My biggest reason for not using Firefox is that I always keep 2 browser windows open in Chrome, one is for my work account and the other is for my personal account. I like this separation. IIRC you can't have 2 profiles open at the same time in Firefox and even switching between profiles is not easy. I do use Firefox on my personal laptop, but I spend 8 hours a day on my work laptop and need this feature.
Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
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Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
#82I have some serious issues with Chrome (the permaloading, it's new download blocking 'feature', poor startup time), but I did not find Firefox remotely an improvement. On my system it is half as fast, twice as buggy, and even more memory hungry than Chrome is. I think people overstate Chrome's memory usage as a factor of performance; IME it's still less than FF in total most times, and largely that memory cost doesn'…
How long since you last tried Firefox? This is almost completely opposite my experience with Firefox vs. Chrome. Chrome for 4 tabs consumes about 600MB, Firefox for those same 4 plus 8 more consumes 400MB. I also haven't seen any significant memory leaks in the last year or two. Sad to say, but 1.4 G is not uncommmon (or even unreasonable) for any browser these days, mostly due not to the browser itself, but the reso…
You might want to check your extensions.
I know AdBlock+ is a very popular, common, RAM-hungry extension
Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
#83I read the article hoping for something insightful, but when I read the paragraph ...a half-dozen tabs that auto-open on launch thanks to the dozens of extensions I've accumulated over the years[...] I had to stop and say "wait, what?" To leverage his analogy that it is like coming home to a new house to find that most of your stuff is already there, it is like not cleaning your house and not taking out the trash for…
He mentioned importing all of his plugins and preferences from Chrome back into Firefox, so it stands to reason that his benchmark between the two is roughly the same.
As for the question of will it change? Well, to be frank, it shouldn't. It's known, however, that it will: Chrome in particular is known to not handle the accumulated history well. I haven't had a similar experience with Firefox, but that's only one data point.
Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
#84He'll change his mind once he starts encountering more SVG (which is becoming increasingly popular). Firefox SVG performance is so bad compared to Chrome/Safari/IE. Some sites are unusable.
Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
#85A little bit OT.
I tried to go back to Firefox as I wrote an internal tool for company. Two problems did not go well: a) Firefox failed to provide a reasonable size for SVG elements, and by calling getBBox() I got a bounds that is not cropped by the container frame but the inner one which has been extended by elements drawn into, whereas in Safari/Chrome I could just call .offsetWidth/.offsetHeight; b) I cannot view node data as quickly as I could in Safari/Chrome and this is a pain when debugging __data bound in D3.js. Maybe I will try installing Firebugs later.
For now I guess I have to stick to Chrome-first strategy or just ship it with nw.js.
Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
#86I have tried it many times but failed. The reason - if firfox memory goes too high, which happens frequently, there is no option to kill single tab(in the stable version) like Google Chrome. I have started using Firefox Nightly (because of separate process feature) but it keeps on crashing. So I am ready to jump on it as soon as we have new stable build with separate process for each tab.
1) What do you do to make "Firefox memory goes too high" 2) What does about:crashes say for the crashes you get? Are those known bugs?
I had the same issue. For me it was pages' JS having bugs or pages recreating ads after adblock blocks them.
Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
#87Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
#88Something I noticed the other week - Chrome on Windows will scan my desktop on startup (all the icons go back their generic version, and then return). Why would they do that? My desktop isn't where the cache is.
Is THAT what's doing that? That is extremely annoying, is it possible to safely use a flag to disable this?
Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
#89I find Chrome's web dev tools to be vastly superior to FF and last time I tried it it didn't look good on my Mac and I had the same memory problems as with Chrome. Until FF get's much faster or better devtools than chrome I'm not interested. Not to mention how often does a Chrome extension hit the front page of HN vs a FF one? Don't get me wrong, I don't love Chrome unconditionally (the RAM usage is crazy but so is F…
I heard a rumor a while back that Firefox was developing a browser targeted at web developers. Not sure if thats unnecessary or what but if it materializes I'll probably give it a try.
It's already out, it's called Firefox Developer Edition: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Developer_Editio...
Re: Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox
#90I find Chrome's web dev tools to be vastly superior to FF and last time I tried it it didn't look good on my Mac and I had the same memory problems as with Chrome. Until FF get's much faster or better devtools than chrome I'm not interested. Not to mention how often does a Chrome extension hit the front page of HN vs a FF one? Don't get me wrong, I don't love Chrome unconditionally (the RAM usage is crazy but so is F…
I've found FF dev tools to have everything I need -- it's gotten really good recently. The only thing it doesn't have that I need to switch to Chrome for is for web socket purposes. Chrome allows you to see all the data sent/received in the Network tab.
That's a big one, along with some small stylistic issues I have (I hate the console on FF) and little things like not being able to expand an object/array in the console (Yes, I know you can click on it to open an inspector but Chrome's approach is so clean and easy to use and doesn't take up half your console to inspect an object/array, Adding conditional breakpoints is a bitch.... I don't have a ton more off the top of my head but I know there are more and if I tried to use FF again I would run into them almost right away.
At the end of the day I use the browser that allows me to do my job the fastest and more efficient. As of 2015-02-13 that browser is Chrome. That could change tomorrow but there would have to be a compelling reason and I have yet to find one.