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Comment by 2bitencryption | Hacker News Reader

After reading that article in 2014, I switched to Firefox. I used it from that point until just a few weeks ago when a program bypassed my defaults and launched Chrome. And I immediately remembered why I preferred Chrome and how much more responsive it feels, and how it handles plugins and per-tab processes and uses a quarter the memory somehow.

So now I'm back on Chrome. Felt good to be on FF for awhile, felt like I was preserving freedom or whatever. But now that I'm on Chrome, I won't switch back until Firefox actually becomes a better browser.

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I've heard this same thing from many people, and the problem almost always turns out to be accumulated cruft in the Firefox profile. Switching to a "fresh" browser usually makes it feel much more responsive because you don't have the cruft. If that's the case for you, following the steps at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a... may help.

It's not. FF is slower then Chrome. I formatted my Macbook recently so I know it was clean. FF is significantly slower than Chrome, especially on JS heavy sites like Amazon.

It's also worse on power. FF tends to drain my battery much faster than Chrome. That's with <20 tabs open, mostly light weight sites.

I'm still using FF as my main browser but will probably switch to Chrome again.

> how it handles plugins and per-tab processes and uses a quarter the memory somehow.

Swings and roundabouts. I find chrome uses much more memory, and the plugins I care about (tab group view, NoScript) don't have effective parallels in chrome last I looked. I also have a pet hate for any application which decides that it needs its own look-and-feel and you should discard your own window decorations.

Also, the mozilla entity is much more about preserving freedom, and I think that's worth the minor inconveniences you get from webdevs who think that chrome is the only browser in existence.

uMatrix is on Firefox and Chrome. I switched to it from NoScript last year and I have to say I like it better.

> and uses a quarter the memory somehow.

I thought Chrome was famous for being a resource hog. It consumes more RAM on my Windows PCs, though I confess I use more tabs than are viable in Chrome....

Chrome is a resource hog for me, on macOS and Windows. But Firefox is only slightly better in my experience. I last tried it about 3 months ago.

You can clear out memory use in Firefox by restarting it. It doesn't create a firestorm of reloads that cripple your PC because it only reloads tabs when you click on them.

> I thought Chrome was famous for being a resource hog.

That's only in comparison to Safari and Edge. If you open enough tabs to cause memory issues on Chrome, Firefox would have frozen and slowed down to a crawl before filling the memory, anyhow, and electrolysis still isn't in a state where it could change that: there's still one process for the renderer so if enough intensive webpages are run your web browsing experience will still slow down.

That's not what I find. How are you measuring memory use?

I use FF for almost everything but when it comes to Google stuff (Gmail, Docs, Sheets, etc.) I use Chromium. Firefox crashes on me too much with those apps and though I generally don't lose work it's a pain to have to relaunch and get back to where I was.

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