the sake of web browsing.
Joe consumer, comprising an ever increasing majority of the Internet population, simply doesn't care about which browser she is using. More often it is a result of what randomly got installed as the default through their last foray of random clicking and purchases. As a result, Chrome's regular placement on the Google homepage (and IE's default-installation) give it obvious "competitive" edges.
Of course when discussing browser market share this is rarely mentioned, instead popularity is usually attributed to fractional nanosecond differences in rendering time and so on that 99% of users never notice, and simply won't care about even if you told them.
(Edit: there is another reason to appreciate Mozilla in here, in that their efforts seem less focused on branding and positioning than they are much more so on function and vision. Mozilla's endgame shares a certain utilitarian theme compatible with what the masses seem to expect from technology (it's a "computer" with the "Internet" on it, not a "Chromebook" with "Google" on it), than does just about every other company in this space who are using their platforms to sell people more shit they don't need)
Chrome - McAfee
IE9 - Chrome & Google Toolbar
Firefox - McAfee
But you can't convince people to drop Java if they as much have one site/app depending on it. I'd love to install an alternative non-Oracle Java (not because they're significantly more secure, but to diversify the ecosystem a bit, and to stick it to Oracle for bundling that Ask toolbar), but I haven't figured out how to install them in Win7 yet. (that's not for other people btw, but for the computers at the kids centre I teach)
Still, what I wanted to say, the reason I do give them Chrome (or Firefox, or Opera), is because I'm absolutely unfamiliar with IE, no idea how to enable the proper security settings (or if there are any) and I do want to help many people with an AdBlocker (which also can do wonders for one's Internet security, btw).
There are other good reasons why the security is better, with the only downside being the invasion of privacy, where Google are no worse than others, so pick your poison.
Just to add, users rarely choose their car at all. If we're talking about the unwashed masses here, then the primary reason Ford, Toyota, GM, or Volkswagon are popular at all is almost entirely due to happenstance. Joe consumer, comprising an ever increasing majority of the car buying population, simply doesn't care about which car she is driving. More often it is a result of what randomly went up for sale at the corner car lot. As a result, Ford's regular placement on the edge of the car lot give it "competitive" edges.
"Joe Sixpack" makes sense to me. Someone who thinks computer experts are elite, and doesn't know much about computers.
The "tech savvy" only differ in one sense: they are incredibly more delusional about their choices than the rest of the planet. I certainly haven't taken the time to study Chrome's design in depth (or for that matter Firefox's), and probably never will. My reasoning for using Firefox is due to a vague-warm-fuzzy ideological alignment I seem to have with Mozilla and their approach to software. Nothing quantitative, and certainly nothing adequately logical that I could use it to command authority over anyone else on the planet. In fact exactly the kind of thought processes that "joe user" experiences ("I like the icon.. it bounces"). 23 years spent in front of a machine, and that's still pretty much me.
but, if someone says that, you know exactly what they mean. seems like a valid response to me any way you slice it.
p.s. this kind of attitude is part of the problem.
How so? It does not tell you if it's Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera or Safari. My mom refers to the Internet as "google".
that's how she browses the internet then? in her case the application wouldn't matter to greatly if her point of reference is the Google search box
To make the example clearer, I've personally had the experience of asking someone what browser they use and getting "Yahoo" (as in the Yahoo.com homepage) as an answer.
This highlights your confusion. The set of people that have average computer savvy contains all kinds of races and economic standing. It has nothing to do with "working class," wealth, or racial status and everything to do with computer skills.
> You don't have to have a college degree and a six figure income to be discerning about technology.
I'm not going to point any fingers, but I just want to say someone has some massive insecurities.
> The set of people that have average computer savvy contains all kinds of races and economic standing
How is that different from what I'm saying? Saying the "unwashed masses" don't care about what browser they use is inaccurate. That's all.
To the users, browsers are mostly homogeneous, and choosing one over the other incurs in almost no cost (real or of opportunity). It stands to reason that most people (regardless of class) don't have any incentive to care, and therefore they don't.
The market share of IE (and the usage habits of people of both normal and more advanced tech knowledge) points to the fact that people frequently DO use IE (or safari) because it's pre-installed and only change when it just happens (chrome getting installed and set as default by various other installers being a good example)
The Big 3 made it through the miserable 70's and 80's mostly because they had dealers on every corner while superior Japanese brands were fighting to get lots built anywhere.
However chrome became stable. And then it built on it -- multi processing made one site not crash the browser. Startup speeds were fast, etc. Eventually I switched. It was a minimalistic interface that I could teach to my grandparents. And performance was ALWAYS great.
So the question remains: Switch back to FF? I vote no, until they finally implement what IE has done since IE9 -- multi processing, or solve the damn problem in other ways. Also chrome's sandbox is pretty much unbypassed except for a couple of times in pwn2own (all the exploits are already patched)
Mozilla focusing on the user while google on profit is a point, but it is not a selling point. Show me features. So far chrome's porn mode has been an innovator in the space, and firefox had to hack that mode on to their browser. So from an objective perspective... idk.
But now I'll try Firefox again because of this post. :)
How was it faster than Opera? I have never seen another browser give you the previous page instantly when pressing the back button. Chrome needs to start its spinners for a few ms and then reflow the page, Opera just does it. I'm hoping that, with the move to WebKit, I can switch back to it.
EDIT: I just checked, Firefox does this too. It didn't, at the time that Chrome was released, though.
And the speed people refer to is JavaScript execution. There is no doubt that V8 was much faster than competitors a few years back.
[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5281540 Unfortunately, the original article looks to have been removed.
01 Sep 2008: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser...
TraceMonkey was in the works since late Spring 2008. Apple was also doing more advanced JS performance work before Chrome launched.
V8 had the world-class VM team and at least two years lead (Lars Bak went to Google in 2004; I met him in August 2006 when he was definitely working on V8), so it indeed was fastest at the usual benchmarks, but not by the sometimes-asserted 3x factor.
Maciej Stachowiak of Apple and I were both noting back then how V8's advantage seemed more like 1.3x at the time, but I don't have performance charts from Sep 2008 at hand. Perhaps someone reading does.
V8 got faster over time, as did other engines. Again, it's an excellent piece of work and tops by many measures, but not all -- see http://kripken.github.com/mloc_emscripten_talk/#/17 for two large benchmarks of three where SpiderMonkey beats V8 currently.
/be
I remember, vividly, in Firefox: I would middle-click on a Slashdot link to load it in the background while reading the current one. My focused tab would begin to hesitate and sometimes altogether freeze for several seconds. In Chrome, only the spinning tab would be affected by their bloated DOM.
Try opera, there's a reason he's pointing out that it is different.
It took about one year and a half of JavaScript engine development for Chrome to surpass Opera in performance.
Since then, Opera has not been the faster browser anymore.
Before giving up, and switching to FF, I tried the --disable-gpu --disable-software-rasterizer switches to disable the GPU process but that prevented videos from playing at full speed. Some people here mentioned Chrome runs great on their rigs with 16GB of RAM. But for the rest of the world, Google should force their devs to use Chrome on a machine with a mere 2GB.
How is it that sites like anandtech and investing.com run fine on my old iPhone 3GS, yet take up 256+ MB in Chrome, more RAM than the phone has? Somehow the 3 year old phone loads and displays the sites smooth as butter. Apple is doing something right or Google is doing something terribly wrong to webkit.
You can't install buggy plugins or extensions on your iPhone. Try removing some of your Chrome extensions down and you'll be back in the 50MB range.
It's clear from my own experience, posts here, and benchmarks that Chrome has strayed from it's original design goals of being a lightweight browser. My reference to this iPhone was just to point out that I think it's a issue with Chrome itself, and not the underlining webkit browser.
It's clear that it's fashionable in certain circles to claim this. It's also clear that these claims are based on subjective impressions rather than anything measured, which makes me suspicious given that an effect of that magnitude should be obvious and I haven't seen any sign of it.
If you have actual data showing that the current Chrome browser performs worse than it used to, I'm sure the Chrome development team would love to see it.
The generic argument is empty. Firefox is good for Mozilla's business. Same for Opera.
The business cases for IE and Chrome are significantly different. Distributing IE with Windows benefits users for the same reasons that Ubuntu Linix distros ship with Firefox - they providing a rational and reasonable path from the act of stuffing an install disk into a drive to the point where the user is surfing the internet and possibly completing the installation. IE allows windows to be used right out of the box.
It's hard to make that sort of case for Chrome - but easy for Safari. Chrome was primaily developed to improve Google's data mining and reduce search server loads by collecting keystokes from the address bar.
Is that really more believable than internal corporate interests deciding that it threatened Word?
-- Bill Gates, 1998 a memo to the Office product group[2]
Seems like the guy in charge knew when to actively "stop putting effort into" things and intentionally sabotage the open web when necessary.
I suspect that the corporate interests have long known that IE is not a sales critical feature.
You can blame software designers at Microsoft for that decision (or lack of decision), but I'm fairly sure that dev's at Microsoft are on the "fulfill the design" side of developing...
bubble.....
Please stop this immature behavior.
Though in this case I think maybe there is a third option.. ignorance maybe?
Netscape was a startup and its founder had a Fuck You Money exit before it met its fate as a corporate subsidiary managed across a continent. The legacy of IE6 lives with us because of suboptimal architectural decisions by web developers. Yet, the web is escaping it - unlike the warts of JavaScript.
IE bootstrapped access to Navigator for the general population of computer users. People got Navigator using IE to download it from Netscape's website - just like they get Chrome, Firefox, and Opera today.
Until IE shipped with Windows, the only way a typical user was going to get Netscape was on a floppy disk via the shareware community or perhaps from a BBS. It wasn't being downloaded through AOL or Compuserve and if it was, what would one have done with it August 1995?
It would be naive to ignore Netscape's IPO occurred one week before IE 1.0.
There were no IE days before Netscape. Netscape came first, and IE was originally just a defensive response. That's not to deny that there was a period where IE was arguably a superior browser, but IE simply would not have have been created were it not for Netscape becoming the first mainstream browser.
Had Microsoft not shipped a browser with Windows, browsers would have remained obscure shareware like Netscape Navigator and AOL or Compuserve would have been the standard online experience of most people for much longer.
"A new competitor "born" on the Internet is Netscape. Their browser is dominant, with 70% usage share, allowing them to determine which network extensions will catch on. They are pursuing a multi-platform strategy where they move the key API into the client to commoditize the underlying operating system. They have attracted a number of public network operators to use their platform to offer information and directory services. We have to match and beat their offerings including working with MCI, newspapers, and other who are considering their products."
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/07/internet-tidal-wave.htm...
He seems to view it as a most serious threat. I think if he thought it would remain non-threatening they would never have made a browser.
70% of browser usage was probably less than 1,000,000 browsers in 1994 and those primarily in large commercial and educational settings. The consumer internet didn't exist because the web wasn't viable at 9600 baud (2738 websites of which 370 were .com in June '94).
http://www.mit.edu/~mkgray/net/web-growth-summary.html
It's obvious that once Microsoft got serious about the web, they quickly moved beyond MCI and newspapers of the memo to a vision of browsers "on every desk and in every home."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSjfmme4hpM
The scale at which Microsoft distributed browsers made the web commercially viable in the way we know it today. It's easy to forget that Netscape was bundled with AOL - keyword: walled garden.
I bet the adoption was faster that it would have been if microsoft hadn't integrated IE. Of course, if microsoft hadn't integrated IE it's quite possible company would have died by now (or been a footnote of desktop computing history - like IBM). They didn't really have much of a choice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer
"0.4 Netscape September 9, 1994 First public beta release" "1.0 Netscape December 15, 1994 First non-beta release"
Right? We would have had AJAX and DHTML so much sooner if it wasn't for Microsoft holding things back.
This statement is not just technically ignorant; it's downright absurd. More than probably any company, Google lives and dies by the web as a platform. Chrome is Google's best way to influence and improve that platform. It's why Google previously had a team of mostly former Mozilla/Netscape employees contributing fulltime to Firefox (including one of the original creators of Firefox), and why that team eventually chose to create Chrome. When the web is so essential to your business, it only makes sense to invest heavily in its improvement, and ensure you have a say in its trajectory.
I'm not saying Chrome is a data-mining tool (though I don't doubt that it could be doing some of that), but it's also not a purely altruistic contribution to the community. Google is the big developer that's doing lots of beautification and really contributing to the growth of the city, but Firefox is the community activist that's trying to make sure all the developers play by the rules that benefit everyone, not just them.
You mean by pushing Google Mail, search, docs and other Google properties.
There's a flip side to this coin; Firefox exists to support Mozilla's main business, which is the web.
This also means that Mozilla staunchly and without fail opposes any technological shift that could unseat the entrenched market position of the existing web technology stack, even if it would improve things for end users.
Google developed SPDY, NaCL, Dart, all in an effort to improve the underlying constraints of delivering code/information -- in any form -- to users.
If we only had Mozilla, we'd be locked into HTTP/HTML/CSS/DOM/JS forever. Technology has to evolve to move forward, but Mozilla has very little reason to want the web to evolve.
What? Mozilla very much has a reason to want the web to evolve, in order to stay competitive with the various non-web mobile app ecosystems.
If you accept 'the web' as more of a conceptual ideal of openness, then there's a lot more room for innovation.
The problem is, at its core, that the people who are best suited to change the way the web works, are the developers that stuck it out through learning JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and browser quirks, and then spent the years required on top of that to begin working on the browsers themselves.
Of that self-selecting group, how many of them are likely to want to voluntarily rework and/or abandon core web technologies?
On the other hand, Chrome, existing to further Google's interests, has every reason to employ whatever creative technology solutions are necessary to improve the user experience, even if that means changing or abandoning the legacy web technology stack in the process.
Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft will not implement NaCl and Dart because they feel that they are technically worse than alternatives (asm.js and either ES6 or compiling other languages to JS).
The technical problems will ultimately provide a worse experience to end users. For example, NaCl is not portable, meaning that users' apps will not work on all the users' devices like they expect, and PNaCl is not backwards compatible, so the apps won't work on all browsers. Dart threatens to make garbage collection slower because of cross-language cycle collection, which results in a worse experience to end users.
Mozilla has every reason to want the Web to evolve. If the Web doesn't evolve and loses to native platforms, Mozilla becomes irrelevant and dies. How is that not incentive?
After Google designed it, developed it, and then deployed it to their properties. And even then Mozilla was still questioning whether it should be implemented, because "would anyone use it?".
> Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft will not implement NaCl and Dart because they feel that they are technically worse than alternatives (asm.js and either ES6 or compiling other languages to JS).
We fundamentally disagree on that. I see NaCL as a route to the future of haardware-supported sandboxing, in the same way that virtualization was. NaCL is a way to fundamentally re-invision how we implement sandboxing of process, and move beyond the legacy ring-0 design.
asm.js is just another application-level hack on top of a huge pile of application-level hacks. It's time to coalesce the stack of these hacky abstractions, and clean up shop.
> For example, NaCl is not portable, meaning that users' apps will not work on all the users' devices like they expect, and PNaCl is not backwards compatible, so the apps won't work on all browsers.
So what? You know what happens when I fire up a PPC Mac from 1998 and try to use Netscape 4 on the modern web? Nothing works.
At least something like PNaCL has a MUCH smaller surface area than something like the full HTML/DOM/CSS/JS stack, which makes supporting it in a backwards compatible manner indefinitely far, far easier.
> Mozilla has every reason to want the Web to evolve. If the Web doesn't evolve and loses to native platforms, Mozilla becomes irrelevant and dies. How is that not incentive?
Because the web needs to evolve away from what it currently is, and that's the one thing Mozilla ideologically doesn't want and won't do.
PNaCl, to interact with the world, uses Pepper. Pepper is a huge surface area, comparable with the web stack in size.
It's neither comparable in size or complexity to the entire browser stack. CSS, HTML, DOM, and JavaScript are so large that they that require the full weight of large-scale corporations to provide a working implementation that's even remotely compatible with the web as its deployed today.
Mozilla received a leg-up in terms of having the majority of the code donated by a large corporation, and by having the web be compatible with that existing technology stack. I can see how I could spend $1M and have a team implement the Pepper API in 6-12 months, and that includes an independent implementation of NaCL/PNaCL sandboxing (if we leveraged google's development tools).
I can't even begin to imagine trying to create an independent browser stack for any reasonable amount of money.
[edit] This is the current Pepper API documentation:
https://developers.google.com/native-client/peppercpp/inheri...
It's tiny.
Pepper, NaCL, et al also collapse a huge number of complex and nuanced layered web abstractions back down to the approachable problem of running somewhat arbitrary user code, at speed, in a relatively open and loosely define environment.
That's the same environment that projects like Mozilla needed to ever have the chance of producing a web browser in the first place. It sure seems to me that you guys -- consciously or not -- have divided the market into 'browser makers' and 'non-browser makers', and then decided to constrain the tooling and power available to everyone that is not a browser maker.
This can't be healthy for the internet.
NaCl is something new. It isn't meant to render documents. It sandboxes native code.
Both the web and NaCl are great, just for different things.
Well, now we're getting to the core of it! :)
I agree! I think the web should stick to rendering documents, which it has always done reasonably well, and leave applications to technologies such as NaCL, which people can use to produce the next web browser.
[1] NaCL and the future of hardware, Google's investment in SPDY, surface area of NaCL's complexity, evolution of the web ...
Each of these does not threaten the importance of the browser. On the contrary, they both widen the use cases of the browser and raise the entry barrier for competing browsers. These effects protect Mozilla, instead of threatening Mozilla.
On the other hand, Google pushes OAuth single sign-on against Google accounts, whereas Mozilla is pushing Mozilla Persona, a distributed, no-central-authority SSO for the web.
I conclude the exact opposite of what you state. If we use Chrome, we're locked into technologies that serve Google, if we use Firefox we're pushing open technologies.
I personally didn't buy the whole Chrome hype when it came out, and stayed with Firefox, observing how Mozilla gradually made it much better.
The two things I dislike about Firefox. The development tools are funky. I am sure many people like them but when you are used to firebug / webkit tools the default Firefox tools are a bit of a shock.
The second issue is the lack of tab sand-boxing. A fairly large part of my job is testing for edge cases in our products. Our products are JavaScript heavy. I often find issues which crash the browser... well.. they crash Firefox. In Chrome the tab shows an error in the console and I have the option to close the tab. In Firefox I never get an error in the console. The whole browser freezes and stops responding.
It would be fantastic if Firefox sandboxed tabs to stop the entire browser crashing.
Totally orthogonal issues.
Not to mention Firefox ate memory like a pig until recently, despite not having sandboxing.
Now it's somewhat better with post 16 stuff, but still it's slow. Chrome is much more responsive and fast.
http://blog.ffextensionguru.com/2011/11/20/electrolysis-proj... Add-on were one of the major issues blocking Multi-process Firefox.
>Not to mention Firefox ate memory like a pig until recently, despite not having sandboxing.
Agreed. Sandboxed Chrome was like a gift from the IT gods back in the bloated FF3 days.
>Now it's somewhat better with post 16 stuff, but still it's slow. Chrome is much more responsive and fast.
Responsive and fast until it starts thrashing when your physical RAM gets all used up.
Well, they will need adaptation to communicate cross pages, but it's not like you can't have sandboxing and plugins (a la Chrome/Safari).
>Responsive and fast until it starts thrashing when your physical RAM gets all used up.
Haven't really seen that. But I rarely have more than 20 tabs open (usually around 10-15). OS X, and using Canary.
They're really not. Many add-ons would function without issues with sandboxing (once updated), but there are many cases where requiring IPC between tabs/windows would be prohibitive (particularly for individualized add-ons).
This has not been my experience. Chrome used to be faster, but for the past year, Firefox's responsiveness have blown Chrome's out of the water for me personally on the PCs I use.
Really? I've heard that said before, but right now Firefox is grabbing almost half a gigabyte of my RAM just to have about a dozen tabs open on simple forum sites like HN. Some of the extensions are significant offenders at the moment, particularly things like the AdBlock ones, but Firefox itself is still greedy even with no pages open and running in safe mode with all the plug-ins disabled, and of course Firefox without any of the major plug-ins is much less useful as a default browser.
Is there a sane way to report bugs these days? I'm happy to do things like describing a useful test case or attaching a screenshot of about:memory, but I've spent too many half-hours trying and ultimately failed to report useful information via Bugzilla to ever go near it again. It's like a case study of how to do every possible thing wrong in usability terms. :-(
Why not simply run two FF instances in parallel (e.g., via the profile manager) - one for actual browsing, and another for testing, that can blow up as often as it "needs" to?
In 3 years our webapp has been affected by very few Chrome specific bugs none of which caused us serious problems, or hard to work-around. Chrome has fixed bugs that affected us within a release or two (not years).
Currently our app has about 4 Firefox specific work-arounds. The worst was opened in 2004 and last month took me over 20 hours work to diagnose due to it only affecting us under specific circumstances: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=263945
* we have a complex pure JavaScript front-end, 95% written by me, with no library dependencies (because we started with scriptaculous many years ago, and outgrew it).
The fact that mozilla actively fights for internet freedom and user privacy is just the delicious icing on a technically solid browser cake.
The best bookmarking in-browser. I am really convinced it's better than most others out there - even those dedicated "bookmarking" services e.g. Delicious, Pinboard(which is a disappointment other than when I look at my li'l bookmarks in a browser window in its webapp) etc - with its sync.
I am planning to plug my own server to Firefox sync service so that I can have it wherever I want. Great if I could just stumble upon sth good ready to deploy.
If you click the star on a website and you want your bookmark to go in the bookmarks menu, you need to press the star TWICE, then choose "Bookmarks Menu" from a dropdown, and then click ok. That is 4 click too much. And where it puts it after clicking the star once is useless.
Then, the bookmark menu itself. So many useless things in there first before your actual bookmarks start.
I often bookmark pages before I read them, and use the Unsorted Bookmarks folder as a kind of reading list and sorting area. After I've read a web page, I will either delete the bookmark (if the page turns out to be useless) or move it to its final location (if I want to reference it again). I also often change the title to be more descriptive, remove cruft from the URL, etc. while doing so.
For my workflow, a bookmarking system that automatically placed my bookmarks inside the Bookmarks Menu would be useless. It would be even worse if it tried to "guess" the folder where I wanted my bookmarks to be.
If a page doesn't have a title I'll add a couple tags, and likewise if it ever takes too long to find a particular bookmark. But 99% of the time I don't even need to think about those things.
In Opera you can right click a link and then select the exact place in the bookmark heirarchy to place it in. In Firefox you have to first bookmark the link, then go to the atrocious bookmark manager and move the bookmark where you want it to go.
Opera's bookmark manager is also just much nicer, more powerful, and more intuitive than Firefox's.
Unfortunately, Opera is closed-source software, and has been moving in anti-privacy directions I don't like, so I still use Firefox. But in many ways, Opera is a far superior browser.
In Firefox you can click the star in the URL bar to set a bookbar. When you click the star for a second time immediately, you can select where in the bookmark hierarchy it should go without opening the bookmark manager at all.
You can also just drag&drop the tab title to the right location in the bookmarks toolbar and it will create a bookmark there.
Or are you talking about in which order a bookmark is placed inside a folder, accessed from the first bookmark setup window? I am quite sure there is a add-on that do exactly this.
I like Firefox's tagged bookmarks. I love how it's not slow anymore, and how I can browse by tag in the main bookmarks window I get through Ctrl+Shift+O.
But I'm using the MicroFox theme, which pretty much completely changes how Firefox looks. Nobody that I know of in the browser world does themes like Mozilla does for Firefox. Chrome doesn't even come close, and I don't remember Opera offering much beyond palette swaps, either. I have MicroFox and Status-4-Evar and a number of other Add-Ons that combine to give me the browser I want. I can do that with Firefox and with no other browser I know of.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/microfox-for-...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/status-4-evar...
I do like chrome's dev tools better imo, so I run both. Chrome for active dev and FF for browsing
I've not used bookmarks for years, literally. I even tried to use GReader, Delicious and Kippt but I can not wrap my head around bookmarks. Instead, my "bookmarks" are my history, my most frequently visited websites and the few pinned tabs I keep open on all my browsers through syncing. I am alone in this?
Keeping them all in my browser session for six months before I put it to good use is just unnecessary, so I bookmark it and find it later when I need it.
I do. Then I delete them again three years later when I bother to check my old bookmarks.
Like Cthulhu_, I've been bookmarking for years till my bookmarks were filled and literally unusable; then I moved to Google Reader and carefully chosen RSS Feeds, which slowly became a bloated mess (more than 3,000 favorites there); then to Kippt, and bis repetita.
In the end, I've come to the conclusion that keeping bookmarks for "interesting stuff" isn't so interesting (no pun intended.) If it's a great thing and I must keep it in mind, it'll surely come back to the surface somehow.
I must add that I have an extremely complex memory: it is very small and forgetful when it comes to actual stuff I have to remember (like my friends's names or university lessons), and abnormally large when it comes to seemingly insignificant stuff (like ZURB's Foundation framework which is competing with Twitter's Boostrap). I'll usually remember all the URLs I've typed. I'm a strange weirdo.
Finally, I realize now that I'm quite the exception here in terms of bookmarks, but seeing the rise and fall of Delicious, as well as Xmarks's (one of the insignificant things I remember, even though I've never used the service or heard of it before it closed down) I thought it was more common.
And sooner or later the guy shows up who hasn't closed his browser window or any tab in it since 2003, and now has essentially the entire Wayback Machine in memory.
Is this a record?
I'm currently working on a slightly heavy page, and Chrome is the slowest of the bunch to render, despite having smoother animations in most cases after it has done it's thing. Firefox, Safari and even IE9 are visibly faster by a couple seconds.
I feel like it slowly got worse and worse over the years. These days Chrome is the main CPU hog in my machine, uses GBs of memory and is responsible for most system hangs (OSX). The com.google.keystone agent thing even causes the trackpad and keyboard to malfunction every once and a while.
I would very much like to see a memory and cpu comparison between Firefox and chrome when the tab sizes reaches that size.
Thank you for mentioning this!
When you're not logged into your google account, typing into the address bar with periodically kill chrome on mountain lion.
Not often, but maybe 3 or 4 times a day. Not kill the tab; hard kill chrome, instantly, destroying all the tabs, no recovery, all chrome processes go poof. It happens on all three of my mac devices (and this is on Version 25.0.1364.160).
It's not even a choice; that's just unusable.
I've also found firefox to be a lot better than I remember. Firebug is still a memory hog though, and as we saw in the other epic thread, the firebug / native developer tools thing is still just idiotic.
...but it's pretty good.
I honestly didn't expect to be ever returning to firefox because it was more stable than the alternative.
3 Chrome Beta windows, with 17, 14, and 1 tabs open. 1 Chrome Canary window with 2 tabs
A good number of these tabs have not-very-light applications open like Gmail, Google spreadsheets, and some YouTube vids.
If you say to yourself, "oh, let me go check out Firefox compared to this," and launch it with one tab, do a quick Google search, and then determine, "hey, this is way faster," well... yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. Not only do you not have multiple windows and tabs open, but if you haven't used it in years you've probably got a pretty small cache not bogging you down.
Personally I've never actually noticed Chrome's performance to have any issues. Maybe because I have 12 gigs of RAM and an otherwise decent setup. On a more constrained system perhaps problems start to show themselves more easily. But are you sure that those same problems don't also appear in other browsers, given you're using them as intensely as you've been using Chrome this whole time?
I'd really love to see some browser comparison stats that go in-depth on this. Basically the only numbers you ever see these days are javascript rendering scores, and I feel like that's a really poor way to determine a browser's overall speed and efficiency. It doesn't account for how long it takes to open a new tab (like .01 seconds vs .3 seconds, which IMO is a big difference), scroll lag, startup time, etc, and it certainly doesn't account for how and if browsers become bogged down by real-world use.
I fear that users may be making similar snap judgments by comparing on the basis of quick open-and-go tests, instead of actual in-depth testing. First impressions are everything. You may find yourself five years from now using a browser that is actually slower than you were using previously, but you maintain your use of it because one time five years ago you opened it and loaded a page and it was faster than the encumbered incumbent.
Firefox isn't perfect, but it seems to be more of a problem with Flash than the browser (clearing out my Rdio tab has the most effect). And measuring memory usage through top isn't perfect, but FF does seem to use significantly less RES even after long sessions.
So, anecdotal evidence, but I was using Chromium as my regular browser for years and ended up switching back to FF because I found the performance on my reasonable-but-aging machine to be far superior to Chromes under regular, long-term usage.
Firefox has it's issues. It still doesn't silently update when run under a normal user account. Also the UI freezes when running heavy HTML5 pages.
Chrome is beginning to feel like FF 3. Google needs to take a page from Mozilla and start their own MemShrink program.
Any examples? I've never seen this (other than blatantly broken JS), and would be interested in seeing what would cause it.
I don't use sites like gmail or google docs, though, so maybe it has more to do with the sites visited than the OS platform.
first, a cache should never slow you down. old obscure settings can. and these can be in your old firefox profile as well.
second, the usecase of many open tabs is better in firefox. there are studies out there that show lower ram usage in firefox for many tabs. (first google link, because i don't find the one i had in mind right now: http://lifehacker.com/5976082/browser-speed-tests-chrome-24-...)
btw: if you are going to criticize test methodology, why do you include two browser? you know you can run various development version of firefox as well?
Cache tangent: Of course it can and will, generally things that use caches wait for the results of those caches query before hitting whatever the slower thing is being cached. Anytime you have a cache miss and the slower thing must be queried anyway, the wasted time you spent waiting for the cache query results "slowed you down". Also applications that allocate huge caches for data sets with poor cache rates or low utilization can "slow things down" by starving other data-sets with better hit rates or higher utilization from being as large as they could be.
Your second point is a good one. I didn't know!
I'm not sure what you mean by your last point. Include two browsers? Do you mean that I mentioned Canary? I didn't consider that specific to my point. Yes, I know FF has dev versions as well.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/internet-explorer-10-chr... In the 40 tab test, Chrome used 1619MB while FF only used 872MB.
This memory bloat is why I switched back to Firefox. After reading this article I fired up Chrome and it loaded about 20 tabs, then a message popped up: Close programs to prevent information loss. Your computer is low on memory.
Looking at the old browser comparisons on Toms, I can see that Chrome's memory has ballooned from 991MB in Chrome 13 to 1619MB in Chrome 23. This is a real problem. I wish Google would return to it's roots of making a lean responsive browser.
2. While a couple of hundred megabytes is usually a small portion of the total RAM, it could be a critical share of the free RAM, and this is what matters.
Ctrl + 1,2,3... let's switch between tabs. Do you know the equivalent? I'm going to try using it for a while if you say you can run that much tabs and it still runs smoothly. I usually have 40+ tabs open at all times.
CTRL+# are reserved for websites stored in SpeedDial. But maybe [2] helps you. I doubt that any experienced Opera user would require such a feature, because the more fluent you become with the UI the more often you swap tabs around. Instead I stored sites into the SpeedDial that I visit regularly, e.g. CTRL+7 is HN :)
[1] http://i.imgur.com/Z55rPDh.png [2] http://my.opera.com/Tamil/blog/go-to-a-specific-tab-using-ke...
If you are an extremely fast typer, pretty much any time you use Firefox on OS X to "Save As" you will hit this incarnation of a bug that hangs every tab in your browser and forces you to kill it and start from scratch: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=528149
Total bummer, I love Firefox but I'm not gonna train myself to type slower to keep from breaking it. This is no Therac-25.
For example, my largest pet peeve with Firefox is that two sessions cannot share the same profile. I can't have Firefox open for user abc in desktop session 1 and try to open it again as user abc in desktop session 2. Chrome and IE have no problem doing that. No joke, the issue is a decade old. And Mozilla recently marked the issue as a wont-fix.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=135137
I didn't lodge a complaint in the bug's comment trail. It's disappointing, but I figure it's essentially impossible for any of these guys to have a stellar record on bugs when you're got bug IDs in the high six-digits.
As a web dev, I have 10+ tabs open all day long and I never see a chrome crash. I'm not even looking at the RAM usage, if everything run smooth there is not reason to...
Firefox takes it, and provides a huge range of tools and options to make the browser environment exactly how I like.
Amazing add-ons, custom looks. I prefer an old fashioned status bar at the bottom of the browser. Thank God for status-4-eva add-on.
I'm glad Chrome was made, it's an option for anyone who doesn't mind the 'Google feel'. There's a Google vibe that has a sort of marketing agenda that you can sometimes see, manifesting in a few different ways in and out of browser. No big deal, just sometimes it feels like you're renting your online experience from Google rather than on your own journey. Hard to explain.
They make amazing things, so can forgive, just don't want to sign up to Google every time I'm online.
They currently push you to sign in and stay signed in on Google.com search when not logged in. And they try to sell you Chrome too, with "no thanks" as the button to hide the ad. You know when you make a button that says "no thanks", you're assuming the user who clicks the button is thankful, for being given the ad on google for the 500th time. Your assumption would be wrong.
I can honestly say that if performance wasn't an issue, I would prefer Firefox. I love the addons that are available, particularly NoScript, ABP and Vimperator. The Chrome equivalents are imperfect due to Chrome's extension model, and I miss the real things almost daily. However, I just can't go back to a browser that's slow and unresponsive. Maybe Firefox and Chrome are just making different trade-offs, and I happen to benefit more from Chrome's choices. I don't know. What I do know is that I can't tolerate my browser freezing up or taking 5 seconds to process clicks.
* - A fairly modest laptop with a 1.6ghz dual-core AMD APU, 6gb of RAM and an SSD. It's easily fast enough for everything else that I do, and Chrome flies on it. On my much beefier desktop, Firefox is usable, but still noticeably slower than Chrome.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi...
(In short: Go to "about:support" and click reset. It will prompt you before doing anything, and will rebuild your profile while preserving bookmarks/history/saved-forms/etc)
At the moment, Chrome's response is still snappy, but it certainly is not unusual for it to get pretty bad in my experience, particularly if I'm doing something else memory intensive at the same time.
If Firefox is now seen as being as good as or even better than Chrome, it looks like Google have succeeded.
Firefox dev tools in Nightly are much better, but still don't beat Chrome's. Firefox is still ugly. Firefox still won't let me open Nightly and Aurora. Firefox's Javascript performance is getting faster and memory usage is getting better, but when running tight loops in Javascript doing lots of calculations (specifically rendering fractal flames) Firefox becomes unresponsive and unusable, where as Chrome is fine and I can still browse normally while it runs in the background. Chrome might use a but more RAM but that's not a problem for me. I have buckets of RAM. Firefox needs restarting all the time when I change extensions or get updates.
I'll stick with Chrome for now. :)
As far as opening both Nightly and Aurora, create a shortcut to Nightly with the following options "...\firefox.exe -p -no-remote". This will let you select a profile on startup, keeping your Aurora and Nightly profiles separate and running both at the same time.
Because the extensions are more powerful.
Say what you will about chrome, but tab plugins are king in firefox. Tree style tabs on the left hand side and tab grouping what really sank it for me. I even merged the the search box and address bar in FF to give me that chrome omnibar feeling.
I think the most important takeaway is this: FF is still competitive among technical people and so is chrome. There even might be room for IE. We as a community, would need to keep voting with our feet and we can make sure the "browser wars" never end.
Chrome dev tools are still the best in the business, and Chrome just works.
Also I did a memory usage comparison on Chrome and Firefox 2 months ago and Firefox was using more memory by quite a bit (and got worse the more tabs you had open.) And this was Firefox with NO Flash and Chrome with Flash.
I personally see no reason to keep more than 8-10 tabs open at a given time which doesn't affect my CPU performance whatsoever (running a "standard" dev machine of 12GB+ RAM, i7, etc) so I could care less if FF handles 40 tabs better.
And quickly, some reasons I love Chrome (& Google):
- Accessible nightly builds (Canary)
- AngularJS debug extension
- Built-in bookmark/history/search sync (read something at home yesterday - can easily find it in my history at work or on mobile)
I agree they're useful things to have, but they're not exactly Chrome-specific.
* ad block is much better
* addons work in private mode by default,
* an addon to use keepaas as my password manager
* many addons that allow me to customize youtube which i could not do in chrome (force 240p etc..),
* I missed Instant search but Firefox already searches bookmarks better and with the instantFox addon i can also search any site ala google instant and ddg
Better in chrome
* Addons by HNers (HN in chrome is great with a few addons like tldr.io, HNbox)
* Firefox seems unable to do multiple downloads as well as chrome (I'm unable to download multiple videos at once from coursera when using firefox)
* some chrome store apps
* Developer tools (which I don't really need)
I don't see much of a performance difference (maybe Firefox is better now or it may be hardware accelerated as I'm using Windows)
Chrome Web Store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-options/bd...
Developer's site: https://spoi.com/software/yto/
I'm surprised to hear that you've not found a KeePass addon for Chrome. I'm using LastPass right now, but I've been thinking of switching to take advantage of KeePassDroid on Android. Do the popular options on the Chrome Web Store not pass muster?
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chromeipass/ompiai...
But I can't relate to how he feels:
- Chrome still has better dev tools than Firefox
- Chrome doesn't freeze at all (while Firefox does when handling a lot of tabs)
- Chrome doesn't require to restart when installing an extension (even if Firefox starts moving to this too)
- I still prefer Chrome's UI
- Even though I didn't try syncing with Firefox, Chrome does that very nicely
Mozilla did introduce an api to do restart-less addons about two years ago, as a side effect these addons don't depend on specific firefox versions anymore.
The problem with firefox addons is that they have always hooked directly into XUL, a layout language used inside firefox, which changes (nearly) every version. This means addons needed to be updated regularly. However it did allow them many capabilities (that I suspect the new api doesn't give them).
I haven't tried it myself, but apparently it's a kind of reverse Noscript (hence the name).
"YesScript lets you make a blacklist of sites that aren't allowed to run JavaScript. Use YesScript on sites that annoy you or hog your system resources. One click to the icon in the status bar turns scripts on or off for the current site."
Noscript can be paranoid (a feature, not a bug) and occasionally stop sites from working even if they are white-listed; I consider having to open a site in another browser sometimes less of a nuisance than having my main browser slowed down by dodgy JS.
Two add-ons anthropomorphized in one comment! I guess that's what happens when you spend so much time in front of a screen ;-)
I don't understand why you had to switch to Firefox to block JS, that's possible with Chrome as well. Check out NotScripts, for example.
I know is supposed to be the same source code, but it gives me some peace of mind that a 3rd party I trust (Linux distro) had access to the source code and built the actual binary I'm using.
[1] http://www.google.co.uk/chrome/intl/en/eula_text.html
EDIT: formatting
Unlike you I always been a Firefox user mostly because I still can't the basic addons for Chrome which I use on Firefox. And privacy concerns. I still use Chrome for cross-browser checks.
The one thing that Chrome was been said to be better than Firefox was the memory management. Over the past years, Firefox's memory leak issue has almost diminished and Chrome's has started.
Mozilla was and always is making Firefox for web browsing, they never pulled in any other feature/add-on/plug-in which would side track their motto.
It's the consistent tic- tic-tic of disk access by Chrome. I have all extensions and plug-ins disabled. All caching disabled. And yet when I try to concentrate on something I'm reading in Chrome I'm continuously distracted by the tic-tic-tic of chrome accessing the hard disk every second or two.
Right now this window I'm writing in is the only Chrome window open. Yet there are three Chrome processes running. One of which is writing 7k per second to a temp file.
Chrome is not the sleek beast it once was. It's living off its reputation at this point.
The only problem is some people seem to think every single CSS3/HTML5 feature needs to be prefixed with -webkit- to work.
If you need Chrome as a 2nd browser you should consider using any of the Chromium forks available. E.g. I use Comodo Dragon.
cheers
A good example of the lack of common sense (imho) is the addon bar. Why do I want an extra bar with 2 or 3 icons? Most people will probably remember the status bar in browsers and they ditched that because it was not needed and you lost valuable screen estate. What was the best solution mozilla could come up with to handle the extension icons? An extra bar in the bottom of your browser. Just implement an omnibar already and put those things there...
If anyone from mozilla is reading this: you've done a great (GREAT!) job at making firefox faster and use less memory, and if you're ever in the neighbourhood I'll buy you a beer. Now please also start thinking about those little things that just don't make any sense.
The majority of the revenues comes from Google Inc., which is the default search engine on Mozilla Firefox.[1]
Doesn't Mozilla exist because Google exists?
[1]- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Mozilla_Corp...
Personally, I hope that the venture with Firefox OS will be successful in making Mozilla less reliant on search engine licensing agreements.
[1] http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2244472/Google-Once-Aga...
NB: duckduckgo uses Bing, among others.
Also, the feature I most appreciate with Chrome is the synchronization of tabs across all my devices (PC, laptop and phone). Firefox also has this but it never really worked for me (it was slow to update the tab list of my PC so I could access it from my phone, or it didn't update it at all "Ubuntu 12.04 - 4 days ago").
I found that this was not useful at all. My three main consumptions are: -> Work Computer -> Tablet and phone -> Home computer
The tabs on my work computer are almost always not relevant for when I am at home and on tablet phone. There is also certain cases where I would not particularly want my tabs from my work machine (sensitive information perhaps) shared to my home computer or a mobile device I could get stolen and vice versa.
For any sharing of tabs I want, I just use pocket, as the tabs I really want to share are usually just articles that I want to read, either way pocket will take those links.
My only annoyance is the development tools - Chrome still whips FF here - and they are still no where as good as Firebug, which continues to be the most required extension - but I believe work is being done there too.
Firefox is also capable of handling large amounts of tabs. In Chrome the tab bar is of fixed length (length of the window) and thus the maximum number of tabs is limited by my screen width. In Firefox the tab bar can extend to the sides or even better you can use the TreeStyleTabs addon to organize tabs in a tree view.
I think the biggest problem for Firefox was the long wait before FF4 was released. That was the exact time many people moved to Chrome. FF3.6 wasn't bad but was clearly slower than Chrome and had a huge memory appetite. Later versions improved this dramatically and Firefox now feels lighter/faster than Chrome. But every time FF vs. Chrome there are people claiming otherwise who have stopped using FF at version 3.6...
Firefox is the only browser that runs comfortably on it. I'm using a lot of extensions, including ABP with multiple filter lists. After disabling caching on hard drive, I'm keeping around 25 tabs, sometimes 30 or more, and there's still RAM to spare, and the CPU isn't getting pounded.
Of course, browsers should be optimized for current use cases and computers, but what I've experienced for the past two weeks really changed my impression of Firefox as a bloated and slow browser that was only fast in comparison to old IE.
But I'll give it a try.
That said, yes, they also have less reasons to be 'answerable' to their users or to fix problems. On Bugzilla, I've mostly seen arrogant and rude contributors who are mostly like, if you can't contribute or fix it yourself, go away! Don't even complain. See the example of this major/critical 12 years old bug, which no one wants to fix, and now they don't even want users to express their displeasure on that. There's no resolve, while other browsers have fixed that problem.
I've always stuck to Firefox for its customizability and because it has less reasons to collect all my data and become an Apple like walled garden which Chrome is slow turning into.
That said, yes, they also have less reasons to be 'answerable' to their users or to fix problems. On Bugzilla, I've mostly seen arrogant and rude contributors who are mostly like, "If you can't contribute or fix it yourself, go away!" Don't even complain. See the example of this major/critical 12 years old bug, which no one wants to fix, and now they don't even want users to express their displeasure on that. There's no resolve, while other browsers have fixed that problem. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78414
It's pretty much the only thing I'm missing whenever I try FF again.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fastest-searc...
One thing that strikes me as vastly inferior in FF given my use cases is the way private browsing works. I use incognito tabs in Chrome all the time in dev to get a clean tab with no sessions etc. FF only allows for either normal tabs or private tabs, not both. Oh well :-)
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2013/02/22/firefox-b...
[1] http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/20.0beta/releasenotes/
One of the things I tried out was WebGL performance using the recently posted WebGL terrain flyover demo (http://www.zephyrosanemos.com/windstorm/20130301/live-demo.h...), but I can't get over 30.5 fps in Firefox whereas on Chrome I get 50 - 60. Hardware acceleration seems to be enabled for both, perhaps Firefox is not recognizing the graphics card?
One of the things that impressed my about Chrome in the beginning was when they launched Chrome Experiments to show off the performance. There was no comparison at the time between any other browser and Chrome. This may still hold true to a certain extent.
However, for general browsing I can't tell a difference with the current iteration.
I tried Firefox a few weeks ago just to see if I had been missing out on anything. Nope. Opening new tabs in Firefox was sluggish. Page navigation was even worse. I assumed that most browsers would be roughly on par these days but Firefox was not even tolerable after having used Chrome.
It pains me because I, too, share the sentiment that Mozilla is committed to freedom and privacy on the internet. I guess I am just willing to give that up in exchange for a better internet experience for the time being.
Thats why im looking forward to opera's webkit version (so i can ditch google chrome for opera), i think google chrome is getting more and more creepy and has made some decisions that are more in google's interest than the users (like posting links on the speed dial or all the extensions that are nothing more thank links and all the extensions that are not links but behave like links, its weird).
1. Option "Don't load tabs until selected"
2. Firefox Sync
3. Aurora releases
Now, similar to the OP I keep having issues with Chrome, the biggest of which is its memory usage.
"Memory usage is off the charts and I frequently have tabs become completely unresponsive."
In my case, it not only eats 2GB of my RAM, but also takes a bit proportion of my hard-disk. I did a quick experiment yesterday and measured my FREE HDD space before closing Chrome and after that.
Before: 800 MB free. After: 10.9 GB free :)
It's true I keep a lot of tabs open (>70), but 10GB.. I think that's too much. Now, I'm considering switching back to Firefox, too.
Anyway, I think everyone here using Firefox AND chrome.
Quality is not the same for everyone. I have switched to Chrome, and it feels like it's build much better than Firefox. Maybe Firefox is actually built better, but as an user, I perceive Chrome to be better, starting with rare crashes instead of Firefox's frequent ones. Yes, Firefox's crashes may be because of its plugins, but that's a moot point, because without any plugins, Firefox is too basic a browser.
The bad thing is: hardly anyone knows about this, because Google is investing tons and tons of money for Chrome marketing purposes (and developer evangelisation; a point you also have to consider).
Only thing i like more about Chrome: the dev tools
edit: After I posted this I figured I should dig deeper before I get all kinds of negative comments. I found the console and also some other useful tools that I didn't know existed. Things like the responsive view and scratch pad are pretty cool.
So I decided that the easiest way to reduce Chrome's memory usage was to curb my slightly irrational usage patterns - keeping dozens of tabs open that I rarely ever get around to going back to.
Why? It can change it the next update. Or you can just use Firefox (and NoScript) with much less worry.
Webkit is supported by Apple as well as Google which happen to be worlds largest companies. Firefox on other other had is open, non profit organization giving a tough fight to both of them.
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/hsW8ls9...
It goes on and off. When I have this problem I switch back to Firefox for a while.
This started happening to me a few months ago, and yesterday I had about 5 tabs do this. I even cleared the cache and restarted, and it happened again.
I've been having the same thoughts as the OP, and having fled FF around the same time frame, perhaps I should give it another try.
Check.
> Memory usage is off the charts and I frequently have tabs become completely unresponsive.
Check.
> JavaScript errors occasionally disappear into the void instead of logging to the console.
Check.
Oh, my! I'm so glad I'm not the only one!
So the only reason I use firefox today is due to noscript.
I have always used Chromium as opposed to Chrome. I am not sure why people would go for the Chrome version if they really care about freedom.
1) Where can I find official-ish Chromium for Windows?
2) On Ubuntu, Chromium always seems to be behind Chrome wrt updates.
I tried Chromium on Ubuntu, but switched because of the lag. Let me know if I am mistaken.
Apparently this is the page to look out for. http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-sna...
But looks like the downloading part is not straight forward. Look at the second answer at in the following link.
http://superuser.com/questions/203606/where-can-i-get-chromi...
>2) On Ubuntu, Chromium always seems to be behind Chrome wrt updates.
This has to do with an Ubuntu repository (for chromium) vs PPA from Google (for chrome). Ubuntu is always going to be a bit behind upstream. The same way it is a few days behind upstream firefox or other software. If you absolutely need the bleeding edge version of google chrome, either use something like archlinux (where you get updates within a day or two), or continue with Ubuntu, but use a ppa for chromium beta which is available from here (http://askubuntu.com/questions/126092/where-are-the-daily-bu...).
- Firefox is horrible with inversive color theme (light text on dark background). With Chrome it just works on 99% websites
- KDE Firefox integration is horrible.
The KDE integration is also not that bad. I use ArchLinux and never installed any special packages, and while tabs and menus do not look exactly like Qt/KDE apps, the difference is barely noticable. And they are the correct color.
Are there reviews/benchmarks that substantiate the article's claims ?
I've the same issue. It works sometimes and other times it doesn't.
I actually like this behavior but obviously you need to know about it for it to seem reasonable :-)
My solution for now is to use about:blank as a homepage.
There's a tendency which you may have heard of: mobile (smartphones and tablets) and there's a lot of push for making these supported and available to employees (the push very often coming both from the employees and from very high up the chain).
As a result mobile browsers support in large enterprise are becoming very often mandatory.
Why do you think large enterprise are supporting browsers at all? why do you think large enterprise are switching en masse to internal webapps instead of internal desktop apps? To free themselves from a particular technology vendor. It's the way they regain control. And you think they'd ruin all that by mandating "IE only"!?
This is not at all what I'm seeing in the enterprisey webapp world. On the contrary: the shift is to more platform, more standards, more openness.
It's the same experience, except that the PDF is rendered right, the fonts are nicer, and the scrolling is far better. I can also view it as a presentation with slides easily.
I've been using Mozilla code since the Netscape 7.X days (and tried to use NS6, but it was way too buggy.) I progressed from MS7 to the Mozilla Suite to Firefox, and have stayed there.
I have Chrome (and Opera, Safari, Midori, Konqueror, K-Meleon, D+, and a few other things including IE installed, but mostly to keep up on what others are doing. Firefox is what I use in production, and I currently run Aurora (which will be the next release when it gets out of beta.)
FF isn't the smallest or fastest browser on the machine I'm on at the moment (and old netbook) but is the most capable. FF, like other current browsers, makes assumptions about what you will run it on, and assumes a reasonably current machine with a reasonable CPU, GPU, and amount of RAM. I have another old machine I don't even try to run FF on.
My reasons are tied up in the architecture. FF uses the Gecko engine, like everything else Mozilla puts out. Aside from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, Gecko interprets and renders XUL, an XML language for designing user interfaces. The look and feel of FF is determined by XUL, CSS, and widgets, and the browser is simply an instance of something Gecko renders.
This makes it possible to create themes that change what FF looks like, and extensions that modify and extend what it does, and that power is why I use it. My RSS reader, IRC client and several other things that would ordinarily be external programs are implemented in FF as extensions. Since the browser is always running when I'm at the computer, this make things very convenient.
Other browsers like Chrome added an extension capability, but they are pure JavaScript and limited by what the device API will let you do in JavaScript. Half of what I do in FF isn't possible in Chrome.
Chrome is a worthy browser, and I'm glad it's there, but it's not what I use. It invokes somewhat faster than FF, but page rendering is equivalent, and memory usage rises rapidly as you add extensions, so there's little difference between FF and Chrome in use. Faster invocation is a non-issue here: I start the browser when I sit down at the machine and simply leave it running, so a few extra seconds to invoke it isn't a concern. Too many people have the bad habit learned from IE of hopping in and out of the browser, and I just tell such folks "You're doing it wrong".
On my desktop booted into Windows, I run FF from a RAMdisk. The desktop still runs XP and has 4GB RAM, but 32 bit Windows can only use 3.2GB of it. I found a RAMdisk driver that can use the rest and have a 768MBR ramdrive seen as Z:. Firefox, its cache, and its profile all live there and FF is run from there. It's quick. (Batch files populate the ramdisk on start up, and store the contents back to HD on shutdown.) I don't believe I can do that with Chrome.
Edit: immediately after making this post I realized there might be a way to disable all popups and notifications. Is there? If so, I might give it a spin for a week.
I switched back to Firefox sometime ago. It got back its speed and crashes less and fries my Mac less than other browsers. Well, on crashing part and getting stuck part Safari is better than all others on a Mac(at least) but for other purpose(for my usage) it's a pretty pretty useless browser. Safari uses more RAM in Mac than Firefox/Chrome and for less tabs it uses more RAM than both combined, it just does that in a different helper process.
Quick releases ensures FF gets thinks out and fixed faster.
Their mobile browser is not still there. I hope it becomes better so that I can replace Chrome on my Android too.
There are things I wish were there in Firefox. Like manage tabs separately. Like in Chrome. Visual tools/API(seems it's not that open, not sure) like Chrome. I really liked Cortex extension of Chrome in Firefox(it was my favourite).
And of course I love those people at Mozilla for always standing against those privacy-killers and keep telling them to suck it up their -----.
I'd be using Firefox if they started to sandbox all the tabs. To me the argument that it's faster and use less memory because it's not sandboxed is a very poor one.
Actually that argument shows what is wrong with the mindset of many people in our field.
You should never trade security for a bit more perfs.
2) "I honestly believe Mozilla is committed to freedom and privacy on the web." - haha thats funny :D you know about chromium right? :D its free, you can code on it too if you want too, sure there are might be 1-2 functions in the chrome, which belongs to google, but all in all you can know the code. and google did there learnings after the first versions where they sending stuff to there servers.
and in the end, all browser are logging the same shit, where are we clicking, what are we doing, where we enter this and that. why? because they want to make there money too, and collect a big big big database, which they can sell to other companies. and learn stuff out of it. i guess on this view all brothers are the same crap
3) memory management - yes its true chrome get stuck more and more often, and eating the memory, and it is annoying. but for me, firefox still is worse. everytime i start firefox for debugging some website or whatever, i'm totally pissed, because this stupid software still needs like forever for the initialised start. and when you keep it open for 2 days, you done :D in my opinion even photoshop has a better memory management then firefox.
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i hope for the chrome too, that the switch from opera to webkit, give them a little ass kick, because that is that what all browser companies needed, an ass kick.
first there was an IE everybody used it, so why should they update it? then there was the firefox, ie was screwed, everybody used ff now, so why should they update it? then there was the chrome, ff was screwed, everybody used chrome now, so why should they update it?
and everybody took there lesson out of it, IE is getting better, FF starts updating there browser after sitting on 3.6 like forever... and thats ok, people now having like 3-4 good brothers and can choose.
I switched from Opera (then known as the lightweight) to Chrome (then known as the chugging oversized beast) because of Opera's (sudden in v11 ish) memory leaks. Hopefully they fix that and I'll switch abck to Opera for the same reasons as OP did for Firefox.
Too far, buddy.
I'm not sure how they're calculating 87% -- do unknowns count towards supported? It looks like, from that list, that Chrome supports more.