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To chromium

Tl;DR

I switched from firefox to chromium as a primary web browser on my desktop.

On firefox

I was a happy firefox since it’s 1.5 release. Internet says it was released in 2005. This made a 20-year run for me. The web changed so much since then. Adobe Flash went away and web 2.0 javascript-heavy applications took it’s place. At some point I had to start using content filtering extensions to be able to browse the web.

firefox was able to keep up with the times most of the time. It felt like at some point UI became too sluggish. Subjectively quantum 2017 release made it snappy again.

Fast forward to 2025 firefox mostly meets my needs, but there are a few performance warts I don’t know how to deal with:

• Some of web-based instance messengers are very slow in firefox: when I switch to the tab it freezes the whole of firefox for a few seconds (it happens every time I switch to a tab, not just for the first time).
• Branch selection (drop-down menu) at pull request creation time on github is visibly slow on repositories with many branches (200+ in nixpkgs).
• firefox startup time on mostly empty user profiles on HDDs are very slow: about tens of seconds.

Over past few years I have encountered a few widespread bugs in firefox:

• 100% CPU usage on HTTP3: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749914
• tab crashes due to LLVM bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1741454

On chrome

I already used chrome at work for about 10 years. And 3 years ago I started using chrome on a chromebook laptop for some of personal things. But for a personal desktop my strong preference prefer is not to use proprietary software.

With a recent shift to AI and advertising at Mozilla I wondered what are the alternatives to firefox there are if I should give chromium a proper try.

On chromium

After about 2 months using chromium I should say that it is very pleasant to use. Subjectively fonts look a bit better in chromium and most performance hiccups I encountered in firefox disappeared (but a new one appeared, mentioned below).

Helper pages like chrome://about, chrome://flags and chrome://gpu are a reasonable substitute for firefox’s about:config.

I also discovered a few bugs/warts/known-issues as well:

• wayland backend is not enabled by default and needs either a flag like --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland or an option selected at chrome://flags > Preferred Ozone platform > Wayland.

  While it’s a one-off setup it feels like wayland might not be the primary target for linux desktops.

• pdf viewer is quite a bit slower than in firefox. 350-paged doc make chromium visibly struggle to scroll around, might be a known https://issues.chromium.org/issues/345117890.

  I have to fall back to local viewers for larger docs.

  UPDATE: installing pdf.js ended up being even better solution.

• chromium syncs on disk somewhat frequently. There is a 15-years old https://issues.chromium.org/issues/41198599 that mentions it’s all the actions user does are synced on dusk time to time. I don’t think it’s a real problem for modern SSDs, but still it feel quite wasteful.

• sway sometimes crashes completely when I visit certain utility provider sites with a message like:

  00:00:25.696 [sway/sway_text_node.c:110] cairo_image_surface_create failed: invalid value (typically too big) for the size of the input (surface, pattern, etc.)
  00:00:25.696 [sway/sway_text_node.c:110] cairo_image_surface_create failed: invalid value (typically too big) for the size of the input (surface, pattern, etc.)
  sway: render/pass.c:23: wlr_render_pass_add_texture: Assertion `box->x >= 0 && box->y >= 0 && box->x + box->width <= options->texture->width && box->y + box->height <= options->texture->height' failed.

  There is a bunch of open bugs with related error messages. I looks like those are usually sway or wlroots robustness bugs. chromium is probably also at fault here trying to create surfaces of unreasonable dimensions.

  Installing sway and wlroots from git master fixed all crashes for me.

Have fun!