I broke my Chrome instance and decided to give Firefox a try, and I must say it has A LOT of usability problems compared to Google's. I'd say Mozilla has a lot to work on to avoid losing users, if they aren't already.
Edit: It appears only browser instances launched with Selenium are affected. Instances launched the usual way default to Google as expected.
Are you clicking "Change Search Settings" in the search drop-down, and changing the "Default Search Engine" in the preferences (about:preferences#search) ?
1 - crashes, approximately bimonthly. Chrome just doesn't crash for me any more.
2 - very high cpu usage if ff runs long enough. Eventually it will creep up towards consuming 50%+ of a cpu
3 - similar problems with memory usage. Chrome is a pig, but if you close windows, the system gets memory back. FF just doesn't seem to return memory to the system w/o a full restart.
4 - intermittent freezes when loading new tabs. The entire app becomes unresponsive, long enough to notice / feel jerky.
fwiw, I leave chrome up for weeks on end and don't have these issues. osx 10.9
If the PC is running for days Firefox crashes automatically after some days.
Firefox crashes (whole browser) more often than other browsers. It's annoying that the multi process implementation that so many years to implement and will still break plugin compatibility.
2. Painful for me as well until I I blocked js in google search and search results. (I often have quite a number of tab trees open and the roots are often google search results and they eat CPU if not restrained. I don't know if this is intentional on googles part but it leadt it shows poor attention to QA.)
Just recently learned about about:performance and it is really nice.
https://support.mozilla.org/fr/questions/965360
Unfortunately I usually only remember to close the results tabs when my fan spins-up.
That thought struck me as well. Lets ask :-)
Googlers at HN: is this a lack of QA, a deliberate stab at Firefox or something else?
It's also a lot easier to toggle javascript for individual sites in Chrome without extensions.
At each of these interactions, I would be confronted with the worst possible next-actionable-step: a large, seemingly unbounded number of options. Picking any of them then requires an additional interaction to confirm, possibly whilst (realistically speaking) disregarding scary-looking security warnings about what the extension will be able to do with my first-born child.
Of course, IRL, users respond as you'd expect when given such immediate negative feedback. They will make it through at most one forced-decision interaction. By the time they hit #2, the user's goal will become "install Chrome", not "figure out which extension to install next".
It's really important to recognize here that the extension search/installation/configuration user flow is more-or-less indistinguishable from actively punishing the user for using firefox. Oh, so you want to use firefox, and actually do something? Kindly direct this barrage of STOP NO DONT feedback to your decision-making apparatus until it comes around to it's senses and installs something, anything else.
That said, I still prefer Firefox to anything produced by MS, sorry, I mean Google... :)
I ended up switching back to allowing all cookies because my whitelist kept getting deleted (probably a bug) but when it works, it's wonderful.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-monste...