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Comment by thezilch | Hacker News Reader

These mechanical benchmarks may be true, but FF still feels sluggish and the dev tooling still leaves A LOT to be desired. Even in recreational browsing, I tend to use dev tools and would get bothered easily having to open another browser.

The memory efficiency doesn't explain much to me. It's like complaining that linux is holding memory hostage in buffers/cache or that Chrome should lose points for its process model. The test surely doesn't tell the whole story; not to mention, I can't be bothered to worry about a couple 100M when I can get 160 of them for the price of dinner. For all I know, the chunking I experience with FF could very well be a relic of their process and/or memory model.

And security is just a smudge on the score? No thanks.

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I find it interesting that when Firefox consumed too much memory it was bashed for it. When it fixed that and became one of the most efficient browser, while Chrome uses tons of memory, Firefox still gets bashed for "spending time on making the browser efficient".

This only leads to one conclusion: unless your product is largely better than the competition, its all about who's the cool kid on the block and who has the most financial interests.

"news at 11" i guess

Firefox was and is chided for feeling sluggish, crashing, and the likes. Most assume(d) these problems are related to the memory and process model. As well, the "memory bashing" was largely related to presuming the memory was "leaked," which turned out to be true. Such assumption have not been applied to Chrome, as far as I know. It was never anything I was much concerned with -- Firefox consuming too much memory. It was better than IE, in speed (re: not appearing to be sluggish) and tooling. Now Chrome takes a lead in those regards; mechanical test-results do not parallel my experiences.

You're talking about memory leaks as though they were a subjective thing (because nobody accused Chrome of having leaks, it doesn't). They are not. Objectively, both Gecko and WebKit have leaks, as a search through the bug trackers of both projects will confirm. (IMO, Gecko's approach to dealing with leaks -- a cycle collector -- is a superior approach to WebKit's more ad-hoc approach.)

As a developer, I couldn't possibly say with a straight face that a codebase like FF's or Chrome's, in size and language, are immune to leaks. I'm speaking about them the way every armchair developer has attacked FF over the years. I'm not saying they are right or wrong. I haven't invested myself in the issue, and I've stated or alluded to, several times, that it was not the "why" but the "what" that drove me. Firefox was slower and did less, so I switched. Anecdotal; 100% agree; I couldn't tell you exactly what I want; I don't necessarily have the time. For some, I'm sure the scale has dropped the opposite way (eg. they need more from FF's extension model).

Curiously, I went back to Iceweasel from Chromium after the latter kept crashing reproducible on some sites – among them plus.google.com and many others with Flash. So far, I have no encountered Iceweasel to crash, and the dev tools are only slightly worse than Chromium’s.

Last time Opera crashed on me? Hmmm…

> dev tooling still leaves A LOT to be desired.

Anything specific?

Feel free to file bugs, we want to make it better :)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c...

Not bugs, but features. And frankly -- sorry to be short -- everything Chrome has (or doesn't yet). I and my colleagues use just about everything.

I see a lot of these things landing in the FFs landing in the last week, so I can't commend those efforts enough. Literally, I don't want to have to ever install Firebug; it makes the browsing experience even more sluggish. And I would have probably never started using FF, a decade ago, if it wasn't for the tooling, and I would have never had a chance to convince as many friends and family to use FF. The same reasons I will just recommend Chrome, today.

Frankly, you will have to have something that Chrome doesn't to bring us back, and it's been a long time coming for the tooling to be even on par. Again, I commend your efforts, because I think your community involvement and dev blogs are really great.

My Chromium-using coworker is jealous of my (Firefox's) 3D View and my Responsive Design View. I use both browsers in order to have access to all the best tools.

(I keep development separate from regular browsing, either through Incognito or separate Firefox profiles. This way, my regular browser addons don't distort my view of how-my-website-looks-to-most-people, and Firebug speed becomes irrelevant.)

Your co-worker should know that both are available via an extension and native DevTools, respectively.

We hear you and we are working on it.

Just a note, we use bugzilla for everything, so if there is ever a specific feature you want, you can make a bug for that feature. For example, "integrate source maps with the debugger" was the title of a bug that I worked on.

I'm loving the focus that's been going into the FF dev tools over the last few releases, they are improving rapidly and dramatically!

One thing that irks me is inspecting returned JS values - I almost never want to see [object Array]. I vastly prefer the Chrome dev tools output: inline, expandable, and a meaningful representation for objects.

Not a bug, but I think it would be a big improvement :)

We're working on it :)

BTW, we use bugzilla bugs for features too, so if you feel there is a specific feature missing, just open a bug for it.

I've never felt that Firefox feels "sluggish", at least not since version 20. I've been running Aurora (24a2) for a while now, and it feels quite snappy - not Sublime Text 3 like, but far better IMO than Chrome/IE10

I still find firebug much more enjoyable to use all round than webkits dev tools. CMD+ALT+M is also a god send for responsive development.

Chrome DevTools has the ability to adjust UA and viewport values, under the gear menu. Random search result... http://blog.divshot.com/post/29829585371/chrome-developer-to...

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