It's not me, it's you: giving up on Google Chrome

[WickerBill]

I've been a loyal Chrome user for years, for a few reasons: it was fast, followed web standards, and wasn't IE. Additionally, my life is super, super dull and I don't really care if Google knows about me. I've got nothing to hide.

But for the last six months, Chrome has been leaving ridiculous numbers of ghost processes running and using crazy amounts of memory. But the last straw was the lockups. After maybe two days of use, it just won't open anymore. Oh look, there are six Chrome processes that can't be killed and are preventing Chrome from running. PID killers can't even unload the processes. A reboot is the only thing that works. Now, I use Windows, but even I don't want to reboot every other day - or better, whenever Chrome decides it can no longer load.

Yesterday, I downloaded Firefox for the first time in five years or so. It seems fine. Uses a bit more memory per tab (process) than Chrome, but astonishingly, every time I close a tab, the process quits, too. I kind of like this whole "works as expected" aspect of Firefox.



But attention nerds: should completely fed-up WB try other browsers before just immediately settling on FF?

[opinionated ow]

I've been a loyal Chrome user for years, for a few reasons: it was fast, followed web standards, and wasn't IE. Additionally, my life is super, super dull and I don't really care if Google knows about me. I've got nothing to hide.

But for the last six months, Chrome has been leaving ridiculous numbers of ghost processes running and using crazy amounts of memory. But the last straw was the lockups. After maybe two days of use, it just won't open anymore. Oh look, there are six Chrome processes that can't be killed and are preventing Chrome from running. PID killers can't even unload the processes. A reboot is the only thing that works. Now, I use Windows, but even I don't want to reboot every other day - or better, whenever Chrome decides it can no longer load.

Yesterday, I downloaded Firefox for the first time in five years or so. It seems fine. Uses a bit more memory per tab (process) than Chrome, but astonishingly, every time I close a tab, the process quits, too. I kind of like this whole "works as expected" aspect of Firefox.



But attention nerds: should completely fed-up WB try other browsers before just immediately settling on FF?

I find often than FF becomes a massive drag on the system, particularly if you're looking back through facebook over more than say a day's worth of updates

[nissan gtp]

I use safari, plus chrome on occasion when I need a plugin.

[Insomniac]

Not sure which version of Windows you use, but Edge + uBlock Origin could be something to try.

The worst thing with Chrome is its inconsistency. You will not find many people with the same problem. Mine is stable, but whenever I download a file, it will take between 0 and 100s to go from 100% to complete. No rhyme or reason. And the help you get is the standard reset defaults/setings. Uninstall/reinstall. Doesn't matter.

[nrc]

Good luck. Firefox seems determined to mimic Chrome right down to the resource hogging behavior. Maybe it's just all my "don't act so much like Chrome" add-ons.

[TravelGal]

I've found the same thing with Chrome. It's been driving me nuts lately. I use it every few days for certain tasks but for the last several months it has taken forever to load. I'm finding Firefox to be much more reliable. Edge is still the one (per previous discussions) that I must open for certain providers. I use it so seldom, I don't really have an thoughts on how it works vs the others.

[nrc]

That's it. I'm giving up on Firefox - at least the current release. I'm switching to the Extended Support Release. At least they only break that every year or so.

[TravelGal]

I use both and some days could strange Chrome but more recently Firefox. I agree with you nrc. I thought the new release would fix things but it's actually worse :shakehead:

[nrc]

That's it. I'm giving up on Firefox - at least the current release. I'm switching to the Extended Support Release. At least they only break that every year or so.

Well that didn't last long. The Mozilla people broke sound for some Linux users because "nobody does it that way anymore, do it our way." I hate today's software developers. Once upon a time open source hackers were supportive of the fact that there were a lot of people out there trying to do things differently - better for their purpose. Now they seem to want to tell everyone that there's one right way to do things, and that's theirs.

So on to the next thing. I've discovered Vivaldi. Vivaldi uses the Chromium engine but applies it's own interface, which I prefer to Chrome. I'm hopeful so far.

https://vivaldi.com/

[TravelGal]

So on to the next thing. I've discovered Vivaldi. Vivaldi uses the Chromium engine but applies it's own interface, which I prefer to Chrome. I'm hopeful so far.

https://vivaldi.com/

Downloaded and installed. Let's run this puppy.