Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

Firefox has been my primary browser since 0.93, so I am naturally biased, but here is my anecdotal position.

I develop sites in Firefox and then go for compatibility checking in other browsers.

Edge is normally fine.

Chrome is horrible. Atrocious. Abysmal. It implements lots of new features, but they are just so regularly buggy or badly implemented. To select the example I remember the clearest (there have been many more over the years): I went to use flexbox on one site and Firefox agreed with the spec (and what was obvious) on the treatment of some major item sizing issue while Chrome did something altogether different which I really couldn’t think of any justification for and which made flexbox a non-starter in that case. A year or two later they had fixed it in Chrome, but I’ve ever found it like that: Firefox has a slower rate of implementation, but normally implements things well; WebKit/Blink has a faster rate of implementation, but breaks things often (even with a handful of serious bugs in production releases that broke entire websites completely) and has always felt like a toy, rather than a serious, stable browser engine.

In my use case, it's still a problem if you have a bunch of tabs loaded, but I think the class of problem is somewhat different than it is in, say, Chrome. Sure, Firefox gets a bit sluggish with 500-700 tabs open, but since I don't have a habit of keeping a single session open for days (then it IS a problem), the net effect is relatively small since restarting Firefox generally behaves as if the inactive tabs from the last session weren't open. Obviously, if you click through tabs you opened previously, then it'll load them but otherwise it's fine. So there's some truth to it, but as with most things, it depends.

I use Firefox mostly because I have a terrible habit of clicking any link that looks remotely interesting with the intent to come back to it for later reading. Granted, it rarely works quite like that, but Chrome became a bear after 150-200 tabs (and often started capping my RAM). For all its faults, Firefox (again, in my use case) still manages to stay around ~2GiB unless I do something stupid or watch a bunch of YouTube videos (under Linux). Chrome does well, but the UI became unusable since you couldn't scroll through opened tabs without having specialized addons and such. I'm not sure if this is still the case, and even if it's changed, I don't think I'd go back. The RAM usage was too much, but I fully understand Chrome was probably never designed with my browsing habits in mind. Whereas I've seen claims that allege a handful of Firefox developers are tabholics. I'd believe it.

Somewhat off-topic: One thing I really like about Firefox is the profile manager. I've started creating separate profiles for general browsing, documentation, and videos sometimes with extensions tailored for each. It was a slight pain to change my habits around to accommodate that, but I've noticed if one instance hangs, it's not much of a problem. With multiprocesses on the horizon, maybe this will cause me to change my browsing habits again, but I think I like the profile isolation for enough reasons unrelated to performance to continue as is. Perhaps this is abusing it somewhat, but it works for me. If you keep a relatively clean profile with few tabs open, Firefox stays pretty snappy.

Sorry but that is just not true, Firefox has miserable DOM performance that results in laggyness, freezes on pages that work fine with Chrome. Until the Firefox people accept that their browser sucks can they finally try to make it better.

There is no sandboxing (in the works for how many years now?), their pdfjs is not as fast as the chrome native plugin, they force me to use the insecure and terribe flash plugin that crashes every time, one frozen tab still freezes the entire browser.

No I don't want to use Chrom{e,ium}. I wasn't tricked into choosing google. I just want something that works.

Firefox lost me when they conspired to kill WebSQL. They were the ones used the vast marked share they had to push the trendy thing of the day, namely nosql and IndexeDB, a technology which is bemoaned by web developers today.

I think the fact that there is another post about SQLite on the front page right now, attests that it would have been better to just standardise that. But then all those greenfield "spec hackers" wouldn't have had the fun of building cloud castles.

As a web developer and a browser user I'm tired of things not working. And if that means less options in terms of browsers I don't care as long as the browsers that are there give me a solid foundation to work with.

I'd rather have less options with more freedom of choice because all the different options are compatible and interchangeable, than many options but little choice, because their features sets are all disjoint and nothing is compatible.

I use Chrome for developing and Firefox for normal browsing. That way, I know when I'm wasting my time ;-)

Simply, I just couldn't switch to Chrome for normal browsing. One thing I couldn't do without is the bookmark tagging in FF. I also like the fact that the address bar behaves much more predictably, like when I type something and it shows me links only from my recent history.

Youtube does play better in Chrome, FF uses a lot more CPU and it is a known issue. So now I use Chrome for playing Youtube and FF for everything else! It's a mess.