5 ms·

I rage quit Firefox years ago because it's impossible to discuss it's critical perf issues without people pointing shifting blame to plugins. It got so bad I ra

I rage quit Firefox years ago because it's impossible to discuss it's critical perf issues without people pointing shifting blame to plugins. It got so bad I ran clean installs that never had a plugin ever, still had perf issues, and people on the internet simply refused Firefox could be at fault. I switched to Chrome and have never looked back. I also have never had a single issue with any AdBlock plugin in Chrome. Maybe they're doing something insanely stupid. I don't know. I use Chrome where it just works so I also don't care.

goochtek 12y ago
I was in your situation. I switched from Firefox to Chrome and thought I would never go back. Funnily enough, I went back recently (a few months ago) and have really been enjoying the recent Firefox editions. Sure, they make some "interesting" design choices, but overall I believe it's really improved recently. You should really give it another shot.
sliverstorm 12y ago
It's the memory gluttony that really puts a cramp in Chrome's style. I can't always afford to run it.
jwilliams 12y ago
I run Chrome as my general browser and Firefox for development. So I use both in anger every day. I must say that FF has caught up, plus it feels like Chrome is starting to fall behind -- I regularly get lockups in Chrome (particularly GMail) and FF has made great strides. To the point that I might flip and use FF for my everyday work too.
- ksec 12y ago
  Exactly right. Everything is comparative. If Chrome never appeared in the first place, Firefox may well still reign supreme. The problem is Chrome first appeared so god damn fast, and has better caching, advance / pre DNS lookup, rendering and responsiveness, startup speed etc. Firefox looked the IE of its days. Then Firefox did improve, ( at its own pace ) and Chrome manage to slip behind in multiple areas. But i really wanted a third choice, WebKit based Browser that is Firefox Like ( Tab OverFlow. ) Or may be i should just buy a Mac.
jacobolus 12y ago
Once you get past about 30 tabs, Chrome performance drops through the floor while memory usage just balloons; by contrast, both Firefox and Safari hold up pretty well. That, plus sending every keystroke in the URL bar to Google, and a bunch of really quirky UIs that I deeply dislike, keeps me from using Chrome for anything but testing. Edit: This seems to be a controversial comment. I’m curious whether folks disagree with me that Chrome doesn’t work very well for many tabs, or if they think that’s irrelevant to the discussion, or what?
- shanelja 12y ago
  I don't think I've ever had the need for 30 tabs; the magic of the internet is that if I ever need to see a specific website, I can just type in a URL.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - __david__ 12y ago
    I use tabs/windows as a todo list. I have 84 tabs open in my main window, and 36 windows open. Mostly I have 1 window per task, each with a few to a dozen tabs of related stuff. When I complete a task (or decide not to pursue it) I close the window. It's not the best way of organizing, but it actually fits my ADD/scattershot style of working pretty well.
    - mandeepj 12y ago
      using tools like tab-snap and grab-your-tabs, you can get dump of yours tabs incase you want to pursue things later on
      - Xylakant 12y ago
        I used to do that - then the "saved tabs" just piled up. Having a lot of tabs open just suits my workflow, so I enjoy a browser that supports it.
TwoBit 12y ago
What you're saying applies to FireFox of years ago, but that's changed, especially with the big memory cleanup of a year or so ago. It now performs ~equal to Chrome under low stress and better under high stress.
truncate 12y ago
Which platform do you use? For me FF on Windows clearly performed worse than Chrome. On Linux I find it difficult to to see any difference.
aluhut 12y ago
I never have perf issues. My machine is not the newest, I run win7 and have serveral applications running next to it. I also don't see much difference between the sum of chrome processes and the single FF process (both ABP installed. FF full with different addons). I switched to Chrome when it was new and everybody was telling me how slow FF was compared to that. I came back to FF because there was no relevant difference and I missed several AddOns as well as the oldschool win2k look I could give it. Today I use Chrome (adn Opera) as reference but it'll never become my main browser. The people who made me change, came back to FF, so I guess it wasn't such a big deal for them also. Edit: I started to hate Chrome when I had to remove it from my parents PC every time I went there. I guess it's the Java Updater or something similar...
nnethercote 12y ago
When somebody reports a performance problem with Firefox, the first question is always "do you have any add-ons installed" precisely because a lot of them do impact performance significantly. That's not necessarily bad -- e.g. I happily use ABP despite the memory and speed hit -- but there's a reason why it's always the first question. Having said that, as a Firefox developer I'm sorry that people didn't believe you when you had problems. We're certainly aware that Firefox's performance did compare poorly to Chrome's, which is why numerous performance programs were introduced to fix this difference. MemShrink is the one I started about three years ago: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink. It has resulted in many fixes, both big and small, and it is ongoing. (Indeed, Firefox OS might not have been feasible without it.) As some others have said, Firefox's performance is a lot better now than it was a couple of years ago. If you want to try it again and you have an old profile hanging around, I suggest that you "Reset Firefox" (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi...) to clear up any lingering problems in that profile. Or you could just create a new profile. If you do try Firefox again, I'd be interested to hear how it goes. Thanks.
- Serow225 12y ago
  Hi Nicholas, I just wanted to say thanks for being the public face of MemShrink. It's really great to have such visibility into this important work in one place, rather than scattered around a bunch of dev blogs etc. Also the continued focus from one person over an extended timeframe really helps get stuff done, from my experience as a PM. Thanks again!

goochtek 12y ago

I was in your situation. I switched from Firefox to Chrome and thought I would never go back. Funnily enough, I went back recently (a few months ago) and have really been enjoying the recent Firefox editions. Sure, they make some "interesting" design choices, but overall I believe it's really improved recently. You should really give it another shot.

sliverstorm 12y ago

It's the memory gluttony that really puts a cramp in Chrome's style. I can't always afford to run it.

jwilliams 12y ago

I run Chrome as my general browser and Firefox for development. So I use both in anger every day. I must say that FF has caught up, plus it feels like Chrome is starting to fall behind -- I regularly get lockups in Chrome (particularly GMail) and FF has made great strides. To the point that I might flip and use FF for my everyday work too.

ksec 12y ago
Exactly right. Everything is comparative. If Chrome never appeared in the first place, Firefox may well still reign supreme. The problem is Chrome first appeared so god damn fast, and has better caching, advance / pre DNS lookup, rendering and responsiveness, startup speed etc. Firefox looked the IE of its days. Then Firefox did improve, ( at its own pace ) and Chrome manage to slip behind in multiple areas. But i really wanted a third choice, WebKit based Browser that is Firefox Like ( Tab OverFlow. ) Or may be i should just buy a Mac.

jacobolus 12y ago

Once you get past about 30 tabs, Chrome performance drops through the floor while memory usage just balloons; by contrast, both Firefox and Safari hold up pretty well. That, plus sending every keystroke in the URL bar to Google, and a bunch of really quirky UIs that I deeply dislike, keeps me from using Chrome for anything but testing. Edit: This seems to be a controversial comment. I’m curious whether folks disagree with me that Chrome doesn’t work very well for many tabs, or if they think that’s irrelevant to the discussion, or what?

shanelja 12y ago
I don't think I've ever had the need for 30 tabs; the magic of the internet is that if I ever need to see a specific website, I can just type in a URL.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- __david__ 12y ago
  I use tabs/windows as a todo list. I have 84 tabs open in my main window, and 36 windows open. Mostly I have 1 window per task, each with a few to a dozen tabs of related stuff. When I complete a task (or decide not to pursue it) I close the window. It's not the best way of organizing, but it actually fits my ADD/scattershot style of working pretty well.
  - mandeepj 12y ago
    using tools like tab-snap and grab-your-tabs, you can get dump of yours tabs incase you want to pursue things later on
    - Xylakant 12y ago
      I used to do that - then the "saved tabs" just piled up. Having a lot of tabs open just suits my workflow, so I enjoy a browser that supports it.

TwoBit 12y ago

What you're saying applies to FireFox of years ago, but that's changed, especially with the big memory cleanup of a year or so ago. It now performs ~equal to Chrome under low stress and better under high stress.

truncate 12y ago

Which platform do you use? For me FF on Windows clearly performed worse than Chrome. On Linux I find it difficult to to see any difference.

aluhut 12y ago

I never have perf issues. My machine is not the newest, I run win7 and have serveral applications running next to it. I also don't see much difference between the sum of chrome processes and the single FF process (both ABP installed. FF full with different addons). I switched to Chrome when it was new and everybody was telling me how slow FF was compared to that. I came back to FF because there was no relevant difference and I missed several AddOns as well as the oldschool win2k look I could give it. Today I use Chrome (adn Opera) as reference but it'll never become my main browser. The people who made me change, came back to FF, so I guess it wasn't such a big deal for them also. Edit: I started to hate Chrome when I had to remove it from my parents PC every time I went there. I guess it's the Java Updater or something similar...

nnethercote 12y ago

When somebody reports a performance problem with Firefox, the first question is always "do you have any add-ons installed" precisely because a lot of them do impact performance significantly. That's not necessarily bad -- e.g. I happily use ABP despite the memory and speed hit -- but there's a reason why it's always the first question. Having said that, as a Firefox developer I'm sorry that people didn't believe you when you had problems. We're certainly aware that Firefox's performance did compare poorly to Chrome's, which is why numerous performance programs were introduced to fix this difference. MemShrink is the one I started about three years ago: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink. It has resulted in many fixes, both big and small, and it is ongoing. (Indeed, Firefox OS might not have been feasible without it.) As some others have said, Firefox's performance is a lot better now than it was a couple of years ago. If you want to try it again and you have an old profile hanging around, I suggest that you "Reset Firefox" (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi...) to clear up any lingering problems in that profile. Or you could just create a new profile. If you do try Firefox again, I'd be interested to hear how it goes. Thanks.

Serow225 12y ago
Hi Nicholas, I just wanted to say thanks for being the public face of MemShrink. It's really great to have such visibility into this important work in one place, rather than scattered around a bunch of dev blogs etc. Also the continued focus from one person over an extended timeframe really helps get stuff done, from my experience as a PM. Thanks again!