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We Need Chrome No More

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Re: We Need Chrome No More

#271

Post by mbesto »

Jldevictoria wrote: post #221
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…

I gave Firefox a solid test last year (about 3 months of dedicated use at work + home) and I ended up coming back to Chrome. There are some really great things about Firefox. It has gotten so much better and faster than it was, but Chrome still struggles less with troublesome websites, and seems to load all pages faster overall. I'm keeping my eye on Firefox, but Chrome still gets my business for now.

Same here - made a switch and switched back quickly after.

1. Compatibility - random sites would just break...I reckon 15% of the time

2. Battery life - FF destroyed my battery life. To the tune of 8 hours on Chrome vs like 2 on FF.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#273

Post by Yoric »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #228
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…

I remember using Firefox in the pre 1.0 days. It took slightly longer to launch than IE, but since it had tabs, I didn't care, because I wasn't opening a new instances constantly.

Fwiw, IE was pre-launched with Windows. That was the secret behind its (often) fast startup.

Not doing the same in Firefox was a conscious design decision by the Firefox team, which didn't want to hoard the memory when Firefox wasn't in use.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#274

Post by groestl »

Aser wrote: post #259
VBprogrammer wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised there aren't more people on here who moved to chome for the dev tools. That is what moved me over there. Firebug was great in it's day but at some point Chrome's dev tools just became too much better to make staying on Firefox possible.

I'm not a professional web developer, but in the experience I've had building a couple of JS heavy sites, I've actually found the Edge developer tools to be the best. If there's one thing microsoft knows how to do well, it's build developer tools.

> If there's one thing microsoft knows how to do well, it's build developer tools.

This is probably very subjective, but I can absolutely not relate to that.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#275

Post by leftyted »

a1369209993 wrote: post #136
leftyted wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The fact that you're emphasizing ads over the very real performance advantages just means you've got an axe to grind. Alternatively, it could mean that, like me, they had NoScript installed when Chrome came out[0], making Firefox genuinely faster by dint of brute do-less-stuff-ism. 0: or when we heard about it anyway.

I'm not sure why so many HN posters feel the need to boast about not executing JavaScript.

All that means is that you've opted out of the web that the rest of the world is using. Good for you. But people who have disabled JS make up such a small porportion of web users (~.2% of pageviews) that your experience is pretty much irrelevant to the question of general browser trends.

I'd also bet that Chrome was faster at painting pages than Firefox, so it wasn't just a JS engine advantge.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#276

Post by Yoric »

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…

While Chrome was definitely very good, it did benefit from a huge worldwide marketing campaign, even without counting omnipresent ads on Google properties, or tech evangelism.

All this at a time when Mozilla was spending lots of time trying to come up with a good Firefox 4.0, and was about to bet the farm on Firefox OS (and lose).

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#277

Post by callahad »

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…

> Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time

IE8 had a public release with process-per-tab before Chrome debuted.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#278

Post by drewmol »

ethelward wrote: post #14
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…

> 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.

>For the remaining 99.99% of users, absolutely not. Chrome's appeal came from...

Bingo! Thank you for pointing this out. For those younger readers, Chrome's penetration was forceful and uninvited. A browser add-on/search hijacker/ persistant spyware known as Google Toolbar was it's predecessor project from Google. It was an epidemic across the PC landscape for half a decade and all those infected machines became Chromes initial foothold. There's plenty of positives from the project, but for Chrome to achieve browser monopoly status, user consent sure did seem to get sacrificed.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#279

Post by Phrodo_00 »

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…

Yeah, before Chrome became popular, Firefox had close to 50% marketshare, and Firefox is a lot farther away from your typical corp than Chrome.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#280

Post by laumars »

_ea1k wrote: post #162
laumars wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, i agree. And very succinctly put too.
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