The latest Firefox, vs. Chrome...

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GradualGames
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The latest Firefox, vs. Chrome...

Post by GradualGames »

I'd been using Chrome for several years thinking it would forever be the best browser. Then within the last year or so, Chrome got into this state where it would sort of freeze up for 2 minutes, then finally be usable again.

I got fed up and am now trying the latest Firefox, which advertised greater speed.

It seems to be proving to be true...this is easily one of the smoothest experiences I've had with a browser. Been using it about a week now, no freeze ups or anything.

It's not malware causing my chrome issue. The only websites I use are nesdev and nintendoage, google's sites (gmail, youtube) and facebook (which I also barely use)
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tokumaru
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Re: The latest Firefox, vs. Chrome...

Post by tokumaru »

If the new Firefox works well on your machine, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't switch to it, but it's not like this Chrome freezing issue is universal, since I've never experienced it. There must be an explanation for this issue on your machine, maybe a combination of extensions or something else that's been installed at some point. If it's been a while since you last formatted the hard disk, I'd suggest you do it again and try a clean install of everything.
tepples
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Re: The latest Firefox, vs. Chrome...

Post by tepples »

Ctrl+Q in Firefox for Linux causes all tabs in all windows to disappear immediately, and Session Restore doesn't restore the exact state of each document, especially changes made by JavaScript. This causes loss of data in unsubmitted comment forms on Slashdot.org, among other sites. I used to use the Keybinder extension to remap Ctrl+Q, but this no longer works as of Firefox 57 because WebExtensions can't remap keys unless and until bug 1325692 becomes fixed.

The solution that worked for me was to enter about:config in the location bar, press Enter, click past the "This might void your warranty" warning, and set both of these to true:
  • browser.showQuitWarning
  • browser.warnOnQuit
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GradualGames
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Re: The latest Firefox, vs. Chrome...

Post by GradualGames »

tokumaru wrote:If the new Firefox works well on your machine, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't switch to it, but it's not like this Chrome freezing issue is universal, since I've never experienced it. There must be an explanation for this issue on your machine, maybe a combination of extensions or something else that's been installed at some point. If it's been a while since you last formatted the hard disk, I'd suggest you do it again and try a clean install of everything.
That's just the thing. I never install anything, ever. My usage of my PC is incredibly minimalist. nesdev (meaning everything I do while developing nes games), and like 3 sites I visit regularly. I rarely if ever "browse the web" and go to random places, so I wouldn't expect to be infested with much (if any) malware at all.
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DRW
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Re: The latest Firefox, vs. Chrome...

Post by DRW »

You might try to reinstall your operation system on another partition (don't ask me what you need to pay attention to if you want to do this with a modern Windows system) and see if the issue appears there as well.
My game "City Trouble":
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rainwarrior
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Re: The latest Firefox, vs. Chrome...

Post by rainwarrior »

I've been back and forth between Firefox and Chrome over the years. I've always had both installed (for a few reasons), but I had been using Chrome for about the last two years I think because at one point Firefox wasn't recognizing my GPU for hardware acceleration. This was eventually fixed, but it was the reason I switched at the time.

Anyhow, when the new version of Firefox came out I was happy to give it another try, and I like it a whole lot. It definitely uses a lot less memory, and less CPU. At the same time, it has a very customizable interface, compared to Chrome which has almost no customization at all, aside from plugins.

My favourite feature is that the font menu has an option to disable custom fonts on webpages. I hate all the random fonts people use to display webpages (I came here to read), especially because almost none render properly without font anti-aliasing, which I always have turned off. With Chrome there was a "font blocker" plugin which inconveniently let me block /some/ of them on a per-website basis one at a time, but Firefox has the nuclear option I wanted built right in and efficient. It's wonderful.

At the same time I switched from using Adblock Plus to Ublock Origin. I'd been using ABP for years and never really thought much about it, but apparently it had kinda gone to seed a while back... with the new Firefox there were horrible performance issues until I disabled it (took a little bit of experimentation to figure this out). I don't know if this was a temporary problem that has been fixed, but it doesn't matter because I switched to Ublock Origin which works perfectly fine and does the same thing (maybe better).

One thing I am missing from Chrome is the easy user profiles switch in the top right. In Chrome I can create multiple user profiles, and just click an icon in the top right to switch between them. Very slick. I use this a lot for things like, e.g. the official twitter account for my game, it's much easier to just switch profiles instead of logging out and into twitter. In Firefox this kind of capability is a bit hidden by default. It exists, but it's buried under some command line options (still not sure what -no-remote means) but after a bit of fussing I have gotten it to work okay. Switching is not as easy as in Chrome (had to create separate desktop shortcuts with some command line options) but it at least works.

Another thing I'm missing a little from Chrome is its integrated translator. Again there's a substitute, but it's not quite as easy in Firefox. Currently using the S3.Translator plugin, which works okay, but Chrome's had some really nice options/UI for it, IMO.

There's some good plugins on Firefox for downloading streaming videos from places like YouTube (see: Video DownloadHelper) that never had a Chrome version. I find that pretty useful, like if I want to use a clip from something, make a GIF, etc. I can just grab the video directly. Chrome never had a good plugin for that. That's actually a big reason I always kept Firefox installed.

Anyhow, I'm back on the Firefox and I love it.


Honourable mention: I also tried Opera for a bit when I was experimenting. It was mostly pretty good, but just has a lot less features than either Firefox or Chrome, and performance is comparable anyway. I wouldn't really consider it because: lack of user profiles, lack of available plugins (esp. none for font blocking), and also I hit the GPU hardware acceleration problem with it.
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Bregalad
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Re: The latest Firefox, vs. Chrome...

Post by Bregalad »

I use Opera and this is by far the best browser and had been so for the last 10 years, I do not understand why anyone would use anything else.

* IE : It's microsoft so forget it
* Safari : It's apple so forget it (also they stopped making windows version)
* Google chrome : Do you really want Google to spy on you that much ? Spying with google search is not bad enough ?
* Firefox : Now that's something that can actually be used for browsing, but Opera is better
* Opera : <3
tepples wrote:Ctrl+Q in Firefox for Linux causes all tabs in all windows to disappear immediately
Oh my god, I've been a victim of this "feature" so many times it's enraging ! While I understand it can be useful in a "oh shit my boss/teacher is coming" case, it's more likely to be used by accident and being damaging.
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TmEE
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Re: The latest Firefox, vs. Chrome...

Post by TmEE »

I used to use Opera all the way until it turned into Chrome with different name, all the nice UI things and features got tossed out and performance turned terrible, so nowdays I keep an old version of Opera around for most stuff and Firefox for the few things that no longer work with the old thing.
Vivaldi browser is supposed to do what old Operas did but they dropped XP support and the performance is terrible also, probably because it is Chrome based and its UI is apparently all javascript.
For a while I used Pale Moon, which is essentially Firefox done right, but then it dropped XP support and I'm now using vanilla Firefox instead of it. For Vista+ machines I go directly to Pale Moon instead of Firefox, greater performance and much more customizability out the box.
tepples
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Re: The latest Firefox, vs. Chrome...

Post by tepples »

TmEE wrote:Vivaldi browser is supposed to do what old Operas did but they dropped XP support
So did Microsoft. How do you protect your system from intruders who exploit vulnerabilities discovered after April 2014, when Microsoft stopped issuing patches for Windows XP Home and Pro? Updates to the browser won't help you when the operating system itself is vulnerable. Or have you been using the POSReady hack?
Rahsennor
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Re: The latest Firefox, vs. Chrome...

Post by Rahsennor »

I'm currently using Chromium from the Debian repository, with two plugins: blank new tab and AdBlock Plus.

Call me old, but all I want to do is browse the web. Without ads, because I pay per byte, and I never look at them anyway. Chromium does that without crashing. Do I have anything else to worry about?
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Re: The latest Firefox, vs. Chrome...

Post by TmEE »

tepples wrote:
TmEE wrote:Vivaldi browser is supposed to do what old Operas did but they dropped XP support
So did Microsoft. How do you protect your system from intruders who exploit vulnerabilities discovered after April 2014, when Microsoft stopped issuing patches for Windows XP Home and Pro? Updates to the browser won't help you when the operating system itself is vulnerable. Or have you been using the POSReady hack?
Good hygiene goes a long way. Good HOSTS file is a necessity (regardless of OS), turning off/removing/reconfiguring services, not going to shady places (a good HOSTS file aready won't let you for the most part) and definitely not running all the software you can find can do wonders. Then you can think of stuff like anti malware software and/or use any of the online file scanners to make sure what you get is most probably clean. I don't even have any realtime protections (mostly due to their severe performance implications) but I do offline (involves removal of storage medium(s)) scans with another machine every once in a while to make sure there isn't anything weird going on and last time I had a virus or anything else harmful was at a time when Windows 98SE and ME were still widely used and Windows Vista was going through its growing pains. Stuff like Wannacry and the like wouldn't have been able to remotely infect any of my computers in my home environment (but if I took one of my laptops out there could be a chance of infection).
POSready hack is useful too but by no means a necessity. As far as new Windowses go, I wouldn't even want the updates to happen as more often than not something breaks as a result. I repair computers as a living and each time there's some update on win10 there's a tidalwave of problem machines coming at my way. Then come more updates to fix the previous updates and more stuff breaks... (and there's a conflict of interest, updates break stuff and make me money, but they tend to cause inconveniences to the clients and I am paid to get rid of any inconveniences). I know that some government organizations over here have forcefully disabled windows updates because of all the problems they tend to cause initially, only after it is certain that things are finally ok there will be manual installs of updates deemed necessary. There seems to be no proper testing done anymore (and apparently real humans based testing staff was fired for the most part not very long ago).
Revenant
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Re: The latest Firefox, vs. Chrome...

Post by Revenant »

Windows XP is nearly 17 years old. You might as well complain that software vendors in 2012 weren't supporting Windows 95 anymore.
93143
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Re: The latest Firefox, vs. Chrome...

Post by 93143 »

The difference is that Windows 95 was a bug-ridden heap. The only thing wrong with Windows XP (as far as the average user could tell) was that it wasn't 64-bit, but apparently software companies have to reinvent the wheel all the time. Making actual improvements is hard once the product is mature, but changing stuff for no reason gets you to the next version number just as quickly...

Why does Adobe Reader bring my computer to its knees? It used to run fine on a Pentium with 24 MB of RAM. The PDF format hasn't changed that much, has it?
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Hamtaro126
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Re: The latest Firefox, vs. Chrome...

Post by Hamtaro126 »

GradualGames wrote:That's just the thing. I never install anything, ever. My usage of my PC is incredibly minimalist. nesdev (meaning everything I do while developing nes games), and like 3 sites I visit regularly. I rarely if ever "browse the web" and go to random places, so I wouldn't expect to be infested with much (if any) malware at all.
That is a pretty neat concept of thought, I myself do have Windows 10 but try to keep things 100% Virus and Malware Free as best as I could by staying away or clicking out FAST from dangerous sites,

I do use Adblock plus and ghostery to assist me, but will turn the adblocker off completely from time to time in order to access some site perks that I want (I.e. Disable Ghostery from disabling access from Discord chat) or needily help out sometimes
AKA SmilyMZX/AtariHacker.
calima
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Re: The latest Firefox, vs. Chrome...

Post by calima »

93143 wrote:Why does Adobe Reader bring my computer to its knees? It used to run fine on a Pentium with 24 MB of RAM. The PDF format hasn't changed that much, has it?
It has, it nowadays includes scripting, vector graphics, animations...
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