Browse Against the Machine

I know lot of people here say that Chrome is much faster than Firefox. I agree that sometimes chrome feels more responsive, but I want to tell my perspective from someone who owns a very old and slow laptop. Whenever I just start Chrome, it seems superfast until 5 minutes. Just open 5 tabs and some other programs like Terminal and Clementine, my whole system just hangs. So I can't even use Chrome because of the memory it consumes. Firefox actually seems very responsive for me even if I open 10-15 tabs, I can open other programs when it's open. Also I feel that in last two years I have rarely seen the UI hanging in Firefox when a page loads (even with my shitty laptop).

So I am really thankful for people who work on Firefox and letting me use it on a shitty laptop. Also it's one of the reasons I am learning Rust now so that I can contribute to it.

Firefox is still set as my default browser, but it feels like every month more and more sites just seem to QA only on Chrome :(.

Well, using Google docs/sheets the difference is really big. I understand that Chrome should be heavily optimised to use other Google products like Google Sheets, but in the end, as a user it really makes a diference.

On a Macbook Pro from 2015, entering a simple Google Sheets documents and have the page fully loaded and ready to work takes me ~8 seconds on Chromium, but ~17 seconds on Firefox. It's really a huge diference.

Still, I'm trying to use Firefox more and more because of privacy considerations, but Mozilla really should up their game and have more focus in their roadmap.

Let me state here again that I would love to use Firefox, and I've tried more than once, but Chrome DevTools are much faster.