The edge it had over IE was that it was a better user experience. It's not compared to Chrome anymore. Even IE is better than FF apart from the weird crash like blank screen glitch when opening a new tab that IE has.
Chrome has an advantage because it's relatively new. It doesn't have to deal with over a decade of add-ons and browser history and cookies.
Much like how a computer gets slow and needs to be reformatted, people who are browser power users need to clean out Firefox every few years.
Try vacuuming your Firefox database [1], syncing everything [2] and/or create a new profile [3] with only the extensions you actually use.
Oh, and be careful of Firebug. That's why most developers laugh at Firefox for being so slow; they use Firebug, which slows Firefox down to a grinding halt. We're working on our own dev tools, which are slowly coming together. They're not a Firebug replacement yet, but they're getting there. [4]
1 http://mozillalinks.org/2009/08/vacuum-firefox-databases-for... 2 http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/sync/ 3 http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing-profiles 4 http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/11/developer-tools-in-firefox-...
I think the major reason this myth has stayed in my mind is doing upgrades on startup, testing FF v Chrome just now, on a computer that FF has never been the primary browser, they're very similar in terms of responsiveness (FF still a little slower if I'm honest, but trivially and I think it's a bit psychological in the way it opens the window compared to Chrome). I'm not seeing major differences on disabling/enabling firebug though.
Right now every time I open FF it seems to upgrade, because I do it so rarely. So in my mind it's now become intolerably slow and I only open it when I really, really need 3 different sessions on a single site. I use Chrome as primary, IE secondary (due to it being more likely to have quirks and historically preferring IE dev toolbar to firebug).
As Chrome upgrades in the background and IE does it through windows update you're not playing on a fair playing field I guess.
EDIT: I should add this isn't exactly a modern computer, no SSD, 2.4ghz quad core, 3Gb RAM and my laptop's even more in need of an upgrade.
On this computer I'm using, Firefox 9 starts faster.
Also, this version on my computer upgrades in the background. I just get a "restart" notice when it finishes, then after I restart it checks for addons updates, in case some of them are invalid, but that's pretty fast too. And these upgrades don't happen so ofter.
You'd have a point here if Firefox hadn't started blithely breaking everyone's add-ons by bumping the version number about 5 times per week. Okay, that's hyperbole -- I know it wasn't that often, but the point is that a "rapid release schedule" comes with real costs.
If you have 500MM users, and the mean user time to adapt to a trivial new release is 5 minutes (a gross underestimate if add-ons have broken), you've just wasted 16 million hours of user time. Just because that cost doesn't appear as a line item in the Mozilla Foundation's budget doesn't mean it isn't real.
I used Firefox for years because of the rich add-on community. When it started being more trouble than it was worth to update the add-ons (or find/write new ones, if the old one hadn't been updated), I switched to Chrome. It's unlikely that I'll be back.
In the meantime, sorry it's been a hassle. I wish we hadn't switched to rapid release without fixing add-on compatibility. We honestly didn't realize how hard it would be to get right.
That's part of the problem. I'm a huge fan of Firefox, but I shouldn't have to manage these things in order to keep my browser fluid after six months of regular use.
However, there are still extensions that cause issues, and the odd bug that is an actual issue with how we do things.
The reason he recommends creating a new profile and syncing stuff over is because it's sometimes easier than to figure out what's broken on a particular system that has a pre-Firefox 4 profile.
Here's a step-by-step instruction on how to do it — if your Firefox is slow, this will most likely fix it: http://limi.net/articles/firefox-preferences/
Maybe I'm asking to much, but this seems totally unacceptable to me -- both things seem totally unacceptable to me. And while it may still be just true, Firefox suffers worse from this problem than any OS, software or other browser that I use.
Mozilla can do nothing about you using Firebug, yet still gets blamed for the slowness.
I was responding to YOUR stipulation that browsing experience degrades the more you use Firefox. IF it does, that seems like emergency problem #1 to fix if Firefox wants to stop hemmorrhaging users. But then, I'm speaking completely out of turn, since I haven't been a Firefox user for years.
EDIT: ...since I haven't used Firefox as my primary browser in years. I use it daily; not as a "power user."
This is how things go in real-world. I remember reading about how much work went into each new version of Windows because of bugs and clever code in existing software. Otherwise people who upgraded and found their old software not working anymore would have blamed Windows instead of their buggy software.
You can't boast about Firefox being extensible and then blame plugins because they break it. At least, Firefox should be warning about troublesome plugins. The more people have to deal with Firefox being slow and unstable, the more Firefox will be getting a bad rep. Sorry, but you can't fight human nature, you know. You can't change how most users think. If you want to increase market share, your software must be as much dumb-friendly as possible.
On my Linux box, Firefox is crashing lots of times a day without giving me any clues about what could have gone wrong. What am I expected to do? To become a Firefox developer? Switching to another browser is an easier path.
By saying this, I hope I don't seem unappreciative of Firefox developers' efforts.
And modern versions of Firefox are doing a lot better again. It is much faster these days. They now have a much better release cycle, and their updater is smoother encouraging people to keep on the upgrade treadmill.
I wouldn't write Firefox off. The recent increase in competition in the browser space has done great things for all of the browsers; they have all improved dramatically over the past couple of years.