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Comment by nivla | Hacker News Reader

I maybe wrong but I think a lot of users are switching back to Firefox from Chrome. My personal observation is that Chrome is getting more bloated, buggy and intrusive. Sad to see my favorite browser degrading.

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I moved to Firefox from IE in 2004 for the same reason I moved back from Chrome to Firefox recently. Chrome has increasingly agitated me as options and features were removed or hidden, then the stability and responsiveness took a nosedive. I wrote about it: http://mkronline.com/2013/03/28/i-switched-back-to-firefox-a...

As someone who stuck with Firefox through the years when Chrome was almost-certainly better, I feel your pain. Perhaps a major tech company revitalize Google's efforts by entering the browser market.

I can perhaps understand buggy and intrusive, but how has Chrome gotten more bloated? I can think of very few features that have been added since it was first released.

Sorry, I don't want to "login" to my browser. That's bloat. I don't need to synch my browser's state across all devices (and if ever wanted to I'd use a known trusted sync source like my OS-device sync or a independent cloud service).

Other cruft - built-in password manager, built-in pdf render, flash runtime… a bit more and it's a standalone OS (say, like ChromeOS).

If all this were a plugin, I'd be fine with that … but it keeps prompting me and I can't disable it.

It's really just an OS posing as a browser. Kinda like iTunes for Windows - lots of cruft and some features and many bugs.

Eventually it'll all be part of Google+.

I nearly did, but Chrome handles my university's webmail client better (and what with the NSA and all, they strongly recommend against mirroring your mail to an American server, which rules out most of the nicer webmail interfaces).

How about using a local mail client rather than a webmail one?

It'd be a pain in the rear to setup and keep synched for my home computer, lab computer, and smartphone. And Horde's not amazing, but it works well enough.

That's certainly what I did. Firefox has improved immeasurably (at least for me) since about version 14, while Chrome has crept up in size. As a point of reference, if I open one tab in Chrome with Google Music and I let my computer idle for a minute, the various Chrome processes will sum up to between 800-1024MB of memory. You know how much Firefox with 8 tabs takes? 420MB.

Apparently people don't like this comment, but unlike some I do not possess scads and scads of RAM.

The underdog has room to improve - the reigning king has a throne to rest its laurels upon.

I imagine Chrome will pick back up soon, Google needs to make a move on web apps in Android before the Firefox Marketplace steals the webapp momentum.

Chrome has gone from the 'fastest' (whatever that means) and 'leanest' (ditto) to one that has the (penultimate) worst cold start times[1] and worst memory efficiency[2].

[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-ope...

[2] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-ope...

My hypothesis is that Chrome is lately sacrificing memory for speed by doing heavier matryoshka caching on the rendered parts of a page. This is important for, say, smoothly compositing DOM elements on top of a WebGL canvas, or compositing CSS3-animated elements into a scrollable div. (Actually, I'd think this would cause higher video memory usage, not regular memory usage, but I'm not quite sure how Chrome tracks video memory; is it all grouped together as the memory usage of the "GPU process" in Chrome's task manager?)

As a developer, I've gone back and forth over the years. I just switched back to Firefox I think for good though. Chrome crashes consistently now and having Gmail and google music open at the same time is a total resource hog. I was even using the Canary version and that was hardly ever stable.

I've also come to favor firebug over chrome's dev tools.

Canary is a nightly build, it's not supposed to be stable.

For me it wasn't even usable. I can understand some glitches here and there. Most of time, it just froze or crashed when I only had a few tabs open.

"bleeding edge" to me is more than just being able to use a product for an hour at time.

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