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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

I quit using Firefox due to absolutely horrific memory management and I never used a single add-on ever. It was extremely frustrating because every time I went to a forum seeking help the first and only thing people would do is blame add-ons.

It was so bad that I had to close firefox when I wanted to do anything else. If I played a full screen game it would work great for about half an hour the suddenly it'd chug along at 10fps. Without fail the issue was Firefox deciding to consume 90% CPU. And again this is without installing a single add-on ever.

It may be better today. I don't know. I don't care. I switched to Chrome and haven't looked back since.

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This is exactly right. The party line was "it's the addons" forever, anytime you brought up Firefox taking up 900MB of RAM after being open for 3 days. Even with no addons. I was so glad to switch to Chrome when it came out because of that.

And then years later they have the "MemShrink project". Which basically was admitting that they were spouting bullshit about it being addons for years.

Haters-be hate'n. And how exactly does the one process per tab of chrome address memory issues? Chrome is complete garbage for me after 30ish tabs. Talk about unresponsive...

The great thing about this model is that closing the tabs kills the processes and therefore frees up memory. Last time I used FFx extensively (6 months-1year ago) I could not say the same thing, even after they announced having a pretty major fix for leaks.

Chrome user in Ubuntu, 30ish tabs don't make unresponsive my browser here.

In Chrome you can kill and/or restart tabs without losing your entire session.

State recovery is quite good for the most part, even if memory use is somewhat pants.

I quit Firefox as soon as Chromium for Linux was available. My problem with Firefox wasn't so much the memory leaks (though those were annoying), but rather that it was SLOW. Opening new tabs caused the whole UI to grind to a halt while they rendered....and this wasn't on a slow computer. I've heard that FF has finally been multithreaded, but I haven't really tested it.

This isn't to say Chrome doesn't have its own memory or performance problems. GMail for example will eat up to 1GB of memory eventually before I notice I'm low. I have to actually close the tab (reloading doesn't fix it) and re-open it. It's "only" using 500MB right now...

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