Reasons to Choose Opera over Chrome | Hacker News Reader

Reasons to Choose Opera over Chrome

browserfame.com

34 pointstwapi55 comments

Can we please stop repeating the provably wrong statement that Firefox is too slow to use? Tom's Hardware has recently shown Firefox beating the performance of both Chrome and Opera. No benchmark is absolute, but you can just use it and see for yourself. Also, it still has better extensions.

Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-ope...

Benchmarks are not everything. Firefox feels sluggish and less responsibe when scrolling, switching between tabs, on startup and just in general.

This might not be the case one every machine, I don't know, but it's been consistently true for my usage, it just doesn't feel right.

Unlike the new Opera I might add, it provides a really great experience. The fact that you can now install chrome plugins did it for me as I was a vimium addict. I think the move to blink was the right move for them.

I agree with this, FF might get great benchmark results, but the overall experience is what matters and I still think chrome feels snappier overall.

While we're talking about what "feels snappier," why hasn't anyone mentioned Safari. It is, by far, the smoothest browser on my computer. It may not do as well as Chrome in the benchmarks, but the scrolling is a thousand times smoother and everything feels quicker.

If the default scrolling isn't to your taste, you might want to try addons like this one for Firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/smoothwheel/?...

Of course, if you're happy with Safari, by all means stick with it.

I believe that there are two things being discussed here. One is performance. The other is reactivity.

Performance (aka throughput) measures the total duration of operations, e.g. how long does it take to display a page once it is loaded, how fast a script will be executed, etc. When Chrome was introduced, its performance was much greater than Firefox, largely due to v8. Some other factors involved were add-ons (it used to be really easy to write Firefox add-ons that kill performance, and it used to be impossible in Chrome), or old bloated profiles (which of course didn't exist in Chrome). Now, after lots of hard work, the Mozilla community has managed to make Firefox faster than Chrome. That's what is measured by benchmarks, and that's one point for Firefox. Simultaneously (and this doesn't appear in benchmarks) the Chrome add-on and profile situation have started to show the same weaknesses as Firefox'.

Reactivity (aka snappiness) measures how fast an application appears to be, i.e. the total duration of user-visible pauses, e.g. how long does it take to switch between tabs, or how much one tab eating all CPU affects other tabs. When Chrome was introduced, its reactivity was also much greater than Firefox, largely due to the multi-process architecture. Some other factors involved were add-ons, once again, or old bloated profile, or simply the fact that the Mozilla culture initially didn't take into account this factor. It took some time for the Mozilla community to realize that reactivity was just as important as speed. After lots of hard work, the Mozilla community has managed to make Firefox... well, much better than it used to be. Improvements include off main thread rendering, off main thread disk I/O, asynchronous add-ons, etc. Unfortunately, desktop Firefox does not have multi-process architecture yet. This gives a considerable advantage to Chrome in this domain.

Work is ongoing to bring this multi-process architecture to Firefox desktop. The task is long and difficult and might, unfortunately, kill a number add-ons, but I am confident that the Mozilla community will achieve it.

Incidentally, FirefoxOS has a multi-process architecture already.

Caveat: I'm a Mozillian, and I'm involved in Reactivity work in Firefox.

Perhaps the "long and difficult" multi-process architecture will be the ultimate fix, but it'd be great in the meantime to get some tiny hint about which tabs are sucking up memory/cycles. This could be very crude - a count of the tab's timeout-firings, object allocations or whatever - and it would still allow significant self-help.

For memory, you can already look at about:memory. For performance, if you are running Nightly, you can use the Gecko profiler that basically tells you everything about what takes time. Note that, by design, the Gecko profiler is activated only on Nightly releases.

But yes, both features are rather hardcore. We are working on more user-friendly solutions, too, although I have no idea of the roadmap.

>> Unfortunately, desktop Firefox does not have multi-process architecture yet.

I personally hate Chrome for creating a process per tab. It adds a little bit of security, but it makes harder to manage the processes in a system.

For what it's worth, the multi-process architecture is designed to customize from one-process-for-all-tabs (plus one for the ui and one for Flash) to one-process-per-tab. I don't know whether this will be a released feature, though.

Even worse is the second part of their sentence. They say, "Unfortunately, Firefox is too slow and far behind the Chrome." Far behind in what exactly?

The article is an op-ed piece...not a technology article.

Sure, but even so they could be more clear. The statement is so vague I don't know if I can even choose to agree or disagree with it!

Provably wrong depends on when the proof was done. Firefox releases occasionally go through performance low points, to the point that I can't stand it. I then switch to Chromium, until I can't stand the user experience anymore, then I switch back to Firefox which by then has usually been fixed. Until next time.

Can we please stop repeating the misleading statement that Firefox is fast enough, because of benchmarks?

When people talk about Firefox being slow, they're not talking about page rendering speeds or JavaScript execution times. They're talking about the longer delays in switching between tabs, in closing tabs, opening a bunch of tabs at once and still having the interface be responsive, and so on. User interface stuff.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any user-interface-responsiveness-speed benchmarks, so it's basically impossible to "prove". But that doesn't mean that people who complain about Firefox being slow are imagining it. The only reason I use Chrome instead of FF on my machine is precisely because the UI is an order of magnitude faster in mundane things -- instantaneous rather than pausing a bit on every little thing.

My experience is the opposite. I find Chrome horribly, horribly slow to use. Safari is ultrafast and FF somewhere in between.

I still use it because I've become so accustomed to its UI but I switch to Safari on some sites to avoid spinning up the fan.

My experience has also been the same.

Chrome on the mac is absolutely dog slow to use, especially after you open up a few tabs. Seriously, why do people say it's fast? I really don't get it. It was fast at one point but now it feels slow, bloated and the tabs crash far more often than either Firefox or Safari. If I only had a penny for every time I see the sad face on tab crashes.

Firefox has no lag whatsoever when switching tabs, and general usage. Maybe people think it's slow because of its dated UI? Maybe they haven't used it at all? Maybe they're still using Firefox 10 or older? Firefox 22 is awesome. People just need to give it an unbiased try.

Safari is the fastest of them all, both in rendering speed and general usage, though it tends to use a LOT of memory.

Chrome is very fast on my 4.8Ghz Windows PC with literally hundreds of tabs open sometimes. Almost as fast as Waterfox. If it slows with a few tabs my guess would be the OS is swapping Chrome processes memory to the swap file (or files). FWIW I just put 32GiB in my machines and remove all swap files.

Yes, Chrome is very sensitive to swapping, performance-wise.

I honestly wish I could use Firefox as my development environment. I prefer Firebug to the Chrome dev tools. But I've been slowly forced to admit that it can't keep up. With Chrome, I can casually open up a dozen tabs without considering the consequences; in Firefox, I get worried when I have two open. This pans out in the Activity Monitor.

There exist huge inconsistencies in all of these claims, and it's extremely strange how difficult it is to work out what third variables are involved that are causing such vastly different reports.

I have heard reports of considerable performance improvement from users clicking on "Firefox Reset" button. Have you tried it? You can find it in about:support (or somewhere in the Help menu, I can't remember where).

I find that this kind of behaviour is symptomatic of a machine which has a slow hard drive. Have you run benchmarks on your disk? What kind are you using? (SSD? Magnetic 3.5"? 2.5"?)

Mine is opposite your opposite. :) On my 2.5GB, 1.8GHz Core Duo Thinkpad from 2006, Chrome handles dozens of tabs in multiple windows like a champ. Firefox pre-24 was noticeably slow with just a few tabs in a single window. It's been unusable for me since 2011.

In Firefox, have you tried "Reset Firefox", in about:support? Most users report that this speeds up Firefox considerably.

Thanks, I'll give it a try.

I find that Chrome generally switches tabs instantly, then takes an age to actually display the contents if I have a significant number of tabs open.

I have the latest versions of Safari and Firefox, on the latest version of OS X. Safari has about 15 extensions, has been used daily for the past 5 years (and I haven't deleted its history, though I clear the cache one every couple of months). And I use Firefox "only" if I need to access the web-based GMail (which happens roughly every 2 months), and there are no extensions installed in Firefox.

Considering the above, Safari still is (much) faster than Firefox on my machine. I don't care if it can render JS 5% faster - the whole experience is sluggish and slow on my machine. Of course, YMMV.

Just wanted to point it out to you that there are legitimate reasons why people say Firefox is slow.

Out of curiosity: have you tried "Reset Firefox" (in about:config – you won't lose anything if you don't have add-ons)? Most users experience a huge speedup when they use it.

I don't see a 'Reset Firefox' option when I visit 'about:config' (FF/23.0 'beta channel' MacOS).

(UPDATE:) Per <http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix..., it appears 'about:support' is the right place. I suspect this would help, but the problem would recur as soon as I restore my core Add-ons and usual tabs.

In my experience, Firefox gets slower and slower the longer it's been open and with many tabs open. I believe it to be related to GC. Unfortunately, there aren't any hints (like per-tab activity/memory/allocation/timer readouts) as to which tabs are contributing the most to the problem. Sometimes I'll guess the miscreants and closing enough of them helps, but more often things only improve after a restart (essentially unloading all tabs until revisited).

It does seem add-ons are implicated (and perhaps especially Firebug, even if Firebug is not activated in any tab). NoScript may also be implicated; especially with regard to pages that have some but not all script sources enabled.

It's in Help -> Troubleshooting

Read this article to see what it preserves (or "tries to preserve"): http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix...

FWIW, I just tried it and it indeed made things a whole lot faster.

Cool :) We are working on ways to make this a little more intuitive.

It did indeed! Thanks!

BTW, I didn't find "Reset Firefox" in the about:config page - it was in Help -> Troubleshooting Information.

My bad: "about:support", not "about:config".

I've been using Opera Next (the preview version of Opera with Blink) for a few weeks now and I would say this is the first time in the history of browsers that I actually like a browser.

Chrome has always had a lot of annoying bugs for me (not all of which affect everybody, but in general I seem to attract all bugs in a software if it has any), like sometimes triggering a page load would not do anything for about a minute and then actually load and render in a second.

Considering that it's a beta the bug-freeness is pretty amazing, in fact I have only encountered one bug since I started using it - and that one is OS X (Keychain) specific.

Edit: Oh, I missed that the final release is out which fixes the bug!

Opera 15 is out

It's also not based in US, which could be seen as an advantage now.

This must be the first time in the recent history (that I remember) when Opera chooses not to release for Linux (and BSDs).

Jimmy doesn't like this!

Just once I wish people would fire up a camera, point it at their browsers, and record their claims of sluggishness. This thread is full of competing claims that their favorite browser is fast, while competitor browser is atrociously slow.

Posting system specs would be useful too, there's a chance that slow performance is GPU or driver related, memory related, dependent on other apps you have installed, etc.

Some objectivity would be nice for once instead of warring anecdotes.

I use Firefox and love it. I suppose it depends on what plugins people use. Or they may have had a bad experience once and let it at that

1 good reason not to: It's not open source.

Neither is Chrome.

My point being: choose Firefox, or Chromium, or whatever OS alternative.

Chromium != Chrome

That's what he said

I'm not convinced. I tried it, and it still sucks to this day.

Oh, so I should use Opera just because it's produced by a cool company? Firefox is Open Source and they champion (or so they say) the cause of a more standardised Internet. Oh, they also raise money to donate to charity. Does that mean I should use Firefox? And speaking of standards: Your typical end-user doesn't give a monkey's about whether all the browsers use the same standards, or whether they all use different engines and different versions of HTML and force web designers to run browser detection algorithms. As long as the page looks good, and loads fast, they'll be happy.

Browsing data sync is also available on Google Chrome. And you're mentioning it even though it still hasn't been implemented on Opera 15? Well that's quite something. Saying that "Browser X is better because in the future it will have Y and Z" debases your credibility as a browser user. I don't use Chrome because "in the future it might use quantum computing and fly." I use chrome because it has bookmarks and it has them NOW. I don't have to wait.

Last but not least, extensions. Opera is perhaps the one that's lacking the most when it comes to extensions. It is good that they'll start supporting chrome extensions, but that doesn't automatically makes it better than chrome. If anything, it reinforces the idea that it's just a cheap clone of Chrome.

So there you have it, at least to me your "5 reasons to choose Opera" post should be renamed "Opera has server-side compression. Yay!". Don't get me wrong, I'm not an Opera hater. In fact, I used to love it. I installed Opera everywhere I could. I showed Opera to a lot of people, and explained to them why I considered it to be the best option. That was one year ago. Today I would recommend Chrome. That's just my point of view, of course. Opera can still improve. That's what I hope, that they will turn Opera 15 into a beast, as fast as Chrome and boasting all the features from the previous versions. But in the interim, I'll stick with Chrome. Is not everything I want in a browser, but it's close enough.

I would have loved to see some of these points compared to the traditional chrome alternative - Firefox. There are many browsers out there that aren't produced by google. Is the assumption that I want a browser that's using blink as its rendering engine?

My list (using Opera 15):

* Internal pages and tools as pages, specially the downloads manager (I can't stand Firefox's little windows or Chrome's behind-the-scenes crippled manager).

* How it handles extensions by default (little buttons to the right of the address bar).

* The nested Speed Dial and the Stash.

* Off road mode is a really great tool when using slow connections.

* Default synchronization (is not an extension).

On the other side, v 15 isn't as polished as it should had been before being made publicly available (CTRL+Z doesn't work, no bookmarks, small bugs with the address bar).

Anyway, as you can see, most of the benefits are just UI decisions. I just don't like how Firefox or Chrome look and how they display their functionality (which is absolutely subjective).

aren't points 1, 2, 5 already in chrome, and have been for some times?

Re 1: You have to know to open the page (in the menu, or at chrome://downloads) -- by default it just shows you the download bar at the bottom of the page where you downloaded the file.

Re 2: Parent probably is confused by extensions versus web apps. I find this confusing too, since it's up to the developer to choose which form factor to use when writing the extension/app.

You can use Chromium. There is no way using closed source Opera is safer than open source Chromium.

not a dumb company? Charging money & embedding ads into your browser when the market leaders didn't sounds pretty dumb to me.

I still need tab overflow. Which so far none of the Chromium provides.

That's basically the reason I'm staying with Firefox. I use Tree Style Tabs [1], however, which gives you a hierarchial view of your opened tabs.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

This is the main reason why I can't use any other browser anymore.

Opera actually had a similar tab bar built in for quite some time, but it unfortunately didn't have the tree view. They seem to have removed this feature in Opera 15, which means there is no way I am switching browsers any time soon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com