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What is the alternative to chrome that doesn’t crash or is not noticeably slower?





Full time Firefox user. I run hundreds of tabs for days on end and need to restart it every week or so. Well worth it to not use Chrome. Need to open a site in Chrome about once a month

I've used Firefox for years and it very rarely crashes. Individual tabs will crash occasionally, but rarely the entire browser.

The upcoming version has "Unload tabs" built in to the context menu. That should result in restarts limited to updates.

I use the Auto Discard Tabs plug-in, just lets tabs time-out after a set amount of time

Firefox? Weird question. I haven't even installed Chrome in the past 7 years. Firefox is fast (but I obviously don't know if Chrome is faster) and it never crashes.

Chrome does feel faster to me; I remember someone here saying that was because of some kind of procedural loading shenanigans or something.

But the main hook for me is how websites look. I do a lot of reading on the browser, and fonts on Chrome always look better than on Firefox. I would switch to Firefox in a heartbeat if only things started looking the same on it.


What's wrong with FireFox?

And if you're not a fan of FireFox, Ladybird is becoming a thing in 2026


Brave Browser: https://brave.com/


I mean those aren't real controversies though, it's more like "we added a VPN feature and included the VPN, but have now removed it". A real controversy would be like Mozilla who was pushing for censorship and silencing "bad actors" in the years after the first Trump election.

What?

"This includes bringing new users to Binance & other exchanges via opt-in trading widgets/other UX that preserves privacy prior to opt-in. It includes search revenue deals, as all major browsers do."

Seems pretty relevant to the current topic and not part of the VPN controversy.


I use Vivaldi[1]. Also has built-in ad-blocker although I'm not sure how good it is compared to Ublock or others.

[1] https://vivaldi.com/


seconded. been loving vivaldi since i switched.

I use firefox full time, it works great for me.

Firefox. It's been my default browser for years but now I'm noticing sites that don't work properly with it. I'm not sure why.

It also has a really annoying 'feature' that its update process will sometimes force you to restart the browser.


Zen Browser works well for me. It's a Firefox fork but privacy-focused whereas Mozilla recently became an ad company and published hostile TOS changes. No issues I had when I was evaluating LibreWolf.

I feel like people sleep on safari, especially on Macs.

JavaScript Chrome developers did a good job of convincing people that Safari is the new IE.

I love Safari on macOS. I love the pinch/zoom with the tabs. I love that private browsing mode, at least seems to, keep things contained to the tab they started with. e.g. if I open facebook in a private tab then open new tab and go to facebook, it’s going to make me login.


Chrome’s developers didn’t have to say anything. Anyone who’s been trying to build on the latest web features (for me, particularly WebGL, WebRTC, WebGPU and IndexedDB) over the past decade has been bitten by Safari over and over again. They usually come around after being raked over the coals by the web dev community, but they’re still usually years behind.

When “Safari is the new IE” was first published, they absolutely were. They’ve gotten a bit better since then, but all the same it was hilarious to see people who used to rail against IE for flaunting web standards (cough John Gruber cough) suddenly start saying that web standards were a bogus racket once Apple decided to stop keeping up with them.


You're drinking Apple kool-aid if you think Safari isn't holding web back.

Lots of anti-google people dislike Safari. Safari isn't the only non-google option you know.


Safari is far from perfect, but I’m glad they don’t implement everything Chrome does. Many of the complaints come down to “Safari doesn’t even support RunBitcoinMinerInBackground.js. It sucks!”

And on the plus side, it’s vastly better at power efficiency, meaning I can use my laptop longer without being plugged in.


sure if you want to live a life stuck in the App Store and Play Store walled gardens... having a decent web browser is the way towards a truly open web

Apple is slow to adopt new features, sure but Google bulldozes features to be first to market so it can implemented the way they want it implemented.

>Google bulldozes features to be first to market so it can implemented the way they want it implemented

Can you give an example of this?


Safari is the new IE not because they refuse to implement questionable new web “standards”, but because

- It has all sorts of random quirks in their supposedly supported features;

- Mobile Safari has even more quirks;

- No other major browser introduces random serious bugs like Safari does (remember the IndexedDB one?);

- Version updates are tied to OS updates meaning it’s the only major browsers that’s not evergreen, and coupled with the previous points you have to carry workarounds for bugs forever, and of course can’t use new features;

- Extensions are 10x harder to develop and more than 10x more expensive to publish since they’re tied to Xcode, Apple Developer Program and MAS, because fuck you;

- Like another commenter said, it’s the only browser that crashes on me (random “this page has experienced a problem and reloaded” or something like that);

- PWA is another kind of hell in Safari but opinions are divided so whatever. At the very least it’s not conducive to an open web.

It’s a piece of hot garbage, like a lot of other Apple software these days. Sure, maybe it’s battery efficient or something. I don’t give a shit because I work plugged in.

Oh and developer tools in Safari are crap but who cares.


Significantly better battery life too. Like hours.

Developers don't convince anyone of anything! They just build stuff according to standards (which are inevitably set not by standards orgs, but by the most popular browsers), and then they expect all browsers to follow those standards and "just work".

When a browser like Safari fails to adhere to those standards, sites will break ... but you can't expect developers (of most sites; I'm not talking about the top 100 or anything) to test in every possible browser ... and then change their code to accommodate them. Certainly not in ones with single-digit percentages of market share, that require their own OS to test (like Safari).


Wikipedia says Safari’s their #2 browser, with 17% traffic share: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Web devs ignore Safari at their own risk, lest 100% of iPhone users be unable to use their site.


If Apple wanted more web devs to support Safari they should port it to Linux and Windows. The web is supposed to be an open standard, you shouldn't need a devices and software from a specific manufacturer to develop for it (I say that posting from a Mac).

At some point there was a Safari for Windows.

But there isn't anymore, so there's no way for a web developer to ensure Safari compatibility (unless you expect every dev shop in the world to buy a Mac just for that purpose).

I continually try, but Safari is the only browser where I routinely experience crashes once or twice a month. There are also some random incompatibilities with certain websites (related to the CORS issue as mentioned in another comment) that force me back into another browser anyway.

I tend to use Safari on my mac, but I will say that it evaluates CORS slightly differently than other browsers so that sometimes I have to disable CORS protection to get a site to work that works fine in Chrome or Firefox, and it's the only browser I've used where I expect to have it crash hard with a SEGFAULT or something every once in a while.

Safari lags on implementing key web tech

I use Chrome for Google workspace, Firefox for ongoing personal logins, and Brave incognito for other browsing (restarting completely for a new session when changing gears).

Last week's discussion on a profile management tool offered several insights into how others a bit further down this path use their browsers of choice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44132752


Well, for the past twenty years, Firefox has been a good alternative browser to Chrome, IE, etc.

What experiences have you had with crashing, noticeably slower browsers? I haven't seen that in any modern browsers.

Firefox + uBlock Origin

I’m using Firefox and Kagi’s Orion browser [1] on my Mac and Safari on iOS.

[1] https://kagi.com/orion/


Is it easier to build a browser for MacOS? Arc was Mac only for the longest time, until they released a crippled Windows version. DuckDuckGo browser started Mac only.

> Is it easier to build a browser for MacOS?

Financially, probably. Apple customers represent a disproportionate share of global consumer disposable income.

Technically, I guess Unix-like, BrowserEngineKit and WebKit (Orion uses this) help. Good question, hope someone knowledgeable chimes in!


Firefox.

Any browser that lets you block javascript? It is weird how we now call browsers fast because they can quickly render the most cancerous content.

Doesn't crash? Firefox/Mullvad Browser is fine.

Not slower? Safari or Orion.


I like Vivaldi myself.

I really like Brave, blocks youtube ads and generally just works where other chrome alternatives don't https://brave.com/download/

I'm pretty worried about the security of Brave and stopped using it. I'd like to be wrong. But years old patches missing in Chromium not ported over until recently makes me nervous (referring to a recently addressed long time websocket bug in Brave). What else is missing? It just seems to risky to use for me.



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