Trouser Browser

[Dr Lobster*]

I had been a Google Chrome user for years, but it started to get slower and slower to load so I went back to Firefox, which is my current daily browser.



however, those of you who follow such techy things might have noticed the new kid on the block, Vivaldi, went out of beta and reached it's v1.0 release.

for pure speed, i think firefox seems to win it for me, but there are a few things which i don't like about it namely the text rendering is a bit yucky (it's better if you enable directwrite, but it makes the browser very unstable)

so i've given vivaldi a bit of a spin, really love the adaptive interface and feel, but google suggestions don't seem to be working (which is a right pain) and it seems so much slower than firefox.... i type in a site in firefox and bang, it's there. vivaldi, it's slow and so is the interface.

i've tried opera, seems pretty good... not as fast as firefox to me, and not enough to really sway me... but the built in adblocker looks promising (in the developer channel).

what are you browsing with these days?

[Martin Phillp]

I returned to Firefox last year after Chrome became very sluggish, although I still use Chrome as a back-up browser. Firefox has most if not all the add-ons I use with Chrome

Currently on 45.0.1 (x86) British English version, although to watch Now TV, I use the add-on User Agent Overrider which makes the browser act as if it's the 32bit version as the 64bit version no longer supports Silverlight.

[cwathen]

Until Windows 10 I was a very happy user of IE and never really felt anything was particularly wrong with it (provided you were using an 'of it's time' version and not doing insane things like running IE6 into the 2010's like many corporate environments were), but after it got abandoned by Microsoft and replaced with Edge I jumped ship to Chrome when moving over to Windows 10, having already used it for a few years as my main mobile browser.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it tbh. I really love the bookmark and history syncing so I can get the same bookmarks (including the bookmarks bar) and the same history across all of my devices. It's an 'it just works' feature which I don't have to put any effort into setting up and the result is a much more connected experience in a world where I regularly browse the internet on 3 different computers and my phone on top (and that's before you get into less regularly used devices and virtual machines). I truly didn't realise how big a deal I would find this feature until I started using it.

However, the Windows version of Chrome seems to be getting progressively more sluggish with time and I'm getting increasingly uncertain that it's the best browser to be on from a performance standpoint.

When it comes to a 'backup/secondary' browser I'm still using IE11 on Windows and Opera Mini on my phone.

[Philip]

Still a Firefox diehard over here… I never felt compelled enough to switch to Chrome when that first appeared and Safari has tempted me with its fancy iCloud Tabs business but on a desktop I'd still rather use Firefox.

[Dr Lobster*]

glad it's not just me finding Chrome painful.

it is strange that there isn't a single desktop browser which seems to tick all the right boxes.

i even got fed up with chrome on android... i've been using the built in samsung browser (they updated it recently) and it's so silky smooth.

i love firefox on android, it was one of the reasons i tried the desktop browser, it's a shame the scrolling sucks and the longer you use it, the slower it gets until it grinds to a halt and you end up rebooting your phone.

i might give opera another go on mobile and desktop though.

the thing i do like about firefox is the customisability of the network stack. one thing which really increases responsiveness when browsing is caching dns look ups. i have twiddled with the about:config settings to force it to cache thousands of dns lookups for a day, (ignore the ttl) and it really takes away the hesitancy.

will keep an eye on vivaldi too. it's not quite there yet for me, but there is lots i do like.

[Martin Phillp]

On one of my handsets, I disabled Chrome and now have Firefox as default. Chrome for some reason on Android doesn't bring up pages sometimes and the sync with my desktop Firefox is excellent.

[Dr Lobster*]

i did a bit more reading and discovered the default web link doesn't download the 64bit edition of vavaldi, so i've installed that and performance is much better.

i am really liking some of the features.

in the rather hidden little menu on the status bar the page actions has a built in content blocker which hides most ads as a standard feature.



there are still rough edges and the page actions settings aren't persistent, but it shows promise.

not sure if it can be my daily browser yet, lack of google suggestions when searching seems a real step backwards, but maybe i'll get used to it.

love the split screen feature though. that's almost enough to win me over.

[AgainWTheNorth]

I use Google Chrome almost exclusively. I don't know what you people are talking about with it being sluggish, because it works a charm for me.

[Dr Lobster*]

we've probably got older computers - mine is an original core i3 with 8gb ram.

it runs everything else i need fine - including manipulating fairly hefty 24 megapixel photos in lightroom (known to be a resource hog, but works snappily for me) and photoshop.

i also do a bit of messing around with Blender, rendering bits and pieces and using the compositor to post-process video clips - again - not a problem.

chrome... probably within the last couple of versions just really to the point it seemed to be grinding my hdd to death for about 10 minutes after first launch, and generally being a bit shitty.

[Martin Phillp]

The current version of Chrome isn't too bad, however I've found Firefox to be more flexible for my needs.

[cityprod]

Safari when on a Mac, otherwise Firefox.