Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
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To leverage his analogy that it is like coming home to a new house to find that most of your stuff is already there, it is like not cleaning your house and not taking out the trash for three years and then moving into a new house. Yeah, it's clean and new, but why is it better and will it stay better?
Also, I like using the same browser on my Android tablet as on my laptop and websites that use MathJax render incorrectly on Android Chrome (these sites render perfectly well on Android Firefox and on both desktop Firefox and desktop Chrome). So I'd probably use Firefox even if it were a little slower than Chrome.
(The one I mentioned, VimFx, is more recent and more minimalistic that either Vimperator or Pentadactyl.)
Vimium isn't even the best vimperator clone for Chrome - cVim has now taken that crown by a very large margin, and is worlds better in terms of features, configuration and reliability.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-plus...
[1] http://www.extremetech.com/computing/199188-%C2%B5block-aims...
I have no idea what your experience was, of course. Many people said this for years while Firefox consistently won or tied in objective comparisons.
Having dealt with end-user complaints for years, I've learned to doubt reports that rely on subjective perceptions of things like 'speed'. Sometimes the new, cool thing feels faster. Perhaps Firefox should pump in some fake engine noise.
My main problem was the GUI, not the rendering (though the latter probably played its part in slowing the GUI down).
Opening/closing/moving tabs was sluggish.
Just opening Firefox with my ~20 tabs open would take many times as long as opening Chrome with the same number of tabs.
You didn't need a stopwatch to see the difference.
I realize most people didn't have that problem; it was probably a freak corner case on my machine.
Also note that Firefox was "winning" objective benchmarks on things that didn't matter. Rendering speed doesn't mean much to me if it takes 10x longer to open the tab before rendering begins.
It took some time, but the developers finally convinced themselves that the problem existed, and started fixing it. It also took some time to fix most thing, but now Firefox is stable and fast. Nowadays Chrome it is slow and too "smart".
Anyway, complete comparisons of megabyte-sized sofware, with gigabyte-sized states must take longer than the age of the Universe to run. Anything smaller is not complete enough to exclude bugs.
The toss-up between junk battery life thanks to badly designed attempts to shoe-horn an application model into a document model (and Google employs plenty of the worst offenders, my biggest perf suck under both Firefox and Chrome is GMail!) and random stops is disgusting. Gary Bernhardt's right: we put up with entirely too much bullshit in this part of our lives.
Then, the other browsers made their new engines, and the leading performer has gone back and forth since.
It wasn't subjective perception. You could run the same javascript code in multiple browsers, time it, and see the results quite clearly. Since javascript was (and is) such a huge part of most websites, this speed difference was very noticeable during regular browsing.
Chrome's interface is perfectly snappy. This is with no extensions on either, and brand new profiles. Every once in a while I go through a free software stage and switch back to Firefox, but I always end up going back to Chrome.
I was using then Firefox 2 or 2.5 (don't remember) quite happily.
It was just great (compared to Explorer).
Chrome showed up... But Firefox 2.5 was still much better.
Then one day, Firefox started to INSIST to install 3.0, then 3.5, then one day it just did, no matter how hard I tried to keep my old version.
And then behold, Firefox 3.5 had a bigger interface, that used more screen space (and I am in Brazil, bigger screens and bigger resolutions get expensive FAST, my current laptop, that is a ASUS gaming one, is still 14 inches and the maximum vertical res is 768, screens better than that were unaffordable to me), and it was SLOW, VERY, VERY slow, like RIDICULOUS slow.
So I hopped into Chrome... and I wish I could say I never looked back, but hogging 600mb just to load reuters.com webpage is NOT nice.
I am only still using chrome for google-ecosystem reasons.
If I could get rid of relying on google stuff (several work-related things depend on google) I probably would get on Firefox or Opera (or see if I can put Konqueror on Windows? I never tried that...)
That wasn't your whole post, but when I see it I stop reading and move on. Anyway, don't worry too much about a few negative mods.
Generally Rekonq is considered the better maintained KDE browser nowadays.
When I finally made the move FF had no extensions, no malware or any add-ons. I ran the same (mostly) version on Ubuntu, OSX and Windows 7. It had become unusably slow on all platforms. Looking around on the Internet in those days saw enough validation of the problem being widespread in terms of speed and memory resources that I tried Chrome and found it significantly snappier.
In fact, I still do, although I note the great strides FF has taken in that regard. My problem is I haven't seen the same degradation in Chrome that I saw in FF a few years back. If it's getting bloated, I've missed it (in terms of palpable heft with slowdowns, crashes).
In particular, it's worst-case behaviour (esp. spikes) that hurts the most with memory usage, and Firefox is much better in that regard than it used to be.
As for the question of will it change? Well, to be frank, it shouldn't. It's known, however, that it will: Chrome in particular is known to not handle the accumulated history well. I haven't had a similar experience with Firefox, but that's only one data point.
I've noticed Firefox has been getting faster over the last couple years, but when I use it I still get the feeling that it gets in my way more than Chrome does.
Edit: fix typo
I think this is a rough article, but likely one that either many users will empathize with, so the overarching idea that browsers should be doing something to prevent bloat is probably a sound one.
This guy clearly didn't do research. Yes, Chrome uses a massive amount of memory, but that was originally a feature. Most people had way more memory than they needed at any given time, so Chrome heavily used memory to decrease processing time and therefore improve rendering speed. It also split into many processes to insulate each part of the browser from crashes and security holes.
Now that the age of SoCs/tablets/etc is upon us, people don't have as much extra memory as they did when Chrome first arrived. That may have an impact on how usable Chrome is (don't know if it's smart about "dialing down" its memory usage).
But this guy didn't mention any of that. Like a modern "journalist", he just wrote about his own anecdotal experiences without learning about the underlying concepts.
However, if you treat it as a blog post, and one that's likely to be parroted by other users of his same ability, it's a decent canary for popular opinion.
To me, the worst part is that Chrome seems, even without significant extensions, to be a CPU hog. And that translates into worse battery life. I switched to Firefox strictly because of the better battery life; with Chrome and GMail open it was like my battery had a hole in it. (Now I get to deal with random hangs that lock input for a while because a tab has a sad in Firefox. I hate us.)
In a browser comparison I wrote last month, I included a section for users who like to keep a lot of tabs open. Even Opera, which uses the same code base as Chrome, does tabs better than Chrome:
http://www.filterjoe.com/2015/01/23/best-browsers-2015-which...
edit: not sure why I've been dv, but I'd like to add that one thing I've noticed is that this will usually happen when I open links in a new tab, somehow all those tabs become linked and if one becomes unresponsive they all do. For those who claim I should stop opening links in new tabs, I say: welcome to 2004, this is the whole purpose of tabbed browsing. If you;d like to try to reproduce this: go to facebook and open the first ten links in your newsfeed in new tabs (either by middle clicking, ctrl+click, or context menu) I don't normally do more than one or two at a time but ten will force the issue. then go to another tab that isn't connect to those other 11 it'll work fine while those 11 will look like they're on pause.
Note: I haven't tested this in other browsers.
Other than the occasional tab crashing and quickly reloading (and by "occasional", I mean maybe once every couple of months or so), I've never had an issue with Chrome. It just works.
Firefox is a lot better than it used to be, but it can still be brought to its knees across the board by a bad script, at least in my experience, and it's hard to find the one bad tab to kill.
Turns out, they fixed Firefox up pretty good over the years
It works, kind of, as long as I don't try to run anything else at the same time.
The article persuaded me that Firefox may be worth a try again.
As for testing - you'd think testing on a range of hardware would be standard.
Testing exclusively on top spec machines is just unprofessional.
So, public apolgy: I'm very sorry, eridal. I thought you wrote something you did not. My comment was wrong as a result. I have corrected my mistake, and wish to apologize to you personally for misreading what you wrote.
Original message with the offending part removed, mistakenly assuming eridal was using Chrome (I'm not sure why I read it that way):
---
I stopped using Chromium in part because once I passed the 100-150 tab threshold, memory usage skyrockets to 4-6GiB. It's OK with 16GiB RAM, but usability diminishes pretty badly (the stock UI is NOT conducive to more than 80-100 tabs), and if you're stupid enough to visit a site with Flash, the probability of it leaking and eating up another 2+GiB begin to approach 1.
I like Chrome for its speed--if you have 20 tabs or fewer open. But I can certainly correlate my own experiences with that of the GP comment.
On the other hand, I wasn't able to use Chrome the same way I use Firefox on PC with 8GB RAM.
I misread eridal's comment. :) I thought he/she said they were using Chrome, not Firefox, hence my understandable surprise!
I've corrected my mistake. Sorry about the confusion. Surprised no one else picked it up...
EDIT: After posting this comment, I closed all my tabs (something which causes one of my extensions - probably Tree Style Tab - to throw a confirmation dialog with the number of tabs). The number was 233, plus another ten or so in another window. I must say, that's pretty damn good, all things considered.
I'm trying out Nightly right now to see if I can push that even further with the new e10s features.
Now, I will admit that Firefox misbehaves once you hit about the 500 tab threshold (or higher) to the extent that closing it takes longer. But since tabs aren't loaded on restart until you click them, its memory usage tends to stay much, much lower during regular usage.
I want to like Chrome. It's fast, it's pretty speedy, but for my use case, it's not ideal. It's good for some things, but Firefox is much better behaved!
I do have a coffee-break whenever I open my IDE
Because I COMPLETELY misread your original comment. :( I thought it read that you were using Chrome, not Firefox.
I'm truly very sorry about that, eridal.
My experiences are just like yours, though. Firefox works great for me (relatively low memory usage, up to and including 200+ tabs). Chrome, on the other hand, not so much.
Hopefully you can see why I was surprised, but it was through the entire fault of my own eyes apparently interleaving another comment with yours. I'm an idiot. ;)
And you gotta admit, that was pretty stupid.
Cheers!
Many Google engineers (including folks like me outside of Chrome) use Chromebooks as our primary laptops. In my case that also (mostly) makes my Chromebook Pixel my primary computer. I average 25-100 tabs, many of them doing 'heavy' things like editing large Google Docs or running Inbox.
I do have a beefy dev desktop that I access via ssh, although frankly it mostly exists for running emacs for the pedestrian task of actually typing out bits of code.
Next time I start a new team we're all getting Raspberry Pis for development.
Then you discover their smallest development/test machine is 128GB.
RIGHT?
(Firefox was heavily criticized for having huge apparent memory usage, which was ignored up until at least FF 4)
Back when Chrome came out Firefox was buggy. Since then it has become much more stable. Chrome is the one that's buggy now. One process per tab means that a bug in one tab does not take down the whole browser but it is much better to just fix the bugs and not crash at all.
For example, while browsing HN, I'll frequently just middle-click a bunch of article links and (occasionally) their comments, then read them once I have a sizable queue. Same goes for trying to look up documentation to fix some bug in my code; I'll start with a DuckDuckGo search and, suddenly, I have at least a dozen (sometimes multiple dozens) tabs open with Stack Overflow questions and blog posts and official online docs and such with clues pointing me in the right direction.
At least that's the one I use.
It should also be the first result if you search Mozilla's add-on marketplace thingamajig for "Tree Style Tabs". Here's the link for convenience: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
What would be awesome is some sort of auto tab closer that assumes you'll never use the tab again after 15 minutes of idle time.
Here's an old paper that talks about the architecture (it hasn't changed much at a high level):
http://seclab.stanford.edu/websec/chromium/chromium-security...
Each website is rendered in a separate process with a sandbox, each with an empty chroot + process namespace + network namespace + tiny seccomp-bpf + syscall whitelist.
Chrome also has a stronger sandbox, pioneers better SSL, supports PIE on binaries, uses pepper - doesnt use native Flash plugins, the JIT compiler does randomization / encryption tricks to make it hard to heap spray exploit code. They have their own hardened memory allocator called PartitionAlloc.
Etc Etc.
Firefox also had more critical CVEs in 2014 than Chrome: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=2CRyJkmV
And reports of sandbox escapes are less common in Chrome for a reason.
For my own use cases, Chrome drags my whole system performance into a gutter and shoots it full of bullets.
In other words, it’s not just a “trade-off”, but rather Chrome is completely and utterly unusable, while both Safari and Firefox handle the load with no problem.
However, my high memory consumption in Chrome was due to using AdBlock, which is much lower now that I switched to uBlock. Even back with AdBlock, memory was never an issue with many tabs open.
My only problem (which is probably not Chrome's, but my laptop's fault) is that sometimes, when having ~20 tabs open, and certain tabs are idle for a long time, they take a bit of time to re-render once I visit them again, but that also used to happen in Firefox.
I really don't know what you're talking about - Chrome is a dog after ~10 tabs are opened, uses crazy memory and becomes unusable fast once it starts paging. Firefox remains stable, backgrounds tabs you're not using in a graceful way, and doesn't try to open and render every single tab at once on a session restore.
It's unbelievable that Chrome still does this, after the problem has been reported for years.
That's the thing with anecdotal evidence, it's a sample of one.
There are WebKit-based browsers far lighter and faster than Firefox. Chrome, Firefox in Linux, and the Tor browser provide better security. Isolating browsers in separate VMs or Qubes AppVMs provides even better security.
Sure, its process model isnt as "secure" as chrome since it has the trade off or sharing more memory among other examples. But as a user, it seems like a freaking good enough trade off right now....
I'd found a big boon for this workflow in the very simple extension "Export Tabs[1]." It's really simple: click an icon on the toolbar and it lists open tabs by title and then by URL.
Now when I notice that I've got a real glut of tabs open I dump them into my bookmark software so I can comb through later.
Like I said, really simple extension but tremendously helpful.
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/export-tabs/odafag...
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabattack/ginflokh...
Instead of exporting tabs as plain text it exports them as Markdown. And it allows you to download the resulting document with one click as a *.md file, instead of having to copy and paste it in an editor.
It also uses the screen real estate in the toolbar a little bit more usefully by showing a tab counter (similar to what Chrome does on mobile).
And of course there are keyboard shortcuts for everything.
Here is my Show HN:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Though another comment has led me to wonder if FF doesn't have something similar built-in.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/the-fox-only-...
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/u_g2cx...
In your opinion, what makes this "impossible"? I also use a few hundred tabs at any one time (also to the consternation of everyone who sees any _one_ of the Chrome windows I have open) and I'm very happy with Chrome.
With those options plus tab groups, I find it pretty easy to handle several hundred tabs in Firefox, where Chrome was a nightmare. The drawback is that you just keep adding tabs ;-)
What are you referring to specifically with the "spying on you" claim? I wasn't aware of any behavior like that other than features that you can turn off that end up sending info to Google servers (like tab sync).
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/unloadtab/
It still is crazy and messy. For organizing the various projects there are bookmarks and bookmark folders. Having tons of tabs open != organization.
+ user is able to see a tree-view / list of them all at one.
+ searchable.
+ loadable on demand on the same "tabs", even whole folders (projects) at once.
+ persistent (even across computers with bookmark sync).
+ doesn't waste memory (not even mininal).
+ Was even designed for actual organization (Manage Bookmarks...), instead of a viewing content feature that was abused for that purpose.
Exactly. Tree Style Tab being the biggest reason I've never switched to Chrome.
I admit that I never learned Panorama or Tab Groups. Tree Style Tab does just about everything I need.
> I like to keep dozens of tabs open
Only dozens? Son, I just closed a Firefox session (in order to switch over to Nightly) with 233 tabs (plus another window with 10 or so). Didn't even push the 6GB mark.
When it comes to browsing, Chrome is like a modern soldier with all his gadgets and gizmos to keep him nice and sandboxed and safe from his adversaries ("adversaries" being poorly-designed "responsive" "web-scale" "mobile-first" "semantic" "Wangular.js" "jQWOP" "SASSy" "single-page" "web applications"); a good marksman, but easily overwhelmed should he find himself at close range and significantly outnumbered.
Firefox, in the meantime, is better likened to what would result if SkyNet had based its Terminators on Viking berserkers: almost naked, wielding nothing more than battle-axes (axen?) in each hand, charging at hundreds of foes in a magic-mushroom-fueled frenzy and winning. Yet, even if he should fail, 'twould matter not, for he only dreams of dying in such a great battle (as he does every week or so when I inevitably need to restart the Firefox process) and ascending to Robot Valhalla; and someday, Servo Firefoxson will grow from boy to man, and upon doing so, himself join the epic battles to avenge his father.
As for existing things, I've found Tab Counter quite useful in combination with TSTs.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/sr732e...
Is vimperator still actively developed and compatible with the latest Firefox? I switched over to the fork, Pentadactyl some years ago.
You might be referring to the OS task manager, but I don't use that--don't need to. I think the fact that Chrome has its own task manager is a killer feature.
Biggest reason I switched, which is still the true (though less so), is that Chrome takes up less screen real estate.
Other than the rare tab freezing up and needing to be restarted, I've had absolutely no issues. Chrome just works.
On Firefox I had no such issue as each tab would only reload on focus.
[digs into settings] Ah, that's it: on Settings > On Startup, I've selected "Open The New Tab Page" which (I think) is the default.
Yeah, trying to open up a couple dozen tabs at once, several of which are videos, could be problematic.
Firefox needs to get itself a multi-process system. I really don't mind a little extra RAM being used as long as tabs are separated and sandboxed. I'm also looking forward to a complete rewrite in Rust. That should make Firefox much faster than anything else out there. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
Rust also allows one to safely use patterns that one couldn't use in C++ without screwing things up, thanks to the borrow checker. And quite a lot of Firefox is written in Javascript, which definitely would be faster when rewritten in a compiled language.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabattack/ginflokh...
It's able to save tabs and windows to the file system as Markdown and restore them from these files, too.
I would love to get feedback on it.
It chokes on all 1 word phrases, spending many seconds attempting to find webpages for that word instead of searching. Chrome instantly searches.
Also, having a separate address bar and search was novel in 1999, when search was novel.
However, let's get real: a single address bar capable of nearly instantly deciding between search and location isn't a pipedream, it's the competitors reality and has been for many many years.
I have a feeling I'll migrate from Chrome sooner or later because I dislike Google's approach to standards and new features (no respect for standards, passionate desire to pump chrome full of backgrounds jobs and proprietary vendor features).
But I just cannot wrap myself around the fact that the Firefox address bar hasn't been meaningfully changed in what feels like the entire history of the modern web.
I'd say you either have a seriously old oc, have something weird in your profile or you are doing something seriously wrong.
Furthermore, awesomebar lets me automatically do full text searches across titles and urls, something chrome still cannot really do (with firefox you can search a couple of fragments of the url or title and off it goes and finds it, quick.)
Furthermore, two separate boxes are the best of both worlds, both awesomebar and quick (ctrl+k)access to your preferred search engine.
If I've understood what you're saying, I believe this was fixed in Firefox 33: https://msujaws.wordpress.com/2014/08/01/faster-and-snappier...
As for the general complaint about Firefox's address bar: I find it to be vastly superior to Chrome's at finding sites I've visited before. I can type in fragments of URLs and/or page titles (even partial words) and get matches immediately in a way that Chrome (and Safari) can't compete with.
For years I wondered why the other browsers were so much worse at this. Then somebody pointed out to me that, for the case of Chrome, Google would much prefer you find a page via Google search than via your browser history...
To be fair, much of the huffing and puffing "I'm leaving Firefox...Chrome is so much better!" was based upon the same sort of rhetoric. Early on Chrome didn't even have extensions, much less bloated monstrosities like Ad Block Plus and Firebug (don't get me wrong -- they both are fantastic, but most don't realize how incredibly onerous they are). So those people kicked Firefox to the curb and talked about how grand everything was with Chrome. Now that Chrome has an ecosystem, they put themselves in the same situation again.
Now you can have HUNDREDS of tabs (in firefox's nice tab groups, of course) and they'll only stay open / in-memory for a configurable amount of time after you stop using them.
Keeps memory utilization tight. I'm currently south of 500MB utilization with hundreds of tabs open and lots of extensions: Disconnect Search, DownThemAll, FoxyProxy, Greasemonkey, HTTPS Everywhere, Imagus, Stylish and uBlock
Do you think the user cares? Firefox is the one who opened themselves up to get abused by. (Same things happened on Windows, you'll get a machine full of crapware if you install popular apps. OSX has a curated app store. Look at the difference on an average windows and OSX machine.)
Some solutions instead of blaming the user:
* Name & shame poorly-performing plugins in the interface. (OSX does this with "apps using significant power" in the battery meter)
* Have a plugin speed rating in the store
* Have performance requirements for plugins (users will report usage data, you have X seconds to startup, if you average higher you will be reviwed/yanked.)
Asking users to not install extensions when extensibility is one of your selling points is not a good idea. Fix how they interact with the browser.
Please Google, understand this; I don't want my browser linked with my Google account.
Plus Firefox crashing is a huge downside.
As for privacy implications, there's no reason to believe Google does anything inappropriate, and I rather like having my internet experience tailored based on past behaviour.
To each their own I guess.
How do you get Firefox to crash? What does about:crashes say? Did you report the bug?
Also, pretty much anything that's Javascript + WebGL runs like shit in Firefox. Emscripten demos are good though. But Emscripten runs better in Chrome than JS+WebGL in Firefox.
Compiling all those shaders is rough on any browser, but only Firefox gets its entire UI blocked. Even Internet Explorer manages to isolate the jank to one tab.
Sadly Firefox 39 (nightly) still has no real multi process support. There are only two processes, the main process holds all tabs, the single child process "plugin-container" holds all plugins (Flash, Acrobat, etc.). It's a bit disappointing to see such little progress since 2010. Hopefully Mozilla's Rust based Servo engine comes to the rescue soon and replaces gecko and its old XUL (XML based UI framework) with Servo and an HTML5 based UI (like Firefox OS).
I use Firefox as development browser because of Firebug and and the new developer tools. Working with dozens of tabs open for days is only possible with IE11 and Chrome.
That is incorrect. There is one plugin-container for each plugin module. All Flash instances share a single plugin-container, all Acrobat instances share a single plugin-container, and so forth.
As for the e10s content process, for the moment there is only one content process. The plan is to get e10s working well with the one content process, and then start scaling that up to multiple content processes. Nightly is a bleeding edge development channel, after all.
Another interesting thing you can do: click through from about:crashes to your crash report. Then click the "more reports" link. You can see if your crash signature is rare or if you have one of the currently "popular" ones. If a lot of other people are crashing with that same signature, there is probably a bug and developers are probably discussing it. Again the most useful thing you can do is figuring out how to make that crash happen consistently and adding steps to reproduce it to its bug.
If that's the case try using 64 bit builds.
Instead, I've switched to Disconnect search. They proxy searches and claim to do so anonymously. So at least I'm not directly contributing to Google's profile building that way. It does add a second or two latency per search, which can be annoying.
FF switched to Yahoo, and I'm just amused at how bad it is. They even open results in new tabs by default, a lame trick used to try to accidentally keep people on your site.
It's unfortunate, but Google really does dominate in search.
Also, chromium seems to be getting less and less care from google now. See this bug for example which prevents using screenshare in hangouts: https://crbug.com/416856
It's called Firefox.
check this comparison between chrome and iron (which is based on chromium): https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iro...
"Although SRWare claims 'Iron is free and OpenSource' ... Iron 'is entirely closed source and has been since at least version 6'."
Or this:
http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.ht...
https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/download-chro...
I also do so with Amazon and Microsoft and would probably claim that I am offering informed consent.
I'm keen to have it explained to me where I might be in error on this matter.
And I agree 100% with you!
I'm a goddamn software developer, software doesn't usually make me feel stupid. So congrats to Google on that I guess...
Storing bookmarks as *.lnk as with IE3+ is still the way to go. Though, I found out that 50% of my bookmarks are obsolete and many were never archived in archive.org due evil robots.txt entries.
Being that I'd never intended to 'sign into Chrome' in the first place (the form looks awfully similar to the gmail login), I essentially rage-quit Chrome and haven't looked back since. I've embraced Firefox and I feel better using free and open source software.
Performance has been excellent. The only thing I regularly notice is that many startups seem to only QA their products in Chrome.
Additionally, I've found FireFox to be more consistent about it's quality, vs having occasional releases with a jump in bugs/instability.
They've actually gotten very upfront about their user features in recent versions. It's a great toolset for maintaining different sessions with multiple sites. Or for using as an incognito session with less ephemeral data.
I have multiple g-mail accounts. One of them is my primary personal one, and another one I use is a shared account that my band uses for business and soundcloud.
Google makes it hellish to sign out of one and into the other. For the longest time, I had them linked, and my band mates could see my personal e-mail. I don't know if they could get past a log in point, but the fact that its so hard to keep them un-linked and log into one or the other is infuriating.
You can change users by clicking the top right of a chrome window.
They may not be obvious to set up, but they are worth learning about if you are going to use stick with Chrome and use multiple Google accounts, or multiple accounts on any service - Twitter, FB, etc.
But that's their entire business model.
You might want to pay a lot more attention to SSL-based tracking methods, e.g. https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/Home/chromium-se...
Uncoupling your use of Google services from your other online activities is much harder than many people seem to believe.
Visiting a page on a creep's domain to find out about its creepiness seems like a bad idea.
Now that Google has pushed HTTP/2 on everybody, connection reuse will be a major new fingerprinting and tracking technique because it keeps connections open a long time and essentially can't be proxied so one connection is always one browser.
http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.ht...
Google Chrome now has a "feature" that will automatically reset your homepage, search settings, wipe all extensions and wipe all extension data whenever it detects an unexpected change to any of your settings files or they do not match up to the PC they are locked to.
The goal was to prevent third parties from hijacking your search engine within Chrome. Things like bundleware installers on Windows that switch it.
The actual result is that all your settings are now locked to a specific PC and will be reset anytime anything changes. As the developer of Google Chrome Portable, this means only your bookmarks move with you as you move PCs unless you're logged in. This also means that even if you backup your Chrome install, if your PC dies, you can not restore that Chrome install on another PC. Your bookmarks will be restored, but you will lose your settings, extensions, and passwords since your profile was moved to a new PC.
This stands in stark contrast to Firefox which is completely self-contained. If a third party bundleware installer hijacks your search engine or homepage, you can simply set them back as they should be. All your extensions, extension settings, etc will continue working as expected whether or not you opt to use Firefox Sync.
You absolutely must link your Google Chrome install to
your Google ID on Windows or you will lose data.
Incognito mode at all times, no Google ID ever, trash local history on every exit. I don't carry the expectation that my bookmarks must live on and follow me from machine to machine.
I don't care about what my search preferences are. I simply turn address bar searches off, or point it to localhost. I don't conduct rampant web searches from the address bar, because an address bar is an address bar, and I only feed it well-formed URLs. I don't waste my time regularly using web sites that can't provide me with a URL that isn't intended to be typed, and sub pages that I can't readily navigate to.
Address to long? No soup for you. Absurd URL parameters? No soup for you. Deeply nested pages, locked away behind a login, 30 clicks deep, and obscured by dark patterns? No. Soup. For. You.
Preferences are preferences, and that's all they are. The default install should be completely useful and practical as-is, on a clean install. If it isn't then preferences should be exportable to plaint-text using an open standard.
Firefox happily dumps its bookmarks as simple JSON. As a result, when I want to transport my bookmarks I can, although, digging back into my archive more than a year 50% tend to perish due to simple link rot.
I think web applications should never have existed. The web was designed for hypertext, images, and other static consumable content. It wasn't designed to be a platform for massive distributed applications. Why are there so many security fuckups on the web? Because it wasn't designed to be secure. The fact that people are now programming desktop applications in JavaScript against NodeJS suggests to me that the web has gone too far. We should have built something new to handle what we now call "web applications".
I, too, look at huge disgusting URLs every day and wonder why we didn't see this coming.
But mostly I see no benefits from having it enabled, but quite a few negatives (security, privacy, etc). As long as the browser keeps the history of your current browser session alive while the browser stays open, that's perfectly fine for me.
The total market share of people who care about whether or not their browser is linked with their Google account is probably less than one percent. The value they get from knowing everything you do online? I'm not sure how you'd calculate that, but I'm positive it's greater than losing the tiny number of hackers who are protective of their personal data.
Google will continue to build the browser under the assumption that your browser will be linked with your Google account. If you don't link, you'll be a permanent edge case.
If you don't want to link your account, it's much easier to just switch browsers.
> The value they get from knowing everything you do online?
This is a myth. Or less politely, a lie you have been told.
https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/privacy/ is very clear about exactly when chrome reports back data, including what happens when you sign in. It does not report your online activity in ways different from other web browsers. It sends just about the minimum possible to implement the features it provides.
I don't claim to know anything about how Chrome works, so could be completely wrong in this, but my sense is that it is part of a broader desire to tie together tracking across all devices. Cracking that nut is very difficult from an analytics perspective, and having people logged in to Chrome across all devices provides a very convenient GUID for matching against AdSense units, DFA tags, GA tags, etc.
So the value in this play is not necessarily in knowing everything you do online, but simply knowing that you are who you are regardless of device or Chrome instance. That means data about you is consistent, and can feed into the broader targeting algorithms to serve you the right ad, at the right place, at the right time.
Again, I don't know what data Chrome makes available to Google's ad services, so please tell me if I am in fact incorrect here.
If you read the very detailed Chrome privacy policy (https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/privacy/), you will see that it does nothing different to other browsers here (each server sees your IP address, cookies, etc). It does not send any form of uniquely identifiable ID with every request. Only some very specific cases (offline drive, google wallet, DRM auth, etc) send your signed-in userid, which they need in order to work at all.
Please read the privacy policy. People put a lot of time and effort into writing it and it answers all your questions.
I see a section in the link you provided that reads:
> "Chrome OS may send a non-unique promotional tag to Google periodically (including during initial setup) and when performing searches with Google."
Sure Chrome may not be sending a GUID with every request. That wasn't my point. To clarify, my point was that Google has a GUID (your Google account, and likely other forms of ID) that identify you pretty clearly across devices/Chrome instances. I saw nothing in the policy you linked that said Google AdSense and other Google ad services (DoubleClick tags, GA, etc.) do not use that information to link identities across devices for purposes of tracking.
The AdWords and GA teams have rolled out significant advances in cross-device tracking over the past year or two, including new metrics and reports in the respective platforms. It seems pretty obvious to me that this is a data point that is factored into making that link.
But again, I'd love to be proven wrong if I missed a section of your link that explicitly says otherwise.
> To clarify, my point was that Google has a GUID (your Google account, and likely other forms of ID) that identify you pretty clearly across devices/Chrome instances.
I think the privacy policy is quite clear that Chrome does nothing here that other browsers don't do. Obviously if you have a Google cookie from signing in to the website then that's going to identify you pretty clearly, but that's just how cookies work, and would be exactly the same in any other browser. I'd like to specifically direct your attention to the first three paragraphs of the policy, and in particular:
"If you use Chrome to access other Google services, such as using the search engine on the Google homepage or checking Gmail, the fact that you are using Chrome does not mean that Google will receive any special or additional personally identifiable information about you."
> I saw nothing in the policy you linked that said Google AdSense and other Google ad services (DoubleClick tags, GA, etc.) do not use that information to link identities across devices for purposes of tracking.
I wouldn't expect to find any information about how AdSense works in the Chrome policy. The privacy policy for ads is over here and discusses this topic: http://www.google.co.uk/policies/technologies/ads/
Speaking for myself, I always disable (i.e. "rm -rf") auto-updaters because they don't separate security updates from other random changes. Browsers are the worst, with a "major version upgrade" every month dropping whatever the developers had on their build server onto my computer.
Personally, I've also found that, despite Firefox's distinction as the browser to popularize the idea of extensions, it now tends to lag in that department. Sure, you can get Adblock, but the stuff available on Chrome tends to be much more diverse these days. Finally, it's still not multi-process (though it's finally getting there.) [2]
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_activity.cgi?id=636564 [2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Roadmap
In fact, Nightly now is by default.
EDIT: Ok, downvote me all you want but it's a fact, not opinion. I'd give FF another shot once it's in stable but as it is now I'm not going to waste my time playing on a nightly build.
Chrome is a much newer browser. At the time Chrome was released, it was the only browser with this design, because it's much easier to do when starting from scratch. Chrome benefited greatly simply from observing the design decisions of Firefox, IE, etc. that had had several years to play out by that point.
In ten years (assuming Chrome is still around then), it will also have similarly antiquated design decisions that make sense to us now, but will be frustrating and obsolescent a decade from now. It doesn't mean that Chrome won't be able to keep up at all with these changes eventually; it just means that it's not great to compare a brand-new browser with one that's been around (and used!)[0] for a long time.
Electrolysis (the name for the project) took much longer in Firefox because they had to essentially retrofit an existing browser that hadn't been designed this way from the start.
[0] If Firefox hadn't had significant market share, it could have made this change much more rapidly without fear of breaking things for existing users. But of course, making sure the browser remains stable for its millions of users is a top priority as well, alongside developing these new features.
> "In ten years (assuming Chrome is still around then), it will also have similarly antiquated design decisions that make sense to us now,"
You can't say that with any certainty whatsoever maybe Chrome will fair better than FF has or maybe we will see a re-write of Chrome's core to deal with future changes.
As I said elsewhere in this thread I will use the browser I deem best at the current point in time. Right now, for me, that browser is Chrome (I couldn't care less which browser has been around longer).
As for "it just means that it's not great to compare a brand-new browser with one that's been around (and used!)[0] for a long time" this is so wrong.... of course I can compare the two, they both do the same thing at the end of the day (provide a portal to the internet). When FF came out (and in it's heyday) no one said "You can't compare FF to IE, FF is a brand new browser" No, instead they/we all switched to FF because it was BETTER. Now, at least IMHO, Chrome is BETTER and so I've switched again. If that changes I will switch yet again.
Not true. Beta 1 (and subsequent releases) of Internet Explorer 8 [1] included process isolation [2][3][4] before Google released the first public beta of Chrome on 2 September 2008 [5].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8#Release_his...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8#Performance...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_isolation#Web_browsers
[4] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftIE8AndGoogleChromePro...
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#Public_release
So if one tab hangs (e.g. WebGL demo) then still the whole Firefox is slow as hell. Firefox should finally spawn child processes for every other tab with less permissions ("sandbox" technique) so that if one tab hangs or crashes every other tab and the UI still is responsive. It seems we have to wait for Rust based Servo engine to get that feature - but that would also rescue us from XUL based UI (FirefoxOS already has an HTML5 based UI).
Not true. Each plugin module gets its own plugin container. Flash instances share a separate plugin-container from the one shared by Acrobat instances.
It's worth noting that multi-process is why Chrome has a much higher memory footprint than Firefox these days for users running several tabs. Firefox pulls out plugins (Flash, etc) to a separate process so when they crash, they don't take out the browser. It will still cause the browser to pause for a few seconds as it waits to be sure Flash is hung up before asking you to stop the plugin.
https://i.imgur.com/yffoLQY.jpg
Take a large image like this, first off it loads full size instead of scaled, and when you click teh magnifying glass to scale it, you still have to scroll to see the whole thing
When will this proprietary crap die off already?
I know because I witnessed them breaking one Flash video-recording feature after the other trying to reimplement the damn thing...
Yeah, it does. Pepper Flash is just Flash repackaged to use Chrome's new plug-in architecture; it is still written by Adobe. (Although perhaps Chrome does deserve the blame for some crashes related to how it integrates with the browser.)
Very strange that Google let the situation get so bad. Mind you I find the Chrome developer tools far more powerful and intuitive than those in Firefox which stops me moving entirely.
I had this problem too and found that Chrome was getting so slow that it was unusable. For those who have this problem and don't want to switch from Chrome there is an extension called "The Great Suspender" which dumps background tabs after a configurable time period of inactivity. It helped immensely.
Why do we keep open 500 tabs instead of using bookmarks these days?
I'm still fighting to keep my number of tabs down. It causes significant mental overhead and task switching costs. I've noticed a bump in my productivity by taking the time to close/bookmark/onetab tabs.
I do realize it's glorified bookmarking, but the concept and ease-of-use make it nice.
(I'm glad I looked it up, this makes me more inclined to make bookmarks without sorting or tagging them)
This ... is exceptionally powerful.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_...
If I had a _better_ way of keeping track of what it is I'm currently accessing (or interested in accessing) than tabs, I'd use them.
A key problem is that browsers are keeping _every last tab fully open and rendered in the fear that you might need to immediately access is_. The tendency of websites toward full interactive designs exacerbates this problem.
Really: most text is pretty static. Generally I'm viewing one page at a time. Perhaps 2-5. The rest ... they can just go off and die.
Having them _saved locally in a state that's suitable for quick re-render_ would be kind of cool. Again, yes, this means that a lot of interactive page shit dies. But then, it should.
IMO webpages should earn their privileges. Including whether or not to animate, or play video, or audio, or display nonrelevant sidebars, headers, footers, and the rest.
The present browser / Web paradigm is grossly overextended and deserves to die.
I agree with you in general. A while ago I tried thinking of some other paradigm to keep track of webpages I might want to get back to in the near future without the permanence of bookmarks. Some of my thoughts:
Web browsers are used for multiple activities that have their own "stack" in my mind. Often I find myself opening a whole set of tabs that are all related to a general activity I am doing. For example, I'm be doing some coursework and open a million tabs (man pages, tutorials, etc.), then I close my laptop and go to bed. The next day it's class time and I just want a clean tab pane to focus only on what is being discussed in class. Then maybe the next day it's the weekend and I'm relaxing, reading some blogs, going on social media, etc. The point is that every time I use my browser, I might not be performing the same overall activity, and I don't want to be distracted by what I did hours ago.
I don't want to lose information on what I was doing earlier, though. I want to be able to come back to the particular state of my browser as it was when I was last doing a certain activity. Let's say I have Tuesday/Thursday classes, and on Thursday I want to return to where I left off on Tuesday. I need a way to get back to that state without what I may have done on the browser between then and now to get in the way.
Bookmarks don't cut it for me in this regard. Bookmarks only work for a single webpage. But maybe I have a whole group of webpages that are all inter-related! Using the bookmark model we have now, I'll have to bookmark each page individually, then open them up individually when I want to return. There are add-ons that bookmark tab sets, but I think that UI needs to be a core part of browser UI, not wedged into a browser extension.
Right now, I think the most useful way to manage tabs (for me, YMMV) is some combination of tab pinning, tab groups and tree style tabs, and tab suspension/delayed loading. Each of those has a particular advantage:
Tab pinning (as seen in Firefox and Chrome) is useful to me. It lets me identify single tab activities (usually web apps) that I always want to have available to me because they are commonly accessed. Facebook, email, Youtube, Calendar, etc. It is useful to have a muscle-memory location on my tab pane that I can quickly switch back to those common activities.
Tab groups are one of my top favorite features in Firefox. It so naturally fits my particular workflow where I might be switching browsing contexts on a daily basis (class, work, relaxing, Wikipedia bingeing, blog reading, ...). The main brilliance behind tab groups is that they act as a less permanent form of a bookmark group. I can easily switch between contexts in a context overview mode (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+E), and all of my contexts are clearly delineated. All I have to do to organize the contexts is to think "I am starting a new activity" and open a new tab group. However, I only need to close a tab for it to be gone from my mind.
Tree Style Tabs does this pretty well too, but for some reason I just found the UI unintuitive. Plenty of other people like it so I won't knock it. It does do a good job of organizing tabs by activity.
Another style that I thought was interesting is tab stacking as seen in Opera[1]. I think it is an idea not mutually exclusive to tab groups.
I also really like Firefox's delayed loading of tabs on startup. It fits perfectly with the concept of tab groups because it automatically means that other tab groups won't load up, and little memory and CPU cycles are wasted on them. Right now I have 81 tabs "open" in various tab groups, but Firefox has only loaded the ones I clicked or opened since starting.
Where things can improve:
1. Memory management/unloading of old tabs
I really think if Firefox wants to embrace the idea of tab groups, it needs to clear out tabs that haven't been interacted with for a long time. That would bring the best of all worlds: only the tabs I care about being open are open, and the tabs (and tab groups) I care about (with associated states, tab histories, and page scroll placement) are still preserved. Some add-ons like Bartab[2] are a good step in this direction, but it would be nice to see this put into mainline Firefox (with a preference to adjust the time limit to, say, infinity).
2. Tab group classification or tagging
Tab pins also could be more useful if they had some way to classify them based on importance. Currently, if you pin a tab in Firefox, the pin is available within all tab groups. However, I think the idea can be expanded so that you can:
* Pin for all tab groups
* Pin for a certain subset of tab groups (e.g. YouTube pin only on groups categorized/tagged with "relax")
* Pin for a single tab group
3. Tab stacking
As I said earlier, tab stacking is available in Opera, but I'd like to see it in other browsers too. It's another way to save on tab bar space while also grouping tabs by concept. One could use tab stacking and tab groups and pinning at the same time.
I think this idea would particularly match the use case of having a web application like a Google Doc open while also doing some research: create a new tab group, pin the document tab to just a single tab group (so that it is permanent and also takes up less horizontal space), and then go about browsing as normal with the rest of your tab space. Similar tabs (e.g. tabs on the same domain) can be stacked, and switching tab stacks automatically maximizes one stack while minimizing the others.
4. Open the browser to the tab overview page
This one is pretty self-explanatory. I think opening into a tab group overview is a better way to deal with the concept that a browser is used for multiple activities, and it may not be the same (or last) activity on startup every time.
These are just wishful ideas that I have. Firefox does the best job for me right now, I can't even use Chrome for my workflow because it just doesn't handle >50 tabs well enough.
[1]: http://www.operasoftware.com/press/releases/desktop/tabs-go-...
Thanks :)
Web browsers are used for multiple activities...
Something I've concluded Web browser developers put insufficient thought into. They're also far too often optimizing for content providers and advertisers rather than readers.
...a whole set of tabs ... related to a general activity...
Quite. And I'll often have multiple projects going on, each with their own set of related references.
The failure of the Desktop (and GUI) paradigms in general to reflect this is a growing and tremendous frustration of mine. Our activities are organized and grouped by application and increasingly by Web silo rather than by task. It's where the UNIX shell philosophy is increadibly powerful, and the abilty to both create different "workspaces" (generally: directories) for projects, and to string data through commands and pipelines, is phenomenally useful.
Just to highlight a frustration: increasingly desktop tools are utilizing Web tools for documentation. I arrange my work by Workspace. So when I fire off the Help command in a particular utility ... a browser tab opens somewhere three workspaces away, that I'm not aware of. Often in the midst of a bunch of other unrelated tabs....
For example...
Excellent use cases, and while my own work differs in details, the general outline is the same: different tasks, often persisting across days, weeks, months, or even years, but alternating with time, which I wish to group. Often quite complex and involving many related sites and/or pages. And retaining that user state is at an extreme premium.
Bookmarks don't cut it for me in this regard....
I'm leaning toward a middle ground between Bookmarks, History, and some level of annotation. Readability is an interesting experiment but ultimately frustrating and limiting.
My own curated lists of stuff are somewhat useful but extremely tedious to create. My subreddit is as much a bookmarking tool (of both Websites / references, and my own thoughts) as it is a publication and discussion.
The ability to create and readily access sets of bookmarks, tag and tab them, filter them usefully (by tag, author, site, dates, etc.) would be tremendously useful.
I'd really love a browser feature which let me search for text within pages I'd recently visited (hour, day, week, month, ...). Often what I'm looking for is something I've already recently visited.
It is* possible to organize Bookmarks hierarchically, etc. But I find that the UI/UX for doing this in numerous browsers is simply tedious beyond description.
...some combination of tab pinning, tab groups and tree style tabs, and tab suspension/delayed loading...
Yes to all of this.
For Pinning, I'd prefer to simply break out Web Apps as their own local app instance. Not associated with a browser at all. While Web-as-App-delivery is interesting, it's ultimately highly frustrating in my experience. A neither-man-nor-beast experience.
Tab groups...
I'll need to play with that.
Tree Style Tabs...
I use and love the plugin (for Firefox), and use it much as you do Tab Groups from what I can tell.
...tab stacking...
Not familiar with that.
...delayed loading of tabs...
Genius.
1. Memory management/unloading of old tabs
2. Tab group classification or tagging
4. Open the browser to the tab overview page
A-fucking-men to all of this. Your point that there is no overview page for tabs, or similarly that there is not way to perform group operations on tabs, is another massive failing.
So then you devote a couple of hours to going through and closing tabs, and find you still have 300...
The solution, if anyone ever gets this far down the page, is to use Session Manager to save the tabs, close Firefox, and then just uncheck the boxes for the tabs you don't ever want to reload.
I just can't stand if my browser has so many tabs open I can't read the what the hell it is from the header and since I always use browser only on half of my screen with editor on the other side (actually since I have 21:9 screen I've split it in 3 so I can have project | editor | docs) that gives me at most like 15+-5 tabs to work with.
But maybe I'm just the weirdo out of everyone.
I've presently got 2 tabs open: HN and this comment form.
Even when neck deep into documentation or github issues I don't think I've ever gone above 20 tabs, it definitely doesn't seem like it could be productive.
Things like: Gmail, calendar, Xero, time tracker, things I've been meaning to read but haven't yet put in a TO READ folder (sometimes hits 30+ tabs), Trello, business plan lists, BitBucket for an iOS project, Shopify partner admin, Font Awesome cheatsheet, 15-20 client projects I might work on in any given week including their admin backends, App Annie, Analytics, trip research (20-40 tabs easily on maps, spreadsheets, itinerary suggestions, Airbnb, Booking.com, hotels, national park sites), 5 tabs currently devoted to trying to work out how to get a National Geographic subscription to work on device and web, and so it goes on.
My associate had a machine that would RESET because of flash (we know it is flash because it would only start to randomly reset if flash was running somewhere on the machine), no matter what browser.
And in my personal experience flash could crash ALL browsers open at once, one time flash crashing on MSN Messenger partially froze my entire machine, after 10 minutes wrestling it to get to the task manager (yep, sometimes I am stupid) and close flash process, the machine came back to normal.
Months later that Thinkpad's battery died and I moved to working on a modern dual monitor desktop machine. Thinking my problems with Chrome would be gone with plenty of horsepower I discovered a new bug. My monitors are (unfortunately) BGR pixel order not much much more common RGB. It's pretty easy to setup in Cinnamon/Gnome just change 1 dconf key and font rendering is great. Chrome completely ignores this setting and renders fuzzy haloed fonts, plus it not just for Linux, Chrome does the same under Windows. The best workaround is to enable grayscale sub-pixel rendering in chrome://flags but fonts are still fuzzy. From what I found while debugging the problem Chrome used to support different pixel orders but broke it recently.
Once again Firefox renders fonts just fine by reading the pixel order set by the OS. Chrome isn't alone in the pixel order problems, Sublime Text and Atom both suffer from the same problem.
It runs fine and dandy on my Windows machine though.
[1] Ubuntu 12.04, dual-monitor, AwesomeWM, Nvidia Quadro FX 580, 8-core and 8GB RAM,
It's easy(ish) to create a first release of a product that is lean and efficient and has well-organized code.
Then you start addressing all the edge cases that it turns out you really want to handle but weren't, and adding various features that you realize really are important (that the original 'competitor' may have had some version of already too)...
Pretty soon you realize that keeping your software lean and efficient and well-organized is _hard_, the reason the original competitor was bloated and a mess was _not_ that their developers aren't as smart as yours. It's cause it's way harder to do this with living evolving software past the 1.0 release.
Doesn't mean it's impossible to keep post-1.0, mature, feature-complete software lean and efficient and well-organized. It's just hard. And will slow down your new-feature release cycle.
This cautionary note can apply to just about any "Why is X so bloated and/or such a mess internally or in it's API's, can't we write a new one without those problems?" Popular X's might include "Rails", or an existing programming language in favor of a new hot programming language.
Now, the experience of the first one that "went wrong" might be useful in creating a second one that does better -- but for it to be so, you actually have to _understand_ the experience of the first one, why various decisions were made at various times that led to "the mess". Not just assume it's because you've got smarter devs than them. And in many cases, might require making some fundamental different decisions about scope, architecture, or other goals, than the first one did -- and sticking to them.
This is related to, and kind of a generalization of, the famous Joel "rewriting software is a mistake" argument, but shouldn't be oversimplified to "never bother trying to create new software that's better than software already out there", of course.
I think people overstate Chrome's memory usage as a factor of performance; IME it's still less than FF in total most times, and largely that memory cost doesn't seem to come with the performance impact of FF's because of the way Chrome handles processes.
On my Win8.1 system at the moment, Chrome uses about 400mb of RAM. Firefox routinely ballooned up to a full 1GB or more. Even on FreeBSD, it was not at all unheard of to glance at top and find FF consuming as much as 1.4GB.
The idea of switching back to FF because of Chrome's memory consumption seems frankly laughable to me. FF's memory leakage is infamous, and literally goes clear back to FF Beta, and still hasn't been fixed a decade on.
And since Opera is a joke now, and Safari a toy, and there being zero real viable alternatives, that means Chrome, for good or ill.
I'd really appreciate it if they'd stop telling me what I'm allowed to download though. At least they disabled the autodelete function.
Safari tends to get sand kicked in its face a lot when people talk about browsers, but it's actually the one I keep finding myself coming back to. I got frustrated recently by Safari's JS performance on certain web sites (ones with badly written JS web chat clients, I think, but never mind) and switched to Firefox 36 for a few weeks. On both machines I used it on it would just... get slower over time, and not a lot of time to boot: about 24-48 hours. And I rarely have more than a dozen tabs open at once, and that's on the high end.
If I was going to knock Safari for anything -- other than the JS issues -- it's that it's got much weaker extension support than Chrome or Firefox. But the only extensions I really use are Instapaper and 1Password. (I'm one of the weirdos who doesn't use Adblock Plus; instead, I've just uninstalled Flash, and if I want to use a web site that absolutely requires it I'll hop into Chrome for that.) I like the way it handles tabs, most versions are pretty stable, and the linked list sidebar -- where it pulls out links from your Twitter feed -- can be surprisingly useful.
I absolutely agree that on MacOS, it's a solid option. The OS X version is a very good browser, and not to be dismissed.
The Windows version however was always an also ran, a weird proof-of-concept release more than anything. It was never seriously marketed, it made ludicrous design decisions, wouldn't play ball with the OS, and has since been more or less completely abandoned. You have to go digging just to find it, and it hasn't been updated since Snow Leopard.
Finally tried Safari and have not looked back. It is a breeze to use, and I in particular love the shortcut to read articles later. Memory footprint is much lighter, and even with 10+ tabs, I've noticed it doesn't eat a lot of battery.
Also agreed with your point about the extensions. I have the usual suspects like Adblock and Ghostery installed, along with LastPass, but Safari's extensions leave a lot to be desired.
I could go on ...
I left Chrome open overnight and by the time I came back it was pegging the CPU at 100%. No extensions, no nothing. Seriously Google?
I also haven't seen any significant memory leaks in the last year or two.
Sad to say, but 1.4 G is not uncommmon (or even unreasonable) for any browser these days, mostly due not to the browser itself, but the resources consumed by the individual web sites.
I know AdBlock+ is a very popular, common, RAM-hungry extension
http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
But when you have youtube, gmail, and other web applications open, memory usage tends to go nuts. I've been told that it's technically impossible for a web application to have a memory leak, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
I wrote a slightly-more-than-basic Angular.js app and it leaks like crazy up to the point that the Chrome tab will crash.
If you're having serious ram problems in Chrome though, Shift-ESC is your friend. Shows you what exactly is consuming RAM (in the event you didn't already know)
Within the last three months.
You can switch profiles and even have different profiles active in different Chrome windows, without restarting Chrome.
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en
(I am not saying this makes it all better, trying to use more than one Google account is a _mess_ no matter what. But that it's one workaround I discovered recently, which has been lessening the pain somewhat)
They help me to separate my work and personal everything. Not just email, but my tabs, bookmarks, saved passwords, extensions, etc.
On Firefox I click the user icon, choose my work account and my personal account loads.
On Chrome I click the user icon, choose my personal account and my work account loads.
It's so fucking frustrating. I've cleared cookies, cache and history completely and the problem just comes back later that day.
I remember the hype, but I never switched. Firefox was always good enough for me. And really, Firefox overtook Chrome in performance a while ago already. And naturally Mozilla's manifesto is way better to support than Eric Schmidt's "you don't need privacy if you have nothing to hide" idea.
One fact: Currently, Chromium-based browsers suffer from a nasty memory leak: each time one bring up an extension's popup UI, a big chunk of memory is leaked.[1] This alone for me justify using Firefox over Chromium if one has an extension which popup UI must be accessed often.
Anecdotal observation: I have noticed since a couple of versions now that it appears Chromium's garbage collector can be very lazy sometimes. To the point where I am wondering if this is a bug, because the memory would just not be reclaimed by the browser until I forced it through the developer console: upon clicking the trash can in the Timeline tab, 60 MB were re-claimed for one of the extension (from ~130MB to 70MB). This was after waiting for an hour to see if it would be reclaimed. Yes, there was a lot of idle time while I waited.
[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=441500
Privacy Extensions always seem to work better in FF because it's produced by an organization, if imperfect, whose values center around privacy and not subservience to advertisers.
I've worked in offices of companies with ad-supported site where we could barely support the product without an ad blocker, but these days I primarily lean toward privacy badger or other privacy-oriented extensions like Disconnect.
It seems to me that the focus on security by isolating every webpage from each other went to far recently. When I started with Chrome I think they used to limit the maximum amount of render processes much more. Of course if there was a serious security hole in e.g. webkit/blink then one tab could have stolen data from another tab more easily. But it consumed much less memory
"Convenient though it would be if it were true, Mozilla is not big because it's full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful. If that's what you need, you've got options..." -- jwz
I doubt there is enough difference between the browsers to make a meaningful productivity impact for most end users (the population at HN might probably has more exceptions to that statement). The only significant difference is confidentiality, where I trust Mozilla far more than Google.
Here is what is really going on:
1) IE defined the web for most people, with 95% market share.
2) Firefox became the new, cool alternative, with some social/political appeal (free-as-in-speech, non-profit mission, openness, anti-corporate), and the appeal of being the cutting-edge and the shiny-new thing.
3) 'New' and 'cool' have shelf lives, slowing your subjective experience of browsers and skinny blue jeans. Also, Mozilla lacked a marketing budget and department to manage and refresh their image, as other vendors might have done: 'In limited release beta preview: Firefox XE! Be the first person you know to get it! It's burning up the 'net!'
4) Google was an uber-cool company, and they put out a browser, which became the new uber-cool thing. 'You're not still using Firefox, are you?' (Actually said to an end-user I was helping by a technorati wannabe.)
5) Chrome might have performed better for a time, but the browsers were neck and neck in performance tests for many years while people rationalized their love of cool. As I said, I doubt there was much real difference, except in some specialized circumstances.
6) Now repeat #3, except this time for Chrome. The subtext and whole point of this article is, 'is Chrome no longer cool?' It's as if the author is throwing some red meat in the waters, to see if the piranha are ready to swarm.
Perhaps Mozilla and Google should pump in fake engine noise.
We have such a tendency to have to follow trends in groups.. its a little scary at times.
If you use Task Manager (Windows) / Activity Monitor (OSX) or something similar in Linux, you would see memory over-reported.
Google for this: http://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+"shared+memory"
Some info: http://www.chromium.org/developers/memory-usage-backgrounder
Some more info: http://blog.chromium.org/2008/09/google-chrome-memory-usage-...
Best tool to see the memory usage is chrome itself: about://memory -> check the real sum at the end of the page.
Another funny thing is that chromium "measures" ff memory but measures it as more than the OS or Firefox itself. Not too sure whats going on there, albeit its still lower
for others that are interested, see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection-fir...
Safari is much faster than it used to be. It's also tightly integrated with my phone, including password management functionality (similar to LastPass) that works on all my devices. You can also get AdBlock for Safari now, which wasn't always the case. It also has a snazzy built-in RSS reader and just looks better than Chrome.
What exactly is "clogging up memory" that everyone here complains about? I can understand if Chrome is using 6 / 8gb of your ram and you are simultaneously running photoshop and it can't grab any memory due to Chrome, but is this the case?
Shouldn't Chrome use as much RAM as it can to ensure speedy performance provided its not starving out any other applications?
I have little experience in writing desktop applications & memory management in an environment of this nature. Genuinely curious what the normal practice is.
Edit: To clarify, I am assuming the memory growth is not due to any sort of leaks :)
Do you have a reference for why this should be? A quick search yields results suggesting only the opposite (for instance, https://superuser.com/questions/738848/does-more-ram-usage-c...).
That said, eventually both get to 6g of ram in use and a restart is needed anyway.
Cheers!
Otherwise, I agree completely.
If any other company did those sorts of things in persisting pieces of their software all over the OS without easy removal for non-technical users, people would be calling it malware or spyware.
I would think it just uninstalls. Are you claiming otherwise? I'd love to try and reproduce what your claims are (fact check).
I pick Safari because now it's fast, memory and _battery_ efficient (I think it's the most battery efficient browser that I've used on the Mac). Apple seems very wary about defending it's users privacy, and it's actually in their best business interests to do so. They have the money and weight to actually put a decent fight on the subject.
That's why I use Safari.
PS: I do use Thunderbird for my e-mail needs though ;)
See https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/11/19/promoting-choice-an... for the details.
One thing I did notice the other day is that chrome will reload webpages on it's own even if they don't have focus. I was running an express.js app on localhost and periodically I would see traffic in in the logs even though I wasn't interacting with it. It may just be enforcing some ttl/cache header that was automagicly set, but it will make me close my browser more often.
It might be worth installing firefox and see if it behaves the same.
The post-crash session restore seems to work well for me; and luckily it's not a frequent occurrence.
> A filter can be a plain hostname, or an Adblock Plus-compatible filter. Lines prefixed with ‘!’ will be ignored.
http://www.cvedetails.com/product/2935/Apple-Safari.html?ven...
http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?v...
Add to that Chrome has a far more secure version of Flash and yea, I'll be avoiding Safari (and Firefox) until they catch up.
For me, I like that Firefox isn't constantly bombarding me with "link your accounts" crap. And I like how Firefox still has the option built in to reset the browser / delete all data on close.
Performance seems like a wash these days, and frankly isn't something I care about even a little -- it's basically a problem solved by adding more RAM and RAM is cheap. 16 GB in my laptop these days... 32 GB in my workstation... who cares how it gets used.
Also I like some of the Firefox plugins over Chrome.
I do like how Chrome doesn't require a restart for plugins... Firefox needs to get on that train.
But I add plugins once a week at most, so it's kind of moot.
Anyway I like Firefox more than I like Chrome, that's why I use it.
Because users don't know what they want, right Google?
It's only 1.7 KB
If I need to do a Google or Bing web search, starting a browser or opening a new tab is no hassle, and a minute later the tab is gone.
Anyway it was interesting to read that people keep a browser running for days or longer with many tabs open. I am not being judgemental, and I hope that I don't sound so, I just have different working preferences.
I fully expected a couple years ago to eventually be the last hold-out user of Firefox in a Chrome world but I have watched things turn around. I'll never say Chrome is bad... but I prefer to see a market where there is still browser competition and choice for the user. It looked like Chrome was going to be the next IE with some vast percentage of the market locked up. I'm glad to see signs of some balance being restored.
I'm a big fan of NoScript and RequestPolicy, but having to "redo" all the whitelisting is a major PITA.
Does anybody else run into this? Am I missing a setting or is there a file I can manually sync (or just backup and restore) to ensure I don't need to endure this pain again?
It's not even "if you download a poorly made extension your browser will be slower" but it seems like extensions have that effect in general. It's probably irrational but I've honestly seen a lot of the most popular extensions falling into this category, extensions like AdBlock and HTTPS Everywhere come to mind.
The second reason I don't use Chrome is with a logitech mouse on Mac, there are no good gesture extensions that I know of that will allow me to right-click / scroll wheel to zoom through open tabs. Actually, all gesture extensions seem crippled in some way or another.
Of course, maybe the grass is always greener on the other side. I left chrome a few years ago because I had an linux install where any non-trivial js would cause the computer to lock up.
I'm waiting for someone to encorporate vim bindings, umatrix, and webkit into a package... I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't use it.
EDIT: Oh, and there was also having my browser UI lock up when a page had a misbehaving script but that might have been due to an older version of firefox.
Then you can enter this in the URL bar: so python reverse list
...and you'll get a search for "python reverse list".
This is much less magical than how it works in Chrome, and harder to discover, but once you get it set up it is reasonably convenient.
1. Firefox's private window still runs your plugins - its not a sandbox clean browser 2. You still have to restart if you installed a plugin (ugh! its 2015) 3. You can search from the address bar, prepend a "?". i.e "?google.com" will search with keyword "google.com".
Otherthan this it was a joy to use firefox - works faster than my "chromium" build on osx yosamite.
Firefox with NoScript/Ghostery for e-commerce and article/blog reading. I have a selection of unblocked websites.
Vanilla Safari for banking.
Vanilla Chrome for anything that would require a lot of unblocking in FF.
This means that at any time I can have three browsers opened with multiple tabs each. I never seem to have any problem.
- ctrl + tab that really works like it should, no sequential switching through tabs - per site user-agent/js settings
For development I still use firefox; chrome has been too aggressive with their caching in my experience. Plus some one else mentioned, I don't like my browser to link to my account!
Chrome's performance has taken a major hit on iOS and OS X. It regularly freezes up and seems to be getting worse with each new update. Now Chrome to Mobile is being axed soon, to be "replaced" with Google Sync - which isn't even the same thing.
There's one thing about chrome that has spoiled me. The fact that when something crashes only the tab or tabs crash. After the third time firefox crashes and the whole browser locks up you go back, like me. Also chrome's task manager is magnificent.
I haven't stop once to debug why (I just switch to Chrome but sometimes do report the websites to Mozilla), can the reason be in Firefox being more pure and the others browsers allowing more quirks? If this is the case, isn't this bad UX?
I cannot wait for the current trend of all-things-must-be-web-things to die.
That's enough for me to stick with Firefox.
I tried to go back to Firefox as I wrote an internal tool for company. Two problems did not go well: a) Firefox failed to provide a reasonable size for SVG elements, and by calling getBBox() I got a bounds that is not cropped by the container frame but the inner one which has been extended by elements drawn into, whereas in Safari/Chrome I could just call .offsetWidth/.offsetHeight; b) I cannot view node data as quickly as I could in Safari/Chrome and this is a pain when debugging __data bound in D3.js. Maybe I will try installing Firebugs later.
For now I guess I have to stick to Chrome-first strategy or just ship it with nw.js.
The two browsers and opera are the only browsers I plan on supporting...
Our game http://www.FreeRiderHD.com has always performed best on mobile and desktop through Chrome.
That being said the most recent stable build of Chrome desktop is constantly triggering 'Aw Snap' crashes without any crash data where the issue does not appear to exist in previous or future beta builds. Not just limited to our game as I have been experiencing crashes on Facebook and Twitter as well.
There are bugs in progress linked from this tracking site, and so, for example, if you want to help test Greasemonkey or Vimperator or whatever, search down the page, go to the bug, and see if there's something useful you can add to the comments in bugzilla.mozilla.org.
If you're willing to do some testing and go back and forth with developers a bit, it can be really helpful!
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the author probably has a lot of heavy addons that do stuff that is not needed. Biggest example probably is AdBlock Plus which bogs down any browser considerably and poking around with family's and friends' Chromes I see that a lot of them have several ad blocking extensions as well as couple privacy extensions is it any wonder Safari or Firefox with no addons is faster?
My one major gripe is how poorly it works with Sharepoint. There have been times in the past where I have been working in Sharepoint using Chrome and I can't use a particular function because... well because Chrome? I don't really know why. I just know it works in FF and IE.
Hacker Vision on Chrome is sooooo good. The closest I've found for Firefox is Color Toggle, but it fails in a lot of places, enough that FF+CT is not usable as my main browser.
(This difference might be laid at the feet of the plugin writers, but I have the idea that there is inversion support available in the browser in Chrome but not in FF.)
Unfortunately, after getting used to Hacker Vision, good color inversion is a must-have feature for me.
The css invert filter was very recently added to Firefox. Haven't played with this but sounds like it could make the job easier, so maybe FF will catch up here.
Chrome was the culprit. Switched to Firefox and the issue is gone. However, I have recently gone back to Chrome when plugged in because FF has been crashing a lot and seems sluggish.
I hardly use any add-ons other than ad-block and a handful of selected ones and do not have the problems described. Quite the opposite actually! I do have the occasional freezes and crashes with ff using webgl, html5 video and even firebug (with less than 10 tabs open).
Even if it was a bit slower than the competition (not convinced that it is) , I would rather be safe.
That being said, I keep the number of extensions I use low: json formatter, a rest client, adblock, cloud-to-butt, clearly, and pocket. Chrome works a lot better with multiple windows open in my experience (on a new iMac with 2 external monitors).
I've not experienced these slowdowns or crashes, on any of the machines that I use. (PCs, Phones, Tablets...) Perhaps something you've installed (your extensions maybe?), is giving you issues.
Your problem could be as simple as you're using the wrong versions of java and chrome together. Mix-n-match 64-32 bit doesn't work well at all.
- No omnibar with custom search engines by keyword. I use this extensively. - Closing multiple tabs is annoying, because they resize. Chrome solves this well.
The couple of times I used Firefox weren't pleasant. It seems to not work as well on OS X. Granted that has been a long time ago.
Safari 8 has this feature. Not as elegant as the way Chrome handles it, but you can search domains you've previously searched by typing in the first few characters of the domain and hitting tab.
> Closing multiple tabs is annoying, because they resize.
Not sure when this was changed, but tabs only resize once you've moved your mouse away from the tab bar.
I switched away from Chrome a year or so ago when they changed the new tab page to have the huge, redundant search box and fewer frequently visited pages and haven't regretted it. I find Safari's UI to be leaps and bounds better than Chrome's, scrolling is much smoother, and it drains my battery way less than either Chrome or FF. There aren't nearly as many extensions for Safari, but the ones I use (1Password, Reddit Enhancement, etc.) are all available for Safari.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=939318
There is a separate issue to deal specifically with recovering from proxy settings that have gone bad, though:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1121800
Also I hate how Google switched all of its apps to webapps, which work worse and use more resources than their native counterparts.
The difference between Chrome and Firefox, for me, is that some sites that work on Chrome don't work on Firefox. Other than that, it's mostly muscle memory of things like Chrome developer tools that keep me in Chrome.
Even tried a fresh install of Firefox but no dice. I love Firefox but getting the wrong search results is a deal breaker for me.
Any ideas?
and you'll have google.co.uk :)
http://davidjohnstone.net/blog/2013/06/be-careful-when-buyin...
1. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=143619
[0] https://github.com/shotgunsoftware/browser-plugin/issues/13
Nope. Vertical tabs are the future and Chrome never had that.
I don't like manually zooming for every single page I visit, and the zoom extensions that exist for Firefox and Safari always break on certain pages.
But from a business point of view it's dire mistake, but it's kind of outrageous too in some way, when you would promise one thing and do another.
anyway fuck users, what about the competitors, Google perhaps is the most alienated enterprise of its size anyway too. Not because they were totally unreasonable, just because google have no respect for any of them.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/02/10/extension-signing...
FWIW, there is SRWARE Iron: http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_faq.php
Everybody said it was faster. So I did countless benchmarks with a stop watch for the pages that I frequent and for every single one of them Firefox rendered the pages faster.
Easy choice.
To each his own, but Firefox can go full retard just as well as any other browser. (their SSL fix is aggravating too)
Until FF get's much faster or better devtools than chrome I'm not interested. Not to mention how often does a Chrome extension hit the front page of HN vs a FF one?
Don't get me wrong, I don't love Chrome unconditionally (the RAM usage is crazy but so is FF) but I still think it's the better of the two. Just my two cents...
Edit: Oh now I remember why I wrote off:
> Firefox Developer Edition replaces the Aurora channel in the Firefox Release Process.
> By using the Developer Edition, you gain access to tools and platform features at least 12 weeks before they reach the main Firefox release channel.
They just fucking renamed their alpha channel to "Firefox Developer Edition"....
At the end of the day I use the browser that allows me to do my job the fastest and more efficient. As of 2015-02-13 that browser is Chrome. That could change tomorrow but there would have to be a compelling reason and I have yet to find one.
Then I had to go back to Firefox on the company computer. What a disappointment. Still slow as hell.
using both Firefox an Chrome. Chrome on Linux is very fast and responsive. Firefox on Windows slow and clunky.
MRU tabs is essential to my usage flow. Sorry if that hurts your feelings. I frequently have many tabs open, and I need to be able to quickly switch back and forth between two or three tabs. People have been clamoring for MRU tabs since Chrome came out, and Google and the Chromium developers simply ignore them. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=161960
1) People that only use one browser.
2) People that use Chrome over Chromium.
3) People that do not have one browser with js disabled.
4) People that have flash installed (there is some overlap with #1 here because Chrome bundles flash).
Everybody here should know better, IMO.
Uhm, no. We didn't.
Right now, I have one tab open in Chrome (was debugging a web page) and, including "Chrome Helpers", is using 86 threads and 11% of CPU. Firefox on the other hand has 33 tabs active and, including "Firefox Plugin Content", is using 104 threads and 8.5% of CPU.
Of course deleting your user profile deleted all of that profile's data
* Guest mode: A user in Guest mode does not leave any browsing history or cookies on the computer. In addition, they can't see or modify the computer owner's Chrome profile.
* Incognito mode: You don't leave browsing history and cookies on your computer, but you can still see your existing history, bookmarks, passwords, Autofill data, and other Chrome settings.
The multi-process "Electrolysis" support in 38 is great. Several tabs with flash plugin work fine now, without slowing down the whole browser. Though, I still see only one main process for all web sites (there is a child process "plugin-container"), that's a bit disappointing. IE 9+, Chrome and Safari 7+ spawn a new process for every x sites - a child process with little permissions (a technique known as "sandbox"). Maybe we have to wait a little longer for Mozilla's Rust based Servo engine.
- sync (Chrome syncs everything while being reliable) - mobile Android app (FF mobile has insane scrolling behaviour, that's out of place on the platform).
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/02/07/introducing-mozilla...
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi...
[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/
[4] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-to-update-to-the-ne...
Are we going to go back to the days of no great browser options? Please no.