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Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

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Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#351
post #7

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.

> I don't want my browser linked with my Google account. 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.

> https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/Home/chromium-se...

Visiting a page on a creep's domain to find out about its creepiness seems like a bad idea.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#352
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

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.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#353
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had always had a profile.. Chrome just made it more visible so that you knew about Guest mode and stuff.. Of course deleting your user profile deleted all of that profile's data

Your condescension is on point, but your reading comprehension could use some work: what I deleted was not my browser profile (which turns out to be undeleteable, and crashy), but my bookmarks that have been stored in my Google account in the cloud for years. Previously the browser-level profile (if indeed it existed) was invisible to me so it never bothered me. Also unclear why a "guest mode" needs to be different t…

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/6130773?hl=en

* Guest mode: A user in Guest mode does not leave any browsing history or cookies on the computer. In addition, they can't see or modify the computer owner's Chrome profile.

* Incognito mode: You don't leave browsing history and cookies on your computer, but you can still see your existing history, bookmarks, passwords, Autofill data, and other Chrome settings.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 includ…

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.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#355
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ctrl-w kills a tab. Makes that kind of thing completely painless.

As does middle-click, which is super-handy.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#356
This article prompted me to dust off Firefox to try it out again. Right away I notice a nice improvement over Safari- Firefox seems willing to cache a page for "back button" behavior longer than Safari. I always hate when sites fail to set their cache-control to something reasonable (Reddit is especially bad about this). So you click a link, read it for 5 seconds then go back- bam, full (slow) page reload. Firefox instantly fetches the page from local cache without hitting the server again. I really like this.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'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.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#359
post #19

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 (ret…

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. 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,…

This image loaded totally fine for me. Chrome 40 on OS X 10.8.

Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox

#360
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 includ…

> It also has more and better extensions for helping with multiple tabs. Exactly. Tree Style Tab being the biggest reason I've never switched to Chrome.

+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.

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