Chrome or Firefox

I was a big fan of firefox for many years, but like vbulletin, something better came along.

tl;dr now firefox looks like chrome lol

Capture.webp
 
Firefox all the way.

Why?
  • More resource friendly (uses less memory than Chrome)
  • Better and faster hardware accelerated rendering (especially layer composition)
  • Fonts look better (Chrome sometimes gets you really, really ugly font rendering)
  • UI is much more customizable, also looks better and if you don't want the way it looks, get stylish and change it via CSS edits.
  • Much better development tools (and if you need more, there is still Firebug)
  • Extensions are much more powerful. Chrome extensions are very limited in what they can do, but Firefox allows extension authors to do almost everything - the extension API gives you full access to the UI and basically the entire browser API.
  • Open Source (yes, I know, ChromIUM is as well, but Chrome is not)
  • Countless amounts of really useful extensions.
What Chrome does better?

Generally, it loads pages a little bit faster and has somewhat higher JS performance, but the differences are not something one will notice except when running synthetic benchmarks.

In theory, Chrome also has the better security model with its highly isolated sandbox concept. Not perfect though, since it has been broken on several occasions.
 
I was a big fan of firefox for many years, but like vbulletin, something better came along.

tl;dr now firefox looks like chrome lol
A few lines of css (via userchrome or stylish), and it will look like:

Capture.PNG


I do like the new theme, but can't stand the curved tabs, especially the fact that they're wasting too much screen real estate, so I made them appear flat and decreased their height. That's why Firefox is cool, because it allows you such little tweaks :)
 
UI is much more customizable, also looks better and if you don't want the way it looks, get stylish and change it via CSS edits.

Just for the record, Google Chrome also has Stylish.

As for the personal RAM issue with me, I will be upgrading from 2 GB to 4 GB of RAM soon, so I'll give Google Chrome another go and see how it handles.
 
I use NoScript. Therefore Firefox.

I just block all javascript, and add sites to my allow list as needed.

Eh. Still will use less RAM than Google Chrome.

I leave my browser open for days on end (I average about 7-10 days uptime at any given time) and Firefox almost always takes more resources than Chrome or Opera. They still haven't fully fixed a memory leak issue for extended browser sessions, and it locks up for me much more when I have 100+ tabs open.
 
I leave my browser open for days on end (I average about 7-10 days uptime at any given time) and Firefox almost always takes more resources than Chrome or Opera. They still haven't fully fixed a memory leak issue for extended browser sessions, and it locks up for me much more when I have 100+ tabs open.

I always turn my computer off at night when I go to bed, so it's not an issue for me.
 
Firefox all the way.
In addition to Chrome also having Stylish (and dotjs, which has been ported to Firefox).. just wanted to add the font rendering is a bug with how it handles web fonts, affecting only Windows. It can be worked around, but only if you host the fonts locally.. so ironically Google's Font API doesn't work well with Chrome.

I find the "looks" to be a bit subjective, but Firefox is less resource intensive and the UI is more customizable.
 
In addition to Chrome also having Stylish (and dotjs, which has been ported to Firefox).. just wanted to add the font rendering is a bug with how it handles web fonts, affecting only Windows. It can be worked around, but only if you host the fonts locally.. so ironically Google's Font API doesn't work well with Chrome.
Well, you could enable the experimental DirectWrite support in Chrome and give up the sandbox. That should fix font rendering issues, but ruin the security concept. Not a deal I would make though.

That DirectWrite thing is actually the reason why FF renders fonts so nicely. With DWrite you get some important features like correct hinting, sub-pixel placement and -antialiasing - things that are not available to classic GDI-based font rendering with ClearType.
I find the "looks" to be a bit subjective, but Firefox is less resource intensive and the UI is more customizable.
"Looks" is always subjective, of course.

P.S. the issue with DirectWrite and the sandbox might be solved by now... don't know, I'm not really up-to-date with Chrome at the moment.
 
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