And people keep asking why I prefer Firefox
This is just another reason to add to the pile
This is the thing about Chrome and the whole Chromium based ecosystem. Why on earth would anyone use a browser from an Ad company.
By the way. They are planning on putting it in Android apps too. So there one gets little choice. A non-starter like Apple where you cannot even load your own apps and app stores or Android from an Ad company where you can with effort at least choose your own software and even image your own OS.
@Gormadt They say Firefox is slow. Because in the past it used to, especially with the old engine and when Chrome was new, that’s true. But nowadays it does not matter anymore and the speed differences are negligible. If that is the only reason to not use Firefox, then people should reevaluate their decision.
Then there is the argument that people do not like Mozilla. But they like Google more? Even if you use a Chromium based browser by a different company, you give more power to Google this way, as the engine becomes a bigger part of the web. Am I crazy for thinking that?
I use Firefox since version 1 as my default. Occasionally I switched to a different browser, but always came back to good ol’ Firefox.
Firefox has been slower to startup for a long time. Maybe a few seconds slower compared to Chrome. But it has always made up for it in it’s memory usage. The more tabs you open, the worse Chrome gets.
@NaoPb Firefox starts in 2 seconds total for me on my 10 years old CPU, even with many plugins installed. While there are constantly 6 or more tabs open, most are not loaded in when starting Firefox, unless I click the tab itself. And opening a new private window is almost instant. I even use Firefox for reading PDFs, instead installing a dedicated application, because it is fast loading and does the job. All in all, it’s probably not far away from Chrome in starting up Firefox. And it probably isn’t that important, because the browser is open all the time for me.
As for the memory usage, I always thought Firefox is being bad here. Can’t imagine Chrome being worse. Are people happy with that?
I remember Chrome starting nearly instantly. But that could be that it’s doing some preloading. I haven’t used Chrome in years though. 2 seconds for Firefox startup sounds about right yes.
As for memory, I wouldn’t say Firefox is great. But I often have a lot of tabs open at once while I am researching some things and Firefox is just rock solid for me. It has had some memory leaks in the past but they seem to be mostly gone now. You’d probably find browsers that use less memory but I dare to question if they would use less memory than Firefox in my usecase.
In an unrelated note I am curious which modern browser (in Linux) uses the fewest amount of memory.
@NaoPb Hi, I just wanted report that the startup of Firefox is almost instant. I have a new modern PC build with a modern and fast M2 SSD and took the exact same Firefox profile over. Now running Firefox starts basically instant. The tabs are not loaded in however, so obviously the webpages would start loading once clicking the tab. But Firefox itself is now instant operation for me.
You are probably right. My memories are of using Firefox on a PC with a mechanical hard drive. Back then Chrome seemed to have the upper hand. But these days Firefox loads instantly when you have an SSD. So yes, please ignore my earlier argument.
Hope other browser developers realize chromium is a ticking time bomb. I’ve used firefox for over 15 years and see no reason to change with the current landscape of browsers being so reliant on google .
Seemingly my Google pixel phone has stopped connecting to the Internet with other browsers. So I’m stuck using Google Chrome on it. 😠
I have a pixel 5a and haven’t had that problem, currently using Fennec (firefox fork).
I’ve used firefox for over 15 years and see no reason to change
Okay, but change to what then? All the other options are just Chrome, Safari, and Firefox again.
Ungoogle-Chromium, Brave, Vivaldi, Librewolf, anything that isn’t paid by Google. That they are still based on Chrome or Firefox doesn’t really matter, since they remove the undesirable parts of them.
