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Comment by lingben | Hacker News Reader

I'm using firefox for another reason, it is the fastest, most secure, most memory efficient browser out there. Chrome doesn't even compare on benchmarks. They may have had the crown for a tiny split second a few years ago but not anymore firefox closed the distance a while ago and now they're ahead and the gap is growing.

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Everything you said is absolutely true.

Firefox rocks my world for all those reasons and more.

Hell, I would use it just for the Tree-Style Tabs addon, which isn't available for Chrome.

But I use Chrome at least as often as Firefox for one reason alone: when everything doesn't go smoothly and a page does crash, it doesn't take the whole browser down with it.

When Firefox hangs and/or crashes, it's much more annoying because everything is interrupted to a greater degree.

Chrome: Oops! This tab crashed, just reload it or close it and move on.

Firefox: Firefox has encountered an error and must be closed. Do you wish to debug?

As someone who spends a third of the day on the web professionally, and always has 10-50 tabs open, it matters.

+1 switched to ffox primarily because of tree-style tabs.

Forever on Firefox because of tree-style tabs.

Yeah, the tab thing is in progress. The problem is that Chrome was designed from the ground up to be process-per-tab, while Firefox is having to adapt extensive existing code.

Thankfully, plugins made it into their own processes a while ago, which has greatly reduced the number of crashes.

I don't really encounter bugs in Firefox more than maybe once a month.

That said, per-tab multi-process is coming as part of Electrolysis: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

You can follow along the roadmap here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Roadmap

It's already available in Nightly builds just disabled by default. If you'd like to try out a Nightly on Windows without messing with your local copy of Firefox, grab a copy of Firefox Portable Nightly and it'll run with it's own separate profile and Firefox install without affecting your local one: http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable/test#...

Fortunately, Mozilla has been working on this problem for a while now:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

I believe you can enable it right now in about:config (browser.tabs.remote), but it's not production-quality yet.

In Firefox Nightly, you can just use File menu > Open e10s Window menu item to open a new e10s without restarting Firefox, but setting the browser.tabs.remote.autostart pref in about:config will enable some extra compatibility code for some add-ons.

Don't forget that Firefox is fully open source. Rendering engine, PDF engine, updater, installer, all of it. Chrome isn't. Chromium is, but it lacks quite a few features of Chrome and Firefox and isn't available in stable builds for Windows or Mac.

Could you name those benchmarks where Chrome "doesn't even compare" to Firefox?

On my x86_64 linux system, Firefox is marginally faster at Mozilla's Kraken benchmark (a few %), and Chrome is much faster at Google's Octane benchmark (30+%).

Firefox? Faster? Tell that to my browser which gets sluggish whenever I have large or complex pages open. Tell that to my browser which slows to a crawl when flash or HTML5 video is loaded. Tell that to my browser which slows every other tab to a crawl when one is slow. Tell that to my browser which allows a single tab to crash the entire show.

There's a reason why I keep going back to Chrome after trying each version of Firefox for a week or two, and it's all related to basic user experience: performance and stability.

I did not switch to Chrome a few years back because it was better, but for because Firefox was worse. If both would've worked fine I of course would've not changed.

I don't know about today, but a few years back starting up Firefox was painfully slow, and when an update arrived it would first nag you about it and then during restart started checking for extension compatibilies. Even using felt sluggish and was temporarily fixed by running the sqlite vacuum in it db.

Chrome for whatever reason had none these issues, and it felt even slightly nicer to use, with usability enhancements all around like more fluid animations in tab moving, and all settings on a nicely laid out web view instead of a tiny modeless window with 10 tabs.

I really hope Firefox can not just catch up, but go past Chrome. Unfortunately the last time I tried it not too long ago, it didn't start but instead wanted to show that it is checking for extension compatibilies. Didn't exactly fill me with excitement.

An open and free Web is much more important than those ridiculous personal complaints about tiny issues.

Just interested, aren't blink/webkit still open? As long as that is true, it seems to me that there is no worries with using chrome. If google starts doing dev behind closed doors, people will just fork blink/webkit and build new browsers. I don't understand the argument that using chrome is anti-open source.

But forking blink/webkit would be a huge undertaking for anyone interested, wouldn't it? I'm not sure if there are that many companies out there who would like to go that route (imagine web browser made by facebook, that would be interesting).

It is about an open WEB not Open Source. An Open Source Browser controlled by a big corporation is still a problem if it has a giant market share.

How does Chrome discourage an open web?

second that. Visiting sites linked from even the first rated Russian sites frequently makes your IE or Chrome catch something nasty. Never with FF.

Could you explain how you came to the conclusion that Firefox is the most secure browser? Firefox had the most number of reported security bugs according to Secunia.

http://secunia.com/vulnerability-review/browser_security.htm...

Chrome is much better than Firefox in terms of security, as the Chrome team has put a huge amount of time into it.

Let's just say Google have more awesome developers than Mozilla.

Also, until recently Chromes font rendering on my 'high dpi' screen has been almost impossible to look at, and I really like my gesture plugin and the way firefox syncs with mobile firefox.

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