Firefox 78
mozilla.org
mozilla.org
Although, in linux Firefox FTW.
Looking at [0], it seems Firefox sometimes outperforms Chrome/Chromium, and sometimes loses, depending on what's being tested.
Security is also a practical concern, not ideological.
It doesn't even stop you from developing with FF. DevTools were completely usable for years and unless you need very specific functionality, FF is just fine.
Disclaimer: I couldn't actually provide helpful advice on how to improve it, I'm not very imaginative :/
To me Chrome is the browser version of Windows. I can get by and it sort of does what I need. It’s just that somehow it feels a little half-baked, while being too much at the same time. It can as you say: be confusing but you are also left with the: why is this a feature and why is this in my browser.
Firefox has a few feature which only exists so I have something to turn off, but Chrome is starting to look like Emacs, all it needs is a good browser.
Quick example: event listeners in Firefox are visibly attached to their DOM element; in Chrome, I just can't find them. There's this Event Listeners list in a sidebar somewhere, but getting the function that attached it is a PITA.
Edit: Just tried a 60FP4k video on youtube and it was smooth as butter so that's interesting.
The only thing I noticed is that sometimes Chrome's errors in the console are slightly better. I prefer Firefox's HTML/CSS panels, and the CSS Grid/Flex support is generally better. As anything, this comment is a point-of-time comment, they are both iterating rapidly, and when one adds something people like, the other usually pushes it in also.
I think Chrome probably benefits from better performance in its Devtools, but I do agree that Firefox does just fine. I find them nearly identical.
My only criticism of Firefox Devtools is they seem to move around buttons and icons pretty frequently. It's frustrating to search for "is .... possible in Firefox devtools?" and see screenshots of how things looked only a couple months ago. Then I play i-spy for the icon that does this.
I do wish a remote debugging standard were defined. Firefox says it supports remote debugging but I have no exposure to this. I just want to hook up node to it like in Chrome.
This is an offshoot, separate topic: I wish there were a Firefox extension for using the compatibility/emulator mode in Devtools to avoid fingerprinting. I want the website to always think I am 1920x1080 (a common res) and have it be easy to pan around in if the viewport does not match the dimensions of Firefox's window/tab.
Google is still the majority of their revenue is it not? The reason they're making that money is off the backs of other consumers who are NOT benefiting from the privacy features that you guys want to see everywhere.
Willing to be totally wrong here and would love to see more FF advocates speak out here but FF wouldn't be financially viable without Google and many FF advocates say Google is the problem...
It's not really an unknown. Donations to Mozilla Foundation do not and cannot fund Firefox development.
> if Google's funding were to become insufficient, then the Foundation would step in to fund it if they have the funds
There are two assumptions here that are off. One is that the Foundation could come up with the kind of money that the Corporation spends on Firefox. The other is that the Corporation is somehow in a tight situation financially. Reality is opposite to both.
First, the Corporation is not strapped for cash. It brings in a lot of money. Like, in-the-neighborhood-of-half-a-billion-dollars-a-year a lot. It spent something like 29MM acquiring Pocket (which is still as closed source now as it was 3 years ago), and it manages to spend 50MM on its marketing campaigns that most people aren't even aware exist. Under the current arrangement the Corporation funds the Foundation, paying a percentage of its revenues to allow the Corporation to trade on Mozilla's name. (If that sounds like a weird way to put it, consider revisiting your other assumptions about Mozilla and Firefox.)
I don't think that's necessarily true. Their mission isn't to break search engines, just to prevent privacy violations.
If Google Search is unsustainable with any less than Google's current level of tracking/etc, then I suppose a successful Firefox means an unsuccessful Google.
But Google didn't start out doing this much tracking, and there are other search engines out there that still don't. A paid default search engine that shows a few search-related ads on its results pages doesn't seem opposed to Firefox's mission?
At this point I'm just blocked on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042. I've seriously tried switching to Firefox a few times, and I really want to switch, but it's just not acceptable to have my CPU regularly pinned at 200%.
Neither you or I like macOS. However, people who do like it are welcome to use it. Being a jerk does nothing to get $YOUR_FAV_OS to gain population.
But I switched back to Firefox about 3-4 years ago because of the growing Chromium monoculture (which is even greater now that Edge is using Chromium) and because the performance difference isn't really there anymore.
Mozilla has done some great work keeping up with the giants. Lockwise is great. The "Send Tab to Device" feature is great. And they're working on offline voice recognition using DeepSpeech in future releases (Chrome sends all audio to Google for recognition).
Exact same thing for FF on Android.
Is there a specific site?
On Android, you might try the Firefox Beta. It is the new "Fenix" browser that is a big perf improvement over the older Firefox Android ("Fennec") browser. All Fennec users will eventually be migrated to the new Firefox Fenix browser this year, but you can try Fenix in Beta now. Installed along Fennec as a separate app, it won't overwrite your Fennec user data.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi...
Also using Wayland (on Linux), gfx.webrender.all and a few other options can help quite a lot. For more details, I suggest you check out these two pages:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox/Tweaks
I applied most of the recommended (and some of the not recommended) tweaks documented there, and I'm very happy with the results.
I don't find that to be true. At least not anymore. I use both Chrome and Fx bout 50/50 for developing, and they each have something the other misses.
For instance, "preserve log" in Chrome's network tab throws away all the actual response data when moving to a new page. In Firefox it's there. So when debugging through our micro-frontend flow I prefer Fx.
I used to miss chrome but I barely think about it nowadays.
And as usual, kudos to all mozillians.
Without demand, supply dries up. Without supply, the knowledge base dries up. When the shit hits the fan you have to start over from first principles. And if the 'shit' is someone flexing their muscles, then the world looks like extortion while people scramble to play catch-up.
There are other forms of "charity" besides giving money to non-profits. You can buy from the store where the owner is pleasant instead of the one that is cheap. You can eat at your 5th most favorite restaurant so that you continue to have more than 4 choices. Use privacy software when your life is pretty boring. You can contrive 'hand-me-downs' for your kid's friend.
All of these keep society working, and none of them have a clear reward for you, so it's down to a matter of ethics.
If you haven't tried a PB&J on multigrain toast, it can be messy but a different flavor profile.
ETA: Also there's multi-grain and there's multi-grain. Some brands get their 'N-grain' by making wheat and X bread and then sprinkling N-2 grains on the crust, not unlike a poppy-seed bagel. I think my brain was more comfortable with the latter. Perhaps I expect the crust to get stuck in my teeth anyway, but chunky bits in the middle remind me of badly-made bread.
The company behind Chrome also supports Firefox. And will continue to, for fear of their browser dominance being used against them within an antitrust action.
The Wayland issues have improved after trying it out just now, but I still often get artifacts when resizing and switching between fullscreen and split screen.
I also have an instance of Brave open. I use this for "apps" like my email and Spotify which are always open. It seems to perform slightly better for this and it supports media keys, so that works well.
The thing that made this easy was using a password manager which synchronizes across all my browsers.
As for dev tools, I find that they both have strenghts and weaknesses and so, I switch back and forth.
Mozilla needs to shift focus, atleast briefly if not long term, to work on squashing such common issues instead of racing to add new features.
basically, they should look at the various web ui toolkits like bootstrap and integrate all the controls and behaviors common across all of them. it would be such a major win for developers and users.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57342
(this has become less relevant in recent years as "everyone" uses github to present source to the world, and websites in general vanish in favour of social media)
I try to avoid opening multiple FF windows because I always close the wrong one last.
Interestingly there was a recently discovered Mutter bug[1] where the Culling code to prevent rendering of windows that were not visible was not working. This fix will need to be deployed to see the biggest benefit of Partial Present.
[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1620076
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Br...
https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-fedor...
I've also had to disable media.ffvpx.enabled in previous versions to enable VA-API for more than just VP9 (I haven't yet been able to verify if it's needed for this one).
Now if they could just get around to supporting intermediate CA certificates and all of the Windows certificate stores, not just a couple of randomly chosen ones, that would be swell.
Also, IPv6 support in PAC files would be nice.
If any Mozilla employees come to YC News: Unimportant-seeming stuff like this is why Chrome crushed Firefox in the Enterprise.
This isn't why. At work I deal with two different vendors who refuse to troubleshoot any issues with their products on anything but Chrome. To this day, the issue has never been a browser compatibility issue, but we have to actually temporarily give the user a Chromium-based browser just to get a modicum of decent support these days.
Both vendors, of course, tell us we should just use Chrome because it's the only browser they support. (Even though other browsers work fine.) And unfortunately, most IT staffers end up getting directed by superiors to follow said instructions.
But it was easier to debug on Mozilla so it got supported first because you could eliminate 90% of the bugs before ever having to touch IE.
This is the case now but a decade ago, in the period the original poster was talking about, it was because of things like what they mentioned: Mozilla needed some attention to detail on those tickets, a robust MSI install package, and a polished policy deployment system. Lots of large shops deployed it but it wasn't loved because there was always some wart to work around.
Who watches the watchers? How do you know what's running on the servers?
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po...
I can't completely rely on it to ingest an entire long-form article, which forces me to switch back to web-view to make sure Pocket caught the entire piece. It's frustrating.
Is there something I can do to make Pocket prevent duplicates from being added on the basis of the article's URL alone?
It will be here when it is released:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2020-2...
This issue is frankly far more important than the style changes they made. It's a muscle-memory issue that drastically affects daily usage. I was so desperate to restore the sane behavior of not selecting everything on a single click that I was recompiling firefox prior to discovering this workaround.
Just go to the tab bar, right-click on an empty space or the "+" -> "Customize..." and remove them. I did so when Firefox upgraded to Quantum and the spacers never returned by themselves.
No other input field becomes fat when you click on it. It is enough to just highlight the edges like the old version (And like every other input field) when you want to indicate that the input field is currently active.
Since I use Firefox 99% of the time, I just opened Chrome and Edge to check out their address bars. All three are extremely similar. In Chrome and Edge the borders are more rounded, while Firefox opts for a more square look. All three feature a "popup" effect that makes the bar slightly bigger when interacting with it: in Firefox this effect activates when clicking the bar, while the other two enlarge when inputting data.
As for obscuring other parts of the UI … such as? (That it wasn't since the dawn of time; I mean, it drops down and obscures part of the browser window, sure? But it's done that since the idea of having it autocomplete was first added.)
The only recent change seems to be that it swells up by a few pixels when you focus it. (I'm not a fan, but it honestly doesn't seem to matter much. It has started to not show the carat, and that is definitely annoying, and I'd agree more with a native widget argument there, I just don't think one exists.)
Bookmarks toolbar, for one. Open a new blank tab, the URLbar has focus by default and is now partially obscuring the bookmarks right at the moment you're most likely to use them.
I'll admit, I did not think of the bookmarks bar. (I don't use it, myself.) Thanks, too, for responding.
1. It is inconsistent with the behaviour of every other control, including other combobox/search/dropdown UI elements. The web search element on the new page/tab for both Firefox and Chrome only expand downward to show the results. (The one on Chrome adjusts the border radius slightly, but that is more to do with the way the border radius is calculated.)
2. I personally find it distracting, especially as it is moving in two directions at once. -- I don't like animated elements in the Windows start menu and YouTube's latest post section even more for the same reason (I notice the movement in the corner of my eye, then get distracted as it is drawing attention away from what I am doing).
3. It can happen when not user initiated, e.g. when switching to an already open tab where the focus then goes to the address bar. This further adds to the distracting "look at me!" nature of the new design, where you have to explicitly click away to get rid of. Couple that with reddit's behaviour of clicking outside a post navigating to the channels page and you have some fun times!
4. The dropdown of frequently visited pages can no longer be opened by the mouse only. You need to click on the address bar and then press the down arrow key.
This difference is why Firefox receives mores complaints.
When opening a new tab in Firefox, the address bar is automatically focused. This actually makes the address bar larger than the bounds of the encapsulating toolbar. This combined with the drop shadows helps to partially obscure adjacent toolbar(s), like the bookmarks toolbar.
PS: I'm not disabling it on principle for now just to see like some people say if get used to it. So far it still annoys me after weeks of usage. It is just bad design and bad decision and FF team can't accept own mistakes, like small children.
It's subjective. I like it.
It feels like some "genius" manager who brute forced his "brilliant" idea on the team.
Is my experience not typical? Does anyone know why I don't get the new bar if not? I'm on 78.
Is there something you need to opt in to?
PS: here is a proof - https://imgur.com/a/AYi99Ht
This is the kind of ungraceful UI degradation which would send me packing if there was anywhere else decent to go.
Though there is one caveat that bothers me a lot. When auto restoring sessions after I've closed Firefox and launch it the next day, it restores the same tabs, but with the old data (for eg., youtube or twitch live channels / searches). Every tab needs to be refreshed manually to get the new data, which Chrome automatically does.
[0] http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=3062694
https://github.com/Pocket/extension-save-to-pocket/issues/75
Firefox still has some rough issues. It doesn't always feel like a native app (e.g. form fields, toolbar, preferences), and its visual touches (e.g. the main toolbar) are sometimes heavy-handed. In other areas, such as the "omnibar" behaviour, it's still catching up to other browsers, but at least it's catching up.
Another thing I dislike is just how much tweaking I had to do to remove quirks. For example, Firefox has some really excessive animations, which fortunately can be turned off ("ui.prefersReducedMotion" in "about:config").
Firefox has some ways to go, but I'm a lot more optimistic about its future than I used to be.
Firefox and Safari are my two main stays now. Both have privacy focus, although one takes privacy significantly more seriously. They are both phenomenal browsers in my opinion.
Why?
It didn't make sense for Google to have done it but it especially didn't make sense for Mozilla to play the "me too" game. It's a waste of money and developer resources and frankly shows poor stewardship on the part of management.
> We fixed bugs in the search results quality composition and improved search result texts based on recommendations by our partners.
It sounds like Firefox has its own search engine? Do they mean the browser history+bookmark search feature? Or the search query suggestions when you have third-party autocomplete turned on? What "partners" (this sounds very markety) is this about?
The linked description, while great, is half a year old and focuses on technical aspects of parts of the toolchain. How far are we currently from being able to enable this in normal builds of Rust or C++?
EDIT: seems like I can enable this in nightly rustc by passing `-C target-feature=+multivalue`.
I've given that random person's blog thousands of hits over the last year...
I don't know of an easier way to do this.
To manage the top sites (which Firefox 78 displays on address bar click or down arrow if enabled in the preferences [1]), you need to: 1) add the top sites on the home page, 2) hover over the page you want to remove, 3) click the "..." button in the top right ("Open Menu"), 4) click "unpin" if you don't want it to be kept there, but stil calculated in the ranking, 5) click "dismiss" if you don't want it displayed.
[1] This is a change in Firefox 78, as when pressing the down arrow key Firefox 77 displayed what Firefox 78 displays when pressing the space bar.
Firebug was really a pioneer in the devtools, but for so long Firefox just allowed it to be the defacto Dev tools that google ended up lapping them. And they we made to play catch up
Once developers started jumping, they convinced slowly got their relatives or non techs friends to switch.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/10/15/removing-old-ve... [2] https://blog.chromium.org/2019/10/chrome-ui-for-deprecating-...
... or are hardware appliances with a management interface, segregated on an internal VLAN, that will never be updated, but which were helpfully "forward thinking" enough to force HTTPS.
> I'd rather see
TLS 1.0 and 1.1 have unfixable security issues and TLS 1.2 was ratified as an internet standard 12 years ago. Mozilla reported over 1.5 years ago that the total number of TLS 1.1 and 1.0 connections seen from users was less than 1.5% of total TLS connections. There have been years of notice leading up to this. What internet forums filled with nerds would "rather see" isn't really relevant. I'm sure there were plenty of people worried about SSL 3.0, too, and the world didn't come to an end.
Is it because I'm running OS X 10.9, and they're planning to migrate me to ESR but the ESR build isn't out yet or something? Because I'm on 10.9, and I know my system is vulnerable, I always try to update to the latest release very quickly.
I think I will indeed need to do a manual download, although I'm kind of curious how long it will take at this point.
I don't see anything about it in the Release Notes,
but Help > About Firefox would normally offer the latest update.
Mine is saying 77.0.1 is up to date.
This caught me by surprise and can be changed in the Settings -> Data collection menu.
I dread the thought of buying a newer one but everyday it's getting closer to a necessity.
I'm curious why it is still not built in instead other nonsense they integrate
They are privacy focused, so I suppose they don't make money through the sale of personal data; also their services are free. Unless there is some other revenue source I'm missing, there seems to be a significant dependency on search engines and similar partners.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google
google-analytics.com is on https://disconnect.me/trackerprotection/blocked and also https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protecti...
I think we have this revisionist history where the signers to the Agile Manifesto invented these processes from whole cloth, when it's more accurate to think of it as 80% curated list of existing practices, >10% discovered, <10% invented.
I ran a Kanban board in 1995, and I wouldn't learn about Deming, Goldratt or Ohno for another ten years. I think a couple people were upset or at least perplexed by my 'yeah ok' reaction to some of their revelations.
The previous one was done on May 5, 2020: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/76.0/releasenotes/
And the one before on April 7, 2020: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/75.0/releasenotes/
More or less, one release per month. Hardly "every week".
In an age where the web is becoming more hostile to users by hiding and controlling the info, and forcing things like amqp, I think plug-ins are really the only override to enable user agency and Firefox plug in management is very immature.
Personally, I can't leave Firefox due to:
1. Sidebery (on Desktop)
2. Night-mode (on Mobile)
It still boggles my mind that everything is made to go horizontal on default Windows/Mac UIs when desktops are widescreen and most content we consume now is tall and thin.
Sidebery is my favorite by far, because it also lets you organize the tabs in "panels", and lets you set keyboard shortcuts for navigating across panels. So you don't end up with a giant list of 50 tabs.
Eg I have 1 panel for email/chat/music, and a separate panel for each task I'm working on. Makes things a lot more manageable, since each panel usually has only 5-10 tabs.
> Why would someone, as a developer and a user, want to use Firefox over Safari (mostly) and Chrome (for work).
You wrote the answer before the question. Safari might have users' best interest at heart, but anything that stops an advertising company's browser from dominating the market is a good thing.
Maybe we need to coin "vendor-purpose browser" as well? All of the big three are, to some extent. And now, one has to think of the motives behind each vendor.
Hint: I'll stay on Firefox. And I even use other browsers sometimes, that just support some HTML (elinks, dillo...) on underpowered systems. Maybe we just need more underpowered systems?
Edit: I've been asked for examples where FF dev tools are lacking, so copying from another comment of mine below:
1) Chrome CPU profiler will display the amount of time taken against calls in line in your source JS files. FF does not do this.
2) Memory snapshots in FF are not sortable, and do not show distance.
3) Performance tab in Chrome allows CPU throttling, FF does not.
4) Performance tab in Chrome also captures much more info, such as node count, heap size, number of listeners, GPU memory.
All the above are very useful if you're building a high performance web app or library.
Like what for example? Please be specific.
1) Chrome CPU profiler will display the amount of time taken against calls in line in your source JS files. FF does not do this.
2) Memory snapshots in FF are not sortable, and do not show distance.
3) Performance tab in Chrome allows CPU throttling, FF does not.
4) Performance tab in Chrome also captures much more info, such as node count, heap size, number of listeners, GPU memory.
All the above are very useful if you're building a high performance web app or library.
But I've actually been running two browsers, one I keep clean for development and one for everything else. If you really want to switch, you could try that.
It's not even that FF's dev tools are bad -- it's good, but sadly Chrome is still better in some marginal yet significant ways.
Most notably Chrome is still better for CSS work when I'm trying out colors, tweaking shadows and animation timings, where Chrome has some nifty widgets to preview changes quickly and easily.
1. The omnibar completion isn't as good. Chrome figures out where I go pretty regularly, and autocompletes extremely well based upon habits. 2. The dev tools aren't as good. I mostly work in the frontend, and simple things like how you write css overwrites with tab completion is just not as good in Firefox. 3. I often run with lots of tabs. Although firefox lets you make tabs smaller, it's default method of "scrolling" tabs isn't as nice as chrome infinite method.
It doesn't help that I pair this yearly experiment with DDG as my search. With that pairing I often run into autocompletion / omnibar issues and find myself just banging !g to get myself out of it.
I really would like to switch, but the gap is too much for my daily tooling. I say this as someone who recently switched to Linux from OSX and really ran into no issues outside of having to spend a week setting thing up how I liked.
That's interesting, because I have found rather the opposite, for how I use it. Chrome doesn't seem to remember anything but my most frequented sites; with Firefox I find it much easier to find that thing I was reading a few weeks back that I did not bookmark by searching a word from the title. Chrome doesn't seem to remember anything but my most frequent and/or very most recently visited sites.
For the deep history I'm a pinboard user and bookmark at least a dozen things daily with tags.
edit: So I just opened my very secondary chrome. I use it for Youtube listening mostly. When I enter "hand co" to find my often listened "hand covers bruise" song, I get 7 (!) google searches, and the 8th and last entry is the Youtube link.
Tree style tabs works better in Firefox than Chrome. Just saying
[1]: https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery [2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
2: strongly disagree; I use Firefox, and on the odd occasion where I’m doing something in Chrome, it drives me insane with things like its CSS editing experience, because it does things in what I find to be a much less native-feeling way, whereas Firefox’s behave in a mostly native way, so that things tend to work the way I expect. There are glaring problems with it (mostly around “completing” a whole new word when I press Space when that makes an otherwise valid value nonsense; I really should file a bug about that if there isn’t one), but I find Chrome much more painful to interact with. And what do you know, a lot of it probably comes down to familiarity and what you’re used to.
3: Chrome is a disaster for large numbers of tabs. On most screen sizes it’s just about hopeless with even thirty tabs, maybe as few as twenty, both for reasons of performance and because of its infinite tab shrinking folly. Firefox, on the other hand, can handle hundreds of tabs in a session with perfect equanimity (though performance will definitely be affected by that point).
On DuckDuckGo, I find it to yield good results most of the time, and it’s rare for me to reach for !g.
In most of these sorts of things, it’s much more about what you’re used to and know how to interact with, than any inherent superiority of one over the other.
If you have comments on !s vs !g, I'll all ears. For example, I have wondered, to what degree does the "extra" hop: (a) help my privacy; (b) affect DDG's revenue stream; (c) affect the results.
i've used firefox ever since galeon bit the dust (or maybe since epiphany switched to webkit). it knows my habits. but it still suggests urls i don't want instead of just offering to switch to an open tab. (frankly, i want open tabs to match enthusiatically. i would rather switch to an open tab than open a new tab to the same site, which is redundant.)
FYI, you can filter it to search only open tabs with %: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...
I switch to Firefox about once a year (seasonal surveillance paranoia?). I mostly run older machines and there's a noticeable performance difference between FF and Chrome-based browsers. As a compromise I run Brave (chrome-based, un-googled, and kind of privacy oriented?) but not really happy about that.
Fwiw I really want Firefox to succeed, I donate to Mozilla every month and I am learning Rust.
I think it's partly sequencing, eg. opening a new window in FF, FF waits until the window is built before showing it (takes nearly a second on my machine), while Chrome will open it instantly and then paint in the UI. The actual time til usable URL bar is the same on both, but on FF the experience is "I gave a command and nothing is happening... oh there it is".
There's just no indication that anything is happening until it's done, and that makes a big difference. It makes it feel slow: even if the total delay is exactly the same, the perceived delay is several orders of magnitude greater.
There's also some difference in the time it takes to load a page, but once they're loaded JS perf is on par.
I expect the difference would be less dramatic on a machine from this decade, but I haven't had the pleasure of finding out :)
My main peeve is that Firefox is so slow to learn. I have to visit a certain site many, many times before it becomes an autocomplete candidate. Firefox will suggest it in the dropdown, but becoming a "primary" autocompletion that gets filled out in the omnibar itself takes a long time. Maybe there's a setting somewhere?
Safari is, as far as I'm concerned, the gold standard here. Its autocompletions are fantastic.
At a certain point Chrome will just disappear your tabs. They'll be loaded in the browser - there's just no way to access them. Scrolling in Firefox (especially with a mousewheel) just feels so natural and makes dealing with large amounts of tabs so much easier almost all of the time (with a potential exception right after Firefox starts scrolling tabs, but they're all visible on Chrome - but that can still be hit or miss).
That rather sounds like you run with a medium amount of tabs. I have one browser session that literally has >900 tabs in it (I started pruning when it hit 1000); if Chrome even let me have that many tabs, the interface would no longer be usable.