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View Poll Results: Which is better, Chromium or Firefox?
It's entirely feasible that Chrome for Linux could be abandoned and it may eventually be entirely be up to Linux distributions to just distribute or build chromium - as they do anyway. (Linux port has little value these days in my opinion.)
It looks like Firefox is losing users rapidly. It becomes worse and worse, adds garbage functionality, becomes slower and slower and probably less stable. And still the browser uses only one CPU core to handle everything while Chrome is more lightweight and uses all cores available. People complain a lot that Firefox breaks options with almost every update because thay always add, change and remove something and updates are frequent. And I've been Firefox dude for a lot of time now, I started to use it when Firefox 2 was around I believe. Last years it's been constant war of me against Firefox to make it look and work as older versions. And as time goes by this was becomes more and more difficult.
I wonder why I didn't think about it earlier, but several days ago I decided to remove Firefox from my system and completely switch to Chrome. And it's great! I won't explain all good experience I have with Chrome web surfing (it's unnecessary) but what I have to say is that this switch should've been done since Firefox 4 came out.
Look at the URL above, click down the months and see how Firefox loses people with every month passes (the older the month, the more users it had). The browser is going off stage.
Well, you're right of course stating that Firefox became more and more bloated over the years, but isn't that so with about every software on hand? I've been using Firefox for years now (and before that Netscape,remember?) and I still like it even if I think they should do away with all the "extra stuff". Tried chrome several times now (when I am scratching my head over Firefox) but still can't make up my mind.
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Distribution: Debian Sid AMD64, Raspbian Wheezy, various VMs
Posts: 7,680
Rep:
Indeed, I have noticed some things I don't like about Firefox but the things I like far outweigh them and almost everything I don't like is present in Chrom[e|ium].
I am amused by the people who say "The Firefox interface is getting all annoying like Google Chrome. So, I use Google Chrome." when, with a couple of selections, things like the menu bar can be had in Firefox but not Chrome. Not a dig at anybody here, by the way, just a general observation that I'd rather have Firefox with its faults than use a browser with only the faults*.
... several days ago I decided to remove Firefox from my system and completely switch to Chrome.
I doubt that I am unique, but I don't find that any single browser will run with every web site that I need to use. I have Chromium, Firefox, and Opera running on each of two Ubuntu machines, and Iceweasel and Opera on a Debian machine. I have Chromium set as the default under Ubuntu, but it won't even start on the Debian machine (not Debian's fault -- the machine is so old it does not have an SSE2 instruction capability, which Chromium now requires). As to site compatibility, the most common problem with Chromium is that some links on some sites are often dead -- not because the linked site is gone; I just get no response from the link. When I use another browser at the same site, the link works normally. Firefox sometimes renders a site so poorly that the site is unusable. Opera mostly works OK, but it hasn't had an update in years. Perhaps it has been abandoned in favor of Vivaldi development.
My basic point is that I don't see how anyone gets along with just one browser.
Last edited by flshope; 11-08-2015 at 07:02 AM.
Reason: Change 'Firefox' to 'Iceweasel' for Debian machine
I've used Chromium for about two weeks to a month after being a heavy Firefox/Iceweasel user since forever. Besides not having NoScript*, after I install the plugins I care about (ublock origin & vimfx/vimium) there's very little difference between the two. I really cannot tell the difference in just using them to do web things besides the slightly different window chrome**.
* I don't care deeply about NoScript in general, but it's instructive to see what happens when you don't run javascript by default: better perf, some stuff breaks and others don't.
I've used Chromium for about two weeks to a month after being a heavy Firefox/Iceweasel user since forever. Besides not having NoScript*, after I install the plugins I care about (ublock origin & vimfx/vimium) there's very little difference between the two. I really cannot tell the difference in just using them to do web things besides the slightly different window chrome**.
* I don't care deeply about NoScript in general, but it's instructive to see what happens when you don't run javascript by default: better perf, some stuff breaks and others don't.
I like them both, but I use mostly Firefox (Iceweasel). I use Firefox for general stuff (checking my email, reading news, etc), and it's where I have my bookmarks.
One Firefox feature I really like is the sync function, that allows me to sync my bookmarks and settings on all my devices. It would be nice to sync my passwords too, but I don't think it's safe to have them somewhere around "in the cloud" (besides the risk of being spied by Mozilla or whichever company stores this information, anyone who got my sync password could have access to all my other passwords).
I only install ChromeDome again because they are making me... e.g: some hospitals have you except a "using our internet policy" and it only has worked with Chrome and now HULU which I'm ditching. Flash hits my mind (pun ,) corporations aren't people they plague$.
Last edited by jamison20000e; 11-09-2015 at 10:43 AM.
Firefox is really slow and it lacks compatibility with services like YouTube, for example. I now left only Chromium in my system, so no Chrome, no Firefox. And YouTube works fine just like through Flash, although I don't have Flash plugin installed. In Firefox without Flash YouTube works only 360p, you have to do additional tweaks in "about:config" to make other dimensions available, plus fonts are ugly (on YouTube). Almost all in Firefox is just not usable anymore. Compare it to Firefox v2 which was the thing that made me like it and use it. It's not that anymore. They broke EVERYTHING and continue to make things worse. Add new functionality that shouldn't be part of web-browser, like that environment to play full 3D games directly in browser. It's just not the Firefox it used to be. It became something else. No wonder people leave using it.
On Debian, I use either. I use the freshplayerplugin w/ pepperflash for Iceweasel (firefox), and everything works fine, but some sites run MUCH faster on Chrome.
On Mageia, I use mostly Chrome because the fresh-player-plugin doesn't work very well (videos go black screen if I try to do fullscreen) so I'm forced to use native npapi flash, which is old and doesn't work with some sites anymore.
Firefox is really slow and it lacks compatibility ...
Lacks compatibility I see but slow must depend on the setup... I'm in an experimental to testing OS most of the time so am using Nightly plus have 8GBs of RAM. https://nightly.mozilla.org/
jamison20000e, Firefox is single-threaded, which is a giant flaw with today's computers. And 8 GB of RAM is A LOT for browser. Plus it's hard to trace RAM usage of a program in Linux (there are some articles about it out there). So people who see in {h,}top memory usage don't see real numbers. But when you have average office computer, you can compare speed of browsers by simply using them (I mean how fast browsers feel). Today we have 4-, 6-, 8-cores in CPUs. Chromium uses them all. Firefox uses only one.
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