A big battle on Lemmy about why I prefer Chrome/ium instead of Firefox on the old laptops I rescue from the landfills: https://lemmy.ml/post/24202956/15809331
People need to stop thinking with GNU glasses on, and become more objective. The reality is, Chrome is FASTER and uses less RAM than Firefox. This has a HUGE IMPACT on the desktop experience on OLD Pcs (not on your modern PCs, no).
But noooo... we have to support Firefox no matter what. Cultists.
[#]linux #opensource #foss #firefox #mozilla #browser
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@eugenialoli Is it just straight Chrome or a deGoogle Chrome?
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@kaspa For other people that I install Linux on their old PCs, I use straight Chrome. For my PCs, it can be either, but I prefer Chrome because it has immediate security updates -- chromium and degoogled chromium take a few days to update.
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@eugenialoli I understand your views and where you're coming from. It's basically a trade off between speed/security and security/privacy.
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@eugenialoli Firefox has VA-API decode on Wayland and many older chipsets -- that can make a real difference in video playback that Chrome (perhaps not Chromium) will struggle with.
Perhaps esoteric, but old machines aren't going to be good for YouTube very much otherwise anyway.
Also, I used to report bugs to Mozilla for slow pages - you can buy yourself options by doing the same: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/performance/reporting_a_performance_problem.html
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@eugenialoli PS: This also means that running a supported Windows may be a better option than Linux, but I guess that may antagonize you to other cultists. 😄
IME, Firefox runs better with video acceleration on Linux, Windows runs terribly without an SSD, and Linux does better in lower RAM situations.
Every situation is different - I strongly prefer Linux and Firefox, but of course they aren't necessarily the best options.
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@yoasif In Greece, people can't buy new laptops. So they have to run Linux, and for now, Chrome performs better on it.
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@eugenialoli Not sure you read what I wrote about VA-API video acceleration on Linux. 🤷
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@yoasif I did, but in my tests, Chrome is faster on youtube than firefox. Much faster. So no matter what, for now, Chrome wins in the situations we use it on.
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@eugenialoli Have your tests included enabling VA-API on Linux Firefox? It is unfortunately not enabled by default.
It probably should be, but most developers aren't targeting super old hardware where this makes more of a difference.
My current understanding is that it needs VA-API and hardware decode features. Enabling VA-API requires setting media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled to true in about:config and restarting Firefox.
More information here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Firefox_Hardware_acceleration#Video_decoding
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@yoasif The distros I install for these old Pcs are on X, not wayland. It's either Cinnamon or XFce for 4 GB PCs, and TDE for 2 GB PCs. These are still best with X11.
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@eugenialoli My information was outdated - you don't need Wayland anymore, just decode support. Check out the Fedora wiki page I linked to for some instructions.
If your hardware lacks video decode, of course this makes less of a difference.
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@yoasif Intel GPUs always have gpu decode in the last 15 years, so it's there. But I don't think that firefox does't have that enabled.
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@eugenialoli Easy to check, it likely isn't enabled on your hardware. about:support should show you the status via the HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING entry.
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@yoasif I'm pretty sure it's enabled. It would be god-awefully slow if it wasn't on the kid of hardware i m using it with.
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@eugenialoli 🤷 It wasn't on mine, and I have pretty new hardware. Easy to check.
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@yoasif I just checked, it's on.
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@eugenialoli Worth a shot to check. My fairly new hardware wasn't enabled.
FWIW, that should make Firefox more competitive on video playback, since Chrome doesn't have hardware video decode on Linux.
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@eugenialoli "Chromium is bad bc it's controlled by google"
Wait until they found out who finances Mozilla.
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@eugenialoli last i looked into it, chrome used a ton of RAM and firefox used less, and this becomes more pronounced when you open more tabs. has it flipped?
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@trwnh In the laptops I install Linux for people with 2 or 4 GB of ram they only open 1-3 tabs, and in these situations, Chrome uses less.
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@eugenialoli
We all know that chrome is faster, etc ... but this is about choice, and the problem is that, while Google controls the development of chrome, they will decide what is added and what is removed from the browser, as it has just done with the migration to manifest v3 in which it has left in the lurch the extensions that harm their advertising business, such as ublock.
That's why we need to have alternatives to Google's monopoly and that's why we need to support projects like Mozilla
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@napmaniak Ι agree with you if you have a fast PC. But in my case, where I install Linux on old laptops for friends and family, they don't care. They just want a working laptop, because they can't afford a new one. And at 2/4 GB of RAM, Firefox is not a good option.
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@eugenialoli I'm so tired of this holy war, and I hate both options as they exist.
I really wish we had a browser that did enough to be usable on the current web but wasn't so bloated with features suitable for an OS. The fact that Hypertext browsers have become so heavy as a default is really troubling to me, from a permacomputing perspective. And the whole Gemini/Gopher/Etc alternatives help a bit, but they have their own problems (limited adoption being the biggest hurdle in my mind).
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@yewscion I agree with you. The browser and web sites nowadays use more RAM and CPU than the whole of the operating system. It's ridiculous.
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@eugenialoli we have number of other open source browsers as well, it doesn't have to be Firefox only!
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@tuhin Nothing except Firefox-based or Chrome-based will run youtube. That's what people want to run properly. Falkon for example, while lightweight, it actually uses more ram than chrome specifically on youtube, and its ad blocker doesn't work on youtube either. So it's not really an option. There are no other browsers that can perform properly.
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@eugenialoli My computer is very old so I am honestly interested in this. Please forgive me cause I am not an expert but looking at the resources usage (I run a manjaro linux with XFCE desktop) it seems to me that Firefox uses less memory than Chromium. I have opened both borowsers with no extensions loadeded pointing at duckduckgo.com and this is what I see. What am I doing wrong?
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@grendelspace I look at the overall ram usage going up, not only the browser ram reporting, since that's what matters to not hit the swap. On YouTube, chromium wins.
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