Maybe consider other browsers now. Yes speed is great and all and as much as I hate the idea of supporting the little guy just because he is a little guy; this is the web at stake. And most of us make our living on the web.
It is in my opinion that the gatekeeper of the web (browser) should not also be the one taxing web traffic (via ads).
Personally, I am on Microsoft Edge because it was low-effort coming from Chrome. But I have learnt that Microsoft Edge is as bad as Google Chrome (for me) because they are mirroring Google Chrome with regards to Manifest V3. I had thought the only other guy that will stand up to Google is Microsoft but hey, what do I know.
Anyways, it seems like Firefox is the last non-chromium browser that has the balls to keep uBlock Origin supported as it is. I'll be moving to Firefox as soon as I port my personal productivity extensions over.
I started using Firefox about two years ago. The only time I ever have to launch Chrome now is to specifically test Chrome compatibility. Other than that, I've never missed Chrome.
This is me also. Even on my personal PC I recently built, I didn't even bother installing Chrome. I just use Edge if I need Chromium, which is extremely rare.
Firefox and multi-account containers was a game changer the first time I used it.
Same! I switched back to Firefox a few years ago when I discovered that logging into Gmail on Chromium (not Chrome!) crossed a hard boundary by also signing me into the browser account sync. I tested a few times to confirm before switching and I've never looked back.
I've done the opposite. I used Safari for more than a half decade, then jumped to Firefox when I decided to switch to weird operating system. But then Firefox dropped support for my weird OS a year ago (I can't blame them), and I was forced to switch to Chromium.
I quickly became delighted at just how speedy everything was. It's not as if I'd never opened Chrome before, but the difference was much more noticeable after using it as my primary browser for a few days. Even on my weird platform where Chromium can't use graphics acceleration, the browser is just stupid fast at getting web pages on screen.
I'm not, well, particularly happy about this. I think that browser diversity is super important, and I do still use Firefox on Windows and Safari on modern Apple platforms. But Chromium really does seem to provide the better experience.
I've actually tested Firefox and Chromium side-by-side on my webapp. Firefox rendered the page quicker. (Chrome is more responsive while it's waiting for DOM manipulations to finish.)
You might have been working on an really old port of Firefox (considering support for that OS was dropped). Firefox used to be noticeably slower, but has received numerous speed improvements over the years, to the point where I can't perceive a difference in performance between the two.
> But I have learnt that Microsoft Edge is as bad as Google Chrome (for me) because they are mirroring Google Chrome with regards to Manifest V3.
In case you don't know, Edge is built on Chrome's engine - using Edge is just as bad as using Chrome if you want the web to be more open with different vendors having a say in how it works.
It is, but there is the question of how much effort MS puts into it. So far it seems to be that it is not so much "built on" as it is a low effort reskin.
I don't know much about the internals of Chromium, but I'd say it's more than a "low effort reskin". Not including the UI changes like vertical tabs and collections, there's also a lot of underlying changes/improvements made like PlayReady support (for e.g. 4K Netflix playback), better scrolling support, tracking protection, Windows-specific improvements, memory/performance improvements, PDF annotation, web capture, etc. Granted, Microsoft are contributing most of these underlying improvements back upstream to the Chromium project, so the gap between them will remain small. Second to Google, Microsoft is the most prolific contributor to the Chromium project, so I think "low effort reskin" is a bit of an undermining to their efforts.
With all of that said, Google is still the gatekeeper, Microsoft's contributions don't really solve the Chromium browser monopoly, and Microsoft is being really scummy with their push for Edge (i.e. Windows and Bing annoyances about it). I'd still prefer to have more independent browser options like Firefox.
It's so funny that Microsoft copied Chrome's left space between the edge of the screen the the first tab, but they didn't realize that Chrome still counts that as part of the tab (https://imgur.com/a/hI2XrcX). So if you try to quickly mouse over to your leftmost tab on Edge, you'll end up clicking the menu section instead and un-fullscreening it.
Chromium seems to me a bit analogous to Linux. Chrome, Edge, Brave, etc are link Red Hat, Ubuntu, and so on. Between the varied stakeholders and the various web standards groups, I don't see Google going off the deep-end and introducing truly unpopular changes. I do see some advantages though, since browser engines are near the same complexity of an OS, it make sense to cooperate on one main engine.
I switched to Firefox from Chrome a few years ago (maybe 2017/2018). It required a tiny bit of willpower since making even minor changes to frequently used tools causes friction. I've experienced few issues since. About once a month I'll run into a website that doesn't work in Firefox. Mostly experimental things on HN. My doctor's virtual visit web software was Chrome only, but the audio didn't work in Chrome either. I used the Android App. Dish network's internet DVR streaming requires Chrome, but I don't watch a lot of TV and the quality is terrible. Otherwise I never think about it.
At the time Firefox Android was a bit slow and would crash weekly or more, but I stuck with it for uBlock and Sync. After the Android app rewrite its been working well. I like having the navigation bar on the bottom (can Chrome do that yet?). The password autofill integration API took a while to get integrated since that happened during the app rewrite. At least with Bitwarden it's still a bit buggy when it decides to show the autofill prompt, but that seems to happen in other apps and in Chrome. It's annoying that most Google apps will ignore your system preferences and open things in Chrome where I don't have any sign-in cookies etc. Still like the Google search/assistant experience and haven't found an alternative so I live with it.
Overall, a very mild sacrifice for the open web. Very easy slacktivism.
I call this the "eat your vegetables" strategy of browser promotion.
Yes, browser engine hegemony is not a good thing. No, Firefox is not the solution.
Mozilla has proven repeatedly that they are not up to the task of competing with Chrome. The market has steadily moved away from them ever since shortly after Chrome was released. They've not once, in the last 13 years, done anything to make a dent in that loss of market share.
Firefox is now 19 years old. It has always ran on "webdevs just need to be better about testing in Firefox". When the only alternative was IE 6 and 7, that worked. But it's now been longer that that strategy has not worked than the period of time that it did work.
I don't have a solution, but without massive upheaval within Mozilla, "just use Firefox" is also not a viable solution. People aren't going to "eat their vegetables". You need to come up with a more compelling, longer term strategy than backing a perennial loser.
You're free to try to convince me that Mozilla has the capacity for change. That somehow, they are going to completely change their management corps and corporate culture enough to be able to get out of their quagmire. Extraordinary claims are going to require extraordinary evidence.
>Mozilla has proven repeatedly that they are not up to the task of competing with Chrome.
Seriously? Mozilla has simply proven they can't compete with Google on ads: Chrome has been promoted everywhere from TV, Web banners on all major media websites, Adwords placements on all "browser" queries, even subway stations in all big cities... starting with the bundling with Google Earth more than a decade ago. Most people around me switched to Chrome because of all the popups on the Google homepage and because companies slowly replaced the "IE required" with "Chrome required" over the years.
Mozilla also couldn't get Firefox to be preinstalled on billions of Android devices either. I wonder why.
You've described the playing field in which Mozilla has to work. But it's not going away. If Mozilla can't figure out a strategy to deal with that, it doesn't change anything.
I think the sentiment is that WE need to do something too, and I don't see how you really diagree with the OP in terms that what is happening is bad, so what are you going to do about it, if FF is not the answer?
Not an attack, really interested in ideas other than just give up.
I'm more invested in the web being a viable platform for feature-rich applications, in competition with walled-garden app stores, than I am in defeating browser engine hegemony. I'm interested in defeating browser engine hegemony, but I have no specific love for Firefox to stump for Mozilla being the David to this Goliath.
With Microsoft, Facebook, and Samsung shipping Chromium-based browsers and being in direct competition with Google across industries, I don't think there is much danger of Google taking over the web. If things get really bad, I can easily see all of the chromium-based browsers forming a consortium together and hard-forking. But I only see them staying in the game if the web grows and continues to be a viable alternative to native applications. So what I do is I make sure that my apps are usable across as many of them as possible, and not just Google Chrome.
I'm sorry for the vent of frustration that is coming up next. But I'm sick of hearing 5% of the market being one of the loudest voices in threads like this. WebRTC is killing the CPU, WebAudio keeps clipping, I can't run graphics ops in a worker thread, so the UI becomes unresponsive during scene transitions. I can't do anything about these things. I've tried. I've gone to great lengths to maintain as much fall-back compat with Firefox as I could. I finally just gave up because it was taking such a large percentage of my time that it couldn't justify it for being able to reach only 5% of the market. A portion of the market that, quite frankly, tends to not be very interested in spending money. Making Firefox better is not my job. My job is to make web apps.
Have you ever talked to any Mozilla employees? The stories they tell of the corporate culture make my blood boil for them. I mean, hell, after the latest purge, one of the projects they kept on (Hubs) has no developers working on the API support in their browser (WebXR, they fired all of the VR developers working on Firefox).
Maybe if we gave up on Firefox, those developers at Mozilla could be put to better use on browser projects that aren't managed poorly. People said Google was stupid for starting a new browser engine. They didn't start from scratch, but eventually they got there. There are other browser engine projects out there. Mozilla even chucked one of the more promising ones out of their umbrella. So yes, let's stop sending good money after bad and give up on Firefox.
In what way exactly Firefox is not up to the task? Mozilla manages to maintain and constantly update a non-chromium based browser engine that implements most of the web standards and is fully usable for anyone, with much less resources.
This graph only covers the last decade, but it's enough to show that the trend for Mozilla ends in irrelevance. I personally think it's already there, but I wanted to keep my original post a little more pragmatic.
How can you look at that graph and say "you got this, Mozilla"?
I personally think a big part of the problem is that part where you said they implement "most of the web standards". Most isn't good enough, especially when the web standards are growing. We need the web standards to grow so that web applications can successfully compete with apps in walled-garden app stores. That's what I care about. I care about not being beholden to Apple, Facebook, and Google taking a cut of my revenue or having a say in what content I publish.
I have apps that would be hobbled to the point of being nearly unusable because of missing web standards in Firefox. I can release very high-tech apps in Chromium-based browsers that can go toe-to-toe with native apps on features and performance. I can't do that in Firefox, both because they have given up on several platforms that I care about and because they are falling behind on web standards on the other platforms that are left.
Out of the big 3 (with edge being basically chrome at this point), safari is waaay behind firefox and chrome in terms of number of implemented standards and they still have plenty of market share — as if market share would at most correlate slightly with technical merit. And I don’t think that firefox would have gaping holes in terms of standard-compliance.
Safari is A) only available on two operating systems, both owned by Apple, B) is mandated on one of those OSes (iOS), which C) just happens to be their most popular OS.
I don't think it's very surprising that share of Safari for browsers across all OSes closely matches the share of iOS. Safari on macOS is only about 1/3rd of an OS that has 6 or 7% of the market, so you're only going to get about 2 points there. Firefox on macOS mirrors the rest of the market.
Chrome is #1 on all platforms except iOS, where it just literally does not exist. Safari's relative popularity over Firefox is due to lack of choice on iOS. So no, I don't think you can make that claim that technical merit does not matter.
If Apple were forced to allow other vendors distrubte their browsers on iOS (and they should be forced to), you would not see any uptick in Firefox's numbers, but a relatively big uptick in Chrome's numbers. I'm guessing like 10 points.
Exactly. It appears the market share of a browser is more linked to marketing, publicity, promotion, monopoly, rather than the coverage of web standards, as you pointed out. I bet if we give Firefox to Google and give Chrome to Mozilla tomorrow, Firefox will still end up having 60% market share. How much resource you have determines how big the territory you can enclose.
How much of this is technical versus the constant promotion on Google.com, youtube.com, etc.? It's been a _long_ time since I had significant issues supporting Firefox (and the warts I do find are just as commonly Chrome as Firefox) but using it primarily I see fairly regular upsells across Google properties and near-constant friction from Google developers choosing to implement features in a non-standard manner with user-agent checks or use of Chrome's earlier APIs rather than the standard ones (they blocked U2F/FIDO from Safari users for a long time after release, for example).
The GCP console breaks Firefox every month or two, Meet is the lone service which can't reliably do video chat, etc. That's probably not an explicit goal but it definitely highlights the risks of a single company setting priorities for so many different popular services.
This is all the same sort of environment that Chrome entered into back in 2008, versus Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Yes, you've accurately described the challenges that Mozilla faces. If anything, it was easier for Chrome, because at that time Firefox had successfully clawed about 1/3 of the market from IE. So yes, things are harder for Mozilla today.
Which is my point! That's all just excuses for the inevitable failure of Firefox as a viable platform. It is not a viable plan for making sure Firefox survives. It's self-pitying, backwards-looking, naval gazing, and as long as Firefox's biggest proponents continue to engage in it as their main line of defense, Mozilla will never claw back any market share.
Can't live without container tabs anymore - Firefox is actually killing it with great user focused features. Give it a try, many of us actually enjoy vegetables just fine for what they are!
Chrome is heavily promoted on some of the most high traffic websites. Users of those websites are told they should use Chrome. So they do. There's nothing Mozilla can do about that. Mozilla doesn't enforce antitrust. No upheaval within Mozilla will change it.
Make sure you enable all of the additional filter lists in uBlock's settings page (regardless of browser) as well. Well, except lists for languages you don't regularly use, those will just slow things down with no benefit to blocking.
Not sure about that case, but on Firefox, uBlock Origin does have more features enabled, such as cname uncloaking to block trackers that use this sneaky trick.
Totally agree. Using Chrome because it is faster, at this point, is like using C++ for everything instead of python or a good bash script just because C++ is faster. If you really need absolute cutting edge speed for a webapp, then maybe you should be using a desktop application or the webapp needs to cut some fat.
That may seem like a plus from a user's perspective when websites were only tested with / optimized for Chrome. From the perspective of someone who's concerned about Google's power as a monopoly, alternative browsers being Chromium-based is just part of the problem. Sure, you can fork Chromium in theory, but making changes that are incompatible with Google's vision is going to be a problem for you. So Google is still going to be in control as long as they ship the browser that dominates all others. Brave don't have the resources to maintain an engine by themselves anyway. Besides Mozilla, only Apple and Microsoft could do it, and Microsoft already gave up.
>Sure, you can fork Chromium in theory, but making changes that are incompatible with Google's vision is going to be a problem for you.
Isn't Brave doing just that? They have created a whole new business model on top of Chromium that is incompatible with Google's vision. I'm not convinced that it's a better model, but that's beside the point. Brave has also said that they won't be supporting FLoC.
But if you mean Google's vision for the rendering and JavaScript engines then I agree with you. Only Google can really steer the core technology into any particular direction.
> Is the engine really the thing you're worried about though?
Yes. Google is unable to separate their ad business from making a browser engine (as any profit-seeking corporation in the same position would be). So far their power hasn't been absolute, so some of their less nice efforts have failed, but they'll keep trying.
Do they really have the engineering capacity to support a fork for years after divergence?
Also, I am personally not really okay with their shady crypto practice where content creators didn’t get their share made before their joining. Any reason to prefer it over Firefox?
I mean, everyone has more engineering capacity to fork Chromium than to build their own browser/engine from scratch, which is why I find a lot of this discussion so silly.
With regards to the crypto donations, that was an early version of the system which they improved after receiving feedback. Hearing feedback that your product is misleading and then fixing it is exactly the type of behavior I want to see, not sure about anyone else.
I prefer it to Firefox because of the best-in-class adblocking and because (for JS heavy workloads) I still find that V8 is far superior to SpiderMonkey.
Also because I don't think Mozilla has been a great steward, and most of their revenue comes from Google, so if your goal is to de-google I think Firefox is a worse bet than Brave.
> I mean, everyone has more engineering capacity to fork Chromium than to build their own browser/engine from scratch
That doesn’t contradict my question. If google does go through with crippling ad blockers at a deep level of the engine, how long till forks will break under backporting every security update, etc. And that is without thinking of any sort of malice. If google deliberately builds heavily on top of these changes, they will pretty much cripple every fork, except for perhaps edge.
And I do agree that V8 is a superior engine when it comes to performance, but for me the minimal performance gain is meaningless (especially with good ad blocking it is almost insignificant for the majority of websites)
And just because it is a symbiosis where Google won’t face anti-monopolism lawsuits if Mozilla is around and Mozilla gets some money, I doubt it would shine negative light on Firefox.
Brave is a Chromium fork which mostly just adds UI features. They don't appear to have the will/man-power to modify and develop fundamental browser features, so using Brave doesn't do much against preserving browser diversity.
When some site doesn't work for any reason, I usually open them in different browsers one by one to see if it works. They act as fall backs.
Also, I'm a web dev and I have to use Chrome just for its debugger because Firefox's debugger is slow and it hangs for some reason on our app.
I love Chrome and I am amongst those who are not planning to switch anytime soon. My ecosystem is mostly Google for work, my passwords are in there, and I just enjoy the synergy with my phone, too.
But... It's true that trying Safari or Firefox or Brave showed great speed improvements over Chrome. The memory hog is real with Chrome, too.
So, if this is true and replicates in my session then this is amazing news.
I switched to firefox for personal use only. I still like chrome for work. It's a good way to try out firefox and it also separates my work and home life which is nice.
I would use Firefox for work except there doesn't seem to be an equivalent to `chrome://inspect`. That's quite literally the only reason I use Chrome at work besides the obvious (cross browser support). If I could debug Deno/Node apps without Chrome, that would be super.
Have you tried `about:debugging`? Pretty sure both chrome and firefox support a remote debugging protocol. I only know about it because there is a way to hook up VSCode so all the debugging stats end up in the editor instead of the browser.
Brave is based on Chromium, so you're not going to get much more other than a preinstalled adblocker and a few other tweaks. The memory usage won't look much better.
I've found the opposite, especially for development. I use ff 99% of the time and it's slower and crashier than Chrome by an order of magnitude at least. Using ff because Google is evil, and suffering for it. (Arch Linux, sway, 5yo Thinkpad)
I have somewhat similar experiences. FF is the worst of the browsers I use in terms of feel (I don’t want to say it’s slower necessarily because I don’t actually time things, and I assume if a browser is smarter about what it loads first and how, it could feel better even if it’s technically slower), while Safari and Chromium based browsers a feel much more responsive. Generally I’m using Brave but also have to use Chrome for work.
It's more than just load, it's all the little hangs. Especially with devtools open. Also unlike Chrome, one tab can crash every window, which can happen to me daily.
Edit: I suppose that's what you meant by "responsive"
Sorry what is M91? I thought it could be the new Apple processor that might be released later today but it seems like it's not. Cannot seem to find anything relevant as well...
> For some CPUs, calling functions that are further away from your generated code can cause CPU-internal optimizations (such as branch prediction logic) to fail. The fix for this is to copy the builtin functions into the same memory region as the generated code. This change is especially impactful for the new Apple M1 chip.
I think the number of comments here asking about the M indicate that it really is obscure jargon. The Chrome release blog doesn't use the M consistently, about:chrome doesn't use the M, and the M doesn't appear in the user agent string.
Remember when you could turn off the graphic loading part of the browser, and essentially only browse the web in text mode. That would be save millennia of time.
this is a stupid question. because else you would need to compare how much it would cost you to pay for visiting the site your going to and than calculating the energy costs of the transactions involved.
How much would there be to read on the internet without ads?
I don't like ads but its the only business model that seems to be viable online, other than instituting outright paywalls. Or perhaps we should just burn it all down...
V8 is really an engineering marvel, making such a high-level, dynamically typed language as fast as it is.
I see people talking about WASM and “why bother with JS at all”, but keep in mind that JS code is more expressive than WASM, so if you’re aim is to minimize costs you still save bandwidth using JS over WASM. You could argue that it’s negligible or worth the performance increase, but if you’re a big site the cost savings add up, right?
Also, JS is of course widely used outside of the browser, and there’s a reason it got so popular: it lets you focus on the domain instead of all the other stuff. I can’t think of another mainstream language I’d rather use to prototype and algorithm, application, system, whatever. And the fact that V8 makes it so fast is the reason people just stick with JS. Gradual typing with TS eliminates the only remaining downside (dynamic typing and a big code base).
If you click through to the linked posts they give numbers, for example it says that the short builtins change saves 10% on Facebook and 15% on YouTube.
If a quarter of chrome’s global CPU rate is 17 years per day, that means it’s only using about 27000 cores continuously. I’ve often been curious about the split between client and server CPU usage on the web. Apparently, the client usage is negligible.
I think the article focuses on JS execution CPU usage and its savings on M91, so it doesn't count for all the CPU Chrome uses.
About the split, it depends a lot on the type of content.
If you're visiting a statically generated page, that's negligible on the server and puts the strain on the client: Document formatting, JS execution, image rendering, etc.
If you're dialling into a 10 person google meet, your laptop fans will start spinning fast, but also the server needs to transcode/serve the video (well, multiple servers, multiple services most likely) so heavy on both sides.
If you're consuming some elaborate web dashboard with high data requirements, then the strain is probably on the server side.
No matter what you do, web development would still feel like you're scripting a word processor because that's exactly what it is. Web was never intended to be an application platform, and so it makes a terrible application platform. No amount of band-aid is going to change this.
Unpopular opinion: JS should be slow to discourage abuse. Browsers should not be embracing SPAs.
On the opposite, I find Web as a platform much more accessible (as a developer) than having to program with desktop toolkits (Gtk, Qt, etc). Tight iteration loop (F5, F5, F5...), the one and only truly cross-platform solution (from different desktop OSes to billions of mobile devices and smart TVs...), a rich open-source ecosystem (~1.3 million packages on npm).
Cross-platform GUIs always, inevitably, suck. Yes, Qt too. Electron apps just feel like they don't belong on your OS. They try hard to reimplement all the behaviors you'd get for free if you used the OS's native GUI toolkit, but they do it shittily and it shows. It's extremely hard to make a cross-platform app that feels like a native one. I haven't seen a single one yet.
> a rich open-source ecosystem (~1.3 million packages on npm)
And people using those packages without ever understanding what's inside, resulting in unneeded abstraction layers and enormous bloat.
The real question is why we tolerate Javascript at all. It's a security nightmare and isn't really designed to run fast. In 20 years, people will have shifted to a less horrible alternative.
I'm not defending the comment you replied to, but the privacy vs. performance aspect of the browser landscape seems like a reasonable tangent to me. After all, it's not far fetched that improvements like this are partly motivated and funded by the prospect of funneling users into a browser built by a company that's thirsting for your data.
I don't mind the topic on principal alone and think privacy of the tech is a natural points of conversation for plenty of hackers but only if they are substantive/thought out and not just short dismissive flaimbait to plant the controversy in every thread. These things are already in the guidelines though, no need for a new rule.
Frankly, there is not much to add. Google will continue to develop Chrome, add new features, making the JS engine faster, maybe trying to sneak in some feature that will make adblocking less efficient and so on. In the past, when we heard about good developments, we would happily hooray them. These days the situation is very different. I don't feel like arguing about it though as everybody has their opinion on it and it's unlikely to change.
I meant exactly what I wrote. The huge success of Chrome was because of its technical merits, starting with separating tab processes and then an enormous work on V8. But all these marvels weren't done for free. Fortunately, we still have a choice, and I believe this freedom of choice is very important.
Is chrome still automatically uploading any saved credit card information from the browser to your google account, and automatically putting test charges on those cards? Without warning?
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It is in my opinion that the gatekeeper of the web (browser) should not also be the one taxing web traffic (via ads).
Personally, I am on Microsoft Edge because it was low-effort coming from Chrome. But I have learnt that Microsoft Edge is as bad as Google Chrome (for me) because they are mirroring Google Chrome with regards to Manifest V3. I had thought the only other guy that will stand up to Google is Microsoft but hey, what do I know.
Anyways, it seems like Firefox is the last non-chromium browser that has the balls to keep uBlock Origin supported as it is. I'll be moving to Firefox as soon as I port my personal productivity extensions over.