Why I’m Dumping Google Chrome

derek533 said:
Funny how I remember the tabs being below the bookmarks bar earlier in FF's life but they switched a few years ago to being on the very top just like Chrome.
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Yes but the beauty of Firefox (unlike Chrome) is it's configurability - you can change it back to the way it was before if you'd like by simply adjusting any option, for this and so many other things, no extensions required.
 
Extremetech has been shit since they fired the original staff years ago. I forgot they even still existed.
 
JMSNorthern said:
Yes but the beauty of Firefox (unlike Chrome) is it's configurability - you can change it back to the way it was before if you'd like by simply adjusting any option, for this and so many other things, no extensions required.
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Actually for some things in the newest versions of Firefox, you need extensions to actually reasonably be able to change things back. They've taken away some options that they used to have. Another part of Chrome's plague is them becoming popular and then others saying "Hey this must be how EVERYONE wants it DERP". Sigh...
 
Right, well not everything is fully configurable, unfortunately (I've had issues before too), but a lot of things are, in any case a lot more so than Chrome was my main point.

And yes I've lamented the Chrom-ization of Firefox as well but what can you do.. at least for the most part (in my experience) you can still have you pre-Chromized FF interface back if you dick around a bit in the settings.

So long as that's the case, I'm content. If they ever get rid of the ability to remove tabs on top though I'm gone.. where to is another question. Opera has that on top as well, but maybe they have the option to alter that? Probably a fork of FF or something though. In any case, not an issue so far fortunately.
 
JMSNorthern said:
Right, well not everything is fully configurable, unfortunately (I've had issues before too), but a lot of things are, in any case a lot more so than Chrome was my main point.

And yes I've lamented the Chrom-ization of Firefox as well but what can you do.. at least for the most part (in my experience) you can still have you pre-Chromized FF interface back if you dick around a bit in the settings.

So long as that's the case, I'm content. If they ever get rid of the ability to remove tabs on top though I'm gone.. where to is another question. Opera has that on top as well, but maybe they have the option to alter that? Probably a fork of FF or something though. In any case, not an issue so far fortunately.
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Browser UI should be like Opera 12 where you can pretty much change everything to just about anywhere without the use of any 3rd party plug-in or scripts etc.
 
My main concerns about FF vs Chrome is attaining feature parity with Chrome. NOT for it to become Chrome.

There were a few things over the years I felt they were really behind on but now, for the most part I feel like they've got parity on most of what I'm missing from Chrome (like ripping tabs from a window to another monitor and having it actually appear on that monitor instead of your default one).

The only things better about Chrome right now (for me) are:

1. per tab process isolation (though FF have greatly improved the crash-rate issue here via other solutions, so this is less of a problem now, but apparently this is actually going to be coming soon anyway)

2. Google voice search. Competitors need to find some way to integrate this in the future, as much as possible (hard to be without after being use to on my tablet, imo missing this in the future will soon become a BIG liability, if perhaps years from now. Voice assistants are well into taking off now and becoming expected on mobile and with Cortana's inclusion in Win. 10 I'd expect voice input computing to only accelerate even more.)

3. As previously mentioned on here, an in-browser version of Flash.

I know it's against their open source philosophy to include it with FF (which I like) but some way of incorporating their own version of Flash like Chrome does would be nice. Perhaps as an official Mozilla developed add-on or something. Just because they support open source doesn't mean everything they develop should require it, as long as can keep such things separate from their core software products.

Bleeding users to Chrome because of lacking feature parity doesn't help open source either.

4. And most importantly right now - in-tab AUDIO PLAYING indicators!

This is the biggest thing I am missing from Chrome; session restore is hell on crashes if you have tons of tabs open across multiple windows that have videos auto-playing and no way to figure out from where.

Fortunately though, this is actually finally coming along.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=486262

That feature/"bug" has been around forever, but with the rise of HTML5 media playback, especially on Youtube, apparently they can cover most or a lot more cases now (without being able to cover Flash) whereas before they seemed content to simply point the blame at Adobe for not making APIs.

Also apparently they've come up with the idea of just including the icon on any page detected with a Flash video, whether it's playing or not. Not as accurate/nice as Chrome, but an acceptable workaround worth implementing.

There is actually a recent Firefox add-on making use of those features right now:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noise-control/

which has worked for me everywhere I've tested it.

Even better than Chrome though, for that add-on (right now) and the planned FF bug patch you can/will be able to simply mute a tab just from clicking on the audio-playing indicator symbol on the tab, instead of having to click on the tab itself and scroll the page looking for the video to mute.

***

Aside from all that, they are also starting to develop and incorporate a few interesting extra features of their own right into the browser such as Firefox Hello. Still pretty nascent admittedly but it's a good direction they're headed in.

My 2 cents.
 
chockomonkey said:
Oh i did not know that. I used to use Ninite to update flash via a logon script, but Adobe asked ninite to pull the installer... which started the whole quest. Finally found that chrome had it built in and didn't require admin privileges to update.



good to know. Just last year got the whole office away from XP and onto 7... so i doubt that we'll have 8 or 10 anytime soon =P
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If you are at windows 7, the jump to 10 would be free from the software standpoint. Now that doesn't make the process of upgrading free, but does at least help make it less painful. As long as you upgrade before July 29th 2016 that is.

Red Squirrel said:
I had to dump Firefox for Chromium. Firefox has gotten so bloated and slow it's ridiculous. Simply opening or closing tabs would be all choppy and lock up and crap. Ridiculous.

On similar note though, WTF is up with everything constantly wanting to update so often these days? It seems to be a trend with everything now. Can't people code stuff that actually works right after a while? Everything is in a perpetual update cycle it seems.
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Every time I see something like this I always wonder what I did wrong as firefox has ALWAYS been bloated and slow for me. Then again that could be that they fixed some issues got better for awhile then got worse again. But up to at least version 4.x I would try out every few releases, notice that it would eat my memory if I left it open all day to the point where I had to make sure close out and restart it every 30 minutes to keep 1 tab from eating 2GB+ of memory. Which always seemed that some people had that issue, some never. I was one that had that problem on every computer so never made the jump from IE to FF. FF was always just the backup for the site I might hit once a month that didn't work correctly in IE.
 
Talyrius said:
I wonder why I never seem to experience any of this... I use Twitter and watch YouTube for hours on end with at least 10 tabs open at all times.
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one specific issue i have with twitter and chrome is that any embedded video or vine from twitter from either straight through twitter.com or embedded to a third party site almost never works for me. I doesnt work on my w7 machine, or my osx. If i want to see a video that's embedded i almost always have to go to opera to get it to work.

the crashing doesnt bother me too much, because i think that's going to happen on no matter what browser you end up using.
 
Exavior said:
If you are at windows 7, the jump to 10 would be free from the software standpoint. Now that doesn't make the process of upgrading free, but does at least help make it less painful. As long as you upgrade before July 29th 2016 that is.
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Good to know. Thanks! I'm definitely planning on putting it on my workstation to see how I like it. Depending on how it behaves on the domain its nice knowing I have this opportunity.

Regarding tabs.. Where else would you have them if not on top? Feels natural to me
 
I rather use Firefox but google makes it hard. Firefox is faster for me but it has horrible screen tearing with hardware accel turned off and when I turn it on I get serious problems watching flash videos. Chrome works perfectly with hardware accel turned on and I get zero problems with videos and zero screen tearing. It just loads up noticeably slower than Firefox and is not as fast in general which really annoys me.

It also saves bookmarks to the cloud which I find a plus. I was shocked Firefox didn't have that feature tbh.
 
"Chrome still feels faster in many cases"

Last test I read on browser speed Firefox is faster than Chrome so "feels" faster is BS.
 
I think in this day and age no one has patience for anything anymore. I know that bugs are annoying and all, and I was cursing my recent iOS update too because it messed with my music....and I don't want anyone messing with my music! But I think that what we need to remember is that developments and updates are usually meant to try to make a product better. Unfortunately, when you do something that has never been done before, it doesn't always work as planned. Hence why you run into bugs and glitches that can only be found when it is in use and then you fix them. I have huge respect for software developers. Really they don't get enough credit. People really only ever harp on them for what went wrong, not what went right.

The alternative to Chrome would be Firefox or Thunderbird, but guaranteed you will never find a technology that does not require updates and will not run into glitches. If it's not evolving, it's outdated and unusable...like Internet Explorer...if anyone even remembers what that atrocity is these days. ;-)
 
Never had these troubles with Chrome, but then again i know how to operate a PC and keep it running nice and smooth.
 
Exavior said:
Every time I see something like this I always wonder what I did wrong as firefox has ALWAYS been bloated and slow for me. Then again that could be that they fixed some issues got better for awhile then got worse again. But up to at least version 4.x I would try out every few releases, notice that it would eat my memory if I left it open all day to the point where I had to make sure close out and restart it every 30 minutes to keep 1 tab from eating 2GB+ of memory. Which always seemed that some people had that issue, some never. I was one that had that problem on every computer so never made the jump from IE to FF. FF was always just the backup for the site I might hit once a month that didn't work correctly in IE.
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I've wondered this too. People saying the FF is faster than chrome... what am i doing wrong? I click FF and chrome, and it takes FF forever to load shit.. then seems sluggish when doing anything from playing a YT video to looking at email.
 
chockomonkey said:
I've wondered this too. People saying the FF is faster than chrome... what am i doing wrong? I click FF and chrome, and it takes FF forever to load shit.. then seems sluggish when doing anything from playing a YT video to looking at email.
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I run four browsers at once for webdev and also just splitting up my tabs by whichever browser runs them better.

FireFox is definitely slow and sluggish compared to others. If I end up spawning a new tab in FireFox that involves video, I have to cut and paste the URL into Chrome in order to be able to play the video fluidly. On a machine that can run 1080p fluidly. Firefox is also the browser that needs to be killed most often due to memory leaks and runaway processes that cause the machine to overheat.

Calling Firefox bloated is like calling someone too obese to ride a rascal scooter "fat".
 
techrat said:
I run four browsers at once for webdev and also just splitting up my tabs by whichever browser runs them better.

FireFox is definitely slow and sluggish compared to others. If I end up spawning a new tab in FireFox that involves video, I have to cut and paste the URL into Chrome in order to be able to play the video fluidly. On a machine that can run 1080p fluidly. Firefox is also the browser that needs to be killed most often due to memory leaks and runaway processes that cause the machine to overheat.

Calling Firefox bloated is like calling someone too obese to ride a rascal scooter "fat".
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ahhahah glad i'm not the only one. Chrome, with two windows, and many tabs per window, will load faster for me than FF with one window and 3 tabs.
 
chockomonkey said:
ahhahah glad i'm not the only one. Chrome, with two windows, and many tabs per window, will load faster for me than FF with one window and 3 tabs.
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Chrome with 15 tabs to reload will load faster than Firefox with less than 5 tabs. Most of the time Firefox ends up going full retard and won't refresh the tabs unless I manually do it.
 
techrat said:
Chrome with 15 tabs to reload will load faster than Firefox with less than 5 tabs. Most of the time Firefox ends up going full retard and won't refresh the tabs unless I manually do it.
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sounds about like my time with it.
 
Exavior said:
Every time I see something like this I always wonder what I did wrong as firefox has ALWAYS been bloated and slow for me. Then again that could be that they fixed some issues got better for awhile then got worse again. But up to at least version 4.x I would try out every few releases, notice that it would eat my memory if I left it open all day to the point where I had to make sure close out and restart it every 30 minutes to keep 1 tab from eating 2GB+ of memory. Which always seemed that some people had that issue, some never. I was one that had that problem on every computer so never made the jump from IE to FF. FF was always just the backup for the site I might hit once a month that didn't work correctly in IE.
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Yep it's been a memory hog for a long time now. I've caught it using 10GB of ram once as it had been open for quite a while without restarting it, pretty crazy. It seems not not cleanup after itself when you close web pages and just keeps growing. I was able to deal with that most of the time as I have lot of ram, but when it started to get really slow and choppy it was the last straw for me. It's really too bad because in general it's a really good browser and always used it, but I just had to switch.
 
///AMG said:
I havent had any problems with chrome lately. No crashes in the last month.
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I don't think I've had a browser crash on me more than once in the past 5 years. The only thing that bothered me about chrome was that in one version on iOS they decided to put delete bookmarks right under a bunch of delete history/cookies/etc. tabs and I accidentally deleted my bookmarks. For some reason it was impossible to get the old bookmarks back, even though I still had them on an old Android phone.
 
Red Squirrel said:
Yep it's been a memory hog for a long time now. I've caught it using 10GB of ram once as it had been open for quite a while without restarting it, pretty crazy. It seems not not cleanup after itself when you close web pages and just keeps growing. I was able to deal with that most of the time as I have lot of ram, but when it started to get really slow and choppy it was the last straw for me. It's really too bad because in general it's a really good browser and always used it, but I just had to switch.
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Firefox remains the only browser I have to regularly kill and restart. Chrome, Chromium and Opera all remain stable for the entire duration of my uptime, which usually spans several weeks. Same story whether it's xUbuntu or Windows 7.
 
Really don't know what the hell you guys that get all these issues are doing with your setups.

I can't remember the last time I got a crash from Chrome or Firefox. Just works.

I would add I use ECC ram though....maybe that helps.
 
I was always a big FF user, then Chrome came out, started using it because of how lightweight it felt, then SSDs came around, after a while Chrome started to become buggy, would not work right with a few things, and just got worse, it also was missing a few addons I still missed. Ended up swapping back to FF, and shockingly it was faster than Chrome and since going back, no crashes/hangs etc etc.

I don't do the browser fanboy thing, as soon as something stops working, or something does it better, I switch, I have no issue with that. If FF goes down the tube again or Chrome gets its act together, I will swap in a heartbeat.
 
I use Chrome and for the most part, I like it. Since I rebuild my rigs once every month / few weeks, not having to worry about recovering bookmarks is great.

The funny / ironic error I've been consistently getting though is when I enable google as the default search (and only google - all other search engines work fine in Chrome). As soon as I search for something (whether in the omnibox or on the google.com web page), it "Aww snaps" errors out.
 
OT: Windows 8.1 but between all the SSDs I have scattered about my different rigs and laptops, sometimes I'll put a RAID setup over here or over there for testing purposes and move them around.
 
I used Firefox until Chrome came out. Even then, it took several versions of Chrome before I started paying attention to it. At the time, and I still feel the same today, its speed was its main differentiator, especially on Linux.

I had also noticed how much nicer its Dev Tools were. Firebug in FireFox was nice, but Chrome's dev tools were included out of the box w/out a plugin, and everything about their's vs. Firebug was nicer. Firefox eventually adopted their own native dev tools, but up until recently, they took seconds to open on my machine and remained slow. They're much faster now, though.

And I find Chrome generally handles multiple tabs better.

Overall I get faster, more reliable use out of Chrome, and it's played a big part in easing web development. That's why I stick with it.
 
Chrome is my DD but lately it has become so unstable.. Dead Jims everywhere at anytime and a really slow Hangouts plug in are making me consider switching back to FF..
 
Terpfen said:
Thanks for proving my point.
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Hey you're welcome, I know it's hard to find software companies anymore run by people with such societally discredited views but at least we can always fall back to the "never made a statement on these issues" group and hope/pretend that this means they're run by "the good ones".
 
daglesj said:
Really don't know what the hell you guys that get all these issues are doing with your setups.

I can't remember the last time I got a crash from Chrome or Firefox. Just works.

I would add I use ECC ram though....maybe that helps.
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I would wager that a lot of peoples current problems (or memories of past problems) are based on updating their browsers over old versions with long histories and preference data.

Which of course they should have every right to expect should work, but alas, this unfortunately does not always turn out to be the case.

In regards to Firefox, it's my personal experience & view that things started becoming a lot more unstable from the big changes of Firefox 4 when upgrading from 3.6.

I had intermittent issues for a long while until I just totally wiped it off my system and installed the latest version anew. For lack of a better term, I think having the root of the new builds from the old one's installs just made the installation "rotten" with probably a lot of garbage/conflicting files not cleaned up or managed properly for the upgrade versions.

(Just my hunch though.)

TL:DR - +1 for fresh browser installs
 
Wow, the Firefox audio indicator noisy tabs feature has actually been formally announced, so you don't have to take my word for it/hope that the recent bug thread activity may finally lead somewhere.

http://venturebeat.com/2015/07/24/firefox-is-getting-audio-indicators-to-show-noisy-tabs-and-will-let-you-mute-them/

I think this illustrates why it's not too hard to see why a lot of people shifted to Chrome some time ago. Here you have a fairly nifty feature in Chrome that has taken Firefox over 6 years to achieve parity with - frankly it's disgraceful, from the project manager side.

Still, better late than never.
 
Nasgul said:
And why is the reason Chrome has that market share?

Android, w/o it, Chrome would be as much as operas. In my smart phone, I've disabled everything google has to offer, sometimes I can't view some contents because it wants to force me to enable "google +", no thanks, I go back to CM Browser. Or I use my pc.

I tried Chrome when it came out as well........I'd rather use Netscape first than Chrome again.
Firefox isn't that much better, but at least is not Chrome and I use it everyday, and have been for many years.

Heck, even Opera seems much better than Chrome.
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These stats show desktop market share and mobile market share as different areas, so no, Chrome on Android (which wasn't default until Lollipop, mind you) isn't factored in as a reason for Chrome's 50%+ market share on Desktop.

And you'd do best to stay away from anything by CheetaMobile. They're spyware. They buy up popular apps and shove their tracking code in everything: Even going as far as to use their "security" apps to false flag competitor's products as malicious, as is what happened with SD Maid.
 
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