Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Jldevictoria 2671 days ago
I gave Firefox a solid test last year (about 3 months of dedicated use at work + home) and I ended up coming back to Chrome. There are some really great things about Firefox. It has gotten so much better and faster than it was, but Chrome still struggles less with troublesome websites, and seems to load all pages faster overall.

I'm keeping my eye on Firefox, but Chrome still gets my business for now.

4 comments

I use both on a daily basis, and even I have no idea why I'd pick one over the other, except for power-user functions that 96% of the world couldn't care less about. In normal use, even standard dev work, they both do what I need them to do, and I (infrequently) run into bugs for both of them.

And honestly, at this point I don't even bother opening sites that struggle in one with the other: I just go "you clearly just didn't care to develop your website to work cross browser, good job, goodbye forever" and close the tab.

For almost everything, both browsers are identical except for the veneer their UIs present. They have different quirks, but a reasonably generated website or React app will work just fine in both. So while, if someone asked me to recommend one, I would absolutely tell them to get Firefox: not one asks for recommendations... everyone's already using either Chrome, or "the ios browser".

(and safari on iOS really _is_ the new IE6. I 100% disagree with the article's claim that Apple is making good strides, there. It needs to get out the shotgun and take Safari out to the back of the barn)

I dev with Chrome for the dev tools and use firefox for literally everything else, the Tab containers thing was the latest in a long sequence of "man they make that so much easier than Chrome" features.

Used both for a long time.

I'm okay with the dev tools in either. Install the React dev tools addons in both browsers and you're basically 99% of the way there =P

(I like chrome's mobile 'simulation' better, but both still lack lots of things I wish I could do, like simulating tiny CPUs or limited RAM, actually tracing through setTimeout, etc)

I use both regularly, and the only differences that I've noticed are related to Google web properties (particularly gmail and youtube), where Firefox has to rely on inefficient polyfills for chrome-specific features (I think, based on some googling one time, take this with a grain of salt.) What troublesome websites does Chrome work better on in your experience?
Same here - made a switch and switched back quickly after.

1. Compatibility - random sites would just break...I reckon 15% of the time

2. Battery life - FF destroyed my battery life. To the tune of 8 hours on Chrome vs like 2 on FF.

Did you have add-ons in Firefox? I almost never have sites break—certainly not anywhere near 15% of the time. And at least 95% of the time I've had issues in the past, it has turned out to be an add-on causing problems, rather than the browser itself. (Ad blockers would be the first thing to check in the case of random breakages.)
I don't think 15% is accurate, I only know of 1 site that breaks under Firefox and that is operated at minimum budget by a chinese electronics shop. I've literally never found any other site that broke on Firefox.
I suspect more detail regarding your setup would prove to be useful for context as neither one of your bullets point towards an issue with Firefox directly.
> and I ended up coming back to Chrome

same, except i use Brave (Chromium minus the Google crap/tracking.)

I try Firefox after every major update, but for me "pinch to zoom" not working for the trackpad is the biggest flaw. It's so frustrating/such a basic feature.

Safari and Chrome have had this feature for at least 6 years.