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Comment by go561192 | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried Firefox with the 'Ublock Origin' add-on? No ads in years and snappy.

I tried to use it for years as my "personal" browser while Chrome was for work. It would regularly cause the system as a whole to be slow when video (Twitch/Netflix) was playing. Switched to Vivaldi for personal and everything works smoothly so far.

When did you stop using it?

~1 week ago. It had been an ongoing issue for the past few months.

On which hardware?

MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2017) 3.1 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3

I have approximately the same Macbook (but from 2015), one issue i have is playing 4K .webm videos on Youtube. It doesn't matter which browser, it even happens when i download the video and play it in another player. My CPU will spike and the fans start blasting.

4K videos in mkv/H.264 format i can play fine though.

The issue here is the hardware decoders capability;

Depending on which browser you use, and whether your Macbook is connected to power, websites will send you a different video/codec/size.

Here's a random post that sort of describes this: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/409764

It works fine in another browser. So I don't think it is a hardware issue? Is there a situation where Chrome/Vivaldi would be able to use hardware the FF wouldn't? And 90% of my time is spent on power (top left usb-c port).

Using a different browser results in a different video (/codec) being downloaded. The different codec is what can cause your hardware/cpu to spike.

Switched to Vivaldi. It's amazing!

I was thinking of switching away from Chrome as well. Was there something about Vivaldi that made you use it instead of Brave?

I don't know much about either one of them except that Brave is (fully?) open source while Vivaldi is not.

Chrome is signed into my primary work account. Brave is signed into a shared work account. Vivaldi is doing my personal stuff.

I get that Chrome could do all of these alone with profiles but I prefer having the UX of separate applications for each.

Brave is built directly on Chrome/Chromium. You still get extensions from the Chrome store. Its underlying functionality is all chrome.

What would that accomplish?

> What would that accomplish?

What would what accomplished? Moving off of Chrome to a different Chromium based browser?

Presumably I would retain all the high quality that I enjoy from Chrome while avoiding Googles spyware services. Edge, Brave and others remove them. In the case of Brave I believe I would also get some decent adblocking without having to worry about what Googles eventual Manifest v3 enforcement will do to uBlock Origin.

I think it's quite important to state the OS you're using. All Browsers tend to fly on Windows, except for ironically MS browsers. Safari tends to be fastest on MacOS. Basically every mainstream browser sucks in performance, memory usage, cpu, battery usage and so on, on Linux distros, comparatively to the former.

Can't edit anymore, but you're absolutely right. This is on OSX. Safari is a gem, and I used it as my daily driver for 2 years. I switched to Chrome for work stuff because there are no equivalent necessary Safari extensions for some of the tools I use. Not sure why I didn't stay on Safari for personal.

If Firefox used macOS keychain for password management, sure. But that bug has been sitting there for 10 years or something.

I really wanted to like it, and the adblock story was good, but it did something wrong with some async js code, and sites like reddit would stop the world to wait until some tracker would time out (likely due to the adblock). This was a poor experience, to say the least.

I wonder how much something like SmartBlock [0] might help with that.

[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/03/23/introducing-sma...

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