I didn't care until it consistently loaded faster.
That's now my new baseline, and anything slower than 'instant' is annoying.
I would care if that was no longer the case, because I don't like being constantly annoyed.
That said, I don't think the page loading speed is noticeably different between major browsers.
The addons, customisation, privacy and resource usage are where it's at.
I'm just hoping that some competition to chromium stays afloat.
I haven't experienced that. What is the use-case that makes this happen?
I have one machine with only 8 gig and firefox is fine, and a 16 and 32 gig machine, firefox has never eaten 8 gigs
What they mean is "I use woefully malformed websites loaded up with all sorts of weird shit that eats ram on the regular, and somehow that's my browser's fault"
I have been on the firefox train since it was new. I witnessed the rise of Chrome and Chromium, and never really felt the pull, and worried about everyone targeting the same platform. Figured I'd stay on FF until I had no choice. Don't see myself leaving.
Figured I’d stay on FF until I had no choice. Don’t see myself leaving.
i'm in a similar boat and given the overwhelming majority popular use of chrome, it feels clear to me that firefox will eventually stop working and i wonder what surfing will like like for me in the future.
i suspect i'll have to go back to use chrome again.
I've switched to Firefox but there's definitely a few things that irritate me about it.
First thing is when I boot up my computer, launch Firefox, it launches long enough for me to click a bookmark then closes to perform an update. And then doesn't automatically reopen...
I also have it set to not "remember" my tabs after closing. Yet when I launch Firefox for the first time after rebooting or closing ally tabs, it gives me a "hmm.. we're having a hard time finding your previous session" message. Uh, yeah, I told you not to look for it.. can I just have the regular "new tab" page?
It also might just be because I'm used to chrome, but I feel the mobile app is severely lacking. I hate that I can't access my bookmarks directly from the new tab page, and that the tablet version doesn't show you your bookmark bar. The synchronization between mobile and desktop isn't great either, I'll have a very long specific search query that I've used multiple times on my phone, yet it doesn't offer it for auto-complete on desktop, I have to search the entire term again or go digging through my history. When you're searching long model numbers and the like, this is incredibly frustrating.
Finally, and I don't know if this is a Firefox issue, but there's some memory leak that occurs when viewing a webcam stream from my raspberry pi that only has happened in Firefox. The first time I noticed it happening my PC slowed to a crawl, when task manager finally opened Firefox was taking 23GB of RAM. So I have to use chrome to keep that steam open for more than a few minutes at a time.
I'm curious as to why Firefox is checking for updates, have you configured it to do so? I've never seen Firefox do that (and it feels weird to have a program sidestep the update mechanism of the package manager)
To be fair, Chrome does generally render most websites faster and correctly. I have Chrome installed just in case of some webpages not working with Firefox. Now, that's not Mozillas fault, but from user standpoint makes Chrome more attractive browser to use.
WebGPU, WebHID and h.265 are all unsupported on firefox
that said, i still daily drive firefox with mostly no problems, but saying that it can do everything chrome can is just flat out wrong
this is by design mind you, chrome have a big enough market share that they can basically just add whatever they want to the web standards and all other browsers just have to try to keep up. i imagine that's part of the reason that chromium skins are so widespread
I feel like including WebGPU and WebHID is kind of unfair. They are both still in the working draft state as far as web standards go and are experimental. Codec support, on the other hand, is fair though.
By default, I doubt that Firefox is better at privacy than Chrome. Actually even worse than Chrome I'd say. But you can customize Firefox to be much more privacy friendlier than Chrome. That is the functionality Chrome lacks. The last time I tried out Ungoogled chromium, it sucked ass.
Websites actually loaded slower than on Firefox for me. And both had uBlock Origin installed.
I tried those fancy GPU stuff as well, almost nothing changed.
One thing I've been annoyed with after switching to Firefox is the iffy password manager performance. It's so common for it not to remember a password that it should, or, weirdly, for it to only remember the password once I've typed the whole username in and hit tab.
i was talking more about how mobile chrome can't adblock, so it has ads just not on the app itself, and desktop chrome will soon not be able to effectively
The thing is, using a Chromium-based browser isn't contributing to their monopoly unless Google holds sway over the fork. Brave, Vivaldi, those two are generally fine and stand against what Google has been up to.
You can't truly degoogle chromium without a hard fork. Soft forks are still enabling them and their grip on the web, even if they're not specifically spying on you in particular.
The Vivaldi team is working hard to gut the Google spyware in Chromium on every update. Because of this only security patches are in realtime, all other updates are 1-2 weeks behind. The rest remains as user choice in the settings (save browsing, Chrome Store (without Vivaldi isn't even recognized as Chromium), G DNS and little else). Therefore, Vivaldi can be seen a hard fork. No data sended to Google, nor other third party companies (excepting naturally extensions and search engines you use, they can be not so private in any browser, Mullvad also recommend to use less extensions possibles).
Sure it is. Everyone starts trying to be sure things render correctly on Chromium based browsers and nothing else. Next thing you know people say "Wow Chromium based browsers render pages more reliably than everything else" and then you end up somewhere not too differently from where we were heading. Everything that's not based on Chromium starts getting tossed aside.
They are contributing to Google's hold over web specs. If Google decides to implement a feature off spec, then website developers will optimise for that implementation because it will be the implementation used by all chromium based browsers. And that leads to worse performance for other browsers with a more correct implementation.
This. Firefox has always been just good. It wasn't great or anything, it was just a good browser. Then chrome came around and it had more, better features. It was a bit more memory usage, but those were for the additional features Firefox didn't have.
Firefox didn't really change a whole lot, it added synching features across accounts, and didn't get worse. It just stayed the same.
The people made Firefox better, because now they're creating add-ons for Firefox, where chrome had more.
I feel like once chrome got the majority of browser users, it immediately started going to shit. I have no proof of this, just a memory of it being better until it was announced that chrome was the most used browser, and the near immediate heavier memory usage.
Yes, but not neccesary other Chromium do it, that depends only on the corresponding devs. Chrome is a RAM and Data Hog, because use for every tab a own process, but Vivaldi Hibernate the background tabs and because of this use less RAM than other Chromium and even FF.
But generally all US browsers send data to Alphabet, googleanalytics and googletagmanager, except Edge (also Chromium), but in change it sends data to other MS partners which are even worst (Towerdata).
I use Vivaldi for this, because it's the only existing EU browser (after the French UR browser died some years ago) maybe apart Konqueror from KDE (Linux only, KHTML or KDE WEBKit engine), no data for third parties, nor Google, despite the Chromium base. The Browser companies are the problem, not the engine which they use.
firefox is going on a steady decline more recently with ads on the homepage by default, plus new telemetry being introduced. hopefully it can change direction
If you're switching a couple extensions are uBlock origin and no script with Firefox, prevents most ads and lets you choose which hosts to accept JavaScript from temporarily or permanently.
Firefox add-on for Tab Groups? I looked and couldn't find one. At some point they appeared to try to support tab groups, but gave up? I dunno. I've only used Chrome a little. I don't personally care for Chrome, but I found the tab groups useful.
I just searched "tab groups Firefox" and found results saying it has them. No idea as I wasn't able to find relevant settings last time I tried on a PC. Mobile just now I tried adding tabs to a collection, but it doesn't look like it did anything
This might be known already, but I bet that Microsoft decided to switch Edge to Chromium instead of forking Gecko/Firefox because Google either bribed them or threatened to lower Microsoft sites' ranks in search results.
Otherwise why would MS use a web browser controlled by one of their very few competitors?
Edit: maybe they were enthralled by the promise of using Proton/Chromium based "desktop applications" (which just contain an entire Chromium browser in their install directory) to cheaply create apps that people are forced to use in their jobs, like Teams. Which is still awful even after they made it a full UWP desktop app. Like Skype already was.
