Comment by nathanb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nathanb | Hacker News Reader

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This article is, in my opinion, not very good. It documents areas where Firefox differs from Chrome, yes, but it fails to make the case why I should care.

* I don't want a multi-process architecture, I want it so one tab can't kill my entire browser. If Firefox can get there in a different way than Chrome, so much the better.

* I don't care whether or not my browser utilizes certain Windows features, since I run Linux. Have we seen an attack against Firefox which would have been stopped if it utilized this Windows feature? The article provides no evidence of this.

* I don't want a desktop app store. addons.mozilla.org is, for all intents and purposes, Firefox's app store. mozilla.org is Mozilla's "app store". This is kind of a silly request.

I use Firefox for the following reasons:

* There are extensions I like which have no equivalent (that I know of) in Chrome

* Inertia

* I like the Mozilla Foundation better than I like Google

I don't expect these reasons to convince you. They are sufficient for convincing me. I'm not going to pretend like they present a compelling argument.

To this list you can add the deal breaker - Firefox is not mining your data and then passing it on to the NSA.

Even if this were true (and there's no reason to believe that Google Chrome is being used in this way), there's still the open-source Chromium browser.

Which Google has made intentionally hard to find. Could your mom or grandmother figure this one out? http://build.chromium.org/f/chromium/layout_test_results/

On the systems I work with, it's easy to walk your grandmother through "click on the black square, now type apt-get install chromium, now hit enter."

Yea, my dad still hasn't _quite_ figured out copy and paste but was clicking around the Ubuntu Software Center one day and managed to install Chromium (he heard me talk about how I was planning to install Chrome on his computer and I guess the names were similar enough).

http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-sna...

Which is a Nightly as well as being a pain to update. (though I hear it's different on GNU/Linux)

Chromium is inferior in certain respects, such as lacking an integrated PDF viewer.

I would really wish that Firefox provided a way of disabling all external services, including Googles.

If you go to the about:config and search for "Google", I would like the ability to disable all these services.

Firefox button > Options > Options (or Tools > Options) > Security, un-check both "Block reported attack sites" and "Block reported web forgeries"

That will turn off the Firefox Safe Browsing features that come from Google.

Seeing as it's extremely likely that the NSA is tapping into fiber at exchanges near major corporations, and almost everything you do online is tracked by someone, it seems like a moot point anyway.

Who cares if Mozilla or Google is providing the NSA with access when the NSA is monitoring all the data heading to and from them without permission?

Why wouldn't you want a multi-process architecture? It's bad enough that so many apps can utilize the quad core CPU's we have in our PC's. At least the browser is one app that can fully take advantage of multiple cores, unlike most apps out there.

You can take advantage of multiple cores using a single process with threads.

But don't threads generally share memory? So therefore if a thread crashes, it can totally screw up all the other tabs still.

mtgox was talking about scalability, not stability.

Scalability just makes me want stability all the more because the stakes are that much higher.

He's mtgx, not mtgox (the Bitcoin company).

>At least the browser is one app that can fully take advantage of multiple cores, unlike most apps out there.

Nope. The vast majority of web pages and web apps do work either on page load, or in direct response to user input. While in the background, they almost universally sit idle. Multicore has no benefit in this scenario.

The exceptions are games and media, but music is the only case there where you are likely to have something actively running in the background. Unfortunately, audio decoding is so incredibly cheap now that the gains from using a separate core are negligible.

I didn't say I definitely don't want a multiprocess architecture.

Just that a multiprocess architecture may not be the only way to solve the problem, and if Firefox devs believe they can provide equivalent stability without switching to a multiprocess architecture, I won't ding them just because they can't tick a checkbox that Chrome ticks.

Scaling (and taking advantage of multiple cores) can be done by using threads instead of processes, but processes (and IPC) have larger overhead than threads. Processes need more RAM than threads.

Google (and Microsoft) argue that using processes make the browser more stable in the sense that if one tab crashes, not the entire browser crashes, too (correct, as long as no deadlock in IPC between the processes occur - which has happened in some past Chrome relases) and makes the browser more secure (but not everybody agrees here). Thus they argue that the overhead of processes over threads is worth it.

But if you just want the scalability there are more easy solutions.

It's actually hard for a browser to utilize multiple cores, because Javascript and DOM designed for one thread: While javascript runs the layout shall not be recalculated. When you click and an onclick handler fires and JS runs, the browser cannot run other JS of the same tab in parallel. While HTML is parsed any time a inline script could come and block processing the rest of the document.

Chrome and other browsers of course work hard against that: There is a second fast parser which heuristically finds ressources to preload and Chrome just switched to blink in order to do the parsing and something else in parallel and now they want to do CSS calculations in threads, too, which is hard. There was a story here about it recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5895729

It's significantly more difficult to share resources between processes than it is between threads. There are certainly things you can do, but it requires much more effort (especially if you're trying to be portable), and the results typically aren't anywhere near as good.

The effect of this is pretty obvious with chrome vs. FF: chrome memory usage grows a lot faster with multiple tabs than FF's memory usage does. OTOH, it's easier to manually control usage in chrome by killing tabs. Which of these effects is more important depends on your needs (so I tend to switch between chrome and FF...).

Anyway, anybody claiming that chrome is "obviously" better than FF these days is on crack. They are both very good, and each has its strong points and weak points, but they're pretty much on par...

good reply.

i use <strike>iceweasel</strike> firefox for the same reasons, specifically:

* pentadactyl (formerly vimperator)

* xul and xpcom took time to read about

* i like that the entirety of the codebase is free, not just the big blocks of C++

oh, and might be worth noting that the mobile version of firefox is multiprocess, and there's always the -no-remote flag (if you want to debug something w/o potentially crashing the 20 tabs of docs, bug reports, mailing list archives, and stack overflow you had to dig through to find the thing that maybe, possibly created the bug in the first place), although i totally agree about this thing where solving the problem of stability has somehow been conflated with running more than one process.

to each their own. having more browsers promotes a healthier "ecosystem" or something like this.

> There are extensions I like which have no equivalent (that I know of) in Chrome

Can you give an some examples of useful extensions you use that are available in Firefox but not yet in Chrome ?

Tree Style Tab - tabs should be a tree, not a list.

The last I heard, Chrome had a vertical tabs feature for a while, but that didn't allow nested tabs.

This is honestly the only thing keeping me on firefox. After getting used to it horizontal tabs just seem so... wrong.

vimperator is probably the most useful web extension i've ever used.. and it doesn't have a good chrome equivalent

http://www.vimperator.org/vimperator

I've used Vimperator before but I now use Vimium on chromium and very much prefer it.

When you navigate via keyboard (by pressing "f"), Vimperator marks links with numbers, Vimium marks them with letters, from ("a to "zz'). Letters are much nicer when you can touch type and your hands are already on the keys.

Vimperator used to do silly things like hide the address bar and force you into doing everything in a kind of "command mode". It never felt very smoothly integrated with the browser and it was always a pain to try and open a new site via command mode instead of just using <Ctrl>-L and typing it in the address bar. Invariably I would try to type something in a textbox or use some keyboard shortcut, only to find that Vimperator hijacked it and I'm now typing in command mode.

Vimium doesn't give me these problems because it doesn't have a command prompt/mode. Besides that, it's integrated very nicely with chrome, in such a way that I can use normal keyboard shortcuts as far as possible, but have vim-like shortcuts for the things that matter (e.g. "/" for searching, navigation via keyboard etc.)

to me vimperator isn't just about having a few vim bindings here and there, it completely redefines the browsing experience... also, when you "f" to find links, you can just enter a piece of the url string and vimperator opens it.. either way, it doesn't matter much..

vimium is a lightweight clone of vimperator, if that's what you want then of course you'll prefer it..

these "problems" you're talking about in vimperator are features once you actually embrace it and use it properly. it's a power user's tool.. and should be recognized as such..

http://i.imgur.com/vznzJMV.png

> I've used Vimperator before but I now use Vimium on chromium and very much prefer it.

> When you navigate via keyboard (by pressing "f"), Vimperator marks links with numbers, Vimium marks them with letters, from ("a to "zz'). Letters are much nicer when you can touch type and your hands are already on the keys.

I can't get myself to use Vimium. While I agree that it is in some ways a stronger navigation experience, the fact that it goes inert on un-loaded pages is a deal breaker. Not being able to cycle through my tabs all the way is not cool (i.e. as soon as it hits gmail it ceases to respond).

Also, while I do like the alphabetic link highlights, I dislike the size. Particularly here on HN, the links can overlap making it difficult to determine what the second letter in the sequence is.

Pentadactyl (Vimperator fork) annotates links with letters now, I think on the home row.

The very first instructions that you saw when opening Vimium were "How do I unhide the address bar?" It takes two clicks or just a few keystrokes.

Fully agreed. I've tried both Vimium and Vrome. Neither were adequate, IMHO. Had I never touched Vimperator, Vimium would have been perfectly fine - but my bar is now set much higher.

I addition to the other extensions that have been mentioned, such as the awesome Tree Style Tab, the Session Manager extension[1] for Firefox is far better than every session extension for Chrome that I evaluated last year. Nothing came close. For example, at this point, I couldn't live without session appending, which is a feature that wasn't included with any session extension for Chrome that I evaluated.

[1] http://sessionmanager.mozdev.org/documentation.html

Adblock plus with real filtering.

GMarks. There are a couple of Chrome extensions for integrating with Google Bookmarks, but they can't touch GMarks on Firefox.

downthemall, But I use chromium and go to firefox when I need it.

Live HTTP Headers

He also mentions that there is no web suite anymore from Mozilla, but there is; it's called SeaMonkey and it's actively maintained. Although, a lot of it is upstream features from Thunderbird and Firefox.

Multiprocess is also important for security. It means that simply finding a renderer exploit isn't enough to pwn your system if the renderer processes have no privileges to write/execute arbitrary files.

If you're running your browser as a privileged user then you deserve to have your system pwned.

A privileged user has nothing to do with it. Running as a non privileged user will not stop keyloggers, cookie theft, privilege escalation exploits, etc.

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