Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I’m done with Chrome

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 876 posts

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#101

Post by abecedarius »

ausjke wrote: post #71

Just watched youtube on the newest chrome it immediately brought my PC to a near-freeze status with 2GB swapped to disk, unusable. Opened firefox and it worked smoothly. This started to occur recently, combining with the fact that each chrome tab needs about 120MB memory along, yes it is about time to be back to firefox

Related: the morning Chrome updated itself to 69, it went into spinny-beach-ball hell (I had a zillion tabs open, which hadn't been too many before). This mattered because I had a plane to catch, and info on my trip to review and save. It wasn't immediately obvious why it was suddenly unusable, the first workarounds I tried didn't help, and every step of trying things took a long time. (E.g. bookmark all tabs, close the window, and restart: now you're just back seeing the same zillion tabs, where in previous versions with my setup this would come back with an empty window.)

OK, things change and we're kind of stuck going along for the sake of security updates, but going near-unusable at an important moment without obvious warning is a problem. (I'm looking at Firefox and Brave now too.)

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#102

Post by mehrdadn »

colemickens wrote: post #89
mehrdadn wrote: post #32

For now at least, there's this escape hatch: chrome://flags/#account-consistency Edit: Some are saying this doesn't work on Chrome 69. :(

Maybe they've revised the flag, but the flag did not disable the feature as much as the text might lead you to believe. My comment from a couple weeks ago... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17943524

Thanks for letting me know! For some reason I don't see that on my toolbar, though I haven't tried creating a new profile. I'm on Chrome 68 on Windows, if that might explain anything?

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#103

Post by felipelemos »

Twirrim wrote: post #58
heartbreak wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feature doesn’t enable sync. That’s something that members of the Chrome team have been patiently trying to explain to Matthew Green on Twitter for several days now. [0] https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1043505744144826369?s=21

It doesn't for _now_. Which is no small part of his point. The next step is to automatically turn on sync etc, which is an easier step now people will start to be used to the idea they're automatically signed in to stuff in Chrome. The main thrust though, is that this doesn't actually solve anything for end users that the Google Chrome team says it does. There appears to be absolutely no benefit in turning this on.

"We had to enable the sync by default because it was causing confusion with people that are already signed in and are expecting to have all their info in sync".

It's not hard to imagine that this could be their reasoning around the change in the future.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#104

Post by ferongr »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #10

Firefox is a truly fantastic browser now. I've been using it again for about 2 years and haven't regretted it at all. There have been a couple of weird feature hiccups but generally Mozilla seems to get things right.

>Firefox is a truly fantastic browser now

I've been seeing people repeat that for the past 5 years. It turns out to be false though.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#105

Post by the_duke »

mikedilger wrote: post #74

I switched to firefox (linux) several years ago for my main browser and I couldn't be happer. I also run chromium when some webpage isn't working in firefox (rare) or when I need to use my companies LastPass account (I avoid LastPass in firefox because that plugin sucks balls), but I never use chromium for google services. I run all google services in a "google" multi-account container in firefox.

Were you taking about the old plugin pre webextensions?

Because I haven't noticed any difference between Chrome and FF extensions now.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#106

Post by nostrademons »

lucb1e wrote: post #5
aphextron wrote: post #2

So I wanted to drop Chrome a while ago, and looked at Chromium. Apparently using the "no sync" version you can no longer even log into Gmail (or any other Google service) on the web. That was definitely the last straw for me losing trust in Google, but there's just no good alternative. I'm not sure where to go from here because it seems pointless to even use Chromium if I can't remove Google from it and still be able…

If you're really set on a Chrome-like browser, there's ungoogled chromium. Otherwise, I guess Firefox is the only truly free choice at this point, and even that includes DRM to be able to cope with sites like Netflix. Edit: actually, there should be more browsers that I don't know about because I haven't really looked around anymore since choosing Firefox a decade ago. Is anything as well-supported (in terms of prope…

Brave and Vivaldi are both based on Chromium and have packaged, non-Google distributions.

I'm posting this comment on Brave, having switched over last week for most of my personal browsing. Generally like it a lot; there are a couple warts (it won't open S3 URLs from the AWS web interface, for example), but it does most of what I need in a browser.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#109

Post by 0xmohit »

reaperducer wrote: post #95
inferiorhuman wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you should ditch Gmail instead?

Maybe you should ditch Gmail instead? I'm thinking about doing that. The single reason I started with GMail was because at the time, it had the best spam filter in the industry. But that was years ago. Has everyone else caught up? Is there another option with equally good spam filtering?

It appears that GMail addresses attract more spam.

IMO, options like ProtonMail are much better. A service that isn't free but doesn't exploit users in order to make $$ ought to be a better option.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#110

Post by shawnz »

Twirrim wrote: post #58
heartbreak wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feature doesn’t enable sync. That’s something that members of the Chrome team have been patiently trying to explain to Matthew Green on Twitter for several days now. [0] https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1043505744144826369?s=21

It doesn't for _now_. Which is no small part of his point. The next step is to automatically turn on sync etc, which is an easier step now people will start to be used to the idea they're automatically signed in to stuff in Chrome. The main thrust though, is that this doesn't actually solve anything for end users that the Google Chrome team says it does. There appears to be absolutely no benefit in turning this on.

> The main thrust though, is that this doesn't actually solve anything for end users that the Google Chrome team says it does.

Yes it does, it solves the exact problem described right in the article. Before this change, there would be a seperate log-in process for Chrome versus every other google service (which normally all share your current login status). Now, your login status is shared between every google service including Chrome, as a layperson would expect. Previously people who wanted to be logged into Chrome AND other google services would have to complete the login process twice which could be confusing for novice users.

Post reply on HN