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Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried Chrome?

Firefox 57+ is absolutely not the fastest way to browse the web. I'm sorry, I tried.

Yes. It's my second browser (and was my main browser until I switched to FF Nightly in the summer). And no, it isn't faster - at least not for me. And it hogs memory as if there's no other software running on my PC. I'm really happy that I can use FF again instead.

  it hogs my memory if there's no other software running

What exactly is wrong with that? Do you understand how RAM works on a computer?

Maybe your system is different, but for me, FF 57+ uses much more CPU than Chrome, and unlike RAM, that's a statistic that actually affects something in a meaningful way (increased power consumption).

If you're worried about Chrome using RAM when nothing else is, you might be fetishizing the concept of free RAM.

I wrote as if, not if - i.e. I run other programs that could use the RAM if Chrome wouldn't take it.

I think ultimately it's very dependant on which sites you frequent. Like with many things, it's absolutely a case where the only good answer is YMMV.

As far as I can tell, any website that uses a less than negligible amount of JS runs better on Chrome, and that's about 80% of the sites I visit.

FF nightly and now stable have been my default browser for almost a year, and I have to agree with you. FF in all variants (as of today) regularly consumes more RAM than Chrome for my day-to-day usage. FF crashes on me several times per week. Netflix, YouTube, and it seems most React sites consistently seem to just chug in FF, but do fine in Chrome. I'm not sure what's happening here, but the hype about FF's new performance gains has not been fulfilled in my experience.

I've stuck with FF because I'm a web developer-- sadly, the money led me there from other more interesting lines of dev work-- and I don't want to see a single browser dominate the web the way IE used to.

As far as Nightly goes, I'd always imagine a debug/testing build would use more RAM by a fair margin.

elsewise, I'd say, try creating a new FF profile, unfortunately afaik older profiles can still jank up the browser a bit

Chrome keeps asking me to log in to Google.

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