Firefox: 46 features you might not know about

xul which is used by firefox to render the ui, while being really easy to use and modify, is incredibly slow, firefoxs renderer is also a little slower, but I think most of it is on the responsiveness in the ui, most people attribute this to the different javascript engines but actually they are very similiar in speed.

For me, Chrome starts and renders my default page faster than Firefox. Noticeably faster.

I'm not sure if, when following a link that one is faster than the other, since server response time is a factor. However, I've had far fewer cases of of frozen pages with Chrome, and have never had all my tabs and browser instances of Chrome get locked up because of one page page. Firefox, on the other hand, is monolithic in that way.

There is one feature of Firefox that is essential for me: invoking firefox from the command line (or a shortcut) starts a new instance.

Chrome seems to (usually) want to find an existing instance and open a new tab. I seriously do not want to have a single browser instance with all my tabs; I prefer to have multiple instances with related tabs.

It's especially annoying when kicking off a link in chrome opens a tab in an instance in some other virtual desktop. :(

OK, Chrome rant over.

Chrome has gotten better about supporting bookmarklets and greasemonkey, key aspects of my Firefox use, and overall memory use is much better for me with Chrome.

First, Firefox takes a long time to start up, probably between 5 and 10 seconds. Tabs open and close quickly, but there's a constantly noticable 1/2-1 second delay when opening a new window. ⌘-N ... short pause ... window opens. With both Chrome and Safari it's instantaneous.

But perhaps most importantly, Chrome runs everything in separate processes and when you close a tab, that memory is freed up. This is a huge deal compared to both Firefox and Safari. It means you can just leave Chrome open forever, whereas Firefox and Safari will just gradually eat up more and more RAM. If RAM usage from other processes pushes Firefox's memory to disk, then it's even worse, since you then need to wait forever to do anything with the browser while it pulls it from disk. Safari is similar, but not as bad since it's more responsive overall. While with Chrome all you'd need to do is close a couple tabs, with Firefox you have restart the whole app.

And I experience all of this on a Firefox accounts with zero extensions.

There really is no contest. If you aren't seeing a difference I can only presume it's because of your usage patterns or possibly the platform, although I'm skeptical of the latter since people widely report Firefox hogging memory on every platform.