this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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I donate to the Mozilla foundation, and I love Firefox a ton. But I can't seem to like the UI by installing a theme, and when I change it to look better the browser slows to a crawl. Does it really matter all that much if I use Chromium?

P.S. To the people from my last post regarding something similar, Firefox was too slow, I'm sorry, but I use Vivaldi instead of Brave because Brendon Eich can suck my dick.

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[–] systemglitch@lemmy.world 42 points 10 months ago

You don't even make sense. Themes slowing down the browser, what?? That doesn't happen.

[–] jerrimu@lemmy.world 40 points 10 months ago

Ff is faster for me

[–] pimento64@sopuli.xyz 31 points 10 months ago

Chromium is a dead end, I use Firefox because it respects my privacy but also because it works better.

[–] khannie@lemmy.world 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Hmmm. Hard to get over that dislike of an interface. I have found one plugin killed Firefox performance for me but I'm generally happy with the layout so haven't messed with it.

On how important it is: I used Chromium for a while but went back to Firefox because I read someone somewhere say "If you don't use Firefox, there eventually wont be a Firefox to use" and that was enough for me to switch back.

If you're donating to Mozilla though, I guess they're more than happy with that even if you're not using the product.

[–] popemichael@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 10 months ago

That's the same reason I don't complain about having to pay taxes for schools, even if I don't have a child in school right now.

[–] the_q@lemmy.world 10 points 10 months ago

It matters as much as you want it to.

[–] heygooberman@lemmy.today 9 points 10 months ago

Well, if Firefox does become unusable for you, then I don't think you would be at fault for switching to a Chromium-based browser, like Vivaldi. Usability is an important aspect to consider.

Have you considered using a Firefox fork, like LibreWolf?

[–] BananaTrifleViolin@kbin.social 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Out of interest what part of the UI don't you like? You can drag and drop pretty much any button and component where ever you want and you can use the Firefox colours website to apply any colour scheme you want. This is all core browser features so no performance affects.

What is it that a theme is then adding?

[–] Bruncvik@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago

Not OP, but I also prefer Vivaldi over Firefox. My reason may not be the same as OP's, but for the sake of discussion, here it is. I simply can't stand having tabs on top of my screen, and I'll go to great lengths to have them on the bottom. On my private computer, I used to use Firefox with Tab Mix Plus, until Mozilla killed support for such extensions. I later managed to get the tabs to the bottom via custom CSS for Firefox, but every few releases the CSS stopped working and had to be recreated from scratch. So, I switched to Vivaldi. On my work PC, where only Edge and Chrome are allowed, my workaround is to work in separate windows instead of tabs, but that tends to get a little messy.

[–] daredevil@kbin.social 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I prefer supporting browser alternatives as opposed to supporting Google's monopoly of web browsing

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Google provides the majority of mozilla's funding

[–] daredevil@kbin.social 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Well, if that extends beyond paying to be the default search engine, I'd be happy to take a look at a source if you have one. Changing search engines is also only a matter of a few clicks.

Classic...ask for more info and they disappear

[–] darganon@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Use what you prefer, except brave, they can go fuck themselves.

Firefox works great for me, but I have OP hardware.

[–] helenslunch@feddit.nl 1 points 10 months ago

I prefer Brave

[–] Sanctus@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago

Remove all your plug-ins and run it standalone. Firefox doesn't drag ass.

[–] tun@lemm.ee 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

using firefox on Linux with i5 6th gen, ddr3 32gb.

have over 100 tabs. most are suspended. cannot say it is slow.

edit: running with NVMe

[–] wtry@lemm.ee 0 points 10 months ago (4 children)

I use a laptop with about 6GB of ram :/

[–] XeroxCool@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

Browser ram usage will just about always max out the available ram. It's by design. It's keeping open as much as it can for a faster user experience. As you run other programs, the browser should be giving up ram (blanking more tabs) to give it to the programs demanding it.

[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

FF runs fine on my 4gb netbook and 2gb raspi, I think you might have other bottlenecks on your system that are causing your issues

[–] tun@lemm.ee 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

do your laptop has HDD by any chance? if so, changing HDD to SSD would give your laptop a new life.

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 2 points 10 months ago

It's a fairly low cost upgrade as well, so I highly recommend it.

[–] Bebo@literature.cafe 0 points 10 months ago

Firefox runs better than chrome browser in my very old laptop with 3GB RAM. In fact this was the reason I used only Firefox on my old laptop.

[–] droopy4096@lemmy.ca 6 points 10 months ago

Whatever you've done to UI must be some atrocity as I do not experience issues with FF. You've never specified which FF extension you've used that had slowed down your browser.

Chrome (and by extension) Chromium and all derivative browsers are Google's lever to truly control and shape internet to their liking. Multiple people said it already.

Personally I find Chromium UI very cumbersome and dislike it a lot. Which is to say we all have our own preferences for UI.

In your case you'd have to weigh your repulsion with available performant FF UIs vs future of internet and choose which decision can you really live with.

[–] neveraskedforthis@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago
[–] OfficerBribe@lemm.ee 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Use whatever browser works best for you. It is kind of dumb to stick to something you do not like just because of ideology.

That said both Firefox and Chromium based browsers have pros and cons, there is no best one. My primary browser at home is Firefox, at work I use Edge, I like both. Some time ago tried to fully move from Firefox to Vivaldi, but went back due to couple things that I preferred on FF.

Your main problem is probably 6GB physical memory. At least on Windows 10+ I would not be comfortable with less than 16GB. Hope you at least have SSD.

[–] MrHandyMan@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

Every now and then I just force myself to use different browsers just to see if I like them more or if there are some features I like. For now I have always returned to Firefox because it just works for me best, but I have also really enjoyed Vivald when I have tried it and I could easily also use it as my main browser.

[–] wtry@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago

I use Linux, so system memory usage shouldn't be an issue

[–] realitista@lemm.ee 3 points 10 months ago

Firefox is faster than Chrome for me. Theme isn't an issue for me, but the thing that took me a long time to get where I like it, is getting rid of all the buttons and UI elements and plugin icons that I didn't want to see all the time to get things streamlined down to where I like them. It did take me a couple months to get everything how I like it, but now when I use chrome, it seems clunky.

Trying to switch tools takes a while to get right and to re-learn. There are some things I don't like about Firefox still, but more I don't like about Chrome.

[–] Open_Mike@artemis.camp 2 points 10 months ago

I use Firefox because Chrome screws up my task bar icons too often. I have to use a PWA extension for Firefox to get that functionality, but once set up it just works.

[–] rhymepurple@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 months ago

tl;dr: A notable marketshare of multiple browser components and browsers must exist in order to properly ensure/maintain truly open web standards.

It is important that Firefox and its components like Gecko and Spidermonkey to exist as well as maintain a notable marketshare. Likewise, it is important for WebKit and its components to exist and maintain a notable marketshare. The same is true for any other browser/rendering/JavaScript engines.

While it is great that we have so many non-Google Chrome alternatives like Chromium, Edge, Vivaldi, etc., they all use the same or very similar engines. This means that they all display and interact with websites nearly identically.

When Google decides certain implementation/interpretation of web standards, formats, behavior, etc. should be included in Google Chrome (and consequently all Chromium based browsers), then the majority marketshare of web browsers will behave that way. If the Chrome/Chromium based browsers reaches a nearly unanimous browser marketshare, then Google can either ignore any/all open web standards, force their will in deciding/implementing new open web standards, or even become the defacto open web standard.

When any one entity has that much control over the open web standards, then the web standards are no longer truly "open" and in this case becomes "Google's web standards". In some (or maybe even many) cases, this may be fine. However, we saw with Internet Explorer in the past this is not something that the market should allow. We are seeing evidence that we shouldn't allow Google to have this much influence with things like the adoption of JPEG XL or implementation of FLoC.

With three or more browser engines, rendering engines, and browsers with notable marketshares, web developers are forced to develop in adherence to the accepted open web standards. With enough marketshare spread across those engines/browsers, the various engines/browsers are incentivized to maintain compatibility with open web standards. As long as the open web standards are designed and maintained without overt influence by a single or few entities and the open standards are actively used, then the best interest of the collective of all internet users is best served.

Otherwise, the best interest of a few entities (in this case Google) is best served.

[–] Mandy@sh.itjust.works -2 points 10 months ago

While it is important in a sense what you use, you and I are such a miniscule inconsequential part of the equation that it won't matter what you actually end up using

Use what you like instead and dont worry too much about what these hokier than thou doichenozzles wanna force you into usinfg

[–] thisisawayoflife@lemmy.world -2 points 10 months ago (3 children)

FF is totally broken for me when I try to use anything Google or Cloudflare related for some reason. With cloudflare, I'm in a human verification loop and with Google I get the message "This browser or app may not be secure", in a regular window or private window. This is Ubuntu 22.04. Works fine in chrome. Only browser plug-in I use is KeePassXC, and disabling it doesn't resolve the issue. Disabling pfblocker-ng at my router also did not solve the issue.

[–] skulblaka@kbin.social 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Anecdotal, and I am a Windows idiot, but I've never had a problem like this with Firefox in my life. People always talk about how slow it is and how half the internet doesn't work on it but I've personally never had a single problem. It's just worked perfectly out of the box since the very beginning.

Makes me wonder what the difference is.

[–] ripcord@kbin.social 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Weird, they all work fine for me. Some cookies thing?

[–] thisisawayoflife@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Private browser, wiped local data. I have no idea what the problem is.

[–] Administrator@lemm.ee -4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

as much as I like firefox, it runs like crap on Android. Performance is just not quite there (yet)

[–] agent_flounder@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

What are you running into? Performance for me is more or less the same between both. I'm on a Pixel 4a but also running pihole and ublock so maybe that speeds things.

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 3 points 10 months ago

Use Firefox daily at work on three different smartphones over the years and never had any performance issues. In fact, it was usually much faster.

Can't say I know what's going on.