** Chris Green cl@isbd.net [2017-12-05 13:27]:
I'm finally getting a bit fed up with Firefox, for a couple of reasons:-
It's seems incapable of working with eBay without going to 100% CPU and slowly grinding to a halt. The last few updates have made it *look* decidedly clunky. Arcane configuration parameters required to make it so it can open files on one's local file system.So, I've been looking at alternatives and there's not much that seems any better (they have different issues in the main).
I've been trying chromium and it certainly seems faster than Firefox and doesn't seem to grind to a halt on eBay, but:-
I want a separate search bar You can't change the keyboard shortcutsIs anything else any better? I've been wondering about Vivaldi, same underlying engine as Chromium but apparently much more configurable. Has anyone here tried it? I'm just a bit wary of going 'off piste' as it were (not in the Ubuntu repositories).
** end quote [Chris Green]
I know what you mean about the clunk look in Firefox, it has been gradually creeping towards Chrome which still feels like an interface in development to me. I've stuck with Firefox and am quite enjoying 57, although that is helped by the fact that the one feature I needed from an addon has a forked option that I have contributed to (all be it only in the documentation so far). It has always, for me, been notably faster and more memory efficient than Chrome, and bar a brief wilderness period between the end of Netscape and Mozilla when I used Opera as the only real option on Linux, I guess I've stuck with it.
One alternative you may like to look at is Brave. I've heard a lot of good comments about that, but I've not tried it myself yet. It isn't in the standard Ubuntu repositories, but if you are running a reasonably up to date version of Ubuntu you can install the Snap. With 16.04 on you should be able to just:
snap install brave --beta
With 14.04 you will need to install snapd first as it isn't there by default, but it is in the repositories:
sudo apt install snapd
I've just tried it on my 17.10 install and it seems to work without issues, there is a bit of a pause on the first run - presumably while it sets things up. I'll have to have a play later.