article: Google Chrome Is The Worst Browser
-
I switched to brave on Friday, entirely because of a Mozilla blog entry - We need more than deplatforming - The Mozilla Blog[^] I don't need the web browser to pick/choose what I do/don't see.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-----
When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013You don't want your web browser to expose the sources of advertising and make the web more transparent? You don't want to know when search results have been boosted by money instead of relevance? Ok then, enjoy your bubble. Because that's all that article is talking about - not changing what you can or cannot see on the web, unless you dump "knowing how the sausage is made" into that pile. Though I'll admit that the Brave people definitely have the right idea, just a pity it's Yet Another Chrome Derivative.
------------------------------------------------ If you say that getting the money is the most important thing You will spend your life completely wasting your time You will be doing things you don't like doing In order to go on living That is, to go on doing things you don't like doing Which is stupid. - Alan Watts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gXTZM\_uPMY
-
I do not think there is good or bad or better or worse browsers. It is all a matter of personal taste in the end -yes, even if there are light differences in performance - so these articles are quite futile. That said, Edge is really the worst browser ever, especially combined with Bing.
When was the last time you used Edge? If you wanted the rendering experience of Chrome without the spying and backed by a company that can keep you regularly updated with security fixes and modern web standards (ie, bump their chromium dependency regularly), then Edge is a good choice. Starts up faster than Chrome - probably because it's not packed full of stuff which has no place in a browser - like remote desktop sharing. I run Gentoo on my main home machine (primary browser is Firefox), so I'm sometimes inclined to spelunk through sources. Firefox compressed source: 323mb vs Chromium compressed source: 817mb. Chromium is packed full of stuff like the aforementioned remote desktop code and heaps of other third-party stuff, on top of the built-in crapware. It's literally on my system as a backup browser for "is this site broken everywhere?". It takes around 6-8x longer to build.
------------------------------------------------ If you say that getting the money is the most important thing You will spend your life completely wasting your time You will be doing things you don't like doing In order to go on living That is, to go on doing things you don't like doing Which is stupid. - Alan Watts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gXTZM\_uPMY
-
I switched from Firefox some years ago and never regretted it. And I even installed Chrome on my iPad to replace the awful Safari. From what I have seen of Edge (when MS forces me to use it) it is not that wonderful.
Edge uses the same rendering engine as Chrome, but Microsoft has a vested interest in protecting your privacy, since their primary business focus is not the harvesting of user details for ad revenue but rather selling software and services which require user trust. And, as pointed out below, Chrome on your iPad is just Safari in a tutu.
------------------------------------------------ If you say that getting the money is the most important thing You will spend your life completely wasting your time You will be doing things you don't like doing In order to go on living That is, to go on doing things you don't like doing Which is stupid. - Alan Watts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gXTZM\_uPMY
-
I got to the part about how much memory it uses and didn't bother with the rest. That was the case several years ago. It is now far more memory efficient. <shaming> I know this, because I was shown the error of my ways in a technical debate I had a while back, when I suggested it was a memory eater. </shaming> It would want 8GB just to open a single default home page. Now It uses less that 1GB for the multitude of tabs that I have open at any given time.
Nothing succeeds like a budgie without teeth.
-
When was the last time you used Edge? If you wanted the rendering experience of Chrome without the spying and backed by a company that can keep you regularly updated with security fixes and modern web standards (ie, bump their chromium dependency regularly), then Edge is a good choice. Starts up faster than Chrome - probably because it's not packed full of stuff which has no place in a browser - like remote desktop sharing. I run Gentoo on my main home machine (primary browser is Firefox), so I'm sometimes inclined to spelunk through sources. Firefox compressed source: 323mb vs Chromium compressed source: 817mb. Chromium is packed full of stuff like the aforementioned remote desktop code and heaps of other third-party stuff, on top of the built-in crapware. It's literally on my system as a backup browser for "is this site broken everywhere?". It takes around 6-8x longer to build.
------------------------------------------------ If you say that getting the money is the most important thing You will spend your life completely wasting your time You will be doing things you don't like doing In order to go on living That is, to go on doing things you don't like doing Which is stupid. - Alan Watts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gXTZM\_uPMY
The Edge part was only a joke - I think it _really_ is a matter of taste. Concerning Edge particularly, I am still suffering from the Internet Explorer experience, especially since I was forced to use it during many years because of company policies (which were probably legit from a company point of view), but it will take time to heal the wounds and I have not reached that point. So definitely a veto from my side for the moment. Concerning spying, all web browsers are spying to some extent (there is no such thing as a free product), some more, some less, so this is sadly no point which I would consider to influence my choice.
-
When using any browser on an iPad, you are using the Safari rendering engine because that's the only one Apple allows on *their* devices. So, on an iPad, the Chrome browser is a skin that replaces the Safari skin. You may prefer that skin, but in terms of rendering, etc., it's Safari all the way down. Note that it's not *your* iPad, it's *theirs*. It's nice of them to let you use it.
-
Sadly Edge is just another Chrome, reporting to a different HQ. No, Chrome is not perfect, because remaining on top is easy if you are big enough to break others' products. The only sane browser on Windows was IE11, just look at it's memory usage.
Peter Adam wrote:
Chrome is not perfect
I never claimed that it is. I just stated that of all the browsers I have used I find Chrome works best for me. So when someone says it is the worst browser ever I tend to dismiss his opinion because it does not match my experience.
-
I bet a lot of the bad firefox you saw was actually related to Flash player. Flash player was terrible in firefox and I switched away back in 2010-11 too. Now FireFox is far better and has a great dev console. FireFox does some great things for anti-tracking built right in too. You should try it out. Also you can share your history among machines and the data doesn't get shared anywhere else. you own your data on firefox. very nice actually.
-
The Edge part was only a joke - I think it _really_ is a matter of taste. Concerning Edge particularly, I am still suffering from the Internet Explorer experience, especially since I was forced to use it during many years because of company policies (which were probably legit from a company point of view), but it will take time to heal the wounds and I have not reached that point. So definitely a veto from my side for the moment. Concerning spying, all web browsers are spying to some extent (there is no such thing as a free product), some more, some less, so this is sadly no point which I would consider to influence my choice.
I feel you pain, having had to "fix" a site which only broke on IE6, many moons ago. The sad part is that the engine Microsoft put in the original Edge was actually rather good -- whilst the version of IE at the time shared the same engine, they had a bunch of flags to make IE compatible with all the bugs in the past, which people had built internal software on. Microsoft has this constant tension between trying to keep as much backwards compatibility as possible and fixing stuff that's clearly broken: their official stance is to try to keep things alive and compatible as long as possible, since it's in the interests of their users (and, ultimately, themselves) that things continue to "Just Work". Windows is a great example: you can still run Win3.1 executables on it! Sadly, they can never please everyone: for every person who is mad about, eg IE being rubbish, there are a bunch of corporates using some old system that requires the brokenness that's in IE ): They only gave up on their own engines (Trident and Chakra) because it made more business sense to hitch their carts to an existing rendering & JS engine that has someone else spending time (read: money) on it, so they chose Chromium's renderer, but honestly have ripped out all the Chrome bs. Whilst I'm a Firefox person, I'd take Edge in a heartbeat over Chrome / Chromium / Brave. Microsoft has done a lot of turnaround since Ballmer left and Satya Nadella took the helm. For the user, the loss of Trident and Chakra (the modern versions, which were, I re-iterate, Rather Good) is a bad thing: there are essentially only two contenders in the renderer space now: Chromium and Firefox. One could argue a case for Safari's webkit, I guess. Anyway, it means that we're edging closer to another "IE situation" where a dominant browser can start implementing things that aren't standards or implementing standards incorrectly and people assume that when it doesn't work on another browser, that other browser must be broken. Google has already taken quite a few stabs at this stance (Polymer / WebComponents being a good example: when they shifted YouTube to use WebComponents, which were non-standard, but natively supported by Chrome, all non-Chrome users got a rubbish YouTube experience and, naturally, blamed their browser). On the spying front: there are free products (truly free), but they're scarce (all the software that I release for free is truly free, for example, not that I'm releasing browsers or anything useful like that!). Mozilla does allow y
-
I just switched to Ecosia[^] because of that article. My "ned code urgntz" query was never this eco friendly :D
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
-
The page content should be pixel-accurate for most content even if there were two different rendering engines because the specs are precise. If they are different, that's either in an area where the spec leaves decisions to the user agent or where the rendering engine is not compliant. iOS does include multiple HTML components, so perhaps it is now possible for an app to use a different renderer than iOS Safari uses, but if so, the renderer is still provided by Apple.
-
I got to the part about how much memory it uses and didn't bother with the rest. That was the case several years ago. It is now far more memory efficient. <shaming> I know this, because I was shown the error of my ways in a technical debate I had a while back, when I suggested it was a memory eater. </shaming> It would want 8GB just to open a single default home page. Now It uses less that 1GB for the multitude of tabs that I have open at any given time.
Nothing succeeds like a budgie without teeth.
Chrome is still the only browser that will periodically freeze up for 10-30 seconds of apparent garbage collecting when reducing its memory footprint on my work machine from 10-12gb to 2-4gb.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
-
What about Opera? Bond Keep all things as simple as possible, but no simpler. -said someone, somewhere
What about it? I still use Chrome, but my default search engine is now Ecosia.
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
-
Peter Adam wrote:
Chrome is not perfect
I never claimed that it is. I just stated that of all the browsers I have used I find Chrome works best for me. So when someone says it is the worst browser ever I tend to dismiss his opinion because it does not match my experience.
You are right, it is far from being the worst. Technically the other side (except on 32 bit systems, where still IE11 the only sane memory consumer on Windows) But unfortunately it is a weapon like IE6 was.
