
Bye, Chrome: Why I’m switching to Firefox - ProAm
https://www.fastcodesign.com/90174010/bye-chrome-why-im-switching-to-firefox-and-you-should-too
======
romwell
Just to offer a sample point:

Switched to Firefox Quantum when it came out, and never looked back. Never had
a problem with any website I used on any of my machines (which include the i7
16GB RAM work laptop, Core2Duo 3GB home desktop, and wife's old Thinkpad still
running XP). Everything runs faster than Chrome, especially on the older
machines, and I can comfortably open more tabs.

Granted, my top 4 sites are probably HN, Reddit, Facebook and Youtube, and the
first two aren't very demanding of the browser - but the links from these
sites go all over the place, and I simply never had to launch another browser
ever since.

I find Firefox more feature-rich, and use the Reader View very often
(especially at work, where visual clutter is the last thing I need on my
monitors). MRU tab switching order out of the box is also great to have.

</anecdata>

~~~
zamalek
> Article: Firefox doesn’t always work better than Chrome

I assume the author isn't on Quantum because my experience (developer edition)
matches yours. Firefox is mind bogglingly fast, which is precisely why I
dumped Firefox for Chrome when Chrome first launched. My extensions seriously
bloat memory usage; memory is cheap, time is priceless.

Features and privacy are great, but the performance is simply so
incomprehensibly far ahead (and we don't even have Servo yet). The omnibar is
also default now and is more reliable than the extension - that was one
crucial Chrome holdout for me.

------
tinus_hn
The point of Chrome is not that it can spy on you, it is a vehicle that allows
Google to control the evolution of web standards. Still a good reason to use
something else though, it’s very important that there are competitors.

------
spadros
Hmm, there is something contradictory to me in the funding of Firefox. If it's
funded by big search engines paying to be the default for Firefox, then
Firefox's revenues are coming from Google or Baidu's revenues. These search
engines' revenues come from advertising and tracking, which is what Firefox is
meant to be against. I'm not sure how meaningful it is, but it seems like a
strange loop to me.

~~~
SuperNinKenDo
There's a lot of strange loops like this is free and open-source software
generally. For instance much free software is partially funded by proprietary
software companies who want to use it internally, or is open-core but not
fully open-source. GitHub itself is a walking contradiction of license
philosophies for instance.

Not quite the same thing, but there's (almost) always a weird interplay and
tension whenever something actually needs to get funded or make money.

~~~
Spivak
GitHub's on-prem enterprise offering is certainly a contradiction but I don't
think their hosted service is. It's code they wrote running on servers they
own/rent. FOSS software might come with an ethos of publishing useful things
one makes but it's certainly not an obligation.

I will admit that there is issue regarding non-free client-side JS but a lot
of projects tend to ignore that.

------
bsaul
switched to firefox a few months ago but i keep going back to chrome everytime
i need to watch a video online. Firefox videoplayer just doesn't work. The
video lags very frequently and the cpu is always overheating.

Only when that matter is fixed will i be able to completely ditch chrome.

~~~
imagetic
Yeah, I do video production work and Firefox is useless when it comes to
video. If it even can play half the things, it's going to suck up a lot of
computer power to do it.

------
beenBoutIT
This article resurfaces every time a new version of Firefox gets released. I'd
love for someone more technically inclined to explain how the new iteration of
Firefox is better than the current build of Chromium for Linux
(66.0.3359.117).

~~~
Sylos
You didn't get a whole lot of responses, but honestly, I'd bet money that you
would get even less, if you posed the question the other way around. Because
how is Chrome/-ium better than Firefox?

To give some rough image from what I know about the browsers and what I've
heard other people say:

Performance: Roughly equal, Chrome seems to still be more consistently fast,
which Mozilla is still cleaning up after that big architecture change. Mozilla
also has more in the pipeline, which I'm not seeing as much from Chrome.

RAM use: Firefox is still considerably lower here, even though the Quantum
iteration needs more RAM. There's little motivation for Google to have users
use software outside of their web browser, they can't display ads or gather
data in those, so there's little motivation for them to not eat up all of the
RAM.

Customizability: Clear win for Firefox. You can drag UI elements everywhere
you want, color the whole UI with extensions as you like or even fuck around
with CSS to alter its look.

Extensibility: Chrome still has more extensions in numbers, mainly because
Mozilla does not allow telemetry in add-ons (unless the users opts in).
Firefox extensions are more capable, though.

And Chrome's extension store is a dumpster fire, filled with malware. Mozilla
vets extensions with actual human beings, which Google doesn't consider an
option.

Security against script-kiddies: Also roughly equal. Chrome has to a minor
degree still a more secure architecture (sandboxes each tab individually most
of the time, whereas Firefox sandboxes them in groups of how many cores your
CPU has, for performance reasons), but Chrome on the other hand has some
glaring idiocies here and there.

For example Chrome's autofill fills in data in all input fields on the page at
once, meaning that it will also fill input fields that you as a user can't
see, so you might send off your address to a sketchy site without knowing
about it. Another example is them shipping the WebUSB-API in a form that made
Yubikey Neos completely exploitable, as webpages could literally just connect
to the Yubikey on their own and read out the secret, bypassing the U2F API
that Google had built into Chrome.

Security against Google and in extension US intelligence agencies (and in
extension non-US intelligence agencies): Well, you can probably guess by
yourself. Chrome Sync by default uploads your browsing history and such to
Google's server in decryptable form. So, Google can access it, and because of
US law, the US intelligence agencies can grab it from Google's servers, too.
And because those intelligence agencies are friends with other intelligence
agencies (Five Eyes etc.), those likely have your browsing history, too.
Obviously depends how much you consider these a threat, but it's certainly not
in your favor for these groups to have your data.

You can bypass that, by enabling end-to-end-encryption, which Google requires
a second password for, so it's not necessarily an argument when you know about
it, but that brings us to what the article mentions, too.

Defaults: Firefox Sync is end-to-end-encrypted by default. Only one password
needed. Firefox's Private Browsing mode ships with Tracking Protection, no
(potential malware) extension needed to block trackers, not that Chrome even
allows extension to run in Incognito mode.

And these are just superficial examples. We're talking about millions of lines
of code, tens of thousands of design decisions. In one case made by a non-
profit, that always tries to protect users while trying to not piss off
webpage owners too much, in the other case made by a company that always tries
to satisfy its own needs in the hope that users don't notice or don't complain
too much. And again, millions of lines of code. Lots of shit goes under the
radar that no journalist reports about. Even in Chromium.

This is for example a project that tries to fix Chromium and it admits that
it's an uphill battle: [https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-
chromium](https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium)

~~~
beenBoutIT
Thanks. I'm a big fan of Chromium's UI because outside of enabling flags I
don't have to customize it to get it where I need it to be.

------
usr1106
Nice article for laymen. On HN I want something more technical, more in-depth.

~~~
sethc2
I don't necessarily want something more technical, but for some reason I was
anticipating that the reason given would've been more of a technical one, like
"Firefox is way better with WASM" or something of that nature.

------
esturk
Firefox still haven't fixed a privacy bug of keeping a record of all your
closed tabs in private mode. You can all try by opening several tabs, going to
any sites of your choosing and closeing them. If you invoke, reopen last
closed tabs, all of them returns.

This simply doesn't happen in Safari and Chrome. I reported this issue some
time back and someone at Firfeox said this is not an issue.

So if I left my private window open, but with no tabs, someone can always
retrace my steps even though I've closed all my tabs. How's that for privacy?

~~~
pahool
Chrome preserves your cookies across tabs, so it's not really "private" in the
sense that you seem to want, either. I wouldn't say that Firefox is less
private. I'd say that they made a design decision to allow you to re-open tabs
in privacy mode in case you unintentionally close them. In both Firefox and
Chrome, you need to close your private window if you really want to erase your
data.

~~~
romwell
To further your point: if you log in to you Gmail account in a private window,
close the tab, but keep the window open, someone can open Gmail in that window
and will be still logged into your account.

This goes for both Chrome and Firefox.

------
cafard
One of my email accounts is through my ISP. I can read mail with Firefox, but
not read it, the error being

TypeError: this._getDoc(...).body is undefined

I reported this to the ISP some months ago, and was assured that they are
working on it. Obviously, it is not Mozilla's fault that this doesn't work,
but it suggests that some organizations don't think they need to accommodate
it.

~~~
cafard
Edit: "but not write" it.

------
to_bpr
I stopped using all Google products in my personal life quite some time ago
(including Gmail, Maps, etc.). I gave the latest Firefox a shot though and
found it super slow on my Macbook Pro compared with Chrome and Safari, so
stuck with Safari.

Would love to return to using Firefox but even without any extensions
installed I experience regular lag. Anyone else?

~~~
berfarah
I did for a while. Around version 58 it started performing better again. Then
something in v60 caused a bunch of CPU spikes again, so I'm using Developer
Edition, which is on v61 and doesn't have that issue.

I would say 99% of the time, Firefox is great for me. There are occasional
sites that I open in Chrome - either because of video choppiness or JS going
out of control on a page.

However, I would love it if it were less of a gamble when upgrading versions.

~~~
to_bpr
You likely won't come back to this, but in the event you do - thank you. V61
dev edition is working an absolute charm for me.

------
felixis-1
I don't want to say this, but you'll be back. Putting all cons aside of using
Chrome, Google is actually doing a very impressive job which will make
everyone considering this switch to go back in no time for some reason or the
other.

~~~
Tijdreiziger
Can you expand on that? I switched from Chrome to Firefox a few years ago and
I've been very happy with that decision.

------
DrScump
My Windows 10 machine just did a huge update. Ever since, Chrome closes within
a few seconds unless I let it Run As Administrator. Uh, no thanks. I tried
various suggested fixes and even did a complete remove and reinstall. So, no
more Chrome.

~~~
Sylos
Interesting. I think, Chrome doesn't do sandboxing when you run it as
administrator (because it'd be pointless security-wise), so maybe it
specifically crashes when trying to spawn those sandbox processes.

Or it's a simple matter of it not having file access permission to a file that
it needs and running it as administrator obviously grants it access to that
file.

Not that this information is likely to help you fix that issue...

~~~
DrScump
I even tried manually deleting all the files in the user-specific directory;
made no difference.

There comes a point when the time investment has to be viewed as a sunk cost,
and move on.

------
beanboot
I agree with the sentiment of the article. It’s been this way for a while
though. Chrome is perceived as the more powerful browser by the masses. I love
Firefox for sure, unfortunately it has been hard to convince normal internet
users to make the switch.

~~~
romwell
Show them the Reader View feature, which is there out of the box.

Way too many websites (including CNN) turn a humble article into something
barely appropriate by plastering ads, animated ads, video ads, and other
irrelevant, bright, colorful mess around the text. Reader View takes one back
to text.

Also appreciated by someone who doesn't want to signal "I'M READING A TABLOID"
with their screen by simply opening a CNN link.

