The separate URL and search bars are the one reason I don't switch. Such a silly UI feature that feels years behind other browsers. I know you can get rid of it, but then I have to fiddle around with about:config to get it working as I want it to out of the box. All very strange.
I'm with you on the superiority of a unified search/URL bar, but why would you resist a one-time tweak that takes 15 seconds and fixes the problem forever? Or just install the Omnibar extension, for that matter.
If that's literally the one reason you don't switch, and that one reason can be handled with no more effort than swapping the shortcuts on your desktop, I just don't get it.
I've gone back to FF after using Chrome literally form the day it landed. I changed because of vimperator + the ability to theme the header slimmer (i'm on laptop 24/7). But frankly it kind of sucks a bit and I have to jump over to Chrome a lot because almost no videos will play in FF.
Chrome has Vimium, but I haven't used either enough to compare them. On laptop, I sometimes ctrl+shift+b to hide the Chrome toolbar.
I use Vimium and I like it, but it's crippled by Chrome's extension model. Extensions aren't really part of the browser, they run in the context of the page you're looking at. This means Vimum's shortcuts don't work on the new tab page or when viewing PDFs, and they're unresponsive when repeatedly changing tabs. I'm trying to switch to Firefox + Pentadactyl, which seems much less hacky, but there are enough differences to make the change difficult.
I do use Firefox, through inertia, but honestly it's not a good browser. It consumes 50%+ CPU constantly. It uses huge amounts of RAM. It crashes from time to time. Every few months I end up losing all my open tabs permanently. There's no isolation (process per tab). And they keep making gratuitous changes to the UI that don't improve the real UI problems but do require searching through about:config to revert them.…
That CPU and RAM consumption is likely due to extensions (AdBlock Plus being the most common hog). Unless you're running a really old version, Firefox is usually smaller than Chrome these days.
Actually almost forgot about this, but I tried watching a video on FF recently, and Chrome used about 5 percent of my CPU (with about 10 other tabs open), and a lot of extensions, too, while on Firefox I had just a few add-ons (some of the same as on Chrome), and only that video running. It used 15 percent of my CPU.
As someone who switches browsers about every six months, I feel that Firefox is still quite a bit behind in terms of stability and performance. I mostly blame the single-process model, which makes crashes and hangups way more global than they should be in 2014. On Windows, there's also the 32-bit issue. On machines with 8+ GB of RAM, having all tabs share a 2 GB address space just doesn't cut it. Especially when your…
Personally, I use firefox nightly and i get a couple of crashes a year... I also use chrome extensively... and i get crashes about once... a month (im not talking about tab crashes but entiere browser crash) So im not convinced by the whole multi process thing for stability reasons. It seems like a good idea for sandboxing or "webapps" and only so IF you also have separate cookie jars, etc. (and i trust chrome more f…
I use Chrome on everything, no plugins. I can't remember a crash in the last year on Windows or Mac but Linux has lately been telling me it did crash but it really didn't. What are you on? Got any plugins?
The separate URL and search bars are the one reason I don't switch. Such a silly UI feature that feels years behind other browsers. I know you can get rid of it, but then I have to fiddle around with about:config to get it working as I want it to out of the box. All very strange.
I want them separate.
If I want get things from my history then that's one box, if I want to search then it's a different one. Two completely different sets of suggestions, for different purposes.
I use Chrom(ium), Firefox, IE, and Opera, and even Lynx, so I have no particular loyalty to any one browser, but it doesn't feel like there is all that much of a choice anymore among the "mainstream" ones as they all seem to be converging in design. Even Opera, which used to use its own rendering engine, has moved to WebKit, and Blink is not all that different from WebKit either. I certainly hope Mozilla will never c…
Minor correction: Opera has followed Google on to Blink.
Almost every other comment that have been posted so far are complaining that FF tabs are not independent processes. Let me express my contrarian opinion. For my use case FF is just excellent and has served me well, I have absolutely no complains now. There was a time when FF leaked, and held a lot of memory, that time has since passed, at least seams so. I regularly keep several hundreds of tabs open for months on en…
I also keep several hundreds of tabs open for months on end. I use Firefox and have simply accepted that it will crash about four times per day, requiring me to wait a few minutes while it restarts and reloads the tabs.
I've gone back to FF after using Chrome literally form the day it landed. I changed because of vimperator + the ability to theme the header slimmer (i'm on laptop 24/7). But frankly it kind of sucks a bit and I have to jump over to Chrome a lot because almost no videos will play in FF.
Firefox 33 will have native h.264 support so that will solve the video problem. September 2nd will bring 33beta
Together with the developer tools this will be a hell of a release. 33 sounds nice.
Developers, please stop making add-ons and extensions for Google products. You accelerate Google's domination and vendor lock-in when you do.
What are we to do? We build data visualization software, but firefox is REALLY slow at rendering SVG (so no d3 for us). We have a choice of asking our customers to run ie11 or chrome, since both run quickly.
We would recommend firefox, since we really like the Mozilla foundation, but the performance of it is so bad we have to steer people away from it.