A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality <comment><USER2> So looks like the 80s is when things start going south (increased income inequality) so I looked up who was president during that time, then looked at their wiki page to see their economic policy and found this gem of a quote:

"Soon after taking office, Reagan began implementing sweeping new political and economic initiatives. His supply-side economic policies, dubbed "Reaganomics", advocated tax rate reduction to spur economic growth, economic deregulation, and reduction in government spending."

<comment><USER3> As an engineer and computational scientist, drawing conclusions from correlations like this is absurd. Maybe Reagan was good for income inequality or maybe he was bad for it. Did you control for the other variables before drawing your conclusions? What about:

* The governments' legislation and economic policies in countries like the USSR, China, etc. in the 80s

* Changing technology especially communication technology

* Changing levels of education in the world.

* Lingering/diminishing trends/effects from wars like: Cold War, Korean War, Vietnam War, etc.

* Changing age distribution of humans in western countries,

And on and on. The world economy is extremely complex with heavy nonlinear feedback effects. How can you possibly state things like Reagan caused X w.r.t. the world wealth distribution with such confidence?

<comment><USER4> >As an engineer and computational scientist, drawing conclusions from correlations like this is absurd. Maybe Reagan was good for income inequality or maybe he was bad for it. Did you control for the other variables before drawing your conclusions?

Drawing absolute conclusions in this area is nearly impossible, and we can't say with any certainty that Reaganomics caused this problem. The evidence does seem to suggest that the policies are not fixing the problem, which is a far easier claim to make. They might not be the cause, but it seems very likely they aren't the solution.

<comment><USER5> Given that you don't know what would occur without reagonimics, even that much isn't safe to say. It's quite possible that reagonimics is in fact helpful, just not enough to overcome other negatives in the environment (so in sum, a loss). Removal may very well increase the rate of inequality.

In other words, with just the evidence provided, you can't safely say much of anything beyond "it started getting worse in the 80's"

<comment><USER4> >Given that you don't know what would occur without reagonimics, even that much isn't safe to say.

Yes, I can. The current situation seems undesirable. While it's possible that the situation would be worse without Reaganomics, the actual situation is still undesirable. Looking towards the future, it seems unwise to continue a plan that led to undesirable results.

<comment><USER6> Your argument proves too much. Consider the following example:

> You are diagnosed with Type II Diabetes. Your doctor tells you to monitor > your blood sugar and take insulin. This situation seems undesirable. While > it is possible that the situation would be worse without monitoring your > blood sugar and taking insulin, the actual situation is still undesirable. > Looking towards the future, it seems unwise to continue a plan that led to > undesirable results.

<comment><USER4> If Reaganomics came from a trained professional who were basing their recommendations on the best theory science had developed through experimentation, I would not advocate changing the policy. That is not the case though, as we both agree that reliable evidence is scant.

Going forward, there isn't a great theory showing that Reaganomics is worth continuing, and the hypothesis that different policies would provide a better outcome seems worthy of testing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's the best solution to this - if wealthy and high-income individuals get more power via political lobbying, they can then gain more wealth and higher incomes, gaining even more lobbying power. They can also flood the media with advertising money and propagandist messaging to convince voters to care more about less impactful issues. It feels like an endless cycle to me.

Other than war or complete societal upheaval, what can actually be done to solve the problem?

<comment><USER8> I'm still amazed at how effectively we have collectively shunned thought along these lines by turning the founding father of the relevant branch of economical philosophy into a real life he-who-shall-not-be-named. Anyone who wants to talk about these problems either has to either re-invent the wheel or mention the unmentionable name and doom themselves to immediate dismissal as a kook.

<comment><USER9> In fairness, attempts have been made to translate the revolution part of his ideas into functional policy at least twice now and both events have included massive violence (and one has followed up that massive violence with a general mismanagement of public resources to the detriment of the "unconnected," not unlike the pain inflicted upon them by the previous ruling class).

At this point, the burden of proof is on the theory to show merit. It's a bit like Extreme Programming in that regard---looks great on paper, but how many times does it get to fall short of its promises before people stop blaming the implementers for "holding it wrong" and start talking seriously about the flaws in the originating theory?

Perhaps also like XP, however, pieces of it do seem worthwhile and are bearing fruit in the nations that have adopted them.

<comment><USER10> I've done XP. It was awesome.

As for the two attempts to implement Marxism (assuming you're speaking of Russia and China here)... in Russia, you can't separate it from Leninism and Stalinism. Is Marxism the problem, or the authoritarian government?

China is more interesting. China is still ostensibly a Marxist nation, right? Per World Bank data I just looked up, China's per capita GDP (in constant US dollars) was lowest in 1962, at $71.91. That's per year. In 2017, it's $8826.99. Constant dollars, mind you. That's 123 times more.

I have a hard time calling that a failure of any sort.

There hasn't been large-scale political violence in China since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. That ten-year period killed 5-10 million on the high end. Which is, of course, quite bad, but in comparison to the 50-80M that died in ostensibly capitalist Europe during WWII, it doesn't seem that outsized.

So for burden of proof, I think you need to argue that an alternative model would have resulted in less political violence and more economic prosperity than that for China. Good luck.

<comment><USER11> > There hasn't been large-scale political violence in China since the end of > the Cultural Revolution in 1976. That ten-year period killed 5-10 million on > the high end. Which is, of course, quite bad, but in comparison to the > 50-80M that died in ostensibly capitalist Europe during WWII, it doesn't > seem that outsized.

> So for burden of proof, I think you need to argue that an alternative model > would have resulted in less political violence and more economic prosperity > than that for China. Good luck.

The Communist China's Great Famine[0] is said to have caused the deaths of tens of millions of people, as much as 30-40M, depending on who is guesstimating.

I am not sure I would call that a triumph of economic prosperity for China.

[0] [https://www.npr.org/2012/11/10/164732497/a-grim-chronicle- of...](https://www.npr.org/2012/11/10/164732497/a-grim-chronicle-of-chinas- great-famine)

<comment><USER10> Famines were not exactly unusual in backwards agrarian nations recovering from 50 years of nonstop civil war and foreign occupation. European nations, before modernization, had famine problems, even without war. As Hans Rosling pointed out, famine killed much of the Swedish population in the late 19th century. From 1845-1850, Ireland lost a quarter of its population to famine and emigration to escape famine - 10-15% of the country starved to death under ostensible capitalist rule. And there are plenty more examples where that came from.

So blaming it on communism seems a little off to me. Matter of fact, one could easily argue that communist revolution is a _consequence_ of capitalist failure, not a cause of failure on its own.

<comment><USER11> I certainly didn't mean to imply that Communism was the cause of the famine.

I meant to instead do what you seem to be doing - pointing out a bit of economic turmoil that lead to great loss of life. Mine just happened to be accounting for on the side of the ledger labeled "Communism".

Does it make the Great Famine any less an economic blow to Communist China that there are also historical examples of large famines in capitalist societies?

I'm not sure it does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there an inherent problem with income inequality? Would you rather live in:

* World 1, where everybody has x, except one person has 100x * World 2, where everybody has .5x and is thus totally equal

(I realize assets and income are not equal, but I think the point stands)

<comment> munk-a I don't really understand why this scenario is worded this way, it seems like World 2 where everybody has .5x is just worse due to World 2 getting the shaft. Here's a setup:

* World 1, where everybody has x except one person has 100x

* World 2, where everybody has 1.2x

I think World 2 pretty clearly wins but this is a bit of a strawman to begin with. I'd personally rather live in a world where the poor have x and the rich may benefit by having 6x in extreme cases.

I agree with the general concept that incentives can increase productivity and different people are adding different amounts to society, I disagree with the idea that some people are equal in skill to 100,000 other people and need to be rewarded accordingly.

<comment><USER13> Well you actually do end up with 0.5x instead of 1.2x because in World 2 you have eliminated the profit motive that drives progress forward. Basically you forego all progress that would have happened with the opportunity to profit by creating and inventing things and then making those things faster, cheaper and better.

<comment> munk-a Sorry, so part of your scenario to divine why wealth inequality isn't so bad is an assumption (without grounding or explanation) that a lack of wealth inequality necessarily leads to high levels of economic inefficiency?

I feel like your initial question is just coming from a very disingenuous place, the discussion of the relative economic efficiency of unequal vs. perfectly equally distributed wealth is a bit aside from the question of how extreme wealth inequality is. So I suppose, I agree that wealth inequality does provide value, but it does so in very small doses which we have greatly exceeded at this point.

<comment><USER13> The view that "wealth = money" is myopic. Wealth is access to goods and services. At any point in time, money is just the means to get more goods and services, but over long periods of time, goods and services becoming cheaper and more accessible is a form of wealth.

[https://fee.org/articles/you-are-richer-than-john-d- rockefel...](https://fee.org/articles/you-are-richer-than-john-d-rockefeller/)

The problem with people who focus on inequality is that they completely ignore ∂t. If you're trying to improve the lives of 7.6 billion people, time is of utmost importance.

<comment> munk-a I agree entirely with you in theory. I agree that increased compensation drives innovation and that innovation is the primary driven of our standard of living. In ~1700 france if the extreme wealth of the monarchy and clergy had been redistributed to the common folk their standard of living would almost certainly be below that of people living in slums in the modern day. I think that over the last three hundred years we've all gotten to a place where we're much better off, but the relative standard of living people experience has slid downward in the first world in recent decades and I think that is an issue that's worth solving, or at least finding the source of so we can mitigate it in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a very US - centric view. With globalization I think a different picture emerges. Increasing global trade has hurt US (and Other Western) working classes with de-industrialization, where many more people foreign countries have been lifted out of poverty.

<comment> munk-a The US has, on a global scale, long had higher standards of living than a large remainder of the world so balancing US workers with foreign workers to elevate the standard of living in third world countries isn't a bad thing. The issue is more that while this process was happening a small segment of the US population has managed to sequester a nearly incomprehensible portion of that wealth for no good reason.

<comment><USER14> > long had higher standards of living than a large remainder of the world

Not really 200 years ago most Americans were scratching a living in a new world fighting off the natives and importing slaves.

>The issue is more that while this process was happening a small segment of the US population has managed to sequester a nearly incomprehensible portion of that wealth for no good reason.

Agreed its a big change from the 60s and 70s.

<comment> munk-a Sorry, to clarify here, long is defined as ~80 years, which, I'll grant, isn't actually very long. My apologies for the confusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Another side of this to consider, is that low-skill many jobs today are literally not worth as much as they used to be.

In labor economic there is a very well established understanding that jobs requiring high levels of skill are typically harder to fill hence corporations must pay more to get those individuals.

But the reverse is true, low skill jobs are easy to fill so we don't have to pay as much.

But here's the kicker, many branches of economics focus on technology as a eliminator of work. Basically, two guys becomes one guy and a machine. Eventually a machine might replace both of the guys.

There is an intermediary between a job being automated entirely away though, where a physical human's work loses value. McDonalds for example has been rolling out automated ordering systems so that they don't have to employ as much "front-office" staff. If they keep those on payroll, there job brings much less value to the company than it did prior.

Technology creates skilled jobs (aka maintain the robot) and eliminated unskilled jobs. But technology can also reduce the value-add of another unskilled employee.

What I am getting at is the sad truth that it's totally possible unskilled labor is not worth as much as it used to be.

If we continue to base our salaries entirely capitalistically, maybe these gaps will widen as low skill employees become less and less valuable while high skill employees gain value but less of them are required.

<comment><USER16> Moral of this story: become high skilled. If you are high skilled not only do you make more money in absolute dollars, but also the things you want to buy are cheaper in absolute dollars.

There are plenty of things to automate for the foreseeable future. I don't know what the correct answer for kids 100 years from now will be: they have the figure out their own answers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> i wish people would call out the fed.

their primary metric for increasing interest rates is wage inflation. so they play wack a mole when people start seeing income growth, a recession comes, and employers have all the bargaining rights again.

yet despite the fed's goal of smacking down wage growth _ahem_ , inflation,, nobody points a finger at them.

</comment><comment><USER18> I posted my take on this recently on Facebook. (And I recently gave a TedX talk on the same concept entitled "Money: The Greatest Story Ever Told" [1])

Here is an image of the entire world's Money supply [2].

In my eyes, the majority shift occurred due to two things:

1) Ending the gold standard peg

2) Creation of the derivative market

1 --- Ending the Gold Standard Peg

In 1971, Nixon severed the connection between Gold and the US-Dollar. The USD now became purely fiat --- no actual resource backed the USD anymore.

This allowed the dollar to change. Banks could create money -- really. Credit could be expanded and offered to customers. Debt could become an asset, and banks could trade.

But the most interesting part is that it led to #2 --- the Derivate market

2 -- Creation of the Derivative Market

By removing the gold standard tether, money became _anything that people believe in_

In 1973, the first derivative began to trade.

And banks utilized this to create futures, contracts, warrants, swaps --- bets against bets against bets against bets. The money isn't really there. It's just a financial instrument traded to hedge against fluctuations.

It's a betting system. And it's turtles the whole way down.

Here's the crazy part. The global derivatives market is 1.4 QUADRILLION dollars. That is, 20 times larger than the GDP of the entire WORLD.

In the picture attached --- see that giganticly long section at the bottom? That is derivates. It outweighs the rest of the world's money by FAR.

1.4 Quadrillion USD are in derivatives. Guess how much money world-wide is in coins and banknotes? $5 trillion.

That is --- derivatives are 280x the amount of coins and bank notes in THE ENTIRE WORLD.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G0F-VUPTa4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G0F-VUPTa4) [2] [http://money.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-money-markets- one-v...](http://money.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-money-markets-one- visualization-2017/)

<comment><USER19> Glad to see someone mention the "temporary" cessation of the dollar's convertibility to gold. From my perspective that would mark the most important event for this topic but it is hardly discussed.

<comment><USER18> I never understand why people see these actions all happening simultaneously -- a invention of infinite money will of course go to the top, and create inequality between the rich and poor -- because that's how compound interest works.

But for some reason, that doesn't seem to even register on people's radar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Reganomics, the end of Breton Woods, the end of the "Gold Standard", "Stagflation", "Peak Oil", population growth, immigration, greying population, healthcare, welfare, tax cuts, globalization, capitalism, communism.

Oh don't mind me, just pulling excuses out of my ass. I love posts like these and I especially love their graphs. Less so for the (little) content they contain. More so for people's reactions to the content. Its confirmation bias bait all the way down!

I don't mean to be so negative and critical. I'm just tired of people trying to explain the state of the world from a single graph!

Income inequality could be increasing for different reasons at different times. It might not be increasing at all (depending on how you define income)!

\---

Let's stop drooling over graphs and have an actual conversation about the "problem". Who am I richer than and why? Who is richer than me and why? Maybe if we answer these questions we can solve income inequality (assuming we still want to solve it all).

<comment><USER21> Considering that certain paths of inquiry are off limits socially, both Left and Right, I don't think you'll get that any time soon.</comment></comment>


Breaking antivirus software - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/JoxeanKoret/breaking-av-software-33153490

<comment><USER2> Here's PDF: [http://mincore.c9x.org/breaking_av_software.pdf](http://mincore.c9x.org/breaking_av_software.pdf)

Disclaimer: I hate slideshare with passion. Presentation format and how they use HTML makes it painful to use if there are some connection issues (and their servers routinely hang on slides.

<comment><USER3> > I hate slideshare with passion.

Same. I can't figure out why people trying to share their PDF slides use it, when any device more sophisticated than a flip-phone has a good built-in PDF reader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can imagine AV engines having massive attack surfaces due to having to support a ton of exploitable file formats and decompression methods, and often supporting decade+ old detections. It still is a surprising that some vendors (I'm looking at you Bitdefender!) have obviously not even tried to fuzz their product. Koret's presentation is already a year old, so I hope vendors would've now gotten at least some of their shit together. I wouldn't bet too much money on it though, as it still has virtually no effect on how much the product will be sold. Take a guess many people will still give money to Bitdefender because they have had a really good review performances.

There's definitely a pattern that AV companies put their efforts in being able to say they're #1 in outside tests or in reviews. In ye olden times someone would just take multiple vendors, scan against 1000000 old viruses and rank them based on the detection %, and as the end result the "best" (and the most sold) products ended up being resource hogs. Later reviewers took notice and started also measuring file copying performance and detection capabilities against active malware, and in a year or two many vendors adapted and improved their performance and their efforts against malware that actually is being spread.

Hopefully reviewers will take notice and include some exploitability metrics in the future so that vendors need to focus on it or go out of business.

Funny thing is that despite Bitdefender having thousands of exploitable points in their product, at the moment your average user will still be less vulnerable against online criminals than most those who don't run anything.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is mostly just sad. Updating through HTTP without proper signing, really? Also last time I checked I couldn't even download Avast through HTTPS.

<comment><USER6> It surprised me just yesterday to note that Microsoft security essentials is also downloaded by way of HTTP.

<comment><USER7> Same with all Microsoft updates, but the update catalog and the updates are signed. This is because they support downloading to a corporate master updates mirror, and further downstream mirrors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >Any software you install makes you a bit more vulnerable. AV engines are no exceptions. Just the opposite.

The only time I've ever gotten a (disruptive) computer virus was after installing Norton Antivirus. These days my goal is to ensure that I can quickly reformat and reinstall my system. I keep records of what I've installed and how I configure it.

Antivirus software is usually either dangerous, not worth paying for, or basically malware. How much anti-virus software is just resource-hogging, popup-spamming adware? No thanks.

</comment><comment><USER9> Most viruses are identified by their signature only, because most of them are dumb. Heuristics for unknown threats are often there purely for marketing.

AVs have all more or less the same signature database due to the same reason as above, most viruses are dumb and well known (most can't even be called _viruses_ , think adware & co). IMO this the best reason for not having multiple AVs. I personally do not trust an AV for anything more than dumb signature checking (which are easily circumvented with polymorphism or sometime encryption alone) and targeted heuristics.

I also don't even want to start thinking at the mess that could be created by several AVs's injection/hooking mechanisms on the same machine.

</comment><comment><USER10> Obviously it wouldn't be easy to test on Linux, but it would be really interesting to see the results of fuzzing against Windows Defender. Seeing as it's the de facto AV packaged with Windows 8, and a lot of people use MSE on prior versions, imagine the attack surface area.

Then again, if Microsoft is competent in how they built their AV engine, it might be properly fuzzed already. With such a wide deployment, you'd certainly want to think so...

<comment><USER11> "In an interview with Dennis Protection Labs, Holly Stewart, the senior program manager of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, said that Microsoft Security Essentials was just a "baseline" that's designed to "always be on the bottom" of antivirus tests. She said Microsoft sees MSE as a first layer of protection and advises Windows users to use a third-party antivirus instead."

<comment><USER12> Huh... That is really not the vibe I get from their website[0].

>"There are a host of nasty intruders on the Internet including viruses, trojans, worms and spyware. Microsoft Security Essentials offers award-winning protection against these intruders without getting in your way."

To me that reads like MSE is really good at protecting your computer. Why should I as a consumer think that I need something else? They really need to message that better if that is indeed the case.

[0]: [http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security- essentia...](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security-essentials- product-information#tabs1=overview)

<comment><USER13> That website was probably written by professional marketers. Large companies usually don't let its engineers advertise to consumers (and that's effectively what MS is doing here).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why I'm switching back to Firefox - <AUTHOR> http://www.campaul.net/blog/2013/03/10/why-im-switching-back-to-firefox/ <comment><USER4> The post is spot on. Firefox is a great browser, but reading the OP's last paragraphs, users rarely choose software for quality _alone_.

The most popular alternatives to Firefox are Google's Chrome and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. I doubt these alternative browsers would exist if they were not useful for Google's and Microsofts main businesses. These companies produce web browsers to support their main products/services. The rationale behind AOL Explorer (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Browser>) was similar. In settings like those privacy and other interests of web users are easily sacrificed.

Out of all the big browsers, Mozilla Firefox comes closest to being a web browser for the sake of web browsing.

<comment><USER5> Just to add, users rarely choose their software at all. If we're talking about the unwashed masses here, then the primary reason Chrome, Internet Explorer, or Safari are popular at all is almost entirely due to placement.

Joe consumer, comprising an ever increasing majority of the Internet population, simply doesn't care about which browser she is using. More often it is a result of what randomly got installed as the default through their last foray of random clicking and purchases. As a result, Chrome's regular placement on the Google homepage (and IE's default-installation) give it obvious "competitive" edges.

Of course when discussing browser market share this is rarely mentioned, instead popularity is usually attributed to fractional nanosecond differences in rendering time and so on that 99% of users never notice, and simply won't care about even if you told them.

(Edit: there is another reason to appreciate Mozilla in here, in that their efforts seem less focused on branding and positioning than they are much more so on function and vision. Mozilla's endgame shares a certain utilitarian theme compatible with what the masses seem to expect from technology (it's a "computer" with the "Internet" on it, not a "Chromebook" with "Google" on it), than does just about every other company in this space who are using their platforms to sell people more shit they don't need)

<comment><USER6> This is a very elitist and snobbish piece of writing and almost entirely inaccurate. Just for fun, I rewrote it a bit:

Just to add, users rarely choose their car at all. If we're talking about the unwashed masses here, then the primary reason Ford, Toyota, GM, or Volkswagon are popular at all is almost entirely due to happenstance. Joe consumer, comprising an ever increasing majority of the car buying population, simply doesn't care about which car she is driving. More often it is a result of what randomly went up for sale at the corner car lot. As a result, Ford's regular placement on the edge of the car lot give it "competitive" edges.

<comment><USER7> I'm having trouble understanding what point you're trying to make. What, exactly, is "entirely inaccurate" about the comment? How is your rendition with physical cars similar? How is it snobbish in the least?

<comment><USER6> Using terms like "unwashed masses" and "Joe sixpack" to describe the computer users of working class background where I come from is insulting. Why not just go all the way and them call them "white trash"? The inaccuracy I was trying to highlight with my rewrite was your idea that people of lower means and education don't care about what browser they use, presumably in your view because they are too ignorant to know the difference. Obviously, this is not the case with automobiles and is also not the case in choice of computers, browsers, mobile phones, etc... You don't have to have a college degree and a six figure income to be discerning about technology.

<comment><USER5> Speaking as someone of "lower means" and mostly with a lifelong dedication to computers, _I_ don't particularly care what software I use, and if you forced me to try and rationalize my choices, most likely I would, like the majority of people on the planet, spout mostly meaningless bullshit.

The "tech savvy" only differ in one sense: they are incredibly more delusional about their choices than the rest of the planet. I certainly haven't taken the time to study Chrome's design in depth (or for that matter Firefox's), and probably never will. My reasoning for using Firefox is due to a vague-warm- fuzzy ideological alignment I seem to have with Mozilla and their approach to software. Nothing quantitative, and certainly nothing adequately logical that I could use it to command authority over anyone else on the planet. In fact exactly the kind of thought processes that "joe user" experiences ("I like the icon.. it bounces"). 23 years spent in front of a machine, and that's still pretty much me.

<comment><USER8> No, the difference is that you actually _know_ what a browser is. "Google" is still a common reply to "what browser do you use?".

<comment><USER9> how is that not a valid response? sure, it's not semantically accurate.

but, if someone says that, you know exactly what they mean. seems like a valid response to me any way you slice it.

p.s. this kind of attitude is part of the problem.

<comment><USER10> > seems like a valid response to me any way you slice it.

How so? It does not tell you if it's Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera or Safari. My mom refers to the Internet as "google".

<comment><USER11> > My mom refers to the Internet as "Google".

that's how she browses the internet then? in her case the application wouldn't matter to greatly if her point of reference is the Google search box

<comment><USER10> If it's a matter of security, speed, or an issue with how a particular website is rendered, knowing that somebody uses "google" as a web browser is of little help when attempting a diagnosis, regardless of their point of reference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I feel Chrome is becoming the new IE. Firefox always works. I keep finding obscure bugs in Chrome. I report them. They are confirmed by 3+ people. 9 months later issues remain unfixed. It feels like all development is targeted at new features instead of rounding off and fixing existing functionality.

The two things I dislike about Firefox. The development tools are funky. I am sure many people like them but when you are used to firebug / webkit tools the default Firefox tools are a bit of a shock.

The second issue is the lack of tab sand-boxing. A fairly large part of my job is testing for edge cases in our products. Our products are JavaScript heavy. I often find issues which crash the browser... well.. they crash Firefox. In Chrome the tab shows an error in the console and I have the option to close the tab. In Firefox I never get an error in the console. The whole browser freezes and stops responding.

It would be fantastic if Firefox sandboxed tabs to stop the entire browser crashing.

<comment><USER13> Two of the main advantages of Firefox for many are its memory usage and its extensibility. Those two advantages would be lost if Firefox added sandboxing. I'm glad that I can choose between sandboxing and better extensions and I would be sad to see that choice disappear.

<comment><USER14> > _Two of the main advantages of Firefox for many are its memory usage and its > extensibility. Those two advantages would be lost if Firefox added > sandboxing. I'm glad that I can choose between sandboxing and better > extensions and I would be sad to see that choice disappear._

Totally orthogonal issues.

Not to mention Firefox ate memory like a pig until recently, despite not having sandboxing.

Now it's somewhat better with post 16 stuff, but still it's slow. Chrome is much more responsive and fast.

<comment><USER15> > _Totally orthogonal issues._

[http://blog.ffextensionguru.com/2011/11/20/electrolysis- proj...](http://blog.ffextensionguru.com/2011/11/20/electrolysis-project-on- hold/) Add-on were one of the major issues blocking Multi-process Firefox.

> _Not to mention Firefox ate memory like a pig until recently, despite not > having sandboxing._

Agreed. Sandboxed Chrome was like a gift from the IT gods back in the bloated FF3 days.

> _Now it's somewhat better with post 16 stuff, but still it's slow. Chrome is > much more responsive and fast._

Responsive and fast until it starts thrashing when your physical RAM gets all used up.

<comment><USER14> > _Add-on were one of the major issues blocking Multi-process Firefox._

Well, they will need adaptation to communicate cross pages, but it's not like you can't have sandboxing and plugins (a la Chrome/Safari).

> _Responsive and fast until it starts thrashing when your physical RAM gets > all used up._

Haven't really seen that. But I rarely have more than 20 tabs open (usually around 10-15). OS X, and using Canary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Firefox really needed the release of chrome to kick it back into gear because it had stagnated to some extent, easy in its "we're better then IE and that's all that really matters" mediocrity, and swapping over to the rapid release schedule has just accelerated things.

The fact that mozilla actively fights for internet freedom and user privacy is just the delicious icing on a technically solid browser cake.

<comment><USER17> And it's bookmark system is still second to none (imo)

<comment><USER18> Firefox's bookmarking system is actually one of the things I hate most about it, compared to Opera.

In Opera you can right click a link and then select the exact place in the bookmark heirarchy to place it in. In Firefox you have to first bookmark the link, then go to the atrocious bookmark manager and move the bookmark where you want it to go.

Opera's bookmark manager is also just much nicer, more powerful, and more intuitive than Firefox's.

Unfortunately, Opera is closed-source software, and has been moving in anti- privacy directions I don't like, so I still use Firefox. But in many ways, Opera is a far superior browser.

<comment><USER19> _In Firefox you have to first bookmark the link, then go to the atrocious bookmark manager and move the bookmark where you want it to go._

In Firefox you can click the star in the URL bar to set a bookbar. When you click the star for a second time immediately, you can select where in the bookmark hierarchy it should go without opening the bookmark manager at all.

You can also just drag&drop the tab title to the right location in the bookmarks toolbar and it will create a bookmark there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here we go again! This is a sentiment that is spreading in the dev community, Chrome is starting to lose it's edge.

I'm currently working on a slightly heavy page, and Chrome is the slowest of the bunch to render, despite having smoother animations in most cases after it has done it's thing. Firefox, Safari and even IE9 are visibly faster by a couple _seconds_.

I feel like it slowly got worse and worse over the years. These days Chrome is the main CPU hog in my machine, uses GBs of memory and is responsible for most system hangs (OSX). The com.google.keystone agent thing even causes the trackpad and keyboard to malfunction every once and a while.

<comment><USER21> WTF! _THAT_ is the thing which makes my input go away for a few seconds? I thought I had hardware which was flaking out, since really, how does the whole system regularly "lose" both input devices at once?

Thank you for mentioning this!

<comment><USER22> Well that's good news, sorta. I too thought the hardware was having issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Same here, but for a slightly different reason for me:

When you're not logged into your google account, typing into the address bar with periodically kill chrome on mountain lion.

Not often, but maybe 3 or 4 times a day. Not kill the tab; hard kill chrome, instantly, destroying all the tabs, no recovery, all chrome processes go poof. It happens on all three of my mac devices (and this is on Version 25.0.1364.160).

It's not even a choice; that's just unusable.

I've also found firefox to be a lot better than I remember. Firebug is still a memory hog though, and as we saw in the other epic thread, the firebug / native developer tools thing is still just idiotic.

...but it's pretty good.

I honestly didn't expect to be ever returning to firefox because it was _more stable_ than the alternative.

<comment><USER24> I had the same problem on chrome. There's a lengthy bug discussion and a suggested solution (that worked for me): [https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=175341#c...](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=175341#c45)

<comment><USER25> The immediate difference toggling "Predict network actions to improve page load performance" off for me is STUNNING. Thank you so much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sometimes I wonder how comprehensive these comparisons actually are. This is what I currently have open in Chrome:

3 Chrome Beta windows, with 17, 14, and 1 tabs open. 1 Chrome Canary window with 2 tabs

A good number of these tabs have not-very-light applications open like Gmail, Google spreadsheets, and some YouTube vids.

If you say to yourself, "oh, let me go check out Firefox compared to this," and launch it with one tab, do a quick Google search, and then determine, "hey, this is way faster," well... yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. Not only do you not have multiple windows and tabs open, but if you haven't used it in years you've probably got a pretty small cache not bogging you down.

Personally I've never actually noticed Chrome's performance to have any issues. Maybe because I have 12 gigs of RAM and an otherwise decent setup. On a more constrained system perhaps problems start to show themselves more easily. But are you sure that those same problems don't also appear in other browsers, given you're using them as intensely as you've been using Chrome this whole time?

I'd really love to see some browser comparison stats that go in-depth on this. Basically the only numbers you ever see these days are javascript rendering scores, and I feel like that's a really poor way to determine a browser's overall speed and efficiency. It doesn't account for how long it takes to open a new tab (like .01 seconds vs .3 seconds, which IMO is a big difference), scroll lag, startup time, etc, and it certainly doesn't account for how and if browsers become bogged down by real-world use.

I fear that users may be making similar snap judgments by comparing on the basis of quick open-and-go tests, instead of actual in-depth testing. First impressions are everything. You may find yourself five years from now using a browser that is actually slower than you were using previously, but you maintain your use of it because one time five years ago you opened it and loaded a page and it was faster than the encumbered incumbent.

<comment><USER27> this post is uninformed.

first, a cache should never slow you down. old obscure settings can. and these can be in your old firefox profile as well.

second, the usecase of many open tabs is better in firefox. there are studies out there that show lower ram usage in firefox for many tabs. (first google link, because i don't find the one i had in mind right now: [http://lifehacker.com/5976082/browser-speed-tests- chrome-24-...](http://lifehacker.com/5976082/browser-speed-tests- chrome-24-firefox-18-internet-explorer-10-and-opera-1212))

btw: if you are going to criticize test methodology, why do you include two browser? you know you can run various development version of firefox as well?

<comment><USER28> With Chrome you have to trade memory usage for the process sandboxing of each tab which adds a measurable overhead. But I think for the general population it is a trade worth making.

<comment><USER29> I think it definitely used to be, but these days Firefox crashes so rarely that I don't see it as an issue. I imagine other browsers are similarly stable, and it depends on your personal usage patterns, but I think the majority of users probably neither use dozens of tabs nor experience frequent crashes, so both should be fine for most users, but power users are likely to prefer one or the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> We've just passed the four-year anniversary of the bug that made me abandon Firefox on Mac: <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=476541>

If you are an extremely fast typer, pretty much any time you use Firefox on OS X to "Save As" you will hit this incarnation of a bug that hangs every tab in your browser and forces you to kill it and start from scratch: <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=528149>

Total bummer, I love Firefox but I'm not gonna train myself to type slower to keep from breaking it. This is no Therac-25.

<comment><USER31> I love Firefox and use it every day. But you bring up an important point. The Google Chrome team has some pretty annoying bugs and limitations that they ignore for years, but the same is true for Firefox.

For example, my largest pet peeve with Firefox is that two sessions cannot share the same profile. I can't have Firefox open for user abc in desktop session 1 and try to open it again as user abc in desktop session 2. Chrome and IE have no problem doing that. No joke, the issue is a decade old. And Mozilla recently marked the issue as a wont-fix.

<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=135137>

I didn't lodge a complaint in the bug's comment trail. It's disappointing, but I figure it's essentially impossible for any of these guys to have a stellar record on bugs when you're got bug IDs in the high six-digits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I have no idea what the article and some of you guys are talking about. I'm a very heavy user of Chrome, usually I have around 3 windows and 50-60 tabs in total; with this is setting I feel it's running pretty snappy, animations runs very smooth compared to the choppy experience I get with a single window and a single tab using Firefox. And don't get me started about Firebug; it's still so slow and clumsy compared to the chrome dev tools, every time I have to debug something Firefox specific the mere thought of being forced to use it gives me pain. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to discourage Mozilla, I have a huge appreciation for what they are doing. But when it comes to day-to- day usage, and as a developer tool, Chrome still wins in my book.

<comment><USER33> I was a Firefox user since the Phoenix/Firebird days, but I switched to Chrome about a year ago. On two separate occasions recently, I tried to switch back to Firefox for daily use. In both cases, I was back on Chrome within a week. Firefox has made great strides in memory usage, Javascript performance and overall UI polish, but on my hardware* and with my usage patterns, it absolutely CRAWLS compared to Chrome. I found myself restarting it almost daily to keep it responsive, and even on a fresh startup it wasn't as snappy as a fully-loaded (15-20 tabs open) and long-running Chrome.

I can honestly say that if performance wasn't an issue, I would prefer Firefox. I love the addons that are available, particularly NoScript, ABP and Vimperator. The Chrome equivalents are imperfect due to Chrome's extension model, and I miss the real things almost daily. However, I just can't go back to a browser that's slow and unresponsive. Maybe Firefox and Chrome are just making different trade-offs, and I happen to benefit more from Chrome's choices. I don't know. What I do know is that I can't tolerate my browser freezing up or taking 5 seconds to process clicks.

* - A fairly modest laptop with a 1.6ghz dual-core AMD APU, 6gb of RAM and an SSD. It's easily fast enough for everything else that I do, and Chrome flies on it. On my much beefier desktop, Firefox is usable, but still noticeably slower than Chrome.

<comment><USER34> That doesn't sound typical. Have you tried doing a Firefox reset? I've seen it make a large improvement to performance, especially with older Firefox profiles:

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily- fi...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most- problems)

(In short: Go to "about:support" and click reset. It will prompt you before doing anything, and will rebuild your profile while preserving bookmarks/history/saved-forms/etc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> IIRC when Google released Chrome they said (I'm paraphrasing) they were doing it to raise the bar by which web browsers were measured. They needed to do this so that their other products (gmail, google docs) were viable replacements to their desktop competitors. They weren't really interested in developing a browser for its own sake.

If Firefox is now seen as being as good as or even better than Chrome, it looks like Google have succeeded.

<comment><USER36> Seeing ads in Google Chrome, I'd say they use the browser for more than that. But yes, I can also remember hearing something like that. They're profiting regardless of the outcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I get where everyone is coming from when they say Firefox is getting better, but I really don't see Chrome getting worse and I certainly don't see Firefox surpassing Chrome.

Firefox dev tools in Nightly are much better, but still don't beat Chrome's. Firefox is still ugly. Firefox still won't let me open Nightly _and_ Aurora. Firefox's Javascript performance is getting faster and memory usage is getting better, but when running tight loops in Javascript doing lots of calculations (specifically rendering fractal flames) Firefox becomes unresponsive and unusable, where as Chrome is fine and I can still browse normally while it runs in the background. Chrome might use a but more RAM but that's not a problem for me. I have buckets of RAM. Firefox needs restarting all the time when I change extensions or get updates.

I'll stick with Chrome for now. :)

<comment><USER38> Firefox's dev tools are still inadaquate compared to the ones in Chrome, even with Nightly. Thankfully Firebug and another Firefox profile solves that.

As far as opening both Nightly and Aurora, create a shortcut to Nightly with the following options "...\firefox.exe -p -no-remote". This will let you select a profile on startup, keeping your Aurora and Nightly profiles separate and running both at the same time.

<comment><USER37> Thanks for this tip! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I also switched back for similiar reasons. FF has really stepped up their memory management and patching IMO. Also, i went back because of plugins.

Say what you will about chrome, but tab plugins are king in firefox. Tree style tabs on the left hand side and tab grouping what really sank it for me. I even merged the the search box and address bar in FF to give me that chrome omnibar feeling.

I think the most important takeaway is this: FF is still competitive among technical people and so is chrome. There even might be room for IE. We as a community, would need to keep voting with our feet and we can make sure the "browser wars" never end.

</comment><comment><USER40> I never switched to Chrome for the silly and simple reason that I prefer a less corporate internet over a more corporate one. On top of that I am not sure that Chrome is or is not spyware but I'd like to err on the side of caution with stuff like this.

</comment><comment><USER41> I develop on Chrome all day every day and I cannot relate at all to these people saying it is full of bugs and crashing all the time. Nor do I find that Firefox is faster.

Chrome dev tools are still the best in the business, and Chrome just works.

Also I did a memory usage comparison on Chrome and Firefox 2 months ago and Firefox was using more memory by quite a bit (and got worse the more tabs you had open.) And this was Firefox with NO Flash and Chrome with Flash.

<comment><USER42> This is the first comment I've read so far that I 100% agree with.

I personally see no reason to keep more than 8-10 tabs open at a given time which doesn't affect my CPU performance whatsoever (running a "standard" dev machine of 12GB+ RAM, i7, etc) so I could care less if FF handles 40 tabs better.

And quickly, some reasons I love Chrome (& Google):

\- Accessible nightly builds (Canary)

\- AngularJS debug extension

\- Built-in bookmark/history/search sync (read something at home yesterday - can easily find it in my history at work or on mobile)

\- <http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/>

<comment><USER43> You do realize that Firefox has accessible nightly builds (and has for over a decade) and has built-in sync?

I agree they're useful things to have, but they're not exactly Chrome- specific.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I too have switched Firefox as my main browser, so far I like the better addons,

* ad block is much better

* addons work in private mode by default,

* an addon to use keepaas as my password manager

* many addons that allow me to customize youtube which i could not do in chrome (force 240p etc..),

* I missed Instant search but Firefox already searches bookmarks better and with the instantFox addon i can also search any site ala google instant and ddg

Better in chrome

* Addons by HNers (HN in chrome is great with a few addons like tldr.io, HNbox)

* Firefox seems unable to do multiple downloads as well as chrome (I'm unable to download multiple videos at once from coursera when using firefox)

* some chrome store apps

* Developer tools (which I don't really need)

I don't see much of a performance difference (maybe Firefox is better now or it may be hardware accelerated as I'm using Windows)

<comment><USER45> I haven't seen this multiple download issue with Firefox, but you may like the DownThemAll! download manager, it provides a queue, maximum downloads, bandwidth limits, and other very nice features: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/downthemall/>

<comment><USER44> Thanks for the suggestion, I already use DownThemAll but it could not even grab the download. It may be the site's fault, once I click on the download link it opens a new tab and the download starts, on chrome I can start another download but it gets stuck on Firefox, it may be that the page was made with chrome in mind idk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I switched from Firefox to Chrome at about the same time as op.

But I can't relate to how he feels:

\- Chrome still has better dev tools than Firefox

\- Chrome doesn't freeze at all (while Firefox does when handling a lot of tabs)

\- Chrome doesn't require to restart when installing an extension (even if Firefox starts moving to this too)

\- I still prefer Chrome's UI

\- Even though I didn't try syncing with Firefox, Chrome does that very nicely

<comment><USER47> > Chrome doesn't require to restart when installing an extension (even if > Firefox starts moving to this too)

Mozilla did introduce an api to do restart-less addons about two years ago, as a side effect these addons don't depend on specific firefox versions anymore.

The problem with firefox addons is that they have always hooked directly into XUL, a layout language used inside firefox, which changes (nearly) every version. This means addons needed to be updated regularly. However it did allow them many capabilities (that I suspect the new api doesn't give them).

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> For me the big difference wasn't the browser itself; it has been excessive javascript that's slowing the browsers. Many media sites are loading 20-30 external scripts, and I found that switching back to Firefox with NoScript has made a huge difference in load times and memory usage. The other issue with Chrome was releasing memory. I can close a tab in FF and the memory is recovered.

<comment><USER49> Installing NoScript freed up like 20% of my CPU time. Now I just need websites to stop failing ungracefully.

<comment><USER50> I saw someone recommend this before: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en- us/firefox/addon/yesscript/>

I haven't tried it myself, but apparently it's a kind of reverse Noscript (hence the name).

"YesScript lets you make a blacklist of sites that aren't allowed to run JavaScript. Use YesScript on sites that annoy you or hog your system resources. One click to the icon in the status bar turns scripts on or off for the current site."

<comment><USER51> Would Ghostery accomplish the same thing?

<comment><USER50> I had Ghostery, but didn't like it. It seemed to "talk too much".

Noscript can be paranoid (a feature, not a bug) and occasionally stop sites from working even if they are white-listed; I consider having to open a site in another browser sometimes less of a nuisance than having my main browser slowed down by dodgy JS.

Two add-ons anthropomorphized in one comment! I guess that's what happens when you spend so much time in front of a screen ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Firefox is great, but I think is a unfair comparison Chrome vs Firefox as he's talking about freedom and Chrome is not free software[1]. He may want to try Chromium instead.

I know is supposed to be the same source code, but it gives me some peace of mind that a 3rd party I trust (Linux distro) had access to the source code and built the actual binary I'm using.

[1] <http://www.google.co.uk/chrome/intl/en/eula_text.html>

EDIT: formatting

</comment><comment><USER53> Spot on, OP. Spot on. Firefox is a great browser and its truly open.

Unlike you I always been a Firefox user mostly because I still can't the basic addons for Chrome which I use on Firefox. And privacy concerns. I still use Chrome for cross-browser checks.

The one thing that Chrome was been said to be better than Firefox was the memory management. Over the past years, Firefox's memory leak issue has almost diminished and Chrome's has started.

Mozilla was and always is making Firefox for web browsing, they never pulled in any other feature/add-on/plug-in which would side track their motto.

</comment><comment><USER54> I have returned to firefox for the following reasons: 1) It feels more stable. Almost never crashes. 2) Can run separate profiles at the same time in a nicer way than chrome. I use this to have a work and personal browser in work. 3) I use vimperator now which I find works best on firefox. 4) I get that happy feeling that I am using software which actually values some of the open source philosophy that I value.

</comment><comment><USER55> I've been using Firefox more myself.

It's the consistent tic- tic-tic of disk access by Chrome. I have all extensions and plug-ins disabled. All caching disabled. And yet when I try to concentrate on something I'm reading in Chrome I'm continuously distracted by the tic-tic-tic of chrome accessing the hard disk every second or two.

Right now this window I'm writing in is the only Chrome window open. Yet there are three Chrome processes running. One of which is writing 7k per second to a temp file.

Chrome is not the sleek beast it once was. It's living off its reputation at this point.

</comment><comment><USER56> I've been a lifelong Opera user and given the current situation (it's dying), I am considering Firefox the only viable alternative. I've never even liked having chrome on my computer, and in fact I would not be surprised if Google simply dropped chrome as a product, leaving it to the hands of the open source community anyway. They've abandoned many good products and dropping chrome wouldn't surprise me. Then again, maybe I am bitter, I thought Opera would be around forever.

<comment><USER36> Was it ever not dying? I liked the browser, but the lack of support and incorrectly rendering websites got me off of it after at most one evening. (I tried a few times.)

<comment><USER57> I use Opera pretty much 100% and I've very rarely found any issues that would not have been issues in the other browsers.

The only problem is some people seem to think every single CSS3/HTML5 feature needs to be prefixed with -webkit- to work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I'm sticking with firefox for most of the same reasons as the author notes, but I do wish the mozilla team used some common sense when they think of new features.

A good example of the lack of common sense (imho) is the addon bar. Why do I want an extra bar with 2 or 3 icons? Most people will probably remember the status bar in browsers and they ditched that because it was not needed and you lost valuable screen estate. What was the best solution mozilla could come up with to handle the extension icons? An extra bar in the bottom of your browser. Just implement an omnibar already and put those things there...

If anyone from mozilla is reading this: you've done a great (GREAT!) job at making firefox faster and use less memory, and if you're ever in the neighbourhood I'll buy you a beer. Now please also start thinking about those little things that just don't make any sense.

<comment><USER59> It might not be useful for you, but I for one find the "addon bar" really great. I've about 10 addons installed and configured most of them to be at the bottom, all in a single place. You can toggle it with "CTRL + /" at anytime, which pleases both parties.

<comment><USER58> I'm using a non-us keyboard layout and unfortunately that doesn't work...

<comment><USER60> It's probably accessible somehow. For example, on my Serbian keyboard it's AltGr+Shift+Q

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> _I honestly believe Mozilla is committed to freedom and privacy on the web. Google is committed to making money and knowing everything I do._

 _The majority of the revenues comes from Google Inc., which is the default search engine on Mozilla Firefox._ [1]

Doesn't Mozilla exist because Google exists?

[1]- [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Mozilla_Corp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Mozilla_Corporation)

<comment><USER62> Mozilla continues to exist because there is competition among search engines for marketshare. If Google was the only search engine in the world, they likely wouldn't see any need to fund Mozilla. But given that Bing does exist, and that it has non-negligible marketshare (16.5% [1]), Microsoft would be more than willing to fund Mozilla if Google wasn't willing to pony up. We can only speculate, but bids from Microsoft are likely why Google _increased_ the amount that they're paying Mozilla in the most recent round of negotiations.

Personally, I hope that the venture with Firefox OS will be successful in making Mozilla less reliant on search engine licensing agreements.

[1] [http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2244472/Google-Once- Aga...](http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2244472/Google-Once-Again- Claims-67-Search-Market-Share)

<comment><USER63> But what if I use the duckduckgo search in Firefox? Am I screwing google?

NB: duckduckgo uses Bing, among others.

<comment><USER62> No, because in order to use DDG you had to change the default away from Google. That default is the entirety of what Google is paying for, and I'm sure it actually gets them a lot of traffic from people who don't care enough to switch (or who just don't care at all).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I made the same switch about a year ago now. Firefox feels so much better than it did when Chrome first appeared. I also now have an Android tablet, and Firefox on Android has come on leaps and bounds since it was first released; the tab syncing feature it shares with the desktop is fantastic and I haven't even launched Chrome on my tablet since I got it.

</comment><comment><USER65> Switched to Firefox from Chrome due to the following: \- I dislike Google tracking everything that I am doing \- Chrome with one tab starts out smoothly but with more tabs, its memory usage increases at a faster rate compared to Firefox \- A browser that puts an advertisement in a blank page (chromebook anyone?) is a total turn-off

</comment><comment><USER66> My biggest complain with Chrome right now is it freezes up and take over the entire CPU for 10 to 30 seconds every now and then. It's the case on both Windows 7 and Mac (10.8 Mountain Lion). Usually when that happens, I take a mini-break. Before it was lightning fast. I tried to switch back to Firefox but it's still IMO considerably slower in general but admittedly much more stable and doesn't freeze up for no good reason. Chrome seems to be slowly slipping to where Firefox was before as author ranted.

</comment><comment><USER67> If you're on windows, the difference in font rendering between firefox and chrome is huge.

<comment><USER68> That's always bothered me. Firefox's fonts are so crisp and clear. Chrome's look faded for some reason.

<comment><USER69> They screwed it up in Chrome 22 while rewriting part of skia: <https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=146407>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I recently switched back to _Chrome_ because I felt Firefox was too slow. Strange how we experience the exact opposite :\\.

Also, the feature I most appreciate with Chrome is the synchronization of tabs across all my devices (PC, laptop and phone). Firefox also has this but it never really worked for me (it was slow to update the tab list of my PC so I could access it from my phone, or it didn't update it at all "Ubuntu 12.04 - <USER2> days ago").

<comment><USER54> Strangely this was one of the main reasons I switched off Chrome.

I found that this was not useful at all. My three main consumptions are: -> Work Computer -> Tablet and phone -> Home computer

The tabs on my work computer are almost always not relevant for when I am at home and on tablet phone. There is also certain cases where I would not particularly want my tabs from my work machine (sensitive information perhaps) shared to my home computer or a mobile device I could get stolen and vice versa.

For any sharing of tabs I want, I just use pocket, as the tabs I really want to share are usually just articles that I want to read, either way pocket will take those links.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I've recently switched back as well and I find that it's back to a much better experience. Firefox was horrible for a while, but I think the team have been doing an excellent job of optimising it.

My only annoyance is the development tools - Chrome still whips FF here - <USER3> they are still no where as good as Firebug, which continues to be the most required extension - but I believe work is being done there too.

<comment><USER72> Chrome Dev Tools were what ultimately lured me over to Chrome full time. The Sync tool is pretty good too. I don't really get these memory issues everyone talks about. Maybe it's because I'm not on OSX but on Linux and Windows I regularly have 20+ tabs open for weeks and have no issues... even if I'm playing video games that take up 60% of my memory when Chrome was taking up 50% as it was it seems to play nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I use both Firefox and Chrome. But I prefer Firefox. Better addons and extensibility were already mentioned. But one thing that seems to be commonly overlooked is the superior typography of Firefox. Firefox even does stuff like ligatures. That makes reading longer text much more pleasant.

Firefox is also capable of handling large amounts of tabs. In Chrome the tab bar is of fixed length (length of the window) and thus the maximum number of tabs is limited by my screen width. In Firefox the tab bar can extend to the sides or even better you can use the TreeStyleTabs addon to organize tabs in a tree view.

I think the biggest problem for Firefox was the long wait before FF4 was released. That was the exact time many people moved to Chrome. FF3.6 wasn't bad but was clearly slower than Chrome and had a huge memory appetite. Later versions improved this dramatically and Firefox now feels lighter/faster than Chrome. But every time FF vs. Chrome there are people claiming otherwise who have stopped using FF at version 3.6...

</comment><comment><USER74> At the least, we desperately need Firefox as competition for Webkit.

</comment><comment><USER75> I'm currently using an early 2006 iMac with Core Duo and 2GB of memory, running OS X 10.6.8, while my main computer is being repaired. For two years I thought it was dead (or on its last gasp), after some futile attempts to revive it with an external HDD. Finally I managed to boot it with an USB flash drive and later transferred its contents to an external USB hard drive.

Firefox is the only browser that runs comfortably on it. I'm using a lot of extensions, including ABP with multiple filter lists. After disabling caching on hard drive, I'm keeping around 25 tabs, sometimes 30 or more, and there's still RAM to spare, and the CPU isn't getting pounded.

Of course, browsers should be optimized for current use cases and computers, but what I've experienced for the past two weeks really changed my impression of Firefox as a bloated and slow browser that was only fast in comparison to old IE.

</comment><comment><USER76> I've switched back to Firefox recently too (from Safari). Here's what I had to tweak to get it working like it should: [http://sdfjkl.org/post/2013/03/07/Making-Firefox-behave- on-O...](http://sdfjkl.org/post/2013/03/07/Making-Firefox-behave-on-OS-X)

</comment><comment><USER77> I would love to switch back to Firefox, but, to be honest, the rapid relase cycle really annoys me. I would love to head back, if Mozilla switched to a more stable release cycle - or at least to updates, that don't interupt me everytime I start the browser up.

But I'll give it a try.

<comment><USER78> The update nagging has been much reduce since the start of the rapid release cycle, so you should definitely give it a try.

<comment><USER77> Thanks all, I will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> I've always stuck to Firefox for its customizability and because it has less reasons to collect all my data and become an Apple like walled garden which Chrome is slow turning into.

That said, yes, they also have less reasons to be 'answerable' to their users or to fix problems. On Bugzilla, I've mostly seen arrogant and rude contributors who are mostly like, if you can't contribute or fix it yourself, go away! Don't even complain. See the example of this major/critical _12 years_ old bug, which no one wants to fix, and now they don't even want users to express their displeasure on that. There's no resolve, while other browsers have fixed that problem.

I've always stuck to Firefox for its customizability and because it has less reasons to collect all my data and become an Apple like walled garden which Chrome is slow turning into.

That said, yes, they also have less reasons to be 'answerable' to their users or to fix problems. On Bugzilla, I've mostly seen arrogant and rude contributors who are mostly like, "If you can't contribute or fix it yourself, go away!" Don't even complain. See the example of this major/critical _12 years_ old bug, which no one wants to fix, and now they don't even want users to express their displeasure on that. There's no resolve, while other browsers have fixed that problem. <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78414>

</comment><comment><USER80> Does anyone know of an extension that adds Chromes feature of highlighting results in the scrollbar when searching through a page (Ctrl+F)?

It's pretty much the only thing I'm missing whenever I try FF again.

<comment><USER81> I use XUL/Migemo which marks matches in a similar way to what you describe and also allows a a regex search. It also has some Japanese language features (but I'm not interested in those).

<comment><USER80> Thank you so much! While XUL/Migemo seems to have problems with current FF versions, someone there linked Fastest Search [1] and it has everything I wanted plus way more (including RegEx).

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fastest- searc...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fastest-search/)

<comment><USER82> Great find, I've been looking for something like this too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Recently, it seems Chrome is saving history online between browsers on different machines. This has freaked me out to the point where I'm moving back to using Firefox.

<comment><USER84> You can always disable it in the sync settings. Seriously this is HN, not some news site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> I switch back on Linux every so often, feel refreshed and stay for a few months. Then I switch to Chrome, feel refreshed and the cycle continues.

</comment><comment><USER86> What OS? I have noticed that Firefox on Ubuntu (12.04 clean install) looks way worse and feels worse than FF on Windows 7. I feel like Firefox on Windows is still more peppy than Chrome / Firefox on Ubuntu despite my Linux box being way beefier. I feel like the author's post is 1 dimensional (which browser) when it should be a 2 dimensional comparison (browser and OS).

</comment><comment><USER87> I was actually thinking the same thing and am giving it a try.

One thing that strikes me as vastly inferior in FF given my use cases is the way private browsing works. I use incognito tabs in Chrome all the time in dev to get a clean tab with no sessions etc. FF only allows for either normal tabs or private tabs, not both. Oh well :-)

<comment><USER88> Firefox has just added private windows (just like incognito in Chrome). It's currently in Firefox beta [1], which will be released on April 2nd.

[1] <http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/20.0beta/releasenotes/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> Installed Firefox again because of this post.

One of the things I tried out was WebGL performance using the recently posted WebGL terrain flyover demo ([http://www.zephyrosanemos.com/windstorm/20130301/live- demo.h...](http://www.zephyrosanemos.com/windstorm/20130301/live-demo.html)), but I can't get over 30.5 fps in Firefox whereas on Chrome I get 50 - 60. Hardware acceleration seems to be enabled for both, perhaps Firefox is not recognizing the graphics card?

One of the things that impressed my about Chrome in the beginning was when they launched Chrome Experiments to show off the performance. There was no comparison at the time between any other browser and Chrome. This may still hold true to a certain extent.

However, for general browsing I can't tell a difference with the current iteration.

</comment><comment><USER90> Finding myself using Firefox more often again. Chrome is not as snappy as I once felt it to be.

</comment><comment><USER91> I switched from Firefox to Chrome around the same time as the author. However, I'm having the opposite experience. Chrome is great; everything is blazing fast, even with my ~25 tabs open.

I tried Firefox a few weeks ago just to see if I had been missing out on anything. Nope. Opening new tabs in Firefox was sluggish. Page navigation was even worse. I assumed that most browsers would be roughly on par these days but Firefox was not even tolerable after having used Chrome.

It pains me because I, too, share the sentiment that Mozilla is committed to freedom and privacy on the internet. I guess I am just willing to give that up in exchange for a better internet experience for the time being.

<comment><USER92> Try "Reset Firefox" -- it helps lots of problems like this. See [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily- fi...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most- problems).

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> I use firefox, always have even when it was buggy as hell, mostly because i needed all the web dev tools and was confortable with it, but i also use chrome for watching youtube and quick browsing (unfortunately firefox till this day is damn slow to open and become responsive).

Thats why im looking forward to opera's webkit version (so i can ditch google chrome for opera), i think google chrome is getting more and more creepy and has made some decisions that are more in google's interest than the users (like posting links on the speed dial or all the extensions that are nothing more thank links and all the extensions that are not links but behave like links, its weird).

</comment><comment><USER94> Firefox's killer features:

1\. Option "Don't load tabs until selected"

2\. Firefox Sync

3\. Aurora releases

<comment><USER82> Yes, I love lazy-loading tabs!

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> I used to be a Firefox user a couple of years ago and then when I switched to Chrome I noticed a BIG difference in the performance. Chrome was faster and more stable.

Now, similar to the OP I keep having issues with Chrome, the biggest of which is its memory usage.

"Memory usage is off the charts and I frequently have tabs become completely unresponsive."

In my case, it not only eats 2GB of my RAM, but also takes a bit proportion of my hard-disk. I did a quick experiment yesterday and measured my FREE HDD space before closing Chrome and after that.

Before: 800 MB free. After: 10.9 GB free :)

It's true I keep a lot of tabs open (>70), but 10GB.. I think that's too much. Now, I'm considering switching back to Firefox, too.

</comment><comment><USER96> Firefox is great for his philosophy, but for my part, Chrome is better for dev., performance, memory, etc. (And recently, I'm having a weird bug with text while scrolling with Firefox).

Anyway, I think everyone here using Firefox AND chrome.

</comment><comment><USER97> > The post is spot on. Firefox is a great browser, but reading the OP's last > paragraphs, users rarely choose software for quality alone.

Quality is not the same for everyone. I have switched to Chrome, and it feels like it's build much better than Firefox. Maybe Firefox is actually built better, but as an user, I perceive Chrome to be better, starting with rare crashes instead of Firefox's frequent ones. Yes, Firefox's crashes may be because of its plugins, but that's a moot point, because without any plugins, Firefox is too basic a browser.

</comment><comment><USER98> Firefox is still slow as heck for me. Not sure what performance you guys are talking about. I unfortunately have to use Firefox heavily at work. When I can I use something else, sometimes even IE.

<comment><USER99> you can try to reset profile: [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset- firefox-easily-fi...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox- easily-fix-most-problems) Also, AdBlock plus addon for faster and clutterless browsing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> Great timing - I just posted a Show HN about my new extension to save 95% memory in Google Chrome

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5356823>

</comment><comment><USER101> Surf with Chrome and use Firefox for dev

</comment><comment><USER102> I switched my main browser Chrome to Canary some time ago. And recently i have been using Firefox Nightly. And all i can say is that Chrome now lacks the quality it used to have (yes, even in the canary build) and Firefox has gained a lot in terms of stability, memory consumption and Dev-features.

The bad thing is: hardly anyone knows about this, because Google is investing tons and tons of money for Chrome marketing purposes (and developer evangelisation; a point you also have to consider).

Only thing i like more about Chrome: the dev tools

</comment><comment><USER103> Chrome lags a lot when dealing with HTML5 and hogs a lot of memory

</comment><comment><USER104> I still prefer firebug over the firefox dev tools. The built in tools look pretty but they aren't that useful to me. I just figured out how to show the style window, but there doesn't seem to be any javascript tools. Where is the console?

edit: After I posted this I figured I should dig deeper before I get all kinds of negative comments. I found the console and also some other useful tools that I didn't know existed. Things like the responsive view and scratch pad are pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER105> Due to issues with memory usage on Chrome I recently tried switching back but page rendering and UI response felt noticeably slower. I am also so fluent with web inspector that the burden of re-learning Firebug or the built-in tools was a drag.

So I decided that the easiest way to reduce Chrome's memory usage was to curb my slightly irrational usage patterns - keeping dozens of tabs open that I rarely ever get around to going back to.

</comment><comment><USER106> The exact reason I jumped out of Chrome to back Firefox. Privacy. I will never trust Google with my information and it seems they do collect it without me knowing as well. I have scoured over Chrome's source code to see if they are doing anything nefarious as tracking my url visits but still I never felt safe in that platform. I moved to duckduckgo, Firefox and I am happy.

</comment><comment><USER107> I have tried several times to switch back to firefox, but without success. I have to use different computers almost everyday, chrome does the sync work so well besides other functions, when I install firefox on a different pc, the sync configuration is so conplex for me... but there are some excelent addons on firefox I will miss, e.g. pantadactyl

</comment><comment><USER108> How about doing actual benchmarks? How about pin pointing how exactly google tracks you more or better with chrome than with ff?

<comment><USER109> > How about pin pointing how exactly google tracks you more or better with > chrome than with ff?

Why? It can change it the next update. Or you can just use Firefox (and NoScript) with much less worry.

<comment><USER108> There is no evidence that chrome tracks you anymore than FF with google as search engine. My gripe is that the article is all about "feelings" and makes claims without backing them up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> Switching between Firefox and chrome will happen often for at least few years to come. Chrome was a good thing because it brought some real competition in the Market.

Webkit is supported by Apple as well as Google which happen to be worlds largest companies. Firefox on other other had is open, non profit organization giving a tough fight to both of them.

</comment><comment><USER111> I'm switching back from Chrome to Firefox because Chrome doesn't work for me with basic Google services, like search, maps, gmail.

[http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/hsW8ls9...](http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/hsW8ls9XhQE)

It goes on and off. When I have this problem I switch back to Firefox for a while.

</comment><comment><USER112> This post seems weird to me as I recently switched back to Chrome for Firefox precisely because Chrome is faster than ff. It is visibly faster for me and most recent articles I could find after I googled 'Chrome versus Firefox' showed exactly that - that Chrome is faster than Firefox on the more important metrics right now.

<comment><USER113> And for me, Firefox is faster. By a lot, in fact, because Chrome loves to hit the disk for every little thing, especially on startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER114> _I frequently have tabs become completely unresponsive_

This started happening to me a few months ago, and yesterday I had about 5 tabs do this. I even cleared the cache and restarted, and it happened again.

I've been having the same thoughts as the OP, and having fled FF around the same time frame, perhaps I should give it another try.

</comment><comment><USER115> > Now it's five years later and things aren't so great. More than ever I'm > having issues with general slowness in the browser.

Check.

> Memory usage is off the charts and I frequently have tabs become completely > unresponsive.

Check.

> JavaScript errors occasionally disappear into the void instead of logging to > the console.

Check.

Oh, my! I'm so glad I'm not the only one!

</comment><comment><USER116> First of all Firebug and million other addons are good reason to stick to Firefox ;) Welcome back!

</comment><comment><USER117> My story is similar but goes further back, I tried Chrome shortly but soon learned that its only two noscript-options were flawed in various ways, mainly they loaded all the javascript once before they blocked it.

So the only reason I use firefox today is due to noscript.

</comment><comment><USER118> Pentadactyl alone did it for me.

<comment><USER119> Pentadactyl is incredible. I find it difficult to use a browser without it now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER120> > Chrome greets me with… sigh… Chrome greets me with a fucking advertisement > for a Chromebook.

I have always used Chromium as opposed to Chrome. I am not sure why people would go for the Chrome version if they really care about freedom.

<comment><USER121> Two reasons:

1) Where can I find official-ish Chromium for Windows?

2) On Ubuntu, Chromium always seems to be behind Chrome wrt updates.

I tried Chromium on Ubuntu, but switched because of the lag. Let me know if I am mistaken.

<comment><USER120> > 1) Where can I find official-ish Chromium for Windows?

Apparently this is the page to look out for. [http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser- sna...](http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser- snapshots/index.html)

But looks like the downloading part is not straight forward. Look at the second answer at in the following link.

[http://superuser.com/questions/203606/where-can-i-get- chromi...](http://superuser.com/questions/203606/where-can-i-get-chromium- binaries)

>2) On Ubuntu, Chromium always seems to be behind Chrome wrt updates.

This has to do with an Ubuntu repository (for chromium) vs PPA from Google (for chrome). Ubuntu is always going to be a bit behind upstream. The same way it is a few days behind upstream firefox or other software. If you absolutely need the bleeding edge version of google chrome, either use something like archlinux (where you get updates within a day or two), or continue with Ubuntu, but use a ppa for chromium beta which is available from here ([http://askubuntu.com/questions/126092/where-are-the-daily- bu...](http://askubuntu.com/questions/126092/where-are-the-daily-builds-for- chromium-for-12-04)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER122> I tried to switch to Firefox while ago, but there are two problems which holds me back:

\- Firefox is horrible with inversive color theme (light text on dark background). With Chrome it just works on 99% websites

\- KDE Firefox integration is horrible.

<comment><USER123> I use Firefox on KDE with a dark theme (obsidian coast). Parts of some pages, like this very comment input on HN, specify either text color or background color, but not the other, and so you get dark text on dark bg or light text on light bg. However, these are relatively rare, and I have little issue with this setup.

The KDE integration is also not that bad. I use ArchLinux and never installed any special packages, and while tabs and menus do not look exactly like Qt/KDE apps, the difference is barely noticable. And they are the correct color.

</comment></comment><comment><USER124> The ultimate parameter for me is speed. As much as I love Mozilla's open source policy, I just can't use it because it is slower. RAM is not a problem to anyone, so I prefer more RAM used than slower performance.

</comment><comment><USER125> There must be some shifting in the geekforce. I just switched back to Firefox a couple of weeks ago on OSX 10.7. Flawless, which is more than I can say for Chrome or Safari.

</comment><comment><USER126> Til people are snobbish and only use one browser , personally i use whatever is avail i have no allegiance to one or the other just the one that works first.

</comment><comment><USER127> See you there. Most of us already made the switch (back).

<comment><USER128> Do you have numbers to support that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER129> Unfortunately, in my experience, Chrome's WebGL performance is several times better than Firefox's. Upon several benchmarks, there is just no comparison.

</comment><comment><USER130> Reading blog posts like this makes me wonder if the author even considered using Opera at any point in his painful journey with Firefox and Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER131> Like many, I also switched to Chrome when it came out, after many years of Firefox.

Are there reviews/benchmarks that substantiate the article's claims ?

</comment><comment><USER132> >The "disable cache" checkbox in the developer tools seems to do nothing

I've the same issue. It works sometimes and other times it doesn't.

<comment><USER133> You need to keep the pane open for it to have an effect. The relevant SO thread: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5690269/disabling- chrome-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5690269/disabling-chrome-cache- for-website-development)

I actually like this behavior but obviously you need to know about it for it to seem reasonable :-)

<comment><USER132> Yes, I'm aware of that. But sometimes even keeping the dev tools open doesn't clear the cache. Probably it's some bug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER134> I've noticed Google Analytics tab in Google Chrome crashing often. Google Analytics eats lot of memory in Google Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER135> I actually use Chrome because it syncs my settings between Chrome for Desktop and Chrome for Android quite nicely.

</comment><comment><USER136> > Chrome greets me with a fucking advertisement for a Chromebook

My solution for now is to use about:blank as a homepage.

</comment><comment><USER137> Built-in syncing service is still not user friendly. Persona may fix it in future

</comment><comment><USER138> And firefox has Tree Style Tab. Makes it superior to any other browsers.

</comment><comment><USER94> Why was this post showing as [deleted] a few hours ago?

</comment><comment><USER139> Does the op know that the Mozilla foundation is almost entirely funded by Google?

<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation>

</comment><comment><USER140> Well, with both Chrome and Firefox on rapid mandatory release schedules, all I can say is: Get comfortable supporting IE for large enterprise customers forever.

<comment><USER141> Interesting... I've been consulting for one of the biggest of the biggest you could dream of.

There's a tendency which you may have heard of: mobile (smartphones and tablets) and there's a _lot_ of push for making these supported and available to employees (the push very often coming both from the employees _and_ from very high up the chain).

As a result mobile browsers support in large enterprise are becoming very often _mandatory_.

Why do you think large enterprise are supporting browsers at all? why do you think large enterprise are switching en masse to internal webapps instead of internal desktop apps? To free themselves from a particular technology vendor. It's the way they regain control. And you think they'd ruin all that by mandating "IE only"!?

This is not at all what I'm seeing in the enterprisey webapp world. On the contrary: the shift is to more platform, more standards, more openness.

<comment><USER142> Also seeing BYOD in small and medium sized enterprises.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER143> Chromium doesn't greet you with an ad. ;-)

<comment><USER36> Chromium doesn't have a built-in pdf reader :(

<comment><USER144> I consider that a feature.

<comment><USER36> What, downloading, opening, closing and deleting a pdf file instead of just opening a new tab with it?

<comment><USER144> I simply click the link, and a real PDF viewer shows me the content. I close the viewer when finished, and forget about it.

It's the same experience, except that the PDF is rendered right, the fonts are nicer, and the scrolling is far better. I can also view it as a presentation with slides easily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER145> I use Chrome because of the UI.

</comment><comment><USER146> Speaking personally, I never _left_ Firefox.

I've been using Mozilla code since the Netscape 7.X days (and tried to use NS6, but it was way too buggy.) I progressed from MS7 to the Mozilla Suite to Firefox, and have stayed there.

I have Chrome (and Opera, Safari, Midori, Konqueror, K-Meleon, D+, and a few other things including IE installed, but mostly to keep up on what others are doing. Firefox is what I use in production, and I currently run Aurora (which will be the next release when it gets out of beta.)

FF isn't the smallest or fastest browser on the machine I'm on at the moment (and old netbook) but is the most capable. FF, like other current browsers, makes assumptions about what you will run it on, and assumes a reasonably current machine with a reasonable CPU, GPU, and amount of RAM. I have another old machine I don't even _try_ to run FF on.

My reasons are tied up in the architecture. FF uses the Gecko engine, like everything else Mozilla puts out. Aside from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, Gecko interprets and renders XUL, an XML language for designing user interfaces. The look and feel of FF is determined by XUL, CSS, and widgets, and the browser is simply an instance of something Gecko renders.

This makes it possible to create themes that change what FF looks like, and extensions that modify and extend what it does, and that power is why I use it. My RSS reader, IRC client and several other things that would ordinarily be external programs are implemented in FF as extensions. Since the browser is always running when I'm at the computer, this make things very convenient.

Other browsers like Chrome added an extension capability, but they are pure JavaScript and limited by what the device API will let you do in JavaScript. Half of what I do in FF isn't _possible_ in Chrome.

Chrome is a worthy browser, and I'm glad it's there, but it's not what I use. It invokes somewhat faster than FF, but page rendering is equivalent, and memory usage rises rapidly as you add extensions, so there's little difference between FF and Chrome in use. Faster invocation is a non-issue here: I start the browser when I sit down at the machine and simply leave it running, so a few extra seconds to invoke it isn't a concern. Too many people have the bad habit learned from IE of hopping in and out of the browser, and I just tell such folks "You're doing it wrong".

On my desktop booted into Windows, I run FF from a RAMdisk. The desktop still runs XP and has 4GB RAM, but 32 bit Windows can only use 3.2GB of it. I found a RAMdisk driver that can use the rest and have a 768MBR ramdrive seen as Z:. Firefox, its cache, and its profile all live there and FF is run from there. It's _quick_. (Batch files populate the ramdisk on start up, and store the contents back to HD on shutdown.) I don't believe I can _do_ that with Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER147> really refreshing!

</comment><comment><USER148> It's getting better and it's now overtaken Safari as my default when I need a second browser. However I'll never consider switching back until they completely eliminate popups of any kind. I never want to be asked to restart the browser or update my plugins or anything. I don't care if Mozilla is filing for bankruptcy and they are turning it over to Kim Jong-un - I don't want a fucking popup announcing it.

Edit: immediately after making this post I realized there might be a way to disable all popups and notifications. Is there? If so, I might give it a spin for a week.

<comment><USER149> If you set the about:config pref "app.update.silent" to true, Firefox should never show you an update dialog. A Mozilla user study showed that most Firefox users restarted their browser at least once a day, so the update dialog usually waits something like 12 or 24 hours. By then, most users will have restarted their browser without needing to be prodded.

<http://kb.mozillazine.org/App.update.silent>

</comment></comment><comment><USER150> Earlier it used to be ...-Firefox-Chrome-Firefox-... every 2/3 months but fot that 1 year or so it's been just Firefox, happily.

I switched back to Firefox sometime ago. It got back its speed and crashes less and fries my Mac less than other browsers. Well, on crashing part and getting stuck part Safari is better than all others on a Mac(at least) but for other purpose(for my usage) it's a pretty pretty useless browser. Safari uses more RAM in Mac than Firefox/Chrome and for less tabs it uses more RAM than both combined, it just does that in a different helper process.

Quick releases ensures FF gets thinks out and fixed faster.

Their mobile browser is not still there. I hope it becomes better so that I can replace Chrome on my Android too.

There are things I wish were there in Firefox. Like manage tabs separately. Like in Chrome. Visual tools/API(seems it's not that open, not sure) like Chrome. I really liked Cortex extension of Chrome in Firefox(it was my favourite).

And of course I love those people at Mozilla for always standing against those privacy-killers and keep telling them to suck it up their -----.

<comment><USER151> I don't get about FF on Android, I find it more useable than Chrome. It's about the same speed and it runs flash rather decently (as decently as Flash can run on ARM).

</comment></comment><comment><USER141> People trading security (sandboxing) for performance (lower memory usage and faster speed in Firefox) deserve to be a) owned and b) have their whole browser crash when one tab crashes.

I'd be using Firefox if they started to sandbox all the tabs. To me the argument that it's faster and use less memory because it's not sandboxed is a _very_ poor one.

Actually that argument shows what is wrong with the mindset of many people in our field.

You should never trade security for a bit more perfs.

<comment><USER152> I don't believe Chrome took appreciably longer than Firefox to compromise in the recent PWN2OWN competition. Chrome's sandboxing implementation is not a silver bullet, and FF has run plugins out-of-process for some time. That said, full sandboxing is probably preferable and I believe it is on the agenda.

</comment></comment><comment><USER153> Welcome back! :)

</comment><comment><USER154> 1) Firefox is the new IE7/8 - i having more and more issues with standard css settings, which are f __ __* up in the ff, but are nice and shiny in all other brothers (yes even in ie)

2) "I honestly believe Mozilla is committed to freedom and privacy on the web." - haha thats funny :D you know about chromium right? :D its free, you can code on it too if you want too, sure there are might be 1-2 functions in the chrome, which belongs to google, but all in all you can know the code. and google did there learnings after the first versions where they sending stuff to there servers.

and in the end, all browser are logging the same shit, where are we clicking, what are we doing, where we enter this and that. why? because they want to make there money too, and collect a big big big database, which they can sell to other companies. and learn stuff out of it. i guess on this view all brothers are the same crap

3) memory management - yes its true chrome get stuck more and more often, and eating the memory, and it is annoying. but for me, firefox still is worse. everytime i start firefox for debugging some website or whatever, i'm totally pissed, because this stupid software still needs like forever for the initialised start. and when you keep it open for 2 days, you done :D in my opinion even photoshop has a better memory management then firefox.

=

i hope for the chrome too, that the switch from opera to webkit, give them a little ass kick, because that is that what all browser companies needed, an ass kick.

first there was an IE everybody used it, so why should they update it? then there was the firefox, ie was screwed, everybody used ff now, so why should they update it? then there was the chrome, ff was screwed, everybody used chrome now, so why should they update it?

and everybody took there lesson out of it, IE is getting better, FF starts updating there browser after sitting on 3.6 like forever... and thats ok, people now having like 3-4 good brothers and can choose.

<comment><USER20> > in my opinion even photoshop has a better memory management then firefox.

Too far, buddy.

<comment><USER155> Photoshop actually lets you cap its RAM and virtual memory usage. Does any browser?

<comment><USER68> Do you really think capping memory usage comes without costs?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rust now available on 14 Debian architectures - <AUTHOR> https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2018/11/msg00000.html <comment><USER2> This is awesome news. To the people behind this, thank you for the fantastic work.</comment>