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So much this. It just seems like everyone repeats the "Chrome is better and Firefox is slow" mantra without spending a couple of days trying Firefox.

It's a browser owned by an advertising company. An advertising company that knows a lot about you, and constantly strives to learn more by whatever nefarious means they can think of. I can't see how anyone is okay with that.

Because it's faster.*

The day I can open Firefox and it feels as snappy as Chrome I'll switch back to Firefox.

* Opinion of one blue-collar worker.

I don't feel like the bottleneck nowadays is the browser. It's several mb of advertising flotsam that Google is actively endorsing.

No it is not. Whenever I use Chromium to see if some page renders well, I am surprised how slower it is. That said, it probably depends on the type of pages you are visiting, but startup time in FF is much lower in my experience.

+1. Moreover, I find Google/Chrome behaving like MS of late 90s when they used to force IE down Windows users. For instance, to use Chromecast to stream youtube videos from my laptop, I am required to necessarily use a buggy, bloated Chrome that takes ages to boot up. There's no plugin made available for Firefox which is exasperating.

Same here unfortunately i was not able find an alternative to chromecast that can work with Firefox.

Its these little things and in general Video support that I keep my Chrome installed. Most of the times i end up using Chrome at home more than Firefox.

> This "Chrome is great, screw everything else" attitude is exactly how we ended up with IE and stagnation in standards/development in the late 90s/early 2000s.

A similar thing can be said about Apple versus other hardware companies. It saddens me that especially people on dev forums don't want to see this.

I know Firefox has made immense progress in a lot of hard components. But the UI lag is ... ridiculous. And I mean it lovingly, I have nothing against "slow", I still love my HP48 calc which is sluggish in a way, but it's not jitter-lag.

I love Firefox extensions, I love the bookmark editor, I love the non-big-corp centric coupling. But I can only use it for long periods of time if chrome has a bug (I use canary). Or when they send a memory debugging build which are as sluggish as Firefox.

Every time I run Firefox I'm sad thinking about Firefox 2 with good old basic windows gui.

Also, since Chrome 56, maybe it's just an accounting trick, but memory usage dropped tremendously...

You might want to "refresh" your Firefox, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13227658

Let's see if that improves things.

ps: refresh done, still lagging on tab open/close. That said, I use Nightly, and I'm not sure it's not instrumented and thus slower..

I do not think that Nightly should be any slower than say Dev Edition (Aurora) or the stable release. What's your default page when opening a new tab? Maybe it's because your start page needs long to load?! Mine is "about:home" (set with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-overr...)

If you have LastPass, make sure you updated to plugin 4.x. Earlier versions didn't play nicely with the new multithreading, causing big lags.

Can you cite some of those pages? I have been using Firefox forever and haven't had any rendering issues in the past years. I imagine it must be some fancy niche node+webgl websites...

Chrome tends to perform better than Firefox handsdown on my 2015 mbPro.

I went back and tried both the developer edition and the stable release after seeing this post because I want to move away from google as much as possible. But the fact of the matter is that in the hour I was attempting to use firefox I saw the OsX spinning wheel about 20 times. I have never once seen it while using chrome. This killed it for me immediately.

(Notes. I had GPU acceleration turned on, and nearly 6 gigs of free memory.)

What about the fact that Firefox isn't considered as secure as chrome - http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/pwn2own-2016-firefox-missing-i... (I say that as someone who mains chrome but jumps on to FF now and then).

My personal biggest problem with FF is that it uses too much screen real estate compared to Chrome. For example, the tabs are really fat, and the address bar is much thicker, leaving less space for actual content.

Perhaps FF should include a "look-like-chromium" option to win over users (since chromium is open-source, I guess they will not run into copyright issues there).

The difference is 5px [1] on my system (osx, 1080p), it also does look a lot like Chrome.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/h4acDaK.png

On Linux the difference is 10px (FF versus Chromium), [1].

[1] http://imgur.com/a/TX7Qm

You could try the developer edition, the default theme is more compact, even smaller than chrome on osx. (you can choose a dark and light theme in the developer tools)

http://i.imgur.com/jsvfSvU.png

There is an addon that does just that[0]. That being said, it unfortunately breaks from time to time, and it's not e10 compatible.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fxchrome/

Personally - and this isn't for everyone - I use vimperator, which allows me to just hide the url bar and do everything from the keyboard. I end up feeling the opposite; that the viewport is small whenever I have to test in Chrome.

This... :set gui=none

I also switched from Chrome to Firefox about a year ago and the fat tabs are the only thing that I don't like. The removal of `browser.tabs.tabMinWidth` is very annoying (now you need to create a new CSS file in your profile directory, but there is hardly any documentation for that). Also, 15px of the total tab width are taken by ellipses when the tab title is truncated.

There are add-ons which claim to fix that, but they always change other stuff as well. I just want to get rid of the ellipses and make the tabs take up at most 50-60px. The current 100px-wide tabs have roughly 8px of horizontal padding, 16px favicon, another 8px of whitespace, 40px title, 15px ellipses, and then even more whitespace on the right.

Ellipsis will take up less space from Firefox 53 onwards: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2016/12/20/these-weeks-in-f...

As for the CSS-file, you have to create a folder called "chrome" in your profile folder and then in that folder create a file "userChrome.css".

In that file, you have to have the following line at the top of everything else: "@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xu...");"

From that point onwards, I'd just search on userstyles.org. In the advanced search, select "App" from the first dropdown, then it'll show you pretty much only Firefox-styles.

If you found something that suites your taste, you can click the "Show CSS"-link and copy-paste that into userChrome.css. Just make sure that you don't have the @namespace-line twice.

This for example sets the minimal tab-width rather low: https://userstyles.org/styles/53019/firefox-5-minimal-browse...

You can also find userstyles that for example hide the close-button until you hover over the tab or merge the close-button with the favicon.

That's good news, I've missed that.

Does userChrome.css work with e10s? I remember that there were some issues with that in the past.

you can use this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/thintabs/ or even better tab bar on the left with this https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center.

Personally, I can't do without Tree Style Tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

I prefer FireGestures. I can right click and scroll anywhere on a page to switch tabs. I then organize these tabs via Tab Groups (Ctrl+Shift+E, I believe removed in FF42 or FF44 but has an add-on to restore its functionality).

The gesture, I believe, is under 'Advanced Gestures' and is called `[Popup] List All Tabs`. Honestly I wish this was a standalone add-on because it is bloody amazing and I don't really use anything else from FireGestures.

It gives me a context menu with all of my tabs. No need to move my mouse to some "tab area". Although it appears this functionality is broken in modern versions of FF, as it only lists the active tab instead of all tabs. :(

I mean, there's plenty of add-ons to make Firefox's UI slimmer. Including a setting won't do much else than that.

The only thing that makes Firefox take up more than Chrome for me is the Web Developer toolbar. Aside from that, I use the bookmark bar on both, and they are exactly the same height.

* Disclaimer: I use Cinnamon Desktop on Ubuntu with the Numix theme. Other themes/Window Managers might be different.

I regularly find myself with 200-300 tabs open, it was a very sad day when Mozilla axed the Tab Group feature, but luckily addons stepped up and even improved it a bit.

As someone who's never used Chrome in his life, and who's not a web developer, I can say I don't notice any of this in my day-to-day browsing.

I'm seriously baffled by a big red UK based telecommunications company, which prompts me to use their e-billing features, yet can't make their local website work with Firefox for years now.

I used Firefox for a long time as I wanted to use the same browser across all my devices [for synching reasons]. The Android version of Firefox is definitely the least 'crippled' browser I've used on mobile, with full support for plugins [not that I'm one of those who load up their browser with dozens of plugins, but I like to add a few things like uBlock, NoScript, etc].

Unfortunately [and call it subjective, if you like] Firefox on Android is slow and gets noticeably slower as you use it. It needs regular 'fettling' by manually wiping its caches –more so than any other Android browser, in my experience.

After getting fed up with Firefox, I gave Opera a try and, for a while, that was my default browser across all devices. It has a brilliant text reflow on Android, which is a real 'killer feature' and, of course, the desktop version supports those 3 or 4 'must-have' plugins.

Unfortunately, Opera seem to be on a kamikaze mission to drive away their few remaining users –and contrive to make each release worse than the one before. The last straw for me was when they started pushing those trashy clickbait type junk articles on the homepage as a "News Feed" and adding spamvertising bookmarks to your 'speed dial' page. Opera on mobile also seemed to suffer the FF style slow-downs, after prolonged use.

So, after a brief trek through a couple more browsers [Vivaldi on desktop, Ghostery on Android], I arrived back [reluctantly, I thought at the time] at Chrome [or Chromium for the desktop version]. And you know what?... it runs great on Android. It doesn't slow down after a couple of weeks of use and have to be given a 'cache enema'. It's the only browser I've used on Android that can be relied on to communicate semi-reliably with LastPass's atrocious mobile version...

[OK. I'll admit. That's LastPass's fault for making their Android app so bad that it only [just about] works with Chrome]

...and, since I've got my Android devices rooted and have AdAway patching my hosts file, I actually find out that, in daily use, the lack of plugins for Chrome on Android isn't such a big deal after all.

I'd like to use Firefox for all the reasons you mentioned but, I've evaluated them all and switched between them all quite recently and have come to the conclusion that, while all browsers are flawed and all have their particular strengths and weaknesses across platforms and in terms of 'philosophy', Chrome/Chromium is currently the best of a bad bunch, for my use case.

I'll be happy to take Firefox for a spin again, if they make any measurable improvements to the browser [I've read that they're working on re-writing it in Rust, which may make it a leaner machine] but frankly, the whole 'Firefox experience' recently has been a complete turn off. Are they still carrying on that lunacy of what seems like a new release every couple of days which appears to do nothing other than annoy me with yet another hefty download?

Not disagreeing with anything you said, I want to make that clear first.

Disclaimer: what follows only applies to Samsung Androids from 6.0 (Marshmallow) and above. I use Chrome on my Win10 main machine.

What works best for me on Android is Samsung's Internet browser. It supports content blocking (definitely saves my sanity when I browse on my S7 Edge) -- and the lack of bookmarks synced to Google wasn't something that proved to be a problem. In the very rare cases I miss it, I just open my Android Chrome, copy the URL from the bookmarks UI and open it in Samsung's Internet browser.

Plus it's very fast and has a pretty decent Reading Mode support (which also has a switch between a day and night mode and a config for font size; it works really well and helps a lot when I want to read the web while on the bed).

I was never a brand loyalist and I realize the problem with the standards and I dislike every dev team that doesn't take it seriously, please note that. But I still love Samsung and Apple for being one of the few that keep Google's browser monopoly at bay. Microsoft too, although their Edge browser is yet to get more audience.

There are broken because like IE Firefox don't support all standard. Chrome has been every time pushing news technology, ban or isolate adobe flash for the best for the users.

Firefox take decision for me and I don't like it.

> Firefox don't support all standard

Could you give some examples? Let me make it easy for you. Check out [1] and tell me which API you found difficult to manage without.

> ban or isolate adobe flash

Firefox doesn't come bundled with Flash. Chrome does. Does that count as a decision taken on your behalf?

[1] - http://caniuse.com/#compare=firefox+53,chrome+58