Regardless, I agree with the move 100%. Thanksfully, while Firefox may not be the best, its very good/useable for everything.
If ever it isnt good enough anymore and there is no other replacement - this is when we'll really be cornered
In my experience, people who think Chrome is faster than Firefox never have hundreds of tabs open.
I like Chrome and I use it for development, but I use Firefox for general web browsing because it handles hundreds of tabs much, much better. Not only is Firefox's performance better, but Firefox extensions such Tree Style Tab and Session Manager are vastly superior to the tab management extensions that are available for Chrome. For example, I'm still waiting for a Chrome extension that supports the basic task of appending the current window to a previously saved session.
Mozilla is working on a multi-process Firefox, one can activate it with a hidden flag (it is still not production ready, and it will break several old plugins).
With multi-process browsers one can have hundreds of tabs open for weeks (if you have enough RAM like 8+ GB).
It's more complicated than that. For one thing, "have less latency" is often the opposite: a keypress in a multiprocess browser has to travel from the user-facing process to the child process, then the effects have to travel back. In a single-process browser, there is no need to cross that boundary back and forth. You can see this in action in games for example, where you can sometimes see more input lag in multiprocess browsers.
Regarding speed, depends how you define it. Definitely multiprocess gives you responsiveness - one slow tab doesn't slow down the others. But throughput, not necessarily.
Overall though, multiprocess is a good thing. I'm just saying it isn't a win across the board, like everything it has downsides.
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-plus...
Granted, I am also using different machine with similar but newer processor and (integrated) graphics hardware, I am using a several-versions newer Firefox than I was last year (I was running v27 nightlies at the time and now I run v29 stable). Still I think that some performance drop in Firefox on OS X might be attributable to a lower-performing graphical backend.
Meh. Good thing I don't use OSX. ;)
If I find 'Zilla performance to be a continuing issue, I might give Opera a real chance.
Firefox does seem slower than Safari on OS X, but I don't use Chrome enough on my Mac to compare Firefox vs. Chrome.