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Comment by FinanceAnon | Hacker News Reader

After a year of using Firefox on Macbook, I've switched back to Chrome. The laptop was running really hot just from having a few tabs opened and Youtube playing in the background. It's been much better after I've made the switch to Chrome. For privacy reasons, I would rather stick to Firefox, but I feel like the performance is worse.

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Yup, the performance of browsers are highly dependent on their host. Firefox performs best on Linux (and beats the other browsers for Linux too), so the default on my Linux machine is Firefox. For Windows, it's Chrome and for Mac is Safari. Wish there was some syncing utility between the three of them, as switching between them has always been a bit of a hassle.

I strongly disagree regarding Windows. I use Firefox on Windows as a primary browser and occasionally Chrome, - Firefox offers much better performance even having some extensions installed while Chrome is in vanilla state. The only issue with FF for me is exactly as the other commenter said - Mozilla likes to piss off its core userbase.

I strongly disagree. I have it installed on Windows 7, Windows 10 and the performance has gone so far down in the last few years I've had to switch to chrome.

What kind of performance are you talking about? I've been using it as my only browser at home (Win10) for years and I haven't noticed much.

edit: Really just curious, I'm assuming I'm using it differently.

Disagree here. Thinkpad P52 (16GB Ram and i7-8750H) running Windows 10 Pro. Absolutely no issues with Firefox. I always find it strange when people talk about FF issues. I never had any on Linux, MacOS or Windows. Always worked for me. Rarely do I run Chrome. I do use Edge a lot though as all my 'work' stuff resides there - Mail, Slack. It works pretty well.

I run Steam on the same machine (AoE III) with Firefox, LibreOffice Calc open as well and it's just smooth. No overheating or anything.

> Firefox performs best on Linux

I find that hard to believe considering no hardware accelerated video playback (although other linux browsers also have the same problem). At the very least, I think that statement needs to be qualified with a "under certain use cases".

Firefox has had HW-accelerated video playback under Wayland for a few months now. Along with per-monitor mixed-/high-dpi support it is by far the best browser on Linux atm.

With NVIDIA gpu support?

Yes.

It even has hardware accelerated video on FreeBSD with X11. My old NUC wouldn't be able to play video without it.

Apple has an extension for syncing bookmarks between devices and browsers with iCloud.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/icloud-bookma...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/icloud-bookmarks/f...

I think it does tabs, too, but I'm not sure.

In general I think there is no way to heavily use Google properties (in particular drive, docs and meet) without Chrome.

I tried through the years, and always ended up with a main browser (Safari or now Firefox) and Chrome as a Google dedicated browser, because the experience would be miserable otherwise. At this point I stopped blaming the other browsers.

While Google apps definitely perform less than ideally for me on Firefox, I think that falls far short of unusable. I use Google Docs, Drive, YouTube, and other Google properties in 4K on my old (5+ year old AMD Ryzen 2400G) system. I definitely don't relish using their apps, but I definitely can and don't feel hindered.

The 2400G came out in February 2018 so your system is 3.5 years old at max?

You're right. I don't know how old my desktop is, I confused it for my laptop, which I remember I bought in 2016.

I always use somewhat recent laptops, but with middle range specs (e.g. the current 13” M1), so the effect is more visible than on your system I think.

I can/could use any of the properties in a pinch, but something would give after a while. The worst offender for me was Meet, a few hours of here and there meetings would trigger weird interface scaling effects, or it just wouldn’t join any new meeting with the screen staying stale. On firefox Bluejeans or Zoom wouldn’t do it, just Meet.

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