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> I dont understand when people find firefox noticeably slower. In my experience, people who think Chrome is faster than Firefox never have hundreds of tabs op

> I dont understand when people find firefox noticeably slower. In my experience, people who think Chrome is faster than Firefox never have hundreds of tabs open. I like Chrome and I use it for development, but I use Firefox for general web browsing because it handles hundreds of tabs much, much better. Not only is Firefox's performance better, but Firefox extensions such Tree Style Tab and Session Manager are vastly superior to the tab management extensions that are available for Chrome. For example, I'm still waiting for a Chrome extension that supports the basic task of appending the current window to a previously saved session.

mschuster91 12y ago
Funny enough, on Win x64 I experience it exactly the other way round. I guess this may be related to the fact that I don't have much RAM and Windows might be more efficient in swapping out unneeded tabs as each tab is its own process in Chrome, while Firefox mixes everything together in RAM.
frik 12y ago
Browsers that use several child processes (like IE, Chrome, Safari/WebKit2) are faster, have less latency, crashes involve only one tab and the child processes run with limited OS priviledges ("sandbox") than browsers with only one process (Firefox, Safari/WebKit1). Mozilla is working on a multi-process Firefox, one can activate it with a hidden flag (it is still not production ready, and it will break several old plugins). With multi-process browsers one can have hundreds of tabs open for weeks (if you have enough RAM like 8+ GB).
- azakai 12y ago
  > Browsers that use several child processes (like IE, Chrome, Safari/WebKit2) are faster, have less latency, crashes involve only one tab and the child processes run with limited OS priviledges ("sandbox") than browsers with only one process (Firefox, Safari/WebKit1). It's more complicated than that. For one thing, "have less latency" is often the opposite: a keypress in a multiprocess browser has to travel from the user-facing process to the child process, then the effects have to travel back. In a single-process browser, there is no need to cross that boundary back and forth. You can see this in action in games for example, where you can sometimes see more input lag in multiprocess browsers. Regarding speed, depends how you define it. Definitely multiprocess gives you responsiveness - one slow tab doesn't slow down the others. But throughput, not necessarily. Overall though, multiprocess is a good thing. I'm just saying it isn't a win across the board, like everything it has downsides.
Nostaris 12y ago
I swapped from Firefox to Chrome, in chromes early days.. but switched again because Firefox has lazy loaded tabs = no lag at startup yay.

mschuster91 12y ago

Funny enough, on Win x64 I experience it exactly the other way round. I guess this may be related to the fact that I don't have much RAM and Windows might be more efficient in swapping out unneeded tabs as each tab is its own process in Chrome, while Firefox mixes everything together in RAM.

frik 12y ago

Browsers that use several child processes (like IE, Chrome, Safari/WebKit2) are faster, have less latency, crashes involve only one tab and the child processes run with limited OS priviledges ("sandbox") than browsers with only one process (Firefox, Safari/WebKit1). Mozilla is working on a multi-process Firefox, one can activate it with a hidden flag (it is still not production ready, and it will break several old plugins). With multi-process browsers one can have hundreds of tabs open for weeks (if you have enough RAM like 8+ GB).

azakai 12y ago
> Browsers that use several child processes (like IE, Chrome, Safari/WebKit2) are faster, have less latency, crashes involve only one tab and the child processes run with limited OS priviledges ("sandbox") than browsers with only one process (Firefox, Safari/WebKit1). It's more complicated than that. For one thing, "have less latency" is often the opposite: a keypress in a multiprocess browser has to travel from the user-facing process to the child process, then the effects have to travel back. In a single-process browser, there is no need to cross that boundary back and forth. You can see this in action in games for example, where you can sometimes see more input lag in multiprocess browsers. Regarding speed, depends how you define it. Definitely multiprocess gives you responsiveness - one slow tab doesn't slow down the others. But throughput, not necessarily. Overall though, multiprocess is a good thing. I'm just saying it isn't a win across the board, like everything it has downsides.

Nostaris 12y ago

I swapped from Firefox to Chrome, in chromes early days.. but switched again because Firefox has lazy loaded tabs = no lag at startup yay.