this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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I mainly use Firefox (on both Linux and Android), but I also use Chrome regularly. I wouldn't describe Firefox as buggy or clunky. On the whole, I find Firefox more pleasant to use than Chrome on its own merits—nothing at all to do with privacy or Google.
I do agree that Chrome is more performant on JS-heavy websites, but not so much so that I find Firefox sluggish by comparison. And both slow down significantly once you have lots of tabs open.
I prefer Firefox's tab UI to Chrome's, both on desktop and mobile:
I also love Firefox's screenshot tool. It's so much nicer than taking a screenshot via the OS:
Firefox also has way better (read: any at all) hardware video decoding support on desktop Linux than Chrome does. Some distros patch Chrome to add that support, but Firefox has it in official builds out of the box.
I started using Firefox on Android because my old phone (Nexus 5X) was very RAM-constrained and Firefox seemed to kick fewer other apps out of RAM than Chrome did. I now have a newer phone where RAM isn't an issue, but I still use Firefox, mainly for uBlock and because it can sync tabs, bookmarks, and history to Firefox on my desktop. It runs just as smoothly as Chrome does in my experience.
This is all my personal experience, though. I have experienced frustrating Firefox bugs in the past that make it crash or freeze, and it sounds like GP is currently experiencing one such bug. But I've used Firefox for over a decade and probably only encountered 3-4 such bugs. Each time, once I got frustrated enough to go digging, I found an existing upstream bug report describing the root cause and a workaround to use until a proper fix landed (usually within a couple releases). I've used Chrome a lot less regularly, so I don't know if the experience there is comparable or if they do just have better QA for bugs like that. Either way, I think the benefits of Firefox for me outweigh the occasional bug that gets through for a few releases.
Thanks a lot for this detailed run down! You've done a good job filling in the blank spots for me, and convinced me to download the app. I forgot that there was a desktop version as well, I've only been thinking of mobile! I have noticed YouTube videos look worse when streaming from my PC vs on the TV apps ..it'll be interesting to check if Firefox does better because of what you said about the video.