• Why I dumped Firefox for Chromium


    My relationship with Firefox has been on the rocks for a while. It officially ended this week. Time to move on.

    While Firefox started out as a small, fast, and secure browser — everything that Internet Explorer wasn’t back in 2004 — in the last several years Firefox has unfortunately become a bit of a slow, bloated, resource hog. Nevertheless, since I’ve been such a long-time Firefox user, I’ve been hanging on and waiting for the final release of Firefox 4, hoping that would give the ‘fox some new life.

    After using Firefox 4 for less than a week, it’s clear to me that Mozilla hasn’t fixed the speed issues or the resource problems, and I’ve finally reached the point where I’m tired of fighting with Firefox. I’m tired of constantly looking at my open processes to see what’s bogging down my system and virtually every time it turns out to be Firefox.

    The situation finally came to a head on Monday and Tuesday of this week when both cores of the CPU on my system were at 80% for big chunks of the day on both days, and the culprit was, naturally, my newly-installed Firefox 4. The clincher was when I took all of the tabs that I had open in Firefox (about 10 of them) and copied and pasted the URLs from Firefox into Chromium. Then, I closed down Firefox. The CPU utilization immediately dropped under 20% and everything on the system started running at normal speeds again.

    I used Chromium all day on Wednesday as my primary Web browser for all of my TechRepublic tasks — content management, blogging, selecting articles for our front door, creating photo galleries, running reports, and doing Web research. Chromium performed like a champ, opening most pages faster than Firefox and never bogging down the processor except for two occasions when I played large videos.

    I’m sure some of you are asking, “What’s Chromium?” or “Why Chromium instead of Google Chrome?”Chromium is the open source project that serves as the foundation for Google Chrome. Think of Chromium as the bleeding edge version of Chrome created by the open source community. However, Chromium is not for everyone. It’s not nearly as polished or bug-free as Chrome, and while Chrome silently updates itself in the background, Chromium has to be updated manually (and there a new builds available almost every day). The process of updating to the latest build of Chromium is made easier by tools such as Chromium Updater.
    However, my biggest motivation for choosing Chromium over Chrome is security. While Google promisesthat Chrome isn’t reporting back to Google with any additional data about your browsing habits — at last no more than any other Web browser — I don’t completely trust Google in that regard. The company has too much to benefit from gathering as much data as possible from every single user. Because Chromium is open source, if there was any kind of supposedly-harmless data collection going on, the open source coders would likely spot it and alert the community and the public. That, and the extra speed boost from running the cutting edge software builds, are what led me to Chromium.

    I had been using Firefox as my primary Web browser for six years. That’s certainly the longest I’ve ever stuck with a single browser — I was on Netscape and then IE for 3-4 years each before jumping to Firefox in late 2004. Still, I’m not going to be uninstalling Firefox. I’ll keep it around for occasional testing — especially for new TechRepublic features. But, I don’t see much chance of it regaining its spot as my primary Web browser.

    by
    Jason Hiner

    Source: ZDnet
    Comments 7 Comments
    1. duke0102's Avatar
      duke0102 -
      More Firefox bashing eh?
    1. usr's Avatar
      usr -
      I am still a Firefox fan, but I see this day coming for me very soon. (actually I am already installing Chromium to try it compared to Chrome).

      I also see me leaving uTorrent for another client at some point, at the moment I still use 2.0.4 (i hate the new versions)..

      Okay installed https://sites.google.com/site/chromeupdater/
      installed it, got adblock plus, xmarks and lastpass going. Dont even need to import anything that way. Lets see how long I can use it before I get annoyed and go back to Firefox.

      But so far I can tell it is better resource wise than firefox (and I had the same addons) It was able to me opening like 80 tabs at once to different sites.. I find it annoying it runs in separate processes, but I figure that is a good thing. (reminds me of ps -e and seeing apache 150 times).

      Anyway so far it looks like firefox might have just lost me. I will keep it installed for if I need it situations.. but....
    1. darkstate01's Avatar
      darkstate01 -
      Firefox for me.
      Google are to much like the stasi for me,they keep your ip searches and info on there servers for 18 months.
      I'm pretty sure even though they say chrome doesn't keep any Info about you or google,pretty sure that is bnlls#!t.
      Firefox has become a bit overblown and slow,even with the new update,but they are telling all the developers to speedup there addons to maximize for speed.
      If you do find your firefox a bit slow, just find out which addon is at fault and disable it.
      The problem I have with firefox is the sad problem its had for many years with it memory leaking, but a simple addon called memory fox sorts that out.
    1. mr. nails's Avatar
      mr. nails -
      Quote Originally Posted by duke0102 View Post
      More Firefox bashing eh?
      while i've been a loyal customer(?) chrome is looking more and more default imo. tbh, the only thing i'm waiting on in chrome is a better adblocker. shit still gets thru.
    1. HMthePM's Avatar
      HMthePM -
      Chromium seems an awful lot of download size.Or am I missing something?
      I wanna check it out as firefox memory problems is getting me down.
    1. usr's Avatar
      usr -
      Easy way to install Chromium:

      1. Download & install: https://sites.google.com/site/chromeupdater/
      2. Run it, it will 'update' aka install Chromium for you.

      Done.

      I started trying it as my default browser yesterday. Not sure I will keep it yet, but I am having less issues than FireFox. I am aware addons in firefox can cause issues, in my case eliminated them as the cause. FireFox memory leaks and can not handle as much as Chromium, at least the way I use it. I still love several addons for FireFox and will keep it around for that or when Chromium finally ticks me off.

      In any event I am quite happy FireFox, Chromium, etc exists. Sure is a better day than when IE 4 took 90%+ of the browser market.
    1. Alpha-Q's Avatar
      Alpha-Q -
      Firefox Forever.....
      Variety of ADDON'S they offer are a huge bonus....
      Can't live without them..........