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Comment by Mahn | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea what the article and some of you guys are talking about. I'm a very heavy user of Chrome, usually I have around 3 windows and 50-60 tabs in total; with this is setting I feel it's running pretty snappy, animations runs very smooth compared to the choppy experience I get with a single window and a single tab using Firefox. And don't get me started about Firebug; it's still so slow and clumsy compared to the chrome dev tools, every time I have to debug something Firefox specific the mere thought of being forced to use it gives me pain. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to discourage Mozilla, I have a huge appreciation for what they are doing. But when it comes to day-to-day usage, and as a developer tool, Chrome still wins in my book.

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I was a Firefox user since the Phoenix/Firebird days, but I switched to Chrome about a year ago. On two separate occasions recently, I tried to switch back to Firefox for daily use. In both cases, I was back on Chrome within a week. Firefox has made great strides in memory usage, Javascript performance and overall UI polish, but on my hardware* and with my usage patterns, it absolutely CRAWLS compared to Chrome. I found myself restarting it almost daily to keep it responsive, and even on a fresh startup it wasn't as snappy as a fully-loaded (15-20 tabs open) and long-running Chrome.

I can honestly say that if performance wasn't an issue, I would prefer Firefox. I love the addons that are available, particularly NoScript, ABP and Vimperator. The Chrome equivalents are imperfect due to Chrome's extension model, and I miss the real things almost daily. However, I just can't go back to a browser that's slow and unresponsive. Maybe Firefox and Chrome are just making different trade-offs, and I happen to benefit more from Chrome's choices. I don't know. What I do know is that I can't tolerate my browser freezing up or taking 5 seconds to process clicks.

* - A fairly modest laptop with a 1.6ghz dual-core AMD APU, 6gb of RAM and an SSD. It's easily fast enough for everything else that I do, and Chrome flies on it. On my much beefier desktop, Firefox is usable, but still noticeably slower than Chrome.

That doesn't sound typical. Have you tried doing a Firefox reset? I've seen it make a large improvement to performance, especially with older Firefox profiles:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi...

(In short: Go to "about:support" and click reset. It will prompt you before doing anything, and will rebuild your profile while preserving bookmarks/history/saved-forms/etc)

Same experience here (well my Firefox experience is ok too but I don't see anything better then Chrome so I'm not switching back).

As a web dev, I have 10+ tabs open all day long and I never see a chrome crash. I'm not even looking at the RAM usage, if everything run smooth there is not reason to...

22 tabs open now in Firefox on Win7, and they've been open for days in between hibernation, gaming, other stuff. All kinds of dodgy developer tabs and video sites etc.

Firefox takes it, and provides a huge range of tools and options to make the browser environment exactly how I like.

Amazing add-ons, custom looks. I prefer an old fashioned status bar at the bottom of the browser. Thank God for status-4-eva add-on.

I'm glad Chrome was made, it's an option for anyone who doesn't mind the 'Google feel'. There's a Google vibe that has a sort of marketing agenda that you can sometimes see, manifesting in a few different ways in and out of browser. No big deal, just sometimes it feels like you're renting your online experience from Google rather than on your own journey. Hard to explain.

They make amazing things, so can forgive, just don't want to sign up to Google every time I'm online.

They currently push you to sign in and stay signed in on Google.com search when not logged in. And they try to sell you Chrome too, with "no thanks" as the button to hide the ad. You know when you make a button that says "no thanks", you're assuming the user who clicks the button is thankful, for being given the ad on google for the 500th time. Your assumption would be wrong.

For what it's worth, I've got 16 tabs open in Chrome at the moment -- the process has been running for days -- and it's taking 2.6 gigs of RAM. This is without tabs like Facebook and Twitter, which I will not leave open any more because of noticing how much memory they were burning through just sitting there. A lot of those tabs are simple things like a static page I generated myself or github pages.

At the moment, Chrome's response is still snappy, but it certainly is not unusual for it to get pretty bad in my experience, particularly if I'm doing something else memory intensive at the same time.

This was exactly my experience with FF back in the day -- while everyone was bitching about it being a bloated memory hog, I had no problem using it on an old machine with 256MB of RAM.

How much RAM do you have ?

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