Google today reached the final milestone in a browser-extension transition that has been years in the making, all remaining Manifest V2 extensions were removed from the Chrome Web Store.
I switched to Chrome back then because it ran tabs in separate processes. A tab crashing in Firefox would take the whole browser down.
The final straw for me was the plugins. Flash, Java, Acrobat, etc. Chrome kept them up to date for you. Firefox made you just through hoops, which eventually lead to a rogue site injecting crap onto my machine which took me a day to clean up. Plugins are pretty much dead now, but back then you needed them for half the web to work.
Chrome really was a great browser back then (and MS were still in the “what’s wrong with Internet Explorer?” era), and it’s a shame that they’re now working so hard to fuck it up again.
Chrome did a bunch of things absolutely wonderfully in the beginning. Fast JavaScript engine, removed title bar (tabs on top), simple settings page, sandboxed tabs, and they made some of the functionality of the most popular Firefox extensions the default (such as the downloads bar, instead of a separate window).
It was basically a pre-modded Firefox, but supercharged. Now it’s corporate slop.
I think it was still called Phoenix when I originally dropped it. Before it got renamed Firefox. Came back around last year after adblock stuff in chrome finally chased me away.
nobody ever seems to detail what kinda bloat they mean when they say that, i don’t think they actually thought about it that deeply. nobody complains about anything specific like XUL support, for example.
In my experience, there was a period when Firefox crashed all over the place, especially under heavy load. Tabs shared the same process back then, one tab could take down whole the browser session when crashed. I vividly remember how it felt so silky when i switched to chrome. Now I am back to Firefox since 3 years. Firefox is the sexier now with all the shiny addons
Yeah Firefox was kind of a hog around 2013. I have a netbook that I’ve kept around since like 2014 and I remember when I first got it, it couldn’t really run Firefox. Firefox would freeze up and crash. Funily enough today Firefox runs better on that 2014 netbook than chrome does.
I also had a high end gaming PC at the time and Firefox always ran fine as long as you had the reaources to run it.
It was back before enshittification of the internet, when things were better. Was just big and clunky, chrome came along and ran very fast, until last few years, they swapped places.
What’s “bloated” about Firefox?
I switched to Chrome back then because it ran tabs in separate processes. A tab crashing in Firefox would take the whole browser down.
The final straw for me was the plugins. Flash, Java, Acrobat, etc. Chrome kept them up to date for you. Firefox made you just through hoops, which eventually lead to a rogue site injecting crap onto my machine which took me a day to clean up. Plugins are pretty much dead now, but back then you needed them for half the web to work.
Chrome really was a great browser back then (and MS were still in the “what’s wrong with Internet Explorer?” era), and it’s a shame that they’re now working so hard to fuck it up again.
Chrome did a bunch of things absolutely wonderfully in the beginning. Fast JavaScript engine, removed title bar (tabs on top), simple settings page, sandboxed tabs, and they made some of the functionality of the most popular Firefox extensions the default (such as the downloads bar, instead of a separate window).
It was basically a pre-modded Firefox, but supercharged. Now it’s corporate slop.
that’s how I remember switching to chrome in the 00s. it had become unstable.
Distant past. Few of us recall.
I think it was still called Phoenix when I originally dropped it. Before it got renamed Firefox. Came back around last year after adblock stuff in chrome finally chased me away.
I remember! 2.0 to 3.0 switch wherethe GUI slowed down dramatically. 2.0 felt like driving a sports-car.
nobody ever seems to detail what kinda bloat they mean when they say that, i don’t think they actually thought about it that deeply. nobody complains about anything specific like XUL support, for example.
In my experience, there was a period when Firefox crashed all over the place, especially under heavy load. Tabs shared the same process back then, one tab could take down whole the browser session when crashed. I vividly remember how it felt so silky when i switched to chrome. Now I am back to Firefox since 3 years. Firefox is the sexier now with all the shiny addons
Maybe in like Firefox 4 days
Yeah Firefox was kind of a hog around 2013. I have a netbook that I’ve kept around since like 2014 and I remember when I first got it, it couldn’t really run Firefox. Firefox would freeze up and crash. Funily enough today Firefox runs better on that 2014 netbook than chrome does.
I also had a high end gaming PC at the time and Firefox always ran fine as long as you had the reaources to run it.
Well, that was 2011, so…
I guess right before Firefox Quantum?
It was back before enshittification of the internet, when things were better. Was just big and clunky, chrome came along and ran very fast, until last few years, they swapped places.
And Google was still ‘nice’.
Microsoft, at least in my lifetime, invented the ‘embrace, extend, extinguish’ method, but google was certainly taking notes.
One of the many little compromises.