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Is it time to switch back to Firefox from Chrome? I remember when I originally switched around Firefox 3.5.x Chrome was much leaner and faster. Has the pendulum finally swung back the other way?
It depends how you use it: e.g. I normally have many many tabs open, and Firefox handles that much better on my system than Chromium.
Great news! Many thanks to Timothy Nikkel and all the other Mozilla devs. It's particularly great on Fennec, where the memory constraint is noticeable. For people - like me - who didn't know what B2G was, it's Boot2Gecko, the OS project: https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G/FAQ
I just compared it with Chrome using the example page mentioned in article: In Firefox Nightly at the initial page load it uses around 250 MB memory and with scrolling it stays around that. In Chrome (in Canary too) initial it uses around 300 MB but scrolling keeps filling the memory indefinitely (I stopped scrolling above 1.2GB)
Like many of the other Firefox memory changes, this one leaves me feeling a little ambiguous. On the one hand, obviously keeping memory usage down is good. On the other hand, waiting to decompress/decode images until they are visible to the user means that there are obviously going to be performance trade-offs (and also, obviously, design/engineering trade-offs). Speaking just from my personal usage: I don't think th…
This was a follow-up to an earlier change which also delayed image decompressing. In the description of that change the author wrote: "Andrew McCreight wrote a comment that I can’t find now, but basically he said that on one of his machines, that page was extremely slow and painful to scroll through before the change, and after the change it was smooth and pleasant." If you have any examples where the linked changes…
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> but surely that's worth it to save gigabytes of memory I'm not sure _save_ is the right word here...using available memory has no particular cost to me over not using it. Of course, the _available_ modifier is relevant, so I take your point.
It's a huge advance for those of us who usually have 50-60 tabs open for weeks at a time, where hitting a really heavy image page would tip Firefox over the top and crash it. I switched from Chrome to Firefox a couple of months ago for its ability to handle more tabs without slowing/crashing, and for its better performance with image-heavy pages. So, for me, it's not just "who cares?" it's a killer feature.
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It's a huge advance for those of us who usually have 50-60 tabs open for weeks at a time, where hitting a really heavy image page would tip Firefox over the top and crash it. I switched from Chrome to Firefox a couple of months ago for its ability to handle more tabs without slowing/crashing, and for its better performance with image-heavy pages. So, for me, it's not just "who cares?" it's a killer feature.
Tabs are not bookmarks. Use bookmarks.
Basically, my tabs are bookmarks, except tabs are integrated into the web-browser better.
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It's a huge advance for those of us who usually have 50-60 tabs open for weeks at a time, where hitting a really heavy image page would tip Firefox over the top and crash it. I switched from Chrome to Firefox a couple of months ago for its ability to handle more tabs without slowing/crashing, and for its better performance with image-heavy pages. So, for me, it's not just "who cares?" it's a killer feature.
Tabs are not bookmarks. Use bookmarks.
I just compared it with Chrome using the example page mentioned in article: In Firefox Nightly at the initial page load it uses around 250 MB memory and with scrolling it stays around that. In Chrome (in Canary too) initial it uses around 300 MB but scrolling keeps filling the memory indefinitely (I stopped scrolling above 1.2GB)
Yea, I also noticed that, save for the pages with tons of images, firefox has actually been better than chrome in that respect for the last few releases. Now with this fix, I'm seriously thinking of jumping back. Then I'll finally have my sweet DownThemAll again. Many kudos to the firefox devs, performance and memory-usage is very important, and it seems they realized that before it was too late. Even with my 16GB I'…
* Unresponsiveness due to one tab thrashing
* Bad use of screen-space (bookmarks always visible, cannot disappear titlebar like in Chrome [there's only a Windows extension for that], menu-bar takes up another bar of space by default)
* Launching firefox has stop-the-world behavior to check/update extensions -- interrupting your flow when you need your browser most
* Some extensions still require restarts
These are the ones I remember off the top of my mind, I'm sure there were more...
I really tried going back to Firefox, but the cumulative pain of all of these made me go back to Chrome.
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really? I have about 20 tabs open on Chrome now with no lag, with one tab open in Firefox my whole system grinds to a halt.
The "many tabs" situation where Firefox performs better than Chrome is more like 50+ or 100+ tabs than 20. People have widely different use cases with tabs. My experience is that performance on Chrome degrades beyond 30 or 40 tabs, though the exact value depends on your system. You can have Firefox open with 400 tabs without too much performance degradation. Many tabs will be swapped to disk or not even loaded, but t…
For me it's much sooner... on my work machine with limited memory, firefox is almost always noticeably better after 3-4 tabs, or even fewer when they're memory-hungry sites like gmail. With only 1GB on that machine, I tend to be hyper-sensitive to memory usage, and unfortunately chrome tends to basically use up all memory on the system once I reach 8-9 tabs. FF gets a fair bit further.
The upside of chrome on that machine, however, is that the process-per-tab thing makes much easier to control memory usage: although tabs chew up memory quickly, closing a tab gives you back all the memory it was using, whereas with FF the relationship between closing tabs and giving memory back to the system is much fuzzier....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea, I also noticed that, save for the pages with tons of images, firefox has actually been better than chrome in that respect for the last few releases. Now with this fix, I'm seriously thinking of jumping back. Then I'll finally have my sweet DownThemAll again. Many kudos to the firefox devs, performance and memory-usage is very important, and it seems they realized that before it was too late. Even with my 16GB I'…
Last I tried Firefox, pretty recently, it still needed to address some serious issues, when compared to Chrome: * Unresponsiveness due to one tab thrashing * Bad use of screen-space (bookmarks always visible, cannot disappear titlebar like in Chrome [there's only a Windows extension for that], menu-bar takes up another bar of space by default) * Launching firefox has stop-the-world behavior to check/update extensions…
View -> toolbars -> bookmarks toolbar (uncheck)
> menu-bar takes up another bar of space by default
View -> toolbars -> menu bar (uncheck)