I really like Firefox but the big annoying part that I run into is that Sync seems to blow away extension-specific settings whenever I install Firefox on a new machine. Like, the new machine doesn't have any of my settings for the extensions it knows I already have installed on a different machine, and then Sync happily syncs the new settings to the other machines, blowing it away there too. Thanks, Sync. I'm a big f…
NoScript and RequestPolicy each allow exporting and importing of their rulesets so you can manually back up those settings where a bad sync can't delete them.
The problem is using many open tabs with Chrome. If you use no more than 3 or 4 tabs, Chrome is generally fine. If you use more than that, Firefox has some built-in features to help with tabs such as delayed tab loading and tab grouping. It also has more and better extensions for helping with multiple tabs. Furthermore, it doesn't launch a new process for each tab. In a browser comparison I wrote last month, I includ…
This is probably b/c most people at Google use computers with 32GB of ram.
So there's an open source developer out there with just 2GB of ram that comes in and offers solutions to the memory problem, right?
RIGHT?
(Firefox was heavily criticized for having huge apparent memory usage, which was ignored up until at least FF 4)
This might sound silly to some, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google limited its usability tests to high-end machines with RAM in the double-digits. I reckon most programming teams have this issue, since even if they're dogfooding, they're doing so on high-end hardware, meaning that low-end hardware is untested and often unusable. Google isn't the only culprit; many websites nowadays will start to lean heavier towar…
Google also happens to be behind the Chromebook effort, so I would be surprised if they don't do any testing on Chromebooks.
Maybe some testing of, say, a few tabs, but I'd be very surprised if a significant number of Chrome devs (or any Chrome devs, for that matter) use Chromebooks for Chrome development (maybe the Chromebook Pixel, but even that seems unlikely). The Chromebook is optimized toward content consumption; while I'm sure it's possible to do serious programming on ChromeOS (just as it's possible to do serious programming on Android or (jailbroken) iOS if you really wanted to), it's not going to be nearly as productive as a high end workstation (portable or stationary) with 16+GB of RAM and a quad+ core processor.
This might sound silly to some, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google limited its usability tests to high-end machines with RAM in the double-digits. I reckon most programming teams have this issue, since even if they're dogfooding, they're doing so on high-end hardware, meaning that low-end hardware is untested and often unusable. Google isn't the only culprit; many websites nowadays will start to lean heavier towar…
It's certainly not the only issue with running Chrome on machines that aren't configured just like Google's. If you try and run it on a Linux distro which limits the number of open files per process to 1024, like most do by default, it crashes when you try and open more than a handful of tabs. Turns out that Google run a custom version of Ubuntu internally with the limit raised to something like 32,768 open files per…
I frequently have dozens of tabs open in Chrome on Ubuntu without any problems and I haven't touched the open-files-per-process limit. You must be talking about a problem with older versions.
The problem is using many open tabs with Chrome. If you use no more than 3 or 4 tabs, Chrome is generally fine. If you use more than that, Firefox has some built-in features to help with tabs such as delayed tab loading and tab grouping. It also has more and better extensions for helping with multiple tabs. Furthermore, it doesn't launch a new process for each tab. In a browser comparison I wrote last month, I includ…
Tabs were one of the major reasons I switched over to Chrome. At the time, firefox resized the tabs as soon as space became available, making closing a bunch of tabs a pain. They don't do that anymore, but now they have the tab scrolling feature which adds a gui element if there are too many tabs. Thing is, once you close enough tabs, those elements go away immediately, making closing a bunch of tabs a pain. Biggest…
I switched to Chrome a few years ago for the same reason. Another reason was Chrome had an 'omnibar' that takes in both urls and search queries. I was instantly sold on that.
The biggest issue I have with Chrome is how aggressive it's been about linking Google IDs with the browser. I've lost data twice by bugs related to not having a linked ID. Please Google, understand this; I don't want my browser linked with my Google account.
Chromium does not include the Google bloat and works flawlessly. I don't know whether it will make you lose data, but personally never had any issues with it.
No you're not. You're gonna be right back in Chrome because it has V8. Admit it. You liked Chrome because it ran fast because it had a great JS engine and HTML renderer. We all did. Stop complaining, suck it up, and use Chrome.
Firefox on Mac still has too many visual issues, and the devs often drag their feet on fixing them. Lion (released 2011) added "bounce" scrolling and auto-hiding scrollbars. It took them nearly half a year to fix the lack of auto-hiding scrollbars nightly builds[1], and even longer for it to finally make it to mainline Firefox. Firefox still doesn't have bounce scrolling. To add to that point, the first high-dpi (ret…
> Finally, it's still not multi-process (though it's finally getting there.) [2] In fact, Nightly now is by default.
This. Have the scales tipped the other way recently? Chrome still feels faster to me, but I only have one active extension (Ad Blocker).
The Ad Block Plus extension is itself a notorious memory and CPU hog [1]. Chrome's slimmer uBlock extension has now been ported to Firefox [2]. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-plus... [2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases
Please don't put the blame solely on AdBlock Plus. Most of the problem is due to the rulesets, not the extension itself. EasyList and friends have a truly frightening number of broad CSS element hiding rules, which are much less efficient than the URL blocking rules that were the original AdBlock mode and should have stayed the primary means of blocking.
You mean one main "firefox" process that holds all tabs and one child process that holds all plugins (Flash, Acrobat). So if one tab hangs (e.g. WebGL demo) then still the whole Firefox is slow as hell. Firefox should finally spawn child processes for every other tab with less permissions ("sandbox" technique) so that if one tab hangs or crashes every other tab and the UI still is responsive. It seems we have to wait…
It's one process for tabs and one for the UI. Plugins have been in a separate process for years.
That's still far less than optimal. Under Chrome (Chromium) I can kill individual tabs if they start getting sluggish. Not so w/ Firefox.