points by verandaguy 5 years ago

Disagree on most points, actually:

>Faster, less bloat

Stock Firefox doesn't actually have that much bloat, and it's not noticeably slower than Chrome on reasonably modern hardware (i.e.: most page loads are near-instant, same as in Chrome on a good connection).

>Extension support for Chromium is way better too

Until Google decides that your extension is unworthy of being in their store. This notably happened with Pushbullet quite recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23168874

... Until Google inexplicably restored it a few days later, but not before lots of accusations were thrown around.

---

IMO it's also worth noting that ungoogled-chromium is (obviously) an unofficial fork of Chromium. Google may at any time change Chromium so substantially as to either require Google integration at some fundamental level for even the most basic functionality, causing too much work for such a low-profile effort to continue, or just make Chromium closed-source. With Firefox, that risk doesn't exist because of the business motivations of the company that develops it.

nichch 5 years ago

Also important to note that ungoogled-chromium builds can be provided by anyone that submits them, (e.g. not the maintainers)

niftylettuce 5 years ago

As I said in other another comment, I'm a power user. And by power user I mean probably 10x the normal standard of what a 10x power user means. Tooling is everything to me; which is why I prefer this over anything else. I'm very biased.

  • jnkl 5 years ago

    What does that even mean? Ten times? Tooling is everything?

    • johntash 5 years ago

      When it comes to a browser, I'm curious as well. I often end up with 100+ tabs in firefox before I close them all. I don't think think I'd consider that being a power user, but would a 10x power user simply mean someone with over 1,000 tabs open?

      I haven't used Chrome regularly in the last year or so, but it would get noticeably slow by the time I had 3-4 windows with 10-20 tabs each. Firefox hasn't really had that issue yet.

      Years ago though, Chrome was noticeably faster than Firefox. That changed (IMO at least) at some point in the last few years.

      • McAtNite 5 years ago

        I use Firefox day to day, but if I was a “power user” and picking apart web traffic everyday I’d probably use Chromium. The dev tools in it are way better than the ones built in Firefox.

        • bad_user 5 years ago

          In what way are Chrome's dev tools better?

          I got used to Firefox's dev tools and can't find my way around in Chrome's.

        • imtringued 5 years ago

          That's just pure muscle memory. I personally dislike the chrome tools.

  • Zhenya 5 years ago

    So you're a 100x poweruser. Got it.

    • toyg 5 years ago

      That has fresh meme potential. How many 100x power-users do you need to make a 10x developer? And how many normal users for a 100xPU? Are 10 100xPU equal to a 1kPU? So many questions...

  • eitland 5 years ago

    You are probably seriously overestimating yourself and/or underestimating a large subset of your audience here.

    People here are:

    - early developers from majir browsers

    - extension creators

    - creators of major web properties

    - people who spend their work days on the web

    - etc

    seriously. Don't underestimate HN.

    Edit: and as someone who's been very into customizing and extending browsers since early Firefox: your ideas about Firefox vs Chrome tells me that you are either

    - deeply biased

    - use a subset of browser features that is too small to realize the problems with Chromium (in which case I suspect your 100x superuser is wild hyperbole)

    You can come back when Tree Style Tabs including related sub-extensions works as well on Chrome as on Firefox.