This has been exactly my experience. I was an early convert to Chrome, and I loved how fast it was, but now I find it slow and buggy. There are some partial workarounds: Chrome does a cache lookup on your history when you type, so if you delete your history, then you get a speed bump. But I'm annoyed that I have to erase my history. If I never erase my history, Chrome gets very slow after a few months of history piling up. And when I have many windows open it is slower, and when Flash is running, it often crashes. I've switched back to FireFox.
I never switched to chrome since it seemed sub-par all that time (reduced set of controls, dumbed down all the way) but flash-related crashes are Adobe's problem actually (I also have them on FF sometimes).
Yeah, it does. Pepper Flash is just Flash repackaged to use Chrome's new plug-in architecture; it is still written by Adobe. (Although perhaps Chrome does deserve the blame for some crashes related to how it integrates with the browser.)
Its been my recent experience too, I keep a lot of tabs open and began to notice Chrome was filling up my memory.
Very strange that Google let the situation get so bad. Mind you I find the Chrome developer tools far more powerful and intuitive than those in Firefox which stops me moving entirely.
The Firefox Devtools team regularly probes the webdev community on the features they need - make sure you let them know (and don't be surprised if they're in Aurora already).
Ta yeah, I probably should but its usually just I don't find the approach the UI takes intuitive in a lot of cases. Even just things like doing a search, viewing results, compared to Chrome I find it all a little painful...not sure that's the sort of thing I can meaningfully report though.
> I keep a lot of tabs open and began to notice Chrome was filling up my memory.
I had this problem too and found that Chrome was getting so slow that it was unusable. For those who have this problem and don't want to switch from Chrome there is an extension called "The Great Suspender" which dumps background tabs after a configurable time period of inactivity. It helped immensely.
This looks exceptionally helpful. I have around 50 tabs open, nominally, and my CPU fan is almost perpetually on high for it. Just before installing it, however, I found myself wondering, "Why am I using an app which allows me to keep more tabs open? Why am I not using bookmarks?"
Why do we keep open 500 tabs instead of using bookmarks these days?
I'm still fighting to keep my number of tabs down. It causes significant mental overhead and task switching costs. I've noticed a bump in my productivity by taking the time to close/bookmark/onetab tabs.
Agreed. OneTab is a great way to organize your "sessions" of browsing. If you're like me, you keep separate windows for separate topics and it's great to OneTab them all when something needs to be put on hold.
I do realize it's glorified bookmarking, but the concept and ease-of-use make it nice.
Because maintaining a large catalogue of bookmarks is a nightmare; good luck finding anything unless you are incredibly meticulous about organizing them. In addition, I think it's a spatial locality thing. I find that I'm a lot more likely to come back to an article/page/etc. if it's still open than I am to remember that I bookmarked it and wanted to come back later.
That's an excellent question, and one I started asking myself about a year ago. My conclusion: it's a lousy band-aid over poor browser document and state management.
If I had a _better_ way of keeping track of what it is I'm currently accessing (or interested in accessing) than tabs, I'd use them.
A key problem is that browsers are keeping _every last tab fully open and rendered in the fear that you might need to immediately access is_. The tendency of websites toward full interactive designs exacerbates this problem.
Really: most text is pretty static. Generally I'm viewing one page at a time. Perhaps 2-5. The rest ... they can just go off and die.
Having them _saved locally in a state that's suitable for quick re-render_ would be kind of cool. Again, yes, this means that a lot of interactive page shit dies. But then, it should.
IMO webpages should earn their privileges. Including whether or not to animate, or play video, or audio, or display nonrelevant sidebars, headers, footers, and the rest.
The present browser / Web paradigm is grossly overextended and deserves to die.
I've never been to your subreddit before, but now I think I've found a blog I'll be keeping/catching up with for the next few weeks.
I agree with you in general. A while ago I tried thinking of some other paradigm to keep track of webpages I might want to get back to in the near future without the permanence of bookmarks. Some of my thoughts:
Web browsers are used for multiple activities that have their own "stack" in my mind. Often I find myself opening a whole set of tabs that are all related to a general activity I am doing. For example, I'm be doing some coursework and open a million tabs (man pages, tutorials, etc.), then I close my laptop and go to bed. The next day it's class time and I just want a clean tab pane to focus only on what is being discussed in class. Then maybe the next day it's the weekend and I'm relaxing, reading some blogs, going on social media, etc. The point is that every time I use my browser, I might not be performing the same overall activity, and I don't want to be distracted by what I did hours ago.
I don't want to lose information on what I was doing earlier, though. I want to be able to come back to the particular state of my browser as it was when I was last doing a certain activity. Let's say I have Tuesday/Thursday classes, and on Thursday I want to return to where I left off on Tuesday. I need a way to get back to that state without what I may have done on the browser between then and now to get in the way.
Bookmarks don't cut it for me in this regard. Bookmarks only work for a single webpage. But maybe I have a whole group of webpages that are all inter-related! Using the bookmark model we have now, I'll have to bookmark each page individually, then open them up individually when I want to return. There are add-ons that bookmark tab sets, but I think that UI needs to be a core part of browser UI, not wedged into a browser extension.
Right now, I think the most useful way to manage tabs (for me, YMMV) is some combination of tab pinning, tab groups and tree style tabs, and tab suspension/delayed loading. Each of those has a particular advantage:
Tab pinning (as seen in Firefox and Chrome) is useful to me. It lets me identify single tab activities (usually web apps) that I always want to have available to me because they are commonly accessed. Facebook, email, Youtube, Calendar, etc. It is useful to have a muscle-memory location on my tab pane that I can quickly switch back to those common activities.
Tab groups are one of my top favorite features in Firefox. It so naturally fits my particular workflow where I might be switching browsing contexts on a daily basis (class, work, relaxing, Wikipedia bingeing, blog reading, ...). The main brilliance behind tab groups is that they act as a less permanent form of a bookmark group. I can easily switch between contexts in a context overview mode (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+E), and all of my contexts are clearly delineated. All I have to do to organize the contexts is to think "I am starting a new activity" and open a new tab group. However, I only need to close a tab for it to be gone from my mind.
Tree Style Tabs does this pretty well too, but for some reason I just found the UI unintuitive. Plenty of other people like it so I won't knock it. It does do a good job of organizing tabs by activity.
Another style that I thought was interesting is tab stacking as seen in Opera[1]. I think it is an idea not mutually exclusive to tab groups.
I also really like Firefox's delayed loading of tabs on startup. It fits perfectly with the concept of tab groups because it automatically means that other tab groups won't load up, and little memory and CPU cycles are wasted on them. Right now I have 81 tabs "open" in various tab groups, but Firefox has only loaded the ones I clicked or opened since starting.
...I've found a blog I'll be keeping/catching up with...
Thanks :)
Web browsers are used for multiple activities...
Something I've concluded Web browser developers put insufficient thought into. They're also far too often optimizing for content providers and advertisers rather than readers.
...a whole set of tabs ... related to a general activity...
Quite. And I'll often have multiple projects going on, each with their own set of related references.
The failure of the Desktop (and GUI) paradigms in general to reflect this is a growing and tremendous frustration of mine. Our activities are organized and grouped by application and increasingly by Web silo rather than by task. It's where the UNIX shell philosophy is increadibly powerful, and the abilty to both create different "workspaces" (generally: directories) for projects, and to string data through commands and pipelines, is phenomenally useful.
Just to highlight a frustration: increasingly desktop tools are utilizing Web tools for documentation. I arrange my work by Workspace. So when I fire off the Help command in a particular utility ... a browser tab opens somewhere three workspaces away, that I'm not aware of. Often in the midst of a bunch of other unrelated tabs....
For example...
Excellent use cases, and while my own work differs in details, the general outline is the same: different tasks, often persisting across days, weeks, months, or even years, but alternating with time, which I wish to group. Often quite complex and involving many related sites and/or pages. And retaining that user state is at an extreme premium.
Bookmarks don't cut it for me in this regard....
I'm leaning toward a middle ground between Bookmarks, History, and some level of annotation. Readability is an interesting experiment but ultimately frustrating and limiting.
My own curated lists of stuff are somewhat useful but extremely tedious to create. My subreddit is as much a bookmarking tool (of both Websites / references, and my own thoughts) as it is a publication and discussion.
The ability to create and readily access sets of bookmarks, tag and tab them, filter them usefully (by tag, author, site, dates, etc.) would be tremendously useful.
I'd really love a browser feature which let me search for text within pages I'd recently visited (hour, day, week, month, ...). Often what I'm looking for is something I've already recently visited.
It is* possible to organize Bookmarks hierarchically, etc. But I find that the UI/UX for doing this in numerous browsers is simply tedious beyond description.
...some combination of tab pinning, tab groups and tree style tabs, and tab suspension/delayed loading...
Yes to all of this.
For Pinning, I'd prefer to simply break out Web Apps as their own local app instance. Not associated with a browser at all. While Web-as-App-delivery is interesting, it's ultimately highly frustrating in my experience. A neither-man-nor-beast experience.
Tab groups...
I'll need to play with that.
Tree Style Tabs...
I use and love the plugin (for Firefox), and use it much as you do Tab Groups from what I can tell.
...tab stacking...
Not familiar with that.
...delayed loading of tabs...
Genius.
1. Memory management/unloading of old tabs
2. Tab group classification or tagging
4. Open the browser to the tab overview page
A-fucking-men to all of this. Your point that there is no overview page for tabs, or similarly that there is not way to perform group operations on tabs, is another massive failing.
I also agree-- the developer tools in Chrome are pretty critical for me, in my opinion they overtook firebug. Whenever I try to use the tools in Firefox or Safari I end up getting confused and frustrated. I use Safari if I'm on battery/traveling because it is a ton more efficient, and then only fire up Chrome if I need it.
I hear quite a few people talking how they have 30-50 tabs open, how do people manage something like that? And why would anyone need so many simultaneous tabs open?
I do work with web projects, but I hardly live in github, sure it's an important tool and I tend to visit the site quite often especially if I'm working, but I see no need to keep it open all the time, but maybe I'm not solving hard enough problems for that to matter.
The problem is that you're doing something that uses lots of tabs, and with luck you remember to close them down. Still, at the end of the day, you may have an extra five tabs open, and that's 100 a month. After a few months you have 500 tabs.
So then you devote a couple of hours to going through and closing tabs, and find you still have 300...
The solution, if anyone ever gets this far down the page, is to use Session Manager to save the tabs, close Firefox, and then just uncheck the boxes for the tabs you don't ever want to reload.
See that "you don't remember to close them down" part gets me, or rather doesn't. I mean I have a lot of tabs open when I'm working, but at the end of the day I close my browser and I don't have any fixed set of pages that it opens or last session, it just opens on the new tab page and asks for commands.
I just can't stand if my browser has so many tabs open I can't read the what the hell it is from the header and since I always use browser only on half of my screen with editor on the other side (actually since I have 21:9 screen I've split it in 3 so I can have project | editor | docs) that gives me at most like 15+-5 tabs to work with.
Agreed. Sibling comment is talking about devoting "hours" to closing tabs, I'm not even sure if it's a joke.
I've presently got 2 tabs open: HN and this comment form.
Even when neck deep into documentation or github issues I don't think I've ever gone above 20 tabs, it definitely doesn't seem like it could be productive.
I have 5-6 windows open, each with 5-20 tabs. Often it's worse.
Things like: Gmail, calendar, Xero, time tracker, things I've been meaning to read but haven't yet put in a TO READ folder (sometimes hits 30+ tabs), Trello, business plan lists, BitBucket for an iOS project, Shopify partner admin, Font Awesome cheatsheet, 15-20 client projects I might work on in any given week including their admin backends, App Annie, Analytics, trip research (20-40 tabs easily on maps, spreadsheets, itinerary suggestions, Airbnb, Booking.com, hotels, national park sites), 5 tabs currently devoted to trying to work out how to get a National Geographic subscription to work on device and web, and so it goes on.
There is any browser that tolerates flash properly?
My associate had a machine that would RESET because of flash (we know it is flash because it would only start to randomly reset if flash was running somewhere on the machine), no matter what browser.
And in my personal experience flash could crash ALL browsers open at once, one time flash crashing on MSN Messenger partially froze my entire machine, after 10 minutes wrestling it to get to the task manager (yep, sometimes I am stupid) and close flash process, the machine came back to normal.
After reading this, I tried out Firefox for Android on my old Nexus 7 tablet. The performance improvement over Chrome is significant. Chrome simply can't be run on low-RAM devices any more, IMHO.
The biggest issue I have with Chrome is how aggressive it's been about linking Google IDs with the browser. I've lost data twice by bugs related to not having a linked ID.
Please Google, understand this; I don't want my browser linked with my Google account.
Funny, that's part of why I use Chrome. Having all my Google accounts and apps available is a huge feature to me.
Plus Firefox crashing is a huge downside.
As for privacy implications, there's no reason to believe Google does anything inappropriate, and I rather like having my internet experience tailored based on past behaviour.
Running many WebGL demos. Whereas in Chrome only 1 tab will freeze.
Also, pretty much anything that's Javascript + WebGL runs like shit in Firefox. Emscripten demos are good though. But Emscripten runs better in Chrome than JS+WebGL in Firefox.
Compiling all those shaders is rough on any browser, but only Firefox gets its entire UI blocked. Even Internet Explorer manages to isolate the jank to one tab.
Chrome 1+, IE 9+ and Safari 7+ spawn child processes with less permissions ("sandbox") for almost every tab.
Sadly Firefox 39 (nightly) still has no real multi process support. There are only two processes, the main process holds all tabs, the single child process "plugin-container" holds all plugins (Flash, Acrobat, etc.). It's a bit disappointing to see such little progress since 2010. Hopefully Mozilla's Rust based Servo engine comes to the rescue soon and replaces gecko and its old XUL (XML based UI framework) with Servo and an HTML5 based UI (like Firefox OS).
I use Firefox as development browser because of Firebug and and the new developer tools. Working with dozens of tabs open for days is only possible with IE11 and Chrome.
"Sadly Firefox 39 (nightly) still has no real multi process support. There are only two processes, the main process holds all tabs, the single child process 'plugin-container' holds all plugins (Flash, Acrobat, etc.)."
That is incorrect. There is one plugin-container for each plugin module. All Flash instances share a single plugin-container, all Acrobat instances share a single plugin-container, and so forth.
As for the e10s content process, for the moment there is only one content process. The plan is to get e10s working well with the one content process, and then start scaling that up to multiple content processes. Nightly is a bleeding edge development channel, after all.
Is there a better way to report the bug than just use the built-in crash reporter? I still get super sporadic crashes, I think it has to do with having too many tabs loaded.
Yes, if you follow one of the links from about:crashes, you can see the crash report. If there's already a bug on file for it, click on over to bugzilla.mozilla.org and see if you may be able to help out there. If there isn't already a bug active for your specific crash signature, you can try filing one and explain what you think may have caused the crash. Specific steps to reproduce a crash are especially helpful!
Another interesting thing you can do: click through from about:crashes to your crash report. Then click the "more reports" link. You can see if your crash signature is rare or if you have one of the currently "popular" ones. If a lot of other people are crashing with that same signature, there is probably a bug and developers are probably discussing it. Again the most useful thing you can do is figuring out how to make that crash happen consistently and adding steps to reproduce it to its bug.
I tried that. DDG just wasn't even remotely good enough to service my searching habits.
Instead, I've switched to Disconnect search. They proxy searches and claim to do so anonymously. So at least I'm not directly contributing to Google's profile building that way. It does add a second or two latency per search, which can be annoying.
FF switched to Yahoo, and I'm just amused at how bad it is. They even open results in new tabs by default, a lame trick used to try to accidentally keep people on your site.
It's unfortunate, but Google really does dominate in search.
The nice thing about DuckDuckGo is that you can just put !sp in front of your search and it will send the search to StartPage.com (for google results).
They want to make their little OS inside your current OS, so that's it, they introduce accounts, users, apps, notifications... Meanwhile most people (including me) just want to browse the damn open internet.
Chromium doesn't opt you out of linking the browser to a google account. Opting out of linking the browser to a google account is called "not doing it", because it's an optional step anyway.
Also, chromium seems to be getting less and less care from google now. See this bug for example which prevents using screenshare in hangouts: https://crbug.com/416856
Just don't sign in? I don't feel being pushed into anything. If you're annoyed by that new button near the window management buttons, there's a chrome:flags thing to disable it (enable the new avatar).
The new Opera has the same engine of Chrome and none of the inconveniences. I'm using Firefox as primary browser and Chrome in another virtual desktop to work in Google Drive because it's a little faster (maybe too many extensions). I replaced it with Opera and it works well. I have no idea if it can use Chrome extensions, never installed one anyway as it was a single purpose browser.
To be fair, the trend of the browser usurping the OS has been going on for years. Any browser that wishes to stay modern and competitive has no choice but to leverage the inner-platform effect to a full extent.
I'm not sure that's totally true – the number of people I've seen who are frustrated by constant popups, reminders and so on far outweighs the number of people who I've encountered talking about how much they want to sign into multiple accounts…
I also lost data by this: I was trying to disable browser profiles but inadvertently deleted the cloud portion of my account that stored all my bookmarks.
I'm a goddamn software developer, software doesn't usually make me feel stupid. So congrats to Google on that I guess...
I lost all bookmarks as well (in Google Chrome Canary, not stable Chrome) due a bug. Canary sometimes is buggy and parts of the theme (e.g. scrollbar) sometimes even look like OSX, probably because most Chrome devs work on OSX and don't regression test the Win7+ daily-build that often.
Storing bookmarks as *.lnk as with IE3+ is still the way to go. Though, I found out that 50% of my bookmarks are obsolete and many were never archived in archive.org due evil robots.txt entries.
I'm honestly curious about the scenario where not having a linked ID caused you data loss.
I was an early adopter of Chrome but have not used it for a while. Is this linked ID just the Cookie or another mechanism? How could not having it cause data loss?
Not sure how, but this happened to me. Specifically, my bookmarks accumulated over years seem to have been wiped out when I did decide to sign in. Turns out I had already synced a new computer, so Chrome decided to helpfully delete my un-signed-in bookmarks with the blank set from the new computer.
This was the driving reason I switched back to Firefox as my main browser about a year ago. It reached a tipping point when I discovered that there was no way to unlink a Google apps business account from Chrome without resetting the browser entirely.
Being that I'd never intended to 'sign into Chrome' in the first place (the form looks awfully similar to the gmail login), I essentially rage-quit Chrome and haven't looked back since. I've embraced Firefox and I feel better using free and open source software.
Performance has been excellent. The only thing I regularly notice is that many startups seem to only QA their products in Chrome.
Similarly, I became uncomfortable with the integration that Chrome was encouraging. Add to that the issues it was having with font rendering and displaying at different DPI's, and FireFox has been my go-to browser ever since.
Additionally, I've found FireFox to be more consistent about it's quality, vs having occasional releases with a jump in bugs/instability.
You can just create a new Chrome "user", linked to another Google account (or not), make it the primary account, and delete the old one.
They've actually gotten very upfront about their user features in recent versions. It's a great toolset for maintaining different sessions with multiple sites. Or for using as an incognito session with less ephemeral data.
I have multiple g-mail accounts. One of them is my primary personal one, and another one I use is a shared account that my band uses for business and soundcloud.
Google makes it hellish to sign out of one and into the other. For the longest time, I had them linked, and my band mates could see my personal e-mail. I don't know if they could get past a log in point, but the fact that its so hard to keep them un-linked and log into one or the other is infuriating.
You can change users by clicking the top right of a chrome window.
They may not be obvious to set up, but they are worth learning about if you are going to use stick with Chrome and use multiple Google accounts, or multiple accounts on any service - Twitter, FB, etc.
The keyboard shortcut that I found is Control-Shift-M to open a box around the profile, down-enter to select "Switch person", then Tab-(Tab-)enter to select the other account. Anyone know if there's a shorter shortcut?
hahahaha! Great response. Yes, mass digital surveillance or mass collection of data if you like. This is arguably Google's hidden agenda and perhaps the most compelling reason to dump Chrome aside from performance issues.
Then just change the name on the user. It's not required that you have the same name in the browser as on your Google account. I renamed mine "Work" and "Personal". It's helpful to isolate things so my side projects don't get sucked up into my work stuff.
Incognito already did that. Like the Great G+ Push, I was sick of feeling hounded. "Login?" "No." "Login, it's super easy." "No, really." "Go on, log in. It's great." "Seriously?" "How about now?" "See previous response ad nauseum. Goodbye."
A good point. They don't even mention connection reuse information leaks, for instance if any one URL sent to google analytics contains fingerprint information then all URLs sent over that same connection belong to you as well, as the network connection is kept open a long time and reused across all domains. I wonder if they are aware of the problem or just didn't mention it.
Now that Google has pushed HTTP/2 on everybody, connection reuse will be a major new fingerprinting and tracking technique because it keeps connections open a long time and essentially can't be proxied so one connection is always one browser.
Firefox is a giant ugly beast of code and it too has an overlord (albeit, a gentler one). And FF dev forums/tickets are not exactly joyous places, especially for non-Mozilla employees. If I had to contribute to an open source browser, it would be in a small community of friendly volunteers.
You absolutely must link your Google Chrome install to your Google ID on Windows or you will lose data.
Google Chrome now has a "feature" that will automatically reset your homepage, search settings, wipe all extensions and wipe all extension data whenever it detects an unexpected change to any of your settings files or they do not match up to the PC they are locked to.
The goal was to prevent third parties from hijacking your search engine within Chrome. Things like bundleware installers on Windows that switch it.
The actual result is that all your settings are now locked to a specific PC and will be reset anytime anything changes. As the developer of Google Chrome Portable, this means only your bookmarks move with you as you move PCs unless you're logged in. This also means that even if you backup your Chrome install, if your PC dies, you can not restore that Chrome install on another PC. Your bookmarks will be restored, but you will lose your settings, extensions, and passwords since your profile was moved to a new PC.
This stands in stark contrast to Firefox which is completely self-contained. If a third party bundleware installer hijacks your search engine or homepage, you can simply set them back as they should be. All your extensions, extension settings, etc will continue working as expected whether or not you opt to use Firefox Sync.
You absolutely must link your Google Chrome install to
your Google ID on Windows or you will lose data.
Oh man... Settings and bookmarks are not "data" in any substantial sense.
Incognito mode at all times, no Google ID ever, trash local history on every exit. I don't carry the expectation that my bookmarks must live on and follow me from machine to machine.
I don't care about what my search preferences are. I simply turn address bar searches off, or point it to localhost. I don't conduct rampant web searches from the address bar, because an address bar is an address bar, and I only feed it well-formed URLs. I don't waste my time regularly using web sites that can't provide me with a URL that isn't intended to be typed, and sub pages that I can't readily navigate to.
Address to long? No soup for you. Absurd URL parameters? No soup for you. Deeply nested pages, locked away behind a login, 30 clicks deep, and obscured by dark patterns? No. Soup. For. You.
Preferences are preferences, and that's all they are. The default install should be completely useful and practical as-is, on a clean install. If it isn't then preferences should be exportable to plaint-text using an open standard.
Firefox happily dumps its bookmarks as simple JSON. As a result, when I want to transport my bookmarks I can, although, digging back into my archive more than a year 50% tend to perish due to simple link rot.
Judging by your comment, I bet you're also fed up with the web being overloaded and scripted to hell to build enterprise applications on top of a system that was only designed to deliver plain readable text with links to other plain readable text. Me too.
I think web applications should never have existed. The web was designed for hypertext, images, and other static consumable content. It wasn't designed to be a platform for massive distributed applications. Why are there so many security fuckups on the web? Because it wasn't designed to be secure. The fact that people are now programming desktop applications in JavaScript against NodeJS suggests to me that the web has gone too far. We should have built something new to handle what we now call "web applications".
I, too, look at huge disgusting URLs every day and wonder why we didn't see this coming.
What does Node.js has to do with web in the context of being a platform? Sure, it is used for mostly for developing http apis but that doesn't make it "web".
But mostly I see no benefits from having it enabled, but quite a few negatives (security, privacy, etc). As long as the browser keeps the history of your current browser session alive while the browser stays open, that's perfectly fine for me.
You should probably understand this: Google doesn't give a shit.
The total market share of people who care about whether or not their browser is linked with their Google account is probably less than one percent. The value they get from knowing everything you do online? I'm not sure how you'd calculate that, but I'm positive it's greater than losing the tiny number of hackers who are protective of their personal data.
Google will continue to build the browser under the assumption that your browser will be linked with your Google account. If you don't link, you'll be a permanent edge case.
If you don't want to link your account, it's much easier to just switch browsers.
You're right. We can add this (already predictable) aspect to our visions of the future where we get into our self-driving Googleobile that on startup signs into our Google accounts...
(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employer's. Not representing my employer, read the links for yourself. I work at Google, not on Chrome.)
> The value they get from knowing everything you do online?
This is a myth. Or less politely, a lie you have been told.
https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/privacy/ is very clear about exactly when chrome reports back data, including what happens when you sign in. It does not report your online activity in ways different from other web browsers. It sends just about the minimum possible to implement the features it provides.
Who said the browser has to report everything you do online to be of value.
I don't claim to know anything about how Chrome works, so could be completely wrong in this, but my sense is that it is part of a broader desire to tie together tracking across all devices. Cracking that nut is very difficult from an analytics perspective, and having people logged in to Chrome across all devices provides a very convenient GUID for matching against AdSense units, DFA tags, GA tags, etc.
So the value in this play is not necessarily in knowing everything you do online, but simply knowing that you are who you are regardless of device or Chrome instance. That means data about you is consistent, and can feed into the broader targeting algorithms to serve you the right ad, at the right place, at the right time.
Again, I don't know what data Chrome makes available to Google's ad services, so please tell me if I am in fact incorrect here.
> Again, I don't know what data Chrome makes available to Google's ad services, so please tell me if I am in fact incorrect here.
If you read the very detailed Chrome privacy policy (https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/privacy/), you will see that it does nothing different to other browsers here (each server sees your IP address, cookies, etc). It does not send any form of uniquely identifiable ID with every request. Only some very specific cases (offline drive, google wallet, DRM auth, etc) send your signed-in userid, which they need in order to work at all.
Please read the privacy policy. People put a lot of time and effort into writing it and it answers all your questions.
I have read it, and respectfully disagree that it sufficiently addresses my very specific point.
I see a section in the link you provided that reads:
> "Chrome OS may send a non-unique promotional tag to Google periodically (including during initial setup) and when performing searches with Google."
Sure Chrome may not be sending a GUID with every request. That wasn't my point. To clarify, my point was that Google has a GUID (your Google account, and likely other forms of ID) that identify you pretty clearly across devices/Chrome instances. I saw nothing in the policy you linked that said Google AdSense and other Google ad services (DoubleClick tags, GA, etc.) do not use that information to link identities across devices for purposes of tracking.
The AdWords and GA teams have rolled out significant advances in cross-device tracking over the past year or two, including new metrics and reports in the respective platforms. It seems pretty obvious to me that this is a data point that is factored into making that link.
But again, I'd love to be proven wrong if I missed a section of your link that explicitly says otherwise.
That bit is about Chrome OS (ie, a chromebook), not Chrome itself. The bit about it being "non-unique" means it's not a GUID - other people's devices will send the same tag. It does not identify you.
> To clarify, my point was that Google has a GUID (your Google account, and likely other forms of ID) that identify you pretty clearly across devices/Chrome instances.
I think the privacy policy is quite clear that Chrome does nothing here that other browsers don't do. Obviously if you have a Google cookie from signing in to the website then that's going to identify you pretty clearly, but that's just how cookies work, and would be exactly the same in any other browser. I'd like to specifically direct your attention to the first three paragraphs of the policy, and in particular:
"If you use Chrome to access other Google services, such as using the search engine on the Google homepage or checking Gmail, the fact that you are using Chrome does not mean that Google will receive any special or additional personally identifiable information about you."
> I saw nothing in the policy you linked that said Google AdSense and other Google ad services (DoubleClick tags, GA, etc.) do not use that information to link identities across devices for purposes of tracking.
I wouldn't expect to find any information about how AdSense works in the Chrome policy. The privacy policy for ads is over here and discusses this topic: http://www.google.co.uk/policies/technologies/ads/
This is probably one of the reasons why I have been using Firefox for web browsing and Chrome only as a dedicated gmail reader. I doubt this is what Google wants, but it has been working great for me.
Chromium does not include the Google bloat and works flawlessly. I don't know whether it will make you lose data, but personally never had any issues with it.
My solution to this was to use both. I use Chrome only for Gmail and Docs (drive, whatever...) and disabled the auto-updater. I use Firefox with DDG for everything else. Couldn't be happier.
Speaking for myself, I always disable (i.e. "rm -rf") auto-updaters because they don't separate security updates from other random changes. Browsers are the worst, with a "major version upgrade" every month dropping whatever the developers had on their build server onto my computer.
My only beef with Firefox is multiple webpages don't render well for me, but those pages render fine in Chrome and IE.
I haven't stop once to debug why (I just switch to Chrome but sometimes do report the websites to Mozilla), can the reason be in Firefox being more pure and the others browsers allowing more quirks? If this is the case, isn't this bad UX?
You can report these issues to https://webcompat.com/ where Mozilla staff and others will help debug them and report them to browser developers or web site publishers, as appropriate.
Half the time I encounter pages that don't render well with FF it's because they use API only available in Chrome and those pages and/or spa have not even been tested in other browsers.
I have tried it many times but failed. The reason - if firfox memory goes too high, which happens frequently, there is no option to kill single tab(in the stable version) like Google Chrome. I have started using Firefox Nightly (because of separate process feature) but it keeps on crashing. So I am ready to jump on it as soon as we have new stable build with separate process for each tab.
If you use custom filters instead of subscribing to one of the popular filtersets, then you should check to see whether you're even using the kind of rules that ABP doesn't handle well. The memory and CPU usage only gets bad when you've got a lot of broad-spectrum CSS element hiding rules; regular URL-based blocking rules are plenty scalable.
I recently switched to Safari for similar reasons.
Safari is much faster than it used to be. It's also tightly integrated with my phone, including password management functionality (similar to LastPass) that works on all my devices. You can also get AdBlock for Safari now, which wasn't always the case. It also has a snazzy built-in RSS reader and just looks better than Chrome.
Exactly, Safari handles 90% of web needs and doesn't clog up my memory the way Chrome does. It handles my battery exponentially better then Chrome as well. Then with adblock plus, lastpass and pocket I'm all set on extensions.
What exactly is "clogging up memory" that everyone here complains about? I can understand if Chrome is using 6 / 8gb of your ram and you are simultaneously running photoshop and it can't grab any memory due to Chrome, but is this the case?
Shouldn't Chrome use as much RAM as it can to ensure speedy performance provided its not starving out any other applications?
I have little experience in writing desktop applications & memory management in an environment of this nature. Genuinely curious what the normal practice is.
Edit: To clarify, I am assuming the memory growth is not due to any sort of leaks :)
Ah could point! I could even imagine scenarios about pre-fecthing content (say loading the next page that may never be viewed) and throwing it in RAM. Definitely would not be good for battery life.
I have seen my battery life improve from 3 hours while using Chrome to 5 hours while browsing the same content using Safari on my MacBook pro.
One downside I've experienced with Safari is that it does not reclaim the memory a tab uses after it is closed, which leads to a crash once a day.
I used to love Safari but they've lost me with the direction their UI has taken the last few years. There's something about not showing the full URL by default that bugs me.
My biggest issue with Safari over firefox is location bar - it's simply cumbersome and stupid compared to the Firefox Awesomebar. I like being able to type two distinct parts of a URL or title and that Firefox just groks it.
I read the article hoping for something insightful, but when I read the paragraph ...a half-dozen tabs that auto-open on launch thanks to the dozens of extensions I've accumulated over the years[...] I had to stop and say "wait, what?"
To leverage his analogy that it is like coming home to a new house to find that most of your stuff is already there, it is like not cleaning your house and not taking out the trash for three years and then moving into a new house. Yeah, it's clean and new, but why is it better and will it stay better?
Well, as one piece of anecdotal evidence: I only use one browser extension (Vimium on Chrome, VimFx on Firefox) and still find Firefox significantly faster than Chrome.
Also, I like using the same browser on my Android tablet as on my laptop and websites that use MathJax render incorrectly on Android Chrome (these sites render perfectly well on Android Firefox and on both desktop Firefox and desktop Chrome). So I'd probably use Firefox even if it were a little slower than Chrome.
You're kidding right? Vimperator and the much better fork Pentadactyl have been around for years on Firefox, and implement everything Vimium does and more, in a much more reliable way. Every single control interface is available, and scriptable in Pentadactyl.
Vimium isn't even the best vimperator clone for Chrome - cVim has now taken that crown by a very large margin, and is worlds better in terms of features, configuration and reliability.
To be fair quite a few users left Firefox because they found it "bloated" or "it didn't work anymore" but never realized they were the ones that installed the bloat/adware/malware.
I left Firefox because it was measurably slower than Chrome at the time (and not by a small margin) and because crashes/hangs would usually take the whole Browser down.
I think most people on HN using FF are running nightly versions, I know I was. The nightly versions of FF have always had the edge on Chrome, but I think it's just recently that the stable version of FF has really gotten pretty much on par with Chrome, and I'd say definitely better on the Linux 64bit.
Nightly -> Stable every ~12 weeks or so, so should feel just as fast. I noticed this difference too, but I believe that's as I use it with a fresh profile each time.
Please don't put the blame solely on AdBlock Plus. Most of the problem is due to the rulesets, not the extension itself. EasyList and friends have a truly frightening number of broad CSS element hiding rules, which are much less efficient than the URL blocking rules that were the original AdBlock mode and should have stayed the primary means of blocking.
This is patently untrue, as I subscribe to the exact same filter rulesets in uBlock, and it makes a dramatic, incredible difference to the browser's performance.
I didn't say that there was no difference in performance between uBlock and ABP. I was explaining that the performance problems with ABP are a result of it being misused. uBlock tolerates the abuse much better, but URL based blocking should still be the first line of defense.
Thanks for the link to uBlock. I've been growing frustrated with Ghostery and AdBlock Plus, but didn't know of a good alternative. I'm giving uBlock a try, and so far, so good.
Although µBlock might be a lot slimmer than AdBlock Plus, according to this article [1] it's comparable with Ghostery. Ofcours µBlock is open source where Ghostery is not and I personlly really like µBlock's philosophy [2] about tracking and privacy.
> I left Firefox mainly because it was measurably slower than Chrome at the time (and not by a small margin)
I have no idea what your experience was, of course. Many people said this for years while Firefox consistently won or tied in objective comparisons.
Having dealt with end-user complaints for years, I've learned to doubt reports that rely on subjective perceptions of things like 'speed'. Sometimes the new, cool thing feels faster. Perhaps Firefox should pump in some fake engine noise.
I was one of the small group suffering (I think back around Firefox 24). It indeed was winning reviews & praise- but it was also completely unresponsive on my high-end machine. Several seconds of unresponsive, as if it/I were having problems with interrupts.
I realize most people didn't have that problem; it was probably a freak corner case on my machine.
I switched to Chrome primarily because of that doubting. For a while a pretty good chunk of people were complaining about Firefox's speed and memory usage, and the dev team stuck their head in the sand and blamed plugins, extensions, slow hardware, OS problems, malware, and everything under the sun except Firefox itself. At some point people just said, "Fuck it, I'm not even trying to convince them any more, I'm just switching to Chrome."
Also note that Firefox was "winning" objective benchmarks on things that didn't matter. Rendering speed doesn't mean much to me if it takes 10x longer to open the tab before rendering begins.
There was a time where Firefox was slow, used lots and lots of memory, and crashed all the time. And yet, developers doubted that was true at bug discussions.
It took some time, but the developers finally convinced themselves that the problem existed, and started fixing it. It also took some time to fix most thing, but now Firefox is stable and fast. Nowadays Chrome it is slow and too "smart".
Anyway, complete comparisons of megabyte-sized sofware, with gigabyte-sized states must take longer than the age of the Universe to run. Anything smaller is not complete enough to exclude bugs.
YMMV, but--after switching over to Firefox recently--I have it space out at random. Chrome has problems (its penchant for lighting my laptop on fire being the biggest reason I switched) but I don't have it just stop in the middle of my day.
The toss-up between junk battery life thanks to badly designed attempts to shoe-horn an application model into a document model (and Google employs plenty of the worst offenders, my biggest perf suck under both Firefox and Chrome is GMail!) and random stops is disgusting. Gary Bernhardt's right: we put up with entirely too much bullshit in this part of our lives.
When the V8 javascript engine came out for Chrome, it was objectively faster than the other browsers. I was a web developer at the time, and it was night and day.
Then, the other browsers made their new engines, and the leading performer has gone back and forth since.
It wasn't subjective perception. You could run the same javascript code in multiple browsers, time it, and see the results quite clearly. Since javascript was (and is) such a huge part of most websites, this speed difference was very noticeable during regular browsing.
The reason I quit using Firefox wasn't because pages loaded slowly. It was the overall responsiveness of the interface. Tab management, opening menus, pressing buttons, and even scrolling were (and are) incredibly sluggish in Firefox on my computer. I think most people who say Firefox is "slow" are actually referring to this, and not the things benchmarks measure.
Chrome's interface is perfectly snappy. This is with no extensions on either, and brand new profiles. Every once in a while I go through a free software stage and switch back to Firefox, but I always end up going back to Chrome.
For me the bloatware was Firefox 3.0 that installed itself against my wishes.
I was using then Firefox 2 or 2.5 (don't remember) quite happily.
It was just great (compared to Explorer).
Chrome showed up... But Firefox 2.5 was still much better.
Then one day, Firefox started to INSIST to install 3.0, then 3.5, then one day it just did, no matter how hard I tried to keep my old version.
And then behold, Firefox 3.5 had a bigger interface, that used more screen space (and I am in Brazil, bigger screens and bigger resolutions get expensive FAST, my current laptop, that is a ASUS gaming one, is still 14 inches and the maximum vertical res is 768, screens better than that were unaffordable to me), and it was SLOW, VERY, VERY slow, like RIDICULOUS slow.
So I hopped into Chrome... and I wish I could say I never looked back, but hogging 600mb just to load reuters.com webpage is NOT nice.
I am only still using chrome for google-ecosystem reasons.
If I could get rid of relying on google stuff (several work-related things depend on google) I probably would get on Firefox or Opera (or see if I can put Konqueror on Windows? I never tried that...)
Feedback as requested: It's the all caps hyperbole. It contributes little; it undermines interesting, valuable discussions; it's contagious, spreading from one poster to another; and it's also used so much in so many forums that long ago it became tiresome and dull.
That wasn't your whole post, but when I see it I stop reading and move on. Anyway, don't worry too much about a few negative mods.
I'd hate for this to become the revisionist history of the migration from FF -> Chrome.
When I finally made the move FF had no extensions, no malware or any add-ons. I ran the same (mostly) version on Ubuntu, OSX and Windows 7. It had become unusably slow on all platforms. Looking around on the Internet in those days saw enough validation of the problem being widespread in terms of speed and memory resources that I tried Chrome and found it significantly snappier.
In fact, I still do, although I note the great strides FF has taken in that regard. My problem is I haven't seen the same degradation in Chrome that I saw in FF a few years back. If it's getting bloated, I've missed it (in terms of palpable heft with slowdowns, crashes).
That site is the historical record of memory usage on one automated benchmark on one particular test machine. It's useful for finding memory regressions but you really can't draw general conclusions from it.
In particular, it's worst-case behaviour (esp. spikes) that hurts the most with memory usage, and Firefox is much better in that regard than it used to be.
I'm not a Chrome-by-default user. But when it is closed and I drag a link to its icon, it is very infuriating that it just doesn't open the link that I asked it to, but whatever else it felt like opening alongside it.
You can disable the "open all the tabs I had open last time" behavior in the settings, though. Is Firefox more clairvoyant about what you want (e.g., startup with arguments does not load prior tabs, but normal startup does)?
He mentioned importing all of his plugins and preferences from Chrome back into Firefox, so it stands to reason that his benchmark between the two is roughly the same.
As for the question of will it change? Well, to be frank, it shouldn't. It's known, however, that it will: Chrome in particular is known to not handle the accumulated history well. I haven't had a similar experience with Firefox, but that's only one data point.
Right. That paragraph about the extensions makes me question the credibility of his claims. Disappointing. I haven't experienced the performance problems he describes, and I use the Chrome dev channel for my main browser.
I've noticed Firefox has been getting faster over the last couple years, but when I use it I still get the feeling that it gets in my way more than Chrome does.
He's part of the rule that tech writers aren't technical people and often write about things they don't understand. As some famous person recently said, there's a huge amount of "intellectual dishonesty" in tech journalism.
To spin it more positively, he and his ilk more generally represent our users than more "in the know" tech-journalists.
I think this is a rough article, but likely one that either many users will empathize with, so the overarching idea that browsers should be doing something to prevent bloat is probably a sound one.
I guess I see journalism the old-fashioned way: you're not an expert on everything, but you do research and distill the concepts for regular readers.
This guy clearly didn't do research. Yes, Chrome uses a massive amount of memory, but that was originally a feature. Most people had way more memory than they needed at any given time, so Chrome heavily used memory to decrease processing time and therefore improve rendering speed. It also split into many processes to insulate each part of the browser from crashes and security holes.
Now that the age of SoCs/tablets/etc is upon us, people don't have as much extra memory as they did when Chrome first arrived. That may have an impact on how usable Chrome is (don't know if it's smart about "dialing down" its memory usage).
But this guy didn't mention any of that. Like a modern "journalist", he just wrote about his own anecdotal experiences without learning about the underlying concepts.
I agree 100%, I think the article is worthless, as a journalistic piece.
However, if you treat it as a blog post, and one that's likely to be parroted by other users of his same ability, it's a decent canary for popular opinion.
> Now that the age of SoCs/tablets/etc is upon us, people don't have as much extra memory as they did when Chrome first arrived. That may have an impact on how usable Chrome is (don't know if it's smart about "dialing down" its memory usage).
To me, the worst part is that Chrome seems, even without significant extensions, to be a CPU hog. And that translates into worse battery life. I switched to Firefox strictly because of the better battery life; with Chrome and GMail open it was like my battery had a hole in it. (Now I get to deal with random hangs that lock input for a while because a tab has a sad in Firefox. I hate us.)
I still use pentadactyl, even though it isn't being supported AFAIK. These kind of customizations are not possible on chrome. This is why I never switched even when it was cool.
I love Pentadactyl too, that's why I'm amazed it's no longer supported. Seems to me that with all the vim and Firefox-using devs out there, a lot of people would want to support it. But I have no evidence of that.
The problem is using many open tabs with Chrome. If you use no more than 3 or 4 tabs, Chrome is generally fine. If you use more than that, Firefox has some built-in features to help with tabs such as delayed tab loading and tab grouping. It also has more and better extensions for helping with multiple tabs. Furthermore, it doesn't launch a new process for each tab.
In a browser comparison I wrote last month, I included a section for users who like to keep a lot of tabs open. Even Opera, which uses the same code base as Chrome, does tabs better than Chrome:
Yes. Sandboxing makes sense when you think of browser as operating system. Isolate each process to increase security and crash-resistance. Makes sense, but it takes more memory.
I don't know, I've had one tab cause other tabs to crash all the time, which is something that confused me considering the supposed isolation that should be happening.
edit: not sure why I've been dv, but I'd like to add that one thing I've noticed is that this will usually happen when I open links in a new tab, somehow all those tabs become linked and if one becomes unresponsive they all do. For those who claim I should stop opening links in new tabs, I say: welcome to 2004, this is the whole purpose of tabbed browsing. If you;d like to try to reproduce this: go to facebook and open the first ten links in your newsfeed in new tabs (either by middle clicking, ctrl+click, or context menu) I don't normally do more than one or two at a time but ten will force the issue. then go to another tab that isn't connect to those other 11 it'll work fine while those 11 will look like they're on pause.
I switched from Firefox to Chrome right around Firefox 3.6. I have an average of around 20 tabs open at any given moment, and I tend to go around a week or two between reboots.
Other than the occasional tab crashing and quickly reloading (and by "occasional", I mean maybe once every couple of months or so), I've never had an issue with Chrome. It just works.
I also have better luck with tabs in Chrome. Overall CPU usage is lower, and the in-browser task inspector makes it trivial to ID bad tabs and close them.
Firefox is a lot better than it used to be, but it can still be brought to its knees across the board by a bad script, at least in my experience, and it's hard to find the one bad tab to kill.
This might sound silly to some, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google limited its usability tests to high-end machines with RAM in the double-digits. I reckon most programming teams have this issue, since even if they're dogfooding, they're doing so on high-end hardware, meaning that low-end hardware is untested and often unusable. Google isn't the only culprit; many websites nowadays will start to lean heavier toward excessive features - making them borderline-unusable on slower computers - because they were developed and tested on fast computers exclusively.
Edit: I want to apologize to eridal. I misread his/her statement and though the browser in question was Chrome, not Firefox.
So, public apolgy: I'm very sorry, eridal. I thought you wrote something you did not. My comment was wrong as a result. I have corrected my mistake, and wish to apologize to you personally for misreading what you wrote.
Original message with the offending part removed, mistakenly assuming eridal was using Chrome (I'm not sure why I read it that way):
---
I stopped using Chromium in part because once I passed the 100-150 tab threshold, memory usage skyrockets to 4-6GiB. It's OK with 16GiB RAM, but usability diminishes pretty badly (the stock UI is NOT conducive to more than 80-100 tabs), and if you're stupid enough to visit a site with Flash, the probability of it leaking and eating up another 2+GiB begin to approach 1.
I like Chrome for its speed--if you have 20 tabs or fewer open. But I can certainly correlate my own experiences with that of the GP comment.
I don't doubt. Firefox with hundreds of tabs works well with 4GB RAM, and somewhat bearable on 2GB, with occasional restart once per week or so to clean it up.
On the other hand, I wasn't able to use Chrome the same way I use Firefox on PC with 8GB RAM.
I, at least, do typically run with anywhere from 50-200 tabs (or more!) at any given time. Yeah, there's some slowdown if you're running on an 8GB machine (I'm typing this on a Macbook Air with a Firefox session with at least 100 tabs open at the moment (SEE EDIT)), but it's certainly way more than I used to get with Chrome before I switched back to Firefox a couple years back (Tree View Tabs being the motivating factor). Currently using 5.4GB of RAM (OSX is reporting a "Compressed Mem" of 2.96GB), and it's currently pegging one of the cores of the i7 on this thing. This is after about a week of nonstop (i.e. same Firefox process) use, and with Flash present in a lot of places (like the 20+ Github tabs I have open, thanks to Github using Flash for its silly "click here to copy a link to your clipboard" feature; I really need to get those wretched things blocked); a lot of things will clear out pretty well after restarting and restoring the opened tabs (though this is partly because they're not loaded into memory again until they're accessed again).
EDIT: After posting this comment, I closed all my tabs (something which causes one of my extensions - probably Tree Style Tab - to throw a confirmation dialog with the number of tabs). The number was 233, plus another ten or so in another window. I must say, that's pretty damn good, all things considered.
I'm trying out Nightly right now to see if I can push that even further with the new e10s features.
Same here. I'm regularly hitting 200+ tabs on multiple profiles for various reasons (news, documentation, etc.). This is precisely why I use Firefox for all my browsing usage (and have for some time). Chrome/Chromium chokes once you hit about 100-150 tabs, and the tab UI is not usable once open tabs fall off the edge of the window (there's probably an extension to fix this).
Now, I will admit that Firefox misbehaves once you hit about the 500 tab threshold (or higher) to the extent that closing it takes longer. But since tabs aren't loaded on restart until you click them, its memory usage tends to stay much, much lower during regular usage.
I want to like Chrome. It's fast, it's pretty speedy, but for my use case, it's not ideal. It's good for some things, but Firefox is much better behaved!
> why don't? unused tabs won't consume much, or at least noticeable to me.
Because I COMPLETELY misread your original comment. :( I thought it read that you were using Chrome, not Firefox.
I'm truly very sorry about that, eridal.
My experiences are just like yours, though. Firefox works great for me (relatively low memory usage, up to and including 200+ tabs). Chrome, on the other hand, not so much.
Hopefully you can see why I was surprised, but it was through the entire fault of my own eyes apparently interleaving another comment with yours. I'm an idiot. ;)
I have a 4GB Windows 7 machine with over 500 tabs in Firefox and it still runs Office, IE11 and various other stuff without any problems. Mind you, Firefox only loads tabs when you click on them, so only about 30-50 are actually "live"....
Maybe some testing of, say, a few tabs, but I'd be very surprised if a significant number of Chrome devs (or any Chrome devs, for that matter) use Chromebooks for Chrome development (maybe the Chromebook Pixel, but even that seems unlikely). The Chromebook is optimized toward content consumption; while I'm sure it's possible to do serious programming on ChromeOS (just as it's possible to do serious programming on Android or (jailbroken) iOS if you really wanted to), it's not going to be nearly as productive as a high end workstation (portable or stationary) with 16+GB of RAM and a quad+ core processor.
I remember having a few Google engineers coming to my uni to do a talk - afterwards they mentioned that internally they've been doing a large amount of programming work using internal tools on Chromebooks.
Many Google engineers (including folks like me outside of Chrome) use Chromebooks as our primary laptops. In my case that also (mostly) makes my Chromebook Pixel my primary computer. I average 25-100 tabs, many of them doing 'heavy' things like editing large Google Docs or running Inbox.
I do have a beefy dev desktop that I access via ssh, although frankly it mostly exists for running emacs for the pedestrian task of actually typing out bits of code.
It's certainly not the only issue with running Chrome on machines that aren't configured just like Google's. If you try and run it on a Linux distro which limits the number of open files per process to 1024, like most do by default, it crashes when you try and open more than a handful of tabs. Turns out that Google run a custom version of Ubuntu internally with the limit raised to something like 32,768 open files per process, so they never ran into the issue.
I frequently have dozens of tabs open in Chrome on Ubuntu without any problems and I haven't touched the open-files-per-process limit. You must be talking about a problem with older versions.
We are in the weird situation where even most web application developers run their dev environment on beefier machines than the VMs they are hosting it on.
Yup. Similar to the mobile html5 app I am rescuing that ran smoothly in chrome om the developers desktops with 16 gb of ram and core i7 and what not but the complex animations are shockingly less smooth on the iPad 2. Weird
Talking with vendors is always great -- those moments when their eyes get wide and they say "You mean you're doing that? We never intended for anyone to do that!" I had a moment like that just last week on a visit to one of our hardware vendors.
I regularly have several hundred tabs open in Firefox with no problems. Some people may think this is crazy or messy but I find it very useful for organizing the various projects I'm working on for different clients and my own personal projects. Tab groups and delayed loading make it all very smooth. Such usage is just not possible with Chrome. I tried to switch to Chrome but couldn't find the features I needed and did not wish to change my workflow.
Back when Chrome came out Firefox was buggy. Since then it has become much more stable. Chrome is the one that's buggy now. One process per tab means that a bug in one tab does not take down the whole browser but it is much better to just fix the bugs and not crash at all.
I do the same thing; it's incredibly easy to do with the Tree View Tabs extension.
For example, while browsing HN, I'll frequently just middle-click a bunch of article links and (occasionally) their comments, then read them once I have a sizable queue. Same goes for trying to look up documentation to fix some bug in my code; I'll start with a DuckDuckGo search and, suddenly, I have at least a dozen (sometimes multiple dozens) tabs open with Stack Overflow questions and blog posts and official online docs and such with clues pointing me in the right direction.
The Great Suspender will remove the tab's contents from memory after a freely configurable time, while still keeping it where it was in case you want to get back to it later. I've found that this works best for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
As a Chrome developer, I agree that process-per-tab absolutely should not be a replacement for fixing bugs. However, I think it's important to point out that process-per-tab is not just for stability: it's also critical for security.
I found your statement very interesting, and would like to learn more. If you're allowed, would you please provide more details or links to resources that further explain the security issues that process-per-tab resolves?
There's a bunch of good public docs on the Chromium security architecture. One big thing that having a separate process per origin does is that you can use OS sandboxing techniques on each process separately, and even if there are renderer bugs, an exploit can't immediately get to another origin; it provides defense in depth by also requiring a sandbox escape.
Here's an old paper that talks about the architecture (it hasn't changed much at a high level):
Chrome is way ahead of Firefox in terms of security. It's worth the performance trade-offs.
Each website is rendered in a separate process with a sandbox, each with an empty chroot + process namespace + network namespace + tiny seccomp-bpf + syscall whitelist.
Chrome also has a stronger sandbox, pioneers better SSL, supports PIE on binaries, uses pepper - doesnt use native Flash plugins, the JIT compiler does randomization / encryption tricks to make it hard to heap spray exploit code. They have their own hardened memory allocator called PartitionAlloc.
For my own use cases, Chrome drags my whole system performance into a gutter and shoots it full of bullets.
In other words, it’s not just a “trade-off”, but rather Chrome is completely and utterly unusable, while both Safari and Firefox handle the load with no problem.
I actually have more problems with Firefox's performance than with Chrome's (in terms of processor power), Chrome definitely uses more memory, but it's super fast; firefox is just abysmally slow and can;t handle more than a few tabs. Tried both browsers on Windows 8.1 and Linux, with different machines (home and work computers), too.
However, my high memory consumption in Chrome was due to using AdBlock, which is much lower now that I switched to uBlock. Even back with AdBlock, memory was never an issue with many tabs open.
My only problem (which is probably not Chrome's, but my laptop's fault) is that sometimes, when having ~20 tabs open, and certain tabs are idle for a long time, they take a bit of time to re-render once I visit them again, but that also used to happen in Firefox.
uBlock is now available on Firefox too, and makes an even more dramatic difference in performance.
I really don't know what you're talking about - Chrome is a dog after ~10 tabs are opened, uses crazy memory and becomes unusable fast once it starts paging. Firefox remains stable, backgrounds tabs you're not using in a graceful way, and doesn't try to open and render every single tab at once on a session restore.
It's unbelievable that Chrome still does this, after the problem has been reported for years.
I regularly have dozens of tabs open in Chrome on both Windows and Linux and I haven't experienced the unusably fast (slow?) behaviour you're talking about. That said, Chrome seems much more unstable than Firefox for me lately.
My typical browsing has about 50–100 background tabs (stuff kept around to look at later), with spikes up to 300+ (when I’m actively researching something). This kind of usage in Chrome absolutely trashes system performance, especially if any of those tabs happen to have gmail/gdocs/gmaps/g+ stuff in them (ironic, huh?), or other heavyweight sites like facebook. Safari and Firefox mostly don’t have a problem, though restarting the browser once every few days can sometimes help clear up some memory/CPU.
You should also keep in mind that everyone dosen't owns a high end machine or even a macbook. I have 4 machines at home , maximum specs are 2.5ghz with i3-4gb , and I guess this should be sufficient for running chrome alone , well atleast theoritically. In reality , chrome starts being unresponive , crashing tabs and stuff occurs beyond opening tabs beyond 7-8 and flash player crashes more often. Anddd , firefox is sure late to start ( a longer startup time ) , but idk how it manages to sustain itself throughout.
In one of my machine , I have arch installed with bspwm as WM ,and firefox takes about 150-200 mb only ( when I'm aggresively testing it ) , with 7-8 tabs. Chrome , well ...
There are WebKit-based browsers far lighter and faster than Firefox. Chrome, Firefox in Linux, and the Tor browser provide better security. Isolating browsers in separate VMs or Qubes AppVMs provides even better security.
I'll just throw that in there but Firefox Linux - since you refer to that (99% of what you just mentioned doesnt exit on windows/osx) - so yeah, Firefox for Linux uses the Chromium sandbox. You know, the exact same code, with a different filter and options applied.
Sure, its process model isnt as "secure" as chrome since it has the trade off or sharing more memory among other examples. But as a user, it seems like a freaking good enough trade off right now....
Chrome does not load every website into its own process: it does a lot of cross-site process sharing, and often very large numbers of sites can end up in the same process. It also does not keep each website into only one process, so in practice if a lot of tabs exist for one process (whether malicious or vulnerable) you can be assured of an overlap as you can end up in every process.
We should also keep in mind that Google is a content company, and is leverageing their market share to bring us such wonderful features such as HTML5 DRM support in our browsers.
I find that over time I end up with a bunch of tabs whose content seems interesting that grow over time. My working set is off to one side while the 'to read' tabs stack up over to the left.
I'd found a big boon for this workflow in the very simple extension "Export Tabs[1]." It's really simple: click an icon on the toolbar and it lists open tabs by title and then by URL.
Now when I notice that I've got a real glut of tabs open I dump them into my bookmark software so I can comb through later.
Like I said, really simple extension but tremendously helpful.
I'm old school. My to-read queue goes off to del.icio.us. After all the switches and selling and buying, in the end, it's not half bad. Bookmarklets plus droidicious on Android and I have a dependable bookmark store.
Instead of exporting tabs as plain text it exports them as Markdown. And it allows you to download the resulting document with one click as a *.md file, instead of having to copy and paste it in an editor.
It also uses the screen real estate in the toolbar a little bit more usefully by showing a tab counter (similar to what Chrome does on mobile).
And of course there are keyboard shortcuts for everything.
More than being more organized, it's really changed the way I browse. Throughout the day I'll build buckets of things to read/deal with and keeping them in groups makes it incredibly simple (and less stressful) to run through.
Tree Style Tabs is essential if you keep many tabs open. Not only does it make it possible to read the window titles and use screen real estate more effectively, it facilitates tab hierachies (parent page A opened links to B, C, D, parent page B opened links to E, F, G, etc).
There is a very simple extension called Tab Counter which works very well together with TSTs and it helps to remind me when it's time to clean up the tab bar. It also appears to bring peace of mind that all tabs are still there, it's just the missing status bar. :)
Between Tree Style Tabs and The Fox Only Better[0] I can't see myself going to Chrome or any other browser. The UI is pretty much hidden until I need it, giving me maximum browsing space.
In your opinion, what makes this "impossible"? I also use a few hundred tabs at any one time (also to the consternation of everyone who sees any _one_ of the Chrome windows I have open) and I'm very happy with Chrome.
How do you see which tab is which? (I gave up on Chrome about 20 months ago for Firefox's superior tab handling, better stability, and being less of a resource hog. Oh, and for not spying on me.)
Not GP, but:
multiple windows and intuition. Generally, for ~20 tabs per window I still can tell pretty okay what is what, only large swabs of similar tabs (e.g. 10 ebay product sites) are a bit annoying. A tab switcher that shows the headlines would admittedly be helpful.
In Firefox, I either scroll quickly though readable tabs with the mouse-wheel, or click the right down-arrow for a text list of tabs, or start typing in the address bar of whichever tab I'm in. For example, if I type twi then the drop-down list offers Twitter, and I select "Switch to tab". That gets me to the half-dozen tabs I want to look at several times a day.
With those options plus tab groups, I find it pretty easy to handle several hundred tabs in Firefox, where Chrome was a nightmare. The drawback is that you just keep adding tabs ;-)
I use an extension called switch to tab. It uses the omnibox interface to auto complete what you type and switch to the right tab. (and when I'm switching back and forth multiple times between two tabs, I just have muscle memory for how many tabs apart they are).
What are you referring to specifically with the "spying on you" claim? I wasn't aware of any behavior like that other than features that you can turn off that end up sending info to Google servers (like tab sync).
If you tend to accumulate tabs and forget to close them then the Unload Tab [1] extension is a must.
Your browser becomes laggy after opening 5 pages with flash elements? Just right-click on the current tab > "Unload Other Tabs". You can also set it to automatically unload background tabs after a certain amount of time.
>I regularly have several hundred tabs open in Firefox with no problems. Some people may think this is crazy or messy but I find it very useful for organizing the various projects I'm working on for different clients and my own personal projects.
It still is crazy and messy. For organizing the various projects there are bookmarks and bookmark folders. Having tons of tabs open != organization.
Why is "a list of bookmarks grouped by folders" organized, but "a list of tabs grouped by windows"(potentially with the support of tree style tabs or something similar) crazy and messy?
+1 for Tree Style Tab. I like to keep dozens of tabs open, and to drag and drop 'em into hierarchical groups. I also like to additionally organize the tab trees into multiple windows; the windows can be distinctively named with the FireTitle extension to identify them quickly.
I admit that I never learned Panorama or Tab Groups. Tree Style Tab does just about everything I need.
I'm not sure what Panorama or Tab Groups are, though I suppose I could infer the purpose/function of Tab Groups based on the name.
> I like to keep dozens of tabs open
Only dozens? Son, I just closed a Firefox session (in order to switch over to Nightly) with 233 tabs (plus another window with 10 or so). Didn't even push the 6GB mark.
When it comes to browsing, Chrome is like a modern soldier with all his gadgets and gizmos to keep him nice and sandboxed and safe from his adversaries ("adversaries" being poorly-designed "responsive" "web-scale" "mobile-first" "semantic" "Wangular.js" "jQWOP" "SASSy" "single-page" "web applications"); a good marksman, but easily overwhelmed should he find himself at close range and significantly outnumbered.
Firefox, in the meantime, is better likened to what would result if SkyNet had based its Terminators on Viking berserkers: almost naked, wielding nothing more than battle-axes (axen?) in each hand, charging at hundreds of foes in a magic-mushroom-fueled frenzy and winning. Yet, even if he should fail, 'twould matter not, for he only dreams of dying in such a great battle (as he does every week or so when I inevitably need to restart the Firefox process) and ascending to Robot Valhalla; and someday, Servo Firefoxson will grow from boy to man, and upon doing so, himself join the epic battles to avenge his father.
Tree Style Tabs looks like it has a potential to allow querying HTML via SQL. I have been thinking about this for a while. I do not have a concrete idea for an application, but it would be cool to retrieve titles of all open sites in certain group/tree. Almost like some sort of scraper.
I had similar thoughts recently. This kind of hierarchical and persistent 'view' into a graph (the web) could possibly be useful in other contexts (perhaps even as a general computer interface), and not just for graphs but generally as a hierarchical scratch board for queuing and structuring tasks and information. I'm thinking about implementing this in an experimental package for Emacs.
As for existing things, I've found Tab Counter quite useful in combination with TSTs.
It's also the reason why I switched from Chrome to Firefox. Sure, having 150 tabs open does slow down a machine at least a little bit, but god damn does it feel good to be able to do that without having to horizontally scroll though all 150 of them individually.
The whole point of having separate processes for each tab is that it isolates them. If one crashes, the others remain up. It supports multiple processors, too.
I would ask you to open up your task manager and try picking the largest-in-memory Chrome task and kill it, then see if you still think they are completely isolated. I agree with your point, but give it a shot.
I don't think that's really fair, the largest Chrome task in memory isn't a tab or extension. Yes I suppose it isn't perfectly isolated and if something happens to the main program task it will obviously cause problems but if a single page or extension crashes everything else lives on.
It's a perfectly fair point. The fact that the largest Chrome task by far is not a tab or extension at all, but is the core of Chrome itself, indicates that maybe - just maybe - Chrome isn't doing as good a job of keeping things isolated as it should. That process shouldn't be doing a whole lot beyond driving the UI and managing the lifecycles of its children.
The point is to isolate any code which renders HTML, plugins, etc., i.e., anything which processes untrusted external input, something which the main process does not do.
That is chrome itself...of course closing the parent process of a bunch of processes that are tied to it and that it monitors is going to close them all.
I've used the Chrome task manager to kill tabs. There is one process in there that's just called "Browser"--that's obviously the parent, and the UI won't let you kill it.
You might be referring to the OS task manager, but I don't use that--don't need to. I think the fact that Chrome has its own task manager is a killer feature.
No. Firefox's multi-process support ("Electrolysis" aka e10s) is only enabled in the Nightly channel. Firefox does not yet use tab-per-process like Chrome. Nightly only uses two processes: one from the browser (the "chrome" process) and one for all tabs (the content process). You don't get crash or security isolation between tabs when they all share one content process, but that process can be sandboxed by the OS and it reduces memory overhead. Firefox will later experiment with multiple content processes, comparing one vs N tabs per process.
Firefox on my PC seems to disagree with you. Try to use any site with a Flash video player since some of the recent updates and you're very likely to see a hang. I don't know whether the cause is Firefox or Flash, but the end result is still taking out the entire browser session, not just the tab with the Flash video.
Tabs were one of the major reasons I switched over to Chrome. At the time, firefox resized the tabs as soon as space became available, making closing a bunch of tabs a pain. They don't do that anymore, but now they have the tab scrolling feature which adds a gui element if there are too many tabs. Thing is, once you close enough tabs, those elements go away immediately, making closing a bunch of tabs a pain.
Biggest reason I switched, which is still the true (though less so), is that Chrome takes up less screen real estate.
Chrome has a menu item toggle called "Warn before quitting" that I just enabled, and it has already saved me a bunch of times!!!! In OSX it's under the Chrome menu item (before File), don't know where they stuck it in Windows.
I can't seem to find this in my settings : (. This bit me every once in a while, and as I keep hundreds of tabs open, it's a huge pain in the ass to restore Chrome. I ended up remapping the ctrl+q shortcut to do nothing.
I switched to Chrome a few years ago for the same reason. Another reason was Chrome had an 'omnibar' that takes in both urls and search queries. I was instantly sold on that.
I use Chrome as my only browser. On my desktop, I run an average of 20 tabs open at any given time, across two windows. I also run Chrome on my Android phone (Samsung Galaxy Note 3) and keep 4--8 tabs open at any given time. I reboot my desktop once every 1--2 weeks, and my phone maybe once per month.
Other than the rare tab freezing up and needing to be restarted, I've had absolutely no issues. Chrome just works.
Our workflow sounds similar, except that when my system reboots, Chrome is frozen for a minute as every tab tries to reload simultaneously, following by confusion as any youtube tabs all start playing.
On Firefox I had no such issue as each tab would only reload on focus.
Chrome on my girlfriend's PC did that in the middle of the night once or twice. I guess Windows or Chrome decided to update or something, not sure which, but all the YouTube videos in all the tabs started playing in the earlier hours of the morning.
Actually my main problem with Firefox is that if it "chokes" on one tab, I can't use the whole browser until that fixes itself. In Chrome I generally have 20+ tabs open and I don't have any issues.
Firefox needs to get itself a multi-process system. I really don't mind a little extra RAM being used as long as tabs are separated and sandboxed. I'm also looking forward to a complete rewrite in Rust. That should make Firefox much faster than anything else out there. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
yes we have enough proof of that concept... I do not believe you. It's a urban myth that rewriting always make things faster. Especially when looking at a C(++) code basis. Rust will maybe make the code safer but I doubt it will make it faster.
Improving the design is part of a rewrite, which would make it faster, even if the rewrite was in C++. Sufficiently large, old projects (and Firefox certainly qualifies) tend to accumulate a lot of gunk and design choices that used to make sense, but don't any more.
Rust also allows one to safely use patterns that one couldn't use in C++ without screwing things up, thanks to the borrow checker. And quite a lot of Firefox is written in Javascript, which definitely would be faster when rewritten in a compiled language.
This extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... helped me a lot keeping multiple tabs under control. I tend to leave tabs open for days, sometimes weeks, and come to them later. I don't want to waste memory all that time to just keep a tab open. So this extension helps with that.
The main reason I stuck with Opera 12 is how well it handled dozens of tabs (I remember counting 96 in a long-lasting session). Yes, the memory usage was high, but it never felt slow. After switching to the new Opera, I was pretty disappointed, and even switched to Chrome (because the new Opera is a poor man's Chrome in a way), but after a while I came back to Opera. With that said, Vivaldi looks very promising, but it's still too buggy! I'm holding my fingers crossed.
I wish the Firefox address bar wasn't something stuck in 2005.
It chokes on all 1 word phrases, spending many seconds attempting to find webpages for that word instead of searching. Chrome instantly searches.
Also, having a separate address bar and search was novel in 1999, when search was novel.
However, let's get real: a single address bar capable of nearly instantly deciding between search and location isn't a pipedream, it's the competitors reality and has been for many many years.
I have a feeling I'll migrate from Chrome sooner or later because I dislike Google's approach to standards and new features (no respect for standards, passionate desire to pump chrome full of backgrounds jobs and proprietary vendor features).
But I just cannot wrap myself around the fact that the Firefox address bar hasn't been meaningfully changed in what feels like the entire history of the modern web.
Firefox awesomebar has worked nicely for me for years across linux, mac and windows installations.
I'd say you either have a seriously old oc, have something weird in your profile or you are doing something seriously wrong.
Furthermore, awesomebar lets me automatically do full text searches across titles and urls, something chrome still cannot really do (with firefox you can search a couple of fragments of the url or title and off it goes and finds it, quick.)
Furthermore, two separate boxes are the best of both worlds, both awesomebar and quick (ctrl+k)access to your preferred search engine.
As for the general complaint about Firefox's address bar: I find it to be vastly superior to Chrome's at finding sites I've visited before. I can type in fragments of URLs and/or page titles (even partial words) and get matches immediately in a way that Chrome (and Safari) can't compete with.
For years I wondered why the other browsers were so much worse at this. Then somebody pointed out to me that, for the case of Chrome, Google would much prefer you find a page via Google search than via your browser history...
I regularly use Chrome on windows with ~100 tabs, and it ... just works? It is a bit annoying that it loads everything immediately on start-up, on the other hand once it's done everything is available without further delays. Firefox seemed to get slow/stuck easier, but I haven't tested it extensively for a while.
I remember one or two extensions I liked started injecting ads into pages with updates, which led me to uninstall them but would probably go unnoticed by a lot of users.
To be fair, much of the huffing and puffing "I'm leaving Firefox...Chrome is so much better!" was based upon the same sort of rhetoric. Early on Chrome didn't even have extensions, much less bloated monstrosities like Ad Block Plus and Firebug (don't get me wrong -- they both are fantastic, but most don't realize how incredibly onerous they are). So those people kicked Firefox to the curb and talked about how grand everything was with Chrome. Now that Chrome has an ecosystem, they put themselves in the same situation again.
Now you can have HUNDREDS of tabs (in firefox's nice tab groups, of course) and they'll only stay open / in-memory for a configurable amount of time after you stop using them.
Keeps memory utilization tight. I'm currently south of 500MB utilization with hundreds of tabs open and lots of extensions: Disconnect Search, DownThemAll, FoxyProxy, Greasemonkey, HTTPS Everywhere, Imagus, Stylish and uBlock
It doesn't matter. The user gets a bad experience and blames Firefox. "Oh, it's those naughty extensions slowing everything down!" smirk the developers.
Do you think the user cares? Firefox is the one who opened themselves up to get abused by. (Same things happened on Windows, you'll get a machine full of crapware if you install popular apps. OSX has a curated app store. Look at the difference on an average windows and OSX machine.)
Some solutions instead of blaming the user:
* Name & shame poorly-performing plugins in the interface. (OSX does this with "apps using significant power" in the battery meter)
* Have a plugin speed rating in the store
* Have performance requirements for plugins (users will report usage data, you have X seconds to startup, if you average higher you will be reviwed/yanked.)
Asking users to not install extensions when extensibility is one of your selling points is not a good idea. Fix how they interact with the browser.
Despite that fact I've run both without add-ons and I'm very happy to be back using Firefox. Like the author there was a point when I switched to Chrome, but even without add-ons it has become bloated and slow. My breaking point was when it decided to auto-install a Google Now notification center that started up with my computer.
I have some serious issues with Chrome (the permaloading, it's new download blocking 'feature', poor startup time), but I did not find Firefox remotely an improvement. On my system it is half as fast, twice as buggy, and even more memory hungry than Chrome is.
I think people overstate Chrome's memory usage as a factor of performance; IME it's still less than FF in total most times, and largely that memory cost doesn't seem to come with the performance impact of FF's because of the way Chrome handles processes.
On my Win8.1 system at the moment, Chrome uses about 400mb of RAM. Firefox routinely ballooned up to a full 1GB or more. Even on FreeBSD, it was not at all unheard of to glance at top and find FF consuming as much as 1.4GB.
The idea of switching back to FF because of Chrome's memory consumption seems frankly laughable to me. FF's memory leakage is infamous, and literally goes clear back to FF Beta, and still hasn't been fixed a decade on.
And since Opera is a joke now, and Safari a toy, and there being zero real viable alternatives, that means Chrome, for good or ill.
I'd really appreciate it if they'd stop telling me what I'm allowed to download though. At least they disabled the autodelete function.
That doesn't make it a toy. It makes it a bad choice if you need a browser to be cross-platform, but not everyone has that as a prerequisite.
Safari tends to get sand kicked in its face a lot when people talk about browsers, but it's actually the one I keep finding myself coming back to. I got frustrated recently by Safari's JS performance on certain web sites (ones with badly written JS web chat clients, I think, but never mind) and switched to Firefox 36 for a few weeks. On both machines I used it on it would just... get slower over time, and not a lot of time to boot: about 24-48 hours. And I rarely have more than a dozen tabs open at once, and that's on the high end.
If I was going to knock Safari for anything -- other than the JS issues -- it's that it's got much weaker extension support than Chrome or Firefox. But the only extensions I really use are Instapaper and 1Password. (I'm one of the weirdos who doesn't use Adblock Plus; instead, I've just uninstalled Flash, and if I want to use a web site that absolutely requires it I'll hop into Chrome for that.) I like the way it handles tabs, most versions are pretty stable, and the linked list sidebar -- where it pulls out links from your Twitter feed -- can be surprisingly useful.
I absolutely agree that on MacOS, it's a solid option. The OS X version is a very good browser, and not to be dismissed.
The Windows version however was always an also ran, a weird proof-of-concept release more than anything. It was never seriously marketed, it made ludicrous design decisions, wouldn't play ball with the OS, and has since been more or less completely abandoned. You have to go digging just to find it, and it hasn't been updated since Snow Leopard.
Very much agreed. A few months ago, I, very much like the person who wrote the article, gave up on Chrome because of huge memory issues (and more importantly, eating up my Air's battery). I converted to Firefox, but on OSX, it is absolutely abysmal.
Finally tried Safari and have not looked back. It is a breeze to use, and I in particular love the shortcut to read articles later. Memory footprint is much lighter, and even with 10+ tabs, I've noticed it doesn't eat a lot of battery.
Also agreed with your point about the extensions. I have the usual suspects like Adblock and Ghostery installed, along with LastPass, but Safari's extensions leave a lot to be desired.
dev tools rarely work, just having the console open slows down the entire process by several magnitudes of order, the UI for safari devtools is horrible - I can never find what I am looking for when I need it, there is no public bug tracker for safari proper, web apis for database access are magnitudes slower than both firefox and chrome
I'm not sure how you get Firefox to use more memory than Chrome. Like literally, I wouldn't manage it even if I tried. (Cheating by installing extensions notwithstanding)
I left Chrome open overnight and by the time I came back it was pegging the CPU at 100%. No extensions, no nothing. Seriously Google?
How long since you last tried Firefox? This is almost completely opposite my experience with Firefox vs. Chrome. Chrome for 4 tabs consumes about 600MB, Firefox for those same 4 plus 8 more consumes 400MB.
I also haven't seen any significant memory leaks in the last year or two.
Sad to say, but 1.4 G is not uncommmon (or even unreasonable) for any browser these days, mostly due not to the browser itself, but the resources consumed by the individual web sites.
But when you have youtube, gmail, and other web applications open, memory usage tends to go nuts. I've been told that it's technically impossible for a web application to have a memory leak, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
Whomever said that it's technically impossible for a web application to have a memory leak is a liar.
I wrote a slightly-more-than-basic Angular.js app and it leaks like crazy up to the point that the Chrome tab will crash.
If you're having serious ram problems in Chrome though, Shift-ESC is your friend. Shows you what exactly is consuming RAM (in the event you didn't already know)
I'm sorry that your experience with Firefox has been so poor. Web browsers are a complex application platform, and individual experiences can vary wildly. You may use some web page that does well on Chrome but poorly on Firefox, while others may experience the opposite. Individual browsing habits, in terms of the number of tabs that are open at once, or how long the browser is left open, also vary greatly, and can affect performance on one browser compared to another.
Firefox on Mac still has too many visual issues, and the devs often drag their feet on fixing them. Lion (released 2011) added "bounce" scrolling and auto-hiding scrollbars. It took them nearly half a year to fix the lack of auto-hiding scrollbars nightly builds[1], and even longer for it to finally make it to mainline Firefox. Firefox still doesn't have bounce scrolling. To add to that point, the first high-dpi (retina) laptops were released in 2012, and nearly three years later, Firefox still contains a reasonable number of icons that aren't in 2x (Retina) resolution. I suspect that these and other similar issues relate to the unfortunate decision to continue using a cross-platform UI toolkit (XUL).
Personally, I've also found that, despite Firefox's distinction as the browser to popularize the idea of extensions, it now tends to lag in that department. Sure, you can get Adblock, but the stuff available on Chrome tends to be much more diverse these days. Finally, it's still not multi-process (though it's finally getting there.) [2]
So still not in stable and Chrome has had it for what? 4 years now?
EDIT: Ok, downvote me all you want but it's a fact, not opinion. I'd give FF another shot once it's in stable but as it is now I'm not going to waste my time playing on a nightly build.
This kind of major potentially havoc wreaking change takes time. Google also has a much larger team then Mozilla, so I wouldn't exactly rush these things.
> So still not in stable and Chrome has had it for what? 4 years now?
Chrome is a much newer browser. At the time Chrome was released, it was the only browser with this design, because it's much easier to do when starting from scratch. Chrome benefited greatly simply from observing the design decisions of Firefox, IE, etc. that had had several years to play out by that point.
In ten years (assuming Chrome is still around then), it will also have similarly antiquated design decisions that make sense to us now, but will be frustrating and obsolescent a decade from now. It doesn't mean that Chrome won't be able to keep up at all with these changes eventually; it just means that it's not great to compare a brand-new browser with one that's been around (and used!)[0] for a long time.
Electrolysis (the name for the project) took much longer in Firefox because they had to essentially retrofit an existing browser that hadn't been designed this way from the start.
[0] If Firefox hadn't had significant market share, it could have made this change much more rapidly without fear of breaking things for existing users. But of course, making sure the browser remains stable for its millions of users is a top priority as well, alongside developing these new features.
IIRC Chrome did not have this feature day 1, they added it after the fact. That's not to say they didn't plan for it but still.... Also "Chrome benefited greatly simply from observing the design decisions of Firefox, IE, " Yes and Firefox benefited from observing the browsers before it, so what?
> "In ten years (assuming Chrome is still around then), it will also have similarly antiquated design decisions that make sense to us now,"
You can't say that with any certainty whatsoever maybe Chrome will fair better than FF has or maybe we will see a re-write of Chrome's core to deal with future changes.
As I said elsewhere in this thread I will use the browser I deem best at the current point in time. Right now, for me, that browser is Chrome (I couldn't care less which browser has been around longer).
As for "it just means that it's not great to compare a brand-new browser with one that's been around (and used!)[0] for a long time" this is so wrong.... of course I can compare the two, they both do the same thing at the end of the day (provide a portal to the internet). When FF came out (and in it's heyday) no one said "You can't compare FF to IE, FF is a brand new browser" No, instead they/we all switched to FF because it was BETTER. Now, at least IMHO, Chrome is BETTER and so I've switched again. If that changes I will switch yet again.
I don't think people are taking issue with the fact that you switched; they're taking issue with your indirect suggestion that Mozilla is taking too long to implement multiprocess.
> At the time Chrome was released, it was the only browser with this design
Not true. Beta 1 (and subsequent releases) of Internet Explorer 8 [1] included process isolation [2][3][4] before Google released the first public beta of Chrome on 2 September 2008 [5].
You mean one main "firefox" process that holds all tabs and one child process that holds all plugins (Flash, Acrobat).
So if one tab hangs (e.g. WebGL demo) then still the whole Firefox is slow as hell. Firefox should finally spawn child processes for every other tab with less permissions ("sandbox" technique) so that if one tab hangs or crashes every other tab and the UI still is responsive. It seems we have to wait for Rust based Servo engine to get that feature - but that would also rescue us from XUL based UI (FirefoxOS already has an HTML5 based UI).
"one child process that holds all plugins (Flash, Acrobat)."
Not true. Each plugin module gets its own plugin container. Flash instances share a separate plugin-container from the one shared by Acrobat instances.
Firefox has a far more diverse selection of extensions. And Firefox extensions are far more powerful than Chrome extensions with much deeper integration into the browser. This can also be a curse with a poorly written extension, though.
It's worth noting that multi-process is why Chrome has a much higher memory footprint than Firefox these days for users running several tabs. Firefox pulls out plugins (Flash, etc) to a separate process so when they crash, they don't take out the browser. It will still cause the browser to pause for a few seconds as it waits to be sure Flash is hung up before asking you to stop the plugin.
Completely agree. The complete lack of OS X native feel turns me off. There's not even a swipe animation for going back/forward in history. I know most of the work is done, but just finish this already, it's been ongoing for like 4 years now.
That interesting because one of the reasons I abandoned Chrome on mac is because of all the visual problems I had. Image loading is the biggest annoyance, why can't they simply load an image scaled correctly to the viewport of the window without scrollbars.
Take a large image like this, first off it loads full size instead of scaled, and when you click teh magnifying glass to scale it, you still have to scroll to see the whole thing
I'm not sure how you can use Chrome with a lot of tabs anyway. Maybe with a mouse with a DPI switch so you can hit the few pixes they size down to if you have 20+?
Keyboard controls to switch tabs. But I can have about 20 before they get too small to click on my laptop -- but they've already become too small to know what is in what tab at that point. I do it anyway. Because my browser is just about as messy as my physical desktop or my apartment.
I can't live without Tab Mix Plus and multi-row tabs on Firefox. On Chrome I can't even be a power tabber. It's pretty much the only reason I've stuck with Firefox over Chrome.
The post-crash session restore seems to work well for me; and luckily it's not a frequent occurrence.
At one point, the post-crash session restore on Firefox actually single handedly made me move to Chrome. Another reason was the fact that I needed to kill its process because the UI became unresponsive.
Chrome was fresh and snappy, not a fair comparison at that point but it was definitely fast. I never wanted to switch away from Firefox but I felt like I had to because it had become unusable.
I've switched back to Firefox since and all the previous problems were gone. It's been very reliable and if it did crash (which can still happen like with all software) it would restore my tabs just fine. I just like it better than I ever did Chrome and I certainly like the organization behind Firefox better than that behind Chrome. :)
Something I noticed the other week - Chrome on Windows will scan my desktop on startup (all the icons go back their generic version, and then return). Why would they do that? My desktop isn't where the cache is.
I believe it is hooking the explorer launch process not 'scanning' the desktop. But I may be wrong. Like the author I got tired of all the issues I was having (exactly two extensions, OnePassword and Evernote) and switched to Firefox.
My experience with relatives' computers has been that trying to completely remove Chrome from Windows is a lot like trying to remove a rootkit, specifically one that phones home a lot.
If any other company did those sorts of things in persisting pieces of their software all over the OS without easy removal for non-technical users, people would be calling it malware or spyware.
the main reason why I never switched to Chrome is the Google process that is always running whether you are currently using Chrome or not.. but I don't think I had any issues uninstalling it a few years ago
I run Chrome with
"C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --renderer-process-limit=9
and it's much better that way: Less total memory consumption and killing a renderer unloads many tabs at once.
It seems to me that the focus on security by isolating every webpage from each other went to far recently. When I started with Chrome I think they used to limit the maximum amount of render processes much more. Of course if there was a serious security hole in e.g. webkit/blink then one tab could have stolen data from another tab more easily. But it consumed much less memory
After reading this I fired up Safari (on Yosemite). Never really tried Safari before - opened it once when I got my first Mac, wondered who moved my cheese, and downloaded Chrome. But the last half hour with it have been great actually!
Though most of time, I still use Chrome, yeah, most of time, because recently(about one or more years), Chrome crashes a lot and when it keep crashing in some pages, I have to use other, like Firefox, I plan to switch to Firefox as well. Chrome crashes everyday. That's really annoying. I am on Ubuntu 12.04.
I love firefox, mostly because of the pentadactyl extension(not compatible with firefox 35, sadly) but it has a huge number of problems. Namely, it crashes far too often. It's extremely frustrating, and no number of bug reports I fill out or new releases ever seems to address the problem. I'm thinking of trying to find a better productivity extension, or go back to emacs type shortcuts with chrome or safari.
Of course, maybe the grass is always greener on the other side. I left chrome a few years ago because I had an linux install where any non-trivial js would cause the computer to lock up.
I find Chrome's web dev tools to be vastly superior to FF and last time I tried it it didn't look good on my Mac and I had the same memory problems as with Chrome.
Until FF get's much faster or better devtools than chrome I'm not interested. Not to mention how often does a Chrome extension hit the front page of HN vs a FF one?
Don't get me wrong, I don't love Chrome unconditionally (the RAM usage is crazy but so is FF) but I still think it's the better of the two. Just my two cents...
I heard a rumor a while back that Firefox was developing a browser targeted at web developers. Not sure if thats unnecessary or what but if it materializes I'll probably give it a try.
Yeah, I remember getting excited when I read about that. I'll give it a shot when it comes out but there are a number of little things that annoy me with FF web dev tools that I doubt they will fix. Also I really need to dev on the SAME browser the product will be released on and not some special dev build.
Edit:
Oh now I remember why I wrote off:
> Firefox Developer Edition replaces the Aurora channel in the Firefox Release Process.
> By using the Developer Edition, you gain access to tools and platform features at least 12 weeks before they reach the main Firefox release channel.
They just fucking renamed their alpha channel to "Firefox Developer Edition"....
I've found FF dev tools to have everything I need -- it's gotten really good recently. The only thing it doesn't have that I need to switch to Chrome for is for web socket purposes. Chrome allows you to see all the data sent/received in the Network tab.
That's a big one, along with some small stylistic issues I have (I hate the console on FF) and little things like not being able to expand an object/array in the console (Yes, I know you can click on it to open an inspector but Chrome's approach is so clean and easy to use and doesn't take up half your console to inspect an object/array, Adding conditional breakpoints is a bitch.... I don't have a ton more off the top of my head but I know there are more and if I tried to use FF again I would run into them almost right away.
At the end of the day I use the browser that allows me to do my job the fastest and more efficient. As of 2015-02-13 that browser is Chrome. That could change tomorrow but there would have to be a compelling reason and I have yet to find one.
I would have agreed with you about the usefulness of the stock dev tools up until a couple months ago when I made Firefox my main browser again, the main tabs I use (network, console, and elements/inspector) are pretty much at 99% parity.
It's almost as if browser bloat is a cyclical phenomenon, as formerly kings of the hill struggle against the upstarts that displaced them by streamlining and improving technologies. Firefox has made strides against Chrome, but IE is the current major underdog.
The worst part about chrome for me is that I can't access my Gmail accounts through Chrome. That's right, I have to use Firefox to access Google's own product because Chrome won't play nice with my school Google Apps account that my school provided us for email. Whenever I try to get to my school account it redirects to the gmail account I used to sign into Chrome - this happens regardless of whether I try to access the account directly through the school's website, or through the gmail website. The only way to get around it is to completely sign out of the browser, restart it, then make sure I don't visit any other sites than my school email. Obviously this is an enormous hassle and it wasn't always this way. I used to be able to use the multiple accounts feature with ease until one day Google up and broke it.
I share your pain. One way to get around it is to use the Chrome 'multiple profiles' feature, it lets you switch to a different 'profile' with entirely different cookies, cache, etc., and will let you sign into a different Google account than in your first profile.
You can switch profiles and even have different profiles active in different Chrome windows, without restarting Chrome.
(I am not saying this makes it all better, trying to use more than one Google account is a _mess_ no matter what. But that it's one workaround I discovered recently, which has been lessening the pain somewhat)
The profile switcher is nice - would like Firefox to support fast switching out of the box. But here Chrome is going a little backwards too. Recent work has made that profile switcher a bit less convenient. Many complaints here:
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=403619
This does happen to me sometimes. I'm a consultant so I end up having to use customer gmail accounts and my personal account. So of course it always logs in with my personal since the browser logs in with that. Then I add this customer. Sometimes when I click to switch accounts it keeps sending me back to my personal account. I'm sure someone from the GMAIL team is on HN so they might see this.
That list is totally broken, it won't update when you get logged out of one of your accounts, and like you've seen if you try to go to one of those accounts, you get bumped over to the one you're still connected to. If you do the "add account" thing and add the one that's not working, you'll be authenticated and able to switch back and forth for a while.
To me that sounds like your school's sysadmin team is to blame, they don't seem to have figured out SSO. Both schools I've gone to (undergrad and graduate) had perfect Gapps integration, and both work perfectly in Chrome.
They have some other issues as well, the wireless is very difficult to connect to and the "program" that we had to download usually does not work. Android devices were not even supported at all until sometime in late 2013. The print queue is constantly frozen, and a few other problems I can't think of off the top of my head right now. All of this is strange because from what I understand the school has a decent computer science program but I was in humanities so I'm not sure.
The same problems exist in Firefox, too - I open a private browsing tab when I need to access my work Google Apps account when I'm logged into my personal Gmail account. Google's multiple-account login system is just totally broken, it would be less frustrating if they didn't offer it at all.
I've had to use Safari lately because Hulu simply won't work in Chrome. I've also found that some sites that are unusably slow in Chrome scroll like a dream in Safari. It's too bad, because I prefer Chrome's UI. YMMV.
653 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 362 ms ] threadWhen will this proprietary crap die off already?
I know because I witnessed them breaking one Flash video-recording feature after the other trying to reimplement the damn thing...
Yeah, it does. Pepper Flash is just Flash repackaged to use Chrome's new plug-in architecture; it is still written by Adobe. (Although perhaps Chrome does deserve the blame for some crashes related to how it integrates with the browser.)
Very strange that Google let the situation get so bad. Mind you I find the Chrome developer tools far more powerful and intuitive than those in Firefox which stops me moving entirely.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5325445
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5393864
I had this problem too and found that Chrome was getting so slow that it was unusable. For those who have this problem and don't want to switch from Chrome there is an extension called "The Great Suspender" which dumps background tabs after a configurable time period of inactivity. It helped immensely.
Why do we keep open 500 tabs instead of using bookmarks these days?
I'm still fighting to keep my number of tabs down. It causes significant mental overhead and task switching costs. I've noticed a bump in my productivity by taking the time to close/bookmark/onetab tabs.
I do realize it's glorified bookmarking, but the concept and ease-of-use make it nice.
(I'm glad I looked it up, this makes me more inclined to make bookmarks without sorting or tagging them)
This ... is exceptionally powerful.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_...
If I had a _better_ way of keeping track of what it is I'm currently accessing (or interested in accessing) than tabs, I'd use them.
A key problem is that browsers are keeping _every last tab fully open and rendered in the fear that you might need to immediately access is_. The tendency of websites toward full interactive designs exacerbates this problem.
Really: most text is pretty static. Generally I'm viewing one page at a time. Perhaps 2-5. The rest ... they can just go off and die.
Having them _saved locally in a state that's suitable for quick re-render_ would be kind of cool. Again, yes, this means that a lot of interactive page shit dies. But then, it should.
IMO webpages should earn their privileges. Including whether or not to animate, or play video, or audio, or display nonrelevant sidebars, headers, footers, and the rest.
The present browser / Web paradigm is grossly overextended and deserves to die.
I agree with you in general. A while ago I tried thinking of some other paradigm to keep track of webpages I might want to get back to in the near future without the permanence of bookmarks. Some of my thoughts:
Web browsers are used for multiple activities that have their own "stack" in my mind. Often I find myself opening a whole set of tabs that are all related to a general activity I am doing. For example, I'm be doing some coursework and open a million tabs (man pages, tutorials, etc.), then I close my laptop and go to bed. The next day it's class time and I just want a clean tab pane to focus only on what is being discussed in class. Then maybe the next day it's the weekend and I'm relaxing, reading some blogs, going on social media, etc. The point is that every time I use my browser, I might not be performing the same overall activity, and I don't want to be distracted by what I did hours ago.
I don't want to lose information on what I was doing earlier, though. I want to be able to come back to the particular state of my browser as it was when I was last doing a certain activity. Let's say I have Tuesday/Thursday classes, and on Thursday I want to return to where I left off on Tuesday. I need a way to get back to that state without what I may have done on the browser between then and now to get in the way.
Bookmarks don't cut it for me in this regard. Bookmarks only work for a single webpage. But maybe I have a whole group of webpages that are all inter-related! Using the bookmark model we have now, I'll have to bookmark each page individually, then open them up individually when I want to return. There are add-ons that bookmark tab sets, but I think that UI needs to be a core part of browser UI, not wedged into a browser extension.
Right now, I think the most useful way to manage tabs (for me, YMMV) is some combination of tab pinning, tab groups and tree style tabs, and tab suspension/delayed loading. Each of those has a particular advantage:
Tab pinning (as seen in Firefox and Chrome) is useful to me. It lets me identify single tab activities (usually web apps) that I always want to have available to me because they are commonly accessed. Facebook, email, Youtube, Calendar, etc. It is useful to have a muscle-memory location on my tab pane that I can quickly switch back to those common activities.
Tab groups are one of my top favorite features in Firefox. It so naturally fits my particular workflow where I might be switching browsing contexts on a daily basis (class, work, relaxing, Wikipedia bingeing, blog reading, ...). The main brilliance behind tab groups is that they act as a less permanent form of a bookmark group. I can easily switch between contexts in a context overview mode (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+E), and all of my contexts are clearly delineated. All I have to do to organize the contexts is to think "I am starting a new activity" and open a new tab group. However, I only need to close a tab for it to be gone from my mind.
Tree Style Tabs does this pretty well too, but for some reason I just found the UI unintuitive. Plenty of other people like it so I won't knock it. It does do a good job of organizing tabs by activity.
Another style that I thought was interesting is tab stacking as seen in Opera[1]. I think it is an idea not mutually exclusive to tab groups.
I also really like Firefox's delayed loading of tabs on startup. It fits perfectly with the concept of tab groups because it automatically means that other tab groups won't load up, and little memory and CPU cycles are wasted on them. Right now I have 81 tabs "open" in various tab groups, but Firefox has only loaded the ones I clicked or opened since starting.
Where things can improve:
1. Memory management/unloading of old tabs
I really think if Firefox ...
Thanks :)
Web browsers are used for multiple activities...
Something I've concluded Web browser developers put insufficient thought into. They're also far too often optimizing for content providers and advertisers rather than readers.
...a whole set of tabs ... related to a general activity...
Quite. And I'll often have multiple projects going on, each with their own set of related references.
The failure of the Desktop (and GUI) paradigms in general to reflect this is a growing and tremendous frustration of mine. Our activities are organized and grouped by application and increasingly by Web silo rather than by task. It's where the UNIX shell philosophy is increadibly powerful, and the abilty to both create different "workspaces" (generally: directories) for projects, and to string data through commands and pipelines, is phenomenally useful.
Just to highlight a frustration: increasingly desktop tools are utilizing Web tools for documentation. I arrange my work by Workspace. So when I fire off the Help command in a particular utility ... a browser tab opens somewhere three workspaces away, that I'm not aware of. Often in the midst of a bunch of other unrelated tabs....
For example...
Excellent use cases, and while my own work differs in details, the general outline is the same: different tasks, often persisting across days, weeks, months, or even years, but alternating with time, which I wish to group. Often quite complex and involving many related sites and/or pages. And retaining that user state is at an extreme premium.
Bookmarks don't cut it for me in this regard....
I'm leaning toward a middle ground between Bookmarks, History, and some level of annotation. Readability is an interesting experiment but ultimately frustrating and limiting.
My own curated lists of stuff are somewhat useful but extremely tedious to create. My subreddit is as much a bookmarking tool (of both Websites / references, and my own thoughts) as it is a publication and discussion.
The ability to create and readily access sets of bookmarks, tag and tab them, filter them usefully (by tag, author, site, dates, etc.) would be tremendously useful.
I'd really love a browser feature which let me search for text within pages I'd recently visited (hour, day, week, month, ...). Often what I'm looking for is something I've already recently visited.
It is* possible to organize Bookmarks hierarchically, etc. But I find that the UI/UX for doing this in numerous browsers is simply tedious beyond description.
...some combination of tab pinning, tab groups and tree style tabs, and tab suspension/delayed loading...
Yes to all of this.
For Pinning, I'd prefer to simply break out Web Apps as their own local app instance. Not associated with a browser at all. While Web-as-App-delivery is interesting, it's ultimately highly frustrating in my experience. A neither-man-nor-beast experience.
Tab groups...
I'll need to play with that.
Tree Style Tabs...
I use and love the plugin (for Firefox), and use it much as you do Tab Groups from what I can tell.
...tab stacking...
Not familiar with that.
...delayed loading of tabs...
Genius.
1. Memory management/unloading of old tabs
2. Tab group classification or tagging
4. Open the browser to the tab overview page
A-fucking-men to all of this. Your point that there is no overview page for tabs, or similarly that there is not way to perform group operations on tabs, is another massive failing.
So then you devote a couple of hours to going through and closing tabs, and find you still have 300...
The solution, if anyone ever gets this far down the page, is to use Session Manager to save the tabs, close Firefox, and then just uncheck the boxes for the tabs you don't ever want to reload.
I just can't stand if my browser has so many tabs open I can't read the what the hell it is from the header and since I always use browser only on half of my screen with editor on the other side (actually since I have 21:9 screen I've split it in 3 so I can have project | editor | docs) that gives me at most like 15+-5 tabs to work with.
But maybe I'm just the weirdo out of everyone.
I've presently got 2 tabs open: HN and this comment form.
Even when neck deep into documentation or github issues I don't think I've ever gone above 20 tabs, it definitely doesn't seem like it could be productive.
Things like: Gmail, calendar, Xero, time tracker, things I've been meaning to read but haven't yet put in a TO READ folder (sometimes hits 30+ tabs), Trello, business plan lists, BitBucket for an iOS project, Shopify partner admin, Font Awesome cheatsheet, 15-20 client projects I might work on in any given week including their admin backends, App Annie, Analytics, trip research (20-40 tabs easily on maps, spreadsheets, itinerary suggestions, Airbnb, Booking.com, hotels, national park sites), 5 tabs currently devoted to trying to work out how to get a National Geographic subscription to work on device and web, and so it goes on.
My associate had a machine that would RESET because of flash (we know it is flash because it would only start to randomly reset if flash was running somewhere on the machine), no matter what browser.
And in my personal experience flash could crash ALL browsers open at once, one time flash crashing on MSN Messenger partially froze my entire machine, after 10 minutes wrestling it to get to the task manager (yep, sometimes I am stupid) and close flash process, the machine came back to normal.
[0] https://github.com/shotgunsoftware/browser-plugin/issues/13
Please Google, understand this; I don't want my browser linked with my Google account.
Plus Firefox crashing is a huge downside.
As for privacy implications, there's no reason to believe Google does anything inappropriate, and I rather like having my internet experience tailored based on past behaviour.
To each their own I guess.
How do you get Firefox to crash? What does about:crashes say? Did you report the bug?
Also, pretty much anything that's Javascript + WebGL runs like shit in Firefox. Emscripten demos are good though. But Emscripten runs better in Chrome than JS+WebGL in Firefox.
Compiling all those shaders is rough on any browser, but only Firefox gets its entire UI blocked. Even Internet Explorer manages to isolate the jank to one tab.
Sadly Firefox 39 (nightly) still has no real multi process support. There are only two processes, the main process holds all tabs, the single child process "plugin-container" holds all plugins (Flash, Acrobat, etc.). It's a bit disappointing to see such little progress since 2010. Hopefully Mozilla's Rust based Servo engine comes to the rescue soon and replaces gecko and its old XUL (XML based UI framework) with Servo and an HTML5 based UI (like Firefox OS).
I use Firefox as development browser because of Firebug and and the new developer tools. Working with dozens of tabs open for days is only possible with IE11 and Chrome.
That is incorrect. There is one plugin-container for each plugin module. All Flash instances share a single plugin-container, all Acrobat instances share a single plugin-container, and so forth.
As for the e10s content process, for the moment there is only one content process. The plan is to get e10s working well with the one content process, and then start scaling that up to multiple content processes. Nightly is a bleeding edge development channel, after all.
Another interesting thing you can do: click through from about:crashes to your crash report. Then click the "more reports" link. You can see if your crash signature is rare or if you have one of the currently "popular" ones. If a lot of other people are crashing with that same signature, there is probably a bug and developers are probably discussing it. Again the most useful thing you can do is figuring out how to make that crash happen consistently and adding steps to reproduce it to its bug.
If that's the case try using 64 bit builds.
Instead, I've switched to Disconnect search. They proxy searches and claim to do so anonymously. So at least I'm not directly contributing to Google's profile building that way. It does add a second or two latency per search, which can be annoying.
FF switched to Yahoo, and I'm just amused at how bad it is. They even open results in new tabs by default, a lame trick used to try to accidentally keep people on your site.
It's unfortunate, but Google really does dominate in search.
Also, chromium seems to be getting less and less care from google now. See this bug for example which prevents using screenshare in hangouts: https://crbug.com/416856
It's called Firefox.
check this comparison between chrome and iron (which is based on chromium): https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iro...
"Although SRWare claims 'Iron is free and OpenSource' ... Iron 'is entirely closed source and has been since at least version 6'."
Or this:
http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.ht...
https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/download-chro...
I also do so with Amazon and Microsoft and would probably claim that I am offering informed consent.
I'm keen to have it explained to me where I might be in error on this matter.
And I agree 100% with you!
I'm a goddamn software developer, software doesn't usually make me feel stupid. So congrats to Google on that I guess...
Storing bookmarks as *.lnk as with IE3+ is still the way to go. Though, I found out that 50% of my bookmarks are obsolete and many were never archived in archive.org due evil robots.txt entries.
Being that I'd never intended to 'sign into Chrome' in the first place (the form looks awfully similar to the gmail login), I essentially rage-quit Chrome and haven't looked back since. I've embraced Firefox and I feel better using free and open source software.
Performance has been excellent. The only thing I regularly notice is that many startups seem to only QA their products in Chrome.
Additionally, I've found FireFox to be more consistent about it's quality, vs having occasional releases with a jump in bugs/instability.
They've actually gotten very upfront about their user features in recent versions. It's a great toolset for maintaining different sessions with multiple sites. Or for using as an incognito session with less ephemeral data.
I have multiple g-mail accounts. One of them is my primary personal one, and another one I use is a shared account that my band uses for business and soundcloud.
Google makes it hellish to sign out of one and into the other. For the longest time, I had them linked, and my band mates could see my personal e-mail. I don't know if they could get past a log in point, but the fact that its so hard to keep them un-linked and log into one or the other is infuriating.
You can change users by clicking the top right of a chrome window.
They may not be obvious to set up, but they are worth learning about if you are going to use stick with Chrome and use multiple Google accounts, or multiple accounts on any service - Twitter, FB, etc.
But that's their entire business model.
You might want to pay a lot more attention to SSL-based tracking methods, e.g. https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/Home/chromium-se...
Uncoupling your use of Google services from your other online activities is much harder than many people seem to believe.
Visiting a page on a creep's domain to find out about its creepiness seems like a bad idea.
Now that Google has pushed HTTP/2 on everybody, connection reuse will be a major new fingerprinting and tracking technique because it keeps connections open a long time and essentially can't be proxied so one connection is always one browser.
http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.ht...
Google Chrome now has a "feature" that will automatically reset your homepage, search settings, wipe all extensions and wipe all extension data whenever it detects an unexpected change to any of your settings files or they do not match up to the PC they are locked to.
The goal was to prevent third parties from hijacking your search engine within Chrome. Things like bundleware installers on Windows that switch it.
The actual result is that all your settings are now locked to a specific PC and will be reset anytime anything changes. As the developer of Google Chrome Portable, this means only your bookmarks move with you as you move PCs unless you're logged in. This also means that even if you backup your Chrome install, if your PC dies, you can not restore that Chrome install on another PC. Your bookmarks will be restored, but you will lose your settings, extensions, and passwords since your profile was moved to a new PC.
This stands in stark contrast to Firefox which is completely self-contained. If a third party bundleware installer hijacks your search engine or homepage, you can simply set them back as they should be. All your extensions, extension settings, etc will continue working as expected whether or not you opt to use Firefox Sync.
Incognito mode at all times, no Google ID ever, trash local history on every exit. I don't carry the expectation that my bookmarks must live on and follow me from machine to machine.
I don't care about what my search preferences are. I simply turn address bar searches off, or point it to localhost. I don't conduct rampant web searches from the address bar, because an address bar is an address bar, and I only feed it well-formed URLs. I don't waste my time regularly using web sites that can't provide me with a URL that isn't intended to be typed, and sub pages that I can't readily navigate to.
Address to long? No soup for you. Absurd URL parameters? No soup for you. Deeply nested pages, locked away behind a login, 30 clicks deep, and obscured by dark patterns? No. Soup. For. You.
Preferences are preferences, and that's all they are. The default install should be completely useful and practical as-is, on a clean install. If it isn't then preferences should be exportable to plaint-text using an open standard.
Firefox happily dumps its bookmarks as simple JSON. As a result, when I want to transport my bookmarks I can, although, digging back into my archive more than a year 50% tend to perish due to simple link rot.
I think web applications should never have existed. The web was designed for hypertext, images, and other static consumable content. It wasn't designed to be a platform for massive distributed applications. Why are there so many security fuckups on the web? Because it wasn't designed to be secure. The fact that people are now programming desktop applications in JavaScript against NodeJS suggests to me that the web has gone too far. We should have built something new to handle what we now call "web applications".
I, too, look at huge disgusting URLs every day and wonder why we didn't see this coming.
But mostly I see no benefits from having it enabled, but quite a few negatives (security, privacy, etc). As long as the browser keeps the history of your current browser session alive while the browser stays open, that's perfectly fine for me.
The total market share of people who care about whether or not their browser is linked with their Google account is probably less than one percent. The value they get from knowing everything you do online? I'm not sure how you'd calculate that, but I'm positive it's greater than losing the tiny number of hackers who are protective of their personal data.
Google will continue to build the browser under the assumption that your browser will be linked with your Google account. If you don't link, you'll be a permanent edge case.
If you don't want to link your account, it's much easier to just switch browsers.
> The value they get from knowing everything you do online?
This is a myth. Or less politely, a lie you have been told.
https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/privacy/ is very clear about exactly when chrome reports back data, including what happens when you sign in. It does not report your online activity in ways different from other web browsers. It sends just about the minimum possible to implement the features it provides.
I don't claim to know anything about how Chrome works, so could be completely wrong in this, but my sense is that it is part of a broader desire to tie together tracking across all devices. Cracking that nut is very difficult from an analytics perspective, and having people logged in to Chrome across all devices provides a very convenient GUID for matching against AdSense units, DFA tags, GA tags, etc.
So the value in this play is not necessarily in knowing everything you do online, but simply knowing that you are who you are regardless of device or Chrome instance. That means data about you is consistent, and can feed into the broader targeting algorithms to serve you the right ad, at the right place, at the right time.
Again, I don't know what data Chrome makes available to Google's ad services, so please tell me if I am in fact incorrect here.
If you read the very detailed Chrome privacy policy (https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/privacy/), you will see that it does nothing different to other browsers here (each server sees your IP address, cookies, etc). It does not send any form of uniquely identifiable ID with every request. Only some very specific cases (offline drive, google wallet, DRM auth, etc) send your signed-in userid, which they need in order to work at all.
Please read the privacy policy. People put a lot of time and effort into writing it and it answers all your questions.
I see a section in the link you provided that reads:
> "Chrome OS may send a non-unique promotional tag to Google periodically (including during initial setup) and when performing searches with Google."
Sure Chrome may not be sending a GUID with every request. That wasn't my point. To clarify, my point was that Google has a GUID (your Google account, and likely other forms of ID) that identify you pretty clearly across devices/Chrome instances. I saw nothing in the policy you linked that said Google AdSense and other Google ad services (DoubleClick tags, GA, etc.) do not use that information to link identities across devices for purposes of tracking.
The AdWords and GA teams have rolled out significant advances in cross-device tracking over the past year or two, including new metrics and reports in the respective platforms. It seems pretty obvious to me that this is a data point that is factored into making that link.
But again, I'd love to be proven wrong if I missed a section of your link that explicitly says otherwise.
> To clarify, my point was that Google has a GUID (your Google account, and likely other forms of ID) that identify you pretty clearly across devices/Chrome instances.
I think the privacy policy is quite clear that Chrome does nothing here that other browsers don't do. Obviously if you have a Google cookie from signing in to the website then that's going to identify you pretty clearly, but that's just how cookies work, and would be exactly the same in any other browser. I'd like to specifically direct your attention to the first three paragraphs of the policy, and in particular:
"If you use Chrome to access other Google services, such as using the search engine on the Google homepage or checking Gmail, the fact that you are using Chrome does not mean that Google will receive any special or additional personally identifiable information about you."
> I saw nothing in the policy you linked that said Google AdSense and other Google ad services (DoubleClick tags, GA, etc.) do not use that information to link identities across devices for purposes of tracking.
I wouldn't expect to find any information about how AdSense works in the Chrome policy. The privacy policy for ads is over here and discusses this topic: http://www.google.co.uk/policies/technologies/ads/
Speaking for myself, I always disable (i.e. "rm -rf") auto-updaters because they don't separate security updates from other random changes. Browsers are the worst, with a "major version upgrade" every month dropping whatever the developers had on their build server onto my computer.
I haven't stop once to debug why (I just switch to Chrome but sometimes do report the websites to Mozilla), can the reason be in Firefox being more pure and the others browsers allowing more quirks? If this is the case, isn't this bad UX?
> A filter can be a plain hostname, or an Adblock Plus-compatible filter. Lines prefixed with ‘!’ will be ignored.
Safari is much faster than it used to be. It's also tightly integrated with my phone, including password management functionality (similar to LastPass) that works on all my devices. You can also get AdBlock for Safari now, which wasn't always the case. It also has a snazzy built-in RSS reader and just looks better than Chrome.
What exactly is "clogging up memory" that everyone here complains about? I can understand if Chrome is using 6 / 8gb of your ram and you are simultaneously running photoshop and it can't grab any memory due to Chrome, but is this the case?
Shouldn't Chrome use as much RAM as it can to ensure speedy performance provided its not starving out any other applications?
I have little experience in writing desktop applications & memory management in an environment of this nature. Genuinely curious what the normal practice is.
Edit: To clarify, I am assuming the memory growth is not due to any sort of leaks :)
Do you have a reference for why this should be? A quick search yields results suggesting only the opposite (for instance, https://superuser.com/questions/738848/does-more-ram-usage-c...).
That said, eventually both get to 6g of ram in use and a restart is needed anyway.
That said, eventually both get to 6g of ram in use and a restart is needed anyway.
Cheers!
Otherwise, I agree completely.
To leverage his analogy that it is like coming home to a new house to find that most of your stuff is already there, it is like not cleaning your house and not taking out the trash for three years and then moving into a new house. Yeah, it's clean and new, but why is it better and will it stay better?
Also, I like using the same browser on my Android tablet as on my laptop and websites that use MathJax render incorrectly on Android Chrome (these sites render perfectly well on Android Firefox and on both desktop Firefox and desktop Chrome). So I'd probably use Firefox even if it were a little slower than Chrome.
(The one I mentioned, VimFx, is more recent and more minimalistic that either Vimperator or Pentadactyl.)
Vimium isn't even the best vimperator clone for Chrome - cVim has now taken that crown by a very large margin, and is worlds better in terms of features, configuration and reliability.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-plus...
[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases
[1] http://www.extremetech.com/computing/199188-%C2%B5block-aims...
[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#philosophy
I have no idea what your experience was, of course. Many people said this for years while Firefox consistently won or tied in objective comparisons.
Having dealt with end-user complaints for years, I've learned to doubt reports that rely on subjective perceptions of things like 'speed'. Sometimes the new, cool thing feels faster. Perhaps Firefox should pump in some fake engine noise.
My main problem was the GUI, not the rendering (though the latter probably played its part in slowing the GUI down).
Opening/closing/moving tabs was sluggish.
Just opening Firefox with my ~20 tabs open would take many times as long as opening Chrome with the same number of tabs.
You didn't need a stopwatch to see the difference.
I realize most people didn't have that problem; it was probably a freak corner case on my machine.
Also note that Firefox was "winning" objective benchmarks on things that didn't matter. Rendering speed doesn't mean much to me if it takes 10x longer to open the tab before rendering begins.
It took some time, but the developers finally convinced themselves that the problem existed, and started fixing it. It also took some time to fix most thing, but now Firefox is stable and fast. Nowadays Chrome it is slow and too "smart".
Anyway, complete comparisons of megabyte-sized sofware, with gigabyte-sized states must take longer than the age of the Universe to run. Anything smaller is not complete enough to exclude bugs.
The toss-up between junk battery life thanks to badly designed attempts to shoe-horn an application model into a document model (and Google employs plenty of the worst offenders, my biggest perf suck under both Firefox and Chrome is GMail!) and random stops is disgusting. Gary Bernhardt's right: we put up with entirely too much bullshit in this part of our lives.
Then, the other browsers made their new engines, and the leading performer has gone back and forth since.
It wasn't subjective perception. You could run the same javascript code in multiple browsers, time it, and see the results quite clearly. Since javascript was (and is) such a huge part of most websites, this speed difference was very noticeable during regular browsing.
Chrome's interface is perfectly snappy. This is with no extensions on either, and brand new profiles. Every once in a while I go through a free software stage and switch back to Firefox, but I always end up going back to Chrome.
I was using then Firefox 2 or 2.5 (don't remember) quite happily.
It was just great (compared to Explorer).
Chrome showed up... But Firefox 2.5 was still much better.
Then one day, Firefox started to INSIST to install 3.0, then 3.5, then one day it just did, no matter how hard I tried to keep my old version.
And then behold, Firefox 3.5 had a bigger interface, that used more screen space (and I am in Brazil, bigger screens and bigger resolutions get expensive FAST, my current laptop, that is a ASUS gaming one, is still 14 inches and the maximum vertical res is 768, screens better than that were unaffordable to me), and it was SLOW, VERY, VERY slow, like RIDICULOUS slow.
So I hopped into Chrome... and I wish I could say I never looked back, but hogging 600mb just to load reuters.com webpage is NOT nice.
I am only still using chrome for google-ecosystem reasons.
If I could get rid of relying on google stuff (several work-related things depend on google) I probably would get on Firefox or Opera (or see if I can put Konqueror on Windows? I never tried that...)
That wasn't your whole post, but when I see it I stop reading and move on. Anyway, don't worry too much about a few negative mods.
Generally Rekonq is considered the better maintained KDE browser nowadays.
When I finally made the move FF had no extensions, no malware or any add-ons. I ran the same (mostly) version on Ubuntu, OSX and Windows 7. It had become unusably slow on all platforms. Looking around on the Internet in those days saw enough validation of the problem being widespread in terms of speed and memory resources that I tried Chrome and found it significantly snappier.
In fact, I still do, although I note the great strides FF has taken in that regard. My problem is I haven't seen the same degradation in Chrome that I saw in FF a few years back. If it's getting bloated, I've missed it (in terms of palpable heft with slowdowns, crashes).
In particular, it's worst-case behaviour (esp. spikes) that hurts the most with memory usage, and Firefox is much better in that regard than it used to be.
As for the question of will it change? Well, to be frank, it shouldn't. It's known, however, that it will: Chrome in particular is known to not handle the accumulated history well. I haven't had a similar experience with Firefox, but that's only one data point.
I've noticed Firefox has been getting faster over the last couple years, but when I use it I still get the feeling that it gets in my way more than Chrome does.
Edit: fix typo
I think this is a rough article, but likely one that either many users will empathize with, so the overarching idea that browsers should be doing something to prevent bloat is probably a sound one.
This guy clearly didn't do research. Yes, Chrome uses a massive amount of memory, but that was originally a feature. Most people had way more memory than they needed at any given time, so Chrome heavily used memory to decrease processing time and therefore improve rendering speed. It also split into many processes to insulate each part of the browser from crashes and security holes.
Now that the age of SoCs/tablets/etc is upon us, people don't have as much extra memory as they did when Chrome first arrived. That may have an impact on how usable Chrome is (don't know if it's smart about "dialing down" its memory usage).
But this guy didn't mention any of that. Like a modern "journalist", he just wrote about his own anecdotal experiences without learning about the underlying concepts.
However, if you treat it as a blog post, and one that's likely to be parroted by other users of his same ability, it's a decent canary for popular opinion.
To me, the worst part is that Chrome seems, even without significant extensions, to be a CPU hog. And that translates into worse battery life. I switched to Firefox strictly because of the better battery life; with Chrome and GMail open it was like my battery had a hole in it. (Now I get to deal with random hangs that lock input for a while because a tab has a sad in Firefox. I hate us.)
In a browser comparison I wrote last month, I included a section for users who like to keep a lot of tabs open. Even Opera, which uses the same code base as Chrome, does tabs better than Chrome:
http://www.filterjoe.com/2015/01/23/best-browsers-2015-which...
edit: not sure why I've been dv, but I'd like to add that one thing I've noticed is that this will usually happen when I open links in a new tab, somehow all those tabs become linked and if one becomes unresponsive they all do. For those who claim I should stop opening links in new tabs, I say: welcome to 2004, this is the whole purpose of tabbed browsing. If you;d like to try to reproduce this: go to facebook and open the first ten links in your newsfeed in new tabs (either by middle clicking, ctrl+click, or context menu) I don't normally do more than one or two at a time but ten will force the issue. then go to another tab that isn't connect to those other 11 it'll work fine while those 11 will look like they're on pause.
Note: I haven't tested this in other browsers.
Other than the occasional tab crashing and quickly reloading (and by "occasional", I mean maybe once every couple of months or so), I've never had an issue with Chrome. It just works.
Firefox is a lot better than it used to be, but it can still be brought to its knees across the board by a bad script, at least in my experience, and it's hard to find the one bad tab to kill.
Turns out, they fixed Firefox up pretty good over the years
It works, kind of, as long as I don't try to run anything else at the same time.
The article persuaded me that Firefox may be worth a try again.
As for testing - you'd think testing on a range of hardware would be standard.
Testing exclusively on top spec machines is just unprofessional.
So, public apolgy: I'm very sorry, eridal. I thought you wrote something you did not. My comment was wrong as a result. I have corrected my mistake, and wish to apologize to you personally for misreading what you wrote.
Original message with the offending part removed, mistakenly assuming eridal was using Chrome (I'm not sure why I read it that way):
---
I stopped using Chromium in part because once I passed the 100-150 tab threshold, memory usage skyrockets to 4-6GiB. It's OK with 16GiB RAM, but usability diminishes pretty badly (the stock UI is NOT conducive to more than 80-100 tabs), and if you're stupid enough to visit a site with Flash, the probability of it leaking and eating up another 2+GiB begin to approach 1.
I like Chrome for its speed--if you have 20 tabs or fewer open. But I can certainly correlate my own experiences with that of the GP comment.
On the other hand, I wasn't able to use Chrome the same way I use Firefox on PC with 8GB RAM.
I misread eridal's comment. :) I thought he/she said they were using Chrome, not Firefox, hence my understandable surprise!
I've corrected my mistake. Sorry about the confusion. Surprised no one else picked it up...
EDIT: After posting this comment, I closed all my tabs (something which causes one of my extensions - probably Tree Style Tab - to throw a confirmation dialog with the number of tabs). The number was 233, plus another ten or so in another window. I must say, that's pretty damn good, all things considered.
I'm trying out Nightly right now to see if I can push that even further with the new e10s features.
Now, I will admit that Firefox misbehaves once you hit about the 500 tab threshold (or higher) to the extent that closing it takes longer. But since tabs aren't loaded on restart until you click them, its memory usage tends to stay much, much lower during regular usage.
I want to like Chrome. It's fast, it's pretty speedy, but for my use case, it's not ideal. It's good for some things, but Firefox is much better behaved!
I do have a coffee-break whenever I open my IDE
Because I COMPLETELY misread your original comment. :( I thought it read that you were using Chrome, not Firefox.
I'm truly very sorry about that, eridal.
My experiences are just like yours, though. Firefox works great for me (relatively low memory usage, up to and including 200+ tabs). Chrome, on the other hand, not so much.
Hopefully you can see why I was surprised, but it was through the entire fault of my own eyes apparently interleaving another comment with yours. I'm an idiot. ;)
And you gotta admit, that was pretty stupid.
Cheers!
Many Google engineers (including folks like me outside of Chrome) use Chromebooks as our primary laptops. In my case that also (mostly) makes my Chromebook Pixel my primary computer. I average 25-100 tabs, many of them doing 'heavy' things like editing large Google Docs or running Inbox.
I do have a beefy dev desktop that I access via ssh, although frankly it mostly exists for running emacs for the pedestrian task of actually typing out bits of code.
Next time I start a new team we're all getting Raspberry Pis for development.
Then you discover their smallest development/test machine is 128GB.
RIGHT?
(Firefox was heavily criticized for having huge apparent memory usage, which was ignored up until at least FF 4)
Back when Chrome came out Firefox was buggy. Since then it has become much more stable. Chrome is the one that's buggy now. One process per tab means that a bug in one tab does not take down the whole browser but it is much better to just fix the bugs and not crash at all.
For example, while browsing HN, I'll frequently just middle-click a bunch of article links and (occasionally) their comments, then read them once I have a sizable queue. Same goes for trying to look up documentation to fix some bug in my code; I'll start with a DuckDuckGo search and, suddenly, I have at least a dozen (sometimes multiple dozens) tabs open with Stack Overflow questions and blog posts and official online docs and such with clues pointing me in the right direction.
At least that's the one I use.
It should also be the first result if you search Mozilla's add-on marketplace thingamajig for "Tree Style Tabs". Here's the link for convenience: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
What would be awesome is some sort of auto tab closer that assumes you'll never use the tab again after 15 minutes of idle time.
Here's an old paper that talks about the architecture (it hasn't changed much at a high level):
http://seclab.stanford.edu/websec/chromium/chromium-security...
Each website is rendered in a separate process with a sandbox, each with an empty chroot + process namespace + network namespace + tiny seccomp-bpf + syscall whitelist.
Chrome also has a stronger sandbox, pioneers better SSL, supports PIE on binaries, uses pepper - doesnt use native Flash plugins, the JIT compiler does randomization / encryption tricks to make it hard to heap spray exploit code. They have their own hardened memory allocator called PartitionAlloc.
Etc Etc.
Firefox also had more critical CVEs in 2014 than Chrome: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=2CRyJkmV
And reports of sandbox escapes are less common in Chrome for a reason.
For my own use cases, Chrome drags my whole system performance into a gutter and shoots it full of bullets.
In other words, it’s not just a “trade-off”, but rather Chrome is completely and utterly unusable, while both Safari and Firefox handle the load with no problem.
However, my high memory consumption in Chrome was due to using AdBlock, which is much lower now that I switched to uBlock. Even back with AdBlock, memory was never an issue with many tabs open.
My only problem (which is probably not Chrome's, but my laptop's fault) is that sometimes, when having ~20 tabs open, and certain tabs are idle for a long time, they take a bit of time to re-render once I visit them again, but that also used to happen in Firefox.
I really don't know what you're talking about - Chrome is a dog after ~10 tabs are opened, uses crazy memory and becomes unusable fast once it starts paging. Firefox remains stable, backgrounds tabs you're not using in a graceful way, and doesn't try to open and render every single tab at once on a session restore.
It's unbelievable that Chrome still does this, after the problem has been reported for years.
That's the thing with anecdotal evidence, it's a sample of one.
There are WebKit-based browsers far lighter and faster than Firefox. Chrome, Firefox in Linux, and the Tor browser provide better security. Isolating browsers in separate VMs or Qubes AppVMs provides even better security.
Sure, its process model isnt as "secure" as chrome since it has the trade off or sharing more memory among other examples. But as a user, it seems like a freaking good enough trade off right now....
I'd found a big boon for this workflow in the very simple extension "Export Tabs[1]." It's really simple: click an icon on the toolbar and it lists open tabs by title and then by URL.
Now when I notice that I've got a real glut of tabs open I dump them into my bookmark software so I can comb through later.
Like I said, really simple extension but tremendously helpful.
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/export-tabs/odafag...
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabattack/ginflokh...
Instead of exporting tabs as plain text it exports them as Markdown. And it allows you to download the resulting document with one click as a *.md file, instead of having to copy and paste it in an editor.
It also uses the screen real estate in the toolbar a little bit more usefully by showing a tab counter (similar to what Chrome does on mobile).
And of course there are keyboard shortcuts for everything.
Here is my Show HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9047945
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Though another comment has led me to wonder if FF doesn't have something similar built-in.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/the-fox-only-...
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/u_g2cx...
In your opinion, what makes this "impossible"? I also use a few hundred tabs at any one time (also to the consternation of everyone who sees any _one_ of the Chrome windows I have open) and I'm very happy with Chrome.
With those options plus tab groups, I find it pretty easy to handle several hundred tabs in Firefox, where Chrome was a nightmare. The drawback is that you just keep adding tabs ;-)
What are you referring to specifically with the "spying on you" claim? I wasn't aware of any behavior like that other than features that you can turn off that end up sending info to Google servers (like tab sync).
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/unloadtab/
It still is crazy and messy. For organizing the various projects there are bookmarks and bookmark folders. Having tons of tabs open != organization.
+ user is able to see a tree-view / list of them all at one.
+ searchable.
+ loadable on demand on the same "tabs", even whole folders (projects) at once.
+ persistent (even across computers with bookmark sync).
+ doesn't waste memory (not even mininal).
+ Was even designed for actual organization (Manage Bookmarks...), instead of a viewing content feature that was abused for that purpose.
Exactly. Tree Style Tab being the biggest reason I've never switched to Chrome.
I admit that I never learned Panorama or Tab Groups. Tree Style Tab does just about everything I need.
> I like to keep dozens of tabs open
Only dozens? Son, I just closed a Firefox session (in order to switch over to Nightly) with 233 tabs (plus another window with 10 or so). Didn't even push the 6GB mark.
When it comes to browsing, Chrome is like a modern soldier with all his gadgets and gizmos to keep him nice and sandboxed and safe from his adversaries ("adversaries" being poorly-designed "responsive" "web-scale" "mobile-first" "semantic" "Wangular.js" "jQWOP" "SASSy" "single-page" "web applications"); a good marksman, but easily overwhelmed should he find himself at close range and significantly outnumbered.
Firefox, in the meantime, is better likened to what would result if SkyNet had based its Terminators on Viking berserkers: almost naked, wielding nothing more than battle-axes (axen?) in each hand, charging at hundreds of foes in a magic-mushroom-fueled frenzy and winning. Yet, even if he should fail, 'twould matter not, for he only dreams of dying in such a great battle (as he does every week or so when I inevitably need to restart the Firefox process) and ascending to Robot Valhalla; and someday, Servo Firefoxson will grow from boy to man, and upon doing so, himself join the epic battles to avenge his father.
As for existing things, I've found Tab Counter quite useful in combination with TSTs.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/sr732e...
Is vimperator still actively developed and compatible with the latest Firefox? I switched over to the fork, Pentadactyl some years ago.
You might be referring to the OS task manager, but I don't use that--don't need to. I think the fact that Chrome has its own task manager is a killer feature.
Biggest reason I switched, which is still the true (though less so), is that Chrome takes up less screen real estate.
Other than the rare tab freezing up and needing to be restarted, I've had absolutely no issues. Chrome just works.
On Firefox I had no such issue as each tab would only reload on focus.
[digs into settings] Ah, that's it: on Settings > On Startup, I've selected "Open The New Tab Page" which (I think) is the default.
Yeah, trying to open up a couple dozen tabs at once, several of which are videos, could be problematic.
Firefox needs to get itself a multi-process system. I really don't mind a little extra RAM being used as long as tabs are separated and sandboxed. I'm also looking forward to a complete rewrite in Rust. That should make Firefox much faster than anything else out there. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
Rust also allows one to safely use patterns that one couldn't use in C++ without screwing things up, thanks to the borrow checker. And quite a lot of Firefox is written in Javascript, which definitely would be faster when rewritten in a compiled language.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabattack/ginflokh...
It's able to save tabs and windows to the file system as Markdown and restore them from these files, too.
I would love to get feedback on it.
It chokes on all 1 word phrases, spending many seconds attempting to find webpages for that word instead of searching. Chrome instantly searches.
Also, having a separate address bar and search was novel in 1999, when search was novel.
However, let's get real: a single address bar capable of nearly instantly deciding between search and location isn't a pipedream, it's the competitors reality and has been for many many years.
I have a feeling I'll migrate from Chrome sooner or later because I dislike Google's approach to standards and new features (no respect for standards, passionate desire to pump chrome full of backgrounds jobs and proprietary vendor features).
But I just cannot wrap myself around the fact that the Firefox address bar hasn't been meaningfully changed in what feels like the entire history of the modern web.
I'd say you either have a seriously old oc, have something weird in your profile or you are doing something seriously wrong.
Furthermore, awesomebar lets me automatically do full text searches across titles and urls, something chrome still cannot really do (with firefox you can search a couple of fragments of the url or title and off it goes and finds it, quick.)
Furthermore, two separate boxes are the best of both worlds, both awesomebar and quick (ctrl+k)access to your preferred search engine.
If I've understood what you're saying, I believe this was fixed in Firefox 33: https://msujaws.wordpress.com/2014/08/01/faster-and-snappier...
As for the general complaint about Firefox's address bar: I find it to be vastly superior to Chrome's at finding sites I've visited before. I can type in fragments of URLs and/or page titles (even partial words) and get matches immediately in a way that Chrome (and Safari) can't compete with.
For years I wondered why the other browsers were so much worse at this. Then somebody pointed out to me that, for the case of Chrome, Google would much prefer you find a page via Google search than via your browser history...
To be fair, much of the huffing and puffing "I'm leaving Firefox...Chrome is so much better!" was based upon the same sort of rhetoric. Early on Chrome didn't even have extensions, much less bloated monstrosities like Ad Block Plus and Firebug (don't get me wrong -- they both are fantastic, but most don't realize how incredibly onerous they are). So those people kicked Firefox to the curb and talked about how grand everything was with Chrome. Now that Chrome has an ecosystem, they put themselves in the same situation again.
Now you can have HUNDREDS of tabs (in firefox's nice tab groups, of course) and they'll only stay open / in-memory for a configurable amount of time after you stop using them.
Keeps memory utilization tight. I'm currently south of 500MB utilization with hundreds of tabs open and lots of extensions: Disconnect Search, DownThemAll, FoxyProxy, Greasemonkey, HTTPS Everywhere, Imagus, Stylish and uBlock
Do you think the user cares? Firefox is the one who opened themselves up to get abused by. (Same things happened on Windows, you'll get a machine full of crapware if you install popular apps. OSX has a curated app store. Look at the difference on an average windows and OSX machine.)
Some solutions instead of blaming the user:
* Name & shame poorly-performing plugins in the interface. (OSX does this with "apps using significant power" in the battery meter)
* Have a plugin speed rating in the store
* Have performance requirements for plugins (users will report usage data, you have X seconds to startup, if you average higher you will be reviwed/yanked.)
Asking users to not install extensions when extensibility is one of your selling points is not a good idea. Fix how they interact with the browser.
I think people overstate Chrome's memory usage as a factor of performance; IME it's still less than FF in total most times, and largely that memory cost doesn't seem to come with the performance impact of FF's because of the way Chrome handles processes.
On my Win8.1 system at the moment, Chrome uses about 400mb of RAM. Firefox routinely ballooned up to a full 1GB or more. Even on FreeBSD, it was not at all unheard of to glance at top and find FF consuming as much as 1.4GB.
The idea of switching back to FF because of Chrome's memory consumption seems frankly laughable to me. FF's memory leakage is infamous, and literally goes clear back to FF Beta, and still hasn't been fixed a decade on.
And since Opera is a joke now, and Safari a toy, and there being zero real viable alternatives, that means Chrome, for good or ill.
I'd really appreciate it if they'd stop telling me what I'm allowed to download though. At least they disabled the autodelete function.
Safari tends to get sand kicked in its face a lot when people talk about browsers, but it's actually the one I keep finding myself coming back to. I got frustrated recently by Safari's JS performance on certain web sites (ones with badly written JS web chat clients, I think, but never mind) and switched to Firefox 36 for a few weeks. On both machines I used it on it would just... get slower over time, and not a lot of time to boot: about 24-48 hours. And I rarely have more than a dozen tabs open at once, and that's on the high end.
If I was going to knock Safari for anything -- other than the JS issues -- it's that it's got much weaker extension support than Chrome or Firefox. But the only extensions I really use are Instapaper and 1Password. (I'm one of the weirdos who doesn't use Adblock Plus; instead, I've just uninstalled Flash, and if I want to use a web site that absolutely requires it I'll hop into Chrome for that.) I like the way it handles tabs, most versions are pretty stable, and the linked list sidebar -- where it pulls out links from your Twitter feed -- can be surprisingly useful.
I absolutely agree that on MacOS, it's a solid option. The OS X version is a very good browser, and not to be dismissed.
The Windows version however was always an also ran, a weird proof-of-concept release more than anything. It was never seriously marketed, it made ludicrous design decisions, wouldn't play ball with the OS, and has since been more or less completely abandoned. You have to go digging just to find it, and it hasn't been updated since Snow Leopard.
Finally tried Safari and have not looked back. It is a breeze to use, and I in particular love the shortcut to read articles later. Memory footprint is much lighter, and even with 10+ tabs, I've noticed it doesn't eat a lot of battery.
Also agreed with your point about the extensions. I have the usual suspects like Adblock and Ghostery installed, along with LastPass, but Safari's extensions leave a lot to be desired.
I could go on ...
I left Chrome open overnight and by the time I came back it was pegging the CPU at 100%. No extensions, no nothing. Seriously Google?
I also haven't seen any significant memory leaks in the last year or two.
Sad to say, but 1.4 G is not uncommmon (or even unreasonable) for any browser these days, mostly due not to the browser itself, but the resources consumed by the individual web sites.
I know AdBlock+ is a very popular, common, RAM-hungry extension
http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
But when you have youtube, gmail, and other web applications open, memory usage tends to go nuts. I've been told that it's technically impossible for a web application to have a memory leak, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
I wrote a slightly-more-than-basic Angular.js app and it leaks like crazy up to the point that the Chrome tab will crash.
If you're having serious ram problems in Chrome though, Shift-ESC is your friend. Shows you what exactly is consuming RAM (in the event you didn't already know)
Within the last three months.
Personally, I've also found that, despite Firefox's distinction as the browser to popularize the idea of extensions, it now tends to lag in that department. Sure, you can get Adblock, but the stuff available on Chrome tends to be much more diverse these days. Finally, it's still not multi-process (though it's finally getting there.) [2]
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_activity.cgi?id=636564 [2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Roadmap
In fact, Nightly now is by default.
EDIT: Ok, downvote me all you want but it's a fact, not opinion. I'd give FF another shot once it's in stable but as it is now I'm not going to waste my time playing on a nightly build.
Chrome is a much newer browser. At the time Chrome was released, it was the only browser with this design, because it's much easier to do when starting from scratch. Chrome benefited greatly simply from observing the design decisions of Firefox, IE, etc. that had had several years to play out by that point.
In ten years (assuming Chrome is still around then), it will also have similarly antiquated design decisions that make sense to us now, but will be frustrating and obsolescent a decade from now. It doesn't mean that Chrome won't be able to keep up at all with these changes eventually; it just means that it's not great to compare a brand-new browser with one that's been around (and used!)[0] for a long time.
Electrolysis (the name for the project) took much longer in Firefox because they had to essentially retrofit an existing browser that hadn't been designed this way from the start.
[0] If Firefox hadn't had significant market share, it could have made this change much more rapidly without fear of breaking things for existing users. But of course, making sure the browser remains stable for its millions of users is a top priority as well, alongside developing these new features.
> "In ten years (assuming Chrome is still around then), it will also have similarly antiquated design decisions that make sense to us now,"
You can't say that with any certainty whatsoever maybe Chrome will fair better than FF has or maybe we will see a re-write of Chrome's core to deal with future changes.
As I said elsewhere in this thread I will use the browser I deem best at the current point in time. Right now, for me, that browser is Chrome (I couldn't care less which browser has been around longer).
As for "it just means that it's not great to compare a brand-new browser with one that's been around (and used!)[0] for a long time" this is so wrong.... of course I can compare the two, they both do the same thing at the end of the day (provide a portal to the internet). When FF came out (and in it's heyday) no one said "You can't compare FF to IE, FF is a brand new browser" No, instead they/we all switched to FF because it was BETTER. Now, at least IMHO, Chrome is BETTER and so I've switched again. If that changes I will switch yet again.
Not true. Beta 1 (and subsequent releases) of Internet Explorer 8 [1] included process isolation [2][3][4] before Google released the first public beta of Chrome on 2 September 2008 [5].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8#Release_his...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8#Performance...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_isolation#Web_browsers
[4] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftIE8AndGoogleChromePro...
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#Public_release
So if one tab hangs (e.g. WebGL demo) then still the whole Firefox is slow as hell. Firefox should finally spawn child processes for every other tab with less permissions ("sandbox" technique) so that if one tab hangs or crashes every other tab and the UI still is responsive. It seems we have to wait for Rust based Servo engine to get that feature - but that would also rescue us from XUL based UI (FirefoxOS already has an HTML5 based UI).
Not true. Each plugin module gets its own plugin container. Flash instances share a separate plugin-container from the one shared by Acrobat instances.
It's worth noting that multi-process is why Chrome has a much higher memory footprint than Firefox these days for users running several tabs. Firefox pulls out plugins (Flash, etc) to a separate process so when they crash, they don't take out the browser. It will still cause the browser to pause for a few seconds as it waits to be sure Flash is hung up before asking you to stop the plugin.
https://i.imgur.com/yffoLQY.jpg
Take a large image like this, first off it loads full size instead of scaled, and when you click teh magnifying glass to scale it, you still have to scroll to see the whole thing
The post-crash session restore seems to work well for me; and luckily it's not a frequent occurrence.
If any other company did those sorts of things in persisting pieces of their software all over the OS without easy removal for non-technical users, people would be calling it malware or spyware.
I would think it just uninstalls. Are you claiming otherwise? I'd love to try and reproduce what your claims are (fact check).
It seems to me that the focus on security by isolating every webpage from each other went to far recently. When I started with Chrome I think they used to limit the maximum amount of render processes much more. Of course if there was a serious security hole in e.g. webkit/blink then one tab could have stolen data from another tab more easily. But it consumed much less memory
Of course, maybe the grass is always greener on the other side. I left chrome a few years ago because I had an linux install where any non-trivial js would cause the computer to lock up.
I'm waiting for someone to encorporate vim bindings, umatrix, and webkit into a package... I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't use it.
Until FF get's much faster or better devtools than chrome I'm not interested. Not to mention how often does a Chrome extension hit the front page of HN vs a FF one?
Don't get me wrong, I don't love Chrome unconditionally (the RAM usage is crazy but so is FF) but I still think it's the better of the two. Just my two cents...
Edit: Oh now I remember why I wrote off:
> Firefox Developer Edition replaces the Aurora channel in the Firefox Release Process.
> By using the Developer Edition, you gain access to tools and platform features at least 12 weeks before they reach the main Firefox release channel.
They just fucking renamed their alpha channel to "Firefox Developer Edition"....
At the end of the day I use the browser that allows me to do my job the fastest and more efficient. As of 2015-02-13 that browser is Chrome. That could change tomorrow but there would have to be a compelling reason and I have yet to find one.
You can switch profiles and even have different profiles active in different Chrome windows, without restarting Chrome.
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en
(I am not saying this makes it all better, trying to use more than one Google account is a _mess_ no matter what. But that it's one workaround I discovered recently, which has been lessening the pain somewhat)
They help me to separate my work and personal everything. Not just email, but my tabs, bookmarks, saved passwords, extensions, etc.
On Firefox I click the user icon, choose my work account and my personal account loads.
On Chrome I click the user icon, choose my personal account and my work account loads.
It's so fucking frustrating. I've cleared cookies, cache and history completely and the problem just comes back later that day.