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"There's very often a speed / memory usage tradeoff."

And yet Firefox seems to use about 4 or 5 times more memory than Chrome on my system whilst being noticably slower as well...

If Chrome had all the addons that Firefox had, Firefox would be a dead browser.

I still use Firefox as my primary browser. For now.

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I have the inverse of your situation that chrome always use much more memory than firefox.

That's because 1) Chrome is better-designed 2) Chrome extensions are JS and not native code, meaning they're less likely to leak due to programmer error, and there are fewer of them, to boot

> 2) Chrome extensions are JS and not native code, meaning they're less likely to leak due to programmer error, and there are fewer of them, to boot

Are there really that many Firefox extensions that use native code?

Side note: Firefox extensions aren't native code, they're written in JS.

EDIT: I do however agree that chrome is more well designed. Firefox has been through a lot of iterations through the years.

While most Firefox extensions are in JS, I believe you can bind to native c++ as well.

Chrome also allows you to access native code in extensions using NPAPI plugins: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/npapi.html

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