Comment by j7k6 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by j7k6 | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I come across one of those articles promoting "use Firefox instead of Chrome" I wonder if I'm the only one having those huge performance issues with Firefox on macOS. I seriously tried to make the switch from Chrome to Firefox a few times in the recent years because of all the dark patterns Google is pushing upon its userbase with Chrome, version after version. But Firefox feels significantly slower, makes the MBP fans go crazy and drains the battery like hell.

I've come to the conclusion that at this point it's no option for me to make the final switch to Firefox, as much as I'd like to. But I try to cut off Google's prying eyes from my browsing behaviour as much as possible:

- uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger is all you need to block the most nasty privacy invaders, seriously.

- I don't use the sync feature.

- I don't use Gmail, so there's no reason to login to my Google account, ever.

- I used Youtube's thumbs-up button as sort of bookmarks for my favorite videos, now I have a bookmarks folder for Youtube videos, which is ok for me, but might not be for everybody.

- automatically clear browsing data after quitting Chrome.

My dream browser would be Firefox with Chromium under the hood, but that's not very likely to happen...

On Linux it simply flies. macOS is known to have issues with GPU performance

It's not macOS, it's Firefox on macOS.

>It's not the OS, its the Software only on that OS

You're not the only one. Firefox uses way too much GPU power on MBPs. Supposedly fixes are in the works, but I doubt they will happen any time soon. I've learned to tune out the 'improvements to performance' claimed by Firefox releases because never actually do anything for MBP users.

Like you, it is one of the main things keeping me to Chrome (although pinch-to-zoom and casting are nice, too).

My solution for Chrome's privacy issues are similar to yours, except I use the full sync for bookmarks, but then I switch to a private window for actually using any Google site (except for search). At the end of the day, it's still a huge compromise. I might try going full Chromium for a while and trying your bookmarks method, although plugins are a bit of a PITA.

The only reason I'm not using Chromium is that 1Password is not trusting it as a "secure browser".

1Password is closed source app. KeepassXC is better, and Keychain for syncing.

then use Brave... (un-Googled and you can use Chrome extensions.)

https://brave.com/download/

> all you need to block the most nasty privacy invaders

The most known invaders. NoScript is the only real protection against zero-days.

I've had the same issue as well. I use Firefox at my home Windows 10 machine and really never miss Chrome. But for work I run macOS and find Firefox slightly intolerable. It's really unfortunate because Tree Style Tabs is a game changer for me, and it'd be even more useful at work than home.

> huge performance issues with Firefox on macOS

Why not Safari? It has ITP2 built in, Private windows, plus I use Ka-Block and VPN.

I really wanted to have Firefox work for me on macOS, but if you use more than 1 OS user concurrently, Firefox regularly locks up when switching between them, or when the computer comes back from sleep. Having to constantly reboot the browser was a deal breaker for me.

> But I try to cut off Google's prying eyes from my browsing behaviour as much as possible

Check out https://brave.com/download/

Un-Googled and supports Chrome extensions.

> now I have a bookmarks folder for Youtube videos

FWIW, you could use youtube-dl to download videos once from the terminal, and then don't need to visit that google site again.

Video performance is particularly awful with huge amounts of dropped frames on YouTube and Twitch.

I have no issues with the latest Firefox on my 2012 MBP.

Is it a retina model? All retina models are affected. Also, you likely wouldn't notice unless you are using the battery.

If you care about privacy, you shouldn't be on a Mac anyway. Their privacy policy amounts to "you can trust us".

Privacy is always about trust. I trust Apple (more than others) because they never gave me the impression they are doing anything shady with my personal data behind my back. Unlike Google.

Privacy is only about trust when you can't know what software does. That's only a concern with closed source software and services. Much of Apple's software is closed, much of Apple is based on services. The one thing you can trust is that, at some point, something they do with data they have will displease you. Software that doesn't even try to collect data is the only acceptable kind of software.

Using services obviously requires trust as far as data your client software exposes, but if you choose closed source clients, you've given up on privacy at a fundamental level.

As opposed to…Google's?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com