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Comment by bureaucrat | Hacker News Reader

Switched to Firefox a month ago. It was worse.

Since then I became more thankful of Chrome(Chromium to be exact).

In what aspects did you find the newer Firefox worse than it was years ago? Aside the dumbing down of the preferences menu, which I deeply dislike but is common to Chrome as well, I found not a single thing that would make me switch to Chrome today. Chrome was indeed a lot faster than FF when it came out, there was no comparison at all, but things changed a lot. Just to be clear, I'm not at all a Mozilla fanboy (in fact using Waterfox in place of Firefox where I can) but should I have to choose between Firefox and Chrome I'd have no hesitation. Todays Chrome domination is due exclusively to advertising: inviting users to use your product to surf the web on your start page helps a lot if you're the #1 search engine in the world.

edit: privacy considerations aside of course.

I've never seen Firefox consume more memory than Chrome. And Chrome chokes way too quickly on 100+ tabs where Firefox will work fine.

How can it "choke way too quickly with a 100+ tabs"??? Your brain will choke way before the browser with that much open.

Not sure what my brain has to do with it. I can handle hundreds of tabs just fine. Put simply: Chrome can't handle my workflow. If it can't handle my workflow, it isn't viable for me as a daily use browser. And in my experience, every time I've tried it (and I've tried it every year for good measure), I've become frustrated by how badly the performance degrades so quickly.

Go on HN. Open 5 submissions you are interested in. Also don't forget to click on the comments link. Bang you now have 10 tabs and this is just the start of your browsing session. As you read those articles you will open more tabs.

As most websites are 10s of megabytes to store, unsurprisingly keeping 100s of tabs alive consumes gigabytes of memory. It’s just basic math. The only way this can work is if the browser just closes most tabs and uses them as transient bookmarks internally.

Chrome is also more aggressive about isolating and forking processes for each and every tab. So yeah, I understand to some degree where the RAM usage is coming from. But if the browser isn't usable for me, it just doesn't matter why.

Not only that, but each extension also gets at least one process to itself, sometimes more.

Chrome has become much better with tabs in the past year. I should know; I have more than two thousand open. I use The Great Discarder (discussed elsewhere) and FooTab (which helps a lot when starting a session with said thousands of tabs), among others. I also recently tested each active extension to see how much it affects performance when opening a new tab, and removed OneTab as a result.

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