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That's been my experience/preference as well. In fact I have been very taken aback by all the "Firefox is back" and "time to try Firefox again" headlines. I gue

That's been my experience/preference as well. In fact I have been very taken aback by all the "Firefox is back" and "time to try Firefox again" headlines. I guess I didn't realize what sort of exodus occurred when chrome came out. But honestly, I never ran into performance issues with Firefox over the years and various versions, including the overhaul with Firefox 3. I typically have 2-8 tabs open (hasn't changed much over the years). Maybe other usage patterns used to cause problems... Also worth noting I was always on Linux; maybe Windows/Mac versions weren't as good? When quantum came out, I didn't personally notice a big performance improvement in terms of user experience (though I don't doubt it's there, and I don't watch CPU/MEM constantly). I've seen these headlines and have just been thinking to myself "but it's always been good!"

mkirklions 8y ago
> I have been very taken aback by all the "Firefox is back" and "time to try Firefox again" headlines. I think this is because there is a marketing campaign for firefox at the moment. When it was front page reddit, the comments were overtly positive and any pro-chrome comments were downvoted to oblivion. Thinking there is a massive marketing campaign and thats why we are seeing it.
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  Though there is undoubtedly a marketing campaign going on right now, there's nothing suggesting they're engaged in the kind of reddit manipulation you're describing.
  - lemeow 8y ago
    Agree - and I don't think the lead New York Times consumer technology reporter would have publicly documented all the reasons why he's switching back to Firefox unless he genuinely felt that way.
- pessimizer 8y ago
  They assumed that removing their last distinctions from chrome - the extensions that had become integral parts of the workflows of millions for up to a dozen years, and the lack of tab processes - would somehow get people to switch from chrome instead of to chrome in resentment. This was where the organization had fixed all of their hopes - once they got rid of extensions and got chrome's primary marked feature (on release), then they would stop hemorrhaging users, because now people could choose to have a browser that was almost exactly like chrome, just a little bit off, and a little bit slow on google-owned sites, but without google, and run by a non-profit. Since this had no effect, except causing an instant loss of a lot of users (one that hasn't been completely felt yet due to esr), and a slight bump in chrome's user numbers, there's no resort other than advertise heavily the benefits of not using google's browser, without mentioning google negatively because they generally rely on google for funding. So just weird platitudes about "freer people web standard access foundation" or something. Or talk about start-up times that no one cares about, and which don't make them distinctive from chrome. The immediate problem is the vast majority of people who are sympathetic to that branding were already firefox users, and at some point were turned off because firefox killed some plugin or other or it just stopped being updated, or because of some UI change which are now explicitly not mitigatable in quantum. The way firefox responded to those complaints (which is not materially, even once; when a meeting of firefox management has determined something is going to be done, it is going to be done, and exactly in that way) has assured that target audience that development by a non-profit is no more amenable to consumer desires than development by the largest, most predatory companies in the US. At least Microsoft and Google are big enough that user complaints catch fire in the mainstream media, and they're forced to respond to a critical audience. If firefox decides that they're going to take out the back button, because "in a modern internet, users shouldn't be moving backwards", you're just going to find a closed WONTFIX bug with 400 angry comments from users on it, and a few comments from Mozilla explaining how their user testing showed that people don't want a back button, the bug tracker isn't for general complaints, that the tone of the thread was very negative and regrettable, and that the thread was being closed for further comments. The real problem is that Firefox has 10x as many employees as it needs, and is just another corporate bureaucracy collapsing under its own weight. Should have been slim and user-focused, and instead of rhetoric about a "free people web standard internet brings people together", central and visible in every conflict regarding the internet and its architecture, and the distribution of knowledge in general. It used to be almost that, but I think the fight over h264 broke it. Now, the only reason it's alive is to keep the forces of antitrust from google's door. Their employees, whether intentionally or inadvertantly, also brigade message boards.
debacle 8y ago
I'm primarily a Firefox user, but WebGL heavy apps tend to run way better in Chrome.
dspillett 8y ago
>* I guess I didn't realize what sort of exodus occurred when chrome came out.* It wasn't really a mass exodus, but a gradual wax & wane over time (with more moves FF->C over the long term than C->FF). In development fields the count is complicated by people who regularly use both, but prefer one. > I typically have 2-8 tabs open I tend to have many open[1], over several windows on different desktops. I use open tabs more than I use bookmarks! Every once in a while I go through the open tabs and close those I've not touched in a while that I don;t expect to touch any time soon (obviously the need to have it open has passed). I currently use Chrome more then FF, and here The Great Suspender[1] is a godsend for saving RAM (and to a lesser extent CPU time) Chrome would otherwise consume. [1] TGS lists my current use on this machine as "22 windows, 148 tabs"
- natecavanaugh 8y ago
  Thank you for link to TGS, I have similar browsing patterns, and I do notice chrome closing in on 5gb of RAM, slowing down alot of other stuff. Hopefully this will help :)
  - dspillett 8y ago
    I've only been using it for a few weeks, but so far it has proven to be a wonderful tool. I've even been moved to donate a little.
- jimbofisher1 8y ago
  You may have just changed my life with The Great Suspender...
zargon 8y ago
I typically have 25-250 tabs open at a time, and also never left Firefox. Though maybe this is the other end of the spectrum because managing this number of tabs in Chrome is impossible.
- FrostAlot 8y ago
  I have the same browsing habit. How to you manage tabs on FF?
- afranchuk 8y ago
  I should have also said that it depends on one's definition of open. For instance, when expo mode was added to Firefox (I was sad to see it go), I used it to have about 4-5 groups of 2-8 tabs each, but only was ever actively using one group.
Bartweiss 8y ago
This is an interesting take, since it's so difference from my experience. There's definitely some difference in use cases that had a large impact - whether that's device memory, open tabs, or even choice of websites. I didn't switch to Chrome when it first came out, but over the next couple of years I found Firefox frustratingly slow and crash-prone. When I cut over, everything was drastically faster and more reliable, plus the feature set (extensions, url completion, incognito for parallel sign-ins, and so on) was noticeably better. High memory usage was the only price, and Chrome surrenders that somewhat gracefully when it's needed. I'm hoping to make the switch back. Chrome has become more frustrating as Google adds brand alignment, and moreover I simply don't like being siloed by a brand. But the usability gain was massive when I first switched, and I'm only making the move now because there's been a lot of good news out of Mozilla.
- ploxiln 8y ago
  It really depends on the websites. Firefox has long been significantly faster than it was in the Firefox-1.x days, when it was the fastest browser. It's always been perfectly snappy and efficient for hackernews, craigslist, 10,000-line colored diffs in the cgit web frontend ... but popular web sites got many times slower. Chrome enabled web developers to do atrociously inefficient things and just not care. Even today, Travis-CI really struggles in firefox, it's modern pleasing animations are just so atrociously coded. And remember when the Reason (facebook language) website was unveiled, it really killed firefox, because of some strange shadow effect applied to all letters or something ...
  - addicted 8y ago
    I think the issue is less poor coding and resource consumption and more the fact that devs seem to primarily test their website on Chrome. Whether inadvertently or not, the Chrome team hit on a genius way of gaining market share by focusing on dev tools so heavily.
    - tedmielczarek 8y ago
      The web is a complex platform, so it's definitely not hard to wind up using some feature that performs well in one browser but poorly in another. I don't know that it necessarily reflects badly on any individual browser--software is complex and it's hard to determine what combinations of web features will wind up being widely used. I do think it's a shame when this happens because sites don't get tested in anything but Chrome. There's no excuse when large companies release webapps and don't test in multiple browsers. (Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla.)
sandworm101 8y ago
>> I didn't personally notice a big performance improvement in terms of user experience I've seen no difference in performance in recent years, at least on my home machines. My browser performance is basically limited by my internet connection, making all the browser v browser speed tests moot. (At work I have to use windows+IE+bing+outlook because work are idiots.) I switched to chrome last year because a couple quality of life plugins were not longer compatible with the latest versions of firefox. What I want is firefox from a couple years ago, back when all the plugins I wanted worked nicely together (mostly privacy and dev tool stuff). Firefox needs to simplify itself, to get rid of things that can be handled much better by plugins.
deevolution 8y ago
I regularly have 50+ tabs open... i know friends who will have multiple browser windows open and im talking like 5 - 10 windows with 50-100+ tabs in each window. Browser developers absolutely have to account for the fact that some people are lazy and dont want to close tabs or browser windows. If a browser can handle these extreme cases, its got a bright future. Edit: spelling
iamwil 8y ago
I've seen other people's browsers with about 40 to 50 tabs open. I think the fact you close them is atypical.
- afranchuk 8y ago
  Yeah. I like to keep my active set very organized to not lose myself in a sea of tabs. I also use Alt+# shortcuts to quickly switch. I think one behavior I've seen people do is treat tabs as if they are bookmarks, which would definitely result in 10s-100s of them open.
Fuxy 8y ago
I have used Firefox since forever as well and fell the same way. I have never run into memory issues or slow loading with Firefox while I kept hearing about Chrome constantly using too much memory recently. As a developer i noticed some minor default CSS bugs with the new Firefox Quantum that didn't used to be there but that's about it. I also use Chrome in my development cycle so it does seem to have some neat features that Firefox is lacking but I doubt regular users would ever notice that. It was just never enough to make me switch although I would appreciate Mozilla putting more effort into their developer tools. P.S. I end up having over 100 tabs open so yeah... although my OS is Linux not Windows so your mileage may vary.
diaz 8y ago
That's also been my experience for long years and 99% on firefox. I could never actually get over the fact you can't close all the tabs without it forcing the closing of the window that happens on chrome. Many other paper cuts exist in browsers not firefox that make it really hard to switch. Anyway almost all the time I see someone saying firefox is bad they are usually using Mac. So I blame Firefox on mac being the problem, not firefox itself.

mkirklions 8y ago

> I have been very taken aback by all the "Firefox is back" and "time to try Firefox again" headlines. I think this is because there is a marketing campaign for firefox at the moment. When it was front page reddit, the comments were overtly positive and any pro-chrome comments were downvoted to oblivion. Thinking there is a massive marketing campaign and thats why we are seeing it.

boomboomsubban 8y ago
Though there is undoubtedly a marketing campaign going on right now, there's nothing suggesting they're engaged in the kind of reddit manipulation you're describing.
- lemeow 8y ago
  Agree - and I don't think the lead New York Times consumer technology reporter would have publicly documented all the reasons why he's switching back to Firefox unless he genuinely felt that way.
pessimizer 8y ago
They assumed that removing their last distinctions from chrome - the extensions that had become integral parts of the workflows of millions for up to a dozen years, and the lack of tab processes - would somehow get people to switch from chrome instead of to chrome in resentment. This was where the organization had fixed all of their hopes - once they got rid of extensions and got chrome's primary marked feature (on release), then they would stop hemorrhaging users, because now people could choose to have a browser that was almost exactly like chrome, just a little bit off, and a little bit slow on google-owned sites, but without google, and run by a non-profit. Since this had no effect, except causing an instant loss of a lot of users (one that hasn't been completely felt yet due to esr), and a slight bump in chrome's user numbers, there's no resort other than advertise heavily the benefits of not using google's browser, without mentioning google negatively because they generally rely on google for funding. So just weird platitudes about "freer people web standard access foundation" or something. Or talk about start-up times that no one cares about, and which don't make them distinctive from chrome. The immediate problem is the vast majority of people who are sympathetic to that branding were already firefox users, and at some point were turned off because firefox killed some plugin or other or it just stopped being updated, or because of some UI change which are now explicitly not mitigatable in quantum. The way firefox responded to those complaints (which is not materially, even once; when a meeting of firefox management has determined something is going to be done, it is going to be done, and exactly in that way) has assured that target audience that development by a non-profit is no more amenable to consumer desires than development by the largest, most predatory companies in the US. At least Microsoft and Google are big enough that user complaints catch fire in the mainstream media, and they're forced to respond to a critical audience. If firefox decides that they're going to take out the back button, because "in a modern internet, users shouldn't be moving backwards", you're just going to find a closed WONTFIX bug with 400 angry comments from users on it, and a few comments from Mozilla explaining how their user testing showed that people don't want a back button, the bug tracker isn't for general complaints, that the tone of the thread was very negative and regrettable, and that the thread was being closed for further comments. The real problem is that Firefox has 10x as many employees as it needs, and is just another corporate bureaucracy collapsing under its own weight. Should have been slim and user-focused, and instead of rhetoric about a "free people web standard internet brings people together", central and visible in every conflict regarding the internet and its architecture, and the distribution of knowledge in general. It used to be almost that, but I think the fight over h264 broke it. Now, the only reason it's alive is to keep the forces of antitrust from google's door. Their employees, whether intentionally or inadvertantly, also brigade message boards.

debacle 8y ago

I'm primarily a Firefox user, but WebGL heavy apps tend to run way better in Chrome.

dspillett 8y ago

>* I guess I didn't realize what sort of exodus occurred when chrome came out.* It wasn't really a mass exodus, but a gradual wax & wane over time (with more moves FF->C over the long term than C->FF). In development fields the count is complicated by people who regularly use both, but prefer one. > I typically have 2-8 tabs open I tend to have many open[1], over several windows on different desktops. I use open tabs more than I use bookmarks! Every once in a while I go through the open tabs and close those I've not touched in a while that I don;t expect to touch any time soon (obviously the need to have it open has passed). I currently use Chrome more then FF, and here The Great Suspender[1] is a godsend for saving RAM (and to a lesser extent CPU time) Chrome would otherwise consume. [1] TGS lists my current use on this machine as "22 windows, 148 tabs"

natecavanaugh 8y ago
Thank you for link to TGS, I have similar browsing patterns, and I do notice chrome closing in on 5gb of RAM, slowing down alot of other stuff. Hopefully this will help :)
- dspillett 8y ago
  I've only been using it for a few weeks, but so far it has proven to be a wonderful tool. I've even been moved to donate a little.
jimbofisher1 8y ago
You may have just changed my life with The Great Suspender...

zargon 8y ago

I typically have 25-250 tabs open at a time, and also never left Firefox. Though maybe this is the other end of the spectrum because managing this number of tabs in Chrome is impossible.

FrostAlot 8y ago
I have the same browsing habit. How to you manage tabs on FF?
afranchuk 8y ago
I should have also said that it depends on one's definition of open. For instance, when expo mode was added to Firefox (I was sad to see it go), I used it to have about 4-5 groups of 2-8 tabs each, but only was ever actively using one group.

Bartweiss 8y ago

This is an interesting take, since it's so difference from my experience. There's definitely some difference in use cases that had a large impact - whether that's device memory, open tabs, or even choice of websites. I didn't switch to Chrome when it first came out, but over the next couple of years I found Firefox frustratingly slow and crash-prone. When I cut over, everything was drastically faster and more reliable, plus the feature set (extensions, url completion, incognito for parallel sign-ins, and so on) was noticeably better. High memory usage was the only price, and Chrome surrenders that somewhat gracefully when it's needed. I'm hoping to make the switch back. Chrome has become more frustrating as Google adds brand alignment, and moreover I simply don't like being siloed by a brand. But the usability gain was massive when I first switched, and I'm only making the move now because there's been a lot of good news out of Mozilla.

ploxiln 8y ago
It really depends on the websites. Firefox has long been significantly faster than it was in the Firefox-1.x days, when it was the fastest browser. It's always been perfectly snappy and efficient for hackernews, craigslist, 10,000-line colored diffs in the cgit web frontend ... but popular web sites got many times slower. Chrome enabled web developers to do atrociously inefficient things and just not care. Even today, Travis-CI really struggles in firefox, it's modern pleasing animations are just so atrociously coded. And remember when the Reason (facebook language) website was unveiled, it really killed firefox, because of some strange shadow effect applied to all letters or something ...
- addicted 8y ago
  I think the issue is less poor coding and resource consumption and more the fact that devs seem to primarily test their website on Chrome. Whether inadvertently or not, the Chrome team hit on a genius way of gaining market share by focusing on dev tools so heavily.
  - tedmielczarek 8y ago
    The web is a complex platform, so it's definitely not hard to wind up using some feature that performs well in one browser but poorly in another. I don't know that it necessarily reflects badly on any individual browser--software is complex and it's hard to determine what combinations of web features will wind up being widely used. I do think it's a shame when this happens because sites don't get tested in anything but Chrome. There's no excuse when large companies release webapps and don't test in multiple browsers. (Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla.)

sandworm101 8y ago

>> I didn't personally notice a big performance improvement in terms of user experience I've seen no difference in performance in recent years, at least on my home machines. My browser performance is basically limited by my internet connection, making all the browser v browser speed tests moot. (At work I have to use windows+IE+bing+outlook because work are idiots.) I switched to chrome last year because a couple quality of life plugins were not longer compatible with the latest versions of firefox. What I want is firefox from a couple years ago, back when all the plugins I wanted worked nicely together (mostly privacy and dev tool stuff). Firefox needs to simplify itself, to get rid of things that can be handled much better by plugins.

deevolution 8y ago

I regularly have 50+ tabs open... i know friends who will have multiple browser windows open and im talking like 5 - 10 windows with 50-100+ tabs in each window. Browser developers absolutely have to account for the fact that some people are lazy and dont want to close tabs or browser windows. If a browser can handle these extreme cases, its got a bright future. Edit: spelling

iamwil 8y ago

I've seen other people's browsers with about 40 to 50 tabs open. I think the fact you close them is atypical.

afranchuk 8y ago
Yeah. I like to keep my active set very organized to not lose myself in a sea of tabs. I also use Alt+# shortcuts to quickly switch. I think one behavior I've seen people do is treat tabs as if they are bookmarks, which would definitely result in 10s-100s of them open.

Fuxy 8y ago

I have used Firefox since forever as well and fell the same way. I have never run into memory issues or slow loading with Firefox while I kept hearing about Chrome constantly using too much memory recently. As a developer i noticed some minor default CSS bugs with the new Firefox Quantum that didn't used to be there but that's about it. I also use Chrome in my development cycle so it does seem to have some neat features that Firefox is lacking but I doubt regular users would ever notice that. It was just never enough to make me switch although I would appreciate Mozilla putting more effort into their developer tools. P.S. I end up having over 100 tabs open so yeah... although my OS is Linux not Windows so your mileage may vary.

diaz 8y ago

That's also been my experience for long years and 99% on firefox. I could never actually get over the fact you can't close all the tabs without it forcing the closing of the window that happens on chrome. Many other paper cuts exist in browsers not firefox that make it really hard to switch. Anyway almost all the time I see someone saying firefox is bad they are usually using Mac. So I blame Firefox on mac being the problem, not firefox itself.