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Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

What's truly impressive to me (in a bad/sad way), is how despite all it's great features Firefox manages to feel so, I don't know, I guess clunky would be the word. And it's not a habit thing because I use it every day, although for disclosure Chrome is my personal browser.

It just doesn't feel like a piece of software that I enjoy using, like it used to some long years ago. Fix that, and you win me back.

PS: I think the memory score is not so relevant as a few years ago. People talked a lot about FF memory, but that was because it was leaking like crazy and ultimately lead to crashes of your browser. I don't care how much ram my browser is using as long as it doesn't start swapping nor crashing.

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Perhaps on a strong development machine, the resource-heavy Chrome is enjoyable.

However, on a more limited machine (Since when is a 4GB machine not good enough to browse the web???), Firefox definitely wins and is much more enjoyable.

I was a long time Chrome user ever since it came out. However, recent versions (on OS X and Windows) are unusable with a large number of tabs. Firefox handles many tabs much better.

It's a simple tradeoff: you want the security that Chrome's sandboxing provides? Then you have to accept the memory overhead.

Frankly the memory usage isn't as infuriating as the "tabs extend past the right edge of the window" bug, which has been open for forever -- I'd link to a bug report but it's a nightmare to find with a search engine because of how hard it is to describe. Firefox has a simple fix for this -- they let you scroll the "row" of tabs -- but for some reason Google refuses to fix it this way. It's probably too rare of a use case; you have to have a relatively small resolution monitor and at least ~70-80+ tabs open in a single window, IIRC.

> Firefox manages to feel so, I don't know, I guess clunky

> It just doesn't feel like a piece of software that I enjoy using

> Fix that, and you win me back.

Fix what? Those are extremely vague complaints. Why does it feel clunky? Why don't you enjoy using it?

There are many different, relevant parameters:

1) Start-up time.

2) Performance with 25+ tabs open.

3) Performance on older devices.

4) Performance with a "basic" set of extensions.

I don't really care about benchmarks these days; I am much more interested in whether a browser supports HTML5, WebGL, etc. I'm currently bummed that Opera 13 doesn't display shapefiles on GitHub. :(

I don't think that's completely unfair to say that the UI is not as responsive as it really should be, I would suggest two things:

1) look around on http://planet.mozilla.org https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance etc. people are working on UI-specific performance issues (commonly called "jank")

2) try the UX branch builds for the latest UI which is coming soon - https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/late...

Progress is being made, but it takes a while to hit the beta/release channels.

It's pretty critical that such improvements don't cause stability/security/standards problems too so they're not the simplest of changes!

Status: CLOSED WORKSFORME

(This is a tough one to debug, perhaps if Firefox had a pixel perfect Chrome theme it'd work for you?)

It's not a theme thing, it's a behavior thing.

Firefox feels like Eclipse to me.

Well, I still wouldn't be able to reopen the bug on a hand-waving comparison between two unrelated software projects. Also, I'll have it known that I love Eclipse and think it's way better than IntelliJ. I know that's not a very popular opinion around these parts, but still.

In this hypothetical scenario, you're not trying to fix a bug for a user, he already left for (what he considers) better horizons. If the FF team wants to win me back they can try, but I'm not asking them anything.

So yes, I'm hand waving a comparison between two pieces of software who have great technical features but feel painful to use, because this is a comment on a benchmark post and not me doing a bug report.

For me, it's the opposite. I've been using the FF lineage since it was Netscape. I've been trying to switch to Chrome lately, but Chrome keeps doing things that annoy me. I don't open FF on the same pages to see if FF has the same problems, but FF just feels comfortable.

The only reason I can't get my wife to switch to Chrome is that Chrome has no "left sidebar history". If I could find an extension or something which duplicate that, I'd switch her over in a heartbeat.

The memory score is pretty relevant on phones, for what it's worth. Precisely because once you're our of memory you crash.

blame the add ons. I had a vicious memory problem in FireFox and it turned out to be the ad blocker not handling cycletrader.com correctly, I could watch memory just climb and climb. Turn off the add on and all was fine.

FWIW, firefox still took more than twice the memory to show that site than IE did.

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