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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

> This will be the end of an era where users still had control.

Google land never had it. The land with choices is called Firefox, and yet people still believe that it's a slow, bloated, supports-nothing browser.

Google does the advertisement part well, it seems.

For facts: see https://arewefastyet.com

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They can say whatever they want on that site. To me Firefox feels much slower and it's not just placebo. I suspect it has to do with poor multithreading. I still get hangs or slow responsiveness of the entire Firefox chrome because of a single misbehaving tab. I can also see that some media sites (e.g. di.fm or SoundCloud) use more CPU when playing media.

It's almost certainly just placebo. I've been using firefox next to chrome for years and it's completely unnoticeable outside of a handful of Google-specific sites (YouTube, mostly)

Well, with 211 tabs open for a couple of weeks, I neither get CPU spikes, slow tabs, or a misbehaving chrome.

This is not on a cutting edge PC. It's a core i7-7700.

Firefox's soft spot is DNS response speed. If your DNS is slow, Firefox is slow. Otherwise it's indifferent from Google Chrome speed-wise.

I don't need 211 tabs open. One tab is enough to notice the difference.

Have you used Firefox recently in 2024 ? I had switched permanently to Firefox in early 2023. But, even in late 2023, there were issues with "misbehaving tabs" are you put it. However, now in mid-2024, everything is butter smooth. A fair number of pending issues were fixed in Firefox over the last year. Including a 25 year old bug!

A lot of Firefox contributors rolled up their sleeves over the last year. Chrome is FULLY in the "Enterprise Spyware" space now with the glaring introduction of ad topics over and above community objections. The need for an alternative cross platform browser that is not corporate and ad-controlled has solidified.

I've used Firefox for at least five years. I switched to Vivaldi (which is Chromium-based) about two weeks ago and the speed difference feels liberating.

Agreed. It's not just a placebo effect, it really is slower. People often don't notice this because they use relatively high-end machines. If you're skeptical, try running it on a low-end laptop or a Raspberry Pi. The difference is like night and day.

I get everything you mentioned for Chrome. Especially if I open the Meta store for Quest apps.

Doesn't happen with Firefox.

It was never so black and white. If we define control as the ability to configure the browser as one wants and its extensibility then I'd agree that Firefox did have far more control until the Quantum update where it was gutted, while some Chromium based browsers like Vivaldi are feature rich and have features Firefox doesn't (only now approaching a quasi-equivalence with the pre-Chromium Opera before it too was gutted).

I still no longer use Firefox as a main desktop browser due to the features I loved no longer being possible and never getting equivalents, despite using Firefox as a mobile browser and every other day on desktop for other purposes.

However due to the Manifest v2 phase out some of the more useful extensibility on the Chromium side is being removed (outside of say backporting like Brave but we'll see how long that will last), so one may have to consider alternatives if need be.

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