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So about 3 weeks ago a strange problem happened with Chrome. I could not load it or install it without getting a BSOD (yes, my entire computer crashed). I can only imagine/assume this must be a recent Windows or video driver bug because it was working fine before for a long time. My solution was to start using Firefox as my main browser for the time being.

Well, it has performed pretty well as my main browser for about 3 weeks now. It works better on maps.google.com than Chrome does because Chrome often did not show me the map. Don't know what was going on there either... but Firefox does not work well on one site I like when posting messages... and, unfortunately, Firefox can still be a resource hog like Chrome.

So I'm still using Firefox about 3 weeks later and have not yet tried to re-install Chrome on this computer. I have received some Windows Updates since then so maybe they addressed the problem.

Oh, one thing that is great about Firefox is the ad-blocking. I know Chrome has this too but in Firefox when a website blocks you because it detects that you are using an ad blocker, you can often still use the reader view (F9) to read the article (if Chrome has this feature too then I do not know about it). By the way, I'll be happy to look at a few ads when they get them under control.

Thought I'd share my experience with Firefox here. I like it and it is a competent competitor to Chrome that is some cases works better.

unfortunately, Firefox can still be a resource hog like Chrome.

Yea, there was a time when you got bonus points for tight, efficient code. That was 40 years ago. One of the downsides of cheap RAM.

Don't know if related, but 1-2 weeks ago Firefox was crashing my PC. Windows claimed it was a disk drive issue. However, after three OS updates, things worked fine again.

Lou wrote: ↑

Wed Jul 03, 2019 12:58 pm

Yea, there was a time when you got bonus points for tight, efficient code. That was 40 years ago. One of the downsides of cheap RAM.

Yep... and a downside of fast computers is less optimized code.

I think the fault lies both with websites and browsers (but probably mostly the websites). The browsers are just trying to handle all the bloat that the websites dish out at them... but the browsers support a lot more bloat/features now and the websites are just trying to take advantage of it (many by showing more bloated ads).

Sometimes I miss the "old" days were a 1.5 megabit connection (or even slower) still resulted in fast page loads because the web pages were so much simpler and lighter-weight. Go back a little farther and a 128 kilobit ISDN connection was pretty fast. Today, the actual main content is probably about the same for most pages but the bloat has increased 100x to 1000x.

Speaking of Firefox, this was interesting. I had not heard of DNS-over-HTTPS before. It seems to open up a new can of worms.

UK ISP group names Mozilla 'Internet Villain' for supporting 'DNS-over-HTTPS'

I use Firefox quite a bit and Brave rather than Chrome. (I think technically Brave is still in Beta, but it's pretty solid. It's a Chromium browser.)

Some observations.

1. Firefox, and other browsers, get slow as they save information about web sites. Cookies and other data. Firefox has a useful facility. On a per site basis you can delete all data. If you delete most of them, startup time is noticeably reduced. I find few sites that I want to remember anything. I haven't found a programmatic way to sweep out the trash yet. (If anybody has please let me know.)
2. Brave is good at avoiding some of the surveillance and the huge downloads that can entail. You can be down to a few percent of the "normal page size" if you block the unwanted baggage, on some sites.
3. The UK body complaining about DNS-over-HTTPS is basically complaining that the technique prevents a lot of the surveillance that they're obliged by law to do. They log all your DNS lookups and keep them for a year or two (I think). This data is then provided to various people so that they can track what you do. (Much as Google, and others, do with their DNS servers.) A lot of computer people in the UK are furious with the ISP's for this attitude, I can't see them being able to do much other than using pi-hole or unbound.
4. Google is trying to change the way it's browser works. The fury of developers may have stopped them for now, but I'm not sure. They wanted to change the API so that ad blockers wouldn't be able to work. They also did quite a good job of sabotaging Edge, by writing Youtube and search (I believe) in ways that didn't work properly in it.