For the Nth time, I've gone "Chrome-free" for a couple of months, this time using Firefox and Brave.
What I've found is that I need at least two browsers to replace Chrome because so many sites do not work in one browser or the other.
I just hit my breaking point when I was unable to use Paypal with Brave, even with "shields down." Progress circles turn and turn and turn and the part of the page I actually need just never loads when trying to transfer money in from a bank.
I have also been unable to use Amazon with Firefox. Even in incognito with all extensions disabled, pages crash as soon as they fully load.
So just as the last time I quit Chrome, I think I'm going back to the Gorg. It's a circular function - Chrome dominates the market, so every website is vetted against Chrome with the utmost care, so Chrome grows market share. Ironically, the only websites that have ever consistently given me trouble in Chrome have been Google properties (Doc, Sheets).
I guess, in order to escape the Gorg, I could switch to Edge.... oh the irony.
I'm on Linux, but Amazon & PayPal both work fine for me with FF.
Yes, FF is my default browser on my computer, Chrome on an office one.
FF works perfectly. Never an issue.
I'm still using Vivaldi with no problems rendering.
Could it be an extension messing with FF?
Nope. I can't even look at an Amazon product page in a private browsing window with no extensions active in FF. All the other pages are fine, but the product detail pages don't work at all.
As for Brave, a lot of things that won't work with Privacy Badger also won't work with Brave. The difference is that when I disable PB, everything works. When I got "shields down" in Brave, it only actually works about half the time. In Paypal when trying to connect an account to my bank, it would just never load the third-party bank authentication. FF and Chrome handle that no problem.
I've always seemed to have more browser stability issues that most. Not sure why. I don't even run many plugins/extensions these days.
But I always wonder: am I just really good at finding edge cases or is it that there's a vicious cycle where once a browser achieves a certain market share, as Chrome has now on the desktop and IE once had, where other browsers just stop working?
I thought we were out of that era with the standards movement, but now web pages are so much more complex, we're perhaps entering a new era of browser compatibility issues.
That does seem odd, ergo. FF has been my main on several different workstations and has been rock solid steady for years.
Have you tried a new profile? I have had them get corrupted before.
Oddness. I, too, have Firefox as my default *and have for years* and no issues.
No issues on FF for me, no extensions on Linux.
My only browser gripe is watching Netflix on Edge, pause and unpause and it usually jitters until I hard refresh. Pretty annoying.
I have always been really good at crashing browsers. For Firefox, I actually already have two profiles - Standard and Minimal. I use Minimal for most testing. No extensions. Neither one likes Amazon. Very strange. It just started a couple of months ago.
The first time I switched back to Firefox, I was beaten back by constant crashes. More recent versions of Firefox have been really good and for a while I found that Google Docs and Sheets worked poorly for me Chrome, of all things, so I had gone to defaulting to FF.
I am at this point a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet anyway, so there's no point in resisting.