[rant]I just about had it with you, Chrome

[Misanthrope]

Just an FYI this is sort of a rant, I might describe technical issues but I'm not looking for solutions cause I figured them out already or found workarounds, the point is that I should not HAVE to have this many problems.

So yeah, I'm getting sick and tired of Google Chrome for Windows. I've been using web browsers for a good while, When internet first became a thing that was available to us here in Mexico in the mid 90s I almost immediately started using Netscape instead of Internet Explorer, quite simply because it was just better in every conceivable way.

Time marched on and a lot of us embraced Firefox, but along came a fast, slick new browser from Google that just made Firefox look slow and bloated by comparison, much like I remember Netscape Navigator did to IE way back in the day.

So I switched and have been using Chrome as my main and only browser for years. But it has slowly but steadily been getting worse and worse and getting back to a lot of decisions that made me run away from Internet Explorer immediately and ever since. First of all, the bloat. My god why does it takes several gigabytes of ram just to run my 3 basic tabs (Facebook, gmail inbox and whatever else I'm doing at the time). I get that you gotta implement new features, patch a few things but it's just gotten insane.

Second pet peeve: Why am I not allowed to cancel updates? More than one time I've ran into issues with sites immediately after the automatic updates. I used to be able to opt out of them but guess what? Now I have to dig around the web to find out how to basically BLOCK chrome from auto updates by using that enterprise deployment thing. WAT. Shouldn't it be my choice to sacrifice bleeding edge on features and security to have a stable experience? What is this motherfucking Internet Explorer? No, scratch that, I can manually turn off all windows updates and avoid having to update IE, I have the option.

Also, ads. Now full disclosure: I am an adblock user. I have been blocking ads for a while, I am not stopping. I appreciate guys like Linus or other sites I frequent that basically need the ad revenue to make a living and keep giving us free content. I honestly tried turning off ad block for a few sites of smaller guys I like and that I wanted to support. The result was that I threw up in my mouth a little after having to experience ads EVERYWHERE. I know guys like Linus try their best to keep them unobtrusive but every so often an annoying one will take a shit on your eyes or even ears, freeze your fucking browser by loading too many animated crap, etc.

How does this relates to Chrome? Well Chrome seems to be in an all out war against ad blocking. They found a way (at least for me, English filters still work but the spanish ones on chrome just wont) to force their advertisement back into youtube bypassing ad block, all of them, multiple filters. I mean fuck again with the shit in your eyes analogy but if it was just a banner I can hide on a video, cool I'll live with that. But I don't want to hear about some jackass trying a "prank" EVERY damn time I want to watch a video.

Not only that but now Chrome seems to think that I want to know if the price of a product I'm looking at it's a good deal. It wants to let me know about it instead of letting me fucking click on unrelated links of the sites to fucking browse it. It actively blocks what I am trying to fucking read. This shit it's just intolerable, I'm sorry but if it comes to youtubers or bloggers making a living or me having to tolerate relentless fucking in your face mega intrusive advertisement, you're not gonna make a living out of me I rather not watch your content at all, no offense.

And speaking of youtube, oh my god youtube. First of, you intentionally make me not want to comment anything at all, that's fine I have less reasons to go back but whatever. Then I find out you basically want to turn it into a giant commercial delivering system and go after the shit I wanna see by bending over to the RIAA and MPAA. Again I have to say it: WAT. Don't you guys understand that I go to youtube precisely to GET AWAY FROM THAT CRAP, that's why I haven't watched regular TV for years, that's why I don't even care that much about Netflix or Hulu, since I don't want any of that entertainment that's still mainly tied to the bullshit TV and Hollywood crap. And now you're taking the fun parts out of youtube with copyright claims everywhere.

Not only that, your flagshit video site won't fucking work with your flagship fucking web browser half of the time! Seriously if you're going to continue to rely on Adobe to get to your site, why am I able to visualize it without issues on Firefox yet chrome decides, out of the fucking blue, that it's no longer going to properly render youtube videos half of the time forcing me to constantly reload, sometimes over and over, to get the stupid thing to show me both video and sound? I shouldn't have to figure this shit out if it's YOUR MAIN DELIVERY PLATFORM on your biggest site.

So now you have massive resource hogging for no good goddamn reason, big, nasty preference given to advertisement to the point of hurting user experience. Constant errors, less and less control and configuration options that seem to go away constantly and to top it all off, issues with your own damn websites that work better with the competitions browser. Isn't it sad that I was talking about Chrome and not Internet Explorer?

Congratulations Google, you're on the fast track to becoming a miserable PoS just like Microsoft did.

[dizmo]

Haha, I was just ranting about the same thing to a buddy.

Windows sees every Chrome tab as a separate process in the manager. Really? Why?

It bogs down my system to the point it becomes unstable.

I've since removed it.

 

....you should send this rant to Google.

[2CoolforCPU]

Firefox is and has always been best in my opinion

[Marco Martinho]

Well said good sir.

 

Edit: This could perfectly be a piece from Lewis Black.

[Superarragon]

I switched to Firefox a couple days ago because I agree with you. I also get random SSL errors and "Invalid URL" every so often. It just gets really annoying.

[Misanthrope]

Firefox is not without pet peeves either don't get me wrong. Right now it randomly decides to go into full retard mode when using flash for videos but unlike Chrome it takes down the entire thing with it. However this is far less often, it generally uses far less resources and it works with a lot of sites that just flat out won't work on Chrome like a government site I have to check for Taxes and other things.

But in a way, it feels like moving to a new house (something I loathe with all my heart) having to rearrange and adjust my main bookmarks, re-enter some passwords, you know the drill. I am also considering giving Opera the vote for a bit but I am not sure what to expect. Failing that is it possible to compile Chromium under windows? I remember that it used to be pretty solid on Linux although I'm not sure if they have been fucking that up too.
 

[flibberdipper]

I don't get why it takes 30 processes, 1.7GB of RAM, and 1/2 of my total CPU usability to just browse LTT on a single tab. Firefox and Midori get my vote for best browser.

 

EDIT: And Seamonkey. That little f***** is pretty fast, and sometimes puts Chrome to shame.

[typetheed]

You made me come out of my posting hiatus just to agree with your rant.

 

I switched from chrome after I realized that it was caching EVERYTHING in my appdata folder. There was a good 15GB of stuff in there. I was practically loading websites from my HDD instead of from the internet.

 

I use firefox and IE together now for my browsing experience.

[Albatross]

This is why I have been using Firefox since forever. I have tried so many internet browsers and Firefox has been the best experience for me.

[Joonikko]

• use Chromium

• move your cache directory to a ramdisk (this is more annoying to do on Windows than it is on OS X)

 

I've recently noticed that the Flash player likes to bug out at times and you have to resize the window frame to fix it. I noticed the same problem on my brother's machine too the other day.

 

I can't comment on the ram usage since I've pretty much stopped monitoring my ram usage while using the computer for normal stuff. Sure I'll glance at the ram percentage sometimes while running heavy applications like Photoshop or Aperture, but otherwise, why bother.

[Hazy125]

I don't get why it takes 30 processes, 1.7GB of RAM, and 1/2 of my total CPU usability to just browse LTT on a single tab. Firefox and Midori get my vote for best browser.

EDIT: And Seamonkey. That little f***** is pretty fast, and sometimes puts Chrome to shame.

1.7GB? Lucky you, I'm using up the to 8 at times. My vote goes to opera at the moment. I'm falling in love with it

[Misanthrope]

1.7GB? Lucky you, I'm using up the to 8 at times. My vote goes to opera at the moment. I'm falling in love with it

 

Near 2gb sounds ok, but I only have 4gb total so after system chunks and Chrome I began noticing the page file being used which is absurd.

[GoodBytes]

Firefox. While not as fast as Chrome. It is a better web browser. It's a non-profitable organization, so it doesn't track your web site that you visit and build a profile of you (especially when you use a google account), to target you ads, and sell your information. It also much better for slow systems and mobile devices, Reviews have showed that Firefox, even IE, consumes less CPU power to render and navigate a page than Chrome.

Also, Firefox is actively supporting next generation web standards. like animated PNG's, color profiled images for accurately displaying them on your screen for the best experience, among other things. And the addom's are the best.

[GoodBytes]

Haha, I was just ranting about the same thing to a buddy.

Windows sees every Chrome tab as a separate process in the manager. Really? Why?

It bogs down my system to the point it becomes unstable.

I've since removed it.

 

....you should send this rant to Google.

Very simple. So you know how you can have your web browser crash? Well instead of fixing it, They make it that each tab is a separate Chrome program, like this it only affects that tab. Sadly, this is very ineffective. Also, it's a cheap way to get multi-core support. Firefox, actually uses threads, and manages it, which is smarter. And if it crashes, open Firefox again, and you are exactly were you left off.

[Blade of Grass]

The reason why Chrome uses so many process is because they've made it "bullet proof". Each tab gets its own process, so if it crashes, it only takes down that one tab vs. the whole browser. The same goes for each plugin, they each get a process.

 

Although it is kinda excessive, I find it more annoying when a singular tab crashes and takes the browser down with it.

[dizmo]

Very simple. So you know how you can have your web browser crash? Well instead of fixing it, They make it that each tab is a separate Chrome program, like this it only affects that tab. Sadly, this is very ineffective. Also, it's a cheap way to get multi-core support. Firefox, actually uses threads, and manages it, which is smarter. And if it crashes, open Firefox again, and you are exactly were you left off.

 

The reason why Chrome uses so many process is because they've made it "bullet proof". Each tab gets its own process, so if it crashes, it only takes down that one tab vs. the whole browser. The same goes for each plugin, they each get a process.

 

Although it is kinda excessive, I find it more annoying when a singular tab crashes and takes the browser down with it.

 

I seeeee. Learn something new every day.

Still. It doesn't seem like a very wise way to do things. I don't have the browser crash often enough to make losing the ability to open a great deal of tabs a good compromise.

[ohJey]

Does anyone else find Nightly to be faster than the official FireFox?  I do..

[GoodBytes]

I have noticed that too. Very nice.

[Joonikko]

Firefox. While not as fast as Chrome. It is a better web browser. It's a non-profitable organization, so it doesn't track your web site that you visit and build a profile of you (especially when you use a google account), to target you ads, and sell your information. It also much better for slow systems and mobile devices, Reviews have showed that Firefox, even IE, consumes less CPU power to render and navigate a page than Chrome.

Also, Firefox is actively supporting next generation web standards. like animated PNG's, color profiled images for accurately displaying them on your screen for the best experience, among other things. And the addom's are the best.

Personally I've negated the tracking issue by using multiple profiles in Chromium. I tried to do the same in Firefox, but the Firefox profile manager only supports one profile at a time, which somewhat defeats the purpose of separating different services into different profiles.

+1 To Firefox though for supporting new standards and precise rendering.

Here's my post about the profiles: http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/80162-using-chromiums-chromes-profiles-to-improve-browser-security-usability-and-customisation/

[Blade of Grass]

I seeeee. Learn something new every day.

Still. It doesn't seem like a very wise way to do things. I don't have the browser crash often enough to make losing the ability to open a great deal of tabs a good compromise.

It depends on what you're doing with it. I find it a nice feature if I'm messing with scripting and create an infinite loop (haven't done that in awhile, but at the start, I did it a bunch of times), so then I can kill the specific tab, or just let it run till it crashes.

[Wyre]

Well said good sir.

 

Edit: This could perfectly be a piece from Lewis Black.

 

I was actually reading this in my head with Lewis Black as the narrator!

[flibberdipper]

Near 2gb sounds ok, but I only have 4gb total so after system chunks and Chrome I began noticing the page file being used which is absurd.

I only have 2GB, and this on on a Chromebook. On my desktop with 2GB and 4GB of swap, it'll soak up all the physical and a decent chunk of the swap.

[Misanthrope]

I only have 2GB, and this on on a Chromebook. On my desktop with 2GB and 4GB of swap, it'll soak up all the physical and a decent chunk of the swap.

 

What a selfish hog, maybe that should be it's codename for the newer versions.

[Satlen]

Just use Firefox or Opera?

[Giddyguy]

I think I've just about had it too. I was watching Linus' new SliFX video at 1080p and my cpu went to 100% usage...yup firefox is downloading at the moment!