
Why I’m breaking up with Google Chrome - yanis_t
http://thenextweb.com/opinion/2015/05/14/why-im-breaking-up-with-google-chrome/
======
criley2
The loss of NPAPI is what's going to drive me away. If they stick to their
guns and drop NPAPI in 42 including the flags, then I'll finish my transition
to making Firefox my new main browser. I've heard the arguments for why it
shouldn't be present, I've heard Google's argument for a more pure web
experience, but quite frankly _I don 't care_.

I don't like Google's "our way is the only way" vision for the internet, where
Chrome has morphed into an operating-system like amalgamation of resource
heavy proprietary features, while simultaneously shutting down flags, features
and settings that power users rely on to wrestle back any control at all of
our own personal browsing experience.

Chrome was a great step forward and I will remember it fondly, but it really
is post-peak on the technology adoption curve. Google is focused _only_ on
that giant laggy late adopter side of the curve and simply could not care less
about early adopters and bleeding edge users anymore. If you feel like Chrome
and Google actively design against our use cases -- you're right, because the
laggard phase of adoption is in full swing and we're, once again, pointless
nothings and easily ignored voices, drowned out by Google's Master Vision.

Oh well, Firefox has really solidified into a nice product these past few
years, even if they are following Google down the stupid proprietary forced-
bundled of useless features (here's looking at you, "Hello", which I
ironically am not allowed to say "Goodbye" to).

~~~
lectrick
NPAPI is insecure and dates back to Netscape 2.0.

Abandoning a 20 year old technology is _really_ the final nail in the coffin
for you?

~~~
criley2
>Abandoning a 20 year old technology is really the final nail in the coffin
for you

Abandoning a useful technology with zero alternatives, telling the world to
"simply get over using those previous functions and adjust to a new reality
where you cannot do what you used to do" is the nail in the coffin for me.

This is not a case of a legacy technology being dropped for which there are
modern superior alternatives.

This is a case where a core idea in web functionality has been rethought, and
the powers that be have decided that we should not use web browsers in this
way at all, and we will not be able to do so moving forward.

And if we are given the ability back, it'll be a proprietary, non-standard,
vendor hack solution that, in 20 years, will occupy the same space as NPAPI.

~~~
dragonwriter
> This is not a case of a legacy technology being dropped for which there are
> modern superior alternatives.

On the contrary, that's actually _exactly_ the reason that _all_ browser
vendors are phasing out NPAPI (or, in MS's case with Spartan succeeding IE,
ActiveX) plug-in technology: it is legacy technology for which there are
modern superior alternatives.

------
franciscop
This article is so misguided that I am actually surprised... here's a the same
search for the browsers:

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=chrome%2C%20firefox%...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=chrome%2C%20firefox%2C%20internet%20explorer%2C%20safari&cmpt=q&tz=)

We can clearly see that each browser's "slow" search mimics similarly the
browser's popularity. If they could provide a "browser's slow" / "browser"
graph that would be a much more useful graph.

------
beat
I'm probably dumping Chrome soon too. What gets me is the random crashing. I
can count on Chrome to still be running maybe 50% of the time when I re-open
my Macbook in the morning.

Note to Chrome engineers... stability is a must-have feature, not a nice-to-
have. Being a good battery citizen is a must-have. Performance is a must-have.

~~~
jeffasinger
Chrome's stability greatly improved for me when I disabled Flash.

I'd really like to switch to Firefox, but there's a few things I just can't
seem to get used to every time I try to.

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
Like?

Most of my annoyances with FF were fixed by moving to a fork (Pale Moon).

------
CSMastermind
I switched off of Chrome on all my personal PCs for Firefox about a month ago
and I'm happy I did.

------
ohitsdom
I would love for Chrome to spend an entire version's development focused on
reducing memory. I haven't heard of any focused effort in this area from the
development team, has anyone else? I know computers are coming out with
increasingly large memory, but I don't want that taken up by a sluggish
browser.

For all my complaints with Chrome, there's not an alternative that's
attractive enough to entice me to switch (yet).

~~~
afsina
There is a memory team formed for Blink[1]. Also, soon they will start rolling
out a garbage collector mechanism (code name Oilpan) which would make Blink
more stable, safer and faster. But I am not sure about the overall effect of
these on Chrome. Presentations in the link has more details.

[1] [https://www.chromium.org/blink/memory-
team](https://www.chromium.org/blink/memory-team)

------
alooPotato
Is anyone on the chrome team lurking here and want to comment?

I believe I remember reading that the chrome team had tons of automated tests
that get run on every change list measuring compatibility, performance, memory
usage, battery usage(?) etc. So either these tests are broken and they don't
know there's a problem or they are ignoring the problem (to work on other
features) or there is no actual problem and ours in our heads.

------
de_dave
I'm an accidental convert. Since upgrading to Fedora 22, I've found myself
using Firefox almost exclusively for both normal browsing and webdev.
Previously I was 100% Chrome, and I've somehow transitioned without really
thinking about it nor meaning to!

(IMHO Chrome's developer/debugging tools are more pleasant to use, but Firefox
is getting there...)

~~~
droidist2
You ever use Firebug on Firefox? So awesome.

~~~
eridal
I been a Firefox user since 2004 I think, and used Firebug till something like
2012 .. when the dev console was launched --I haven't touched firebug since
then.

nowadays the native console works great! you should give it a try

~~~
rrss1122
Agree with this. The dev console in Firefox is better than Firebug now for me.

------
ninkendo
I'm in the same boat: I've been a Chrome user and advocate since 2008 and I
definitely feel the bloat they've added to it over the past few years.

Vanilla Safari with zero extensions has been completely satisfactory for me
for quite some time.

I have Chrome installed, but nowadays I only use it for a kind of "Flash
Browser", where I only use it when there's a flash-requiring that I'm
convinced is worth my time (most flash-requiring sites definitely aren't.)
Occasionally I'll use Chrome's developer tools, which I find to be more robust
than Safari's too.

Safari is by far the faster browser in my experience, it scrolls faster, it
uses less battery, it has nicer OS integration on OSX (swipe-to-go-back feels
much more natural in Safari, for instance), and it just seems _simpler_ than
Chrome (the UI gets out of your way better, IMO.)

~~~
commentnull
Yep. Chrome had its moment in the sun, helped push some vital changes in the
web ecosystem in its day, but now it has become a parody browser. When it is
not crashing it is a fragile thing that seems to break every page, despite the
fact all the web gurus try to optimise for it. And how much system resource
does it want? Makes me miss simple browsers like Dillo.

------
cabirum
I suspect disabling Flash, etc. plugins and removing extensions will make
battery life closer to Safari.

And Google Trends shows increasing amount of 'Chrome slow' searches because it
mostly depends on browser market share, which is still rising for Chrome.

------
ufmace
I haven't gotten to that point yet, but what really gets me is the random high
CPU usage that kills batter for things that other browsers can render with
virtually no CPU usage. The main offender that I've noticed is animated GIFs.

Chrome seems to handle huge, complex DOMs and piles of JS just fine, but throw
a few animated GIFs at it, and CPU usage rapidly spikes, fans spin up, if it's
a laptop, it'll get noticeably hotter and the battery life remaining will drop
fast. On OS X, Safari can render lots of animated GIFs like it's nothing. I
have no idea how they let such an old and widely used piece of web tech get
and stay so bad for so long. WTF Chrome?

------
alfiedotwtf
It would be interesting to see the browser usage stats for HN...

------
aikah
In my experience, Firefox is slower than Chrome when it comes to expensive
"javascript stunts" like JS games or interactive js experiments. However, as a
browser Firefox consumes WAY WAY less memory than Chrome. On Windows, just
opening the process manager helps confirm these facts. So it's a trade
off.Personnally since I usually limit the amount of paginated memory available
on my computer, Firefox seems like a better Choice.

------
at-fates-hands
I go in cycles and use Chrome for a while and then switch back to Firefox. The
last few months, I've found myself using FF Developer version a lot more.

The dev tools are much better than Chrome's, and it uses a fraction of the
memory and tends to be much more stable. I have an HP Elite book with 8GB of
RAM with an Intel i5 processor. If I leave Chrome open long enough, it will
bring my system to its knees.

------
kldavis4
I've had issues with Chrome consuming tons of memory for quite some time. I
found a single tab with gmail consuming ~700MB. Seems like a common issue:
[https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/86yzpx...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/86yzpxX7aws%5B1-25%5D)

------
jonathansizz
I was seeing some of the problems discussed in the article. Chrome had slowed
over time, and tabs were frequently hanging or crashing. I usually have around
30-35 tabs open across several virtual desktops on my linux machine, and the
whole browser would hang for around 5 minutes whenever they were restored on a
browser restart.

Deleting my Chrome data (I mean deleting _.config /google-chrome_, not just
deleting the profile through the browser settings) and purging then
reinstalling Chrome fixed everything, even with the same extensions and
settings restored and all the same tabs open. Data syncing meant this process
was very quick.

Everything is working great on my linux desktop now, and my Toshiba Chromebook
2 gets 8-9 hours on a charge and has never had any problems. Maybe the OSX
version is particularly poor?

Maybe some problems are plugin-related? I set 'Let me choose when to run
plugin content', rather than having plugins automatically run.

------
pcwalton
> Maybe something like Vivaldi, which builds on top of Chrome’s rendering
> engine, could be the answer?

Not likely if the main complaint is power usage. The browser engine is likely
to be the main driver there, and switching skins won't help, especially for an
engine as tightly coupled to its shell as Blink is.

~~~
karmakaze
Just tried Vivaldi on Mac and it shows roughly about the same process and
thread usage for tabs as Chrome so probably not the answer to battery life. It
does feel quite snappy so I'll continue using it instead of Chrome for other
reasons.

Generally I use Safari because it renders text better than Chrome (Yosemite)
on external displays, but for developer tools still use Chrome.

------
brandmeyer
I never did switch to Chrome or Chromium, simply because it doesn't integrate
as well with the XFCE desktop compared to Firefox/Iceweasel. So maybe I don't
know what I'm missing. Regarding the author's comment, "The problem is that
the Web is now optimized for Chrome users and that means alternatives often
provide a terrible experience." What are some examples of sites that provide a
terrible experience to non-Chrome users?

~~~
zuron7
I'm not aware of any non-Google sites that are optimized for Chrome, but
Google's Search and literally every single one of their products was optimized
for Chrome using the SPDY protocol. This was the major one.

[https://developers.google.com/speed/spdy/](https://developers.google.com/speed/spdy/)

~~~
JohnBooty
Firefox has supported SPDY for quite a few years. Did any of Google's sites
perform badly on Firefox?

I use a few of Google's services; for browsers I mainly use Firefox and
sometimes Chrome. I've never noticed a big difference between the two browsers
when it came to performance, on Google's properties or otherwise.

~~~
zuron7
Didn't know that. I just remember reading on a lot of scattered reports that
Chrome performed better than Firefox. I wouldn't know because I never did move
from Firefox.

------
rrss1122
For me, it wasn't just desktop chrome crashing. Mobile chrome also crashed and
lost all my tabs occasionally.

But on desktop chrome, what really drove me away was how bad it got using on
Ubuntu running in a virtual box. I'm unable to drag to do anything in chrome
any more, making it very inconvenient to use. I've been forced to switch to
Firefox, and chrome still isn't fixed even though I've seen this issue
reported online many times.

------
ajmarsh
I was having the same issue, until I enabled "click to play" for flash etc.
Currently with 8-10 tabs open 1.4 GB of memory. YMMV.

------
Grue3
I don't use Chrome, but I installed Chromium to test websites on webkit, and,
amazingly, it still manages to crash after a few hours of uptime despite being
a fresh, barely used install. It's beyond me how people are using such buggy
software regularly.

------
narrowrail
I am of the opinion that one should use multiple browsers, not just one. I
stick with Chromium for certain things (with uMatrix), and I refuse to install
Silverlight or Flash. I don't have any issues with crashes or memory
consumption.

------
wimagguc
I'm surprised that privacy wasn't even mentioned here.

(As in: most people switch to DuckDuckGo not to be tracked at all times. And
if a browser wants you to sign in, that implies quite some volume of data
being collected.)

------
djim
i dont have any issues with chrome. love my chromebook and my browser it is
synced to all my devices.

------
akilism
oh man just tried Vivaldi I think I'm switching just for tab stacks alone.

------
WorldWideWayne
thenextweb.com has just lost Javascript privileges in my browser for using a
dirty trick to push ads. As a matter of fact, after disabling Javascript, I
didn't read the article and I won't be talking about the article or sending
other users to the site by linking to it.

I would have liked to talk about the actual article here, but instead I'm
talking about this horrible advertising technique and that should be OK with
anyone who supports Internet advertising because that seems to be what you
want. Let's start off talking about something else and then _maybe_ we'll get
to the article you came here for.

~~~
abluecloud
I know. When this:
[http://i.imgur.com/AwG4AMr.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/AwG4AMr.jpg) is what you
get when you load a page, I ain't sticking around for long.

~~~
borisvvz
A screenshot doesn't do it much justice. What other people don't see is that
the article is moving in a bit and a hover or 'c' key moves it in completely.
If you think the ad looks too big, pick up any paper magazine and look at
those ads. In my Wired magazine it takes 7 pages to get to the content. We
show you ONE ful page ad that is easy to ignore and generates revenue that
enables us to hire writers and provide you with free content. Not such a
shitty deal after all? Boris (CEO TNW)

~~~
abluecloud
It may not be a shit deal for some people, but it is for me and I wont be
visiting your website again.

I'll give you credit for getting around my adblocker though, although that
just pissed me off more.

~~~
borisvvz
I think adblockers will catch up soon enouygh, and that's fine.

