We Need Chrome No More • Hacker News Board

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#161

Post by tracker1 » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 5:52 PM UTC

mapgrep wrote: post #7

I enjoyed this post, but I take issue with the idea that Chrome was initially adopted, or served, "to break the Web free from corporate greed." Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today. Luckily…

Beyond even that, Firefox was already stripping market share away from IE at the time. Around 2010 or so it was really a 3-way split, which was really nice in terms of getting a lot of things worked out between the three (relatively speaking). A lot of people would have migrated away from IE, it just would have been more Firefox, less Chrome.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#162

Post by _ea1k » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 5:53 PM UTC

laumars wrote: post #80

perlgeek wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. Google invented V8 (the javascript engine), with some pretty decent optimizations and a well-working JIT on i386/amd64 platforms. At the time when chromium came out, it handled some JS-heavy applications very nicely that Firefox struggled w…

As you alluded to at the start of your post, Chromes speed improvements were more technical than it was due to a lack of bloat. In fact Chrome consumed more memory than FF did at that time and that was down to it being multi-processed (ie one heavy page wouldn’t slow down the rest of the application in other tabs) but that came at a cost in terms of RAM used. Obviously the v8 stuff also made a massive difference too.

Honestly, I hate the term "bloat". Most of the times when I've seen bloat blamed, the real cause has been a bad algorithm somewhere. Just as was the case with Chrome, its often the case that using more RAM (and maybe more "bloat") can make things faster.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#163

Post by ionised » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 5:53 PM UTC

shoulderfake wrote: post #100

Whenever Firefox comes out with a new version I try to use it for a week and realize it just doesn't perform as well as Chrome. Theres always one or two sites like twitch where it just LAGS to death whereas in Chrome its smooth as butter. At this point I just go back to it. Sigh...

Are you using mostly Google pages or services? That might explain why Firefox runs worse.

Anecdotally, of the three browsers I have on my dev machine Chrome is the biggest resource hog.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#164

Post by AsyncAwait » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 5:54 PM UTC

tzakrajs wrote: post #116

neogodless wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What OS, hardware and video platform(s)? I haven't had any issues with Desktop Firefox on Windows 10 on any of my Core i7 machines, when watching YouTube/Vimeo. Even my old dual-core budget Inspiron 3137 laptop works for YouTube and Firefox as well as Pandora/Firefox/bluetooth audio blasting. (It does like to consume RAM as if it was running SQL Server though.)

Also having a good time with Firefox on macOS running on an early 2018 MacBook Pro. It has fully replaced my Chrome use at work.

Same here on Arch Linux for me.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#165

Post by tracker1 » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 5:55 PM UTC

leftyted wrote: post #35

ethelward wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical Among the tech crowd, probably. For the remaining 99.99% of users, absolutely not. Chrome's appeal came from the pervasive advertisement campaigns, from the bundling strategy with other pieces of software, for the pre-installation on new computers or from the ads on Google SEarch homepage.

Chrome's main appeal was that it was much faster than firefox and IE. At everything. I had no technical knowledge when chrome came out, was using firefox, tried chrome, never looked back. It's not really possible to separate out the effects of advertising from the effects of the product actually being better. Maybe I installed chrome because I saw an ad, but I stopped using firefox because it was clear that chrome wa…

For me it was a nice UX that kept me on chrome... the performance was really nice too. There was some chrome in IE extension iirc that I pushed for around 2010, as one of our SPA applications tended to really bloat in IE7-8, and worked fine in chrome and ff. (Note this was an actual application, not a website)

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#166

Post by quacked » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

It's bizarre to see the number of comments on this thread adamantly insisting that Chrome became and stayed popular because of an ad campaign. I was a high school student when Chrome was released. I saw an ad for it, downloaded it, and found that it was much faster and much cleaner-looking that Firefox, so I stayed with it.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#167

Post by bbb91 » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

Profiles are the only thing stopping me moving to Firefox right now. They're so easy to use on Chrome.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#168

Post by closetohome » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

lxe wrote: post #66

> Ten years ago, we needed Google Chrome to break the Web free from corporate greed Firefox already did this. We needed Chrome because Firefox lagged behind in performance and was a memory hog.

Oh right, that's why I switched to Chrome. At the time Firefox had that horrid memory leak that would consume gigs of RAM if you left a tab open long enough.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#169

Post by i_am_proteus » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 5:59 PM UTC

Passthepeas wrote: post #12

mapgrep wrote: post #7

I enjoyed this post, but I take issue with the idea that Chrome was initially adopted, or served, "to break the Web free from corporate greed." Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today. Luckily…

In my experience I can't stream video on firefox without the video freezing within the first 5 minutes, and it feels clunky even with non video webpages. I really hate google the company, and I'd love to stop using their software, but so far I have yet to see a browser that even comes close to chrome.

I am able to stream video on Firefox on Windows, Linux, and Mac, including on a computer with a 2nd-gen i3 with 4GB RAM. I suspect there may be something besides Firefox at fault for your issue.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#170

Post by AsyncAwait » Wed, Feb 27, 2019, 5:59 PM UTC

obtaniumstool wrote: post #156

TheRealPomax wrote: post #106

The problem with these articles is that the recommendation always ends up just preaching to the choir: people who already switched away from Chrome nod in appreciation, but people who haven't switched literally get nothing out of these posts to convince them to switch to what is basically the same application made by a different company, with completely different conventions on where everything is, without any concre…

Agreed. Aside from some vague intimations that Google is using Chrome as a business tool, it really didn't present much of an argument to switch to something else. Furthermore I'd argue that if the author hasn't used Chrome since 2014, he's not well positioned to comment on its usability today.

> Agreed. Aside from some vague intimations that Google is using Chrome as a business tool

Not sure about 'vague', they're using non-standard APIs to advantage their browser accross Google products, implemented a forced Chrome login and are planning to remove ad blocking APIs, the last one being the most clear case of Chrome being used to support their primary source of revenue.