Why I’m breaking up with Google Chrome

http://thenextweb.com/opinion/2015/05/14/why-im-breaking-up-with-google-chrome/

by yanis_t • 11 years ago

58 99 11 years ago

beat• 11 years ago

I'm probably dumping Chrome soon too. What gets me is the random crashing. I can count on Chrome to still be running maybe 50% of the time when I re-open my Macbook in the morning.

Note to Chrome engineers... stability is a must-have feature, not a nice-to-have. Being a good battery citizen is a must-have. Performance is a must-have.

jeffasinger• 11 years ago

Chrome's stability greatly improved for me when I disabled Flash.

I'd really like to switch to Firefox, but there's a few things I just can't seem to get used to every time I try to.

TheLoneWolfling• 11 years ago

Like?

Most of my annoyances with FF were fixed by moving to a fork (Pale Moon).

owenwil• 11 years ago

I actually just found this single mention of Google engineers specifically addressing this in the next major build of Chrome. Maybe there is hope after all:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=453303#c...

pcwalton• 11 years ago

Maybe something like Vivaldi, which builds on top of Chrome’s rendering engine, could be the answer?

Not likely if the main complaint is power usage. The browser engine is likely to be the main driver there, and switching skins won't help, especially for an engine as tightly coupled to its shell as Blink is.

karmakaze• 11 years ago

Just tried Vivaldi on Mac and it shows roughly about the same process and thread usage for tabs as Chrome so probably not the answer to battery life. It does feel quite snappy so I'll continue using it instead of Chrome for other reasons.

Generally I use Safari because it renders text better than Chrome (Yosemite) on external displays, but for developer tools still use Chrome.

brandmeyer• 11 years ago

I never did switch to Chrome or Chromium, simply because it doesn't integrate as well with the XFCE desktop compared to Firefox/Iceweasel. So maybe I don't know what I'm missing. Regarding the author's comment, "The problem is that the Web is now optimized for Chrome users and that means alternatives often provide a terrible experience." What are some examples of sites that provide a terrible experience to non-Chrome users?

zuron72• 11 years ago

I'm not aware of any non-Google sites that are optimized for Chrome, but Google's Search and literally every single one of their products was optimized for Chrome using the SPDY protocol. This was the major one.

https://developers.google.com/speed/spdy/

djrogers• 11 years ago

A website being able to run on a nearly abandoned network protocol (I know, most of sdpy is in http/2) hardly results in a horrible experience for everyone else. It's the perfect kind of optimization - nobody without chrome would ever know it exists.

JohnBooty• 11 years ago

Firefox has supported SPDY for quite a few years. Did any of Google's sites perform badly on Firefox?

I use a few of Google's services; for browsers I mainly use Firefox and sometimes Chrome. I've never noticed a big difference between the two browsers when it came to performance, on Google's properties or otherwise.

criley23• 11 years ago

The loss of NPAPI is what's going to drive me away. If they stick to their guns and drop NPAPI in 42 including the flags, then I'll finish my transition to making Firefox my new main browser. I've heard the arguments for why it shouldn't be present, I've heard Google's argument for a more pure web experience, but quite frankly I don't care.

I don't like Google's "our way is the only way" vision for the internet, where Chrome has morphed into an operating-system like amalgamation of resource heavy proprietary features, while simultaneously shutting down flags, features and settings that power users rely on to wrestle back any control at all of our own personal browsing experience.

Chrome was a great step forward and I will remember it fondly, but it really is post-peak on the technology adoption curve. Google is focused only on that giant laggy late adopter side of the curve and simply could not care less about early adopters and bleeding edge users anymore. If you feel like Chrome and Google actively design against our use cases -- you're right, because the laggard phase of adoption is in full swing and we're, once again, pointless nothings and easily ignored voices, drowned out by Google's Master Vision.

Oh well, Firefox has really solidified into a nice product these past few years, even if they are following Google down the stupid proprietary forced-bundled of useless features (here's looking at you, "Hello", which I ironically am not allowed to say "Goodbye" to).

ohitsdom4• 11 years ago

Curious- what tasks do you do that are reliant on NPAPI? Job related or personal?

bbarn• 11 years ago

Not the OP but lots of people who use acrobat reader plugins to fill in / sign forms. Chrome's built in PDF reader got better, but it still can't A. post a filled form back to the browser/server or B. sign a document.

scuba7183• 11 years ago

Job related for my users. Newegg order management needs silverlight

nulagrithom• 11 years ago

Our Citrix log in portal uses NPAPI... Made for a rough week when that update rolled out.

makmanalp• 11 years ago

What's sad is that it seems FF is losing market share :(

https://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=1&qpaf=&qpc...

I'm really not sure how mozilla will survive without that.

bobajeff• 11 years ago

I imagine without marketshare (along with royalties from referrals to search engines) they'll start relying more on donations and open source collaborations with companies like Samsung.

wslh• 11 years ago

At the end competition worked for browsers. That is the main benefit of having Chrome.

I remember when they launched with V8 and that pressed other actors to improve their own browsers. now this is also happening with new render engines such as Servo.

Regarding NPAPI, I think it never atracted a bigger audience because the building tools (circa 2011) were difficult to use.

lectrick2• 11 years ago

NPAPI is insecure and dates back to Netscape 2.0.

Abandoning a 20 year old technology is really the final nail in the coffin for you?

icebraining• 11 years ago

Why would one care if the technology is old? Should we drop TCP too?

And I don't see how it is insecure by itself; that depends on the plugins themselves, and on the websites we allow to launch them.

Koldark• 11 years ago

It might be. We use several apps that require Silverlight. I am sure Microsoft will update Silverlight in the future to work differently, but I can't do my work without Silverlight.

criley23• 11 years ago

Abandoning a 20 year old technology is really the final nail in the coffin for you

Abandoning a useful technology with zero alternatives, telling the world to "simply get over using those previous functions and adjust to a new reality where you cannot do what you used to do" is the nail in the coffin for me.

This is not a case of a legacy technology being dropped for which there are modern superior alternatives.

This is a case where a core idea in web functionality has been rethought, and the powers that be have decided that we should not use web browsers in this way at all, and we will not be able to do so moving forward.

And if we are given the ability back, it'll be a proprietary, non-standard, vendor hack solution that, in 20 years, will occupy the same space as NPAPI.

dragonwriter3• 11 years ago

The loss of NPAPI is what's going to drive me away. If they stick to their guns and drop NPAPI in 42 including the flags, then I'll finish my transition to making Firefox my new main browser. I've heard the arguments for why it shouldn't be present, I've heard Google's argument for a more pure web experience, but quite frankly I don't care.

Firefox is also favoring a phase-out of NPAPI usage, for largely the same reasons, though they are dragging it out longer.

NPAPI (and the IE alternative, ActiveX) are done; the only difference between the major browser vendors is the details of the phase-out.

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2014/02/28/update-on-plugi...

criley23• 11 years ago

Firefox is also favoring a phase-out of NPAPI usage, for largely the same reasons, though they are dragging it out longer.

Guess it'll be time to say Auto Updates -> Off.

Until the websites and services I use migrate to a different solution, if at all possible, I just will open myself up to vulnerabilities and security risks and stop updating at all.

I wonder how many users will do the same?

Maybe the browser companies will get lucky and the companies and services relying on this technology will simply fail since there is no alternative, and they won't have to deal with users holding out, since what they hold out for has been destroyed.

CSMastermind• 11 years ago

I switched off of Chrome on all my personal PCs for Firefox about a month ago and I'm happy I did.

de_dave• 11 years ago

I'm an accidental convert. Since upgrading to Fedora 22, I've found myself using Firefox almost exclusively for both normal browsing and webdev. Previously I was 100% Chrome, and I've somehow transitioned without really thinking about it nor meaning to!

(IMHO Chrome's developer/debugging tools are more pleasant to use, but Firefox is getting there...)

droidist2• 11 years ago

You ever use Firebug on Firefox? So awesome.

_lce0• 11 years ago

I been a Firefox user since 2004 I think, and used Firebug till something like 2012 .. when the dev console was launched --I haven't touched firebug since then.

nowadays the native console works great! you should give it a try

Aoyagi• 11 years ago

Yeah, about developing tools, I still have a faint hope that Opera's Dragonfly (which is open-source, I hear) will someday be implemented to either Vivaldi or Chropera.

WorldWideWayne• 11 years ago

thenextweb.com has just lost Javascript privileges in my browser for using a dirty trick to push ads. As a matter of fact, after disabling Javascript, I didn't read the article and I won't be talking about the article or sending other users to the site by linking to it.

I would have liked to talk about the actual article here, but instead I'm talking about this horrible advertising technique and that should be OK with anyone who supports Internet advertising because that seems to be what you want. Let's start off talking about something else and then maybe we'll get to the article you came here for.

codezero3• 11 years ago

What's the dirty trick? I doubt the author is aware of it, or had anything to do with implementing it. Can you elaborate on what TNW is doing?

at-fates-hands2• 11 years ago

When you go to the page, you're served a full page ad, and you have to move your mouse to the right in order to get the actual article to move left in order for you to read it.

As far as UX goes, this is about as bad as you get to force people to view an ad.

I'm a developer and it took me a few seconds to realize what was happening. I'm fairly certain most users would go to the page, see the ad and think, "Where's the article I just clicked on?" not see it and then leave right away.

abluecloud2• 11 years ago

I know. When this: http://i.imgur.com/AwG4AMr.jpg is what you get when you load a page, I ain't sticking around for long.

borisvvz16• 11 years ago

A screenshot doesn't do it much justice. What other people don't see is that the article is moving in a bit and a hover or 'c' key moves it in completely. If you think the ad looks too big, pick up any paper magazine and look at those ads. In my Wired magazine it takes 7 pages to get to the content. We show you ONE ful page ad that is easy to ignore and generates revenue that enables us to hire writers and provide you with free content. Not such a shitty deal after all? Boris (CEO TNW)

cheshire1372• 11 years ago

Is this what Adblock Plus is saving me from? Awesome!

5h2• 11 years ago

That was the most appalling ad I have seen in months, they have a whole page justifying them here http://thenextweb.com/voice/2015/05/07/whats-the-deal-with-t...

Q: Isn’t this just an interstitital?

A: No. We don’t like interstitials either. They sit between you and the content and require another click and new pageload before you can proceed to the article. The Canvas ad surrounds the article and the article loads at the same time. All it takes to move the article back in view is to hover over the article. It’s a much more intuitive and smooth process.

I pity their developers for putting up with that sort of delusional rhetoric.

borisvvz16• 11 years ago

I wrote that. I'm the founder and CEO of TNW and came up with part of the Canvas ad. After I pitched the idea of developing a sexy interstitial that would work intuitively and easy to use our designer and dev team came up with this, and I love it. I also understand your frustration. I know this is a bigger ad than you are used to. I also think you'll get used to it if you give it another chance. I see advertisers love it and we see readers tweeting about ads (when was the last time you even looked at an ad, clicked on one, or tweeted about one because you liked it? Right!) and mostly we get positive replies. And then there's a group of people who absolutely HATE them. So, we are trying to improve them as much as possible to make everybody love them, or at least not hate them as much. First thing you could try: hit the 'c' on your keyboard when you hit a Canvas ad and it will magically disappear. We will make it a lot better over the next week but always appreciate input. So contact me here, or at boris@thenextweb.com with anything you've got.

maccard• 11 years ago

That was an absolutely awful ad - the website renders at sub 10fps on my i7 32GB ram workstation.

rrss11223• 11 years ago

That ad was terrible. I don't normally visit thenextweb.com, and I for sure will not be going back.

borisvvz16• 11 years ago

That would be a shame because we can produce some awesome content because we have an advertising model that works. Also, if you visit TNW through the front page you won't see an ad. ANd if you go to a story directly you only see an ad every now and then. I hope you give us another try. Boris (CEO TNW)

aikah2• 11 years ago

ublock was enough for me, I didn't see the ad in question.

borisvvz16• 11 years ago

As far as I know adblockers aren't blocking our Canvas ads yet. I don't mind if they do though. I think it is better to give up trying to make money on people who really hate ads and instead focus on people who don't mind them. Feel free to read our content with an adlocker. I just hope to tweet or like our stuff every now and then. :-)

asd• 11 years ago

Indeed. I almost thought the link was broken and I was redirected to an alternative article. Once I figured out that I had to mouse-over to the right to present the article, it was broken due to my mostly default Ghostery config. Here's a screenshot:

http://imgur.com/SEXEwZg

borisvvz16• 11 years ago

That looks awful and somethign we should fix. Passed it on to #dev. Boris (CEO TNW)

natch• 11 years ago

Agree. After seeing this, I am now looking to reinstall AdBlock after having had it disabled for a while.

I wonder if people responsible for sites like this even think about how they may hurt their own site by pushing things too far?

borisvvz16• 11 years ago

I thought about that a lot of course! I'm the founder and CEO of TNW and worked on the canvas ad with the design & dev team for months. We do know some people absolutely hate ads. No matter how small. And this one is huge! But we figured the upside of having a beautiful ad that more people would like would be worth the downside of losing a few people who hate any ad and probably even use an adblocker. I don't dislike people who use adblockers and think it is fine if they read our site for free and without making us any money. But if you do I also don't think you have mucch right to complain about ads anyway.

cheshire1372• 11 years ago

Adblock Plus made it so the ad shows up as a background image behind the article. I never realized it was an ad. When I open a private browsing window where Adblock Plus isn't enabled, the ad is full-page, front and center and you have to move your mouse to the right to reveal the article.

jsnell• 11 years ago

I would have liked to talk about the actual article here,

Oh, but if you know the contents of the article, the irony is absolutely delicious. The main complaint there is Chrome's excessive power usage. Which is hard to argue with, to be honest. But that obnoxious ad was increasing my laptop's power usage from 11W to 17W (and the using 50% of a mobile i7). People living in glass houses, etc.

borisvvz16• 11 years ago

I agree that's ironic and something we (I'm TNW's CEO and worked closely with the dev them on this) should work on. I also believe we built this for the future and computers will catch up with some of the more innovative stuff we built. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't make it better and we will. We are improving the code and functionality every day so the canvas ad you might see today (we don't show them on every visit) might be better than the one you've seen yesterday.

gorhill• 11 years ago

Default-deny works wonder on such site (given the amount of 3rd parties), and I could read the article just fine. Here, local default-deny rules (dynamic filtering) for just that one site (if you don't want default-deny globally):

    thenextweb.com * 3p block
    thenextweb.com tnwcdn.com * noop

ohitsdom4• 11 years ago

I would love for Chrome to spend an entire version's development focused on reducing memory. I haven't heard of any focused effort in this area from the development team, has anyone else? I know computers are coming out with increasingly large memory, but I don't want that taken up by a sluggish browser.

For all my complaints with Chrome, there's not an alternative that's attractive enough to entice me to switch (yet).

afsina• 11 years ago

There is a memory team formed for Blink[1]. Also, soon they will start rolling out a garbage collector mechanism (code name Oilpan) which would make Blink more stable, safer and faster. But I am not sure about the overall effect of these on Chrome. Presentations in the link has more details.

[1] https://www.chromium.org/blink/memory-team

djim• 11 years ago

i dont have any issues with chrome. love my chromebook and my browser it is synced to all my devices.

jonathansizz• 11 years ago

I was seeing some of the problems discussed in the article. Chrome had slowed over time, and tabs were frequently hanging or crashing. I usually have around 30-35 tabs open across several virtual desktops on my linux machine, and the whole browser would hang for around 5 minutes whenever they were restored on a browser restart.

Deleting my Chrome data (I mean deleting .config/google-chrome, not just deleting the profile through the browser settings) and purging then reinstalling Chrome fixed everything, even with the same extensions and settings restored and all the same tabs open. Data syncing meant this process was very quick.

Everything is working great on my linux desktop now, and my Toshiba Chromebook 2 gets 8-9 hours on a charge and has never had any problems. Maybe the OSX version is particularly poor?

Maybe some problems are plugin-related? I set 'Let me choose when to run plugin content', rather than having plugins automatically run.

alfiedotwtf• 11 years ago

It would be interesting to see the browser usage stats for HN...

cabirum• 11 years ago

I suspect disabling Flash, etc. plugins and removing extensions will make battery life closer to Safari.

And Google Trends shows increasing amount of 'Chrome slow' searches because it mostly depends on browser market share, which is still rising for Chrome.

akilism• 11 years ago

oh man just tried Vivaldi I think I'm switching just for tab stacks alone.

ajmarsh• 11 years ago

I was having the same issue, until I enabled "click to play" for flash etc. Currently with 8-10 tabs open 1.4 GB of memory. YMMV.

ninkendo• 11 years ago

I'm in the same boat: I've been a Chrome user and advocate since 2008 and I definitely feel the bloat they've added to it over the past few years.

Vanilla Safari with zero extensions has been completely satisfactory for me for quite some time.

I have Chrome installed, but nowadays I only use it for a kind of "Flash Browser", where I only use it when there's a flash-requiring that I'm convinced is worth my time (most flash-requiring sites definitely aren't.) Occasionally I'll use Chrome's developer tools, which I find to be more robust than Safari's too.

Safari is by far the faster browser in my experience, it scrolls faster, it uses less battery, it has nicer OS integration on OSX (swipe-to-go-back feels much more natural in Safari, for instance), and it just seems simpler than Chrome (the UI gets out of your way better, IMO.)

commentnull• 11 years ago

Yep. Chrome had its moment in the sun, helped push some vital changes in the web ecosystem in its day, but now it has become a parody browser. When it is not crashing it is a fragile thing that seems to break every page, despite the fact all the web gurus try to optimise for it. And how much system resource does it want? Makes me miss simple browsers like Dillo.

narrowrail• 11 years ago

I am of the opinion that one should use multiple browsers, not just one. I stick with Chromium for certain things (with uMatrix), and I refuse to install Silverlight or Flash. I don't have any issues with crashes or memory consumption.

rrss11223• 11 years ago

For me, it wasn't just desktop chrome crashing. Mobile chrome also crashed and lost all my tabs occasionally.

But on desktop chrome, what really drove me away was how bad it got using on Ubuntu running in a virtual box. I'm unable to drag to do anything in chrome any more, making it very inconvenient to use. I've been forced to switch to Firefox, and chrome still isn't fixed even though I've seen this issue reported online many times.

ufmace• 11 years ago

I haven't gotten to that point yet, but what really gets me is the random high CPU usage that kills batter for things that other browsers can render with virtually no CPU usage. The main offender that I've noticed is animated GIFs.

Chrome seems to handle huge, complex DOMs and piles of JS just fine, but throw a few animated GIFs at it, and CPU usage rapidly spikes, fans spin up, if it's a laptop, it'll get noticeably hotter and the battery life remaining will drop fast. On OS X, Safari can render lots of animated GIFs like it's nothing. I have no idea how they let such an old and widely used piece of web tech get and stay so bad for so long. WTF Chrome?

franciscop• 11 years ago

This article is so misguided that I am actually surprised... here's a the same search for the browsers:

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=chrome%2C%20firefox%...

We can clearly see that each browser's "slow" search mimics similarly the browser's popularity. If they could provide a "browser's slow" / "browser" graph that would be a much more useful graph.

aikah2• 11 years ago

In my experience, Firefox is slower than Chrome when it comes to expensive "javascript stunts" like JS games or interactive js experiments. However, as a browser Firefox consumes WAY WAY less memory than Chrome. On Windows, just opening the process manager helps confirm these facts. So it's a trade off.Personnally since I usually limit the amount of paginated memory available on my computer, Firefox seems like a better Choice.

at-fates-hands2• 11 years ago

I go in cycles and use Chrome for a while and then switch back to Firefox. The last few months, I've found myself using FF Developer version a lot more.

The dev tools are much better than Chrome's, and it uses a fraction of the memory and tends to be much more stable. I have an HP Elite book with 8GB of RAM with an Intel i5 processor. If I leave Chrome open long enough, it will bring my system to its knees.

alooPotato• 11 years ago

Is anyone on the chrome team lurking here and want to comment?

I believe I remember reading that the chrome team had tons of automated tests that get run on every change list measuring compatibility, performance, memory usage, battery usage(?) etc. So either these tests are broken and they don't know there's a problem or they are ignoring the problem (to work on other features) or there is no actual problem and ours in our heads.

wimagguc• 11 years ago

I'm surprised that privacy wasn't even mentioned here.

(As in: most people switch to DuckDuckGo not to be tracked at all times. And if a browser wants you to sign in, that implies quite some volume of data being collected.)

kldavis4• 11 years ago

I've had issues with Chrome consuming tons of memory for quite some time. I found a single tab with gmail consuming ~700MB. Seems like a common issue: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/86yzpx...

Grue3• 11 years ago

I don't use Chrome, but I installed Chromium to test websites on webkit, and, amazingly, it still manages to crash after a few hours of uptime despite being a fresh, barely used install. It's beyond me how people are using such buggy software regularly.

Why I’m breaking up with Google Chrome

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