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ldom66today at 5:10 PM3 repliesview on HN

I see a lot of people saying that Firefox is not as good as Chrome. Do you have any examples of things Chrome does that Firefox doesn't? Genuinely curious, I have been alternating between Chrome and Firefox for the past two decades and last time I switched back to Firefox was 2 years ago, and I haven't had any performance/compability/feature concerns at all. (Full disclosure I use Zen, not vanilla Firefox)


Replies

upfrogtoday at 5:38 PM

Two things that I noticed: - Firefox did crash on me more frequently. It wasn't a daily, or even a weekly thing, but it was more of a problem. - Firefox limits how small I can shrink my tabs in the tab bar. Chrome also has a limit, but it is much less restrictive.

That last one was the killer difference for me. Firefox wants me to be able to see (at least part of) the title of each tab, even if that means I can't see all my tabs at once. I want to see all of my tabs at once, and I don't care if I can see the title - the favicon is enough.

I did try configuring Firefox to let me shrink the tabs more, and even tried messing with its GTK configuration, but no luck.

So I do feel a bit bad for using Brave instead of Firefox, but after months of dealing with Firefox's UI I lost patience.

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buzertoday at 5:59 PM

Firefox leaks memory. When I have it open for long time the memory usage will increase and even if I were to close all tabs & do memory minimization it will still use multiple gigabytes of memory.

While I cannot be sure, I assume that is the cause of the general slowdown I experience as well.

Restarting Firefox will fix free up the memory & fix the slowness. I do still use it as my primary browser despite these issues.

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mschuster91today at 5:38 PM

Web USB and Web NFC immediately come to my mind, it took ages until they at least implemented Web Serial in Firefox a few weeks ago.

And the devtools are nowhere near comparable to Chrome's, although I admit this might be a matter of personal experience.