Why don't they first produce near-Chrome performance for their browser? Every time I use Firefox, it slows down to a snail's pace and eventually crashes if there are more than 4--6 tabs open.
So, my best guess is that you have an add-on killing your performance and stability.
When exactly was this? Also FF is moving very rapidly, I remember FF 19(possibly 20) with no addons being way slower on my laptop than Chrome while its nightly at the time - FF 22 (or 23-24) ran blazingly fast (with same addons as FF 19) on par with Chrome.
I use Firefox and Chrome every day. My results line up with recent HN comments about how Firefox is competitive, uses less memory at scale (lots of tabs), still janks worse, but may be actually more stable at the moment. Flash is a big source of instability still, for both browsers.
My bottom line: both Firefox and Chrome are competitive, leading-edge browsers. Firefox on desktops is pure open source, Chrome is not (if that matters to you; it does to me a bit, but I'm a realist). AwesomeBar wins for me over Omnibox.
I hope you'll give Firefox a try again.
/be
So, I just wanted to say thank you.
I wonder if you have a profile that goes back years and has some property that tickles a latent bug. Sorry if I missed it: have you tried running on a brand new profile? You'll have to use the -ProfileManager option on the command line at startup, I think.
/be
What you are experiencing is definitely abnormal. The only days I have that kind of performance issue is on my old laptop. In which case try switching to Aurora/Nightly, it might help.
Let's be honest, this isn't meant to be helpful, it's just meant to shift blame back to the user.