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I’m a Firefox user but I’m not sure that I can agree that it’s lighter than Google Chrome. I think Chrome is generally faster at everything. Chrome is also mor

I’m a Firefox user but I’m not sure that I can agree that it’s lighter than Google Chrome. I think Chrome is generally faster at everything. Chrome is also more stable. For some reason my Firefox randomly freezes once or twice a month and gets stuck in a crashing loop where only a reboot will fix it. But on principle I use Firefox whenever possible. I appreciate the effort that went into it. Still have to use Chrome daily for one or two business web apps that block FF.

szundi 4y ago
I have a colleage who has a separate monitor for the open tabs. That many he has. Only Firefox can do this for him.
invalidname 4y ago
Chrome is possibly faster for 10 tabs or less. When you go upwards of 100 like I do... It's not even in the competition. Its UI becomes terrible and its unresponsive. FF keeps chugging along without missing a beat.
- haunter 4y ago
  Total opposite experience. At least under Windows Chromium is perfectly fine with 150-200 tabs but FF starts falling apart
  - invalidname 4y ago
    Odd. I've been on Mac for more than a decade so no idea. Notice that this only became a thing with Quantum so if you used an older version of FF it wouldn't apply.
    - jlokier 4y ago
      I'm with the GP on this: FF is unstable with lots of tabs. It's a big memory hog, and it's been like this for about 2 years in my experience so far. I'm using a Mac with 16GB RAM, and it's not enough for Firefox any more (something changed, it used to use less memory). Using current FF (103.0b9). Lot of tabs, but auto tab-unloading so there shouldn't be a large number active. Reported memory use (in Activity Monitor) varies, 8GB-25GB, and it's often swapping. Sometimes it uses more, and then the system crashes. Often it fills my remaining 20GB of free disk space for swap space. Surprisingly, even opening HN pages and only following HN links (i.e. all text-only), the memory usage grows in this way over time. It's not possible to scroll smoothly or type a comment like this without pauses and occasional spinning beach balls. Just scrolling through a page with two-finger drag, it will stop every 10 seconds or so, then jump forwawrd. Moving the cursor with the cursor keys in this comment window is similar. The constant jank and pauses may be entirely due to memory swapping or some other garbage-collection like overhead, I have no way to know. What other people write about this issue is that it's likely some combination of number of tabs, and the fact that modern pages need a lot of memory for large images, compositing and similar, and perhaps memory used by add-ons. But all of this has suggestive evidence against it: If I go to about:memory and click "Minimize memory usage", it consistently brings memory usage down to not much more than when Firefox starts up, without appearing to change any functionality or deactivate any tabs; and when it starts up it's using less than 8GB despite loading up the same session. It also does this itself spontaneously from time to time, though not reliably enough. That said, I switched from Safari when I realised Safari was also being a memory hog and was causing everything else on the laptop to be slow. At the time I switched, Firefox was a lovely breath of fresh air in that department. Even though I copied over all my tabs from Safari (by hand), Firefox ran in very much less RAM, and life was good again on the laptop. Something has changed since then, making Firefox much worse for memory usage, and I don't yet know what it is.
      - invalidname 4y ago
        I think this is due to specific sites. I try to avoid Google Docs and have a separate instance of Chrome only for that. I updated to the M1 Max with 64gb so even if FF slowed down at some point I wouldn't know at this point. But it was OK on my previous air which was pretty weak.
        jlokier 4y ago
        "about:performance" does not show any pages or add-ons being memory hogs. The memory use per page that it shows is surprisingly small, and the total comes to < 1GB. And I see the real memory usage grown, eventually to crashing size, even when I'm just reading around HN, clicking many article headings and comments but remaining within the HN text-only site. I agree it's probably made worse caused by specific sites, but I haven't been able to figure out which ones, or perhaps it's wide range of them, which defeats browsing in general. However, I now avoid Telegram Web, because that does consistently crash Firefox for me eventually (I've seen reported memory use grow to 67GB when TW was open, about three times). Whatever it is, it doesn't look like site JavaScript holding data in large JavaScript objects or DOM trees, because minimizing memory use with "about:memory" reduces the size to workable levels without any other observable effect on open pages. So I'm inclined to think of the Firefox as having a severe reclaimable-but-not-reclaimed memory leak or cache problem of some kind, that is outside the world of JavaScript data.
      - Tagbert 4y ago
        Oddly, I also use FF on a 16GB Mac and experience none of those slowdowns that you mention. On my work machine, FF typically has around 100 tabs grouped into 4-6 tab groups by project and it is solid. I do find that some websites end up using 1GB+ of memory if you leave them running for an extended period of time (looking at you MacRumors forums) but that happens on Safari and Chrome, too. HN is usually the safest one that uses the least memory. Sites with lots of ads load all kinds of crap and can use surprising amounts of memory.
      - 6510 4y ago
        I vaguely remember reading a discussion about how much memory Firefox should use to optimize performance. Some ppl wanted it to just use everything while others wanted a memory footprint as small as possible. I think they went with a percentage of available memory, an idea neither side liked. (hah) I bet there are settings to be configured.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      Pre-Quantum Firefox handled more tabs better.
  - 6510 4y ago
    For what is worth: On my windows Chrome just freezes everything under 10-20 tab load. Firefox just works with hundreds of tabs not rebooting for months.
  - michaelcampbell 4y ago
    With that many tabs I can't get either to work well, tbh. OTOH, FF has an _apparent_ speed advantage for me in that it crashes pretty regularly so I'm not having to worry about memory leaks. =\
    - hmry 4y ago
      Same here, I also get frequent crashes on FF. In the past it used to crash when selecting text with the mouse, but since the latest update that seems to have been fixed. Now it tends to crash when drag&dropping things instead.
      - michaelcampbell 4y ago
        I could never figure out any consistent action to cause it; it would be there, then it would not. Often when doing nothing. Could be some confluence of extensions I have, too.
LegitShady 4y ago
I've been using firefox for the last 2-3 years, and I've had it 'crash' 2 times, both on youtube, but that might be because of all the privacy related addons I have. Ublock origin reports more than 2k blocked scripts on youtube. Chrome also would crash occasionally and force me to reload tabs. I don't think chrome is significantly faster in practice.
MegaDeKay 4y ago
I'd consider faster as a different thing than lighter. I think benchmarks show that the JS engine in Chrome is faster, but you pay a price in memory and processor to get that. Personally, I have found FF really stable lately on both Windows and Linux and use it whenever possible as you do. And like you, I also need to fire up Chrome for the odd thing now and then.
rkangel 4y ago
This is what keeps me away from Firefox. I gave it a try for 3 months a little while back but it was so much slower than Chrome for general browsing. Maybe I'm due another try.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Zardoz84 4y ago
  Weird... Since quantum, FF usually it's faster that Chrome for general browsing. Specially if you have uBlock origin installed.
  - rkangel 4y ago
    It was after all the press about quantum that I last gave FireFox a go and was disappointed. Still, I'm willing to try again - I'd like to do what I can to prevent another browser monopoly.
emsixteen 4y ago
Within the past couple years I've went from Chrome to Edge, then to Firefox, and on to LibreWolf. Edge is probably my favourite of the bunch, and I think the CSS devtools are a lot nicer in it, but I just want to keep my stuff as independent as possible etc.
therein 4y ago
> For some reason my Firefox randomly freezes once or twice a month and gets stuck in a crashing loop where only a reboot will fix it. My Chrome does that every other day on Linux. It has been that way for the last year or two. I can get around a full restart and loss of tabs by killing some GPU renderer processes.

szundi 4y ago

I have a colleage who has a separate monitor for the open tabs. That many he has. Only Firefox can do this for him.

invalidname 4y ago

Chrome is possibly faster for 10 tabs or less. When you go upwards of 100 like I do... It's not even in the competition. Its UI becomes terrible and its unresponsive. FF keeps chugging along without missing a beat.

haunter 4y ago
Total opposite experience. At least under Windows Chromium is perfectly fine with 150-200 tabs but FF starts falling apart
- invalidname 4y ago
  Odd. I've been on Mac for more than a decade so no idea. Notice that this only became a thing with Quantum so if you used an older version of FF it wouldn't apply.
  - jlokier 4y ago
    I'm with the GP on this: FF is unstable with lots of tabs. It's a big memory hog, and it's been like this for about 2 years in my experience so far. I'm using a Mac with 16GB RAM, and it's not enough for Firefox any more (something changed, it used to use less memory). Using current FF (103.0b9). Lot of tabs, but auto tab-unloading so there shouldn't be a large number active. Reported memory use (in Activity Monitor) varies, 8GB-25GB, and it's often swapping. Sometimes it uses more, and then the system crashes. Often it fills my remaining 20GB of free disk space for swap space. Surprisingly, even opening HN pages and only following HN links (i.e. all text-only), the memory usage grows in this way over time. It's not possible to scroll smoothly or type a comment like this without pauses and occasional spinning beach balls. Just scrolling through a page with two-finger drag, it will stop every 10 seconds or so, then jump forwawrd. Moving the cursor with the cursor keys in this comment window is similar. The constant jank and pauses may be entirely due to memory swapping or some other garbage-collection like overhead, I have no way to know. What other people write about this issue is that it's likely some combination of number of tabs, and the fact that modern pages need a lot of memory for large images, compositing and similar, and perhaps memory used by add-ons. But all of this has suggestive evidence against it: If I go to about:memory and click "Minimize memory usage", it consistently brings memory usage down to not much more than when Firefox starts up, without appearing to change any functionality or deactivate any tabs; and when it starts up it's using less than 8GB despite loading up the same session. It also does this itself spontaneously from time to time, though not reliably enough. That said, I switched from Safari when I realised Safari was also being a memory hog and was causing everything else on the laptop to be slow. At the time I switched, Firefox was a lovely breath of fresh air in that department. Even though I copied over all my tabs from Safari (by hand), Firefox ran in very much less RAM, and life was good again on the laptop. Something has changed since then, making Firefox much worse for memory usage, and I don't yet know what it is.
    - invalidname 4y ago
      I think this is due to specific sites. I try to avoid Google Docs and have a separate instance of Chrome only for that. I updated to the M1 Max with 64gb so even if FF slowed down at some point I wouldn't know at this point. But it was OK on my previous air which was pretty weak.
      - jlokier 4y ago
        "about:performance" does not show any pages or add-ons being memory hogs. The memory use per page that it shows is surprisingly small, and the total comes to < 1GB. And I see the real memory usage grown, eventually to crashing size, even when I'm just reading around HN, clicking many article headings and comments but remaining within the HN text-only site. I agree it's probably made worse caused by specific sites, but I haven't been able to figure out which ones, or perhaps it's wide range of them, which defeats browsing in general. However, I now avoid Telegram Web, because that does consistently crash Firefox for me eventually (I've seen reported memory use grow to 67GB when TW was open, about three times). Whatever it is, it doesn't look like site JavaScript holding data in large JavaScript objects or DOM trees, because minimizing memory use with "about:memory" reduces the size to workable levels without any other observable effect on open pages. So I'm inclined to think of the Firefox as having a severe reclaimable-but-not-reclaimed memory leak or cache problem of some kind, that is outside the world of JavaScript data.
    - Tagbert 4y ago
      Oddly, I also use FF on a 16GB Mac and experience none of those slowdowns that you mention. On my work machine, FF typically has around 100 tabs grouped into 4-6 tab groups by project and it is solid. I do find that some websites end up using 1GB+ of memory if you leave them running for an extended period of time (looking at you MacRumors forums) but that happens on Safari and Chrome, too. HN is usually the safest one that uses the least memory. Sites with lots of ads load all kinds of crap and can use surprising amounts of memory.
    - 6510 4y ago
      I vaguely remember reading a discussion about how much memory Firefox should use to optimize performance. Some ppl wanted it to just use everything while others wanted a memory footprint as small as possible. I think they went with a percentage of available memory, an idea neither side liked. (hah) I bet there are settings to be configured.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Pre-Quantum Firefox handled more tabs better.
- 6510 4y ago
  For what is worth: On my windows Chrome just freezes everything under 10-20 tab load. Firefox just works with hundreds of tabs not rebooting for months.
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  With that many tabs I can't get either to work well, tbh. OTOH, FF has an _apparent_ speed advantage for me in that it crashes pretty regularly so I'm not having to worry about memory leaks. =\
  - hmry 4y ago
    Same here, I also get frequent crashes on FF. In the past it used to crash when selecting text with the mouse, but since the latest update that seems to have been fixed. Now it tends to crash when drag&dropping things instead.
    - michaelcampbell 4y ago
      I could never figure out any consistent action to cause it; it would be there, then it would not. Often when doing nothing. Could be some confluence of extensions I have, too.

LegitShady 4y ago

I've been using firefox for the last 2-3 years, and I've had it 'crash' 2 times, both on youtube, but that might be because of all the privacy related addons I have. Ublock origin reports more than 2k blocked scripts on youtube. Chrome also would crash occasionally and force me to reload tabs. I don't think chrome is significantly faster in practice.

MegaDeKay 4y ago

I'd consider faster as a different thing than lighter. I think benchmarks show that the JS engine in Chrome is faster, but you pay a price in memory and processor to get that. Personally, I have found FF really stable lately on both Windows and Linux and use it whenever possible as you do. And like you, I also need to fire up Chrome for the odd thing now and then.

rkangel 4y ago

This is what keeps me away from Firefox. I gave it a try for 3 months a little while back but it was so much slower than Chrome for general browsing. Maybe I'm due another try.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Zardoz84 4y ago
Weird... Since quantum, FF usually it's faster that Chrome for general browsing. Specially if you have uBlock origin installed.
- rkangel 4y ago
  It was after all the press about quantum that I last gave FireFox a go and was disappointed. Still, I'm willing to try again - I'd like to do what I can to prevent another browser monopoly.

emsixteen 4y ago

Within the past couple years I've went from Chrome to Edge, then to Firefox, and on to LibreWolf. Edge is probably my favourite of the bunch, and I think the CSS devtools are a lot nicer in it, but I just want to keep my stuff as independent as possible etc.

therein 4y ago

> For some reason my Firefox randomly freezes once or twice a month and gets stuck in a crashing loop where only a reboot will fix it. My Chrome does that every other day on Linux. It has been that way for the last year or two. I can get around a full restart and loss of tabs by killing some GPU renderer processes.